Review: Vic Muniz and Pipilotti Rist at MoMA

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (–Feb. 2)
Artist's Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus (-Feb 23)

Two shows at the MoMA aim to enhance our museum experience and expand our minds. Pipilotti Rist has totally transformed the 2nd floor atrium into a womb room that comforts as it attunes our body to the experience of visual sensation. Vik Muniz offers a visual puzzle that pushes our understanding of art and its connections to other art and the world.

Muniz is the ninth artist invited to guest curate a MoMA show. Known for his technical proficiency and wit -- think of his photograph of a Mona Lisa made of peanut butter -- Muniz also takes a clever tact as curator. He's created what he calls rebus, a kind of visual puzzle where meanings are created combining one or more objects. He's fashioned connections between all manner of objects, including some fun picks from the design department. A 1963 venetian blind is paired with the bars of a prison window (a Robert Gober installation), in turn matched to a Doris Ulmann photograph of a chain gang outfitted in striped prison uniforms. Later on, a photograph by Joel Sternfeld shows children's toys littered on a landscape, leading us to, what else, but Legos and a Rubik's cube, which then takes us to a African-inspired Giacometti figure whose outstretched hands you could imagine twisting and turning the plastic puzzle. Muniz wisely dispenses with wall labels. Instead you're given a poster-sized index of all 82 objects. I recommend bringing a pen so you can connect all the dots.

Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist makes dreamlike meditations on gender, sexuality and the body. For "Pour Your Body Out," MoMA's atrium space is enclosed in pink curtains and covered in carpeting. Visitors wanting to sprawl out on a large eye-shaped sofa are told to remove their shoes. (It must be a socks moment in the art world. The Gugg's "anyspacewhatever" also has a shoe-free zone.) On the day I was there, there was an impromptu kindergarten in the area inside the sofas, with little ones toddling around in a way that seemed in keeping with the art. In fact, the wall text encourages dancing and singing. Projected onto three large walls is a 10-minute looping video. It's a hallucinogenic hayride that loosely follows a woman she as she gets her feet wet in a dirty puddle, plunges underwater, then crawls naked through a field miming a wild boar. With a super-saturated palate and reassuring New Age soundtrack, its part Björk video, part Teletubbies episode.

You might compare what the two artists are doing to the effects of drugs. Muniz is like Ritalin, concentrating the mind and creating cognitive leaps, and Rist is like magic mushrooms, making a sensous space that bridges body and mind.

Review: Street Art Street Life at the Bronx Museum

Still from Yoko Ono and John Lennon's "Rape" (1968)

Street Art Street Life at the Bronx Museum
Sept. 14, 2008 - Jan. 25, 2009

First let's get the title out of the way. There's no "street art" on display at the Bronx Museum. OK, a few photos of some Basquiat "Samo" tags from the 80s, but there isn't a Banksy, Faile or Swoon to be seen. Instead, what we have is a 50-year look back at some established artists' takes on the urban experience -- with an emphasis on photography, performance and protest.

For street photographers, we start with the big three: Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winnogrand, and their magical images documenting the loneliness, romance and curious corners of our urban environs. The show's contemporary shooters mainly falls short, either too antiseptic -- Sze Tsung Leong -- or sloppy -- Xaviera Simmons. More satisfying is a collection by Francis Alys of several dozen black & white commercial street pics taken in Mexico City in the 40s, 50s and 60s.

The street is also a place for performance. The Fluxus collective pioneered a playful style of street theater in the 60s; the show has photos of a guided tour by Nam June Paik, and a ballet performed on a fire escape (wish there was video of this one). Other examples of street performance have a musical element. Most memorable is a joyful video called "Ear to the Ground" by David Van Tieghem showing him dancing and drumming on everything from streetlights to stop signs and payphones (check it out here). A video by Daniel Guzmán shows the artist and his friend doing a parody of a goofy 80s-style video set to the Ace Freely song "New York Groove" (it was also recently on display at the New Museum, and can be seen here). A David Hammons video is more foreboding: we see a dark screen with sound of him kicking a bucket down a street.

Other performances dealt with aspects of the urban condition. Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh lived on the streets of New York City for an entire year, following self-imposed stricture to never seek shelter, compromised only once when he spent a night in jail. The photos of Nikki S. Lee document her efforts to assume the identities of various urban subgroups, such as a St. Mark's punk and an Asian grandma. Artist Kimsooja takes poetic video of herself standing absolutely still in busy streets in Mexico City, London, etc.

There is more overtly political art on display, such as two slideshows: London-based Nils Norman's images of the "vernacular of terror" (images of CCTVs, car-bomb barriers disguised as planters, metal teeth on ledges designed to keep the homeless, etc.) and Allan Sekula's "Waiting for the Teargas," which highlights the drama of the "Battle for Seattle" protest against the WTO in 1999.

