"Subcontinental Drift: Modernist Art From India: Approaching Abstraction" in @wsj

By LEE LAWRENCE
New York
Rubin Museum of Art
Through Oct. 16

When friend and fellow artist Akbar Padamsee was—as a 1954 issue of the Bombay Sentinel termed it—"charge-sheeted" for obscenity, M.F. Husain came to his defense. Husain argued to the prosecutors that in Mr. Padamsee's painting, "Lovers," a man was not holding a woman's breast; straight lines and flat planes of color were crossing a circle. These "geometrical structures," he added, are "what you see in the folk art of India."

The case—whose outcome set a precedent for artistic freedom still invoked in Indian courts—features in an ingeniously simple timeline created by Beth Citron, assistant curator at the Rubin Museum of Art. Posted on the museum's website, it accompanies "Modernist Art From India," a continuing series of shows Ms. Citron has curated to explore artistic developments and experimentations in India and by Indians from the 1950s through the 1980s.

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Peabody Essex Museum
'The Diagonal' (1974) by Tyeb Mehta.

The lower track of the timeline highlights landmark events in the rise of Indian nationalism through the country's independence in 1947 and chronicles postindependence history until the early 1990s. The upper register, meanwhile, features seminal events in the lives of individual artists and in the country's art scene as a whole. It starts with the foundation of Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan school of art in 1901, just six years after the birth of the Indian National Congress, and ends with exhibitions both at home and abroad in the late 1980s. The stage was set for the splash Indian artists were to make in the international art market in the following decade.

The value of the Rubin's "Modernist Art From India" series is that it provides some background to that splash without, for all that, trying to "explain" it. The timeline does not draw neat correlations between politics and art—sometimes they exist, sometimes they don't—just as the series' second and current show, "Approaching Abstraction," does not construct a cohesive, chronological narrative. Ms. Citron has grouped its 30 or so works by author under headings that capture the thrust of each artist's approach to abstraction—"Abstracting Language," "Marks of Minimalism," "Architectural Abstractions," "Formalist Abstraction," and so forth.

Granted, logistics and budget dictated that Ms. Citron could bring in only works from nearby collections in the Northeast—more than half of those in "Approaching Abstraction" are from individuals and institutions in New York. The selection is therefore by no means all-inclusive, but it does a good job of delineating various trends animating India's modernist art scene. These range from Zarina Hashmi's mid-1970s monochromatic, textured prints or Nasreen Mohamedi's spare, pencil and ink drawings on grid paper (c. 1977) to the controlled exuberance of Krishna Reddy's "Great Clown" (1981) and the impasto of Shanti Dave's "Accordance" (1963), where the layers of paint are occasionally scraped away, leaving an after-image as revealing and ephemeral as reflections on water.

Ironically, while Eastern mysticism propelled Europeans like Wassily Kandinsky toward an abstract visual expression, only two of the artists here telegraph a connection to spirituality. Biren De's and Gulam Rasool Santosh's paintings, from 1962 and 1980 respectively, play with symbolic language of the esoteric practice of Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, even though, it turns out, neither artist was a practitioner. More interesting is the work by V.S. Gaitonde, a reclusive artist whose understanding and practice of Zen Buddhism propelled a lifelong quest to achieve a purity of form and color. Credited with pioneering the abstract in India, Gaitonde is represented here by two works. "Painting, 4" (1962) shows the vestiges of representation in markings that could be human figures or calligraphic symbols; in his 1964 untitled painting, coincidentally created during a year-long fellowship in New York, he strips away representation altogether, leaving a field of texture and color.

There are also some direct references to India. In Tyeb Mehta's "The Diagonal" (1974), for example, a jagged diagonal line splits a figure. This is a recurring image for Mehta, who witnessed the brutal killings and violence that flared when the country, at independence, was partitioned into India and Pakistan. And two short movies—Husain's "Through the Eyes of a Painter" (1967) and Mehta's "Koodal" (1969-70)—were shot in India. They run about 17 and 14 minutes, respectively, and plunge viewers into the forms and rhythms that these artists saw in the India that surrounded them.

So much variety packed into a small show makes it feel kaleidoscopic and splintered—yet therein lies its honesty. What comes through is that independence brought with it a measure of freedom for artists, both from the European models imposed by British colonialism and from the nationalist dictates of India's freedom struggle.

The artists on view do not appear uniformly compelled to proclaim their "Indianness," nor do they evidence the need to articulate an overarching ideology for their forays into abstract art. Indeed, many bounce back and forth between styles—a handful of these artists were also featured in the series' first show, "Body Unbound," and some will recur in the third part of the series, "Radical Terrain," which opens Nov. 9 and will explore artists' treatment of landscape. And while some find their moorings in European art, others, like Husain, arrive at a modernist stance through indigenous Indian art forms.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

A version of this article appeared August 30, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Subcontinental Drift.

"Noises Off: Silence @ the #Menil Collection" in @wsj #andywarhol via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

By Willard Spiegelman
Houston  - Updated August 28, 2012, 6:59 p.m. ET

In 1819 John Keats called his imaginary Grecian urn a “foster-child of silence and slow time” and a “sylvan historian.” He put himself in a line going back to the ancients, who thought of pictures and statues as silent poems that speak volumes.

 

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‘Lavender Disaster’ (1963) by Andy Warhol - Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS

 

Silence is now as precious and rare as slowness, or solitude, clean air and a star-filled night sky. As someone who never goes anywhere without ear plugs, and who would rather stay hungry than be forced into a noisy restaurant, I was keen to visit “Silence” at the Menil Collection here. In a variety of tones, voices and media, it reminds us of what we often want but can never have.

You won’t experience silence here. That would be impossible, even in the cool, chaste chambers of Renzo Piano’s exquisite building. This exhibit is really a riff on the composer John Cage’s remark that “there’s no such thing as silence.” The show has 52 pieces. Some are metaphysical or abstract paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko, all favorites of John and Dominique de Menil, who had amassed a fabulous if quirky collection before the museum opened in 1987.

