"Soundings’ Features Art With Audio Elements

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Soundings: A Contemporary Score, a survey of sound art, opens at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall” is a 25-foot panel with 1,500 tiny speakers, each at different pitch. More Photos »

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: August 8, 2013

Three summers ago, the Museum of Modern Art installed a 1961 sound art work by Yoko Ono in its atrium. It was called “Voice Piece for Soprano — Scream 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky.” It consisted of a live standing microphone and some extremely loud amplifiers. Anyone passing through the atrium was invited to stand in front of the mike and follow the instructions in the title: that is, scream.

Countless visitors, including many kids and antic-minded adults, gleefully complied. But where Ms. Ono could turn a scream into a coloratura aria, the average amateur participant just gave an explosive shriek and scampered away. The piece stayed in place for months. It turned the museum into a sonic hell. MoMA habitués, including guards, couldn’t wait for it to go away.

Still, it had its merits. It was, for one thing, a very un-MoMA phenomenon: unpredictable, uncontrolled, anarchic, all that that institution is not. It also did what sound art was historically meant to do: to give sound — variously referred to as noise, or music or silence — the assertive presence of any other art medium, make it fill space, claim attention and time.

In recent years, attention has been slight. The much-maligned 2002 Whitney Biennial included a substantial amount of sound art, by the likes of Maryanne Amacher and Stephen Vitiello. But like many of that show’s innovations, this one sailed straight over the heads of critics and didn’t get much follow-up.

Now, more than a decade later, MoMA is picking up the slack with a survey show of new art called “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” which opens Saturday. As if in reaction to Ms. Ono’s eruptive brashness, it is low key to the point of timidity. And formally speaking, much of it isn’t sound art in any pure sense. It’s sculpture, film, installation and work on paper with audio components.

Throughout the 20th century, sound was frontier terrain, staked out by crazies and visionaries: pro-violence Futurists, war-addled Dadaists and out-there beings like Antonin Artaud. The composer John Cage and his Fluxus successors were part of sound art’s gentler, though no less radical side. And that’s the side, now neatly landscaped, that “Soundings” is on.

The simple fact that the show looks like a normal, neat, stuff-on-the-walls-and-floors MoMA fare says a lot. Two artists are represented only by drawings. Marco Fusinato’s are based on the printed pages of a score by the composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). On each page, Mr. Fusinato has drawn hundreds of ink lines tying all the notes to a single central point. Were the piece played the way the score looks, it would sound like a detonation.

The large-format drawings on paper by Christine Sun Kim are also scores, but look expressive and personal, even diaristic. Ms. Kim has been deaf since birth, and her approach to sound is highly conceptual. Basically, she’s creating the idea of it, visually, in terms most useful to her: American Sign Language, written English, physical gesture.

Both artists present sound in abstract form, as notion. The work of a third artist, Carsten Nicolai, incorporates sound that’s actual but inaudible. Using a tanklike container, he directs low-frequency sound waves onto the surface of a pool of water and, with mirrors, projects the patterns the waves create onto a display screen. The screen is the first thing you see when you enter the galleries. You could easily take it for an abstract painting with the shakes. Only when you circle around, do you see that it’s really an elaborate, overly ingenious kinetic sculpture.

The show has more busy sculpture. One by the American composer Richard Garet is an ensemble of old stereo speakers, a spinning turntable, a microphone and a glass marble, joined to produce a sound like a skipping record. A concoction of buzzes and flashes by the British artist Haroon Mirza is notable mostly for serving as a frame for one of MoMA’s Mondrian paintings, which looks like a fancy acoustic panel in this context.

And the Rube Goldberg bug carries over into an installation by the Scottish artist and filmmaker Luke Fowler and the Japanese composer Toshiya Tsunoda that includes electric fans, landscape images projected on a loose cloth, stretched piano wires and a dollop of Cagean chance. If the cloth, blown by the fans, touches the wires, we get a sound, a dull drone. The piece is very pretty to see, but to hear, not much.

Both of the show’s videos are good. For the 2011 “Music While We Work,” the Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang recruited retired sugar factory workers to return to their former plant, record its ambient sounds and create a score from them. As we watch them attentively holding microphones at assembly lines and loading platforms, we’re hearing what they are conscientiously rehearing: the soundtrack of their lives.

The Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard also recorded and filmed specific environments, four public buildings in Chernobyl, abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster. Unlike Ms. Wang, he manipulates his data by recording and rerecording it multiple times, until sounds and images become dense, grainy and heavy. Interiors seem to be slowly leaking out of darkness into visibility; sounds swell from near-silence to a carillon clamor.

Bells — church bells, stock exchange bells, bicycle bells, all taped in Manhattan — are the substance of a charming timed sound installation by Mr. Vitiello in MoMA’s sculpture garden. (One bell goes off every minute; they all go off on the hour.) It’s one of several works that extended the exhibition — organized by Barbara London, an associate curator in the department of media and performance art, and Leora Morinis, a curatorial assistant — into other parts of the museum.

Most of the outlying things are physically plain and audio-intensive. In a sweet, slight piece by Florian Hecker, three discretely placed speakers carry on an electronic conversation between two floors of the museum. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall,” a 25-foot-long panel pieced together from 1,500 tiny speakers, each tuned to a different pitch, is a kind of monumental musical instrument. To walk past it is to feel the sensation of a xylophone playing in your head.

