haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

It was 1972, and environmentalists were desperate. At least Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison were, and they sought a “survivalist alternative” where you might never expect it, in a work of art—and I work this together with past reports on summery sculpture indoors and out in Harlem Sculpture Gardens and by Alexis Rockman and Tiril Hasselknippe as a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

Their Survival Piece (the fifth of seven) made its debut that year in the gallery at Cal State Fullerton. In its Portable Orchard, nature had an assist from recycled redwood and artificial light. Now the Whitney recreates it, through January 1, and one can hear their urgency. “To survive as a species,” they wrote, “we are going to have to learn how to grow our own food and take care of ourselves.” So why has it gone all but forgotten? And why does it look so calm, so composed, and so green?

The Harrisons were themselves survivors. Like the fruit of their “sustainable food system,” they lived to a ripe old age. They would be in their nineties were they alive today. Their indoor citrus grove includes all that one might wish, including lemons, limes, grapefruit, and naval and mandarin oranges, each carefully labeled. On the First of July, just days after the opening at the Whitney, young fruit had already begun to appear. As if to proclaim their eco-friendliness, they were still green.

To appreciate it, though, you may have to get past the rhetoric. The enterprise sounds not just urgent, but downright bureaucratic. It speaks of not natural farming, which in any case takes more land to feed the millions, but natural farming practices—and they are not just obsolete, but “cannot be taken for granted.” You must get past the contradictions as well. This may be sustainable agriculture, but not for eating. If it makes you think of Rirkrit Tiravanija, “relational esthetics,” interactive art, free food, and sharing, forget it, and do not touch.

Perhaps the contradictions come with the territory, where fears mix with love. The Whole Earth Catalog appeared in 1972, Silent Spring was ten years old, and the Whitney has copies of both. Like the EPA, established in 1970, they attest to urgency, but also to hope. Artists may have felt a sense of desperation as well, as late modern art gave way to criticism and chaos. Besides, fears are easier to understand than ever in light of climate change. Yet artists like Maya Lin do not just conserve the environment, but transform it.

The orchard flourishes all the same. The Whitney has removed its eighth-floor partitions, leaving a wide-open room with planters in neat rows. They share their redwood hexagons with parallel light tubes directly above. As trees grow, their peaks extend into those upper hexagons as well. Other survival pieces included a hog pasture, a fishery, and an entire farm, all portable. Here a uniform design and strong colors carry the day.

It is tendentious all the same. This is not the future, sustainable or otherwise. It is art, and a true New York landmark shows what that might mean. Back from college in the 1970s, I was rediscovering the city, its neighborhoods and its architecture. The Ford Foundation on East 42nd Street offered a glorious respite from my minimum-wage job barely a block away. Like the Harrisons, it, too, took nature indoors and artifice into nature.

Finished in 1967, its twelve stories of offices surround a soaring atrium—a place for walking, sitting, and contemplation. Greenery blossoms out from the balconies and rises from the floor. A collaboration between Dan Kiley, the landscape architect (whose other landmarks include Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis), and Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo (who also designed the Met’s American wing), it brought a temperate environment and a seamless flow of plants, trees, pink stone, and rusted steel. It has its surfeit of good intentions, too, no doubt. It has after all, been the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice since restoration in 2019 (and I described it at greater length then). Still, by comparison, that citrus grove is a lemon.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

The oldest work in a show of “Chinese Painting and Calligraphy” is neither painting nor calligraphy. You might not know that, though, which only adds to its fascination at The Met.

It sure looks like calligraphy, but the characters have turned a ghostly white. Nor do they appear alongside a landscape as in so much Chinese art, although they seem to inhabit one—blending into a rocky, watery, or forested expanse. It takes on the texture of landscape as well, with eerie white slabs against a grainy black. As long ago as the fifth century B.C.E., an unknown artisan carved the cryptic characters into stone before rubbing them with ink and transferring them onto paper. Long before photography, it is the ultimate paper negative. It should have you wondering at the relationship between painting and calligraphy in the centuries of art to come, through January 5.

Chinese painting and calligraphy—it must sound like the entirety of Chinese art. And the Met often rehangs its Asian wing to showcase its collection, most recently in its space for Korean art. Sometimes the rooms for China convey a theme, like “Companions in Solitude,” whereas this time they approach a comprehensive history. Far be it from me to try for one myself. Consider then an amateur’s chance impressions and a single question: what are painting and calligraphy doing together in the first place?

You may take for granted that Chinese poetry and landscape were conceived together, in contemplating art and nature. That early work, though, has no true landscape at all, and each stage in its creation ruled out the fluency and precision of a fine brush in the artist’s hand. Other works have at most a token inscription, in descending letters. The Met throws in other media as well, with enamelware, porcelain, and silver for what the painted images represent. The installation ends with three scrolls of portrait busts from the 1700s. The interplay between Asia and the West has begun in earnest, and the fluidity of ink has given way to hard outlines and firm color.

