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Jason Fox
Feature Inc.
By Lily Faust
Eight paintings
and a lone sculpture placed in the center of the gallery
highlight Fox’s idiosyncratic iconography: cartoon-based
images of single men, in many cases shown from the shoulders
up, bearing visual cues of obvious impenetrable human emotion;
a smirk, a blank stare. Simultaneously frank, quirky and
urgent, Fox’s work bridges painting and cartooning,
synthesizing the shorthand of linear caricature. Sinuous
lines accentuate washes of paint, utilizing painting techniques
that move from illustrational to painterly, often borrowing
from the vocabulary of Pop and narrative art.
The paintings are
notable for their play on collective imagery, utilizing
clichés to establish an unexpected truthfulness in
capturing human character. The four drawings located at
the entrance of the gallery are remarkable in parodying
comic “types,” such as “the villain”,
“the drunkard,” or “the knave”.
These near life-size drawings compel the viewer to have
a one-on-one encounter with characters reminiscent of Dr.
Seuss’s “the Grinch”. In Untitled, a gaunt
face is visible through the four slats of an enclosure;
something like closet, or perhaps a jail. Illuminated from
the outside, the slats cast repetitive shadows, which appear
as gray horizontal bars on the face, pushing the drama of
the image toward an effective graphic tension of black and
white. In another work, titled Jeff, the face is ominously
blank; no eyes, no lines, except for a red, styrofoam clown
nose collaged onto the middle of the face. Floating on a
milky white surface, the face is outlined by gestural strokes
in red paint, accentuated by scrawling lines to depict the
shoulder-length hair. The mouth shows ambiguity, fixed in
a curious, tentative smile. Considering the absence of features,
and the reduction of portrait elements, the painting expresses
more than what initially meets the eye. The deceptively
blank, atonal face, in spite of having no eyes, returns
the viewers gaze, striking dissonance in the observer.
Monument for Destruction,
a cement and resin sculpture, has a humorous touch that
belies the work’s impressive artistry. Half figure,
the piece is cast from the waist down with two cement legs
on bulbous feet that support a red pelvis, made from resin,
while topped by a phallic spike, whose constituent parts,
like spinal vertebrae, gradually change in color from bright
red, to pale pink, to white. Resistant to specific interpretation,
yet obviously rich in metaphor, the sculpture brings to
mind issues of consciousness, both spiritual and physical.
The work here confirms Fox’s answer to a question
that appears on the Q&A sheet that the gallery provides.
Responding to, “Are these portraits?” Fox states,
“they’re portraits of being stuck inside a big,
powerful, stupid, funny, crazy, violent, ignorant, dangerous
head looking into a mirror.” The direct appeal of
these words is matched by the zany energy of the artwork
bordering on existential horror (and mirth), appreciated
by all who have been there.
Through 2/19.
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Kim Keever
Feigen Contemporary
By Mary Hrbacek
Defined by misty
air and diffuse light, these color photographs of majestic
mountain landscapes conjure an ephemeral feeling of form
emerging from chaos. Empty, pristine settings evoke a primordial
quality reminiscent of an early geologic age, spurring philosophical
queries regarding the nature of time and perceptions of
reality. Rocky peaks observed from the air stress a sense
of unending space, like the far reaches of the American
West. Rather than document the known, natural world, Keever
creates his own topologies in fish tanks; utilizing plaster
of Paris rocks, colored lights, and colored pigments in
the water. Then he photographs these homemade environments,
capturing the effects that transform within their confines.
Landscape as a
genre offers limitless possibilities with diverse implications;
superficially, these images are related to the grand tradition
of Albert Bierstadt and the Hudson River School. Keever's
backlit rock out-croppings and roiling cloud formations
suggest the turbulent natural phenomena associated with
JMS Turner, or even Thomas Cole. But the anonymity of place
and the fleeting effects convey an unreal dimension. The
intermingling of earth and sky evokes a silent eternal quality
associated with remote areas. Time, measured in the millennia
required to create the earth's tectonic plates, acquires
new meaning.
Happy accidents
add formal details; dark scratches and smudges enrich the
harmonious hues that provide for lush surfaces. Here the
mutable physical dynamics of nature become metaphoric equivalents
of mercurial human emotions. Ansel Adams photographed panoramas
of the Western United States with similar results. While
these photographs have a familiar veneer, appearances can
be deceiving; Keever reaches beneath the surface to provide
a taste of spectacle and fabricated photo-drama, not unlike
a cinematic stage or natural history diorama.
