NYC Museum Run
Last weekend was very long. Gehry's very large model of the downtown Guggenheim was the most moving piece I saw during my trip. I browsed around the tiny early models, looked over the sketches, spent a bit of time inspecting the Bilbao model, but it wasnt until I approached the huge model that it all started to click. My father was always building models of houses when I was a child, and I've seen plenty of building models since then, but none of them were anything but models to me. Standing in front of this piece, looking at it set against a wall-sized photograph of downtown-- the setting it will be placed in-- was the first time I've ever been able to look at a model and imagine myself there. I was able to imagine the water reflecting off the trademark titanium and onto cafe tables below.
Gursky's "Brasila, General Assembly I" wins second prize. Richard is right, after seeing his photographs in person, seeing them in books and magazines just isn't the same. Perhaps the most noticeable differences are the intelligible reflections. That is, in print it's very hard to see the reflections and the quality of reflected images, but at full resolution you see the image and Gursky's amazing attention to surface. There's also the color, but you only need to take one look at "99 cent" to know about that.
The Whitney's Bitstreams exhibit mostly has no place in a museum. It's more of the typical crap where museums find "digital art" and get all frothy because it was made on a computer. What I don't understand is how Lamsweerde's "Me Kissing Vindoodh", with its poor image manipulation, keeps getting referenced as a critical piece of 'digital art.' Especially given that John Haddock has done much more interesting work with the removal of subjects from historical images (which I cant find online) with (marginally) better image trickery. Is the poor quality of image editing part of the allure? Is it the equivalent of noticeable brush strokes? I dont think so. In fact, the Whitney itself claimed that all of the techniques used in the Bitstreams exhibit have been executed by the likes of the Dadaists and other contemporaries and that digital artwork brought the ability to simply take it one step further, to erase the seams. Why, then, are half of the pieces in the Whitney full of visible seams?
There were interesting pieces though. Robert Lazzarini's sculptures are some of the most mind-bending pieces I've ever seen. The sculptures look like they've been flattened into 2D images and then manipulated as an image plane. In fact, Lazzarini scans his subjects, distorts them in CAD, and outputs them with a rapid prototyping device. Looking at one of his sculptures makes you think you're looking at a 2D picture, but it's a 3D object. you can walk around it, and look from any angle you like, yet it always appears as a 2D image. Such a simple manipulation with dramatic effect.
Also notable were Paul Pfieffer's John 3:16 and Jim Campbell's "Ambiguous Icon #5" and "Portrait of Harry Nyquist." Hilary Harkness (seen at the Bill Maynes Gallery) has amazing technical ability with oil paints.
Saturday night Steve joined me at a fashion show for Annabelle in Williamsburg. Fashion show blah blah blah. What was interesting about the whole thing was seeing all of the models do a curtain call at the end of the (very brief) show. Seeing twenty-odd people lined up and knowing that every stitch of clothing they were wearing was assembled by one woman is kind of amazing. It's amazing force of will, if nothing else.
Ah, but to continue the see-saw, lets talk about the MOMA's Workspheres exhibit. It was great. The whole thing was filled with brilliant, innovate, playful, and smart furniture. Unfortunately, great pieces dont make the show, it was like walking through a pop-up version of a DWR catalog. There was little history about each piece. I want to read about the thought process that went into designing the pieces, to learn something about the problem solving process the designers went through, or just hear a bit of why they built what they did. The Un-Private House exhibit from years ago was curated much better. Each house model had a sizable explanation next to it and some were also presented next to the blueprints.
What bothered me most is that the exhibit just contributed to the sort of design fetishism so popular these days, c.f. Graves at Target. We dont need to go into that, however, it's old news.
Next time you go outside, look up in the sky and count the number of airplanes you can see. At any one time there seem to be at least five planes above the silicon valley. NY was similar. There is a world of metal above ours.
--Posted 04/19/01 06:17PM