Wes Anderson and
Juman Malouf with Sabine Haag in front of a hall of portraits in Vienna
(KHM-Museumsverband/Rafaela Proell)
Larger-than-life
personalities
Celebrity curations
are nothing new for the Kunsthistorisches Museum. But many of the 400 objects
on display in "Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin," curated by director Wes
Anderson (center) and illustrator and designer Juman Malouf (l), can be seen
for the first time in the museum. Working with museum director Sabine Haag (r),
the pair selected objects from 14 collections, including the Old Masters.
"The Spitzmaus
Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures from the Kunsthistorisches Museum"
is a unique title for an exhibition. Then again, this is no ordinary show.
Opening on November
6, 2018, the palatial Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna — which houses one of
the world's foremost fine arts collections — features 400 items chosen from its
14 collections of more than 4 million objects. Dating back as early as ancient
Egypt and spanning more than 5,000 years, the items were hand-picked by
American director Wes Anderson and his partner, the author and illustrator
Juman Malouf.
A complimentary
aesthetic: Twee
Renowned for
producing unusual movies with complex plots, Anderson has gained cult status
for cultivating a highly stylized aesthetic — one which fans will nearly
instantly recognize. Although Anderson himself has said his films are the
product of collaborative efforts with the others on each project — "You
cannot end up with the same thing if you change those names and keep mine"
— there is a common thread tying Anderson's movies together: the look.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
(picture-alliance/dpa/20th Century Fox/M. Scali)
Colorful, nostalgic,
original: Anderson claims to not have a unique aesthetic, yet his art is easily
recognizable
While some critics
have referred to the aesthetics of Anderson's work in a derogatory way,
labeling it as "twee," the author Marc Spitz finds both Anderson and
the idea of twee a good thing in contemporary society.
Writing in 2012,
shortly after Anderson's film The Royal Tenenbaums was released, Spitz said
that the twee "were souls with an almost incapacitating awareness of
darkness, death and cruelty, who made the personal choice to focus on essential
goodness and sweetness. They kept a tether to childhood and innocence and a
tether to adulthood as is required by the politically and socially
active."
That aesthetic — and
the thread tethering the innocence of childhood with the political and social
activism of adulthood — has come through in the curation led by Anderson and
Malouf. As has a certain nostalgia, a glance back at the dynasties of bygone
eras.
Curation by trial-and-error
From a Qing Dynasty
vase to a bugle belonging to the Austrian court wardrobe to an Indonesian
actor's mask, the selection of objects cuts across centuries, medium and genre.
The selection is a compendium of artifacts tied together in a manner only
Anderson and Malouf could create.
Instead of
displaying the objects by era or separating them by collection, the artists
chose unusual placements — hanging a portrait of a seven-year-old falconer
(Emperor Charles V) alongside one of a four-year-old dog owner (Emperor
Ferdinand II). Anderson explains their selection process in the accompanying
catalog as such, "We do harbor the humble aspiration that the
unconventional groupings and arrangement of the works on display may influence
the study of art and antiquity in minor, even trivial, but nevertheless
detectable ways for many future generations to come."
"True: one of
the Kunsthistorisches Museum's most senior curators (educated, of course, at
the University of Heidelberg) at first failed to detect some of the, we
thought, more blatant connections; and, even after we pointed most of them out,
still questions their curatorial validity in, arguably, all instances. But,
should our experiment fail on these levels, we are, nevertheless, confident it
will, at the very least, serve the purpose of ruling out certain hypotheses,
thereby advancing the methods of art history through the scientific process of
trial-and-error. (In this case, error.)"
Pencil sketch of two nude sculptures (Juman
Malouf)
Malouf, a writer and
illustrator, created sketches of several of the exhibits
An idea inspired by Warhol
One of the museum's
curators, Jasper Sharp, worked closely with the guest curators while also
allowing them freedom during the selection process. "Their approach was
governed from the very beginning by intuition and excitement," Sharp
writes in the exhibition catalog.
Noting the
historical significance of the museum galleries in which the objects are
presented, he writes, "it feels entirely appropriate that the exhibition
is being presented within the rooms of the Kunstkammer, in whose origins we can
find the very earliest strategies of display, systems of order and
organization, and play of relationships between objects."
The idea for the
guest curatorship, he goes on to say, was not his own but was inspired instead
by Andy Warhol's work across three museums in 1969-1970, which resulted in the
exhibition "Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol."
Invited by Jean and
Dominique de Menil to draw from the collections of the Rhode Island School of
Design, Warhol selected items from the museum's storage as an experiment that
responded to de Menil's questions: "What would happen if some important
contemporary artist were to choose an exhibition from the reserves? If the only
organizing principle would be whether or not he liked whatever he saw? Would
the result be different from having a storage show chosen by a curator? Or by
anyone? If the artist who selected the materials were strong enough, would he
impose his personality on the objects? And If he were famous enough, would it
not oblige the curious to look?"
The answers Warhol
provided both in his selection and in his methods for presentation, Sharp
writes, "were provocative and unconventional, assaulting the principles of
connoisseurship and established institutional yardsticks for considering the
relative value of objects."
While Warhol's
answers have continued to inspire museum directors even today, the questions
are being posed anew with each guest curatorship.
Whether the twee universe
of Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf will oblige the curious to look will be seen
in the number of visitors to the Viennese Museum to see the exhibition, which
will move to the Fondazione Prada in Milan in October 2019.
https://www.dw.com/en/twee-in-vienna-wes-anderson-and-juman-malouf-curate-art-exhibition/a-46174092
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