1/6 through 2/19.
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Amy
Yoes
Michael
Steinberg Fine Art
By Joyce
Korotkin
Amy
Yoes’ Room Tone, a complex installation of interrelated
parts whose sum total presents a kind of retrospective of
her own body of work reads as a metaphor for the interior
landscape of public and private memory. All of the works
in this show; paintings, sculpture, and ink wall drawings,
re-appear in miniature in the heart of the exhibition, an
intricate sculpture titled Beehive 2003. Something of a
cross between an architectural model and an elaborate post-modernist
doll house, this piece functions as both an artwork in the
show, as well as a miniature museum repository for work
that Yoes has created since her days at the Art Institute
of Chicago in 1984. Filled with psychological spaces one
can peer into, the model serves as an interior and exterior
replica of not only the artist’s personal and professional
history in the art world. The pool on one side of the house,
for instance, replicates an installation the artist once
created, in which white marble amphora on red felt circles
floated around like giant lily pads on a lovely lake, propelled
by hoses. Inside, echoing the cycles of studio life, works
are hung or set leaning against the walls, as if they were
still in progress or perhaps waiting to be shipped out to
a show or sent to a collector. On the upper levels of the
construction are models of works yet to come, the embodiment
of ideas still in formation.
In
the main space of the “real” gallery, the originals
of works that are represented in miniature within the model
are exhibited. Five colorful, nearly kinetic paintings,
each with multiple vanishing points, are hung in a row.
Graphic, flat and yet full of illusionistic depth, they
contain a pastiche of decorative images from architecture
and theatrical sets. Scaffolding, balconies and platforms
careen around in skewed space with no gravitational anchor.
Ornamental embellishments float around like dancing satin
ribbons. The effect is that of a visualization of a wild
musical composition.
Huge, site-specific sepia ink drawings, reminiscent of 18th
century nature studies, grace the gallery walls. Derived
from Yoes’ filigree and flourish pattern paintings,
titled Fragments, some of these works intertwine around
the gallery’s structural columns in the center of
the room. If one stands in a particular spot (subtly marked
on the floor), the drawings on the column and the wall,
beyond, coalesce perfectly into one greater whole which
is emblematic of the structure of this idiosyncratic exhibition
in which every element, as if in a huge puzzle, falls into
place to complete the picture.
1/7 through 2/12.
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Stephen Hughes
Robert Mann Gallery
By Nicollette
Ramirez
These small prints
are a welcome change from the large scale works by German
artists like Gursky, Struth and Ruff, and packs as much
visual punch. Capturing natural and man-made landscapes
across Europe and America, Hughes’ prints evoke a
kind of peace that can only exist when people are not the
focus of the work. Human beings are shown here as an afterthought,
framed against the immensity of space.
Sometimes Hughes
chooses landscapes that are somewhat reminiscent of the
English suburbs. In Atlantic City I, USA, 2004, Atlantic
City never seemed so bleak. We see a school bus, a red car,
and and two boarded up buildings with a wide lawn littered
with debris against the backdrop of a boardwalk that tells
the viewer, ominously, of the cold ocean beyond.
In Buffalo, USA,
2004, a field of white snow is interrupted by the jutting
masculine lines of an abandoned factory, the rust and grey
and grime contrasting with the white snow and blue sky.
Bari I, Italy, 2003 suggests a similar bleak beauty. This
photograph shows a playground without children. Completely
devoid of life, the work suggests an “empty stage”,
a space where one can imagine something occurring, but nothing
else.
The stark beauty
of Hughes landscapes come from a juxtaposition of straight
and horizontal lines, coupled with the dynamic of natural
and man-made worlds colliding. In Genoa, Italy, 2002 waves
from the ocean come right up to recreational facilities,
where men play football. The flat planes of brown earth
colliding with the horizon of hazy buildings and mountains
in the distance are punctuated by the lone figure of a man
engaged in an ambiguous task. These images, though not staged,
are intriguing and leave the viewer with an odd sense of
unfulfilled desire.
Through 3/5.
