http://nalinamoses.tumblr.com/

There were several compelling stories wrapped inside Vanity...

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:51:00 -0400

There were several compelling stories wrapped inside 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 Tut’s tomb was opened by British archeologist Howard Carter in 1922. The moment he located its entrance, Carter stopped work and summoned his patron, Lord Carnavaron, 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 ninety-three 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 highly deliberately, by setting one or more very important things at the center of the frame. We see the crypt’s slender stone entrance, which has no apparent end. We see the the suburban-basement clutter of of the antechamber, piled with chests, foot stools, chariot wheels, alabaster vases, gilded thrones, and gold statues. We see the king’s tomb sitting alone in the burial chamber, a stone monolith wrapped in clouds of cuneiform. We see, inside the tomb, a garland with tiny, pill-sized blossoms, which had been preserved for centuries and crumbled when Carter reached to remove it. And we see a peon — one of the boys that might have fixed tea for the archaeologists — 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. The photograph brings to life vividly what all of the treasures cannot, that Tutankhamun was a boy, an African, and a king.

As I was reviewing a book about contemporary micro-houses (Rock...

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:53:00 -0400

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...

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:48:00 -0400

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...

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:27:00 -0400

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...

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:18:00 -0400

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...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:28:00 -0400

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...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:01:00 -0400

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.

The Thorne Miniature Rooms the Art Institute of Chicago are a...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:51:17 -0400

The Thorne Miniature Rooms the Art Institute of Chicago are a collection of 46 historically accurate models of various European, American and East Asian interiors. They were imagined and commissioned by Mrs. James Ward Thorne in the 1930’s to house her collection of miniature furniture, and donated to the museum in 1940. Today they’re installed in a basement gallery, within the walls, behind glass, at chest level, so that small children can peer right into them, and with a carpeted ledge running around the entire room so that very small children can do the same. The rooms certainly have a dollhouse appeal. They’re built at 1:12 scale, each about the size of a breadbox, and capture the places they represent in mesmerizing fidelity. One takes in their period furnishings first (elaborately turned matchstick-sized legs on tables and chairs, hand-threaded carpets, plaster mouldings as fine as lace) but ends up transfixed by the ordinary objects with which the rooms are furnished to give them a sense of scale and warmth: a pair of eyeglasses on the kitchen table, a folded newspaper in the living room, the electrical cord on a lamp, a dinner fork. While the rooms faithfully render the proportions and splendor of a Tudor hall, a mid-century modern living room, and a traditional Japanese house, they trade less in architecture than a kind of special effects, conjuring other worlds.

The Thorne Miniature Rooms aren’t really individual rooms; most incorporate a cluster of rooms, one central space and also the rooms and passages branching off of them, as wells as the stretches of outdoor space beyond their doors and windows. Each model is lit from within, from various hidden sources, that establish a specific time of day and time of year. We see the morning sun spill over the slate floor of a Cape Cod kitchen, and the setting sun graze the curtains of a Charleston drawing room. It’s easy to look at each room and imagine what kind of life unfolds inside. There’s a fancy feathered hat on a stand in the dressing room of the Biedermeier apartment, as if the lady of the house is preparing to meet later with a gentleman friend. There’s a clarin trumpet lying on the window seat in an eighteenth-century English study, as if the lord of the estate has just unburdened his heart in a letter, in pen and ink, and summoned a servant to deliver it on foot. There’s a bronze statue of Shiva presiding over the desk of a prim eighteenth-century Virginia drawing room, as if the wealthy merchant who lives here has ties to the East, as well as a hankering to leave his life here behind and explore the far corners of the world. In the end the Thorne rooms, historically faithful, are less evocative architecturally — in their expression of space through forms and structure — than novelistically — in their expression of character through a cloud of details. Each period room is set in the dramatic present, where anything can happen.

Image courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.

