George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Critics Voice Objections to MoMA’s Plan to Take Down Folk Art Museum" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

| To the surprise of perhaps no one, including the Museum of Modern Art, the decision to take down the former home of the American Folk Art Museum as part of a redesign of MoMA’s Midtown Manhattan building provoked strong reactions on Thursday from architects and critics.

“I’m very disappointed,” said Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of Yale’s School of Architecture. “Justice has not been served.

“It’s a work of art, especially the facade,” he added of the Folk Art building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, which opened in 2001 and features a textured bronze exterior.

Having announced plans in April to demolish the folk museum, MoMA revisited the decision after protests from architects, urban planners and preservationists. But the architectural firm charged with that evaluation, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, concluded that saving the building was unworkable, even as it proposed that MoMA undertake a more comprehensive rethinking of its physical complex.

MoMA now plans to make its current building — designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi nine years ago in a $858 million renovation — more open and welcoming. The plans include improving circulation in the lobby and making the entire ground level free to the public. The folk art site will hold two stacked glass-fronted spaces for exhibitions and performances.

Architecture critics quickly weighed in against the demolition plan. “A city that allows such a work to disappear after barely a dozen years is a city with a flawed architectural heart,” Paul Goldberger wrote on Vanity Fair’s website.

Jerry Saltz, on New York magazine site, said that during MoMA’s presentation of the project, “I felt my eyes tear up and my stomach turn.”

“I have seen the best modern museum of my generation destroyed by madness,” he wrote. “Goodbye, MoMA. I loved you.”

Not every reaction was negative. Thom Mayne, who designed the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art’s new building in Manhattan, said MoMA’s populist instincts were on target — an important antidote to the building’s current aesthetic. “It needs that more relaxed, open, less precious quality,” he said.

And he commended MoMA’s use of the folk art site as responsive to a shift among museums toward presenting alternative art forms. “The first order of business is to produce space that’s relevant to the art they’re going to present in this century,” he said.

After a public-relations offensive this week that included detailed briefings for journalists, MoMA officials declined to comment on the reactions on Thursday. Mr. Taniguchi also has not commented on the decision to adjust his building’s design, but MoMA’s director, Glenn D. Lowry, said the architect had been briefed on the plan and had not protested.

“A number of these gestures are gestures he had anticipated,” Mr. Lowry said. “He wants his building to work well.”

Museum officials have said they have not formulated a budget yet for the sweeping redesign of the MoMA complex on West 53rd Street, which is to be completed by 2019. The project has about $5 million in the city’s capital budget, funds that were allocated in fiscal 2012.

Many architects said they feel badly for Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien, whose folk art building was a breakout project that raised the husband-and-wife team’s profile. “It’s devastating to them,” the architect Frank Gehry said. “It’s like tearing down my house in Santa Monica. It’s their kind of beginning.”

“We all loved it when it was done; it was a major piece of architecture on the street,” he added. “I think Billie and Tod deserve a major project in New York City, and let’s get it for them and get on with it. That will get them their dignity back.”

It remains to be seen whether the Diller firm — led by Liz Diller; her husband, Ricardo Scofidio; and Charles Renfro — are held personally accountable for MoMA’s decision. “None of them are responsible for the organization of MoMA that led to making these decisions,” Mr. Gehry said. “It’s not Liz’s fault, it’s not Ric’s fault, it’s not Billie’s fault, it’s not Tod’s fault. Architects work for clients.”

MoMA’s plans include opening its sculpture garden to the public, a decision that is also stirring debate.

“While I think it’s well intentioned to open the garden to the public, the garden since my childhood was an oasis of quiet,” Mr. Stern said.

Now, Mr. Stern added, that sense of calm will be compromised. “It’s lost in the galleries,” he said, “and now I think it’s going to be lost in the garden.”

But Mr. Mayne applauded the decision to open the garden. “It makes it part of the public spaces of New York, and not this private thing,” he said. “It’s not tranquil anymore. It’s a highly dense urban space in the middle of Midtown Manhattan.”

Mr. Mayne was somewhat existential about the whole thing. “All of our work is somewhat ephemeral,” he said.

The architect Richard Meier, whose projects include the Getty Center in Los Angeles, was similarly resigned. “This was a good work, but New York City is ever changing,” he said. “Not everything lasts forever, and sometimes you have to let go.”

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The Museum of Modern Art unveiled on Wednesday a sweeping redesign of its Midtown building, featuring a retractable glass wall, new gallery space and the opening of its entire first floor, including the beloved sculpture garden, free to the public.

It is unclear whether this grand, ambitious plan will be enough to quell protests over a long-contemplated and controversial part of the museum’s overhaul: the razing of its next-door neighbor on West 53rd Street, the noteworthy, if idiosyncratic, former home of the American Folk Art Museum.

MoMA announced in April that it planned to demolish the folk museum, despite the building’s well-regarded designers and its striking bronze facade. After protests from architects, urban planners and preservationists, MoMA officials said they would review that decision.

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  To Raze or Not? MoMA Rethinks PlanMAY 9, 2013

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  12-Year-Old Building at MoMA Is DoomedAPRIL 10, 2013

But museum officials said on Wednesday that keeping the folk museum, built in 2001 and bought by MoMA in 2011, was simply impossible, and they focused on the benefits of the new design that came about during the review.

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“It’s a very nice gesture of a kind of new ethos: To make publicly accessible, unticketed space that is attractive and has cultural programming,” Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director, said.

The architects of the folk museum, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, protested the most recent decision in a statement.

“This action represents a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many,” the architects said. “The inability to experience the building firsthand and to appreciate its meaning from an historical perspective will be profoundly felt.”

MoMA plans to start construction this spring or summer and to finish the project in 2018 or 2019. Despite the plan’s broad scope, the museum said it could not yet provide a budget, making the viability of the redesign hard to measure.

