April 29, 2007 11:11
Adding (and Adding) to the Seattle Art Museum
Last January, when I went out to see the new Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, I also got an early look at what was then the nearly completed new addition to it's parent institution, the Seattle Art Museum, which is actually a few blocks away. At the time I wrote mostly about the fascinating sculpture park, but with the addition having its official opening this Saturday let's come back back to the building.
It's by the Portland-based Brad Cloepfil, of Allied Works Architecture, who is also the architect behind the much contended transformation of an Edward Durrell Stone building in Manhattan into the American Craft Museum. For Seattle Cloepfil has provided some very handsomely proportioned and detailed galleries, some of the warmest I've seen since the ones Rafael Moneo designed for his addition to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts — though without the advantage of Moneo's ceiling light wells, chimney-style shafts of diffused light that are possible in Houston because that's a low rise addition in which most of the galleries are just under the roof. (On the other hand, the Seattle addition has a wall to wall brise soleil — vertical steel panels on the avenue side — that can slide open across the double height ground floor public space to admit views of water and mountain that Houston can only dream of.) Interestingly, both additions also share a similar and somewhat awkward platform space that emerges when the ground floor escalators reach the third floor. where the galleries begin. They have always struggled a bit to decide how best to fill it in Houston and Seattle may have the same problem.
But the really interesting thing about the new Seattle Art Museum is its business plan. The SAM, as it's called, moved into a new Robert Venturi-designed museum in 1991, then quickly decided its new home wasn't big enough. But though it owned the entire block that the Venturi building occupied just one corner of, the museum's leadership opted not to build a free standing expansion. Instead, it accepted the offer of a local bank to build a skyscraper headquarters on most of the remaining site. Then SAM hired Cloepfil to design a 16-story museum addition that runs up the side of the larger tower and connects to the Venturi addition. The museum currently occupies just four of those floors and rents the next eight to the bank, but with the option to move into those in stages over the years as its own needs to expand even further require. (The bank owns the four uppermost floors outright.) It's an ingenious business plan — built in expansion room.
Meanwhile, is it strange for a museum to occupy an office buidling? Hey, what do you think the Uffizi used to be?
April 27, 2007 12:30
New York's New Gehry: Splendor in the Glass
The IAC Headquarters/Frank Gehry — All Photos: Albert Vecerka/ESTO
I got a tour earlier this week of Manhattan’s first Frank Gehry building, the IAC headquarters, a 10-story undulating mesa — actually, it's an office building — on the lower west side of Manhattan. I first got a glimpse of this project, which was commissioned by the mogul Barry Diller to house his media/internet conglomerate, at Gehry’s offices in Santa Monica five years ago. At the time he had whole shelves lined with various evolving versions. I didn’t grasp then just how good this was going to be. It looks to me like the best thing Gehry has completed since the Stata Center at M.I.T.
The IAC headquarters uses Gehry's characteristic whiplashing lines, but in a more subdued and legible way. The folded, prismatic silhouette is a clear and accurate expression of the interior floorplates. They just happen to be madly inventive floorplates, full of prow shaped conference rooms, trapezoidal offices and tilted arc employee snackbar areas.
Western side of the ground floor lobby
This is also a place that has some of the most unusual views of lower Manhattan and the Hudson River of any building I know. Those views are everywhere you turn, because the building is faced on all sides in glass — with each plate fritted with tiny white ceramic dots that give it a clouded band at top and bottom — and the glass encloses a lot of open plan work spaces. And the views, of course, are even more fascinating because of the convex and concave steel cagework that frames them, an effect you also get from some of Norman Foster's diagrid-supported office towers like the Gherkin in London and the Hearst Tower in New York.
For a relatively compact building, the IAC headquarters also has one of the most complicated footprints in Manhattan. In a city mostly defined by the implacable rectangles of its streetscape, Gehry has set down a building that’s a pleated skirt. It touches the ground with the same folds and billows that it presents against the sky. Actually, it doesn't quite touch the ground. Gehry has hemmed the perimeter with a reveal, a slight gap, between the bottom edge of the ground floor exterior glass panels, which are bordered in what looks like aluminum, and the sidewalk. The building appears to hover just above its landing pad. That reveal creates the impression of a defined container, a furrowed glass cannister, and also bestows on this very transparent building a touch of sculptural self-enclosure.
It’s no secret that on his off days Gehry resorts to what look like knocks offs of his best ideas, and that sometimes he'll even commit outright "facade-ism". (If you’ve seen his performing arts center at Bard College, which wraps some windblown Bilbao-ish flutter around basic sheds, you know what I mean.) But the IAC headquarters has none of those problems. More than any other Gehry building I can think of it puts you in mind of Borromini, the Borromini of the rippling Roman churches. What it does, simply and suavely, is adapts some of Gehry's most intricate gestures into a coherent whole. This doesn't mean I prefer it to the Bilbao Guggenheim or the Disney Concert Hall in L.A., buildings with greater complexity. But a more serene Gehry is not the same thing as Gehry running of steam, as some critics have complained. This is a vigorous, witty building. And at night, fully lit, in a neighborhood with a lot of dark warehouses, it makes a very jaunty impression.