To see Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:53:00 -0400

To see Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation The Visitors, at Luhring Augustine, gallery-goers duck behind a black velvet curtain and enter a small, squarish room lined with ten large-format monitors. By the time they’ve become accustomed to the dark, and to the other viewers shifting around inside, they understand that there are nine monitors showing nine different musicians performing in nine different spaces inside the same richly appointed, gorgeously decaying old country house. (The tenth monitor shows the house’s wood-columned front porch.) And they understand that each of these musicians is contributing a track to the folksy, slow-moving lament on the soundtrack, and that their performances are synced chronologically and spatially. So as the chorus ends and the wan, bird-boned singer in the parlor removes her headphones and collapses into her highback chair, we turn our attention to the muscular young pianist, who’s playing at the other end of the parlor, and can be seen on the monitor to her left. And when we hear feedback we turn around to see, on another monitor, a guitarist in an upstairs bedroom, whose face remains hidden behind long unkempt bangs, tuning his instrument and then sweeping his hands across its body with studied bravado. The 64-minute video moves at a pace far slower than commercial television and movies, so that even though there are ten monitors and ten different stories, there is plenty of time to take in everything seriously, properly.

This sort of video array is a magnificent way to describe orchestral music, as well as the interior architecture of a house. Viewers can inhabit each room, gripped by details like the uncommonly large square panes of glass on the dilapidated kitchen cabinets, the steely blue tint of paint on the bathroom walls, and an ornate gilded picture frame in the parlor that looks like it might have belonged to Peter the Great. The music moves in lulling, dirge-like pulses. Nothing seems to happen but the song plays on. Viewers, entranced, float from monitor to monitor, following the movement of the video but also their own desires. Each of the video cameras is still but slightly splayed, looking into a corner rather than directly at a wall or into an opening, so that even when standing directly in front of a screen viewers feel as if they’re sliding out of its space. The musicians emerge as full-blooded characters. It’s hard to look away from the acoustic guitarist in the bathroom, who has a comically disgruntled appearance and, at one point, looks as if he might drown himself in the claw foot tub. Things happen on various screens, intermittently: violence and nudity, drinking and smoking. But nothing in the video breaks the spell until, finally, as the song winds down, the musicians leave their seats, gather in the living room, and stream out of the house and into the surrounding countryside while the remaining monitors transmit still, empty rooms. Then Kjartansson himself appears on screen as he enters each room to switch off the video cameras. The monitors go blank, one by one, and the gallery-goers, who have been watching and waiting, are left standing in darkness, silence, and sadness. The Visitors notes the regretful, inevitable passage of time, the secret spaces inside a large house, and the fractured spirit of the people living inside it. These performers come together to play a song, and when the song is over they leave.

Image courtesy of Luhring Ugustine Gallery.

I was honored when my two young nieces shared their favorite toy...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:30:00 -0400

I was honored when my two young nieces shared their favorite toy with me, a figurine of Princess Cadance (a unicorn from the My Little Pony stories) that flaps her wings and talks. And I was horrified when I heard the three things that she says in an endless loop: “I’m happy because I’m getting married today!”, “My dress is soooo pretty!”, and, finally, after a giggle fit, “Everybody, it’s time to dance now!”, at which point she plays a disco song and flashes bright lights. Each time the music started my nieces squealed and bounced around her. This figure is a cunning mash-up of all the things that little girls love: horses, unicorns, princesses, tiaras, pink, purple, rainbows and sparkles. Its less like a toy than a sociologically engineered composite.

The unicorn’s chatter is mindlessly girlish, and I wondered how this was shaping my nieces’ unformed, agile young minds. I remember when I was young my mother, to her great credit and my great annoyance, refused to buy me a Barbie doll, not because she was a feminist, but because she thought the doll was ridiculous. Princess Cadence, a six-inch-high electrified pink plastic unicorn, is also ridiculous. She has none of the surreal animal grace of a unicorn; she’s a cartoon. I ended up acquiring a hand-me-down Barbie doll, and also a banged-up blonde Barbie styling head, from a sympathetic babysitter. I can reveal here that I enjoyed them heartily, and also that they did nothing to shape my ideas about what a woman should look like and how a woman should behave. Similarly, I’m confident that when my two nieces finally grow tired of playing with Princess Cadance, they will remember little of what she said.

Image courtesy of Hasbro.

Kirsten Greenidge’s play Luck of the Irish at LCT3 takes...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:51:00 -0400

Kirsten Greenidge’s play Luck of the Irish at LCT3 takes the single family house as a lens through which to examine race and class. Its story begins in the 1950’s, when an Irish American handyman “ghost buys“ a house for an African American doctor and his family in a posh suburb of Boston. The play’s writing is admirably even-handed, exploring each character’s point of view. The play’s set, designed by Mimi Lien, is at once incredibly suggestive and incredibly elegant. It gives us the house itself, a clapboard colonial with a pitched roof and brick chimney, as a full-size clear plexiglass cut-out at the back of the stage, tethered to the ceiling with wires. This ghost-bought house is appropriately spectral, more of an idea than a thing. The house’s back yard is expressed as a stretch of artificial turf that covers the entire stage, spilling over its front edge to the floor below. Its sumptuous texture and crazy green color are indelible; they overwhelm the house itself and all the other furniture on stage.

