In 1960 artist Robert Smithson noted, all too correctly, that contemporary buildings “rise into ruin before they are built.” Today, in addition to that, we can complain that new buildings rise into image before they are built. Massive, dense, and complex, they're built with truckloads of steel, glass and gravel, yet look like photographs. This is true of the New School University Building, that fills the half-block at the southeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. Its facades are wrapped with horizontal bands of brass panels that cant in and out like accordion folds, and take on a plastic, purplish sheen in the sun. It has two stairwells pushing up against the facades, slicing through them diagonally, but their interiors remain hidden in shadow. The building’s shell has a bold contemporary presence on the street but feels illusory, empty, like a symbol for the building it was supposed to be.

But then I saw the building very late late one night, walking west on Fourteenth Street. Coming across it like this, in darkness and stillness, without expectation, the New School Building looked like a natural formation, like it was meant to be there, a cliff in Greenwich Village. The night sky softened the facade so that only its gently zig-zagging profile was legible. The staircases, lit brightly from within, thrummed, as if the structure supported an ecstatic inner life. The building, monstrous in daylight, now held the corner proudly, addressing both west and north, presiding over the neighborhood like a fortress, summoning visitors like a beacon. Unexpectedly, the building bested its own image.

Photograph by James Ewing, 2013.

October 16, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Many artists (most famously Daniel Buren and most recently Maurizio Catellan) have challenged the iconic architecture of the Guggenheim Museum. But James Turrell, with his immersive, cinematic light installation Aten Reign, succeeded. He turned our city’s most elegant space into a peepshow, and everyone inside seemed to be enjoying the show. The artist blocked off the museum’s signature spiraling balconies and installed a low ceiling, about twenty feet above the ground floor. He cut an elliptical opening at the center, evocatively egg-shaped, and set four higher, stepped ceilings above that, with successively smaller openings. He washed these ceilings with programmed fields of light so that the whole environment morphed, almost imperceptibly, on a one-minute cycle, from color to color: from cupric blue to screaming magenta to ice white to mossy green, and then on and on, rhythmically, relentlessly. These shifts evoked dusk and dawn. And they created illusions of depth and compression, as if the ceilings were closing and opening like a camera aperture, or rising and falling like a telescope.

For full effect, a visitor had to stare straight upwards for about half an hour. The darkened gallery, lit only by the installation, was packed tight with visitors lying on mats in the middle of the floor, leaning against the walls, and standing in a ring between them, all surrendered to the spectacle overhead. The rotunda, a soaring space, was dark, cluttered and compressed. Turrell had, with just a few elements, disguised the architecture of the museum and undone its modern allure. I overheard one visitor say that the scene reminded him of an ashram, with everyone mindlessly tuned-in and blissed-out. It felt less innocent than that to me. Dim and damp, washed in oily pools of color, the place had the claustrophobic, illicit feeling of an adult movie theater. We’d gathered in this majestic place to lose ourselves in unthinking private reverie. It was unseemly.

Aten Reign, 2013, by James Turrell. Photo courtesy of James Turrell.

October 15, 2013 by Nalina Moses

There is no finer delivery system for pleasure than a good pop song. Sadly, this power is left mostly unexploited in Massive Attack’s multi-media concert/collaboration with documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis at the Armory. The Drill Hall is majestically transformed, with a small stage for the musicians at the center, wrapped with a giant U-shaped field of video screens. Curtis’ film, which traces, compellingly, western social culture from the 1960’s to the present by laying critical speech and text over archival news footage, flickers across them simultaneously. And Massive Attack becomes, for the evening, a cover band, performing songs relevant to moments in the film’s narration, most of them written by other artists. In following along so literally the band don’t do justice to their own dense, textured, enveloping sound, or to the film’s political verve. The show becomes another pop video, serving up music alongside imagery without engaging it incisively.

The film gives moments of astounding political clarity, as when clips from Jane Fonda’s iconic exercise tape, unnervingly glossy, illustrate how American culture collapsed in the 1980’s from shaping the world to shaping its body. There are moments of pop magic too, like when the growling vocals to Karmacona start up and the band breaks into its signature hypnotic torrents. But nothing is as enthusiastically received as their cover of Sugar Sugar, which is meant to illustrate the enforced jolliness of postwar, pre-Beatles pop culture. The accompanying film shows us minstrel shows, dog shows, dance contests, and other inanities, but we don’t feel them ironically; instead we surrender to the sweet, stupid power of the song. Throughout the 90-minute show the music and film move at different paces, overlapping at moments literally but rarely viscerally. What if the sonic and visual forces, both potent, were fully fused, the entire show choreographed thematically with original music from the band, so that it became charged with the sting of the film’s righteous, deeply troubling politics? We would accept both, ecstatically.

Image courtesy of Massive Attack.

September 29, 2013 by Nalina Moses

I’ve been reeling, happily, all day after seeing Rick Owens’ Womens Spring 2014 Paris runway show. He recruited American college step dancing teams to wear his clothes, and the young women do it while strutting, jumping, and stomping across the stage en masse like possessed tribal warriors. The media focused on Owen’s enlightened casting, since the women are, by industry standards, heavy and muscular, and almost all are African American. But what’s most exciting is how the presentation, called Vicious, deftly reimagines the runway show, turning a rarified formal presentation into a full-on kinetic assault.

Rather than stare beatifically into the mid-distance, as models do, these ladies grimace and bare their teeth. Many of them wear their hair naturally, with Afros stuttering dramatically a half-second behind their strong, compact frames. Rather than sauntering down a catwalk one-by-one, the dancers, each one dressed uniquely, appear in teams of twenty-four grouped by color: first black, then beige, and then white. So instead of a single ensemble appraised in stasis we have a storm of them at once, stretched across flaring limbs and torsos. The spectacle is especially thrilling in the final dance, when dancers bump against each other, swallow each other in a throbbing huddle, and then – each woman crouching to grab the hips of the woman before her – join in a long pulsating chain that turns and marches off stage like a giant prehistoric insect. There’s is a blunt, thundering beauty in this that doesn’t often find its way onto the runway.

Image courtesy of Rick Owens, 2013.

September 28, 2013 by Nalina Moses