Placing the Blaine

It's an interesting accident that for Halloween today, I have something related to the holiday to discuss. It concerns PS1 Contemporary Art Center. For those readers living in other parts of the world, it's a sort of branch of the Museum of Modern Art that's been set up in a converted school building out in Queens. "PS" is how New York City designates its Public Schools, and the ones that aren't named for a dead president or someone are all numbered. PS1 concentrates on more contemporary work than its mothership, for the most part.

The MoMA is probably the greatest modern art museum on the whole planet. I mean no disrespect to the great museums in any other part of the world, but I say that because MoMA came into existence at the very moment that New York was about to explode as the world leader in Modern Art. It was the love child of some of the wealthiest people in the world who could provide it with a collection of artworks from this era unparalleled by any other institution. The tides may be turning away from New York now, granted. To where, I don't know. Berlin? Tokyo? The Netherlands? I suppose it remains to be seen.

Despite all that, it is, ironically, an old school institution. It has a long tradition in the Modern Movement, but it's big. It's corporate. It has responsibilities to Monet, Van Gogh, and Mondrian, so to speak. The stakes are too high. It's what made PS1 such a fantastic complement to the monolithic MoMA. PS1 could be edgier, more hip, more futuristic, more thought-provoking a destination. I haven't been to one for a few years, but their outdoor afternoon parties on summer Sundays drew one of the coolest crowds I'd ever seen: mature but energetic, international but drawn together by an elusive sense of belonging, ridiculously hip but without trying too hard. They'd get superb DJs and the installations in their courtyard were interactive, innovative, and fun.

All this has made recent events all the more disappointing. The first thing that happened was, in my humble opinion, completely unforgivable. In one of their galleries they were hosting a performance by Ann Liv Young. Young's act was offensive, obscene, angry, insulting, disgusting, loud, and perverse. So halfway through, the director of the museum, Klaus Biesenbach, shut off the power in the room to put an end to her performance. At one point there was a video of the performance that included the censoring moment, but it appears to have been taken down. If you do manage to find it, it is obviously NSFW.

SO WHAT. In this day and age, art is not about making people happy. It's not about being pretty. It's about challenging and questioning and altering people's perception of the world and themselves. That's not always a pleasant undertaking. I'm not suggesting her work accomplished any of that. I'm not even saying that I found it all that interesting or good. And Young's antics are a romp through a field of daisies compared to some of the hijinks Karen Finley was pulling over twenty years ago. That's hardly the point.

If Biesenbach shouldn't be fired, and I believe he should be, then he most certainly should be shunned by anyone who cares at all about contemporary art. At the very least, he should hide his face in shame. How someone who would even dare to think about censoring an artist is allowed to direct an art institution in New York City is completely beyond me. What have we come to in New York? He almost makes me ashamed to live here with this deplorable behavior. Small mention should be made, as at least one article pointed out, if there were concerns that her performance was actually putting audience members in danger, shutting off all the lights was about the most dangerous solution he could have come up with.

I've just not been able to get past it. When I get email blasts from PS1 now, all I can think is, "eh. What of truly forward, mind-altering interest could they possibly have to offer me when they'd have the nerve to censor artworks?" It was the same reason that I permanently boycotted Blockbuster many years ago, after hearing that they'd taken it upon themselves to re-edit certain films to make them more family-friendly. "Who in the hell do they think they are," I thought to myself, to alter the work of an artist, a filmmaker, because there was something they didn't think people should see? But there is much more at stake for a contemporary art institution than a couple of questionable video tapes.

Then I got the most recent notice from PS1. David Blaine is performing there. David Blaine. I know, I get it, Halloween: magician. I absolutely love his work. His Harry Houdinian feats of endurance are maybe even more impressive than his mystifying illusionism. He brought something back into the art form that I'd truly never seen before. Despite the vaguely sinister twinkle in his eye, he has a surprisingly classy air about him, stoic and determined.

Oddly enough, I think he was a great match for Lincoln Center. The s(c)h(l)ock-value weirdness of his act there didn't rob LC of anything. In fact, it only really served to emphasize this as a performing arts acropolis across all standards. Practically speaking, it drew crowds of people who otherwise might never have walked up the stairs into that complex. Most poignantly, the endurance required by his spectacle was just an amplified distillation of what every performer goes through, especially the ones on the stages in the buildings that surrounded his fishbowl. From the other direction, the location gave his performance a boost of legitimacy that he'd been slowly earning all along on his own merits. Everybody wins.

This is something quite different at PS1. I just could not resist my urge to respond to that email: "Will you be shutting the lights off halfway through Blaine's performance, also, or is he 'safe' enough for you?" Although it is a game of Rock/ Paper/ Scissors, hopefully you'll understand how I mean this: Theater is Illusion. Theater is Art. But Art is not Illusion. "Of course it is!" you exclaim, and refer me to a thousand different paintings throughout art history. But I disagree. I maintain that Art is always about Truth, in its purest, deepest sense. In the sense that when Jackson Pollock first started dripping paint to express some inner state, he had discovered something radically more "True" than anyone before him. Even in Theater, the audience imagination required to reconcile the sometimes barest of scenery with the reality of being inside an auditorium is only the mechanics of the situation. The very best plays in history capture the most intimate Truth of human experience. It's why Romeo & Juliet endures.

Unlike at Lincoln Center, David Blaine at PS1 feels like a clown making balloon dogs at a five year old's birthday party. His presence makes PS1 look insipid and utterly irrelevant. The PS1 location isn't really helping him, either. It's not elevating what he does to the level of high art--and I do think that, to some degree, what he does is most certainly "art." For those who might encounter him who are aware of all the brilliant things that have been perpetrated by mainstream performance art over the past few decades, what he's doing will look not much better than superficial trickery without substance. I find this state of affairs personally and professionally disappointing.

I can only hope that this was a Halloween fluke. I can only hope that in the days to come, PS1 will both realize that its reputation has taken an unflattering blow and will endeavor to repair it. They owe it not just to themselves but to all of New York and to the art world in general.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Seeing is Believing

When I saw the notice for the Joan Miró show at the MoMA, Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937, I didn't bother to read very carefully, because there was no question that I'd be going to see it. I sort of figured it might be a few pieces from their permanent collection not normally on view that had been rotated out into the galleries. I was wrong. This is a seriously comprehensive show of the man's work during this decade, with a ton of amazing pieces on display.

The first year of 1927 opens the show with his very sparse works on bare, glue-sized canvas.

--48, 1927 (oil and aqueous medium on canvas)

--All images courtesy of the MoMA's online exhibition, except where otherwise noted.  That they've done this is impressive in its own right; there are a good number of works included in the online catalogue that didn't appear at the show and help to flesh out more of what the artist was doing.

I think what I love most about these first works was how extremely basic the statements were that he was making:

The surface is canvas.

Some canvas is gessoed.

Paint is applied with a brush.

Some paint has color.

Composition involves lines and points in space.

Something from the real world is being represented pictorially.

Miró lived at number 45, so 48 was right across the street, and he would see it every day. Certainly there's a precursor to Jasper Johns here in the symbolic quality of its representativeness, but again I go back to the progressive subtraction from the nature of painting that would lead to the end of it all. Because these paintings are so very simple, one gets the most crystal clear impression of what Miró believed to be the fundamental starting points for his explorations.

But he's also paring down the nature of representation itself to its barest minimum:

--Painting (Cloud and Birds), 1927 (oil and aqueous medium on canvas)

What is it really? A blotch of white paint, scribbly black lines, and sharp triangular licks accented by primary colors. But look at the title, and it is immediately obvious what's cloud and what's bird. Why? What is it about these primitive, even childlike forms that suggests anything from reality to the viewer at all? Is it that the white field is round? Clouds aren't always necessarily round. Is it that the scribbled black strokes are contained inside the white field, rather than straying outside it or being adjacent to it? Would that make a difference? Is it that the curving triangular shapes are where the colors are to be found and not in the white field? Is it the combined sum of all of these elements, where if one were missing, it would all fail to achieve what it has? All of these carefully controlled decisions bring into serious question the viewer's ability to assign representational meaning to the very basic elements of composition and how that process operates.

