March 31, 2008 12:22
Jean Nouvel Gets the Pritzker
Jean Nouvel /Photo: JEAN AYISSI — AFP — GETTY
On Sunday the Pritzker Foundation announced that Jean Nouvel was this year's winner of the Pritzker Prize, the knighthood of architecture. Here's a link to the piece I posted on Time.com when the announcement was made. And here's a link to a slide show we put up yesterday of his work, including the hilariously phallic Torre Agbar in Barcelona, here:
Torre Agbar, Jean Nouvel /Photo: THOMAS MAYER
Nouvel is an interesting man. Like a lot of architects he insists that his buildings must speak to the demands of their immediate surroundings. But for him this is not the same thing as room-temperature contextualism, the practice of matching a building just so to the ones around it. It has to do with reading the setting at a deeper level and finding equivalents in a new language, but not a language so new that you can't draw a connection between past and present. You can actually analyze a Nouvel building and find the correlatives between what was there before he arrived and what he did on the site.
Which I try to explain in this piece from my encounter with Nouvel two years ago in Minneapolis.
March 28, 2008 10:55
More Talk With: Michael Conforti
Let's finish that conversation with Michael Conforti, director of the Clark in Williamstown. Ma. He's also upcoming president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, so in this part we talk about some issues affecting museums generally.
LACAYO: As everybody knows, Italy's been reclaiming antiquities from American museums that were looted from archeological digs. So museums are taking more seriously the cultural property laws of other nations. But we also want museums that can show people what other cultures have created. Are there arrangements that could protect archeological sites but still supply museums with works?
CONFORTI: We need to figure out a way to enhance loans. We had a Clark Forum two years ago called "Art for Hire" that was about the whole issue of sharing and whether it can ever be about money. That was about the time of Louvre-Atlanta. [Lacayo: This is the agreement by the Louvre to send several hundred works on loan over a three-year period to the Atlanta High Museum in exchange for a payment of $6.4 million.] I don't see money in entirely negative terms if it serves the purposes of the institutions involved. There's more and more conversation about this. Neil MacGregor and I are doing a Salzburg Global Seminar in May, inviting colleagues and thinkers and ministry people from around the world on the question of how to effect a more positive environment for loans.
LACAYO: Last fall you organized a one-day conference at the American Academy in Rome of American museum people and Italians to discuss relations in the aftermath of the Italian campaign to reclaim antiquities.
CONFORTI: I wanted to join with the Academy in trying to improve Italian-American relations in the cultural sphere, because relations had so deteriorated. We could talk about that conference as the beginning of turning the corner. We came up with a list of eight things to work on. One is the establishment of an office in the Italian Culture Ministry which would oversee which objects are coming into Italy on loan and which are going out to the U.S. Because Italians borrow a great deal from American museums. The Italian public has gotten more interested in art [from other nations] that they can't see in Italy. But if you're sitting in an office in the Uffizi you don't know that there are fifteen loan requests to the U.S. from modest scale Italian museums. So we wanted an awareness of the number of American institutions that lend to Italy and a sense of responsibility on the Italian side to lend back.
LACAYO: What else did you discuss?
CONFORTI: We talked about the possibility of joint archeological excavations with the potential that partage might be re-instituted — in the form of long term loans, title would not be shared. [Lacayo: Partage is the practice of sharing archeological finds between source nations and the foreign museums or universities that sponsor the digs.]
LACAYO: You talked before about the exchange of money for loans, what some people call renting out the collection.
CONFORTI: We're seeing experiments in which money is exchanged in return for objects being leant for longer periods of time. You could have objects going to institutions for twenty or thirty years, at which point the loan could be renegotiated or the objects could go back. The exhibition market place is taking care of this already, with arrangements like Louvre-Abu Dhabi. [This is the $760 million agreement by the Louvre to establish a satellite museum in Abu Dhabi.] And there are more modest ideas too, like the proposal by Alice Walton to share art with Fisk University. If you begin to think of a world like that, and treat it positively, then we're talking great things.
LACAYO: But for you new loan arrangements of whatever kind are the main answer.
CONFORTI: It isn't just about loans. There also needs to be established a "licit" market in works of art, including antiquities, in those countries that currently ban it. That's clearly what's encouraging so much illicit excavation. The source countries have a responsibility to establish some way that they can endorse a licit market. And that's a process that we would like to be part of at the Association of Art Museum Directors. We see traditional acquisitions as part of the future of museums as well.
March 26, 2008 5:06
Drawing the Line
Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery in London, is getting awfully fastidious. In January he let it be known that he really doesn't think his museum should be doing big blockbuster loan shows when it's more important to focus on scholarly exhibitions that draw attention to neglected corners of art history. Now he's announced that the National will also resume treating 1900 as a cut off year for the art it exhibits, a practice that Penny's predecessor Charles Saumarez Smith had moved away from.
I'm not much interested in the fuss over whether encyclopedic museums are sufficiently on top of contemporary art. That's not their primary mission. I'm more concerned about how they superintend the past. But Penny is going overboard. Art of the 20th century, certainly at least the first half, is the past, a period that's pretty well sorted out and that benefits from being seen in the context of what came before. I'm thinking of something I came across at the National last October. Curators had placed two new sculptures by Yinka Shonibare, the London-based Nigerian artist, in the circular gallery where two of their great 18th century portraits ordinarily hang, Reynolds' Portrait of Colonel Tarleton...
Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton, Joshua Reynolds /Photos: NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
....and Johann's Zoffany's dour looking Mrs. Oswald.
Portrait of Mrs. Oswald, Johann Zoffany, 1763-64
The two Shonibares faced each other across the circular gallery as a single work, Colonel Tarleton and Mrs. Oswald, Shooting, typical Shonibare figures, headless and in 18th-century dress made from contemporary prints.
One half of Colonel Tarleton and Mrs. Oswald, Shooting, Yinka Shonibare, 2007
They were present there among the gentry to point up the fact that Reynolds' gallant Colonel was actually a notorious figure in the British slave trade, the son of a slaver and the implacable enemy of British abolitionists. (And before that the "Bloody Ban" responsible for a massacre of American troops during the Revolutionary War.) The quality of the painting in no way rests on the virtues of the man, but it was interesting to find out just who this noble character actually was, and the Shonibares were energized by the chance to engage in, ahem, a dialogue, with this dubious gentleman.
Another Reynolds, his great portrait of Captain Robert Orme, was also in the gallery to witness the Shonibare-slaver face off. Whenever I'm in London I always pay him a visit, but this time I remembered that while he's in a magnificent portrait, he was actually a bit of a dolt, the man partly responsible for the defeat of the British and American soldiers by a much smaller force of French and Indians at the Battle of Monongahela
Captain Robert Orme, Joshua Reynolds, 1756
My point isn't that contemporary art has to be brought in to fill in the historical record on older works. But that's one way to do it and it stayed with me. It can be done on more purely formal grounds. Morris Louis needs to be seen from time to time with 19th century American Luminist painting, R. B. Kitaj within the long tradition of history painting, Francis Bacon with Velazquez. And although I think David Hockney's huge new canvas Bigger Trees Near Warter, which he just decided to present as a gift to Tate Britain, will look fine there, it would be even more interesting to see it set among the Hobbemas, Van Ruisdaels and Corots at the National.
UPDATE: I originally managed to mangle the spelling of Shonibare's name three times out of four in that post. All fixed now. Sorry Yinka.
March 25, 2008 9:08
Gehry Keeps Going
Serpentine Pavilion, Frank Gehry, 2008 /Photo: GEHRY PARTNERS LLP
Every year London's Serpentine Gallery sponsors a temporary summer pavilion designed by a major artist or architect. It frequently turns out to be an experimental space that gives clues as to where that designer is really going. When Toyo Ito, the Japanese architect I just posted about yesterday, did the pavilion in 2002, it aired ideas you would find in his Tod store in Tokyo two years later.
Serpentine Pavilion, Toyo Ito, 2002 / Photo: DEBORAH BULLEN
And Daniel Libeskind's pavilion in 2001 was an exercise in fractal geometry that found its way into a private home he did later. (We're talking brave client here.)
Serpentine Pavilion, Daniel Libeskind, 2001 /Photo: HELENE BINET
This year the pavilion will be Frank Gehry's. The design was unveiled this week.
Serpentine Pavilion, Frank Gehry, 2008 / Photo: GEHRY PARTNERS LLP
Where's he going now?
March 25, 2008 10:25
Ito Gets to Go to Berkeley
Rendering of Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Toyo Ito, 2008 / Image: UC BERKELEY
I sat down last week with Julia White, senior curator for Asian art at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. We talked about a few things, including Berkeley's upcoming show called Mahjong, a selection of contemporary Chinese art from the collection of Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to Beijing. We also got into the new building that the Japanese architect Toyo Ito has designed for her museum and the Pacific Film Archive. He was announced as the architect last September but the first images of his proposal, at least that I'm aware of, appeared last week.
In the competition for the Berkeley Museum, Ito was picked over a field that also included Tadao Ando, SANAA, Brad Cloepfil's firm and Kengo Kuma, another Japanese architect who I don't think has worked in the U.S. before. I've wondered for years when Ito, who has a high profile in Japan, was going to make his way across the Pacific. When I saw it a few years ago, his Tod's store on the Omotesando, Tokyo's high end shopping boulevard, was much more appealing to me than Herzog & de Meuron's famous Prada store a few blocks away. It was some of the most enjoyable structural concrete I'd ever seen. (Now there's an odd sentence. The unmistakable tone of the true architecture nerd.) Anyway, it made the rest of that would-be sophisticated street look strictly dressed for business.
Tod's Omotesando, Toyo Ito, 2004 /Photo: HIRO SAKAGUCHI
March 24, 2008 2:47
The Barnes Battle Rumbles On
Lawyers for both sides were back in court today in the fight to keep the Barnes Foundation from moving to Philadelphia from its home in Merion, Pa. Opponents of the move are hoping to persuade Judge Stanley Ott, who ruled four years ago to allow the move, that new developments justify new hearings on the matter.
