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The prince of museum islands, the Ando-centric Naoshima has a truly first class hotel. Most surprising, it feels like Hawaii with lovely beaches, a tropical breeze and little communities that spring up behind the hills. Naoshima is very organized compared to Teshima and is worth a night, though I found the hotel restaurant pretentious. Better to eat in town and shuttle back.
It's impossible to get to all three Museum Islands in one day, and lord knows, I tried. The ferry and boat schedule make it impossible if you want to stay on one of the islands at night, probably Naoshima. But, you can get to two out of the three. I chose Teshima so I could see the Sanaa museum there and have lunch at the Shima Kitchen and hike around this less developed of the art site destinations. Without a van or bike, I was forced to hitch, not a bad solution.
For my money, after what seemed like days of imperial-ness and temples, it was the back streets and alleys of Kyoto that held sway. Kyoto has a few more mid century holdovers as it was not bombed like Osaka and Tokyo during the war.
Directly across from the Le Corbusier masterpiece museum in the Ueno Museum district sits a much overlooked and truly thrilling symphony space, one a local patron described to me as "the people's concert hall". Built in 1961 by architect Kunio Maekawa, it is a paradigm of mid century wooden architecture replete with acoustical elements that look like Josef Albers. I heard not just one but two Beethoven symphonies and was, I think, the only non native in the packed 2300 plus hall.
Tadao Ando's 21 21 Design Sight Museum had a whirligig of a VR sports exhibit which weighed, tossed and balanced visitors to the museum, only one of so many museums Ando has done in Japan (and elsewhere). His concrete aesthetic has become a signature of permanence which does not always jibe with the contents.
The worldwide sensation of Japanese artist Kusama does not abate. The Hirschhorn Museum had its highest numbers ever and the exhibit which will hit LA soon will surely compete with Rain Room for foot traffic. These trees adorning the foot path to the National Museum of Tokyo were as far as I got on the last day of the exhibit as the lines were historic, and in truth, I am less and less inclined to wait on line for art.
Ropponghi is a delight of fashion and tasty treats. The design aesthetic of Japan reaches from the most pedestrian to the sublime. With the perfection comes rigidity however.
The Pritzker Prize for Architecture--the “Oscar” of architecture for achievement for a body of work and generally conceded to be a bellwether of still more architectural promise--this year was awarded at the Imperial Guest House in Tokyo in the presence of the Emperor and Empress and distinguished guests to a modest, affable collaborative of Catalonians--Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigen and her husband Ramon Vilata. The professional ménage a trois whose practice was described as having much in common with a Japanese aesthetic of harmony with nature, refer to themselves as “six hands, one voice” who communicate in “spoken jazz”. The images of their low-rise kindergartens, senior citizen centers, restaurants and sports facilities stand in marked contrast to the soaring towers and twisted confabulations of some of the work of previous laureates. At a dinner following the ceremony, I was seated next to Shigeru Ban whose Aspen Art Museum is probably his most well known work in the US and whose affection for the US may derive from his Sci Arc and Cooper Union formation. His fellow Japanese laureates Tadao Ando and Toyo Ito were seen posing for photos together. Ito mentored the Sanaa principals whose work is sprouting not only in New York (New Museum) and Connecticut (The River) but also in Teshima, one of the museum islands of Japan, Kanazawa, at the Vitra campus in Germany. Ando's Naoshima Island project is now the art world destination in Japan and may be the first time I actually slept in a museum.
Dizzying heights | Art | Wallpaper* Magazine
In theatres now, a documentary by Magnolia Pictures celebrates the life and oeuvre of the late Chris Burden The artist behind the Instagram darlings Urban Light and Metropolis II at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) was once not so photo-friendly, as a new documentary on the late Chris Burden reveals.