April 26, 2007 10:48
Travel is So Broadening
I've been on the road since yesterday. Back to the blog tomorrow, Friday. Meanwhile you can check out a new architecture toy. The American Institute of Architects has set up a new layer in Google Earth that lets you "visit" digital recreations of the buildings featured on their recent list of the 150 American buildings, bridges and monuments that a group of American voters liked the most. Go to http://earth.google.com/index.html and download the software.
It's just like being on the road yourself, except without the connecting flights.
April 24, 2007 3:34
Talking Bout the Biennale
I grabbed lunch today with Rob Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art and director of the upcoming Venice Biennale, the first American invited to fill that job. (For the record, there was an earlier Biennale directed by an Italian who became a U.S. citizen just before it opened.) The Biennale, of course, is run along the lines of a world's fair. Each participating nation — there's a record 77 this year — has its own exhibition, which is generally devoted to a single artist. (And usually a living artist, though the U.S. pavillion this year is devoted to Felix Gonzales-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996.)
Among other things, the director curates the big international show that's mounted at the Arsenale and in the Italian Pavillion at the Giardini. Storr's will be called "Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind", and it will concentrate on art that is, as he puts it, both conceptual and perceptual, built upon the foundation of an idea, but executed with the intention of producing something visually interesting. Here's a bit of what we talked about:
Q: What exactly does the director of the Biennale do?
Storr: The mandate of the director is essentially to make the international component of the exhibition in the Italian Pavillion and in the Arsenale’s artillery area. In many contexts I’m also the voice of the Biennale, artistically speaking, and I have a sort of gentlemen’s oversight of the so-called collateral events, which are exhibitions that have official Biennale recognition. These include curated exhibitions sponsored by foundations and also some local events — for instance, the art school puts things on. I've dealt with these things with a very light hand. I’ve only ruled out something that was really awful or things that were totally commercial propositions.
And then I made a decision on my own, and the board approved it, to hive off a third or half of the Artillery section to create three pavillions that would incorporate into the core of the Biennale regions or nations that have not been represented before. We offered space to India and to Turkey. And I also opened space to curators to make a show of African artists and artists of the African diaspora. My aim was to make sure that anyone who went to the main events of the Biennale could not fail to find these shows.
Q: You hear it said that the 90s was the era of biennials, but this is the era of art fairs. What exactly is the Biennale for?
Storr: Biennales are for the general public. Art fairs are for the informed art public and also of course they’re business propositions. Biennales are a crash course in contemporary art, a place where the general public at a relatively low cost can come and find out what’s going on in the world. In my mind the real audience for the Biennale are students and travelers who have sufficient income to make a trip to Italy and who don’t have access to much contemporary art at home.
Q; What's attendance like for Venice?
Storr: Well, the Biennale goes on for seven months. The art world comes for the opening just as the summer heat has started to rise. The drop off in attendance after that is precipitous and lasts all summer. Then with September and October — with the nicer weather — the audience rises again. I think the last Biennale had between 200,000 and 300,000 visitors. But attendance has sloped off over the last decade or so. I’m not sure why.
Q: Does it make any difference for the director to be an American?
Storr: It makes a difference perceptually, because America has been, in terms of markets, exhibitions and publications, the 300 pound gorilla. It’s not in the place where it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s but it still weighs in very heavily. So if you are an American you’re seen as part of that sizeable American art world. And America’s role in the world generally means there’s also a lot of speculaton about what does an American think about this or that. My show at the Biennale is not necessarily a political show, but there’s a good deal of work about geographical displacement and about war.
Q: What’s going to be different about that show?
Storr: I’m trying to make a show that can be read as a show, that is textured in a way that somebody coming into it at any point begins to pick up certian qualities in one work that they will see in other works. Because of the maze-like quality of these pavillions that's not as easy as you might think. You can’t do what you would do in a regular museum context where you have much more control over the space.
The underlying premise of the show is that there has been a division between the conceptual and the perceptual, between the "criticality" crowd and the beauty crowd. The argument of the show is that first rate work is always both conceptual and perceptual and the artists making art are far less concerned with these divisions than people who write about them.
It has about 96 artists. A larger number of Americans than I would have expected going into it — about 22. But there are quite a lot of Brazilians, quite a lot of Latin American art, a lot of Chinese art but none of it paintings, and quite a lot of art from the Middle East. There’s a fair amount of painting in it — Richter, Ryman, Kelly, Susan Rothenberg, and a lot of younger painters. There’s a larger amount of painting than there has been for some time.
April 23, 2007 11:53
June on Helmut (Newton)
I caught an early look at Helmut by June, a one hour documentary about Helmut Newton made by his widow, June. (That's her to the right in the picture above.) It broadcasts next Monday, April 30 on Cinemax. (Which is, just like me, a subsidiary of Time-Warner, a conglomerate so vast and mysterious that before I write about anything — and I do mean anything — I have to check first to see if it might not be part of the far flung empire. Sure enough....)
