Instant Replay

“Fabiola,” an exhibition arranged by the Dia Foundation and assembled in one of the pavilions of the Hispanic Society of America at the Audubon Terrace, is one of the oddest art shows to appear in New York in a long, long time. The demurely classical McKim, Mead & White structure that houses the exhibition contains fully 300 identical images of a young woman in profile, her head covered in a vermilion cloak and set against a deep black background. Along all the walls of the gallery, this image is relentlessly repeated to the point of seeming a neurotic compulsion, menacing and sickly.What is going on here and who was the artist? It turns out that this is a tricky question. At one level, the artist is an obscure French academic painter of the 19th century, Jean-Jacques Henner, who painted the image in 1885. The original, however, was lost long ago. In subsequent years, the image was, and continues to be, reproduced in places as diverse as Maastricht and Mexico City, mostly by anonymous artisans and amateurs, in materials as diverse as oil paint, ceramic dishes, and needlepoint. The composite of these reproductions can be seen as a work of conceptual art assembled by Francis Alys, whom the gallery text refers to as “the collector.”The young woman in question is Saint Fabiola, who died around 400 and is mostly remembered as one of the pious Roman matrons in the circle of Saint Jerome. She appears to have been the subject of renewed interest in the revived Catholicism of the latter half of the 19th century, especially after the publication of “Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs,” a novel written in 1854 by Cardinal Wiseman, a now largely forgotten British prelate. Each of the works in the Dia show faithfully reproduces — to the extent of the artisan’s skills of mimicry — the form and spirit of the original, with its sharply delineated realism. But like so much of the pietistic culture of the later 19th century, neither the original nor its imitations can resist turning that realism to the service of a compromised piety — one suspects that if the piety were made of sterner stuff, it wouldn’t need a “photographic” rendering like this in the first place.So what is going on in this exhibition? Mr. Alys explains himself through a series of questions: “What gives [this image] the power to resist first mechanical reproduction and now digital reproduction? What does the act/ritual of painting that image … mean for its author? How has it served as a reminder of the existence of a completely parallel and separate art scene from, say, ‘ours,’ with its own references and obsessions?” Interesting questions, indeed.Or are they? In touring the exhibition, contained in that charming sepulcher of late-19th-century classicism that is Audubon Terrace, I felt transported in time — not back to the 1880s when the original was made, but to the 1980s when, hard as it may now be to believe, such questions of attribution, of originality and simulacrum, actually sounded interesting, at least to someone. In a book published a few years later, I coined a term for such art, and I now beg leave to resurrect it. The term was Art Art, that is, art about art, art whose main, if not only, content was a question of art itself, of its consumption and distribution by the art world. References like the one cited in the previous paragraph to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” are still to be found in a thousand dissertations and college art history papers a year. But even so, Mr. Alys’s invoking of it sounds so passé at this point as almost to take on a kind of period charm.What else is going on in this work? Though this cannot be proven, there appears to be a rather unappetizing spectacle of art-world condescension to those backward souls who actually made these images in the sincerity of their hearts. At the same time, the intimations of pathology (Mr. Alys uses the word “obsessions” in the passage quoted above) suggest the bizarre fascination with outsider art, with its slightly comical cast of misfits, morbid introverts, and all the rest. I cannot forbear from mentioning one final twist in the story of this exhibition. An early and smaller version of it was apparently sent to Saaremaa, Estonia. When the works came back, Mr. Alys discovered that “almost thirty had been replaced with substitutes, crude versions made to simulate his ‘originals,’ which had mysteriously disappeared en route,” according to a footnote in the Dia flyer that accompanies the show.How perfectly appropriate to the tenor and nature of this exhibition. I wonder if it’s true.

Instant Replay

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