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

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

There are museums and then there is the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Even the names of its rooms make magic, like The Twenty-Column Hall, The Raphael Loggias, and The Blackamoor Dining-Room. The galleries are so opulent that the collections of artwork they house, which are superb, might be beside the point. This museum is an immense, multi-courtyarded complex that overlooks Plaza Square on one side and the Neva River on the other. On the outside, it’s formidable, with an endless facade that’s been restored to a delicate tint of blue-green that evokes both sea and sky.

On the inside, particularly in those rooms that were originally part of the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, it’s decorated with fairytale splendor. To visit the Hermitage is to move from one astoundingly furnished gallery to the next. They are dressed with gilded and coffered and vaulted ceilings, tapestries and bas-reliefs, wood parquetry and tile mosaics, and chandeliers exploding with crystals. There doesn’t seem to be any architecture present – every surface dissolves into ornament. And the ornament is executed with such fineness that it’s never over-sweet; it all seems, somehow, entirely appropriate. (The ornament seems, also, more Asian in spirit than European.) The highlight might be St. George Hall, the room where the Romanovs held their coronations. It’s finished in a frosted palette of blue and white, with gold accents that shimmer in the white daylight. The museum’s astonishing interior design that offers a seamless dream of royal Russia.

July 16, 2012 by Nalina Moses

How is a contemporary art museum different from any other kind of art museum? And how is a museum different from any other kind of building? Kiasma, the contemporary art gallery in Helsinki designed by Steven Holl, might be the perfect showcase for contemporary art. Museums with similar programs, like PS1 and Mass MoCA, both adaptations of existing buildings, seem to have been designed primarily to accommodate the humongous scale of so much contemporary work, as well as an increased focus on sculpture and installations. Kiasma has been designed to house the art, and delight visitors, in an array of galleries that are diverse in size, proportion and character. The result is a warm, welcoming gallery for a kind of art that is, oftentimes, not.

The most surprising thing about the building is its gentleness. Kiasma, which Holl won in a design competition, opened in 2008, at at time when he was regarded as a rock star in the United States. Publicity photos showing the building’s sweeping interior ramp made the museum seem highly expressive, sculptural, and idiosyncratic – another signature work from another over-regarded post-postmodern architect. But the building is astoundingly fluid; one moves through it effortlessly. A great deal of this is due to the careful composition, scaled beautifully for the moving body and alert to the picturesque. And a great deal of it is due to the judicious use of daylight, which is carried into the galleries through concealed windows and skylights. It’s a wonderful place to see contemporary art and, probably, just about anything.

July 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses