Knock Outs and Knock Offs

Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi
The Noguchi Museum
(Sept. 20, 2007 - May 25, 2008)

After riding our bikes to Astoria, we learned that the museum’s main attraction, their sculpture garden, is closed for construction, due to be completed late this year at the earliest. After checking out its other offerings, we headed to the nearby Socrates Sculpture Park, which despite an unsuccessful environmental-themed show, was a lovely place to have picnic lunch by the water.

If you kept to the dreary and overcrowded first floor of the Noguchi Museum in Astoria, Queens, you might be forgiven for thinking the artist was exclusively a middling sculptor of stone. It’s a shame, because, in fact, he had a varied artistic output, creating objects with much more lasting value than the often garish examples on display. Noguchi is so much more — set designer, muralist, creator of gardens and monuments. But he is best known for his coffee table with uniquely interlocking L-shaped legs. Designed in 1944, this icon of Mid-Century modern still being sold today (see above image).

Industrial design was something Noguchi only pursued for a period of about twenty years, beginning with an ominous-looking Radio Nurse, a bakelite baby intercom for Zenith he designed in 1939. Two years later, he was commissioned to create a three-legged, glass-top table for MoMA's first president, A. Conger Goodyear. Its biomorphic design, like his sculpture at the time, was indebted to surrealism, especially to Joan Miró, Alexander Calder and Constantine Brancusi (who he studied under). After sharing a similar creation with the designer Robsjohn Gibbings, he later discovered the table was being passed off by Gibbings as one of his one. In response, Noguchi revised the design for George Nelson, who was to become head of Herman Miller, sealing the deal for the famous table.

In 1950, following the suicide of his friend Arshelle Gorky, Noguchi visited Japan — his first trip back to his childhood home in nearly 20 years (the illegitimate child of a Japanese father and Irish-American mother, he spent the bulk of his childhood in Japan, before settling in the U.S. for his schooling). There he met designer Isamu Kenmochi, and the two briefly collaborate on a bamboo chair that joined traditional Japanese materials and technique and modern furniture design.

Visually rich but lacking connective narrative and context, "Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi," tells the non-quite-parallel stories of the two Isamus whose inventive furniture designs helped define Japanese Modern.

Featured are Noguchi's Herman Miller designs of the 40's — including the famous coffee table (which he once said was his only successful design) and his lovely Rudder dinette (1944) — named for the shape of its rounded, fin-like third leg. While the Goodwin table isn’t included, another commission is – a smallish cocktail table for another MoMA honcho, the museum’s architect Philip L. Goodwin (1941). There are also photos of a spectacular stingray-shaped dining room table he made for MoMA trustee William A.M. Burden (1947). (Noguchi was included in the MoMA’s show “Fourteen Americans” in 1946.)

Also on display are his designs from the 50s – including his rocker stool (1953), which, impractically, featured a rounded-bottom stool and dining table (1957) – both for Knoll; and his final industrial design, the prismatic table (1957) (see image to right), commissioned by Alcoa to showcase aluminum as futuristic and affordable. The latter table, while it received press attention in Time, Newsweek and the New Yorker, never made it into mass production, although it’s available today for $600 (if you ask me, the Herman Miller table’s the better deal at $1,300). That year Noguchi quit industrial design, because, he said, there were too many knockoffs (especially true of his paper lamp for Knoll, oddly not included in the exhibit). It’s easy to speculate that, much as he had supported himself doing portrait sculpture in 30s, industrial design was more of means than an end, paying his way towards his true passions of sculpture and making of gardens and monuments. After marrying Japanese actress Shirley Yamaguchi and living in Japan for six years, his marriage failed and he moved back to New York, which remained his main residence for the rest of his life.

Isamu Kenmochi was an active designer throughout the 50s, as a founding member of the Japan Industrial Designers Association and the International Design Committee (later called the Good Design Committee) as well as with his own design studio. In 1952, he traveled to California, where he met Charles and Ray Eames (a photograph of the three enjoying coffee in the famous couple’s backyard is featured in this exhibit). But his design breakthrough didn’t happen until 1960, with the design of his rattan rounded chair, a lovely wicker orb with a cushion in the middle that received design blessing from MoMA four years later by being included in the museum’s collection (see above image). Also included are his 1961 lacquered wood Kashiwado chair, its wide-bodied design named after a famous sumo wrestler, and his bowl-shaped 1963 Easy Chair, made of molded transparent plastic and metal. It was to be his last industrial design; like Noguchi, he was disillusioned by poor quality imitators. He did contribute a couple more furniture designs, including some excellent modular chairs and carpeting for the Kyoto International Conference Center (1963). In 1971, he would kill himself.

The show is not only a grouping of exquisite furniture designs, but an opportunity to reflect on the shared aesthetics of traditional Japanese design and high modernism — the clean functionalism of tatami mats and Bauhaus. Noguchi, with his shared heritage and upbringing, embodied this current — although his most Japanese designs, his stunning paper lanterns, are left out of the show. We also think about how, despite the utopian intentions of the “international style,” mid-Century modern design was a cut-throat business and dominated by Europeans and Americans. As Noguchi and Kenmochi collaborated on their bamboo chair, General Douglas McArthur remained in Japan, even though he had relinquished formal power to the new Japanese government in 1949.

Bonus: If you're in NYC, check out these three Noguchi public sculptures: his low relief for the Associated Press building (1939-40), his sunken garden for the Chase Manhattan building (1961-4) and his Helmsley Plaza red cube (1968).

Review Roundup

Action/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum (-Sept. 21)

"...more a perambulatory essay than an art exhibition... Something epochal is afoot: a dovetailing of raw personal emotion and disinterested aesthetic experiment, Dionysus and Apollo. Those opposed qualities became the magnetic poles of Abstract Expressionism (which was named in 1946 by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates) and also the virtual battle stations of the movement’s great, mutually hostile critics, Harold Rosenberg (1906-78), who interpreted the new art rather exclusively in terms of existential drama, and Clement Greenberg (1909-94), who exalted formal invention as an end in itself. ... The result suggests, to me, the pleasant conceit of considering Rosenberg and Greenberg themselves as types of Abstract Expressionists, in discursive prose: Rosenberg lyrically impulsive, like de Kooning; and Greenberg as starkly decisive as Newman. Both aspired, à la Pollock, to perfect unconventional modes of argument that would knock any would-be antagonist cold." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker


Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy at the Met (-Sept. 1)

"It's too bad that Philippe de Montebello's successor couldn't have been in place by now. Then PdM's record for excellence wouldn't have been marred by his Director's Forward for the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum's Superheroes show, opening Wednesday. ... Its inept attempt to impart the weight of intellectual seriousness to thin air casts the much maligned Star Wars (organized by Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and seen in 2002 at the Brooklyn Museum) in a more favorable light." - Lee Rosenbaum/CultureGrrl

"...perhaps it was those Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman statues perched atop the information desk, as poorly realized as the bronze Rocky Balboa that keeps turning up at the Philadelphia Museum like a bad penny. Whatever, this show of haute couture celebrating superhero comics, which should be fun and perhaps even inspiring, is in fact enervating and rather pointless. ...the antithesis of sexy..." - R.C. Baker/Village Voice


Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim (-May 28)

"...made from the oldest contemporary art-making formulas in the book. The general aesthetic philosophy behind much of his work falls under the 'multiples look good, particularly in larger scale' means of problem solving. ...too-easily reduced to an aesthetic reliant on the inevitable beauty found within destructive forces. With the exception of a breathtaking shipwreck sunk in broken dishes on the top floor, the exhibition never escapes the predictability of its own formulaic processes." - Paddy Johnson/Art Fag City


Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum (-July 13)

"Is there anyone who doesn't like his work? Or doesn't like to loathe its shallowness?" - Régine Debatty/We Make Money Not Art


George Lois: The Esquire Covers at the MoMA (-March 31, 2009)

"With an adman's brazenness, Lois transported the magazine cover beyond Norman Rockwell's small towns and Time's head-shot formality to something that snagged the eye and flummoxed the brain." - R.C. Baker/Village Voice


Nan Golden at the Tate Modern

"In many ways, [Patrick] Wolf's input actually freshened up some work which has become slightly over-familiar, and gave extra emotional heft to shots that no longer seem so shocking or transgressive (though Goldin defiantly kept in the picture of two young girls that caused huge controversy last year)." - Alex Needham/Guardian

Sensational

"Beauty," 1993

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson
MoMA and P.S.1
April 20–June 30

Ever since reading about his "Weather project," a huge artificial sun at the Tate Modern, I've been intrigued by the work of Olafur Eliasson, and eagerly anticipated the double-whammy show at the P.S.1 and MoMA.

"Take your time" is the kind of show that you can enthusiastically recommend to friends who only set inside a museum once or twice a year. It's fun, you'd say. There's this circular room where the walls light up and change colors, bathing everyone inside with intense color. People sit on the floor taking photos of each other. It's wild. Maybe my favorite piece, you continue, is this regular electric fan that hangs on this really long cord from the ceiling in the MoMA's atrium space. It swings around powered by it's own wind. Kids love it and chase it around. There's something sweet and surreal about it...

Olafur Eliasson is likable because his works are straight-forward and easy to understand without any back story or art history degree necessary. In fact, none of the works in "Take your time" are labeled. If you want to know the names of the pieces, you can consult a glossy hand-out, but it's clear that the artist and curators feel it's unnecessary. We don't need to know that he's 41 years old, Icelandic, has a residence in Berlin and that he's influenced by "Light and Space" artist Robert Irwin, or that he is comfortable discussing his work in terms of Continental philosophy, specifically phenomenology and the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

In fact, his works are so stripped-down and baggage-free -- a huge rotating mirror on a ceiling, a wall covered in living moss -- that it's easy to blow through the show. It's something Eliasson is cognizant of. Witness the show's injunctive title -- "Take your time."

