MACHINES FOR LIVING WITH

The Ettore Sottsass retrospective at the Met Breuer is subtitled Design Radical, and “radical” is correct for both its ideological and scientific connotations. Sottsass was a singular spirit who, like an atomic free radical, moved independently and reacted strongly with all the forces he encountered. Born in 1917 and trained in Viennese-inflected modernism by his architect father, he borrowed tenets and freedoms from every cultural movement afoot in postwar Europe: Bauhaus, Pop, Zen, Minimalism, Neo-Classicism. While his designs are typically filed under Postmodernism, they’re more personally-felt and eclectic than those of academic practitioners like Michael Graves and Robert Stern, whose references are mostly Classical. In addition, Sottsass worked in a far broader range of media. There are at the museum, in addition to Sottsass’ architectural drawings, glassware, jewelry, tableware, furniture, lighting, plastic laminate patterns, and textiles.

Sottsass remains best-known for his product design, in particular the portable red plastic typewriter he concocted for Olivetti in 1969. But it’s probably better to think of him as an interior designer. Not because he cared about finishing rooms, but because his sphere of influence is primarily the interior. His strongest works are large-scale furnishings (desks, armoires, etageres, totems) that possess dubious practical value and exceptional sculptural charisma. They overturn, effortlessly, the modern dictum that form follows function, suggesting instead that form intends to delight. Rendered with theatrical proportions and unorthodox materials in noisy juxtaposition to one another, these constructions have a playful mechanistic energy, like friendly robots. A standing cabinet with a glowing yellow stained maple finish has shiny, gold, cupcake-sized pulls. A wall divider with long canted shelves, its arms akimbo, is finished in a crayon-box assortment of lacquers. Each piece is strong enough to anchor an otherwise simply furnished loft or bedroom or conference room, charging the entire space. However eccentric, Sottsass’ designs are fit for living.

Ettore Sottsass, Tartar Table, 1985. Reconstituted wood veneer, plastic laminate (HPL print laminate), lacquer, plywood. Photo courtesy The Met.

September 05, 2017 by Nalina Moses

FACE TIME

What a pleasure it is to step out of the elevator onto the fourth floor of the New Museum and into painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s show. The ceiling is high, the lights are dim, and the walls have been painted blood red and hung with seventeen of the artist’s large-scale oil portraits. Each canvas is about eight feet high and depicts, in slightly larger-than-life scale, a single young black man or woman. They are handsome people, and the gallery shimmers with their physical presence.

It’s well-known that Yiadom-Boakye paints from memory, and the practice gives her work a heightened enigma. Unlike Alice Neel’s portraits, that exaggerate singularities in appearance, Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits endow her sitters with a sublime classical grace. They are supremely poised, remain absolutely still. From the finish of the paint one sees that the subjects’ faces, hands and feet, those parts of the body we expect to reveal character, have been worked with extra effort to get them just right, and yet they don’t reveal anything at all. A ballerina with raised arms closes her eyes. A man lying in bed stares blankly into the middle distance. The subjects’ backdrops also remain a mystery. One man, dressed in black, rests languidly in a flurry of great green brushstrokes. Is he lying in a field of high wild grasses, a flat lawn, or a steep hill? Most figures are simply set against a dark, shadowed background, like a department store photographer’s blank scrim.

As the wall text notes, in ennobling the black figure Yiadom-Boakye fills an unseemly void in art history and the art museum. The sensuality of these paintings – their of-the-body scale, gestural brushstrokes, densely colored surfaces – give them extraordinary charisma. The subjects’ dark skin tones are rendered as if warmed from within. But these paintings don’t depict real people, who come with warts, veins, blemishes, crooked grins, and darting eyes, and pass their days in mussed apartments, sunlit studios, and neighborhood bars. Like many other contemporary painters, Yiadom-Boakye is uninterested in portraiture as a tool to reveal personal character. She holds something back. But when a museum visitor sees these elegant black men and women, she wants, perhaps naively, to know exactly who they are.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 8am Cadiz, 2017. Oil on linen, 78 ¾ × 98 3/8 in (200 × 250 cm). Courtesy the artist; Corvi-Mora, London; and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