The Florine Stettheimer show Painting Poetry at the Guggenheim Museum is charming, delightful and goes down easy. Stehttheimer's sinuous, colorful drawings and paintings which take as their subject matter the very elite world of her sisters, shopping, picnicking, dancing, opera and famous friends give insight into an upper class woman who straddled the line between fine art and illustration. At a panel about the artist last night, this artist was recognized as culturally undervalued as someone who created meaning through social process. Artist Cecily Brown who said at first Stettheimer was something of a guilty pleasure then studied the work and understood the work to be more like the Breugel jigsaw puzzles she favors for their crowds and sub texts. "She leads your eye on in a joyous dance...in the electricity and intense passages between things."
After all is said (too much) and done, the Rei Kawakubo show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York is really spectacular. The lumps and bumps, the holes, the ruching, gathering, tucking, coloration and cut makes you understand that Abner Elbaz and now everyone else could not have helped by be influenced by this march-to-her-own-drum original artist. We are now used to seeing pregnancy bumps in full display, but Kawakubo puts them everywhere but. Her hole-y designs reminded me of Lee Bontecou's wall sculptures. Misplaced sleeves, shoulders, belts, stitches combine to make you feel her restless, original energy. The hair treatments by Julien d'Y's are another delight of stiffened towers, urethane curls, Louis XIV wigs and helmets. I had a smile of wonder and delight throughout. Though the natural resting place of these garments is in a museum show, if you manage even a small protuberance or mis match even one thing next time you get dressed it will be in homage to this unique and original talent. Here's how you feel when you leave: tame and small and risk-adverse and determined to shake up your life and be bold.
Barbara Gladstone's show of the work of mid century Italian artist Mimmo Rotella at her splendid space on E 64 Street is short and sweet. Rotella's work will remind you of Alberto Burri , the surfaces built up with gumpy resins and glue as if each layer was an application demanded a week's worth of settling. His palette is my own personal favorite, the nubby burlap hosting flame-like muddy colors and plackets of collage.
This year’s iteration of Frieze New York 2017 seems both larger and smaller. A gallery from Dubai sits across from a gallery from Mumbai. But the big players are still stationed at the crossroads of the long allees. Gagosian Gallery with four walls of John Currin drawings. Currie-for-all? There is so much beautiful art from around the world I felt sorry for artists. If you are not a blue chip artist or collector, how to choose? Themes that emerged: black women artists and black artists in general in ascendance in lockstep with the national mood for reflection and commentary on the impoverished state of civil rights. (Kara Walker and Lorna Simpson on full display). Pattern and decoration is back, but maybe it never went away. Images of houses, embassies, all kinds of architecture as subject matter. Art world denizens are uniformly handsome and well dressed and now treks to Venice, Basel, Germany, Greece and so on. Eat your Wheaties.
The sixties are in full summer-of-love-y flower all over the country, (Museum of Arts and Design had a show, another in Los Angeles) but especially in northern Cal where it all began. UC Berkeley Art Museum has a show up for a few more days and then the big SF guns at De Young mounted their own hippie-inflected show. On view, many walls of psychedelic posters, fringe, embroidered flowers, fringe, macramé and weaving, fringe, photos of be-ins, musical interludes, fringe, virtual rooms with astral projections, furry seating, etc. The times they are a changing but not so much it seems. Does anyone remember that the sixties were scary too?
The elegiac Alice Neel: Uptown show that newly-anointed Pulitzer Prize winner Hilton Als has curated at David Zwirner Gallery shows her to be a prescient, original talent. The infinitely more rambling but charming cinema verite film on her by Michel Auder was shown alongside. Neel, a white woman lived most of her life in Harlem. The show’s title was originally Colored People which was how African Americans were most often referred to in those days, preceeding Negro, Black, African American and post terms this writer is too politically correct to list. There are people of other races in the show as well, but as the catalogue states, “for Neel herself, everyone was equal in all their idiosyncrasies and racial differences. Everyone was a member of her club."