Susan Philipsz’s “Study for Strings,” inside the galleries, is the closest thing to conventional music, and one of the show’s strong entries. It’s a recording of only the viola and cello parts, and their pauses, from a string orchestra composition written in 1943 by Pavel Haas in a German concentration camp. A performance by prisoners of the full, 24-part piece was filmed for Nazi propaganda purposes, after which the musicians, including Haas, were killed.

Clearly, sound, all but dematerialized, can be extremely powerful. Here’s proof. And there’s more in Jana Winderen’s “Ultrafield,” a classic “field recording” piece for which the artist taped sounds made by bats, deepwater fish and insects pitched beyond human hearing. Converted to the minimal audibility, the whirs, ticks and crackles of invisible beings turn a dark gallery into a kind of cosmic acoustic device.

Finally, one piece, Camille Norment’s “Triplight,” radiates that wondrous thing, the music of silence. The hardware involved is bare-bones: a 1955 standing microphone, of a kind once regularly used by jazz, blues and pop singers. In this one, though, the amplification unit has been replaced by a small light that flickers and brightens as if responding to a singer’s breath and voice.

It’s tempting to see Ms. Norment’s mute mike as a counterweight to Ms. Ono’s loud one. And a few more comparisons, probing the parameters of an understudied discipline, might have given some punch to a show that, like too many others at MoMA these days, tames unruly impulses in art, past and present, when it should be egging them on. There’s still a major sound art exhibition waiting to be done, and it will be, but not here.

Ross Bleckner's home in Sagaponack, N.Y., was once owned by Truman Capote. Mr. Bleckner expanded the once-modest footprint of the home twice and added a pool to the five-acre property. More Photos »

 By STEVEN KURUTZ

Published: July 24, 2013

All was quiet at Ross Bleckner’s house last week, if you didn’t count the four yappy dachshunds gnashing their teeth in a downstairs window. Strange, because the renowned artist had an appointment to show a reporter around the place.

An hour passed. The sun intensified. Still no sign of the homeowner.

Then a tall man was spotted in the distance, trimming trees. He explained that Mr. Bleckner was in his studio, at the far, wild end of the property, accessible by a path cut into waist-high grass.

Indeed, Mr. Bleckner was inside, working feverishly on a large-scale painting in the morning heat.

“Oh, you’re here,” he said in a high, scratchy voice. “I forgot all about our meeting.”

He worked a brush quickly back and forth on the canvas. “What is this article about, again?”

Your home.

“Oh. Well, what do you want to know?”

In the early ’90s, Mr. Bleckner paid $800,000 for Truman Capote’s old beach house, which sits on five cloistered acres here on the East End of Long Island, a short walk from the ocean. Over 20 years and two major renovations, he has taken a little two-story, box-shaped dwelling and added wings, a pool and the art studio. He expanded the guesthouse, too, and repaired and winterized the whole place.

“I had to,” Mr. Bleckner said. “It was falling apart.”

He was happy to show the home, he said, but he needed to use this fresh paint before it dried. He works on several groups of paintings at the same time, he said. The one in front of him, a dark canvas layered with ghostly white and red dots, was part of his brain-scan series: “They go from very calm to schizophrenia. This is not calm. This is plaque.”

Mr. Bleckner is friendly, quick-witted, curious and well read. He is not, however, prone to lengthy digressions about decorating or his domestic life. Nor does he exhibit much interest in the lore surrounding the previous owner.

Did Mr. Capote do a lot of entertaining here?

“I don’t know,” Mr. Bleckner said.

Do you?

“No.”

Mr. Bleckner said he uses the home as a summer retreat, and relishes the quiet. Noise was one of the main reasons he sold his longtime home in the city, a loft building in TriBeCa whose ground floor once held the Mudd Club.

“Every time you turned around someone was tearing down a building,” he said. “If you want quiet, you need to be in a place that is deeply established architecturally.” (He moved to the West Village, where he still lives most of the time.)

Eventually, the morning’s work was completed, and Mr. Bleckner walked through the football-field-size yard and up to the main house.

In Mr. Capote’s day, the home was filled with books and tchotchkes, and decorated with yellow stuffed chairs, pillows and animal skins. Mr. Bleckner, it quickly became apparent, is not Mr. Capote. Though he shares the home with Eric Freeman, an artist who lives here year-round and designed the space, the rooms looked barely lived in.

The living area had very little furniture or art. The kitchen was showroom-neat. Upstairs, in the master suite that Mr. Bleckner added (Mr. Capote used a tiny sleeping loft), a Zen-like sparseness prevailed. A wooden shelf held a simple framed photo of Mr. Bleckner’s mother, who died in 2008. The main attraction was not inside but out the windows, where a beach and white-capped water were tantalizingly visible in the distance.

Still, Mr. Bleckner was anxious about the potential for personal revelation. “You see a lot when you come into someone’s room,” he said. “Even when you don’t see a lot, you see a lot.”

He picked up a copy of the New York Review of Books on a low table. “You can see what I read,” he said, mock scandalized.

Back downstairs, Mr. Bleckner said he would probably pick up a sandwich for lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon in his studio, followed by a late swim in the ocean.

Asked if he was happy here, he smiled and replied, simply, “Yes.”

Critic’s Notebook

Art Fatigue in London

By CAROL VOGE

Published: June 28, 2013 

Dia Foundation to Sell Works to Start Acquisition Fund

Left, Cy Twombly Foundation; right, 2013 John Chamberlain/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Cy Twombly’s “Poems to the Sea” (1959), left, and John Chamberlain’s “Candy Andy” (1963) are among works to be auctioned by the Dia Foundation in November to start an acquisition fund.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: June 27, 2013

There hasn’t been any news about the Dia Art Foundation since it announced more than a year ago that it had bought the former Alcamo Marble building at 541 West 22nd Street in Chelsea. Dia is in fund-raising mode, trying to secure at least half the money needed to build its new Manhattan home on that site and on two spaces either side of it.