September 04, 2017 by Nalina Moses

STAND UP GUYS

Like other Americans I’ve been searching desperately for poetry – concise, vivid, explosively beautiful language – to make sense of the current political climate. I turned first to the pundits. Keith Olbermann, who performed eloquently on his nightly MSNBC show during the 2008 election, now publishes a video journal for GQ (The Closer) that takes the form of irrational, deeply-felt tirades. On her MSNBC show Maddow his former colleague Rachel Maddow shares intellectual musings that often don’t add up. And MSNBC’s smart first couple, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (Morning Joe), remain frustratingly restrained. So I’m turning to revisionist history. And I’m turning to actual poetry. Yet none of it captures exactly that thing that is simmering right now in America, and in me.

Is the best hope our stand-up comedians, with their irreverent, slapdash wisdom? A month before the 2016 election Bill Maher tweeted “The great sadness is even if Trump doesn’t become president, we live in a country where half the people think he should be.” Chris Rock, in a Rolling Stone interview, joked simply that the police might once in a while shoot a white man. And Marc Maron kicks off each WTF podcast with a ten-minute preamble in which he describes what he’s at that very moment doing, eating, listening to, annoyed with, and dreaming about, all of which veers, naturally and more and more frequently, straight into American politics. He refers to the Charlottesville white supremacists as “the army of unfuckable hate nerds.”

In each loosely-structured ten-minute soliloquy Maron conveys, with sense and passion, in an unembellished vernacular, the mood of the time. He’s a shouter and delivers every part of his show (cheesy on-air commercials, respectful guest introductions, conversation-prodding interjections) with the same level of earnestness. Maron is self-absorbed, but when he stops and looks outwards he can wrangle unsavory social complexities. His preamble feels like a form for our time, storytelling laced with rage.

September 03, 2017 by Nalina Moses

HANDIWORK

About to embark on a new writing project about architectural drawings, I took in this season’s architecture show at MoMA, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archives.

An architectural drawing can do a number number of things: construct a personal vision, instruct a builder, persuade a client, clarify spatial organization, communicate technical specifications… Most of the drawings in the FLW show are visionary, and what singular visions they are. Prepared for publication or presentation, these exterior perspectives illustrate, all-at-once, the character of the building: its sculptural presence, its materials, its formal stylings, and its relationship to the landscape. Many are so brilliantly composed that they are themselves iconic. A drawing of the David and Gladys Wright House gives a glimpse of its curved inner facade from below, standing at the center of its circular walkway, a small child’s glowing spaceship dream.

Other drawings on display are more fundamentally pragmatic, fixing dimensional and construction details. One poster-sized section drawing of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo slices through its entryway to reveal profiles and details of its customized brickwork and stone panels. It shows every grout line, every turn of every stone panel, every steel reinforcing bar embedded in the concrete decks. Marks noting dimensions have been lain right over those noting profiles, right over those noting materials. The drawing is a cloud of lines, alive with the density, complexity and sensuality of real brick and stone.

Most remarkable are those drawings that convey both the vision and the physicality of a building. A perspective of the Millard House, in colored pencil, shows us its stern textile-block facade from slightly above, as a bird would see it, overlooking a gentle ravine, framed by the drooping branches of decades-old eucalyptus trees. Its yellowing sheet has worn, torn edges, and its surface a rich patina of lead smudges, pencil points, erasings, overlapping lines and small stray marks. The character of the drawing gives the house itself a dark, ancient feeling. It’s less like a building than a natural formation, rising from the ground.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Millard House (La Miniatura), Pasadena, California (Exterior perspective from the garden) 1923–1924

September 02, 2017 by Nalina Moses