His more immersive environments encourage languor on their own. His blockbuster 2003 "Weather project," had visitors sitting or lying on the floor of huge turbine room at the Tate Modern, basking in an artificial sun. In the current show, visitors lie beneath a rotating ceiling mirror in a piece with same name as the show (this is a new work specially made for P.S.1).

Lying under the mirror, you're taken by how fun and calming it is to commune with a bunch of art-loving strangers, staring at yourself and others. Then, after a few minutes, you notice that the mirror is tilted, causing your image to recede, get closer, and so on. It's meditative. You feel pleasantly disembodied. It's the same deal in the "360° room for all colours"; you feel a sense of spontaneous community, bathed together in the shifting spectrum, as your subjective perceptions are tweaked and your sense of objectivity is loosened. It's a bit paradoxical: a group experience of heightened subjectivity.

In a clever but lighthearted way, Eliasson aims at upending our critical faculties and tweaks our preconceived notions, such as about the separation between nature and culture. In the brilliant "Wall eclipse" (2004), a spotlight shines on a slowly spinning mirror, filling the room with shifting shapes of light and shadow, arranged so that it perfectly to illuminate and "eclipse" opposite walls. In "Beauty" (1993), a light shines through a spray of mist creating a spectral like rainbow that changes shape depending on your viewing angle.

His best works are both lyrical and reveal themselves over time. All his works reveal how they work, with simple materials and nothing hidden. There is no trickery in his spectacles. This simplicity at it's best is charming and honest. For his lesser works it can be stupefying. (As Leslie Camhi writes in the Village Voice, formalism is his Achilles’ heel.)

Such is the case of "1 m³ light" (1999), an arrangement of spotlights defines the shape of a cube in a dark, foggy room; and "Reversed waterfall" (1998), a contraption of basins and hoses that ferries water up.

"Take your time" is the first joint exhibition between MoMA and P.S.1 since their merger in 2000. It's a bit sad in the context of the ouster of P.S.1's founder Alanna Heiss and inevitable corporate encroachment (see recent reporting by New York Magazine). While surely it's a sign of institutional changes, perhaps the split exhibit makes sense for Eliasson, who likes to mess with the museum space and its normalizing and essentializing devices like the frame, the wall label and the white cube. (One unexpected and annoying difference between the shows is that photography is allowed at MoMA and banned at by P.S.1, as enforced by their disgruntled guards -- why?)

While not all of it is completely successful, there are a handful of brilliant and beautiful works and happy-making participatory spectacles that engage every viewer and make this show one of the year's best.

Review Roundup

Everyone seems to like the new Mapplethorpe Polaroid show at the Whitney, taking the opportunity to wax nostalgic about the medium. More praise for Tomma Abt and another semi-negative review for Paul Chan (I liked it). The New York Sun prefers Philip Guston's 50's drawings over his later stuff (I argued the opposite). And another positive review of "Mike's World" at the Philly ICA -- I hope I can make the trip.

Polaroids: Mapplethorpe at the Whitney (-Sept. 7)

"The beloved instant photograph could not have hoped for a better sendoff than the Whitney’s exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. ... All the themes of Mapplethorpe’s mature work — the body as a site of pain and pleasure, the ideals of classical beauty, the celebration of alternative lifestyles — are here, but rendered in a more spontaneous medium." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes

"... includes some of the artist’s best work, much of it on exhibit for the first time. ... The sophistication of this style is apparent early on, and, whether his subject is Marianne Faithfull or a tangle of bondage gear, it’s at its most intimate and seductive here." - Vince Aletti/New Yorker

"...he makes his own best subject, because he was at his most seductive when looking into the mirror." - Dan Bischoff/Star Ledger


Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing at the MoMA (-July 7)

"Other than the fact that all 100 works on view are drawings and that they belong to MoMA, they share little in the way of a unifying theme. ... Perhaps it would be churlish to point out that this exhibition would have been slightly better off without the dead weight of such usual suspects as Mike Kelley, Richard Prince, and Raymond Pettibon, all of whom draw extensively and quite poorly." - James Gardner/NY Sun


Tomma Abt at the New Museum (-June 29)

"Abts’ spare paint handling and resolute edges reveal a disturbing and provocative core of self-abnegation and humility. ... In an age of hyper-ideation and inflated art rhetoric, in which ideas may be valued more than emotional insight or intuition, Abts’ ingenuous simplicity, like that of Chauncey Gardner in 'Being There,' is refreshing. ... If she is a minimalist, she is a maximal one." - Sharon L. Butler/Brooklyn Rail


Paul Chan at the New Museum (-June 29)

"...the simplicity and even didacticism of the exhibition’s narrative ultimately take away from the work, the show at least fails with grace. ...within Chan’s clumsy visual conceptual framework lies a really great show." - Paddy Johnson/L Magazine


Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy at the Met (-Sept. 1)

"...the result is all shiny surface, images of power for the frivolous rich. Missing, for instance, are the kind of hazmat suits and military gear documented by photographer Paul Shambroom in his celebrated 'Security' series. One also notices the absence of villains, who could have profitably been represented by mannequins of heads of state -- Dick Cheney, Vladimir Putin, Robert Mugabe. The comic-book hero who’s missing from the lineup, obviously enough, is G.I. Joe, but with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps that particular avatar is a little too close to contemporary reality to be 'most effective as metaphor,' in the words used to describe the show’s purpose." - Walter Robinson/ArtNet