Dia closed its two Chelsea galleries in 2004, saying it had outgrown the buildings. Those who want to see its permanent collection — primarily works from the 1960s to the present — can visit its outpost along the Hudson River in Beacon, N.Y.

Philippe Vergne, the Dia director, said this week that he had more on his mind that just the new building, though. Surprisingly, the foundation has no acquisition fund for its collection, which includes works by artists like Warhol, Walter De Maria, Joseph Beuys, Robert Ryman and John Chamberlain. “Dia cannot be a mausoleum,” Mr. Vergne said. “It needs to grow and develop.”

So the foundation plans to sell a group of paintings and sculptures at Sotheby’s in New York on Nov. 13 and 14, hoping to raise at least $20 million for an acquisition budget.

The works for sale include pieces by Cy Twombly, Chamberlain and Barnett Newman. In 1991 Dia gave the Menil Collection in Houston six of its best works by Twombly in anticipation of the Twombly Gallery that opened there in 1995. Mr. Vergne said that when he started evaluating Dia’s collection he felt it no longer made sense to keep the remaining Twomblys because there are not enough to fill a gallery.

The Sotheby’s sale will include 14 works by Twombly from the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, including “Poems to the Sea,” a suite of 24 drawings from 1959 created when the artist moved to Sperlonga, a fishing village between Rome and Naples. “Poems” is expected to sell for $6 million to $8 million.

Chamberlain has been crucial to Dia since its founding in 1974. “Dia has about 100 Chamberlains, and even after the sale we will still have among the largest and deepest representation of works by him,” Mr. Vergne said.

Among those being sold is “Shortstop,” from 1958, one of the artist’s first sculptures fashioned from crushed automobile parts. It is estimated to bring $1.5 million to $2 million.

Dia has also decided to sell its only Newman, “Genesis — The Break,” a 1946 abstract canvas that is a precursor to the artist’s so-called zip paintings, which feature feathery bands of contrasting color. It is estimated at $3.5 million to $4.5 million. (Dia tried unsuccessfully to sell “Genesis — The Break” before, in 1985, to raise money for an endowment.)

Mr. Vergne said it was premature to say what he planned to buy with the auction proceeds, but he did give a hint: “There are things at Beacon that are on long-term loan and don’t belong to us,” he said. He was referring to works by the German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher and by Louise Bourgeois.

MORE KELLYS AT MOMA

Ellsworth Kelly’s 90th birthday on May 31 has become a summer-long celebration, with exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit, as well as Paris and London. At the Museum of Modern Art, which has a show of 14 paintings from Mr. Kelly’s “Chatham Series” on view through Sept. 8, the occasion was also an excuse for the museum’s curators to assess their Kelly holdings and come up with a plan to barter some for better ones.

MoMA was an early supporter of Mr. Kelly. In 1959 Dorothy Miller, one of its first curators, organized “Sixteen Americans,” the first show there to feature his work. The next year it bought “Running White,” a black canvas with a giant white swirl that appears to be moving. It now has 22 Kelly paintings and sculptures, along with prints and drawings. Many of these works are regularly on view, but others have languished in storage.

“We decided to collaborate with the artist,” said Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, “to see how we could best enhance the collection.” She, Mr. Kelly and Matthew Marks, the artist’s Chelsea dealer, devised a plan for Mr. Kelly to trade five works from his own collection for paintings and sculptures from MoMA’s.

Three were even exchanges with Mr. Kelly. But because of differences in value among the works, trustees stepped in to help the museum with promised gifts. Marie-Josée Kravis, MoMA’s president, and her husband, Henry, the Manhattan financier, and Glenn Dubin, a trustee, and his wife, Eva, bought works from Mr. Kelly and promised them to the museum. In addition, Agnes Gund, the museum’s president emerita, has promised the museum a sixth work, “Orange Green,” a 1964 painting she owns.

“Two of the works from the 1950s are paintings that Ellsworth had never been willing to part with,” Ms. Temkin said. In exchange, the museum gave Mr. Kelly two works of lesser importance from the same period. The museum got “Fête à Torcy,” a 1952 painting named for a village outside Paris where the artist spent the summer. It is composed of two canvas panels separated by a thin, dark wood strip. It also received “Two Blacks, White and Blue” (1955), a multipanel painting inspired by tugboat smokestacks in the harbor near his Lower Manhattan studio.

CHRISTIE’S DEPARTURES

After a decade at Christie’s, Joshua Holdeman left two weeks ago to join Sotheby’s, where in March he will become a vice chairman working globally with various departments, including postwar art and design.

Mr. Holdeman, who was Christie’s international director of 20th-century art, is yet another top business-getter there to leave. Most recently, Ken Yeh, its Asia chairman, departed for the Acquavella Galleries in New York.

The George Lindemann Journal

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Ken Price's “Arctic” (1998), “Balls Congo” (2003), “Moose the Mooch” (1998) and “Phobia” (1995).

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 20, 2013

OVER six months in 2011 and 2012, dozens of art institutions in Southern California joined forces in a festival of exhibitions, “Pacific Standard Time,” celebrating the history of contemporary art in Los Angeles. The project was a big success and continues to generate energy. A jolt of it hits New York City this week in an unheard-of convergence here of major California shows.

