DISEMBODIED

MoMA’s new exhibit Items: Is Fashion Modern? might be the most elegant presentation I’ve seen there. The 111 items featured, “clothing and accessories that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries,” are mounted with minimal fuss, on headless mannequins on low platforms, and pinned like dead butterflies on the blank walls of the sixth floor galleries, leaving oceanic expanses in between for wandering and reflection. There are simple printed text cards and some small video monitors at the displays, but the installation remains blissfully free of gimmickry. It’s also, sadly, free of drama, glamor and sex appeal. Is Fashion Modern? takes the fizz out of fashion.

Unlike the small, rich, thoughtfully-curated fashion shows at The Museum at FIT, this show feels thematically vague. It’s less about the items themselves, and how and why they’re worn, than about their intellectual associations. Most of the items are types of garments (LEOTARD, BRIEFS, MOTORCYCLE JACKET), but some aren’t “items” at all. They are materials (KENTE, GORE-TEX), brands (Y-3, WONDERBRA, SPANKS, FITBIT), and even ideas (SPACE AGE).

As they prepared the show – only the second fashion show in MoMA’s history – curators must have imagined the throngs visiting The Met's annual blocksbuster fashion show. But instead of presenting iconic garments, like Elizabeth Hurley’s Versace safety pin gown or Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy cocktail dress (LITTLE BLACK DRESS), there are generic versions from the same designers. And instead of offering Michael Jordan’s hightops (AIR FORCE 1), there’s a sagging, scuffed pair that look like they were lifted from the sidewalk on garbage day. So many of the items are commonplace, overly familiar (SUIT, WHITE T SHIRT, TIGHTS), that they have little charge formally, and don’t hold the eye when set in vitrines or hung on the wall. These 111 items might have been better collected in a time capsule, marked How Everyone Dresses in 2017, and set aside for fifty years.

Most strangely, the show misses timely political connections. We see a replica of Colin Kaepernick’s 49ers shirt (SPORTS JERSEY) but we don’t see a replica of Mickey Mantle’s, though both wear, iconically, number 7. We see a Yankees hat but we don’t see a Make America Great Again hat. And a red Champion sweatshirt (HOODIE), displayed against a big black wall with its hood pointed upwards, has an spooky, unsettling presence. Rather than speaking to trends in athleisure and streetwear, it recalls Tayvon Martin, and the anonymous hooded prisoner in the grainy photographs from Abu Ghraib.

This show is so eager to decipher each of the 111 items semiotically that it forgets that that they are also clothing, charged mythologically when worn on a body, by a person, in the world. These items make our identities and our dreams.

Photograph courtesy of MoMA.

October 28, 2017 by Nalina Moses

HANDIWORK

About to embark on a new writing project about architectural drawings, I took in this season’s architecture show at MoMA, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archives.

An architectural drawing can do a number number of things: construct a personal vision, instruct a builder, persuade a client, clarify spatial organization, communicate technical specifications… Most of the drawings in the FLW show are visionary, and what singular visions they are. Prepared for publication or presentation, these exterior perspectives illustrate, all-at-once, the character of the building: its sculptural presence, its materials, its formal stylings, and its relationship to the landscape. Many are so brilliantly composed that they are themselves iconic. A drawing of the David and Gladys Wright House gives a glimpse of its curved inner facade from below, standing at the center of its circular walkway, a small child’s glowing spaceship dream.

Other drawings on display are more fundamentally pragmatic, fixing dimensional and construction details. One poster-sized section drawing of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo slices through its entryway to reveal profiles and details of its customized brickwork and stone panels. It shows every grout line, every turn of every stone panel, every steel reinforcing bar embedded in the concrete decks. Marks noting dimensions have been lain right over those noting profiles, right over those noting materials. The drawing is a cloud of lines, alive with the density, complexity and sensuality of real brick and stone.

Most remarkable are those drawings that convey both the vision and the physicality of a building. A perspective of the Millard House, in colored pencil, shows us its stern textile-block facade from slightly above, as a bird would see it, overlooking a gentle ravine, framed by the drooping branches of decades-old eucalyptus trees. Its yellowing sheet has worn, torn edges, and its surface a rich patina of lead smudges, pencil points, erasings, overlapping lines and small stray marks. The character of the drawing gives the house itself a dark, ancient feeling. It’s less like a building than a natural formation, rising from the ground.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Millard House (La Miniatura), Pasadena, California (Exterior perspective from the garden) 1923–1924

September 02, 2017 by Nalina Moses

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

HOME FURNISHINGS

The vital MoMA exhibit Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter examines refugee housing. At a moment when millions globally have been displaced, and more are displaced each day, the question of how to house them is vital. This exhibit is (disappointingly) small and gives only a glimpse into the challenges and horrors. In the end it might be most affecting for leaving a visitor with so many questions. What minimal quality of shelter is required? How can individual shelters make a community? Is it correct to build temporary shelters? What is the image of a refugee shelter? And, most importantly, What is the difference between a shelter and a home?

The most powerful artifact on display, standing at the center of the gallery, is a Better Shelter, a structure designed, fabricated and funded by the IKEA Foundation in collaboration with UNHCR. So far 30,000 Better Shelters have been deployed to refugee camps in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The Shelter exploits IKEA’s expertise in economies of manufacturing, shipping and assembly. It’s a small hip-roofed structure, about the size of a detached suburban two-car garage, built from plastic panels that are shipped flat and assembled on the ground in two hours by a team of four adults. The Shelter is spacious enough for five adults, affords more privacy and protection than a tent, and can be personalized very simply by finishing the interior with posters or wall coverings. It’s profile gives it the image of a (suburban, American) house, while its materials give it the feeling (flimsy, airless, beige) of a FEMA trailer.

In an essay accompanying the exhibit photographer Henk Wildschut, whose lyrical shots of informal settlements in Calais might be the emotional highlight of the exhibit, explains, refugees “carry on being human in an inhuman situation.” People who have been displaced will likely make the most of minimal resources. But the challenge remains. Can we design a refugee shelter that maximizes value, transportability and constructibility, while it also supports human dignity? IKEA revolutionized the industry by mass-producing handsome, inexpensive furniture that shapes an environment of modern comfort. Will their foundation aim even higher, and make homes rather than shelters?

Image courtesy of MoMA.

January 14, 2017 by Nalina Moses