JOURNALISM

There was a time, abruptly undone, when an Instagram feed – that stream of exquisitely-curated single images – was the consummate expression of social identity. Then it all shifted and the Zoom video chat – an array of live, grainy, eerily shifting, beloved human faces – became the standard.

I’d like here to plead for physical expression, and more specifically the journal – a catchment for all manner of writing, drawing, recording, collecting, sorting, and salvaging. A friend in Europe, whose sensibilities are fundamentally literary, observed that the one-of-a-kind crisis we’re living through now resembles a war, and that we should all be looking around closely, taking notes, keeping track. A recent piece by Sloane Crossley in the Times, thoughtful and fantastically premature, wonders what kind of novels this period will produce, concerned that a universal experience like this “is poison to actual book writing.” But there are surely millions of perspectives and many millions of stories to tell.

Short of a novel, a journal might be the richest, most supple form. One’s journal can be a book or box in which one leaves things: lists, poems, Post-it notes, receipts, rants, sketches, snack wrappers, lists. It’s a loose, low-tech, capacious form that requires no deep artistic or literary skill. As one’s ideas, feelings and observations build, the journal can take on an infinite number of shapes.

At a moment when looking outward is painful and necessary, looking inward might offer some comfort, distance and, for those privileged to remain in quarantine, a way to mark the strange, stubborn stream of days. One’s journal is private and typically remains unseen, which might trouble some, especially youngsters. But it captures, if only for our future selves, what is happening now, and who we are becoming.

Notebook by Kengo Kuma, 2009. Photograph courtesy the Moleskine Collection.

April 04, 2020 by Nalina Moses

IT’S WHAT IT IS

The Vija Celmins show at The Met Breuer is an exemplary retrospective, guiding one logically through this artist’s rich career, which seems to shift, at each stage, more deeply into abstraction. She began in the 1960′s painting everyday objects and found media images, and then turned in following decades to subjects that could be understood more simply as fields: spiderwebs, moonscapes and seascapes.

Celmins’ iconic wave drawings from the 1970′s and 80′s fill the surface with an exquisitely rendered texture, like a tissue. They reproduce beautifully and, in print and on screen, capture majestic natural rhythms. When seen in person they are less obviously charismatic. They call one close to examine their marks and, the moment one takes that step, fall straight into abstraction. One finds only graphite on paper.

Perhaps it’s naive to to make a distinction, and certainly a judgment, between figuration and abstraction in painting. But I found something uniquely magnificent and dramatic in the small figural canvases Celmins completed in the early 1960′s, when she first arrived in Los Angeles after art school. She painted household objects against blank backdrops on small notebook-sized canvases, in black and white with faints patches of color. There are, in the show, in this genre, portraits of an electric skillet, a fan, a two-headed desk lamp, a pencil, and an airmail envelope. In addition to the exquisite craftsmanship that brightens all of Celmin’s work, these canvases offer the blunt pleasure of representation. This is an electric skillet with eggs, and this is a pair of shoes.

There’s one painting, larger and more complex, that caps this period. It’s the view of a freeway, painted from a snapshot Celmins took from the front seat one morning when driving to Irvine to teach. The view, somewhat off-center, of the straight, wide, open road ahead, framed by the car’s hood and wipers, blighted with billboards and blocked by an overpass, doesn’t romanticize the landscape. But the seamless brushwork – it basically disappears – and just-as-it-is rendering of powdery white Pacific light, give the scene a sweet illustionistic cast. One could look at this painting, and stay in this place, forever.

Vija Celmins, Freeway, 1966.

February 09, 2020 by Nalina Moses

FREE SPEECH

At an open reading I was part of long ago, after about a dozen amateurs (including myself) shared bits of self-conscious prose, a woman with dishevelled hair and a very big handbag shuffled to the mike, unfolded a piece of paper, and read a poem dedicated to her dead stepmother, which began:

She combed my hair every morning

She took me to school on time

She packed me sandwiches with jam

After she was done she looked up, smiled, and said, “She was the only person who really cared about me.”

The Pencil is a Key, the recent exhibit at the Drawing Center in SoHo, reminded me of that moment. There’s an immense rage of drawings here, by artists from different cultures and ages, with different degrees of talent and training, who all completed these works while they were incarcerated. But each artist drew with the same urgency – the same fundamental need to communicate. And in the end the skill with which they’ve drawn (linework, perspective, composition) matters less than the fact that they’ve drawn at all.

There are accomplished, professional renderings are, including works by political prisoners Honoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet. All the works are rich in feeling: sadness, pity, confusion, rage and grace. But the most affecting are those by untutored artists, perhaps because the content comes across so plainly. I was stunned by Angola prisoner Herman Wallace’s drawings. During more than forty years in prison he drew, over and over again, with relentless clarity, his cell in solitary confinement (bed, door, toilet) and the dream house he hoped to move to (two floors, bay windows, a one-car garage). Completed with pencil and ball point pen on scrap paper, these sketches were mailed to relatives and friends.

It’s facile to compare art to language, and drawing to speech. But this exhibit makes a strong case that drawing is, like speech, a human need.

Herman Wallace, 2002-07.

January 23, 2020 by Nalina Moses

PAINTED LADIES

Is a painting more than a drawing? One can say that drawing is about line and painting is about surface, offering richer physical and imaginative depths. The Jewish Museum’s exhibit Modigliani Unmasked intends to show that early in his career, between 1906 and 1915, the artist used drawing as his primary medium, exploring ideas that would shape, later, his iconic painted portraits.

Some artists produce drawings that are as compelling as their paintings and sculpture. Richard Serra’s oilstick drawings have the same density, gravity, and alchemical potential as his steel sculptures. Picasso’s drawings capture the inspirations, intellectual and cosmic, that lead to a painting. Modigliani’s drawings, in contrast, seem merely like tests. They map, with pencil line on paper, a composition before it’s committed to canvas. They are as tidy, as free from ambiguity, as a simple architectural plans. At the Jewish Museum, Modigliani’s drawings are hung beside the paintings that supersede them. In most cases there’s a direct translation from paper to canvas. The paintings have a gorgeous jewel-like sheen, but no more spatial or dramatic complexity than the drawings beside it. In fact Modigliani’s best known paintings retain the same strong graphic quality as the drawings; they’re lovely, stylized, emblems.

The first artwork one sees entering the exhibit is a portrait of the painter’s mistress Maude Abrantes called Nude in a Hat, and it is so good that it shames all the works that follow. The surface is heavy and clouded, build up in fat flat strokes of paint. Abrantes is glimpsed from above the waist from an odd angle, as if in passing, ready to slip out of the frame. She doesn’t offer herself easily; she is haunted, haughty, and willful. Her figure dissolves into her big black hat at the top, and into bare brushstrokes at the bottom. The painting is stormy and unsettled, raw and physical. A drawing might offer the same effects, but not one here does.

Amedeo Modigliani, Nude with a Hat, 1908. Oil on canvas. 31⅞ x 21¼ in. (81 × 54 cm). Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel. Courtesy of the Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel. Image courtesy University of Haifa.

January 20, 2018 by Nalina Moses