DREAM WEAVINGS

Simone Rocha makes clothes from silk, wool and tulle that feel as if they could evaporate at any moment in a small puff of smoke. They are girlish confections, constructed from layers of ruffles, fringes, bows and sashes. Like Rei Kawakubo, Rocha can transform conventional garments (trenchcoat, party dress, pantaloons) with unorthodox tailoring, while leaving traces of those original forms intact. Her garments are exquisitely imagined; every collar, cuff and hem carries an elemental proposition about what a collar, cuff and hem can be. A khaki trenchcoat has rouched sleeves with cuffs that morph in bows. A party dress in heavy white eyelet hangs across the collarbone as if it has been put on sideways. A ball gown is constructed from a soft voile sack embellished with yellow silk flowers. The clothing’s strong asymmetrical profiles, mismatched fabrics, and elaborate piecing give them a structural audacity that makes their fairytale prettiness all the more remarkable.

While Kawakubo’s garments are charged with aggressive avant garde energy, Rocha’s are tender, sylvan, and sentimental. The young women staffing her New York City shop, who wear the dresses as their uniform, seem less like fashion warriors than artsy teens who read Jane Austen and comic books. Rocha’s clothes don’t need accessories, makeup or jewelry to built a strong look. Each piece carries its own strong image, and shapes its own character. Here is a princess who fell asleep beneath a blanket of wildflowers. Here is a schoolgirl who packs her satchel and runs away from home. Here is a witch who disguises herself in a magnificent gown to attend the ball. These clothes are like dreams translated directly into fabric.

Photograph courtesy of Simone Rocha.

March 04, 2017 by Nalina Moses

POSTMODERN DREAMS

The Kerry James Marshall retrospective at the Met Breuer, Mastry, attracted the most energetic and eclectic museum crowd I’ve ever seen. Marshall is African American, and publicity surrounding the show was pointedly political. An explanatory wall text notes that his work “synthesizes a wide range of pictorial traditions to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society and reassert the place of the black figure within the canon of Western painting.“ Marshall’s richly-colored, mural-sized canvases are strongly graphic, with characters often rendered in profile, and fields in flat, bold colors. They have the kinetic energy of posters, quilts and graffiti. Some capture everyday scenes from black American life: a beauty salon, a barber shop, two lovers in bed. Others capture moments from black history: the failure to seize a rogue slave ship, the colonization of South Africa by the Dutch.

Despite political interpretations, the paintings are most remarkable for their skillful postmodern storytelling, employing fractured imagery to upend conventional narratives. Scenes are constructed within a conventional perspectival background, and their integrity is questioned by a web of seemingly random graphic marks laid right on top of them: letters, numbers, banners, logos, and puddles and streaks of paint. The complex, layered image-making recalls the work of David Salle, and the sensual handling recalls the work of Eric Fischl. But Marshall’s work is more ambitious formally and more troubling emotionally than that of either of his contemporaries.

In the most powerful paintings, the dissonant overlapping and accumulation of images exposes the distance between American life and the American dream. A series of paintings completed in the 1980′s (including Better Homes and Better Gardens, above) shows black men, women and children emerging from handsome apartment blocks, playing on tidy suburban yards, sunning themselves at the beach, and resting inside homes. They’re surrounded by all the acoutrements of good bourgeois living: flags and banners, sprawling green lawns, flowering trees, gently winding streets, sunny skies. But the stray texts, strokes and smears floating on the surface above them expose the scene as a fiction, and the canvas as an unreliable, illusory surface. The very structure of the paintings suggests that, for black Americans, undisturbed good living might remain a fiction.

Kerry James Marshall, Better Homes Better Gardens, 1994. Kerry James Marshall / Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery

#MetBreuer #KerryJamesMarshall #PAINTING #POSTMODERNISM

February 18, 2017 by Nalina Moses

STATIONARY

For Upper East Side residents, the opening of the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway line this month is nothing short of a miracle. Decades in the works, it’s an improvement that East Siders have dreamt about, to alleviate crowding and delays on the 4, 5 and 6 platforms during rush hour.

