The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

 

Every once in a while a major museum mounts what might be called a “Well, duh” exhibition, lavishly demonstrating something everybody pretty much already knows. That Rembrandt was a genius or that the Impressionists were inspired by sunlight fall into this category. So does Andy Warhol being a pervasive influence—probably the pervasive influence—on contemporary art. The most shrewd and sophisticated faux-naïf the world has ever known, Warhol may or may not have had his tongue planted in one of his sallow cheeks with each and every item in his massive oeuvre, but practically every artist who worked in his wake during the past half-century succumbed to at least a mild bout of irony influenza.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, choosing about 100 works by artists influenced by Warhol, along with about half that number made by the doyen of detachment himself, endeavors to illustrate this obvious fact in “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years.”

The show is a breeze. Walking leisurely through a gentle maze of galleries with your head on a swivel, you can take in the whole thing in about half an hour, with a little extra time allowed for the crowds—it’s a popular show—and possibly pausing in front of a video or two. (The grainy black-and-white head-shot “screen tests” of Lou Reed and Nico are strangely fascinating, while the truly awful 1968 Warhol feature “Lonesome Cowboys” is only slightly less odious on a small screen than it was in theaters.) A quick pan of the final gallery, wallpapered with Warhol’s famously garish cow heads and garnished with those floating silver pillows (which constituted his second solo at Leo Castelli, in 1966), and you’re ready, as the British street artist Banksy would have it, to exit through the gift shop. The exhibition contains little, if anything, you need to see close up or to linger over. The audio guide doesn’t whisper, “Andy would have wanted it this way,” but it should.

“Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” really didn’t need much organization in the galleries. Random copses of parent-and-sibling work would have done the didactic trick: Andy did a portrait of Marilyn Monroe this way, while Luc Tuymans paints Condoleezza Rice that way and Julian Schnabel painted Barbara Walters still another way. But see how they’re all kind of similar because they’re anything but honorific? The Met groups the exhibition into five convenient categories which, with their subtitles (and like Warhol’s collection of flea-market kitsch), embrace just about everything under the sun: “Daily News: From Banality to Disaster”; “Portraiture: Celebrity and Power”; “Queer Studies: Camouflage and Shifting Identities”; “Consuming Images: Appropriation, Abstraction and Seriality”; and “No Boundaries: Collaboration, and Spectacle.” The wall texts aren’t awful, but they’re a far cry from “Eureka!” For example, this from the portraiture section: “Power and fame in their countless manifestations have held a strong appeal for many artists beyond Warhol. The artists in this section, nearly all of whom depend on the photograph in some way, build on the Warholian model and replenish the art of portraiture in their own unique fashion.” It’s hard to image anybody who sees “Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” not knowing this beforehand, or not being able to see the point just from the pictures on the walls.

What’s good about the show? A lot. This is the Met, after all, and it either owns or can borrow excellent and salient works by Ed Ruscha, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vija Celmins, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and the rest of the no-surprises supporting cast. The installation is first rate. (It’s not the designer’s fault that nothing beckons you to stop for a moment of contemplation.) The catalog—an ample but concise bit of one-stop shopping for Everything Andy—boasts a long, cohesive, and nicely written essay by the show’s co-curator Mark Rosenthal. It also includes a superb chronology of “moments” in Warhol’s career, from his initial rejection by Castelli in 1961 to his cameo in the movie “Tootsie” and hilarious Braniff Airlines ad campaign with Sonny Liston, to his near-murder in 1968, to highlights from Warhol’s even more influential posthumous quarter-century (for example, Rob Pruitt’s “The Andy Monument” statue recently on view on a street corner in New York’s Union Square.)

Still, there’s something dishearteningly lightweight about “Sixty Years, Fifty Artists.” It may be that the august Met, straining against type as it does to hold little contemporary art circuses (e.g., Koons, the Starn Twins) on its roof, isn’t really comfortable with an artist as nearly omniscient, yet will-o’-the-wisp, as Warhol. In one of the catalog’s interviews with several artists influenced by Warhol, co-curator Marla Prather blunders. She says to California artist John Baldessari, “As you no doubt know, Warhol’s first solo show was at the Ferus Gallery [in Los Angeles], in 1962.” If she isn’t somehow referring to his first show in California, that isn’t the case. In 1952, Warhol had a one-person exhibition, “Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote” in New York. He also enjoyed at least a couple more solo outings prior to showing his Campbell’s soup can paintings at Irving Blum’s emporium.

It’s not usually a critic’s place to tell a great museum what it should have done, but the disappointing superficiality of “Sixty Years, Fifty Artists” bids me step over the line. We all know the breadth of Warhol’s influence; a peek into the first 10 Chelsea galleries you happen across will tell you that. What the Met should have plumbed is the depth of Warhol’s influence, by taking, say, 10 artists (I’ll nominate Ms. Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton, Messrs. Koons and Baldessari, and Robert Gober to get the squeegee moving), first noting the affinity between an early work and a relevant Warhol, and then documenting how, and to where, those artists ran with it. The Met could have escorted the viewer beyond Pop’s chic ennui and into Warhol’s profundity as an artist, as evidenced in the “Disaster” paintings, the Jackies and early films like “Empire.”

