I'm on vacation this week, returning the week of August 4. No new posts until then. For now, I give you eight shows I've reviewed that are still open in NYC ordered from must-see to less-so:
1. Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim (-Sept. 28): "...enthralling and essential..."
2. Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art at the Jewish Museum (-Sept. 21): "...instructive time capsule of an exhibit, is organized around an impressive ensemble of works from many of the heavyweights..."
3. Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney (-Sept. 21): "...fifty years of his idiosyncratic designs and ideas for everything from housing to transportation, cartography and globalism..."
4. Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling at the MoMA (-Oct. 20): "...a dizzying, and sometimes amusing, history lesson..."
5. Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan and Bill Wood's Business at the ICP (-Sept. 7): "uneven but eye-opening..."
6. Philip Guston at the Morgan Library & Museum (-Aug. 31): "...instructive and illuminating... "
7. Plague in Gotham! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York at the New York Historical Society (-Nov. 2): "...recounts a couple of really bad summers in the rapidly growing city, showing how New Yorkers of all stripes responded to the outbreak in an age before modern epidemiology."
8. 2008 Altoids Award at the New Museum (-Oct. 12): "...a small and oddly flat exhibition..."
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Saturday, July 26, 2008
A Lot of Empty
Micro Compact House by Horden Cherry Lee and Haack + Höpfner
Museum of Modern Art
July 20–Oct. 20
Imagine a house available to anyone: cheap, easily assembled, expandable, portable and with all the amenities inside a compact rectilinear design. It can be situated anywhere, including in a park near other similarly designed structures.
That dream’s been a reality for more than half a century. In fact the U.S. has more of these homes then anyone else, millions of them. Its name is the mobile home, the trailerpark.
There are no trailers or double-wides on display at “Home Delivery,” MoMA’s off-the-mark prefab survey, which not-surprisingly is more concerned with the design concepts of big-name architects.
The main attraction is five commissioned prefabs arranged in the museum’s nearby empty lot, soon make way 75-story skyscraper designed by Jean Nouvel. But first we’re instructed to visit the museum’s 4th Floor for a dizzying, and sometimes amusing, history lesson as told through an overabundance of plans, models, brochures, drawings photographs, films and computer animations. (The catalog does a better job.)
Prefab’s origins are traced all the way back to 1833, a year that saw the introduction of a kit home for British colonists in Australia. But things only really got going in the 20th Century with a fever for bringing industrial efficiencies and materials to housing.
The ever-inventive Thomas Edison saw the answer in the concrete home. A single standardized mold was used for everything including staircases, bookshelves — even for pianos, which couldn’t have been very melodious. More than 100 were built in New Jersey, and a few are still standing.It was the modernists, with their rationalist utopian ideas about transforming the world, who really got excited about prefab. Bauhaus chieftain Walter Gropius pioneered a system of copper-paneled houses which were Palestine as homes for Jews who left Germany in the prewar years. Ironically, the project’s co-designer, Hans Dustmann, would go on to become a major architect for the Nazis; Gropius fled to the United States.
Gropius protégé Marcel Breuer created his own prefab system, which was exhibited on its own in the MoMA’s garden in 1946. It was a commercial failure, and the model was bought by the Rockefellers for use as a guesthouse on their sprawling Westchester estate. However, the first structure displayed in the garden, in 1941, was Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit, or DDU, a repurposed grain bin which was used by the Army in WWII; for more on Bucky and his far-out housing ideas head over to the Whitney.The inspiration for the Brueur home display was a contemporaneous prefab display in a nearby vacant lot (sound familiar?). The provocatively named Lustron was a
Also displayed are sections of an elegant steel-based structure by Frenchman Jean Prouvé originally designed for use by a secondary school headmistress in Niger. One surviving example was bought at auction for $5 million by the hotelier Andrew Balazs for use as a lounge inside a Costa Rica resort development.
Other materials were also explored, such as with the unrealized nautilus-form All Plastic House by Ionel Schein of 1956, and a comically modish late-60s fiberglass UFO by Matti Suuronen known as Futuro House. Richard and Su Rogers too made use of plastics and other high-tech materials in their banana-yellow Zip-Up Enclosures (see above left), designed for a 1969 competition sponsored by DuPont, best known at the time as the makers of Agent Orange.While we think of prefabs as stand-alone homes, modularity and off-site construction were also brought to bear on apartment building design. The pied piper of the apartment block himself, Le Courbusier, designed a 12-story structure for Marseille that was described as a wine rack, into which modular units could be inserted like bottles.
Following in Corbu's footsteps, the 60s saw a rash of interest in modularity and mega-structures, including by everyone’s favorite architectural fantasists, Archigram, represented by their far-out Plug-In City and Living Pod. In terms of building that were actually built, there is Habitat ’67 in Montreal, a super-cool geometric pile of interlocking concrete units designed by 24-year-old Moshe Safdie as part of his graduate school thesis. While the structure was intended to organically expand as necessary, it has remained in its original form. A similar story is told with the Tokyo’s Nagakin Capsule Tower of 1970 (see above), an arrangement of studio apartment modules attached to a central core. Architect Kisho Kurokawa intended them to be periodically replaced; they weren’t and are now suffering from disrepair. Also from that year is the practically-minded Oriental Masonic Gardens, an affordable housing community for New Haven that features clever pinwheel clusters of mobile homes (imagine that), which its architect, Paul Rudolph, dubbed the “Brick of the Twentieth Century.” Despite the enthusiasm, it would be his only realized project taking this approach.Much more successful were the concrete-panel low-rise apartments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Block. And in the U.S., suburbia itself can be seen as partially prefab. The prototypical Levittown cookie-cutter colonial made use of standardized designs and precut lumber; in fact, William Levitt’s ideas were more popular in France than those Jean Prouvé. Today, one third of U.S. home are built offsite. But Japan is home to the most successful prefab industry, with homes are widely available through companies like Toyota and Muji.
While MoMA emphasizes the many failings of high-design prefabs, they remain optimistic. Their reason? It’s the same song we heard at the museum’s "Design and the Elastic Mind": computers are our salvation.
To gaze into this bright tomorrow, we head for the empty lot, where we’re greeted with BURST *008, a homely beach home on stilts adorned with 70s-style sunburst patterns window and connected bleachers. Designers Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier use sophisticated software that allows prefab even for complex forms, doing away with the need for the boring box. It didn’t bode well that the house was temporarily closed to visitors.
Also employing a computer-intensive approach was a shed concept for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Created by MIT’s Lawrence Sass and collaborators, the shotgun-style house features a neat-looking pixilated New Orleans neoclassical façade. The inside was empty, with no indication of what the layout would looks like. By contrast, the arrangement of appliances seemed to be the main point of the shoe-box shaped System3 by Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf/KFN Systems. All mechanical features, including kitchen and bathroom, are arranged around a central core.
The aptly named Micro Compact House (Horden Cherry Lee and Haack + Höpfner) is a clown-car prefab, packing everything from bed to espresso maker into an impossibly and oppressively small space. What appears to be a parody is actually for sale. One the other end of the size spectrum is the four-story Cellophane House by Kiernan Timberlake Associates, featuring eco-chic plastic walls interwoven with photovoltaic cells and a steel frame made of off-the-shelf parts.To the MoMA’s credit, the five prefabs aren’t all chic glass boxes out of Dwell Magazine. But, somehow they come off as insubstantial and unrealistic.
