As I was reviewing a book about contemporary micro-houses (Rock the Shack: Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs) I realized that our homes are no longer refuges, retreats from work and society. Instead our houses and apartments are highly sophisticated instruments: exquisitely furnished, mechanically conditioned, audio-visually equipped, pulsating with streams of electronic data. They shape vibrant micro-environments that allow us to keep working, consuming and communicating when we’re supposed to be resting. Country houses aren’t much different, just finished with a slightly lower level of complexity.

As the book suggests, we might want to run away and live in a “shack,” a primitive hut, the kind of small building that hearkens back to the first manmade structures. Their architecture is primarily about shelter from the elements, and does little to serve identity, status and place-making. These are structures that stand lightly, that barely disturb the ground, that can be simply dismantled and replaced, that can be washed away by rains or blown to bits by a storm. When left inside a building like this with nothing to do, what would we do? What dreams and stories would we find?

Bridge Studio, Saunders Architecture, Newfoundland, Canada. Photography: Bent Rene Synnevag.

May 20, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Six weeks ago MoMA announced that it would raze the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building on West 53rd Street that originally housed the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM). In its place MoMA wanted to build one to properly connect its existing building, just to the east, with the new Jean Nouvel-designed tower it's building, just to the west. Then last week MoMA announced that it was reconsidering. Many had opposed the proposed demolition, including AFAM’s architects, architecture critics, and even MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll. But, if art critic Jerry Saltz’s commentary in New York Magazine is any indication, the art world is less concerned about it. Saltz argues that the building served architecture far better than it served art, and supports its removal with a directness that approaches zeal.

It’s sad to see any building razed, especially one as architecturally ambitious and distinctive and AFAM, and one that’s only twelve years old. Yet I’m unmoved about seeing it go. AFAM sold the building to MoMA and left, and it occupies a key property within the MoMA campus. From the outside the AFAM building has never felt like a part of midtown Manhattan. Its signature super-tall bronze facade panels are uncomfortably overscaled – unrelated to the scale of surrounding facades – and, when seen from the sidewalk, have a dull, mottled surface that feels unfinished. On an isolated site in the woods the building might cut a dramatic figure, a post-Brutalist megalith, but on a dense block in Midtown, rubbing shoulders with towers dressed in limestone and glass, it feels overly rugged, like a cocktail party guest in a parka. Inside, the museum is spatially and sculpturally dynamic, but doesn’t carve out substantial spaces and surfaces for display. Nearly half of each floor plate is given over to three staircases and an elevator. Artworks are scattered all over the inner skin of the building, in corners and nooks and along stairwells, giving the place an eccentric, unorganized feeling. My lack of sentimentality about razing AFAM is linked directly to my persistent nostalgia for the original, intimate MoMA building, which I remember, along with the installations of many of the individual artworks housed inside, from childhood. After that building was swallowed up inside Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion, I have little ardor left to preserve museum buildings, especially on this block. MoMA has evolved as a corporate entity, amassing properties in midtown the way New York University does in Greenwich Village. I didn’t flinch as I read in the Times that the AFAM building might be gone before the end of the year, but I did when I read that the MoMA board is currently chaired by Tishman Speyer head Jerry I. Speyer. Museum leadership is running the place with a developer’s eye, designing a signature property rather than a temple for art. It’s this same mentality that led to the construction of the AFAM building in the first place. Let’s see if MoMA, in its upcoming expansion, can hit both marks.

Credit: © Peter Mauss | Esto

May 13, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Django Unchained stirs up memories of dozens of other movies (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, Lawrence of Arabia, Taxi Driver, Gladiator), but what it reminds me of most is Huckleberry Finn. In his consideration (it’s certainly not a review) of Django in the New York Press, critic Armond White makes the same comparison, although derogatively, saying that, like the book, the movie “gratifies some people’s entrenched racial prejudices." The first half of the movie, which is lyrical, tender and hilarious, follows the slave Django and his owner, the German-born dentist Dr. King Schultz, as they meet in the ante-bellum West and travel to the South on horseback. Along the way they learn how to talk to one another, how to work together, and something about who the other is. And while there is, as in Huckleberry Finn, an obscene imbalance between the men in their status, security, and means of expression (Django remains uncomfortably silent most of the time, while King never shuts up), the men become like best friends, like teammates, like father and son. This, the first part of the movie, is a love story.

