The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art

Barbican
6 March 2008 – 18 May 2008

Review by James Westcott

In the The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art at the Barbican, curators Francesco Manacorda and Lydia Yee have attempted to put themselves in the shoes (or whatever) of Martians wandering earth and trying to make sense of the objects we place in the category of contemporary art.

But they still end up choosing all the correct names for their exhibition of 'Terrestrial Art'. They still so just happen to choose Earth's most relevant and trendy contemporary artists. This is the problem with the exhibition: an exciting conceit isn't taken far enough. Manacorda and Yee should have really taken their excellent idea to the ends of the earth.

Manacorda and Yee split up contemporary art into anthropological categories like Communication, Magic and Belief, Kinship and Descent, and Ritual – a move which on the face of it is a fertile, irreverent and primal way of looking at contemporary art, which is so often drained of these essential meanings/functions.

But aliens would surely choose much more surprising stuff than this roster of mostly familiar names, and would definitely make category errors in their selections, accidentally (and fruitfully) stretching beyond what we deem contemporary art to illuminate much more brightly these basic categories of human behaviour.

Aliens, unconcerned with hitting the right artworld notes, and ignorant of our boundaries dictating what's considered art (a single, conscious author (even for found works) and conventional gallery setting are still the most important conditions here), might count phenomenon like YouTube or Facebook as model artworks (with a whole culture as the author) that reveal contemporary (and primal) human methods of communication. Or something like the American flag (not Jasper John's version, but the actual American flag) could easily be deemed one of the most potent artistic symbols on earth, perhaps one attempting at interplanetary communication too (a sub-category that a room upstairs deals with, including Bruce Nauman's graceful and puzzling My Name as Though it Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968) – a white neon sign saying "bbbbbbrrrrruuuuucccccceeeee").

The category 'Ancestor Worship' contains a slew of appropriations – like Sherrie Levine's golden (actually highly polished bronze) version of Duchamp's fountain and Maurizio Cattelan's pastiche of Lichtenstein with a little doll of Picasso in the forground. What's going on here (and atleast since Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning drawingin 1953) is more like an oedipal desire to kill off father figures, or humiliate, reinvent or declare them irrelevant rather than traditional ancestor worship.

And this is part of what's depressing about the show. Using these classical anthropological categories only makes you realise how denuded and abject most contemporary art is as a fulfillment of primal human and societal functions.

And if we're talking about the anthropological functions of art, the primal and only semi-confessed or disavowed roles that it plays for human beings and human society, then the curators missed the most crucial category: status – art as a luxury object conferring power on the rich.