May 9, 2008 9:26

Everything is Less Than Zero

Proposal for World Trade Center PATH Station, Santiago Calatrava/PORT AUTHORITY

I see that the big transit center by Santiago Calatrava that's planned for the World Trade Center site is being whittled away again for cost-cutting reasons. This doesn't come as a surprise. The New York and New Jersey Port Authority, which is overseeing the project, has watched the budget climb to $2.5 billion. (Actually higher for a while, until it was yanked back down.) But it's also in keeping with the general willingness to walk away from the idea that Ground Zero should re-emerge as anything other than a business-as-usual business district that happens to be built around a memorial. The cultural facilities that were supposed to be a feature of the place are either gone from the plan or iffy. (Museums? We don't need no stinking museums.)

A few weeks ago it was the design for the separate subway hub nearby, which has already been dumbed down once, that was put under pressure again. Part of the thinking now for that dwindling project involves moving the planned Frank Gehry-designed theater off the Trade Center site and plunking it on top what was supposed to be the light flooded, glass domed station, thereby screwing up two projects at one time. (Theaters? We don't need no stinking theaters.)

That leaves the Calatrava station, which is scheduled to be complete in 2011, as one of the few surviving elements of the Trade Center master plan that isn't just one more office building. It's been undergoing a slimming process almost from the time it was proposed. Now we're promised more "value engineering", which any architect will tell you is a process that has a way of arriving at "blander and cheaper". The Port Authority promises that the overall integrity of Calatrava's bird-like design will be respected. But it also says that more revisions to the design may be needed if it can't find a contractor to build the station within the $2.5 billion budget.

I'm just waiting for the other wing to drop.

May 8, 2008 8:30

Their Kingdom for a Horse?

Back in January I posted about a British competition to choose the design for a massive outdoor sculpture at the site of a planned new transit center in Kent. I've been envious for a while of the way the Brits can create interest in contemporary art by way of public competitions, but I was also a little wary of this one because of the requirement that the sculpture should be around 165 ft. (50 m.) tall. It's not often that "big" gets you "good." Granted, I never saw the Colossus of Rhodes.

Yesterday the proposals of the five finalists were unveiled. They include Rachel Whiteread's artificial mountain with a cast interior of a house on top, an open-work abstract steel tower by Richard Deacon, a vertical concrete disc by Christopher Le Brun, a giant signal tower by Daniel Buren and the strangest, a white horse, 33 times life size, by Mark Wallinger, the most recent winner of the Turner Prize, who has a thing for horses.

You can see images here. On first impression, I'm inclined to agree with Adrian Searle at the British daily the Guardian that most of them look like contemporary art, blown up and stuck in a field.

The winner will be announced this fall. I'm betting on the horse.

May 7, 2008 8:38

Rich People Shopping Update

I don't actually care much about the art market, since, like 99% of the human race, I'm not in it. But the big spring auction season started last night at Christie's in New York and naturally the results are being sifted for signs that the market is poised for a fall. The results? Monet, Rodin and Giacometti broke records. But 14 of the 58 lots failed to sell — including another Monet and a Van Gogh — and the sale as a whole brought in $277.2 million, a figure below it's pre-sale low estimate of $286.8 million.

After days of pre-sale speculation about where the market was headed, it's funny to see the different ways that last night's mixed numbers were interpreted this morning at different New York media outlets.

The New York Times thinks that on the whole everything is still fine.

The Sun sees mixed sun and clouds.

Bloomberg.com doesn't buy it.

But I think the most pertinent piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal before the sale. Its point was that the market has already corrected itself on the quiet. Among other things, fewer works were going to auction and sales of less than blue chip works, the ones that don't make headlines, are already falling.

Meanwhile, most people I know were focused last night on an entirely different set of numbers.

May 5, 2008 9:02

Sunday in the Park with George(s)

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Seurat, 1884/ ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

A few nights ago I made it over to the New York revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George. In its first act, as a way to talk about the personal isolation of artists generally meaning Sondheim — it uses a fictionalized version of Georges Seurat at work on his most famous painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. I had seen the original production 25 years ago with Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin. At that performance Peters abruptly stopped singing in the middle of Act I, looked down to the orchestra pit and said: "What?" Somebody in the pit shouted something up to her, then she faced the audience and said "Ladies and gentlemen, I need to ask you to evacuate the theater." Bomb threat.

This was pre-9/11, so it didn't create a panic, though it wasn't the greatest news for the two people sitting next to me. Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston had rushed into the adjoining seats at the last possible moment at the beginning of Act I, just as the house lights went down, presumably so they wouldn't be mobbed by fans. But after we were all herded into the street for 15 minutes of "bomb scare" they both chatted with anybody who came over to them, and there were quite a few. I was impressed. I made a mental note that if I ever became an international superstar I too would talk to ordinary people. When we returned to our seats I also made a point of not talking to Nicholson and Huston so they would see what a cool New Yorker I was. To call my bluff Nicholson initiated a conversation. I thought that was a very suave move. All the while my inner fanboy banged at the bars of his cage.

But I digress.

