Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Take The High (Line) Road: Art CAN Be Fun

If one of her first projects is an indication, I like the way Cecilia Alemani, the new art curator at the High Line, thinks. Alemani joined the High Line last October, and in a Q&A she did for the park’s spring newsletter, she was answered a question about her plans this way:

As soon as I joined the High Line, people started asking me what my first  big bronze sculpture would be. I think it’s funny how people put art in silos, assuming that “public art” means monumental sculptures in corporate plazas and government buildings. To react to this, I decided to do a show of very tiny objects to debut in HIGH LINE COMMISSIONS. The show will be called Lilliput. It will be the High Line’s first group exhibition, with a series of miniature sculptures installed in peculiar places along the High Line.

She’s right; people do have certain expections — and sometimes the best way to create interest is to defy them. Alemandi is doing it in a way that doesn’t employ shock value, which is often the fallback position. I like that.

The High Line website has more about the show, which opened on Apr. 19 and continues for a year. It involves six artists — names and projects are here — who made and sited their pieces among the vegetation and along the pathways. For visitors, it’s an art treasure hunt.  “Throughout the different seasons, nature will embrace the sculptures, transforming their surroundings and acting as a backdrop in continuous flux,” Alemani says, looking forward to the way the art works will blend with, or not, the landscape over the course of the year.

The artists Alemani chose are all, but one, foreign-born, as is the curator. That’s not a complaint, just an observation.

They’re lucky: the  High Line is an incredible venue for exposure. Since it opened in June 2009, more than 7 million people have visited.

Photo Credit: Herakles by Oliver Laric, one of the artists in the exhibition, Courtesy of the High Line

 

Lasting Impression: World’s Fairs As Design Incubators

To hear the curators of “Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939” tell it, we have museums around the world to thank for preserving this slice of history. Otherwise, physical remains of these fairs are scant. And judging by the catalogue for the show, we are very lucky that they did. There’s a lot of eye candy, and there are even more items that made lasting impact, influencing future generations of designers and artists. Some, like the Thonet chair, a bentwood design by Michael Thonet, and Alvo Aalto’s Savoy vase, shown at the 1937 fair, are still in production.

The years between the 1851 “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations” at the Crystal Palace in London and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 were the glory years for design, as the 200 objects in this exhibit — most not seen publicly since before World War II — demonstrate. Manufacturers used fairs to show off, to stir up excitement about their wares and to spark consumption (in general, as well as for these objects specifically). Carlo Bugatt’s “cobra chair” made its debut at a fair, as did a rocking chair demonstrating the bentwood technique. Westerners didn’t use jade or onyx in jewelry until they saw it in a Chinese mask at a fair. And take a look at the silver rococco dressing table here, made by Gorham for the 1900 fair, and now in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. 

Catherine Futter, the Nelson-Atkins curator who began work on this exhibit 15 years ago, when she was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, says she and co-curator Jason Busch, of the Carnegie Museum of Art (where the show goes next), looked at thousands of objects, narrowing them down to the ones that really demonstrated innovation. In general, she said, “I want people to get a sense of what world’s fairs were like for debuting new technology and new styles all in one place. It was the world on a stage.”  

“This was where art meets industry,” she added. The exhibit stops when fairs became more about ideas and less about products.

The Nelson-Atkins is trying to make the show an experience, so visitors will see images of the fairs, hear period music, and have access to interactive elements that are supposed to provide virtual “hands-on” experiences — these things I have not seen, so I can’t really comment.  It also, emulating the function of world’s fairs as technology and style incubators, mounted a design contest for a temporary pavilion for the interative elements that has been constructed at the mseum grounds for the exhibition; it was won by a company called Generator Studio which used solar panels and will re-use all of the materials in other projects when the exhibition ends — you can see a rendering and more info here.

I have a short article with a bit more information (it’ll explain that papier mache piano above left, and shows an object illustrating the cross-cultural benefits of the fairs) in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

 And I’m happy to report is traveling beyond Kansas City and Pittsburgh to New Orleans and Charlotte, N.C., which is very good distribution nowaadays.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins (top) and the Carnegie Museum (bottom)

SOFA Tries To Mix It Up, But Maybe We’re Faired Out

The 15th annual Sculpture Objects & Functional Art Fair — aka SOFA NEW YORK – opens tomorrow at the Park Avenue Armory, but the preview was tonight, and I went. It’s interesting, and I use the adjective purposefully. Only one booth really stood out.

The organizers mixed it up this year, hiring architect David Ling to create a different ambiance — and he did. Visitors enter through a white tunnel, and come upon an open area with seating and, tonight, a bar and a table of nibbles. A few booths hug the drill hall’s perimeter behind the entrance and the rest are on a grid with both vertical and horizonal aisles. White sculptural elements (floating blocks, I think they are called) are hung from the ceiling, effectively lowering it.

All of this creates a more intimately scaled space, although one dealer I spoke with said the booths are the same size as last year’s. To him, and me, they feel smaller.  He wasn’t sure he liked this feeling, but he told me he would reserve judgment until Saturday, to see how collectors felt. (He did not know I was a reporter, so I am not naming him.)

But clearly SOFA realizes that fairs are proliferating, and was trying to differentiate itself. Normally, that’s a good move for a business, so long as customers don’t rebel against it (think New Coke, if you’re old enough). I wouldn’t predict a rebellion here.