In addition to her subject matter, her style is over the top gorgeous. It’s outlining but not paint by numbers, the character of each sitter reflected both in its application of paint and choice of rock-me-baby color. Even a Harlem building has a sensuousness and flow. Neel apparently kept her sitters for a long time, like Lucien Freud, but for her arm’s length meant something different. The film shows how she interacted with them, even taking one famous cellist along with her on an inspection of the plumbing when the building inspector came to call in response to a complaint.
Mostly though, you sense the trust each sitter had that Neel would bring out their essence: the proud, the fierce, the innocent. The show is only open until April 22.
The Raymond Pettibon show closes today at the New Museum. A sprawling but perfectly curated show that displays the images and text of this witty, brilliant polymath is not to be missed. Dialing down on politics, surfing, sex, drugs, the Virgin Mary and baseball with equal candor and a gorgeous palette of water colors, Pettibon turns out to be one of the seers of our time.
Matt Tyrnauer and Robert Hammond's new docCitizen Jane: Battle for the City is slightly mislabeled: it could have been called more accurately Citizen Jane and Overlord Moses. Journalist-Activist Jane Jacobs and Urban Planner-Czar Robert Moses are two combative personalities who staked out opposite sides of the urban planning wars of the early sixties. Moses, he of Jones Beach and the Cross Bronx Expressway, and Jacobs, she of Greenwich Village journalist-Mom citizen activism were the perfect antagonists, and I wouldn’t be surprised after all the Feud plays and tv shows we are seeing now that this also could be an effective sequel. Paul Goldberger plays an outsize roll as quasi-narrator who puts the whole relationship in context and tries to answer the age-old question: Should we bulldoze our way to a better life? Jacobs’ seminal text, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was reactive to the I-can-do-bigger-and-better ethic of Le Corbusier, who to be fair, also did the divine Ronchamp Chapel I just visited. Greedy pols also take a hit in the film. The filmmakers say they made this film for the general public who have precious little idea who Moses and Jacobs were, even though they had such powerful influence on the New York—and many other cities—of today. Jacobs fled to Canada after she won her last battle to save the Village from an expressway running through it. The film is excellent from a tech standpoint, seamlessly combining stock footage, voice-over, interviews and Jacobs and Moses voices.
Petra Epperlein’s quest to find out if her father was an informant in the Stasi, East Germany’s answer to the Thought Police is simple but powerful. Though we’ve seen the story told before in a fictionalized (and apparently, according to Karl Marx City, exaggerated) in the wonderful film The Lives of Others, this film takes one woman’s search for answers in the labyrinthine Stasi archives and makes it very personal. Epperlein is portrayed in third person in voice over and first person on screen with her fuzzy boom microphone and earphones which make her as much of an object to be studied as what she herself is studying, but the affectation actually amplifies and imitates the Stasi methodologies. Cameras, still photographers, even your best friends and neighbors: you could not trust anyone in the post war GDR. Its applicability to today hardly a thought bubble away.
Marisa Merz and Lygia Pape, now on view at The Met Breuer, make the case that "having it all" has been something women artists have been juggling forever. Merz in Italy and Pape in Brazil managed to find a way to combine a domestic life with a life of ground breaking art production by not trying to cleave the two with such vehemence. Merz's little chairs for her daughter Beatrice, Pape's furry table with a lone breast sticking out of it make mincemeat of the idea that a woman at home with a child cannot be productive. Both politically engaged and willing to experiment with form and the whole notion of what "art" is, the two form an interesting juxtaposition with Marsden Hartley who felt he had to obscure his sexuality and separate out his private life. Tucked away in remote Maine, he was able to have more of an integrated life.
Hurry to catch one of the best shows all year which closes April 1: the NYU Grey Art Gallery show, Inventing Downtown. Focusing on artist-run galleries of the sixties, the show is both nostalgic and forward thinking, the art, though smaller scaled than today, seems very contemporary. What shines through: the collegiality of the art world, the kindness with which artists treated each other, the playful, pick-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps, can-do mentality. What is sad: so many talented people utterly forgotten by the history books. Many of us do know Red Grooms from his seventies era large scale installations, but here we see his do-it-yourself beginnings.