Most are historical, documenting West Coast art movements and careers stretching over the last 60 years. “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970,” opening at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on Sunday, tells the story of California Conceptualism, which emerged in parallel with its East Coast counterpart but developed its own distinctive trajectory.       

Traveling retrospectives flesh out important West Coast figures still under the mainstream radar here. The much-loved ceramic sculptor Ken Price, who died last year, is the subject of a doubleheader survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Drawing Center in SoHo, while the Los Angeles artist Llyn Foulkes, an artist’s artist with an avid hometown following, is at the New Museum.

A keenly awaited new site-specific project by the Los Angeles-born James Turrell, a leader of the West Coast Light and Space movement, is flooding the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda with unearthly illumination. (A recreated 1977 light piece by his California colleague Robert Irwin opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday.) And in the cavernous Park Avenue Armory, the veteran bad-boy Paul McCarthy brings Disneyland innocence crashing to earth.

How “California” is all of this? Totally. What can New York learn from it? We’re just finding out. HOLLAND COTTER

A Career of Bumps and Twists

Tableware? Toys? Genetic accidents? Objets d’art? The ceramic sculptures of Ken Price suggest all these possibilities and many more. To the market’s old divide-and-label query, “Is this art or craft?,” Price offered one finessing answer: “Yes.”

And right he was.

You see the rightness instantly in “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is one of those rare ideal shows: right size, great design (by Frank Gehry), pretty near faultless art. Ideal, too, in a plainer way, is a concurrent survey of the artist’s works on paper, “Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race,” at the Drawing Center in SoHo.

Price, who died last year at 77, was in certain ways a classic Southern Californian. Born in Los Angeles and raised there in the 1930s and ’40s, as a kid he lived for surfing and jazz, and he had art on the brain from the start: drawing, painting, sculpturing, he liked it all.

Where he departed from the stereotype was in the matter of focus: creatively, there was nothing laid-back about him. He was alert, hungry for input. One day on the beach he met a surfer named Billy Al Bengston, a serious painter who, like Price, had an interest in ceramics. They buddied up and eventually shared a studio, but while Mr. Bengston stuck with painting, for Price clay became the way.

It was not, however, the way in most art schools, where the art-craft divide was firm. At the University of Southern California, Price ended up studying, among other things, cartooning and animation.

He made a major shift in 1957, when he was a graduate student at what is now Otis College of Art and Design. There he worked with Peter Voulkos, who is often credited with shifting ceramics, in the art world’s eyes, from craft to fine-art status.

Voulkos, a big-gestured sculptor in the Abstract Expressionist mode, was a don’t-talk-but-do-as-I-do sort of teacher. And what he did was work with clay every day in the Otis studios.

Seeing Voulkos in action and working beside him had a deep effect on Price, who always seems to have learned more from experience than from instruction. On early surfing trips to Mexico, he paid close attention to folk pottery sold in Tijuana shops, noting that even objects produced in bulk were individually enlivened by flourishes and flaws that came with handmaking. In the early 1960s he traveled to Japan — in a charming pen-and-ink scroll at the Drawing Center he depicts himself as a visiting pooh-bah — less to gather technical tips than to feel the vibes of a place where great pots were made.

For Price, nature was a real presence. In the 1930s, Los Angeles was still rural around the edges. He grew up at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains, near the sea. Mountainous landscapes recur in his drawings. Some of his sculptures look like things that were fished from tidal pools: extravagant crustaceans, tangles of kelp and a variety of oozy, amphibious eel-ish critters.

And he was soaked — what young person isn’t? — in visual pop culture, which in the 1940s and ’50s meant, among other things, comic books, monster movies and advertising. He embraced it all, though selectively, in the same way he did modern art, paying attention to Abstract Expressionism’s appetite for color; to Joan Miró’s soft-porn blobs and curves; to Joseph Cornell’s blend of adorableness and abjection.

The Met show — organized by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and department head of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and overseen in New York by Marla Prather — is arranged in reverse chronological sequence, with late Price coming first.

Strategically, this makes sense. His last sculptures are his largest, weirdest and, with their wondrous surface patterning, prettiest. You see them and you want to see more of him. Yet an early-to-late narrative is well worth tracing.

In the 1950s and early ’60s, as if in recoil from Voulkos’s dour, crushing work, Price went light, bright and anti-titanic. Instead of clay colossi, he made ceramic cups. Some were ornamented with frogs, turtles or snails, like children’s breakfast mugs. Others had handles in the shape of branches or stems, like jade brush holders found on a Chinese scholar’s table.

Mr. Bengston was also making cups at the time, as was the slightly younger artist Ron Nagle, a Voulkos acolyte (and a star of this year’s Venice Biennale). All three were learning about the power of smallness. As Price correctly perceived, diminutive doesn’t have to mean dinky. Imaginatively shaped, a very small object can seem more monumental than something many times its size.

For Price, such insights were arrived at through experimentation. At first, for example, he enclosed some of his cups in display cases, as if uncertain that they would otherwise be perceived as art. Such framing became unnecessary as the cup forms, broken down into modular cubes or stacks of craggy planes, lost all pretense to utility, making them sculptures for sure.

