CITY SLICKER

The press surrounding MoMA’s retrospective of Bodys Isek Kingelez can’t really pin down who he is or what he does. It refers to him as a sculptor and an architect but he’s neither; he’s an artist who crafts maquettes proposing vibrant new cityscapes. He might most accurately referred to as a dreamer.

This Congolan’s remarkable tableaux, built to scale on rigid bases, just as conventional architectural models are, propose brilliant new facilities for cities in Zaire and around the world. He has designed the shells for hospitals, laboratories, hotels, casinos and government buildings. His schemes are megastructures that have the bravura and unembarrassed grandiosity of themed amusement parks, gated resorts, and Olympic villages.

Kingelez has no formal training as an artist, architect or planner. His assemblage are crafted from mundane materials: cardboad boxes, colored paper, tin cans, magic marker and crayon. They are impressive in their formal inventiveness and raw physical charisma. He devises structures with never-before-seen geometries, profiles and ornaments. He works in a palette of bright primary colors, highlighting elements with mirror, glitter, and foil. There’s no concern for good taste, restraint, balance or proportion, or for the fashions of modernism. Kingelez crafts cities that are intoxicated with the notions of progress and development, shaping a joyful new world of activity and prosperity.

October 28, 2018 by Nalina Moses

EIGHT MILLION STORIES

The Mile-Long Opera, a biography of 7 o’clock, a choral work with music by David Lang and lyrics by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, premiered on the High Line last month. It’s a series of 26 linked songs staged along the length of the park, performed by 1,000 professional and amateur singers culled from city choirs. The work’s pedigree is highbrow; architecture office D S + R is credited as Creator and partner Elizabeth Diller as Co-Director, along with the accomplished choreographer Lynsey Peisinger.

Yet the Opera is direct and moving. Almost impossibly, it succeeds in capturing the battered and eccentric spirit of the city right now. Carson and Rankine wrote after interviewing locals about what 7:00 pm meant to them. It’s a time when most shed a public identity and fall back into themselves. Some of the words stun:

No we don’t talk but people get to know each other just by walking past each other all the time.

Parts of us erase.

Others are more lighthearted and, perhaps unintentionally, comic.

I think about coffee cups a lot.

Everyone getting their food delivered… no one cooks anymore.

The songs are staged very simply, with the bulk of the singers dressed in street clothes and lit visors, standing out like firelies against the dusk. Their voices, mostly unamplified, float just above the roar of traffic. The piece resets the architecture of the park. A tier of benches becomes a stepped stage. Metal floor grate becomes a precarious membrane through which singers wail to passersby, Marry me. One brushes up against the performers in order to move on. Some stare ahead blankly, and others, convincing actors, engage a visitor directly, holding her gaze until she steps out of range. The experience is embarrassingly intimate, exposing how fraught one-on-one exchange can be. It might be a sign of our times.

As one strolls north, towards Hudson Yards, individual singers and lyrics fade and one understands the opera as a constellation of small, brilliant, individual stories. That the singers are deeply diverse in age, race, community and singing ability adds another layer of truth. In New York City we live deep in the sea of humanity. There are around us millions of others – entirely unknown – to speak to, learn from, and love. Yet to remain whole, and to remain sane, we move past them and return to the familiar.

Photograph by Thomas Schenk.

October 21, 2018 by Nalina Moses

BRAVE NEW FORMS

The architecture megashow at MoMA Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 highlights the era when the nation became politically and economically fortified after the second world war. It’s eye-opening for a number of reasons. First, it puts Yugoslavia on the map as a nation with an extraordinary legacy of modern architecture. The buildings documented here are stunning, and most likely unfamiliar to those who haven’t traveled through the country or studied the subject. The installation, featuring drawings, photographs (many commissioned for the exhibit by Valentin Jeck), video, and furniture, provides a rich context for the design.

Second, the show makes a strong case for concrete over steel and glass, the preferred materials of high modernism. Valentin’s photographs have a graininess and grandeur that capture surfaces of aging concrete magnificently. One sees in these avant-garde concrete structures the innate plasticity of the material, the drama of sculptural forms, and the inventiveness of the architects. One sees traces of, and perhaps homage to, Le Corbusier, Lou Kahn and Paul Rudolph. And one sees a unique modern language emerge, one unconstrained by orthogonal geometries and open to emotional expression. Some of the buildings, through pragmatic in programing, have the feeling of science fiction.

Finally, and most deeply, the show reminds one of what architecture, at its most elemental, can mean and do. Similar to South American architects today, the Yugoslavian architects featured here were operating at a nexus of shifting political and cultural identity, making forms charged with meanings that were in every case more than formal. The resulting buildings are hopeful, forward-looking, violent and otherworldly. At a time when so much of contemporary American architecture is cynically corporate, intended primarily to improve the value of a property, these buildings – that climb, spin, splinter and rage – elevate physical experience, and give testimony to history and place.

Photograph by Valentin Jeck. Marko Mušič, Memorial and Cultural Center and Town Hall, Montenegro, 1969-75.

October 06, 2018 by Nalina Moses

NOWHERE MEN

After seeing the Giacometti retrospective at the Guggenheim, one considers his work in a new way. His figures are sculptures and also portraits. They are not abstract symbols for the human condition but depictions of this person and that person, though those individuals may not be named. Each figure has the nuances, character, and dignity of a real human person; it carries a soul. Some of the loveliest pieces are of his wife Annette.

The show also offers lessons about scale. It’s a handsome installation, the best sculpture installation I can remember at the museum. Larger than life-size figures have been placed singly, in private niches on low pedestals, and cast dramatic shadows across the curving outer walls. Small figures are collected in standing vitrines closer to the inner railing, and are swallowed in streams of museum visitors. Medium-sized pieces are set in groups on low curved tables that permit views from both the front and the back. Surprisingly, it’s these mid-sized pieces that have the most powerful presence. Together, they make engaging compositions that call one forward.

Even those figures that share a platform or base seem entirely disconnected from one another, entirely alone. Whether walking about or standing still, they worry. To consider numbers of them at once is shattering. These impossibly elegant figures, who we see as real men and women, are doomed by their individuality, They cannot connect to the world around them, or to each other.

Photograph courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum.

September 30, 2018 by Nalina Moses