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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Sleeper At The Met: Ink Art

XuBingFew people in the art world would say that contemporary Chinese art is underexposed, but Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, is a stunner and perhaps a sleeper at the Metropolitan Museum* just the same.

Curator Maxwell Hearn has chosen well, I think, and better yet — though this creates a problem or two — has decided to install the show in the Met’s permanent galleries for Chinese art. This encourages, perhaps even forces, visitors to view the show through a historical lens. The downside, the problem, occurs because the show is a little disjointed, with some pieces scattered in with the collection.

Lee Adair Lawrence, in The Wall Street Journal, liked the exhibit a lot, saying:

Hard to imagine a better way to express the vitality and questioning that has characterized China’s art scene for the past 30 years. After the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, artists gradually gained easier access to European and American art scenes and could stay abroad for longer periods. They were now experimenting and pushing boundaries, looking outward and inward, wrestling with the past as they shaped their future.

DanLiuDictionaryRoberta Smith, in The New York Times,  was more critical, saying:

The show endures a scattered installation, includes works that don’t always rise to the occasion, and wanders off message in spots, especially with several sculptures that don’t seem to belong here. This ploy seems to allow for some signature objects by Ai Weiwei, a marquee figure whom the Met may have deemed essential but that the show could have done without.

Both know much more about Chinese art than I do, but as I implied above, despite seeing a lot of contemporary Chinese art in recent year, my eyes were opened on several occasions.

Layers of InkBoth, of course, mentioned Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky, a fabulous installation — pictured top — and Smith called Liu Dan’s Dictionary a “bravura” work, with which I agree, pictured at right.

Others I’d call out include Yang Jiechang’s 100 Layers of Ink, No. 1, 2, 3 — I have just 2 and 3 in my photo, bottom left, a marvelous scroll by scroll by Yang Yongliang, and Shao Fan’s 2009 Landscape made in pencil. But there is much more.

If you can, go see Ink Art.

Photo Credits: © Judith H. Dobrzynski 

Waugh Fans: Head to California

Waugh-HuntingtonIf you like Evelyn Waugh — and I do — you may be pleased to learn that about 250 rare books and reference books and 135 letters and manuscripts by the great English prose satirist have been given to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Ca.  (Unless, like me, you happen to live in New York, and wish they had gone to the Morgan Library,* which has some Waugh material, but has you will see below, not much by comparison with other institutions).

But really, that wouldn’t have happened: the Waugh trove was given by Loren and Frances Rothschild, and “Loren is a longtime book collector and current member of The Huntington’s five-person board of trustees,” the Huntington said. Says the press release:

According to John Wilson, associate professor of English at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania and founder of the Waugh Society, the Rothschilds’ gift establishes The Huntington as the second leading center of Waugh studies in the world, second only to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which acquired Waugh’s library in several batches from 1961 to 1991. Other institutions with Waugh holdings include the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Georgetown University, Leeds University, Leicester University, and Notre Dame University.

For the Huntington, the Waugh materials are another notch on its belt in 20th-century literature holdings. It already owns what it calls “significant archives” of writers like Conrad Aiken, Kingsley Amis, Charles Bukowksi, Octavia Butler, Kent Haruf, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Christopher Isherwood, Hilary Mantel, and Wallace Stevens. Some of them knew or worked with or admired Waugh, so the Huntington already owns Waugh materials.

I think I’ve read all of Waugh’s early novels – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and Scoop (1938), plus, of course, Brideshead Revisited. I recommend them.

waugh_lettermcintyre_440But what’s in this trove? Some examples:

  • the handwritten manuscript of Waugh’s early travel book, Ninety-Two Days
  • Waugh’s hand-corrected typescript of his first novel, Decline and Fall, with the title page showing the alternate titles Picaresque, The Making of an Englishman, and A Study in Discouragement. Waugh crossed out each before settling on Decline and Fall, the first of many satires of British society
  •  the 17-page annotated original typed manuscript of The Hopeful Pontiff, Waugh’s essay on Pope John XXIII
  • more than 100 letters between Waugh and his English publisher, Chapman & Hall
  • a series of unpublished letters relating to the risk of a libel lawsuit resulting from the publication in the United States of The Loved One, Waugh’s satire on Forest Lawn, the Los Angeles–based funeral business
  • a copy of The Cynic, a rare 1916 subversive alternative to the official school journal, co-edited by Waugh, then a 13-year-old student at Heath Mount School.
  • a copy of the Broom, a short-lived 1923 publication with a story written by Waugh while at Oxford.
  • scores of Waugh’s articles, essays, and fiction published in periodicals, in some cases as the only or the true first editions of the work.
  • “critical, biographical, and bibliographic secondary research materials”

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Huntington (at right is a handwritten letter by Waugh about his novel, The Loved One)

 

 

Philippe de Montebello Checks Up On Happenings At the Met

Philippe de Montebello interviewing Tom Campbell? There’s a potentially freighted, and artificial, encounter. Leave it to television, Channel Thirteen in in New York, to set up this engagement — it was done for the station’s NYC arts show, which airs tomorrow, but the 13-minute-plus interview is up on the web now. That them, at right, when Campbell got the job in 2008.

