Summer in NYC: Brief Rundown
Before I totally leave New York mentally, I thought I'd give some mini-reviews of the shows I saw in NYC in July/August before I left. I hope people will feel free to comment, especially if you've seen these shows...
MoMA
Dada
This show began in France, I believe, and then traveled to D.C.'s National Gallery before coming to MoMA. It's the most comprehensive survey of the Dada movement I've ever seen, organized geographically rather than chronologically or thematically. The exhibition design is very whimsical and fun; there are two entrances (New York and Zurich, if I'm remembering right), so that the audience chooses their route through the show like a notorious Dada game of chance. Dada is one of my favorite art movements, so I loved the show, and one thing that struck me was the inclusion of a few artists who I wouldn't normally think of as Dadaists, like Otto Dix. My favorite blogger, Tyler Green (who writes Modern Art Notes-- artsjournal.com/man ) pointed out in his review of the show that the interesting paradox of Dada is how humor is juxtaposed with and used to mask the incredible violence and trauma of WWI, in which many Dadaists fought. I think the show hilights this well. Closes September 11.
Also at MoMA is the amazing Artist's Choice: Herzog and de Meuron, Perception Restrained, a single room surveying the MoMA's permanent collection curated by Herzog and de Meuron and organized by Terrence Riley, MoMA's Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. The idea behind the show is the utter impossibility, as H & M explains, of finding the "gems" within a vast collection of gems. The resulting show is a room of small windows to various parts of the MoMA's collection that restrict the audience's view and suggest all of the thousands of works not included, which bleed off, out of view, in every direction. Herzog & de Meuron also hilight the museum's video collection with flat screen TVs lined up in rows along the ceiling. The idea of restricted perception is so smart that the physical exhibition doesn't have to be vast in scope to mask any kind of conceptual shortcoming. The result is an incredibly succinct, controlled, precise environment that really fits with the ideas at hand. I was really impressed by this show. Closes September 25.
The Jewish Museum
Eva Hesse: Sculpture
This small show spans Eva Hesse's short but amazing career, partially recreating her only other solo sculpture show at Fischbach Gallery in 1968. One thing that struck me when looking at her work was what an obvious precursor she is to Matthew Barney-- it's weird to think of them together, but they work with such similar materials, and it's kind of astonishing how different their subject matter is. On the other hand, I think what makes Eva Hesse's work so interesting, besides being so experimental with materials and how they react to one another in a very scientific way, is that its minimalism gives it a distinctly serene feeling. Similarly, while Barney's work as a whole is complicated and detailed and overwhelming, the frames, vitrines and sculptures he makes out of petroleum and similar materials provide a sort of neutralizing force-- part of that is the monochromatic nature of the substance. Petroleum is kind of the Matthew Barney Universe equivalent to soil on planet Earth. Anyway, the Hesse show reminded me of how amazing she is. She's not someone who I think of often without prompting, so it was great to see her work in a solo exhibition to put her back in the front of my brain. The Jewish Museum often likes to incorporate a biographical element to their shows and, I think, does it better than any other museum I've seen. The last room of the Hesse show is filled with artifacts from her life: photos, scrapbook pages, a couple of videos and letters which provided a brief chronology of her life. Often, I think rooms like this turn out looking kind of cheesy, but in this case it really worked. It was especially powerful to see video footage and snapshots of her in her studio alongside certain sculptures-- she was so young when she made her most influential, inspired work, and actually seeing that moment captured visually was very cool. This exhibition was mounted concurrent with a show of Hesse's drawings at the Drawing Center, which I missed, sadly. The show at the Jewish Museum closes September 17.
The Asia Society
Projected Realities: Video Art from East Asia
This show closed in early August, but I thought it was worth mentioning, because all of the six or seven artists showcased were really unique, and a lot of the work was very funny. It seems that there's a tendency among American video artists in particular to take themselves too seriously, maybe because new media had to fight its way into the realm of fine art more recently than other mediums. But most of these East Asian artists' work had an element of surreal humor about them, which was really refreshing. There seemed to be an interesting common thread between several of the artists around the idea of mechanizing humanity and, inversely, anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The exhibition was conceived in memory of Nam June Paik, who passed away in January of 2006.
