PERSONAL STATEMENT

The pitch of the Hilda af Klint solo show at the Guggenheim is that this early twentieth-century Swedish painter, a woman, mastered an uncompromisingly abstract style before all the men who are ordinarily credited with it (i.e. Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky) did, and that she has been tragically under-recognized. The former may be true, and the latter certainly is. But a better pitch would have focused on the extraordinary personal language she forged. I can’t think of another modern painter who’s syntax is so rich and remains so internally consistent. All the works here are of a piece; all were clearly crafted by one person.

Klint’s forms are simple and evocative. The graceful, non-representational globules, strips and swirls she employs have a rational bent. These marks have precise meanings for her, which she documented neatly with pencil in ledgers, which are also here on display. They are deployed unerringly, on door-sized vertical canvases, against dull blank backdrops, in bright, slightly acrid, fruit-colored hues. The compositions recall biology illustrations, geometry diagrams, foreign alphabets, religious talismans, and alchemical equations. They have intellectual authority and graphic ease.

The paintings command attention from viewers rushing down the crowded ramps, a perfect foil for the blank white curving walls behind them. Klint wrote with hope that her great late-in-life series of canvases The Paintings for the Temple would one day be shown in a spiral temple. Now they have been.

Hilda af Klint, Altarpieces, Group X, No.1, 1915

August 14, 2019 by Nalina Moses

A STRANGE CHARISMA

The Met Breuer’s survey Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason 1950-1980 offers works that don’t conform to canonical modernism. Taking in the selection of painting, sculpture and videos installed in the building’s grand fourth floor gallery, against kookily skewed partitions, is like walking through a playground; it gives great pleasure. The artworks are, for the most part, eccentric, personal, whimsical, political, confusing, ugly, and viscerally powerful. A wall of Hanne Darboven’s tablet-sized paintings, each crowded with X’s and O’s on a quarter inch grid, evokes both the sterility and infinite possibility of Cartesian space. Eva Hesse’s ottoman-sized cube of metal grate, threaded with hundreds of lengths of dark rubber tubing, is oddly, warmly organic. Paul Thek’s painted wax models resembling raw chunks of flex, sealed inside cool acrylic vitrines, are both revolting and fascinating; one can’t turn away from them. These artworks posses a strange charisma; they give a middle finger to modernist cool.

Delirious impresses as a group show of outsiders – of stubborn, brilliant postwar artists who followed the visions in their heads rather than intellectual and commercial trends. In most cases the artist involves himself or herself actually, physically, personally. Bruce Nauman videotapes himself performing an abstract choreography, raising his leg and turning at fixed angles like a jewelry-box ballerina. Lee Lozano keeps a personal calendar of upcoming performances with felt-tipped marker, in text, in a spiral notebook. Ana Mendieta takes self-portraits with her face smashed against a square of glass, distorting her fine features into the mask of a hysteric, producing images as gruesome as Charcot’s nineteenth-century portraits of the insane. (In addition to everything else, this show is a love song to obsolete technologies, including videotape, xerox, analog photography, CRT television, and handheld calculators.)

One senses that these artist aren’t constructing a parallel modernism, but working in causal disregard to modernism, turning instead towards more intimate narratives of gender, race and brute power that at the time remained unexpressed. In that sense they were decades ahead of their more convention-bound contemporaries.

Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints—Face), 1972. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum and Art Resource.

January 13, 2018 by Nalina Moses

MOVING PARTS

Every architect works best at a particular scale: that of the detail, piece of furniture, interior space, exterior shell, site plan, or city plan. French architect Pierre Chareau excelled at the peculiar in-between scale of the device, an element larger than furniture and smaller than a room: the staircase, the sliding door, the screen, the storage cabinet. As a handsome retrospective at The Jewish Museum makes clear, it’s these devices, with precise mechanical functions, that animate his designs.

Chareau’s masterwork, the Maison de Verre in Paris, remains a favorite for architecture students who are seduced by its tricked-out fittings and ultra-modern feeling. It’s a house that doesn’t feel domestic, a kind of architecture that exceeds construction to produce effects that are eery – both bodily and emotionally. Its richest rooms are its secondary or “servant” spaces, where the shower stalls, closets, stairs, entryways and shafts are. In these parts the building engages its inhabitants like an organism, a living thing.

The exhibit includes illustrative video clips, in which a straight, plainly-dressed, 30-something couple enact daily life in the house, silently, and to unintentionally comic (or maybe just French?) effect. She climbs up a folding staircase, and He closes the hatch behind her. He enters through a revolving door, and She locks the door behind him. She leaves a coffee cup in a chamber in the kitchen cupboard, and He retrieves it from behind. They interact with the building in a proscribed, ritualized way.

The exhibit is exquisitely designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Other shows they’ve designed, like the Charles James retrospective at The Met, have been overly cerebral, obscuring the raw power of the objects on display. Here their strategy is lighter and more agile, and the high technologies they employ (i.e. a monitor “scanning” a virtual model of the Maison de Verre like an MRI machine, and VR headsets showing views from inside the house and garden) are put to good use. The Maison de Verre defies easy description through photographs and orthogonal drawings. Only by visiting it, seeing it in film, or through VR, can one see it quickly and clearly as a whole. Rather than a single structure, it’s best understood as a web of smaller movements. It’s a building that’s like a dance.

December 29, 2016 by Nalina Moses

LESS IS LESS

For anyone with any interest in architecture, visiting Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, when in the city, is an obligation. One finds there, in a faithful reproduction of the original 1929 structure, what one expects: the travertine slab floor, the serene reflecting pools, the dramatically cantilevering roof, the floor-to ceiling window panes, the floating marble partition, the precious cruciform columns, and, presiding over it all, the life-size female statue in the back corner, who, with twisted torso and outstretched arms, seems to be practicing an arty minimalist dance.

But the experience of the building is thin. The first time I visited, two summers ago, the sun blasted the interior, giving the space a dreamy organic glow. I wandered through, dazzled, and walked away, satisfied that I had encountered a building I’d known before, for decades, only through textbooks. The second time I visited, this winter, the clouds hung low and gave the interior a cool blue cast. The travertine floor, I saw, was streaked with years of grime. The leather chair cushions were dull. The richly veined sepia marble and bright red velvet curtains seemed, in combination, gauche. And the chrome column covers, with a fattened profile and exposed flathead screws along each side, were clumsily executed.

My friend, an architect, remarked, “This is a building that travels best in black and white photographs.” Photography draws out the long perspectival lines of the walls and the roof, flattening them into elegant lines, wiry starburst compositions that Mies studied meticulously in collages before construction. Photographs take the weight out of the materials, softening the figuring in the stone, dematerializing the low plaster ceiling, and rendering the glass invisible. It brushes away the dull physicality of the building, and also the heavy-handedness of the design.

The Pavilion was designed as a space to receive the King and Queen of Spain during the 1929 Exposition. It’s less a proper building than a dressed-up shed, and its main spaces have no lights, electricity, security, plumbing and weatherproofing. This program frees the design, so the plan can resolve itself with mathematical precision, like a difficult proof solved by a very clever student. The Pavilion’s open plan falls easily into abstraction. And the building itself is pretty in an immediate, uncomplicated way. It’s forms are reduced, purged of historical references, which is how it became an icon of High Modernism. But for someone deeply interested in design and construction, the Pavilion remains just that, a magnificent symbol. All of its less leaves one wanting more of what one finds in buildings one loves: ornament and grit, tension and complexity.

March 06, 2016 by Nalina Moses