MoMA officials said they would need to raise all the money privately because the museum is not a city-owned institution. “This is now a much bigger project than we had envisioned,” Mr. Lowry said. “We have to figure out how to cost it out.”

The overhaul seeks to address some of the criticisms leveled at the museum since its $858 million overhaul by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi just nine years ago. Common complaints are that the 2004 redesign appears cold and closed off to the general public; its lobby is chaotic and overcrowded; and it takes too long to reach the art.

Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the architectural firm hired by MoMA to evaluate whether the shoebox-shaped, 40-foot-wide folk art building could be incorporated into a renovation, said the decision was arrived at after intensive study. The broad plan was presented to some members of the media on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“It’s not for lack of trying that we find ourselves at the same pass,” said Elizabeth Diller, a principal at the firm. “We can’t find a way to save the building.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/arts/design/a-grand-redesign-of-moma-does-not-spare-a-notable-neighbor.html?hp&_r=0

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Jan. 7, 2014 5:52 p.m. ET

'Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn' (1995/2009), by Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei

Washington

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Creative Destruction" @wsj - By Richard B. Woodward      

When visitors step off the escalator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and enter "Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950," they are greeted by towering Kodachrome images of slow-motion explosions. Blooming into flowery clouds, these shots of nuclear tests—excerpts from 1950s films made by the defense contractor Edgerton, Germeshausen & Grier for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—are like a silent ballet for smoke monsters.

Nothing that follows in this smart, provocative show, which is about the dangerous wish to eradicate the past and start anew, can match the hellish beauty of these toxic pictures.

That hasn't stopped curators Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson from filling the outer ring on the second floor with 100 or so works that play with the crunching, fiery theme of violence. All of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, films and performances—by a stellar group of artists from the U.S., Europe and Asia—are about the spectacle of destroying things.

As such acts can arouse contrary reactions, depending on who is doing the destroying, what is being destroyed and why, the show is guaranteed to upset and divide audiences.

Artists have for a long time smashed all sorts of things on purpose. A Yamaha grand piano lies in shambles in the first room. It was recently demolished by Raphael Montañez Ortiz, author of the 1962 Destructivist Manifesto, who has done this more than 80 times since the 1960s for filmed concerts that explore the post-John Cage sonic regions between noise and music. (Rock 'n' roll equipment bashers and feedback freaks who seek high-art credibility can cite Mr. Ortiz as inspiration.)

Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950

Hirshhorn Museum

And Sculpture Garden

Through May 26

The thing destroyed can be someone else's art or one's own. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing to erase. De Kooning reluctantly agreed to the collaboration, but gave the younger artist a work so deeply marked it took Rauschenberg a month to wipe clean. "Erased De Kooning Drawing" shares a room with documents from John Baldessari's cremation of his own pre-1970 oeuvre. He photographed the act, confirmed it in a newspaper notice, and even made cookies from the ashes.

Another kind of whimsy can be found in car-crash photographs from the 1950s to '70s by the Swiss policeman Arnold Odermatt. He focused not on human victims, but on smashed auto bodies as a new, delicate form of sculpture. (His 1965 image of a Volkswagen VOW3.XE +0.07% Volkswagen AG Non-Vtg Pfd. Germany: Xetra ^€200.15 +0.15 +0.07% Jan. 8, 2014 5:35 pm Volume : 470,813 P/E Ratio 11.50 Market Cap€91.14 Billion Dividend Yield 1.78% Rev. per Employee €353,101 20120019919810a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 01/08/14 Mexican Auto Exports Break Yea... 01/08/14 Mexican Auto Production Hit Re... 01/07/14 Brazil Posts First Drop in Aut... More quote details and news » VOW3.XE in Your Value Your Change Short position in an Alpine lake, Hitler's "People's Car" sinking in a Romantic setting, is the catalog cover.)

"Damage Control" brings back forgotten movements, such as Auto-Destructive Art. Its 1961 manifesto, written by Gustav Metzger, a Polish Jew who had fled the Nazis for England, called on artists to harness the forces of nature in order to make public art that would disintegrate in moments or years. ("Not interested in ruins," the manifesto specified.) In a 1963 film he is seen torching a hanging sheet into ashy wisps.

Jean Tinguely, the Swiss Dadaist inventor of clanky, self-immolating machines, is prominent here. An archival find is a 1962 performance, improbably commissioned by NBC, where he is seen prowling Las Vegas junkyards for stuff to blow up in a casino parking lot. The network not only devoted 22 minutes of air time to his actions, but also employed David Brinkley to explain them as a commentary on U.S. consumerism.

The British artist Michael Landy, a fan of Tinguely, used his personal belongings for public spectacle in his audacious piece "Break Down." In 2001 he rented a London shop where visitors could watch over 11 days as a machine he conceived of destroyed everything he owned. The 16-minute video documents the slow compacting and shredding of 7,227 items—books and bedding, art by friends as well as his own art, and finally a coat given to him by his father. The pipe-dream of starting one's life again without any baggage has seldom been so poignantly realized.

Questions about artistic license to destroy grow more vexing in a gallery where three photographs of Ai Weiwei show him dropping and smashing a Han Dynasty urn. This 1995 work is not far from a kindred desecration by Jake and Dinos Chapman, who in 2004 drew in colored pen on Goya's series "The Disasters of War," claiming that their additions "improved" the 80 etchings.

In neither case did the artists rely on reproductions, as many other artists since Marcel Duchamp have done. Mr. Ai irreparably broke a third-century Chinese artifact; and the Chapman brothers have marred a set of rare masterworks.

It's a toss-up which action is more irresponsible. Is Mr. Ai's forgivable because of his dissident status? Or is it less so because the urn is no longer recognizable as a functional object, whereas most areas in Goya's etchings remain untouched by the Chapmans' graffiti? Why do both gestures seem more scandalous than, say, composing a disco version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? Is it their arrogance or the permanence of the harm they've done to another's work of art?