We’re told that despite its long history of failures, that modern prefab still holds promise, even offering solutions to problems as big as the environment and poverty. It’s a message that rings untrue. This utopianism feels dishonest when the museum's empty lot is soon to be another luxury tower for the mega-rich. We remain undelivered.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Review Roundup
Just yesterday we were at the MoMA prefab show, which we found underwhelming (more on that later this week). By contrast, Nicolai Ouroussoff at the New York Times heaps on the praise for the show's curator, Barry Bergdoll. Whereas, Justin Davidson at New York Magazine has some issues. We also had the pleasure last week of attending the "After Nature" opening at the New Museum (thanks, Niknaz!). I mainly agree with Ken Johnson on praise for the better bits, although I haven't have a chance to explore everything in detail. Review of the Week goes to Thomas Hoving, former Met director, who is writing again for ArtNet. It's a bit bizarre. He starts by thanking the exhibit's sponsors and takes time to dis the Met's Web site (in my view, the design's bad, but the image library is quite good -- and their art history time line is useful.)
Home Delivery at the MoMA (-Oct. 20)
"This sporadically exciting but ultimately diffuse show begins indoors, on the sixth floor, and sidles up on the present by way of the past. ...an exhibit that can’t quite decide whether prefabrication should be treated with irony or exuberance. ...the history of mass-produced shelter as a shaggy tale of standardized cottages and eccentric prototypes elaborated with hyperrational lunacy. ... In the company of so many utopians and tinkerers, the current exhibit feels bereft of an agenda, lacking in loopy euphoria or any quixotic certainty about what’s next. ...a chronicle of impossible futures. The masses were never going to live in molded plastic wombs or fancifully efficient cubbyholes. Instead, many chose trailers, or assembly-line units disguised as old-fashioned, stick-built ranches. Mass-produced housing exists, but the beautiful, original, and flexible varieties remain stubbornly in the realm of the experimental. All this historical vamping doesn’t so much set up MoMA’s prefab village as make all five new houses seem variously retro." -Justin Davidson/NY Mag.
"With a shiny cubic pod, a scaffolding wrapped in transparent solar panels and a jigsaw-puzzle cottage, New York's Museum of Modern Art has turned a next-door vacant lot into a tiny, giddy world's fair. ...a wildly ambitious display of the pleasures and peculiarities of prefabricated houses. The prototypes, augmented inside the museum by a rich history of the genre, capture both the earnestness of architecture's obsession with industrial technique and its faith in technology as an agent of progress. ... The gallery exhibition reveals the almost pornographic obsession of many architects with machined surfaces, floors supported by webs of triangulated tubes and joinery layered with washers, gaskets and ball joints. Too often the fetish gets in the way of both marketability and production reality. Few of the exhibited prototypes have found a market." -James S. Russell/Bloomberg
"...a delightful surprise. ...more than 80 projects, from humble experiments in suburban living to stunning works of creative imagination. In a tour de force Mr. Bergdoll was able to build five full-scale model houses for the show in a lot just west of the museum. The effect is startling: expressions of a suburban utopian world surrounded by Midtown’s looming skyscrapers. ...the kind of loving, scholarly achievement that is rare in today’s architectural climate, which so often favors cheap spectacle over probing intellect. Mr. Bergdoll has not only managed to track down some unexpected gems, he has also arranged them in a way that allows us to see them with fresh eyes. He makes a convincing case that prefabricated housing was both a central theme of Modernist history and a dream that remains very much alive today. ... one of the exhibition’s most haunting themes: the conflict inherent in the so-called American dream. In many ways the prefab house embodies the tension between a desire for stability and a quixotic faith in social mobility." -Nicolai Ouroussoff/NYTimes
After Nature at the New Museum (-Sept. 21)
"... strange, lugubrious, wildly uneven dream of an exhibition. ...it exudes a distinctly European spirit of ruminative pessimism relieved intermittently by moments of black humor and otherworldly fantasy. It lurches from transcendentally thrilling to portentous to kitschy. ... No stylistic trends prevail, but many of these artists will be familiar — in some cases, overly familiar — to followers of the international avant-garde. ...the exhibition sets out to evoke a metaphorical landscape of death and destruction. ... From behind a grill on the second floor comes the noise of a bird rustling and screeching, as though desperately trying to escape its cage. A sound piece by Micol Assaël, it suggests the human soul trapped in the labyrinthine corridors of modern consciousness. It might also be the spirit of an exhibition that, however fascinating in parts, is too weighed down by mundane works to really fly." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes
J. M. W. Turner at the Met (-Sept. 21)
"It really bugs me that mainstream art critics never give the sponsors of a show the kudos they deserve. So, right up front, enthusiastic thanks to the Bank of America and the Access Foundation for their spectacular generosity in making possible the grandiose and not-to-be-missed J. M. W. Turner show at the Met. ... A full comprehension of the pieces in this show should be attempted only if you have to study for a Ph.D. exam. The only way to deal with such an array is to walk through swiftly noting the pieces that hit you hard and then backtrack and savor only them. Turner is like old studio-system Hollywood. He created a dozen true masterpieces that appeal to every generation. Hundreds of A-productions, which today seem quaint. And a plethora of B-movies Turner churned out to make a living and which look trite and superficial today. Face it: Whereas William Turner was one of the three or four greatest British artists in history, in world art he’s merely an intriguing figure. ... After seeing this unparalleled array I no longer believe he’s a brilliant landscape, seascape and history painter. I now see him as a painter of compelling fantasies who happened to use landscape and the sea as stage sets. He’s a magician and poet of color and light and atmosphere who transforms grim -- and jejune -- reality into a surreal, dreamy never-never land, which is both intimate and universal at the same time. ... The part of the Met’s website devoted to the show is puerile, as is the entire site, which is kindergarten level compared to the British Museum and the Boston MFA, for example." -Thomas Hoving/ArtNet
Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney (-Sept. 21)
"His geometries and lightweight skeletons live on in the architecture of Norman Foster, whose celebrated 'Gherkin' bears a remarkable resemblance to Fuller’s drawing of a segment of the Montreal dome. With his insistence on environmental efficiency and his globe-spanning practice, Foster is Fuller reincarnated in more practical form. He has, for instance, never flinched from the imperial implications of his mentor’s grandest visions – or of his clients’ political leanings. ... On all this, the Whitney is sadly silent – so intent on chronicling the history of Fuller’s intellect that it has neglected the continuing relevance of his genius, his philosophy, and his megalomania." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
Framing a Century: Master Photographers at the Met (-Sept. 1)
"...the story of photography’s first century through the work of 13 luminous figures who shaped its evolution, from Le Gray, Fenton and Watkins to Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï. The show cleverly lets us juxtapose different treatments of the same motifs, exposing the extent to which sensibility, culture and context filter the quirks of individual vision." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
Philip Guston at the Morgan Library & Museum (-Aug. 31)
"The link between Pollock and Guston is well documented, but what seems to get left out of every telling is how, in his art, Guston changed the terms of their dialogue, particularly when it came to line, image, and space. Starting around 1945 and lasting at least until his death in 1956, the conversation is dominated by Pollock. He was the first to take the image out of painting, and it was Guston who followed suit. Pollock, however, wasn’t completely successful in his attempts to put the image back into painting, while Guston, who got sick of how abstraction had become codified after his friend’s death, succeeded in reintroducing both image and space, but only after he stopped painting in the late sixties and focused solely on drawing." -John Yau/Brooklyn Rail
Imi Knoebel 24 Colors–For Blinky at the Dia: Beacon (Beacon, NY) (ongoing)
