The impressive Henri Labrouste exhibit at MoMA is called Structure Brought to Light, to celebrate the architect’s pioneering use of exposed structural steel, most famously at the Bibliothèques Sainte-Geneviève and nationale in Paris.  Here slender steel posts lift roofs high and open walls to great expanses of glass.  Much of the exhibit is devoted to drawings, models and photographs of these two buildings, and to historical artifacts from their construction.  We even see the architect’s cloth-bound construction journals, filled with his lean, leaning script.  But the real treasures are Labrouste’s student drawings, which fill the first gallery.  They’re huge, yellowing sheets with renderings in black ink and soft, sepia-toned washes.  The drawings depict classical monuments Labrouste visited while traveling through southern Europe on the Prix de Rome, and some of his early speculative designs, like a bridge connecting France with Italy, and a tomb for Napoleon, all in conventional neoclassical styles.  Despite the fidelity with which these drawings depict masonry (and all of these structures are masonry), they are entirely weightless.  The heaviest ink lines are finer than hairs, and the colored washes, laid with exquisite evenness, feel as if they might evaporate from the page.

Labrouste’s student drawings are faithful, cataloging every crevice between stone blocks in a wall, and every millimeters-wide turn in the profile of a corinthian column capital,  and also dreamy, unrooted in time and place.  The images float on the page, cushioned by empty space, unmoored from landscape and geography.  We know precisely what this  memorial looks like, how it was built, how to enter it, and what it might look like inside, but we have no idea where it is.  Is it off the coast of Elba, at the center of a park in London, or in a back yard in Beverly Hills?  In the way the drawing highlights symmetries and geometries of the monument it’s highly rational, and yet it’s tempered with romanticism, a yearning for the faraway time and place where the building stands.

There has always been, for architects, a seductive freedom in drawings, where vision is given free reign, unchecked by realities of construction.  One of my architecture teachers used to say, “All that’s needed to do architecture is a pencil and paper.”  Labrouste’s student drawings are a compelling argument for the fullness of paper architecture.  They have the geometric clarity of drawings by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée, the shadowy melodrama of renderings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and the unsettling emptiness of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico.  Labrouste’s position within modern architectural history is that of an enlightened pragmatist; a man working at the cusp of Modernism, pushing contemporary construction one small, bold step away from Medieval masonry traditions.  From the evidence of these drawings, he is also a dreamer.

Punk fashion is hard to do.  Fashion exists to make boys and girls look pretty, and punk requires a fundamental not-wanting-to-be-pretty.  No figure illustrates this better than singer Siouxsie Sioux.  In black-and-white photographs of her from the 1970’s and 80’s, before she started working with professional stylists and makeup artists, it’s clear that she’s a classic English beauty, slender-hipped and fine-boned, and also that she’s willing to throw that beauty, and the privilege it confers, away.  She dyes her hair ink black, then shears it close to her skull or teases it freakishly high.  She paints her eyes with great black bat wings.  She wears trashy slip dresses that expose her breasts, and slim leather trousers and squarish t-shirts that make her look like an adolescent boy.  There’s something about her willingness during these years to make herself conventionally unattractive in order to make a statement (I’m not like you, I’m not a lady, I’m pissed-off) that is punk.

Because womens’ identities are, traditionally, so wound up in their looks, punk fashion might be harder for women to do than for men.  Courtney Love did it, thrillingly, in the beginning, with bad skin, bad makeup, bad dye jobs, and bad clothes.  Debbie Harry never did it but has always carried herself with an artsy disdain, an unattainability, that is, if not punk, impressively defiant.  Madonna has wanted to do it all along, very badly, but has, really, never done it.  At this year’s Costume Institute gala, the night before Punk opened to the public, Madge walked the red carpet pantless, in a studded plaid jacket over fishnets, with black leather gloves, a bobbed black wig, and silent movie star makeup.  She was trying to be punk but she was, still, pretty.

Siouxsie Sioux, 1976.  By Sheila Rock.

