Darren Waterston’s remake of an elaborate building, one of the most exquisite china hutches ever made, might have ceramic connections to his past. When he was completing art school and for a few years thereafter he worked as a gallery assistant in the 1980’s at the Garth Clark Gallery in Los Angeles which only showed ceramics.
Remembering his involvement, CFile’s Chief Editor Garth Clark comments:
“Darren was a gem to have in the gallery. Aside from practical skill his charm and warmth worked well at the front desk. When we met he was making work that was inventive but gave no warning of what was to come. Within a few years he switched from funky to intense.
“Seemingly out of blue he began to paint rich autumn-toned landscapes of a depth and maturity that seemed beyond his years. They resembled old master paintings, not as they were when painted but after the fog of repeated coats of vanish to the surface over time that darkened the color and made them more mystical and mysterious. Then, as now, what Waterston does brilliantly is engage with time and history.”
In his first major museum exhibition on the East Coast, painter Darren Waterston’s installation Filthy Lucre — the centerpiece of his exhibition Uncertain Beauty — re-imagines James McNeill Whistler’s decorative masterpiece Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (1876-77).
Installation of Filthy Lucre at MASS MoCA. Video courtesy of the artist.
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. The exhibition, for which the artist had been in residency at MASS MoCA since July 2013, opened on March 8, 2014, with an opening reception to celebrate Waterston and Uncertain Beauty on March 29th.
The 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. In a fit of enthusiasm he painted the entire room — executing his now famous peacocks over the expensive leather wall panels. The collector refused to pay Whistler’s full bill and banned him from the house; in response, Whistler 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, San Francisco, California. Conflating the words frilly and filthy, Whistler made a jab at Leyland’s own “peacocking” as well as his miserliness.
Waterston discusses his project. Video courtesy of MASS MoCA.
At 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 (http://www.hellobetty.com/) is heard intermittently through the space, punctuating the silence with haunting reverberations.
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 late nineteenth century to the present.
Filthy Lucre in progress. Video courtesy of the artist.
The installation is accompanied by two galleries filled with nearly 30 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 Waterston to the Peacock Room.
To complete the work, the New York-based artist 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.”
A 160-page hardcover catalogue published in association with Skira-Rizzoli will document Filthy Lucre and the original Peacock Room with 90 full-color images. Texts will include a lead essay by Curator Susan Cross, an essay by Lee Glazer, Associate Curator of American Art, Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and the co-editor of James McNeill Whistler in Context (2008), and an additional essay by John Ott, Associate Professor of Art History, James Madison University, and a scholar of patronage, museums, and markets and the author of the forthcoming book, The Gilded Rush: Art Patronage, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority in Victorian America.
Designed as a modular installation (inspired by the Peacock Room’s own dismantling and relocation from Leyland’s London home to Detroit upon Freer’s acquisition of the room, and then to Washington, D.C. upon Freer’s donation to the Smithsonian Institution), the work will travel to the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, opening in July 2015 and remaining on view through May 2016. Whistler’s Peacock Room is housed at the adjacent Freer Gallery of Art.
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, Stanford, California; and The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense) (2007) at the Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon.
Above images: Darren Waterston, Filthy Lucre, from Uncertain Beauty at MASS MoCA.
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James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 1876-77
Process photographs of the artist at work.
I’m amazed, I must say. Seldom do I come across a blog that’s both equally educative and entertaining,
and without a doubt, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
The issue is something that too few people are speaking intelligently about.
I am very happy I came across this in my search for something
concerning this.
The Peacock Room at the Freer is one my favorite “art environments”. Now Waterston has taken it a fabulous step further. Instead of the much lauded blue and white ware of Asia, he has inserted a mini, sketchy survey of ceramics, many of them contemporary with Whistler’s outlandish installation. He asks us to look a little deeper. Bravo!
You confused his name also, Bruce!
I find it odd that C-file indiscriminately mixes images of the real Peacock Room and Mr. Waterson’s satire. A tad sloppy, don’t you think? As for Waterson’s piece, he does not replicate the blue-and-white china that was shown in the room when Leyland owned it. Waterson’s pots more closely resemble the Turkish (and other?) material that Freer showed when the room was in Detroit. Or, alternatively, they resemble what is shown in the room now. Which I find confusing.
Hey Bruce! Thanks for calling attention to that. I went back into it and reorganized the images so the split between Waterston and Whistler is a little more obvious.
– Bill