"I Am Become Death" at Kunsthalle Basel
Basel
Jan. 16 – March 8 Polish artist Goshka Macuga has long been interested in the politics of exhibition display. Using curatorial strategies to craft narratives, she creates unlikely and thought-provoking connections among disparate objects. For her first solo in continental Europe, she wove a complex chain of associations via the art historian Aby Warburg’s technique of clustering random images according to a shared thematic idea. Thus, photographs of Warburg’s 1896 expedition to the land of the Hopi were grouped with casual snapshots of a military base in Vietnam. The layers didn’t stop there, though: There was documentation of a trip Macuga took through the American West that followed Warburg’s path, and there were images of a 1971 exhibition of Robert Morris’s Participatory Objects at the Tate Gallery in London, and replicas of these sculptures with which viewers could interact. Capping it off was a film that documents her trip and concludes with footage of a spontaneous street party in Washington, DC, celebrating Obama’s inauguration.

How to make sense of this meandering web? The title, "I Am Become Death," after Robert Oppenheimer’s famous misquotation of the Bhagavad Gita, offered a clue. Alluding to World War II and Vietnam, Macuga created a partial portrait of US military aggression. Her references to Obama were apparently meant to conjure him as a new American "founding-myth" (a term that Warburg applied to the Hopi mythology). The problem is that unless one read the three-page-long press release and watched the 30-minute documentary, the show’s many references were impossible to grasp. On the other hand, Macuga encouraged us to observe and make our own connections, and to change our perspective by taking a risk — as the massive wooden plank, which viewers could scale until they were just beneath the roof, seemed to suggest.  "Goshka Macuga" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2009 Table of Contents.