ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS
__________
Hans Theys
And God Created the Opening
Johan Creten in New York
Under the sort of clear blue sky so beloved by Louise Bourgeois who grew up under a low sky that hung down like a leaden lid, I walk through Central Park to the wickedly expensive intersection of Madison Avenue and 73rd Street, where Johan Creten (°1963) has a one-man show at the Galerie Perrotin. How wonderful it is to stroll through the galleries at the Metropolitan, where all the display cases and sculptures are scattered around by people who dare to think contrapuntually (nothing is lined up, so you don’t look at the works as if you were standing at teller windows in a bank and you can always walk round the sculptures), and how wonderful then to arrive at Creten’s magnificent show where the works are as carefully strewn as the arrangements in Brancusi’s studio. You will search in vain for a similar approach in Belgium or in Paris. You would also be hard put to find anything like it in the reconstruction of Brancusi’s studio at Beaubourg, where you can only look at the display from an impossible viewpoint (through the now transparent walls of his studio), instead of from a glass corridor which might perhaps have run diagonally through the space.
Today you’ll find Paris’ best laid-out exhibition at Louis Vuitton on the Champs-Elysées, its magnificent cabinets displaying handbags high up but perfectly visible.* On Madison Avenue, however, Vuitton’s display cabinets are outclassed by Valentino’s meticulously sited shelves and a couple of streets away by Johan Creten’s contrapuntal show.
All the sculptures on display are new, less constrained than some earlier works, set free from their literal origin. To give an idea of how you look at these works, here are two examples. Facing the visitor on entering the gallery, to the right of the middle, is a slender bronze column, which is instantly reminiscent of Brancusi’s Endless Column. It is a thinner version, it works more clearly in four directions and its rounded form is gentler. It puts me in mind of a thyrsus, used for various purposes in Greek antiquity, but also of the suggestive parrot stick in Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot and of the twisted column, the stick’s companion piece, which is concealed in the semidarkness of the painting. Creten’s sculptures are like John Donne’s poems: coded messages about spirituality, but also about physical love. In the United States they also call to mind Walt Whitman.
Another sculpture is entitled ‘Glory’. The form derives from a Hopi rain sash, but reminds us of starfish or female genitals. I talk to the artist about it. He is wearing a platinum brooch dating from 1850 which represents a spider whose abdomen consists of a Colombian emerald.
“The title refers to the radiant suns known as ‘glories’ you see behind some altars,” he tells me. “For example, the one above Bernini’s Throne of Saint Peter in St Peter’s Basilica.”
The title also makes me think of Verlaine’s divine sonnet about anal pleasure and of the famous Donkey Trial of the writer Gerard Reve, the great inquisitor of what he called ‘blindness to symbols’, who also tried to reconcile spirituality and corporality.
‘Glory’ is stoneware with a top layer of real gold. The form of the sculpture is repeated twice, thereby creating a sort of triptych or altarpiece. I find this an amusing form principle, of the sort you come across when people from other eras or regions start to imitate artworks and in their zeal exaggerate certain characteristics. For example, in the Gothic you sometimes come across crucifixes with two crossbars and in the current Congo exhibition at the Metropolitan there is even a triple crucifix with three horizontal crossbars and three suffering saviours!
Creten’s exhibition is called ‘God Is a Stranger’. The New York city authorities covered over the word ‘God’ with a black rectangle because on Madison Avenue you may not take the Lord’s name in vain. And the city government is right, because you never know what artists mean.
Montagne de Miel, September 17th 2015
Translated by Alison Mouthaan
* Only in 2018 did I discover that the interior of the shop was designed by the divine Peter Marino.