On view...at the Met: Patty Chang
Notes on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in June, part 4.
Last weekend, our editor Alexandra went to see what was happening on the upper east side and never made it out of the Met. This week, she’s telling you about the five shows that kept her there.
On View: Monstrous Beauty
You’re unlikely to take your eyes off the video: a woman in a rather full white brassiere speaking while balancing a tea saucer on her head. She takes a long knife and begins to slice away at where her breast would be—clearly (thankfully) there’s something else there. She saws and saws, continuing to speak and continuing to balance the saucer. As the bra gets sliced apart, a cantaloupe melon is revealed. When she finishes slicing, she takes a spoon and eats from the cantaloupe that is resting in the bra on her chest. An example of the video performance art that proliferated in the 1990s, the work—Melons (At a Loss) from 1998 by Patty Chang—is a fitting contemporary addition to Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.
On view through August 17, this exhibit presents an alternate history to porcelain, a commodity traded between China and Europe that has become synonymous with ideas of delicacy or daintiness. Monstrous Beauty argues that there’s an overlooked element of grotesqueness and monstrosity to the material, and begins by situating porcelain as part of a sixteenth-century trading economy intended to exercise global colonial control. This dynamic continues today in how the fantasy and imagery of porcelain can feed stereotypical ideas of Asian women to the European and American societies that consume it. The show charts even the earliest overlap of monstrosity and porcelain—in tying the fearsome lore of man-eating mermaids that might overturn a trading ship to the images pictured in porcelain—and connects it to a work like Chang’s, which upsets the simple idea of “porcelain for the table” (domestic, convenient). It’s a clever and challenging curatorial idea that, to my eye, just works.
later this week:
Lorna Simpson: Source Notes. Through November 2.
also on view in the city:
Jochen Mühlenbrink, “STILL (Lifes and Dreams)”, at Long Story Short. Through June 14.
Allen Berke and Lise Soskolne, ESTHETIC BOMB SHELTER, at Ulrik. Through July 12.
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