Visual Arts

DMA

Untitled #302 by Cindy Sherman

"Fast Forward" will be hard to upstage as the area's most important artistic event of the decade. In sheer quantity – nearly 300 works – this exhibition of six decades' worth of modern art at the Dallas Museum of Art is a bona fide blockbuster. And it's not a show to be breezed through: One work after another forces us to confront how we see and how we live.The show spotlights the coordinated bequest to the DMA of the modern art collections of three Dallas couples: Marguerite and the late Robert Hoffman, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, and Deedie and Rusty Rose. Selecting from more than 900 works in the combined collections, curator María de Corral has deftly mixed them with pieces promised by other collectors and items already owned by the museum. The show ranges from 1940s abstract expressionism to mixed-media and video installations with the plastics barely dry.

A first reaction to the show, in the Feb. 11 GuideLive, didn't include several rooms where installations were still under way. And these were rooms with some of the newest and most provocative works, leading right into the 21st century. Three visits later, some themes emerge.

With abstract expressionism, represented in the DMA show by stunning canvases from Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, modern art reached an apotheosis and a dead end: all gesture and color, though sometimes little of either. If you had to ask what it meant, you didn't belong. In a way, the subsequent wave of minimalism pushed the abstraction envelope yet further, purging gesture to leave pure form and color.

But minimalism also deflated the high-priest pretensions of modern art. Ellsworth Kelly's crisp rectangles of color and Donald Judd's repetitive boxes give the simplest of pleasures, unburdened with emotional undercurrents.

A more subversive, anti-elitist response to father-knows-best abstract expressionism was pop art – surprisingly downplayed at the DMA. Taking up the challenge of critic Clement Greenberg's famous 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Andy Warhol and company fetishized commercial products and images, from Brillo boxes to newspaper comics. Banal was in, as was a heavy dose of leg-pulling.

The persistence and transformation of the banal is a thread running through much of the later art in "Fast Forward." Here is the detritus of civilization, variously fragmented, distorted and collaged. If the avant-garde and kitsch could once seem polar opposites, here they're often inseparable.

DMA

True Plastic Love by Tony Cragg

Take Tony Cragg's True Plastic Love, a silhouette of a cuddling couple done in plastic shards, pink for the woman, blue for the man, stuck to a wall. Or Jim Hodges' Changing Things, a constellation of pastel silk flowers and bits pinned across another patch of wall.

The elevation of trivia to art and the deflation of artistic pretense date back to Marcel Duchamp's urinal, bottle rack and shovel. But a related thread of surrealism, with its strange juxtapositions and dislocations, also runs through much of the more recent "Fast Forward" art.

Laura Owens gives us a kiddies'-book sendup of a Max Ernst nightmare, a gnarly tree with scary critters above an innocent Bambi and a sea with happy fish and fowl. One imagines René Magritte admiring the spooky presence of Chris Burden's All the Submarines of the United States of America, a room full of 625 little cardboard submarines suspended from filaments.

In a straw basket Robert Gober melts together male and female torsos around a drain. (Lots of loaded messages here.) Nearby, a Gober leg protrudes from a wall. Matthew Barney's CREMASTER 3: The Cloud Club has a symmetrical baby-grand piano, its innards loaded with concrete, tilted on a pile of petrified potatoes.

Houstonian Trenton Doyle Hancock's Good Vegan Progression #2 is like a church-school felt banner gone terribly wrong, a garish collage of leafless trees and what look like contents of a couple of upset stomachs. Even photographs by Nic Nicosia and Gregory Crewdson play unsettling tricks with perspectives, and coal bunkers captured in black-and-white photos by Bernd and Hilla Becher are as sinister as any of Ernst's imaginary monsters.

Another recurrent theme is human vulnerability. The exhibition skirts the touchiest issues of race and sexuality – don't look for any of Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic/S&M photos – but there's certainly an accent on specifically feminine vulnerability, notably in three Kiki Smith sculptures.

Virgin flattens a hairless papier-maché woman, with genitals brought forward, into a sad mummy. Blue Girl is a worried-looking ceramic cartoon, leaning forward on a little chair. Daisy Hair frames a young woman's bust, in submissive posture, in fragile "curls" of tissue-paper hair. Cindy Sherman's photographs capture disturbing things done with doll parts.

DMA

All the Submarines of the United States of America by Chris Burden

Mona Hatoum's Silence is a crib elegantly crafted of laboratory glass tubes. Beautiful to look at, it also suggests unsettling connections between fragile young life and medical science. Tony Oursler supplies one of his sad talking heads: Atop a dark suit, a moving face is projected on a cloth blob as a recorded voice cycles through a psychological profile.

A first glance, two works by the late Feliz Gonzáles-Torres look like the ultimate in triviality: two side-by-side office clocks, set to the same time; and a turf of green-wrapped candies. But both works actually distill emotions surrounding the death of the artist's partner.

The clocks represent the two men's parallel lives, one destined to run down before the other. You're supposed to help yourself to the candies, thus contributing to the slow demise of the art work.

If this is starting to get a little heavy for you, take a break with a walk through the museum's sculpture garden. As big live oaks rustle in the breeze and water cascades over corrugated concrete, you can calm yourself amid sublime abstractions of David Smith, Tony Smith, Richard Serra and Ellsworth Kelly, even a swooping aluminum bench by architect Zaha Hadid.

Rachofsky Collection

Untitled (Little Drummer Boy), 2003 by Maurizio Cattelan

Most of the big works here have belonged to the DMA for a while, but two additions from the Rachofsky collection supply perky counterpoint: the squiggly, pastel, intersecting cubes of Liz Larner's Two as Three and Some Too for Howard Rachofsky and Maurizio Catellan's little drummer boy perched on a parapet.

All told, the Hoffman, Rachofsky and Roses bequests will make the DMA one of the country's richest nonspecialist repositories of post-World War II art. "Fast Forward" is a dazzling rush through the riches to come, along with some really fine art already in the DMA's holdings. Give yourself at least a couple of sessions to take it all in, but, whatever you do, don't miss it.

Plan your life

"Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art": first part, in Barrel Vault and Quadrant Galleries, continues through April 8; second part, in Chilton Galleries, continues through May 20 at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood at Ross. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays, and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays. $10; free 5 to 9 p.m. each Thursday and first Tuesday of the month. 214-922-1200, www.dallas museumofart.org.