SEATING ARRANGEMENTS

Amie Siegel’s 40-minute art film Provenance traces the history of the simple, wood-framed, leather-cushioned chairs, tables and stools that furnished the capitol buildings of Chandigarh, India in the 1950’s. They were designed by the buildings’ architects, Le Corbusier and Charles Jeanneret, with mid-century modern stylings that are, today, incredibly fashionable. The film shows us these pieces (battered, broken, scratched) in place in the government buildings, in the French workshops where they are taken (not without protest) to be restored, and, finally, in the lofts, townhouses and yachts where they land after they are sold through international auction houses, for tens of thousands of dollars each.

As the film’s title implies, the pieces carry considerable aura. Each one was cataloged in Chandigarh with a unique number that’s hand-painted in a florid script, in white paint, on its side. During the refinishing process these numbers are preserved to attest to their authenticity. But after their frames are stripped and stained and their upholstery remade, how “authentic” are they? Slipper chairs originally covered in orange and blue leather are remade in crushed white linen for a loft in Antwerp and pony-printed cow hide for a house in the Hamptons. Wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper (and more ethical, too) to simply reproduce the pieces?

In the movie we see unused chairs and tables in Chandigarh piled, uncovered, in storage spaces and on the roofs of the buildings. There are couches whose upholstery has been patched with duct tape, chairs whose legs have split and been nailed hastily back together, and tables whose tops are burned from coffee cups. It’s sad that they’re being spirited away for western collectors. And sadder still that they weren’t treasured by their original owners.

Image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art. Amie Siegel (American, b. 1974). Provenance (still), 2013. HD video, color, sound; 40 min., 30 sec.

September 03, 2014 by Nalina Moses

SKIN TRADE

What is it that makes underwear dumpy, campy, or sexy? As I walked through the F.I.T. exhibit Exposed: A History of Lingerie, a survey of womens undergarments from the nineteenth century to the present, it seemed that each of the ensembles fell straight away into one of these three categories. And the category into which it fell had precious little to do with its vintage, or the amount of flesh it left exposed.

A black corset by Lady Marlene and a satin teddy by Patricia Fieldwalker, both from the 1980’s, and both trimmed in fine black lace, are worlds apart. The corset is cut classically, with softly swelling curve along the top and bottom, and the teddy is cut dramatically, climbing super-high at the thighs and dipping super-low at the cleavage. But the teddy feels, somehow, stale, as if it’s trying too hard. Some pale green silk “caminickers” (a slip with concealed shorts) from 1924, that just skim the hips and breasts, seem infinitely more sophisticated than a bra and briefs from the 1930’s, which fit close to the body and bare the midriff, but are cut from coarse white knits. A 2006 Agent Provocateur leopard print bra and panty set, elaborately pieced and trimmed with thin black satin ribbon, is terrifically camp, while a giraffe print set by Rudi Gernreich, from forty years earlier, with the simple lines of a bikini bathing suit, seems effortlessly sexy. It’s those underthings that flatter the figure without constraining it, that allow its shape to show through, that entice.

Rudi Gernreich, “No Bra” and half slip, sheer nylon and printed nylon, ca. 1966, USA. Collection of the Museum at F.I.T. Gifts of Mitch Rein. Photograph courtesy of The Museum at F.I.T.

September 01, 2014 by Nalina Moses

COVER CHARGE

There’s a small exhibit at the Morgan Library of literary documents from the collection of Carter Burden. It includes first editions, galleys, manuscripts, handwritten letters, and an aerogram, all related to canonical twentieth-century novels. It’s really a love song to books, assembled at a time when so many of us read and write mostly on screens, and have stopped reading and writing seriously (that is, for anything more than information) at all. It’s humbling to walk through the gallery and recall what was required to produce a book in times before the computer: the rounds of drafting, typing, printing, revising and proofreading. Now these steps, and maybe even the act of writing itself, have become frictionless, requiring little physical exertion.

The exhibit also serves as an excellent survey of book cover artwork. There is The Great Gatsby, with a sly, smiling face in the night sky over East Egg, an image that’s kooky and glamorous, and that remains in use today. There is the The Sun Also Rises, with a muse in toga and sandals, a romantic figure at odds with the book’s bluntly contemporary narrative and syntax. And there is Light in August, with a small house on a hill rendered in a deco style that disguises the complex, broken language and souls of the story.

The most audacious cover on display is the one for Saul Bellow’s Herzog. It gives us a heroic, Motherwell-like cloud of black paint hovering on a blank, peacock blue field. It’s the kind of action painting one would find hanging in a Manhattan psychiatrist’s office in the early 60’s, when the book was first published, and also the kind of ink blot test he might administer. The image speaks to masculine bravado and the tumult of personal desire, themes appropriate to Bellow’s dense, textured writing and to the novel itself. The graphic is economic, and uses just three colors, one type face, and one figure. It’s simple and symphonic.

Photograph courtesy of Viking Press.

August 22, 2014 by Nalina Moses

SO FAR

After finishing Americanah, a novel set in Nigeria, I was starved for another experience of Africa, any experience of Africa. I began listening to West African-themed playlists online, and one brought me to this album by the late Malian singer and guitarist Ali Farka Touré, Red & Green. Because I don’t understand the words, the music seems incredibly abstract, built from streams of sound (some tinkling, some swirling, some pulsating) that move forward in endless, gentle surges, so that the compositions don’t begin and end so much as come and go.

Touré, who died in 2006, recorded and toured abroad, but lived his entire adult life in Niafunké, the village where he had grown up. Yet this photograph of him in caftan and trousers, leaning on his acoustic guitar beneath a concrete fence, is profoundly urban. It has the formality, and rich black and white tones, of studio portraits by Malian photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe, and also the same sense that the subject is summoning his finest self for the camera. But the way that Touré’s body, and the entire composition, open so broadly to the left, suggest that the musician is not entirely captured here, that something slips away.

It’s a strongly graphic image, with bold, contrasting patterns: the grid of the fence, the hatching on the caftan, the stripes down the trousers. These are tied together by a cluster of criss-crossing lines: Toure’s figure sloped right, his guitar tilted left, and the wall falling off to the far left. Touré wears generic twentieth-century century sandals, trousers and wristwatch, and plays a guitar that looks like one an American folk singer would. But the scene is clearly African. There is something about the low slant of the light, the bare ground, and Touré’s inscrutable expression – both remote and joyous – that tells us so. Here Touré, and Africa too, seem far away.

Photograph courtesy of World Circuit.

August 19, 2014 by Nalina Moses