Provoking Magic: Lighting of Ingo Maurer at the Cooper-Hewitt

Just in case you woke up this morning panicking "Holy Smokes that lamp show at the Cooper-Hewitt closes in two weeks I've gotta go today!", well.... relax. You really don't.

I mean, Ingo Maurer definitely has a lot of interesting ideas about lighting, and Provoking Magic does feature some attention-getting objects, but like many exhibitions at this museum, there's also a definite air of seen-it-before, especially if you've visited a design blog more than twice this past year. Another flaw in the show, and a common one at the Copper-Hewitt: few, if any, curator's "liner" notes accompany the pieces, so nothing comes with any context, unless you do the free audio tour, which Debbie and I did not.

Anyway, the exhibit showcases more than 50 of Maurer's creations, spread out through all the exhibit rooms on Andrew Carnegie's one-time mansion's second floor. Highlights for us included "Porca Miseria!", a chandelier made from shattered white porcelain dinner plates, as well as the odd fork and knife; the spooky-blue installation featuring "Wo bist do Edison....?", a hanging lamp with a hologram bulb; and the Golden Ribbon, a huge, undulating, surprisingly elegant ceiling piece that looks exactly like it sounds like it would look.

There are plenty of lowlights here, as well, especially the overly kitschy stuff (lamps made from Astroboy and the like), the ho-hum LED clothing, and the chandelier infested with rats. And the fluorescent playground pictured below would probably be really cool if it was actually built and you could wander through it, but it's not.

Provoking Magic: Lighting of Ingo Maurer will be at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum through January 27. Admission to the museum is a painful $15. Fortunately for me, Debbie had two free passes, so we left feeling only disappointed, rather than disappointed and ripped off.

Georges Seurat: Drawings at the MoMA

I know what you're thinking. "Wait, a drawings show? I don't know.... sounds boring. Unfinished. Technical. For students and critics only."

OK, so you're probably more open-minded than me, and were thinking nothing of the sort.

But just in case, let me reassure you that the Georges Seurat exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art features literally dozens of beautiful, memorable pieces that stand on their own—not as "studies" of anything—as complete, and in this case quite brilliant, works of art.

Yes, there are a number of pure sketches here, some from Seurat's early days as a student, more drawn by the artist in preparation for one of his big paintings. These are interesting for what they are, and the full-color "final practice round" of his pointillistic masterpiece Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte—all landscape, no people—looks amusingly like a photoshop experiment.

But it is Seurat's stand-alone works that are the real draw here. I've been to the exhibition twice, and can't get enough of his cafe series, the performers almost ghostly on stage, the audience's heads slightly in your way, all of it unbelievably evocative of dim, crowded, smoky clubs; or his landscapes, both rural and urban, as well as the more intimate portraits, and the way Seurat expresses an astonishing amount of movement, or energy, or emotion, not with lines, but through shadow, and negative space.

Georges Seurat: Drawings runs through January 7. The Museum of Modern Art is located on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. My apologies, as always on these museum posts, for the surreptitiously-snapped photographs.

The New Museum

My daughters and I had a blast yesterday touring the spanking New Museum with Debbie, who had snagged us four tickets for a prime slot during the Target-sponsored, free-admission, grand-opening weekend. And while we all agreed that the art inside was a bit of a bust (with a few notable exceptions), the museum itself is a huge success, we thought: cleverly designed, filled with small surprises, nice wide-open galleries, an excellent addition to the neighborhood in particular, and to the City as a whole.

The building makes for a dramatic, dynamic terminus to Prince Street, and is best seen by that approach (rather than coming up or down Bowery). And its shape—all precarious, piled-up-rectangles—also, as Nicolai Ouroussoff helpfully articulated in the Times, fits neatly in with the ramshackle tenements of different heights and stones that flank it on either side. The LED signage above the doorway is bright and welcoming, and though we wished they hadn't put the aluminum mesh that covers the entire exterior over the windows as well (a bit penitentiarial, no?), we all agreed that this truly is a beautiful building. Thankfully, the "Hell, Yes!" piece is temporary (a rainbow? really?), and will be replaced by something hopefully fresher soon. Anyway, here's some more thoughts and pictures from our visit...

