Accidents of scheduling took me to two exhibitions today which seek to challenge the ethos of exhibition. "What is the use of Buddhist art?" at the Wallach Art Gallery tries valiantly to let its magnificent works from Columbia's collection of Buddhist art be encountered not as aesthetic or historic objects but as figures of devotion. The other, "Lenapoehoking" at the Brooklyn Public Library's Greenpoint branch, tries to conjure the genocide of our region's indigenous population and seed a kind of return.
For all its meritorious efforts, the former wasn't really successful. Captions explained why objects were made but the exhibit still isolated them from the rhythms of Buddhist practice, which we'd learned just enough about to know was incredibly specific, local to a particular time, donor and setting. (The Wallach Gallery, which had two other shows on in the same large space, has a unifying aesthetic so the curators' hands were tied.) The displays invited a kind of intimate looking but this will have been fundamentally different from the stance of those "using" these figures and texts. I didn't feel any of them as objects of salvific power except in the (perhaps intentional) reflections of two cases containing medieval Japanese figures above. Not that I can imagine a non-cheesy way of letting exhibition guests get a taste of the prostration, chanting, incensing, gifting with fruit and flowers or other interactions through which practitioners will have engaged these works (the Rubin Museum has thought all this through more comprehensively) but the airy silence, white walls and glass cases of the gallery encouraged only the usual quasi-religious devotion which art museums encourage.
Quite different was "Lenapehoking," which quite deliberately chose a library rather than a museum or gallery setting for the first Lenape-curated experience in the city. Above a bustling local library full of children and people using the free wi-fi, a darkened room presented five glass-beaded bandoliers, a turkey feather gown, and, against the darkened windows, three "tapestries" of dried vines of three native bean species recently "rematriated" to the area. Some local fruit trees will be planted in the roof garden of the library starting next week, too. Two of the bandoliers, including the one at left in the photo (from here), are from the early 19th century, after the Lenape had already been driven from their homeland, but pose in a suspended dance with new ones commissioned for this show. And yet the mannequins make clear that bandoliers are for wearing, and as one circles around them one starts to feel the absence/presence of the shoulders and hips they embraced, and is increasingly astonished at their durability and survival. The bean tapestries, meanwhile, full of pods full of seeds, conjure the upward and downward motion of vines and beans, death and future life. After a while what had seemed a small and straightforward exhibition proves instead to be a space of looping time of absence and promise, the scene of a crime and an opening to hope.
Both exhibitions were good to think with.
