Hot on the heels of the show of Bob Dylan’s paintings at the Gagosian, there’s a show of Rabindranath Tagore’s drawings at the Asia Society Museum.  The great Bengali poet and novelist, who died in 1940, is revered both in India and abroad as a pivotal cultural figure, who linked his country’s enormous, mythological past with a free and independent future.  I find what poetry of his that I’ve read in translation a bit sentimental, and his image self-consciously exotic, as if it were designed to please a westerner’s idea of a mystic.  I’ve always preferred the face that Jawaharlal Nehru presented for India – one of refinement and modernity.

Tagore began drawing and painting late on life, when he was 63.  (The show is called Late Harvest.)  There’s no denying his passion for the media.  He completed over 2,500 works before he died.  Some are vivid graphically, with a palette of inky blacks and surreal earth-tones.  But there’s little spatial and emotional complexity in them, and they feel more like illustrations than drawings.  Because many feature naturalistic figures in flattened backgrounds, and have a dreamy, symbolic cast, they reminded me of drawings by Francesco Clemente.  But Clemente’s drawings are erotically and mythologically charged.  They seem naive at first glance and then pull you deep inside.  Tagore’s drawings are simply appreciated and forgotten.

Sometimes I think that New York City is becoming a Third World country.  There’s litter in the streets, bad driving, tribal allegiances, a riot of dialects, and piercing odors.  And there are pedicabs.  It’s barbaric for a man to peddle visitors around Beijing or Bombay, and it’s barbaric around Manhattan too.  New York City pedicab drivers certainly don’t seem oppressed.  They smile brightly and have the confident, healthy glow of college athletes.  Although pedicabs have been praised as fuel-efficient transportation, they’re still almost exclusively patronized by tourists.  But they point to a big gap in the city’s transportation system.  There’s a real need for private transportation that’s more informal and less expensive than a cab.

I vote for the auto rickshaw, just like the ones that swarm Indian streets.  They’re basically motorcycles with a seat in back and a shell above.  They’re open to weather but but give a sense of freedom, and leave passengers open to interaction with other city characters.  (This video, moralizing aside, gives a sense of what the ride is like.)  There was a failed effort recently to bring them into the country from Asia.  With Mayor Bloomberg hell-bent on eliminating cars (as well as smokers and trans-fats) from the city, the auto rickshaw could be one solution.

No artwork manufactured before the nineteenth century was meant to be displayed in a museum; it was meant to be out in the world, and almost always integrated with architecture.  We’re all accustomed to seeing classical Greek and Roman statuary as relics, and their oldness and brokenness makes them powerfully romantic.  These ancient and precious things, we think, have been battered by history.  But the show of Gandharan art at the Asia Society Museum is frustrating because the work is very literally fragmented.  The bits of stone statuary on display are so small and so incomplete that it’s difficult to imagine what kind of power they originally possessed.

The exhibit included pieces of stone that once served as stair risers, room dividers, pillars, false dormers, and friezes.  Each has been ripped from its original structure and pinned to the museum wall.  Some, like the figures of Buddha, are effecting.  Some, like the tiny panel above, that illustrates Maya’s dream of Buddha entering her womb in the form of an elephant, are tantalizing.  But each piece is just one flash of something.  Some pieces of sculpture, particularly those that were once part of friezes, were almost certainly intended to be appraised from below, from the side, or in dark shadow.  When seen straight on, in bright lights, as they are now, their compositions become strangely distorted and overbearing.  Each scrap is engaging, but hints at something much larger.

Fluxus was not really about art objects so much as it was about provocations.  The artists in the movement, which drew from theater, dada and conceptual art, were overturning centuries-old conventions about artmaking, and conventions about other things too.  And, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when they hit their stride, just about everything was being overturned.  So I was curious to see how the NYU’s Gray Art Gallery would mount their exhibit Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life.  As you’d expect, the works aren’t monumental.  There are a lot of texts (pamphlets, posters, stamps, postcards), a lot of found objects (bottles, boxes, timepieces, a white dress shirt), and a lot of small, personal, hand-crafted objects.

Most appealing are the Fluxkits, little boxes that provided all the pieces needed, as well as bare-bone instructions, to perform one proscribed Fluxus action.  They’re a riff on do-it-yourself art kits, and also the facility with which just about everything in our culture – even the most ephemeral ideas – can be packaged, marketed, and sold.  The exhibit includes Fluxkits called A Flux Corsage (a package of seeds), A Box of Smile (a mirror-lined pillbox), Sacramental Fluxkit (vials of holy water), and Zen for Film (an infinity loop of entirely clear 35mm film).  The finest one is A Flux Suicide Kit by Ben Vautier, which contains a razor blade, a rope, a shard of glass, and other potentially dangerous but largely innocuous household objects.  It’s funny, chilling and elegant.