CURLICUED

A small exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Fragile Beasts, collects prints with motifs in the spirit of the grotesque. This style has highly specific origins; it was born when ceiling frescoes from the Domus Aurea were uncovered in Rome in the sixteenth century. These elegant, ancient panels are decorated with sepia-colored angels, wrestlers, garlands, centaurs, leopards, and flowering trees, all depicted in profile against a light-filled sky. Grotesque is a baroque style, characterized by curving, curlicued forms that incorporate, very literally, the figures of plants and animals, including humans, so that they seem to be morphing into each other. Grotesque forms have a bizarre half-object half-thing quality; they spring strangely to life, with a tenuous, slithering identity.

The exhibit itself, of small prints displayed behind glass, didn’t hold me. But as I moved through adjoining galleries, with displays of Tiffany glass and Victorian birdcages, and through the museum itself, the old Carnegie Mansion, lined in carved wood panels and lit with decorative iron chandeliers, I felt as if I were submerged in the grotesque. The rich, thick ornament in the objects and the architecture feels animate, as if the place is a living thing. This whirling, stirring quality might not be unique to the grotesque, but characteristic of all premodern art. Before God was in the details, life was in the ornament.

Print, Plate from a Series of Designs for Ewers and Vessels, 1548; Cornelis Floris II (Flemish, ca. 1513-1575); Published by Hieronymus Cock (Netherlandish, ca. 1510-1570); Engravings on paper; Museum purchase through gift of Mrs. John Innes Kane; 1946-3-3. Courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt.

October 08, 2016 by Nalina Moses

NO SO SIMPLE

In lieu of church, I walked to the Met on Sunday morning to see a show of Shaker objects culled from the collection called Simple Gifts. There is an immense maple dining table held together by pin-sized wood dowels. There is a handwoven bolt of wool, just wide enough for a dress, with softly jagged edges, dyed darker than midnight. There is a chair made with such minimal material, and fuss, that it looks like a line drawing of a chair. All these objects are handsome but none has the revelatory, purifying effect I was searching for. They are sort of beautiful and also sort of unremarkable.

What is remarkable is their purposefulness, their unapologetic pragmatism. There are no tchotchkes or decorative pieces here, like those that fill the ceramics, metalworks and furniture halls surrounding the gallery. Each is, instead, made to meet a particular need, and each of its attributes responds to an aspect of that need. A cabinet has drawers just wide enough to store bolts of fabric laid flat. A sewing table has inches marked off along its front lip to reference when cutting patterns. A knit glove has open fingertips so one can sit inside, near the window, on a cold day, and turn the pages of a book.

This pragmatism is strikingly apparent when one steps into the Shaker Retiring Room, just footsteps away. The room is furnished with a constellation of everyday objects, and without any decoration. The atmosphere is sensually spare and dramatically rich, as each object speaks powerfully to its use. There is a desk and chair for writing in a journal and keeping accounts, a rocking chair with a footrest for knitting and mending, a small iron fireplace for heat in winter winter, a bed for sleeping (it’s too narrow for much else) and small high windows to let in light. Each thing is simple in form and rich in life.

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum.

September 18, 2016 by Nalina Moses

SLY DESIGN

I declined to attend ICFF this week, picturing endless stalls of hyper-crafted wood furniture, twisted LED light sculptures, and hand-blocked wallpaper. A last-minute invitation drew me instead to Sight Unseen Offsite (SUO), a small market curated by the design website. It was the perfect antidote to the theatricality, commercialism, and insistent luxury of ICFF. The sun-drenched 15th floor of the Grace Building, where SUO unfolded, was stripped to a bare concrete slab and white walls, and filled with young designers – makers of things – showing their wares on plywood tables.

Despite the number of Pratt graduates and Brooklyn-based industries, the sensiblity was less Outer-Borough Artisanal than Understated Postmodern. The designs (furniture, tableware, linens, carpets) shared a stripped-down 80′s formalism that tempered Memphis eccentricity with Real Simple minimalism. The entire spectacle was sweetly ahistorical, because the designers are too young to have any memory of that era. Products were crafted with basic geometries (thrown pillows shaped like pyramids, pipes shaped like cones, chairs shaped like cubes), bold graphics (checkerboard rugs, quilts with fields of squiggles), chalky pastels (hand-thrown dinnerware, shift dresses) and crayon-bright primaries (throw cushions, childrens toys). There was a smartness to the products. On the surface they seemed natural, simply put together. But achieving this kind of grace actually requires a great deal of sophistication.

Photo courtesy of Crosby Studios.

May 16, 2016 by Nalina Moses

A story in last month's Metropolis, Modernists at Play, featured designs for children by noted twentieth century architects. These playrooms and pieces of furniture are sweet because they’re so small and because they're mostly personal, intended for the designer’s own children. But Aldo Van Eyck’s drawing for an array of playground equipment made my heart leap. Van Eyck pictures each plaything – sandbox, jungle gym, swingset – as a platonic figure, built from geometries of circle, square, and line. Spread evenly across the blank page, these figures have a bright, musical energy. It’s as if Van Eyck intends to set children within a field of cartesian space, one filled with adventure and pleasure.

Working for the city of Amsterdam as a young architect in the 1950’s, Van Eyck designed about 700 playgrounds in the city. Most are gone. The ones that we have photographs of seem both elegant and audacious because they are so simply composed, with a handful of play pieces set strategically within a flat, open plot. These toys, because they’re idealized in form, are ripe with possibility. They aren’t proscriptive; they're generic objects for children to climb on and jump from and run in between. Are children happy in this sort of playground? It’s hard to know. But it must take an imaginative leap for a child to enter and make the landscape their own. Maybe they invent nicknames for the elements, and games for each one too. Today we give children entertainments that are, whether educational (Reading Rainbow) or escapist (Mulan), structured and predictable. Van Eyck gives children a lot of credit. He doesn't set them in a scaled-down version of the city, or on courts for games with readymade rules. He lets them play.

December 11, 2013 by Nalina Moses