It is also an ecstatic vision of the American landscape. Interspersed with the comedy and action set pieces there are wide, distant views of Django and King riding their horses, across prairies dotted with wildflowers, beneath ranges of stony, snow-capped mountain, and down allees of knarled, centuries-old, kudzu-draped trees. These views are cliched (probably deliberately so), over-familiar from landscape paintings, westerns and car commercials, but it's stunning to see these different American landscapes depicted so simply and expansively. The images aren’t prettified; they’re raw and shadowed, alive with motion. They give a feeling for the horizon, and for the vastness and wildness of the terrain. In one passage the two men, after a snowfall, on their horses, approach a herd of grazing bison. It’s part of a lighthearted montage, with an old, worn pop song playing on the soundtrack, that’s meant to express that time is passing but nothing important is going on. But as I watched I felt that image, which is very loosely composed, as if looking on from a ladder’s height about twenty feet away, fall straight into my subconscious. The men move slowly, like the animals, comfortable on the land and in the presence of one another, without speech and without purpose. They might each never belong anywhere in American but they both, at this moment, belong right here. At the end the movie turns into exactly what one expects, a profane and comic bloodbath. But when Django and King are traveling alone together across forest and field the story is splendid. Just as it was following Huck and Jim drift down the Mississippi, I wanted these men to keep going.

May 03, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Books & Co, a show at the Gagosian uptown, kicks off with a framed typewritten letter to Ed Ruscha from 1963 that states, “I am, herewith, returning this copy of Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, which the Library of Congress does not wish to add to its collections." It’s hilarious because the book, along with others Ruscha published in that decade, is a now-canonical work that impressed a generation of photo and print artists, whose books are featured in this exhibit right alongside Ruscha’s. (Also, those first editions are now worth a small fortune.) Ruscha’s books are simple things, Playbill-sized volumes with glued binding and blunt graphics: white paper, modern black type face, a picture on every page, blank pages to separate sections. His method is to choose one type of thing (gas stations, apartment buildings, parking lots, palm trees), photograph it over and over again, and collect the photographs in a book. In the 1960’s, before digital photography and home printing, the acts of photography and publishing conferred authority. The things Ruscha selected to photograph were rooted in the landscape of Los Angeles, where he spent his teenage years and continues to live and work. There’s a bit of a scientific impulse in his method, similar to the those of August Sander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, who use photography to classify and record what they see. Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, that documents that street in two long, linear collages of black and white photos along a single, unfolding, horizontal page, seems particularly so. But that book also has the feeling of a scrapbook, softened by memories.

Ruscha isn’t too concerned with being comprehensive, or even faithful. He gives his books names that are literal and funny without being sarcastic. Some Los Angeles Apartments, Various Small Fires and Milk, and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, are all each exactly what they say they are. Ruscha’s original photographs now hang in MoMA and the Whitney, but these same images are more powerful when framed within the books. They don’t easily mythologize the American landscape (like Robert Frank’s) or satirize it (like Gary Winogrand’s). His intentions aren't political or provocative. One of Rushca’s book is called Colored People but contains photos of small cacti, and another book called Hard Light contains photographs, entirely chaste, of an attractive young female couple as they pass they day together. Like Warhol, who also exploited photography for its impersonal emotional and graphic power, Ruscha uses the medium to mirror vernacular American culture. He's content to show us what’s out there and what it's like, which is hard to see when we’re standing inside of it.

May 01, 2013 by Nalina Moses