Arendt in Contemporary Art: Lyln Foulkes at the New Museum

Arendt in Contemporary Art: Lyln Foulkes at the New Museum

Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt is only the latest appearance of the political thinker in popular culture. This summer, the New Museum's Lyln Foulkes retrospective provided an opportunity to examine an appearance of Arendt in contemporary art. Completed in 1991, The New Renaissance employs materials and motifs reminiscent of pop art and post-modern collage to create a vibrant but mysterious self-portrait.

The setting of the painting, Santa Monica Bay, reminds us of the early paintings modeled on post cards that first brought Foulkes critical attention in the 1960s. The face of the painter, traditionally the center of subjectivity in Western painting, has been disfigured in a style that Foulkes employed since the 1970s. While facing, if not exactly looking, west though, the painter seems to reach out to the East, painting the Chinese character “humanity.” The words written on the painter's brain list a series of concepts and problems, the pallet has a wide mix of colors, but on the canvas it seems that the painter is able to get a clear sign of the picture he wishes to express. Foulkes also uses what looks like real wood for the telephone pole, further satirizing the process of art as creative mediation.

At the viewer's left, Arendt’s book The Human Condition appears in the hands of Foulkes’s wife. She stands behind him in black and white outline, unfinished or highlighted by lack of color. One might conjecture that she reads Arendt to attempt to make sense of the work of art before her. In this case, we might imagine that she's immersed in book 4, where Arendt calls works of art "the most worldly of all things." Foulkes's work leads us to ask how contemporary art creates a human world by telling a story. What kind of "durability" does it create, given that it often challenges understanding rather than simply marking an event (like a monument), or even recounting an recognizable story?

The “HUMAN” in all capital letters of the title makes its way from the book through the painter to the Chinese character on canvas. West meets East here through different cultural symbols. In a similar manner, the ghostly, electric image on Christ on the telephone pole suggests a striking confrontation of the modern age with the imagery of the biblical tradition. Whether or not one thinks that Foulkes succeeds in contributing to the durability of the world with these combinations, we can see them as the kind of attempt to confront the challenges of the present with resources of the past that Arendt advocated and practiced.

-Jeffrey Champlin