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Back to Helmut. In his wife's film — actually mostly video that she shot over a period of several years before his death in 2004 — he’s the charming, puckish and, I always suspect, self-concealing man you meet in the not very revealing but very entertaining memoir that he published four years ago. Most of the hour consists of cheerfully ramshackle video of Newton at work in Paris, LA and around his home base of Monte Carlo, with the usual array of supermodels of the 90s and early 00s, who assume all kinds of intricate postures in a workaday manner. At one point Newton, working outdoors in a garden, directs a naked model who's positioned on her hands and knees while smoking a cigarette. "Make it almost look natural," he tells her. She almost does.
For the most part it's an inconsequential hour. But in one area Newton opens up a bit. He talks about being drawn to large, powerful women — Amazons he calls them — and he connects it to the power of his mother, who guided the family to safety during the Holocaust. In his memoir Newton makes light of his early experience. Like everyone else in his family he had to flee Europe, but he likes to offer himself as a man whom history never laid a glove on. But after hearing him talk, however briefly, about his mother you begin to understand the S&M currents in his work differently. Now they seem like an outgrowth of his own struggle with the power of women, a way to subordinate his own fears.
As for his apparently sincere soliloquoy about the sexual allure of "my pin up girl" Margaret Thatcher, another aspect of his fascination with powerful women, all I can say is, it leaves you wondering how he must have felt about Golda Meir.
April 20, 2007 11:34
Marbles Moving A Bit More?
Hot on the heels of the recent interview that British Museum Director Neil MacGregor gave to Bloomberg News, in which he hinted that his museum might be willing periodically to "lend" the Elgin Marbles back to Greece — so long as the Greeks recognized that they were the property of the museum — the Times of London reports this morning that the Greeks, or at least a few of them at lower levels, have come back with a surprisingly accomodating reply.
One interesting quote:
The Greek authorities hailed his comments as unprecedented. One source told The Times: “This is the first time they’ve ever said they’d let them out of the museum. We’ve said we’re not disputing the ownership.”
And two more, these on the record:
Victoria Solomonidis, the cultural counsellor at the Greek Embassy in London, said: “The words of Neil MacGregor are most welcome news. The Greek side is interested in the reunification of the Parthenon and the issue of ownership does not come into it.”
Eleni Corka, an official in the Greek Culture Ministry, told the BBC: “I believe that if we discuss the issue we will find ground which will be suitable and solutions which will be profitable for both sides.”
Promising signals from lower ranking officials in Greek embassies and ministries are still not the same thing as an ok from Greek Prime Minster Costas Karamanlis on what remains the world's best known tug of war over cultural patrimony. At the very least, let's see if Greek Culture Minister George Voulgarakis weighs in. But if MacGregor was deliberately putting out a feeler in that Bloomberg interview, it looks like it's been felt.
April 19, 2007 1:14
Elgin Marbles in (Just a Bit of) Motion?
Diverted by Virginia Tech, I didn't get a chance to point out this development from a couple of days ago in the battle between Greece and the British Museum over the Elgin Marbles. In brief, in an interview with Bloomberg News, Neil MacGregor, Director of the Museum, said that "in principle" he would be willing to lend the marbles to Greece, if Greece would acknowledge that the trustees of the Museum are the owners.
From The Parthenon Frieze: Procession of Horse Drawn Chariots — © Trustees of the British Museum
Is this an opening gambit? MacGregor must know that for now no Greek government could agree to relinquish its own claim to be the rightful owner. But he may be genuinely signaling that a sharing arrangement is something the museum would consider — so long as it had assurances it would always get them back.
That leaves open the question of what's good for the works themselves. Do we really want them continually shuttled back and forth from London to Athens? We've already got an Eakins commuting regularly across Philadelphia, which still strikes me as a risky proposition. And if the British Museum assents to a sharing arrangement, would the Greeks also expect to retrieve the fragments of the Parthenon carvings that are in seven other European museums? (Including the Louvre and — uh oh — the Vatican.)
April 18, 2007 1:30
Rothko and Public Grief
Re: the brief picture-post I did yesterday in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings. Watching the news coverage on Monday, I was struck, as I pretty much expected to be, by how inadequate TV news is to the experience of tragedy. This is no insult to the hardworking people on cable, which is where I was getting most of my information Monday night, even when they were repeating for the twentieth time the same video of distant gunfire. But even news people know that the very format of the news, in which airtime must be filled by constant commentary, is inadequate to any moment when words fail.
So when I started to think yesterday about ways to mark the moment, or even whether to mark it, I thought of Rothko. The work of his mature years was dedicated to finding a way to express the unfathomable, and more than that, to express tragedy in a century that either denied it with all the noisemakers at its disposal — you’ve heard of pop culture? — or contended with it by way of religious consolations that did not speak to him.
I wasn’t always much of a Rothko fan and I’m still not always convinced by him. The first time I visited the Rothko Chapel in Houston, in the late 1980s, I was operating under the influence of a remark by the poet Czeslaw Milosz, something to the effect that the Western search for meaning in abstract art was a case of expecting too much from mere pigment. As you probably already know, as guides for the perplexed, the writers of central Europe cannot be beat. History has equipped them with just the right balance of the tragic and the ironic dimension. (For anyone making his or her way through the second Bush presidency, these qualities have a lot to recommend them.) So it was Milosz’s skepticism I brought with me on that first visit to Rothko’s Chapel. I looked at those walls covered with those very austere paintings in dim light and saw one more attempt to offer canvases as secular icons, gateways to the ineffable, an ineffable I didn’t believe in anyway. I went away unpersuaded.
