INNER LIFE

A friend of mine is recovering from a serious illness and was, through the most critical passage of it, connected to an EEG machine. The device linked electrodes on his skull to a large LED monitor with a built-in camera that washed his bed in cool blue light. On the screen twenty black lines ran right-to-left across a blank white field. A grainy stamp-sized live image of his face floated on the left side. And a list of clinical terms doctors could select from to classify his condition ran down the right: Eyes Open, Head Movement, Awake, Talking, Drowsy, Coughing, Crying, Lethargic.

Each line on an EEG maps a brain “wave,” and together they measure neurological climate. The lines are rational and intricate, relentless, peaking and crashing, and, sometimes, criss-crossing. When there’s a disruption in normal function, as in a seizure, the lines spike wildly, making a dark cloud. Yet there is no trace left of even the most dramatic event; within thirty seconds one record is gone, swept away by new data emerging from the right side.

The EEG is the most lyrical graphic notation I know, full of mystery. Its lines recall, in their detail and complexity: topography, music, calligraphy, embroidery, choreography. At any moment my friend’s EEG seemed to reveal more deeply who he was than his face and body, stilled as they were by illness. I thought I found, within the machine’s continual stream, his memories, his breath, his dreams, his tender broken spirit. Looking at the EEG monitor was like peering into his soul.

May 22, 2016 by Nalina Moses

BELLES LETTRES

I knew there would be trouble when, in 2013, The Metropolitan Museum of Art hired a Chief Digital Officer and abandoned its metal admission pins. Then, in February 2016, to coincide with the opening of the The Met Breuer, the museum unveiled a new brand identity, adopting “The Met,” spelled out in squat cherry red letters, as its official logo. Designed by Wolff Olins, the company that guided the Tate through its phenomenal expansion, the intent was to bring the museum into the twenty-first century.

The new logo, bright and informal, leaves me longing for the DaVinci-style M that served as the museum’s logo, perfectly, for 45 years. That single letter, based on a Renaissance woodcut in the collection by Fra Luca Pacioli, looked as if it had been hand-drafted, with regulating lines and circles sketched finely around it. It was instantly recognizable, and carried rich connotations: history, geometry, mathematics, proportion, rigor, rhythm, beauty.

The new swollen run-on letters are, by comparison, garish. They’re shaped messily and meet messily, like lumps of Play-Doh. What suffers the most are the E’s, whose center strokes tilt upward like trumpets. The lower E even gives over its top left corner to the soft shoulder of the preceding M. And the two T’s are entirely different: the first kicks its little leg to the left, the second to the right. These no longer letters, they’re cartoons. The Met, one of our country’s most storied cultural institution, has reshaped its logo for illiterates.

May 21, 2016 by Nalina Moses

SLY DESIGN

I declined to attend ICFF this week, picturing endless stalls of hyper-crafted wood furniture, twisted LED light sculptures, and hand-blocked wallpaper. A last-minute invitation drew me instead to Sight Unseen Offsite (SUO), a small market curated by the design website. It was the perfect antidote to the theatricality, commercialism, and insistent luxury of ICFF. The sun-drenched 15th floor of the Grace Building, where SUO unfolded, was stripped to a bare concrete slab and white walls, and filled with young designers – makers of things – showing their wares on plywood tables.

Despite the number of Pratt graduates and Brooklyn-based industries, the sensiblity was less Outer-Borough Artisanal than Understated Postmodern. The designs (furniture, tableware, linens, carpets) shared a stripped-down 80′s formalism that tempered Memphis eccentricity with Real Simple minimalism. The entire spectacle was sweetly ahistorical, because the designers are too young to have any memory of that era. Products were crafted with basic geometries (thrown pillows shaped like pyramids, pipes shaped like cones, chairs shaped like cubes), bold graphics (checkerboard rugs, quilts with fields of squiggles), chalky pastels (hand-thrown dinnerware, shift dresses) and crayon-bright primaries (throw cushions, childrens toys). There was a smartness to the products. On the surface they seemed natural, simply put together. But achieving this kind of grace actually requires a great deal of sophistication.

Photo courtesy of Crosby Studios.

May 16, 2016 by Nalina Moses

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

The old Whitney Museum uptown has, finally, been refinished, rechristened and reopened as the Met Breuer. The inaugural exhibition, Unfinished: Thoughts Made Visible, collects Western artworks from the sixteenth century through the present that either were left unfinished or that embody an unfinished aesthetic. This second category is highly dubious, and leaves the show open to paintings that are entirely finished, but that include bits of exposed canvas, patches of freewheeling brushstroke, or blank backgrounds. There are major works by Titian, Velazquez, El Greco, Goya, and Picasso here, and almost all of the Impressionists, particularly Monet and Cezanne. At the heart of the show, in a small interior gallery on the third floor, there are five majestic Turners, each not much larger than a tea tray, that render Atlantic views in a miasma of paint. These canvases are awesomely complete. They scream with life, and blow apart the weak thesis of this show.

And then there is the museum itself, which has been lightly refurbished by Beyer Blinder and Belle, with its original brutalist sensibility left intact. The thick coats of varnish have been scraped off the granite floor, the concrete ceiling coffers have been cleaned, and the partitions have been painted a flat dove grey. The effect, when walking through at midday, is like wandering through a huge, luminous shell. The refinishing highlights details of the architecture I had never noticed before: the rhyme of the square ceiling coffers with the floor tiles, the explosion in volume as one passes from the second floor to the high-ceilinged third floor, the pinched street views through the slanted cyclops windows, and the jagged, ignaceous-like concrete of the bearing walls. This building is a gentle giant. It’s raw sensuality and restrained proportions demonstrate, more so than any painting in the show, that the most thoughtful, accomplished work can feel, in the end, unfinished.

April 14, 2016 by Nalina Moses