THE PEN IS MIGHTIER

There’s an exhibit, Imalabra, at the Museo de las Americas in San Juan devoted to artist Antonio Martorell and his “amigos.” It’s really a tribute to the stamina and imagination of Martorell himself, whose ouevre spans five decades and a dazzling, almost comical, array of media: installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, illustration, printmaking, film, and set and costume design. Martorell’s work calls to mind that of his contemporary Lucas Samaras, whose lifelong project also seems less concerned with the expression of formal ideas than the act of producing things. Both men do so with such ferocity and velocity that these things, taken as a whole, furnish a kind of autobiography.

Almost all of Martorell’s works in the show, which is organized around large-scale installations, rely on his brilliance as a draftsman. His hand is energetic, authoritative, and playful, and his sensibility is dense, so that his drawings (ink on plastic, charcoal on paper, pen on board) have a powerful emotional charge. Compositionally, figures often collect on one side of the page, as if they are about to burst out of it. Characters are rendered taut with kinetic energy, in tension with one other and their settings.

Martell integrates words with images particularly skillfully. Text, rendered in a large langorous script, is often laid over figures, which are often drawn across pages torn from a book, adding pictorial depth. In other works drawings are rendered on lengths of fabric and draped across frames and furniture, complicating their legibility. The show includes life-size silhouettes of hip street characters stamped on canvas, framed portraits of political figures crafted with shards from aluminum cans, vinyl floor coverings printed with newspaper collages, and, towards the end, a series of simple (and stunning) charcoal drawings of a bookshelf. All of these pieces can be understood as drawings, as surfaces inscribed with story. If the show asks, broadly, How far can drawing take you?, the answer is, Very far indeed.

January 07, 2016 by Nalina Moses

THE WRIGHT STUFF

In addition to being a master architect, Frank Lloyd Wright was a master storyteller and a master showman, skills he put to excellent use constructing his own outsized persona. Many of his buildings (particularly the houses) can be understood independently of the man, but Taliesin West, his Arizona home and school, cannot. It’s a vivid, eccentric work forged from the disparate influences that shaped his personality. It’s name is Celtic, derived from a Welsh word meaning “shining brow.” Its materials, plantings and colorings reference, gently, Native American traditions. And its geometries and planning exploit, magnificently, modernist principles of free space.

The buildings that make up the complex possess a monstrous sculptural charisma, real-world presence, that owes less to good planning and composition than to inventive, unorthodox construction. They have few of the traits we associate with canonical modernism (insistent grids, reduced facades, restrained materiality). Instead they are crafted from a rich, varied palette of materials, including stones culled from the site, rough concrete pours, stained hardwood, and painted steel, all combined with dazzling elan (if not always good sense). The buildings seem less “constructed” than “assembled,” with elements conventional architects might shy away from: bare canvas roofing, mitered glass corner windows, steeply sloping masonry retaining walls, and exposed wood frames tipped dramatically from the horizontal.

In fact the buildings at Taliesin were built by hand, by Wright’s apprentices (i.e. paying students). Though their designs were likely drawn and studied painstakingly, the buildings feel loosely-structured, concocted. In their formal ambition, willful eccentricity, happy syncretism and irreducible physicality, Taliesin is the most Wrightian of Wright’s projects that I’ve seen. The campus embodies a vision so peculiar, so evocative, so expressive, that it seems to have sprung directly from his head onto the land.

Photograph © Pedro E. Guerrero.

January 03, 2016 by Nalina Moses

DOMESTIC ARTS

In 1952, in Phoenix, about half an hour from his perch at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright built a house for his son David and daughter-in-law Gladys. That house has recently been opened to the public, and what a marvel it is.

It’s a small structure, closer in spirit and in scale to a Usonian House than to the expansive, majestic Prairie Style houses Wright is most famous for. Its enclosure is only about sixteen feet wide, and its doorways are barely 5′-6″ high. Like all Wright creations, the house has a vivid sculptural character. Its kooky, spinning, circular geometries prefigure the Guggenheim, and remain true to the space-age stylings the architect favored at mid-century. Entering is dramatic: one approaches on a gravel path below a broad curving ramp, walks up that ramp, and then passes through a low threshold into a living room that seems to hover above ground. The house’s sloped copper roof juts out savagely at the far end, like the prow of a spaceship.

Yet the feeling isn’t avant-garde; it’s intimate. Wright seems to have designed the house to serve real people rather than the visions in his head. And it’s being shown in an informal way that honors this. When I visited, during the holidays, there were doormats at each entrance, LED lanterns lining the walkways, and a Christmas tree in the living room. A circular coffee table, displaced by the tree, was stored upside down on the bed in the second bedroom. Wright-designed chairs and lamps, not original to the design, had been purchased and set in empty nooks. These additions all give the place a warm, lived-in kind of clutter. (In fact the house really is a home; right now one of the architect’s great-granddaughters is in residence.)

True to Wright’s reputation for being a less-than-pragmatic builder, the house needs improvements. Some wood coffers on the living room ceiling are water-damaged. The concrete lining at the bottom of the entrance ramp is spalling, and the steel reinforcing inside rusting. The ramp’s guard wall has crumbled, leaving holes along the bottom where one’s foot can slide through. The plain, rough masonry blocks at the facade have been regrouted in a shade that doesn’t match the original.

At the end of our tour our guide asked us for overall impressions. Several visitors remarked that the house still feels “modern.” One, a former home builder, admired its uncanny domesticity: “You walk right in and it feels like a house.” This is true, and, for an architect with Wright’s titanic ambitions and abilities, also remarkable.

January 02, 2016 by Nalina Moses

PUNK SOIGNEE

Hearing In the Hammersmith Palais on the radio last week sent me sifting through old photographs of The Clash online, which made me understand how terrifically glamorous they were. Punk valued the damaged, the distorted,and the broken-down, and The Clash, at first glance, fit the bill. Their sound was aggressive, their posture trenchant. They dressed in zippered jackets and combat boots, and had bad teeth and madman haircuts. But, even in the early days, they were always put-together, brilliantly dressed and coiffed. They achieved a kind of punk soignée.

Paul Simonon, the band’s bassist, was a painter working at Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Sex when guitarist Mick Jones recruited him, largely because of his style. Simonon played a key role in outfitting the band, and guiding photo and stage set designs. At first the musicians sported skinny jackets and ties, and shirts with hand-stenciled slogans and Pollock-style paint splatters. Later they wore police and military uniforms, zoot suits, ranger hats, gasoline attendant shirts, neckerchiefs, and string ties. Much of the boldness and detail in their dress is lost in photographs and video, which are shot mostly in grainy black and white, and in shadowy tour buses, dressing rooms, and concert halls.

The band hit a sartorial peak when they opened for The Who at Shea Stadium in 1982. Simonon wore camouflage pants, a camel topcoat, and a Mets cap, with walnut-sized silver rings across his knuckles. Jones wore a cherry red parachute jumpsuit with a green Che Guevara beret. Frontman Joe Strummer wore contrasting camouflage prints and a coonskin cap. All of them sported shining eight-hole Doc Martens and, in some photographs, carried baseball bats like walking sticks. They don’t look like a punk band, and they don’t look like newly-minted rock stars either. They look like art students dressed for Halloween.

Photograph by Neal Preston. The Clash backstage at Shea Stadium, October 13, 1982.

November 15, 2015 by Nalina Moses