The Guggenheim
Zaha Hadid
My first reaction to the show overall was one of satisfaction; I think architecture exhibitions typically tend to require a lot of explanation supplementary to drawings and models on display. Hadid's work, however, actually lends itself to exhibition-- much of what was on display included paintings and multi-media artworks portraying a concept for a building or study of an urban area. Hadid's renderings and models are also so much more conceptual and less precise and nit-picky than the average architectural rendering, you can sort of trick yourself into forgetting that it's architecture you're looking at. I really appreciate how conscious her designs are of urban planning and how buildings relate to each other; she never designs one structure in a vacuum. But, as a non-architect, I found it frustrating not to be able to get any sort of idea how it feels to be inside a Hadid structure, because none of her renderings are on a human scale. Everything is shown from a bird's-eye, panned out perspective, so we never know how this architecture is actually experienced. I find it interesting that the only really famous female architect is from Iraq-- there might be a lot of implications there, but it's something I'll have to mull over.
I also have to say that this was one of the more poorly installed shows I've ever seen-- I don't know whether hadid's firm or the Guggenheim were responsible for framing, but there were several framed drawings and paintings which were puckering and bubbling under the plexi glass, a wood frame that had one corner splitting, and there was one frame in which one corner of the plexi was actually coming out of the frame, jutting right off the wall. It was astonishing to see these very obvious, sloppy mistakes; if they're that obvious to me, who knows a little about framing but not a ton, I can't imagine a professional framer getting away with that... sigh. A good show nonetheless. Closes October 25.
The Met
On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag
This tiny but very touching tribute to Susan Sontag, drawing from the Met's permanent photography collection, really reminded me of what an amazing and unique writer she was; Susan Sontag completely invented a language with which to describe art and singlehandedly shaped photography criticism. We really have to give Sontag partial credit for legitimizing photography as a fine art in the eyes of the rest of the art world. Photography would never have evolved as it did, as an art form, without the vocabulary that Sontag created for it. The show pairs individual works and groups of works with Sontag quotes (and even provided titles of essays in which the quotes can be found, encouraging audiences to revisit her texts or read them for the first time), which act as the wall texts for the whole show. The most touching and striking piece, for me, was Robert Mapplethorpe's early portrait of Patti Smith in which she's squatting in a profile fetal position, naked, in an empty hardwood floored studio, looking up at the camera. The quote was something to do with how Mapplethorpe always had to make people look perfect, like the most perfect version of themselves. It was so powerful to have the relationship between Patti and Robert as well as the relationship between Robert and Susan Sontag both intertwined and displayed so purely. Closes September 4.
MoMA
Dada
This show began in France, I believe, and then traveled to D.C.'s National Gallery before coming to MoMA. It's the most comprehensive survey of the Dada movement I've ever seen, organized geographically rather than chronologically or thematically. The exhibition design is very whimsical and fun; there are two entrances (New York and Zurich, if I'm remembering right), so that the audience chooses their route through the show like a notorious Dada game of chance. Dada is one of my favorite art movements, so I loved the show, and one thing that struck me was the inclusion of a few artists who I wouldn't normally think of as Dadaists, like Otto Dix. My favorite blogger, Tyler Green (who writes Modern Art Notes-- artsjournal.com/man ) pointed out in his review of the show that the interesting paradox of Dada is how humor is juxtaposed with and used to mask the incredible violence and trauma of WWI, in which many Dadaists fought. I think the show hilights this well. Closes September 11.
Also at MoMA is the amazing Artist's Choice: Herzog and de Meuron, Perception Restrained, a single room surveying the MoMA's permanent collection curated by Herzog and de Meuron and organized by Terrence Riley, MoMA's Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. The idea behind the show is the utter impossibility, as H & M explains, of finding the "gems" within a vast collection of gems. The resulting show is a room of small windows to various parts of the MoMA's collection that restrict the audience's view and suggest all of the thousands of works not included, which bleed off, out of view, in every direction. Herzog & de Meuron also hilight the museum's video collection with flat screen TVs lined up in rows along the ceiling. The idea of restricted perception is so smart that the physical exhibition doesn't have to be vast in scope to mask any kind of conceptual shortcoming. The result is an incredibly succinct, controlled, precise environment that really fits with the ideas at hand. I was really impressed by this show. Closes September 25.