Punk: Chaos to Couture is smaller sized and scaled than previous Met Costume Institute exhibits like Anglomania and Savage Beauty, and also less richly contextualized than those shows, which positioned punk as an eruption of eccentric personal vision through the elaborate stratifications of British culture.  Instead Chaos to Couture shows us exactly what it promises, how fashion rises in the street and works its way onto the runways.  The first gallery holds racks of t-shirts and trousers from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary 1970’s London boutique Sex, all obliterated (“deconstructed” is too gentle a word) with rips, cuts, safety pins, and comically tasteless sexual and anti-royalist graphics.  The following galleries show proper fashion, including a tweed Chanel suit embellished with hand-trimmed holes, a Versace gown whose whiplash panels are held together by over-sized gold safety pins, and a sagging, striped, open-weave, knit dress from Rodarte.  The “chaos” to “couture” comparison doesn’t serve the couture well.  Next to the real things — unwashed, ill-fitting, falling-to-threads, off-the-rack clothing — the legitimate fashions feel lifeless.

Part of this might be the displays, which show all the clothes on the Met’s standard, white, Cristy-Turlington-faced mannequins, in ladylike poses lifted high on platforms.  One of the galleries is decorated to resemble the bowels of a Lower East Side club, with simulated cracked cement block walls painted matte black.  Why didn’t the curators blow holes through the walls?  Or dismember the mannequins?  Or pump stale cigarette smoke through the rooms?  Another part of it is curatorial.  Most of high fashions have been selected for punk motifs rather than aesthetic kinship.  Of the ”couture” on display, only the Junya Watanabe and Commes des Garcons garments feel authentically punk, undoing the body’s natural graces with monstrous appendages and asymmetries that are just as arresting and convulsive as multiple piercings, black-and-white face makeup, gravity-defying hairdos, and all-over tattoos.  The trio of black Alexander McQueen dresses on display, tailored, exquisitely, from synthetics that emulate bubble wrap and garbage bags, are not punk; they are classical in their proportions and repose.  Why didn’t the Met include dresses from McQueen’s Highland Rape collection, which obscured the face with feathers and veils while uncovering the stomach, breast and thigh, giving the women wearing them a disfiguring, disquieting power?  It’s this unease that’s deeply punk.

There were several compelling stories in Vanity Fair’s remembrance of the Met’s landmark 1978 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit: the fragile collaboration between Met head Thomas P. F. Hoving and National Gallery head J. Carter Brown, the international political intrigues that inspired and then complicated execution, and the way this modestly scaled show, with just fifty-five artifacts and a catalog the size of a comic book, became the first stand-in-line museum blockbuster.  But the finest story is how Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922.  The moment he located its entrance, Carter stopped work and summoned his patron, Lord Carnarvon, from England, and photographer Harry Burton, who was in the country working for National Geographic.  Only after Carnarvon arrived, two and a half weeks later, did Carter open the tomb.  Burton photographed progress systematically, on that momentous day and then over the next eight years, as the team moved deeper into the mortuary.  There are, in his collection of 1,847 photographs, archived at the Ashmoleon Museum, a record of the mortuary’s architecture, of all the objects recovered, and of the archaeologists at work.

The photographs have a romantic soft, silvery glow that many early twentieth-century photographs, with long exposure times, have, as well as a stunning formal directness.  A photograph was a precious thing then, and each shot is composed deliberately by setting one or more very important things at the center of the frame.  We see the slender stone passage at the entrance to the crypt, which has no apparent end.  We see the the suburban-basement clutter of the antechamber, piled high with wooden chests, chariot wheels, alabaster vases, gilded furniture, and statues.  We see the king’s tomb resting alone in the burial chamber, a stone monolith wrapped in clouds of cuneiform.  We see, inside the tomb, a garland of tiny, pill-sized blossoms, which crumbled when Carter reached to remove it.  And we see a peon — one of the boys that might have fixed tea for Carter and his team — modeling the king’s necklace.  Tutankhamun ascended to the throne when he was nine years old and died when he was eighteen.  The boy in the photograph, who looks as if he is nine or ten, wears a white cotton gown and turban that set off his dark skin dramatically, and a gentle, solemn expression, as if he’s reluctantly but obligingly making believe.  This photograph brings to life more vividly than all the treasures that Tutankhamun was a boy, an African, and a king.