The argument for moving the Barnes collection to a new, as yet unbuilt home in Philadelphia is that it's the only way to rescue the place from insolvency. But opponents of the move can now point to an offer from Montgomery County to purchase the Barnes land (as well as its KerFeal estate located elsewhere) for $50 million, then lease it back to the Barnes. That would provide the Barnes with a lot of badly needed operating cash. The Lower Merion township also agreed last summer to amend its zoning laws to permit more visitors to come to the Barnes, which would also mean more revenue.
But the Associated Press reports this today from the courtroom:
Attorneys for the foundation and the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office, which has jurisdiction over the executors of wills, told Ott the county's financial proposal is far from guaranteed and the opponents' ideas are too little, too late."They come in here at the 13th hour, asserting pie-in-the-sky schemes ... that would not withstand any scrutiny," said Senior Deputy Attorney General Lawrence Barth. "Enough is enough."
Ralph Wellington, an attorney for the foundation, said the $50 million arrangement proposes that the Barnes invest the money in high-yield investments and pay back the loan with interest.
"What if the investments were unsuccessful, given the current climate? What charity could responsibly take such a risk?" he asked the judge. "This proposal does nothing other than expose the Barnes Foundation to financial ruin."
As expected, Ott did not issue his ruling today. Whatever it turns out to be, my view of the matter is one I set down in a post last March. It hasn't changed.
It simply will not be possible to "recreate" the Barnes in a much larger new building on Ben Franklin Parkway, any more than the Dulwich Picture Gallery outside London could be stuffed into the Great Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. In an era of big box museums, the Barnes is the ultimate jewel box. The financial problems of the Foundation are real, but the snatch-and-grab solution of relocating the collection to Philadelphia is no solution at all. It isn't salvation. It isn't even euthanasia. It's death by disembowelment.
March 24, 2008 9:19
Getting Plastered
Frieze Gallery, New Acropolis Museum, October 2007 / Photo: RICHARD LACAYO
I was in Athens last October to get an early look at the New Acropolis Museum, which opens this fall. As you probably know, its chief purpose will be to display the surviving Parthenon marbles, roughly half of which are in Greece. The other half, the Elgin Marbles, are in London at the British Museum, and the Greeks, as you definitely know, want those back.
Last fall the organizers of the museum had an ingenious plan for displaying the Parthenon frieze, which is the scene of the Panathenaic procession that once wrapped around the perimeter of the temple. They would place the portions still in Greece beside plaster copies of the panels in London, but the plaster copies would be covered with a thin fabric scrim. That way it would be possible to suggest how the reunited marbles would appear if only the Brits would give back the Elgins. But the scrims would make it clear that visitors shouldn't mistake the the copies for real marbles.
(By the way, in the picture above the thing leaning against that column is a blown-up photograph of a metope, not a panel from the frieze. But in the background you can see a couple of frieze panels inserted into one of the walls that will eventually hold all of them.)
Now it appears the museum organizers have changed their minds, and in the wrong direction. Blogger Lee Rosenbaum, who's just back from Athens, says the new plan is to display the plaster copies without the scrims. The idea is that visitors will still understand that the plaster panels are modern replicas, because they're whiter than the original, honey-colored marbles. Maybe so, but this sounds to me a little too much like the now discredited practice of attaching new additions to replace missing parts on fragmentary classical statuary. Actually, I think the word for it is....kitsch.
Rosenbaum's blogpost is here. My take on the museum from last fall is here.
March 20, 2008 1:56
Guest Blog: C-Monster Sees the Art-Shrink
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Bert Rodriguez’s therapy cube at the Whitney Biennial/ All Photos: C-MONSTER
When I first heard that part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial would consist of "events" at the Park Avenue Armory that aren't usually thought of as art, I wondered how I might cover one or two. But which one. The 24-hour dance marathon? Too tiring. The gypsy feast? Too fattening. The tequila bar? Too much....tequilla.
Then I learned that my distinguished blogging colleague C-Monster had scored one of the limited number of appointments for one of the most curious undertakings of the whole Biennial, the Bert Rodriguez "therapy sessions". Lightbulb! Have her go to her appointment, I decided, and then write about it. And since Rodriguez isn't actually a therapist, there wouldn't be any of that inconvenient doctor-patient confidentiality stuff to worry about.
So here it is, C-Monster's daring inside account of the talking-as-art experience.
I somehow managed to finagle one of the few coveted spots for a “therapy” session at the Whitney Biennial with Miami artist Bert Rodriguez. (The piece is officially titled In the Beginning…) Inside a furnished, white-walled cube, Rodriguez has been conducting hour-long therapy appointments with “patients”. (i.e. volunteers) Those are transmitted, with ample distortion, into the gallery space outside. To anyone outside, the broadcasts sound sort of like the mumbles that Charlie Brown hears when the grown-ups are talking.
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If only I’d had a big Sharpie — in the waiting area outside the cube was a table of blank magazines
I’ve never been to therapy in my life. But seeing as the session was free and I’m seriously lacking in health insurance, I figured it couldn’t hurt. That was until I sat in the waiting area, wondering what I was gonna talk to Rodriguez about for a whole hour. My parents love me and I’m happily married. So I focused my thoughts on all of the things that make me apprehensive—art, war, my perennial lack of funds. In the process, I became increasingly anxious. (Is this what therapy does to people?) By the time Rodriguez opened the door, I was ready to talk.
