CULTURE SHOCK

In advance of a hiking holiday in Germany, my friends insisted that I purchase proper boots. But when I researched the brand they recommended I was horrified: by the company’s tagline (”Shoes for Actives”), by the fact that all the shoes are unisex, and by the ungainliness of the designs. I looked at other brands and found that all the available styles, even those specifically for women, looked like orthopedic shoes for hippies. Obviously hiking boots need to offer support, water-tightness, agility, and durability. But do they need to have bloated profiles and drab colors (mud brown, dust grey, fungus green)? My friend Anne hiked in an old pair of traditional mountain climbing boots. They were mannish, in rough brown leather with thick black rubber soles and red laces, but they gave off a whiff of Alpine charm. Modern hiking boots offer no style at all.

On the trails with my friends, I joked continually about how I could make my boots socially acceptable in New York: by adding brightly colored laces, by spray-painting them gold, by wearing them unlaced. But there’s a real business challenge here: to make a hiking shoe that offers authenticity, technology, and glamor. At a time when sassy details from running shoes (thick colored soles, breathable synthetics, neon accents) have made their way into mens and womens dress shoes, why haven’t they made a mark on hiking boots? Serious hikers would respond to a better-looking shoe, and novices would be more eager to invest in a pair. Non-hikers would use them for weather. Certainly there’s a way to make a hiking boot that also lives up to the challenges of city living: icy sidewalks, ankle-deep puddles, salt, dog piss, and fashion?

August 11, 2015 by Nalina Moses

MOVING DAYS

MoMA has mounted a show about the great African American migration to the north called One Way Ticket. It takes painter Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series from 1941 as its centerpiece. This group of 64 small (about 12″ x 18″) oil paintings documents that movement in intimate vignettes with prose captions on wall texts below. The language is simple, which makes the facts all the more devastating. We read, “The trains were packed continually with migrants… Many of them left because of Southern conditions… They were very poor… Another cause was lynching… There had always been discrimination.”

Each small panel is smartly and economically composed, with strong graphic shapes rendered in flat, acrid hues. The sparse, controlled brushwork allows the white of the wood panel beneath to show through, giving the paintings a rough, unprecious feeling. But these paintings are not about painting. And they are not really about history either. They are about people, about the thousands of black Americans who left the rural south for the urban north between the wars, without money and work, searching for better lives.

Though simply rendered, the figures are never cartoonish. They’re ennobled by their actions, and move in formal, expressive ways. These are paintings that have the character of dance. Four men lifting bushels of cotton, seen in profile, have the solemnity and rhythmic clarity of figures on a Egyptian frieze. A boy peering over a table to watch his mother slice bread from a loaf looks like a symbol of need. Three men in handcuffs waiting deportation stand stiff with pride, like giants. We rarely see people from the front, or see their faces. Instead we see them from the side, from the back, or obscured by a newspaper, a fence, a hat, or a tree. They don’t offer themselves, or their sorrows, up for consideration. Instead they move on.

July 31, 2015 by Nalina Moses

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

One Woman Show at MoMA highlights Yoko Ono’s work from 1961-1971. There are films that slow time painfully, projected in endless loops on the walls. There’s an installation, Half-A-Room (1967), that collects ordinary household artifacts (a pot, a chair, a carpet) that have been sliced in half. There’s a sculpture, Apple (1966), that is, simply, a green apple. And there’s a sculpture, To See the Sky (1966), that is a monumental spiraling steel staircase that carries visitors to the gallery’s ceiling.

The rooms are packed with art but strangely empty of drama. No narrative seems to connect one work with the next. What’s missing might be the character of the artist herself. We all know who Yoko Ono is: she grew up in a prominent family in Japan, began her career as an artist in Tokyo, had a husband and then a child and then a divorce, became a vital member of Fluxus in New York, married a rock star, and was famously widowed. But who is the woman who made this art?

The most vivid piece in the show is a film of Ono’s performance Cut Piece (1964). It shows her kneeling on a stage in front of a pair of scissors as, one by one, audience members step up and cut away parts of her clothing. Here she looks like moon-faced co-ed, in a dark cardigan with a Peter Pan collar and an A-line skirt, without jewelry and makeup, her hair pulled away in a braid. Throughout the performance her expression remains placid while her eyes scan the room anxiously. There’s thick, quiet drama in the not-knowingness of who will pick up the scissors and what they will do with them. And there’s something in this, the simple mystery of the performance and the fragility of the performer, that’s more compelling than all the other high-art high-concept works in the show. We’re seeing someone take a risk, test her resolve, and construct a fresh identity for herself. We’re seeing a young woman make herself into an artist.

Photograph courtesy of Yoko Ono.

July 29, 2015 by Nalina Moses

LOST IN SPACE

The Whitney Museum reopened two months ago in new expanded digs in the Meatpacking District, a colossus designed by Renzo Piano on Gansevoort Street that spans Tenth and Ninth Avenues. It has huge column-free galleries on its fifth through eighth floors, picture windows on its west facade with views to the Hudson River, staggered balconies on its east facade with views to the Highline, and an open glass-walled lobby that doubles as a public plaza.

It’s hard, from outside, to get a clear sense of the building. From Fourteenth Street its decks and railings gives it it the feeling of an approaching luxury liner. From Tenth Avenue it looks like a postmodern playhouse, a precarious stack of seven smaller volumes finished in different materials. The Gansevoort Street facade, where one enters, is dominated by the sloping hull of the gallery spaces that’s cantilevered above. This immense, inert mass is wrapped in blank green-grey metal panels that give no scale or sense of the interior.

And it’s hard, from inside, to get a clear sense of the building. The visitors’ pamphlet shows a building cross section rather than floor plans, suggesting that, like the old Whitney, it’s a vertical museum, experienced floor-by-floor. But there’s no hierarchy or variety in the gallery floors – they’re all the same. And there’s no element tying them together, like the iconic concrete stair in the old building. The ceremonial stair at the new building reaches from the ground floor to the fifth and then, abruptly, stops.

The new Whitney is a super-large building that feels as if it’s been conceived in small moments, without any central organizing principle. Many of its details are exuberant and exquisite: the staggered patio decks and runs of railings, the high glass curtain wall at the sidewalk cafe, the attenuated steel posts that support the cantilevered gallery floors, the punched ship windows at third floor study rooms. But the building has no heart. One walks through it searching for the vantage point from which all its operations make sense, and just can’t find it.

Photograph by Ed Lederman, courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

July 05, 2015 by Nalina Moses