Unfinished at the Met Breuer

We saw the opening exhibit of what is now called the "Met Breuer".  It is the old Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue, which is now an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum.   The featured opening exhibit was entitled "Unfinished".   The idea was to explore works of European art ranging from the 15th Century to the 21st Century that are either literally unfinished, or else invoke the notion of unfinished in some sense.   This is a very broad topic, perfectly capable of provoking all kinds of discussions, which, in our case, kind of lead nowhere.   There are too many variables involved to come to any clear sense of what unfinished means in artistic terms, except in the literal sense when the artist died before he or she finished a work.     The best thing, though, was that the museum was filled with wonderful and astonishing works of art, many of which the Met had borrowed from elsewhere.   It was quite a shock to get off the elevator on the third floor of the Whitney and to see paintings by Titian et. al. after all these years of seeing nothing but 20th century American art in that building.

An unfinished work by Reubens:

There was a wonderful room of late Turner paintings which were apparently thought of as unfinished after his death and eventually consigned to the Tate's attic.   Now, of course, we don't think of them as unfinished.  Or do we?

This Klimt is clearly unfinished, but I found it to be a nicely subversive version of the Klimt paintings that have become all too iconic these days.

In the 20th century portions of the exhibit, the notion of unfinished becomes more philosophical.

Witness this grayish work by Roman Opalka, which from a distance looks like this:

Looking closer,  this is what you see:

He had the notion of writing out the numbers to visualize infinity.   He never got there...

Then there is Cezanne..

And Picasso:

And did I mention Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci?

A truly spectacular exhibition...

Postscript:

It was interesting to read the New York Times art critic's takes on this show.   There were many contemporary woman artists in the show, so they couldn't complain about that.   But they did complain about the lack of Non-European works in the show, or as Roberta Smith put it, leaving  "....the Met very much in its comfort zone, with older art in a hermetically sealed Eurocentric bubble."    Really!   The Met must be the most non-Eurocentric museum in New York, as they exhibit and treat with great respect art from all cultures.  And the curators even addressed the issue in an interview, mentioning that the notion of "unfinished" became even more complex and problematic when other cultures were involved.    

A Stroll in the South Bronx

When I walk in New York, I enjoy seeing all the disparate streetscapes that exist; they all interest me one way or the other.  Industrial, residential, commercial, wasteland or high end, there is always something to see.  So I wanted to walk around the South Bronx, which, 30 or 40 years ago, was considered to be unsafe to walk in, day or night.  The South Bronx, unlike most of Manhattan, has been disfigured by expressways that divide up neighborhoods.   I went to the Mott Haven and Port Morris neighborhoods in the extreme southern tip of the Bronx, both bisected by the Major Deegan and Bruckner expressways.   There are both housing projects and residential historic districts, as well as  and industrial areas and wasteland areas.   Mott Haven was originally populated by German immigrants, and Port Morris was home to many piano factories, among other industries.   Some remnants of these factory buildings still exist, and some are transitioning to condos.   There are Con Ed facilities, waste treatment and recycling plants, and even a new distillery.  I saw a place that many sanitation trucks spend the night.   The main railroad tracks from Connecticut also cross the district, leading to the beautiful Hell Gate Bridge that crosses from the South Bronx to Queens via Randall's Island.     As alway, I got carried away in finding colors and shapes in the landscape.

A Richard Serra in the making?

 Underneath the beginnings of the Hell Gate Bridge, this path leads to Randall's Island and all the playing fields there.  I didn't see any other people.

 The same, showing the underside of the bridge;

Looking in the other direction, another view of the underside of the bridge.

Things grow under the bridge...

 Colorful doors and walls:

Older residential buildings overlooking industrial areas.

You can't get away from Manhattan.

One of the old piano factories:

By the time I got to the Mott Haven historic district, I was out of of photographic energy.  There were blocks of nice old townhouses, not unlike many other older parts of New York.

And We Like Sheep

We heard Louis Andreissen's "Die Materie", as staged by Heiner Goebbels in the Park Avenue Armory.  "Die Materie" was written in the mid 1980's, and is a kind of symphony/oratorio/opera hybrid, originally conceived in collaboration with Robert Wilson.   The subject, "matter" in English, is varied and complex, with texts ranging from the diaries of Marie Curie to ship building manuals.   What Goebbels has done, however, is a kind of transformation of Andreissen's  original musical conception into a spectacular event for arena-sized spaces, like the Park Avenue Armory. (It was originally commissioned for a very large space at a festival in Germany.)   Which means, of course, that everything is amplified through loudspeakers.   The famous introduction to the piece, when a very loud chord is repeated 144 times, was striking; you could hear the reverberation of the single chords echoing across the vast space.   The amplification was superbly done, but, at the same time, I found myself wondering what the piece really sounded like.   But the big excitement, though, and what the sellout crowds came for, was the spectacle of the staging.  (It goes without saying that, had the NY Philharmonic put on a concert performance of the piece, no one would have come.)   It was indeed an extraordinary spectacle, and an event I will never forget.   The most spectacular part was the fourth moment, when Goebbels brought 100 live sheep into the arena, while  illuminated zeppelins floated through the space above them.   What it actually had to do with the music I have no idea, but the effect was extraordinary, especially once the sheep stopped humping each other and the audience giggles receded .    The occasional "baa" blended in nicely with the music, and eventually the smell of the sheep wafted in our direction.  It was fascinating to watch the both the predictability of the sheep movements (they do like to be a herd) and the actual unpredictability of individual movements, as individuals would sometimes detach themselves and start a sudden quick movement in a different direction.  But ultimately, it was one of those image/music moments that resist easy explanation but somehow grip you.