Speaking of titles, I believe the title of this next piece can be read in two quite significant ways:

--Painting, 1927 (oil and aqueous medium on canvas)

On the one hand, the title is a noun, describing what this object is. On the other, it's a verb, describing what the piece is about. To some degree, any artist's self-portrait essentially does something very similar to this. In other words, a self-portrait is a portrait of an artist in the act of painting a portrait of the artist. And unlike the furthest reaches of Minimalism, which just simply were Paintings, Miró's piece represents, depicts what painting is. According to him, it's paint applied to a canvas, line, field, and color, and the illusion of a three-dimensional universe in perspective. The question of the relationship between the means by which painting signifies, and what outside itself it is able to signify and how, is one he will return to time and again.

When he enters into collage, the whole question becomes transcendental. Here, though, he's talking not about what a painting is, but about the actions of representing:

--Spanish Dancer I, 1928 (sandpaper, printed paper, nails, conté crayon, and graphite on flocked paper mounted on paperboard)

First of all, the only thing representational about this piece is the tiny little shoe, likely cut out of a newspaper advertisement or similar, and glued on. Since it's collage, the very two-dimensional nature of the work's ability to be representational is strongly amplified by the shoe. The sandpaper, however, draws the sharpest contrast. It isn't just a two-dimensional surface anymore. In fact, the only reason sandpaper has any utilitarian function at all is because it has a three-dimensional, scratchy texture. By drawing on both the sandpaper and the flocked paper, he's made an analogy between the two materials. It's the three-dimensionality of both--however fine--that allows them to accept the wax and graphite from the crayon. The sandpaper fully scrapes the wax off the end of it, absorbing it in chunks into its sandy cavities. At a much smaller scale, all paper must do this to be drawn upon.

The sandpaper isn't just glued on, either; that would be a relatively two-dimensional object stuck to another by the means of a third, that is, a more or less two-dimensional layer of glue. Rather, it's nailed to the paperboard. Nailing is violent, piercing, destructive, it amplifies the physicality of the materials. The nails go in, through, behind the surface in three-dimensions and draw attention to the movements of hammering in addition to that of laying one paper onto another. The lines drawn onto the sandpaper converge at an angle, pointing upwards like an arrow, but in any case alluding to a direction in space, a movement. The texture of the paper calls vivid attention to the movement of the crayon across its surface. All this in a close relationship with the shoe, or foot, as if the dance that is the act of painting might be felt like the movements of a Spanish dancer.

I need to skip ahead briefly to discuss one last step in this vein:

--Collage, 1929 (conté crayon, tar paper, paper, and flocked paper on paper)

After a few painterly experiments, he switched back to collage for a short time. These collages mostly deal more with how the three-dimensional nature of the background surface affects and alters the lines and fields applied to them. But this one is particularly interesting because here the sandpaper becomes tarpaper. Its grain is so very coarse, and the tar so completely black. Quite contrary to the sandpaper--the texture of which exaggerates the ability of crayon to leave marks on a surface--here the analogous qualities of the paper confounds the possibility of leaving marks on it. In other words, the grain would likely take off chunks of wax too large to read as a continuous line, and on top of that, it's too dark to provide a suitable ground for a line drawing. Certainly he could have used white chalk easily enough. But I think the point here is that the wax crayon is very much constrained by a narrow range in the three-dimensionality of the surface: too smooth and it can't leave a mark (e.g. trying to use crayons on a coloring book with glossy laminated pages), too coarse (and dark) and it can't leave a visible line, either.

Going back, possibly the furthest he ever went into exploring the nature of pictorial representation by itself is this next one:

--Dutch Interior (I), 1928 (oil on canvas)

Dutch Interior is based on this painting:

--Hendrick Martensz Sorgh, De Luitspeler, 1661

--Image courtesy Lute of the Month.

But Miró was working from a postcard of Sorgh's painting. So Miró's work, hanging in the MoMA, is essentially six steps removed from the original subject:

The original three-dimensional room and subject.

Sorgh's two-dimensional representation of the subject.

Sorgh's 3D art object.

The 2D photographic reproduction of the painting.

The 3D postcard.

Miró's 2D reinterpretation of the postcard.

Miró's 3D art object.