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Chinese Photography
Today
Chambers Fine
Art
By Joel Simpson
The varied styles
of this work by six Chinese photographers; Chi Peng, He
Yunchang, Hong Lei, Song Dong, Weng Fen and Zhang Huan,
are entirely consistent with trends in photography elsewhere
in the world, including examples of staged photographs,
urban landscapes and body identity themes. The varied styles
of this work are entirely consistent with trends in photography
elsewhere in the world, including examples of staged photographs,
urban landscapes and body identity themes. The show includes
work that is astonishingly original, as well as some that
looks naïve to the jaded, Western eye, but which may
resonate more strongly with Chinese viewers.
In the series of
urban landscapes, titled Birds Eye View: Shenzhen and other
cities, by Weng Fen, each image overlooks a contemporary
city in China; with its high-rise office and apartment buildings,
many of which are still under construction. Each is viewed
from behind a foreground wall, where one or two uniformed
schoolgirls with braids looks over to the scene beyond.
The walls take up most of the foreground, and the skies
— two of them with dramatic clouds — most of
the background, leaving the landscape to occupy a narrow
strip in between, deadening the composition. We’re
clearly being asked to view the bustling present from the
perspective of an innocent future. The symbolism may seem
a bit heavy-handed to western eyes, but one can only imagine
what the issues of urban development might be in China,
and how these images might offer a gentle remonstrance to
go-go developers regarding the legacy they are leaving.
At the opposite
stylistic extreme is the twelve-image work, Seeds of Hamburg,
by Zhang Huan. These large prints document a performance
piece in which Zhang, his naked body covered in bird seed,
enters a gazebo-size cage into which twenty-eight doves
are released. They proceed to feed off of him, and he emerges
carrying one of doves in his arms, and then ends up flat
on his back in front of the cage with several birds pecking
on him. Zhang seems to be making a statement about martyrdom,
constraint, care and sacrifice, themes that seem especially
relevant to contemporary China.
Zhang’s work
follows the lead of another multiple in the show, Song Dong’s
Sampling the Water, a thirty-three-image installation depicting
the photographer, waist-high in the surf, patting at the
water and changing body positions. The press release informs
us that this work was one of the “most celebrated
images of Chinese photography in the 1990s.” One can
only surmise that its symbolism of a lone individual trying
to make meaningful shapes out of a patch of sea, with the
suggestion of dogged commitment to a futile endeavor, resonates
with a certain audience there. Has photography become the
new samizdat medium for China?
With these thoughts
in mind, we can wonder what issues Chi Peng’s two
black and white photographs, titled Consubstantiality, evoke.
Two people are shown, from the waist up, facing each other
in open palm contact; both are naked and completely painted
(or powered) in white. The figures, both with short cropped
hair and no facial hair, are apparently but not assertively
male and female, with the male taller than the female. They
look away from each other, one of them gazing into the camera.
In the second image, the heads seem to to have switched
bodies — or maybe they’re the same person’s
head. The implication seems to be that the two people are
so close that they share the same body, hence the title.
These photographs present striking graphic images; the facial
and body surface similarity pose universal questions of
sameness, difference, and the sharing of inner and outer
selves between intimate lovers. The cropped hair and farded
body surfaces suggest a curiously purified, even austere
context, with a hint of life-after-death. They are compelling
images in the West, and one must presume special meaning
to a Chinese audience.
Through 2/19. ¶
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Lee Kang-So
White Box
By Jessica
Park
Is it possible
to discuss contemporary Korean art, or any art for that
matter, without talking about national identities one way
or another? Perhaps not. Or at least not when it comes to
Korean art from the 1870s and 1880s, when finding “Korean-ness"
or balancing Korean characteristics with Western art forms
was one of the major issues in the Korean art world. Lee
Kang-So, born in 1943, is among the most distinguished artists
nationally and internationally, who has managed to give
expression to the Korean spirit in Western art forms. This
show presents an overview of his recent paintings, photographs,
and one sculpture piece.
Lee Kang-So is
best-known for his large-scale monochrome landscape paintings
that hint at mountain cliffs, hills, trees, and the like;
utilizing a few quick brush strokes. In these paintings
the artist uses less brush strokes and colors than in earlier
works. On white-ish blue gray canvas, black strokes dance
freely with a distinct rhythm, reminiscent of Korean traditional
literati ink paintings or calligraphic works. Not only the
lack of information on the scenes but the artist’s
playful brush strokes convey all the more charming mysteries
about the depicted landscape, as well as the artist himself,
as if one would secretly hope an especially whimsical Buddhist
monk would have some brilliant spiritual insights.