Those portraits may compile a family history or a procession of scholars, but then most Chinese art looks to its ancestors. Could a backward glance be the secret of pairing art and text as well? The show opens with exactly what you might expect—sheets of painting and calligraphy mounted together. They stake out a point of origin, a millennium ago or more, only they date from up to three hundred years apart, and dates for either one are hard to pin down. The Met calls its hanging “roughly” chronological, and you can see why. It can still display a coherent history.

Is it about shared visions or influences, and can one even tell the two apart? Often the text, clear and dark, vies with the subtlety and lightness of painting, but which came first? Calligraphy here may be a colophon (which, I fear, the Met does not trouble to translate)—not the date and place of publication as in printing practices today, but a kind of commentary, in poetry and prose. By the 1600s, though, poetry comes can take priority as well. Does that make the whole an illustrated book? If so, calligraphy is itself an art, both text and illustration.

Remember an old truth in Western literature—that the greatest of all must die, but trees live on as a glimpse of eternity? Shitao, a poet, knows that “no old tree can gain its youth again” either, and it makes him wonder why he writes. Poignant as it is, it returns to the theme of authority and ancestry. They are explicit when armies gather and palaces hold sway. They are clearer still in the 1300s, with drawings of women at court. They have hair like helmets, in parallel stokes that a greater freedom has yet to disturb.

Power may yet require accommodations (and the Met never once mentions religion). The women look after their children or stake a claim for themselves—at least one dressed as a man. Nestled trees with a crown in their branches may stand for Mongol rule or a peace surpassing it. In the fifteenth century, with Fang Congyi and others, authority must take a back seat to a softer handling, a mistier landscape, and a “beneficent rain.” A scroll’s long format from Zhang Yucai makes that rain all the more encompassing. Ancestry is everything, but there is no looking back.

Calligraphy, too, takes on a life of its own—bold to the point of ink blots, although never again the spatters of that ancient rubbing on stone drums. You can almost imagine a history akin to that of European art, from the certainties of the Middle Ages to the artistic personalities of the Renaissance. The Baroque, in this history, would take one last step, at risk of losing art’s hand-won playfulness and atmosphere. Simplistic? Sure, and I cannot claim the expertise to say more. Still, it undermines the settled truths of a single, shared role and loving collaboration for calligraphy and painting.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

There is nothing wrong with an empty table in a diner. The waiter has set it for customers, and who knows but it is about to receive them.

Jeff Brouws, for all I know, may have asked them to wait while he snaps a photo. And if salt, pepper, cream, and ketchup are not your idea of sophisticated tastes, that is what diners then were for. You may still think of them as creature comforts. If the standard-issue black ashtray would look out of place today and a bit of a turn-off, this was the early 1990s, and Brouws often leaves hints of time and place in the most innocuous of settings.

There is nothing wrong either with a single car in an otherwise empty lot. An employee at the mall might have been early getting in or late getting home. Americans work hard, right? Yet it can only be a portrait of its time and of emptiness, much like the diner. Blame Joe Biden if you like for the American unease that could easily have turned the election to Donald F. Trump, or blame the media and right-wing propaganda in a time of unprecedented prosperity. Brouws, though, knew an earlier time when crime had only begun to fall and unease was anyone’s right. He, in turn, can take credit for photographing it. He can take even more for seeming to do so without really trying, at Robert Mann through December 6.

You may still think of malls as creature comforts, too, even as they fall victim of e-commerce. Just do so at your own risk. And Brouws photographs a world of impulse buying, even as impulsive acts lead to disaster. A car stands trapped in its own smoke and fire on the highway. The neon glow of a motel at night looks frighteningly cold. Could this have been so cold and so dangerous a time?

It could be almost anything. Back in Chelsea after the pandemic, the gallery calls the show “Just About Everything, Someplace Else,” after two photographs of spray-painted walls. The photographer, it says, has an eye for just about everything, but there is always that unsettling someplace else. He crosses America to find it, much like Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander. Unlike them, he works in color. He must relish the darkness of smoke and the brightness of fire, all but ordering you not to look away.

Unlike them, too, he all but omits people. Frank had his landmark with The Americans, but here Americans are present by what they leave behind. Bars and storefronts are at least partly boarded up, but you may still look inside to see what they were selling. With luck, the driver and passengers escaped a burning wreck. Come to think of it, a worker at the mall would probably claim a spot closer to the stores, not dead center. The car really could be abandoned, or it could take that much more care for its place.

Regardless, the work speaks of its time, between spray paint as urban blight and as entering the museum. If those slogans are graffiti, they are neatly executed. There may be tragedy on the highway, but also comedy in a car at a forty-five degree angle to an untended field. There may be beauty in a jazz singer and her unheard melodies. Titles spell out the location of each one. They want you to remember everything and something else.