The curators go too far in apologizing for artists who trash the past for a giggle. But there's no denying that strains of Modernism (and capitalism) encourage disruption. Futurism was only one movement that believed art could "move forward" only by razing the old order.

Dario Gamboni's catalog essay takes care to distinguish among various individuals or groups that have defaced art in the name of a higher calling. He mentions Mary Richardson, who in 1914 took a meat cleaver to Diego Velázquez's "Rokeby Venus" at the National Gallery in London. (To protest the imprisonment of fellow suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, "the most beautiful character in modern history," Richardson thought it right to destroy "the most beautiful woman in mythological history.") Tony Shafrazi spray painted "KILL LIES ALL" on "Guernica" in 1974, when Pablo Picasso's mural was still at MoMA. (He claimed his actions were an anti-Vietnam War protest and an attempt "to bring the art absolutely up to date" and "give it life.")

Self-righteousness can justify any act of havoc. In 2001 the Afghani Taliban dynamited the Buddhas in Bamiyan, calling them idols of the infidels. In a Byzantine art exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art one can see classical statues that were vandalized in the fourth century by Christians who "improved" Greek and Roman art with incised crucifixes.

Historical cycles of political and religious fervor, though, should not obscure the fact that, when safely consumed, mayhem is a basic food group in the world's entertainment diet. Science-fiction movies pump up their box office numbers with ever more extravagant disasters, as Mr. Brougher writes in his essay.

Watching things explode can be mesmerizing, as in Ori Gersht's "Big Bang I" from 2006, a slow-motion video of a flower vase's shattering. David Letterman used to feature a popular segment in which things were thrown off buildings or crushed by steamrollers, to the delight of his audience. "Mythbusters" often relies on similar small-scale acts of televised havoc.

"Damage Control" brings together artists from different eras who don't usually schedule play dates. Bruce Conner's "A Movie," his 1958 montage of nukes and nudes, turns out to be a distant relative of Douglas Gordon's 2007 "Self Portrait of You + Me" series, portraits of celebrities with faces deformed as if by an atomic blast.

The curators want us to share in the anarchic glee, safely contained by a museum. But behind the fun and games, their expertly installed show also raises difficult-to-answer questions about technology, politics, the role of an avant garde in history, and what we want art and artists to do for us.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann -"A Once-Troubled Museum Frames a Future in Los Angeles" @nytimes by RANDY KENNEDY and CAROL VOGEL

After three years of tumultuous leadership, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles said it was nearing the end of a search for a new director and announced on Monday that it had reached a fund-raising milestone that would ensure it does not have to merge with another institution or face dissolution.

The museum, which has one of the most important collections of postwar art in the country but has struggled financially for years, said it had a combination of “firm commitments” and donations in hand that would raise its endowment to $100 million. The amount, a goal its board members set last year, is by far the highest in the museum’s history.

At its low point in 2008, because of overspending and flagging investments during the recession, the endowment dwindled to only a few million from a high of more than $40 million at the beginning of the decade. The billionaire collector Eli Broad, one of the museum’s founding board members, came to the rescue, donating $15 million and pledging $15 million more to match contributions by others. But the museum struggled to find donors who would allow those matching funds to be used.

The new fund-raising drive — led by wealthy board members like Jeffrey Soros, a nephew of the financier George Soros; Eugenio Lopez, the Mexican art collector; and Maurice Marciano, a founder of the Guess clothing company — will “eliminate any doubt in the public’s mind that we’re not here to stay,” said Maria Seferian, the museum’s interim director.

Twice in the past six years, the museum’s troubles became so acute that proposals were floated to merge it with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, its larger neighbor to the west. At the urging of Mr. Broad, the museum also explored an agreement last year with the National Gallery of Art in Washington that would have involved collaborations on programming and research but not a merger.

As the museum looks ahead to try to stabilize itself, Maria Arena Bell, who is stepping down after the end of her term as a co-chairwoman of the museum’s board, said in an interview Monday that there were “absolutely no plans” being discussed by the board for the museum to share curatorial, administrative or any other significant resources with the Broad, the private contemporary art museum that Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, plan to open next year almost directly across the street from the main site of the Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. While the two museums might collaborate on marketing strategies and have a “very friendly relationship,” she said, they will remain separate entities. Ms. Bell added that there were no strings attached to any of the donations or pledges that would require the museum to join forces in any way with the Broads’ museum.

Even as it began to shore up its finances recently, the museum endured three rocky years under the leadership of Jeffrey Deitch, a veteran New York art dealer whose selection as the museum’s director in 2010 was highly unconventional. While his tenure included a few well-attended, critically praised exhibitions, it suffered from staff defections, budget problems and the departure of all four artists on the museum’s board; the artists complained that Mr. Deitch was taking the museum too far away from serious shows and toward celebrity, fashion and pop culture. After Mr. Deitch resigned in 2013, during the third year of a five-year contract, the four artists — John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha — joined the search committee for a director. (Mr. Deitch said on Monday that he was “looking for a large space in New York where I can present ambitious projects.”)

David G. Johnson, the museum’s other co-chairman, who is also stepping down after many years on the board, said that none of the donations or pledges for the endowment were contingent upon Mr. Deitch’s leaving. He added that the museum remained “committed to continuing both a program of diverse artists and diverse audiences.”

But in its search for the next director, Mr. Johnson, Ms. Seferian and Ms. Bell added that the candidates considered have been museum professionals, not figures from the commercial art world or from other nonprofit institutions. A director will probably be chosen in the next few weeks, the officials said.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

A Legendary Dealer’s Eagle Eye

‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New’ at MoMA

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

‘Ambassador for the New’: A look at a new exhibition at MoMA that highlights the career of the gallery owner and art collector Ileana Sonnabend.

 By HOLLAND COTTER

If you think that all art exhibitions result from the natural meeting of laudable subjects and curatorial passion, consider “Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New,” which opens on Saturday at the Museum of Modern Art. Although the subject is a worthy one — Sonnabend was among the most foresighted art dealers of the late 20th century — the show is a byproduct of legal hassles and diplomatic campaigns surrounding her billion-dollar estate, which may be one reason it feels, as a tribute, cool and impersonal, a portrait-in-art that is only a sketch.

The art is certainly impressive, a constellation of icons, with Sonnabend’s eye and energy the gravitational force. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Romania in 1914, she married a future art dealer, Leo Castelli, born Leo Krausz, in 1932. During World War II, they and their young daughter, Nina, fled Europe for New York, where Castelli opened a gallery.

Artwise, they made a good pair. Although very different in demeanor and temperament — Castelli was debonair and talkative, Sonnabend stolid and shy — they shared an appetite for the untried and the difficult, with Sonnabend, in the long run, having the more adventurous eye. Together, in 1957 they made a famous exploratory trip to Robert Rauschenberg’s studio, where they met Jasper Johns. Sonnabend bought a Johns painting on the spot and became Rauschenberg’s avid and lasting advocate.

After she and Castelli divorced in 1959, Sonnabend remarried, moved to Paris and opened a gallery of her own. She introduced American artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Rauschenberg to Europe, helping, long-distance, to position New York as the new art capital. When she moved back to Manhattan in 1968 and set up business in SoHo, she pulled traffic in the other direction, drawing avant-garde European art from across the Atlantic. She sustained this cosmopolitan mix for five decades, and stayed interested in new art until her death at 92 in 2007. The MoMA show, organized by Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, and Claire Lehmann, a curatorial assistant, is a sampler of some 40 objects covering that span, all owned by Sonnabend at one time. Rauschenberg’s monumental 1959 assemblage or “combine” titled “Canyon” has pride of place just inside the gallery entrance, and for good reason. It was Sonnabend’s favorite among the thousands of objects she acquired. It was a much-reported MoMA acquisition in 2012. And it’s still a startler.

Its central element, a taxidermied bald eagle, spread-winged and with a trussed pillow dangling from its claws, conjoins an American emblem with a reference to the Greek myth in which Zeus, in the form of a bird, abducts a boy he lusts after. A collaged photograph of the artist’s young son and the combine’s general air of chaotic dereliction add an intensely subversive spin to the notion of “American” art.

The chaotic look of the piece aroused indignation among some of its initial viewers, which was to Sonnabend always a sign of success. She hit that jackpot repeatedly. Europeans grumbled over Jasper Johns’s work, which was her debut presentation in Paris, and over Andy Warhol’s two years later. A piece by Mr. Johns, “Device,” from that first show, is in the MoMA show. So is one of Warhol’s spectacular “Death and Disaster” pictures, with repeated images of a suicide shuddering across the canvas. (Although shipped, this painting didn’t end up in Warhol’s Paris show because it was too big to fit in the gallery.)

She brought more Pop from New York — James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann — but by the mid- to late-1960s her interests had moved on to American Minimalism, evident here in a majestic Robert Morris sculpture in draped industrial felt. At the same time, she was captivated by a European near-equivalent, Arte Povera, distinguished by a grounding in radical politics and by a poetic use of materials, as in an untitled Giovanni Anselmo sculpture made from carved granite and fresh lettuce.

She exhibited and collected photography at a time when many people didn’t accept the medium as art. And she challenged those who did by promoting hard-to-love work, like the mid-1960s “portraits” of German industrial architecture taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher. She gave fledgling media like video and performance an early berth.

It’s safe to say that Vito Acconci’s notorious 1972 performance, “Seedbed,” for which the artist masturbated, invisibly but audibly, for hours, under a gallery floor, would not have been welcome at many other SoHo spaces, including, one suspects, the Castelli Gallery. When Sonnabend found an artist interesting, she let him (her roster was almost entirely male) do what he wanted, no questions asked.

Her final commitment to something like a movement came in the 1980s when she took on young American artists like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, who cribbed from Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism and who, in ways that make even more sense now, were gripped by a love-hate infatuation with the market. Classic pieces by all three are here.

When I say classic, I mean typical pieces, but I also mean widely seen and often reproduced. Given the thousands of objects that passed through Sonnabend’s hands over five decades, and the rich store of them that became her collection, the objects chosen for the MoMA exhibition are surprisingly unsurprising. With few exceptions — a 1962 Jim Dine “tool” painting, a 1972 Jannis Kounellis text piece — they’re familiar, and in the case of “Canyon,” a textbook staple.

“Canyon” plays a major role here. The show revolves around it in a very basic way. Because it incorporates the remains of a bald eagle, an endangered species, the work could not be sold. When Sonnabend died and her collection was appraised for tax purposes, her heirs — her daughter, Nina Sundell, and her adopted son, Antonio Homem — valued the unmarketable “Canyon” at zero; the Internal Revenue Service, however, estimated that it was worth $65 million and was prepared to tax the estate accordingly.

A deal was struck. If the piece was donated to a museum, the estate tax on it would be dropped. Both the Met and MoMA badly wanted it, and Sonnabend’s heirs made conditions for a gift.

The receiving institution would be required to mount an exhibition in Sonnabend’s honor and inscribe her name in the museum’s list of founding donors. In the end, Ms. Sundell and Mr. Homem deemed MoMA, which owns five Rauschenberg combines, the more appropriate setting.

Ms. Sonnabend’s name is now dutifully listed among the founders in the museum’s lobby.

Dutiful is also how the tribute exhibition feels, and cautious. MoMA is clearly concerned about perceptions of impropriety, the taint of commerce. Sonnabend Gallery is still in business; what remains of the collection (portions have already been sold) could go on the block at any time. Apparently to avoid the impression that the MoMA exhibition might serve as a sales show, the curators have surrounded “Canyon” mostly with work already in museum collections, including its own.

Such caution is wise, but in this instance it also prevents a subject from getting its full due. Sonnabend’s is an important story, not only because of the range of art she embraced, but because she lived in an era when few women were doing what she did.

MoMA presents her monumentally as a tastemaker and canon-shaper, but leaves out all the constructive matter, the human complications, a sense of misses along with hits: in short, context of a kind revealed in letters, informal photographs and contemporary documents. Such material is essential to any truly historical — which inevitably means personal — show. Sonnabend, quiet but deep and prescient, deserves that kind of accounting.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Art-Scene Glimpses, Lost Then Found

Vito Acconci, right, on Pier 18 in 1971, part of a trove of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender photos the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is donating to five art institutions.

Shunk-Kender / Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

December 18, 2013

The black-and-white images from the 1960s immediately evoke an era of experimentation and ebullience on the art scene: Andy Warhol clutching a bouquet at a gallery opening; Yayoi Kusama lying on a sculptural love seat at the height of her first American fame; naked women covered in blue paint rolling on paper to create an image for Yves Klein, while musicians play in the background.

These photographs are among the highlights in an enormous trove of more than 200,000 prints, negatives and other photographic material that the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is donating to five top art institutions. The gift, which the foundation will announce on Thursday, documents some of the art world’s most influential — and ephemeral — artistic achievements of the mid-20th century.

The gift of the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Photography Collection, estimated to be worth around $25 million, is being split among the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Tate in Britain; and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

The photographs were shot by two eccentric characters, Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, largely from 1958 to 1973, and they capture an indelible era centered on the avant-garde world in New York and Paris. Art was often made communally, and spontaneously, and those the photographers caught in the act of creating it include Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Eva Hesse, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and some 400 other artists.

Slide Show | The Shunk-Kender Archive An art foundation is giving away 200,000 images from one of the great archives of photography documenting 20th-century artists.

The German-born Shunk (1924-2006) and the Hungarian-born Kender (1937-2009) were hired as a team by artists and dealers to record events from routine gallery openings to major conceptual happenings. They shot on the fly and frequently at the same time, never identifying photos as by one or the other.

The collection’s spirit — recording art making that looked a lot like play — is epitomized by Shunk-Kender’s 1961 image of a gun-toting and paint-splattered Niki de Saint Phalle taking aim for one of her “rifle-shot” works, in which fractured bags of paint created the image.

Roxana Marcoci, senior curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called the Shunk-Kender images “an extraordinary, absolutely amazing archive.” MoMA has already received 638 vintage prints; among the most valuable of those is a near-complete set of images from a 1971 performance project on Pier 18. Among the works: the artist Vito Acconci, blindfolded, being led to the edge of the pier, and William Wegman’s contribution, a bowling ball rolling toward pins.

The prints fill an important gap in the Modern’s collection, Ms. Marcoci said, “the history of how photography documented performance art from the 1950s to the 1970s.”

They collaborated with Yves Klein on “Leap Into the Void” (1960), a photomontage of him doing a swan dive.

When the two photographers parted ways, in 1973, Kender gave Shunk control of the material they worked on together, and Shunk continued photographing for another 30 years; some of his solo work is also included in the gift.

For years, the entire archive was moldering in Shunk’s hoarder-style West Village apartment in the Westbeth artists’ housing complex, directly across the street from the Lichtenstein Foundation. Toward the end of Shunk’s life, foundation staff members were aware that he was a neighbor, but they had no idea of the extent of his holdings.

When Shunk died, in 2006, the photographs were carted off by the New York public administrator, and the estate was appraised. Dorothy Lichtenstein, widow of Roy and the foundation’s president, and Jack Cowart, its executive director, discovered its existence from the appraiser, with whom they had worked before. They stepped in and made a bid at the public auction, thinking they would be outbid by a museum.

“We hoped to be Plan B,” Mr. Cowart said, adding that it was important that the archive not be dispersed. Once acquired (the foundation made later, much smaller purchases of Shunk-Kender images from other sources), it became a consuming project to organize and whip the material into shape. The foundation also created a free online archive.

“This mother lode of art-historical data needed to be made available to everyone,” Mr. Cowart said. The Lichtenstein Foundation has divided the collection based on institutional strengths and curator requests, and in an unusual move, the five institutions will allow one another unfettered access to all parts of the gift. Mr. Cowart described the somewhat “subversive” sharing arrangement as “membership in a club.”

Glenn Phillips, acting head of the department of architecture and contemporary art at the Getty Research Institute, said, “This archival sharing is not so common, but the Shunk archive is the perfect candidate to try something like that.” The Getty is receiving the bulk of the gift, some 183,000 items, as well as management of the copyright on all the images, because of its ability to care for huge amounts of archival material.

The National Gallery of Art will receive around 2,300 images documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their epic installation works. They are the most heavily represented artists in the archive. (Klein is the runner-up.)

The Pompidou Center will receive 10,000 prints, and the Tate’s final number has yet to be worked out. The Lichtenstein Foundation intends to have an entire set of the most important images available in Europe split between the two museums, so that scholars and curators there will have easy access. Shunk’s disorganized archive was almost lost to history when the foundation rescued it in 2008, despite the minimal presence of Roy Lichtenstein in the reams of photographs.

The acquisition and donation were the brainchild of Mr. Cowart — and of Ms. Lichtenstein, who personally donated $2 million to acquire the works.