As I was reviewing a book about contemporary micro-houses (Rock the Shack: Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs) I realized that our homes are no longer refuges, retreats from work and society.  Instead our houses and apartments are highly sophisticated instruments: exquisitely furnished, mechanically conditioned, audio-visually equipped, pulsating with streams of electronic data.  They shape vibrant micro-environments that allow us to keep working, consuming and communicating when we’re supposed to be resting.  Country houses aren’t much different, just finished with a slightly lower level of complexity.

As the book suggests, we might want to run away and live in a “shack,” a primitive hut, the kind of small building that hearkens back to the first manmade structures.  Their architecture is primarily about shelter from the elements, and does little to serve identity, status and place-making.  These are structures that stand lightly, that barely disturb the ground, that can be simply dismantled and replaced, that can be washed away by rains or blown to bits by a storm.  When left inside a building like this with nothing to do, what would we do?  What dreams and stories would we find?

Bridge Studio, Saunders Architecture, Newfoundland, Canada.  Photography: Bent Rene Synnevag.

Six weeks ago MoMA announced that it would raze the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building on West 53rd Street that originally housed the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM).  In its place MoMA wanted to build one to properly connect its existing building, just to the east, with the new Jean Nouvel-designed tower it’s building, just to the west.  Then last week MoMA announced that it was reconsidering.  Many had opposed the proposed demolition, including AFAM’s architects, architecture critics, and even MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll.  But, if art critic Jerry Saltz’s commentary in New York Magazine is any indication, the art world is less concerned about it.  Saltz argues that the building served architecture far better than it served art, and supports its removal with a directness that approaches zeal.

It’s sad to see any building razed, especially one as architecturally ambitious and distinctive and AFAM, and one that’s only twelve years old.  Yet I’m unmoved about seeing it go.  AFAM sold the building to MoMA and left, and it occupies a key property within the MoMA campus.  From the outside the AFAM building has never felt like a part of midtown Manhattan.  Its signature super-tall bronze facade panels are uncomfortably overscaled — unrelated to the scale of surrounding facades — and, when seen from the sidewalk, have a dull, mottled surface that feels unfinished.  On an isolated site in the woods the building might cut a dramatic figure, a post-Brutalist megalith, but on a dense block in Midtown, rubbing shoulders with towers dressed in limestone and glass, it feels overly rugged, like a cocktail party guest in a parka.  Inside, the museum is spatially and sculpturally dynamic, but doesn’t carve out substantial spaces and surfaces for display.  Nearly half of each floor plate is given over to three staircases and an elevator.  Artworks are scattered all over the inner skin of the building, in corners and nooks and along stairwells, giving the place an eccentric, unorganized feeling.  My lack of sentimentality about razing AFAM is linked directly to my persistent nostalgia for the original, intimate MoMA building, which I remember, along with the installations of many of the individual artworks housed inside, from childhood.  After that building was swallowed up inside Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion, I have little ardor left to preserve museum buildings, especially on this block.  MoMA has evolved as a corporate entity, amassing properties in midtown the way New York University does in Greenwich Village.  I didn’t flinch as I read in the Times that the AFAM building might be gone before the end of the year, but I did when I read that the MoMA board is currently chaired by Tishman Speyer head Jerry I. Speyer.  Museum leadership is running the place with a developer’s eye, designing a signature property rather than a temple for art.  It’s this same mentality that led to the construction of the AFAM building in the first place.  Let’s see if MoMA, in its upcoming expansion, can hit both marks.