But what’s at the fair — again, it’s mixed. I saw no “masterpiece,” no breakthrough in craft, but rather a lot of very routine offerings that everyone has seen a million times before. In a few cases, people one might well imagine that they were in an upmarket gift store and, in one case of jewelry, a local crafts fair.

On the other hand, some booths offered beautifully designed, well-made pieces that I, for one, would be happy to own.  On the right above is a piece by Astrid Dahl that’s not as good as the piece at SOFA (which I could not find an image of) and on the left is a basket by Honda Syoryu — to name just two.

I recall years when SOFA seemed better.

Maybe everyone is all faired-out? Too tired from producing for so many fairs that the artists have little time to innovate and the dealers little time to guide their artists or scout new ones? SOFA is far from alone in having what is, I think, a mediocre fair this year. The Armory Show wasn’t terribly great this year either. While I thought the ADAA Art Show did shine this year, versus the past few years, other critics thought it was ho-hum.

What was the exception? A curated exhibition called Covet by the Ferrin Gallery, with Leslie Ferrin and Sienna Patti doing the organizing. They asked (I think) artists to make works inspired by a museum object. Some were excellent. I wish I could show you the giclee print an artist named Bill Wright made of four children posed like The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, by Sargent, in the Museum of Fine Arts-Boston, but in far less affluent circumstances. Giselle Hicks made the other standout — an all-white china piece that drew on A Bouquet of Flowers in a Crystal Vase by Nicholaes van Veerendael in the Met’s collection. It’s a decorative piece, no question, but beautifully made.

Which brings me back to “interesting.” That’s neither an endorsement, nor a critical blast. Whether or not you should go depends on what your expectations and standards are..

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Astrid Dahl (top) and TAI Gallery (bottom)

 

 

The Online VIP Art Fair Grows And Grows

This will be a really quick post (as I’m really busy elsewhere at the moment), but I want to mention the VIP PAPER fair that runs tomorrow through Sunday. It’s an offshoot of the VIP Art Fair online, which began in 2011 and had, as I recall, an improved edition this past winter.

VIP PAPER, to me, is a better idea than that because buying prints and other works on paper on the Internet is probably a better idea than buying other kinds of work – there’s less difference between the representation and the reality, afterall.  The galleries involved are a good selection.

But one noteworthy thing is that this is simply the first extension of the VIP fair. In June comes the VIP MFA, a juried fair to launch students into the art market; in July comes VIP PHOTO, and in September comes VIP Vernissage, fueled by the fall openings.

How many fairs can be staged before they all run together? Does it matter? Galleries say they do an increasing amount of business at physical fairs, and can’t afford to stay home (more are starting up, too, but that’s another story). These online VIP fairs may well drive even more business to the web, leaving physical galleries for viewing — and possibly leading eventually to closings or shorter hours.

Second, in the runup to the works-on-paper fair, the VIP group has been posting video “Discussions” — walkthoughs with the likes of Morgan Lehman Gallery and Durham Press. I’m not much of an online video-consumer, but I watched two, and found them to be worth my time (with a little multi-tasking on the side).

 Photo Credits: Courtesy of the VIP Art Fair

 

NYC’s Summer Of Monet Elicits Innovative Collaboration, Not Competition

Now this is a good idea — a collaboration between the New York Botanical Garden* and the Metropolitan Museum of Art* that I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted.

This summer belongs to Monet at the NYBG. Not only will it recreate Monet’s garden at Giverny inside the conservatory, but also it will, in the Rondina Gallery, mount an exhibition called “The Artist in the Garden” curated by Paul Hayes Tucker — a foremost Monet scholar. It will include, for the first time together, two rarely seen paintings by Monet – Irises from a private Swiss collection, at right, and The Artist’s Garden in Giverny, on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery. Also on view will be “his paint-encrusted wooden palette and an evocative array of historical photographs that show the artist creating and enjoying his garden.”

In the conservatory, visitors will encounter

…a façade of Monet’s house offer[ing] a glimpse of the artist’s view of his garden and the flowers that served as his muse for many of his most famous paintings. As visitors walk past the vine-covered pink walls with bright-green shutters, familiar to anyone who has seen the original in Giverny, their senses will be invigorated by the sights and scents of spring aubretias, bellflowers, and poppies, as well as masses of Dutch, German-bearded, Japanese, and Siberian irises, which Monet immortalized in his art.

A re-creation of Monet’s Grand Allée from his formal garden known as Clos Normand, or Norman enclosure, will include a path of rose-covered arches with beds of lush, colorful flowers lining both sides. A Japanese footbridge dressed with mauve and white Asian wisterias will extend over a picturesque pool, calling to mind Monet’s water garden, encircled with willow trees, bamboo groves, and flowering shrubs.

Read more of that part here, because what visitors will see changes in the summer and fall.

I wasn’t sure how art museums would react to this incursion. Sure, botanical gardens have been offering visitors art exhibits for years, but paintings? That’s a step further. Cultural institutions compete for visitors’ time as well as interests, after all.

But then today came the announcement from the NYBG about a new iPhone ap — NYBG IN BLOOM. It includes one element in collaboration with the Met:  “Paintings and Plants.”

 This special feature of the app enables visitors to virtually view select Monet paintings on display at the Met and link to the Met’s Web site for further information about them, complementing what visitors see at the Garden’s exhibition.

 That sounds terrific — a win-win. Read more here.

The NYBG’s fantastic-sounding summer of Monet begins on May 19 and runs through October 21.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the NYBG

*I consult to a foundation that supports both institutions.