One thing about parenting could drive anyone crazy, but children eat it up. Who as a child could not take comfort in Disney’s “It’s a Small World After All,” the song introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair, with its lilt, simplicity, and endless repetition? And who could not identify with something small as you but still an entire world?

Wanda Gág got the message long before, and her art was equally obsessive, in prints and children’s books alike. Now the Whitney sets aside a modest room off the permanent collection for “Gág’s World,” through December 2. ” It’s a small world after all and just maybe enough.

It is also a dark world—or at least a ghostly one. Her prints are not peopled but haunted, like that of Christmas Eve, where no child dares to enter, much less to peek. If Gág troubles with presents, a ghost has carried them away. In a reader, C is for crash, with what might be a wrecking ball, D is for dash, and E is for elsewhere. An enchanter carries off, as another title has it, millions of cats—like a pied piper who cannot be bothered with motley and cares too much for rats. And you know what they say about herding cats.

Perhaps I should have said that her ghosts are her gifts. I cannot swear that her prints count as modern art rather than, as the old put-down had it, illustration. She lends the simplest of scenes enormous detail—not in what she includes, but in how she renders it. Lithographs have the sharp edges of woodcuts, in black and white, but with a greater freedom, and the strokes encroach on one another as woodcuts never could. Her subjects, too, stick to what others might mistake for calendar art, like Winter Twilight. Prewar American Modernism’s social realism, Surrealism, and formal experiment are nowhere in sight.

Does her small-town America have more in common with Grant Wood than with Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton? The curators, Roxanne Smith and Scout Hutchinson, make the case for an artist after all. It has just those two spreads from her children’s book amid prints, also from the Whitney’s collection, and they share a small wall with Christmas Eve. Still, she did not become an artist all at once. Born in 1893 to immigrants from Bohemia, Gág left Minnesota in her thirties to study at the Art Student League, when it was a touch less conservative. She mingled and exhibited easily with her peers.

Like Beatrix Potter, with whom I pair this review and an earlier report on Walton Ford in my latest upload, she was also a student of nature, and she settled in the outer edge of suburbia, with an ingenious home at that—a balcony atop a porch as a cylindrical addition to a square home, both with gabled roofing. Like Potter, too, hers is a humanized nature, but without the cuddly, intelligent animals. Plants run wild only as dangerous companions. Plain wood homes cannot rise in straight lines either, and streets cannot afford escape or access. One can only imagine the strange life within. They are observed all the same, which makes the ghosts that much stranger.

Ghosts worthy of their name require a ghostly light, and Gág’s is neither plainly natural nor artificial. It bears down on a scene face on, leaving broad areas of light and white outlines. Does it makes her an illustrator at heart, taking care for her subject more than anything? No doubt, but her idea of community is both familiar and imagined. It might not so be bad for children after all. Besides, they get to carry with them from their reading Millions of Cats. Could there be worlds within worlds?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Forget John Keats, at least for a moment. Spare yourself a recital of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Met looks back far earlier, to the origins of Western civilization in Cycladic art. As far as I know, all its creators were men, and their subjects were female, but this is not the male point of view that you may expect from Greek art. There are no warriors or their rewards, no earthly or unearthly grace. There is only the wish to journey together, to trade, and to survive.

Before a Grecian urn, hundreds or even thousands of years before, there was art, but not exactly Greek art. Before the great cities of Greek tragedies and Homeric myths, before there was much so much as a written language to describe them, culture flourished in a broad cluster of islands in the Aegean Sea, about midway between the mainland to the west and present-day Turkey. It had to be seagoing, for its livelihood, and it had to have a tough existence. Much of its art was created to bury with someone’s remains. Now the Met does its best to bring Cycladic art back to life, but it, too, has to move on fast. It has to cover twenty-five hundred years and four civilizations.

The Met announced new galleries for Cycladic art, opening January 25, but did not make a fuss over the matter. There are no signs directing visitors to them, although there is more than enough verbiage inside. In practice, they come down to a single room in the galleries for Greek art, although with space for more than a hundred fifty works. You may rush right past on your way between the museum’s great hall and its southern wing. Two works appear just outside, maybe just enough to arouse your curiosity. How can they look so unlike a hero, a helmet, or a Grecian urn?

Whatever it is, it has its own appeal quite apart from its history. The standing nudes by the entrance, with no need for a pedestal, look downright modern. They influenced Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, and Amedeo Modigliani, who felt a kinship with their very simplicity—their gentle curves, frontal poses, and approach to abstraction. One might mistake their pure white marble, abundant in the region, for limestone. Smaller figures within the galleries, almost like dolls, take the shape of violins, although violins did not yet exist either. Pablo Picasso and Cubism, with all their instruments and music, would have approved.