"...unlocks some of the mysteries of fashion — especially its outré, outrageous aspects. ... The trivial nature of comic book heroes appears incongruous with this particular museum. ...leads the way in serious scrutiny of popular culture, which — like it or not — is the art of the day." - Pia Catton/NY Sun


Jeff Koons at the Met (-Oct. 26)

"...a beautiful monument to bad taste." -John Perreault/Artopia


Philip Guston at the Morgan Library (-Aug. 31)

"The show flowers early and briefly (the second wall is the most elegant), then trails off in numerous directions. Still, it presents the full spectrum of Guston's drawings between the late '40s and the late '70s. ... In the '50s abstractions, Guston flays the world, bruises, nurses, and caresses it, builds it up, and breaks it down. ... The fact remains, however, that, despite Guston's convictions as a storyteller, his earlier pure abstract pictures are much more inventive and engaging as stories than his later stories are as pictures." - Lance Espund/NY Sun


The Horse at the American Museum of Natural History (-Jan. 4)

"...sprawling, charming and illuminating... a provocative history of the ways in which humans and horses became, as the show says, 'powerfully linked.' ...the history of the horse becomes humanized." - Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


The Single Object Still Life at the Katonah Museum of Art (-June 29)

"...visually and philosophically engaging... The show is crowded and too accepting of technically proficient but unimaginative work. Its weakness, however, is also its strength. In representing so many different approaches, it invites viewers to ponder how various and complex are the ways we see, relate to and think about objects and reality in general." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Culture in Context and The World Around Us at the New Jersey State Museum

"Collect locally, yes, it seems to say, but also think locally. This is limiting. Had the opening show focused on a specific culture or explored cultural similarities and differences, or examined particular types of rituals or crafts, the local would have expanded into the global. But in explicitly and cursorily trying to represent the state’s diversity — even while spotlighting some extraordinary objects — the exhibition actually seems more parochial." - Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Mike’s World at the ICA Philly (-Aug. 3)

"...a terrifically entertaining and philosophically compelling survey... In his inventive engagement with diverse forms, including drawing, comic books, sculpture, photography, musical theater and puppet shows as well as installations and video, he has followed a determinedly unpredictable, exploratory course. ...there does emerge a certain thematic preoccupation, which you might describe as the gap between the mundane and the transcendental." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Reclaimed at the Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT)

"...celebrates the partial recovery of artworks confiscated by the Nazis from Jacques Goudstikker, the pre-eminent Amsterdam art dealer in the 1920s and '30s. ...provides a frame for understanding both the intricacies of locating scattered items and the legal battles involved in restitution. Equally significant, this representative sample of a spectacular collection is a window into one man's influence on the art market between the two world wars." - Maureen Mullarkey/NY Sun


Real Time at the Israel Museum (Jerusalem)

"...the exhibition is one of six to be rolled out over the coming months to mark Israel’s 60th anniversary. There will be one show for each decade of the country’s existence, each in a different museum across the country. ...provides only a little relief to a country that lives with a sense of existential dread. A number of the works have an apocalyptic quality — notably 'Iranian Atom,' an installation by Sigalit Landau featuring humans apparently stripped of their skin after a nuclear attack." - Ethan Bronner/NYTimes

Photo Fest

Robert Burley, "Implosion of Buildings
#65 & #69, Kodak Park," 2007

Between Memory & History: From the Epic to the Everyday
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) (Toronto) / CONTACT Festival
May 1- 31

Ridiculously, we drove 18 hours round-trip for a weekend in Toronto, mainly too see our friend's MFA thesis show. But of course there was the mandatory museum visit. The Art Gallery of Ontario is currently closed for its $250 million Frank Gehry makeover, so we were thinking of checking out the Darwin show at the Royal Ontario Museum (and its insane addition by Daniel Libeskind), but thought better of it when we learned that the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) was a only a block from where we were staying.

Now in its 12th year, Toronto's impressive CONTACT photo festival spans more than 200 venues and over 500 artists. They claim it is the biggest "photography event" in the world. By contrast, New York's first photo festival, which began yesterday, is confined to DUMBO and around a dozen venues and 50 artists.

The marquee exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), a modest exhibition space in Toronto's arts district, presents the works of ten international photographers, including some of the medium's leading lights.

From the outset, this outstanding show provokes us to ask what photography is today. As we walk in, we're presented with a melancholy series by Robert Burley depicting the abandonment and destruction of factories that manufactured film -- including Kodak buildings in Rochester, NY, and a factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, where the medium was born. Lovingly captured using a large-format film camera, they speak to the advent of the digital age and the decline of manufacturing in the U.S. and Europe.

Addressing the issue from a different angle are three large works by Thomas Ruff -- seeminly arbitrary images he downloaded from Web and greatly enlarged, revealing its distorted digital grain and making it difficult to discern what we're looking at (a construction site? an iceberg?). They're not pretty, but maybe that's part of his point.