Hanging on the walls, too, are such two-dimensional works as Yves Klein’s vibrant, glistening, gold-leaf “Untitled (Monogold).” Sculpture, small objects, neon-tubing and other three-dimensional works complement the pictures. The show features audio and video installations, as well as a living performance piece by Tino Sehgal in which a dancer rolls slowly along the floor of an interior room for 2½ hours, followed by another dancer who does the same thing. It certainly is silent; whether it is gripping, rather than boring, depends on a viewer’s patience.

A typical museum show often moves chronologically; in a thematic show, organizers make other arrangements. “Silence” may seem random, but it has a partially recognizable plan. After entering a vestibule containing a selection of representative works, you go on to four inner rooms. The first, the most conventional and tightly arranged, is in many ways the most moving. Four Andy Warhol pieces—silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen from the mid-1960s—represent the ultimate silence, death: in this case, death by electrocution. Warhol’s depictions of the electric chair at Sing Sing are beautiful, almost abstract in their swirls of color, a kind of phantom homage to Jackson Pollock. The smallest one, “Little Electric Chair,” is so black that you might mistake it for a cousin to Ad Reinhardt’s all-black “Abstract Painting” in another room, until you come close and see the chiseled outline of the electric chair staring right back at you.

Interspersed among the Warhols are seven silkscreens by Christian Marclay, each focusing on the single word “Silence” above the electric chair in the death chamber. “Silence” surrounds you, at least visually, on all sides.

The other rooms contain miscellaneous pieces. Some “talk” to one another; others seem more randomly placed. Dominique de Menil, a woman of austere and religious character, famously said that “only silence and love do justice to a great work of art,” but one is seldom alone in a museum, where quiet contemplation is hard to achieve. Interrupting a private experience of the art are not only the voices and footsteps of other viewers but also the sounds from the audio installations, including—most boomingly—Kurt Mueller’s “Cenotaph” (2011), an old jukebox into which you put a quarter and then get to hear one of 99 moments of silence, all of which are preceded by very noisy introductions. No silence comes without sound.

Two of the most compelling pieces are video installations, each within its own darkened chamber. Jacob Kirkegaard’s 2006 “AION” (Greek for eternity or infinity) was shot on location in ruined spaces at Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear reactor explosion. Shapes and colors move, come in and out of focus; an interior landscape is bathed in light, then dark shadows, then overwhelmed with whiteness. Static architecture changes as though it were Tai Chi, Keats’s “slow time” reimagined.

If you move counterclockwise through the show, the last thing you will see is the most resonant—a return to Cage, silence’s major spokesman. Sixty years ago, on Aug. 29, 1952, David Tudor sat down at a piano and performed for the first time Cage’s now celebrated (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) “4’33”“: a work in three movements and total silence other than the extraneous sounds within the hall. Cage himself said it could be “played” by any soloist or group of musicians.

Manon de Boer’s film “Two Times 4’ 33”” stars Jean-Luc Fafchamps. We see him at his piano—stern, unblinking, virtually motionless—and we hear him set and release the chess timer that marks the three movements. A plate glass window behind him gives on to wintry snow, ice and wind, whose sounds we also hear. He finishes, he stands up. An unseen audience applauds. The screen goes black.

The film resumes. It’s impossible to know if he’s playing the piece again or whether we are just seeing the first performance from a different angle. This time, we hear only the timer’s clicks but now we watch the rapt audience of earnest, attentive young people. And we see another view to the outside: a northern European city (it’s Brussels, Dec. 2, 2007), part industrial, part architectural, part natural.

To reach Mr. de Boer’s installation, you walk through two heavy doors with sound-deadening panels, and two sets of heavy black draperies. You sit on a bench, with a single light above you. The chamber is dark. You are bathed in silence, except for the sounds of the jukebox outside, which penetrate into this inner sanctum whenever someone puts a quarter in the old nickelodeon.

Cage would have smiled, audibly.

Mr. Spiegelman writes about the arts for the Journal. His essay “Some Words on Silence” appeared in the April issue of The Yale Review.

 

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Bass Museum has the only mummy south of Atlanta... "Mummy Dearest: Shadow of the Sphinx" in @wsj via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

 

By Barrymore Laurence Scherer
August 27, 2012, 4:37 p.m. ET  

 

Utica, N.Y. - The hills of central New York have been alive with the sounds and sights of Egypt this summer. In Cooperstown, the Glimmerglass Opera Festival featured Verdi’s “Aida” and the Fenimore Art Museum exhibited costumes from Metropolitan Opera “Aida” productions of the past century. And in Utica, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum of Art is presenting the absorbing “Shadow of the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt and Its Influence.”

Comprising roughly 150 objects, paintings, works of art, pieces of jewelry and related items from 30 lenders as well as the museum’s own collections, the show underscores the fascination with a multimillennial legacy that has long made Egyptology a staple of museum culture. Moreover, it places its venerable subject within a fresh and notably accessible historical context: The exhibition isn’t just about ancient Egypt but about its lively effect on fine, decorative and performing art from the Napoleonic era right through Cecil B. DeMille’s brand of Egyptofantasy.


Richard Walker - Detail of a mummy portrait mask from 332 B.C. - A.D. 395.

The first gallery, “The Burial Chamber,” sets the scene with a vivid selection of antiquities concerned with the rites of death, mummification and burial central to ancient Egyptian culture.

Flanking its entrance are two Ptolemaic-period sphinx fragments of carved limestone (332-30 B.C.), their delicately sculpted features softened by the erosion of countless windblown grains of sand. Taking center stage are a wood coffin lid and its base from the Late Dynastic Period (c. 525-343 B.C.) embellished with meticulously carved and painted human and bird motifs. Its splendid condition reminds us how posterity has reaped the preservative benefits of Egypt’s dry climate and the painstaking methods of ancient Egyptian craftsmen and funerary workers.