That, however, would have required the influencees to admit the extent of their debt to Warhol, and big-time contemporary artists are often too career-savvy for such modesty. Pushing them out of their necessary professional conceit is the task, nevertheless, of a premier museum if it wants to get beyond an E-ZPass version of Warhol’s legacy.

By PETER PLAGENS

 

 

APOLOGIES to Milan and Tokyo. Regrets to Stockholm and Paris. Forgive me, Eindhoven, Berlin, Barcelona and, most particularly, New York. But London is the design capital of the world.

Ounce for ounce, bloke for bloke, Britain produces better designers and design impresarios than anywhere else. They build retail emporiums, as Sir Terence Conran did. Or revolutionize household appliances, like Sir James Dyson has done. Or dream up impeccable furniture, as Jasper Morrison has. Or construct toasters from scratch by smelting their own ore and cooking their own plastic, like Thomas Thwaites did, a feat he undertook for his 2009 thesis project at the Royal College of Art.

And if the London Design Festival, a 10-day program of some 200 events, including exhibitions and studio tours, which ended on Sunday, failed to express the full radiance of contemporary British design, blame it on growing pains. Having just marked its 10th year, the festival is poised between being a regional showcase bubbling with spontaneous interventions and a smooth international canvas.

Once a satellite (or several of them) swirling around an annual trade show called 100% Design, the festival now extends from Ladbroke Grove in West London to Hackney in the east. You need an hour on the tube simply to travel its breadth.

Yet despite the scale, and the presence of more than 300,000 visitors, the London Design Festival is apparently still too small for many members of the British design elite.

To be sure, celebrities like Mr. Morrison and Sir Terence were visible. As were Tom Dixon, who organized a group of international design exhibitions near his canal-side studio at Portobello Dock, and Thomas Heatherwick, who had a popular one-man show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. (Mr. Heatherwick may be best known for designing the caldron for the 2012 Olympic Games, a rosette of 204 copper flambeaus that rose and converged like petals in a fiery dahlia.)

But only glimpses, if anything, were seen of work by renowned London-based designers and studios like Ron Arad, Ross Lovegrove, PearsonLloyd and Doshi Levien.

“Everyone with half a brain still launches in Milan,” said Caroline Roux, a writer for The Financial Times and other publications, referring to the international furniture fair held in Italy every April.

The London event offered many bright moments, like patchwork seating and floral wallpaper by the bespoke furniture company Squint Limited and an exquisite group of lamps by the Greek-born designer Michael Anastassiades. (The lamps, which will be produced by Flos, stood on three-pronged bases that resembled birds’ feet and were lighted with big glass bubbles that looked as if they were attached to their brass stems by little more than spit and static.)

But this festival was not the place to go for revolutionary ideas. Nor, despite all the Britishness on view in the form of ceramics, metalwork and a positively druidic devotion to hardwoods, was it simply a distillation of a regional design character.

What it offered, which was fascinating and redeeming in every way, was London itself.

Still glowing from the energy poured into the Olympics, London harmonized with the installations stuffed into its storefronts and leftover spaces. From the crooked houses of a revitalized East End to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, which has become a revolving showcase of contemporary design and craft, new goods basked in venerable niches, mixing it up with Turners and cobblestones.

DOWNING STREET was not open for public viewing of this eclecticism, but the Victoria and Albert Museum was. For the last few years, the V&A, that warehouse of historical spoils that sprawls like a gorgeous beached whale in West London, has been the design festival’s nominal home. Dozens of exhibitions related to the event, grand and tiny, could be found there — if you managed to get hold of a map showing their whereabouts. “We’ve almost run out,” said a woman at the information desk when she handed one to me. “Would you mind returning this when you’re done?”

I might have been better off without it. En route to displays like a collection of smartly sustainable wood chairs by Royal College of Art students and one of courtyard benches commissioned from international designers by the British company Established & Sons, I stopped at exhibits of wrought-iron ornaments, Elizabethan miniatures and Buddhist shrines. Imagine what I would have seen without any direction.

And so it was throughout London: even if the festival fare was hard to find or disappointing, you were sure to stumble on something else worth looking at. A daylong conference called the Global Design Forum, for instance, was a slog (most presenters were limited to an awkward 10 minutes, too short or too long, depending on the speaker).

But attendees could marvel at the construction zone known as the King’s Cross neighborhood and admire the new campus of Central Saint Martins art school, where the forum was held. This proto-Brutalist building, converted from an 1851 granary, had a sea of end-grain wood flooring and a foyer where an Airstream trailer was inconspicuously parked.

More often, though, the setting was a bonus rather than compensation.

Secreted in the basement of a mews house in a pop-up neighborhood called the Brompton Design District was a show of sneaky objects by several Britain-based designers. Paul Elliman fashioned a collection of mineral specimens from discarded materials like plastic pen pieces (“quartz”) and metallic plastic bags (“pyrite”). And Sam Jacob cast a basketball in terra cotta to look something like an artifact from an Etruscan pickup game.

