The Neue Galerie had a show entitled "Berlin Metropolis 1918-1933". This is a huge topic, when you think of all of the activities in the various arts that happened there during that period. And, unfortunately, the Neue Galerie tried to cover them all in six small rooms. There were paintings, photographs, drawings, costumes, set designs, film stills, posters, magazines, collages, architectural drawings, popular recordings, films, etc. You could reasonably make an exhibition out of any of these media; to see all of them crammed together was to much for me, and particularly without any particular thematic overview. But still, there were some interesting things I had never seen before; the wonderful collages of Hannah Hoch were accompanied by some of her paintings which were painted versions of the same kind of visual ideas as her collages. Less effective, but fascinating. There were also some intriguing collage-like set designs for a staging of a ballet for Debussy's "Jeux" by Teo Otto; I will need to look in the catalogue to find out more. (A web search turns up virtually nothing.)
Hannah Hoch:
MOMA had a fascinating exhibit by the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia, who was active in Paris and Uruguay between the 1920's and the 1940's. It was the kind of exhibit I really like, a career retrospective where you can see an artist's ideas developing out of imitative beginnings and watch as things transform over time. Torres-Garcia was part of the artistic ferment of the 1920's as ideas were developed at a rapid pace, including something called "vibrationism", which was somewhere between futurism and cubism, according to the exhibit. There were a lot of wonderful constructivist-style painted wood three dimensional "paintings". His later style involved frequent use of grids, usually in black, with all kinds of different visual motifs lodged in the spaces in between the grids. Apparently he called this "cathedral" style, since the facades of cathedrals often feature a mosaic of different figures.
"Cathedral" style:
I also saw an exhibit by the Ethiopian artist Elias Sime at the James Cohan gallery. What Sime does is to hang out at the enormous markets in Ethiopia and accumulate different materials; in this show most of the art was made out of discarded electronic circuit boards, which Sime has carefully deconstructed and assembled into some stunning large scale works.
From far:
closer:
even closer:
Detail from another work:
In August I saw the wonderful exhibits of abstract paintings by Stanley Whitney at the Studio Museum in Harlem and at the Karma Gallery. Whitney has been developing and refining his approach to painting for many years; his work now focuses on series of colored squares in what might be called a post-Mondrian style. The pictures seem fairly straightforward at first, but the longer you look at them, the more the colors start to come alive and you start to see rhythmic patterns and structures.
In August we finally made it to the new Whitney museum and saw the exhibition showcasing their entire collection. The building is as good as all the critics have said it is: an excellent place to view art. From the outside it could almost be called ungainly, which, I think is probably a virtue in this case. We don't really need a lot more slick architectural showpieces. The opening show attempts to represent everything they have got, and most of the movements in American art in the last one hundred years or so. Which means there are all kinds examples of mediocre and derivative early American art (or mediocre political art from the sixties), and room for only one Rauschenberg. While I did enjoy seeing some things I had never seen before, the overall effect was muddled and all over the map. It was an exhibit without much of a point of view; its main reason for existing being the occasion of the new building.
And it really is a cause for celebration that the building exists, especially in comparison to places like Vancouver, where the art gallery is trying to build a new, more appropriate building for contemporary art, with the likelihood of it ever being built being extremely slim.
We went back to the Whitney in October to see two new shows, a Frank Stella retrospective and an Archibald Motley retrospective. My opinion of the building remains the same. The Stella was definitely stimulating; I loved some of it, and hated other parts. The curators have taken an interesting approach; rather than follow a straight chronological narrative, they have mixed thing up. What you get is that Stella clearly loves abstract painting; from his pioneering minimalist canvases to his later outlandish, three dimensional mishmashes, it's all about painting. (It's interesting to read some of the critical takes on this show; Stella is sometimes taken to task for ignoring any ideological or sociological aspects of contemporary art.) It is confusing, however to see both wonderful and terrible works by the same artist put next to each other. My favorites were the three dimensional works that used metal and color in very dynamic ways.
This is two Stellas:
The Archibald Motley retrospective was fascinating. A Chicago-based African-American painter; he was active from the 30's through to the 60's. (Normally, I wouldn't mention any artist's ethnicity, but in this case, being African-American and painting African-American culture is what it is all about.) I enjoyed this visual dynamism of the paintings, but I was less comfortable with Motley's deployment of African-American stereotypes.
In August we also saw the celebrated exhibit at the Met about the influence of China on costumes (at least I think that was what it was about). I normally would have avoided it, but since one of my favorite film directors, Wong Kar-wai was involved, I thought I should check it out.
The horror!
Seriously, it was like being at an overdecorated high end shopping mall, with a constant assault to the eyes and ears. The exhibit featured costumes, mirrors, and extravagant lighting, all techniques seemingly borrowed from fashion shows. Music and film sound tracks were playing everywhere, overlapping. I realized at a certain point I was simultaneously hearing a Morricone soundtrack and the soundtrack from Minnelli's "Ziegfeld Follies". Tan Dun overlapped with Billie Holiday, and there was lots of ghastly new age sounding stuff. The show featured a number of video screens playing classic Chinese films. The beautiful Astor Court Chinese garden was flooded with water and turned into a fashion display.
Needless to say, the show was a huge hit...
What's this, a Matisse? No, it's a large scale illuminated reproduction:
The Astor Court, with water on the floor:
Visual overdose on mirrors; it looks like more fun than it was:
What are these people doing here?
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