July 2011
24 posts
5 tags
For reasons I don’t really want to go into, I watched an episode of South Park the other night. It was one from 2004, a response to “The Passion of the Christ” called “The Passion of the Jew,” a gleeful skewering of the movie, its director, and the passions (religious and political) they stirred up. What pleased me most was how happily scrambled the graphics are. They combine...
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There are found objects, but are there found photographs? Some of Mark Cohen’s photographs on display now at Bruce Silverstein seem like just that, the sorts of shots you find on your camera, interspersed between the real ones, if you carry it around in your purse for too long. They are obscured, ambiguous views, uncomfortably close, of you’re not really sure what. I think it must...
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The great painter Lucian Freud died, and the obituaries dutifully noted that he was the world’s most expensive living painter, and that he had, in 2001, completed a boldly unflattering portrait of Queen Elizabeth. They didn’t talk openly about what Freud painted most often and best, which was naked flesh, male and female, including his own. The Washington Post described him in...
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Earlier this summer I admired the logo for the southern American supermarket chain Food Lion, a proud blue lion in a square lozenge. I was enchanted by its graphic clarity and its Euro-regal pretensions. It all seemed a bit much, and also exactly right, for a supermarket that stocked buckets of lard and a thousand varieties of barbecue sauce. So I was surprised to spot the logo gracing a...
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The Ann Demeulemeester boutique in Antwerp’s lower city has the feeling of a temple. It’s in the ground floors of an old brick building on a corner of Leopold de Waelplaats, which was previously a naval officer’s training school and then a chemical manufacturing facility. The shop, eleven years old, reminds me of the Commes des Garcons shop in New York. These small spaces...
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We arrived at Brugge on an early morning train, when the streets were empty, and were able to experience the Belgian city in a state of quiet that, I suspect, most visitors don’t. Emerging from the station, we turned toward the spires of the old city and walked in that direction. Although the way was clearly marked, this felt like what it might feel like to approach the city as a...
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There’s a certain fatigue that sets in after you’ve been inside a museum for an hour. It’s less physical than mental, and has to do with the stress of taking in a great deal all at once. So smaller museums often offer a finer experience. The collections are strongly focused and you’re not exhausted by the time you’re through. The Design Museum in Gent strikes me...
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When does marketing and merchandising overwhelm the quality of a product? The chocolates of Pierre Marcolini, which friends in Antwerp and Brussels explained were the finest, are so highly aestheticized that they seem more like precious stones than sweets. The store in Antwerp could be mistaken for a jewelers, with its sumptuous finishes, ethereal lighting, and museum-like vitrines. Even the...
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I think of churches as Medieval structures, built from stone and sweat, heavy with history and mythology. So the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Koekelberg, Brussels, has an unexpected character. It’s immense, described as the fifth largest Christian church in the world. And it’s modern, constructed in increments from 1905 to 1969. A display of archival photos inside shows teams...
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Driving back and forth along the Avenue de Tervueren in Brussels, we got tantalizing glimpses through a low steel fence of the Palais Stoclet, a home by architect Joseph Hofman built in 1911 for industrialist Adolphe Stoclet. It’s still owned by the family, has been named a UNESCO heritage site, and is, very occasionally, open to the public. It was closed when we were there. Sitting...
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Rome has the Trevi Fountain, New York City has the Statue of Liberty, and Brussels has the Manneken Pis, a statue of a little boy wetting the ground in front of him. As civic monuments go it’s not a terribly noble one, although there are stories that the statue depicts the historic actions of a boy insulting enemy soldiers or, alternately, extinguishing a fire. The statue is smaller than...
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It’s hard for structures that try to capture the future to retain their appeal. So many, like the Unisphere, and a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright projects from the 1950’s, quickly seem out of date; they look even older than they are. The Atomium in Brussels, a monument constructed for the 1958 World’s Fair and now a lookout tower for tourists, has escaped that trap. Over fifty...
