Wanås to Venice

I am leaving today for Sweden to visit the Wanås Foundation in Sweden. Wanås is a world class contemporary art site specific art venue on the grounds of a 17th century (? ) estate in southern Sweden. I will know more after my visit! Pictured here is Maya Lin's Eleven Minute Line http://www.wanas.se/

After Wanås, I will spend a few days in Stockholm and then in Copenhagen, I am very excited about seeing these two cities and soaking up not just their history and beauty, but also the art and design, and of course food!

After my inaugural visit to Scandinavia, I will head south to Venice, specifically for the Biennale of Architecture in which a friend has a piece on exhibit. And also because well, Venice is Venice.  I was there last 31 years ago! How time flies.

I intend to check out the Aula Baratto in Ca' Foscari designed by Carlo Scarpa. I also plan to take a day trip to Verona to see the museum he designed there.

And then there's the Academia, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, The Basilica dei Frari with the sublime Titian Ascension of the Virgin, San Marco and Venice itself! 

My iPad comes with and so I will blog as I go. 

Quay Brothers

Intrigued by a macabre photo in the NY Times, I decided to go see the Quay Brothers’ show at MoMA. I must confess, I had never heard of the Quay Brothers and have to say their aesthetic is not mine. All that Victoriana. And dolls. Piero Fornasetti insipidness and Joseph Cornell dark whimsy...

However, I am drawn to obsessive, oddball artists. Indeed, the Quays seem like outsider artists even though they aren’t. I admire the fact that these twins, who settled in England in 1969 and seem to live and breathe only art, burst forth from rural Pennsylvania to scale the very heights of the art world. 

I also admire their work ethic. Though most famous for their stop-action animation, featuring puppets made of doll parts and other materials, there’s nothing they haven’t seemed to have done. From the 1968 Blood, Sweat & Tears album cover (the Quays’ original headless design was altered to include the band’s heads) to T.V. ads. In fact, I loved their ads. Many of their films resemble the opening credits of the Monty Python show, which doesn’t float my boat, but the Doritos ad has a definite Brazil vibe and the ones for Slurpee and a British throat lozenge, Lockets, were terrific.

During their long and fecund career, the Quays have worked as professional illustrators designing book covers; they’ve also designed sets for theatre and opera (in 1998 they received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for the play The Chairs) and have shot music videos for various artists—artists I’ve never heard of, I might add, not that that means a thing.

I was interested to learn about the Polish Surrealists who the Quays admired and emulated, and I realized just how pervasive their influence was remembering back to the posters that graced my high school homerooms in the 1970s.

I sat through the Quays’ most famous film, Street of Crocodiles based on a novella of the same name (nearly all the Quays’ films are inspired by literary texts and feature compelling musical scores) because I thought I should, and liked some aspects of it, most of all the creepy eyeless dolls and the actual liver, but I was really drawn into the shorter film, Bruno Schulz, Fragments and Scenes—Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2006) (actually the "pilot" or preview for their third feature which is currently pre-production) that incorporates live action and nature with puppets. It was mysterious, shimmering and beautiful.

The Quays' objects have a uniformly excavated look, threadbare and covered with grime or dust. This cuts through the saccharin, but in trying to be sinister, is also trite. There are a number of references to screws and watch works, perhaps a tribute to their father, a machinist.

In 2010 the Quays were commissioned to produce a new film entitled Anatomica Asthetica focusing on the history and collections of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum. Having long known of the gruesome nature of the Mütter and never quite having got up the courage to go there, it sounds like a match made in Heaven.

Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City

Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City—part of Saraceno’s series Cloud Cities/Air Port City is a site-specific installation of 16 interconnected multipolygonal modules on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum. Composed of transparent, opaque and reflective materials connected by an internal network of staircases, the piece provides a funhouse experience where orientation is skewed. Discombobulation and vertigo flood one’s senses as one explores the interior space and tries to figure out what is reality and what is reflection. Taking in the exterior vistas framed through Cloud City’s apertures, it's clear that as with Big Bambu, New York City's an integral part of the piece.

On entering the structure the guards made me put away my pad and pen, which I thought silly, but soon realized I needed to grasp both handrails as I crawled, white-knuckled up the stairs. Though the piece goes up only 20 feet from the Met’s roof, one feels much higher seeing the city and park below. Some of the floors of the modules are clear adding to the knee-buckling experience. My companion said being in it felt like skydiving, which she has actually done. To me, it felt like I was inside an enormous kaleidoscope or even some giant honeycomb made by robotic bees. According to Saraceno: “Cloud City’s composition is based on a complex three-dimensional geometry from Weaire-Phelan, which is an idealized foam structure resembling the perfect packaging of spheres with a minimal surface and maximum volume."