The work swings back and forth between object and representation, signified and signifier. It's as if Alice is standing astraddle the looking glass and playing peek-a-boo with the Mad Hatter. It may be precisely because it precariously rides this line that Miró's resulting work raises these questions in its convoluted appearance. The real world of the original subject obeys the laws of physics, physiology, light, shadow, color, and the consistency of change. But the forms and shapes in Miró's representation exist in their own unique universe, with its own set of laws and prohibitions guided by the nature of the medium. He'll explore this much more acutely later on, but this one was for sure worth mentioning.

A similar thing happens with this portrait:

--Portrait of La Fornarina, 1929 (oil on canvas)

It's rather large, and the dark, muted, somber colors, somewhat unusual for Miró, make this an extraordinarily moody and beautiful piece. Fornarina is a reinterpretation of this painting:

--Raphael, La Fornarina, 1520

--Image courtesy Art Catablogue.

No one knows exactly who she is, but she's alleged to have been Raphael's lover. That her true identity is mysterious I feel is important for Miró, but that will go further later on. The maybe sole exception is the yellow eye--and I think worth noting that it is the eye, and not some other part of her, look at how intense her eyes are in Raphael's. Otherwise, take any of the three main fields of color out of Miró's work individually, and there would be absolutely no indication that they were extracted from the portrait of a person. The darkest field at the bottom would be nothing more than a quick impression of a mountain peak. So again, why is it so clear, in their combination, that it is a portrait? What is the fundamental nature of representing the human body, however abstractly, that we can still recognize it as such?

They do have quite a few of Miró's sculptures on display, many of which are quite interesting, but I'm just going to show this one:

--Object, 1932 (oil, sequins, and sand on pebble, shell, mirror, wood, paint, and nails (original mirror and shell have been replaced))

I like this one because it seems to very specifically deal with a lot of the same issues as the works I've been discussing. First of all, the painting is flat, but it's executed on a rounded three-dimensional object, the stone. More interesting though is the mirror and the shell. It's a sculpture, so you can experience the bottom of it as well as the top.  It's a construction that includes a mirror, so you can experience more than one vantage at the same time.  The mirror allows you to see up inside of the shell, where a sea creature once lived. The shell has been replaced, so who knows what it was originally, although I'd be extremely surprised if it weren't as identical to the artist's choice as could be found. So it's interesting that it's a clam shell and not an oyster shell. There's no possibility that by viewing this work from the correct angle, one might find a pearl. It's therefore not the value of what one might find as a result of its construction, like a buried treasure, but the process of discovery per se, made possible by it being three-dimensional.

But what happens next is kind of exciting.  He has a sort of breakthrough where the two separate lines of thought in his work suddenly come together.  He starts making paintings of his own collages:

--Collage (Study for Painting), 1933 (printed paper and graphite on paper) and Painting, 1933 (oil on canvas)

Now, granted, these collages are clearly just studies.  They don't particularly stand alone as collages, at least not in any way like his other collage work does.  We have this same question of distance here between the original real-life subject of the work and the pictorial universe of Miró's landscape.  And he's pushed it one step further, as well.  The objects in his universe start to become something else entirely from where they began.  What starts as a soda siphon now has a face, it's become a figure.  In the other direction, the figures in his work have been distorted by the objects from which they derive.  What I find most interesting here, though, is this source object:

It comes from a political cartoon drawn by Feliu Elias.  But the figure/object is already surreal. With Dutch Interior one can trace the imagery back to a real physical environment, and it's the distance, the layers one goes through to get there that causes the distortion.  Here, the original source object is instead something conceptual, an idea.  There's something similarly ambiguous in his use of industrial machinery in the collages:

--Collage (Study for Painting) [detail], 1933

He's turned it on its side, so from the beginning he's clearly concerned with the formal personality of the object, rather than whatever symbolism it might offer.  But on top of that, while it's still a piece of industrial machinery, most normal viewers at first glance would have not the slightest idea what this machine's function is.  It therefore becomes vaguely symbolic of "machinery" in general, rather than of some specific product or activity that might be performed on it or by it.  With something like plumbing or a propeller, the function of the object and all it connotes is available to most viewers.  Here, the original source is not just simply conceptual, it's for the most part inaccessible.  It means that Miró's pictorial universe must stand alone.  It has a sort of orientation toward something being represented but has been cut loose from it, left to float adrift.

The following year, this direction leads him head-on into his own unique brand of Surrealism, and there's no longer any doubt about it.

