April 30, 2008 3:51
Before the Deluge
The New York City Waterfalls; Brooklyn Bridge Site (artist’s rendering), Eliasson, 2008 / Images: © OLAFUR ELIASSON, COURTESY PUBLIC ART FUND
As you may have heard, this summer and fall New York will be hosting a roughly four-month outdoor art installation by Olafur Eliasson called The New York City Waterfalls. Cascades will pour into the East River from the top of four scaffolding towers, one at each of four sites, each ranging from 90 to 120 feet high. The water will start flowing in late June, around the time that Eliasson's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 will be closing in New York before moving on to Dallas.
To get an idea of how the towers will work I hiked over to a press lunch yesterday with Eliasson that was sponsored by the Public Art Fund, which put this project in motion. From there we were bussed to the East River pier where one of the big faucets will spill. There we all duly admired the scaffolding and pump systems and glimpsed two other towers further down the riverfront, including the one that will pour water down from under the deck of the Brooklyn Bridge.
It was useful to see the workaday physical rigging for The Waterfalls before they get put into operation. Eliasson operates deliberately at a low level of illusion. He takes pains to make sure that you see the machinery behind his effects. This is what makes you smile when you come across his piece called Beauty. It consists of a floating, undulating rainbow effect produced by shining a light through a wall of mist. You could do it at home with a garden hose and a sunbeam. When you were nine years old you probably did. Eliasson attaches the illusion to a lesson about perception, making it not just beautiful but instructive. (That impulse to make beauty purposeful made me think of a line in Bjork song: How Scandinavian of me.) The lesson? Everyone who approaches that piece sees a different rainbow, depending on where they stand in relation to the water — Beauty is literally in the eye of the beholder.
Something similar will be true of the Waterfalls, once they're up and running. Just as with The Gates, the Christo/Jeanne-Claude project in Central Park three years ago, everyone will have a different experience of these things. Eliasson has been working with the Public Art Fund for more than two years to make this project happen. Inevitably you're reminded again of The Gates, another massive public and bureaucratic undertaking. New York's Mayor Bloomberg, who was crucial to making The Gates happen, has been supportive of this project, too, and the city of course is hoping for a tourism windfall of the kind it got with the Christo project.
I doubt it will be on anything like the same scale, partly because The Waterfalls won't be as easy to see. Thanks to a few centuries of lousy planning, the East River waterfront is not always easy to reach, though the Circle Line, the company that runs sight-seeing boats around Manhattan, will be doing special Waterfall cruises all around the four sites and there are stretches on both sides of the river that you can get to without difficulty.
So what will it be like when they turn the water on? To reach for a phrase that Olafur would understand — let's see.
The New York City Waterfalls; Pier 35 Site (artist’s rendering), Eliasson, 2008
April 29, 2008 5:14
Farewell, My Lovely
Antea, Parmigianino, ca. 1531-34. / Image: SOPRINTENDENZA SPECIALE per il POLO MUSIALE NAPOLETANO
It's been a rainy week of catch-up for me on shows about to leave Manhattan, so I jumped a cab over to the Frick yesterday to take a good long look at their one-painting loan show built around Antea. That's a portrait from the 1530s by Parmigianino of a delicately beautiful and elegantly dressed young woman. It heads back soon to the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples and friends were telling me not to miss it. I was also looking to get away from the stupid chatter about Miley Cyrus — Miley who? — and that picture of her by Annie Leibovitz. I figured this would be a good way to clear my head. But wait.
Three-quarter length Mannerist portraits, the good ones, are one of the most enjoyable contrivances of Western art. In the mid-16th century a few Italian painters, Bronzino, Pontormo and Parmigianino among them, hit on a way to present the figure poised just so between direct address to the viewer and elegant reserve. What they give you is the human being in full array, the utmost in lustrous mammals, but with something held back. Among many other things, the 20th-century notion of hauteur begins with them. Just think what they would have done with Charlotte Rampling.
The portait of Antea is one of those pictures, though it may not be a portrait in the sense we usually think of one. It's unknown whether she represents a real person. She was described by one contemporary as the artist's mistress and it's been conjectured that she might have been a well known Roman courtesan. Then again, she may simply be an idealized emblem of virtue. Or, even more interesting, an idealized version of a woman about to say yes. It all depends on how you read the signs.
What are those? Well, for one thing there's nothing blowsy about her. Her white apron is as stable as a fluted column. Her beautiful face is tentative. She's not some Venus on one of Titian's couches.
