As I strode through the Armory at this year’s Print Fair I wondered what it is that makes a print a print, or what it is that only prints can do. It could be the memory of engraving, of scratching into the plates. It could be the sense of reversal, the way images are mirrored horizontally when printed. What I saw at the show only addled me further. Each print reminded me of some other thing: illustration, poster, painting, blueprint, and photograph. In fact the exhibitors themselves might have been confused. Several showed photographic “prints,” and one even showed a formica-and-wood construction by Richard Artschwager that was most certainly not a print.

Lots of the prints were made by painters, moonlighting because they wanted to investigate a different process, because they wanted to produce variations on a single image, because they wanted to reach a different market, or because they just felt like it. (The array of Picasso prints at one booth was so joyous that one believes he just felt like it.) While I think of prints as a graphic medium, of a web of black marks, many are built from broad fields of layered, porous tints that leave tantalizing swatches of paper exposed. The peopled landscapes of Isca Greenfield-Sanders have the freshness of wet watercolors. Prints by Swedish duo Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordstrom, both painters by vocation, fill the frame with strong shapes in eccentric, earthy hues. The scenes have a jittery, improvisatory quality, as if they only came together at the moment the ink hit the paper. That might be something that’s very print-like.

Hunter by Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordström

November 16, 2012 by Nalina Moses

If you head to the Met’s exhibit Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years searching for the ways Warhol provoked and liberated other artists, you’ll find it. But the show might be most compelling as a summation of Warhol’s own work. It includes pieces from all phases of his career, and it’s far more compact and energetic than a blockbuster. There are, in a string of small second-floor galleries beside the museum’s European master paintings, some of the artist’s Greatest Hits: a soup can, Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, two Marilyns, an Elvis, portraits, and cow wallpaper. Each one displays Warhol’s graphic virtuosity, and seems to be orchestrated for maximum optical impact. There’s a small, square Marilyn, the size of an album cover, whose colors and shades are rendered with such pristine concentration that it’s like a piece of jewelry.

There are also, by Warhol, two Jackies, a car crash, and two electric chairs. These works have the same formal power as the happier ones. In fact Orange Disaster #5, a 3x5 grid of electric chairs against a burn-colored field, might be the finest piece in the show. Its scale (it’s the size of a double door), severe composition, and lush gradations stop you as you walk by. It’s majestic. These pieces tap a rich, darker strain, one the artist abandoned later to take on more deliberately superficial subjects like flowers and celebrity portraits. (When I asked a friend what might have caused this shift she deadpanned, “Drugs.”) The exhibit highlights these darker pieces by juxtaposing them with the work of contemporary artists who engaged political subjects. But Warhol’s fascination with death and violence seems entirely personal. These canvases are like emotional maps, looking into the head and the heart. While they’re brilliantly composed they’re gruesome and could not have been uncomplicated to execute. Did Warhol numb himself in order to silkscreen this image of a man dying in an ambulance accident, twice? I doubt he was interested in the irony of the circumstances, but in the man’s spectacular physical vulnerability. The artist completed most of these darker works in the early 1960’s, before the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK. What would have happened if he’d kept on with it? Would we think of him today the way we think of Goya?

November 10, 2012 by Nalina Moses

What’s your favorite New York City-centric Sandy meme: the Fallen Tree, the Flooded Platform, or the Dangling Crane? (I’m going with the Dangling Crane.) I rode through the storm unscathed, without even losing power, and watched it unfold on television and online. In general, still images of the storm are more powerful and communicative than video footage, maybe because the gravity of the situation isn’t undermined by the self-serving narration and heroics of local newscasters. The damage in coastal Queens and New Jersey is devastating, and images of ruined homes there remind me of press photos coming out of war-torn regions in Libya. There’s incredible violence in them. But this is nature perpetuating the violence, and we can probably expect more, and more frequent, anomalous “weather events” like this. As I heard one caller on a local radio show last week plead, we can’t continue to occupy “land that nature wants back.”

The storm brought back scenes from Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I saw several months ago, on a gentle summer afternoon. I liked the way the movie used light and sound to shape a particular physical world (damp, overstuffed, aphasic) in a way that regular movies don’t. And I liked the way the movie examined the unadorned, expressive faces of its actors, many of them black, which regular movies don’t. Beasts takes us to the Bathtub in New Orleans, a low-lying land that became an island after Hurricane Katrina. As another major storm approaches, a band of Bathtub residents defy a forced evacuation and return to their homes. It’s a highly romantic position and, as narrated by Hushpuppie, the gritty five-year-old at the center of the story, understandable. What this movie shows clearly, and the Sandy media coverage does not, is that nature has the awesome power to rewrite geography and obliterate culture. Maybe it’s something we can’t think straight about right now, as we aid the displaced and evaluate the damage. It’s much simpler to think about the Dangling Crane.

November 05, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Just a few years later, the surgical-like strikes carried out by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro at Lincoln Center have healed. Now the LED banners on the steps to the main courtyard, the covered ramps at each side, the wooded garden and green-roofed restaurant pavilion in the north courtyard, and even the clipped southeast corner at the Julliard School, all seem entirely natural, as if they’ve been there forever. There’s been one less noticeable intervention after that: the new 112-seat Claire Tow Theater by H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, led by Hugh Hardy. It was built right on top of the existing Lincoln Center Theater, which houses the larger Vivian Beaumont and Newhouse Theaters.

The Tow is remarkable for its restraint on both the outside and the inside. So often when I walk into a new building I sense immediately that a professional designer has been there. The place is overcrowded with gestures and even if all of them been executed judiciously there’s simply too much going on, too much to consider, and it weighs down the experience. The Tow isn’t like that. It’s a simple, wood-lined, shoebox-shaped room with rows of fold-down seats and a U-shaped catwalk above. I watched a 90-minute one-act play there seated comfortably in the last row, from where I could see every corner of the stage and hear every word clearly. The new theater, which was built along with support spaces for the other theaters below, is set back on the old theater’s roof so that it’s barely visible from street level. In front there’s an open wood deck where theater-goers can collect before and after performances and observe the fray below, and all around are native plantings. The Tow is planned and finished simply; its refined proportions and one-of-a-kind setting are what bring it to life. Perhaps because Hardy has worked on prominent civic projects like this for four decades, he doesn’t feel the need, as another architect would, to raise his voice or confront the existing building, a beloved one by Eero Saarinen. His discretion is impressive.

Photo by H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture

November 02, 2012 by Nalina Moses