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“When is this crazy lady gonna stop talking?” No doubt what the kindly Rodriguez was thinking around minute 58 of our session.
For our session, Rodriguez and I faced each other, Sopranos-style, over a round, low-lying table, box of Kleenex at the ready. He reminded me that he wasn’t a real therapist and told me I could talk about whatever topics I wanted. We chatted about blogging, iPhones, getting mugged on the No. 4 train and what it’s like to have a steady stream of New Yorkers come in and blab to you about their existence. (FYI: It’s exhausting.) But for most of the hour, we discussed art-induced agita—the twitchy, nervous condition that comes from poring through impenetrable museum catalogues and blustering exhibit reviews. I wanted to know why the art industry has this bizarre impulse to bury itself in fancy lingo. Rodriguez couldn’t provide firm answers, but we did come to the conclusion that it’s a way for people with expensive degrees to give themselves purpose, to tell us what we purportedly know.
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Biennial visitors desperately try to figure out what's going on inside the cube.
All the while, outside Rodriguez’s perfect white cube, passersby were straining to understand what was happening inside. People tapped and even slammed on the door in frustration. Rodriguez had had to install a lock early on in the process because a number of visitors were barging in (despite the sign on the door asking them not to do so). It was a perfect metaphor for the art industry. Inside, was a simple conversation between two people. Outside, with all the added layers, everything was distorted, incomprehensible and inaccessible. Just the way the art industry likes it.
March 19, 2008 7:33
A Talk With: Michael Conforti
Rendering of the Stone Hill Center at the Clark, Tadao Ando, 2008/Images: THE CLARK
I had lunch recently with Michael Conforti, director of the Clark in Williamstown, Mass., which most people know as the Clark Art Institute. (They're re-branding.) We talked about the Clark's ongoing expansion, which includes the almost complete Stone Hill Center, devoted mostly to conservation activities, designed by Tadao Ando. Later this year Conforti also becomes president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, so we also got into some larger questions about museum practices these days. As usual I'll split this into two parts.
LACAYO: I used to spend weekends not far from the Clark and whenever I took friends there they were always surprised by the quality of your collection, and not just the Impressionists. Who knew there was a Piero della Francesca in the Berkshires?
CONFORTI: It always comes as a shock. There was also always embedded in the Clark that we were more than just an art museum. [As director] I chose to turn the heat up on the research and academic side. There are now conferences there, the Berkshire Conference, as well as the Clark Forum here in New York. We bring in scholars from all over the world to be in Williamstown for anywhere from a month to a year.
LACAYO: How does the Ando addition fit in to what you do?
CONFORTI: The Ando addition comes because there was an expansion of program. Not so much because we attract enormous crowds, though we do bring in a couple of hundred thousand people a year to a town of 8000. But we needed a new conservation center, more space for our conferences, proper temporary exhibition space.
LACAYO: Why did you put the first of the new buildings at a distance from the old Clark? You have to climb a winding path to get to it, though of course that's typical of Japanese architecture.
CONFORTI: We're in an extraordinary natural environment, 140 acres, amazing views of the Berkshires. But our public didn't actually visit our 140 acres. So in the master plan that was done by Cooper-Robertson they began to think about how we could encourage people to move around that site. So they placed this building on a site overlooking a great view of the Berkshires. That's the building Ando has designed that will open June 22 and be home to the Williamstown Conservation Center.
LACAYO: And then there's another one to come?
CONFORTI: The second building will begin in 2010. It's also an Ando project with temporary exhibition space, retail/cafe space and conference rooms. Annabelle Selldorf, the New York architect, is also doing a renovation of our 1955 building. And around that there will be a garden environment that Ando is working on with our landscape architect Reed Hilderbrand. When you come to the Clark in 2013, when it will all be finished, you'll arrive in a different location. And you'll go into a different building, an Ando building as you enter. And you'll have an opportunity to go up the hill to another set of galleries.
LACAYO: Did you do have to do a capital campaign to pay for all this?
CONFORTI We're in the process of that. We've raised over $80 million already in an unannounced capital campaign. We'll be announcing it in a few months. We announced the first portion of the effort, which was to raise $15 million to build the Stone Hill Center, and we've exceeded that. We're fortunate in that one of the largest gifts ever made to an American museum was made to us last year. Forty million dollars in art and $50 million to support of our research and academic activities from the Manton Foundation.
Rendering of The Stone Hill Center
At his blog The Modernist, Ed Lifson has a photo tour of Ando's still not quite complete building, which Lifson trekked to in February.
March 19, 2008 9:38
Keep Your Eye On the Ball
Proposal for Waterfront City, OMA, 2008/ Image: OMA
Earlier this month the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Rem Koolhaas firm, unveiled plans for Waterfront City, an instant city to be built on an artificial island off the coast of Dubai. The focal point was a 44-story spherical building. At first sight it was a bit startling, which is no doubt what it was intended to be, in Rem's best "Yes, It's True, I Am the Man of the Future" manner. But then you remember how long this idea has been gestating, and not just at Rem's office.
Five years ago, UN Studio and Gregg Lynn's outfit Form, were moving in that direction with their unbuilt proposal for a European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt.
