ANIMALISTIC

The work of Mrinalini Mukherjee, as installed now at the Met Breuer, has a ferociouscharisma. Though often classified as textile art because they’re made from hemp rope, they’d be better described as monumental sculptures. Scaled just larger than the human body, and hanging, standing and sitting directly in front of visitors, without vitrines, pedestals and labels, many have the fera; presence of Rodin’s figures. They’re so richly realized formally that they come alive emotionally. One almost expects them thrash about.

The installation, with mesh curtains and a flat beige carpet pulling one through the third floor gallery in a meandering path, plays brilliantly off the museum’s rough concrete walls and ceiling grid. It opens a soft, secret, shadowed space within the building, a kind of grotto, for these fleshy figures. Some depict characters from Hindu mythology, some depict people, and some depict plants. All have a fundamental axial symmetry that recalls bodies and trees, and curved surfaces that recall organs and leaves.

Weekend visitors were chatty, discussing, with various degrees of success, the iconography (”Look, it’s the peacock god!”), the work (”It’s meant to be seen in the round, not like this.”), and the artist (”She died in 2015”). It’s all rather priceless, since many didn’t know Mukherjee’s work until reading Holland Cotter’s rapturous review in the Times, or hearing about the show through word-of-mouth. At least this crowd took the work seriously. For many this show will be understood as womens art, Asian art, textile art, folk art, and craft, or, cynically, as a political corrective to museum shows celebrating the work of well-known white men. This is, simply, figural sculpture. It can compete with the marble figures on display in the classical wing at The Met, and, in terms of sheer physical charisma, it can win.

Mrinalini Mukherjee, Yakshi, 1984, hemp fibre, 225×105×72 cm. Photograph Courtesy of Jhaveri Contmeporary.

September 08, 2019 by Nalina Moses

SPECTACULAR

A night at the Met Opera, seeing Rigoletto, left me impressed, and also wondering what specifically it is that opera does. This production, reset and reimagined by accomplished Broadway director John Mayer in 1960 Las Vegas, possesses, fittingly, loads of visual razzle dazzle. There are sumptuous silk and sequined costumes, and flashy, majestic sets by Christine Jones.

The only other operas I’ve seen at the Met were both directed by Franco Zefferelli, and each left me feeling as if a distant world were unfolding below me on the round stage of the opera house. In Carmen a medieval Italian village came alive with beggars, peasants and farmers, and a donkey and a horse, as the performers carried on among them. The effect was stagey, but this village had its own texture and rhythms; it was a real place.

Throughout Rigoletto I felt as if I were seeing a Broadway spectacular designed by skilled professionals. The conventions of popular theater certainly brought the story to life: the allover carpet stood telegraphically for the inside of a casino, the sleazy red miasmic glow a strip club, and the slashing neon lights a storm. The actors used broad gestures to communicate, borrowing from sitcoms. One actor dies while emerging from an elevator, and the doors open and close automatically, again and again, on her stiff corpse.

The music, iconic, is performed expressively, particularly by tenor Vittorio Grigolo as the Duke. But it feels as if it has been dropped into the elaborate sets and staging, rather than resting at the heart of the performance. For opera, isn’t that the inverse of how it should be? One expects that the songs will carry the story, and then carry one away.

Photo by Meghan Duffy, Met Opera Production Department.

September 07, 2019 by Nalina Moses

UPON ANOTHER TIME

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is many things: a shoot ‘em up, a buddy film, a nostalgia trip, a revisionist history, and mostly, an essay about the fickle and devastating movement of time. The film, which runs over two and a half hours and never flags, shows how times past (fictional, historical, personal) course inextricably through the present. To paraphrase Faulkner, the past is never past, even when remembered incorrectly.

As the movie, set in 1969 and framed around the Manson murders, marches towards its ugly conclusion, we spend time with three Los Angeles movie industry characters: past-his-prime television actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), Dalton’s stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and Dalton’s neighbor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Each time we drop in on one we are served, in bright, lithe, brilliantly constructed flashbacks, a glimpse at the events that brought them to this point. As Tate watches herself fight in a movie, she remembers training for the stunts. As Doug meets a young television star, he relives a major failed audition. As Cliff fixes the antenna on the roof of Doug’s house, he recalls a life-altering conflict with is ex-wife. These memories flare up instantly and seamlessly, slicing cleanly through the present and then dropping the viewer right back into it. They lend depth to the main narrative without pulling it off on shaggy paths.

There has been criticism about the way Tate is portrayed here, as a glowy, speechless feminine archetype: smiling, dancing, driving on the freeway. But Rick and Cliff too are pictured mainly in small moments, many sadly domestic. We see Doug cracking eggs and making frozen margaritas, and we see Cliff opening cans of dog food and making macaroni and cheese. As a counterpoint, we witness all three of these characters in small triumphs. Tate hears a movie theater audience laugh at her on-screen pratfall. Cliff beats up an unsuspecting martial arts star on a Hollywood backlot. And Rick reshapes trite bag-guy dialogue to steal a scene. It’s in these small moments – often mundane – that they make themselves and their lives. Tate, as we see her, is young woman going about her days: running errands, meeting friends, listening to records. It’s an honorable way to depict her, or anyone.

August 20, 2019 by Nalina Moses

OF TWO NATIONS

I walked into the exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963 - 1983 with questions. Was black power achieved in these years? Would all the artworks featured have a strident political focus? And would this art be good?

This art is great. The exhibit features a cadre of American artists executing museum-caliber work in styles conversant with the dominant aesthetics of the time: expressionism, conceptual art, and the new figuration. Yet almost all of the artists were unknown to me, as if they had been working in a parallel hidden universe.

Photographs by Roy DeCarava have spare compositions and a shadowy graphite-like finish. They render daily scenes with gravity, distance and mystery. Painted portraits by Barkley Hendricks honor their subjects, often himself, with particularizing details but without sentimentality. These life-size renderings possess awesome graphic authority, and bring the white-walled gallery to life. Canvases by Carolyn Mims Lawrence – packed with figures and words – carry the narrative force of epics, and call one closer.

Why haven’t these artists been featured in prominent group shows or individual retrospectives, as their art world peers have? Are they best considered when isolated culturally, as they are here? Certainly many of the artworks tackle political themes, but all can also be understood formally. These artists are producing work that complements or exceeds that of their peers. So why do most of them remain undersung?

Barkley Hendricks. Blood (Donald Formey), 1975. Oil and acrylic on canvas.

August 19, 2019 by Nalina Moses