ENGLISH ECCENTRIC

The comic setpiece of Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is the hero’s birth, reenacted by actor Steve Coogan, who writhes anxiously while suspended naked, upside-down, inside a giant, sweating, pink foam womb. But the movie’s most unforgettable image comes right at the beginning, as an adult Tristram addresses us (that is, the camera) in front of his family home. Photographed in luscious hues, in the gauzy light of a summer morning, the stately brick house makes an indelible backdrop, one that establishes instantly that we are in Great Britain, centuries ago, and that we are among the landed gentry.

The house (it’s Heydon Hall in Norfolk, England) was built in the late sixteenth century in typical Jacobean fashion, from red brick, with stone accents and a steep tiled roof. It’s tautly composed, absolutely symmetrical about its center bay, and richly textured, with a storm of ornament. Its front facade is dressed with so many dormers, windows, entablatures and finials that there is hardly any blank wall at all. And the ridge of its roof is capped, musically, with a string of elements that are all nearly a story high: a central cupola, two lone chimneys, and, to each side of them, runs of five identical chimneys. The house is both restrained and ridiculous, which might also be said of Tristram himself.

Photograph by Steven Brooks.

August 05, 2014 by Nalina Moses

PRETTY UGLY

Sigmar Polke said, “The unforseeable is what turns out to be interesting." He might have added, There is no telling what the unforseeable is going to look like; it could be very ugly. As I walked through the Polke exhibit at MoMA I was bowled over by the passion and energy in the work. There’s a vitality to every sketch, every canvas and collage, every page of every notebook, on display. Polke generated ideas feverishly and implemented them with startling immediacy. Each piece, however small in scale or ambition, looks as if it absolutely had to be made, as if, in it, the artist is searching for something essential.

Of course there’s no covenant that art must be pretty, but it’s something I hope for. In addition to being powerful (i.e. carrying indelible emotional impact), and surprising (i.e. exposing something unseen) I expect a great painting or sculpture to be complexly internally balanced, judiciously composed, possessing a deep order, a formal beauty, that stills and silences.

Polke’s work, which is substantial, has something altogether different: an untidy, over-ripe physicality. He makes collages cluttered with roughly cut magazine clippings, and paintings with arrays of images running across patchworks of printed fabrics. His is a strange, unglamorous style. He leaves audacious stretches of a canvas bare, he draws by filling the margins of a page with cartoons, he studs plywood and wire sculptures with little baby potatoes. The uncensored aesthetic gives his work a highly personal, expressive character. It’s not ugly, really, because it’s unconcerned with what is beautiful.

Image courtesy of the Estate of Sigmar Polke.

August 01, 2014 by Nalina Moses

PAINT INTO SPIRIT

As I read a review of the new biography of James MacNeill Whistler, A Life for Art’s Sake, I learned that he was 5’-3" tall, a dear friend of Oscar Wilde’s, and, basically, a cad and a profligate. These final revelations sat oddly with the gorgeous delicacy of his paintings, particularly the nocturnes, which flicker between abstraction and depiction before settling, gloriously, into abstraction.

So I hunted down the Whistler paintings at the Met. There are two of them in the main galleries: a formal portrait of French art critic Theodore Duret, and a nighttime view of Cremorne Gardens in London. The portrait is lovely, and exactly what one expects: a flattering depiction of a fop in a tuxedo, top hat and pince nez posed against a plain white backdrop. It’s executed in feathery, fluid brushtrokes that give the entire image, even the tiniest details, a tone of dreamy indecision.

The painting of Cremorne Gardens is a revelation. While it depicts a complex, vivid scene, of fashionable men and women seated in the garden at night, it stays close to abstraction. A few broad strokes from left to right, across the top of the narrow, horizontal canvas, make a line of tree tops. Some strokes across the bottom of the canvas make a sandy, open ground. And a dark slash in the between them opens the middle distance, giving depth to the canvas and life to the illusion. On the left-hand side, one vertical stroke – a flick of the wrist, a smear of blue paint – is a woman in a fancy dress and hat standing and taking in the scene.

After looking at the canvas for a few seconds the brushstrokes, ethereal, come to the forefront, and it is they, not the scene, that linger in memory. The paint has no substance; it seems to hover above the canvas like smoke.

Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum.

July 20, 2014 by Nalina Moses

SCREEN CAPTURE

Does it make artists crazy when architects make art? Because it makes me crazy when artists make architecture. Too often, when artists use architectural forms they fashion structures that are unintentionally naive. That’s as it is with the current installation on the roof of the Met, a collaboration between artist Dan Graham and landscape architect Christian Vogt.

The roof is covered in padded green astroturf, which gives it the hyper-real intensity of a manicured suburban lawn. Right at the center there’s a paved stone pad about the size of a two-car garage. This pad is bound on its east and west sides by eight-foot-high green walls, lush with vines. Between these green walls, connecting their far corners, is an “S”-shaped screen made of two-way mirror glass, set in a heavy steel frame. As one looks at the screen one is met with reflections of oneself, the rooftop lawn, the foliage in Central Park , and the Manhattan skyline, all collapsed onto views of what one sees through the glass.

It’s a rich effect, executed with details that are, when considered architecturally, awkward. Why isn’t the glass a single piece, rather than two separate ones that meet with a gap right at the critical point where the two curves meet and turn? Why isn’t the frame made from a polished metal with a clean, narrow profile, to heighten the barely-there nature of the glass? Why isn’t the screen freestanding, pulled away from the green walls, so that visitors can circle it and take in more fully its shifting, cinematic views? And why doesn’t the whole screen sit directly on the lawn, so that it rises from it like an apparition?

Rather than an instrument that reorients visitors within the roofscape and the city, the screen ends up being an object on the lawn, not so different from a traditional sculpture. One sees it, walks towards it, catches the web of reflections on its surface, and then turns around to lose oneself in the magnificent, unobstructed views of Central Park all around. Those views, while static, are immediate, and stirring.

Photograph by Nalina Moses.

July 19, 2014 by Nalina Moses