Metropolitan Museum Wanderings Part 3

More wanderings...

I went to look at installation art at the Metropoltan Museum, which abounds there.   By that I mean the period rooms that can be found all over the museum, interior spaces that have been meticulously reconstructed to resemble the original spaces.   (Kind of the opposite of site specific art, if you will...)   The rooms range from the Damascus room to the bedroom of a Roman villa to my new favorite, a "studiolo" from a ducal palace in Urbino around 1500.   This room, intended as a small space for study and meditation, has walls entirely of wood inlay, with various trompe l'oeil effects, and lots of musical instruments.

Then there are all the period rooms, which attempt to display the kind of interior decoration used in various European palaces.   I get a very odd feeling from these rooms; an interior, without natural light, deprived of all context, inside of a large museum in contemporary New York City.  Where am I?    The oddness may also have something to do with bringing back memories of the innumerable European palaces and stately homes that I was dragged through in my youth on family vacations.   Did I really care what the interior of rich peoples houses from the past centuries looked like?   Though I do get some pleasure out seeing places with authentic historical resonance, like the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

But this bedroom looks very welcoming...

Later, I saw this as I was wandering through the Lehman collection, one of my favorite places in the Met.

You never know what you will find!

Metropolitan Museum Wanderings Part 2

More wanderings..
There was a wonderful show of Japanese paintings from the Edo period.   One of the things I enjoy about looking at most Asian art is my ignorance of what was done when; when I approach a painting, I really don't know whether it was done in the 17th century or the 19th century.  I don't see the same linear development of style that I see in European painting, though it may well exist to the trained eye.  It is also interesting to see how many of developments in 20th century painting exist in earlier Japanese art.   Consider these two detailed parts of a scroll painted around 1760:

And then here are some details from a painting  I saw at a show paintings by the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell at a gallery in Chelsea later in the week:

Admittedly, this kind of comparison can be superficial, and I really shouldn't be venturing into this kind of reductive judgements.  

Wandering through the Chinese galleries...   Here is a detail from a Chinese enamel, created in the late 16th century.

There are so many cool red squiggles that it takes me a while to see the dragons.  And how would I ever be able to guess when this might have been done?

This has happened to me before, but I find that when I go look at European paintings from the Baroque to the mid 19th century periods after seeing Asian art, they look rather conventional, dull and lacking color, trapped by their need for verisimility.   On the other hand, the more I look at late Medieval and early Renaissance paintings, the more I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the colors and designs.  Perhaps someday in the far future people will look at the European paintings from the middle centuries of the last millenium as a temporary aberration from the true nature of painting....

Here are some colorful details from the early Renaissance paintings that I saw most recently:

  
It's also worth remembering in this context that these painters didn't just hop down to their corner art supply store to pick up their tubes of paint.  The amount of work involved  in creating these colors should not be underestimated; for example, the best blue pigments came from grinding lapis lazuli, which needed to be imported from Afghanistan.   Also worth remembering that these paintings were view either in natural light or by candle light or something like that. Not with electric light, needless to say.   (I would love it if some day an art museum would show all its older paintings with candle light only.  Not practical, of course.)

Metropolitan Museum Wanderings Part 1

I went to the Metropolitan Museum five times in the last three weeks.  While continuing to visit my old favorite galleries, I am gradually visiting all the spots I have never been to.   And everything looks different, depending on where you have just been.  European paintings of the 18th century look different if you have just come from the Islamic collection.   (Someday I will invent some kind of Oulipian itinerary in the Met in the style of the French writer Georges Perec, who would construct itineraries on the Paris metro system involving various constraints, such as stopping in metro stations in alphabetical order.)
One place I have never spent time in is the American wing.  I found some interesting things there, along with the expected.   In some ways, it reminded me of visiting places like the Danish national museum; you see works very much in the style of what was being done first elsewhere in the world.  (American art only really gets original as the 20 century proceeds.)  But there are some quirky and fascinating things, as well as the familiar icons.

So who is this, garbed in ancient Roman attire in a marble bust?

It's George Washington, better known in this image, right next to the bust:

And, speaking of Geaorge, here is the famous crossing of the Delaware, reminding me of the huge paintings in the Louvre: it might as well have been Napoleon.   Very large, dramatic, and there was nobody else in the room with me so it had full impact.   It was painted in Germany!

I ran across this quirky painted collage, more to my taste, entitled "A Bachelor's Drawer" by one John Haberle:

This is all meticulously painted in a trompe l'oeil style, not mixed media, painted around 1890.  And something similar by a different painter:

Was there a school of painting in this style?  Yes, it turns out that trompe l'oeil was very popular in the US at this time.

And there are dangerous creatures of all kinds:

and abstract expressionism?

Not really, just part of a Winslow Homer seascape.

And this mish-mash of ancient ruins by Frederic Church, where St. Sophia abuts the Parthenon, etc.  Part of a larger picture:

And you also get lots of pictures glorifying manifest destiny and white man's triumphs and much more.  The American wing, finally, is a fascinating experience, a virtual museum itself, hidden in the back of the Met, and far from the crowds around Van Gogh.
(Maybe if more American painters had mutilated their ears, they would have been more famous.)

