Brancusi exhibited at MoMA.
And a fitting doorman, gatekeeper. Standing tall and phallic like a monolith, hewn by hand and made of stone like a monolith, and bearing a simple iconography immediately identifying itself with the religious, or at least mythic (that is an image of man and/or woman under apparently neverending duress, trapped between a rock and a hard place, so to speak, but in their struggle pointing up toward some fantastic ideal of transformation, transcendence, liberation, simplification, purification), Maiastra drips with the aura of originality, that is that energy which makes certain art-objects seem to take on an autonomy, a subjectivity of their own, as statues of religious figures before whom people kneel and murmur. Maiastra harnesses these same energies, and quite bluntly. So she is a fitting doorman for her place in the chronology of Brancusi's career, but also because as she stands right in the threshold of the show, all must pass through her aura as they enter, and all certainly feel it. Even if they do not particularly feel it the rest of the show, they sense it here as they enter. And as I look past Maiastra I see two more phalluses, a pair of golden needles gleaming in the center of my view. Bird in Space, of course the famous culmination of Brancusi's fascination with the bird-form. The bird-form stripped to its most essential. Though, aside from scale, the pair seems identical, the plaster cast of each was actually adjusted by hand to the differing proportions. Brancusi indeed took great pride in his crafting of the aura of originality, and I imagine he would be displeased to see his work so cloned ad nauseam as it is.
If I carry past Maiastra to follow those golden needles, I find myself faced with Young Bird (1928) and famous Mlle Pogany (1913) pedestaled as a pair, two pedestaled lumps of bronze. Across from it is the first golden needle Bird in Space (1941), together with First Cry (1917) and Socrates (1922). Each occupies a different altitude, bound as a bouquet. Their arrangement, as well as the rest of the show's, mimes the scattered, candid posture and interrelationality exhibited in the black and white prints hanging from the walls, and one drawing by Brancusi, depicting the artist's studio, always inhabited by a throng of wooden, limestone, bronze-cast, plaster-smacked, marble-carved, totemic figures. Between these two white-painted platforms is the highest concentration of milling visitors.
If I continue past Bird in Space I find the blue marble Fish (1930) looking especially individual, for it alone is so heavy and horizontal, and so colored. Yet just like the light rays of Bird in Space, Fish possesses its own sense of motion. So sleek yet of such great gravity, immensity. It once even spun upon the axle of its base. Yet it is humble compared to Brancusi's birds, low to the ground and unassuming yet clearly capable of incredible speed, agility, torque. In one sense, in its gentility, softness, earthiness, roundedness, Fish feels to be the feminine counterpart to the bold, brash, high-reaching and phallic Bird in Space. But in another sense it is the opposite, Fish as sturdy, devoted, and foreboding and Bird in Space as energetic, sensual, capricious, fragile, life-giving. The great marble Fish floating between the pair of shining bronze Birds in Space as in a wonderful balance.
And if I continue to follow the allure of shining bronze past Fish, I would find myself in front the second golden needle Bird in Space (1928). The second gleaming phallus.
But I do not. I do not do any of that. I am still stuck in front Maiastra, trapped by its aura, enamored by its feral romanticism. Past it, not in the space to its right but to its left, between Maiastra and the wall, I see Endless Column (1918) stretching up like a shadow, and I am drawn to it.
A vacillating rhythm of pointed geometry, zigzagging towards the sky. As the geometries stack each upon the other it seems to say it is really stretching into infinity, and I want to believe it. It is carved of oak, the claw and tooth marks of Brancusi's tools marring the dark surface. It radiates a sort of essential religiousness, like that of Maiastra only more naked, stripped of representational iconography leaving only the monolithic gesture of figures of stress pushing upwards. Downwards. Outwards. Inwards.
Looking past the Endless Column I see a final white-painted platform bearing a final pair of pedestals like a finger and a thumb. The Cock (1924) and Blond Negress II (1933) poised as their titles suggest. Like a backlit, glass-cased, and mystified artifact in an ethnographic exhibit. Like a self-absorbed bird on the fencepost ready to doodle-doo the whole town out of bed.
I return my eyes to the column.
Like a load-bearing pillar or a sturdy nail. Like a scaffold to support all the rest.
Or to strike it through, to fuck it. To infiltrate its every fiber and insert itself, leaving in its wake its likeness.
As much a suggestion of totality as an assertion of insatiable lack.
This Constantin Brancusi's infinite and fibrous phallus.
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