A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

One Woman Show at MoMA highlights Yoko Ono’s work from 1961-1971. There are films that slow time painfully, projected in endless loops on the walls. There’s an installation, Half-A-Room (1967), that collects ordinary household artifacts (a pot, a chair, a carpet) that have been sliced in half. There’s a sculpture, Apple (1966), that is, simply, a green apple. And there’s a sculpture, To See the Sky (1966), that is a monumental spiraling steel staircase that carries visitors to the gallery’s ceiling.

The rooms are packed with art but strangely empty of drama. No narrative seems to connect one work with the next. What’s missing might be the character of the artist herself. We all know who Yoko Ono is: she grew up in a prominent family in Japan, began her career as an artist in Tokyo, had a husband and then a child and then a divorce, became a vital member of Fluxus in New York, married a rock star, and was famously widowed. But who is the woman who made this art?

The most vivid piece in the show is a film of Ono’s performance Cut Piece (1964). It shows her kneeling on a stage in front of a pair of scissors as, one by one, audience members step up and cut away parts of her clothing. Here she looks like moon-faced co-ed, in a dark cardigan with a Peter Pan collar and an A-line skirt, without jewelry and makeup, her hair pulled away in a braid. Throughout the performance her expression remains placid while her eyes scan the room anxiously. There’s thick, quiet drama in the not-knowingness of who will pick up the scissors and what they will do with them. And there’s something in this, the simple mystery of the performance and the fragility of the performer, that’s more compelling than all the other high-art high-concept works in the show. We’re seeing someone take a risk, test her resolve, and construct a fresh identity for herself. We’re seeing a young woman make herself into an artist.

Photograph courtesy of Yoko Ono.

July 29, 2015 by Nalina Moses

BODY LANGUAGE

The heroine of Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition is deeply connected to her London house. She settles into its corners and ledges, lost in reverie. These gestures might have been inspired by the work of performance artist Valie Export. In a 1976 series called Body Configurations, Export photographed herself, wearing plain dark clothes, nestled within elements of public buildings throughout Vienna. We see her spread face-down in a corner of paving, wound around the base of a fluted column, draped over a steel basement hatch, bent kneeling across a curb, lying down a run of steps, seated inside a window box, squatting spread-legged at the outside corner of a building, and stretched corpse-like in the gutter along the base of a wall. Each position is simple and expressive, as if distilled from a dance.

Export is always at the center of the photograph, and always alone. Enough context is given to understand the scale of the architecture, which is typically grandiose, at odds with the humility and vulnerability of her position. In the most powerful photographs her face remains hidden and her figure slack; she’s entirely surrendered to her surroundings. The radical passivity carries tremendous sadness, as if she’s abandoned all will. It suggests that, in order to survive, we hide.

Photograph courtesy of Valie Export.

May 26, 2015 by Nalina Moses

FALLING MEN

An opinion piece in today’s (September 14, 2014) Times, which describes (and endorses) the way one can fall in love with a work of art, is illustrated with this Garry Winogrand photograph of a man falling off a building. I was stunned by its uncanny resemblance to The Falling Man, the famous AP photograph of a man falling from the top of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Both images show the men in virtually the same position: upside down, facing the building, with arms flailing and legs bent.

Of course the context is dramatically different. Winogrand’s man is a performer, falling off of a low ledge, with three other men dressed as bellhops watching admiringly, and a bin of crushed paper to cushion his landing. The 9/11 falling man hovers high above the ground, but the striped skin of the Twin Towers behind him is instantly recognizable, and his fate is clear. Just days after marking another anniversary of the event, seeing Winogrand’s falling man, and reading the lighthearted piece accompanying it, which makes no reference to the other photograph, is chilling. Each time I look at Winogrand’s falling man I can only see the 9/11 falling man, who conjures violence and sadness.

“New York, 1950s,” by Garry Winogrand. Credit The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

September 14, 2014 by Nalina Moses

STAGING STRANGENESS

I’ve probably seen a hundred plays in New York City – Broadway, off-Broadway, and amateur. But I’ve never seen a level of stagecraft as high as at that in Robert Wilson’s opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramowic at the Armory. This piece is essentially a vanity production that stars the artist as herself. It’s more biographical than philosophical, and locates the roots of her complex body-centric art in predictable traumas including a wicked mother, a feeling of not being pretty enough, and a lover’s abandonment. The show mixes forms: music, film, fashion, poetry and dance. But it’s most remarkable for its stage sets and lighting, which plunge us into a series of worlds that are, as my friend described, “painfully gorgeous." The narrative recreates episodes from the artist’s life, and each unfolds onstage in a tableau as cunningly crafted as a fashion editorial. Actors are positioned on the broad, high black stage with geometric clarity, and brushed with cool white neon light that accentuates their acrid-colored costumes and stark kabuki-like make-up.

I’ve never seen scenes as archly beautiful as these. There is a man in yellow pajamas in bed under a sky full of pie-sized foil stars. There is a lady in a red feather-tipped gown on a chaise lounge who floats, carelessly, to sea. And there is, most thrillingly, a kind of surrealist playground, with four isolated, mime-type figures on stage at once: a man perched a swing, a lady spinning from a rope clenched in her mouth, a naked girl rolling down a staircase, and a clown anxiously dancing in place. Each scene in the play is brilliantly composed and, ultimately, empty, because it conveys no narrative or emotion. A whole lot of strange things happen on stage (figures run back and forth at back, drop down on harnesses, and join up in a parade to march away) and we don’t ask ourselves why. This strangeness isn’t like that in a David Lynch movie, which, similarly ravishing visually, erupts from puckers in ordinary life. And this strangeness isn’t like that in a Pina Bausch dance, which emerges from fevered concentration on a single action. Wilson here seems to be to producing strangeness for its own sake. Nothing in this production really gets at life and death of Marina Abramowic, or at the deep themes in her art. It’s all very pretty decoration.

January 08, 2014 by Nalina Moses