Temporary Stedelijk 2
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978)
A fluorescent green haze colours the white 19th-century ceiling above the Stedelijk Museum’s majestic staircase. Dan Flavin’s neon light installation Untitled (to Piet Mondriaan Through His Preferred Colours, Red, Yellow and Blue) was produced in 1986 for the main hall and reconstructed for ‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’, the current show in the open, yet closed, Stedelijk museum. Due to re-open last year after the museum’s initial closure in 2003, the official re-opening was pushed back to the end of 2011. After a temporary settlement from 2004–08 in the former offices of the Dutch postal service, the museum has moved back to its original building – an opulent, 1895 neo-Renaissance construction in the Amsterdam Museum Quarter. Comprised of several sub-exhibitions ‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’ follows ‘Temporary Stedelijk’, which opened in August 2010 in an effort to silence the audience’s dismay after facing a sparse cultural environment in Amsterdam with the simultaneous renovation of the Stedelijk, the Rijksmuseum and the contemporary art space De Appel. ‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’ displays a selection from the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and ambitious reenactments of two groundbreaking shows from the 1960s.
Barbara Bloom
Taking place in the only climate-controlled gallery space, ‘Making Histories: Changing Views of the Collection’ presents a strong range of works from the permanent collection that haven’t been on display for over seven years, having been hidden from view during the long renovation. The arrangement of pieces seems effortless, as if they were never taken off the walls in the first place. Central to the show is Henri Matisse’s boldly coloured La Perruche et la Sirène (The Parakeet and the Mermaid, 1952), accompanied by Yves Klein’s L’Accord Blue (re 10) (1969) and Resonances (Mg 16) (1960), forming an attractive triptych in volume and colour (Matisse) and three-dimensionality (Klein). Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Cross (1920) and Piet Mondrian’s series of small abstract paintings (Composition No. IV With Red Blue and Yellow, 1929, and Composition No. XV, 1913) also emphasize the re-visitation of Modern art. Just as in Flavin’s neon beams of circles and lines, here too the line is shown as the ultimate starting point of all that can be created and reproduced. Jo Baer’s Untitled (Korean) (1963) acts as a more contemporary counterpart, celebrating the emptiness of the canvas. In this painting, the white is left to be white and nothing else, merely enclosed by black and blue rims. Brice Marden’s Morada (1976) encompasses this curatorial sequence with the effective simplicity of three simple colours of black, grey and red.
Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Cross (1920)
The show seems to speak of a desire to utilize these canonical pieces as cornerstones for new potentials in contemporary art. Some works manage to very elegantly tap into the main thread: Nairy Baghramian’s painted metal tubes, Beliebte Stellen (Beloved Placements, 2011), seem as light as plastic and are placed seemingly randomly in the room, some on the floor, others attached to the wall but all loosely laid out in open circles. Deceiving the eye in its simplicity while simultaneously representing the openness of the museum’s future ahead, the work is a refreshing sight. However, nearby, Donald Judd’s stack of colourful profiles (Untitled, 1989) could have evoked an interesting curatorial challenge in this context, but here it seems fossilized, standing on its own
Fiona Tan
‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’ offers two other presentations as well: ‘TV as…’ and ‘Recollections’. The latter reconstructs and documents archival material of two innovative shows from the 1960s: ‘Bewogen Beweging’ (Moved Movement, 1961) and ‘Dylaby: Dynamisch Labyrint’ (Dylaby: Dynamic Labyrinth, 1962). Although these are powerful examples of the relation and crossovers between art, television, politics and aesthetics with works by artists such as Nam June Paik and Jan Dibbets, ‘TV as…’ feels a bit outdated in concept. This restaging of the show closes with a stunning recent acquisition of a work by Paul Chan titled 6th Light (2007), in which a window is projected on the floor of a dark, empty room. Amorphous shapes slowly float by in the projection. Between them, some familiar objects (a bicycle, a wheel, a chair) appear, which consequently make you identify the amorphous silhouettes as debris – a world decaying in front of us in a dreamy yet frightening peacefulness.
Although the latter two shows display more singularity of purpose it is still striking that after a long closure, in its second endeavor of curatorial transparency, the museum shows some confusion in direction. ‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’ predominantly gives small but interesting incentives to bigger steps to be taken. One can’t escape the thought that the distribution of elements and range of pieces feels somewhat arbitrary and only hints at what the museum used to be. Though it hopefully suggests what we can look forward to in the near future.
Judith Vrancken
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