Song of a Reformed Headhunter

At MoMA today, the revelation was Bodys Isek Kingelez's sculptural models of buildings and cities. Fanciful, colorful, utopian. "Without a model, you are nowhere. A nation that can't make models is a nation that doesn't understand things, a nation that doesn't live": Kingelez (1948-2015), based in then-Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also saw the retrospective of Adrian Piper but was not as taken with it. The exception was a triptych of Madonnas and children, white in the central and biggest panel, flanked by black and Asian. The misery in the side panels comments ironically on the happiness in the center. Among the many gifts of patron Agnes Gund to the museum was a startling beautiful "Soundsuit" by Nick Cave. Perched on a mannequin was an elaborate construction of metal, beads, and ceramic birds and flowers of the kind commonly founded in antique or secondhand stores. * Two Singaporean debut novels. Enjoyed Rachel Heng...

On Sunday, GH and I went to the MoMA. He wanted to see the exhibition on Japanese architecture: "A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond." I find architectural shows very unsatisfying. The models, plans, drawings, and projections cannot convey the sense of space that must be experienced on-site. I lack 3-D spatial imagination, I suppose. The only architectural show I really enjoyed was the one on Corbusier. I really enjoyed the show on Degas's monotypes. Beautiful, striking surfaces achieved: the shimmer of water, the lushness of hair, the hatchings of curtains. The bathing nudes were spectacular. When two impressions are made, one directly after another, they are called cognates. Good name, that. Degas would make two impressions, instead of the usual one, and color the second one with pastel. He also experimented with dark field and light field printing. In the first, black ink was applied to the whole metal plate, and then removed, with a roll of sponge,...

After seeing the Yoko Ono retrospective at MoMA: Someone painted half a moon tonight Yoko Ono

Chandigarh, India GH and I took advantage of MoMA's early members-only viewing hours and enjoyed the le Corbusier exhibition in relative peace from 9:30 to 10:30. It is an inspiring show that covers his many areas of achievement: architecture, interior design, painting, urban planning, and photography. Radically he advocated demolishing a big area of central Paris in order to make way for workers' high-rises. In Chandigarh, he designed and built India's first post-independence city, with the largest of his Open Hand sculptures. In architecture, he was the first to raise a building above the ground, supporting it on pilotis. He advocated for the use of raw concrete for its versatility and appearance. He designed curves inside rectangular walls. He flattened roofs for gardens, facilities and sculptural forms. After the show, GH wants to see his buildings in France during our coming trip, and so do I.  the church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut, near Ronchamp, France. ...

Borrowed from the library of Instituto Cervantes the MoMA catalogue of its 1993 Miró show. The catalogue essay Peinture-Poésie, Its Logic and Logistics by the show curator Carolyn Lanchner gives an interesting overview of Miró's oeuvre. What Picasso said to the young Spanish pretender became the opening of a new poem. I quoted, and, in a few cases, modified, titles of Miró's paintings for the rest of the poem. Miró loved poetry, and gave his paintings poetic titles. To my mind, it is somehow apt to incorporate and orchestrate his painting titles into a poem. Mira, Miro La Guitarra advised the Catalan peasant, pretend you’re waiting for the subway; you have to get in line. Wait your turn, after all. Painting. A bird eyes the hunter in a pinkish Catalan landscape. Person throws a stone at a bird. Painting. Hand catching a bird. A white bird floats above the carnival of harlequins. Painting. A yellow bird orchestrates a Dutch interior (I). (II)....

from Patrick McCaughey's review of the MoMA show "Inventing Abstraction 1910 - 1925": I have never seen Malevich better displayed or better served as an artist. His excitement at his discoveries in abstraction becomes our excitement. At last we are shown, not just told, how right his boisterous claim was: "I destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon ring that confines the artists and forms of nature."  The Malevich wall comes hard on the heels of a well-chosen group of Fernand Léger's "Contrast of Forms" (1913). They are at once Léger's extension of Cubism and his major contribution to abstract art. They share the high seriousness of Picasso and Braque, the same intense investigation of pictorial form and the same sense of substance and matter. The power of their blue-and-white cylinders grinding their way through the painting, pushing aside the white-and-red rectilinear blocks, has the d...