Many of the objects here would have been buried with the dead to accompany them in the afterlife—brilliantly glazed pottery; diminutive, beautifully wrought amulets and jewelry of cast and beaten gold, carved lapis-lazuli, beads of colored faience. A limestone canopic jar (c. 1070-945 B.C.), to contain the entrails removed from a body as part of mummification, resembles a small coffin with carved face and painted eyes. There’s also an actual mummified head from the Roman period (c. mid-second-century B.C. to mid-first-century A.D.), its face masked in gold leaf and given painted features, to imitate the solid-gold masks of royal mummies. And striking a poignant note is a mummified cat. Whether it once enjoyed life as a sacred creature or a family pet, now its eviscerated, sausagelike body is tightly wrapped in linen, with feline features painted on the swaddled head, its two perky ears distinct.

Virtually all of the chosen artifacts embody the colors, shapes and decorative motifs from which European and, afterward, American craftsmen derived their highly imaginative Egyptian Revivals, initially sparked by 18th-century archaeological discoveries. Representing the awakening interest is a fanciful English “canopic vase” produced about 1770 by the pottery firm of Wedgwood & Bentley. Possibly inspired by elements in the “Egyptian” mantelpiece designs published in 1769 by the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, this striking piece is essentially a bulbous neoclassical urn with a finely modeled Egyptian head pre-empting the usual pine-cone finial.

The shiploads of antiquities sent back to France during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign of 1798 incited the first Egyptian Revival craze during the Directoire and Empire periods and England’s Regency. And the lure of Egypt and its surroundings fostered an enduring “Orientalist” school of painting, as European artists voyaged to Egypt and North Africa, where they produced exotic views of deserts, pyramids and street life that found a ready market back home. The show features lush Orientalist canvases by such exponents through successive decades asCharles Théodore Frère, Rudolf Ernst and Joseph Farquharson, which document their fascination with “primitive” life still extant in 19th-century Egypt. Works like Edwin Long’s “Love’s Labor Lost,” Frederick Arthur Bridgman’s “Cleopatra on the Terraces at Philae” and Gustave Doré’s “Moses Before the Pharaoh” attest to those artists’ mastery of romanticized, dramatic interpretations of ancient and biblical themes.

The construction of the Suez Canal and its completion in 1869 sparked a second Egyptian Revival, represented here with examples of opulent, imaginative furniture, silver, glass, lamps and other decorations in the Egyptian taste whose obelisk, pyramid and sphinx motifs lent distinctive flair to French Second Empire and High Victorian design.

Taking a spin on the stylized Egyptian scarab beetle, a massive porcelain paperweight shaped like a startled but anatomically correct beetle and a porcelain vase embellished with another beetle (replete with six legs and probing antennae) represent experimental extremes by the inventive English designer Christopher Dresser during the 1880s.

More beautiful, and more dazzling, are ancient and European scarab-inspired jewelry in the “Jewels of the Nile” gallery, the exhibition’s visual climax. Among the dazzlers are a scarab brooch of fire opal and enameled gold by Marcus & Co., New York, and a Swiss gold ladies’ watch. Articulated beetles-wings covering the watch face are enameled in royal blue and ablaze with 16 tiny diamonds in star-shaped settings.

The final gallery represents Egypt’s hold on 19th- and 20th-century popular culture, reinvigorated by the English archaeologist Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb. Film posters and other material document successive “Cleopatra” extravaganzas starring Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor; George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” starring Vivian Leigh; “The Mummy” with Boris Karloff and its 1999 remake; “The Ten Commandments,” and of course “Death on the Nile.” There are vaudeville posters, old souvenir postcards, souvenir pencils, toiletries and other commercial relics that once exploited Egyptian fads.

Most endearing is colorful sheet music for such Tin-Pan Alley numbers as “My Cairo Maid” (1917) and “Ilo (A Voice From Mummyland)” (1921), and the wistful tenor air “Star Light, Star Bright” from Victor Herbert’s early operetta hit, “The Wizard of the Nile” (1895). It’s a pity that there isn’t an accompanying selection of historic recordings to let visitors hear the tuneful melodies behind those inviting covers.

For younger viewers as well as adults, videos and board games introduce aspects of Egyptian culture; bins of flash-cards explain hieroglyphics, Egyptian cats, scarabs and other motifs. There are even “scent stations,” whose fragrant boxes of dried seeds and herbs invite visitors to inhale the aromas of “the spicy shores of Araby the blest.” Indeed, virtually no stone has been left unturned, as it were, to make this exhibition delightful and memorable.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.

 

 

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"Artist Focus: Barry McGee: Street Art Steals A Berkeley Show" in @wsj

By RACHEL WOLFF

In the vein of pioneering New York street artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barry McGee got his start spray-painting San Francisco walls in the 1980s with "Wild Style" graffiti and cartoony faces. His work quickly grew to include sculptures, immersive installations and elaborate murals, painted both in and out of doors.

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Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - Barry McGee's 'Untitled,' acrylic on glass bottles from 2005.

Like many of today's street artists and unlike Basquiat, whose work set an auction record in June with a $20 million sale at Christie's, Mr. McGee, 46, is formally trained. He earned his BFA in 1991 at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he specialized in painting and printmaking but found himself drawn to the street rather than to more traditional galleries. Mr. McGee—who is represented by Cheim & Read in New York—and his ilk have made street art more complex while finding homes for it with private collectors willing to pay from $25,000 to $500,000 for a new installation.

In the past decade, mainstream museums have embraced this generation of artists too. Tate Modern commissioned a handful of street artists (including the Brazilian duo Os Gêmeos) to make massive murals on its exterior walls in 2008; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles hosted a major survey dedicated to the movement in 2011, in which Mr. McGee's work was featured prominently.

"Barry McGee," the first comprehensive look at his career, opened Friday at the University of California's Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) and remains on view through Dec. 9. In April, the show travels to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

Street-Art Standouts

[image]Christies Images Ltd. 2012

A Keith Haring ink on vinyl tarpaulin piece executed in 1982 that sold for $2,840,000, more than double the estimate.

[image]Christies Images Ltd 2012

An acrylic by street artist Kaws, the alias of artist Brian Donnelly.