--Figure, 1934 (pastel and pencil on flocked paper) and Woman, 1934 (pastel on flocked paper)

On the one hand, the pictorial objects in the painted universe now fully follow their own internal logic.  In practically no way are they guided by the forms, weights, colors, or laws of the real world.  On the other hand, the enormous, grotesque genitalia makes an extremely directed reference to the gendered identity of the figure being represented.  It's almost as if the gender of the subject is one of very few remaining elements Miró considers crucial to the piece even being a portrait at all, but that he's reluctant to have to concede it.

I'm including this one for no other reason but that I think it's hilarious:

--The Farmers' Meal, 1935 (oil on cardboard)

I don't know.  Cows and chickens are just inherently goofy, aren't they?

--Personages Attracted by the Forms of a Mountain, 1936 (tempera on Masonite)

Miró's use of color had always sort of obeyed its own internal logic, even when he was being most representational.  This painting is really interesting, though, because the way color is being used has completely shifted.  That is to say, how figures and ground are delineated in the pictorial space isn't by dividing them up into distinct color combinations as with Farmers.  Instead, the entire work is stark primaries, with only a few exceptions.  His color choices here don't separate objects in space, but instead are used to reference the way that forms in space are modeled.  He's not dealing as much with the way the work represents something outside the painting, but rather the very act of representing it, in and of itself.  It is, in fact, one further marked step toward abstract expressionism.

--Painting, 1936 (oil, casein, tar and sand on Masonite)

Suddenly he switches again, into this last group of quite abstract works in mixed-media.  The subject is quite different, as well.  The forms and symbolism are extremely primitive, in terrific contrast to the complex works immediately prior.  Instead of color, now he's begun exploring the very internal relationships between line and field, line and texture, texture and field, how each is constrained or affected by the others, and the very materiality of the work.  There's practically no exploration of representation here at all, relatively speaking.  The questions of three-dimensionality are completely internal to the artwork itself, in the interrelationships of texture.  The catalogue notes that he actually gouged out part of the Masonite board, so there's something else here about the duality of construction and destruction in the creation of a work of art.

In the last piece in the show, he again turns around practically 180° and head-on into a still-life:

--Still Life with Old Shoe, 1937 (oil on canvas)

It really is a wonderful way to end the show.  While there's no full circle to speak of, particularly, this work seems to sum up everything that the artist had explored over the previous decade into a single piece.  It's at once a pure painting, fully representational and yet striving at every moment to sabotage its ability to represent what it in fact does.  It creates the illusion of a three-dimensional universe that obeys its own rules and regulations, completely in conflict with those in the world of the objects it represents.  This is a new way of seeing the world, a new way of conceiving the relationship between painting and painted.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Diving In

There are some really wonderful things going on over at the MoMA, at the moment.

First is the gargantuan installation piece by Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Feet).  It's really astonishing.  The entire atrium is filled with it.  And because of the ambient sound of the piece, practically the whole museum throbs with it.

I stepped into the room and first walked around it.  It seems that the MoMA, most particularly of the museums, has very much begun encouraging visitors to lay around.  I really like it.  I think when viewers of artwork are reclined is in some ways when they might be most susceptible to truly contemplating the work and absorbing it.  Of course there may be more intellectual work that would favor standing upright and having just downed an espresso, but this isn't one of them.  It was Friday evening, so the whole room was packed full of people laying around on the floor, the circular upholstered eyeball in the center was totally occupied.  It really reminded me of the Chillout rooms at the Raves back in the olden days.

I'm also reminded that in the 1970s, the New York Philharmonic held their "Rug Concerts," where conductor Pierre Boulez removed all the seats from the auditorium, the orchestra would be down on the floor, and the audiences would lay around on rugs with cushions on the floor.  I wish it were possible to bring that back, I think it would be fantastic.

I wasn't sure if I would sit on the floor of MoMA's atrium, but eventually I realized I must.  The room was silent, but after I sat there for a few minutes, the soundtrack started coming in, almost inaudibly at first, to the point I wasn't sure if there were any sound.  Then it became obvious.  It's sound effects of the human body and vaguely natural sounds overlayed by a sort of beautiful, floating, chanting, haunting melody.  I was grateful, actually, that I'd stumbled in while it was still silent.