“Our charter purpose is to facilitate public access to the work of Roy Lichtenstein, as well as the art and artists of his time,” Mr. Cowart said “We had been musing how we would implement that last part,” he added. “All of a sudden, this dropped in our lap.”

The foundation devoted years to organizing, cataloging and digitizing the material. Mr. Phillips of the Getty said, “A huge amount of the work we usually need to do on a collection like this has already been done.”

The foundation will hold on to some 25,000 Shunk-Kender works after the distribution and said it is likely to make more gifts.

As Mr. Cowart put it, “We feel very bonded to this project.”

Correction: December 18, 2013

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of the artist featured in the image. He is Vito Acconci, not Annonci.

George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Journal - "A Complexity That Trumps Similarities" @nytimes By ROBERTA SMITH

A Complexity That Trumps Similarities

Call and response: Martin Creed’s toilet-paper pyramid at Hauser & Wirth, above, parallels a cinder-block one at Gavin Brown.

Genevieve Hanson / Hauser & Wirth New York

By ROBERTA SMITH

December 17, 2013

Sometimes I think the British artist-musician Martin Creed makes art for dummies, not excluding myself. At the same time, his accumulations and arrangements of everyday objects and materials initially seem so rudimentary and forthright that they can also make you feel smart.

The dumb-smart continuum is very much in play in Mr. Creed’s concurrent shows at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in the West Village and the uptown gallery of Hauser & Wirth. On this occasion he has made art from such mundane items as bricks, I-beams, colored yarn, rolls of toilet paper and light bulbs, rarely using more than one material or kind of object per work. Together these exhibitions provide an unusually complete picture of his subversive wit and rather restrained, almost classic sense of beauty, not least because he uses the two locations for call-and-response exchanges.

For example, the final work at Hauser & Wirth is a large pyramid of stacked rolls of white toilet paper that is surprisingly eye-popping. (It helps that the cardboard tubes read as black spots.) The first piece at Gavin Brown is its exact opposite, a pyramid made of cinder blocks. The works serve as each other’s punch lines in addition to being the largest possible pyramids that either space could accommodate. They also quietly spoof the big expensive artworks that typically fill New York’s large galleries. A similar sendup — in this case, of installation art as architectural intervention — is a large black balloon shape painted on a wall at Hauser & Wirth that at first looks startlingly like an actual hole.

Mr. Creed, who was born in 1968 and has exhibited in New York since 1997, has devised one of today’s more literal-minded hybrids of Minimalism and Conceptualism. His pieces achieve an unusual balance of materials and ideas, partly because thought is emphasized over traditional skill. Yet the complexity and artistic potential of the physical world is a constant theme.

Martin Creed His light-bulb installation at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, one of two shows in Manhattan devoted to the artist.

Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

At Hauser & Wirth, the six widely available sizes of steel I-beams, each cut to a length equal to its height, are stacked, perpendicular to a wall like a staircase, splitting the difference between sculpture and architecture while taking up almost no space. There are more stacked I-beam pieces at Brown, including one that seems to penetrate a wall, another optical illusion. Next to this work is a wall installation made from every type of white light bulb produced by one company: 49 in all, screwed into electrical sockets set flush with the wall in a grid formation. The distinctly different bulbs disrupt the repetition expected of grids while creating a unified glow.

A similar affirmation of individuality, but far more emotionally charged, unfolds in a new video that shows about a dozen people with atypical gaits crossing the street just outside Mr. Brown’s gallery, one at a time. Some are clearly managing without their usual aids, be it a cane, crutch or wheelchair. But one way or another, they all make it across — moving, it seems, in rhythm to the sounds of a loud, cheerful rock song written and performed by Mr. Creed. In addition to uniqueness, fortitude is succinctly demonstrated in addition to uniqueness.

Human individuality and the challenge of capturing it may be an increasing focus for Mr. Creed, who is pursuing traditional mediums with a new zeal, as evidenced by a series of drawn and painted portraits in which conventional aesthetic decision-making has been deliberately thwarted.

These works invariably look a little odd, haphazardly expressionistic or even childish. Mr. Creed clearly made some of them with his eyes closed, including two pencil drawings that resemble skewed wire portraits by Alexander Calder. Others suggest that he was working from memory, without the model. A particularly messy one placed high on the wall, “Jumping up Portrait of Luciana,” leaves little doubt that each stroke was applied by the artist in midair.

Perhaps to prove that he has the requisite artistic skills after all, Mr. Creed has included a small, dark, relatively descriptive self-portrait. In its way, this drawing may spoof the idea of the artist as expressionist madman, or everything Mr. Creed is not.

Martin Creed’s work is on view through Saturday at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, West Village; 212- 627-5258, gavinbrown.biz/home.html; and at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, Manhattan; 212-794-4970, hauserwirth.com.

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George Lindemann Journal - "Mawkish Memoir, Tedious Staging" @wsj - By Heidi Waleson

 

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic'

Park Avenue Armory

Dec. 17-21

New York

A successful memoir depends on the synergy of compelling raw material and the artistry of the teller, but Robert Wilson's "The Life and Death of Marina Abramović," a traveling production that opened last week at the Park Avenue Armory, brings out the worst aspects of both. The combination of Ms. Abramović, a performance artist known for long duration pieces (in "The Artist Is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, she sat motionless for hours), and Mr. Wilson, a pioneer of cryptic, image-based, slow-motion theater (" Einstein on the Beach" lasts 41/2 hours), is weird and finally tedious. The content is repellent, and the artistry doesn't amaze.