None of the characters seems entirely happy about the house. The handyman’s wife is resentful she can’t live in a home this grand (“This is not the order of things — I got passed over.”) and the doctor is disappointed that the house doesn’t bring him satisfaction (“I don’t feel lifted.) The handyman and the doctor’s wife, however, kindred spirits, are drawn more powerfully to the land than the house. The doctor’s wife rushes through her chores each morning to spend her afternoons lounging dreamily in the back yard. One day the handyman meets her here and observes that the grass “curls up to your toes like the sea.” The house promises stability and status while the lawn promises freedom, both physical and imaginative. It’s a tribute to the play that, at the end, we’re not sure what matters most.

Image courtesy of Rose Brand.

The most vivid element of anthropologist Mick Taussig’s...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:09:00 -0400

The most vivid element of anthropologist Mick Taussig’s multi-media happening Berlin Sun Theater, performed at the Whitney Museum last month, were the dances by Kyle Bukhari. Taussig’s goal was ”the re-enchantment of nature in the age of global meltdown.” Specifically, he examined ways our diminished experience of the sun has ruptured elemental physical and mythological connections. The piece unfolded around a personal, poetic text that Taussig read out loud on stage. Enriching the narrative were musical passages, film clips, project images from Taussig’s notebooks, and Bukhari’s dances. Cutting through the shadowy, ground-floor atrium of the Museum, Bukhari enacted routes, rotations and repetitions that recalled planetary motion. At certain moments, moments explosive with feeling, the dancer illustrated specific details from Taussig’s stories. He became, fleetingly, a tree wrestling upwards from the ground, a cloud of fireflies interrupting the darkness, and, in a big bubble-headed mask, the moon.

I had always thought that dance was inevitably tied to human stories because of its dependence on the body, that it was, essentially, about a person moving through the world. But Bukhari’s remarkable transformations showed otherwise. The ease with which he made himself a moon, spooking and enchanting audience members as he emerged among them, got at the majesty of that celestial body. It made clear that a dancer isn’t limited to human actions — he can be anything he imagines.

The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:16:00 -0400

The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process. In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles. By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives. Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.

In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism. And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table. In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things. In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain. In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint. Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window. It makes a poetry of the concrete.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The richest, most expressive element of the BBC detective series...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:18:00 -0500

The richest, most expressive element of the BBC detective series Wallander might be the Scandinavian-modern style sets, which were designed by Anders Olin. They set the scene with precision, and offer deep sensual pleasure. The centerpiece is the police station in Ystad, the small city in southern Sweden where the drama unfolds, which was constructed in its entirety in a studio there. The floor where the homicide detectives work is spacious, with low ceilings and limited views to the outside. The open central space, where they gather, is lined with wood planks and furnished with gently-worn, generic (that is, non-iconic) pieces of Scandinavian modern furniture. Lit dimly, and propped with flurries of paper, stuffed birds, rusting metal desk lamps, and dying potted plants, the room evokes the strangeness and sadness of the work the detectives carry out, and that seeps into their personal lives.

The Wallander sets are a terrific contrast to the Mad Men sets, which fetishize mid-century modern design by recreating pristine, museum-like environments, including Rogers Sterling’s office and Don Draper’s apartment. In those sets every object is gleaming, unused, and bathed in brilliant white light. Compare them to the dark hardwood walls, bare concrete floor, and austere tables and chairs that furnish the Wallander police station, which suggest that these rooms have been around for a while, and that the detectives who work here have been around for a while too. Everything inside it them has a lyrical battered feeling. While open office spaces have become a design cliche, particularly for companies that want to project a socially progressive image, the set for Wallander is not about that at all. These detectives work to unearth secrets, purposefully and painfully. The common room, where everyone’s mutterings and moods spill over into everyone else’s, shows us the tumult.

