Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat light up the cavernous Gagosian Gallery on far West 25th Street like a carnival. At each turn they offer up big noisy characters and splashes of crayon-box color and snatches of street slang. Basquiat, like Warhol, is a brilliant graphic designer, and paints to charge each square inch of surface with a bristling kinetic energy. It’s as if every figure, phrase and mark we see could burst forward at any moment, but has been pinned in place with scientific precision. These canvases are full but aren’t overwrought. In Italian is packed with all sorts of things (faces, quotes, splotches, scribbles, two quarters, one gorilla) and yet remains remarkably poised, with swatches of primer and raw canvas showing through, giving the scene, below its lush, funky texture, space and depth.

Seeing these paintings expunges Basquiat’s personal mythology of a boy genius dying young. These are substantial works that stir up recollections of Jackson Pollock (in their deep swirling motions) and Willem De Kooning (in their scary, funny monsters). They also, seemingly effortlessly, capture rhythms of cartoon art, graffiti, advertising, and video games. Two paintings here stand out for their brute, experimental simplicity. Each of these was shaped by stretching canvas over a wood pallet, overpainting it in a single color, and embellishing it with a single face and name. One, red, commemorates Jersey Joe Walcott and the other, black, commemorates Sugar Ray Robinson. These two pieces have an unique sculptural charisma that sets them apart from the other canvases. They’re more powerful as talismans than as paintings, and start to chart a different course. It’s hard not to wonder what more Basquiat would have done if he had lived. There is in these canvases an iconography not yet fully developed.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983.
Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery

© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris, ARS, New York 2013.

April 29, 2013 by Nalina Moses

After singing the praises of the electronic tablet, I’m having serious doubts. I just finished reading the novel Eureka Street from a worn New York Public Library (NYPL) paperback, and much of the pleasure of that was having the soft saggy thing with me all week. Feeling its weight at the bottom of my handbag as I crossed the street, and laying it across my lap on the subway each morning gave great comfort. Acquired by the library in 1999, shortly after it was published, this book is handsomely worn. Its pages have darkened around the edges, as if tea-stained, and remain luminous along the spine. Its glued binding is so supple that it lies open to any page it’s set down at. The book bears witness to the transition from the old mechanical NYPL check-out system to the new computerized one; there’s a manilla pocket fixed to the inside cover where librarians used to stick a card stamped with the book’s due date. Now librarians tuck a curling silvery receipt somewhere inside, from where it falls the moment the book is cracked open, leading almost inevitably to overdue fines.

This is an old but clean book: there are no markings or food stains inside, which are things I can’t bear in library books. But page 62 is dog-eared to mark a previous reader’s place just before he fell asleep and tossed the book to the ground, and a computerized check-out slip, its print gone ghostly pale, was left lying face-up on page 127 to mark where another reader gave up late in the summer of 2002. It’s too bad, because I’m sure that if she had reached Chapter 10, the heart of the novel, which breaks out into a heartfelt, lyrical ode to the city of Belfast, she would have read on until the end. And this is another pleasure of reading from a library book – the feeling of reading along with others, with those countless anonymous library patrons who have moved through the same pages before. Perhaps they chose it for the same reasons I did (a romantic interest in Ireland and a literary interest in the comic novel). Perhaps they laughed out loud at the same places I did (the satire of an old-school country poet who writes endlessly about hedges and spades, and names his new collection Rejected Poems, 1965-1995). And perhaps they paused to soak in the same turn of phrase that I did (“The city sounded like an old record that fizzled and scratched.”) Eureka Street is an eccentric book, with passages of comedy, romance, lad-lit, action and reverie mixed up in one another, all of it stuffed inside a ragged pile of newsprint.

April 20, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The Thorne Miniature Rooms the Art Institute of Chicago are a collection of 46 historically accurate models of various European, American and East Asian interiors. They were imagined and commissioned by Mrs. James Ward Thorne in the 1930’s to house her collection of miniature furniture, and donated to the museum in 1940. Today they’re installed in a basement gallery, within the walls, behind glass, at chest level, so that small children can peer right into them, and with a carpeted ledge running around the entire room so that very small children can do the same. The rooms certainly have a dollhouse appeal. They’re built at 1:12 scale, each about the size of a breadbox, and capture the places they represent in mesmerizing fidelity. One takes in their period furnishings first (elaborately turned matchstick-sized legs on tables and chairs, hand-threaded carpets, plaster mouldings as fine as lace) but ends up transfixed by the ordinary objects with which the rooms are furnished to give them a sense of scale and warmth: a pair of eyeglasses on the kitchen table, a folded newspaper in the living room, the electrical cord on a lamp, a dinner fork. While the rooms faithfully render the proportions and splendor of a Tudor hall, a mid-century modern living room, and a traditional Japanese house, they trade less in architecture than a kind of special effects, conjuring other worlds.