Proposal for European Central Bank, UNStudio-Form, 2003 / Image: UNStudio
And of course there was an inkling of the same idea in James Polshek's design for the Rose Center for Earth and Space, the planetarium at New York's Museum of Natural History.
Rose Center for Earth and Space, New York, Polshek Partners, 2000 /Photo: JEFF GOLDBERG/ESTO
And as Polshek acknowledged when the Rose Center was announced, all concepts for a spherical building hark back to Etienne-Louis Boullee's great 1784 conception for a 500 ft. tall cenotaph for Isaac Newton.
Proposal for Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, Etienne-Louis Boullee, 1784/ Image: WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
Boulllee of course intended the sphere as a perfect symbol for reason itself, the epitome of Enlightenment design. Bur we have mixed feelings about reason these days. (Didn't technology bring us global warming and the bomb?) Also about cities and modernity in general. Maybe that's why Rem's ball, with its hint of an all seeing eye, has a slightly sinister cast.
Or maybe it's because it looks too much like this precursor.
A nod to Sean Dodson at The Guardian for making the Darth Vader connection.
March 16, 2008 3:12
Dejeuner sur l'herbe
At the Glass House — 3/14/08/ PHOTO: Richard LacayoOkay, that lunch I took part in last week at the Philip Johnson Glass House wasn't actually served on the grass, but from certain angles it looked that way. The conversation — ten people sitting around a table to talk about the problems of civic planning and architecture in New York and elsewhere — will eventually be published in some form by the organizers, so I won't try to summarize it here. But one big theme of the day was a shared frustration about the process of public input into large building projects. There was an easy consensus around the table that things like height, density, impact on traffic and the environment, are plainly matters of community interest. But that leaves open the question of how to determine just what "the community" actually wants, how long the process should go on and whether the public should have a say on aspects of the design that don't touch on those quality of life issues, meaning all of the other things that go under the heading "the architecture".
I've been thinking about all this lately because the new Terminal Five at London's Heathrow Airport will be opening next week, one of those muscular-elegant high tech facilities from the firm of Richard Rogers. I had a chance to preview it when I was in London last fall. Before work could begin the whole thing was famously subjected to the longest period of public review — four years — in British history. That's about the time it took for the new Terminal Three at Beijing Airport, one of those muscular-elegant facilities from the office of Norman Foster, to go from conception to ribbon cutting. Then again, in China they don't have to deal with inconveniences like community boards, court challenges and meaningful environmental reviews.
The relative ease of getting big projects through in places not burdened by democracy explains the willingness — hell, the eagerness — of major architects to work for regimes that don't pass the smell test. Think of Rem Koolhaas (and everybody else) in China, Foster in Russia, Zaha Hadid in Azerbaijan. And it's no surprise that lately we're seeing a reappraisal of Robert Moses, the 20th century "power broker" who forced through some of New York's biggest public projects. (Old take on Moses — municipal autocrat and destroyer of neighborhoods. New take — hey, he got things done.) Even if this strikes me as no surprise, I'd rather not see autocracy become the Next Great Idea. At lunch last week we certainly didn't come up with the perfect compromise between the Endless Review Process and the Maximum Leader. But we got what you might call the parameters of the problem (literally) on the table.
At the Glass House - 3/14/08PHOTO: Drew Harty
March 14, 2008 8:45
The Whitney Biennial Perennial
I'm still occupied at the Philip Johnson Glass House symposium. More on that later. But meanwhile my take on the new Whitney Biennial just happens to be in the new issue of Time. And here on Time.com there's a video download, narrated by yours truly, that looks at a few works in the show.
March 13, 2008 9:22
People Who Talk in Glass Houses
The Glass House / PHOTO: EIRIK JOHNSON
Today and Friday I'll be on the road. I've been invited to join a symposium that's part of a new series called the Glass House Conversations. These are two-day events sponsored by the Philip Johnson Glass House n New Canaan, Conn., which is owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The organizers invite ten people to sit around at lunch in the Glass House to discuss a topic in some area that fascinated Johnson. (Yeah, I know — art critic; it's a tough job.) If the weather is clear we may also be learning first hand how he dealt with the problem of shifting sunlight pouring through the glass walls in a house where the only enclosed space is the bathroom. I'll let you know if that's where they serve dessert.
But first we assemble today at Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate on the Hudson, where I'm guessing dessert is never served in the bathroom. (Though as I recall, during the design phase John D. Rockefeller was also preoccupied with how sunlight would enter his new house at different times of day, and mapped out the sun's path for his architects like he was Copernicus.) After a sleepover at Kykuit — is this why they call bloggers the pajamas media? — we reassemble on Friday at the Glass House compound, which I wrote about here and here when it was about to open to the public last spring. Our topic will be "Design and Civic Leadership" in the New York area, which I suppose is a way of framing the question of how do you get unruly New York, with its multitude of stakeholders and power players, to resist the eternal — meaning always economical — temptation of mediocrity? (Note to self: unruly is good; unruly is what we like about the place.)
I'll post again tomorrow, and more when I get back in harness next Monday. Meanwhile, here's a great Ed Lifson visual rhyming post. Mr. Johnson, meet Mr. Hopper. (With or without Legos.)
