The Left Front: "Radical" US Artists between the Wars at Grey Art Gallery, NYU

Chinese artists are soon going to be required to spend one month living among poor Chinese farmers in rural villages. The rationale of the Chinese Communist Party is that it does not want Chinese artists to succumb to what it sees as the predominant Western orientation toward art production – divorce art from all real social concerns, dabble in beauty and mysticism, and produce for the wealthy art-buying market. The CCP also seems to want Chinese artists to experience various aspects of Chinese social life often neglected by the urban elite and to be influenced by the unsullied nature of the countryside and the work ethic and sense of integrity of non-urban dwellers.  Indeed, the CCP seems to want to bridge the traditional gap between the urban and rural and perhaps forcefully reveal that the farmer is to be respected as a social equal in contemporary China.

This approach by a contemporary socialist government is interesting in light of the predominant socialist aesthetic concept, developed shortly after the Russian Revolution, that an artist who lives among poverty or corruption or forms of social injustice must not blithely ignore the world around him/her and wallow in self-absorbed aesthetics.  One finds oneself in complicity with social injustice if one has a means of expression and does not publicly object to what is wrong.  Indeed, we see how strongly this concept was once embraced by some American artists at the Grey Art Gallery’s current show, at NYU, called The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade,” 1929 - 1940.

In 1937 the American artist Carl Hoeckner wrote, “My art aims, up to the outbreak of the world war, were the search for and expression of beauty. During the war I became interested in truth – the bitter truth and the struggle of life in general.” This quote seems to point at the two forces that will often tug on an artist from opposite directions.  There is the need for inner exploration of the possibilities and conflicts inherent in individual humane development, and there is the world outside filled with corruption, racism, injustice and violence, just begging to be exposed for what it is. 

The pieces in this show, which do an amazing job of social criticism (they reminded me of the work of the New Objectivity movement that was occurring in Germany at around the same time) forced me to ask myself, however, whether it is possible for a visual artist to, somehow, integrate these two forces into one’s overall work.  If not, this could be due to a limitation of the visual arts medium.

In literature, after all, authors often kill two birds with one stone by engaging in social satire or the exposing of injustice while also exploring the possibilities of individual humane development. Dickens and Dostoyevsky, I believe, did this. Toward the end of his life Tolstoy’s Christian anarchist approach in that his novel Resurrection blended an attack on what passes for justice in the civilized world with an implied  concept for self-development in which the true Christian naturally evolves into a dissident role, through an enhanced sense of humanity and compassion, in his/her society.  Perhaps this type of blending is in some of the works, but the predominant approach in this show is to document the social wrongs of the time, and there’s something really amazingly exciting and fun, even 70 years down the line, about seeing artists just laying the naked truth of the corruption, exploitation and abuses of their society out there for anyone to see.

Eva Hild at Nancy Margolis

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Biomorphic art first seemed to appear in the early 20^th century with folks like Miro, Arp and Tanguy. Basically this is art which is evocative of biological forms without really being meant to point to any particular biological organism or organisms.  

Biomorphic art is usually used to highlight the absurdity of our bodily needs in comparison to our belief systems which tell us that we are ‘higher’ than our biological functions. So biomorphism has often questioned the extent to which we are noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in action like an angel and in apprehension like a god. 

At her latest show at Nancy Margolis, Eva Hild adds her own little twists and creativity to this biomorphic tradition.

It’s always fun to look at biomorphic pieces and see how differing biological processes, forms or functions might be used. In the series of darker sculptures we see that these figures are clearly not photosynthetic flowering plants. They seem to be more fungal, yet, unlike a fungus, these organisms do not seem to be parasitically attached to anything. 

How do they get energy? We don’t know. They are sort of huge, free standing, auto-generating fungi-like things, defying the second law of thermodynamics. Despite their size, however, they seem as benign as giant walruses at the zoo. 

In each of these pieces the apex or culmination of the organism’s development is a round hole in an olive like thing through which, I’m assuming, spores or semen or some reproductive substance may be able to shoot out. The structures ultimately become penis-like conduits. Will this lead to asexual or sexual reproduction?

Although these are benign walrus-like creatures, their function is, essentially, something active and aggressive. The entire organism is geared solely toward the reproduction of the entire organism.  It is sort of a monument to Schopenhauer’s ‘will-to-reproduce’.  This is the active and aggressive reproducing itself.  

Arthur is ringing in my ears now: "The purpose of an emotional communion between man and woman is procreation, although those in love are oblivious to nature's deceitfulness, making the actual process seem more noble than it is.” Yet, penicillin comes from a fungus so who knows what properties this organism may have for ‘higher’ beings.

Hild’s white sculptures seem to celebrate the ‘passive’ or ‘receptive’ as opposed to the ‘active’ represented by the darker pieces. Her white pieces seem more bone or skeletal-like. In the ancient world it was recognized that bones do not seem to decay and can last, potentially, forever. So bones were often equated to the eternal.  

In Hild’s pieces we see hollow structures that almost seem meant to be connected through some type of piping to other systems. If they are meant to be skeletal then some type of tissue must have evolved around these structures and some type of viscera may have developed within.

So, essentially, both of these pieces owe their very forms or structures to ‘principles’ – one the principle of active or aggressive desire, the other, possibly, to passive acceptance or fulfilment of aggressive desire. 

Please read the amazingly thought-provoking articles of Daniel Gauss: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/