He returned from Morocco in 1913, and before departing from Paris to Nice in 1917, painted some of his most challenging works. In the geometric construction of the paintings, you can see his response to Cubism, and in his use of blacks and grays his response to World War I. Instead of focusing on the aesthetic or political context of this body of work, the MoMA show throws a light on its physical production, how Matisse scratched and etched and repainted the canvases, or else left them "unfinished." The result is an exciting glimpse into Matisse at work in his studio. Why the physical effort, and then to leave the evidence so clearly on the paintings? Matisse wanted to fight in the war but was rejected because of his influenza. poor eyesight and age. He spoke (or wrote?) about fighting the war in his own way, on his canvases, and so he did, I believe. But who was he fighting against? Not the Tradition, which he loved, but Himself. He fought to paint a different way from how...

Marina Abramovich (Yugoslav, b. 1946) sits across from you, looking at you as you look back at her, in the atrium of the MoMA. She is sculptured in a long red dress. You are anyone who wishes to sit at the table for as long as you like. You are acutely aware that the performance piece is being recorded. And you wonder if you should switch that awareness to something else. But what? Marina Abramovich sits across from you. From the outside of "The Artist is Present," you may sit or stand at any point around the square marked out in white tape on the floor. If you look at the two sitters from the side, you are reminded of so many paintings of just that view. Two human beings seated across from each other, not touching and yet everywhere seems to touch. If you look at Marina Abramovich, she becomes the art object. Black hair tied back on beautiful gaunt head. A red triangle. You can imagine you are seated across from her, but you are not. You are outside the square. If you lo...

His obsessions are outrageous with joy. His fluency is outlined by rigor. He does not see differently from most of us so much as sees longer. The delight in making, in drawing, photographs, paintings, sculpture and installations. His by-now classic works are there: La DS (1993), a Citroen automobile seamlessly streamlined to a single-seater; and Black Kites (1997), a human skull covered with graphite. The works that moved me most were the simplest. A lump of clay pressed by the sculptor's hands into something resembling the heart. A lump of plasticine, the weight of the sculptor's body, rolled all over a city, now looking filthy, scored and mortal.

Saw the MoMA show "Ron Arad: No Discipline" this afternoon with TH. Arad (Israeli, b. 1951) produces objects that aim to blur the boundaries between design, sculpture and architecture. Oh dear. I could not get IKEA out of my head when I saw the numerous chairs displayed on the shelves. There were ripple chairs, butterfly chairs, chairs made of stainless steel rods, carbon fiber armchairs, and chairs inside of another chair. I liked the monumental-looking one, scooped out of a huge twisting hunk of steel. The other favorite was "A Mortal Coil," which could conceivably function as a book case. The long sloping seat of "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie" looked like the back of a dog. Most of the objects looked like design to me, interesting designs, but still design. I enjoyed the Conceptual Art show more than I thought I would. "In and Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976" exhibited about 75 works by artists related to Amsterdam in one way...

The New Yorker , December 22 & 29, 2008 Peter Schjeldahl writes on the Dumas exhibition at the MoMA: There is a heaviness to the paintings of the South African-born, Dutch-based artist Marlene Dumas, as if they might fall off the wall and break the floor. And yet they are thinly brushed, for the most part, on ordinary canvases. There's a flypaper stickiness about them, too, though their usual surface is matte and dry. The impressions are emotional. * Her art rarely conveys feeling so much as excites it and then absorbs it, to the benefit of the work's authority. She doesn't give; she takes. * [Of "Stern" (2004), based on Gerhard Richter's "October 18, 1977" (1988), itself in turn based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof militants] she drags the drama of a particularly haunting tragedy back to the secondhandedness of the photograph from the thirdhandedness of Richter's painting. By this and analogous uses of imagination, Dumas suggests, a li...

Paul Cézanne. (French, 1839-1906). The Bather. c. 1885. Oil on canvas, 50 x 38 1/8" (127 x 96.8 cm). Lillie P. Bliss Collection Henri Matisse. (French, 1869-1954). Bather. Cavalière, summer 1909. Oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 29 1/8" (92.7 x 74 cm). Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. © 2008 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Pablo Picasso. (Spanish, 1881-1973). Bather. winter 1908-09. Oil on canvas, 51 1/8 x 38 1/8" (129.8 x 96.8 cm). Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest. © 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York The Cezanne bather is a statue, the Matisse a bear, the Picasso a dancer.