March 11, 2008 10:24
A New Gauguin At The Getty
Decades ago the J. Paul Getty Museum, with its bulging endowment, was expected to bulldoze its way into the art market and buy every good thing that came up for sale. If only. All these years later the Getty's paintings collection is still a patchwork affair. But on Tuesday the museum announced that it's purchased what looks like a really interesting Gauguin from the most important period of his career. Arii Matamoe is an 1892 canvas from Gauguin's first sojourn in the islands. From the image in the New York Times, it appears to be a picture that combines what was then recent Tahitian history with maybe a whiff of the Symbolist rupture with reality and even a prevision of Surrealism.
This is a canvas I really want to see.
March 11, 2008 8:37
More Talk With: The Curators of the Whitney Biennial
Let's finish up that conversation with Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Monin, the organizers of this year's Whitney Biennial.
LACAYO: Okay, what about the "social performance" activities over at the Park Avenue Armory, things like the dance marathon, the sleepover, the tequila bar. When did you begin to think this was an essential part of the Biennial?
HULDISCH: Early on we talked about how it would be important to show people that some artists might make video or photography but also carry out other activities that are deliberately ephemeral, "live in the moment" work, things not easily saleable or not saleable at all. We were struggling with how to integrate those into a Biennial, how to present them in an institutional setting without stripping them of the spirit in which they were conceived. At that point we were presented with the Armory.
MOMIN: Given the prevalence of this practice, and how important we felt it was, we needed to have it understood as equivalent to the other work artists were doing. And that was part of the appeal of having the Armory, where we could have everything in one space.
LACAYO: How do you make a distinction between a party that's just a party, and the 24-hour dance marathon like the one planned for the Armory by Agathe Snow, which is being presented as an artwork about endurance? How is one a party and the other an art form?
MOMIN: They can be both. It's supposed to be a fun event. But it's intended to help you think about things and experience them in a different way. It's about commitment, time, duration — things we've been talking about — within a framework that's pleasurable.
HULDISCH: We've been asked this question. Why is it art, it's just a party? Well, "A" — because these are some of our more conceptually grounded artists and projects, the ones resistant to conventional categorizations. In some ways it's the more difficult art. And yet it's being talked about as the fun component of the show — which is great, I don't mind that reversal at all. But on the second level, what art does is transform ordinary materials into something else. That's what those artists are doing. They're just using different kinds of materials.
March 10, 2008 10:03
Look Out Bellows
Men of the Docks, George Bellows, 1912/MAIER MUSEUM
A few months ago, writing about the prolonged battled over whether Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va. could sell some of the work from its Maier Museum, I said that the whole thing had turned into one of those movie serial cliffhangers, with regular new chapters in which one side or the other was holding on by its fingertips. This time it's opponents of the sale who went off the cliff, at least for now.
On Friday, they withdrew their suit to halt the sale of four paintings, including Men of the Docks by George Bellows, which the college had consigned for auction at Christie's last fall. (As I've said, a bad idea.) That sale was temporarily blocked by a Virginia judge. (A good idea.) But the judge also required the opponents to post a bond, eventually set at $1 million by an appeals court, to compensate Randolph if their suit failed. They never posted the full amount, and on Friday they dropped the suit. They're still pursuing a separate suit to undo the recent conversion of Randolph, formerly a woman's college, to a co-ed school. Their fallback position now is that their other suit will have the effect — if it's successful — of protecting all of the art in the Maier, not just the four paintings at issue in the suit they dropped. That's a big if. Christa Desrets of the Lynchburg News & Advance explains what happened Friday. Over on his Art Law Blog, Donn Zaretsky, who had been expecting something like this, diagrams the developments that led him to expect it.
Meanwhile, over Randolph, they must be nervously watching the air go out of the art market while their unsold paintings sit in storage, still tied to the railroad tracks while the train comes bearing down.
March 7, 2008 6:07
Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim
Inopportune: Stage One, Cai Guo-Qiang, 2004 /DAVID HELD -— GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION, N.Y.
Admit it, you've been longing to read just one more piece about the new Cai Guo-Qiang show. And wouldn't you know it, I just happen to have one in the new issue of Time.
March 7, 2008 8:09
Georgia on My Mind
Radiator Building, Night — New York, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1927 /ALFRED STIEGLITZ COLLECTION, FISK UNIVERSITY
It's (almost) happy ending time in the fight between Fisk University and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum over the Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Yesterday a Tennessee judge ruled that Fisk could keep the collection but could not sell any of it, as the struggling school had attempted to do. You can get the full story from Jonathan Marx in The Tennessean.
After the cash strapped Fisk attempted to sell paintings from the collection, which O'Keeffe had bequeathed to Fisk three years after Stieglitz's death in 1946, the Museum, which represents the O'Keeffe estate, went to court attempting to reclaim the entire collection on the grounds that Fisk had breached the terms of O'Keeffe's gift. In her decision, Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle agreed that Fisk had violated O'Keeffe's wishes but ruled that "the circumstances do not yet justify removing the Collection from Fisk."