Mr. McGee is widely admired for his ability to create in-gallery environments that evoke the street, and insisting that museum exhibitions include an outdoor display. "There is a tension in artists between wanting to exhibit our work in galleries and wanting to make work that defies that same system and maintains our sense of being individuals," says John O'Connor, an artist and visiting assistant professor in the fine arts department of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Mr. McGee's approach has inspired unknown graffiti writers, MFA hopefuls, and younger New York street artists like Swoon. The wider art world embraced his aesthetic, and he was exhibiting his work regularly by the mid-1990s, often enlisting friends and collaborators (including his late wife and fellow street artist Margaret Kilgallen) to aid in his large-scale installations and make contributions of their own. He has shown everywhere from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to the Prada Foundation in Milan.

The Berkeley show features dozens of framed drawings, prints and bright Op-art-like abstractions clustered tightly on gallery walls; little-seen early etchings; and murals bearing his signature "'toons"—expressive, often droopy faces with deep-set eyes and heavy lids inspired, in part, by the homeless population in San Francisco's Mission District. There's also a sculpture of five hoodie-clad animatronic kids stacked on each other's shoulders as the top one tags a gallery wall with the word "Amaze."

As part of his usual effort to bring his art outside, Mr. McGee has also spray-painted "Amaze" in a graffiti-like scrawl on panel that sheaths the museum's exterior facade. "The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still—it's not something that a museum would really embrace," he says. "And even if they let me do it, I like to make it look like it's done illegally to some degree."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358404577605410129516228.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

 

"Eye Candy or Eyesore?: Work by Niki de Saint Phalle and Bruce High Quality Foundation" in @nytimes

Julia Gillard for The New York Times
An installation by Charles Long at Madison Square Park. More Photos »

By KEN JOHNSON
Published: August 23, 2012

Public art makes me think of what the Conceptualist Douglas Huebler once said: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” That may be a funny thing for an artist to say, but if you live in a place as densely packed with objects of all kinds as New York City, you may appreciate its wisdom. Nevertheless, for better or worse, temporary public art displays pop up all over the city during the warm seasons in hopes of adding beauty and zest to the urban fabric.


Julia Gillard for The New York Times

Outdoor Sculpture One of nine installations by Niki de Saint Phalle on traffic islands from 52nd to 60th Streets on Park Avenue features a stout tree whose branches have morphed into gold heads of lively snakes.


Julia Gillard for The New York Times
John Chamberlain’s sculpture on the plaza of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue.

A stretch of Park Avenue is one place where the necessity of public art comes into question right now. There a series of monumental, bulbous figures clad in colorful mosaic tiles by Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) punctuates the traffic islands from 52nd to 60th Streets. Dating from 1983 to 2001, they include simplified but recognizable portraits of Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, as well as a number of renditions of curvy, knob-headed female beauties and a stout tree whose branches have morphed into gold heads of lively snakes.

Back in the ’60s, when Ms. de Saint Phalle was developing her aesthetic, figures like these had a goofy, liberationist vibe. But the works here seem woefully outdated, more tacky than visionary.

As a counterpoint to Ms. de Saint Phalle’s strenuously playful works, a quartet of abstract metal sculptures by John Chamberlain occupies the plaza of the Seagram Building, on Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets. Made from 2008 to 2010, they are unlike the Abstract Expressionist conglomerations of automobile body parts he was known for.

Mainly they consist of tubular elements, made of crushed sheet metal, that resemble elongated elephant legs bound together into knotlike configurations. They were copied from small maquettes that Mr. Chamberlain created by molding aluminum foil with his hands. Colored metallic green, copper and silver, they are weird hybrids of beauty and ugliness. Here on the Seagram Building’s porch, they call to mind the old dismissive label for abstract sculpture on corporate plazas: “plop art.”

As chance would have it, there is a piece of outdoor sculpture in the same neighborhood representing the opposite of the beautifying imperative. Installed on the plaza of Lever House, it is a giant rat, one of those balloons that labor union strikers often bring with them to represent masters of the capitalist universe, but here cast in bronze by the team of young artist-provocateurs known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation. In a poetically just world, it would be permanently installed on Wall Street within waving distance of the raging bull.

The rat, titled “The New Colossus,” accompanies an exhibition of the group’s works in the glassed-in lobby of Lever House. It consists of real objects, like mops in buckets, vacuum cleaners, a step ladder and office furniture, scattered about the space. Each has an audio speaker built into it that is connected by radio to a video montage on a flat screen called “Art History With Labor: 95 Theses.” Different professional actors’ voices enunciating texts about art and labor emanate from the speakers, as if these objects associated with daily work had themselves become animated, like ventriloquists’ dummies, by unionizing passions.

I wonder what the denizens of this zone of corporate business and super-expensive domiciles think about the Bruces’ agitprop? It is hard to imagine many of them being aroused to revolutionary fervor. Still, the incongruity itself is refreshing. In this respect it is worth noting that the Lever House art program is privately sponsored, with the former Whitney Museum of American Art curator Richard Marshall organizing its exhibitions. It is rare to find such baldly partisan expression as the Bruces’ in outdoor art sponsored by public institutions. Offense is so easily taken, especially if taxpayer money is involved.

A more circumspect approach to political art can be found in two pieces included in “Common Ground,” a 10-artist exhibition in City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, organized by the Public Art Fund. “It’s Never Too Late to Say Sorry,” by the team Elmgreen & Dragset, consists of a glass case displaying a gleaming aluminum megaphone. The case is locked, but a descriptive label explains that once a day a performer will open it and “activate” the piece. No actor showed up while I was there, but in an online video of the sculpture’s debut in Rotterdam you get to see a man unlock the case, take out the megaphone, hold it to his mouth and cry out, “It is never too late to say, ‘Sorry!’,” whereupon he returns the bullhorn to its case and walks away.

Placed across the park’s circular central plaza is Amalia Pica’s “Now, Speak!,” a podium cast in concrete that seems to invite people to step up and say whatever is on their minds. Otherwise implacably silent, it shares with Elmgreen & Dragset’s piece a funereal feeling. Both could be memorials to the loss of a widely shared and well-developed public discourse.