By far our favorite art work inside was Black-on-White, Grey Ascending by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, seven video screens relating a story I couldn't catch (apparently it involves a kidnapping), all told in typography and a bossa-nova soundtrack, overlaid at times with a voice reading from one of the screens. This resides within a sound-proof glass enclosure at the lobby's eastern end, and will be there through March 23.


The main exhibition, Unmonumental, is a group show of recent work "exploring the reinvention of sculptural assemblage." Many of these pieces, spread out across all three floors of the museum's primary exhibit space, were fun to look at, and some were undeniably creative and engaging, but it also all felt a bit silly to me. The sculptural medium did show the museum's wide-open galleries to their full advantage, however (we liked the concrete floors, skylights, and lack of support columns; according to Debbie, however, the ceilings felt "a little too Macy's"). On January 16, a series of giant collages will be placed on the walls, surrounding the current pieces, and the whole thing will run through March 23.


We loved the museum's huge, surprisingly bright green elevator, and its skinny little neighbor next door.


The snack bar toward the back of the lobby, sadly, wasn't yet open, so we couldn't sample the unbelievably intriguing-sounding Cheese Puffs.


This narrow back staircase separating the third and second floors features a serendipitous little nook about halfway down, home on this day to an audio work.


The undulating gift shop, right smack in the lobby, is enclosed by the same aluminum mesh as the building itself.


Downstairs there's a terrific theater, now showing an hilarious (and insanely irritating) POV film of an artist being barked at—and, eventually, attacked—by a pack of dogs.


Also downstairs: the extravagantly tiled bathroom, complete with recessed high-blast hand dryer. The women's is a much less fabulous blue.


On the seventh floor on opening weekend (and presumably not beyond, but you never know): FREE CANDY! Target knows how to throw a logo-heavy party, and this island of free M&Ms, gumballs, jelly bellies, fireballs and other treats provoked giddy grins and shrieks of delight in just about everyone... not an easy feat with this downtown, art-going crowd.


The candy may not be there anymore, but the spectacular three-sided view of the Lower East Side makes an elevator ride to the top a must.


The New Museum is located on the Bowery between Rivington and Stanton Streets, at the easternmost end of Prince Street. The museum is open from Noon until 6:00 on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, and until an excellently late 10:00pm on Friday and Saturday; it's closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission is $12, students $6, 18-and-under free.

Tara Donovan / Damien Hirst at the Met

One of the great things about the Metropolitan's "suggested" admission price policy? You can bamboozle your exhausted-from-skating daughters to stop in for just 15 minutes or so and look at two pieces of art, and, if you're like me, it will only set you back $3.

First we headed over to the mezzanine in the modern wing to see Tara Donovan's new installation, for which the artist covered all three walls of the gallery with rolled strips of mylar tape in seemingly random, organic patterns. Debbie introduced me to Donovan a couple of years ago—she creates amazingly obsessive sculptures out of plastic drinking straws, or styrofoam cups, or pencils—and I must say that this new piece is not her most exciting. Bo, Co and I all agreed that although we liked the "bubble" or "drops-of-water" effect created by both the shape of the loops as well the reflections off the mylar, the whole thing was disappointingly 2-D , and didn't really command the space.


Up one flight of stairs: Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, more popularly known as The Shark. Now, the most obvious reaction to Hirst's most famous work—a 13-foot tiger shark floating in formaldehyde—is that a more appropriate home for this sad, decaying beast might be across the park at the Museum of Natural History. The flip side, to paraphrase my insightful girlfriend: if you installed any of the MNH's animals in the Met and called it art, it would look somewhat cool just because it seems so out of place. That said, my daughters and I also all thought that there is definitely something poignant and compelling about this piece. And you've got love the list of materials on the wall card.

