BACK IN THE DAY

Gary Winogrand: Color at the Brooklyn Museum, has the most perfect format for a photography exhibit. Visitors sit in a dark hall on soft benches gazing at twelve different slide shows on the walls, each picture the size of a windshield projected for the time of a walk sign. The slide shows are staggered, so the eye wanders from one to the other and then back again, tirelessly, hypnotically, even as one loop begins to repeat itself.

The 450 color slides here were selected from over 45,000 left by Winogrand at the time of his death in 1984, and have a scattershot quality. Most are good and some are perfect, but none are without visual and cultural interest. There are classic Winogrand themes: twinning (two teenage girls in matching striped sweaters looking different ways), layering (stooped men passing below stiffly pretty bridal mannequins in a window display), and voyeruism (one gentleman in the crush of a rush hour sidewalk turning a knowing eye to the photographer).

Most of the photographs are from the early 1960′s, before hippies, second wave feminism, civil rights, and the Kennedy assassinations. It’s a gentler time. Winogrand’s photographs are restricted thematically, with only a handful of black and Asian subjects. Gender codes are inflexible; women wear dresses, heels and costume jewelry, and men wear suits and hats. At first the photos have a chic Mad Men gloss, but on closer inspection everyone inside them appears a bit ragged, run-down by the show.

Winogrand’s compositions are typically about five degree off-kilter, with a center of gravity perilously close to the frame. This instability is telling. The photographer’s compulsion to capture every moment, every corner, every character, here feels less manic than sad. It’s as if the world he sees, that he’s sitting inside of, is tipping dangerously. And it is.

August 16, 2019 by Nalina Moses

A PORTRAIT OF THE MAN

The David Bowie retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum has been organized as a long rambling walk, with artifacts from his extraordinary career displayed within half-hidden nooks and narrow passages. There are amazing things to see: the space-age Pierot costume from the Ashes to Ashes video, the lyric sheet from The Jean Jenie, diaries from the Berlin days. Visitors receive headsets that are synced to micro-zones within the galleries, cueing clips from relevant songs.

As a monument to the artist, the show is unpolished. The spaces are dark and uncomfortable, and the exhibit design is inconsistent. Objects that fans are familiar with, like CD and album covers, are hung up front, at eye level. And objects that fans would want to examine more closely, like Aladdin Sane costumes, are mounted on platforms, behind glass, or twelve feet above the floor.

As a testimony to the person, however, the show is true and moving. What grips one are videos from Bowie’s television and stage appearances. These are shown untouched, in their original format, in low resolution, grainy, shadowy, or pixellated, some on CRT monitors. The outdated formats speak powerfully, and poignantly, to the eras in which Bowie was working, before Instagram, gay marriage, and everyday cross-dressing.

Throughout his career Bowie was clear-eyed, gentlemanly, and sincere. In a television clip from the 1960′s he pleads tolerance for men who wear their hair long. In an MTV interview from the 1980′s he asks a reporter, politely, why the channel doesn’t feature black artists. And in the exhibit’s final gallery, in vintage film footage, he performs as Ziggy Stardust. Despite the studied outrageousness of his costume, makeup and hair, the beauty of the songs, and his connection to them, shine through. There are no false notes. Bowie wrote beautiful songs and performed them, meaning every word he sang.

Still from video from David Bowies’ song “Life on Mars?”, directed by Mick Rock, 1972. Suit by Freddie Burretti.

May 22, 2018 by Nalina Moses

DRESS SENSE

As I walked through the sumptuous Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, I couldn’t help but remember the blockbuster 2011 Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met. The Gaultier show suffers by comparison. Though the clothes are exquisitely crafted (many are haute couture), and the installation is vivid (with the filmed facial expressions of live models projected on blank mannequin heads), the experience lacks the emotional intensity of the McQueen show. That show was charged by the fantasy in McQueen’s work, which fused archetypical female characters (maiden, fairy, princess, witch) with archetypical cultural narratives (rape, drowning, mutation, revolution). And the presentation, chronological, was seared by the tragic fact of his death. What we saw at the Met was the complete ouevre of an artist; what we see at the Brooklyn Museum is a retrospective of an immensely skilled professional.

Both designers are showmen, who pair technical mastery with visual flamboyance. They flout conventional styles while executing their clothing with the highest traditional standards of fitting, draping and embellishment. At the Brooklyn Museum it’s starry and also instructive to see the corsets that Gaultier designed for Madonna’s stage shows. They’re kitschy, made of sparkling lurex, with cartoonishly cinched waists and pointed cups. And they are as finely wrought as jewelry, with miles of angelic, millimeter-long stitches holding strips of ribbon, elastic and boning in place. Even garments with simple profiles – a strapless gown with princess seams, flowing sailor paints with a button front – have an overwrought, byzantine quality. They’re shaped with abundant piecing and puckering.

And yet they’re not innovative in form; they’re rich renditions of standard garments. More than a dreamer, Gaultier is an intellectual, able to infuse a garment – dress, suit, jacket – with a single idea to devastating effect. At the Brooklyn show there is a black cocktail dress constructed like a skeleton, a gauzy white wedding gown that takes the shape of a West African mask, and a slithering satin evening gown modelled after a Renaissance Madonna. If McQueen’s works are fantasies erupting into form, Gaultier’s works are garments lit with ideas. They aren’t artworks, they’re clothes.

Virgins dress, by Jean Paul Gaultier, Spring/Summer 2007. Courtesy of Jean Paul Gaultier.

February 10, 2014 by Nalina Moses