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On my last day in Germany I visited Sanssouci, the summer castle of Frederick the Great from 1747, in Potsdam. I expected to find the rococo architecture overwrought and tiresome but instead I found it powerfully expressive, an impression enhanced by the drizzly weather and empty grounds, which made it feel as if the place were a marvelous ancient and abandoned city. The most outstanding...
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An American’s dreamy notions about European train travel are dispelled by Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof, the city’s huge new central station completed in 2006. The great glass shed, just across the River Spree from the capitol buildings, is a nexus for both local and long distance lines. But it offers no public space. There’s no central hall, and the main entrance leads you...
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There’s a new temporary museum at the former site of Reich Main Security Office in Mitte, Berlin called Topography of Terrors, which documents the history of the organizations who used the site as a base of operations, including the Gestapo and the SS. It was at this location that the transports and concentration camps were organized, and enemies of the state were detained and tortured. ...
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Does art always have to go deep? The Kohlhaas Curtain, the Frank Stella - Santiago Calatrava collaboration on view now at the New National Gallery in Berlin, makes me feel that it doesn’t. Big, bright and bold, the installation consists of nearly 100 linear feet of paintings on white tarp (by Stella) wrapped inside and outside a giant wire drum (by Calatrava) that’s suspended in...
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Since I know classical architecture primarily through line drawings, I’ve understood it more as an aesthetic program than as a manner of building, as a very fine and particular language. Now, after seeing the Pergamon Altarpiece at the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, I know that classical architecture is built from mortar and stone, and that it can possess an enveloping, elemental power. ...
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I went to Babelsberg, a hamlet just outside Berlin, with a starstruck friend who wanted to inhale some of the glamor (or, as she would spell it, “glamour”) of that place where, before WWII, the great German movie stars and directors lived. On a drizzly afternoon we walked down Virchowstrasse, a curving street along the Griebnitzsee, and took in the sterile, handsome mansions on...
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In Germany, I’ve learned, preparing and eating a hard-boiled egg are acts undertaken with tremendous seriousness. There are lots of special devices (cups, spoons, timers, cutters) to help. My favorite is this egg-shaped, egg-sized musical timer that one stores inside the fridge with one’s eggs and boils in the water with them. The timer comes in different colors, including gold,...
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I escaped the midday heat last Tuesday inside the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s museum for contemporary art. There I crept through the cool, dark galleries full of cool, dark sculptures and installations. Then, at the end, I found myself in a light-filled room with three enormous Cy Twombly canvases. In contrast with the other art, terse assemblies of plywood, steel, felt and humming neon...
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Architect Peter Behren’s AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin, from 1909, is a canonical work of modern architecture, marking the moment when all the proprieties (structural, ornamental, linguistic) of classicism were loosened and fell away. One afternoon I made a pilgrimage to see the building and was stunned to find its front facade covered with netting and scaffolding. It upset my memory of...
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The gold trinkets and bowls on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin beneath the banner “Schliemann’s Troy” aren’t Schliemann’s and aren’t from Troy. They’re reproductions of the treasures that the German archaeologist unearthed in Hissarlik, Turkey in 1873, incorrectly attributed to the Homeric city, and illegally smuggled from the country. The find...
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Now, twenty-two years after the wall came down, there’s a growing nostalgia for the old East Berlin. Trinket vendors on Museumsinsel sell toy Trabants and Soviet flags. The TimeOut city guide features a walking tour called “Socialism Safari.” And “Ossie,” or Ampelmann, the figure that indicates “walk” and “wait” on East Berlin crosswalk...
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Walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin one afternoon, I spotted an ugly old modern East German building across from the Dom that I had never seen before, a huge spaceship-like thing with blue and white panels. Except that it wasn’t an ugly old modern East German building. It was the Humboldt Box, a new temporary structure that offers special exhibits and a view over the city. The Box...
