CRITICAL REFLECTIONS
Transparent
The Lannan
Foundation’s spa-like gallery space, with its fountains, sand-colored walls, and shuttered windows, is tranquil if spartan; it’s the perfect setting for an exhibition like Transparent. After stints in Palm Beach and Los Angeles, the Foundation seems to have found a permanent home in downtown Santa Fe, where it’s been quietly supporting a variety of arts initiatives for twelve years. Press literature for the Foundation’s current exhibition proclaims that included works are “free from pretense or deceit… in such a way that it is easy for others to see what actions are performed, implying openness and accountability.” The organization’s founder, J. Patrick Lannan Sr., was a self-made millionaire entrepreneur from Chicago. He began collecting modern art in the 1950s and amassed thousands of important works before retiring to Palm Beach, where he set up a salon-style art museum. After Lannan’s death, in 1983, his estate became the subject of a bitter feud—small wonder considering he bequeathed the entirety of it to his art-collecting foundation, and not a penny to any of his six children. Court proceedings were antagonistic, but J. Patrick Jr. was eventually named the Foundation’s new director, making him head of one of the nation’s most powerful art-buying institutions. Under Lannan Jr.’s guidance, the Foundation expanded to include social justice programs, which some argued betrayed his father’s original mission to collect and display visual art. Any criticism seems inappropriate considering how consistently generous the Foundation has been in supporting art; it’s provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial aid to alternative media groups like The Nation, Democracy Now Productions, and Mother Jones Magazine, and has given thousands of dollars in grants to struggling artists and writers. Additionally, the organization offers artist residencies and has recognized outspoken contemporary thinkers like Arundhati Roy and Cornel West with annual Cultural Freedom Prizes. By making opportunities available to new artists, Lannan is still arguably deeply focused on supporting contemporary art, and when the Foundation does acquire artwork it’s automatically earmarked as a gift to an American museum. With its inclusion of artists like Subhankar Banerjee, Uta Barth, and Peter Alexander, this exhibition proves that the Foundation has
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Lannan Foundation 309 Read Street, Santa Fe a keen eye for excellent contemporary art, which makes sense when you realize that they’ve been at the forefront of collecting avant-garde and “difficult” art for many decades. To wit, the Foundation has supported a variety of Earthworks projects, including James Turrell’s unusual Roden Crater. In fact Turrell, with his longstanding practice of conceiving not only new ways of looking at natural environments but also managing to re-conceptualize the physical forms those environments can take, is a perfect fit for a show like Transparent. I was pleased to see two spare aquatints included here, both titled Deep Sky Portfolio. Identically sized and similarly themed, they are obviously from the same time and series. Viewing the first is like looking down a dark hallway, toward a window or portal that contains radiating rings of light. The strange brightness injects unexpected levity to the work. The other Turrell piece is decidedly eerier. The viewer is looking into the corner of a shadowy room, onto a thin strip of glowing light. In both of these photos, the theme of transparency is subtle and wonderfully provocative. Morris Louis’s massive mid-1950s acrylic painting Untitled, from the artist’s lauded Veil series, is visually sublime. Lannan Sr. became an early collector of Louis’s work after he was introduced to the artist by Clement Greenberg. With its layers of gauzy, washed-out blues and reds, Untitled is one of the few pieces in the exhibition that employs a variety of colors, even if they are fairly subdued. Though individually the colors are thinly applied, altogether they achieve a captivating density that challenges our perception of the texture and impact of the work. Elsewhere, pieces that initially seem transparent are deceptively opaque. Subhankar Banerjee’s Sky: Often I Look Up and Wish for Rain is an incredibly simple photograph of an overcast sky, whose wispy clouds in fact prevent the work from being purely transparent. The grouping is enigmatic but elegant, making the show as provocative visually as it is intellectually. Even ruthlessly minimal works, like Kate Shepherd’s Standing Open Box, with its pencil-thin marks of oil paint outlining a geometric form, have a distinct materiality that makes the exhibition feel clever, confident, and weighty. Transparency in any context is a lofty goal, but it uniquely befits an organization as complex as the Lannan Foundation.
—Iris McLister
Subhankar Banerjee, Sky: Often I Look Up and Wish for Rain, digital dye coupler print with face-mounted Plexiglas, 30” x 40,” 2009
Morris Louis, Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 955/ 8 ” x 775/ 8 ”, 1954
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