But in other ways she gives off a different message. The Frick tells us that much of what she's wearing would have been understood by her contemporaries as gifts from a lover, including the pearls that form a triangle around her head, a ring on her exposed hand, and the marten, that furpiece that ends with its head nipping at her hand on the left. (Whether there's a meaning in the way its teeth are so visibly bared is a mystery I won't pretend to solve.) Once you know that, it's hard not to notice that her necklace forms a vaginal delta that duplicates her cleavage. And that she fingers that triangle at the lower point. Her unoccupied right hand is gloved but on the hand that matters the gloves are off.
So what is she saying to us? Is she poised at some threshold between innocence and experience? If that's what it is, it's hard to think of another picture that so perfectly conveys that ambiguous moment, though it's a type of image that has a long pedigree in Western art. And then it occurred to me. I guess it isn't over yet.
April 28, 2008 5:08
Me, Myself and I
Self-Portrait With Pipe, Courbet, 1849 / Image: MUSEE FABRE, MONTPELLIER
The big Courbet show now in its last days at New York's Metropolitan Museum is a reminder that Cindy Sherman wasn't the first artist to get hooked on role playing. In a grand display of curatorial borrowing power, the Met show opens with a gallery containing about a dozen of the self-portraits Courbet produced in the early and mid-1840s.
The Man With the Leather Belt, Courbet, ca. 1845-46/ Image: MUSEE D'ORSAY, PARIS
Like most people who think about him at all, I think of Courbet as one of those swaggering, self-regarding artists, the prototype for Julian Schnabel, if Schnabel were a better painter. The kind you would expect to work, as Courbet did, with a palette knife, if not a trowel. His self portraits fit with that image. He was a young man in his twenties when he did them, the future arch-Realist still trailing the dreamy atmospheres of Romanticism. Even when he casts himself as meditative and inward-looking, his narcissism is the main note. You feel as though you're being invited to admire him as much as he admires himself.
Self-Portrait With Black Dog, Courbet, 1842 / Image: MUSEE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS
Naturally the self-portraits are also demonstrations of mastery. There are borrowings from Titian and Le Brun, from Italian Mannerist drawings or whatever other models he was looking to digest. All the while he tries on different roles — lover, musician, Bohemian — and always playing one role behind all the others, artist. In some, like Self-Portrait With Black Dog, he's plainly costumed as one, a young man just taking on the role he plans to inhabit for life.
The Wounded Man, Courbet, 1844-54/Image: MUSEE D'ORSAY, PARIS
He can be hilariously self-dramatizing. The Wounded Man is his famous representation of himself as just that, though the wound is romantic — the picture originally showed a woman lying against his chest. Ten years later, when the relationship had soured, he painted her out and added a patch of blood where she had been. And then there's his portrait of himself as The Desperate Man, a painting that no doubt grows out of the 19th-century fascination with physiognomy, but that looks to me like the picture of a guy who can't get enough of himself, even in extremis.
Self-Portrait (The Desperate Man), Courbet, 1844-45/ Image: COURTESY CONSEIL INVESTISSEMENT ART, BNP PARIBAS
April 25, 2008 5:30
Talking About: Spanish Painting
Ronni Baer co-curated "El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III", the new show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A few weeks ago we sat down to talk about what she wanted that show to accomplish.
LACAYO: Art historians usually treat the reign of Philip III as a kind of so-so interregnum between his father Philip II, who was a major collector and Titian's great patron, and his son Philip IV, who had Velazquez as his court painter. What made you decide to take a new look at Philip III's overlooked era?
BAER: Sarah Schroth [who co-curated this show] is an old friend of mine from grad school. She had found the inventories of the Duke of Lerma. [Lacayo: Lerma was Philip III's chief adviser and one of the biggest collectors in early 17th century Europe.] Sarah wanted to do a show about them. At the same time, when I first came to the MFA as a curator there was talk of doing a Spanish show. We have two great paintings here in Boston that bookend Philip's era — the El Greco portrait of Fray Hortensio...
Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino, El Greco, 1609 /Image: MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
....and the Velazquez portrait of Luis de Gongara.
Luis de Gongora y Argote, Velazquez, 1622 /Image: MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
When I was a student of art history I used to wonder "How did we ever get from El Greco to Velazquez? Philip III's reign was only 23 years, but what a huge change." For me what was interesting was that there were artists people have never heard of who help explain the changes during that period.