The black and white
photographs, which he began exhibiting in 2003, are equally
serene and meditational. Yet, they are also informational
in that they give us some clues about how the artist perceives
landscapes in a more tangible way (they are much less imposing
scales too). While his visions for paintings tend to be
extensive and spacious, his lens seeks details, such as
street corners, floors, walls and stairs. These photographs
of rural villages in various Asian countries are laudations
of the beauty of ancient architectonic culture in Asia,
where human engineering never seems to overrule nature’s
own coexistence. It is clear that this artist is particularly
fond of polished lines, either of wooden floors, columns,
or streets and their brilliant merging with raw rocks and
natural landscape that surround them.
Kang-So’s photography draws our attention back to
his early mysterious paintings, and reveals that his aesthetic
eye has always searched out a harmonious moment in nature;
order and disorder exist together peacefully. His only sculpture
piece in the show, a pristine shape of a plaster house seated
on scattered rocks, is especially suitable in this setting,
where the piece rests on an extended platform in the middle
of the gallery, whose original corner stones remain exposed.
Whether his art is cliché of Asian culture or not,
his talent in conveying the beauty of nature and its harmony
with human being is still truly amazing.
Through 2/12
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Linda Van Boven
Florence Lynch
Gallery
By Lee Klein
In multi-panel
photographic works, which are not for architectural purposes,
externalized Linda Van Boven investigates “women who
walk the streets”. Using surveillance camera shots
captured in instances as close-ups or scans, the artist
creates a series of cinemagraphic sequences redolent of
effects employed in Damian Loeb paintings.
Shots of prostitutes from afar come off as if the women
are being spied by one of the once ubiquitous TV police
reality genre programs, and thus expose moments, which seemingly
on cue, might raise one’s adrenaline level or otherwise
affect a moment of not quite breathless intensity. Meanwhile
within the sentence created by the consecutive photographs
are placed unexpected ephemeral interludes of spoons with
jam, lotus blossoms, assemblies of broken furniture, and
woodland scenes; suggestive that the artist is trying to
take us to a place or a moment in time which may soon be
gone.
The portions of work here that does not show women hustling
read as if hyper-realistic paintings, like the vegetable
dye transfer and acrylic on polylaminate works by Robert
Rauschenberg, exhibited simultaneously at the Chelsea branch
of Pace Wildenstein gallery right across the street.
Through 2/26
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Linn Meyers
Margaret Thatcher
Projects
By Lily Faust
These drawings
offer the experience of perceiving the shifting of pictorial
space, so tangible that one can almost touch the subtle
movement, itself. Upon closer inspection, one realizes that
it is all linear magic, achieved by slight aberrations in
the tightly spaced lines. Meyers works with lines and dots,
drawn on Mylar with extra-fine and medium point markers,
and broad tipped pens. Her optically rigorous surfaces suggest
the idea of “in front/in the back/and in between,”
hinting at fluctuations in the picture plane.
In Untitled, thin, crimson lines, horizontally drawn, overlap
with vertical sepia ones, creating a vividly undulating
surface. The interaction of the delicate lines enhances
virtual depth and distance. In a narrow section of the composition,
the vertical lines are absent, with only the meticulously
drawn, tight horizontals remaining. The essential vocabulary
of the artist, confined to the minute modulations of parallel
lines, can be examined here, creating the illusion of movement
and depth. In applying the principles of her unique vision,
Meyers effectively contrasts the areas in which the vertical
and horizontal lines resonate, defining and emphasizing
her sense of space.
These drawings, through the dispersion and compression of
lines and of dots in separate or joined instances, extend
pictorial distance. Unlike the endeavors of Renaissance
artists who used perspective to create pictorial depth,
Meyers exploits the optical dynamism inherent to adjacent
lines or dots. Building on the work of Modernist artists,
specifically Op-Artists, such as Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely,
and Agam, she arrives at more intimate and poetic conclusions.
