Eye on Auctions By Caroline Birenbaum As the New York auction season winds down, a spate of preview exhibitions present historic items ranging from Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln documents to first generation Apple computer motherboards.
Edited by Armond White
New York’s Review of Culture • CityArtsNYC.com
Ugly Chic
Bonhams’ June 19 auction comprises a morning session of Russian Literature and Works on Paper, with many examples of constructivist poster design and book illustration and even a notorious volume of homoerotica, and in the afternoon, a wide-ranging selection of Fine Books and Manuscripts that is particularly strong in Americana, including a Revolutionary War journal kept by a Boston Selectman during the crucial year from April 1775 to March 1776 and a significant American Reconstruction document: Abraham Lincoln’s handwritten draft of a proclamation reserving for the president the right to grant amnesty to Confederate prisoners. Bonhams, June 19, 10 a.m. & 1 p.m., previews June 15-18. www.bonhams.com.
Schiaparelli and Prada’s Catwalk Catfight By Mona Molarsky
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chiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, celebrates two influential women designers. The exhibit imagines a conversation between Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada. The two were born 60 years apart and never met, but the curators see the two as kindred, subversive spirits. To make the case, the show uses wall texts and video vignettes in which the actress Judy Davis, playing Schiaparelli with a wicked glint in her eye, converses with the real-life Prada. Schiaparelli (1890-1973) worked with artists Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau during the 1930s to create such surrealist-inflected couture as a hat shaped like a lamb cutlet and a dress that mimicked torn flesh. The show presents Prada (b. 1949) as her successor. Since the late 1980s, Prada has transfixed the fashion press with her designs. They dubbed them “ugly chic” due to the dismal color combinations and Prada’s refusal to flatter the female form. Prada clearly agrees. “If I have done anything,” she says, “it is to make ugly appealing.” One wall display is devoted to Schiaparelli hats and Prada shoes that mostly poke fun at high fashion and the moneyed customers who buy it. In 1937, Schiaparelli did a black hat shaped like a shoe. Prada’s contemporary equivalent is the “Hotrod” shoe with red-and-white “flames” shoot-
Sotheby’s June 15 sale of Fine Books & Manuscripts includes a first edition of James O. Lewis’s Aboriginal Port Folio, the first and rarest colorplate book on North American Indians, containing numerous rather ungainly portraits; six lots of Einstein material, including important autograph letters; two original pencil illustrations by John Tenniel for Through the Looking-Glass; and a rare working example of an Apple 1 computer motherboard—the first ready-made personal computer. Sotheby’s, June 15, 10 a.m., previews June 13-14. www.sothebys.com.
Swann’s June 21 sale of 19th & 20th Century Literature celebrates the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth with extra-illustrated first editions of Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield and Pickwick Club. Other highlights include English caricaturists and graphic humorists, attractive sets, bindings and fore-edge paintings and desirable modern first editions such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. As a counterpart to the Tenniel pencil drawings at Sotheby’s, Swann offers a limited edition set of the complete Alice illustrations, with plates from the original wood blocks engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. Swann, June 21, 1:30 p.m., previews June 16, 18-21. www.swanngalleries.com.
Gala Dali with Schiaparelli’s shoe hat, 1936.
ing out the back. The heart of this show is devoted to ugly chic. A Prada ensemble from the mid-’90s sums it up: the skirt, jacket and top combo, printed in imitation tweed and clashing shades of chartreuse, avocado and peridot, looks like a thrift shop special. “Bad taste is part of our culture,” Prada explains in the wall text. Somehow, she has convinced the rich to wear this sad truth on their backs. Schiaparelli did less egregiously ugly versions. During the Depression, she dressed a moneyed few in garments that seemed to comment archly on their owners’ cluelessness. The most famous was her lobster dress, a pretty organza frock emblazoned with a giant red crustacean. Wallis Simpson
modeled it for Vogue in 1937, just before marrying the Duke of Windsor and traveling to Bavaria to meet Hitler. That Cecil Beaton photo is displayed in the show, with neither historical context nor comment. But it is only with context that the complex relationship between the designers and their customers makes sense. They share a vexed but powerful bond that’s sealed with dollars. Sadly, the Met’s show doesn’t examine that. If it did, the vision of Schiaparelli and Prada as subversive wouldn’t hold up. Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations Through Aug. 19, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org
Christie’s auction of Fine Books & Manuscripts June 22 begins with 42 lots from the estate of Hollywood film and television producer and important book collector William E. Self, including a copy of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers inscribed to Hans Christian Andersen. This sale also offers an Apple 1 motherboard. Among other highlights are a first German edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle with full contemporary hand coloring and Henry M. Stanley’s copy of Richard Burton’s The Lake Regions of Central Africa, heavily annotated as Stanley planned his expedition to rescue David Livingstone. The sale concludes with a fine selection of Americana, including a rare autograph manuscript by Elbridge Gerry concerning how the Constitutional Convention could determine apportioning of representatives in the House of Representatives. Christie’s, June 22, 10 a.m., previews June 1621. www.christies.com.