LACAYO: One thing that's surprising about Spanish art is that they developed a form of realism as powerful as anything the Dutch were doing, but they weren't a society that you would expect to do that. The Dutch were a Protestant middle class republic; it's no surprise that they create a market for scenes of ordinary people doing ordinary things. But Spain was a fairly rigid Catholic monarchy. The Spanish didn't produce a lot of household and tavern scenes the way the Dutch did, but they filled their religious pantings with recognizable humans. El Greco''s saints look like real people. And Velazquez started his career making kitchen scenes.
An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, Velazquez, 1618/ Image: THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF SCOTLAND
BAER: That's right. And the show is also about introducing artists who were doing that who were less well known than El Greco or Velazquez, like Juan Bautista Maino and Luis Tristan. Tristan's amalgam of Italy and Spain is very interesting.
Adoration of the Magi, Juan Bautista Maino, 1612/ Image: MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO, MADRID
LACAYO: But let's start with El Greco — what was it that turned him in the direction of bringing a more recognizable humanity into religious pictures?
BAER: His time in Italy, before he arrived in Spain. Going to Venice and seeing all that incredible Venetian painting. All of the Spanish painters of this era took a lot from Italian art, but from different artists. You can see Maino looking at Gentileschi. You can see El Greco looking at Tintoretto. They all looked at whatever struck their chord. And also Flanders was very important. The print trade was enormous, as well as the buying and selling of paintings.
LACAYO: I was interested in some of the first pictures you have in the show, the royal portraits like the one of a young Philip in dress armor by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. The representation of the body and the armor is very full and real, but the face is still very impassive and "official".
King Philip III of Spain, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, ca. 1601-1602 / Image: KUNSTHISTORICHES MUSEUM, VIENNA
BAER: That kind of work is coming out of a very long and established tradition. You have naturalistic shadow and modeling of the body, it's moving towards naturalism, but the top part, the face, isn't. It's not that the artists can't get there, but they purposely choose not to apply the skills of naturalism to the face, because the face is the way to remove the monarch from humanity. He's a quasi-divine figure. And then along comes Rubens, who's doing something very different. [Lacayo: Rubens visited Spain twice, and his very robust work made a deep impression there.] You can just imagine how much the Duke of Lerma wanted Rubens to paint him.
The Duke of Lerma, Rubens, ca. 1603/Image: MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO, MADRID
April 25, 2008 8:43
Thinking About The Gross Clinic
The Gross Clinic, Eakins, 1875 /Image: THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
They have finally tied up the last of the loose ends in the succession of deaccessions required to keep Thomas Eakins' mighty canvas The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia. This is a sale that's been wrapped into the larger uproar over schools like Fisk University and Randolph College that have been trying to sell off work from their campus collections. But it needs to be understood in a different framework.
First let's recap. In 2006 Thomas Jefferson University, a Philadelphia medical school that has owned The Gross Clinic since 1878, agreed to sell it for $68 million in a joint-purchase arrangement to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and to the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Waters for her upcoming Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. But Jefferson was persuaded to give Philadelphia institutions 45 days to match the price. Eventually the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts came forward with their own joint purchase offer. Jefferson accepted, and also gave the buyers additional time to come up with the full amount. (As a consolation prize, Jefferson eventually sold to Walton another Eakins, Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand, for a reported $20 million.)
To raise money for the deal the Academy quickly sold off a lesser but still considerable Eakins, The Cello Player, that it had owned since 1897. (We'll get back to this.) Then came the news of earlier this week, when the Philadelphia Museum announced that, to raise the remainder of its own share of the purchase price, it had also sold off three works from its sizeable Eakins holdings. A painting, Cowboy Singing, was purchased jointly by the Denver Art Museum and the Denver-based Anschutz Collection. The Denver Art Museum also separately purchased two oil sketches that Eakins made around 1887, the year he made a trip to the Dakotas, for a painting called Cowboys in the Badlands that's already in the Anschutz Collection.
Cowboy Singing, Eakins, ca. 1892 /Image: THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
So, you might say, smiles all around. Philly gets to keep The Gross Clinic. Jefferson gets its millions. The Denver Art Museum gets its first Eakins. And for good measure, the Philadelphia Art Museum has another Eakins oil not so different from the one it sold Denver.