The imagery caused a similar experience, due to my timing.  When I first walked in, the video was showing an underwater scene, waving and swirling around the walls.  It appeared very abstract at that moment in the cycle.  In fact, it kind of reminded me of the psychedelic special effects in Barbarella.  But as I watched through the ten-minute cycle of video, a lot of things came into focus.

Rist says that the footage was taken during the shooting of her first feature-length film, which will be released next year.  This piece is basically about the very tactile experience of nature at various scales: at a human scale, the scale of a pig in a field (very funny, actually), the scale of an earthworm or snail--walking, traveling through.  Bare feet trudging through shallow, muddy water, stepping on pieces of fruit, squishing them between toes.  Fruit contains seeds, the potential for birth.  Swimming, an exercise that completely immerses the body in the natural environment, like a womb.  Long close up views of breasts, a nipple, not erotic exactly, though there's something to that, too.  More it feels primal: the female body as the source of life, the cradle of life, like the earth itself.  It also draws this connection with the act of viewing Pour, which is all encompassing, immersive, and tactile: the speakers are actually inside the upholstered benches.  So I wasn't able to lay on them, myself, but I presume that you can actually feel the sound rumbling through your body.  The curator also explained that they conceived of the atrium like a pool, filling it up with liquid artwork.

Rist drew the analogy between the MoMA's atrium and a cathedral.  She's right; it does have that quality at times.  And that's sort of the point, it's a communal experience.  She also mentioned something about how so much art, media, entertainment gets piped into our homes where we experience it alone or only in very small groups, distracted and unengaged.  The museum environment provides that sense of communally experiencing visual works.  

One might say the same for the cinema, but in so many ways, home video has destroyed people's ability to enjoy going to see movies.  On the one hand, it's destroyed any sense of courtesy or respect because people are so used to watching in their living rooms where they can do as they please.  On the other, it's spoiled audiences, conditioned by their own tightly controlled, personalized home viewing preferences, so they can no longer appreciate the communal experience of watching along with a full audience.

A museum is one of the only places left where this is still possible.  Most visitors don't have a set of rules and regulations for how artwork should be viewed, because they don't ever view artworks in their own homes, on their own terms.  Of course, I've discussed Museum Etiquette before, and I think it's extremely important.  But at the same time, Fine Art naturally seems to demand a greater sense of reverence from its audience than a blockbuster action film.

Rist's piece calls all of this into question in a beautiful, hypnotic installation.  I do hope more artists will recognize what museums have become, culturally speaking, what they can be and can provide, and take advantage of it, encourage it, the way this artist has.

©2008, Ryan Witte

This Is Not a Museum Exhibition

This past Friday, I went over to see the Salvador Dali exhibit Painting and Film at the Museum of Modern Art.  It's really incredible, and I highly recommend it.

Right outside the show they were playing a Buster Keaton film, a scene from One Week.  

I just adore Buster Keaton.

I'd seen both L'Age d'or and Un chien Andalou while in film school, so I didn't spend too much time on those.  There were a couple of other incredible things to be seen, however.

I went chronologically backwards, and first saw Dali's video work, Chaos and Creation (1960).  

I'd never seen this one, but it was pretty funny because he was totally making fun of Piet Mondrian.  He has a sort of pig pen with various compartments, which viewed from above looks like a Mondrian painting.  Then there's pigs and mud and a girl covered with food or some kind of goop writhing around in it.  This one was getting those comical kind of matter-of-fact observations from the crowd ("It looks like one of those hamster balls."  "There's soapy water in it.") that indicate they have no idea what the hell they're watching.

Next was Warhol's screen test of him.  It's sort of an unfortunate viewing experience in a crowded gallery, and a shame that they don't appear to be showing that one in their movie theater (which, by the way, is a fantastic place to see films).  I'd seen a bunch of Warhol's films at a festival at Film Forum many years ago, when I worked there.  I had a number of religious experiences during that festival, but Warhol's screen tests were really mind-blowing.  For the first few minutes, you think "okay, the person's just sitting there, doing nothing.  So what?"  But as you sink deeper into the experience of it, you start to notice the most unbelievably subtle things about the person's facial expressions.  The very, very slightest raise of an eyebrow, twitch of the lip, or series of blinks begins to take on the most profound significance.  You realize in the end, you've seen much deeper into this person's soul, their real persona, precisely because they're sitting there doing nothing at all.  I think my favorite of those I saw was the one of Henry Geldzahler, former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

He starts playing with his eyebrows halfway through and is just a goofy character.