Her lines, which are drawn freehand, show immense control
in the manner that they continue along the length of the
paper in delicate parallel lines. They are also spontaneously
irregular, reflecting the natural quirkiness of the hand
drawn line. The taut balance that she establishes between
control and spontaneity reflects the paradoxical nature
of these drawings. Simultaneously constructing and de-constructing
space, they tease the eye, compelling the viewer to experience
“being” and “nothingness” through
the rhythms of the lines and dots that punctuate space.
Through 2/19
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Drama, Romance,
Loneliness
Massimo Audiello
By Joyce
Korotkin
Alone in the cool
darkness of a Paris night, Kevin Cooley’s lone figure
lurks in the shadows on the shore of the Seine, illuminated
only by the distant festive lights of the Bateaux Mouches
as they glide past. In a cocoon of silence, despite the
loudspeakers and crowds of revelers on the passing boats,
the archetypal 21st century rock teenager sits enveloped
in the scent of history, the ghosts of La Belle Epoque embedded
in the surrounding architecture of winding stairs, curved
bridges and dark paths; above him an incandescent aubergine
sky. Cooley’s exquisitely composed, color saturated
photographs evoke a silent, interior aloneness that perfectly
characterizes the theme of this show of emerging artists
curated by Massimo Audiello, Christopher Bogia and Jen DeNike,
entitled, Drama, Romance, Loneliness, Narcissism and Many
More Diseases of the Soul.
Jen DeNike’s
video, Worshipping False Idols, explores narcissism the
setting of a Louisiana swamp. DeNike’s lens follows
a latter day “Narcissus,” a young man with movie-star
good looks who wanders naked through the primeval dank waters
and ruins. Oblivious to the primeval beauty of his decaying
surroundings, he carries a small camera that, echoing DeNike’s
lens, is also aimed exclusively at himself. In Death of
a Brother, a Scandinavian ritual in which brothers are buried
head to head becomes a metaphoric exploration of death and
Eros. Here, DeNike’s “brothers” are laid
to rest above ground, erotically stroked and gently covered
by flowers.
Like a slap in the face from a 1940s film, Angela Fraleigh’s
large scale figurative imagery violently collides with expressionist
obliterations in luridly colored large scale paintings.
Incorporating painting, photography and performance, Fraleigh
photographs herself masquerading as her mother in invented
scenes of brutality and passion. In defiance of historical
depictions of romance, her re-enactments of archaic notions
of the vulnerability of women are obliterated, replaced
with a contemporary, open indulgence in lust, power and
passion.
While Ann Toebbe
reduces the sum of our lives to the unnoticed little objects
and places that comprise memory in stylistically naïve
paintings resembling doll house floor plans, Christopher
Bogia chronicles the status of dogs, increasingly spoiled,
coiffed, primped and costly, as replacements in our alienated
lives for unfulfilled emotional needs. In one work, the
dog appears as a yarn painting, nostalgically recalling
school and camp craft projects; in another, it appears going
for a walk on printed fabric in the style of digital video
game graphics.
Rachel Foullon sums up the whole of cultural history with
paper floor sculptures into which real objects are inserted.
Echoing a landscape of the mind and the vicissitudes of
time, things such as houses and foliage appear and disappear
as one walks around the silhouetted black mountain of history.
1/6 through 2/26
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Ernest Briggs
The Anita Shapolsky
Gallery
By Lee Klein
This exhibition
of widely divergent and colorful styles covers three decades
of work by Ernest Briggs, who was included in curator Dorothy
Miller's landmark Twelve Americans exhibition in l956 at
the Museum of Modern Art. In turns raffish, exuberant, primitive,
naïf, and emotive one should make a couple of visits
to these canvases in order to get at the particular brand
of abstract art exhibited here.
We are reminded
that Briggs studied with abstract expressionist stalwart
Clifford Styll, who is said to have had the largest impact
on the latter artist's body of work (though Styll's continents
of chroma seem wider and thicker than Briggs sometimes slashes
sometimes dabs sometimes splotches). Further, Matisse and
or Bearden seemingly influenced certain works such as Untitled
l964. Finally, Untitled December l952 has all of the primaries
from Mondrian's grid, which then explode into a sea of slashes
and dashes, pouring down with a few other colors in a thunderous
rain.
Through 2/19.
