At a discussion before the premiere of two new works by Jodi Melnick, fellow dancer and choreographer Kyle Bukhari proposed that Melnick’s dance was a form “between writing and speaking,” which blew my mind and also made perfect sense. The two dances she presented, Solo, Delux Version (choreographed in collaboration with Trisha Brown) and One of Sixty-five Thousand Gestures, reflect her unique style, which some of her colleagues there characterized, with admiration, as one that combines precision and force. These qualities, when coupled with her lithe, almost spectral physicality, make her a remarkable presence.

The postures Melnick captures have the specificity of letters in an alphabet, and her movements have the mesmeric, fluttering quality of an old-fashioned train station destination board. But I can’t help understanding these two dances, and dance in general, as a form of theater, and the movements of the body as drama. The image I’ll take from me is one from early in Gestures, when Melnick, dressed in khaki cargo pants and a silver foil hoodie, lies on the stage and drags herself across it, from front to back, lit by acid-yellow footlights. I imagine she’s somewhere very remote – on the cratered surface of the moon or deep in the desert. There’s heroism in each inch she creeps forward and fear in the solitude. Suddenly Melnick stops, lifts her torso off the ground and reaches far forward with one arm, for something or someone she will never reach. At this moment the dance doesn’t seem like a form of language but like something wilder and greater, something that can’t be fit into language. If Melnick’s choreography lies between writing and speech, her performance exceeds them.

March 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The old Philip Goodwin- and Edward Durell Stone-designed MoMA was my first museum. I visited from high school through college and can still dream-walk my way through, conjuring many of the famous works in exactly the spots where they were displayed. When it reopened in 2004, after a highly sophisticated expansion by Yoshio Taniguchi, I couldn’t bear the bigger, noisier place, with its airport terminal acoustics, listless crowds, and enormous, empty central hall, the Marron Atrium. I stayed away, mostly. Now, eight years later, I’ve come around.

What happened? I stopped thinking of the place as one museum but as many museums, all glued together by that court. Last week, with limited time, I ran inside to see one specific exhibit and then back out again. As I was riding down the escalators I realized that the museum was like an airport terminal, a good one, leading a visitor to and from one gallery, and not necessarily through all of its galleries at once. Seeing the new, expanded MoMA requires strategy; you go to the sixth floor to see the blockbuster, to the third floor to see design, or to the fourth or fifth floors to browse the permanent collection. The place can’t be taken it all at once, as the older MoMA might have been. Before leaving I walked through the court, where there was some sort of politically-charged sculptural installation, and luxuriated in the great, fat void that it cuts, perversely, through the middle of the museum and the middle of midtown. After Marina Abramowic’ performance and then Yoko Ono’s installation there last year, that space has a history of its own; it reverberates. In 2005, MoMA mounted an exhibit of Tanagachi’s work called Nine Museums. That might be a perfect title for the current museum.

March 06, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I went to hear starchitect-gadfly Peter Eisenman in discussion with Catherine Ingraham at Pratt and arrived a few minutes late, after the hall was full. Three burly, uniformed guards explained the situation and asked to me wait in line to be admitted. (This, the security detail, impressed me much more than it should have.) After twenty minutes I was ushered into a classroom full of fashionable, sleep-deprived architecture students. There was a video monitor with a live broadcast of the event, showing murky, slow-moving images of the two speakers and their slides. Eisenman and Ingraham spoke about “autonomy” and “contingency” in form, and then about “speculative realism,” a notion Eisenman dismissed heartily. Then the architect told a terrific story about meeting a donor for the Wexner Center who explained that he was contributing 25M because, “The people of Ohio are going to hate this building." Before long I realized that this might be the best way to experience Eisenman: as a talking head, on a video screen, without a clear image of his work, as he was egged on by a spirited, quick-witted companion.

I’m not big on architectural theory, or on architects talking about their own work, but Eisenman is a terrific speaker and, in discussion, has the ability to describe unorthodox ideas in vivid, straightforward language that pushes one to think more deeply about what architecture is. I heard him speak at the Guggenheim Museum last year and, after presenting a well-prepared academic paper, he opened the floor to questions and the affair heated right up. Eisenman proclaimed, "Architecture can’t really do anything” in response to the first question, and that was just the beginning. I ended up leaving last week’s lecture at Pratt early, lured away by a dinner invitation, but I wondered whether one needed to see Eisenman’s work to understand his ideas. I don’t think so; I think he is all there in his words.

March 05, 2012 by Nalina Moses

After the splash of Bjarke Ingel’s career-making monograph Yes is More, Thomas de Monchaux explains, in the op-ed pages of the Times, Why Less Isn’t Always More. Is it Mies van der Rohe backlash? A sign of the times? Or one architect’s (very real) fear that as a culture we don’t properly value formal invention and creation?

While I’m excited to see an architecture debate carried out in such a popular forum, I’m wary of conflating architectural aesthetics with economic policy. The image illustrating de Monchaux’s essay, a photograph of the all-white interior of a John Pawson house, is terribly seductive. And, in its overzealous denial of profile, color and texture, it’s not austere at all; it’s excessive. I’ll wait for Paul Krugman to weigh in on the advantages of economic austerity, although he too, for the record, seems to be opposed to it. But I’m all for aesthetic austerity, the act of seeing past appearances to something deeper, and striving to make things that are timeless and permanent by building what absolutely needs to be, of which ornament might be an essential part. De Monchaux points out, correctly, that it takes a lot (of time, materials, and effort) to make architecture look as if it is doing very little. But what if we as a culture build fewer things, and if the act of architecture becomes more special. Would we build things in a finer, more thoughtful way? Would each thing be more beautiful? And would we value them more?

March 01, 2012 by Nalina Moses