But most rewarding is the show's focus on the intersection of feminism and the street. This includes Valerie Export's actions where she leads a man on a leash like a dog and another called "Touch Cinema" in which she invites men to fondle her breasts. "Rape," a film by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, shows us a camera crew as they follow a women as if undertaking a sexual assult. Vito Acconci accounts in text and photos how he followed women and men for a period. Sophie Calle does the opposite, hiring a private detective to tail her for a day (the detective's notes and photographs are the piece). More contemporary is the the activist-oriented Blank Noise Project, which contributes a video work documenting "Eve teasing" in India. Two video monitors face off with opposing views -- women sharing how they had been harassed vs. men and and a few women blaming the women for wearing provocative clothing (more here).

I wonder if the show could have included something on that professional denizen of the streets, the prostitute. P.S.1's amazing feminist history of last year, "WACK!," featured Suzanne Lacy's "Prostitution Notes," which maps the artist's efforts to learn about the lives prostitutes.

"Street Art Street Life" addresses the unmediated experience of the individual with the street. No subways, stores or supermarkets. Also, no suburbs. But while the work pounds the pavement, it doesn't have much grit. Nearly everything has a careful conceptual framework or agenda. And because the show covers such a big subject and broad time-frame, it feels crowded with big names and greatest hits. These factors leave street romantics like Keith Haring and Swoon on the sidelines. That said, I enjoyed this show, which is anything but pedestrian.

Reviews Roundup: Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave at the MoMA

Installation view of Models (1994. Ink and chalk on paper. 100 drawings)

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave at the MoMA (-Feb. 16)

"Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer. The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. ... The consistency of this show suggests an artist who settled too early into a style that needs further development. Stasis is disguised by shifting among various charged subjects that communicate gravity in shorthand. Ms. Dumas’s painting is only superficially painterly. The photographic infrastructure is usually too close to the surface, which makes it all look too easy. Worse, it makes subject matter paramount." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"The impressions are emotional. A Dumas retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Cornelia Butler, affected me slowly at first, then in a rush, overcoming a resistance I’ve had to Dumas’s fast and loose, insouciantly ugly pictures, almost all of which are based on photographs of corpses, torture victims, terrorists (Osama bin Laden looking crafty and sensual), pornographically posed nudes, gawky children, and endless anonymous, discontented faces. ... I became fascinated by the refusal of Dumas’s art to let me admire it, despite passages of whiplash drawing worthy of Edvard Munch and a quakingly tender way with incidental colors (pinks, creams, turquoise). The art historian Richard Shiff’s surprising comparison, in the show’s catalogue, of Dumas’s method with that of Willem de Kooning adds up. Like that great Dutchman, she draws in a manner opposed to drawing’s descriptive function, keeping her line loose and a-crackle, in gladiatorial combat with the subjects that occasion it. ... Her art rarely conveys feeling so much as excites it and then absorbs it, to the benefit of the work’s authority. She doesn’t give; she takes. This turns out to be a fair deal, which alerts us to our own untapped emotions. The experience of sheerly responding pleases." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"If the dead don’t look much different than the living here, it is because the departed have only one expression. Like Dumas’s haunting art, it is likely to remain in the mind long after the bearer is gone." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"A trademark Dumas canvas melds frigid existentialism with a heated, painterly passion. We’re repelled by its chill, captured by its glow—and end up caught in a Dumasian gravitational pull." -Kate Lowenstein/TONY

"Not since its obsession with Pavel Tchelitchev in the 1930s has the Museum of Modern Art exhibited, in depth, an artist of such irredeemable mediocrity as Marlene Dumas. The 150 pieces spread across two floors are so devoid of true color, pictorial skill, new ideas and pleasure of any kind, positive or negative, that I found myself, at the opening Wednesday night, desperately searching the crowd, whose faces, as on a bad acid trip, seemed joined to Dumas’ bulbous visages, for things of visual interest. ... The Dumas method is simple: She borrowed Francesco Clemente’s overused gouache technique and perved it up. Her subjects are burnished to dullness by her pathetic brush handling. There are some rear shots of masturbation, a blowzy self-portrait, the groups of schoolmates and bridesmaids, in which she throws in a freaky grin or stern look for variety." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"As you might expect of portraits without sitters, there is an internalized aspect to Dumas' work. This is an artist searching for icons of her own emotions, so she simplifies form, creating a rapid notational style for the figure itself. Pictures of the full body tend to be slapdash, and more about the body as a commodity or dead fact, but the faces get Dumas' full attention. She hangs no drapes before the windows to the soul." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger

"At MoMA, in galleries filled with painted bodies – dead, tortured or writhing in simulated ecstasy – I overheard one insider confide to another that he hoped the economic slump might sweep away all the glitter that has clung to the Dumas brand and reveal her as the great virtuoso she had always been. I was thinking along similar lines but came to a different conclusion. I imagine that once Dumas loses her quantifiable status, she will fade into the nether reaches of art history, a curiosity of the crazy boom years. ... Spread over two floors, the show tracks the non-development of an artist who discovered both her style and her subjects early on and then continued to plumb their shallows over ensuing decades. ... She covers some of the same terrain as Leon Golub, whose immense paintings of torturers, war criminals, and massacres argue that only a fine line of circumstance separates victim from perpetrator. Dumas gestures wispily in the same direction but she lack Golub’s rhetorical force. She is a mistress of the limp provocation and the mild shock." -Ariella Budick/FT

