HOUSEBOUND

There’s no photography allowed at Kai Althoff’s show at MoMA, which might be for the best. This sprawling multi-media installation, that fills a large gallery on the sixth floor, is something of a mess. It obscures the artist’s signature works – lyrical, exotically-colored watercolors and acrylics. Instead of highlighting these small panels, it drops them within a distracting, disorderly stage-set.

The exhibition resembles a family home that’s been imploded, with the contents of its closets and attics spilling out. There are low white painted partitions, scuffed wood floor boards, and scrims hanging from the ceiling, that all outline a ghostly house with a peaked roof. Within it, household objects (appliances, cutlery, magazines, furniture, dolls, suitcases, clothes) are piled on platforms, packed inside vitrines, pooled on the floor, and pinned on the walls. Because these things are old and worn the place seems highly personal. It’s as if the artist is trying to capture a life – his own – by collecting all the things that passed through it. Althoff is my contemporary, and some of the objects brought back all-but-forgotten sense-memories from the mid-seventies: hand-thrown pottery in speckled glazes, dolls with stiff faces and thick synthetic hair, poorly composed black and white family photographs.

But Althoff’s paintings pack a much mightier punch. These small canvases, no larger than album covers, have a pungent, unpretty realism. They depict characters that seem to be based on real people, observed from up close, capturing particularities in face and figure that only a loved one would note. The scenes are rendered in secondary colors, in opaque fields and patterns, in claustrophobic, aspatial vignettes. Althoff’s brushwork is delicate, his palette feverish, his tone straightforward, and his effects quite moving. But here, at MoMA, rather than showing us his work, Althoff shows us his life. The world captured in his paintings – of the people around him – would have given much more.

Untitled, 2007, Cloth, acrylic, lacquer and dispersion on cloth, 38 7/8 x 50 x 2 inches (98.7 x 127 x 5.1 cm). Image courtesy of Barbara Gladstone Gallery and Kai Althoff.

November 15, 2016 by Nalina Moses

THE THINGS THEY CARED ABOUT

The Main Street Museum doesn’t resemble a museum so much as an eccentric rural artist’s basement laboratory, a bit Ed Wood and a bit Silence of the Lambs. It’s a three-story wood-frame house on a postcard-pretty bridge in White River Junction, Vermont. The dark, low, interconnected galleries are encrusted with paintings, sculpture, taxidermy, and everyday objects, in an endless, airless clutter. The exhibits include: a glass candy jar stuffed with broken My Little Ponies, a vitrine that collects black plastic doll heads, a wall case showcasing “Round Objects” (like jar lids, drain caps, washers), and the desktop diorama of a plastic robot ravaging a naked Barbie doll.

The museum, led by young artist David Fairbanks Ford, is also a vibrant community center, with a small reading library and a stage for public lectures and performances. Its website explains: “ We are an ongoing, alternative experiment in material culture studies.” This experiment conveys deep anti-materialism and aesthetic abandon. The museum is only lightly curated; none of the displays have titles or labels. And there’s no indication that these artworks are precious. In fact, on the Sunday morning we visited, the building was unlocked and unmanned, with a wood box for visitors to deposit the $5 entrance fee.

The Museum is far too substantial, and effecting, to be kitsch, or some kind of hipster joke. One senses, amid the chaos, a genuine love for the objects, for the things themselves. Although the museum’s tone is Thrift Store Crazy, it’s no different than any other museum: an assortment of things that someone thinks is important.

Barbies Nightmare, Mixed-media assembly, Main Street Museum. Photo courtesy of Main Street Museum.

November 06, 2016 by Nalina Moses

FREE TO BE

The first-woman-to-become-president narrative that Hilary Clinton is riding doesn’t interest me. What does interest me, deeply, is the way she’s continually attacked for those attributes that confirm and confuse her womanhood: her hair, her ankles, her neck, her pantsuits, her laugh, her ambition, her emotional restraint. It all seems irrelevant.

But when I look back at photos of Clinton from the late 1970′s, during her husband’s first term as governor, I want to cry. There are, here, glimpses of a young woman who is intelligent, willful, wild, expressive, and free. She is wearing her hair in its natural shade (dirty blonde) and texture (big waves), pinned behind her ears with plastic barrettes. She is sporting oversized, hopelessly utilitarian glasses that cover half her face. And she’s draped in hippy-ish Gunne Sax-style dresses with peasant skirts, leg of mutton sleeves and mandarin collars, in loopy floral prints. She’s a vibrant young woman, effortlessly attractive, serious, passionate, alert to the world and the people around her. Where is this Hilary now?

Part of the problem is my own nostalgia, as these pictures show Clinton at an age when she’s far younger than I am now. We change as we get older, and our personalities congeal around those traits that we’re rewarded for. But Hilary’s manicured public image – linked to an extreme makeover after her husband’s 1980 loss in the gubernatorial race – is different, slightly sinister and slightly sad. At that moment she voluntarily remade herself, surrendering her name and her appearance. She has, since, become a fierce political warrior. But was it necessary for her to lose her sass, and herself, along the way?

October 29, 2016 by Nalina Moses

HODGE PODGE

Gucci Creative Director Alessandro “Lallo” Michele, who’s been leading the brand for almost two years, has brought it new life. His ensembles suspend the brand’s established image (ultra-chic body-conscious Euro-centric separates) for a layered hodge-podge styling that piles eccentric accessories over richly-colored, -textured, and -embellished garments. The runway shows and ads project artsy, nerdy, thrift store bohemia, animated with a sleepy, muted sexuality. Lallo’s Instagram feed reveals an imagination focused on rapture and texture – a patch of wallpaper, a stormy sky, a tabletop tableaux, an eighteenth century cornice – rather than trend, form, and fashion. Among the riot of plaids, prints, patchwork and paisleys in the clothes, he incorporates, skillfully and quietly, iconic brand identifiers: the double-G hardware, the signature canvas, the horsebits, and the tri-color stripe. No luxury house could ask for keener leadership.

The clothes Gucci showed for Spring Summer 2017 are just what was expected. The dense, cluttered new Gucci look is instantly recognizable; these clothes can’t be mistaken for those from any other brand. Prada and Miu Miu are offering similar crazily mismatched separates, adorned with patches and ornaments, but those garments have an avant garde feel. Michele’s clothes aren’t intellectual, and they aren’t self-consciously freakish either, intending only to draw attention to themselves. Instead they have a strange innocence. A woman seems to be wearing this argyle sweater, these giant jewelled glasses, this quilted bag, and these elephant leg trousers, because she feels that each piece is beautiful, a thing well-known and well-loved. This is the way that children often dress, without concern for identity and conformity. In the world of high fashion, it’s an act of subversion.

Photo courtesy of Gucci.

October 16, 2016 by Nalina Moses