Go Review: ‘Fast Forward’ hinges on key years for modern art

Bottom line: There's a whole lot to unpack and mull in this occasionally overloaded but idea-rich exhibition.

Can modern art be corralled into illustrative years, when innovation and ideas crystallized? It’s the proposition the Museum of Modern Art makes in its latest collaboration with the High Museum, called “Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 >> 2013.” The show is organized around six interludes in art history: the years 1913, 1929, 1950, 1961, 1988 and a sneak peek of the 2013 to come. All works shown in this far-reaching exhibition were created in one of those key moments.

Jodi Hauptman, co-curator for “Fast Forward” along with Michael Rooks and Samantha Friedman, compares this focus on a specific year in art history to taking a tree core sample: You get the measure of conditions at the time by analyzing the artistic results.

What are some of the ideas that emerge in these epochs? In 1913 there is a fascination, evident in the Cubist shapes of artists such as Pablo Picasso and Kazimir Malevich, with expressing an era of flight, of machines and modernity’s sometimes anxiety-inducing rush forward. Marcel Duchamp’s transformation of a wheel and a stool into a ready-made sculpture called “Bicycle Wheel” rightfully opens the show while also setting the stakes for all modern art to come: If you call it art, it is art.

In 1929 we see the emergence of film, photography, the graphic arts and the sway of surrealism in disturbing the usual ways of seeing. In 1950, there is the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In 1961 comes the unmissable fixation on consumer culture: cars and advertisements and comic book imagery in works by Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein. In 1988 artists such as Annette Messager and the collaborative artists General Idea address society and the self with vigor, whether tackling the AIDS epidemic or the artist’s own identity as black or female or gay.

As Hauptman indicates in the accompanying catalog, by grouping work in this way you are able to discern the huge — sometimes shocking — leaps made in just a decade. As just one illustration, the shift in aesthetics from 1950 to 1961 is like night and day. One minute, artists are pouring out interior states in frantic puddles and splashes of paint. Come 1961 and the interior life of the artist has been replaced with paintings of products, advertisements and a culture reduced to an assembly line. By 1988, artists have gotten back to navel-gazing. A prime example of that era is Ashley Bickerton’s “Tormented Self-Portrait,” an artwork that shows inner thoughts replaced by consumer preference. Bickerton’s self-portrait is a collection of logos for the things he buys and supports: Renault, Wilson, The Village Voice, Body Glove, Cal Arts.

Grouping the works in this way may feel like a forced concept to some. But it does yield some insights when you look at art history in such a macro rather than a micro way. Rather than a show emphasizing big names and prestige collaborations, “Fast Forward” thankfully puts its emphasis on seeing art history differently, though it expects leaps of imagination that viewers may or may not want to join the curator on.

It is possible as you progress through the exhibit to get a sense of things speeding up, of the work becoming more fractured, animated, urgent, as if it is reflecting the manic pace as the 20th century moves on and into the 21st. There is a sense of increased cynicism, too, as the possibility in futurist sculptor Umberto Boccioni’s gloriously fluid 1913 bronze statue of a man who has transformed into a machinelike object in “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” gives way to the snarky wink of Jeff Koons’ 1988 porcelain sculpture “Pink Panther” of the Pink Panther embracing a topless Jayne Mansfield. Perhaps in that way “Fast Forward” has arrested something essential: that like so many things, the art world may not necessarily be progressing, but simply reflecting the pace, the fixations, the manias of our time.

Art review

“Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 >> 2013”

Through Jan. 20. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; until 8 p.m. Thursdays; noon- 5 p.m. Sundays. $18; $15, students and seniors; $11, ages 6-17; free, children 5 and younger and members. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.

Bottom line: There’s a whole lot to unpack and mull in this occasionally overloaded but idea-rich exhibition.