I have a confession. I have never been to the Timken Museum of Art before. I have seen it, I have walked around it and I have passed by it many times on my way to other museums along the Prado in Balboa Park. But I have never gone in. I went in today and I encourage you to go too, sometime between now and May 15 when Video Portraits, an exhibition by Robert Wilson ends.
Have you ever visited a major museum and felt exhausted by the vast galleries full of huge paintings before you have even begun? If you have, then the Timken is a delight because it provides a sandwich-size bite into a spectrum of serious masterworks rather than an impossible to finish all-you-can-eat banquet.
The Timken space is light and consists of a handful of small, accessible galleries with just the right number of paintings to digest. To be clear, the work here is not contemporary; the collection includes Russian Icons, Flemish masters and 19th century American landscapes for example.
Contrasted against this concise collection of art from centuries past is the decidedly contemporary exhibition of video portraits by living artist Robert Wilson. The Timken’s rare but not unknown pairing of its old art with art that is new is summed up this way in the foreword to Wilson’s show: “New art has always been uncomfortable, whether it was in the 17th century or today. Being new it is therefore unfamiliar. Being unfamiliar, it is unsettling until it becomes familiar.”
“Uncomfortable” is right, but in a good way. In a nutshell, Wilson, one of the most original theatre directors for the past four decades presents four video portraits collapsing new technology with multiple art precedents using four contemporary icons as models: Jeanne Moreau, Robert Downey, Jr., Mikhail Baryshnikov and Winona Ryder.
Each celebrity model has been filmed in what appears to be a static painting. But in fact each image is slowly moving video. The portraits are ever so subtly alive; each performer blinking and breathing, even while their arm is being dissected (Downy, Jr. playing a patient on a 17th century physician’s table).
The three portraits inside the gallery are mesmerizing and dizzying and all four are effectively paired with Timken’s non-moving oil on substrate portraits in order to illustrate artistic lineage.
Meanwhile, the fourth portrait, of Winona Ryder buried up to her neck in an earthen mound, is something else altogether. It is screened daily on an outside wall of the museum from sundown to 11 p.m.
Now, if that doesn’t whet your appetite, then I don’t know what will. Enjoy the show. Admission is free.
GALLERY REVIEW
Timken Museum of Art
1500 El Prado (in Balboa Park)
619-239-5548
timkenmuseum.org