British photographer and photojournalist Martin Parr contributes a grid of amusing images of tourists, such as one of man on the back of a donkey with a large camcorder held to his face like some kind of disease, or another of a family in Vegas having their photo taken by someone in a pirate costume. The series, called "Small World," reads like a sarcastic take on the diminished size of the tourist mind. It also reminds us of photography's close bonds with the alienating practice of tourism.

A series called "Recent History" by Frenchman Luc Delahaye, also photojournalist, comprises beautifully composed landscapes of war-torn areas -- such as scene of ruin and rubble in the West Bank resulting from conflict between Israel and Palestinians.

Going beyond documentary photography is "Biblical Stories," a series by Adi Nes, who poses friends and hired models to resemble Biblical figures as images from art history. For example, she poses a woman ("Hagar," 2006) to look like the iconic Depression image by Dorothea Lange. Another, resembling Jean-Francois Milet's "The Gleaners," shows contemporary women gathering discarded fruit.

Working in a similar vein is Alessandra Sanguinetti, who collaborated with two pre-teen girls from her native Argentina to create a tender series illustrating their friendship. The images include both candid shots and staged scenarios -- although both are truthful in their own way. In one photo, a girl plays at being pregnant. In another, her friend is the Madonna with a plastic doll baby Jesus.

Also depicting the sweetness of human bonds is Nan Goldin, who contributes one of her famous slide shows to the exhibit. "Heartbeat" (2001) shows several couples, straight and gay, embracing and having sex. Set to Björk's transcendent rendition of John Taverner's Kyrie Eleison, the works are loving and intimate -- the furthest thing from pornography, although much of it is quite graphic. (Ms. Museum Hours noted with frustration that the artist likes to use blurry images. For this series, I think it works very nicely to convey movement and time by way of image variety.)

My favorite photos of this excellent show are the family portraits of Bert Teunissen, another photojournalist. His "Domestic Landscape" series documents Europeans of the so-called old world -- families of farmers or craftsmen whose trade is handed down generation to generation. He captures individuals and families posed in their kitchens -- all built before the first World War and have lovely architectural touches such as fireplaces and wall tiling. The photos also reveal a sly nod to contemporary life such as a plastic bottle of Fanta or a Batman figure, without which the photo could be dated decades earlier.

While there are a couple of photographers whose work isn't very compelling, overall this is a very strong show that shows a very vital medium that stimulates the eye, the heart and the mind.

Review Roundup

This week there continues to be disagreement over the Olafur Eliasson supershow. Leslie Camh at the Voice is mostly affirmative, exempting weakness for "dry formalism," while Joshua Mack at Time Out doesn't buy the ideas behind the art. Ariella Budick at Newsday is also disappointed. I'm not sure what Blake Gopnik at the Washington Post is saying. The Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn and others review the new "Superheroes" show at the Met, making it seem like something this blog won't like. Ken Johnson affirms my negative feelings towards the "Double Album" show at the New Museum. And Roberta Smith bemoans the state of biennials, writing that they "need to be laboratories, not annual reports." All this and more!...

Olafur Eliasson at the MoMA and P.S.1 (- June 30)

"By upsetting the ways we usually see and process visual data and by challenging categories like inside and out, stationary and moving, vertical and horizontal, Eliasson implies that information, even in museums—assumed by many to be neutral spaces—is highly inflected. ... Eliasson’s ideas, however, seem weightier than the works that convey them. Too often, his pieces come off as one-note optical games whose impact depend on mechanics and scale. ...there are only so many multiplying mirrors, kaleidoscopes and rooms bathed in various hues of light that one can see before a sense of déjà vu takes over." - Joshua Mack/TONY

"Land artists like Robert Smithson, Light and Space artists like Robert Irwin and James Turrell, Minimalists like Donald Judd, designers and social engineers like Buckminster Fuller: Eliasson riffed on their legacy with his own peculiar brand of anti-sublime enchantment—smoke and mirrors revealing themselves as such. This deft sleight of hand that turns dry exercises in phenomenology into wonder-inducing spectacles is also at work in 'Take Your Time'... For people unfamiliar with Eliasson's work, it will likely come as a revelation. For those who have followed his career, it may prove a more uneven experience—heavy on research at times, and light on communication. ... Do these and other works at MOMA rattle our fundamental notions about art or the individual's relationship to society? Probably not—but then, that's a tall order. The best of them skirt the dry formalism that is this artist's Achilles' heel and reach deeper into the realm of fascination and feeling." - Leslie Camhi/Village Voice

"Insubstantial is the word that comes to mind when describing the art of Olafur Eliasson, whose infatuation with light leads him to make things that glint, glow, sparkle and ripple. ... sensual, magical even, but little lies beyond its seductive surface. It is, finally, insubstantial in a deeper sense, a theater of smoke and mirrors that first provokes wonder and leaves an aftertaste of disappointment. ... Eliasson perpetually teeters on the precipice that separates spectacle for its own sake from serious meditations on the nature of perception." - Ariella Budick/Newsday