As Martha Schwendener observed in her review in The New York Times, other works in “Common Ground” exemplify the distinctive language of high-end contemporary art. Paul McCarthy’s colossal inflated ketchup bottle; Christian Jankowski’s plaque announcing the burial of his remains somewhere in the park; Justin Matherly’s rough re-creation of a part of the Ancient Roman sculpture “Laocoön and His Sons,” elevated on a platoon of aluminum walkers: these as well as works by Matthew Day Jackson, Thomas Schütte and Jenny Holzer speak in tongues likely to be as mystifying to the public as they are familiar to people conversant in the polyglot lingo of today’s art world.

There is another, more democratic — utopian, even — rationale for presenting this sort of art to the public. It might interrupt the usual flow of collective consciousness, diverting minds from routine compliance with the banal order of things and opening up ordinarily hidden vistas of imaginative vision.

A more viewer-friendly example of that approach is an installation called “Pet Sounds” by the sculptor Charles Long at Madison Square Park in Manhattan. The main elements are large, cheerfully colored fiberglass blobs resembling extraterrestrial or subaquatic life forms as imagined by the makers of “Ghostbusters.”

Some stand on their own; one sits on a park bench; another sprawls on a picnic table. All are connected to swerving hand railings that create winding pathways for visitors. A close encounter with any of the blobs reveals that each is equipped with a small speaker that emits futuristic electronic noises. A kind of surrealistic petting zoo with a nod to the Beach Boys, Mr. Long’s creation requires little esoteric knowledge to enjoy. Its generosity of spirit is infectious.

Although very different in style from Mr. Long’s sculpture, works by Oscar Tuazon in Brooklyn Bridge Park also aim to tweak everyday consciousness. “People,” the most complex of three pieces there, consists of a poured concrete handball wall with a tall dead tree attached to one vertical edge and an old basketball hoop and backboard attached to a truncated branch. Placed near a chain-link fence setting parkland off from an adjacent construction site, it looks less like art than like an ad hoc construction waiting to be broken down and carted away by a demolition crew. Another production of the Public Art Fund, it reflects a considerable uncertainty about who it wants its public to be.

You might suppose that the High Line would be a good site for outdoor art. Thus far, however, the park’s public art program has done little to distinguish itself. This summer’s effort, called “Lilliput,” sounds like a good idea. Organized by Cecilia Alemani, the High Line’s art curator, it presents small-scale sculptures by six artists distributed in inconspicuous places to either side of the main walkway.

Only one piece creates the sort of surprise you would hope for: Tomoaki Suzuki’s “Carson,” a startlingly realistic, two-foot-tall portrait of a young man with bleached hair wearing tight black jeans and a black motorcycle jacket. Made of carved and painted wood, this miniature hipster stands nonchalantly on gravel between old steel train rails, oblivious to the giant tourists who gawk at him or stop to pose next to him for snapshots.

Nothing else in “Lilliput” has such a galvanizing relationship to its environment. Though mildly appealing, Francis Upritchard’s Rodinesque pair of bronze simian creatures and Oliver Laric’s colorfully striped cast resin portrait of Sun Tzu with two faces like the Roman god Janus, would be seen to better advantage in an indoor gallery.

The High Line public art program faces an unusual challenge. The site is almost a mile and a half long but mostly no wider than a one-way street, and grass and other plantings take up a lot of that space. Because of its popularity, it is pretty congested in nice weather. With vendors selling drinks and snacks, as well, and so much nonart to see in different directions near and far and up and down, there is almost too much going on. Does the High Line need art on top of all that? I’m not convinced that it does.

Site Specific

 

BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION: ‘ART HISTORY WITH LABOR’ Through Sept. 28. Lever House, 390 Park Avenue, at 53rd Street; leverhouseartcollection.com.

‘COMMON GROUND’ Through Nov. 30. City Hall Park, between Broadway and Park Row, Lower Manhattan; publicartfund.org/commonground.

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Through Nov. 16. Seagram Building, 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets; gagosian.com.

‘LILLIPUT’ Through April 14. The High Line, six sculptures between 30th and Gansevoort Streets and 10th and 11th Avenues, Manhattan; thehighline.org.

CHARLES LONG: ‘PET SOUNDS’ Through Sept. 9. Madison Square Park, 23rd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues; madisonsquarepark.org/art.

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE ON PARK AVENUE Through Nov. 15. Park Avenue between 52nd and 60th Streets; nikidesaintphalle.org.

OSCAR TUAZON: ‘PEOPLE’ Through April 26. Brooklyn Bridge Park; entrance at Old Fulton and Furman Streets, Dumbo. publicartfund.org/oscartuazon.

 

A version of this review appeared in print on August 24, 2012, on page C21 of the New York edition with the headline: Eye Candy or Eyesore?.

"Diego Singh Does Denim at Sydney's Mclemoi Gallery"

Lost My Memory in Hollywood, 2009-2012 & The New Yorker 3 by Diego Singh

by Nicholas Forrest
August 20, 2012

I think I speak for most people when I say that I have never felt the desire to contemplate the artistic qualities and cultural significance of my favourite pair of jeans; but I am glad that American based, Argentine-born artist Diego Singh has – or at least appears as though he has.

 

Of all the works by Singh currently on display at Sydney’s Mclemoi Gallery, the most striking are the large, mainly blue canvases that dominate the gallery space. Although the imposing nature of the bright and highly textural paintings is at first somewhat unsettling, a strange sense of familiarity quickly takes over.

 

It might take a few moments, but the dominant blue and grey backgrounds, the textural qualities and the appearance of seam-like patterns soon evolve into what would normally be instantly recognisable as denim. They are, however, not really denim; Singh actually paints the realistic denim pattern by hand and uses the texture of the linen canvas to full effect.

