Manhatta

From the New York Times by David Kehr:

“IN 1920 the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler invited his friend Paul Strand, a photographer who, like Sheeler, was a protégé of Alfred Stieglitz, to collaborate on a film.

 

Photographs from Lowry Digital, Museum of Modern Art/Anthology Film Archives

A digitally restored print of “Manhatta” is being shown this month at the Museum of Modern Art.

Shot with a French camera that Sheeler had acquired for the staggering sum of $1,600, the 10-minute movie that came to be known as “Manhatta” consisted of a series of strikingly composed images, shot in Lower Manhattan, that evoked a typically epic day in the life of New York. Passengers debark from the Staten Island Ferry, steam billows in great clouds from the peaks of skyscrapers, and workers hurry past the darkened windows of office buildings, while printed titles quote lines from Walt Whitman, celebrating the “proud and passionate city.”

This resolutely modernist work, with its Cubist perspectives and percussive rhythms, most likely was, in the words of the film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, “the first avant-garde film produced in the United States.”

But until very recently “Manhatta” could be seen only in a badly compromised version, with jittery images and a blasted-out contrast that made it look like a fifth-generation photocopy that someone’s dog had been sleeping on for several years. (You can experience the horror for yourself at on YouTube.)

It’s hard to imagine the art world allowing a similar fate to befall a painting by Sheeler or a photograph by Strand. “There is a misconception about film,” said Josh Siegel, an associate curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s film department, “that because it’s a mass-produced medium that all of these films are easily accessible and easily reproduced, and of course they’re not.”

In 2006 MoMA joined a consortium of film archives to sponsor a digital restoration of “Manhatta,” supervised by the independent curator Bruce Posner.”

Read the rest here.

Unrestored version.

 

Maya Lin

From the New York Times:

“ON a gray, unusually muggy October day the artist and architect Maya Lin was showing a visitor around “Wave Field,” her new earthwork project at the Storm King Art Center here. The 11-acre installation, which will open to the public next spring, consists of seven rows of undulating hills cradled in a gently sloping valley. Ms. Lin clambered nimbly up and down them, regarding each nook, cranny and blade of grass with something of a proprietary air.

“It’s part of a study that started with looking at a simple water wave,” she explained en route, “and how does the wave begin or end.” Given that she was working with land, not water, she added, “I was almost afraid to start it.”

From a neighboring hill came the delighted screams of children at play: Ms. Lin’s daughters, India, 11, and Rachel, 9, and one of Rachel’s friends.

Seen from afar the piece does suggest an expanse of ocean waves that have been frozen in place, as well as many other things: snowdrifts, a Zen moss garden, perhaps a cluster of the American Indian burial mounds that can be found in the hills of southeastern Ohio, where Ms. Lin grew up.

With its sense of having arisen naturally from the earth, the earthwork also recalls Ms. Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the design for which catapulted her to stardom and notoriety in 1981, when she was a 21-year-old senior at Yale.”

Read the rest here.

William Eggleston

At The Whitney Museum thru January 25th:

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera – Photographs and Video, 1961-2008
by Elizabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski with contributions by Donna De Salvo, Stanley Booth and Tina Kukielski

“Drawing together Eggleston’s famous and lesser-known works, this lavishly illustrated catalogue is the first to examine both his photography and videos. Of particular relevance are his black-and-white images from the late 1950s and 1960s, which helped shape his color photography, as well as the relationship between his provocative video recordings of 1970s Memphis nightlife and his later work. Included are reproductions of newly restored prints, executed specifically for the exhibition. Filled with new and challenging contributions to scholarship, this catalogue will prove the standard reference for Eggleston’s photographs for years to come.”

Read the New York Times review here.

Three

Three things to see

Leandro Erlich: Swimming Pool at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center thru April 13th

Charles Gaines: Manifestos at Kent thru December 20th

Ali Banisadr at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects thru December 20th

Miro at MoMA

from the website:

“Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937 is the first major museum exhibition to identify the core practices and strategies Miró used to attack and reinvigorate painting between 1927 and 1937, a transformative decade within his long career. Taking his notorious claim—“I want to assassinate painting” —as its point of departure, the exhibition explores twelve of Miró’s sustained series from this decade, beginning with a 1927 group of works on canvas that appears to be raw and concluding with 1937’s singular, hallucinatory painting, Still Life with Old Shoe. Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, purposeful stylistic heterogeneity, and the use of collage and readymade materials are among the aggressive tactics that Miró used in pursuit of his goal. By assembling in unprecedented depth the interrelated series of paintings, collages, objects, and drawings of this decade, this exhibition repeatedly poses the question of what painting meant to Miró and what he proposed as its opposite, and in the process reveals the artist’s paradoxical nature: an artist of violence and resistance who never ceased to be a painter, a creator of forms.”