Rothko Chapel — © 2004 Rothko Chapel
But I made another visit in more recent years with a different notion of what Rothko was up to. By that time I understood that all those hovering fog banks of color weren’t gateways to anything, they were emblems of thwarted longing. Rothko was trying to invoke the power of myth, even the power of God, all the while knowing that he could summon those things, but they might not come. Would not, more likely.
By the same token, Barnett Newman’s steel sculpture Broken Obelisk, a fractured obelisk perched upside down on the tip of a pyramid, seemed just right in its position in a reflecting pool outside the chapel. For Rothko’s doubting sanctuary, Newman’s disabled sentinel.
Broken Obelisk/Barnett Newman — © 2004 Rothko Chapel
So when I got to thinking about what use art could possibly be to what happened at Virginia Tech, I went looking for somebody fluent in the language of wordless suffering, whose work acknowledged grief, but provided no easy answers. And naturally I arrived at Mark Rothko.
One last note. Yesterday I also put up a favorite quote from him. “Silence is so accurate”. But if there’s any chance now of resuming a real conversation over gun control, then let’s decide that the moment of silence is over soon.
April 17, 2007 11:39
Thought for the Day: After Virginia Tech
"Silence is so accurate." — Mark Rothko
No. 14, 1960/Mark Rothko — SFMOMA © Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
April 16, 2007 2:32
The Art Market, Part 99
Made it over to the New York Public Library today for a lunch time panel discussion, sponsored by the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Ma., about the impact of the thermonuclear art market on the mere mortals who run museums, write about art or just like to look at it. There were three panelists: Jeffrey Deitch, the well known dealer who heads Deitch Projects; Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan; and Roberta Smith, deputy art critic of the New York Times. The high points:
Deitch called art "the ideal product for the post-industrial century." As he pointed out, you can borrow against it, it's non-polluting and, if it's contemporary art we're talking about, they just keep making more of it. He also made a sobering prediction. Within a decade it will be more common to see a few large global art dealerships, perhaps led by people like Bernard Arnault of LMVH, that will swallow up local galleries and subject their artists to a much greater degree of corporatization. (Think of it as a Counter Reformation with merchant princes as the college of cardinals.) We've already seen this kind of centralization in the world of bookstores, publishing houses (and museums), and it hasn't been a happy development.
Smith had the funniest line. She called the art market, which rains down money on a few very young artists, "a market-driven WPA." She took the realist position, skeptical of the market but resigned to it. "The art market is just one more form of opinion," she said. "A gross, inarticulate form of opinion."
Interestingly, Deitch mentioned that he "recruits" at art schools like Harvard's and Yale's, looking for new additions to his gallery, while Smith said she doesn't generally review shows by kids just out of school. "We're going to see a lot of artists," she said, "who we'll probably forget about."
Phillips' greatest concern was that the acceleration of the market — reputations made (and lost) in no time, crowds hurrying from one gallery to the next — runs contrary to the conditions of quiet contemplation that art requires. How to keep those conditions from invading the museums that we count on to defend that quiet space is exactly the problem for people in jobs like her's. One way to do it, of course, is to resist the occasional pressure from collector/trustees to validate dubious artists in their collections by giving them premature museum exposure.
On the whole, an interesting afternoon. It would have been even more interesting if the Clark people had managed to get for their panel one of the big three bogeymen of the current market — hedge fund traders, Pacific Rim billionaires or Russian kleptocrats. But all of those guys are probably too busy making sell calls and watching Bloomberg News. Gallery owners stir the pot, critics convey names into general awareness, museums can be enablers by lending their authority too soon to artists who haven't earned it. But at the end of the day, it's money that swells markets. And a superabundance of money has been driven to the galleries and auction houses in recent years under the prompting of all the usual motives among the rich: status anxiety, boredom with less glamorous investments, even — hey, it happens — a genuine love of art.
But as a place to put speculative capital, art, because it has no intrinsic value, can be riskier than shale oil fields. And contemporary art, because it has less scarcity value than the blue chip (meaning dead) Old Masters, can be riskier still. The "problem" of the contemporary art market wil be solved by the next general shakeout in the stock market. If, in the meantime, a few mediocre artists collect some of the bigger crumbs from the table, so be it. And if museums of contemporary art are priced out of the market for the very new, even that might not be such a bad thing. As Roberta Smith usefully recalled this afternoon, when Alfred Barr was first establishing the permanent collection of MoMA, he was mostly buying work that was already 20 or 30 years old.
April 13, 2007 1:05
More on Adventures in Merchandising
In the new issue of Time I have a story that summarizes the various art de-accessioning dust ups of the past few months. If you've been following those closely there won't be much in this piece that's new to you. It's written to introduce the controversies to the readership that hasn't been following them closely, and I'm betting it's a sizeable one. From time to time I survey reasonably well educated friends about stories that pre-occupy the artworld, and what I generally discover is that those reasonably well educated friends haven't heard a thing about them.