PdM-TCGive de Montebello credit for asking questions that touch on controversial matters, but — this being TV, where the tough questioner tends to look like the bad guy, not the evasive responder, unless he/she is a clear malfeasor — there are no fireworks. If you want to know what de Montebello thinks about the answers, you’re going to have to read his facial expressions.

To me, probably the most interesting question came near the end, at about 12:20, when de Montebello tries to get Campbell to distinguish between experiencing a museum and experiencing art (sound familiar, RCA readers?). Campbell answers but asserts that the crucial thing is sparking the curiosity of visitors, presumably about art.

What else did Campbell say? He confirmed that the Whitney Breuer building will be experimental without duplicating the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the New Museum (whew) and the Whitney (about 8:05) and that it will mix contemporary art with older art to illustrate interconnections (about 8:35), he talks up performances in the galleries (well, ok, outside the auditoriums (about 6:10) and mentions Leonard Lauder as catalyst (about 11:20).

I have only one quibble with Campbell — ar0und 7:10, he repeats the canard that universal museums can be intimidating to young people: too much art history is scary to people who have no trouble over-imbibing, getting tattoos and trying all that risky behavior we all do when we’re young. I don’t think that frames the problem correctly, and that means it’s leading to wrong answers.

Here’s the link to the video.

 

 

Come On The “Sexually Explicit” Tour

PennEventSometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or cry about museum goings-on. In their ever-ardent initiatives to attract new audiences, they try the darnedest things.

Exhibit A today is not an exhibit; it’s a tour for “Young Friends of the Penn Museum.” In honor of Valentine’s Day, they are staging an event called #Blurred Lines: The Secret Side of the Collecion.” In it, two curators will lead attendees through Penn’s* permanent collection, pointing out “artifacts depicting racy or sexually explicit material.”

I’ve posted the invitation, part of a Calendar of Events I received. (It’s just, as you’ll see, for people aged 21 to 45…)

So what do you think? Laugh or cry?

Personally, I did both, but then decided it was just sad. Even a little desperate.

 

NYT MoMA Critique Isn’t Just About Architecture

Oh, how sweet to see other critics picking up themes related to those I have been harping on mostly on my own. Consider this, about the recently proposed new Museum of Modern Art*:

MoMA's expansion planMoMA and Diller Scofidio hoped to sweeten the pill by promising improvements to the museum’s lobby and opening its sculpture garden to the public free during museum hours. They also propose, in place of the razed building, a Gray Box for performances, above an Art Bay, with a retractable glass wall and spaces for yet-to-be-conceived presentations, visible from the street….[It’s] a lot like the one Diller Scofidio has proposed for the Culture Shed, a glossy event and exhibition center without portfolio… [and meanwhile, across the street from MoMA, the] Donnell Library Center, a long-shuttered branch of the New York Public Library, is scheduled to reopen late next year …at a third of its former size, with wide bleacher seating and steps as the main feature. “More like a cultural space, which is about gathering people, giving people the opportunity to encounter each other,” is how the library’s architect, Enrique Norten, describes the plan.

It’s all the same flimflam: flexible spaces to accommodate to-be-named programming, the logic of real estate developers hiding behind the magical thinking of those who claim cultural foresight. It almost never works.

Boldface mine (exuberantly). That was from today’s New York Times, by architecture critic Michael Kimmelman.

Here are two related quotes of mine (but regular readers of this blog will know there have been many more here):

Many young directors see museums as modern-day “town squares,” social places where members of the community may gather, drawn by art, perhaps, for conversation or music or whatever. They believe that future museum-goers won’t be satisfied by simply looking at art, but rather prefer to participate in it or interact with it… (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 24, 2010.)

And:

Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, has seen the future. In a speech he gave a while back in Australia, he noted that museums had to make a “shift away from passive experiences to interactive or participatory experiences, from art that is hanging on the wall to art that invites people to become part of it.” And, he said, art museums had to shed the idea of being a repository and become social spaces….

This is all in the name of participation and experience — also called visitor engagement — but it changes the very nature of museums, and the expectations of visitors. It changes who will go to museums and for what….(New York Times, Aug. 11. 2013).

And — as Kimmelman says — it will not work, not if MoMA wants to be a respected museum. But maybe it just wants to be hip.

Photo credit: Courtesy of MoMA

*I consult to a foundation that supports MoMA.