MARVELOUS

Cultural critic Hilton Als has curated a show at David Zwirner called Uptown, that collects portraits Alice Neel made of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem during the 60′s and 70′s. It’s possible to stroll through, take it in, and reach the simple, uncomplicated conclusion, “Marvelous.” The exhibit offers all the pleasures of painting without troubling intellectual or aesthetic subject matter. The canvases are handsome, vibrantly colored, and simple to appraise. Here is a streetwise but troubled young man. Here is an older woman who must have been a knockout in her youth. Here is a distinguished gentleman, a pillar of the community. But there are richer, more uncommon currents just below the surface.

Neel’s manner of depicting her subjects, in small vertical canvases, in a simple frontal view as they gaze straight back at the painter, fuses portraiture with self-presentation — with performance. As a white woman artist living in an enclave of working class blacks, Latinos and immigrants, Neel was an outsider, and remained keenly aware of of her status. Some of the paintings’ titles wrankle: Arab, Black Spanish Family, Two Puerto Rican Boys, Cyrus the Gentle Iranian. Yet her portraits don’t have the sting of anthropology, or offer an empty celebration of diversity. Her approach is clear-eyed and painterly. These canvases document the world she moves in, just as it is, without adornment, and without drama.

Neel depicts her subjects truly, soberly noting asymmetries and blemishes in face and figure. The sitters offer themselves easily for view but not for judgment. They are preternaturally relaxed, without a need to put on airs, sitting patiently as their portraits are crafted. Neel, in return, grants them a distance and mystery that confer dignity.

Alice Neel, Anselmo, 1962. Image courtesy of Alice Neel and David Zwirner.

March 27, 2017 by Nalina Moses

HAIR-RAISING

Last week Yankees outfielder Clint Frazier made the front page of the New York Times, on account of his unruly mop of red hair. Since George Steinbrenner’s leadership, the team has forbidden voluptuous hairstyles and facial hair, and fined players, including former captain Don Mattingly, who defied the rules. In vivid contrast, Mets star pitchers Noah Syndegaard, Robert Gsellman and Jacob de Grom are all now, without controversy, sporting ungroomed, free-flowing locks, for a look that’s both hippie and hipster.

Unlike basketball, a game with awesome street credibility, baseball’s appeal remains stubbornly entwined with tradition, and its leaders have been uneasy to embrace the counterculture. Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton’s 1969 memoir, Ball Four, shows how difficult it was for an honest, feeling young player of that time to honor both the traditions of the game and the feelings in the air. Attitudes haven’t shifted all that much, at least within the Yankees organization. Frazier cut his hair just days after the Times article. In many ways baseball culture seems more laced-up now than it was four decades ago.

Let us now remember Dock Ellis, the storied Pirates pitcher who threw a no-hitter in 1971 under the influence of LSD. He sometimes wore his hair, on gameday, in curlers. The documentary No No: A Dockumentary gives an engaging account of Ellis’ personal journey and clubhouse antics. The Pirates teams of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s, where he made his mark, were deeply integrated, more black than white. And, in 1971, the franchise became the first in Major League history to start a game with an entirely non-white lineup. That team management embraced both Ellis – with his abrasive, wildman, showmanship – and teammate Roberto Clemente – with his righteous, elegant, calm – speaks volumes. Why can’t the Yankees foster the same diversity – in culture and in character – on their team? And, if not, why can’t they just let their players grow their hair?

#DockEllis #NoNoDocumentary #Pirates #Mets #Yankees #hairstyles

March 18, 2017 by Nalina Moses

FAR OUT

In the movie The Arrival aliens land on earth in vessels shaped like giant Brazil nuts, that hover on one end just above the ground. Humans enter them from below, in genie lifts, and struggle to understand their language and their intentions. The aliens look like octopi with seven legs and a hairy, wrinkled trunk. They float around the top of the vessels in clouds of steam, behind windows that look like giant iPOD screens. And they communicate in inky, circular squirts that look like the stains coffee cups leave on magazine covers.

The premise of the movie (based on a short story by Ted Chiang) is intriguing, but the special effects don’t serve it well. While watching, I could only think back wistfully to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Though that movie used mechanical effects that are far cruder than the digital ones employed in The Arrival, they were conceived simply and poetically, and strengthened belief in the story, and in the aliens themselves. In Close Encounters the spacecraft looks like an aluminum toy – a child’s vision of a spaceship. Its insides glow like the sun, and the short, big-headed aliens descend from it on stumpy, uncertain legs like infants. These designs have an elemental, archetypical feeling – they tap our emotional connection to well-known earthly things. In The Arrival the designs are at once too strange, and too banal, to believe.

Photograph courtesy of The Arrival.

March 15, 2017 by Nalina Moses

WAX FIGURES

Artist Ren Ri’s beeswax sculptures sit at the intersection of biology and technology, nature and artifice, animal and apparatus. For this series the Chinese artist constructed clear acrylic boxes, large enough to hold bowling balls, and filled them with swarms of bees. Every so often, as the hives were growing, he rotated the boxes and repositioned the queens. Afterwards he flushed the insects and honey from the cages, leaving the empty rippled, folded beeswax forms inside. These look, from up close, like abandoned post-nuclear landscapes and, from across the room, look like the desicated organs of a prehistoric beast.

There’s a strange tension between the tidy hexagonal structure of the hives and their bulging, swollen contours. The cells gives these works a pixellated look, as if they’ve been modeled with a computer program. They don’t seem to recognize gravity, as the beeswax congeals equivalently to all interior faces of the cube. And they don’t seem to recognize Cartesian geometry, their soft, tissue-like clumps evoking a shambolic, bodily logic. Though they offer rich compositions, the wax formations don’t lend themselves to contemplation. Stuffed within the antiseptic plastic boxes, they’re charged with physical potential, as if they’re about to come to life, to change, to grown.

Photo courtesy of Ren Ri and Pearl Lam Galleries.

March 08, 2017 by Nalina Moses