"...as visually striking and technically accomplished as Dia’s Knoebel show is, it also reflects the aesthetic pitfalls and challenges of reconstituting past projects. ... Upon further inquiry, I learned that the panels weren’t merely restored. Rather, each was reconstructed from scratch. ...the wholesale recreation of Knoebel’s paintings has purged them of a not insubstantial measure of their authenticity. Remaking Donald Judd’s plywood boxes, say, or Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light installations does not detract from their real or intended artistic import because the visible subtlety of the artist’s hand is not germane to the aesthetic experience of viewing the work. But a painting itself perceptibly reflects the artist’s creative process, and cannot be reconstructed without effacing the artist’s original experience of making the piece. ...the show would have been far richer had a few of the originals been displayed alongside the recreations, taking us back to the time when Knoebel was both honing his art and mourning the death of a friend. Would he have objected to that?" -Sharon Butler/Brooklyn Rail
Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpoolat the Yale Centerfor British Art (New Haven) (-Aug. 31)
"If you occasionally succumb to the idea, for instance, that English painting has little to offer before the ascendancy of Constable and Turner, or that the 18th century - give or take a few Frenchies like Watteau and Chardin - was a frivolous and formulaic period, put such thoughts on hold as you take a trip here to see 'Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool,' a superb exhibition... Influenced by Rembrandt and the Dutch Caravaggists of the previous century, Wright made his reputation with paintings of candlelit scenes... Wright had an ability, as was once said of Edmund Burke, to wind his way into a subject like a serpent. The subject in question might be the Industrial Revolution. It might be the divorce of ethics and scientific inquiry. Or it might be the slave trade. But again and again Wright showed that he was prepared to inquire rather than declaim. He framed questions rather than providing answers, and tried not to patronize his audiences by pandering to what they already knew." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
The House That Sprawl Built at the Hunterdon Museum of Art (Clinton, NJ) (-Sept. 7)
Lisa Dahl: No Place Like Home at the at the Hunterdon Museum of Art (Clinton, NJ) (-Sept. 7)
The 52nd Annual National Juried Print Exhibition at the at the Hunterdon Museum of Art (Clinton, NJ) (-Sept. 7)
"...one of four sequels to 'Sprawl' at the Jersey City Museum (still up through Aug. 24 -- the other venues were at the Shore Institute of the Contemporary Arts, the Arts Guild of Rahway and the Art Galleries at Ramapo College), which tries to address the problems New Jersey has with suburban development around the state. At the Hunterdon the emphasis, given the museum's location in Jersey horse country, is on single-family homes and their iconic meaning in America. .... 'No Place Like Home,' wields its irony more openly. Dahl makes dozens of little paper houses, like the hotels in a 'Monopoly' game, gluing them to the walls and arranging them in little cul-de-sacs on the windowsills, but she also takes photos, like real estate pix, and carefully blanks out the houses with blank paper. And she appliqués suburban homes onto canvasses so they float on a stormy sky or a slab of pink veined marble, or underlines them with embroidered clichés... the '52nd Annual National Juried Print Exhibition'... always an eye-popping display of techniques from around the country, but this year's Lynd Ward Memorial Purchase Prize went to an absolutely amazing stone lithograph called 'Identity' by Angela Young, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-River Falls." -Dan Bischoff/NJ Star-Ledger
Luisa Rabbia: Travels With Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston) (-Sept. 28)
"...Italian artist Luisa Rabbia's attempt to transform Isabella Stewart Gardner's travel scrapbooks into art. As a lyrical experiment, Rabbia's 26-minute video is nothing if not audacious. And yet - except intermittently - the work is not quite transporting. ... The result is a kind of surrealistic doodling in real time. Visually, it is intriguing, and yet its isolated moments of surprise and even brilliance came too infrequently for my liking." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
Noche Crist: A Romanian Revelation at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center (Washington, D.C) (-July 27)
"Not every art exhibition has a color scheme, but 'Noche Crist: A Romanian Revelation' does. ... It's a shade of pink whose unofficial name, chosen by Romanian-born, Washington-based artist Noche Crist (1909-2004) as the best backdrop to her paintings, cannot be printed in a family newspaper. Nor can many of the works, which tend to celebrate the delights of the flesh in a way that ranges from PG-13 to NC-17. Parts of the show, characterized by copious nudity and images of not infrequent coupling, ought to be accompanied by a parental advisory. ... Maybe it's all the pink, which sends me into the kind of sugar shock I get from eating too many cupcakes. Maybe it's embarrassment at the in-your-face eroticism of Crist's art, which sometimes feels like an uncomfortable cross between postmodern do-me feminism and the old-fashioned notion that women belong in the bedroom, not the boardroom." -Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post
Frida Kahlo at the SFMOMA (-Sept. 28)
"...is Kahlo the Clinton of the art world, a courageous barrier-breaker in a male-dominated arena? Or is she art’s Hillary, who has attracted legions of worshipful fans by shamelessly playing the victim card? ... I came away convinced that, however irritating Kahlo the icon may be, as a painter she’s too good and too weird not to take seriously. ...as a half-Jewish, half-mestiza, intermittently lesbian, disabled Mexican woman, she’s a veritable political-correctness punch line. It doesn’t help that she’s also wildly popular with people who are more likely to read People than ArtForum. Indeed, many of Kahlo’s images are so familiar that encountering them in person is like a celebrity sighting: they’re smaller than you expect, yet denser with significance than anything else in the room. But unlike many celebrities, they look better in real life than on glossy paper. The brushwork and colors are more delicate, and the paintings’ slightly overcast patina give them a depth that make the reproductions look a bit brassy by comparison. ... er combination of visual imagination, unrepentant solipsism, and disregard of art-world propriety is flat-out exhilarating." -Tessa DeCarlo/Brooklyn Rail
Hadrian: Empire and Conflict at the British Museum (London) (-Oct. 26)
"...the brutal thematic clarity here is worthy of Hadrian himself. To prove how up-to-the-minute history can be, the opening object is a colossal head of Hadrian discovered in Turkey only last August. It shows him to have been the first emperor to sport a beard, perhaps to cover up some facial blemishes. ...much is made in the show of the open-mindedness of the Romans in matters of gayness. Antinous, who died in a mysterious river accident in Egypt, was quickly deified by Hadrian and worshipped as a god around the empire. The resulting statues show a beautiful marble Adonis with softly feminine looks. ... Anyway, it’s an exemplary piece of storytelling, achieved with exactly the right mix of telling objects and great art." -
Sunday, July 20, 2008
The Eternal Return
"Arch of Hysteria" (1993)Guggenheim Museum
June 27-Sept. 28
For many years Louise Bourgeois hosted a Sunday salon for artists at her West 20th Street apartment. A few years back, two of our friends decided to go, carrying with them examples of their work — no slides allowed. As it happened, on the day they were there, the 90-something Bourgeois decided to speak exclusively in French. They didn’t understand a word.
Now we’re invited into the exotic world of Louise Bourgeois by way of an enthralling and essential retrospective at the Guggenheim. It’s arranged chronologically, populated by objects spanning most of her seven-decade career, spooling out and winding its way up, with turns towards surrealism, primitivism, cannibalism, mutant sex parts, stuffed dummies and psycho-trauma.
As others have observed, the Gugg’s a perfect venue. Frank Lloyd Wright’s off-white spiral so perfectly matches her organic sensibility, it’s as if the museum itself has been revealed to be one big Bourgeois sculpture. This point is nicely underscored by twin silver swirl cocoon shapes that hang in the rotunda. The museum's spiral ramp also shows how her career circles back on itself as she reworks earlier ideas, adding new twists.
Born in Paris into a comfortable (yes, bourgeois) family of tapestry restorers, she experienced the lasting trauma of having her live-in English teacher become her father's mistress (this could explain why she sometimes prefers her mother tongue). After getting a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne, she took up art, studying under artists, including Fernand Léger. In 1938, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York.
