NYC Museum Exhibitions, 1999

Here are some notes on visits to NYC museums that I wrote in December of 1999, long before this blog.

The MTA Transit Museum

Industrial Art: evolution of subway cars, ceramic tiles in stations, they thought they could make people more moral by giving them beautiful stations. The early cars were wood, but that proved dangerous. Fabric straps went out in the 1940s.

Museum of the City of New York

Exhibition on circus art. Very telling -- use of wild exaggerations (e.g. elephants putting on skits dressed as people and standing up, gesturing in character, etc.) Adults accept because believing itslef is fun? Because impossible to disabuse kids? Big gestures in posters, big swaths of color, big sweep to ignore smaller details -- three rings.

The Frick Collection

The worst mansion ever. No wonder he willed it away: who in the family would live there? Huge, daunting rooms, none small, with no natural relation to one another. Starts with courtyard plan but "magnificence" of rooms overwhelms the courtyard. All conspicuous consumption.

Mostly the paintings are safe. Saw only one Impressionist, an OK Monet, and 2 Vermeers, though of course Vermeer is nice and safe too. Lots of portraits: Van Dyck, Constable, Turner.

"Jump Cut"

This was a film at the MoMA. It follows the plot of Faust in the manner of "live film." It shows how film, lighted a certain way, can make a face or gesture more dramatic than the real thing.

The film follows the main lines of Goethe's play -- the study, the bargain, the jewels, the wildride, the trial. There is no death of Faust at the end, no God and Mephistopheles at the beginning. It samples the Murnau film on a screen that covers the width of the upper third of the stage, as if a screen had been lowered only that far and then stopped.

What is its theme? Beats me. It's more of a jouissance with, a tootling of the story, using multimedia. Not theme but like theme: faces and persona(lities) are merged, demerged, emerged. Gretchen is Gretchen but also (Help Me) Rhonda and finally demi-asserted to be Mephistopheles himself. (Upon this demi-discovery, Faust gives her/him a big kiss. Whom is he kissing? What does he mean? The motion as dance or gesture is more important, gets to you more, than it is a theme or "message.")

Interesting riff on the killing of the child. It is an abortion, and the devil blames her for it, is the prosecutor at her trial.

Robert Rauschenberg Exhibition at the Guggenheim

Rauschenberg started by studying art at Black Mountain College in 1948. Then he went to NYC in 1949, had some influence from Abstract Expressionism but soon got into "ongoing dialogue between mediums" of painting and sculpture and also handmades and machine-made. Some of the works:

• First work: "This is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time," 1949. It is a handmade "book" of 14 woodcuts. It opens from the bottom, topped by (all that's visible) a piece of tracing paper with the penciled title of the piece.
• On the wall: A "documentary photograph" of the 14 pages -- black with white horizontal streaks.
• "Autobiography" (1968): three 6' x 4' panels ranged vertically. The top one is a fluoroscope of a full-size person with a compass and a crazy flying gizmo, which is semi-repeated in the bottom / a photo of a skater with an inverted parasail attached to his back: Art expresses its affection for all science: crazy gizmos but also serious stuff: the background of the lower panel is a nautical relief of a Texas bay for use in sailing, and the central panel is a spiral of biotext with the same center as a photo of the child Rauschenberg (?) taken rowboating by his (?) parents in (?) Texas where R was born.
• The same room has blown-glass auto tires, a blown-glass and glass rod kitchen broom (1997). Science loves art, as Bridget loves Bernie.
• Tire track print on a long paper scroll (20 sheets mounted on linen), 1953. The tire track is sciencelike because manufactured, artlike because individual.
• Also in this room: a sort of pillow of "slumped glass" with all the foldiness and rumpledness of a pillow, except that it is of glass. So the bounds being explored are greater than art/science.
• "Hydro (night Shade)": Tarnishes on a 4 x 7'aluminum sheet: hydrant, swishes.
• Two blueprints from the 1950s with someone named Susan Weil dong a dance pose or something. Photos 5 x 3'.
• Painting: "Mother of God" plays with a cut-out phrase, apparently a review of something.
• Painting: "The Invaluable Spiritual Road Map": Big white empty space imposed on the middle of an assemblage of city road maps. Is he resisting the merger of "road map" (industrial) and "spiritual"?
• "Crucifixion"
• Painting: A white on white as if gameboard, with numbers and a few words ("The lily white")
• Sculpture: "Greenhouse" I love this. Again, soft nature is embraced by hard art/technology. It is 4 feet high and 15" square on base mesh structure in three tiers, proportioned 7:3:1. The lowest tier has big tree twigs, the highest has lots of little twig ends, and the middle has an assemblage of twigs suggesting the (3D) outline of a nest, plus a 3" radius glass globe suggesing an egg. This is from 1950. Not green.
• Untitled work from the collection of Jasper Johns, 22" wide by 20" canvas. Mostly black, with the left 1/5 done over in a silvery something and the right 1/5 a collage of photos, a map, newspaper clipping -- all very small and under a glass plate. Pictures in that panel have the same human-nervousness-verging-on-sexual-aggression composition.
• Now here is one big room that gives an amazing look at how varied Rauschenberg's work was in 1950-55: All-white and all-black paintings, gold paintings inside shadowbox frames, photography, little collections of "scatole personali" (sewing threads, feathers, etc., and a little box to hold them), a box of dirt and mold for John Cage, assemblages of paper and clippings -- he was into everything.
• Continuing on the ramp: from 1953 and 1954, red and black paintings with oil and paper (newsprint in the black) and fabric (red only): thick, lush effect, lots of depth given by the folds in the paper. All threee have composition in the sense of spaces blocked out and against each other -- like the blocking in a Renaissance Adoration of the Magi but without the figures and landscape.
• Now three more smaller paintings -- same idea, same almost classical composition. A conservative among the NYC zanies! One of them ("Untitled" 1954) has pages from the Sunday comics below the dabs of paint and stuff, and out in front is a cheeseball version of Monet's Little Girl with Watering Can -- A U Paint It version or something, just three inches square. Also a crushed (I think it's a) bird nest.
• Next, "Minutiae" from 1954: a "combine" done as a set for a dance piece of the same name by Merce Cunningham. Same materials as the paintings but now in 3D. Still with that affection for the classical or at least the passé (kind of a still life of apples is one of the panels of the front frame)
• Paint Cans 1954 -- real cans in a real wood box, along with flattened-out tin from real cans, with labels reaffixed!
• Interview 1955: a combine like a cupboard -- blows you away. A paean to all art: neoclassical, sentimental, nudie, baseball, toreror, a brick aimed at a coastscape like the one in the background of Boticelli's Venus, an industrial promotion, a smile as if for Pepsodent, etc. Veryy sunny of disposition.
• 14 Illustrations from the Inferno 1958-60. Though 2D, they have Rauschenberg's layered feel. He is not afraid to be literal. Satan has sinners in his mouth, the violent vs. nature are shown by a penissy thing thrusting comet-like into the lower foreground.
• Odalisque 1955 uses what must have been a phot from a nudist magazine. Another combine with a rooster atop (pun for cock?). He uses a lot of them. It's basically a box set atop a single pillar whose bottom pierces a pillow. Hm.

Egon Schiele Exhibition at the MoMA

Dark, angry paintings and drawings, mostly of nudes with challenge in their faces and spread legs. Landscapes of dead-looking cities (one called Todt Stadt). He married in 1918, got the flu, died at 28. The label says he was well respected even after he withdrew from the Vienna Academy and was included in an official government show during the war. (It was for showing in neutral countries.) It is hard to imagine softening people with the violent nudes in this particular show, but the ones of Russian POWs or cities would probably have appeal. The style is very angular, seems to have design reasons also for repeatedly showing women in angled positions (knees down, cheeks up, all boney).

Manhattan as Art

December 19 I walked Manhattan from tip to tip with my son Christian. We started from the Broadway Bridge, which takes Broadway across to the Bronx, and then walked all the way to Battery Park. Surely the city is an artwork that ought to be studied by anyone serious about the Humanities. First there is the design that goes into the building of an expansion to a city -- the technological, the aesthetic, the political, even the moral. As for that, the "slums" of NYC that we saw were hardly slums at all, certainly not like I've seen in Chicago or the worst parts of Augusta, but vibrant and brimming with life. Every block of Amsterdam Avenue that we walked had hozens of small businesses, many with sidewalk components, all briskly engaged with a lively clientele whose look betrayed none of that despair that social "thinkers" attribute to life in upper Manhattan. This seems due to a long established policy in NYC of mixing income groups together. Thus design decisions have impact on moral life. Also the life on these streets is itself a fit subject of humane studies: the aesthetic decisions, the life decisions, attested by hte merchandise and its presentations. Envios were probably the most advertized service.

Downtown and Central Park / Midtown were also revealing. Park design, evolving styles of architecture.

Imagine a Broadway Web Site dedicated to the architecture and life of just this one street, from tip to tip of the metropolis. What a study that would be.