One odd footnote. While I was reporting that piece I got in touch with the American Association of Museums to ask what steps, if any, they could take to enforce their generally sensible guidelines on de-accessioning. One of their press people told me that the most important was to strip a museum of its accreditation, a relatively rare action but one that he said the Association has taken in the past. Accreditation, he added, was important to a museum's credibility and its standing in the public eye. At which point I asked for an example of a museum that had suffered that fate. The answer: the Association does not make public the names of museums that have lost their accreditation.
So much for that shaming mechanism.
April 12, 2007 1:16
Another Eakins: Going, Going, Gone
Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand/Thomas Eakins — Photo: Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia
Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia has sold another Eakins. This time it's the 1874 Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand, which went for a reported $20 million or so to Alice Walton's still-under-construction Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. Jefferson is the same medical school that sold the great Eakins canvas The Gross Clinic earlier this year in a joint deal to both the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
It's a loss for Philadelphia, no doubt. But can Jefferson really be blamed? I have a piece on the general phenomenon of de-accessioning coming up in the issue of Time that appears on newstands tomorrow, so I won't go into the ins and outs of the entire issue here. But it's worth noting that though the American Association of Museums (AAM) has guidelines that discourage deaccessioning for the purpose of funneling money into a school's general revenues, as Jefferson is doing with the millions from its Eakins sales, Jefferson does not actually have a campus museum, at least not in the way that, say, Yale, Harvard or Fisk all do. Much of its collection consists of portraits of distinguished faculty hung in various hallways. (In 1982, the school's three canvases by Eakins were moved to their own gallery, however, along a with a few other pieces.)
I put in a call this morning to Lisa Tremper Hanover, the president of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, an AAM affiliate, to see if Jefferson was in a different category from other schools with a clearly established on-campus museum. She agreed readily that it was. As a consequence, she said, the school was freer to dispose of its holdings as it saw fit.
For the record, Hanover, who is director of the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, is not somebody who takes de-accessioning lightly. So wherever you are Philip and Muriel, rest easy.
April 11, 2007 12:54
More on the Future of LeWitt
I had a conversation yesterday with Jock Reynolds, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, about the future of Sol LeWitt's work. Reynolds was in close contact with LeWitt for years, and especially in his last years. It was Reynolds who suggested to LeWitt the idea of MassMoCA as a place for the long term display of his wall drawings, which has now grown into the plan to bring a 25-year installation of 50 of those into a 27,000 sq. ft. building on the MassMoCA campus.
My question had to do with the issue I raised a few days ago — what will be the limits, if any, for producing LeWitt drawings now that the artist is gone? It was inherent to LeWitt's practice as an artist that other people carried out his drawings, but he also checked in on the execution of many of them and sometimes intervened to tweak them. Which implies that there were parameters of execution quality within which a LeWitt drawing was expected to remain.
Reynolds told me that this is a question that he and other people involved with the Yale/MassMoCA collaboration have given thought to, which is why the drawings at MassMoCA will be executed under the supervision of LeWitt's most experienced studio assistants. Eventually, the LeWitt project at MassMoCA, which will also involve hiring a full time curator or conservator, could even produce a program to train a future cadre of what you might call LeWitt "expert executors."
But Reynolds also made the useful point that LeWitt's wall drawings, which start life simply as written instructions from the artist, are best thought of as musical scores. "When a great composer dies you still have the scores," he said. "And you have people in symphony orchestras who go on playing them."
If anything, a score lives through it’s free interpretation by subsequent generations of musicians, and sometimes the freer the better. And as Reynolds pointed out, with many of LeWitt's wall drawings the people carrying them out get to make decisions on their own about what to do, "much as the dancers in a piece by Cage and Cunningham do."
So executions that departed from how the drawings were done in the past might be the best thing for them. As an example of how not to produce posthumous LeWitts, think of the airless productions of Wagner, the ones "true" to his intentions, that were mounted at Bayreuth for decades after his death. Or of the limitations that Samuel Beckett put on "impure" stage interpretations of his plays while he was still alive. (When he learned about a production of Endgame that was being re-set in a subway station, he insisted that the text of his statement denouncing the idea — "A complete parody of the play. Anybody who cares for the work couldn't fail to be disgusted." — be stapled into the program. And it was.)
Maybe the best model for LeWitt's legacy is Handel's. Over this past Easter weekend you could hear community choirs all over New York breathing new life into The Messiah. It would be nice to think of LeWitt's work that way, as a kind of Hallelujah Chorus, one that goes on for centuries, in new voices all the time.
April 10, 2007 1:20
Kentridge Meets Mozart
I made it out to the Brooklyn Academy of Music last night for the New York premiere of The Magic Flute in the production directed and co-designed by the South African artist William Kentridge. Artists find Mozart's opera irresistable. Chagall produced sets for it. David Hockney's beloved designs were a hit for years at the New York Metropolitian Opera, where Kentridge plans a 2010 version of Shostakovich's Nose, from the Gogol story.
