September 2011
13 posts
7 tags
Right now I’m immersed in Jennifer Egan’s novel “Visit from the Goon Squad,” which is structured as a series of flashbacks and flashforwards in the lives of some music industry professionals. One stunning chapter focuses on a clique of high school punks in the 80’s in San Francisco. They play in a band called the Flaming Dildos and listen to The Cramps. The...
7 tags
I just learned the difference between Helvetica (light) and Arial (dark). It’s like the difference between romaine and iceberg, or, as one pundit puts it, between Jimmy Stewart and Rich Little. Helvetica is the canonical modern font designed in 1957 by the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland, which became, over the next decades, a kind of default typeface for graphic designers. Arial is a...
8 tags
The title of Agnes Martin’s show at Pace Gallery, “The 80’s: Grey Paintings,” sounds less like an art exhibit than a SNL skit about a super-annoying former art star. In reality Martin’s paintings have a fragile, personal quality that makes them hard to pin down, both in terms of time and place. Martin came of age with the great minimalist and abstract...
11 tags
The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy (WPC), who administer Fallingwater, are celebrating the 75th anniversary of that iconic house, and getting ready to build six new guest cottages on an adjacent property. I just wrote about the competition they held to select an architect for the project. The winning entry, from Patkau Architects, is a stunner. It takes Frank Lloyd Wright’s dictum to...
6 tags
Richard Serra’s two new steel works, “Junction” and “Cycle,” fill the cavernous galleries at the Gagosian in Chelsea, squeezing out all peripheral space. Which means that you can’t really see them from the outside, as objects. It’s hard to think of them as sculpture anyway. They remind me of what former French president Francois Mitterrand called his...
9 tags
“Lust for Life,” Vincente Minelli’s 1956 movie about Vincent van Gogh, really delivers. It gives us the love affair with the hooker, the tender patronage of brother Theo, the verbal flare-ups with Gauguin, the ear-cutting, and, in between all the drama, some painting. It also, quietly and convincingly, recreates places from Van Gogh’s paintings, taking us to the outdoor...
6 tags
Can you build a building without a program? The Guggenheim’s summer pop-up inside the park along Houston Street at Bowery, designed by Atelier Bow-Wow, comes tantalizingly close. It’s a spare steel frame wrapped in metal mesh, stuffed with A/V equipment, and furnished with fold-out chairs. When I visited last weekend there was a trio of hippie chicks singing, and then a...
8 tags
When selecting photos to post with a piece about “Fashioning Apollo,” Nicholas de Monchaux’s book documenting American spacesuit design, I found myself seduced by photos of the earliest prototypes, from the 1940’s and 1950’s, which look less like costumes or uniforms than like appliances. Part Tin Man and part Michelin Man, they used metal and hard plastics to...
8 tags
I was at PS 1 in Astoria this weekend to attend a symposium called “Foreclosed,” about housing in America. I walked through the courtyard installation, a series of white cables that shaped ghostly curved surfaces in the air. And I saw the exhibit of art made in response to 9/11. But what impressed me most was the architecture of the museum, which is housed in an old public...
9 tags
“I don’t do event dressing, because every day is an event.” This is the philosophy of Daphne Guinness, heiress, socialite, and patroness of the haute couture, whose clothes are on display now at the gallery at FIT. It’s a brilliantly-curated collection of theatrical, avant-garde clothing, with large doses of Azzedine Alaia, Karl Lagerfeld, Gareth Pugh, and Chanel. But...
6 tags
Every building supports a certain kind of life, and sometimes that life is larger than the building itself. The new Nicola Formichetti pop-up by Gage/Clemenceau Architects, constructed under the auspices of BOFFO for Fashion Week, is like that, crushing the boundary between theater and architecture. A typical storefront space on a quiet TriBeCa sidestreet, it’s lined inside with faceted...
8 tags
I just updated my internet setup and replaced my graphite-colored Apple Base Station, vintage 1999, with a faster, smaller wireless router. But I like my old device too much to get rid of it. Unlike my new router, which disappears into the sea of cords and plugs around it, the Base Station looks like an instrument that does something important. And it doesn’t have the hyper-modern gloss...
9 tags
Patti Smith begins “Just Kids,” her book about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, remembering the moment that she learned he was close to death. To console herself she listens to a television broadcast of “Tosca” and opens an art book to a reproduction of “Le Yeux Clos” by Odillon Redon. The drawing, mute and mystical, shows a woman slipping off into...