The Thorne Miniature Rooms aren’t really individual rooms; most incorporate a cluster of rooms, one central space and also the rooms and passages branching off of them, as wells as the stretches of outdoor space beyond their doors and windows. Each model is lit from within, from various hidden sources, that establish a specific time of day and time of year. We see the morning sun spill over the slate floor of a Cape Cod kitchen, and the setting sun graze the curtains of a Charleston drawing room. It’s easy to look at each room and imagine what kind of life unfolds inside. There’s a fancy feathered hat on a stand in the dressing room of the Biedermeier apartment, as if the lady of the house is preparing to meet later with a gentleman friend. There’s a clarin trumpet lying on the window seat in an eighteenth-century English study, as if the lord of the estate has just unburdened his heart in a letter, in pen and ink, and summoned a servant to deliver it on foot. There’s a bronze statue of Shiva presiding over the desk of a prim eighteenth-century Virginia drawing room, as if the wealthy merchant who lives here has ties to the East, as well as a hankering to leave his life here behind and explore the far corners of the world. In the end the Thorne rooms, historically faithful, are less evocative architecturally — in their expression of space through forms and structure — than novelistically — in their expression of character through a cloud of details. Each period room is set in the dramatic present, where anything can happen.

Image courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.

April 09, 2013 by Nalina Moses

To see Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation The Visitors, at Luhring Augustine, gallery-goers duck behind a black velvet curtain and enter a small, squarish room lined with ten large-format monitors. By the time they’ve become accustomed to the dark, and to the other viewers shifting around inside, they understand that there are nine monitors showing nine different musicians performing in nine different spaces inside the same richly appointed, gorgeously decaying old country house. (The tenth monitor shows the house’s wood-columned front porch.) And they understand that each of these musicians is contributing a track to the folksy, slow-moving lament on the soundtrack, and that their performances are synced chronologically and spatially. So as the chorus ends and the wan, bird-boned singer in the parlor removes her headphones and collapses into her highback chair, we turn our attention to the muscular young pianist, who’s playing at the other end of the parlor, and can be seen on the monitor to her left. And when we hear feedback we turn around to see, on another monitor, a guitarist in an upstairs bedroom, whose face remains hidden behind long unkempt bangs, tuning his instrument and then sweeping his hands across its body with studied bravado. The 64-minute video moves at a pace far slower than commercial television and movies, so that even though there are ten monitors and ten different stories, there is plenty of time to take in everything seriously, properly.

This sort of video array is a magnificent way to describe orchestral music, as well as the interior architecture of a house. Viewers can inhabit each room, gripped by details like the uncommonly large square panes of glass on the dilapidated kitchen cabinets, the steely blue tint of paint on the bathroom walls, and an ornate gilded picture frame in the parlor that looks like it might have belonged to Peter the Great. The music moves in lulling, dirge-like pulses. Nothing seems to happen but the song plays on. Viewers, entranced, float from monitor to monitor, following the movement of the video but also their own desires. Each of the video cameras is still but slightly splayed, looking into a corner rather than directly at a wall or into an opening, so that even when standing directly in front of a screen viewers feel as if they’re sliding out of its space. The musicians emerge as full-blooded characters. It’s hard to look away from the acoustic guitarist in the bathroom, who has a comically disgruntled appearance and, at one point, looks as if he might drown himself in the claw foot tub. Things happen on various screens, intermittently: violence and nudity, drinking and smoking. But nothing in the video breaks the spell until, finally, as the song winds down, the musicians leave their seats, gather in the living room, and stream out of the house and into the surrounding countryside while the remaining monitors transmit still, empty rooms. Then Kjartansson himself appears on screen as he enters each room to switch off the video cameras. The monitors go blank, one by one, and the gallery-goers, who have been watching and waiting, are left standing in darkness, silence, and sadness. The Visitors notes the regretful, inevitable passage of time, the secret spaces inside a large house, and the fractured spirit of the people living inside it. These performers come together to play a song, and when the song is over they leave.

Image courtesy of Luhring Ugustine Gallery.

April 02, 2013 by Nalina Moses