While she made art in Paris and even had a couple gallery shows, the show opens with works made in New York, the first of which are her surrealist-inspired “Femme Maison” paintings, which depict naked armless women joined with buildings, the architecture subsuming their heads. These images and ideas -- the body, buildings, sexuality and mutilation -- would be remain major themes throughout her career.
Next is a group of 17 wooden anthropomorphic “Personage” sculptures, each resembling a totem pole crossed with a Constantine Brancusi. Each represents someone from her life. In the same room is the extraordinary “The Blind Leading the Blind,” an abstract wooden centipede that reminded me of Theo Jansen’s beach-walking robots.
In the 50s, her sculpture becomes more abstract and varied. Her skinny totem towers are now made of a variety of pieces, some that look like they’re made of stacked children’s building blocks, others like shish kabobs of stones. She also begins clustering forms together horizontally on a single object, some resembling a gathering of bird-like forms, a kind of penguin huddle. They are somewhere between representational and abstract, a liminal space that radiates uncanny presence. It's like we're looking at some bizarre life-form from the original Star Trek series.In the 60s, she starts working with new materials, especially marble, but also latex and rubber. The objects are increasingly organic, you could even say ugly, recalling the fecund and fungous underbelly of nature. They're also ever more ambiguous and open to interpretation. It makes for fun guessing games. Is it a diseased eye or a danish? Maggot sex or two potatoes? Burial mounds or tumors?
These organic abstractions have much in common with the sculpture of Eva Hesse, and in fact the two were featured together in seminal 1966 exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in New York.
Sexual imagery also becomes a prominent theme, making us think of a much weirder version of Georgia O’Keefe. Penises, vaginas and breasts are everywhere. Hermaphroditic shapes too. The small bronze “Labyrinth Tower” is a building, a forearm arm and a penis. It also literally looks like poop.
The work also exudes menace, most strikingly in two installations. “The Destruction of the Father” is a subterranean table or altar is covered with bread and pieces of meat. While not immediately obvious, it's said to represent the cannibalistic consumption of a father by his children. “Confrontation" is also oedipal, dealing with the destruction of a relationship between two generations. It again features a table covered with bread-like shapes, some like muffins, others larger and over-leavened. Video taken of the gallery opening shows an accompanying performance featuring a parade of participants wearing latex suits with breast-like protuberances.Bourgeois has said that she is not a feminist artist, and it’s evident that her work isn’t political. But it has some strong overlap with themes in feminist art. This is especially the case of “Hysteria” a stunning hanging bronze male figure with an arching back reaching towards his toes. Interesting that it’s a man, since hysteria was once considered a “woman’s disease.” Another example is her decision to change the name of the “Blind Leading the Blind” to “C.O.Y.O.T.E.” in honor of a prostitution rights group.
It's not only names she revisits. In the 1980s, her “Femme Maisons” reappear in sculptural form. The best example is the lovely hanging bronze “Spiral Woman,” a floating figure with a fecal cocoon spiral subsuming all but her arms and legs. More recently, she has revived her stacked-block tower, covering it with tapestry fabric — a double reference, one to her sculpture of the 50s, and second to her parent’s profession.
This backwards-looking tendency is most pronounced in her “cells” — room-like spaces, with a dramatic arrangement of objects. “Cell V” has two large weathered wooden balls enclosed by a series of doors. In “No Exit,” a old stairway penetrates a space enclosed by a metal screen. Less successful examples recall David Lynch, with a cluttered and heavy-handed arrangements of objects with specific personal psychological meanings, a visual language of memory: underclothes hang on animal bones, clenched hands made of marble sit on a mirror, spools of thread are arranged on a metal stand, a shelf holds a variety of old-fashioned laboratory vessels.
Bourgeois has said these cells are about pain. It’s a statement that brings to mind Frida Kahlo. And, like Kahlo, Bourgeois has made deeply autobiographical works fashioned with her own personal visual vocabulary.Her more recent fabric-based figure works are refreshingly subtle. I especially liked “Three Horizontals,” which shows two armless female stuffed figures stacked above a shape that could be a heart or fetus.
We're captivated with her works' singular strangeness -- no matter if we don't always understand what it's saying.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Review Roundup
This week!... Some fun rememberences of Bucky in the day from Charlie Finch and John Perreault... Review of the Week is Jerry Saltz's rhapsodic take on Jeff Koons' "Balloon Dog," writing that it's "a cross between a classical equestrian sculpture and a Toys ’R’ Us display" and represents "an updated version of Duchamp’s urinal" and a "postmodern fertility symbol or Venus of Willendorf." Jerry also takes the opportunity (again) to ponder the sunset of art-world excesses, comparing it to an Elton John concert: "Future generations will see that we passed through a super-mannered period where razzmatazz became an end in itself." ... And, don't miss Kenneth Baker's pissed-off rant on the tacky Dale Chihuly show at the de Young in San Francisco ("like surrealistic passages in a forest fit for Gump's").
Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney (-Sept. 21)
Paul McCarthy at the Whitney (-Oct. 12)
Dalí: Painting and Film (-Sept. 15)
"...Buckminster Fuller... He used to decamp at Yale, during my undergraduate days, sometimes just after Ken Kesey left town with a bus full of empty nitrous oxide canisters, and informally lecture all comers without limits. ... Below Bucky, on the Whit’s third floor, doors bang and screens flash. It must be Paul McCarthy, who is Bucky Fuller pumped full of crack and thorazine. ... On the other hand, over in midtown, 'Dali: Painting and Film' is one of the most spectacular shows ever mounted at the Museum of Modern Art. ... This show is one long amusement ride through Dali’s fermenting brain, snaking down the escalators to subsume the fey pretension of Olafur Eliasson, not to mention your correspondent’s meager descriptive powers. ... There can be no doubt, as this show confirms, that the champion influence on the art made today by Rachel Harrison, David Altmejd, Thomas Hirschhorn and a thousand others is not Picasso, Warhol or Duchamp, it is Salvador Dali." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet
Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney (-Sept. 21)
"I was once persuaded to attend one of Uncle Bucky's marathon lectures. How could I not have been intrigued? I thought the Dymaxion Car and then the Geodesic Dome at Expo 67 in Montreal were swell, in a Popular Mechanics kind of way. Bouncing around the stage, as advised by his dancer daughter, Bucky seemed more Barnum than beatific, more gasbag than gallant. Blather by any other name is still blather. Baloney is baloney. He gave a new meaning to Wall-of-Sound. I stuck it out for two hours and, deciding it was double-talk, and headed home to Hegel. ... He was the Pied Piper in a business suit. He was, in the name of the greatest good, an elf infected with predictomania and oracularitis. He was infected by neologorrhea, demonstrating that made-up words and new meanings forced upon old words can create another reality you might want to invest in, but not necessarily one you could trust. ... What was disarming about Fuller was his optimism and his idealism, however misplaced. He really seemed to believe that technology, specifically his version of same, would save the world. Progress was not only possible, but inevitable. Toward that end, unlike the dropouts constructing geodesic 'drop cities' out of recycled materials, he had no qualms about dealing with governments of all stripes or with any willing corporate bigwig." -John Perreault/Artopia