So where is the confusion? When it first announced its intention to sell The Gross Clinic, Jefferson University was widely criticized for not living up to the standard we rightfully apply to a university art gallery, which is not supposed to sell pictures to raise money for the school's general revenues. But as I pointed out in a blogpost last April...
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.)
To apply to a medical school that has no mission as an arts institution the rules that apply to schools that do seems to me like mission creep.
Having said that, there's one last piece of this puzzle that doesn't make for a happy ending. The Cello Player, the Eakins canvas sold by the Pennsylvania Academy, disappeared into a private sale. There's no telling when or if it will ever be on public view again, though the anonymous buyer reportedly agreed to lend it back to the Academy occasionally. In this case it was poor judgment on the part of PAFA, which appears to have teamed with the much larger Philadelphia Museum to buy The Gross Clinic without a clear idea of how it would come up with its share of the money. Whereas the Philly could sell off secondary works to get to the magic number, the Academy had to let go of a big one. It should have looked for another way.
The Cello Player, Eakins, 1896
April 24, 2008 8:55
Heeere's Johnny!
I paid a revisit Thursday to the Courbet retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan. I'll have more to say later, but for now I just want to offer this to Hollywood. If you ever make a Courbet bio-pic....
Self-Portrait (The Desperate Man), Courbet, 1844-45/ Image: COURTESY CONSEIL INVESTISSEMENT ART, BNP PARIBAS
...I know who should play him.
April 24, 2008 10:08
Late Titian: The Big Muddy
The Flaying of Marsyas, Titian, 1575-76 / Image: STATE MUSEUM, KROMERIZ
The late works of Titian were the subject of the big temporary show that just closed at the Accademia in Venice, where I caught up with it last week in its final days. Actually, it wasn't that big, 28 canvases from the last decades of Titian's long life, when his brushwork became looser, more vivid and visible, more impastoed and sprezzatura. As a signifier of life and spontaniety, Titian's late style became a hugely influential way of working paint, finding it's way over time into the canvases of Velazquez and Rubens, Hals and Rembrandt, and by way of them to Manet and even 20th-century Expressionism. The late style was a thunderbolt he threw in old age and it travelled a long way.
Or was it? Even in his lifetime there were people who saw in his pittura a macchia — "patchy painting" — not a deliberate style but an accidental one, a sign that the old man was losing it, that his eyesight was too weak and his hand too shaky to accomplish the more assured finish of his earlier work. Then there was what you might call the de Kooning problem — just how much of the late work was done by his apprentices? As a further complication, his final canvases include some that were still in his studio when he died in 1576, swept off in his 90s by a plague that also claimed one of his sons. Were the raw and agitated passages of these pictures deliberate? Or were they simply unfinished at the time of his death?
The show divides his work into three areas: portraits....
Jacopo Strada, Titian, 1567-68/ Image: VIENNA, KUNTSHISTORICHES MUSEUM
......religious scenes, like the Accademia's own magnificent Pieta, one of Titian's last works....
Pieta, Titian, c. 1576 /Image: ACCADEMIA
....and poesies, the eroticized mythological scenes that he produced for learned customers like Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in Rome and Philip II of Spain, the chief patron of his final years.
Danae, Titian, c. 1560 /Image: VIENNA, KUNTSHISTORICHES MUSEUM
In the run up to this show, which was first mounted last year in Vienna, a great deal of new research was done on many of the canvases, including x-ray and infrared reflectography, partly to get a better grasp on Titian's practice of producing multiple versions of the same image. All the same, the curators don't offer a definitive judgment on the question of how deliberate Titian's late style was. But they plainly favor the idea that, as the catalogue puts it, "Titian's visible brushwork is also his artistic signature." All of this is a question that I don't think research and scholarship can ever entirely settle. It may not have a single answer. For myself, I still prefer to think that, having confronted and absorbed the lessons of Michelangelo and central Italian painting generally — Titian had traveled to Rome in 1546 and again in 1550 — in his later work he was making a final, radical statement in the debate between drawing (Rome) and color (Venice) as a means to build a picture. In Titian's lifetime oil paint was still a relatively new medium in Italy, and in the blurred contours and lush textures of his last years he was still working out its possibilities as no one else had.