Lygia Clark at MOMA

I went to MOMA and stumbled on the exhibit "Lygia Clark: the Abandonment of Art".   The title would normally send me in the opposite direction, and I had vaguely recalled reading something about body art and performance, do-it yourself art, etc., etc. the usual 60's stuff.   What I actually found was an exhibit which mostly featured her work from the 50's and early 60's, when she was part of a Brazilian avant-garde that focused on  completely objective abstract art.

(No photos allowed!)(except when guards aren't looking)

She trained with an architect.  One interesting thing she did was to create lines in her canvases by actually cutting into the canvas, or using distinct, separate canvases.   Much theoretical discussion about lines and planes and space.  But the art was interesting to look at; in a kind of Post-Mondrian style.
Later, she began creating sculptures out of smaller, hinged folding sheets of metal.   In the sixties, she began creating participatory art by allowing the viewer to arrange the sheets of metal themselves.  Thus MOMA allowed me to create my first exhibited work of art at MOMA.  Alas, I was not allowed to take a picture, and soon someone else came along and destroyed it.   By the end, she was creating participatory body art, things like people drooping thread and saliva on a minimally clad person (The Sixties!).   Checking to see what Roberta Smith had to say at the NY Times, I discovered that most of the review was about this later art, and virtually nothing except for a few dismissive lines was said about the earlier painting and sculpture, as it is ideologically out of fashion.   Annoying!


Speaking of annoying, there was an adjacent exhibit by Christopher Williams entitled "The Production Line of Happiness".   The curators continued a recently developed practice of including no labels or markings in the exhibit, not even numbers.  You had to look at a program guide, and even that was minimal and you had to try to figure out what was what.  The exhibit was a sort of meta-photographical thing; that means you get pictures of cameras sliced in half, and printing devices, etc..  What you saw was mostly technically competent photographs, with no particular visual style about them, and without any commentary to explicate the ideological constructs involved.  Not to mention that all the photographs were hung at something just above waist level (for me), so that you had to bend down substantially in order to look at them.   No idea why,..something conceptual?
So I checked Smith again; apparently this is an exhibit about exhibits.  I'm so clueless!  So all the things that annoyed me were meant to annoy me. It's institutional critique!
So here you are, straight from Smith.

The entire show is in many ways a giant, brainy artwork unto itself. With it, Mr. Williams takes us deep into the mechanics of making the exhibition, turning it inside out, exposing both its logistics and its aesthetics.

The exhibition is also a kind of apotheosis of Mr. Williams’s own artistic milieu: 1970s site-specific installation, 1980s Pictures Generation art and the arcane 1990s trend of institutional critique. (The interactivity of relational aesthetics could also be added, given how much reading the show invites.)

Someday I will find out what the interactivity of relational aesthetics is.

She also gets off on white walls: they never do that for me:

Smith:
There are lots of white walls, like pages. If the show is a deconstruction of the museum’s white box, it is also a celebration, and among the most beautiful ever staged in these galleries. There are free-standing walls that seem almost to slide back and forth, like screens, as you move through the show.


I now wear earplugs when I go to MOMA; it really helps.   Though I saw an work that involved recorded music and was annoyed that I couldn't hear the sound well.  I didn't realize until a few days later that I had forgotten that I had my earplugs in!

Zeitgeist Art

I finally caught up with the much-lauded Sigmar Polke exhibit at MOMA.   It was interesting for me from a cultural and political viewpoint, but as a whole it didn't do much for me.   When I go to see a major retrospective of an artist's life work, I
 usually have the expectation that I will see a kind of narrative of artistic ideas and development.  Sometimes you see a gradual evolution of a style; sometimes you see a initial burst of creative energy and not much else afterwards.  With Polke, I sense a constant, everpresent urge to invent, and to invent some more, to try this and try that.  Sometimes the results are fascinating; other times, of no interest.  Why do artists think that their unedited, hand-held-camera home movies are of artistic significance?  I don't know.   But some of the later experiments with different media are wonderful, though I am not sure about the "radioactive paint".   The other interesting thing in the exhibit was the extent to which Polke's work involves the culture and political narratives of living in Germany in the later 20th century.  Hippies!  Protests!  Orgies!  Drugs!  Nepal!  etc.  etc.

Normally I would avoid Jeff Koons like the plague, but our friend David convinced us that we should go see it. So we did, and I am glad we did.  It is one thing to see photographs of shiny dog ballon sculptures, and another thing entirely to see them in person.   To begin with, though, we were astonished to see long lines outside the Whitney to get in to the show.   Lots of families with young kids, tourists, etc.  Who knew?  Well, duh, kids like ballon sculptures.  (Hoping they don't wander in to the "pornographic" part of the show, expicit images of Koons having sex with his ex porn-star wife.)
 
Anyway the show begins with vacuum cleaners and florescent lights:

We are in some kind of Duchamp/Warhol ready-made territory.
Then basketballs suspended in water:

Then he starts to go deep into exploring bad taste, kitsch, etc, etc.  This doesn't really interest me.   There's stuff about his childhood and sex life and things like that.