At times this Flute, which was first staged in Brussels two years ago, had a Kiki Smith meets Edward Gorey feel. Smith for her enigmatic drawings of birds and other creatures. Gorey for the patently artificial black and white sets he designed for the Broadway production of Dracula in the 1970's. Kentridge floods his darkened, stepped stage with projected animations of his charcoal drawings — liquid, arabesquing lines, starbursts, comical dancing beasts and men. To represent Sarastro's dark knowledge the air fills with arcane geometries, with cones, coordinates and outwardly radiating orbital paths. During Pamino's wanderings rustling fern patterns rush across the entire proscenium space and across the performers in it. For the triumphant ending, the lovers united, there's a burst of white fireworks.
But Kentridge also means for his designs to link us to a moral and political reading of this always enigmatic story. The characters are in 19th century dress, the men in particular in something that looks like Royal Geographic Society explorer gear. It's all a hint that, as always, questions of colonialism and power relations are on Kentridge's mind. (To be sure that we get the message, at one point there's projected film of two white hunters gunning down a rhinoceros.) He means for us to understand that whatever Sarastro's sometimes benign sentiments, his powers rest on darkness, absolutism and, when the occasion calls for it — or just when it permits — on cruelty.
If only the message came through more clearly and consistently. Lovely as it is, this Flute can leave you feeling as though Kentridge, who's famous for his sly and gentle animations, reflections on South Africa's vexed history, was reluctant to impose himself too powerfully on Mozart's masterpiece. So box cameras are prominent stage devices. We know that Kentridge has always loved primitive cinema techniques and bygone devices like old telephones. But what do the cameras mean here? Are we seeing the 19th century beginnings of the modern surveillance state? Hard to say, since Kentridge doesn't develop the metaphor much.
I'd be happy to see this Flute again, for its imagination and its charm that never descends into mere sweetness. (And for some spectacular singing, especially in the chief female roles.) But I'm not sure that another viewing would bring me any closer to Mozart's vision. Or even to Kentridge's.
April 9, 2007 1:38
Sol LeWitt (1928-2007)
Arcs in Four Directions/Sol LeWitt, 1999 — San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
I was very sorry to hear the news yesterday about the death of Sol LeWitt, who proved that even Conceptualism could be luscious, that the most parsimonious and disembodied of artistic practices could be a means to arrive at a whole fund of sensual pleasures. Three years ago, in a review of the big, simultaneous surveys of Minimalism at LAMOCA and the Guggenheim, I described one of his completely mesmerizing wall drawings as....
madly fastidious decorative art presented in the disguise of high-minded conceptualism. (LeWitt conceives them but leaves it to studio assistants to carry out the actual drawing, removing the taint of the artist's hand.) In their orderly way, the best of them are laugh-out-loud gorgeous. His Wall Drawing 271 at the Guggenheim is one of those, a force field of pale color produced by laying a red square gridwork over a pattern of radiating black circles and yellow and blue arcs. Your eyes could play in that web work all day.
As I mentioned in that passage, LeWitt was famous for minimizing the artist's personal stamp by producing his wall drawings as a set of instructions to be carried out by his assistants. Or for that matter, by anyone — though as Michael Kimmelman pointed out in his obit in today's New York Times, LeWitt frequently looked over and adjusted the results.
For that reason I find myself wondering what limits, if any, there will be on future production of LeWitt's work. Posthumous output in nothing new in the artworld. New prints are made from old negatives, new impressions from old etching plates. There are Rodins at the Metropolitan that were cast in the 1970s — though some people insist that as a consequence those should not be considered real Rodins, even if his estate sanctioned the castings. But LeWitt's use of others to produce his work as a matter of principle, as something inherent to his working method, brings the issue to an entirely new level of complication.
This reminded me that Mass MoCA, in collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery, is about to embark on a massive and enduring installation of 50 of LeWitt's wall drawings made — or would it be better to say "conceived"? — between 1968 and 2007. So I rang up Joseph Thompson, the director of Mass MoCA, who told me that until just last week LeWitt was working with a scale model of the immense 27,000 sq. ft. gallery space on the MoCA campus, an old factory building where renovation work begins in a few weeks, with work on the first wall drawings expected to commence about a year from now. "Sol continued to tweak the model until last Wednesday or Thursday," Thompson said.
Though LeWitt is no longer here to supervise the drawing, experts from his studio will be taking up residence at Mass MoCA to direct the apprentices and art students who will execute the works, which will remain on view for 25 years. Interestingly, some of the drawings will be "loans" from other institutions of an unusual kind. The original drawing will remain on view at the lender institution while the duplicate — or near duplicate; LeWitt was not fussy about exact reproduction — is exhibited at Mass MoCA.
So long as there are people who worked directly with LeWitt to carry out his drawings, a living link to his intentions, these first posthumous LeWitts will have a strong claim to being, well, LeWitts. But a century from now, when all of his collaborators are gone too, will it still be possible to produce LeWitts? Or will it matter not at all that there will be no one left who worked with him, since letting go of the work, welcoming the small interventions of his assistants, was all part of LeWitt's concept. In that sense, his intentions can never decay over time. Because even decay was one of his intentions all along.
