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拍品专文
Combining knowing wit and deep art historical understanding, Alex Da Corte has changed the way we think about contemporary art. His large-scale sculpture The Pied Piper expands the cautionary children’s tale into a ten-foot square sculpture that is awash in humor and mystery. One of the rising stars of conceptualism, Da Corte uses references, installations, and collaboration in order to expand what we think of as art. In 2017, he also directed the music video for avant-garde musician St. Vincent’s “New York,” and he always searches for ways to expand his practice into multiple media. The Pied Piper, itself a reference to the power of music, also engages the canon of boundary-pushing sculpture, from Joseph Beuys to Claes Oldenburg and Louise Bourgeois.
Evocative and unabashedly sentimental, The Pied Piper is part of a 2019 series using cartoons that magnifies details and playful narratives, much like Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings. Inspired by a 1969 short story entitled “Marigolds” about a poor Southern girl by the cherished Black author Eugenia Collier, Da Corte directs our attention to the optimism and danger of childhood. Collier writes, “Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in the multicolored skein of fourteen-going-on-fifteen as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child…” (E. Collier, “Marigolds,” in E. Collier, Breeder and Other Stories, Baltimore, 1994, p. 9). In The Pied Piper, Da Corte likewise admixes this wondrous emotional range, somewhere between happiness and fear, by expanding a detail from a Bugs Bunny cartoon into a colorful and detailed monument. Despite lying flat, The Pied Piper lends depth to history as it considers literature, art, and the conflicting truths of growing up. Critic Roberta Smith wrote that Da Corte’s sculptures and installations “weave confounding narratives about innocence and decadence, mass production and eccentricity” (R. Smith, “Alex Da Corte: ‘Die Hexe,” New York Times, section C, p. 24, April 2, 2015).
Da Corte, born in New Jersey and raised in Venezuela, came to international prominence soon after his graduation from Yale in 2010. Since then, he mounted solo shows at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Secession in Vienna, Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. A career survey of his work at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark is currently on view, and in 2021 he was selected for the Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. All this success has revealed Da Corte to be a necessary chronicler of contemporary life and the power of emotionally charged objects. He says, “I think these works have so much emotion in them and so much care and, like, magic…Maybe that’s part of realizing these things and making them exist in the world” (A. Lubow, “Alex Da Corte: Puppet Master,” T: The New York Times Magazine, June 16, 2021, n.p.)
It is difficult to categorize Da Corte’s vast oeuvre, but The Pied Piper offers us an important clue and a key to unlock a fantastical world. An essential example of his varied but intentional artistic output, The Pied Piper overwhelms us with its size, and yet is comforting and familiar. Life and art are equally comprised of beauty, awe, and uncanniness. Da Corte harnesses the multitude of emotions inherent to contemporary life and makes them into objects of love and fandom. The Pied Piper is a characteristically comical inflection point of a career that only expand, and there is no doubt that Da Corte will continue to act as a mirror for our desires and fears.
Evocative and unabashedly sentimental, The Pied Piper is part of a 2019 series using cartoons that magnifies details and playful narratives, much like Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings. Inspired by a 1969 short story entitled “Marigolds” about a poor Southern girl by the cherished Black author Eugenia Collier, Da Corte directs our attention to the optimism and danger of childhood. Collier writes, “Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in the multicolored skein of fourteen-going-on-fifteen as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child…” (E. Collier, “Marigolds,” in E. Collier, Breeder and Other Stories, Baltimore, 1994, p. 9). In The Pied Piper, Da Corte likewise admixes this wondrous emotional range, somewhere between happiness and fear, by expanding a detail from a Bugs Bunny cartoon into a colorful and detailed monument. Despite lying flat, The Pied Piper lends depth to history as it considers literature, art, and the conflicting truths of growing up. Critic Roberta Smith wrote that Da Corte’s sculptures and installations “weave confounding narratives about innocence and decadence, mass production and eccentricity” (R. Smith, “Alex Da Corte: ‘Die Hexe,” New York Times, section C, p. 24, April 2, 2015).
Da Corte, born in New Jersey and raised in Venezuela, came to international prominence soon after his graduation from Yale in 2010. Since then, he mounted solo shows at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Secession in Vienna, Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. A career survey of his work at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark is currently on view, and in 2021 he was selected for the Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. All this success has revealed Da Corte to be a necessary chronicler of contemporary life and the power of emotionally charged objects. He says, “I think these works have so much emotion in them and so much care and, like, magic…Maybe that’s part of realizing these things and making them exist in the world” (A. Lubow, “Alex Da Corte: Puppet Master,” T: The New York Times Magazine, June 16, 2021, n.p.)
It is difficult to categorize Da Corte’s vast oeuvre, but The Pied Piper offers us an important clue and a key to unlock a fantastical world. An essential example of his varied but intentional artistic output, The Pied Piper overwhelms us with its size, and yet is comforting and familiar. Life and art are equally comprised of beauty, awe, and uncanniness. Da Corte harnesses the multitude of emotions inherent to contemporary life and makes them into objects of love and fandom. The Pied Piper is a characteristically comical inflection point of a career that only expand, and there is no doubt that Da Corte will continue to act as a mirror for our desires and fears.