PLAYING DRESS UP

I’ve always understood that costume is one person’s fantasy of another, while fashion is one person’s fantasy of herself. The Anna Sui retrospective at the Museum of Art and Design, The World of Anna Sui, flattens that distinction.

When styled for shows and shoots Sui’s models have a boldly cluttered look. A woman might wear an Alice in Wonderland inspired dress over Op Art patterned tights with a fitted Victorian peacoat, a feathered hat, and elbow-length kidskin gloves. This rich layering and accessorizing drowns out the fineness and complexity in the tailoring. I don’t think any two dresses here share the same piecing; each one is crafted uniquely, inventively. To examine them individually is the great pleasure of the show. The princess seams of this coat, the fringe along this handkerchief hem, the embroidered yoke of this dress. It’s these details that make the garment, and also give them a costumey feeling. The garments are willfully overdone, joyfully baroque.

The show is organized in thirteen clusters of mannequins, spread over three floors, organized by social type, including what the museum identifies as “cowgirls, grunge girls, hippie chicks, hula girls, Mods, pirate rock stars, Pre-Raphaelite maidens, and surfer nomads.” My favorite outfits are the ethnic ones, labelled “tribal,” perhaps to sidestep accusations of cultural appropriation. There are dresses whose silhouettes and embroideries are inspired by traditional Native American, Inuit, Indian, Ukrainian and Chinese dress. Each is so seriously and unironically executed that it seems less like a copy than a dream, in fabric, of a woman. Anna Sui’s clothing supports a woman being herself while allowing her to imagine that she is someone else.

Photograph courtesy of MAD Museum.

May 04, 2020 by Nalina Moses

MEDIA SAVVY

Sculptor Rachel Feinstein’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum, Maiden, Mother, Crone, is less powerful as an examination of those female archetypes than as as study in various formal media. Feinstein uses different techniques to model the mostly life-size female figures here: painted wood, enameled aluminum, resin, mirror, nylon, foam, plaster, majolica, and plastic. Though they are shaped boldly, even sloppily, there is a balance and fineness to them. It doesn’t surprise that Feinstein first conceives them as drawings and small maquettes before building them to scale. They are more line and space than mass.

The exhibit is an elegant affair. In one light-filled gallery there are maidens, mothers, and one madonna. In another gallery, dim, with silvered wallcovering, there are crones. This dichotomy reinforces the misogyny built into the archetypes, but that seems beside the point. The depictions all feel remote, intellectualized, with no real women implicated. Only two figures – Angel (a Victoria’s Secret runway model) and Butterfly (a stripper) – flutter to life, perhaps because they are rendered in overtly sexual postures, and rather unkindly, with pads of crazily-colored flesh smeared along their slender figures. Although they are meant to be ugly they remain, in line and form, poised.

All the sculptures are undone, casually, by a series of small portraits hung on one wall in the maiden/mother gallery. The gentlewomen in them are rendered warmly, expressively, and particularly, with loose strokes of enamel on oval-shaped mirror panels, in the manner of eighteenth-century cameos. They move beyond caricature, getting at the character of the women depicted. These are not attractive women; they are rich, idle, haughty, bored, clueless and agitated. But they are real. And this undoes, casually, the archetypes in which women are everywhere elsewhere frozen here.

Photograph courtesy of The Jewish Museum.

February 12, 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

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