The impressive Henri Labrouste exhibit at MoMA is called Structure Brought to Light, to celebrate the architect's pioneering use of exposed structural steel, most famously at the Bibliothèques Sainte-Geneviève and nationale in Paris. Here slender steel posts lift roofs high and open walls to great expanses of glass. Much of the exhibit is devoted to drawings, models and photographs of these two buildings, and to historical artifacts from their construction. We even see the architect’s cloth-bound construction journals, filled with his lean, leaning script. But the real treasures are Labrouste’s student drawings, which fill the first gallery. They’re huge, yellowing sheets with renderings in black ink and soft, sepia-toned washes. The drawings depict classical monuments Labrouste visited while traveling through southern Europe on the Prix de Rome, and some of his early speculative designs, like a bridge connecting France with Italy, and a tomb for Napoleon, all in conventional neoclassical styles. Despite the fidelity with which these drawings depict masonry (and all of these structures are masonry), they are entirely weightless. The heaviest ink lines are finer than hairs, and the colored washes, laid with exquisite evenness, feel as if they might evaporate from the page.

Labrouste’s student drawings are faithful, cataloging every crevice between stone blocks in a wall, and every millimeters-wide turn in the profile of a corinthian column capital, and also dreamy, unrooted in time and place. The images float on the page, cushioned by empty space, unmoored from landscape and geography. We know precisely what this memorial looks like, how it was built, how to enter it, and what it might look like inside, but we have no idea where it is. Is it off the coast of Elba, at the center of a park in London, or in a back yard in Beverly Hills? In the way the drawing highlights symmetries and geometries of the monument it’s highly rational, and yet it's tempered with romanticism, a yearning for the faraway time and place where the building stands.

There has always been, for architects, a seductive freedom in drawings, where vision is given free reign, unchecked by realities of construction. One of my architecture teachers used to say, “All that’s needed to do architecture is a pencil and paper." Labrouste’s student drawings are a compelling argument for the fullness of paper architecture. They have the geometric clarity of drawings by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée, the shadowy melodrama of renderings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and the unsettling emptiness of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. Labrouste’s position within modern architectural history is that of an enlightened pragmatist; a man working at the cusp of Modernism, pushing contemporary construction one small, bold step away from Medieval masonry traditions. From the evidence of these drawings, he is also a dreamer.

June 07, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Punk fashion is hard to do. Fashion exists to make boys and girls look pretty, and punk requires a fundamental not-wanting-to-be-pretty. No figure illustrates this better than singer Siouxsie Sioux. In black-and-white photographs of her from the 1970’s and 80’s, before she started working with professional stylists and makeup artists, it's clear that she’s a classic English beauty, slender-hipped and fine-boned, and also that she’s willing to throw that beauty, and the privilege it confers, away. She dyes her hair ink black, then shears it close to her skull or teases it freakishly high. She paints her eyes with great black bat wings. She wears trashy slip dresses that expose her breasts, and slim leather trousers and squarish t-shirts that make her look like an adolescent boy. There’s something about her willingness during these years to make herself conventionally unattractive in order to make a statement (I’m not like you, I’m not a lady, I’m pissed-off) that is punk.

Because womens’ identities are, traditionally, so wound up in their looks, punk fashion might be harder for women to do than for men. Courtney Love did it, thrillingly, in the beginning, with bad skin, bad makeup, bad dye jobs, and bad clothes. Debbie Harry never did it but has always carried herself with an artsy disdain, an unattainability, that is, if not punk, impressively defiant. Madonna has wanted to do it all along, very badly, but has, really, never done it. At this year's Costume Institute gala, the night before Punk opened to the public, Madge walked the red carpet pantless, in a studded plaid jacket over fishnets, with black leather gloves, a bobbed black wig, and silent movie star makeup. She was trying to be punk but she was, still, pretty.

Siouxsie Sioux, 1976. By Sheila Rock.

