STRAPPING YOUNG LASSES

Rick Owens’ SS16 Womens show Cyclops was performed in a Parisian bunker, with rough concrete floors and bare columns, and was presided over by three soul singers in long black gowns, who solemnly delivered This Land is Mine, the theme from the movie Exodus. The looks were built from layered sheaths that wrapped the body like space-age saris, pulling taut across the backside and bunching up in front like broken fenders, in shades of black, putty, pale saffron and stale mint. The whole affair was what one expects of Owens: bold, arty, gothic, tribal and street.

What elevated the show to theater was its procession. Every third model carried around her another model: strapped to her back like a knapsack, cradled to her stomach like a infant, or hooked around her neck by the knees like a stethoscope. The spectacle of each of these women (slender, straight-faced, serene) carrying another live, full-blooded woman through the show, strapped in place with a harness, was effecting. Their poses were awkward, athletic, and strangely asexual. The pairs looked less like lovers than like conjoined sisters, grappling enemies, twin demons. Their positions recalled the famous Annie Leibowitz photograph of Leigh Bowery hauling his wife Nicola Bateman over his belly like a fetus. But Owens’ show wasn’t a statement about birth and maternal power. It was about finding grace in extremes, a punk ballet.

July 02, 2016 by Nalina Moses

THESE CHAIRS CAN TALK

Doris Salcedo’s retrospective at the Perez Art Museum shows her sculpture to great advantage. The large, bare, squarish concrete galleries it fills flow seamlessly into one another. Her sculptures, assemblages of found objects (furniture, clothing, hardware), are set out within them loosely and purposefully, pulling a visitor this way and that, in a state of semi-distraction, as she moves through.

Salcedo’s most powerful works, made from 1989 to 2008, take, slice, turn, reassemble, and seal shut with concrete traditional wood tables, chairs, bureaus, bed frames, and almirahs. This is the kind of furniture that filled our grandparents homes, and that can be found in thrift stores today. By recombining them and filling their voids with concrete the artist renders them useless, helpless, mute. The pieces are immaculately crafted; the wood frames are precisely cut and fastened, the concrete is poured to a soft sheen. Their careful syntactical play (a chair turned to face a wall, a table stacked upside-down within the frame of a dresser) engenders a sense of unease and confusion. Ominous questions arise: Whose bureau is this, and where is she now? Things are deeply and quietly out of order.

These are gorgeous sculptures. They recall Eva Hesse’s ability to infuse common materials with talismanic power, and Rachel Whiteread’s quiet disruption of conventional architectural scale and language. But what’s most remarkable is the power of each piece to speak – clearly and seriously – about silence, history, political oppression and personal dignity, themes Salcedo has spoken about throughout her career. With works like this, she doesn’t need to say a word.

Installation View, Perez Art Museum Miami, 2016. Furniture by Doris Salcedo, 1989. Photo by World Red Eye, courtesy of Perez Art Museum and Doris Salcedo.

June 26, 2016 by Nalina Moses

FOLLIES

Artist-prankster Martin Creed‘s work has the slickness of television advertising; it’s bright, spare, and sprightly. And its content, even when overtly political (like videos of refugees) or scatalogical (like films of people relieving themselves) is rendered practically irrelevant by its good cheer.

For his retrospective at the Armory, The Back Door, Creed has been given the run of the place. He fills smaller ground level rooms with quirky paintings, sculptures and installations. One room has neat pyramidal stacks of chairs and tables, and another is packed with white melon-sized latex balloons. He fills the low brick vaults along the Drill Hall with video-viewing booths. One shows two dogs running across a blank white screen, and another shows hipsters vomiting against a blank white screen. And he leaves the Drill Hall empty except for a giant screen hanging in the middle, which shows films of women eating yogurt in slow motion. This is a show best approached breezily, with a light heart and few expectations. One might stop and wonder Is this art? but one knows this is art, a type of art that doesn’t touch the soul and doesn’t aim too.

My favorite part of the exhibit is a band of five young musicians (including drums, trumpet, cymbals, and singer) who roam the floor performing pop songs written by Creed. They step into rooms unexpectedly, weave in between visitors without meeting their embarrassed glances, then pass out into another room. They’re dressed in ragtag street clothes, like escapees from a juvenile prison, and have a po-faced determination that’s old-fashioned and slightly mad. In the large, wood-lined halls of the Armory, their simple tunes hang in the air like hymns. Their performance ties the show together, highlights the cavernous architecture of the building, and, quite simply, spreads joy.

Still from ‘Work No. 732: Kicking Flowers’ by Martin Creed, 2007. Courtesy of Martin Creed.

June 25, 2016 by Nalina Moses

ILLUMINATED

The Menil Collection in Houston might be the most finely-executed building I’ve visited. Its designer Renzo Piano is now a starchitect, the go-to guy for museum projects internationally, but when he completed the Menil in 1986 he was relatively unknown, and the building glows with a beginner’s passion and, very literally, sunlight.

Its design succeeds at every basic level: landscaping, circulation, scale, materiality, and detail. It’s an intimate structure, modeled after the house that Philip Johnson designed for John and Dominique de Menil, and where their art collection had been originally displayed. The one-story museum sits at the center of flat, grassy lot in a gracious residential neighborhood with manicured bungalows and century-old trees. It’s planned simply, with a string of galleries along one long side, a string of support spaces along the other, and a tall corridor along the spine. Outside, its horizontal wood siding is broken with slender steel columns. Inside, its high white walls are set off by dark wood floors. Some of its larger galleries are interrupted with small interior courtyards crammed with lush, jungle-like plantings.

The building’s signature elements are its long ceiling baffles, that curve gently in profile like razor clam shells, and that cover the hallways, galleries and exterior walkways. They seem to scoop light inside, giving each space a dreamy glow. The baffles are both complex and naive, mechanistic and natural. At first glance they seem heavy, as if they’ve been sculpted from plaster or bone, and then, at the next turn, immaterial, like tissue. On the afternoon I visited there were intermittent rains and, from one minute to the next, the rooms dimmed and brightened, until the clouds passed and they were bathed with sunshine. In drawings and photographs the baffles seem heavy-handed, calculated, as if Piano were more interested in angles (which he studied) and hardware (which he also studied) than light. But as installed at the museum the baffles are natural: entirely exposed and inconspicuous. Through their effects, the building achieves a state of grace.

June 19, 2016 by Nalina Moses