Museums Again

I saw a show of the work of the Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013) at the Asia Society.   It was an interesting exhibit; Zao is really a fusion artist.   You see echoes of Klee, Matisse, and the abstract expressionists in the context of clear evocations of traditional Chinese arts like calligraphy.   But what emerges is clearly a style all his own.  I liked some of then more than others.   Sometimes, when  I look at abstract art, there is a very fine line between what seems moving and of sustaining interest and what seems purely decorative.   When I look at some paintings in galleries, sometimes they look merely like stuff which decorators might add to make innocuous color additions to a residence.  Some of Zao's works came dangerously close to straddling that line to me.
Photos were not allowed, but here are a few images from the internet:

This one was quite large, and clearly refers to screen paintings:

This one was entitled "Le Mistral":

This one had a lot of Klee in it:

MOMA had a new exhibit of Russian art from the period 1912-1930, all things from their collection. It included paintings, photographs, poster, drawings, etc.  It was an excellent show and a good example of what they can do without a whole lot of effort and money.   The art is striking for its radical rethinking of what art should be, with artists talking about things like the dynamism of intersecting planes, along with the assumption that abstract art could empower the workers and create a sense of liberation and freedom from the old bourgeois thinking.  And there was also the notion that artists could create works that were part of daily life, like porcelain and movie posters.   We all know what happened, of course, when Josef Stalin laid down the law.   

Another striking thing about the art of the show was the number of women artists who were involved in the movement, like Stepanova, Goncharova, Exter, Popova, and others. Has any other art movement in history had so many women participants?  I can't think of one, other than those that were intentionally feminist.

Here are some things I enjoyed looking at.   Most of them are by women.


Larionov:

Exter:

Popova:

Stepanova:

El Littsky

Wonderful movie posters:

Also at MOMA was a big Picabia retrospective.  Or retrospectives, I should say, because every time you went into a different room, you got a new and different Picabia.    Picabia could be called a modernist, and clearly had the talent and will to do wonderful things with paint.   But he was also totally preoccupied with the subversion of most known assumptions about art.   Even at the beginning of his career, he was painting impressionist style landscapes, but not from real life but from postcards.   There are also paintings created from what passed for softcore pornography in France.    As Roberta Smith puts it, he was interested in "destabilizing notions of good and bad".    Well, that certainly sounds very contemporary to me.   The experience of viewing the retrospective, then, is very different from the conventional one of seeing an artist slowly develop his or her style.  It is bewildering, which, of course, is the point.  One fascinating and compelling painting is next to a garish and ugly one.   Here are a few photos:

The paintings are more or less in chronological order:

Impressionism from a postcard:

Cubism is around:

Dada and machines:

From a series called "Monsters":

Matchsticks:

Josef Stalin might have liked this one:

From a series called "transparencies", one of my favorite parts of the show:

Postwar;  abstraction is back:

One of his last works:

The Whitney had a show about film etc. entitled "Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art".   There are certainly a lot of different things you could put into this category; mostly you got video.    In general, I am not very happy with video works that are displayed in gallery or museum environments.   My main problem is sound.  Virtually none of these works are silent; all of them have sound, and I have never seen an exhibit that successfully isolates the sound of one work from another.   So while the visual qualities of the works are frequently respected, the audio qualities are treated with near derision.  Thus, when you are watching and listening to one work, you may well be hearing the sound tracks of several other works at the same time.   Ugh!     This proved to be the case for the most part in the Whitney exhibit.   That said, there were several things I was happy to see, including Bruce Conner's "Crossroads", with its astonishing slow motion footage of a Bikini atomic test, set to mushy music by Terry Riley.   My favorite was a work by Oskar Fischinger  "Raumlichtkunst", a recreation of a 1926 work, restored by the Center for Visual Music.   It consists of three separate visual tracks (originally each a different projector), all consisting of abstract color animations.   (Fischinger also worked for Disney on some of the animation for "Fantasia".)   It made for a very rich and involving viewing experience.   Unfortunately, the only record of what music was used mentions some "percussive accompaniment".  The solution proposed by the Center for Visual Music was to use Vareses's "Ionisation" and Cage and Harrison's "Double Music".   The choice could have been a lot worse, musically speaking (I've seen and heard worse), but the choices inevitably color our viewing in ways that Fischinger would not have intended.  I would have much preferred to watch it in silence.   It's kind of like taking a black and white photograph and adding color to it.   I was also happy to see Joseph Cornell's "Rose Hobart", though it was displayed on a small video monitor and I can't possibly think of in what sense this would qualify as "immersive".   Another favorite was "Imitation of Life" by Mathias Polenada.    I wandered in to it not knowing what it was;  what I saw and heard was a few scratchy lines on the screen and some vague blips in the sound.  I thought it was some sort of minimalist thing; then gradually, what emerged was a full fledged, 1930's Disney style color animation, with a singing donkey.   Checking the label outside to see which film it came from, I discovered it was an astonishing faithful recreation of the style, but made in the past few years.   It even had the full orchestral score and sound world recreated.   The point?   I have no clue.

Fischender stills, from the internet:

Polenada:

There was also a small show at the Whitney of work by Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera, who is now 101 years old and still painting.   These were hard-edged abstract works from 1948-1978.   I gave them some time, but I didn't get much out of them.   Somehow the hard-edge aspect puts me off; I like things that are more smudged and ambiguous.    But they are colorful.