You might call such works deceptive. The designers called them placebos. “A placebo is an inert object that looks like it works,” said Tetsuo Mukai, of Study O Portable, which had smeared sheets of glass with cinnabar, malachite and azurite (the ancient religious painter’s sources of red, green and blue) to create a modern triptych. The work, titled “RGB,” evoked the altar of the media screen.

East of Brompton, in a 120,000-square-foot decommissioned postal sorting office, the trade show Design Junction presented the festival’s most efficient concentration of talent. Here, among clusters of well-groomed furniture and lighting (including impressive variations on the Windsor chair), noted British designers like Simon Pengelly, Bethan Gray and Simon Hasan exhibited alongside sympathetic Scandinavians, Italians and Chileans.

Americans turned up at Design Junction as well. Thirteen designers from the United States, including Mike & Maaike and Lindsey Adelman, pooled their experiments with streamlined forms and seductive materials in a show called “America Made Me.” And a transcontinental marriage was contracted between the London furniture maker Russell Pinch and the New York design shop the Future Perfect. The latter is now moving into manufacturing and will be the sole distributor of Mr. Pinch’s voluptuous new Goddard sofa.

NO milieu, however, was more transporting than the East End neighborhood of Shoreditch. It’s not just that the area harbors a disproportionate share of creative workers. Or that you can find a unique retail typology here: the combined design gallery and cafe (go for the lasagna, leave with the ceramics).

It’s that residents of this former manufacturing quarter turned their spaces and practices into time machines as they displayed their loyalty to British industry and craft.

“Shoreditch was the center of the furniture industry, which is why I’m here,” said Sheridan Coakley, founder of the 27-year-old furniture company SCP. Mr. Coakley’s shop on Curtain Road offered not only Matthew Hilton sofas and Donna Wilson poufs but also demonstrations of willow basket weaving by the young Dublin design company Makers & Brothers.

At Lee Broom’s studio on Rivington Street, which looked like a cross between a stable and a high-end saloon, sawdust covered the floor, and dozens of crystal light bulbs cut through the gloaming. Mr. Broom, an interior and product designer, worked with a lead crystal factory in Cumbria to produce the bulbs, which were inspired by traditional cut-glass liquor decanters and lighted by LEDs.

At the KK Outlet gallery at Hoxton Square, a one-man show of work by Dominic Wilcox included a pair of GPS shoes Mr. Wilcox made with a bespoke cobbler in the shoemaking region of Northamptonshire.

Wearers load computerized mapping information into the footwear with a USB cable. LEDs in the left shoe light up when the toe is pointed in the correct direction. LEDs in the right shoe turn green as the destination is approached. The shoes are activated when the heels click together — one reason Mr. Wilcox calls his invention No Place Like Home.

And at Labour and Wait, a vintage housewares store on Redchurch Street, the featured product was a 60-year-old aluminum measuring cup called the Tala Cook’s Measure, which is still made by hand in Liverpool. Vitrines installed in the tiny shop laid out its history with loving photos of the inventors and factory.

It’s not nostalgia, Mr. Coakley of SCP corrected when I floated that word. “It’s positive,” he said.

Still, an emerging generation of British designers, like their counterparts throughout the world, are finding poetry in a kind of traditionalism their parents abhorred. Sir Terence Conran might be an apostle of modernism, but evidence suggests that his son Jasper, a fashion designer who recently took charge of the family retail business, may become the Ralph Lauren of Britain.

I submit as evidence “Country,” a book just released in the United States, which is the younger Mr. Conran’s paean to rural England. The book is filled with photos of thatched roofs, rose-choked gardens and weather-beaten villagers, which all appear to have been snapped in one 15-minute window of late-afternoon September light. Everyone, no matter how broken with the effort of existing for decades without running water, is bathed in the same honeyed hue.

Also consider “Red,” a show at Conran of 50 design products that were reissued in limited editions in the same hot-pepper shade. Rather than peppers, however, Mr. Conran was thinking of the classic British mailbox.

Visually, the conceit worked well. Like the golden-light trick, Pantone 032 brought an ennobling uniformity to a Dyson heater and a pair of Manolo Blahnik boots, so that you wanted to own anything touched by that magic paintbrush. It evoked the question of how color plays against form. It also made me wonder whether a change of shade really adds enough value to make it worth spending $1,764 for a Bertoia chair that normally sells for around $500.

At a dinner celebrating the opening of “Red,” Sir Terence thanked his son for bringing clarity back to Conran in his new capacity. “There was a freshness to the shop that has been lost in the last 25 years,” he said humbly, adding that Jasper’s perspective was not “bogged down with what is happening in Milan.”

Strikingly, however, Sir Terence also referred to red as the color of Marxism. It was the feistiest invocation I heard at the London Design Festival, where most participants, far from exhorting the workers of the world to unite, seemed to be asking gently that the workers of one’s homeland be loved. And employed.

The revolution will have to wait until next year.

-JULIE LASKY