New MASS MoCA Installation Reimagines Whistler’s ‘Peacock Room’

Darren Waterston, Filthy Lucre, 2014(NORTH ADAMS, Mass.) – In his first major museum exhibition on the East Coast, painter Darren Waterston‘s installation Filthy Lucre – the centerpiece of his exhibition Uncertain Beauty – reimagines James McNeill Whistler’s decorative masterpiece Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (1876-77). The exhibition, for which the artist has been in residency at MASS MoCA since July 2013, opens on Saturday, March 8, 2014, with an opening reception to celebrate Waterston and Uncertain Beauty on Saturday, March 29, 2014, from 5 to 7pm.

Fascinated with The Peacock Room both for its lyrical union of painting and architecture and for its dramatic story of patronage and artistic ego, Waterston created an installation that hints at parallels between the excesses and inequities of the Gilded Age (and the high society in Europe that it mimicked), and the social and economic disparities of our own time.

At the same time, the work raises questions about patronage and the relationships between artists, collectors, and institutions. Filthy Lucre is a reminder of the complexities and contradictions of the artist-patron relationship, as well as a reference to the relationship between art and money.

Darren Waterston, Filthy Lucre, 2014The original Peacock Room – the dining room for the London home of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland – was designed to showcase Leyland’s collection of Asian ceramics, with Whistler’s painting La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863-64) featured over the fireplace mantel. Asked to consult on the color scheme for the room, Whistler took bold – if not egregious – liberties while Leyland and his architect were away, and in a fit of enthusiasm painted the entire room – executing his now famous peacocks over the expensive Italian leather wall panels. The collector sued the artist for the large sum of money Whistler charged to Leyland’s account, and Whistler, in response, painted an unflattering caricature of his patron titled The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor) – now in the collection of the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Conflating the words frilly and filthy, Whistler made a jab at Leyland’s own ‘peacocking’ as well as his miserliness.

Darren Waterston, Filthy Lucre, 2014At MASS MoCA, Waterston reconstructs the historical room as an extravagant ruin. Inside, viewers will find a crumbling structure with re-interpretations of Whistler’s work in Waterston’s distinct style, as well as 250 hand-painted ceramic vessels inspired by the collections of both Leyland and the American industrialist Charles Freer, who acquired the room after Leyland’s death. A soundscape featuring voice and cello composed by the New York-based trio BETTY is heard intermittently through the space, punctuating the silence with haunting reverberations. (The group will perform the soundscape live in Club B-10 at MASS MoCA on Saturday, March 22, at 8pm).

Waterston describes Filthy Lucre as a “transgressive parody.” He comments, “I set out to recreate Whistler’s fabled Peacock Room in a state of decadent demolition – a space collapsing in on itself, heavy with its own excess and tumultuous history. I imagined it as an unsettling cacophony of excess, with every interior surface and object within sumptuously painted. A vision of both discord and beauty, the once-extravagant interior is warped, ruptured, and in the process of being overtaken by natural phenomena: stalactites hang from the mantelpiece, light fixtures morph into crystal-like formations, and moss and barnacles cover the walls. Painted vessels sit broken and scattered, or drip florescent glazes down the latticed shelves. The shimmering central mural melts down the wall onto the floor in a puddle of gold. From her perch above the fireplace, the painting of the reigning ‘Porcelain Princess’ – depicted in fantastical deformity – oversees the unsettling scene.”

Situating Filthy Lucre within MASS MoCA’s 19th-century mill buildings brings two examples of period architecture together for deeper examination of both. Industry is embodied in MASS MoCA’s historic structures, a monument to the labor that created the kind of wealth that made pleasures like the original Peacock Room possible. Waterston presents this decrepit version of what was once a private room designed for the presentation of art to a privileged few within the space of an art museum dedicated to serving a wider public. The juxtaposition brings to the surface questions of ownership and patronage, and of art and culture, from the Gilded Age to the present.

The installation is accompanied by two galleries filled with nearly thirty of Waterston’s paintings and works on paper, featuring works from multiple series made over the last five years. Waterston’s luminous paintings, which seem to glow from within, transport viewers to otherworldly spaces, somewhat familiar but unhinged from a particular time or place. Like Filthy Lucre, they express both the grotesque and the beautiful, hinting at utopian fantasies and Arcadian dreams, as well as apocalyptic nightmares. A selection of studies for Filthy Lucre and related works will also be on view. Hung salon-style, the presentation makes a nod to the shifting trends in the history of collection and display, the very same interests that drew him to the Peacock Room.

To complete the work, New York-based Waterston relocated to North Adams, Mass., where he has been in residency in a painting studio on the campus of MASS MoCA for eight months. The museum’s Director of Art Fabrication, Richard Criddle, notes that working with Waterston has been “one of the most outstanding collaborative projects we’ve ever done with an artist here at MASS MoCA.”

Darren Waterston has been exhibiting in the U.S. and abroad since the early 1990s. He received his BFA at the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, California, and continued his training in Germany at the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin and the Fachhochschule für Kunst, Münster. Recent solo exhibitions include: Forest Eater (2011), which Waterston conceived for The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii; Splendid Grief: The Afterlife of Leland Stanford Jr. (2009), an installation at The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, California; and The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense) (2007) at the Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon. Waterston’s paintings are included in numerous permanent collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. A monograph, Darren Waterston: Representing the Invisible, was published by CHARTA in 2007, and in 2013 Prestel published a collaboration between the artist and poet Mark Doty, A Swarm, a Flock, a Host: A Compendium of Creatures. Waterston is represented by DC Moore Gallery, New York City; Haines Gallery, San Francisco; Inman Gallery, Houston; and Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle. Recently transplanted from San Francisco, Waterston currently lives and works in North Adams and New York City.

 

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