As mentioned, Sondheim and James Lapine, who wrote the book for this show, weren't trying to produce a bio-pic about Seurat. They changed many of the facts of his life. But I was interested to see how they would use elements of Seurat's art to work out their themes. Not just through set design, though this production makes some clever use of animated projections to reproduce La Grande Jatte, but as what you might call correlatives for the ideas in the show about the ways that art does and does not serve life.

As it turns out, they hit upon quite a few. And the best one turns out to be about stillness. Seurat was a good choice for a show that's partly about the one man's impulse to convert living people into inert objects — art — which makes them easier to deal with. In his own art Seurat was attempting to take the most fleeting and ordinary moments of daily life — a bunch of people whiling away an afternoon in a suburban park — and make them feel eternal by giving them the heft and monumentality of Egyptian sculpture. To immortalize them by immobilizing them.

Four years ago I wrote this about a Seurat show at the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns La Grande Jatte.

Seurat was also looking closely at the Impressionist works of Renoir, Monet and Pissarro. By the 1880s Impressionism was coming under attack not just from the usual academic conservatives but from a new generation who wanted art to reclaim its larger purposes, to represent moral hierarchies, eternal values, history — anything that imposed an order of the mind on the hectic gatherings of the eye. The Impressionists had no use for any of that. Their working method was to record the fleeting effects of light at a particular moment, and that moment was always now.

Seurat had a longer arc in mind. He wanted to adapt the bright staccato of Impressionist technique to forms that would be as weighty and enduring as the art he saw at the Louvre.

One of the ironies of La Grand Jatte, of course, is that when painting it Seurat chose to experiment with a newly available pigment, zinc yellow, that turned out to be highly unstable. Over time, it turned dull brown. Within a few years, wide areas of the painting had darkened.

No matter how hard to you try to make time stop, things have a way of changing all the time.

May 1, 2008 3:30

The Drawings of Philip Guston

Untitled (Cherries), Guston, 1980 / © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

I got an advance look last week at "Philip Guston: Works on Paper", which opened Friday at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. There are over 100 drawings in the show, which originated in Germany and was organized in New York by Isabelle Dervaux, the Morgan's curator of modern drawings, Quite a few of the drawings were in the big Guston retrospective that toured five years ago, but in that show they were overshadowed somewhat by the heroic canvases. At the Morgan you can see them more clearly for what they are, the great anguished laboratory of Guston's art and the intellectual forecourt to his paintings, the place where ideas entered first.

My favorite moment of the show comes about midway, in the series of untitled drawings that represent Guston almost literally wiping the slate clean. He made them in 1967, a famous period of crisis for him. One year earlier, he had stopped painting. He no longer knew what he wanted to paint. But he continued to draw as the way to find out.

Guston had begun his career as a figurative painter in the 1930s, but by the mid-50s had arrived at the abstract fields that first made his name. Those paintings, built out of hundreds of insistent strokes, had a nervous shimmer. In his drawings of the same period the shimmer is subordinated to the line. The tectonics of the picture show through more strongly. Some of the drawings leave the impression of charred armatures, networks wonderfully but precariously balanced.

Drawing Related to Zone (Drawing No. 19), Guston, 1954 / © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

But as early as 1960 something like recognizable figures were surfacing again from within Guston's drawings. At the height of his prestige as an abstract artist, he found himself being drawn back powerfully to representation. That was the predicament he was still struggling with in 1967. The drawings he made in that year, with black ink brushed on white paper, were the most basic marks and shapes — two parallel vertical lines, or a single short stroke at the top of a blank sheet or a jittery circle. That circle made me think of Giotto's "O", the one he's supposed to have dashed off when he was asked to provide the Pope with a sample of his skills. But Giotto's assured loop was a mark of supreme confidence. Guston's lumpish circle is a much more tentative thing, an exercise in doubt. He's not sure yet where this period of aesthetic cleansing will lead him.

Untitled, Guston, 1967/ © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

We of course do know where everything was headed. By the following year he was making the cartoonish drawings and paintings that would the basis of his work until his death in 1980, the scrappy pile up of shoes, eyeballs, Klansmen, clocks, nails and food that puzzled and even infuriated a lot of people when he first showed them in 1970. Those were mostly people who couldn't abide the thought of a distinguished abstract painter not only venturing back into representational work but doing it by way of images that owed so much to old comic strips. It was well known that the Early Renaissance Italians — Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca — were gods to Guston. But until the 1970 show not many people knew how much he loved Krazy Kat.

Untitled, Guston, 1968 / © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

It turns out that he had arrived at one of the great late styles in American art. The late work looks now like a giant permission slip for American artists generally to return to figuration if they wanted to. Obviously, Pop artists had already done that, but in a strictly ironic way. Guston's drawings were different. Even when they were funny, and they usually were, they were dead earnest, which is one of the things that gives them their paradoxical power. In the last decade of his life, Guston had a sharp sense of his own mortality. (Those clocks!) He was drinking and smoking too much — he would die of a heart attack at age 67 — and discouraged about the direction the country was taking. (His monstrous drawing of Nixon is a classic.) All of it comes through in his art. In a drawing like Web — that's Guston's head on the left, one big cyclops eye gazing upwards, and the top of his wife Musa's head on the right — you get the feeling that some serious personal demons are being tackled.

Web, Guston, 1975 / © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

There are a lot of drawings like that in this show. The pictures are funny, but the laughs come hard.