But here's the catch. The judge also gave the school until Oct. 6 to renovate the Carl Van Vechten Gallery where the collection is usually displayed and return the collection to public view there — or forfeit it to the O'Keeffe Museum, which is in Santa Fe. Because of physical problems at the gallery, a converted 19th-century church that also once served as Fisk's gym, the Stieglitz Collection has been in storage since November 2005. Fisk's failure to exhibit the work for almost three years was one of the complaints brought by the O'Keeffe Museum.
There's plenty of blame to go around in this mess. Fisk should never have attempted to sell off part of its collection in the first place. That provided the opening for the O'Keeffe Museum to step in to block the sale, but then to make a cynical offer to drop its objections if Fisk would sell it the jewel in the crown of Fisk's collection, O'Keeffe's pivotal Radiator Building — Night, New York — for just $7 million, a fraction of what the painting would bring on the open market. The attorney general of Tennessee stepped in to block that deal for failing to serve the interests of the state's people.
Fisk isn't crying wolf about its finances. As a cost cutting measure last month the school dropped its entire intercollegiate athletic program. The judge's decision is still a good one. When the school gets back on its feet, it can restore its sports program. If the art were sold, it would be gone for good, a loss to both Fisk students and to the wider Nashville community that also gets to visit the collection — when it's on display. With a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the pledge of $2 million more if the school can raise $4 million by June 30, Fisk may be on the way to recovery. And when it gets there, it will still have a collection that should never have been put in play in the first place.
March 6, 2008 8:08
A Talk With: The Curators of the Whitney Biennial
It's here, the Whitney Biennial, the show that everybody loves to hate. It opens today at the Whitney Museum in New York. I sat down yesterday with Shamim M. Momin and Henriette Huldisch, the Whitney curators chiefly responsible for this year's edition. The new Biennial is unusual in that for three weeks part of it will spill over to the Park Avenue Armory, a Victorian brick pile a few blocks from the museum. The Armory is going to be given over largely to "social performance" activities, some of which verge into party territory — a dance marathon, a fully operating tequila bar and a mixed media installation that will remind a lot of people of the chill out room at a dance club.
Babylon Bar, Eduardo Sarabia, 2006/ PHOTO: Courtesy I-20, New York
Even granting the tradition of "social sculpture" dating back to Joseph Beuys in the '60s, these are doings that qualify as art only when you apply a very elastic definition of the term. (Except maybe that chill out room. I've been in a few over the years that have struck me as veritable Gestamtkunstwerks, if you know what I mean.) But Momin and Huldisch say that artists have been drawn so much lately to these mercurial group-interactions-as-artform that it's essential to include them in the Biennial.
I've also sometimes thought that partying is an art if you do it right, but that's not what they're getting at. As usual I'll split this conversation into a couple of posts.
LACAYO: You might say that you both took on the most thankless job in the world of art, curating a show that gets spanked by the critics almost every time. Did you ever think of just saying: "Lord, let this cup pass from my lips?"
HULDISCH: The fact that the Biennial tends to be controversial was sort of liberating to us. We felt that we just have to be sure that we do the exhibition that feels right, and we can't really worry about what the critical or public response is going to be. Because that will be what it is, regardless.
We also know that some of the Biennials that are now considered to be some of the most important ones gathered the most vicious reviews. The evaluation changes over time. So we both put it out of our heads as much as possible. The other thing that helps is that we have basically no time to do the show, so you just have to get to work.
LACAYO: When did you start working on it?
MOMIN: Last January.
LACAYO: But in a way you've always been working on it
MOMIN: That's right. This is what we do, so it's not like we're starting from scratch.
LACAYO: This Biennial doen't have an official theme, but one idea you develop in the catalogue is "lessness". So what is "lessness"?
HULDISCH: I'm using the word there to harness a number of ideas. One is a tendency towards non-spectable, non-monumentalism. I talk about three different directions. One is failure as a key motif. Another is an inclination to use modest, humble materials. And lastly there's this notion of people making smaller, more localized gestures that have an "in the moment" aspect.
LACAYO: Modest scale, scavenged materials, evanescent performances that disappear as soon as they're done — this is a place that the art world circles back to repeatedly, no? It did in the late '60s and '70s, when there was also a reaction against the power of the art market. Performance art came along as part of that. There was the Italian "Arte Povera" in the late '70s and '80s. And the catalogue for the '93 Biennial, after the Reagan-Bush years, talks about the prevalence of work that year that "deliberately renounces success and power in favor of the degraded and the dysfunctional."
MOMIN: Certainly the artworld, like most areas of culture, swings on a pendulum to some degree. We're not trying to say that these things have never been done before. But each time these tendencies are revisited they take on different forms, they have different inflections. And in this case it also seems to run very broadly across disciplines.
LACAYO: Did you find the same preoccupations being picked up by artists all over the country — in Chicago, in Miami?
MOMIN: It really seemed to run the gamut, across the board. They emerged in both the cities you mentioned and also in Los Angeles most strongly.
LACAYO: The Biennial is a survey of American art. How did you define American artists?
HULDISCH: Citizenship doesn't matter and hasn't for a long time. The idea of what is Ameriican art has changed a lot at this institution over the last 15 or 20 years. For a long time permanent residents and even people just living and working here have been included. And there have been instances like in 2002 when Christian Jankowski was in the Biennial. He was living in Berlin but had made an artwork dealing with American televangelism that was very resonant.
