Off to the Whitney leaving Dave and Enid munching

Last Wednesday we went off to NYC for a day of museums and food with Dave Drake and Enid Advocate. Arriving in the City at late lunch time, we just had to have a bite. This landed us at a Dean & Deluca’s deli (Madison and 85th). After the bite Karen and I departed leaving Dave and Enid still munching. We went off to the Whitney to see the Lee Friedlander show, “America by Car”. This is the latest demonstration that Friedlander still knows his old trick of shooting from inside his car with a quite unvarying framing approach. Roof pillars and rear view mirrors are in almost every image. When you are confronted with two rooms of pictures, 192 in all,  with two rows running around the walls with almost no spacing between each picture, the effect is not even numbing, just mostly boring.

Third Ave. near 21st Street 6PM

Friedlander,  living legend in the photography world, desperately needed a critical voice in his ear. Maybe, if he had been challenged to boil this current odyssey down to 20 images, or even 40, we might have  been able to identify what was new in his eyes.

By this point I was not in the right frame of mind to enjoy any more of the Whitney. We did march through “CHARLES LEDRAY: WORKWORKWORKWORKWORK” and a mysterious small show on the first floor, “SARA VANDERBEEK: TO THINK OF TIME“.

Mark and Karen in stairwell of Whitney - a continuing series

Karen and I did continue a ritual photo on a seat in the stairwell of the Whitney.

We then met up with Dave and Enid at the Met. Enid had finished her homework assignment. We went to the Baldessari retrospective “Pure Beauty“. I have never “gotten” conceptual art. Most of the “concepts” are either trivial or simply silly. This Baldessari extravaganza simply added more to my sense of betrayal about this art genre. This is cheap stuff done over and over. The art piece from which the show draws its title is a great example of what a waste of time this art is.

borrowed w/o permission: http://www.lurkmoophy.com/tag/john-baldessari

The words “PURE BEAUTY” are painted on a pure white background. (see the image to the left) Now this is worth a moment’s pause, but the next twenty variations on this trick reveal that Baldessari is just another exploitative hack. He found out that people would pay money to own and display this sort of work and so he gave them what they wanted. The only other note about this exhibit is that making bigger works of art does not mean better. Some of his later works took up whole walls in the vast halls of the Met. Boring and insulting.

Artistic Furniture of Rohlfs at MET

Fortunately my day at the Met ended with a trip to a little show of furniture by Rohlfs. He started making furniture at age 40 after starting life as a mold maker and designer of kitchen stoves at the turn of the 20th century. His furniture making career only latest ten years, but he made some interesting pieces and some pretty clunky stuff too.  The flip top desk was presented in a rather unthoughtful manner by the MET. Th desk looks to have stubby little wings (see image below).

Rohlfs cantilever desk

Rohlfs' flip top desk

On closer examination it is clear that Rohlfs built these folding sides to be placed flush against the side of the upper box of the desk. Perhaps the MET thought that people would not notice the graceful curved openings in the sides so they left both at right angles to the desk. Thus the ungainly appearance of vestigial wings. Better that the MET had folded one side entirely flush with the desk case and left the other at an oblique angle to show off the carvings.¹

Our day almost ran off the rails at this point. Dave, not being aware of how pedestrian some of his compatriots are about food, suggested that we stop at Chirping Chicken. I was ready. Fortunately, in most regards, we closed out our day with a trip to Eataly across the street from the Flat Iron Building on Madison Square (5th Ave. and 23rd St.). This hot spot for well-heeled youth was a terrific opportunity for excess, though the excess actually ended at a Belgian hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Amsterdam on the Upper West Side for desert and coffee.

David Drake, the fish, Mark Orton

1. all images of the furniture borrowed without permission from http://www.curatedmag.com/news/2010/10/19/the-artistic-furniture-of-charles-rohlfs-exhibition-at-the-met/

G. Caillebotte's "Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres" - Brooklyn Museum

Last weekend we spent one very busy Saturday in New York City museuming. We started in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum. This time we took the 2 train from 125th St in Harlem. After 45 minutes and a bit of subway back and forth caused by track work, we emerged from the subway walking up to look straight at the new glass entrance hall of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Brooklyn Museum

Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings From Paris to the Sea

We visited a number of galleries. I found the exhibition, “Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings From Paris to the Sea” very interesting. Unlike the New York Time’s reviewer Holland Cotter,¹ I am not too bothered with issues of exactly where any particular artist fits into the taxonomy that art critics and historians use.