Even after he retired the cup as an image, he kept exploring what was most salient about it sculpturally: namely, that it wasn’t a solid mass, but a container, with an inside and an outside of equal importance. Containment itself, put under psychological pressure, became a recurrent subject of Price’s. His first noncup series, in the 1960s, featured egg-shaped sculptures. With their smooth exteriors and vivid, sharp colors — the paint is automobile lacquer — these roughly ovoid objects look solid from a distance. But when you get closer, you see that the surfaces are pierced by orifices from which abstract forms, phallic or fecal, protrude like tongues or groping fingers. The recurrent image is of a high-polish shell hiding appalling activity, sexual or excremental, or both.

Price stayed fixed on this drama of dark recesses even as his sculptural forms changed. Gradually growing larger, they moved from quasi-architectural to freakishly organic. By the early 1990s, he was turning out warty, bulbous, fruitlike lumps that combined realism and fantasy, comedy and pathology in ways reminiscent of Basil Wolverton’s 1950s Mad magazine portrait heads and of gloriously schlumpy Oribe-wear tea bowls.

What saves even outrageous forms from grossness, though, is color, the element that Price ultimately cared about most, worked hardest at, and mastered most completely. By the late 1990s, his forms had simplified — no more orifices, no more interiors — and his colors had grown staggeringly complex, as he covered pieces with up to 70 coats of different-colored acrylic paint, sanding surfaces between applications or swiping them with pigment-dissolving fluid to create mottled and speckled patterns of breathtaking depth and subtlety.

Such fine-grained effects would have been lost on a four-inch-tall cup. But they can be fully savored on sculptures that, by the end of Price’s career, had attained an average height of two feet, twice that in the case of the all-black “Ordell,” completed the year he died. This work comes at the front of the show, exquisitely framed by Mr. Gehry’s multivista design.

The Met retrospective also has several of the artist’s paintings on paper, all landscapes, and dozens more are at the Drawing Center. Price drew almost daily for 50 years, in a crisp, sophisticated pop style. The Drawing Center survey, organized by Douglas Dreishpoon, chief curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, gives some sense of his range, with sculptural studies, book illustrations, cartoons and erotica.

But, as at the Met, landscapes dominate, and they’re odd, disturbed, eschatological images of erupting volcanoes, rising seas and a bleak world viewed from the mouth of a cave. Price has often been celebrated by his fans as an upholder of the pleasure principle, that California specialty, in an era when art was idea-intensive and political. I wonder about that evaluation, though. His surfaces are as gorgeous as Pacific sunsets. But they cover some tough subterranean stuff.

The George Lindemann Journal

“Pressed Flower Yellow,” a crushed Fiat 500, is part of “In Reverse,” an exhibition on the work of Ron Arad at the Design Museum Holon. Courtesy of Ron Arad Associates

The Israeli-British architect and designer Ron Arad has always been fascinated by metal. He made an international name for himself designing furniture like the sheet-steel Well Tempered Chair for Vitra, and he designed an entire building with a ribbonlike Cor-Ten steel exterior — the Design Museum Holon in Holon, Israel, which opened in 2010.

Mr. Arad is now returning to that museum as the subject of an exhibition, “In Reverse,” which opens on Wednesday and looks at metal in a startlingly different way.

While the exhibition includes examples of his designs from the 1980s to the present, Mr. Arad didn’t want it to be a conventional retrospective, so he added a new component: a project that explores how automobile bodies behave under compression. He installed six Fiat 500s (a car he has a particular fondness for) on the walls of one of the galleries; each is crushed into cartoonlike flatness. In the center of the room sits a wooden mold, on loan from the Fiat archive and museum, that was used to shape the 500’s metal panels, and “Roddy Giacosa,” a new sculpture made from hundreds of polished stainless steel rods in the shape of the 500’s body.

The show also includes Mr. Arad’s digital simulation of the crushing process, and a sculpture that is the result of applying a 3-D printing technique to one frame of the film.

The idea of crushed metal is personal for Mr. Arad: when he was a child, his family’s Fiat Topolino Giardinetta was mangled in an accident, and a crushed toy police car that he found in the street when he was 11 actually ended up in the exhibition. “Rather than manipulate materials to render them functional or render digital models towards a functional object,” he said, “here I ‘reverse’ perfectly functional objects and render them useless.”

“In Reverse” runs through Oct. 19 at the Design Museum Holon.

The George Lindemann Journal

NEW YORK, NY.- For more than 50 years, Los Angeles artist Ken Price, who died on February 24, 2012 at the age of 77, made innovative works that helped redefine contemporary sculpture by advancing the medium of clay well beyond its traditionally assigned roles. Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art—a long overdue major exhibition showcasing the artist’s unique and groundbreaking approach to sculpture—is the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work in New York. By assembling the full range of Price’s innovative work, with 62 sculptures dating from 1959 to 2012 along with 11 late works on paper, the exhibition aims to situate his art beyond the realm of craft and into the larger narrative of modern sculpture.