"At the Whitney one can hardly keep straight what came to exist, what lives on in the imagination, and what merely fell by the wayside. Fuller's structures might save humankind or force it into a mold. They could blend art and science or muddle the two. ... Both exhibitions show Fuller as a bundle of contradictions and as something of a street-corner prophet. However, the Whitney makes it easier to pin down the contradictions and the prophecy. His idealism, his connections between art and design, and early interest in mass-produced structures have obvious parallels with European Modernism—from the Russian revolution to the Bauhaus. The housing shares its setting and stilts with Le Corbusier's garden city, with the jellyfish swimming over from the Viennese school. In crossing the Atlantic, though, the map of the world has shifted. The architect of utopia has become the entrepreneur of the fantastic. ... Where Le Corbusier seeks perfection, Fuller demands efficiency. He has his head and housing in the clouds, and he can offer to instruct the United Nations, but to teach recycling. Like the image of the hustler, the lesson has its dark side. Early on, he imagines a zeppelin simultaneously delivering his 4D Towers and dropping bombs, like a vision of capitalism's 'creative destruction.' Stanley Kubrick might have turned it into a dark comedy. Is it an accident that he caught on in the 1960s, the summer of love and of Vietnam?" -John Haber/HaberArts
Jeff Koons at the Met Roof Garden (-Oct. 26)
Jeff Koons at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) (-Sept. 21)
"When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won’t miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event. Giant heads made of pots and pans; tigers flying through museums; muscle cars buffed by bikini-clad girls; bronze Hello Kitty sculptures in courtyards; enough plywood, plastic, aluminum, and steel constructions to wall off Mexico from the U.S.—big isn’t necessarily bad, but it isn’t automatically beautiful, either. ... It’s like an Elton John concert. Future generations will see that we passed through a super-mannered period where razzmatazz became an end in itself. That said, one artist who has excelled at this Nouveau Versailles aesthetic—despite never working on a truly giant scale—is Jeff Koons. Right now two of his three sculptures on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum may send you. They did me. The showstopper up here is Balloon Dog (Yellow), a ten-foot-tall representation of just what it sounds like, made of yellow-tinted high-chromium stainless steel. It’s a cross between a classical equestrian sculpture and a Toys ’R’ Us display, and Koons has called it 'a Trojan horse.' I think of it as an anti–golden calf. Yet, except for moneybag collectors, no one worships Balloon Dog. It worships us, basking in our presence, displaying its fake luxury (steel, not silver or bronze), and reflecting everything around it in hallucinogenic distortion. The philosopher Thales said, 'Everything is full of gods.' Balloon Dog is full of everything except gods, a de-deified sculpture that radiates irony and Eros. It’s an updated version of Duchamp’s urinal. Balloon Dog is also a postmodern fertility symbol or Venus of Willendorf. While its phallic shapes are pretty evident, a hermaphroditic buzz develops as the balloons create vulvalike vortexes where they are twisted together; the pooch’s anus actually resembles a budding flower. Balloon Dog occupies a zone between Platonic contemplation and randy sensation. It isn’t a sacrificial animal to be killed in place of humans; it’s so perfect it exists in some undisturbed eternal state. Call it the reflective sublime. ... Maybe some of Koons’s recent work is the sculptural equivalent of a dazzlingly polished Abba song. But even something as impeccable and weightless as that isn’t bad. Whether you like his work or not, Koons allows you to toggle between abstraction and reality like few other contemporary artists. Koons’s flawless surfaces are devoid of human touch, but they’re charged with physicality, intelligence, and humanity." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.
Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure at the Met (-Sept. 21)
"Despite signs to the contrary, conspicuous consumption is not what it used to be. Most exhibitions of decorative arts from the past, especially Europe’s monarchical age, drive that fact home in thrilling, and sometimes off-putting, fashion. But few shows do so with quite the dazzling vehemence of 'Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure From the Palaces of Europe,' a stealth blockbuster... A sumptuous sprawl of 170 objects borrowed from palaces and former palaces (that is, museums) all over Europe, it is the first in-depth survey of the arts and crafts of pietre dure. ... has something for every taste, meaning that almost all of us will find something in it that seems disconcerting or ugly in its excess. But over all, this extraordinary show suggests why the quest for beauty may be hardwired into humans. Nature habituated us to beauty, and we feel driven to equal its high, inspiring standards." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes
Woven Splendor from Timbuktu to Tibet at the New York Historical Society (-Aug.
17)
"Once I actually peeked at the spectacular rugs and textiles on display, I forgot names and was lost in rich colors, vibrant patterns, and complex abstract designs that would leave any Neo Geo or Op artist gasping. This array of more than 100 carpets, coverings, decorative items and pieces of clothing dates from the 15th to the 20th century. And it is spectacular." -N.F. Karlins/ArtNet
The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library (-Sept. 26)
"Advertising’s greatest hits are mostly there — like Clairol’s 'Does she or doesn’t she?' campaign, Morris the Cat and Volkswagen’s 'Think small' ads — as well as some more obscure samples from the 1920s and ’30s that illustrate the industry’s shifts in sense and sensibility. ... The library’s exhibition is sponsored by the One Club, the trade’s nonprofit cheerleading arm, so there is very little about advertising’s darker moments and no discussion of questions like advertising’s influence on consumption, waste and values." -Patricia Cohen/NYTimes
Elizabeth Peyton: Portrait of an Artist at teh Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT) (-Nov. 16)
"Elizabeth Peyton’s endearing, jewel-like portraits are frequently, and transparently, based on photographic ephemera: newspaper images, film stills, vintage black-and-white prints. Her own snapshots, taken over the last two decades with 35-millimeter, Polaroid and, most recently, digital cameras, are an important but rarely acknowledged source. Some 50 photographs by Ms. Peyton are now on view... ... With a Peyton survey scheduled to open in Manhattan at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in October, the Aldrich’s exhibition tries to deconstruct the mystique surrounding Ms. Peyton’s paintings, emphasizing her social-documentary ambitions rather than her technical facility or fan-girl romanticism. ... Ms. Peyton photographs with the acquisitive determination of someone amassing Facebook friends. ...extends the promise of a less fussy, more authentic Peyton, but it certainly doesn’t strip her paintings of their mysterious aura. Admirers will be left wondering how Ms. Peyton’s brushwork converts her awkward photographs into graceful, intuitive portraits." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
Anish Kapoor at the ICA (Boston) (-Sept. 7)
Chantal Ackerman at the eList Visual Art Center at MIT (Boston) (closed July 6)
"Kapoor's a sculptor who continues to get better and better. His early work involved seductive interior spaces that glowed with the high-keyed intensity of unbound pigments, and one wondered where he’d take it. Big, for one; and he pulls it off, as anyone knows who’s seen his extraordinary and extraordinarily popular Cloud Gate (2004-06) in Chicago. He’s also continued to work with materials that have a mysterious beauty even though they’re no more esoteric than acrylic, resin, wax and stainless steel. ...Chantal Ackerman... It would be worth seeing if only for the first work: D’est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction), 1995, which I think is one of the most important artworks of the last couple of decades." -Andrea Kirsh/FallonandRosof
Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series at the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) (-Oct. 26)
"The painter's most famous work -- a set of 60 narrative panels, on view in its entirety in a rare exhibition at the Phillips Collection -- tells, of course, a single tale. Created between 1940 and 1941, it's the account of the great exodus of more than a million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North in the years following the outbreak of World War I. ... An interactive kiosk allows you to type in your own migration story and to read those of others." -Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post
Thoughts on Democracy at the Wolfsonian museum at Florida International University (Miami Beach) ( -Dec. 7)
"... artists’ responses to Rockwell’s wartime 'Four Freedoms' series. ... a meditation on an American crisis of self-confidence: the sense that trust in American ideals is giving way to fear and uncertainty about how they are exploited. Culture has long been a documentarian of sorts, and this somber mood is also reflected at the box office these days, where the dystopian world of 'Wall-E' is a hit, and in bookstores, where titles like 'Are You There, Vodka, It’s Me, Chelsea' are best sellers." -Damien Cave/NYTimes