Image courtesty of Ouno Design

Google’s Glass integrates smartphone applications with an...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:13:00 -0500

Google’s Glass integrates smartphone applications with an eyeglass-like frame so that one can see commands (there’s a tiny screen attached to one side of the frame) without looking away from the world, and activate them by voice alone. What’s most impressive is that Glass isn’t science fiction; it’s almost here. Google announced a 2014 product release with a retail price of $1,500. It’s just a matter of time, I think, before the screen image is realized as a hologram floating in front of our faces, and then a tissue embedded right within our eyes.

A happy two-minute marketing video, One day…, follows a young man as he moves through his day using Glass. He uses the new technology to arrange to meet a friend, to make a voice memo to buy concert tickets, to navigate his way from East 23rd Street to the Strand bookstore, to locate the music section inside the store, to post photos of graffiti online, and, finally, to broadcast a song he performs on his ukelele to a girl named Jessica. Glass Man is a downtown hipster dream boy, free from work and personal (and even pet) obligations, who only plans things an hour or so in advance, and who spends the day roaming around the city with his buddy. He doesn’t use Glass to do anything vital, and doesn’t use it to do anything an ordinary smartphone can’t do. The video diminishes the most astonishing features of Glass —its almost seamless interface — to spotlight a laddish lifestyle.

The video brought to mind the SNL short Lazy Sunday, where two young men (played by Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell) wake up late, plan to see a matinee of The Chronicles of Narnia, get cupcakes from Magnolia, catch a cab to the Upper West Side, and pick up snacks and drinks at a deli before the show, all the while rapping about their exploits with mock gravity. One day… comes dangerously close to that kind of parody.

Image courtesy of Google Project Glass.

Is the cardigan the new jacket? Last I week I heard two...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 13:39:00 -0500

Is the cardigan the new jacket? Last I week I heard two award-winning up-and-coming creatives, an architect and a web designer, present their work at a design industry event. For the auspicious occasion both men (who were meeting for the first time) came dressed practically identically, in white dress shirts, dark cuffed jeans, beautifully crafted shoe-boots, and fanciful sweaters. One wore a striped V-neck cardigan and the other a color-blocked pullover with a shawl color. Both of them seemed fresh energetic, and serious. The look wasn’t casual at all, but supremely polished.

This new type of sweater is worn more purposefully than the way Mister Rogers wore his cardigan to kick around at home. And it’s worn with less ostentation than the way Bill Cosby wore his crazily-patterned Missoni pullovers. Sweaters like the ones these two young men were wearing aren’t to be thrown on thoughtlessly: they’re to be coordinated carefully with (potentially contrasting) trousers and dress shirts, and to be fitted as meticulously as a suit jacket. The trend owes a great deal to Thom Browne, who has raised the level of detail and fit in mens knits. He’s made the sweater formidable.

There was a controversy when it was announced that actress Zoe...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 13:53:00 -0500

There was a controversy when it was announced that actress Zoe Saldana would portray legendary songstress Nina Simone in a movie biography, and then another when photos of Saldana in costume as Simone, with pancake makeup and a prosthetic nose, were leaked. Simone’s daughter, Simone Kelly, responded obliquely, and others launched a petition to recast the role. Some of the fuss was because Saldana isn’t a singer, but the fiercest of it was because she doesn’t look like Simone; she’s lighter-skinned and slimmer-nosed than Simone is. Why not, some have asked, simply cast an actress who looks like Simone?

The controversy might have less to do with principles of open casting than with notions of what we collectively find beautiful in women — including light skin and slim noses — and our reluctance to acknowledge how persistent, and persuasive, these notions are. In Argo Ben Afflek plays real-life CIA agent Tony Mendez, a gentleman far less conventionally attractive than himself, and no one seems bothered by the incongruity. Affleck doesn’t wear prosthetics to look more like Mendez or crouch to diminish his stature. He doesn’t look like Mendez but the story comes out right. Yet Saldana is remaking her complexion and bone structure to play Simone. For women appearances are considered, still, today, somehow, essential; they define who are and fix our place in the world. In all the discussion about Saldana’s casting, it’s Simone’s skin and nose, rather than her voice and vision, that are considered essential to who she is. It’s as if her appearance, which is singular, was a hindrance, something she needed to overcome before she became an artist, and something that only another woman who looks like her can understand.

Portrait by Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1965.

