A LOST WORLD

MoMA has mounted a 40th anniversary exhibit of photographer Nan Goldin’s 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, that captured her bohemian Lower East Side community with anthropological clarity, and also love. The framed shots, about 8″x10″, seem loosely composed, like snapshots, but carry a stunning physical and emotional immediacy. The most famous one, a self-portrait, shows Goldin in full makeup, a month after she’s been beaten so severely by a boyfriend that she can barely open her eyes. Thirty years afterwards, in a culture numbed by internet porn, reality TV and Tinder, these images do not shock. Instead they stir up nostalgia for a time in New York City, the early 1980′s, when rents were cheap, downtown was different from uptown, and young people moved to the city to become artists and writers rather than venture capitalists and fashion bloggers. New York City served as a vital refuge those who didn’t have the freedom to act out their lives in other places.

Today, the most powerful photographs in The Ballad are those that pull back from the faces and figures to show that world itself: kitchens with battered white metal appliances, bedrooms with bare walls and windows, hotel rooms with flocked wallpaper and mismatched lamps, basement bars with neon lighting and sticky floors. The handful of still lifes on display are surprisingly moving. They capture a mood by giving a glimpse of the corner of a room, a tabletop arrangement, or the wall of an apartment hallway. The manner in which people decorate their homes reveals their values bitingly, innocently, and eloquently. For Goldin’s friends expressiveness, color, corrosiveness and humor matter far more than order.

Goldin’s most unique gift is, surely, her ability to capture the heightened emotional drama between two people – that moment that promises a vital connection or tearing apart. But when she pulls her gaze back further, to reveal these people within their habitat, her photos are even more powerful. One shows two young men sitting behind a small round table at a bar, a cluster of half-empty cocktail glasses obscuring their faces. The view is gently out-of-plumb and softly cropped, so that the entire world seems to be slowly tipping, unable to right itself. These men might be falling for one another or having a lover’s quarrel. And this might be precisely what it felt like to be a young person, in New York City, in the early 1980′s.

January 21, 2017 by Nalina Moses

DRESSED TO IMPRESS

A small exhibit at FIT, Proust’s Muse, The Countess Greffulhe, celebrates the wardrobe of this famous turn-of-the-century Parisian socialite. She captivated the most accomplished artists, writers and musicians of the day, including Proust, with her natural beauty and audacious style. There isn’t a single garment here that, in its extravagant construction and execution, doesn’t feel like a costume. These are clothes that serve personal drama, that heighten that moment when a woman rises from her chair, exits a carriage, or collapses onto a settee.

There are shimmering, floor-skimming Oriental-themed robes, inspired by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, that the Countess wore to receive visitors at her home on Rue d’Astorg. There is an an ankle-length Russian cape embroidered in gold and trimmed with ermine, papal in splendor, that she wore to her daughter’s wedding. There is a Worth ballgown in a brilliant, bracingly modern, emerald green. And there is an off-the-shoulder 1937 Lanvin evening gown of liquid black silk whose enormous ruffles seem to be floating out in front of it.

One senses, beyond the high level of museum curatorship, a strong personal voice. The Countess was discriminating about what she wore, and must have driven her tailors, milliner and jeweler to distraction with modifications and customizations. She fought hard to be fabulous. For women of her time there were few avenues to exercise creativity and forge a unique social identity. Here, with her wardrobe, the Countess did.

House of Worth, tea gown, blue cut velvet on a green satin ground, Valenciennes lace, circa 1897. © Stéphane Piera/Galliera/Roger-Viollet.

January 07, 2017 by Nalina Moses

PARALLEL TRACKS

There’s an exhibit at FIT called Black Fashion Designers that is, simply, a collection of clothes designed by men and women of African descent. The show includes designers like Anne Lowe, who worked in the 50′s and 60′s in relative anonymity, pioneers like Stephen Burrows, Willi Smith and Patrick Kelly, icons like Azzedine Alaïa, and contemporary tastemakers like Duro Olowu and Public School NYC.

The garments on display are, almost without exception, finely proportioned, stunningly crafted, and smartly conceived. But they do not embody ideas or trends that are earth-shattering, or that would suggest that Black Fashion is anything contrary to, or out-of-step with, Regular (which is to say, White) Fashion. While walking through the gallery, it becomes clear that the fashion world has been, for decades, almost entirely segregated, with talented black designers working on a parallel track, separate to their contemporary white counterparts, addressing the same trends, technologies and movements.

There’s an Eric Gaskins evening gown here that’s a swathe of liquid ivory silk with bands of shimmering black bugle beads running around it like monumental brushstrokes, in the manner of a Robert Motherwell canvas. It might be the most elegant gown I’ve ever seen. (I can’t look at photos of this dress without fantasizing about what it would feel like to wear it while walking into a ballroom, approaching a podium, climbing into a black car…) It’s a functional evening gown so meticulously conceived and executed that it rises to the level of fantasy, abstract expressionism stitched into a dress. That Gaskins, a contemporary of Michael Kors and Isaac Mizrahi, remains relatively unknown, suggests that there’s a way to go until the industry becomes entirely open, and exhibits like this serve no purpose.

Image courtesy of FIT. Eric Gaskins, Dress, 2014, USA. Gift of Eric Gaskins.

December 31, 2016 by Nalina Moses

THE THINGS THEY CARED ABOUT

The Main Street Museum doesn’t resemble a museum so much as an eccentric rural artist’s basement laboratory, a bit Ed Wood and a bit Silence of the Lambs. It’s a three-story wood-frame house on a postcard-pretty bridge in White River Junction, Vermont. The dark, low, interconnected galleries are encrusted with paintings, sculpture, taxidermy, and everyday objects, in an endless, airless clutter. The exhibits include: a glass candy jar stuffed with broken My Little Ponies, a vitrine that collects black plastic doll heads, a wall case showcasing “Round Objects” (like jar lids, drain caps, washers), and the desktop diorama of a plastic robot ravaging a naked Barbie doll.

The museum, led by young artist David Fairbanks Ford, is also a vibrant community center, with a small reading library and a stage for public lectures and performances. Its website explains: “ We are an ongoing, alternative experiment in material culture studies.” This experiment conveys deep anti-materialism and aesthetic abandon. The museum is only lightly curated; none of the displays have titles or labels. And there’s no indication that these artworks are precious. In fact, on the Sunday morning we visited, the building was unlocked and unmanned, with a wood box for visitors to deposit the $5 entrance fee.

The Museum is far too substantial, and effecting, to be kitsch, or some kind of hipster joke. One senses, amid the chaos, a genuine love for the objects, for the things themselves. Although the museum’s tone is Thrift Store Crazy, it’s no different than any other museum: an assortment of things that someone thinks is important.

Barbies Nightmare, Mixed-media assembly, Main Street Museum. Photo courtesy of Main Street Museum.

November 06, 2016 by Nalina Moses