Credit: © Peter Mauss | Esto

Django Unchained stirs up memories of dozens of other movies (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, Lawrence of Arabia, Taxi Driver, Gladiator), but what it reminds me of most is Huckleberry Finn.  In his consideration (it’s certainly not a review) of Django in the New York Press, critic Armond White makes the same comparison, although derogatively, saying that, like the book, the movie “gratifies some people’s entrenched racial prejudices.”  The first half of the movie, which is lyrical, tender and hilarious, follows the slave Django and his owner, the German-born dentist Dr. King Schultz, as they meet in the ante-bellum West and travel to the South on horseback.  Along the way they learn how to talk to one another, how to work together, and something about who the other is.  And while there is, as in Huckleberry Finn, an obscene imbalance between the men in their status, security, and means of expression (Django remains uncomfortably silent most of the time, while King never shuts up), the men become like best friends, like teammates, like father and son.  This, the first part of the movie, is a love story.

It is also an ecstatic vision of the American landscape.  Interspersed with the comedy and action set pieces there are wide, distant views of Django and King riding their horses, across prairies dotted with wildflowers, beneath ranges of stony, snow-capped mountain, and down allees of knarled, centuries-old, kudzu-draped trees.  These views are cliched (probably deliberately so), over-familiar from landscape paintings, westerns and car commercials, but it’s stunning to see these different American landscapes depicted so simply and expansively.  The images aren’t prettified; they’re raw and shadowed, alive with motion.  They give a feeling for the horizon, and for the vastness and wildness of the terrain.  In one passage the two men, after a snowfall, on their horses, approach a herd of grazing bison.  It’s part of a lighthearted montage, with an old, worn pop song playing on the soundtrack, that’s meant to express that time is passing but nothing important is going on.  But as I watched I felt that image, which is very loosely composed, as if looking on from a ladder’s height about twenty feet away, fall straight into my subconscious.  The men move slowly, like the animals, comfortable on the land and in the presence of one another, without speech and without purpose.  They might each never belong anywhere in American but they both, at this moment, belong right here.  At the end the movie turns into exactly what one expects, a profane and comic bloodbath.  But when Django and King are traveling alone together across forest and field the story is splendid.  Just as it was following Huck and Jim drift down the Mississippi, I wanted these men to keep going.

Books & Co, a show at the Gagosian uptown, kicks off with a framed typewritten letter to Ed Ruscha from 1963 that states, “I am, herewith, returning this copy of Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, which the Library of Congress does not wish to add to its collections.”  It’s hilarious because the book, along with others Ruscha published in that decade, is a now-canonical work that impressed a generation of photo and print artists, whose books are featured in this exhibit right alongside Ruscha’s.  (Also, those first editions are now worth a small fortune.)  Ruscha’s books are simple things, Playbill-sized volumes with glued binding and blunt graphics: white paper, modern black type face, a picture on every page, blank pages to separate sections.  His method is to choose one type of thing (gas stations, apartment buildings, parking lots, palm trees), photograph it over and over again, and collect the photographs in a book.  In the 1960’s, before digital photography and home printing, the acts of photography and publishing conferred authority.  The things Ruscha selected to photograph were rooted in the landscape of Los Angeles, where he spent his teenage years and continues to live and work.  There’s a bit of a scientific impulse in his method, similar to the those of August Sander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, who use photography to classify and record what they see.  Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, that documents that street in two long, linear collages of black and white photos along a single, unfolding, horizontal page, seems particularly so.  But that book also has the feeling of a scrapbook, softened by memories.

Ruscha isn’t too concerned with being comprehensive, or even faithful.  He gives his books names that are literal and funny without being sarcastic.  Some Los Angeles Apartments, Various Small Fires and Milk, and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, are all each exactly what they say they are.  Ruscha’s original photographs now hang in MoMA and the Whitney, but these same images are more powerful when framed within the books.  They don’t easily mythologize the American landscape (like Robert Frank’s) or satirize it (like Gary Winogrand’s).  His intentions aren’t political or provocative.  One of Rushca’s book is called Colored People but contains photos of small cacti, and another book called Hard Light contains photographs, entirely chaste, of an attractive young female couple as they pass they day together.  Like Warhol, who also exploited photography for its impersonal emotional and graphic power, Ruscha uses the medium to mirror vernacular American culture.  He’s content to show us what’s out there and what it’s like, which is hard to see when we’re standing inside of it.

Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat light up the cavernous Gagosian Gallery on far West 25th Street like a carnival.  At each turn they offer up big noisy characters and splashes of crayon-box color and snatches of street slang.  Basquiat, like Warhol, is a brilliant graphic designer, and paints to charge each square inch of surface with a bristling kinetic energy.  It’s as if every figure, phrase and mark we see could burst forward at any moment, but has been pinned in place with scientific precision.  These canvases are full but aren’t overwrought.  In Italian is packed with all sorts of things (faces, quotes, splotches, scribbles, two quarters, one gorilla) and yet remains remarkably poised, with swatches of primer and raw canvas showing through, giving the scene, below its lush, funky texture, space and depth.

Seeing these paintings expunges Basquiat’s personal mythology of a boy genius dying young.  These are substantial works that stir up recollections of Jackson Pollock (in their deep swirling motions) and Willem De Kooning (in their scary, funny monsters).  They also, seemingly effortlessly, capture rhythms of cartoon art, graffiti, advertising, and video games.  Two paintings here stand out for their brute, experimental simplicity.  Each of these was shaped by stretching canvas over a wood pallet, overpainting it in a single color, and embellishing it with a single face and name.  One, red, commemorates Jersey Joe Walcott and the other, black, commemorates Sugar Ray Robinson.  These two pieces have an unique sculptural charisma that sets them apart from the other canvases.  They’re more powerful as talismans than as paintings, and start to chart a different course.  It’s hard not to wonder what more Basquiat would have done if he had lived.  There is in these canvases an iconography not yet fully developed.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983.
Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery

© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris, ARS, New York 2013.

After singing the praises of the electronic tablet, I’m having serious doubts.  I just finished reading the novel Eureka Street from a worn New York Public Library (NYPL) paperback, and much of the pleasure of that was having the soft saggy thing with me all week.  Feeling its weight at the bottom of my handbag as I crossed the street, and laying it across my lap on the subway each morning gave great comfort.  Acquired by the library in 1999, shortly after it was published, this book is handsomely worn.  Its pages have darkened around the edges, as if tea-stained, and remain luminous along the spine.  Its glued binding is so supple that it lies open to any page it’s set down at.  The book bears witness to the transition from the old mechanical NYPL check-out system to the new computerized one; there’s a manilla pocket fixed to the inside cover where librarians used to stick a card stamped with the book’s due date.  Now librarians tuck a curling silvery receipt somewhere inside, from where it falls the moment the book is cracked open, leading almost inevitably to overdue fines.

This is an old but clean book: there are no markings or food stains inside, which are things I can’t bear in library books.  But page 62 is dog-eared to mark a previous reader’s place just before he fell asleep and tossed the book to the ground, and a computerized check-out slip, its print gone ghostly pale, was left lying face-up on page 127 to mark where another reader gave up late in the summer of 2002.  It’s too bad, because I’m sure that if she had reached Chapter 10, the heart of the novel, which breaks out into a heartfelt, lyrical ode to the city of Belfast, she would have read on until the end.  And this is another pleasure of reading from a library book — the feeling of reading along with others, with those countless anonymous library patrons who have moved through the same pages before.  Perhaps they chose it for the same reasons I did (a romantic interest in Ireland and a literary interest in the comic novel).  Perhaps they laughed out loud at the same places I did (the satire of an old-school country poet who writes endlessly about hedges and spades, and names his new collection Rejected Poems, 1965-1995).  And perhaps they paused to soak in the same turn of phrase that I did (“The city sounded like an old record that fizzled and scratched.”)  Eureka Street is an eccentric book, with passages of comedy, romance, lad-lit, action and reverie mixed up in one another, all of it stuffed inside a ragged pile of newsprint.