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

LA GOTHIC

I use to think of David Hockney as a decorative painter. His work has a strong graphic quality – all flat fields of sweet pastel color – that’s poster-ready. Reproduced in magazines, his paintings look like pretty pictures for pretty people to hang in their pretty houses. So seeing the current Hockney retrospective at The Met is eye-opening. His canvases are substantial, over six feet tall and as wide as twelve feet. And each one commands the space in front of it, luring visitors for closer consideration. Its surface holds together in tension.

Hockney most famous paintings, from the 1960′s and 1970′s, that depict the homes of his well-to-do Los Angeles friends and collectors, make their own cultural anthropology. Outside there are tiled patios, flat green lawns, whistling sprinklers, and palm trees. Inside there are overstuffed chairs, low glass-topped tables, shag carpets, and primitivist sculptures. This glossy, untroubled world is populated by regal white-haired ladies in caftans, and fashionable young men in flared trousers and tube socks. It’s a place of wealth and repose. Southern California sunlight – wistful, shimmering, white – washes objects and people evenly, and gives the scenes an awesome quiet.

The richest canvases incorporate one of more human figures, nearly life-size. Hockney renders them with particularity and vitality; we believe that they are real, and that the world they inhabit is too. In The American Collectors Fred Weisman appears officious and detached, and Marcia Weisman appears direct and critical. The scene is clear, but rendered without pure perspectival logic. The lines of the gridded tile floor lead to different points, so that space seems folded right up against the surface of the canvas. The sky is an even blue fill, the tiles are a dotted pattern, and shadows are puddles of color. Fred and Marcia seem unfixed, disconnected from their landscape and also each other. They stand close to one another but stare – unperturbedly, expressionlessly – in different directions. They are objects in a strangely elegant still-life, energized by movements that we don’t see.

Image courtesy of David Hockney. American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968, Acrylic on canvas, 84″x120″.

December 24, 2017 by Nalina Moses

IN EVERY PHOTO A HEARTACHE

Everything seen through photographer Irving Penn’s eye possesses a hard, polished gloss: still-lifes (of cuts of meats, cigarette butts, naked women), fashion shots (of Dovima, Carmen, Giselle), and portraits (of Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Ingmar Bergman). Penn’s restrospective at The Met, Irving Penn: Centennial, is packed with beauty. At the same time it reveals the kind of beauty these pictures possess - a stilled compositional perfection - leaves something wanting.

Penn did most of his work for fashion magazines, whose task it is to produce distilled, telegraphic, fantasies about clothes. These photos are often remarkably straightforward, showing a single mannequin posing in front of a building, a sleeve ballooning like a melon around a slender arm, a hooded face set against a blank backdrop. These images don’t require contemplation. They are not about character, story, or even clothing; they are instantaneously-appraised emblems of elegance.

But Penn’s still-lives, also commissioned for fashion magazines, often carry rich, complex narratives. One, Theatre Accident, New York, shows a gold clutch that’s been dropped at a woman’s feet, its contents spilling out across the carpet: opera glasses, pen, pocket watch, cigarette lighter, hairpin, earring, room key. Thought we see no more of this woman than her stockinged foot in a patent leather flat, we know all about her: her simple but rigorous toilette, her dark cluttered Manhattan apartment, her stable of gentleman friends. We also know that, tonight, she’s alone, she’s running late, she forgot to drop her lipstick in her purse, she lost her other earring in the cab. The composition is suggestive, it beckons; the objects roll off the bottom off the page into the world.

There’s only one fashion photograph in the show that supports this kind of narrative, Man Lighting Girl’s Cigarette (Jean Patchett). Here a chicly-attired young woman – seen in profile – sits beside a glass of red wine, holding out her cigarette to a man – seen only as a tuxedoed arm – to light for her. This scene is witnessed from a distance, through a half-empty wine bottle that’s tilting precariously in the foreground. The scenario sets off a string of questions: Has this young woman had too much to drink? Will she leave the room with this man? Will the other man, the man who opened the bottle for her, reappear? It’s these stories, in the end, that sear the image in the heart. Its formal beauty is, simply, appraised, and forgotten.

Man Lighting Girl’s Cigarette (Jean Patchett), New York, 1949. Image courtesy of The Irving Penn Foundation.

July 31, 2017 by Nalina Moses

EXCELLENT EXOTICA

Is India becoming fashionable once again? Fashionistas are drinking turmeric milk and wearing mango-print dresses. And there are two new prominent photo essays on Indian street fashion. One, in the Times, by Brooklyn photographer Mark Hartman, called Capturing the Colorful Style of Punjab , India, focuses on residents of that northern state. Another, in National Geographic, by Danish photographer Ken Hermann, called Flower Men, focuses on Kolkata flower vendors.

Hartman’s photos are exactly what the title promises: shots of women in colorfully mismatched salwars, duppattas, bangles, and bindis, and men in candy-hued turbans, cartoon mustaches, and aviator glasses. The shots are too loosely composed for my taste. Subjects are most often captured unknowingly, staring benignly into the middle distance, sweetened in honey-colored sunlight. The shots betray a naive cultural fascination, as if taken during a middle American couple’s first holiday on the subcontinent. These photographs have less to do with fashion than anthropology. One could find more bracing Indian style on a street corner in Jackson Heights.

Hermann’s photos are precisely the inverse: strident, classically-composed portraits of men at work. He poses the flower vendors formally, on a walkway along the Hugli River, in strong midday sunlight that bleaches the background and quiets the lush, riotous tones of their skin, fabric and flowers. Each man stands straight, at the center of the frame, and looks directly into the camera, handsome, alert, and quietly proud. A caption below notes his name and the varieties of flowers he sells.

Most remarkably, Hermann’s photos go beyond portraiture to capture something of the lunatic grace and excess of India, which only someone who’s spent significant time there understands. The basket of long, crimpled ashoka leaves Angad Ray balances on his head makes an Ascot-worthy hat, and his lungi is folded around his knees with the studied asymmetries of a Comme des Garcons skirt. Kulwinder carries thick garlands of marigolds over each shoulder that fan out around him like a medieval priest’s cloak. These photographs trade in exoticism, for sure, but it’s an artful one.

Photograph courtesy of Ken Hermann and National Geographic.

May 20, 2017 by Nalina Moses