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Yoshio Taniguchi
Designing the
new MoMA
By Michael
MacInnis
How to make architecture
invisible — this is the key to understanding Yoshio
Taniguchi’s approach to the risky task of reinventing
the home of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in a time
where the term “modern” rings quaint. In 1939,
when the original Goodwin and Stone building was constructed
on 53rd Street, giving birth to MoMA, the glaring contrast
between the severe minimalist facade of the new modern structure
and its formalist neighbors, a row of intricately detailed
Victorian brownstones, was such that no one needed to ask
which was the modern building. It was as if a spaceship
had landed in a forest, eviscerating the surrounding trees.
Today, however, one would be hard pressed to distinguish
a Midtown office building from a residential tower, or for
that matter, a museum tower. To be sure, this is not the
first time that MoMA has had to reassert its identity in
a volatile architectural environment. There was the Philip
Johnson addition in 1964, and in 1984 Cesar Pelli added
the museum tower. But here we not talking about another
addition; Mr. Taniguchi was asked to, essentially, reinterpret
the past while defining the essence of MoMA for future generations.
In technical terms,
this meant nearly doubling the capacity of the former building,
from a total exhibition space of 85,000 to 125,000 square
feet, with six floors of new and renovated galleries designed
around a glass-topped atrium that soars 110 feet above the
lobby. The new MoMA building, which was constructed under
the supervision of architects Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), holds
some 630,000 square feet, with a lobby that spans 53rd and
54th Streets, providing for two entrances on both sides
of the city block. The original Goodwin and Stone building
marks the 53rd Street entrance to the MoMA Roy and Niuta
Theaters and The Modern restaurant, and an entirely new
entrance on 54th Street provides public access through a
low-key, unified facade that faces a mostly residential
block. A seven-story office tower sits atop the gallery
building, housing conservation studios and offices for MoMA
staff, while construction is still underway on The Lewis
B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building,
which frames the eastern side of the museum’s Sculpture
Garden.
This final stage
of the project, the most extensive rebuilding and renovation
in MoMA’s seventy-five year history, will house the
museum’s archives and library, as well as the Celeste
Theater. Scheduled to open in 2006, the new 110-seat venue
will add a third public screen to MoMA. On a practical note,
it is worth mentioning here that all of the museum’s
facilities; film, theater and “special” exhibitions
are included in a single admission fee of $20. To assure
full access for people of all economic brackets, Target,
the art-friendly retail giant, has agreed to sponsor a weekly
free admission for everyone, Friday nights, from 4:00 to
8:00 pm. Moreover, JPMorgan Chase, the museum’s lead
sponsor, covered a major portion of the $425 million project.
If this were an entirely new museum, built from the ground
up, then such a project might call for the flamboyant design
of a Frank Gheery, whose signature titanium tourist attractions
have won press accolades and put previously unknown destinations
on the map. Everyone has heard about Bilbau; but who has
heard anything about the art the museum shows? Taniguchi’s
design for MoMA, on the other hand, not only allows the
artwork to take center stage, but equally important, the
building takes into account the magical dynamic of people
moving through a public space defined by great art.
There is a reserved,
understated elegance in in this design; the invisible hand
of the architect gets out of the way. Distinctions between
exterior and interior space are blurred, as natural light
and glimpses of the surrounding urban environment seem to
be everywhere wherever you wander throughout the building.
Monumental windows and curtain walls reveal the Abby Aldrich
Rockefeller Sculpture Garden and city street-life below,
while the larger-than-life Contemporary Galleries on the
second floor, with 22-foot high ceilings hovering above
a city bock of column-free space, dwarf even the most ambitious
Chelsea art spaces.
The second floor also houses a media gallery for moving-image
and sound works, as well as the Paul J. Sachs Prints and
Illustrated Books Galleries. On the third floor there are
galleries dedicated to design, drawings and photography,
while the fourth and fifth floors are devoted to painting
and sculpture from the MoMA collection. Temporary exhibitions
are mounted in the Rene d’Harnoncourt Exhibition Galleries
on the sixt floor, which feature 18-foot high ceilings and
sky-lit spaces.
In addition to the traditional infrastructure of the museum,
there are also the modern amenities that visitors have grown
to expect (or at least accept) today; three retail shops
designed by New York’s Gluckman Mayner Architects,
and four dining spaces designed by the firm, Bentel &
Bentel.
