BOXED IN

In Alex Garland’s movie Ex Machina a tech mogul isolates himself inside his remote forest retreat, then gets busy prototyping life-like female robots endowed with artificial intelligence and something very close to artificial emotion. The movie was filmed at the Juvet Hotel in Norway, designed by Jensen & Skodvin, and this structure stands perfectly for the mogul’s values: physical and psychic isolation.

The hotel, comprised of several smaller buildings, is not much to look at from the outside. Its box-like suites, the size of suburban garages, are clad in dark wood siding and, in select spots, with full-height glazing. These windows allow spectacular views of untrammeled forest into the rooms, which are furnished in an opulent version of Scandinavian minimalism.

The mogul never steps outside, and spends much of his waking hours in the airless basement workshop. He works out obsessively and works obsessively, and that’s about it. During the day views of the trees, mountains and river rush inside, like dazzling images on the greatest HD screen. At night everything goes dark, and the rooms feel like bunkers.

I can remember visiting an apartment in the Dakota years ago, on a wet fall day, and stepping out onto the turret balcony to see all of Central Park spread out before me. I felt like a medieval queen, with the wind pulling at my coat, birds circling above, and my dominion below. For centuries that power of survey – of looking and taking in what is yours – has been a measure of power. Now power might be what this mogul has – looking out onto a landscape without having, or wanting, any relationship to it. Nature is just another image. As the mogul concocts a female – for companionship and service – he holds the rest of the world at bay.

August 17, 2019 by Nalina Moses

BACK IN THE DAY

Gary Winogrand: Color at the Brooklyn Museum, has the most perfect format for a photography exhibit. Visitors sit in a dark hall on soft benches gazing at twelve different slide shows on the walls, each picture the size of a windshield projected for the time of a walk sign. The slide shows are staggered, so the eye wanders from one to the other and then back again, tirelessly, hypnotically, even as one loop begins to repeat itself.

The 450 color slides here were selected from over 45,000 left by Winogrand at the time of his death in 1984, and have a scattershot quality. Most are good and some are perfect, but none are without visual and cultural interest. There are classic Winogrand themes: twinning (two teenage girls in matching striped sweaters looking different ways), layering (stooped men passing below stiffly pretty bridal mannequins in a window display), and voyeruism (one gentleman in the crush of a rush hour sidewalk turning a knowing eye to the photographer).

Most of the photographs are from the early 1960′s, before hippies, second wave feminism, civil rights, and the Kennedy assassinations. It’s a gentler time. Winogrand’s photographs are restricted thematically, with only a handful of black and Asian subjects. Gender codes are inflexible; women wear dresses, heels and costume jewelry, and men wear suits and hats. At first the photos have a chic Mad Men gloss, but on closer inspection everyone inside them appears a bit ragged, run-down by the show.

Winogrand’s compositions are typically about five degree off-kilter, with a center of gravity perilously close to the frame. This instability is telling. The photographer’s compulsion to capture every moment, every corner, every character, here feels less manic than sad. It’s as if the world he sees, that he’s sitting inside of, is tipping dangerously. And it is.

August 16, 2019 by Nalina Moses

PERSONAL STATEMENT

The pitch of the Hilda af Klint solo show at the Guggenheim is that this early twentieth-century Swedish painter, a woman, mastered an uncompromisingly abstract style before all the men who are ordinarily credited with it (i.e. Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky) did, and that she has been tragically under-recognized. The former may be true, and the latter certainly is. But a better pitch would have focused on the extraordinary personal language she forged. I can’t think of another modern painter who’s syntax is so rich and remains so internally consistent. All the works here are of a piece; all were clearly crafted by one person.

Klint’s forms are simple and evocative. The graceful, non-representational globules, strips and swirls she employs have a rational bent. These marks have precise meanings for her, which she documented neatly with pencil in ledgers, which are also here on display. They are deployed unerringly, on door-sized vertical canvases, against dull blank backdrops, in bright, slightly acrid, fruit-colored hues. The compositions recall biology illustrations, geometry diagrams, foreign alphabets, religious talismans, and alchemical equations. They have intellectual authority and graphic ease.

The paintings command attention from viewers rushing down the crowded ramps, a perfect foil for the blank white curving walls behind them. Klint wrote with hope that her great late-in-life series of canvases The Paintings for the Temple would one day be shown in a spiral temple. Now they have been.

Hilda af Klint, Altarpieces, Group X, No.1, 1915

August 14, 2019 by Nalina Moses

SECOND IMPRESSION

When I first visited the River Building at Grace Farms two years ago I felt a chill about the place, with its dubious program and precious design. This community center, designed by by SANAA at a purported cost of 150 million dollars, consists of five small, separate, glass-walled pavilions (auditorium, cafe, library/bookstore, basketball court, and tea house) linked with a curving steel canopy. It seemed like a very grand, very expensive folly.

Visiting again, on a chilly, sunny, fall afternoon, the building left an altogether different impression. Rather than the pavilions, it was the canopy that emerged as the primary figure, cutting an easy path through the landscape. Walking beneath it while dipping in and out of the pavilions, it shaped a lively and loosely-structured promenade. The canopy’s low flat roof allowed views to slip through from each side, and its slender steel posts – no wider than a coffee can – sliced them cinematically, framing stretches of the forest and horizon beyond.

The curving glass walls had seemed, earlier, terribly diagrammatic, an element intended to allow the landscape “inside” and the pavilions to “disappear.” On this day they fashioned a compelling membrane between interior and exterior, catching and compounding reflections of sky, clouds, trees and lawn, complicating the profiles of the structures, and enriching one’s walk along them. The building surrendered to the grounds gracefully, making a gorgeous modern park.

Photograph by Nalina Moses

November 06, 2018 by Nalina Moses