Saraceno trained as an architect (he also attended the Space Studies Program of the International Space University at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and judging from his writings about the piece is pretty out there) and there is a definite habitat feel to the piece. According to the Met’s wall dialectic this is intentional: “Over the past decade Saraceno has constructed habitable networks based on organic forms, naturally occurring geometries, and interconnectivity that merge art, architecture, and science. His multidisciplinary project Cloud Cities/Air Port City is rooted in an investigation of how to expand the ways in which we inhabit and experience our environment…Saraceno uses his art to envision floating or flying cities that defy traditional notions of space, time, and gravity. He challenges the boundaries of earthbound living and explores the possibility of utopian airborne habitation, looking to the atmosphere, rather than terra firma, for inspiration.”

All I can say is it's an exhilarating experience to be high above the streets of Manhattan in the ethereal Cloud City.  

A Long Strange Trip

Sunday I flew to Seattle for an intensive immersion in Dale Chihuly. I went as part of a team composed of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts officials and press in advance of the museum’s Chihuly show scheduled for October 2012.

A lot has changed since my previous visit to that fair city, where the last time I was there, in the mid ‘90s, there was no Chihuly to be found. Now there is a glorious new museum and garden that is open late so one can see the glass in its greatest glory, dramatically lit up against the night sky. 

But this is just a foretaste. I will be writing more about the trip and Chihuly for later publication.

I flew home on Wednesday and am now ensconced in a dream of a house in Southside Virginia (that feels more like 19^th century Ireland than America) a continent and world away from the “Emerald City.” 

The Ungovernables

The New Museum’s second Triennial, “The Ungovernables,” a saucy comeback to the Whitney Biennial, is a smaller show, consisting of thirty-four, mostly non-Western, artists and collaborative groups.

The Trainee (2008) by Finish artist, Pilvi Takala, is a mixed-media installation that documents the month-long job Takala held with a global financial company. During her tenure, Takala, intentionally exhibited increasingly abnormal behavior: sitting at her desk staring straight ahead for hours, spending a day in the company’s tax library not doing any work, and for the entire span of another day, riding up and down in the elevator. In addition to everything else, you have to admire Takala’s ability to maintain the ruse in the face of what must have been pretty uncomfortable circumstances dealing with co-workers and superiors perplexed and even angered by her odd behavior.

Though there’s a whiff of Candid Camera about the whole thing, the work speaks to the soul-crushing corporate environment, while also taking a swipe at the asleep-at the-wheel practices that have governed big financial firms, allowing for the kind of mismanagement that led to the recent global economic crisis.

Takala’s installation includes the company’s welcome letter, and a card key, workstation and computer. She even includes voicemails and emails from co-workers and bosses that discuss Takala’s conduct.

Hassan Khan’s compelling video, Jewel (2010) features two men dancing to hypnotic Middle Eastern music composed by Khan. The dancing treads a fine line between belligerence and eroticism. Adding to the tension, the men and the clothes they wear suggests different social classes. There’s something primal and out of control about their interaction; they seem ready to explode and you don’t know in which direction they will go.

Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machadovideo’s 2011 video, O Século (The Century) opens with an aerial view of an empty street. It’s unremarkable, empty and quiet. All of a sudden, objects begin being hurled into the street from the right of the picture: chairs, oil drums, tires, crates, bicycle wheels, and lots of fluorescent light bulbs, all making satisfying crashes when they hit the pavement. After 5 minutes in which the ferocity of the barrage waxes then wanes, the video returns to an empty street and the whole thing starts again, only this time the objects come from the left. I’m not sure what it’s about, but I enjoyed watching it, especially the fluorescents that hit the ground with a pouf and a pop.

Material for a sculpture commemorating the life of a soldier who died defending his nation against intruding enemies (2012) by Iman Issa features an assortment of colored geometric objects on a plinth. With their distinct shape and placement, the objects suggest there’s some sort of symbolism attached to them. I liked the cleanness of the lines, the purity of the colors and how the dispassionate quality of the physical objects jarred with the title. It speaks to the impersonality, inevitability and futility of war.

Rita Ponce de Leon’s 2011 installation of 120 tiny, beautifully executed India ink drawings in a table-top installation, Acepto que nada es mio (I accept that nothing is mine) toyed with scale and obsessiveness.

