DYSTOPIA NOW

For young artists in China, the explosive physical and economic growth of their country is an inevitable subject. Cao Fei grew up in a “new” city, Guangzhou, and tackles it head on, in diverse media (video, games, sculpture, photography, diorama), masterfully. As depicted in her show at PS1, the new cities of China are dystopias, conceived in eccentric styles and scales, and populated by young men and women who silence their inner lives, and find more meaningful expression in cosplay, video games, and fantasy.

Fei’s most eloquent works are a series of dioramas she constructed as backdrops for the 2014 video La Town. They’re made from model kits whose flat plastic parts are used to build scaled replicas of vehicles, buildings and monuments. The models parts here are blasted and refinished to give them a patina, assembled partially, and combined with elements from other model kits. Because the pieces are at different scales, and from different kits (a German town square, a McDonalds drive-through, an office tower, a beach scene, a zoo scene), the dioramas offer strange new fractured narratives. They’re displayed in sealed glass cases and lit with small hanging bulbs that throw horror-movie shadows.

The buildings are wrecked, with missing walls and floors, and look as if they’ve survived an earthquake. The lawns are an unnaturally hyper-green. The scenes are bristling with life, crowded with scale figures (all Caucasian) who gather in small mobs, run into the street, jump off of buildings, and copulate publicly. In one diorama a bullet train is derailed after hitting Santa and his reindeer. In another a one-legged woman swims in a pond below the site of an airplane crash. In another a trio of pole-dancers perform in an old movie theater while a construction crew works in the mezzanine above. The dioramas are gorgeously choreographed and crafted – Bosch for our age. And they serve up, quietly, a bold critique of the new culture and architecture in China.

La Town, White Street. 2014. C-print, 120 x 80cm. Image courtesy Cao Fei.

July 10, 2016 by Nalina Moses

EATEN AWAY

On the inside, Miami’s Perez Art Museum is everything one expects from a Herzog & De Meuron building: smart, spare, ingeniously composed, and finely detailed. Its galleries are perfectly scaled for modern and contemporary art: large enough for full-blown installations, and small enough to foster intimacy. These rooms, smooth-skinned concrete boxes, are stacked in a loose pinwheel pattern with broad halls in between to wander.

What’s most surprising is the way the building is eroded at its edges. Its core, the cluster of galleries, is wrapped with a broad concrete patio and covered with wood slats, and its open courtyards are decorated with hanging column-like gardens. From the outside the building has no clear form – no straightforward profile, and no iconic image. (The richest, most descriptive photographs of it available online are those taken during construction, before the building was covered and the landscape around it had grown in.) It’s as if the tropical air and sun are eating away at the museum’s rough, handsome brutalist structure. I visited on a wet, windy day, and rain splattered through the roof slats, rose in a mist from the deck, and dripped from the swaying planters. Yet the patio, though exposed, was comfortable; one felt sheltered there by the building.

It’s a shame that the galleries themselves are isolated, visually and spatially, from the outside. Many have full-height windows, but when I visited the blinds were pulled down and one couldn’t see out to the patio below, the ocean beyond, and the sky above. Why didn’t the architects offer fixed views to the outside from galleries, and into the galleries from the outside? The building’s expressive, porous outer shell offers a primal experience of the elements, but its interiors remain closed off.

Photo © Iwan Baan.

July 09, 2016 by Nalina Moses

SHADOWY ORIGINS

A friend, a painter, was eager to see the Degas show at MoMA, A Strange New Beauty, because she finds him “incredibly modern.” The monotypes on display certainly are. In this printing method ink is smeared across and then removed from a metal plate, a way of image-making less belabored and more spontaneous than oil painting, where layers of slow-drying colors are built over a canvas. Perhaps Degas took to the monotype because he had a loose hand. If one looks closely, at both his prints and paintings, one sees that the human figures are modeled bluntly. Arms and legs have awkward, rubbery proportions, and sometimes end in stumps. The artist gives women faces that are unspecific, often turned, and not very pretty. Some of the prints are shockingly abstract in the uncertain boundaries between figure and ground, object and space. Degas was a nineteenth-century painter looking a century or more ahead.

Where Degas finds form precisely is in light, and it is light, not ballerinas, that is his primary subject. The women he renders in the monotypes (dancers, prostitutes, showgirls) all feel as if they’re emerging from shadow. In some instances the atmosphere is so dense, and the figures so obscured, that they look like sea creatures rising from a storm. In the monotype process, in shaping images from a spill of ink, by wiping and scraping away parts, Degas was finding form in darkness. (There’s one of Degas’ photographs on display at MoMA too, showing his interest in a technique that relies explicitly on the form-giving properties of light.) That the artist can depict the body with such specificity and charm without describing it literally speaks to his skill in modeling light. The scenes here – of theaters, cafes, bordellos, bedrooms, studios – aren’t, like the work of other Impressionists, flickering pleasurably between the figural and the abstract. They stand firmly with the abstract.

Edgar Degas. Bedtime (Le Coucher), c. 1880 85. Monotype on paper. Plate: 14 7/8 × 10 7/8″ (37.8 × 27.7 cm). Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design.

July 04, 2016 by Nalina Moses

CONCRETE DREAMS

How does one exhibit architecture in a museum? Drawings and models engage, but they cannot take the place of the thing itself, the building. The architecture show at MoMA, A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, falls into this trap. It’s a supremely elegant installation. Each one of six small second floor galleries is given over to one of the six brilliant architects celebrated here: Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. Models and prototypes are set out on small white stands, and drawings and quotes are pinned to pale grey walls. Photos and renderings, about the size of 11x8 sheets, are projected onto floor-length white linen scrims. The overall effect is low-fi and dreamy, as much of the work here is.

The exhibit designers might have decided to project photographs to avoid visible monitors, to emphasize the handicraft in the work. But the images are small and the linen blurs them so much that they’re practically illegible. We never see what these buildings are meant to look like or what they actually look like, and this is a tremendous disservice, because almost all of them have been built. The ideas and geometries given expression in the drawings are models are astounding: at once simple, obtuse, lucid, startling and lyrical. But having ideas about a building is dreaming, not architecture. Since visitors don’t see the renderings and photos clearly, the work remains paper architecture.

Fujimoto conceived a small house in Tokyo, House NA, by splitting each of its rooms, halls, closets, and stair runs into a separate volume, building each one from glass, and stacking them in a shifting, ramshackle pile. The wood and board model of the building at MoMA is lovely, like a spirited doll house, but photographs of the house itself – that show clearly its modest scale, its precarious foothold along the sidewalk, its bamboo-thin metal frame, its unapologetic transparency – are surreal. As astonishing as the concept of the house is, it’s more astounding that it’s been executed skillfully, with each of its quietly radical propositions (about space, about structure, about domesticity) intact. That might be true for all the projects included in this show. We understand the ideas, now show us the buildings.

House NA, Tokyo, 2011, by Sou Fujimoto. Photo by Iwan Baan.

July 03, 2016 by Nalina Moses