Images from the web:

Another movement focused on Piet Mondrian, with a kind of Boogie-woogie music representing Mondrian's late infatuation with that music in New York.   At a certain point, the orchestra, which had been in the middle of the audience sitting in the bleachers, began to slowly move on a platform to the center of the hall. It made for an interesting acoustic phenomenon, as the direct sound of the orchestra began to compete with the amplified sound from the speakers.   And there were these extraordinary giant moving pendulums, gyrating constantly, all illuminated in Mondrian colors.

The opening scene appears with tents, illuminated from within; the tents presumably containing ship builders.

A choir of 17th century Dutch men (actually half of them were women)

And much, much more....

We were very lucky to have been able to see and hear this event.  It was clear the the organizers were extremely well prepared, and obviously no expense was spared.  (There were many articles in the media about the efforts involved in staging with 100 sheep, and the inevitable comparison with opera singers.) It also made me want to sit down and hear an actual performance of the music with a live orchestra in a concert hall.



We also heard a performance of Hans Abrahamsen's "Schee" (snow in German), done at Miller Theater's composer portrait series.   I had greatly admired Abrahamsen's piece with Barbara Hannigan and the Cleveland orchestra in January, and was eager to hear another piece.  It was for nine instruments: three strings, three winds, two pianos and percussion.   The piece is about an hour long, and all of it is written in canons.   As a whole, the piece was too minimal and spartan for my ears, at least at the moment of this concert.   Though I can certainly imagine hearing it at another time when I might be more receptive.   I also probably missed the voice of Barbra Hannigan; "Schnee" has much in common with the piece she sang in January, but the addition of a human voice to the music makes a great deal of difference.

More Wanderings

Sometimes I take shorter walks, sometimes very long ones.   I might see something interesting, or sometimes not.   Here are a few things I have seen.

There is an interesting new residential building on 57th Street and the Hudson River by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels.   It is a startling sight, especially in New York where so much of the architecture is pretty straight forward.   It looks like this:

People leave bottles just anywhere in New York..

Would I want to live in it? I don't know. It apparently has an interior courtyard, but it is pretty much at the edge of things at the end of 57th Street.


Riverside Drive and Riverside Park never cease to amaze me.   The section north of 96th Street has some beautiful old mansions on it, and eventually you get to the area around Grant's Tomb, Riverside Cathedral, which really starts to feel almost Parisian, with its green spaces and churches, etc.   And ornamentation abounds.

Who was it that was buried here?

At the end at 125th Street you descend to see great views of the Riverside Viaduct, an engineering masterpiece from around 1900.  At the moment it seems to have some kind of a diaper which looks like it is meant to keep parts of it from falling on the street below.

The new train station at the World Trade Center designed by Santiago Calatrava has partially opened to the public, and we went to see it.   The original intention behind the design was to create a great public space.   Rather than create a routine, pedestrian type of station, the idea was to create something along the lines of Grand Central Station.   As in the case of many such enterprises, by the time the bureaucrats and the security people and the politicians got through with it, the design was compromised, and the costs way, way over budget.  But the results are certainly exciting, if you don't think about the costs.  And it will continue to cost, if they try to keep all that white clean.  And there is a lot more that is yet to be finished, so I await the final version.

Some pictures:

A Short Trip to a Sewage Plant

I have wanted to go for a walk in New York's Greenpoint neighborhood for a long time.   Green point is known as the center of New York's Polish community.   Sure enough, as soon as I emerged from the G train (immortalized in Mingus's tune) stop, there were signs in Polish, and little shops piled high with every form of sausage you can think of.    Greenpoint is isolated in some ways, and although gentrification is certainly under way, it has nowhere near the hipster cachet of other gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods.  It has a historic district, and it also has a lot of old housing which has been updated with what the AIA guide calls "Archie Bunker" improvements.   And, as yet, its waterfront is not overcome with high-rise condos.

Part of a local church:

A house:

An old bank building:

Not everyone is Polish:

Old warehouses:

Some of the architecture is less distinguished:

The waterfront in Greenpoint is still undeveloped:

The other thing to see in Greenpoint is the Newtown Creek sewage plant, a massive new sewage treatment plant designed by the Polshak architectural firm.  It is quite a stunning building.   It borders on Newtown Creek, which is one of the most polluted waterways in the country and is a EPA Superfund site.    The whole area has been devastated by industrial pollution, dating back to oil refineries in the 19th century.   The designers of the sewage plant, though, even managed to include a "nature walk" which borders the sewage plant and runs along Newtown Creek.  Only in New York could you have a nature walk which has a sewage plant on one side and an EPA Superfund site on the other other side. But it is beautifully done, with a relatively narrow, planted path along the water.   Needless to say, there were only two other people there the whole time I was there; it was peaceful and quiet.

The sewage plant:

The nature walk begins like this:

The path along the water, bordering on "Whale Creek".   No whales to be seen...

Views across Newtown Creek from the nature walk:

The area around the sewage plant is industrial, with a lot of metal scrapyards and the occasional movie making facility.

I am always looking for color and geometry.

Mondrian lives in Brooklyn (actually, he is buried in Brooklyn).