A LIVING THING

Joanna Hogg’s movie Exhibition unfolds almost entirely inside a London house built by architect James Melvin in 1969 and renovated by Sauerbruch Hutton in the 1990′s. It has a brown-brick facade with ribbon windows, and open interiors with wood floors and a narrow steel spiral stair. From the outside it’s incredibly modest, the kind of building you wouldn’t look twice at unless you spotted someone at one of the windows or walking out the door. From the inside it’s generous, with more space and light than a typical city home. During the renovation, lacquered sliding doors were added along the perimeter of each floor to define rooms. Their colors (fuschia, bubble gum pink, dove grey) are jarring but, somehow, entirely correct.

The movie is a high-bourgeois melodrama, about an artist couple whose relationship suffers quiet crises. The house is an exquisite shell that protects them from the noise, dirt, and bustle of the city, and from “real life” itself. There are signs of money and good taste everywhere: a Mini in the driveway, piles of art books in the living room, an Airbook in the studio, and an Alessi teapot and Marc Newson dish drainer on the kitchen counter.

But the movie never gives us authoritative, envy-inducing, Architectural Digest-style views of the house. Instead it gives glimpses into its spaces and inner workings. The husband tends to the house assiduously, sweeping water from the roof, checking the boiler and the elevator shaft. The wife is preternaturally sensitive to its movements: the switching on of vents, the clicking of locks, the creaks of foundations. Though photographed ecstatically, in still, exquisitely composed frames, the house is more than a luxury object; it’s a pulsating, living thing.

Photograph by Helene Binet, courtesy of Suaerbruch Hutton.

May 25, 2015 by Nalina Moses

HOME MADE

Joanna Hogg’s gorgeously-composed movie Exhibition introduces us to a middle-aged bohemian couple, both artists, whose names we never learn. They have lived and worked in a modern house in London for eighteen years, and now they are selling it. He is a sculptor, and sits in a small studio on the third floor designing an installation with AutoCAD. She is a performance artist, and sits in a spacious studio on the second floor, trying to make herself into Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy. He and she communicate, mostly, through the intercom.

He wants to sell the house and move on. He comes and goes from it freely: he takes road trips, and walks through the neighborhood at night. She would like to stay. She is connected to the house in a primal, animalistic way; she will not let go of it. She naps on the long window sill in the bedroom, sits alone under the table in the living room, embraces a boulder in the garden. In one of the movie’s loveliest passages, she lies on her side in the hall and folds herself around a corner. The house’s skin has become her own. She’s constantly peering through the venetian blinds in her studio to see what’s happening on the street below. (She wears shirts with horizontal stripes, as if she’s embedded in these blinds.) She reveals herself most deeply to her husband from this window, when, dressed as St. Teresa, she pulls up the blinds and dances as he watches from the sidewalk below.

The house remains something of a mystery. The camera stays still for long stretches, and reveals only one bit of it at a time: one corner of a room, one floor of a facade, one panel of a sliding door, one run of spiral stair. The layout is never made entirely clear. It’s only at the end, at a farewell party the couple give for friends, when we see a cake that’s been modeled after the house, that we understand its organization. At this point, as he and she cut into it, breaking apart its sugar walls, the fantasy of the architecture, and of their marriage, is coming undone. What seemed uncluttered and modern, seamless and perfectly structured, is not.

Photograph courtesy of BBC Films.

May 24, 2015 by Nalina Moses

IF THESE ROCKS COULD TALK

There’s only one rock that matters in Athol Fugard’s play The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek. That’s the hut-sized boulder at the center of the stage, that dominates the red sand, scrub brush, and rubble around it. The rock is meant to stand for rural South Africa, where the play unfolds. This is a faraway land whose whose earth and sky, whose rhythms and possibilities, are different from our own. And this is a land that’s prehistoric. The rock’s surfaces are ravaged, as if they’ve withstood centuries of sun and rain. It’s stood here, in this place, far longer than people have.

In the first act, set in the 1960′s, an old black man paints bright glyphs across the rock and tells his assistant, a small boy, “This is my story.” Decades later the boy, now a young man, repaints the rocks, to reclaim the old man’s story in a world that has forgotten it. While the rock is part of the play’s it’s peripheral to the performance. This play is one of words: declarations, remembrances, threats, and ideas. Everything is spoken. Even as the old man paints the rock, he explains what each mark stands for. The rock itself remains mute. And that’s a shame, because it’s such a powerful figure. Lit by a scatter of starry ceiling lights, it has an eery, lunar-like presence. It’s the richest element of the play.

May 23, 2015 by Nalina Moses

SHOWTIME

More than the product, what dazzles at ICFF 2015 are the displays. In past years most exhibitors came with no-nonsense presentations, while the handful that came with more ambitious ones stood out. This year it’s just the reverse. Nearly all the installations have a sense of theatricality, with custom partitions, canopies, lighting, and display fixtures. Many have signage, lit promotional images, and seating areas for visitors. Those exhibitors who came with the same kind of barebones installations they did in the past (a table, a binder of product samples, a signboard, and a stool for their rep to sit on) look plain indeed.

In addition, this year’s event has a cool, unified feeling. Many of the booths have a slate grey or black carpet, or bare concrete floors. And many have black or grey painted walls. There’s a terrific rhythm to the layout and no corners lack energy. There are intimate booths mixed in with grand ones, booths showing tabletop items mixed in with booths hawking furniture, and brazenly lit booths mixed in with shadowy ones. It’s a pleasure to walk the aisles of the Javitz Center and take in the spectacle.

There’s a lot of the same kinds of things on display as in in past years: stools made from tree trunks, tables made from geodes, and hand-stamped wallpaper. But this year they’re displayed with more sass and polish. Standouts include booths by the Austrian contingent (who built a giant purple metallic backdrop), Antolini (who built a life-size marble labyrinth) and BECBrittain (who sunk one of their spare LED chandeliers into a pocket jungle garden). The prevailing sensibility is no longer craft, it’s show business.

May 22, 2015 by Nalina Moses