Eavesdropping (Version # 2, large), Amalia Pica’s 2011 installation, presents an array of different sized colored glasses placed against a wall, at the ready for listening in to next-door neighbors. The lusciousness of the vividly colored glass is visually appealing and in these times where our privacy is threatened by high tech devices, its reference to this low-tech spying approach is darkly amusing.

When I first saw Danh Vo’s We the People (2011) I took it for a series of purely abstract copper sculptures, possibly inspired by or evoking water or wind. But, it turns out they’re fragments—parts of the drapery—of a full-size replica of the Statue of Liberty that Danh is working on. Danh has broken the icon, and in pieces, not only has the sculpture become abstracted, but so too the ideals for which it stands. Danh has taken pains to exactly reproducing the thin copper skin. Looking at it, it seems impossibly fragile. In the original statue, the interior feature’s supporting scaffolding makes this fragile skin strong enough to stand and endure—a fitting metaphor for our democracy.

Finally, it was a delight to see Lynette Yiadom Boakye paintings (paintings are rare sights at this kind of show). Boakye compositions feature figures, generally one of two against stark backgrounds. Applying the paint liberally with forceful brushstrokes, Boakye uses color sparingly, but to great effect. I loved her surfaces and the way she conveys so much physical and psychological information with relatively little.

I haven’t been able to put my finger on why the downtown show seemed somehow better when compared to the Biennial. In terms of quality, the work was pretty evenly distributed between the two. In looking back, I wonder if this had something to do with the way the work was displayed in gallery spaces—the New Museum airy spaces are very appealing (so long as you’re not too close to the elevator and its annoying dinging bell), well-suited for displaying contemporary art. I hope this isn’t the case, as I love the Whitney and am sad that the museum is pulling up stakes and leaving its Breuer-designed home. If it is the case, it seems misguided as its collection includes more than just contemporary art. I hope the Whitney doesn’t go down the road MoMA took in their rush to reinvent themselves to “stay relevant,” and sacrifice the intimacy of their spaces.

“The Ungovernables” says it all. It’s a wonderful title, funny and subversive and youthful. It tells you right away that it’s not taking itself too seriously. By contrast, the Whitney Biennial has become so fraught with expectation (for both bad and good), and it’s also just gotten so unwieldy that it seems heavily weighed down with gravitas.

2012 Armory Show

Once again the pickin's were slim at the Armory Show where I could count on almost just one hand, the artists I admired. But I'm in the minority, judging from the masses of super serious, blinged-out people there lapping it all up. On the whole, it was a case of bad ideas, badly executed. A number of big name galleries were absent and favorites of mine, Lisson and White Cube from London, had nothing really to write home about—though I liked the Andreas Gurskey of Niagara’s Maid of the Mist. The reliable Sikkema Jenkins didn’t come out to play, but stayed put at their space in Chelsea. I high-tailed it over to the Paul Kasmin booth hoping for a Walton Ford fix and was rewarded by a rare dud of his. Even Pierogi 2000 failed to impress this time around.

There’s a lot meant to shock, but it just ends up being boring. I’m thinking of the 30 plaster heads of Osama bin Laden by Wang Du at $15,000 a pop or $320,000 for the lot. Then there’s Jota Castro who uses handcuffs (actual ones and photographs) in various prurient ways. For real shock and awe, I suggest he take a look at Catherine Opie’s truly enthralling photographs of Ron Asthy, which (one can hope) might encourage him to hang up both his camera and handcuffs. Andreas Serrano’s contrived photographs of toy figures in silhouette reminded me of the equally dull James Casebere’s toy houses that he photographs in real landscapes. I swear the exact doppelganger of Ai Wei Wei’s polyhedron is in the window of my local Urban Outfitter. I don’t care if it’s hand carved, Ai’s got studio assistants up the wazoo to do the carving for him.

Special kudos go to the revolving group of women dressed in lab coats taking turns lying on a slab with a jagged hunk of quartz suspended millimeters above their foreheads. I actually saw a man cross some kind of line and touch one of these intrepid women, which reminded me of the groper at the Marina Abramovic show who was ejected and permanently barred from MoMA after pulling a similar stunt with one of the nude participants in her piece, Imponderabilia. People were delighted by the piece at the Armory Show, madly snapping pictures of them the whole time. But really what was the point?

I’m tired of seeing one-trick ponies that pop up in more than one booth and in show after show: the aforementioned Casebere and Kehinde Wiley—whose heroic super-realist portraits of black men on highly-patterned backgrounds I liked the first time I saw, but now they’re sameoldsameold.

Without a doubt, the most startling artist at the fair would have to be Mary Reid Kelley. There was something a little too slick about her drawings, but her video, The Syphilis of Sisyphus was jaw dropping. Reid Kelley plays Sisyphus a “grisette,” (French working class woman). The action begins with Sysyphus pondering the fate of woman as she sits at her dressing table and ends with her being dragged off by the "Morals Police," to the infamous Salpêtrière Hospital where women were “treated” for hysteria. Joining her in the performance are four Pierrots (played by Reid Kelley’s family members) who also assume other roles along the way. Reid Kelley employs antique costumes and painted set designs that look like they come from the dawn of cinematography, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligheri or Nosferatu. Her highly articulated make-up and weird black eye covers are downright creepy, evoking simultaneously a death’s head and also somehow not. It’s a wonderfully odd mix of serious, stylish and screwball. Retro and yet contemporary.

Watching the video, I felt strangely out of control, hijacked into some weird netherworld. It was like a bad acid trip in a good way. My one complaint is that I found her flat, girlish voice a little jarring and at odds with the dark intensity of her video. Reid Kelley is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Yale. She is one to watch.

Yang Jiechang’s series of paintings, Tale of the 11th Day, resemble traditional Chinese screens. On closer inspection you realize there’s a whole lot of monkey business going on between different species and between humans and animals. But the bestiality is presented in the same restrained manner as the landscape and adds a dash of spice and outlandishness to these otherwise austere works.

London-based Israeli artist, Gideon Rubin uses a subdued palette of olives, beiges and mauves with wonderful painterly brush strokes to produce curious and compelling paintings. His work has a 1940s aesthetic, recalling old sepia snap shots. What is most distinctive about his work is that he leaves the faces blank. Particularly effective was the girl on skis sitting in the snow and a whole group of small portraits hung in grid fashion, next to each other. Despite their featureless faces, Rubin successfully conveys each subject's individual character.

I think my favorite artist at the show was Mike Bayne, a photographer (Nope he's a painter see comment below.) This makes me like him even more I had never heard of. He paint incredibly realist paintings of sad-sack neighborhoods and down-at-heel commercial strips. Bayne doesn’t go for big statements; he seeks out the ordinary, everyday things anyone anywhere could see: a tawdry motel sign or rundown ranch as opposed to attention grabbing glitz or nifty visual sights. But Bayne’s little gems do grab your attention. It’s all about composition and scale. Bayne frames his work really, really well and they’re diminutive (5” x 8”?), which for me works as well as large format as far as photography’s concerned.

This is the third year of the Armory Focus, which devotes a section of the Armory Show to an important arts community. This time, the attention turned to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. Included in the line-up was a conversation between visual artist Ragnar Kjartansson and Bjork, which I am sad to say I missed.

Two Nordic pieces confront you straight off the bat: Kjartansson’s divine 40-foot-long pink neon sign that reads “Scandinavian Pain." Funny and poignant at the same time, it’s suspended above the bar where you can purchase an $18 flute of champagne. Scandinavian Pain was acquired from the show by Sweden’s Moderna Museet where it's rumored it will be placed on the top of the museum building. On entering the Armory Focus area you soon become aware of a whooshing sound, almost like the surf, but one having an extra long pause between waves. It’s Helsinki-based artists Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen’s Wave of Matter. The piece consists of a table-like platform that holds hundreds of tiny ball bearings on its surface; as the piece tilts slowly back and forth the balls roll across the surface creating the sound. It’s mesmerizing to watch and listen to.

Just based on his materials—light glass, water—you’d know Olafur Eliassion came from Scandinavia. His slices of colored glass, two in each arrangement, are set atop pieces of driftwood. The glass is different colored, forming a solid hue. At the edges,where it doesn't quite overlap you see the separate colors. They’re luscious to look at, unsettling because they appear to be so casually placed on their narrow "shelves," and texturally interesting: the shiny, sleek glass contrasting nicely with the dull, rough wood.

One entire wall in this booth was taken up by the work of the late Icelandic artist, Birgir Andrésson. Like over-scale paint chips, his paintings of pure color feature the name of the color printed across them. One series, different variations of grey, seemed to comment directly on Iceland’s potential for bleakness. But the work is much more than this, referencing a “blind reality” that Andrésson was only too familiar with having been born to blind parents.