The essential difference
between the new MoMA, and what was before, is that where
there had been a single building with various additions
over the years, we can now speak of a fully integrated campus
facility, with historical underpinnings. But the physical
space is only one part of the equation. This is the city
which, after all, razed Mckim Mead & White’s legendary
Pennsylvania Station because, nice as the building was,
people didn’t take the train anymore. Now it’s
up to the decision makers at MoMA; the curators, the board
of directors, the director, to make this building work.
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Tina Modotti and
Edward Weston
Throckmorton Fine
Art
By Gu Huihui
This subtle, quietly
revealing exhibition about the collaboration between Tina
Modotti and Edward Weston during the years the pair had
spent together in Mexico, from 1923 to 1926, documents a
brief but pivotal moment in the history of Modernism. Weston,
dedicated to photography as a fine art medium, had left
his family and traveled to Mexico, hoping to reinvigorate
his artistic development; the twenty-seven-year-old Modotti,
a former minor film star and recently widowed, was embarking
on an uncertain new career. Both artists actively sought
out the unfamiliar landscape for new insights and inspiration.
Their works share an obvious formal affinity — Modotti
was Westen’s protege and lover — which gives
the exhibition its visual coherence, and yet, upon closer
examination, the divergent trajectories of the artists are
nevertheless abundantly foreshadowed.
We see the formalist
Weston mature as an artist; his single-minded focus on photography,
not as social realism or narrative, but as a formal composition
consisting of a few simple elements takes root. Modotti
inherits her mentor’s aesthetics. But while the compositional
elements in her photographs can appear to derive from Westen,
her different concerns and motivations emerge in even the
earliest of these groupings. The differences can be subtle;
her choice to use sepia tone paper and a softer focus lends
a more sentimental, nostalgic feel to her work. For example,
her photograph of an oil tank is not only striking for its
composition, but the image evokes a feeling of empathy.
Modotti, who remained behind in Mexico, without Weston until
1930, would gain notoriety for her political activities;
indeed, she would eventually abandon artist pursuits for
her sociological idealism. Even in her early works, the
energy is much different from Weston. Modotti was influenced
by Mexico itself, and her photographs implied narrative
if not outright social commentary, while for Weston everything
was fodder for composition; Mexico was little more than
an exotic studio location rife with unfamiliar design elements.
The exhibition carefully juxtaposes and weaves photographs
of the two artists together, so that their divergent paths
are clearly evident.
Woman with a Flag,
for example, shows Modotti’s debt to Weston in its
strong, spare composition. Yet, unlike Weston, we are drawn
to the substance of who this person is; there is a social
subtext. Modotti immerses herself in the lives of the people
of Mexico, and manages to incorporate their issues into
the work. Sometimes it is only a matter of what or whom
she chooses to photograph. Among her portraits and still-life
images are the photographs of murals (a conceptual choice
that is already one step removed from reality), including
one with Diego Rivera. Mexican artists such as Rivera and
Siquerios had a major impact on Western modern art and the
confluence of ideas in Mexico.
Weston’s
subjects, on the other hand, remain the existential other;
opaque, foreign, unknowable. The subject in Bell Peppers
are almost unrecognizable and appear monstrous. In his trademark
stark, high-contrast black and white, both plants are presented
at the same time with a relentless scientific precision
and with a monumental, heroic quality. In his portraits,
though not so dehumanized, the personality of the subject
is much less important than the artist’s eye. While
this may sound cold, everything is gorgeous.
Seeing the work of these two artists together in this context
forces one to look closely. The difference between teacher
and student, as well as the social and aesthetic dynamic
of radically different personalities converging and diverging,
allow for a unique hands-on glimpse into the beginnings
of the modern era.
Through 3/12.
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This Article
Sleeping Giant
The Wynwood Arts
District, and
the future of Art in Miami
By Michael
MacInnis
It’s a great
place to live, work and visit; it’s an easy sell —
Tony Goldman, CEO of Goldman Properties, is talking about
what many art world insiders are talking about today; Miami.
The city hosts two major art fairs, Art Miami, once a predominantly
Latin American art fair which (after a brief identity crisis)
has quietly evolved into a promising international boutique
style fair, and Art Basel Miami Beach, the the Swiss mega-fair
franchise with the bottomless bank account. On the surface,
it might appear that the enormous marketing resources behind
the Swiss fair, which enjoys a uniquely generous sponsorship
arrangement with UBS Investment Bank, is driving Miami’s
resurgence as an international center for art. But in fact
the changing demographics of Miami, and the intelligent
real estate development policies of Mr. Goldman and like-minded
“romantic developers” in the years preceding
are what lay the groundwork for this moment we are witnessing
today. The city’s influx of cultured, upwardly mobile
professionals has yielded a critical mass of serious collectors
rife with creativity and open to new ideas.
