James Macdonell: Safe Passage Ohr O'Keefe Museum of Art

By ADAM FALIK April 1, 2025

The function is not how to make meaning, but how to examine it.  For a while, artistic intent was all that was necessary.  By virtue of being an artist, an object is transformed into art.  Ok, we accept that, if the now-transformed object is freshly invigorated with meaning it previously did not contain.  If we agree that there is such a thing as meaning, then the art object should possess it, and we, who seek an experience from the art object, should be able to read that meaning.  Reasonable enough.

The history of modernism is the history of the transformed object.  Marcel Duchamp demonstrated that any everyday object can be repurposed into new context. “No ideas but in things,” the poet William Carlos Williams declared shortly following Duchamp submitting his transformed urinal to the Society of Independent Artists.  Both Duchamp and Williams contend that the most common cultural artifact, anything purchased in a supermarket or found lying against a street curb, possesses the possibility of transformation.

And here we still are: art writing, art criticism, art reading, and continuing to deal with the burden of translating meaning from objects.   

Blue Amédé I, 20 x 16 inches, Mixed Media on Aluminum, 2014

James Macdonell’s solo exhibition Safe Passage, on exhibition at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art through June 14, 2025, challenges us with the task of scouring Macdonell’s works for meaning.  Here are some approaches one might engage:

Macdonell recreated himself as a visual artist in New Orleans following decades as a successful New York City musician.  There is a frequent representation of jazz musicians in Macdonell’s collages (much, not all, of the work is collage).  Jelly Roll Morton, and more significantly, or at least more often, Amédé Ardoin, a legend of Cajun and Creole music who wrote the zydeco standards that Macdonell brought to New York in the 1980s, repeats often enough in the work to become a sort of ghost in the machine.  Ardoin appears in photographic cut-up prints, in mixed media collages on aluminum and steel, in sculptural assemblages of found objects. 

Too often in a gallery we’re expected to derive meaning from an object because of personal connection, because this piece of wood was from the fence that surrounded my childhood home.  It’s not enough to put a baseball mitt under a bell jar (Safe Passage offers several objects under bell jars) and say: this is important because it’s my grandfather’s mitt.  If it’s all about you, why do I, the viewer, have to bother?  What’s in it for me?  Luckily, the objects of Safe Passage invite more than just personal readings.  Joseph Beuys (who also liked to collect objects under bell jars) was a master of reconstituting the discovered object into other systems of organization, from social to mystical to the political.  The poet Wallace Stevens said of Picasso’s The Old Guitarist that “Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar.”  To place something in an art context, to put a catcher’s mitt under a bell jar in a museum gallery, intends transformation.  But that doesn’t mean our reading of the intent is clear. 

Shrine, 12 x 10 inches, Leather Glove and Balls, 2004
 

When Macdonell first locked himself in his New Orleans studio in the early 2000s, he engaged the traditional canvas as a painter.  Safe Passage depicts the evolution from linen canvas to more elusive surfaces.  One wall of the single-room modular building of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum is hung salon style, canvases set amongst collages and other framed objects.  It is here one recognizes the principles of Macdonell’s style: blank spaces, shiny and disappearing surfaces, and free assemblages of found items.  Leo Steinberg’s seminal essay on Robert Rauschenberg (who will shortly be another means for reading this show) “Other Criteria”, addresses the emancipation Rauschenberg brought to the surface.  According to Steinberg, “…Rauschenberg’s work surface stood for the mind itself…the outward symbol of the mind as a running transformer of the external world, constantly ingesting unprocessed data to be mapped in an overcharged field.”  Macdonell’s surfaces can be similarly read as free-reign places where biography, history and artifacts collide.  Early paintings of abstract color fields with modernist-permissive materials such as chicken wire echo into composite surfaces of plexi and glass.  What begins with canvas evolves to metallic and reflective surfaces that mirror.  The evolution can be read as if what Macdonell wants from the surface is for it to disappear. 

Rising Sign, 60 x 36 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas, 2011

Macdonell’s rite of passage (and the word “passage” will prove significant) is through collage.  Some of his works harken the techniques of Hannah Höch and John Hartfield, sans the agitprop.  Sometimes Macdonell removes the seams by reprinting his collages onto smooth, clear surfaces, while in other works the evidence of glued photographic assemblage is evident.  Works towering in scale (like the more than 8” tall Till’s Reel), are composed of minutely cut and pasted images incorporating plant life, dinner plates, candles and cosmological imagery where the micro and macro are snugly comprised and almost musically assembled into fountains.

Steinberg associated Rauschenberg’s surface to the flatbed (which we can now reckon as the computer desktop), “Any flat documentary surface that tabulates information…The flatbed picture plane lends itself to any context that does not evoke a prior optical event.”  Consider Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955-59), which incorporates a stuffed goat and car tire, or Bed (1955), which consists of pillow, quilt, and sheet, mounted on a wooden bed frame.  Rauschenberg shattered expectations of surface, vector and materials alike to expand the vocabulary of artistic license.  Macdonell has a personal connection to Rauschenberg, as a friend of the family and having delivered Rauschenberg’s canvases to Leo Castelli’s gallery as a teenager.  After Rauschenberg’s death, Macdonell was gifted a suit of Rauschenberg’s, which has been fitted into Suit, hanging above the exhibition’s centerpiece the Chair, which incorporates bits of lace, rusted metallic springs, grills, dripping chains and various musical horns into its construction.  Macdonell inherited the emancipation of Rauschenberg’s visual language and applied it when he returned to New Orleans.

Suit, 46 1⁄4 x 34 x 2 inches, Mixed Media, 2020
 

Macdonell’s entire arsenal of incorporated found objects might have been gathered within a block of his art studio once the floodwaters delivered by Hurricane Katrina receded.  Bedsprings, rusted lamps, car parts, scabs of objects that once had working class utilitarian value: one can feel Macdonell’s interest in such things, each object as if studied by an alien sifting through a discovered apocalypse.  But Macdonell’s interest is less archeological than instinctual, like the attraction a Dadaist has for words shed of sign and symbol, now only purveyors of sound.  Macdonell assembles in a poetic way, not attempting to clarify but personifying the experience of transformative intent.  He doesn’t intend, like other New Orleans-based artists, to make statements about destruction or governmental failure or to testify human perseverance.  His assemblies are not an attempt to repair a broken world.  They are a passage, as the title of the show invites us to consider, passage as practice and transformation.  It’s an apt title, though inclusion of the word “Safe” might be more hopeful than reasonable. WM

Click the live link below to visit the exhibition:
https://tourmkr.com/F1arPpKbpo