June 04, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Punk: Chaos to Couture is smaller sized and scaled than previous Met Costume Institute exhibits like Anglomania and Savage Beauty, and also less richly contextualized than those shows, which positioned punk as an eruption of eccentric personal vision through the elaborate stratifications of British culture. Instead Chaos to Couture shows us exactly what it promises, how fashion rises in the street and works its way onto the runways. The first gallery holds racks of t-shirts and trousers from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary 1970’s London boutique Sex, all obliterated (“deconstructed” is too gentle a word) with rips, cuts, safety pins, and comically tasteless sexual and anti-royalist graphics. The following galleries show proper fashion, including a tweed Chanel suit embellished with hand-trimmed holes, a Versace gown whose whiplash panels are held together by over-sized gold safety pins, and a sagging, striped, open-weave, knit dress from Rodarte. The “chaos” to “couture” comparison doesn’t serve the couture well. Next to the real things – unwashed, ill-fitting, falling-to-threads, off-the-rack clothing – the legitimate fashions feel lifeless.

Part of this might be the displays, which show all the clothes on the Met’s standard, white, Cristy-Turlington-faced mannequins, in ladylike poses lifted high on platforms. One of the galleries is decorated to resemble the bowels of a Lower East Side club, with simulated cracked cement block walls painted matte black. Why didn’t the curators blow holes through the walls? Or dismember the mannequins? Or pump stale cigarette smoke through the rooms? Another part of it is curatorial. Most of high fashions have been selected for punk motifs rather than aesthetic kinship. Of the "couture" on display, only the Junya Watanabe and Commes des Garcons garments feel authentically punk, undoing the body’s natural graces with monstrous appendages and asymmetries that are just as arresting and convulsive as multiple piercings, black-and-white face makeup, gravity-defying hairdos, and all-over tattoos. The trio of black Alexander McQueen dresses on display, tailored, exquisitely, from synthetics that emulate bubble wrap and garbage bags, are not punk; they are classical in their proportions and repose. Why didn’t the Met include dresses from McQueen’s Highland Rape collection, which obscured the face with feathers and veils while uncovering the stomach, breast and thigh, giving the women wearing them a disfiguring, disquieting power? It’s this unease that’s deeply punk.

May 29, 2013 by Nalina Moses

There were several compelling stories in Vanity Fair’s remembrance of the Met’s landmark 1978 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit: the fragile collaboration between Met head Thomas P. F. Hoving and National Gallery head J. Carter Brown, the international political intrigues that inspired and then complicated execution, and the way this modestly scaled show, with just fifty-five artifacts and a catalog the size of a comic book, became the first stand-in-line museum blockbuster. But the finest story is how Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. The moment he located its entrance, Carter stopped work and summoned his patron, Lord Carnarvon, from England, and photographer Harry Burton, who was in the country working for National Geographic. Only after Carnarvon arrived, two and a half weeks later, did Carter open the tomb. Burton photographed progress systematically, on that momentous day and then over the next eight years, as the team moved deeper into the mortuary. There are, in his collection of 1,847 photographs, archived at the Ashmoleon Museum, a record of the mortuary’s architecture, of all the objects recovered, and of the archaeologists at work.

The photographs have a romantic soft, silvery glow that many early twentieth-century photographs, with long exposure times, have, as well as a stunning formal directness. A photograph was a precious thing then, and each shot is composed deliberately by setting one or more very important things at the center of the frame. We see the slender stone passage at the entrance to the crypt, which has no apparent end. We see the the suburban-basement clutter of the antechamber, piled high with wooden chests, chariot wheels, alabaster vases, gilded furniture, and statues. We see the king’s tomb resting alone in the burial chamber, a stone monolith wrapped in clouds of cuneiform. We see, inside the tomb, a garland of tiny, pill-sized blossoms, which crumbled when Carter reached to remove it. And we see a peon – one of the boys that might have fixed tea for Carter and his team – modeling the king’s necklace. Tutankhamun ascended to the throne when he was nine years old and died when he was eighteen. The boy in the photograph, who looks as if he is nine or ten, wears a white cotton gown and turban that set off his dark skin dramatically, and a gentle, solemn expression, as if he’s reluctantly but obligingly making believe. This photograph brings to life more vividly than all the treasures that Tutankhamun was a boy, an African, and a king.

May 24, 2013 by Nalina Moses