"So why does Marlene Dumas's painting, appropriated from this loaded image, feel inert and facile? Tiny splatters of blue-gray paint flatten any sense of the sagging weight of inanimate flesh, and the smudged background offers none of the documentary interest the police photographer's scribbled notations lend to the original. ... Part of the buzz around Dumas's work concerns her transformation of source photos into purely painterly forms that supposedly double back and blindside us with emotional content. But the fraught expanse that photographs create between viewer and grisly subject matter was strip-mined by Warhol for his 'Death and Disaster' series decades ago, and with more painterly aplomb." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice

"I mean, look at this ... It's like there's no paint on the canvas at all. There's so much restraint, and the details are all so beautiful. Just look at the nipples. The work is so careful. ... there's a lot of explicit stuff that I wouldn't have the nerve to do ... It's sexy and not vulgar ... Like Titian's nudes are very sexy, and Titian's drawings, you know? A lot of tits in your face. This goes to the edge of pornography." -Alex Katz via Andrew Goldstein/NY Mag.

"...we are witnessing the outcome of a vision that pushes into the edges that define what we should and should not see in a painting." -Sara Rose/AP

"Marlene Dumas' evocative and often provocative work, now on display at the Museum of Modern Art, is full of frightening beauty. These pictures by the South African native, now based in Amsterdam, bear brutal witness to news events and the contemporary condition." -Susan King/St. Petersburg Times

And the blogs!... Eyes Towards the Dove, James Mroy, Pink Pig NYC, Band of the Bes, Anaba, James Kalm. And, for good measure, a couple other much more timely roundups: Two Coats of Paint and Flavorwire.

Reviews Roundup: Art and Love in Renaissance Italy at the Met

"The Combat of Love and Chastity" by Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora (Florentine, 1444/45-1497), Probably 1480s, Tempera on panel, The National Gallery of Art, London

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Feb. 16)

"...offers continuous bodice-ripping and much evidence that romance has its price. The love-token-heavy show makes upper-crust Italians of the 15th and 16th centuries into libidinous serial divorcers who only courted, married and sired children to get the jewelry, ornamental jugs, commemorative plates, portraits, fertility objects and erotica with which they celebrated weddings, betrothals and birthdays. Full of marvelous gift ideas, especially for the rich and titled, the show’s first two galleries resemble the bridal registry at a Renaissance-era Neiman-Marcus. ... Aside from its appeal to carnal appetites and dangerous liaisons, this show, on the whole, is more chaste than lewd. Leaning heavily toward the scholarly and the saintly, it’s mostly prim and distant, disheveled rather than defiled. ... A show about fertility and romance should be more than mildly interesting or simply appreciative of the craft involved in it. Love is complicated and messy, while 'Art and Love' is just too neat." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"It promises romance, desire, youthful beauty, ritual, expensive gift items and possible sex in the land of Romeo and Juliet. It delivers on all counts. But the exhibition, at the Metropolitan Museum, is not an unbroken string of masterpieces. It has its ups and downs, both visual and emotional. It mixes happy endings and cautionary tales and, toward its finish, throws in some Renaissance pornography. ... The works here reveal the ease with which Christian and neo-classical motifs mingled in secular arts during the Renaissance; the centrality of painting as both record and decoration; and the extent to which weddings were big business for artists who found themselves between religious commissions." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"The exhibition delved into the esoterica of 500-year-old wedding rites just as the issue of marriage itself surged into the news, with demonstrations and counter-protests all across America. ... While poets sang amorous lyrics and artists conjured sentimental scenes, real unions were governed by dowry negotiations and strategic alliances. The proof of a marriage's success was not happiness but heirs, whose status and destiny were mapped out years before their birth. ... The Met never mentions gay marriage, of course; the Renaissance would have found a same-sex ceremony preposterous. But the implications of all the deluxe paraphernalia is clear: that to consider marriage as a fixed and timeless practice is to miss its history of adapting to society's inconstant needs. At the same time, by documenting the rights and privileges that marriage can confer - the degree to which it binds people to the social order - the show explains why the current debate simply cannot be willed away." -Ariella Budick/FT

"It's in the decorative and printed arts that this exhibit surprises, coming alive with a gossipy, almost Boccaccio-like love of the commonplace." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger

"For the second time this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has felt it necessary to advise visitors to exercise parental discretion. Over the summer, a Courbet retrospective featured at least two works as pornographic as anything on the Internet." -James Gardner/WSJ

The exhibit's official site is here. In addition, the Met has no fewer that 19 videos on the exhibit, including an excellent talk by curator Andrea Bayer. Finally, blog posts by Radiocain, lowercaseletter and The Met Everyday.