(Con)temporarily Corcoran
There's this unwritten rule for contemporary art history students: don't do a thesis on a living artist, 'cause they'll contradict you faster than you can say feces-spattered-canvas.
So it's with great caution and wide ambiguity that the Corcoran's Contemporary (re)defined attempts to organize contemporary work in a large two-part exhibition. This is a buckshot at art related by chronology, with packeted galleries casing recent trends in art like material based abstraction, graffiti, and text or sign based art.
Prepare for a free-form browse through the Corcoran's permanent collection. The anteroom begins with names you know like Damien Hirst and Bruce Naumann, and successive rooms stretch to locals like James Huckenpahler and D.C. graf pioneer Cool "Disco" Dan. It's the contemporary show that tries to be everyone's friend in a city recently polarized by a modern master. It's a tall order.
Despite what your mom told you, this please-everyone strategy seems to work here. There are the oils of Kim Dingle and Ida Applebroog (Applebroog's Mother mother I am ill is pictured above), the intricate boxed collages of Joseph Cornell, and a nearly hidden Kiki Smith body sculpture. At its worst, a drawing by Philip Guston is a flat tease without more of his cartoonish abstracts to support it. At its best, a hulking mass of pink marble forms a leg emerging from a large sphere by Louise Bourgeois in a strange call out to a lover. The content is as varied as the concepts, Naumann's neon sign flips consumerism as it glows the words SUITE SWEET SUBSTITUTE.
The size of the show will only get bigger when the show expands to the second floor in July, so now is the time to beat the summer rush and what could be the bursting of this already bulging, amalgam of an exhibition. In fact, after digging for a little more information on the exhibit's layout I shot an email to the Corcoran. They answered my question with an addendum: "The show is now being called 'redefined: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection.'" A show about redefinition redefining itself? That is so meta.