Tara Donovan's exhibition runs through April 27, 2008; Damien Hirst's Shark will be on view through the Fall of 2010.

Kara Walker at the Whitney

Yeah, I'm not convinced. The Kara Walker exhibition at the Whitney—My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love—has received the best reviews of the season: "Brilliant is the word for it," said the NY Times, to quote just one gush. But when Debbie and I went last Saturday, we were both remarkably unmoved.

Granted, Walker's old-fashioned silhouettes depicting all manner of slavery-era violence, oppression and degradation are undeniably striking spread out on these large, curved white walls. And I thought the room in which Walker projected colored light upon her figures added an interesting other dimension to her work. And Debbie liked the typed-out notecards, surrounded by the framed collage-y pieces.

But. Maybe it's the shapes themselves, all sort of feathery and curlicued, that didn't grab me. Or Walker's use of the plantation as a way to rattle our cages about latter-day racism that felt tired (as opposed to the Whitney's excellent, absolutely contemporary Lorna Simpson exhibition last year). Or perhaps the relentless, deliberate crudity of the imagery was ultimately a turn-off, as if the viewer (in this case, me) wouldn't get it if there were any subtlety to the work.

Anyway, if Walker's style resonates, then by all means see the show. But if, like I was, you're feeling skeptical going in, I promise you it's OK to skip it.

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through February 3. Admission is $15, except on Friday evenings, when it's pay-what-you-wish.

Martin Puryear at the MoMA

They're on a roll, those MoMA curators. Following this summer's brilliant Richard Serra show comes this beautiful and dramatic career retrospective—from the mid 1970s to 2007—of Martin Puryear's sculptures. My occasionally reluctant but ultimately always art-loving daughters and I went on opening day last Sunday, and totally enjoyed everything about the exhibition, from the soaring pieces in the Atrium—especially, of course, Ladder for Booker T. Washington, from which, as you can see above, Co swung—to the several dozen free-standing and wall-mounted pieces on the sixth floor.

I think my kids and I liked Puryear's free-standing work so much because of its evocative—and inherently narrative—qualities. We would ask each other: What does this one remind you of? An elephant (Bo and Co)... or a snail (me, to much rolling of eyes)? There's also something dark and mysterious about many of these pieces, and if you stumbled across them in the woods, I'm not sure you wouldn't be more than a little creeped out, worried that whomever built them may still be nearby.


Of course, if you're not of a storytelling bent, many of these are also technically marvelous and incredibly sensual—you'll be extremely tempted to touch—plus there's the powerful subtext running throughout of colonialism, oppression, imprisonment (external and internal), and freedom.

But my favorite part of the show, perhaps, was Puryear's series of circular, almost minimalist wall-mounted pieces, including Big and Little Same, below. These all were so elegant and creative, I thought.

The Martin Puryear exhibition runs through January 14. The Museum of Modern Art is located on 53rd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues.

Richard Prince at the Guggenheim

It's always good to have an excuse to head back to the Guggenheim... I love walking down the ramp (yes, I go backward), the art nicely contained within—and framed by—the vestibules, that comfortable feeling of expansive space behind you. Anyway, it had been about a year since my last visit, so a couple of weeks ago I took advantage of the museum's "pay-what-you-wish" Friday evening deal and saw the big Richard Prince retrospective, Spiritual America.

First, let me say this: the show's title has little if anything to do with the subject matter in any sort of overt way. I was afraid that the work would be a lot of fish-in-a-barrel attacks on money-seeking evangelicals and the like, but Spiritual America is actually a good deal more broad and interesting than that: it's both the name of one of Prince's most famous pieces, an appropriated image of 14-year-old Brooke Shields, above; and, in the far-more-articulate-than-I-could-be words of the museum's liner notes, sums up "the powerful conflicting impulses that characterize American culture: the deeply ingrained Puritan ethos countered by a desperate and often degrading desire for recognition."