Born in Los Angeles, Ken Price received his BFA from the University of Southern California in 1956 and his MFA from the famed New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1959. In the late 1950s, at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (later renamed the Otis College of Art and Design), Price’s ceramics professor, Peter Voulkos, encouraged the artist to create work that transcended the traditional boundaries of the medium. Price soon found his calling and within a few years was showing his own abstract clay sculptures. The curved surfaces of Price’s brilliantly colored egg sculptures, such as L. Red from 1963, are disrupted by small portals that open to murky interiors or crevices with sexual and scatological associations. Among the early works in the exhibition is a group of highly colorful cups. According to Price, “The cup essentially presents a set of formal restrictions—sort of a preordained structure. . . . But it can be used as a vehicle for ideas.” He took this everyday object and embellished it with snails, or, in one instance, melded a cup onto the shell of a ceramic turtle (Blind Sea Turtle Cup, 1968). In the early 1970s, the artist moved from Los Angeles to Taos, New Mexico (where he re-settled in 2002 after a sojourn as a professor of ceramics at USC from 1991 to 2001). In Taos, the predominant Mexican folk aesthetic inspired the artist to embark on the series Happy’s Curios (1972-1977). Named for his wife, the works are wood cabinets filled with ceramics—his personal homage to the style of Mexican folk pottery.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Price also created a series of abstracted, geometric sculptures that are brilliantly glazed and painted. Their fabrication was remarkably labor intensive, involving multiple firings and layers of glazed color. The 1972 work Gaudi Cup has obvious affinities to architectural forms. Moving into the 1980s, works such as Big Load (1988) resemble strange unearthly boulders, or meteorites, with mysterious, glowing apertures that have been sliced into the form.

Beginning in the late 1990s and continuing until his death, Price began a series of haunting, subtly erotic sculptures with mottled surfaces that he created by apply roughly 70 layers of paint that were then painstakingly sanded to uncover each stratum through variations in the pressure of the sanding process. The result, as seen in works such as Hunchback of Venice (2000) and Balls Congo (2003), is a lyrical composition of colors held together in a layered arrangement that is unmistakably anthropomorphic. Price’s work grew in scale in later years and his glazes became even more elaborate, with complex layers of color that were scrupulously sanded to achieve a wonderfully iridescent, speckled effect of blues, purples, reds, and greens. Zizi (2011), though abstract, has an undulating, typically organic shape that suggests a primitive life form.

The installation of Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective was designed by Price’s close friend, the renowned architect Frank O. Gehry, who worked closely on the show with the artist. A number of the wood and glass vitrines that contain the sculptures were made by the artist, while the rest were inspired by his original designs.

The exhibition is organized by Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Senior Curator and Department Head of Modern Art, Stephanie Barron, and overseen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Marla Prather, the Museum’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

At the same time as the Met’s venue, The Drawing Center, New York, will present Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, a comprehensive survey of Price’s works on paper (June 19—August 18, 2013), organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, where it will travel September 27, 2013–January 19, 2014 and at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico, from February 22–May 4, 2014.

The George Lindemann Journal

Venice Biennale Oliver Croy and Oliver Elser’s “387 Houses of Peter Fritz,” right, part of the main show, “The Encyclopedic Palace.” By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 5, 2013

VENICE — Dark weather and high water were the backdrop to the start of the 55th Venice Biennale, an event that predictably combines enough cold cash and hot air to create a storm system of critical opinion. The main barometric indicator is always the big show that gives each Biennale its theme, and on this score, for the first time in years, there’s fairly smooth sailing.

The main show, “The Encyclopedic Palace” — organized by Massimiliano Gioni, 39, chief curator at the New Museum in Manhattan and this Biennale’s director — is a quiet success. Spread over two sites, in the park called the Giardini and the fortresslike Arsenale nearby, it’s immense, with more than 150 artists, but as tightly thought out as a small show — maybe too tightly to allow for wild-card surprises. Most shows on this scale are too messy; this one may be too neat. But it works.

Plus — a significant plus for anyone fed up to here with big-buck art — “Palace” doesn’t seem to have much interest in the mainstream market. It doesn’t say no to it, exactly. It just goes its own interesting way, not without problems.

And of course, the show is not the whole story. The Biennale is as much an archipelago of islands as Venice itself is.

Clustered around the main exhibition are dozens of national pavilions, each with an exhibition of its own, with more pavilions scattered around town in premises — churches and palazzi — more interesting than any on the Biennale grounds. Nearly 50 “collateral events,” semiofficially part of the Biennale, must be included in any comprehensive tour.

The total is overwhelming, but equipped with decent shoes and multiday vaporetto pass, I saw roughly 80 percent of this year’s sights on a trek that took me through most of city, always the Biennale’s real attraction.

Mr. Gioni titled his exhibition after a single piece of art, an 11-foot-high tower built by the self-taught artist Marino Auriti. Born in Italy in 1891, Auriti moved to the United States in the 1920s, settling in Kennett Square, Pa., where he ran an auto body shop while painting on the side.

After retiring in the 1950s, he began work on the tower, a stack of seven cylindrical layers surrounded by a colonnaded piazza, constructed of wood, glass and plastic (including hair combs). He conceived it as a model for a museum to be called the Encyclopedic Palace of the World, which would display the range of human achievement, “from the wheel to the satellite.”

He also made it a monument to ethical values, spelled out on the colonnade entablatures: “Live by your work,” “Make friends of your enemies,” “Watch that you don’t become greedy.” He wanted the museum to be erected on the Mall in Washington, took out a patent on it, even initiated a fund-raising campaign.

Mr. Gioni has placed Auriti’s dream tower up front in the Arsenale as a key to what follows: art that embodies utopian and dystopian visions; or attempts to encompass and categorize vast amounts of data; or is composed of many small and repeated parts.

Among works that qualify are paintings by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, who claimed to receive her images from otherworldly beings. A video by the young French artist Camille Henrot jams the entire creation story into one short, percussively edited video. A set of 130 small clay sculptures made by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss cover a period of 30 years.

Although Mr. Gioni includes several young artists on the rise — Ed Atkins, Helen Marten, Paloma Polo, James Richards, Shinichi Sawada — he also chooses some offbeat figures, like the nature photographer Eliot Porter, and brings in spiritual utilitarian objects like Tantric paintings and Roman Catholic ex-votos that were not created to be art in the conventional sense.

