Collage, claimed Donald Barthelme, was “the central principle of all art in the 20th century.” The form has been around since the Chinese invented paper, but it wasn’t until 1912 and 1913 that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque tapped into the greater mixed-media possibilities of the style Braque called papier collé—”pasted paper.” Their early collages would inform Cubism as well as Russian constructivism, Dada, surrealism, and abstract expressionism, whose practitioners developed the technique into a form that by its very essence conveys the fragmentation of modern life.
In “Exhibit, A,” curated by Dieter Roelstraete, the Museum of Contemporary Art collects politically charged works by the Polish-born, London-based artist Goshka Macuga. The most arresting piece is Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not 1, an enormous, enigmatic photo-based wool tapestry showing various groups of people in front of the bombed-out Queen’s Palace in Kabul. In the middle ground, a long line of Afghans and foreign-aid workers face the camera; off to the side, in the distance, acrobats form a pyramid. In the foreground men sleep in the snow, oblivious to a giant cobra that dominates the composition, front and center. Its question-mark shape seems to echo the ruminations of the thinker sitting nearby, chin in hand. The tension between the intimate and the global makes this a heady antiwar cocktail.
Through 4/7, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, mcachicago.org, $12, Tuesdays free for Illinois residents.
“Gigi Scaria: City Unclaimed” Through 12/8, Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood, martmuseum.uchicago.edu, free.