What happens to graffiti when it’s hung inside a gallery...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:47:00 -0500

What happens to graffiti when it’s hung inside a gallery and sold, besides losing a great deal of its cool? Is it fine art, and is it good art? An exhibit at one elegant Lower East Side Gallery gathers saleable pieces from several prominent street artists. Most of the pieces look like they’re samples — smaller segments cut out from works the artist might have completed on the side of a building somewhere. They feel unnaturally reigned in, like zoo animals, drained of their natural elan.

Only the pieces by Ben Eine sit comfortably within the gallery. This English artist stencils letters across buildings, and is best-known for painting the entire alphabet on storefronts along Middlesex Street in London. Like Shepard Fairey, his work is linked to Barack Obama: Prime Minister David Cameron presented Obama with an Eine canvas on a state visit. And, like Shepard Fairey, Eine is a skillful graphic designer. His work relies less on scale, site and bravado for its power — as so much street art does — than on composition and color. There’s a strong tension between figure an field in his paintings; he doesn’t like empty space, and inflates letters to fill the void. The lettering styles he uses resemble nineteenth-century type faces, so that, both in process and feeling, his stencils feel more mechanical than free-form. And his texts are becoming increasingly complicated, especially when he stencils streams of letters. He’s not writing poetry, not yet, but his format slows the act of reading, so that one stops and thinks rather than taking in the words all at once, seamlessly and mindlessly, as happens with so much advertising, signage and media. Eine’s letters have a bracing physicality that alerts us to how powerful and subversive text can be. Sentences are always written for us with a reason.

I know…, 2012. Ben Eine. Couretesy of Charles Bank Gallery.

How do we represent something too horrible to represent? When...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 17:40:00 -0500

How do we represent something too horrible to represent? When 27 people, 20 of them young children, were shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connectictut last month, many news outlets showed a photo of a police officer and a teacher leading a line of children to safety. Each child held her arms out around the shoulders of the child in front of her, as if it were some kind of playground game. There is fear on the children’s faces and one girl is shrieking. Yet the image doesn’t convey the extraordinary facts of the tragedy: that people are shooting at small children, and that twenty of them are dead. Except for a photo of the bloodshed, what could have conveyed that?

Six days later, after the victims’ bodies had been identified and their families notified, The New York Times listed their names on the front page, in white letters, across a black field three-columns-wide and half-a-page high. Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC was unveiled in 1982, the act of listing victims’ names in memorial architecture has become standard practice, almost a design cliche. But the listing in the newspaper is especially powerful. It exploits the traditional broadsheet format: words on paper, black and white graphics, and the authoritative Times type face. The big black box, uncomfortably off-center, is severe. The italicized letters are stately, like those on a formal invitation, or a gravestone. Reading the list is wrenching. These children have the kind of enchanted first names (Chase, Grace, Aviella) we give children now, and last names (Irish, Italian, Chinese, hyphenated) that conjure something of their family life. Beside each victim’s name the Times lists her age. All of the children were 6 or 7, and reading these numbers again and again is staggering. Even the ages of the adult victims, from 25 to 52, are irrationally young. The list capures a gravity and complexity that most photographs of the event just don’t.

Time, and life, stream by, without a moment for contemplation. ...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:33:00 -0500

Time, and life, stream by, without a moment for contemplation. It’s hard to recall what happened yesterday, or in this morning’s dreams. It’s as if we’re lost within our own stories or, sometimes, as if there is no story at all. I’ve tried in various ways to capture the relentless assault of experience, including photo-taking, memento-collecting, and journal-writing. But even when carried out diligently these methods are inadequate. They can’t always capture the shocking, disruptive impact of small moments, and the deeper shifts in mood that underline the weeks. They don’t get it.

Riitta Ikonen’s warm and rigorous conceptual art project Mail Art, gets a great deal of it. Over the past several years, once every week, she has mailed an A5 format “postcard” to a professor at an art school she attended in Brighton, England. They’re dispatched from wherever she happens to be that week, and crafted from whatever materials she has on hand. She’s sent over two hundred of them so far, all of which her professor has saved and returned to her. Ikonen has a liberated graphic sensibility: she has mailed, among other things: a stone, the sole of a boot, a stack of MetroCards, and a chunk of little fish sealed in glue. Each missive is packaged, titled, addressed and stamped distinctively yet unfussily. When taken together, as they were at an exhibit last year, the postcards make up a vibrant personal, physical and psychic history. They’re alive with the tactility and pungency of everyday experience.

“Found paper clips” from Mail Art, by Riita Ikonen.