 

The fact that the primary subject of Singh’s paintings is not immediately identifiable alludes to a cultural phenomenon that is characterised by varying levels of disconnect from particular subjects and objects that we are constantly exposed to in our everyday lives.

 

That noise; that hum; that all-consuming, constant sensual bombardment we experience every day, and which in many ways inhibits our ability to assess and examine what influences our decisions and behaviours, appears to be represented in some of the “denim” paintings as bright and energetic swirls reminiscent of the intoxicating glow emitted by big city neon lights.

 

One of the most noticeable characteristics of Singh’s “denim” series is the varying number of layers visible in each painting that suggests that they are at varying stages of completion – which they actually are.

 

Many of the artist’s paintings are completed in-house at the location of the exhibition and display responses to past experiences in past exhibition spaces which are added to as different layers by the artist as his artistic journey unfolds.

 

For many people a pair of jeans is a wearable, biographical account of past experiences and events that are identifiable by the rips, tears and stains that have become fashionable components of jean culture.

 

By reusing and reinterpreting his canvases, Singh is treating each piece like a continually developing and changing story. In the same way that a pair of jeans changes over time in conjunction with the lifestyle of the wearer, Singh’s paintings accumulate the distinct markings of different venues and experiences.

 

The fact that people purchase brand new pairs of jeans that have been given the appearance of well worn jeans is testament to the influence that fashion and popular culture has on the decisions we make. Far from being a mere homage to jean culture, Singh’s “denim” series is a complex exploration of the way we interpret and react to the interminable and innumerable series of images and messages that we are bombarded with every day.

 

“CAPTCHA” by Diego Singh, is on view at Mclemoi Gallery in Sydney until August 25, 2012

 

For more information visit http://www.mclemoi.com

"Jean Prouvé: A Testimony to Ingenuity" in @nytimes

By
Published: August 17, 2012

NANCY, FRANCE — Jean Prouvé was at his lowest ebb. In 1952, when he was in his early 50s, the French designer lost control of his factory, which had once employed more than 200 people, and was fighting to regain ownership of his trading name and patents. Hoping to distract him, Prouvé’s family encouraged him to start a new project: the construction of a house where he would live with his wife, Madeleine, and the two youngest of their six children.


Courtesy of the Centre Pompidou and Adagp
Jean Prouvé working as an apprentice in 1917

Courtesy of the Centre Pompidou and Adagp
A prototype of a prefabricated house Jean Prouvé designed for use in Africa.

The Prouvés bought a plot of land on a wooded hill on the northern outskirts of Nancy. The site was cheap because it was thought to be too steep to build there. Working with his architect brother Henri, Prouvé designed a long, skinny single-story building made mostly from prefabricated components foraged from the factory. Some parts were originally intended for emergency housing, and others were left over from the construction of a school. His children pitched in by helping him to haul the components up the hill in an ancient Jeep and to assemble them, finishing the house in 1954.

Peeping out between trees, the home, known today as Maison Jean Prouvé, is a model of rationalist ingenuity with tiny bedrooms resembling ship’s cabins and panoramic views across Nancy from the glass wall in the living room. The house now belongs to the City of Nancy, which rents it to an architect and his family on condition that the public can visit at certain times. Together with Prouvé’s workshop from his factory, which has been rebuilt in the grounds, it offers fascinating insights into the life and work of one of the most influential designers — or “factory workers,” as Prouvé described himself — of the 20th century and is a highlight of the current “Tribute to Jean Prouvé” in Nancy.

The tribute includes the opening of permanent galleries devoted to Prouvé’s work at the Musée des beaux-arts and Musée de l’Histoire du Fer. Running through Oct. 28 are an exhibition of his ironwork at Musée de l’École de Nancy, an analysis of his impact on the city during and after World War II at Musée Lorrain and the installation of one of the prefabricated Maisons Tropicales he designed for use in Africa at Musée des beaux-arts. It is to be displayed at Musée de l’Histoire du Fer in 2014. A map has been produced identifying a dozen of Prouvé’s projects in Nancy, ranging from the aquarium doors and a funerary monument, to his family home.

Nancy is renowned for the historic grandeur of its medieval churches and the sumptuous 18th-century Place Stanislas. (When I described the latter as “one of the most beautiful squares in France” to a local, she corrected me with: “No, in the world.”) The tribute to Prouvé asserts its Modernist credentials as the city he chose as his home.

Born in Paris, the second of seven children of the artist Victor Prouvé and the pianist Marie Duhamel, Prouvé grew up in Nancy, where his father co-founded the École de Nancy, an alliance of local artists, industrialists and artisans that championed the Art Nouveau movement in France. After leaving school, Prouvé was apprenticed to master blacksmiths in Paris before returning to Nancy to open a small forge in 1924. Having begun by making wrought-iron grilles and doors, he went on to design metal furniture and other objects intended for mass production.

Prouvé’s work was always more austere than his father’s, and rapidly became wholly utilitarian. “He had no interest in aesthetics,” said Cathérine Coley, who co-curated the tribute. “His work was determined solely by its function.” But Prouvé shared the underlying principles of the École de Nancy, often quoting his father’s belief in the importance of “industrial production for the widest possible public."

By the 1930s, his workshop was manufacturing furniture and architectural components for schools, factories and other buildings. During World War II, Prouvé developed a barrack unit that could be assembled in three hours, only to be compelled to make cooking stoves and bicycle frames under the German occupation. He joined the French Resistance, using the code name “locksmith,” and was appointed mayor of Nancy after the war before returning to manufacturing.

Prouvé continued his wartime research into speedily assembled structures by making emergency housing for refugees and the homeless from modular wooden panels, as metal was still scarce. (A 1945 emergency shelter is in the Musée Lorrain exhibition.) After opening his factory in 1947, Prouvé produced more sophisticated prefabricated structures including the Maisons Tropicales. He was devoted to his employees, whom he called “compagnons” or “comrades,” and insisted that each one owned at least one share in the company. When a janitor explained that he could not afford to do so, Prouvé bought a share for him. After being forced out of the factory by his financial backer, he worked mostly as a consultant in Paris, but spent as much time as possible in Nancy, and died at Maison Jean Prouvé in 1984.