April 6, 2007 4:59
The Met's New Greek and Roman Galleries
Earlier this week I took a pre-opening tour of the new Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. (All praise to my cheerful guide Chris Lightfoot, a Met curator of Roman art. When we talk about "digging" in my business, we don't mean anything as literal as what he does in Turkey.) Just like the Getty Villa in Malibu, which re-opened last year just as the storm over the antiquities trade was hitting home, the Met galleries are debuting when there are still a lot of claims from Greece and Italy on ancient works in U.S. museums. And the (very beautiful) central court of the new Met galleries is named for the late Leon Levy and his wife Shelby White, major collectors who have some questions hanging over some of their purchases. So more, no doubt, to come on all that.
All the same, the Met has also arrived at an agreement with Italian authorities for the return of some the objects they were after, and the museum's press people tell us that nothing in the new galleries, which will open officially on April 20, is presently in dispute. (Unless you count the spectacular Etruscan bronze chariot that came to the Met in 1903, and that the little Italian town of Monteleone, where it was dug up, would like back. But that's a weak and outdated claim that even the Italian prosecutors are belittling — for now.) So, just for a moment, can we put aside the Mystery of the Purloined Prizes and talk about the art?
For today I just want to take note of one big improvement of the new galleries, which were designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, the same firm responsible for the Met's Temple of Dendur wing. The spectacular frescoed bedroom from a 1st centuryt B.C. villa at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, has been restored in a new, brighter and more accessible setting.
Bedroom Fresco from the Villa of P. Fannius Synnistor at Boscoreale, ca. 50-40 B.C./ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund
Even the Getty Villa, where I stopped in again a few weeks ago, has nothing to compare in the way of Roman painting, which had reached surprising levels of sophistication before its discoveries were lost to the Dark Ages. The trompe l'oeil shadows, the unsystematic but persuasive use of perspective, the rising escarpment of pavillions and temples with angled roofs that foreshadow the quattrocento -- it's art that has an intimacy you don't often associate with the antique world. And the new galleries should make the Boscoreale frescoes a real destination at the Met.
Bedroom Fresco from the Villa of P. Fannius Synnistor at Boscoreale, ca. 50-40 B.C./ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund
April 5, 2007 5:00
The Latest on Fisk and That O'Keeffe
Back to the drawing board. Tennessee Attorney General Bob Cooper has rejected the proposed deal between Fisk University in Nashville and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe that would have opened the way for the sale of the O'Keeffe painting Radiator Building. The deal would have allowed Fisk to sell the painting, part of the Stieglitz Collection bequeathed by O'Keeffe to the school in 1949 — but only if the financially strapped Fisk sold it to the O'Keeffe Museum for a very lowball $7 million. Otherwise the Museum would sue Fisk to block sale to any other party, which it says is a violation of the terms of O'Keefe's bequest to the school. The deal also would have permitted Fisk to sell another canvas from the collection, a Marsden Hartley, on the open market.
The A-G rejected the deal because of the plain distance between what the O'Keeffe Museum would pay for the painting and its presumed market value. A press release from the A-G's office discloses that Fisk has been offered as much as $25 million for the painting from other individuals and institutions.
What's next? O'Keeffe Museum President Saul Cohen told me yesterday, before Cooper's office issued his decision, that if the deal was rejected the Museum would seek to pursue its suit. But when I spoke earlier today with Fisk President Hazel O'Leary, shortly after the A-G's decision was announced, she told me that lawyers for Fisk and the O'Keeffe Museum will meet in conference in late April with the Chancery Court judge hearing the O'Keeffe Museum suit to see if a deal can be reached.
One solution that the A-G's office hints at. Keep the O'Keeffe at Fisk but sell the Hartley on the open market, where it, too, would fetch millions, though nothing like what the O'Keeffe would go for. Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale Art Gallery, who curated a show some years ago of art treasures from historically black colleges — Fisk is one — suggested another idea to me today for how Fisk could capitalize on the Stieglitz collection without dismantling it. Why not seek a partnership deal with a wealthy museum — like maybe Alice Walton's forthcoming Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark. — that might bring revenue to Fisk and still permit the collection to return to the campus every other year or so?
At the very least, the rejection of the O'Keeffe Museum deal means there's time now for some, as we say in the artworld, creative thinking.
April 5, 2007 11:43
Department of Declarification
The convoluted case of Alex Matter and the maybe/maybe not Pollock drip paintings took a few more turns in the last 24 hours. Matter is the film maker who discovered a cache of what he believes are Pollock drip paintings two years ago. (His father was a friend of Pollock's.) As I pointed out here, two days ago the New York Times reported that Matter had apparently sold some of the disputed paintings to a New York dealer, Ronald Feldman.
Then yesterday the Boston Globe reported that Matter denied having sold the works. But that was merely yesterday's news. Today the Globe's Geoff Edgers, who wrote yesterday's story, reports on his blog that Matter has now changed his story and told Edgers that he did indeed make an oral agreement to sell or share ownership of some of the paintings with Feldman.
So the Pollocks, which may not be Pollocks, were sold, or maybe not sold, then sold, sort of.
Got that?
April 4, 2007 12:29
There Goes the Neighborhood
Threat to Western Civilization Alert — The Art Newspaper reports this morning that Elton John plans an outdoor concert in St. Mark's Square in Venice. Though John's people are assuring the city that crowd control measures will prevent anything like the mob scene that accompanied a Pink Floyd concert there in 1989, local and international Venice-preservation groups are aghast at the prospect of thousands swarming the Square. Those would probably be the same creaking baby boomers who swarm it every year all during high season.