Dale Chihuly at the de Young Museum (San Francisco) (Sept. 28)
"Admirers of empty virtuosity may thrill to 'Chihuly at the de Young,' the de Young Museum's celebration of contemporary glass master Dale Chihuly. But so will those among the art public building a dossier against director John Buchanan's leadership of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Perhaps in today's arts funding environment, every museum must work a potboiler or two into its exhibition calendar. But Chihuly has come to personify everything meretricious in contemporary art. The most exciting thing about his work: Its status as art stands in question. ... The earliest of Chihuly's installations, from 1972, and one of the latest, 'Mille Fiori' (2008), look like surrealistic passages in a forest fit for Gump's. The many inanities of conceptual and other contemporary art may have inflamed the appetite for craft skill that Chihuly superficially satisfies. ... The history of art is a history of ideas, not just of valuable property. Chihuly has no place in it, and the de Young disserves its public by pretending that he does." -Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle
Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art at the SFMOMA (-Oct. 5)
"...several dozen works by contemporary Asian - predominantly Chinese - artists... The "half-life" of guest curator Jeff Kelley's title refers to the rate of decay in individual artists' memories of Mao's dream of an ideal society engineered by fiat - a nightmare to most who experrienced it. The output of Chinese artists born before or during China's pivot from totalitarian socialism to predatory state capitalism traces the last avant-garde worthy of the name." -Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle
Bruce Busby at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (-Aug. 9)
"...a white nylon tent, large enough to sleep in and open to anyone willing to take off her or his shoes. Despite a curious, off-kilter slant and a number of mysterious cylindrical protuberances, it's a slick, snazzy contraption that would look right at home on the floor of a sporting goods emporium. ... In its reflection of undeniably familiar stereotypes of California (and, to some degree, American) culture -- the ecological paranoia, the exaltation of personal expression, the longing for therapeutic consumer solutions and the pseudo-scientific language in which these solutions are generally couched -- the work actually rings more true than not." -Holly Myers/LATimes
Jim Campbell at the Berkeley Art Museum (-Aug. 30)
"About 30 minutes after seeing Jim Campbell's Home Movies 1248-1 at the Berkeley Art Museum, I couldn't remember what the heck the piece was about. I remembered the extravagant, near-floor to near-ceiling strings of wall-facing LED lights that make up the physical part of the piece. I remembered that Home Movies existed of shadowy objects, figures and shapes that I could make out on the wall. But I couldn't remember a single image or sequence of images. Considering that Campbell's work is substantially about memory, about what we remember and what we don't, about how we remember and how we don't, that seemed just about right." -Tyler Green/Modern Art Notes
This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs at the Huntington Library (Los Angeles) (-Sept. 15)
"Maybe it’s just my personal fixation on Rauschenberg’s epiphany, but he seems to me to be the absent hub at the center of the Huntington’s This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs — a surprising outburst of world-class curatorial practice from an institution whose arcane tweediness has always been one of its main attractions." -Doug Harvey/LA Weekly
The National Museum of Wildlife Art (Jackson Hole, Wyo.)
"In 51,000 square feet every painting, drawing and sculpture is of wild animals; one gallery is devoted to buffalo alone. ... The point of wildlife art is its subject, and the uneven quality of some of these works — even by well-known wildlife artists — shows an impulse other than the purely aesthetic at work. Realism is the dominant style, and kitsch is the familiar currency." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes
Friday, July 11, 2008
Newly Minted
Michael Stickrod "Vacation Money,Saundra Stickrod," (video still) 2003
2008 Altoids Award
The New Museum
June 25 – Oct. 12
The U.K.-based mint manufacturer Altoids has helped keep things fresh at the New Museum for ten years now, donating the more than 150 works in its “Curiously Strong” collection. This year they’re adding a twist by funding a new art prize which distinguishes itself as being the first award for emerging artists that's chosen by other artists.
The museum is now featuring a small and oddly flat exhibition of works by the four inaugural winners: Ei Arakawa, Lauren Kelley, Michael Patterson-Carver and Michael Stickrod.
Nominations were made by a team of ten younger artists (a few of whom, like Trisha Donnelly and Harrell Fletcher, are in the “Curiously Strong” collection). Final selection was decided on by a trio of influential art-world heavy-hitters — Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy and Rirkrit Tiravanija, each known for their singular style — respectively, dramatized photographic self-portraits; messy and disturbing performance, sculpture and video; and sculptures and performances that engage the audience in social activities like eating.
While none of the jury's picks, or at least those works displayed, are particularly enthralling, it's still interesting to look for aspects of the jurors’ art reflected in their choices.
As it happens, the only obvious example is the strangely self-defeating work of Ei Arakawa. Before entering the first-floor exhibition space, you come upon construction paper haphazardly taped to the glass wall. For a moment you wonder, is the exhibition still under construction? Inside amidst more paper on the floor is an array of box fans blowing sections of translucent fabric that hang from two wardrobe racks. A hand-written sign encourages you touch and feel the work. A second sign lists a schedule of rehearsals and performances and a list of collaborators that includes Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. From what I've read, Arakawa's performances are really more like non-performances where you don't know when it's started or ended. This doesn't make me feel it's necessary to show up.
Lauren Kelly’s clever stop-motion animations use African-American Barbie dolls (or similar) to fashion short scenarios about the lives of young women. Simultaneously sad and funny, they evoke human vulnerabilities while playing with stereotypes: a shy librarian has her heart broken by a smooth-talking player; an office worker learns she is pregnant and gets an abortion; a chicken-shack worker is sexually harassed; a bride has trouble fitting into her wedding dress.
Michael Patterson-Carver, an art-world outsider from Seattle, makes politicized drawings using ink and pencil on paper. In a two-dimensional childlike style, he depicts groupings of protesters, both historical and contemporary — everything from a Civil Rights march to a Prohibition demo to a PETA protest to a immigrant rights gathering. One non-protest drawing entitled “Guernica Incident at the U.N.” dramatizes the episode in which Picasso’s antiwar painting was veiled during a speech by Colin Powell at the outset of the Iraq War.
Michael Stickrod contributes a series of documentary-style video pieces on two flat-screen monitors — each devoted to a parent. The artist’s father relates his experiences in Vietnam killing off whole villages, and his years working at a sewage-treatment plant. The artist’s mother shares her health problems and her oil-painting hobby (maybe the best part of the whole exhibition are the images of her eye-popping self-portraits, idealized as a kind of Elizabeth Taylor in clown makeup). Stickrod’s videos share subject matter and home-made quality reminiscent of “Tarnation,” the award-winning documentary about living with a schizophrenic mother.
One complaint is the competing volumes of the video pieces. Kelly’s comes with headphones; so should Stickrod’s.
It’s possible to read-in the influence of the jury to a certain extent. The messier, outsider-y moments remind us of McCarthy, and the social-engagement of Tiravanija, and the play with stereotypes of Cindy Sherman. But more evident is their common mood, uncertain and confused — a push-pull between human pathos and irony.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Review Roundup
This week... The consensus on the new Turner show is that there's just too much Turner; Howard Halle likes Louise Bourgeois at the Gugg; Ken Johnson is unconvinced by the crowd-sourced photo show at the Brooklyn (it seems crowds like photos that look like something from a glossy magazine); and Ariella Budick accuses Anish Kapour of literal naval gazing (his sculptures, she writes, are like belly buttons); and Rachel Campbell-Johnston compares the experience of a Cy Tombley show to an archaeological site.