The Nancy tribute comes at a time when Prouvé’s ideals are in danger of being obscured by his improbable posthumous role as the darling of the design-art market. Would the man who referred to himself as an “anarchist in a good sense” have approved of the furniture he designed for schools and factories being auctioned off as collectors’ trophies? Unlikely.

Perversely, Prouvé’s commitment to mass production has enhanced the marketability of his work, because there is so much of it for dealers to sell. (Most of his contemporaries made furniture in smaller quantities.) The discrepancy between his vision of his designs and the market’s is illustrated by the contrast between the faded panels of his home and the exquisitely reconstructed Maison Tropicale at Musée des beaux-arts, whose gleaming finishes would never have survived the journey to Africa, let alone its climate.

Gorgeous as the Maison Tropicale looks, it has not simply been restored, but beautified, which may not be what Prouvé would have wished. As he said: “If people understand, there’s no need to explain. If they don’t, there’s no use explaining.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 20, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

"Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Pillar at the Bass" via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Pillar Breakfast at the beautiful Bass Museum of Art- July 27, 2012. Pillar members enjoyed a wide array of artwork, a guided museum tour and a speaker panel discussing the highly-anticipated Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach. Speakers: Terry Riley, K/R Architect PC and Jeffrey Lawson, Art Fairs Unlimited. Moderator: Silvia Cubina, Bass Museum of Art Executive Director

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"Why Arts Managers Short of Cash Are Looking at Detroit" in @wsj Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

By Terry Teachout
August 17, 2012

When it comes to the fine arts, things are really, really rough all over. Yet another major regional orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, is now publicly grappling with a debt crisis (it’s nearly $20 million in the hole) exacerbated by high labor costs that threaten the ensemble’s existence. The situation, says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is “increasingly dire.” Meanwhile, a growing number of much-admired performing groups, including Palm Beach’s Florida Stage, have been forced to shut down permanently, while others, most notably the New York City Opera, have chosen instead to gut their operations to the point of unrecognizability.

image
Associated Press
A viewer at a current Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition, ‘Picasso and Matisse: The DIA’s Prints and Drawings.’

That’s why everybody in the art world is now talking about the Detroit Institute of Arts, a world-class institution that just came within inches of closing. Instead, it’s now more financially stable than at any time in the past quarter-century.

The DIA, as Judith H. Dobrzynski recently reported in the Journal, no longer receives public funding from the city of Detroit or the state of Michigan, both of which have been hit brutally hard by the current economic downturn. Because the museum’s operating endowment is so small, more than half of its operating expenses are directly funded by its donors—a model that, as Ms. Dobrzynski wrote, “is simply not sustainable.” DIA director Graham Beal responded by hacking away at the museum’s budget and raising enough money to retire its current debt. But he knew that the DIA was doing no better than running in place, and that the fiscal road ahead would soon grow sharply steeper.

What to do? Mr. Beal went to the voters, asking the residents of Michigan’s Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties to pass a modest 10-year-long dedicated property-tax increase known as a “millage.” It would supply up to $23 million in public funding each year for the next decade—91% of the DIA’s annual operating budget—thus buying time for Mr. Beal and his colleagues to build up the museum’s operating endowment to the point where it can bring in sufficient income to pay the bills.

Sounds great, huh? But how do you get suburban taxpayers to pony up in support of a museum located in the heart of a city on which most of them long ago turned their backs? That’s the beauty part: Mr. Beal announced that the residents of every county that passed the millage would be admitted free to the DIA. Otherwise, he said, the museum would be forced to close on weekdays and lock the doors to half of its galleries.

Having offered voters this stark alternative, Mr. Beal and his staffers rolled up their sleeves and started working the phones … and all three counties passed the millage.

What lessons can other arts organizations learn from the DIA crisis? To begin with, the DIA showed it was serious about money by slashing every thimbleful of fat out of its budget. It simultaneously showed itself to be responsive to the wishes of its patrons by undertaking an imaginative reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection that was both user-friendly and artistically responsible. Then, when the DIA asked for public funding, it sweetened the pill with an equally imaginative free-admission plan that targeted not just Detroiters but local suburbanites.

Contrast the DIA’s approach with that of the Atlanta Symphony, which is opting for innovation-free budget cutting instead of root-and-branch institutional transformation. Or the New York City Opera, which has “transformed” itself into a mini-NYCO that has as much in common with the old company as today’s pre-shrunk Newsweek has with the once-healthy magazine of a quarter-century ago. Cutting is not enough. You also have to think creatively and be willing to take risks, as the DIA did when it asked the people of Detroit and its suburbs to agree to a tax increase.

Yes, Mr. Beal’s three-legged plan was museum-specific, especially the free-admission leg. But the thinking behind it has universal applicability. To wit:

• Don’t ask the public for more money unless you can prove that you’re not wasting the money you’re already spending.

• Keep the needs of your clientele in mind at all times.

• When the world changes, change with it.

That last commandment is the toughest to embrace, as well as the most important. Symphony orchestras and theater companies, for example, continue to cling to the old-fashioned subscription model that provides them with a yearly cushion of “front money.” But a fast-growing number of under-50 Americans are too busy to commit in advance to attending specific performances on specific dates. According to the Theatre Communications Group, the number of subscription tickets sold by America’s nonprofit theaters plummeted 15.1% between 2006 and 2010. That’s not a trend—it’s an avalanche.

No arts organization, however important it may be, is entitled to succeed. It must keep on proving its worth to the public, year after year. But Mr. Beal and his colleagues have clearly accepted the iron necessity of finding creative new ways to engage in the business of high art. As a result, they now have a shot at long-term survival—and they’ve earned it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444508504577593073546227962.html

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"Dog Days: August's Second Saturday Art Walk" in Miami New Times

By Carlos Suarez De Jesus
published: August 09, 2012
Carlos Gámez de Francisco's Glasses for Face Shape and French Mustache
Carlos Gámez de Francisco's Glasses for Face Shape and French Mustache

Despite a notable spike in new gallery shows opening in Wynwood this summer, August remains the sleepiest month of the year for most dealers. In fact, folks who venture out to this weekend's Second Saturday culture crawl will discover that many top-tier programs — including Fredric Snitzer, David Castillo, Dorsch, Pan American Art Projects, and Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts — are closed during the art walk.