The Jewish Museum
Eva Hesse: Sculpture
This small show spans Eva Hesse's short but amazing career, partially recreating her only other solo sculpture show at Fischbach Gallery in 1968. One thing that struck me when looking at her work was what an obvious precursor she is to Matthew Barney-- it's weird to think of them together, but they work with such similar materials, and it's kind of astonishing how different their subject matter is. On the other hand, I think what makes Eva Hesse's work so interesting, besides being so experimental with materials and how they react to one another in a very scientific way, is that its minimalism gives it a distinctly serene feeling. Similarly, while Barney's work as a whole is complicated and detailed and overwhelming, the frames, vitrines and sculptures he makes out of petroleum and similar materials provide a sort of neutralizing force-- part of that is the monochromatic nature of the substance. Petroleum is kind of the Matthew Barney Universe equivalent to soil on planet Earth. Anyway, the Hesse show reminded me of how amazing she is. She's not someone who I think of often without prompting, so it was great to see her work in a solo exhibition to put her back in the front of my brain. The Jewish Museum often likes to incorporate a biographical element to their shows and, I think, does it better than any other museum I've seen. The last room of the Hesse show is filled with artifacts from her life: photos, scrapbook pages, a couple of videos and letters which provided a brief chronology of her life. Often, I think rooms like this turn out looking kind of cheesy, but in this case it really worked. It was especially powerful to see video footage and snapshots of her in her studio alongside certain sculptures-- she was so young when she made her most influential, inspired work, and actually seeing that moment captured visually was very cool. This exhibition was mounted concurrent with a show of Hesse's drawings at the Drawing Center, which I missed, sadly. The show at the Jewish Museum closes September 17.
The Asia Society
Projected Realities: Video Art from East Asia
This show closed in early August, but I thought it was worth mentioning, because all of the six or seven artists showcased were really unique, and a lot of the work was very funny. It seems that there's a tendency among American video artists in particular to take themselves too seriously, maybe because new media had to fight its way into the realm of fine art more recently than other mediums. But most of these East Asian artists' work had an element of surreal humor about them, which was really refreshing. There seemed to be an interesting common thread between several of the artists around the idea of mechanizing humanity and, inversely, anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The exhibition was conceived in memory of Nam June Paik, who passed away in January of 2006.
The Guggenheim
Zaha Hadid
My first reaction to the show overall was one of satisfaction; I think architecture exhibitions typically tend to require a lot of explanation supplementary to drawings and models on display. Hadid's work, however, actually lends itself to exhibition-- much of what was on display included paintings and multi-media artworks portraying a concept for a building or study of an urban area. Hadid's renderings and models are also so much more conceptual and less precise and nit-picky than the average architectural rendering, you can sort of trick yourself into forgetting that it's architecture you're looking at. I really appreciate how conscious her designs are of urban planning and how buildings relate to each other; she never designs one structure in a vacuum. But, as a non-architect, I found it frustrating not to be able to get any sort of idea how it feels to be inside a Hadid structure, because none of her renderings are on a human scale. Everything is shown from a bird's-eye, panned out perspective, so we never know how this architecture is actually experienced. I find it interesting that the only really famous female architect is from Iraq-- there might be a lot of implications there, but it's something I'll have to mull over.
I also have to say that this was one of the more poorly installed shows I've ever seen-- I don't know whether hadid's firm or the Guggenheim were responsible for framing, but there were several framed drawings and paintings which were puckering and bubbling under the plexi glass, a wood frame that had one corner splitting, and there was one frame in which one corner of the plexi was actually coming out of the frame, jutting right off the wall. It was astonishing to see these very obvious, sloppy mistakes; if they're that obvious to me, who knows a little about framing but not a ton, I can't imagine a professional framer getting away with that... sigh. A good show nonetheless. Closes October 25.
The Met
On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag
This tiny but very touching tribute to Susan Sontag, drawing from the Met's permanent photography collection, really reminded me of what an amazing and unique writer she was; Susan Sontag completely invented a language with which to describe art and singlehandedly shaped photography criticism. We really have to give Sontag partial credit for legitimizing photography as a fine art in the eyes of the rest of the art world. Photography would never have evolved as it did, as an art form, without the vocabulary that Sontag created for it. The show pairs individual works and groups of works with Sontag quotes (and even provided titles of essays in which the quotes can be found, encouraging audiences to revisit her texts or read them for the first time), which act as the wall texts for the whole show. The most touching and striking piece, for me, was Robert Mapplethorpe's early portrait of Patti Smith in which she's squatting in a profile fetal position, naked, in an empty hardwood floored studio, looking up at the camera. The quote was something to do with how Mapplethorpe always had to make people look perfect, like the most perfect version of themselves. It was so powerful to have the relationship between Patti and Robert as well as the relationship between Robert and Susan Sontag both intertwined and displayed so purely. Closes September 4.
posted by Jess Brier at 2:26 PM
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