J. M. W. Turner at the Met (-Sept. 21)
"...a beast of a show. With nearly 150 works in oil and watercolor spanning more than half a century, it will either win you over or wear you out. Or it will alternate, gallery by gallery, or wall by wall, as the art swings between overblown and moving, inspired and mechanical. ... His paintings of storms at sea or Alpine plunges are early examples of the natural sublime; his squalls of paint presage the Romantics, the Realists, the Impressionists and even the Abstract Expressionists. ... 'The Houses of Parliament on Fire' might almost have been painted by Monet with a little input from Philip Guston. ... This show may be wearying because there is something imperious and impersonal about the sheer force of Turner’s ambition. It is almost as if his drive to capture nature or history in motion was so intense that it didn’t leave room for anyone else, including the viewer. Maybe that’s why despite all his hard work and even the majesty of his vision, you can emerge from this exhibition impressed but oddly untouched, even chilled." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes
"Against all expectations, the first J.M.W. Turner survey to reach New York in 40 years has landed with a thud. ...is astonishing for all the wrong reasons. Incredibly, this most dependable of cultural institutions seems to have miscalculated the deadening impact of laying out 140 similar paintings and drawings with little variation or context. The show serves up a Johnny One-Note whose brilliance was undermined by an aversion to experiment." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg
"...when he really hits it, as he does frequently after 1830 — it's as if the heavens have opened up and the artist, equal mixtures of Apollo and Dionysus, were a romantic messenger from the gods, a bringer of light. ....Turner is a visionary, a romantic, and an expressionist — more romantic than any of his contemporaries, including Delacroix. For Turner, the world of things is a mere carrier or a conduit for that which is sublime, ephemeral, and spiritual. His vision is sweeping and grand. He dissolves the world into scintillating, misty fragments, all of which get caught up in the stormy whirlwind of his art. ...the show can be a little repetitive, if not tedious. It is important to pick and choose from the vast amount of work on the walls. Walking through the show is a bit like being spun from picture to picture by tornadoes of color, and riding crest after crest on a restless sea, which can tend after a while to cause motion sickness. ... In Turner, it is when he lets go so completely, breaking up form to the point of nearly pure light, pure movement, and formlessness — when he both submerges us in the world and holds the world at a blinding distance — that he is most convincing. It is when we forget the subject of his paintings that we get closest to the subject of his art." -Lance Esplund/NY Sun
"Turner 'thought' in watercolor and scraped and manipulated it wet-into-wet, resulting in unmatched fluidity and depth — as the spectacular series of nine, nighttime 'Burning of the Houses of Parliament' (1837) makes clear. Although his oils of hills, bridges and mandatory canals of Venice may first appear museum-ish and staid, their brilliant or roiling skies take on lives of their own." -Jeff Weinstein/Metro
"What makes Turner so compelling a painter is his ability to make the tension between the realistic surface and all that is churning beneath it so palpable to the viewer." -Howard Kissel/NY Daily News
Framing a Century: Master Photographers at the Met (-Sept. 1)
"...the premise of this trim, instructive survey has all the excitement of an intro-level art-history course. But step into the galleries and look around: every picture is astonishing, and the curator Malcolm Daniel’s choices are sure and sophisticated. Combining famous and little-known images, each carefully annotated grouping doesn’t attempt to sum up a career; rather, it suggests the broader scope of the artist’s range." -Vince Aletti/New Yorker
"...the exhibition reveals photography as a litmus test for social transformation. Many of these photographers used technological innovations—such as the shift from paper to glass negatives, which allowed for crystalline clarity of detail across vast distances—to mirror broader changes in society. ... offers a rare perspective on the transformations (and growing pains) of an infant medium through its first hundred years. ... While one might quibble with this exhibition as an essay in canon formation, its panoramic view also provides a sense of how the photographer's role in society has shifted." -Leslie Camhi/Village Voice
Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney (-Sept. 21)
"For people of my generation, who spent much of their childhoods clambering over jungle gyms inspired by Fuller’s geodesic domes, his architecture embodies the values of an era when it was still possible to believe that society was gliding steadily toward a better future. ... But Fuller, of course, was more than that. His deep conviction was that environmentally sensitive, technologically innovative design could save the world. One of this show’s strengths is that it allows us to recognize how that vision was shaped by cold war militarism as well as personal idealism. It offers a poignant contrast to the ethos of our era, when the technology of war borders on a science-fiction fantasy, yet we no longer seem able to put it to other, constructive uses." -Nicolai Ouroussoff/NYTimes
"If Fuller saw himself as a verb it may be because his life was dominated more by activity than artifact. He truly found himself in his presentations and lectures, from his first talks to a handful of people in Greenwich Village salons to the vast college audiences he drew in his old age. His real skills were 'synergistic,' all right, but it was the synergy of networking, propaganda and performance. ... The most meaningful artifact in the show may be the mirrored bust of Bucky by Isamu Noguchi. ... The mirrored surface suggests the nature of Fuller's appeal: Everyone saw something of themselves in Fuller. His ideas mirrored their ideals, his designs reflected their dreams. Fuller was born of a family with deep roots in New England. His ancestors included Margaret Fuller, who co-founded The Dial with Emerson. He became a latter-day off-shoot of the Transcendalists, a modern-day Thoreau who planned simple life in a soybean silo instead of a cabin, and his architecture carried the mystic overtones of Orson Fowler's octagon house movement of the same period." -Core Jr./Core77
Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (-Aug. 10)
"If you could capture it in a manageable form, would the collective judgment of all visitors to a major art museum be better than that of the people with Ph.D.’s, the curators or, heaven forbid, the professional critics? ... The results are inconclusive, at best, and the exhibition itself is not very interesting to look at, but the issues it raises are fascinating. ... What you see is an array of competent, traditional, magazine-style photography — mostly cityscapes, riverscapes and portraits. ... What if you favor exhibitions designed to appeal not to crowds but mainly to discerning, well-informed individuals? What if you go to museums to learn from experts who have devoted long, deep and careful study to certain subjects? What if one of the things you value most in contemporary art is its resistance to mainstream taste, its willingness to forgo popularity in pursuit of ideas and experiences that few have already had? ... The best you can say for 'Click!' is that it’s a good conversation starter." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes
P.F. One (Public Farm One) by WORK Architecture Company (P.S.1 Ninth Annual Architecture-Program Winner)
"...evoking the look of an environmentally sound magic carpet that's landing squarely in the P.S.1 courtyard. Constructed as a honeycomb of large cardboard tubes, the top surface of the asymmetrical, V-shaped plane is a working farm, blooming with a variety of vegetables and plants... ... Form meets function in the supportive columns as well, offering cell-phone-charging stations, pockets of herbs, and those twisty scopes that allow you to spy on people without them knowing. The plants will be harvested and sold at an accompanying farmers' market during the parties. ...while that flying carpet looks great, it doesn't provide that much shade; this year's parties are going to be motherfucking hot." -Annie Fischer/Village Voice
Louise Borgeois at the Guggenheim (-Sept. 12)
"...one gets the impression of a guarded artist more interested in grandeur than in sharing. She is, in other words, one of the boys, which is why major institutions like the Guggenheim love her. ...a triumph... It’s certainly a relief after the strum und din of Cai Gou-Qiang’s flying cars: I’d gotten so used to being hit over the head whenever I walked into the Gugg, it took me a moment to adjust to what’s basically a good old-fashioned survey. ... Eschewing and embracing the social conventions of her time, she chose her life while also accepting that it was chosen for her. And her art suggests the same mix of retrograde and cutting-edge." -Howard Halle/TONY
Paul McCarthy at the Whitney (-Oct. 12)