The Met has rehung it all to acknowledge Leonard N. Stern, the collector who contributed it—and to acknowledge a settlement reached with Greece, which will own the work but leave it on loan to New York. It is also a boast and a correction. Just when Mesopotamian women were giving voice to the early Bronze age, others were active, too, and I work this together with my earlier report on just that as a longer review and my latest upload. I did not know much about the civilizations or the art, although I can take comfort that, when it comes down to it, no one else does either. Written records did not exist, and technical analysis of old marble cannot deliver authenticity or anywhere exact dates. Paint would have covered its seeming brightness, and chemical analysis can identify the pigments, in more colors than a Grecian urn.

The time line is at least as fascinating as the work. It begins before 3000 B.C.E., about as old a look at human creation as there is. It is not yet the Iron Age, so the carving of marble (with glass, the surfaces refined with emery and pumice) is quite a feat. The carvings have almost childlike features, with a recurring motif of crossed arms, and jugs have distinguishing collars and handles, but their purpose is less clear. The figures are women, suggesting hopes for fertility for a people that knew endless deaths. Yet they are barely female—their hips and breasts as flat as, well, a violin.

The room turns to the Minoan civilization in Crete, after roughly 2000 B.C.E., and then to Myceneans on the mainland, after 1000 B.C.E.. More familiar Greek art, with kraters, or (sure enough) vases in red against black or vice versa, did not begin until around 700 B.C.E., and the Green alphabet emerged not long before. Minoan and Mycenean culture also runs to more useful and decorative art, like pins for clothing and seals, with real or imagined animals. The Greeks changed everything with their focus on youths and men, as warriors and most often in groups, in procession. Their patterns are less bold and their figures more sketchy than Cycladic art, and they cannot honor the dead one by one, but they could be more broadly imagined as ancestors. What to make of the new masculine values, even in light of Homer, is a fascinating question in itself.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time after the retirement of Roberta Smith and the death of Peter Schjeldahl, “I think if I have any legacy,” Smith said in a kind of exit interview, “it’s teaching people how to look at art.” Now if only The Times agreed.

Even before her departure, it began to cut its art reviews almost to nothing. (While changes at The New Yorker are more modest and far less toxic, it has reduced its capsule reviews across the arts as well.) It still covers museum exhibitions, if not critically and often belatedly. That leaves a huge, glib monthly compendium of “what to see in the galleries.”

It has room for anything but teaching. This is not about expanding minds, but planning your weekend, just as the food section tells you what to cook “this minute”—morning, noon and night. It is about letting you know that you are in the know. It is no coincidence that any remaining longer review is now a “critic’s pick,” and the critics write accordingly. They hardly have time for the art of looking, even if they cared to try, and make up for it with superlatives. I hesitate to call it criticism.

I have left out a still more visible change, as reviews give way to feature articles with the emphasis on the artist. They purport to take you behind the scenes, because real people sell papers. They go far to turn the arts pages into a second style section, with role models and rankings, just as opinion articles more and more take on lifestyle changes, and news articles stress the human angle as well, beginning with anecdotes and ending with catchy quotes.

I started this Web site, then the only Web site devoted to contemporary art and art history, nearly thirty years ago to get away from superlatives, with reviews that tell stories about how to look. I was put off by magazines, with their word counts and the need to pitch articles before I could see the show. I hoped to integrate values, theories, and description into something worth reading. (I have explained what I had in mind here and here.) I could not begin to rival those I admire as much as Smith, Schjeldahl, and many others, but I like to think that they would balk at puff pieces, too. Critics have better things to do than huffing and puffing.

Does any of this matter? After all, mainstream media exist to bring news and features to the general public, and there are others worth heeding. Yet art magazines are changing in much the same way, and magazines everywhere are dying, along with alternative weeklies like the Voice (once a home for Schjeldahl and Smith’s husband, Jerry Saltz, as well). Art in America is now hard to tell from ArtNews, which merged with it in 2015, and the latest cover leads with rankings, for “five trailblazing artists.” Artforum is no longer the house organ for Minimalism of its founding in 1962, which is only right. Yet its Web site, too, leads with “news”—and a “spotlight on select summer advertisers.”

Why, though, does it matter except to curmudgeons young and old like me? I shall not repeat my notion of good criticism, but I still believe it, and I still value those, online and off, who get readers looking and thinking—and, sure, than includes our paper of record and my favorite magazine. Galleries, under enormous financial pressure since the pandemic, need lookers and thinkers more than ever as well. But the new model for journalism caters to the art business in a way that shapes art as well. Shallow writing encourages the dominance of shallow artists, and clickbait translates into attention getting. Maybe Smith knew that it was time to retire.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.