Marina Abramović Lucie Jansch

The first part of the piece plumbs Ms. Abramović's terrible childhood—battling parents, abusive mother—in a tone that is alternately deadpan, gleeful and sentimental. The second part, which has even less bite, is about the joys and (mostly) trials of her main romantic relationship. The actor Willem Dafoe, ensconced among file boxes at the side of the stage, is the storyteller, while Mr. Wilson's actor/dancers create processions and tableaux that are representative or not: Marina gets stuck in the washing machine, Marina's mother throws a crystal ashtray at her head, Marina spends a year in the hospital, Marina's parents fight, Marina plays Russian roulette. Everyone wears white clown makeup. The narration speeds along in short sentences, sometimes repeating or going in reverse: "1973: Burning her hair." "2009: Her heart is broken. Psychoanalysis." For most of the first section, Ms. Abramović plays her mother, an ominous, black-gowned figure with a Joan Crawford grin and a penetrating shriek; later, she plays herself.

The music is so amplified and mixed that although there are four live players in the pit, the instrumentals all feel electronic. Three musical genres overlap. The compositions of William Basinski, which repeat brief melodic figures in endless loops (like Philip Glass, another Wilson collaborator, but without the rhythmic drive), segue into the ululations of Svetlana Spajić and her four-voice ensemble. Their Serbian folk-inflected, straight-tone numbers, no doubt intended to evoke the heritage of Ms. Abramović, who was born in Belgrade, have more grit. Then there is Antony, a transgender singer and composer, who also wears a long black gown and sings croony, moony songs with few notes and little textual or textural variety.

Occasionally, the elements come together with a trancelike intensity. "The Story of the Shoe Polish," for example, in which Marina paints her room with shoe polish, which, because it looks and smells like excrement, keeps her mother out, is told in layers—with Mr. Dafoe minutely describing actions like sitting, drinking and urinating; Antony hissing the ballad "I am seething"; and eight Marina avatars dragging lines of miniature beds, like pull toys, onto the stage. The scene concludes with shrieks from Marina's mother, which make all the Marinas run and hide. Perhaps it is making a point about Ms. Abramović's artistic obsession with the body and minutiae as a psychological way to control her environment under abusive circumstances. Or perhaps not.

But the vignettes and the chatter continue endlessly, for two hours and 40 minutes, and the viewer's sense of detachment from the material grows. Finally, the images stop being curious and are just peculiar. Why, for example, is Antony holding a lobster on a leash? Why is there a man carrying an enormous snake? We've seen these kinds of Wilsonian pictures before. They're not magical, and the alternation of morbid glee and soupy sentiment undermines any connection we might feel with Marina. In the end, it left me stupefied and convinced that these artists were a lot less interesting than they think they are.

***

The Salzburg Marionette Theatre's production of Wagner's "Ring," presented at the Metropolitan Museum last weekend, is clever, but it suffers from the fact that without the music, the cycle is just a goofy story. The two-hour distillation of the four operas hits the major plot points but doesn't tell us why we should care. It does use the music—the renowned Georg Solti Decca recording (1958-1964)—but sparingly, with brief snippets of vocal parts and slightly longer stretches of instrumental material.

Two actor-narrators, Tim Oberliessen and Yoann Moess, tell the story, voice the characters, and even venture onto the stage to play the giants Fafner and Fasolt, as well as Gunther, Gutrune and Hunding. They keep it light, stress the absurdities of the libretto, and even add a little tongue-in-cheek political commentary and feminist criticism. (Of Alberich's encounter with the Rhinemaidens, Ms. Moess remarked: "Small men with big egos have caused a lot of trouble in the world.") The production design gives the nod to contemporary European style, though not at its most extreme. The period is the 1950s, with a Cadillac for the gods, a motorcycle for Siegmund, and a trailer home for Mime. Frei and Brünnhilde are done up like Barbie dolls with big chests and skinny legs, the Rhinemaidens are a synchronized swim team, and the Valkyries are Rockettes.

The deftly operated puppets have a lot of personality, and their interactions with the actors, who loom over them, are a nice touch. The actors become actual giants in this context, and when Mr. Oberliessen, as Siegfried disguised as Gunther, wrestled with Brünnhilde for the Ring, it was strangely lifelike and shocking to see this struggle between a large man and tiny woman. Magic effects, like the green blob of a dragon and the Alberich's transformation into a snake that looked like HVAC tubing, are also much easier to concoct in a marionette theater.

But the breakneck pace of the storytelling left little room for musical expansion. There was none, for example, in Brünnhilde's annunciation of Siegmund's death, one of the most harrowing moments in the cycle. Happily, for the two act finales, we got the musical conclusions of "Die Walküre" and "Götterdammerung," and could leave the theater remembering why we sit through the whole 16 hours.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal - "The End, if It’s Up to You" @nytimes by CHARLES ISHERWOOD

That familiar fantasy of spying on one’s own funeral has come spectacularly true for at least one of us mortals, the performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose work dates back to the 1970s and who has become a slavishly adored fixture on the art-celebrity circuit over the past decade. In “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic,” a new music-theater piece being presented through Saturday in the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, Ms. Abramovic is lying plushly in state on a giant stage draped in black and lit by glowing white neon bars.

 As befits an art-world star, the drama of Ms. Abramovic’s pseudo-sendoff has been entrusted to another aesthetic luminary, the avant-garde theater and opera director Robert Wilson. The inception for the project came when Ms. Abramovic called Mr. Wilson and asked if he’d be interested in staging her funeral — death being a primary preoccupation of this self-punishing artist; he agreed, as long as he got to stage the life, too. Also providing eulogistical and biographical interpretation are well-known figures from other artistic realms: the composer and singer Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), dressed in space-age black velvet and appearing as a sort of avatar of Ms. Abramovic, and the actor Willem Dafoe, looking like a skeleton raised from the dead himself in his white makeup under a flaming pouf of red hair.