"A note to the media: There will be no ketchup or chocolate syrup involved in Paul McCarthy’s latest show at the Whitney. It will be devoid of condiments of all kinds. Also, there will be no Santa butt plugs, mechanical pigs or tree-humping animatronic figures. The artist will not wear a bulbous clown nose, portray a psychotic father or introduce any items into orifices, real or simulated. The only violence will be metaphorical and oblique, and the only human bodies will be the viewers’ own, reflected in various mirrors. ...clearly trying for something deeper... To McCarthy, the kinetic rooms he’s built for the Whitney echo both the Minimalist cube and the interior of the human skull." -Howard Halle/TONY
Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe at the Met (-Sept. 21)
"Now, in what has to be a labor of love and curatorial masochism, the museum has mounted the oddly charming... Tables, flagons, chalices, busts, clocks, and perfume burners, all fashioned from stone, make up the riotous polychrome feast of this latest show. ...the charm of pietre dure consists in the conflict and collusion between that almost superhuman control and the essential fortuity of the materials in question." -James Gardner/NY Sun
The Declaration of Independence at the New York Public Library (Aug. 2)
"...once again, the New York Public Library has placed on display its copy in Thomas Jefferson's hand of the Declaration of Independence. ... Of the few copies he made, the library's is one of only two known intact copies. It is thus an autograph manuscript of astonishing historical value. Extremely fragile, it can be exhibited only for very brief periods and under very carefully controlled lighting conditions." -Francis Morrone/NY Sun
Radiance From the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru at the Met (-Sept. 1)
"As Darwin wrote, brightly colored feathers give certain species of birds an evolutionary advantage. Ancient Peruvians adapted such plumage for their own purposes, adorning ritual objects and personal accessories with startling yellows, reds, greens and blues. ...one of the few New York museum exhibitions ever to focus on this little-known art form. Organized by a senior research associate, Heidi King, it supplements the Met’s rarely displayed holdings of featherwork with examples borrowed from public and private collections, including those of the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. It’s the kind of specialized yet accessible show that only the Met can pull off." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
Great British Watercolors From the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven) (-Aug. 17)
"...more than 80 watercolors by English artists from the 18th through 19th centuries in a beautiful new show... The works are arranged more or less chronologically to show the evolution of British watercolor painting from mid-18th-century topographical landscapes to a more widespread application and growing sophistication in the 19th century. The depth, diversity and quality of the exhibits are astonishing. Mr. Mellon not only bought widely, he clearly bought the very best of what he could find. ...inevitably it is Turner who steals this exhibition, for he was such an astonishing artistic talent..." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes
Nineteenth Century American Paintings of the Hudson Highlands at Boscobel (Garrison, NY) (-Oct. 1)
"...a selection of 19th-century American paintings that reflect some of the same meandering beauty that surrounds the estate... The arrangement of the works by themes, along with a map of the area, helps viewers make these connections, enabling them to compare and contrast different views of the same place or subject. It also highlights how much the landscape has changed. ...a little treasure." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes
Claimed by the Sea: Long Island Shipwrecks at the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities Gallery (Cold Spring Harbor, NY) (-Jan. 2009)
"The show focuses on 11 disasters, chosen largely because the society owns or could borrow artworks and artifacts that bring their dramas graphically to life..." -Aileen Jacobson/NYTimes
Anish Kapoor at the ICA (Boston) (-Sept. 7)
"...14 beguiling sculptures... Kapoor often works on an architectural scale and with theatrical verve to create urban spectacles. Most people experience his art one piece at a time, and the ICA offers a rare chance to stroll through a 30-year career. ...the visceral is everywhere in Kapoor's art. His sculptures express themselves in the visual language of birth, sex and death. They brood over the body's skin, delve into cavities, and cast fleeting insights on the gloomy crannies of the mind. ... Most of Kapoor's recent work is either mirrored or a deep sanguinary red, or both. The first surface invokes the art historical motif of womanly vanity, the second is linked to the traditional colour of Indian bridal dresses. This strain of femininity leads him to some disconcerting images. ...In their lofty, stylised sensuality, the sculptures are obviously sexual, though in ways that a woman artist might choose just as much as a man. ... Kapoor's oeuvre could be divided into two kinds: innies and outies. He has harnessed both to a rhetoric of the sublime, yet in the end what really preoccupies him is the way the artist manipulates his art. After spending some time with all these reflective craters and shiny swellings, it occurs to me that Kapoor is the author of a body of anatomical work that refers obsessively back to itself, and so is guilty of the most literal kind of navel-gazing. His strategy is not crudely confessional but illusionistic. He has a magician's toolkit, full of distorting mirrors and secret compartments, that convincingly simulates profundity but in fact offers only varying degrees of shallowness." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape at the Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA) (-Spring 2008)
"...a show dealing with environmental themes... If they are inclined toward political activism, it is the kind of activism that understands the difference between the artistic arena and the political arena and is prepared to act in both. If they are inclined toward lyrical responses to nature, they indulge these responses with their eyes wide open to the real plight of the environment today." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
Modern Love at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.) (-Sept. 21)
"...culled from almost 250 donated to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in the past decade by ... local husband-and-wife collectors... ...it's not just any female body, it seems, that fascinates today's female artists, but my body. ... it tells us something about the Podestas and their tastes." -Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post
Power and Glory: Court Arts of China's Ming Dynasty at the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) (-Sept. 21)
"This grand show surveys the imperial arts of the Ming era - 1368 to 1644 - a dynastic reign distinguished by relative peace and in its later centuries, by religious eclecticism, expanding literacy (especially among women) and transoceanic trade." -Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle
Cy Twombly at the Tate Modern (-Sept. 14)
"He's known as the bloke who does blotches and scribbles - not a particularly sophisticated way of putting it, but as a description it's not bad. ...his fundamental search for an artistic language that could reconcile the brash new surfaces of American Abstract Expressionism with the layered traditions of European art history. He is trying to rediscover the relevance of drawing in a world that had erased the graphic line, and find a role for the old gods amid a modernity that had forgotten all about myth. ... Twombly is not a painter who wants simply to be explained. You unearth him. It is a gradual, almost physical process. And a show of his work should be treated like an archaeological site. You uncover his canvases like fragments of pottery; you blow at the dust of ideas, stare at shards of half-missing puzzles with half-remembered meanings. ... Mark and emptiness, pattern and disruption, movement and stasis, growth and decay all meet and mingle on his canvases. ... Twombly is a profound poet. This show left me convinced." -/Times of London
Perrault at the Pompidou (Paris) (-Sept. 22)
"...exemplary in its design and layout... ...spatially organised by screening devices which use two versions of Perrault’s trademark fine gold and silver metal meshes. ... The entrance space, a techno- souk of chain-link ceiling drapes, presents Perault’s most famous project, The Bibliothèque National. ...contains, possibly the most beautiful architectural models I have ever seen. ... The models are sublime and the public were photographing everything in obvious enjoyment. I felt however that there was little beyond these maquettes that delighted." -Gerrard O’Carroll/BD
Goya in Times of War at the Prado (Madrid) (-July 13)
"It’s much too big an exhibition, like so many shows. But then, an excess of Goya is not exactly an unbearable prospect. ... That is the genius of Goya, not just to give equal weight to drawings and prints and paintings, to public and private pictures, but also to move so effortlessly between cruelty and love. The human condition was never whole, Goya made clear. It splintered into fragments, refused order. Society verged on chaos, then inevitably succumbed. An artist bears witness, unflinchingly. This is the Goya we identify with in the 'Caprichos' and the 'Disasters,' the laconic Goya who speaks to the cynic in us; but there was also the Goya who painted those portraits and landscapes of such surpassing grace and dignity — quiet pictures that found redemption in exceptional people and places. The Romantic Goya, who prompts comparison to Goethe." -Michael Kimmelman/NYTimes
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