Prince is most known for his appropriations—photographing images from magazines, mostly advertisements, then enlarging, re-cropping, framing, and selling for thousands of dollars—and there are plenty of examples here of that work. My favorites among these were from the Fashion and the Girlfriends series (taken from the long-running feature in Easy Rider magazine, for which guys would send in "sexy" pictures of their woman and their bike), both above; and the great Women Looking Left, below.

There are also (too) many of his Joke and Check paintings here, in which bad Borscht-belt one liners are, in the latter, put into grids of blank checks, or old porno pics, and then painted over. These are engaging, because the jokes can't help but elicit a smile, and I'm always a sucker for art that incorporates typography, but it does get repetitive.


But what I liked perhaps most of all was Prince's Upstate series—straightforward photographs taken near a small town in upstate New York—of forlorn man-made structures left to rot in their scrubby landscape. Abandoned dreams, creeping poverty, grinding despair... these pieces are simple, evocative, powerful.


As always, I apologize for the lameness of my surreptitiously taken photographs. Richard Prince: Spiritual America is at the Guggenheim through January 9. Adult admission to the museum is $18, except on Fridays between 5:45 and 7:15, when the place stays open late and you can pay whatever you want. I wanted: $3. Given the special deal and the fact that it was the show's opening night, I was pleasantly surprised that the museum did not feel crowded.

Warm Up / Liquid Sky / Droopscape at PS1

Yesterday marked the kick-off of the increasingly (ridiculously?) popular Warm Up, the PS1 art/dance party that runs on Saturdays all summer long, and Scoboco was most definitely in the hou... errr... courtyard. Admittedly, Bo, Co and I were there more to check out the new Young Architect's Contest winner—and it's excellent this year, called Liquid Sky / Droopscape and designed by the L.A.-based Ball-Nogues—than to rip it up on the dance floor, but we certainly had a nice afternoon soaking up the sun, getting soaked (that'd be Co), people-watching from the stairs, snacking and cracking (up), and doing a run through the museum itself.

Anyway, the outdoor installation. Ball-Nogues's Liquid Sky dominates the scene, with its five giant, tinted-mylar "treetops" throwing kaleidoscopic shadows down upon the main courtyard, and shading the communal hammocks that ring the base of each "trunk." At the top of the trees are the obligatory Warm Up mist-makers, though in this case they were spraying something that felt more like rain and, frankly, was more than a little annoying, which is probably why they turned them off by around 4:30. But overall we loved the piece—the sound of the mylar (it's more like a heavy, reflective plastic than the material they use for those balloons) in the breeze, and the way it changed the light, and the festive air it lent the concrete space.

But my favorite new addition was Droopscape: a saggy mylar "belly" in the smaller courtyard (where the food is served), supported by two freestanding structures at the top of which sit tip buckets that slowly, sloooooooowly, fill with water until gravity finally takes over and it dumps its deluge below, preferably upon some unsuspecting partygoer. Kind of gimmicky, sure (and reminiscent of the great Crown Fountain in Chicago's Millenium Park), but it'll definitely keep you entertained while you're waiting on line to order your burgers and beers.


As far the Warm Up party goes, we arrived not long after 3:00, and there was already a slight wait to get in. When we left at around 5:45, the line snaked around the museum's exterior and out of sight. And by that time the inside already felt too packed! On this day, also, the DJ's started—and stayed too long—in too mellow a mood, giving us early-arrivals nothing to move to, the bass and bump kicking in when it was already too crowded to really dance.

PS1 is located in Long Island City, Queens, a short walk from stops on the 7, the E/V and the G trains. Warm Up happens every Saturday from 3:00 until 9:00 through September 1. Admission is $10, which includes free run of the museum itself. They make kids—or, at least, Bo and Co—pay full price this year, though I'm not sure whether this is actual policy or a mistake up at the front desk.