G. Caillebotte-"Factories in Argenteuil"

Unlike most taxonomies of the physical world, art taxonomy seems to obscure more than enlighten. At any rate I really enjoyed the industrial and street scenes. His perspectives are frequently novel.((pictures of Caillebotte’s work shown here borrowed without permission from the Brooklyn Museum website))

Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”

Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” is now on permanent display. I must admit that very few of the 1038 women honored in this piece were familiar to me. The “Heritage Panels” that are part of this work offer a timeline and some hints about why the women included at the dinner are there. The Brooklyn Museum has wonderful web pages on the Dinner Party, including a 360⁰ virtual tour here.

“American Identities: A New Look”

We made a return visit to the the fifth floor for the “American Identities: A New Look” permanent installation. This is proving to be worth a trot around whenever we get to this museum. The topics are great and the juxtapositions of art from different eras about similar topics provides an unusual view on artists  and topics.

The Black List Project: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell

We also stopped by “The Black List Project: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell” (web information here) on the way out the door. Large conventional portraits of notable people. This part of  “a documentary project that explores being Black in America.”. Not sure how they chose the people included, but with such a large population to pick from any selections would probably raise that question.

The Brooklyn Museum continues to be a very reliable source of good exhibitions without the crushes of the MET and MOMA. Good place to take the grandchildren.

MOMA

“Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West”

Stephen Shore 1973 photo Klamath Falls, OR in MOMA show

With that we got back on the subway and headed back to Manhattan and a visit to MOMA. Fortified by one of the wonders of urban life, a hot dog from a street vendor, we went into MOMA and first looked at “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West”. This topically arranged visit to photographs of the American West was great fun for me. Lots of famous photographers juxtaposed with people unknown to me but shooting photos on a similar topic but perhaps from a completely different time. Leaving aside the pedagogical intent of the show, “the American West is a produced cultural artifact” – the quality of most of the images was very good. Lots to enjoy.²

“The Printed Picture”

I also returned briefly to look at an exhibition that I had stumbled on during an earlier visit. “The Printed Picture” explores the development of printing pictures, something that we take for granted. It is not so long ago that color pictures did not appear in daily newspapers. Color was reserved for the Sunday paper pullouts and magazines. On a daily basis one was used to quite grainy black and whites. Now color is ubiquitous, expected, and black and white images are the more unusual. One technology really caught my attention.  The Hewlett Packard Indigo press. This digital press prints in full four color at 120 pages per minute with variable page content on the fly. The age of on demand printing is here now. Maybe this should be obvious from the flourishing self-publication sites.

Karen has now purchased the book that accompanies this exhibition,  The Printed Picture, a book by Richard Benson that traces the changing technology of picture making from the Renaissance to the present, focusing on the vital role of images in multiple copies.

Paul Graham, “a shimmer of possibility”

Paul Graham. New Orleans (Woman Eating). 2004

Paul Graham. New Orleans (Woman Eating). 2004

I also went back to look again at a series of photos by Paul Graham, “a shimmer of possibility”. Working predominantly in series format, these photos are really compelling. I found myself spending more than my usual 10 seconds studying these series. “New Orleans (Woman Eating) is a wonderful series which is occupied with a woman sitting in a bus stop eating chicken. But, the series seems also to be about accidental art found in the rubbish at her feet.³

In another series, “Texas 2005″,  8 pictures taken around sunset. Only on close examination of the first, taken at a low angle through trees between two houses looking towards a setting sun, do you realize that there are two figures, very faint figures, playing basketball. Later photos in the series show this play up close. In none is there any connection displayed between the photographer and the basketball players. We seem to be an unseen observer. But, as the title of this show suggests, these events are just “a shimmer of possibility”. What in fact are we observing?

Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective

We also rode the escalators to the top floor to look at “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective”. This strange fellow made an enormous amount of “art” in his short life. Most of this seems to fit into the genre of art which MFA and PhD students will worry about. Not much for me to say about this except for repeating my distain for this genere of self-indulgent silli-business masquerading contemporary art. Nevertheless,  I did take a few shots of the exhibition.

Here is a shot from above of Kippenberger large installation on the second floor.

Martin Kippenberger. Installation view of The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”. Mixed media, dimensions variable

I got more interested in some strange reflections as I was taking a few photos from the sixth floor balcony.

reflection-kippenberger-moma

MET

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors

After a brief bus ride, we trooped in to the MET. By this time I was pretty museumed out. Reinforced by a stop in the cafeteria (I can get there blind folded), we did look at the exhbition,    
“Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors”. Could be the end of the day or my general lack of interest in Impressionist flowers, but, I was underwhelmed and glad to board the M2 for Harlem.

1. see his review March 27, 2009 “The Reluctant Impressionist here
2. Stephen Shore photo borrowed without permission from NYTimes
3. The picture here of the series was taken by me. The second is borrowed without permission from MOMA’s website