April 23, 2008 8:34
Death: Be Not Proud
I suppose it was bound to come to this. The German artist Gregor Schneider is looking for someone terminally ill who would be willing to die in public, in something like a gallery setting. The next sound you hear will be critics and columnists, including me, chewing over the ethical implications, reminding you of art's long fascination with death, and wondering whether it's different when you move from the imagery of death to presenting the thing itself as a kind of living theater. Throw in a mention of Kafka's "The Hunger Artist", about a performer who starves himself to death before an indifferent public, and you have a well rounded little essay.
This is another way of saying I don't have an answer to the question of whether Schneider's project, should it happen, is an outrage or a public service. I don't think it's worth belaboring the question "Is it art?" The development of performance and conceptual art long ago laid that question to rest, if you will. Any activity undertaken in a gallery setting becomes art.
That leaves the more important question — is it a good thing? And here will be my helpful addition to that conversation. The single most powerful work I saw at the Venice Biennale last summer was a video that the French artist Sophie Calle made of her mother's very peaceful death at home in bed. At some point during the 13-minute video her mother simply stops breathing, though it happens so gently you can't tell just when that moment is. A wall card explained that Calle's mother had consented to the taping.
I visited that piece twice, and on both visits people in the gallery were wiping their eyes. I was one of them. Who were we crying for, Calle's mother, whom probably none of us knew personally, or ourselves? And did our tears validate our voyeurism — meaning, did our sympathetic response acquit us of the charge of ghoulish curiousity? Even better — could ghoulish curiousity have its morally beneficial side, by leading us to watch a video that impressed on us the power and mystery of death?
Then again, is that what the video did? Did it matter that most of us probably moved on from that gallery to whatever art we were going to look at next? This is what I did both times. What that might mean is that however tender our response to what we had seen, we still somehow weren't according it the respect — would that be the word? — it deserved. Among the many spectacles of the Biennale, it had become one more.
Would it have mattered in that case if, after seeing it, I had left the grounds of the Biennale and, say, sat outside staring at the water for an hour, as you might do after witnessing a death that occurred in your own presence? By watching that video, had I helped myself come to terms with death, or just confined it to the realm of manageable spectacles?
To put it another way, is awe the only appropriate response to death, and is that a response you can ever hope to summon in the face of death offered as a performance?
As mentioned, I'm not in answering mode today. Just putting those questions out there.
And tomorrow I'll try to write about something more uplifting.
April 22, 2008 8:52
In Reality
Sink and Mirror, Lopez, 1967. /Image: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
An added attraction of the new Boston MFA show about Spanish art during the reign of Philip III is that you can slide from there to an almost literally mesmerizing little exhibition a few galleries away. This one is devoted to the contemporary Spanish realist Antonio Lopez Garcia. Though he's been a well established name in Spain for decades, this is his first American museum survey and it's exactly the right pendant to the bigger Philip III show. The traditions of Spanish realism that come forward in the era of Philip, those habits of attention paid to humble people and incidental corners of creation, are fundamental to the enormous power of Lopez's best work. Realism isn't just tradition for him. It's a conviction.
Lopez doesn't really find himself until about 1961, when he arrived at the granular illusionism of his best work. At first glance it has affinities with American photo realist painting of the later '60s and '70s. But in Lopez, who's now 72, more is at stake. The subjects are never brassy and there's no irony. The atmospheres are gentler sometimes but the center of gravity is in a deeper place. He's an inheritor of two Spanish traditions, realist painting and devotional art, and also of that Spanish disposition to see no difference between the two.
View of Madrid from the Vallecas Fire Tower, Lopez, 1997-2006/ Image: Asamblea de la Comunidad de Madrid/Caja Madrid
One of his genres is deadpan Madrid cityscapes, mid-altitude panoramas of unpicturesque quarters of the city, not so different from the territory that the German photographer Thomas Struth used to work in. In some passages of those there's a tesselated facture that reminds you of Cezanne, but a more atmospheric Cezanne, one working in smaller strokes, but with the same powers of concentration.
That reverent attention, that determination to transfigure the ordinary, is very Spanish. Among the places it goes back to is the almost supernatural still lifes of fruits and vegetables that Juan Sanchez Cotan did in the early 17th century.
Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, Cotan, 1600/Image: Museum of Art, San Diego
For Lopez, still life can mean a full frontal oil portrait of a refrigerator with its door open and its contents exposed. A white household appliance in a harshly lit white-tiled kitchen, it very deliberately foregoes the spectral hush of the Cotans, with their spot lit produce looming mysteriously out of darkness. At the same time it's beckoning in its matter of fact way — the home appliance as both cornucopia and tabernacle.