If you’ve ever fallen into a daydream of contemplating your own interment and selecting the guest list, you are unlikely to come away from “Life and Death” with any practical tips, unless your digital address book is likewise stuffed to the gills with the names of artistic luminaries. Nor, I’m afraid, will general theater audiences attracted by the savory soup of talent involved find much to satisfy them here. This visually opulent but dramatically opaque consideration of the life and career of Ms. Abramovic will probably give pleasure verging on the orgiastic only to fervent admirers of Ms. Abramovic and Mr. Wilson. Both artists are known for creating work that tests audiences’ (and artists’) powers of endurance, and while “Life and Death” runs under three hours with intermission — a mere snap of the fingers in the timescape of their most monumental pieces — its fragmentary structure and largely static stage pictures often seem to stretch the passing minutes out indefinitely.

The artist is present onstage, to borrow the title from the recent retrospective of Ms. Abramovic’s work at the Museum of Modern Art. (It was the title of her popular stare-a-thon throughout the run of that show, too, as well as an HBO documentary.) Ms. Abramovic appears in “Life and Death” in several guises. The show opens with one of its most striking images: Three almost identical-looking female figures, their faces painted vampire white (a longstanding Wilson motif) are found lying motionless on black coffinlike structures as the audience enters. Black dogs, silhouetted against a brightly glowing backdrop (another classic Wilson touch), romp across the stage, sniffing and chewing at an elegantly arranged pile of bones, each spotlit in red light. One of the figures is Ms. Abramovic, who has written that she does indeed wish, when she’s actually dead, to have three coffins involved in her burial, presumably for purposes of sowing confusion and mystery: No one will truly know what happens to the body that she employed as her primary medium.

Ms. Abramovic makes her first appearance in the disjointed biographical drama that follows portraying her own mother, who looms large as a baleful influence in her life. (At times, the show threatens to devolve into a fabulously highbrow version of “Mommie Dearest.”) Most of the narration is provided by Mr. Dafoe, giving motor-mouth commentary on the action (which is glacially paced, as is Mr. Wilson’s way) from a platform in front of the main stage, surrounded by piles of newspapers.

The macabre Wilson maquillage turns Mr. Dafoe into a ringer for the Joker character from the Batman franchise, and he brings a dark, mordant humor (and several accents) to his delivery of the text, which ranges from random ticker-tape bullet points from Ms. Abramovic’s life (’68 — “discovering Zen Buddhism,” ’73 — “burning her hair, cutting a star on her stomach with a razor blade”) to more elaborately related stories of her traumatic home life growing up in Yugoslavia.

The grimmer passages of her youth were clearly formative influences. At one point, Mr. Dafoe describes a fight Marina got into with her suffocating mother, which ended with her mother saying that since she’d given Marina life, she had a right to take it. With that she flung a heavy ashtray at her head; Marina contemplated letting it hit her but ducked at the last minute.

The art she went on to create would flirt with the self-destructive impulse that was awakened by this and other incidents. In some sense, Ms. Abramovic’s hated mother embodied the idea of death for her, and she appears here as a sinuously menacing figure, stalking across the stage, tapping a finger on her arm indifferently, as tales of Marina’s miserable childhood are depicted.

The impulse to transform her body physically through self-mutilation was born, it is humorously implied, by Marina’s youthful desire to break her own nose (and have it redesigned by a surgeon to resemble Brigitte Bardot’s). One of the songs written and sung by Antony underscores the idea of creating art from abuse: “I will make a necklace from the stones you throw,” he croons in his ethereal sob of a voice. (Other lyrics hew more to vague New Age imagery: “I am a volcano of snow.”) Ms. Abramovic does a little singing herself, in a slightly croaky, accented voice that might charitably be compared to Marlene Dietrich’s.

The stories of Ms. Abramovic’s rough upbringing enliven the proceedings with their bleak humor, but much of the rest of the text is more impenetrable. There isn’t much cogent or sustained reflection about her career or the themes that run through her work. Instead, Mr. Dafoe gives a plodding description of some of the mundane actions Ms. Abramovic performed during her piece “The House With the Ocean View” (2002), in which she spent 12 days living on platforms in the Sean Kelly gallery, her only sustenance water, her every action on view to the public (during gallery hours, at least).

In the second act, Mr. Dafoe and Ms. Abramovic, dressed in military garb — Ms. Abramovic’s parents were celebrated for heroism in the fight against the Germans during World War II — sit on the stage and trade chatter about her difficulties with romance. Mr. Dafoe’s running commentary is often hilariously funny, undercutting Ms. Abramovic’s lugubrious self-seriousness.

That archness also swamps the show during some other passages, as when she provides a series of recipes for “spirit cooking,” or when the cast barks out through megaphones a series of prescriptions for artists to live by. (“An artist must be aware of his own mortality.”) Whether this was intended to be satirical, I couldn’t quite tell, but then much of what takes place in “Life and Death” defies easy exegesis, or even simple comprehension.

The rigorous, elemental aesthetic that has defined Ms. Abramovic’s own works here has been amplified by the manifold contributions of her collaborators, resulting in a show whose lavish effects tend to keep the woman at its center at a distance, atop a glossy pedestal instead of uncomfortably in our faces, as she is in her solo performances. “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic” feels more like the gilding of an icon rather than the illumination of an artist’s experience.

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic       

Conceived, directed and designed by Robert Wilson; co-creator, Marina Abramovic; performed by Ms. Abramovic, Willem Dafoe and Antony; musical director, composer and lyricist, Antony; composer, William Basinski; composer and lyricist, Svetlana Spajic; costumes by Jacques Reynaud; co-director, Ann-Christin Rommen; dramaturge, Wolfgang Wiens; lighting by A. J. Weissbard; sound by Nick Sagar; makeup design by Joey Cheng; video by Tomasz Jeziorski; music supervisor and music mix, Dan Bora. Presented by Park Avenue Armory, Alex Poots, artistic director. At the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall, 643 Park Avenue, at 67th Street; 212-933-5812

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