Some history: Towards
2000, faced with a moribund economy in Europe, the organizers
of the Art Basel fair in Switzerland sought to buy into
the action in Miami; at first seeking to purchase the Art
Miami fair from its original owners. When they were rebuffed,
however, a new fair was coined, Art Basel Miami Beach, which
was to eventually debut in the same convention center in
Miami’s thriving South Beach, where Art Miami takes
place, only a month earlier in December. In other words;
first came the revitalized neighborhood, and then the Basel
crowd followed the money.
But how did Miami’s
South Beach become a thriving hotspot in the first place?
Not merely by chance, to be sure. A quick reading of the
Goldman Properties company profile is telling; founded in
1968, the company is credited with re-branding New York’s
once infamous upper west side Manhattan (Remember West Side
Story?) as an attractive neighborhood with a distinct, chic
identity. Typically, Goldman purchases a strategic swath
of undervalued properties in a part of town that big-box
developers have all but written off. Rather than clear the
deck and build new, he “recycles” the architecture
that defines the neighborhood’s sense of place.
In 1977, the company
purchased 18 properties in an obscure manufacturing district
in Manhattan, south of Houston Street (an area once destined
to be cleared for an expressway). Today we call it Soho.
In 1985, Goldman Properties applied the same recipe to Miami’s
seemingly run down South Beach. Whereas adherence to an
economy of scale had led conventional developers to shun
the small boutique, Art Deco hotels that once shined along
the waters’ edge, Goldman recognized the potential
value of the hidden treasures waiting to be brought back
to life. Here we have a somewhat mixed blessing, however,
as the big-box builders managed nevertheless to dig in along
the fringes of the Art Deco strip, once the South Beach
imprimatur gained currency.
Fast-forward to
today: In the past year or so Tony Goldman and his son Joe
Goldman have set about to transform a former warehouse district
in Miami, called Wynwood, which boarders the city’s
Design District, into a 24/7 neighborhood with New York’s
Williamsburg across the East River as a model for the future;
Wynwood is located “across the bay” from Miami
Beach. To this end, the company has purchased some 20 properties
(mostly warehouses) in a bid to create a pedestrian friendly
grid system, with plans to widen sidewalks, for example,
in anticipation of sidewalk cafes, storefronts, and lots
of people.
Unlike South Beach, however, where the task involved rejuvenating
(and protecting) an existing neighborhood; or Soho, which
had a highly developed public transit system already in
place to bring people in, the challenge for Goldman this
time around is considerably greater. Fortunately, like-minded
players appear to be on the same page here. Craig Robins,
who worked with Goldman in South Beach is the driving force
behind the Design District in the north; and to the south,
a loosely defined performing arts district which boasts
a new concert hall and opera house (designed by Cesar Pelli)
has received substantial public funding. And not to be overlooked,
there are the individual efforts of artists who have begun
transforming their own buildings into studios and gallery
spaces.
A cautionary note: The future is not now. You don’t
want to be wandering the streets here at night, looking
for your latte. At least not yet; this is after all a tough
part of town in transition. But at the same time, the future
is not so far away. When pressed for specifics, Mr. Goldman
estimates that “The time for pedestrian traffic to
develop here is in about three years.”
Even so, Mr. Goldman,
whose wife, Janet, is an avid collector, is not waiting
three years to get started. Last month, January 8, 2005,
timed to coincide with Art Miami, the city’s oldest
art fair, the pair opened The Goldman Warehouse, which joins
an impressive roster of private museums in the Wynwood Arts
District, whereby prominent collections are shared with
the public. Donald and Mera Rubell opened theirs in 1996,
and the Margulies Collection is also in the neighborhood.
Says Goldman, “We believe enough in this district
to open our own arts center.” Given the Goldman track
record, he should know. ¶
Ed Note: The Goldman
Warehouse is located in the Wynwood Arts District, at 404
NW 26th St., Miami FL 33127 www.thegoldmanwarehouse.com
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