In combining these things, Mr. Gioni refers to the model of the “wunderkammer,” or cabinet of curiosities, collections of uncategorizable, often exotic objects first assembled in Renaissance Europe. This concept is not original, and it gets tricky when, as here, some curiosities are works by “outsider artists,” which can simply mean self-taught, but often implies having some form of physical, social or psychiatric disability.

The outsider art concept is tired by now, even ethically suspect, the equivalent of “primitive art” from decades ago. Mr. Gioni finesses the problem without really addressing it by integrating outsider-ish-looking inside art (there’s more and more of this around) so the two designations get blurred.

However you label them, it’s great to see in one place outsider pieces like the embroidery-encrusted vestments of the Brazilian Arthur Bispo do Rosario and the paper and twine sculptures of the American James Castle together with out-of-the-mainstream art like the copper-wire paintings by Prabhavathi Meppayil from Bangalore, and the thickly collaged notebooks of the Japanese noise-rock musician Shinro Ohtake. That they’re elbow to elbow with Bruce Nauman, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel and Jack Whitten is nice too.

Ms. Sherman is here as guest curator of a minishow embedded within Mr. Gioni’s larger one, but so much in its spirit as to be indistinguishable as a separate entity. Ms. Trockel is represented by components from the exhibition “A Cosmos,” from the New Museum.

She’s an artist I admire, but I found that show surprisingly unsurprising.

With a blend of insider-outsider and art-nonart components, it could have been stimulating. But the objects had little to say to one another. I feel a lack of surprise in Mr. Gioni’s show for the opposite reason: Its pairings — spiritualists paintings by af Klint and Emma Kunz, digital-printer abstractions by Alice Channer and Wade Guyton — are too neat and museumy.

Yet at the same time, the show’s curatorial line is so firm, its choice of artists so strong and its pacing so expert that you are carried along, and ultimately rewarded. This is particularly true toward the conclusion of the Arsenale, with its purgatory of sculptures by Pawel Althamer, followed by Ryan Trecartin’s video hell, followed by Walter De Maria’s Minimalist heaven. It’s a great end to a serious, standard-setting endeavor.

Once outside, you’re in a world of hit and miss among the national pavilions, which tend to be high in polish, low in impact. Some
of the best extend the accumulative density of Mr. Gioni’s show. This is true of Sarah Sze’s assemblages of countless tiny found things in the United States pavilion, and of archival photographic installations by Petra Feriancova at the pavilion of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

There are persuasive alternatives to material density. In the otherwise empty Romania pavilion, Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus have directed performers in stylized enactments of art from Biennales past. The work owes much to the example of Tino Sehgal, but it has its own charms. (Mr. Sehgal, who is in Mr. Gioni’s show, received the Gold Lion award for best artist this year.)  

Three young artists, Ei Arakawa, Gela Patashuri and Sergei Tcherepnin, make similarly interactive use the Georgia pavilion, a temporary, raised, loftlike enclosure at the edge the Arsenale for more sporadic performances. And Alfredo Jaar’s show at the Chile pavilion is centered around a sculpture that moves, an exact model of the Giardini campus that emerges from and sinks back into a vat of fetid-looking water.

Mr. Jaar is telling a story about the alignment of art and power: Many of the older, pre-World War II pavilions are relics of a murderous nationalism were built as cultural trophies by economically competitive nations that created colonial empires and eventually led Europe into war.

This show is filled with narratives. Everything seems to have a back story, many of them politically inflected. Tavares Strachan’s entrancing installation at the Bahamas pavilion tells of exploration and who really got where first.

At the Lebanon pavilion, a film by Akram Zaatari fleshes out a real-life account of an Israeli Air Force fighter who, in 1982, was sent to destroy a building in a Lebanese town, recognized the place as a school and dropped his bombs into the sea. And in a church converted into an exhibition space, a group of dioramas installed in a church dramatize, in exacting detail, the ordeal that artist Ai Weiwei underwent in police custody in China.

This notable display, technically a collateral event, is not far from the Arsenale but hard to find. Others are long walks or boat rides away, but worth tracking down. An Iraq pavilion is an informal affair up the Grand Canal. You’re invited to relax, read up on Iraq, have tea. And the artists, based in Babylon, Basra and Baghdad, are terrific, from Abdul Raheem Yassir, who has been producing mordant political cartoons since 1970, to the two-man collective called WAMI (Hashin Taeeh and Yaseen Wami), which produces ingenious furniture from cardboard boxes.

Without biennales we would probably never see shows of such art, made under truly challenging conditions. And without such shows, we would never see so many of Venice’s varied interiors, from sports arenas (the Cyprus and Lithuania pavilions), to commercial galleries (the Kosovo pavilion), to the National Archaeological Museum, where work by the Cuban-American artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons sits amid Roman sculptures.

Every now and then, a visit gives a shock.

When I climbed the stairs of an old building to the Angola pavilion, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Gorgeous photographs by Edson Chagas, from the city of Luanda, were there, in neat stacks of giveaway prints. And the walls around them were lined with Renaissance paintings: Sassetta, Bernardo Daddi, Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo. I and Angola were in the Palazzo Cini, a private museum that, except during the Biennale, keeps eccentric hours.

Mr. Chagas worked perfectly into the setting. (The pavilion, with his installation, was later awarded best of show.)