Then there's Dali's Impressions de la Haute Mongolie from 1975, where he looks every bit the "guru in drag" that Lennon did.  He also appears like he'd have been a hilarious person to be around.

They're also showing his dream sequence for Hitchcock's Spellbound.  

I feel like I have the vaguest recollection of knowing that the sequence was actually by Dali, himself, but it's been a very long time since I'd seen it.  Hitchcock said he was bored with the hazy, out-of-focus way dream sequences were often done, because he felt that dreams were in fact quite sharp and vivid, much like Dali's paintings.  The best thing about this, in my opinion, is they have the actual studio backdrop from the film shoot there, a giant black and white canvas hanging in the gallery.

It was very cool to see The Persistence of Memory in person.  

I can't recall if I've ever seen it, although it's definitely possible.  It's very small, there was a huge crowd of people around it, about eight deep, so there was really no way I was going to be able to interact with that painting.  To make matters worse, there was this couple standing directly in front of it, pretending to know ALL ABOUT what the whole thing means, pointing out all the symbolism and having an oh, so intelligent conversation about it, meanwhile blocking everyone else's view of the piece.

Regardless, there are so many great paintings that for sure I'd never seen, in person or otherwise, that I didn't necessarily need to spend an hour on Persistence.

I think what excited me most, did you know that he had collaborated with Walt Disney?  No, really, it's true!  Dali felt Disney was actually one of the few true Surrealists himself.  A few years after Fantasia, Disney wanted to do another similar film, but perhaps more serious.  So he began working with Dali on a segment for it called Destino in 1940.  

They only completed about 18 seconds of it until the project was abandoned perhaps due to lack of funds.  But then in 2003, a group of Disney animators got together and finished it, based on the original treatment.  It's playing at the show, and it's really quite creepy and beautiful.

Oh, and just to make the whole thing even more Surreal, I bumped into a total blast from my past, John Witherspoon, The Artist Formerly Known as Lahoma Van Zandt.

As a man, though.  Lahoma was the greatest emcee to ever grace the stage of Limelight's Disco2000 (which I told him, a little too enthusiastically), and allegedly his trip from Atlanta to New York with Larry Tee and RuPaul was the basis for To Wong Foo...  I hadn't seen him around in years and years, which is kind of sad because Lahoma was such a hoot.  Maybe she'll do a comeback tour.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Tomorrow MoMA Knows

Last night I went to see the new show at the Museum of Modern Art, Design and the Elastic Mind.  It’s truly a brilliant and inspiring collection of items that will no doubt shape our world in the decades to come.  They describe the exhibition as going from the micro level to the macro, which it sort of does, but really it’s divided up into to various categories, Bioengineering, Nanotechnology, Green Design, Technology Interface, Bodily Perception, etc. 

As far as I was concerned, the most incredible section was all about information processing.  For the first time in human history, we have the ability to collect and store vast amounts of data on an unprecedented scale.  So the question arises as to how we’re going to organize, sort, interpret, analyze, and understand these huge collections of information.  The far back room showed a number of examples.  One screen showed a map of the world that would skew and warp according to with what geographic locations New Yorkers made telephone contact over a certain span of time.  So if a large number of people telephoned Berlin around 8PM, Berlin would grow larger (or come forward, depending on your perspective).

Another showed different views of our planet in terms of digital information from New York to other parts of the world over “the past 24 hours.”  Here the cities would light up in a huge point of light, or darken again according to how much we’re communicating with them.  Pulsing lines of communication shot up out of New York, rendered three-dimensionally, like missile trajectories, flowing to every corner of the globe.  One piece was a graphic analysis of the Wikipedia entries/ edits for popular search terms, “Abortion” and “Chocolate.”

A screen showing the flight paths of airplanes coming in and out of the United States over the course of 24 hours was simply mesmerizing.  I stood there almost trancelike watching the waves and bursts of squiggly lines crisscross around the country and the world, the lattice blooming from East to West at 8AM or so and slowly fading out at nightfall.