What can one say about the design of the three new stations that were unveiled on New Years Day, at 72nd Street, 86th Street and 96th Street? All have a similar parti: entrances with escalators from street level, generous mezzanine levels that run the entire length of the platform, and platforms that are far wider and brighter (and, right now, cleaner) than existing stations. These stations were planned pragmatically, with more waiting room, improved circulation spaces, a greater number of entrances. And they seem to have been designed empirically, after studying new transit stations in Asia and Europe. All three have the same bland, vaguely futurist, late modern palette of soft grey granite, polished concrete and brushed metal. Their mezzanines have vaulted ceilings, expressed with curved concrete ribs and accented with linear LED light coves. There are surprising moments of boldness. For example, at the mezzanine of the 86th Street station, the ceiling has been constructed with a triangulated grid of deep, dramatically-lit concrete coffers. But the stations, while intelligently planned, have no deep architectural character. They’ve been built in Inoffensive Public Works Modern.

And where is the subway tile? This simple, iconic white 3x6 ceramic tile, which would have tied the new stations indelibly to the older lines to which they’re connected, is nowhere to be seen. Instead, interior passages at all three stations have been finished in a 1′x2′ white porcelain tile with a dull, mottled finish that seems to absorb natural light. Rather then grout, these tiles have been installed with with plastic filler strips, about 1/8″ wide. And these strips have been installed so carelessly, out of plumb with the tiles and out of alignment with tile edges, that they feel as if they are going to pop out. This tile might have been a cost- and time- saving measure. But it’s a sloppy, dispiriting finish, that covers acres of the interiors at these three new stations. One can’t help feeling that, instead, for each one, constructing a simple, brightly-lit shed, finished in neatly-laid subway tile, and graced with original artwork, would have worked just fine.

January 28, 2017 by Nalina Moses

A LOST WORLD

MoMA has mounted a 40th anniversary exhibit of photographer Nan Goldin’s 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, that captured her bohemian Lower East Side community with anthropological clarity, and also love. The framed shots, about 8″x10″, seem loosely composed, like snapshots, but carry a stunning physical and emotional immediacy. The most famous one, a self-portrait, shows Goldin in full makeup, a month after she’s been beaten so severely by a boyfriend that she can barely open her eyes. Thirty years afterwards, in a culture numbed by internet porn, reality TV and Tinder, these images do not shock. Instead they stir up nostalgia for a time in New York City, the early 1980′s, when rents were cheap, downtown was different from uptown, and young people moved to the city to become artists and writers rather than venture capitalists and fashion bloggers. New York City served as a vital refuge those who didn’t have the freedom to act out their lives in other places.

Today, the most powerful photographs in The Ballad are those that pull back from the faces and figures to show that world itself: kitchens with battered white metal appliances, bedrooms with bare walls and windows, hotel rooms with flocked wallpaper and mismatched lamps, basement bars with neon lighting and sticky floors. The handful of still lifes on display are surprisingly moving. They capture a mood by giving a glimpse of the corner of a room, a tabletop arrangement, or the wall of an apartment hallway. The manner in which people decorate their homes reveals their values bitingly, innocently, and eloquently. For Goldin’s friends expressiveness, color, corrosiveness and humor matter far more than order.

Goldin’s most unique gift is, surely, her ability to capture the heightened emotional drama between two people – that moment that promises a vital connection or tearing apart. But when she pulls her gaze back further, to reveal these people within their habitat, her photos are even more powerful. One shows two young men sitting behind a small round table at a bar, a cluster of half-empty cocktail glasses obscuring their faces. The view is gently out-of-plumb and softly cropped, so that the entire world seems to be slowly tipping, unable to right itself. These men might be falling for one another or having a lover’s quarrel. And this might be precisely what it felt like to be a young person, in New York City, in the early 1980′s.

January 21, 2017 by Nalina Moses