And when Lopez paints the skinned carcass of a rabbit on a glass plate, seen from above and folded into a fetal crouch, he arrives at something profound. He puts before you, tenderly but without sentiment, something dead that was once alive. In a picture like that, one that closes the gap between the ordinary and the sacramental, he reaches very quietly into some very deep reservoir of feeling.
Skinned Rabbit, Lopez, 1972 / Image: Private Collection
Like his refrigerator, that rabbit picture draws on the Spanish genre tradition of bodegons, kitchen paintings. (There are several by Velazquez in the Philip III show.) No doubt as intended, it also inevitably brings to mind Zurbaran's Agnus Dei from the 1630s, a barnyard lamb, trussed and isolated, which just so happens to be the symbol of Christ. It's not so much that Lopez matches himself against Zurbaran as that he touches on a similar iconography to conduct his own secular meditation on life and death.
Agnus Dei, Zurbaran, c. 1635-40 / Image: Prado
The Lopez show was curated by Cheryl Brutvan, who heads the department of contemporary art at the Boston MFA. It runs through July 27. It won't be traveling, so maybe you should.
Gran Via, Lopez, 1974-81 /Image: Private Collection
April 20, 2008 11:15
Back in the Saddle
Okay, I'm back from Venice. Having spent a week there last summer for the Biennale, I decided recently to do another week without the hassles of non-stop exhibition-going and blogging two or three times a day. I was still looking at art all day — it's a hard life — but it was nice not to have to do a thing with it other than take it in.
All the same, I had expected to post once or twice last week. That was before I ran into internet hook up problems at my otherwise agreeable hotel. Now that I'm back I won't burden you with my vacation pictures, but there are one or two things from that trip worth talking about. I'll get to those later this week.
Meanwhile, here's my review in this week's issue of Time of "El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III", the smart new show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
St. Martin and the Beggar, El Greco, 1597-1599 / Image: NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON
April 12, 2008 11:41
On the Road Some More
Off again to this place. I'll blog a few times from there. Back next Monday to this place.
April 11, 2008 8:30
Smalltiming at Ground Zero
Proposed Fulton Street Transit Center /Photo: METROPOLITAN TRANSPORTATION AUTHORITY
They're doing it again. Every time you turn around the grand vision for Ground Zero is ground down another notch. This time it's a two-fer — why not screw up two of the still unbuilt portions of the project at one time? One of those would be the performing arts center that Frank Gehry is designing — one of the last of the cultural venues that was supposed to keep Ground Zero from being rebuilt as nothing more than a clutch of office towers around a memorial. The other is the sizeable subway station that's supposed to provide a unified hub for the tangle of 12 subway lines that pass through the area. (Not to be confused with the much larger PATH train station nearby, designed by Santiago Calatrava, which is still going forward.)
While I was on the road, Avi Schick, who heads the Empire State Development Corporation, the New York State body that channels funding to big projects, and who also heads the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which has a role in overseeing the re-emergence of the World Trade Center neighborhood, "suggested" that the theater might be moved out of the Trade Center site and plunked on top of the subway station, which was supposed to be an above-ground glass structure that would culminate in a glass dome — you know, something nice. As you would expect, it's all about budget, which is another way of saying priorities. Moving the theater would mean reducing the subway station to a standard dark hole in the ground while ensuring that Ground Zero lives up to its name.
New York State is asking New York City to examine the idea for 30 days and get back to them. So for now it's still just a trial balloon. Who's got a pin?
April 8, 2008 9:05
Priapism
The Illinois, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1956 / Photo: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT FOUNDATION
Or whatever you would call it when the urge to put up very tall buildings won't go down. Saudi Prince al-Walid bin Talal is proposing to build a mile high tower near Jeddah. Actually, word of this project has been kicking around for a while. The engineering firm Arup is involved, and preliminary designs and studies have apparently also been done by the New Haven-based architecture firm Pickard Chilton, the engineering firm Thornton Thomasetti and other outfits, but I don't find images yet on anybody's websites. Whether this actually gets built or meets the fate of a lot of announced and unbuilt projects is a question I can't answer here, but the prince's holding company plans to invite bids this summer for construction. What does seem clear is that this is the Saudi way of telling every other Gulf state or Asian contender to forget about having the world's tallest anything. The Burj Dubai, still under construction in the emirate next door, which will be the world's tallest building when it's completed next year, is less than a half mile.