Over on Pier 92 was the Modern section. There I saw a nifty blue slit canvas by Lucio Fontana whom I had only recently been introduced to at the Suprasensorial show at the Hirshhorn. Here, also was Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild, yours for a cool $13.5 million, and a not very good, but interesting because it was so uncharacteristic, abstract painting by Chuck Close.

I was lucky enough to meet up with a well-connected art dealer friend who had been invited to parties hosted by the consular generals of Finland, Norway and Belgium at their uniformly splendid apartments. (Not being a Nordic country, I surmise Belgium jumped on the Armory bandwagon purely because, unlike here, art is important in that country.) The work at the Finnish apartment was the most impressive with a number of interesting artists: Hanna Väisänen, Susanna Gotteberg, Margatta Palasto, Raili Tang and Robert Lucander whose triad of paintings Harmaa, Tummanvihreä, Musta (Grey, Dark Green, Black) 1993 (pictured) with their brooding, spare yet dense presence were the best thing I saw in New York.

On the Norwegian Consular’s terrace we were treated to one of the most spectacular moon rises I have ever seen: a great orange orb that matched exactly the lights on the warehouses of Queens, rising slowly above the East River. Framed by tall buildings, city lights and water, it was breathtaking.

Suprasensorial

Almost a decade before the Light and Space movement emerged in this country, in the late 1960s, Latin American artists were working with light and color in innovative ways. Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space, at the Hirshhorn in Washington presents a small gem of a show curated by Alma Ruiz, featuring the work of artists at the forefront of the movement: Carlos Cruz-Diez, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Hélio Oiticica and Jesús Rafael Soto. Challenging the idea of art as a static experience to be looked at, these artists created work that bursts forth from the traditional confines of picture plane or 3-dimensional sculpture, and in some cases fully envelopes the viewer.

I am a sucker for light—have far too many luminaria of all kinds in my possession—so this show is a natural for me. Right off the bat, you’re greeted by Fontana’s grand squiggle of cool, white light, Neon Structure for the IX Triennial of Milan, 1951 that’s suspended over the escalators. A nice counterpoint to this expansive gesture is Le Parc’s 1962 intimate installation, Light in Movement, that uses mirrors, angled metal squares and spotlights to cast reflections around a darkened room, creating the effect of being underwater in some otherworldly, nocturnal pool.

I loved Soto's lawn-sized rectangle of blue plastic tubing, Penetrable BBL Bleu. It reminded me of a piece I saw when I was a child in New York, an entire room of ceiling-to-floor. clear plastic strips one had to make one’s way through. It really was a seminal piece for me, opening my mind up to the possibilities of what art could do: it could be visually arresting and it could also be fun! As a youngster, I was particularly taken with the notion of touching and moving through an artwork. This was a revelation. I remember it being at the location of the folk art museum on 53^rd, but think there was another museum there, possibly of contemporary art?

Much like that earlier piece, you must breaststroke your way through Soto’s plastic tubes, which slap against your face and body and resist gently your forward movement. I felt like I was in some weird plastic jungle or savanna. Looking at people making their way through it produced an almost stroboscopic effect and the piece remained animated for some time after one exited, the moving tubes producing a wonderful striated pattern. It’s a fairly recent work, dating from 1999, but Soto has been exploring the idea for 30 years.

The showstopper is Cruz-Diez’s 1965 large-scale box, Chromosaturation. Walking around the front, one sees rectangles of intense colored light: red, blue, green that turn out to be windows. Around the other side, is the entrance to the box, which is divided into three zones with rows of colored fluorescent tubes in each space suspended from the ceiling. The color is not as intense as it appears looking through the windows, which must have some kind of film on them. Still, it’s plenty intense, surrounding one in a haze of color that is almost tangible, yet curiously, looking at another person, he appears normal in terms of form and colors. Standing in the corner and looking across the entire box, seeing the colors meet and bleed into one another was simply ravishing.

I gather that at the exhibition’s installation at MOCA in Los Angeles where it originated, there was an installation by Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida that featured a swimming pool ringed with blue neon and illuminated by green spotlights. On the opposing walls, slides of John Cage's 1969 book of musical notations, as well as drug imagery were projected. Visitors were allowed to swim laps in the pool—what a sensory experience that would have been, and talk about engaging with the work!

Too bad for me I was at the Hirshhorn during the day and couldn’t see the new commission by Doug Aitken Song 1, a 360° projection that at night, illuminates the museum’s entire façade.