He and the young curators, Paula Nascimento and Stefano Rabolli Pansera, had keyed colors in the photographs to the paintings: a stack of prints of a blue-painted Luanda door stood in front of a blue-robed Botticelli Virgin. Neither blue was more beautiful than the other, but the African blue was soaked in sunlight. And I could take it away. It made my Venice stay.

The George Lindemann Journal

Ellsworth Kelly has been on earth for 90 years — his birthday was Friday — and he has been making abstract art for over 60 of them. Now the New York art world is treating him, and us, to a big party. His boldly colored, emblematic paintings and reliefs can be seen in five exhibitions around town. In unusually gorgeous terms, they attest to a lifelong fusion of austerity and high spirits, and a narrow yet deep exploration of pure colors and simple shapes.

The shows range from a mini-survey at the Mnuchin Gallery on East 78th Street, to an array of brand-new work at the Matthew Marks Gallery‘s three locations in Chelsea, to a radiant exhibition of Mr. Kelly’s 1971 “Chatham Series” at the Museum of Modern Art. The 14 paintings in the series have not been exhibited together since they made their public debut in 1972 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

All told, these exhibitions present 82 works produced from 1951 to 2013. They reveal an artist who is making some of his strongest work right now, at times with a decidedly erotic undercurrent.

Mr. Kelly has spent much of his career romancing the vaunted monochrome in Modernist painting. He has approached this absolute without reverence or irony; it is simply the main building block of his art. For him, the monochrome has been something to particularize through shape and color, render in metal, or combine with another monochrome of a contrasting color, whether they are side by side or overlapping. The results are not so much paintings as crisp, flat objects devoid of spatial illusion. Yet the best of them are so perfectly made that we tend to forget about their physical nature, concentrating solely on their visual effects instead. Their perfection creates an aura of eternal newness that can sometimes seem antiseptic but just as often is central to their power.

Whether by plan or not, these exhibitions outline the three basic ways that Mr. Kelly has used monochrome panels. Consistent with its title, “Singular Shapes 1966-2009,” at Mnuchin, surveys his single-shape works. It starts with his first, “Yellow Piece of 1966,” a fat yellow rectangle with two rounded corners at the lower left and upper right. It could be the daffodil-colored emblem of a fifth suit of playing cards — something between a diamond and a heart.

The show’s most recent work is the declarative “Blue Curves” (2009). It instantly reads as a heart shape turned on its side with its point lopped off — and as breasts or buttocks. (The art historian Pepe Karmel notes in the show’s catalog that the artist himself has said as much.) It also resembles, fittingly, a capital B.

For the “Chatham Series” at MoMA, Mr. Kelly made shaped paintings using a brilliantly obvious method: abutting two ordinary rectangles to form an inverted L. The looming vertical paintings evoke giant rulers, or details of architecture, especially posts and lintels.

Each rectangle is decisively colored — red, blue, yellow, green, black or white — and their combinations pack a punch. There is a white rectangle above a black, and black above white, as well as black above red, blue, yellow or green. Red above yellow or blue. No two works have exactly the same measurements.

Seen in a quadrant of spaces formed by two intersecting walls, the “Chatham” paintings encourage a dizzying process of compare-and-contrast that is less about shape than about the perception of color in terms of weight, balance and proportion. From the end of one wall, you can see one painting that is red-blue and, in the opposite direction, one that is blue-red. From another juncture, two red-blue works with completely different proportions are visible, along with a black-white and a yellow-red with similarly squat proportions but no common color. After a while the show starts to feel subtly animated, as if the blocks of color were expanding or contracting, elongating and shrinking as you move around them.

The Chatham series is shown with a group of 40 small drawings and collages from 1951 whose geometric configurations presage, on a small scale, motifs later developed by artists as disparate as Sol LeWitt and Brice Marden. They also remind us that Mr. Kelly’s career lacks the traditional linear development of most artists of his stature. Most of his compositions first appeared in his works on paper in the 1950s and early 1960s, which he has repeatedly mined. Now he seems interested in circling back to translate them, almost verbatim, into larger sizes or heftier materials, or both.

That is the case with “Blue Curves” at Mnuchin, which is based on a 1956 collage reproduced in the show’s catalog. And such translations figure prominently in the shows at Matthew Marks. Here the third use of the monochrome — one laid on top another — often dominates, and the libidinous undercurrents continue.

At Mr. Marks’s newly renovated 24th Street gallery, four works from 2011 employ some abrupt curved shapes from the early collages and a green and orange painting from 1964. Now the shapes are separate canvases painted red, green, yellow, or blue, laid over white rectangles. More physically defined, these bulges suggest big, cartoonish tongues.

“Black Form II” (2012) in the big Marks space on West 22nd Street reiterates a double-lobed black motif from a 1962 collage. But now it is a funny, suggestive, magnificent wall relief, nearly 7 by 6 feet and over 4 inches thick, in aluminum painted a high-gloss black. The satisfying fat capital C that results looks as if one of Myron Stout’s meticulous black-on-white abstractions had been repurposed by Jeff Koons, only it’s better.

Another standout in the big West 22nd Street showcase is “Yellow Relief Over Blue,” from 2012. Basically it is a blue vertical rectangle whose bottom half is covered by a yellow almost-rectangle with a gently curved top edge. It’s like sunrise from the sun’s point of view. The blue and yellow are so intense and equal in strength that the physicality of the piece all but disappears. And the experience of pure, dense color is no less effective in the details. From the side, the continuation of the blue panel behind the yellow is breathtaking. It encapsulates, in miniature, the passion for color that fuels Mr. Kelly’s singular art.

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