The Unbearable Lightness of Gold

Until March 15, 2017, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) presents Lauren Kalman: But if the Crime Is Beautiful.… Taking up the subject of gold, particularly its application in jewelry and accessory, the installation by metalsmith and performance artist Lauren Kalman is a thought-provoking, fascinating journey through the many symbolisms and meanings of gold.

The title of the exhibition “Lauren Kalman: But if the Crime Is Beautiful” refers to Austrian architect Adolf Loos' 1908 treatise "Ornament and Crime," an essay that has been labeled one of the most radical polemics of design criticism in the twentieth century. In it, Loos declares decoration regressive, degenerate, primitive, and criminal—characteristics he associates with women and minorities, and makes synonymous with moral decay. He advocates instead for a new aesthetic based on rational and unornamented design, which became known as Western-European modernism.

In Kalman's installation, she protests Loos' spare aesthetic and commits a "crime" by covering the inside and outside of MAD's upright white jewelry cases in thousands of golden brass leaves. They weave in and around modernist and contemporary jewelry pieces from MAD's collection, upending the minimalist austerity of the gallery. To create the installation, Kalman surveyed MAD's jewelry collection and chose over 60 gold pieces from the midcentury forward. Gold as a decorative metal is rich in symbolism, representative of luxury, power, wealth, and sentiment. It is the material of choice in mythology and fairy tales to signify transformation and magic. While modernist art jewelers rejected it for these reasons, contemporary artists have been playing with these meanings ever since.

To represent the modernist studio jeweler's rejection of gold, Kalman highlights pieces by Ronald Hayes Pearson and Margaret De Patta. The installation includes gold masterpieces by John Paul Miller, Margret Craver, and Irena Brynner, as well as subversive works by Otto Künzli, J. Fred Woell, and Gijs Bakker. Works by Eunmi Chun and Judy Kensley McKie explore medieval alchemy, the practice of turning ordinary substances into gold, while pieces by Lola Brooks and Frank Tjepkema celebrate tropes of love and eternity.

Kalman uses her golden leaves as representative of the leaves of kudzu, an invasive vine species that engulfs, spreads, and creates new decorative forms wherever it thrives. As guest curator and installation designer, the artist recontextualizes the jewelry gallery at MAD in an act that is, similarly to the invasive kudzu, both beautiful and suffocating. Kalman further challenges Loos' equation of decoration and femininity in her image and video work made for the exhibition. Through the purity of gold, contrasted with the blunt physicality of her own body, she claims the feminine as a position of power rather than shame. C.F.

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