LACAYO: Every Whitney Biennial has a few older, late-career artists. I always wonder how they're chosen. How did you settle on the West Coast realist painter Robert Bechtle, who's in his mid seventies? There's very little painting in your show, and Bechtle works in the style that used to be called Photorealist, so he comes as a surprise.
Six Houses on Mound Street, Robert Bechtle, 2006 / PHOTO: Whitney Museum
HULDISCH: One of the reasons we were interested in Bechtle had to do with a particular chronicling of American terrain and American landscape in his work, which I think appears in a lot of the other works in the exhibition, in very different formal iterations. We thought it was an interesting opportunity to put Bechtle in a different context.
LACAYO: What about Sherrie Levine, who's 61, and who used to "appropriate" famous photographs, re-photographing them and exhibiting them as her own work as a way to question the idea of originality? She has two kinds of works in the Biennial. One is a suite of 18 pictures called Equivalents (After Alfred Stieglitz) that pixillates a group of the famous Stieglitz photographs of clouds so that each one reads as a blurry grid of black, grey and white squares.
MOMIN: I hate "neo" phrases, but there's a kind of neo-appropriation that's going on now and she's obviously very important to that.
March 5, 2008 8:41
Roiling Stones
Stonehenge/PHOTO: WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
While the threat of oil drilling in the vicinity of Spiral Jetty continues, it turns out that Stonehenge is also under siege. The British daily The Guardian has this about plans to build a giant merchandise warehouse nearby, with a whole lot more truck traffic down the highway nearby. This following a decision by the British government a few months ago not to enclose the highway under a tunnel.
So much for one of the most ancient of ancient monuments. As the Guardian critic Jonathan Jones says:
"Come to think of it, why don't we just get Banksy to decorate it?"
March 3, 2008 8:57
Helmut Newton, Mama's Boy
PHOTO: HELMUT NEWTON
I got a chance recently to preview five documentaries about photographers that are turning up this week on the Sundance Channel. Tonight's is Helmut Newton: My Life, about the world's canniest dirty old man. It combines archival imagery with video interviews with Newton in later life — he died four years ago — and scenes of him at work, including some of him shooting what looks like the world's naughtiest Volkswagen campaign. It's not a ground breaking doc, but it has its moments. Those are the ones when it offers a glimpse into the thinking of a man who always seemed like he must have been a charming conversationalist without always being a reliable narrator. As I don't need to tell you, charming and unreliable are just two peas in a pod.
Newton grew up in Germany as a Jew in the 1920s and '30s. In the year 2000 he had the great pleasure of seeing giant posters for one of his shows hung in Berlin's Zoo station, the same station he had departed from when he fled the country in 1938.
By the time he left Germany Newton was taking with him a fraught and complicated image bank in his head. Early on in this doc he says this:
Imagine a kid who's crazy about pictures and all he wants to do is look at pictures and all he sees are Nazi pictures...
And as we know, the ambiguous power poses of fascism, like the ones struck by Arno Brecker's self-dramatizing nudes, made their way into his teeming brain and eventually into his work.
Readiness, Arno Brecker, 1939 / Brecker Archive Dusseldorf
If Newton had merely adapted the hygienic models of fascist iconography into his later work, he'd be what, a European Bruce Weber? But it gets more complicated. Newton combined fascist imagery — and fashion imagery — with personal obsessions. Over the years he drifted from Germany to Singapore, from there to Australia, where he met his wife June, then to postwar, pre-swinging London, which he hated, and then in the late '50s to Paris, where he found his true home for 23 years at French Vogue. For years June also used to videotape Newton, footage which she put to use a few years ago in a documentary of her own, called Helmut by June, that turned up on television last year. It had one interesting insight into Newton's psyche that he doesn't share in the Sundance doc. I wrote about it in a post last April:
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.
That made me realize why there are times when Newton reminds me of....
...R. Crumb:
R. CRUMB, 1980
Post script — I also recommend keeping an eye out for William Eggleston in the Real World, which has its television premiere on Sundance on Wednesday. I caught it in its theatrical release a few years ago. It's a haunting portrait of a haunted man, making his art from the not very promising materials of the world as we know it.
March 3, 2008 7:54
Block That Blockbuster?
Nicholas Penny, the recently appointed director of the National Gallery in London, said last week that he wants his museum to move away from blockbuster exhibitions that bring in crowds, but at the cost of going back again and again to names we already know. He wants to focus on shows that bring to light neglected figures like the National Gallery's upcoming exhibition on the Italian Divisionists, 19th century painters who drew ideas from both Symbolism and Seurat, and passed along a more politicized art to the Futurists.
I sympathize — up to a point. Who doesn't wince at the annual surplus of shows that manage to work "Impressionism" into the title? (One of these days somebody's going to figure a way to get Monet and Vermeer on the same marquee, like one of those Billy Joel-Elton John concert tours. They'll have to fight the crowds off with a whip and a chair.) And who doesn't want more shows that point you back to some lesser known figure who turns out to be a find, like the one five years ago at the Neue Gallerie in New York that opened my eyes to the pitch perfect creepiness of the Weimar-era portraitist Christian Schad? But my mature unde