Any building called "Mile High" is automatically a descendant of a Frank Lloyd Wright proposal from 1956, which is that tall thing in the picture above. He hoped to see it rise in Chicago. They dodged that bullet. This was the same Wright who once called the skyscraper "Incongruous mantrap of monstrous dimensions". You talk that way I guess until you start to think you might get to do one.
April 7, 2008 9:34
Monday, Monday
Seems like a good day for Looking Around to do some looking around.
1. Fisk has decided to appeal the judge's decision that required it to display the Alfred Stieglitz Collection that has been in storage since November 2005. Last month a Nashville judge said that Fisk could keep the collection. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which administers O'Keeffe's estate, was suing to take back the collection, which O'Keeffe had given to Fisk in 1949. Now Fisk says that it can't accept the judge's ruling because it also orders the school to put the collection on "permanent" display by October, while good curatorial practice requires that artworks should be removed from display periodically. "In short," Fisk said in a press release about its decision to appeal, "the court’s order results in the inevitable deterioration of the Collection."
But does the appeal mean that Fisk is also seeking to overturn that part of the judge's ruling that bars it from selling any of the collection, as it hoped to do in a sharing arrangement with Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark? That press release pointedly, almost wistfully, mentions the Crystal Bridges deal as "the most discussed, and most well financed opportunity for Fisk and Nashville to date." Could the real purpose of the appeal be to re-open the argument that Fisk should be allowed to sell an interest in the collection to Walton?
2. The Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers profiles Antonio Lopez Garcia, the meticulous Spanish realist who is getting his first American museum exhibition this month at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (And don't miss the slide show.)
3. Blogger Catherine Spaeth describes my post about bad art writing as a "call for censorship". Actually, I thought it was a call for editing, something nearly all published texts are subjected to, especially the ones directed to a general public, and usually for something called "clarity."
4. Michelangelo: R.I.P.
April 3, 2008 6:37
Blasts from the Past
Shea Stadium, New York, Tod Papageorge, 1970 / Photo: TOD PAPAGEORGE
Not long ago Aperture published American Sports, 1970, a collection of photographs that Tod Papageorge took at various games that happened to be taking place at the height of the Vietnam era. (For one thing, 1970 was the year of Kent State.) None of them are what you would find on the typical sports page. Police and security guards keep popping into the frame. The players dispose themselves in odd ways. Even the cheerleaders start looking a little paramilitary. Not all of the images have a sinister cast, as you can tell from the one above, which as much as anything has to do with how wonderfully complicated the world can look, how it's full of little isoscoles pleasures. But it's a book of accumulating incidents, and in a lot the images there's a sense of low grade anxiety seeping into scenes where you might not expect to find it. It's a book that invites close attention and rewards it.
Meanwhile Aperture has re-issued the Robert Adams classic from 1974, The New West. This was the book that represented a decisive turning away from the romanticization of Western landscape epitomized by Ansel Adams. At a moment when it was becoming plain that sprawl was re-making the foothills and plains, (Robert) Adams pointed a dry-eyed gaze over all those ugly subdivisions, wan suburban settlements that look like the ghost towns of tomorrow. I remember when I first saw the book thinking that this guy was brave simply to look at this stuff, much less to propose it to other people as the proper subject of a picture. We now understand that it was the work of a fierce aesthetic and moral imagination.
Photo: ROBERT ADAMS/APERTURE
I like something from the introduction to that book by the late John Szarkowski, who was then the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Though Robert Adams's book assumes no moral postures, it does have a moral. It's moral is that the landscape is, for us, the place we live. If we have used it badly, we cannot therefore scorn it, without scorning ourselves. If we have abused it, broken its health, and erected upon it memorials to our ignorance, it is still our place, and it before we can proceed we must learn to love it. As Job perhaps began again by learning to love his ash pit.
Photo: ROBERT ADAMS/APERTURE
I was getting ready to write this post yesterday when I happened to be contacted by Eric Etheridge, who operates an indispensable photo blog. (Which I'll be adding to my blogroll on the next update.) He wanted me to know that he's provided a download on his site for a Papageorge essay from 2002 about Adams. Essential reading.
Meanwhile, to close this loop, I wrote about Papageorge last summer.
And here's a link to another part of Etheridge's blog where you can download a Papageorge essay on the influence of Walker Evans on Robert Frank, a piece that stayed with me for years after I first came across it.