In part, that's because collectors tend to flee the 305 as the mercury soars. But it's also because August gives galleries a chance to prep for the big season openings in September, when they crack out the big cannons in anticipation of December's Art Basel and its satellite fairs.

That doesn't mean you won't find some fresh exhibits worth visiting this weekend, though — all with the bonus of snagging a parking space more easily than you would on the average Second Saturday. For galleries that brave the August lull, it can be the perfect time to command eyeballs in a relaxing environment.

"There might be fewer collectors here for the summer, but we still have visitors coming to learn, enjoy, or just satisfy their curiosity," says Elaine Minionis, co-owner of the Lunch Box Gallery, which will be open this weekend. "We've all worked so hard to build the reputation of this area in relation to art content. Where does that go when newcomers visit and they find almost everything closed? It's a waste of opportunity."

Fortunately, a trio of shows — including one at Minionis's gallery — represents anything but a blown chance. Among the best offerings opening at 6 p.m. Saturday are a conceptual duo exploring third-wave feminism, a sprawling photography show featuring the work of 14 international artists, and a solo exhibit by a young Cuban painter whose vision of the French monarchy's waning days offers scathing commentary on absolute power.

With the presidential election season rising to a boil that's hot enough to match the blistering North Miami Avenue asphalt, the Magic City's premier alternative art space features two artists drawing inspiration from a Republican blowhard.

"Female Hu$tle," a collaborative project by Heather Miller and Rosemarie Romero at ­Locust Projects (3852 N. Miami Ave..; 305-576-8570; locustprojects.org), was created partially in response to the furor that erupted earlier this year when Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" after she testified about contraception before a congressional committee.

Miller and Romero, both MFA students at the University of Florida, write that they want to "explore a complex and contradictory dialogue about objectification and identity." To that end, Romero's Porn Nails is an actual nail salon in the gallery, where the artist offers custom manicures for women and girls "in exchange for conversations in relation to love, sex, and work specific to the geographic region of South Florida."

Romero says she wants to explore female stereotypes by employing camp and parody to transform negative labels of women into positive ones.

"I'm Dominican, so I will be performing as a Latin nail manicurist named Chichi and will be in the gallery on roller skates and wearing a platinum wig," she says. "I will be playing with the whole idea of the 'Miami girl' image in a beauty-parlor setting, making cafecitos and cortaditos on a hotplate for my clients."

The artist, who grew up here and often skated to Miami booty bass tunes at Thunder Wheels in Kendall, says Limbaugh's comments where offensive and hurtful; the project is also a way for others hurt by such language to reclaim the insults.

"I felt for her," Romero recalls. "After I finish giving participants their manicures, I will be taking portraits of them with a Polaroid for a large wall collage created as part of the project. They can then write the words bitch, slut, or other phrases on their pictures to reclaim negative female stereotypes as words of empowerment or pleasure."

Miller, meanwhile, has taken over the front gallery and storefront windows facing North Miami Avenue to present Gold/Mirror, a series of human-size sculptural/photographic works depicting female bodies painted gold, with their absent faces replaced by mirrors. Phrases such as "I will not become fettered to the role that you assign me" and "I will live with intention" cover the floor around the exhibit.

The work explores objectification as a means of empowerment and challenges feminist stereotypes, Miller says. "I use my body as bait to draw the viewer into my work. I create objects that transform the body in order to counteract the gaze. The sculptures are both retaliatory and celebratory," she explains.

For a compelling photo-based show that would command attention any time of year, visit the Lunch Box Gallery (310 NW 24th St., Miami; 305-407-8131; thelunchboxgallery.com), where "Summer Photo Show 2012" features scores of stunning images from 14 international artists.

Now in its second annual edition, the exhibit includes entries from all styles of the genre, including mixed-media works employing photography. On view is everything from conceptual and documentary photography to narrative photography, photo essay, iPhoneography, and photo collage.

Look for Noah David Bau's portraits of young professional muay thai boxers at a training camp in Bangkok's most notorious slum. In works that are at once searing and compelling, the Boston artist captures images of boys who have been orphaned or discarded, subjected to grueling workouts and brutal physical punishment, and trained to be merciless.

Another artist worth attention is Miami's Lissette Schaeffler, who focuses her lens on the Magic City's seedy hot-sheet motels. For her By the Hour series, she snaps haunting photos of empty pay-by-the-hour sex dives, inviting viewers to an encounter with the sordid landscapes of the illicit quickie rendezvous.

"The show we had for the summer in 2011 was highly crowded," Minionis says. "There is no excuse for not putting on a show — or even more, a good show — because it's summer... Besides, our particular purpose is not only about selling but also about educating people about the art form and its latest trends, bringing a deeper appreciation."

At Hardcore Art Contemporary Space (72 NW 25th St., Miami; 305-576-1645; hardcoreartmiami.com), a visually striking solo show by young Cuban painter Carlos Gámez de Francisco appropriates the opulence and decadence of the last French monarchs while referencing his life in Cuba during the island's "Special Period," the economic crisis that followed the fall of the Soviet Union.

Curated by the Aluna Curatorial Collective, Adriana Herrera, and Willy Castellanos, the exhibit, titled "Radical Genealogy: The Decline of Dauphins, Courtesans, and Hounds," features animations, paintings, and drawings that aim to explore "the relationship between the Eros of power and the threat of destruction." On view are provocative, richly textured images of a stuck-up Robespierre, the last words of Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette on the way to the guillotine.

Herrera, who is also an independent curator and an art critic for El Nuevo Herald, says, "Black humor serves as the narrative thread linking pictorial scenes in which the bloody and the absurd converge in ostentatious fashion."