"Eliasson's pieces generate spectacular, crowd-pleasing sensations whose closest analogues aren't found in nature so much as in Hollywood. At its most impressive and popular, his is an art of special effects. Which means that it can feel deliberately deceptive; it seems divorced from reality, rather than out to explore and expose it. Despite a sense that the work sets out to worship nature, it is technology that seems most fetishized in it. ... In its weaker moments, the Eliasson retrospective feels like a trade show for the latest in consumer gear. ... The retrospective is better when its projects fail. When you first hear about that up-flowing waterfall, for instance, you expect something grand. Instead, it's just a crude scaffolding supporting a series of metal tanks, and jets of water shooting up from one to the next." - Blake Gopnik/Washington Post


Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy at the Met (- Sept. 1)

"... playful look at comic book costumes and their influence on radical haute couture as well as high-tech sportswear. ...the exhibition is a departure from the museum’s lavish historical surveys. This is the lighter, more fantastical side of fashion, an industry that loves to talk about the genius of Balenciaga while clamoring to dress the body of Beyoncé. ... as the writer Michael Chabon points out in a witty essay on the unitard in the 'Superheroes' catalog, this minimal garment, for all its flash and novel materials, ultimately 'takes its deepest meaning and serves its primary function in the depiction of the naked human form, unfettered, perfect and free.'" - Cathy Horyn/NYTimes

"Holy cultural zeitgeist, Batman! Comic books have invaded the Met." - Joseph V. Amodio/Newsday

"...the exhibit makes clear how designers have taken the superhero troupe and bent it to their own means, be it through explorations of identity, sexuality or nationalism. ... 'It's rather entertaining to consider superheroes in the context of this institution, which is filled with all of the great mythical superheroes of ancient times,' said de Montebello. Indeed, a short stroll from the exhibit are sculpted representations of the originals, such as Hercules who became Superman and the huntress Diana who became Wonder Woman." - Paul Lieberman/L.A. Times

"The show is very graphic and pop, if a bit thin on everyday chic. .. Overall, the vision is dark and edgy, with themes of fetishism, domination, virility, sexual identity and 'hegemonic masculinity' turning up like bad dreams..." - Woody Hochswender/Wall Street Journal


Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer at the New Museum (-July 6)

"...intermittently interesting but ultimately disappointing ... it introduces two artists in their 40s who not only share a fascination with male adolescence and classic rock but also seem mired in creative adolescence themselves. ...resemble promising but unfocused grad students who have yet to assimilate their influences fully." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh) (-Jan. 11, 2009)

"...the latest exercise in handsome, measured, frictionless thoughtfulness. It may actually have more than its share of interesting art and poetic juxtapositions. Yet almost nothing happens. ... I was dismayed to realize that I knew the work of all but three or four of the artists listed. Mr. Fogle has beaten some of the odds of so many usual suspects by selecting exceptional artworks and installing them with great sensitivity. Still, his failure to think outside the curatorial box is close to stunning. Worse yet, 16 of the 39, more than a third, are represented in New York by just three prominent Chelsea galleries: Gladstone, Tanya Bonakdar and Anton Kern. ... Biennials need to be laboratories, not annual reports. And the world is far too full of interesting artists for shows like this to be drawn from such a small and known gene pool. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it reduces the capacity for risk and dulls the imagination." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Discovering Rastafari! at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (-Nov. 8)

"...of course the Rastafari exhibition does not really belong in the same museum as paleontological finds and collections of insects and gems. That placement is a relic of the 19th-century conception of the natural history museum as a temple devoted to exotic 'natural' cultures and objects... As small as this exhibition is, there are enough history and material here to spur curiosity and wonder. But there is enough omitted so that eventually you see how partial — and partly skewed — an interpretation the show represents. ... pandering and promotion, not scholarship, and it mars what could have been an even more fascinating show." - Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Frida Kahlo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (-May 18)

"She is giving the world the finger, whether in The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, where she does it with a masterful complexity, in some of her folk art– like self-portraits of the 1930s, where she can be raw or charming about it, or even in her less spirited self-portraits of the following decade, when illness was getting the better of her. It was an emotion, in any event, that she never quite lost, as it is there in the last words of her diary when she wrote, 'I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back.'" - Sanford Schwartz/New York Review of Books

Shabby Chic

"Untitled (Book)," 1968

Philip Guston: Works on Paper
The Morgan Library & Museum
May 2 - August 31, 2008

I stopped by the Morgan last weekend, mainly to see the Guston show. I've always known him for his cartoonish oils with hooded KKK figures, which I first saw at the MoMA many years ago. But I didn't know anything else about him -- and I had no idea that the bulk of his celebrated career he worked in the abstract style, and that the style I knew was only developed in the last 10 years of his life.

In 1966, American painter Philip Guston put down his brushes, deciding to do nothing but drawings for two years. One of the most celebrated and accomplished artists of his generation, Guston had been part of MoMA's 1958 "New American Painting" show that was a high-water mark for Abstract Expressionism. Pals with Pollack, Rothko and Motherwell, he was the subject of one-man retrospective at the Guggenheim, a show that traveled to London, Brussels, Amsterdam and Los Angeles. All this wasn't enough. He had to evolve.