The show starts to get interesting when he starts becoming obsessed with materials and reproductions and scale.   For example, he has taken some sort of cheap plastic gorilla toy (King Kong?), carefully measured it, and enlarged it to a huge size, and then reproduced the exact look of the toy in granite(!).   Thus reversing the usual process of granite monument to plastic reproduction.   This is rather perverse, but fascinating.
The head (the statue is about 7 feet tall):

He does the same thing for Play-doh.   I would have loved to listen to the teacher explaining to the kids why they were sitting in front of a giant mound of simulated Play-doh.  (Not to mention that the kids are dressed in Play-doh colors...)

 A Hulk statue (bronze), infused with organ:

Then there are all those shiny things:

Part of the dog balloon statues, immaculately cast in polished bronze:

(It's worth noting that photography is seemingly encouraged; in contrast to the Polke exhibit at MOMA, where it was strictly forbidden.)

The exhibit ends with Koons riffing on classical art, thus we get a Venus statue, in shiny blue metal.  I'm not sure what I think about the whole enterprise; compelling, in some ways, but you end up with a kind exhausted feeling afterwards.

In fact, I went to the fifth floor afterwards, where, after so much glitz, it was a relief to encounter a whole room of Agnes Martin "white" paintings.

Or, if you prefer, Ad Reinhardt in black:

This is the last show in the Whitney before it gets handed over to the Met.  I remember hearing a world premiere of an Elliot Carter quartet in one of the galleries.   I wonder what will happen to the Simonds "Dwellings" installation, which has been there forever?

World Trade Center

I went to see the World Trade Center site, now home to the newly opened 9/11 memorial museum.   I find the area to be very disconcerting.   There is still a huge police presence, with barbed wire and concrete security barriers everywhere. There are numerous souvenir stores, hawking NY Fire dept. memorabilia, Twin Tower trinkets, flags, t-shirts. etc.   While I was there, a fire truck was parking on the street; hundreds of cell phones were whipped out to take a picture.  Despite signs admonishing us to remember that the site is a memorial, the atmosphere is more like a carnival.   Though I think it is almost impossible to conceive of a public outdoor space that could function as a crowd-stopping memorial space.  Imagine the thousands of workers in the new buildings who descend to the open space for their lunch hour.  Are they really going to be thinking about 9/11 every day?  The two pools marking the footprint of the towers are mostly anodyne,  symbolic but hardly evocative, especially with the very strong smell of chlorine emanating from them.   And then, next to the pools, the newly built tower, bigger and taller than ever; which mostly serves to inflate the egos of those involved.

I am still intrigued, though, by the in-progress state Calatrava's transit hub, and the general architectural jumble of construction.

Some pictures:


I love the orange feeding tubes:

The World Trade Center in a nutshell:

Architectural behemoth and adjacent pool:

My ____ is bigger than yours...

Eric Comstock

We heard a wonderful show by the pianist/vocalist Eric Comstock.  Comstock, who we normally hear performing as part of the Comstock/Fasano Duo with his very talented wife Barbara as vocalist, now has a regular weekly gig at Cafe Noctambulo in the East Village. What the directors of the Cafe Noctambulo are trying to do is recreate the old fashioned supper club, with excellent food and music.  What Comstock does is perform what might be called the Great American Songbook; showtunes and popular music mostly from the first half of the twentieth century, as typified by the music of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and later by Rogers and Hart, etc.   I know very little about this music, other than the songs from musicals my parents took us to as kids.   But I love the combination of sophisticated harmony and witty lyrics, and it sometimes makes me think of the German lieder of the 19th century in its own 20th century way.    Comstock  is some kind of genius, with both an astoundingly encyclopediac knowledge of the repertoire and an evocative style of singing and piano playing.  He did a wonderful slowed-down version of Ellington's "Don't Get Around Much Any More" which changed my perception of the tune entirely.   He freely moves from tune to tune, with witty and perceptive comments and anecdotes in between.   He played from 8 PM to 12:15 AM, with a couple of short breaks.  In a better world, he (and Barbara) would be very famous stars, playing at the fanciest clubs.

Here is Eric (with tie) and Vera and our friends Krin and Paula, under the colored lights of the club.

Team Lab

I saw a show at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea of animations by a group of Japanese digital artists who call themselves "Team Lab".   The animations, on large screens in darkened rooms, were fascinating.  I was especially taken with one installation, with 10 or 12 large screens in a row, all of them animating and riffing on traditional Japanese screen painting.   Each individual screen was worth watching on its own, and the some total was overwhelming.   I had just seen an exhibition of Japanese screen painting at the Met a few days before. You can see the videos on You Tube.

Youtube videos

One of the other videos unfortunately had a terrible sort of Japanese new-ageish musical soundtrack; the others, mercifully, were silent.

Some still pictures:

I really enjoy scroll paintings because they are so wide that one cannot take them all in at once,  Your eye is meant to move and explore.  I also saw at the Met a widescreen video that was wider than anything I have ever seen.  It was commissioned for a show on Chinese calligraphy, and was a black and white continuously changing drawing.   Impossible to reproduce, but here is a snapshot of part of it.