BUT THAT VOICE

The new Radiohead album A Moon Shaped Pool is music to soothe wounded adult souls. Each of its eleven songs is a spacey, porous confection. Instrumental lines swirl gently around one another, and the vocals float across the top.

The effort would be easy to dismiss but for singer Thom Yorke’s voice, which is celestially beautiful. It’s inspired much bad prose, and might again right now. It doesn’t appeal directly, the way that Joni Mitchell’s and John Lennon’s voices do. When I hear those artists I feel that I’m hearing them themselves, speaking to me. Yorke’s voice, instead, impresses with its elusiveness, its quicksilver agility, the way it slides across and then cuts through a song, descends into a wail and then emerges in a shout. It can feel like an instrument that’s more than human, operating at unexplored registers and stirring up dormant emotions, like birdsong or violin.

The beauty of Yorke’s voice is the unmaking of this album. These songs aren’t complex dramatically – they don’t take anything as their subject – so his singing is reduced to gorgeous ornament. Yorke is an accomplished songwriter and, when left to his own devices, without the band and with minimal accompaniment, can deliver pop songs with astonishing immediacy. But on this album that voice serves no end.

Artwork courtesy of Stanley Donwood and Radiohead.

June 13, 2016 by Nalina Moses

PORTRAITS OF A LADY

Cindy Sherman’s art flickers between theater and autobiography. Over three decades she’s photographed herself while posing as movie starlets, sex show performers, circus freaks, great ladies from history, and pop culture icons. In each instance, as she imagines herself in these roles, she challenges female archetypes and, along with them, presumptions about gender, power, and representation.

In the self-portraits on display at her current show at Metro Pictures she channels grand dames from the 30′s, wearing marcelled wigs, bias-cut gowns, and boa-trimmed shawls. But the scenes are surprisingly placid, emptied of melodrama. These are ladies in repose, assured in their social status.

Earlier Sherman heroines possessed a jarring physical and psychic vulnerability. Their stilted postures and expressions (perched on a ladder, peering in a bathroom mirror, sprawled on a hotel bed) embodied fear, anxiety, and sadness. Those pictures had theatrically lit and composed backdrops that charged them dramatically, as if events – potentially tragic – were about to unfold.

In her new portraits the images Sherman takes as backdrops (a leafless tree, a hillside Mediterranean town, a modern waterfront) are strangely static. They are like the blandly pretty backdrops department store photographers use, and seem entirely unrelated to the women resting in front of them. Here Sherman isn’t depicting female archetypes but a notion of herself, potent, as a contemporary art star. She’s easily identifiable in each of the photographs, and in the gallery we stand looking at her, not the characters. It would be false to claim that these pictures feel like product, but they don’t feel like art either. They feel like opulent, gorgeously-crafted selfies.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2016. Courtesy of Metro Pictures.

June 12, 2016 by Nalina Moses

WEARING WHITE

A pop song sends one back, happily or not, to the time one first heard it, and to the feelings it first delivered. It was like that, for me, seeing the collection of Robert Ryman paintings on long-term view at Dia Beacon. When I first saw Ryman, at MoMA, as a college student, I was thunderstruck by the elegance of his square white-on-white canvases, and the drama they extracted from such slender means. To say it simply, Ryman applies white paint to canvas and then attaches the canvas to a wall. Seeing his paintings at Beacon brought me back to that moment of discovery, after which all other painting began to seem, somehow, rather obvious.

The friend I visited Beacon with, a designer, found the paintings monotonous, and I suppose they are. If one searches in painting for figure, narrative, composition, or message, one won’t find it in Ryman. Like a lot of conceptual art, his works seem more like questions than things. And if the primary question is What is a painting? Ryman’s response is, A surface covered with paint.

The canvases here, painted from 1958 to 2003, vary in size and medium. Some are as small as memo pads and some are as large as garage doors. Some are aluminum panels screwed to the walls with clips, some are sheets of paper stapled to the walls, and some are stretched canvases hung on wire. The canvases, from the early 1960′s, are the richest. They are small, about twelve inches by twelve inches, which draws one close. From this vantage one sees clearly the warp and weft of the fabric, the chemical tint of the paint, and the field of squirming, whirling brushstrokes. The yellowing canvases and rusting hardware give spatial depth and cultural authority. These works, which once seemed to me bracingly contemporary, are now historic.

Robert Ryman, “Untitled,” ca. 1960. Artwork courtesy 2016 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo courtesy Chang W. Lee/The New York Times.

June 03, 2016 by Nalina Moses

PITCH-PERFECT

The small, elegantly staged Isaac Mizrahi retrospective at The Jewish Museum is called An Unruly History. While the designer’s personal and business affairs might be summed up this way, his designs cannot, for they are consistently impeccable. As a dressmaker Mizrahi has the gift of making even the most extravagant garments (a skirt folded from twelve yards of taffeta, a minidress covered with dime-sized palettes stamped from Coca-Cola cans, an ankle-length sheath embroidered to resemble a totem pole) seem straightforward and utterly uncomplicated. He can deliver opulence with perfect pitch. In that sense he’s an ideal society designer.

He’s also a distinctly American designer. The clean lines and immaculate craftsmanship of his garments give them remarkable clarity. These are fancy but unfussy clothes. As styled for the runway, and on the mannequins here, the gowns and suits comprise complete looks in themselves, and don’t require jewelry, hats, shoes or bags to complete them. Each piece is like the platonic ideal of a staple that a fashionable, well-to-do American woman would find hanging in her closet: an A-line dress, a houndstooth suit, a black bodysuit, a camel-colored wool coat. Taken together, Mizrahi’s pieces make up one fantastic wardrobe.

May 30, 2016 by Nalina Moses