Nina Katchadourian, Morgan Library review — a dizzying path of charms and wonders

In a 1964 drawing by Saul Steinberg, a small fellow in a tailored suit contemplates a painting by Georges Braque. Above his head, a wild profusion of associations crowds into a thought bubble so bloated that it threatens to push the thinker off the page. “Braque, bric-a-brac, break, bark, poodle,” begins the chain, which then shoots off into a cloud of phonetic echoes, scattered memories, conceptual links and private codes that are easy to follow and impossible to predict. Pretty soon, we’re careening through telephone exchanges and New York night clubs, from El Morocco to “Mogador, Mogadiscio, Ethiopia, Abyssinia, 1936! Vittorio Emanuele III” and so on.

That sketch (labelled “very tentative” in pencil) summarises the sensibility of Uncommon Denominator, a quirky and endearing exhibition that artist Nina Katchadourian dreamt up for the Morgan Library in New York. The show glories in random-seeming assemblages — what the curator Joel Smith calls “side-angle connections, unplanned affinities”. And because Katchadourian has a sharp mind, a good eye and a gentle wit, the result of this intentional unintentionality is a cabinet of charms and wonders.

The Morgan invited her to mine its vaults, pick out whatever items struck her and juxtapose them with her own works and family artefacts. The sheer number of possibilities resonated with her idea of “swarms”: words, images, objects and faces that assault us in dizzying abundance. “Language can swarm in your head,” she remarks in the delightfully indispensable audio guide, “or one word can lead to another in such rapid succession that suddenly you’re many steps away from where you begin.”

In the same agglomerative spirit, this segment also includes Tim Davis’s brightly coloured photograph of a vegetable mass grave. Discarded eggplants, peppers, tomatoes and squash spread out on the ground awaiting burial, a bounty of inexorable rot. Nearby, an 1865 carte de visite proudly assembles “One Thousand Portraits of Living & Historical Celebrities” into a composite of tiny headshots, a few still famous, most made unrecognisable by miniaturisation and the forgetfulness of time.

“Swarms” is just one of the rubrics Katchadourian uses to help organise her finds and creations, along with “Maps”, “Holes”, “Ships”, “Handheld Objects” and others. A visit to the show is like paging through a sorcerer’s encyclopedia, held together by tenuous correspondences, sometimes emotive or formal, often both.

She began by interviewing members of the museum’s staff, asking them to dive into the storage areas and return with an object or two they loved or would like to see on display. (She made the final selection.) Many picked items they could tuck in the palm of a hand or slip into a pocket. And so we see a leatherbound reading primer from the 18th century, well-thumbed, torn and repeatedly stitched. A notebook from the 1860s has locks of braided and beribboned hair glued on to the pages like samples in a catalogue.

Katchadourian pairs these anonymous heirlooms with her own family’s relics. One is a stained and yellowed needlework sampler made by a 12-year-old adopted relative named Lucy after she’d lost her biological parents in the Armenian genocide of 1915-16. Deposited in an orphanage in Lebanon, the girl embroidered this scrap of cloth to advertise her domestic skills; more than a century later, it’s become both a monument to a vast tragedy and a testament to a childhood shaped by trauma, migration and chance.

Next to the sampler we see another cryptic bit of clan memorabilia: the lid of a broken food storage container that the artist’s grandfather Lale repaired in the 1950s, an act of almost fanatical frugality. He affixed the plastic lid to a plywood backing with brass screws, then painted the whole thing white. The result, a triumph of loving labour, hangs on the wall in the Katchadourian family home when it’s not at the Morgan.

You can read the whole exhibition as an extension of Lale’s urge to preserve, recycle and reuse. After he died, Nina explored his tool shed. She emerged with a bicycle-tyre repair kit that she took into the woods and used to “renovate” a torn mushroom. A close-up photo of a fungus sporting coloured rubber patches hangs among portraits of ancestors and friends.

A strong sense of personality springs from all these odds and ends. I came away thinking I would like to know this woman, this subtle scavenger who detects sagas and poetry and evocative voids that just about anyone else would ignore. Her mind makes Uncommon Denominator special, but she also suggests that anyone can make art out of noticing.

“I hope to infect people with a certain rigorous attentiveness,” she says. “We are a better society and culture when we pay attention and listen well, in a serious, well-trained way, to others — socially, environmentally, politically, in every sense. Art is a good place to practice these skills.”

As if to demonstrate her mastery, Katchadourian includes a snapshot of a metal stanchion in Paris which she took from directly above so that the rounded pommel looks like a globe and the flaking paint forms an unfamiliar pattern of continents. She pairs that picture with a 19th-century portable globe made of fabric and mounted like an umbrella on a central rod. It’s a provocative juxtaposition of the universal and the personal. The world has an objective, measurable existence; your world consists of the tiny portion that meets your glance.

She also pays attention to emptiness. A search of the Morgan’s conservation centre turned up a volume that had once contained original letters between Walt Whitman and his mother. The missives had been cut out so that they could be properly preserved, but Katchadourian was more interested in the eviscerated book. The artefact acts as a negative image, the record of all that even a writer as prolix and candid as Whitman may have left unsaid. It’s also a nod to the artist as editor, wielding the power of excision.

Sensitised to the presence of missing pieces, the viewer can cross the gallery to another display of gaps. The 1930s parlour game Physogs offered a mass-market version of the discipline of physiognomy, which purported to detect character in facial features. Players would fill in a blank face by shuffling eyes, noses and mouths to produce a series of identifiable temperaments: “artistic-imaginative”, “credulous-impractical”, “magnetic” and so on. (If that sounds suspiciously like Nazi junk science in family-friendly form, it was.)

Even if our schnozzes aren’t the keys to our personality, Katchadourian remains fascinated by the ways people compose themselves out of keepsakes, memories, effigies and clothes. A 19th-century paper-doll set from India consists of an androgynous bald head floating in space, waiting to be completed by an assortment of painted outfits and headgear. Nearby, a smiling white family poses with their even whiter doubles: a trio of eerily realistic snowmen.

This accumulation of stuff keeps wandering from the anthropological to the antiquarian, the psychological and the happily haphazard. It all makes a certain strange sense, thanks to the ironical intelligence guiding us along a Steinbergian chain of associations that are simultaneously logical and absurd.

For example, Katchadourian has organised books from the Carter Burden Collection of American Literature so that we can read their titles as lines of found verse. Winter Insomnia announces the volume at the top of one stack, followed by John Updike’s Tossing and Turning. The sequence of spines passes hopefully through Ellen Gilchrist’s In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, before slipping back into its state of original despair with Henry Miller’s Insomnia. That’s the danger of Katchadourian’s infectious hyper-alertness: once the mind starts racing, it’s hard to slow it back down.

To May 28, themorgan.org