But wait. Worse still, the concerts are scheduled for June 5 and 6, creating the potential that the Elton John fans in their vast numbers will inconvenience the squadrons of art critics and other media types who will already be thronging the city that week for the press preview days of the Venice Biennale. Now this is getting personal.
Be afraid Elton. Those Venetians — and us art critics — know something about how the gods deal with presumptuous musicians.
April 3, 2007 12:09
Pollocks -- Or Maybe Just "Pollocks" -- for Sale?
Curiouser and Curiouser. The New York Times reports today that Alex Matter, who announced two years ago that he had found a previously unknown horde of small Jackson Pollock drip paintings, has quietly sold some of them to the New York gallery owner Ronald Feldman. The Times says Feldman bought some entirely and holds others jointly with Matter. Feldman would not comment on the paintings and the Times adds that it's still unknown whether he's resold any of them.
This is quite a surprise, since it was just last January that the art museums of Harvard University, which had conducted chemical analysis of several of the works, issued a report concluding that at least some of them contained pigments that weren't available commercially until years after Pollock's death in 1956. As the Times story notes, both Matter and Ellen Landau, a prominent Pollock scholar who supports Matter's claims, have issues with that study. Which is why another part of the story — much of which was provided to the Times by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, guardians of the Pollock flame who are sceptical that the Matter Pollocks are genuine — is especially interesting.
Recently the [Pollock-Krasner] foundation learned that Mr. Matter had commissioned a forensic scientist, James Martin, in Williamstown, Mass., to conduct an extensive chemical analysis of many more of the paintings. But Mr. Martin has yet to release the results of the study, completed last fall. In a February article about the paintings in The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Mr. Martin said he had decided not to release the results after being threatened with legal action by Mr. Matter’s lawyer, [Jeremy] Epstein.
The Times duly reports that Epstein denies having threatened Martin with legal action, though he acknowledged to the Times "that he had told Mr. Martin he was not authorized to release the report because Mr. Matter did not feel that it was complete."
So when — if ever — will we see it?
Meanwhile, whether the news that Feldman has bought some of the paintings means that he knows something we don't, or merely that the art market has become even more irrational than usual, is a question I won't try to answer here. But it will be interesting to see how much of the detail of the whole strange episode will be reflected in the wall texts of the upcoming exhibition — guest curated by Matter's ally, the Pollock scholar Landau — that will put 25 of the purported Pollocks up on the walls of the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College in September. What I'll be particularly interested to see is how much the McMullen will let visitors know about the controversy around Martin's strangely delayed report. And, presuming that the Times story is correct, whether the Museum will also let visitors in on the news — in the wall texts, not just buried in the catalogue -- that many of the works are now owned by a dealer, with its important implication that there is now real financial incentive, at least for some people, to legitimize the Matter discoveries as Pollocks.
Like I said. Curiouser and curiouser.
April 2, 2007 4:20
Howard's End
I ordinarily wouldn't report on an exhibition that has just closed, but it wasn't until last Friday, its final day, that I was able to get up to New Haven to see the show at the Yale Center for British Art of Howard Hodgkin's work since 1992. It was predictably captivating, and I can't resist putting out a few thoughts. (And if you happen to be in the U.K. later this year, it will be migrating shortly to the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.)
Torso/Howard Hodgkin, 2000 -- The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Purchase, the Drier Fund for Acquisitions in Memory of Robert Cafritz--
Hodgkin is everybody's favorite voluptuary, their exemplar of the pleasure principle in pigment. More than any other contemporary artist, even a color field painter like Ellsworth Kelly, he built upon the working idea of Matisse, that color can operate in a painting not just as sensation, but as meaning and even form. Then from Vuillard and Bonnard (and from Indian painted miniatures) he took the idea of the canvas as a bristling, enclosed world. The sense of feeling under pressure in Vuillard's flickering scenes of domestic life, or in Bonnard's radioactive afternoons at home, were forebears of Hodgkin's passions recollected within a frame while spilling over the edges.
But there's another crucial forebear, the flagrant brush work of the Abstract Expressionists. What I was reminded of by the Yale show is how much the success of Hodgkin's work depends on the way he manages to get his semi-abstract brushwork to linger just so at the threshold of representation. Those big turbulent strokes, like the arching green and blue-black flourishes in Torso, signify as both anatomical forms — not just as torsos in that one but maybe also as tongues and other body parts too — and as explosions of direct feeling, with color and brushwork fused to the same purpose. Of course this is what AbEx painters did all the time, launched pigment in bravura ejaculations, but they didn't generally also get — or want — their brushwork to suggest clear equivalents in the visible world, to be a flourish that was also a curtain or a stem or a table or a tree.
You will never "decipher" a Hodgkin. There's only so far you can go, or should want to go, in finding the table or the tree. (If it's there at all, or as anything more than the faintest residue of a remembered form.) But those bright compartments of feeling under pressure speak for themselves. You don't need to decipher them to get them. Or for them to get you.
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
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