"Philip Guston: Works on Paper," an instructive and illuminating show of drawings at the Morgan Gallery, helps illustrate this crucial before-and-after moment in the artist's style, a split that is emphasized by the show's arrangement into two rooms. In room one, we witness Guston's embrace of the abstract style beginning in the 1940s. An early ink-on-paper drawing, a remnant of his earlier more social realist style, features a human head. Soon this gives way to pure abstractions that celebrate the line -- Cubist-like groupings and loose jazzy scratchings. Although, in a few of the works, if you look closely enough you will sometimes see hints of material life: a pair of eyeglasses, a shoe, a clock. It's a tendency he shares, albeit to a lesser extent, with fellow New York School all star Willem de Kooning, who, at least in the 50s was more expressionist than absract, best known for his somewhat violent portraits of women.

Then in the mid sixties, after all the acclaim, he hit a wall. He quit painting to "clear the decks." Laboring to crank out perfectly nice abstractions, he soon found that he got more pleasure making real-life objects. Like books. So he made drawings of books. Dozens and dozens of books, represented in their most elemental form with squiggly lines for text. The sad-sack mundane, everyday ur-book.

Then another thing happens. It's 1968 and his politics resurfaces. He starts drawing and painting comical and robe-wearing, cigar-chomping KKK members in a R. Crumb-like cartoon style. (As a young man, he was trained as a cartoon artist.) Depicted amidst an urban milieu, the KKK members seem to represent a kind of banal evil, a bumbling and poisonous stupidity. Their sheets have visible ticking, the bottoms of their shoes show nails.

Unsurprisingly, these darkly comic works, first shown in 1970, were not well received. A truly unique style, they weren't Pop and they weren't Abstract Expressionism, they were something entirely new, prefiguring the Neo-Expressionism of the 80s.

After a couple years of pursing the KKK works, he entered a more introspective psychological mode, making shaggy cartoonish images, including existential representations of himself as a disembodied head with one bloodshot eye. And, combining his styles of the 50s and 60s, he made clustered groupings of mundane things -- paintbrushes, a sandwich, trash can lids, cherries. This prodigious body of work culminated in 1980, the year of a major retrospective by the MoMA that opened on May 16. He died of a heart attack less than a month later.

I'm not usually very enthusiastic about drawings shows, I'd rather see the paintings. But these weren't poor substitutes for the real thing, or sketchy yet-to-be-realized ideas. They are all fully realized works, and expertly presented to give real insight into the artist's development.

Review Roundup

Action/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum (-Sept. 21)

"...fast-moving ...exceedingly handsome if somewhat peripatetic ...not so much a historical survey as a series of lavishly illustrated talking points. It proceeds through various pairings and groupings that illuminate who [Clement] Greenberg and [Harold] Rosenberg promoted or ignored, where they differed or overlapped. ... The first gallery is a tour de force in itself. It lays out Abstract Expressionism’s greatest artistic rivalry in four works by Pollock and three by De Kooning." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Philip Guston at the Morgan Library (-Aug. 31)

"...a spellbinding survey... thrilling ...joyful graphic invention. ... They may appear Neanderthal, but they are the products of a sophisticated performance, a kind of method acting. The mandarin playing the stumblebum with passionate, Brando-esque conviction." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Paul Chan at the New Museum (-June 29)

"Chan is a paragon of 'good' politics (anti-war, pro-labor), but I suspect that writers and curators also like him because he's well-read. ... Poeticism and beauty are leavened here with specters of violence. But The 7 Lights feels more minor than momentous. ... the colorless shadow-images register either as heavy-handed symbols or as confused emblems that look intermittently comic and somber." - Martha Schwendener/Village Voice


George Lois: The Esquire Covers at the MoMA (-March 31, 2009)

"The show looks a little like a tidied-up version of a great many college dorm rooms back in the ’60s. ... What was remarkable then — and seems even more so now, when virtually every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of one celebrity or another — is that the Lois covers were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image." - Charles McGrath/NYTimes


Tomma Abts at the New Museum (-June 29)

"...a Turner Prize–winning painter whose mini-canvasses, fourteen of which are on view at the ever-improving New Museum, could break your brain with all the rays and zigs and zags. Sometimes, like here, all this gushing abstract paint reminds us of those POW!s in the old Batman TV show — or the Bat Signal itself; other times, layers of limes and pinks painted in tidy swirls and chunky squares evoke tasty fruit, like a drippy watermelon or gentle slices of lemon." - Emma Pearse/NY Mag.


