Turner, Pape, and the Biennial

There was an excellent small show at the Frick of paintings of ports by Turner.  The Frick itself owns two very large ones, and the show complemented those with several other smaller ones, as well as some watercolors, prints, etc.   The most striking thing in the show, though, was an unfinished version of one of the very large port scenes.   It looked like a very blurred version; apparently Turner painted the big washes of color on the canvas first, and then gradually added the detail that we see in the finished paintings.  In this case, he never got around to it.

A finished port scene (these are all very large paintings):

 The unfinished port scene:

Other "port" scenes:

The curators tried to make a point about the meaning of the port scenes in current times, but I am happy to look at Turner any time.   Looking at the large scale paintings close up and seeing what he did with color is amazing.

There was a retrospective at the Met Breuer of the work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, who began with fairly severe geometrical art in the 1950's and ended up following a number of ideas both in the realm of political and conceptual art, as well as investigating indigenous Brazilian culture.   She is not to be confused with another Lygia, Lygia Clark, who had her own retrospective at MOMA a while ago, and whose career followed a very similar trajectory.)   The early geometric work was a bit to severe for my taste; but her later, more liberated works were excellent.   Here are some:

A huge wall of red, yellow and blue:

 Detail:

Similar, in black and white:

There was an extraordinary installation in a room that featured very thin golden threads strung from ceiling to floor.   As you moved around, the only threads that were visible were those that were illuminated.   Hard to photograph!

Wall sculpture:

She was also interested in indigenous Brazilian art; there were numerous videos of her work in documenting her country's traditions.
There were also some small screen videos of performances of her two "concrete ballets".   You could watch and listen with headphones.   They consisted of abstract shapes moving around the stage, animated by the dancers within.   There was some interesting sounding early electronic music for one of them.  But the wall credits did not mention who did the music!
Could be a rant coming...
I did some research on the web, and found out who did the music for one of the ballets. but not who did the electronic music (or possibly it was added to the video reconstruction?)

Some info from Pape herself from the web:

The artist gave us an illuminating explanation about the Neo-Concrete Ballet: 
It was created in 1958, in the Special Presentation of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Rio de Janeiro. It was staged alongside Reynaldo Jardim, and produced by Gilberto Mota, who was a dancer. The work was structured around Reynaldo Jardim's poem Olho/Alvo, which consists of two words arranged in space into a choreography. For the word "eye" I created four cylinders, 2-meters tall and 70 cm in diameter each; for the word "white", four parallelograms painted with minium (lead tetroxide), all in wood and with rollers at their base, which gave the movements a sense of beauty and synchronicity. We used professional dances from the Municipal Theatre. And something interesting happened: our greatest difficulty was to convince them to do the show while hidden inside those objects, because our intent was to capture the motility of the body, its potential to dislocate through space, freed from the presence of the human figure; this is to say, to capture the movement that the body is capable of executing.  The music for the show was created by Gabriel Artusi, a heteronym of Reynaldo Jardim, and it was two tones, a kind of percussion on piano, all very rhythmic. 





I also took a look at the exhibit of Marsden Hartley's painting on the floor below.   The exhibit was about Hartley's return to his native state of Maine, and his subsequent desire to become a "Maine" painter.   I didn't find the paintings that inspiring; perhaps because of what I had seen upstairs, and perhaps because of my preference for his work from the period around WW I when he was headed in the direction of abstract art.




I went to see the Whitney Biennial, the first in its new location.   I usually emerge from the Biennials in a state of extreme disgruntlement; this year, there was certainly plenty to be annoyed by, but there was also quite a bit that I liked.  Including rooms full of paintings!   What is the world coming to?   While almost everything still tends to push the correct buttons, this year craft and technical skill seemingly were allowed.

But it's somehow still a strange phenomenon to me; sometimes I feel like I am at some sort of circus/variety show/funhouse kind of event; you look at something or a group of things and you are intrigued or annoyed or indifferent, and then you go on to another group of things, with another set of possible reactions.   Even when there is a room full of the artist's work, you don't really get a complete feel for what she or he is about, because you suddenly eye something else in the next room or area and are attracted or repelled by that.
But anyway, here are some things I enjoyed looking at.

Leftover furniture, covered in polyurethane of some kind, and painted:

A mishmash of all kinds of junk, encased in clear resin:

Furniture after my own heart:

The most spectacular work was a site specific installation entitled "The Meatgrinder's Iron Clothes" by Samara Golden

It was a huge construction of mirrors, furnished rooms both right side up and upside down that took over most of the western wall of the Whitney.  It was in fact vertigo inducing; leaning over the railing, you could not tell what was right side up and what was upside down, or what was a reflection or not.  The installation seemed to go infinitely up and down in space; I could not look down.  (Museum goers were in fact encouraged not to lean against the railing, as it was apparently not that sturdy!)  The rooms featured various upscale and downscale interiors, along with melanges of hospitals and prisons, etc.  Well, you know what it's about.

Painting!:

Stained glass covering one of the big windows (actually plastic)

Red Glass, outdoors:≥

And at the end, an installation of trees, another site-specific art work designed to help you recover (chill?) from what you've seen.   One of them was dead already.

I was surprised to see a work by the jazz world's current hero, Kamasi Washington, as one of the chosen works in the exhibition.   It's a 37 minute recording of a suite entitled "Harmony of Difference".  The sound was quite dim, coming out of very small speakers.   A very small part of the music was accompanied by a rudimentary video.  I was very happy to see a jazz work represented in the Biennial, but I don't really understand how it is, with all the music being created in America, this somehow is the only musical work chosen, and that is so poorly exhibited.