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

Punk fashion is hard to do. Fashion exists to make boys and girls look pretty, and punk requires a fundamental not-wanting-to-be-pretty. No figure illustrates this better than singer Siouxsie Sioux. In black-and-white photographs of her from the 1970’s and 80’s, before she started working with professional stylists and makeup artists, it's clear that she’s a classic English beauty, slender-hipped and fine-boned, and also that she’s willing to throw that beauty, and the privilege it confers, away. She dyes her hair ink black, then shears it close to her skull or teases it freakishly high. She paints her eyes with great black bat wings. She wears trashy slip dresses that expose her breasts, and slim leather trousers and squarish t-shirts that make her look like an adolescent boy. There’s something about her willingness during these years to make herself conventionally unattractive in order to make a statement (I’m not like you, I’m not a lady, I’m pissed-off) that is punk.

Because womens’ identities are, traditionally, so wound up in their looks, punk fashion might be harder for women to do than for men. Courtney Love did it, thrillingly, in the beginning, with bad skin, bad makeup, bad dye jobs, and bad clothes. Debbie Harry never did it but has always carried herself with an artsy disdain, an unattainability, that is, if not punk, impressively defiant. Madonna has wanted to do it all along, very badly, but has, really, never done it. At this year's Costume Institute gala, the night before Punk opened to the public, Madge walked the red carpet pantless, in a studded plaid jacket over fishnets, with black leather gloves, a bobbed black wig, and silent movie star makeup. She was trying to be punk but she was, still, pretty.

Siouxsie Sioux, 1976. By Sheila Rock.

June 04, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process. In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles. By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives. Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.

In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism. And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table. In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things. In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain. In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint. Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window. It makes a poetry of the concrete.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

March 19, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Pairing Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli, as the Met has for this year’s Costume Institute blockbuster, doesn’t serve either designer well. Prada’s work, especially, would have benefited from a different context, perhaps that of the fabled brand’s history, which is also her family history. Miuccia’s grandfather Mario started the company in in Milano in 1913, with a shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II that sold handbags, suitcases and other small leather goods. That store is still there, with its lovely Victorian trappings: a checkerboard stone floor, utilitarian steel racks, and P-R-A-D-A spelled out in gold foil on the glass.

It was Miuccia Prada who oversaw the brand’s (brilliant) expansion from accessories to shoes and then ready-to-wear in the 1980’s. Prada never, however, entirely shook off its identity as an accessories brand. The shoes and bags have become iconic, deeply desired by both those who know fashion and those who don’t. On a deeper level, there’s a raw physicality to the brand’s products, even the clothing, that hearkens back to its workmanlike origins. Most of the garments on display at the Met possess a heavy, hearty sense of fabrication. There are simple A-line skirts (Is Miuccia Prada the Stradivarius of the A-line skirt?) layered with shards of mirrors, fake jewels, plastic baubles, leather cut-outs, rivets, rings, and paillettes. These embellishments are all slightly oversized –they’re more than just ornaments – and fastened with visible stitching and hardware. There’s in the pieces great inventiveness and freedom; they really do, as Miuccia says she intended, stretch the boundaries of good clothing. But there’s also in them, embedded, the image of her grandfather leaning over his work bench, making things with his hands.

May 23, 2012 by Nalina Moses