Flow at the Studio Museum in Harlem (-June 29)

"...each is immersed in a diasporic African artistic tradition whose contribution to world culture has been immeasurable... Along with issues of personal and collective identity, this anti-colonial motif weaves its way through 'Flow'...notable for its resourceful handling of diverse materials—traditional or contemporary, African or not, artistic and otherwise. ...art responds with an element of creative affirmation." - Alan Gilbert/Village Voice


Barbara Mensch at the South Street Seaport Museum (-April 15)

"...a photographer who devoted years to documenting the lives of the men who worked along the piers, pays tribute to that tradition, not long gone yet seeming already to be an element of the city’s mythic past. ... 'Mensch’s photographs sometimes give the impression of dating from another, much earlier era, although she used no antiquing tricks to achieve that effect: it is simply that the tribe she portrays seems a throwback,' Mr. [Phillip] Lopate wrote. 'Their faces and bodies express an almost ancient awareness of the price that must be paid to be a man, to hold one’s ground, especially in a society less and less respectful of working-class culture.'" - Sewell Chan/NYTimes


Shaker Design at the Bard Graduate Center

"...the Shaker world was not the stripped-down domain we imagine, but rather a polychrome environment. To that end, the gallery floor is painted yellow, a color common in Shaker rooms, and a few pieces bear other original hues. ... this exhibition is the most important New York presentation of Shaker design since the Whitney Museum’s 1986 survey." - Brian Sholis/ArtForum


Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas at the Museo Del Barrio

"The exhibition examines performance art by seventy-five artists of Caribbean, Latino, and Latin American descent... The exhibition’s premise about the near miss of art and life runs evenly throughout, provoking new questions about the histories of performance art." - Courtney J. Martin/Art Forum


Darwin’s Garden at the New York Botanical Garden (-June 15)

"....a stunning, multipart exhibition... Though most people associate that book and Darwin’s ideas generally with his voyage to the Galápagos and his study of finches there, his work with plants was far more central to his thinking..." - Cornelia Dean/NYTimes


Couples at the Islip Art Museum (East Islip, NY) (-June 2)

"...assembling the work of six couples and inviting viewers to deduce which artist is paired with which. ... Perhaps it's the delicacy of the museum's sensibility that prevented it from including any homosexual relationships and seeing what dynamic that produced. ... But it might have been interesting to include some variety in lifestyle as well as in artistic style." - Ariella Budick/Newsday


Origami at the Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, NY) (-June 22)

"...nearly 100 works by some of the world's star paper-folders, highlighting both the broad diversity of their technique and the vast range of their variations. The exhibit, organized by the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, Calif., created a sensation when it opened in 2003, obliging the museum to extend its run from three to 18 months. The work, almost exclusively by living artists, feels both eternal and strikingly modern, with one foot in a fabled past and the other firmly in the present." - Ariella Budick/Newsday


Mike's World at the ICA Philly (-Aug. 3)

"If Mike's World makes you think Wayne's World, you're not so far off. Like L for Loser. ...from that slightly uncomfortable place, he finds the satirical edge of what's truly loopy, capturing trends, tastes, the conventional wisdom of moments in time, at once archiving them and turning them all against themselves. ...this is a serio-comic exploration of the American Dream." - Libby Rosof/Artblog


Lawrence Weiner at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (L.A.) (-July 14)

"Weiner at his most provocative creates an egalitarian field of thought and feeling. His work is radically subjective. Its meaning belongs to anyone who encounters it, inside a museum or out on the street... Despite the elegance of individual works, the career-long accumulation of about 100 texts, along with lots of posters, books and multiples, can make for a sometimes clamorous environment." - Christopher Knight/LA Times


Jan Fabre at the Louvre (Paris) (-July 7)

"Seriously, what is the Louvre thinking of? The commissioner in charge, Marie-Laure Bernadac, explained that they want to use contemporary art to attract younger people, and also to liven up some of the less-visited galleries. ... The whole place begins to feel like some dusty theatrical props storeroom and the great paintings on the walls are reduced to just another form of prop. It is sad. And what is really sad is that in a few years time, the Louvre will probably say: 'Oh, we tried having contemporary art and it didn't work.' Whereas what they should really say is: 'Why on earth did we choose Jan Fabre?'" - Lynn Barber/The Observer

"...you may be more confused than enlightened. The ponderous explanations, prattling about death and resurrection, sacrifice and metamorphosis, are of little help. One inscription on the wall reads (in English): 'Only Acts of Poetic Terrorism.' Could this be the secret motto of the show?" - Jorg von Uthmann/Bloomberg


Blue at the Textile Museum (Washington, D.C.) (- Sept 18)

"The 'Blue' show is not a blockbuster. The Textile Museum isn't into blockbusters. Its mood is rather sweet, miniature, old-fashioned; the brash new Newseum could swallow the little Textile Museum at a gulp. ... Its real theme is indigo. But the show's reflections on blueness are enough to invite your thoughts to riff." - Paul Richard/Washington Post


Monumental Prints in the Age of Durer and Titian at Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA) (-June 8)

"...beginning in the late 15th century, artists stretched the technical boundaries of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings with multipage prints that rival tapestries and easel paintings in size and drama. ... Woodcuts' complicated technique can sometimes make them seem, well, wooden. But here the lines become gestural, and as big, sinewy, and flowing as the sea's tempest." - Greg Cook/Boston Globe