Read the New York Times review here.

theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim

from the website

“During the 1990s a number of artists claimed the exhibition as their medium. Working independently or in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the individual object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding its physical and temporal parameters. Using the museum as a springboard for work that reaches beyond the visual arts, their work often commingles with other disciplines such as architecture, design, and theater, engaging directly with the vicissitudes of everyday life to offer subtle moments of transformation. This loose affiliation of artists, each of whom now boasts strong, independent careers, periodically and randomly joins forces to create a variety of projects. The Guggenheim Museum has extended an invitation to a core group of these artists—Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—to collectively formulate a scenario for an exhibition, one that will reflect and articulate the unique nature of their practices. Organized by the museum’s Chief Curator, Nancy Spector, in close collaboration with the artists, the exhibition will present a genealogy of their shared history through site-specific installations of new, often self-reflexive works created on the occasion of this project.”

Read the New York Times review here.

Calder at the Whitney

From the New York Times:

” Is art basically glorified child’s play, extending into adulthood, through a lifetime, picking up ideas and gaining finesse as it goes? That’s one way to think of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Few exhibitions have focused so intently on one artist’s child within. It’s a Peter Pan syndrome show.

It’s also a large show, with a chunky, charming catalog. Yet it feels intimate and light, not to say lightweight. Gallery by gallery, it’s as suspenseful and insubstantial as a magic act: what will the artist pull from his sleeve next? The story it tells is like a Kids R Us version of early 20th-century Modernism, with a grown-up surprise at the end.” Read the rest here.

Rachel Whiteread at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

From the New York Times:

“In signature works like “Ghost” and “House,” the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread made plaster casts of the interiors of London homes. Monumental yet ethereal, these works addressed Minimalist sculpture with polite deference while striking up bold conversations about urban preservation. (“House,” a public-art commission made in a condemned East London terrace house and exhibited in situ, was controversial enough that a local council destroyed it after just a few months.)

Ms. Whiteread’s latest project is not a single dwelling but an entire village: an installation of some 200 vintage dollhouses lighted from within and arranged on stepped pedestals in a darkened room. “Place (Village),” the centerpiece of a mini-survey devoted to the artist at the Museum of Fine Arts here, may strike the artist’s admirers as a bizarre and kitschy departure. Viewers who have never seen one of her room-size casts won’t really get a sense of her work from this piece, which is making its United States debut here.

Still, the exhibition, which includes drawings and a few smaller sculptures, reveals the more emotive side of an artist who can come off as somber and humorless. Standing in the midst of “Village,” you have the sensation of floating over the rooftops of Chagall’s Vitebsk.

Mary Heilmann at the New Museum

from the New Museum’s website:

“Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone” will be the first solo exhibition and retrospective of the artist’s work in a New York museum. It will include paintings as well as ceramic sculptures and furniture made by the New York-based artist over the last forty years.

Heilmann (b. 1940) is one of the preeminent artists of her generation—a pioneering painter whose work injects abstraction with elements from popular culture and craft traditions. A “painter’s painter,” her straightforward, seemingly loose and casual approach belies a witty dialogue with art historical preconceptions. As Dave Hickey writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: “The canons of geometric abstraction, Color Field painting, and Minimalism are honored in the spirit but not in the letter. In Heilmann’s synthesis, they are straightforwardly looted as available precedents.”

Heilmann’s work has been deeply influenced by her personal experiences, including a childhood and adolescence split between Los Angeles-area beaches and Bay Area beatnik clubs. The impact of this thoroughly West Coast childhood is seen in the vibrant, lusty color palette, sense of boundless possibility, and experimentation for which Heilmann’s paintings are known. The sense of movement and rhythm evident in the work—as well as many of the paintings’ titles—are connected to Heilmann’s enthusiasm for popular music ranging from Brian Eno to the Sex Pistols, to k.d. lang and beyond. The freedom of abstraction combines with an element of autobiography, making Heilmann’s paintings highly influential to a younger generation of artists. Ultimately, Heilmann’s practice can be seen as an all-encompassing network linking genres, styles, friends, locations, and histories—enabling each individual work to speak eloquently on its own terms as well as in a larger chorus.”

Read the New York Times review here.

Yael Bartana

From Time Out New York

“In conversation one evening last October at the City Hotel in Tel Aviv, Israeli artist Yael Bartana, whose videos are the subject of a small survey opening Sunday 19 at P.S.1, said, “It feels to me like the end of Zionism.” It was a stunning statement, given the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, not incidentally, our country’s virtually uncritical support of Israeli policy. But, as Bartana quickly added, “I don’t want to be saying this is black and white.”

Quite the opposite: Although the five films that curator Klaus Biesenbach has chosen for the show probe the complex issues of Zionism, anti-Semitism and the wars that have shaped Israel’s national story, they are not political statements per se. Instead, they are open-ended, poetic explorations of personal identity and shared history, patriotism and dissent, idealism and reality.

Bartana was born in 1970 in Afula, a conservative municipality of approximately 150,000 in Southern Galilee, and grew up in a family she described as “very Zionist.” She spent the late 1990s in New York, where she lived in the East Village, studied at SVA, and mainly hung out with other Israelis, known in Hebrew as yordim. The term, derived from the verb to descend, suggests betrayal of the homeland, and indeed most of these exiles were left of center and came here to escape a society beset by a siege mentality.”

Read the rest here.