There were some other pieces that were just goofy, like a line of products for a bachelor to simulate being in a relationship.  “Sheet Thief” is an appliance that will rip the sheets off you in the middle of the night.  “Hair Alarm Clock” whips a ponytail in your face to wake you up.  “Heavy Breather” is fairly self-explanatory, as is “Cold Feet.”  I thought the whole thing was hilarious.

There were quite a few ecologically poignant items on display, although I wish there’d been more, considering our current climate (multiple meanings intended).  But that wasn’t the biggest problem I had with the show.  For the most part, the work on display was top-notch, technologically, conceptually, and both.  But the curators really should have done a lot more pruning.

Part of the problem was that this was Target Free Friday Night, the first Friday of a brand new (and much anticipated) show.  We heart TFFNs, MoMA, so thank you—although one might be inclined to wonder if the reason the museum is swarmed by 50-million New Yorkers 4PM Friday is because you charge a ridiculous entrance fee the rest of the week. 

It’s such a scene.  Everybody’s young and hip, these are New York’s starving artists: the ones making Art History in this city.  It’s them, I’m sorry to say, not the stuffy socialites invited to the private openings, not the tourists from the backwoods of Alabama, not the card carrying collectors.  It’s these people, Friday nights, and it’s quite fun to be a part of it.

But the enormous crowd merely exacerbated problems with the show that would confront a visitor unless they were the only person in the gallery.  The nature of this work, being SO new, SO unprecedented, means that in 75% of the cases, you have absolutely no idea what you’re looking at if you don’t read pretty much all the text on the neighboring plaque.  Some of them are insufficient still; as far as I could tell, the description of the work of Materialise (which I’ve talked about here), did nothing to illuminate what makes their technology so brilliant—and who knows for how many other unfamiliar objects that was the case and I wasn’t aware of it.

Meanwhile, the text is in most cases so tiny that you have to be standing less than two feet away from it for it to even be legible, thereby blocking anyone else’s view (and museum etiquette is sorely misunderstood, as it is).  So only one or two people can engage at any one time.  One pertinent aspect about the progress of our technology is that it continues to rapidly decrease in size, but because of that, and because there’s way too much on display, the items are so close together that you’re practically breathing down some stranger’s neck the entire time.  I’m leaning back and forth, back and forth around some fourteen-year-old kid blocking my view and totally unaware that anyone else is trying to see the work.  One plaque was so badly located that I practically had to stand right on top of the artwork to read it.  Others are grouped together in so jumbled a manner that, since we’re talking about extremely unusual research projects and so on, it’s unclear to which piece they even refer.

Certainly it’s possible that I’m missing the whole point.  It’s been discussed that our new technology has this bizarre way of grouping people together in some ways, while isolating and alienating us from one another at the same time.  Perhaps by designing a show where I’m in excruciatingly close proximity to someone I don’t even know, and yet at the same time not really able to share an experience with them, the curators are calling attention to the times in which we live.  Nonetheless, it makes the show unfortunately less enjoyable, and there were a number of items I didn’t feel like bothering to barge through groups of people to get a look at.

So while the show is extremely comprehensive and jam-packed full of great stuff, they'd have been way better off scaling it down, and including more videos showing what these objects do, more movement, objects in use, more visual examples of what's on display, more interactive pieces (there were a couple).  I felt for two Asian women behind me who, from their tones of voice it would seem, had to struggle a lot harder to understand what they were seeing because one's only recourse, really, was to read the accompanying English text.

Another irony of this show, because so much of it at least touched on communications technology, was the fact that about 50% of the people there were so busy taking pictures with their camera phones they likely weren’t even paying any attention to the exhibition.  I’ve never seen so many people snapping pictures in a museum before in my life.  I was unable to find out what their exact policy on photos is, but while there I overheard someone saying “it’s okay, as long as we don’t publish them.”  Especially in light of this particular show, what the hell does that even mean anymore?  “Publish them…” in professional print?  Is what you’re reading right now a “publication?”  And how could they ever possibly enforce that, anyway?

I do highly recommend going to see this show.  It will very likely blow your mind, but leave the camera at home, and I’d suggest either waiting until it’s been up for a long while, or paying the $20 admission so go at a slower time of the week.

©2008, Ryan Witte