April 3, 2008 9:58
Good Ideas About Bad Writing
The comment stream on yesterday's post about bad art writing has been particularly good.
1. I agree with "ruthk's" point that the rise of curatorial gibberish is linked to the desire of museum people to demonstrate to university scholars that they can still talk the talk, and that by moving to the more populist world of exhibitions they haven't sold out. (Though given the typical curator's salary, "sold out" is not the right term.) This kind of remorse was common in the 1940s and '50s among literary novelists who were lured to Hollywood to write screenplays. The solution then was to start smoking a pipe. I wonder if that would work now.
2. I was interested in "jrirwin's" point that the problem begins in college, where art history students aren't expected to think independently, just to master whatever is the prevailing jargon of their field and regurgitate it on papers and exams. Sorry to hear that nothing has changed since I went to school in the '70s, or for that matter since Dickens.
3. "Sprung" is right about artists' statements. A lot of them are written in the same dreary language, which is probably a consequence of the fact that so many artists come out of MFA programs at the same universities that churn out the curators.
4. As for Anthony Calnek's comment that so many texts are badly written because art is difficult to write about — trust me, I know all about it. I fall down on the job all the time.
April 1, 2008 7:37
The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization
Art as Idea: Nothing, Joseph Kosuth, 1968 /Photo: NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Until now I resisted the urge to complain in public about the wall cards and catalogue texts that accompany this year's Whitney Biennial. (Let's be clear, the Kosuth piece up there is not one of them. It just felt pertinent to the mood I'm in.) That was partly because the atrocious writing connected to that show is not so different from what you get from a lot of institutions that deal with contemporary art. But this funny/depressing Tuesday post at Carol Diehl's website, Art Vent (via) brought back to me the sense of being smacked in the face with a spitball that I got when I first ran across the wall card that welcomes you to the Biennial this way:
Many of the projects presented in the exhibition explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange that index larger social, political and economic contexts, often aiming to invert the more object-oriented operations of the art market. Recurring concerns involve a nuanced investigation of social, domestic and public space and its translation into form — primarly sculptural, but also photographic and cinematic.
There's more, but you get the picture.
Why is so much curatorial writing so dreadful? Why is it so clogged with the decrepit formulations of academic artspeak? Why does so much of it sound like it was written by an anxious schoolkid delivering a labored term paper?
My first assumption is that there's a generation of curators who went to college and grad school in the 1980s and '90s, when the congested language of Deconstruction, Critical Studies and so on still seemed important, intrepid and even a little glamorous. I get the impression that even if a budding art writer wasn't fully commited to those lines of inquiry, the incredibly turgid writing they produced infected the academy in all directions.
But the industrial strength rhetoric of so much museum writing is also, I suspect, a defense against anxiety by curators and catalogue essay writers afraid simply to say aloud and in plain English what they suppose the work might be getting at. What if they get it wrong? Better to fall back on cliches that stand in for thought without furthering it.
Finally, bad writing is just insider talk. It's not directed to the public at all, but pitched to the coterie of other curators and academics who use jargon to signal to one another their initiation into the world of.... jargon.
Short of requiring by law that all wall texts be written in haiku — try cramming "problematizes" into that little compartment — I'm not sure what can be done about this. The most obvious thing would be for the directors of museums, contemporary art centers and whatever kunsthalles simply to insist that it stop happening. (I'm assuming here that they take some kind of sign-off responsibility for writing that goes out under the name of their institution.) Here might be a modest way to start. Let whoever edits museum catalogues — does anyone edit them? — ban just these five words, which are arranged into rhetorical daisy chains in every other catalogue I see.
1. Interrogates
2. Problematizes
3. References (as a verb)
4. Transgressive
5. Inverts
I know this is a small gesture, but deprived of this tiny arsenal, half the bad writers in the artworld would be disarmed.
April 1, 2008 8:55
Sign Language
Fifty years ago this week, the peace symbol made its debut at a British demonstration against nuclear weapons. By now it seems like some ancient rune that rose out of a primeval folk culture. It was actually the work of one man, Gerald Holtom, a London textile designer and peace activist. What he created may not be a work of art, but it's been an effective and enduring image, and one that, given the always dismal course of human events, continually comes in handy.
To mark the anniversary I wrote a little something in this week's magazine. And here's a link to a slide show about the peace sign as it's been used through the years.
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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