CITYARTS galleries
Trade Routes Mapping globalization at Aicon By Melissa Stern
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he current exhibition at Aicon Gallery, Mapmakers: The Evolution of Indian Art, got me thinking about globalization. I will freely admit to a certain amount of cultural bias when looking at art. I suppose we all have it; some of us are just more willing to pony up and admit it. When I go to look at a show of contemporary Italian art (for example), I don’t expect to see art that is particularly “Italian” in nature. I expect work that is about contemporary issues, materials and/ or politics, but that is in many ways similar to what I might see in from American artists in New York City. Right or wrong, I go to a show of nonWestern art with the full expectation that I’m going to see artwork that is somehow intrinsically tied to that culture. One hopes the work has a unique and contemporary tweak to it, but I look forward to seeing artwork that has some overt relation to the culture from which it has evolved. Perhaps because modernism came later
to non-Western countries, I expect to be surprised and delighted by the integration of traditional and contemporary vocabularies. And while I don’t believe I am alone in this perspective, my Baiju Parthan, “Progression (Last Supper—After da Vinci),” oil and acrylic on canvas. 2008, 35.5 x 95. viewpoint—indeed long, with inexplicable architectural red this review—reveals as much about my bias same work as anywhere else in the world. lines thrusting into the frame in the vicinity as it do about the art I am reviewing. I miss the sense of place that is so prevaof Christ’s head. Cool and passionless, its Having enjoyed and admired Parts One lent in all art forms that come from India. colors are reduced to icy blues, black and and Two of The Rubin Museum’s groundIt is part of what draws me to the culture. white. A bland and formulaic response to breaking exploration of the development of Perhaps as the place itself becomes more the great passion contained in the original. modernist and contemporary art in India, I global, its most contemporary and worldly Perhaps I’m being a wee bit tough. There was eager to experience the Aicon Gallery’s artists cannot help but reflect the trend. If are some standout pieces that have the view of the contemporary Indian art scene. so, then some of the works on display at feel of authenticity to them. Nitin Mukul’s What I saw was a mixed bag of art trends Aicon succeed most admirably. But in its painting “Fountain” (2008) is a vigorous and from the past decade, some interesting, but attempt to show how global contemporary engaging abstracted vision of water. The largely populated with the same tired ideas Indian art has become, the show’s curators painting is beautiful. Shapes of water dropwith which American art schools have been have lost the pulse of what makes Indian art lets swirl in an almost psychedelic mass of filling U.S. galleries. Globalization has made so very unique and moving in the first place. color and pattern. It not only transcends all art look the same. the subject of water, but, more significantly, The painting by Baiju Parthan, “ProMapmakers: The Evolution of transcends cliché. gression (Last Supper—After Da Vinci)” is Contemporary Indian Art But in the main, the contemporary Indian Through July 7, Aicon Gallery 35 Great Jones painted as if it were an altered film strip, artists on display are turning out much the washed out and blurry. It is about eight feet St., 212-725-6092, www.aicongallery.com.
galleries CITYARTS
Art Clowns History of freak flags flies at Inglett By Jim Long
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n early 1970, with the publication of Robin Morgan’s poem “Goodbye to All That” as its battle cry, WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) took over the daily operations of RAT Subterranean News, founded in 1968, and transformed it into Women’s LibeRATion. By then, New York City had become the East Coast headquarters of activists, writers, musicians and artists from around the world, and tabloid publications like RAT were springing from rhizome networks as quickly as psychedelic mushrooms. Spoofing the lurid covers of easily available “adult” tabloids like National Police Gazette, Keyhole and National Tattler and inspired by progressive politics, the anti-war movement and the power of the pen to empower the people, the romance of cash-up-front, print-at-night independent publishing took hold, with lucrative personals sections paying the bills. Membership in the Underground Press Syndicate allowed free access to
other members’ material. As tips of very cool icebergs go, even the ever-curious cops and feds were never sure how big the material under the surface might be. (Confronted with boxes of evidence, an editor at the East Village Other was informed by arresting officers that they knew R. Crumb was really him.) Curated by Specific Object’s David Platzker, SCREW YOU at Susan Inglett Gallery features back issues of EVO, RAT, SCREW, KISS, LUV, New York Review of Sex (and Politics) and ORGY, along with the work of some of their artists and writers—Brigid Berlin, John Chamberlain, Dan Graham, Peter Hujar, Yayoi Kusama, Mel Ramos, Carolee Schneeman, Robert Stanley, Betty Tompkins and Andy Warhol. Lennon/Ono make an appearance, along with Crumb, Picasso, films by Stan Brakhage, Kusama and Warhol and writing by Gregory Battcock, Charles Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg. Media revolution, around since the days of Luther’s Theses and the peasant revolts, was joined in the ’60s by revolutions in home movie cameras, tape recorders, FM radio and amped guitars. The gatekeepers were caught with their pants down. Innovative reporters like Jane Alpert at RAT wrote
from inside unfolding politics, while EVO artists blew up the repressive Comics Code and its mandatory Seal of Approval. SCREW was an unlikely grail for artists and writers hungry for the publicity of instant notoriety; after all, the publication was busted 16 Kusama and company see spots. times in its first three years, so chances were good your work might acquire branched off with NYRS(andP), offering an aura. Publisher Al Goldstein didn’t give a writing from Battcock and Bukowski, phodamn about art, but his first issue’s centertography from Chamberlain and Schneefold featured Kusama’s naked Central Park man and art by Stanley and Ramos. EVO orgy at sculptor Jose de Creeft’s “Alice in published KISS to compete with SCREW. Wonderland.” Shortly thereafter Kusama The exhibition is necessarily compact, but would launch her own publication, ORGY, Platzker has arranged art and ephemera as and Picasso would release his epic 347 erotic carefully as Indra’s pearls. Look closely at engravings. the works and their miraculous reflections. The tabloids were linked in many ways, not just in the discovery that a nude on the SCREW YOU cover would triple circulation. SCREW’s Through July 13, Susan Inglett Gallery, 522 W. art director, 17-year-old Steven Heller, 24th St., 212-647-9111, inglettgallery.com.
CITYARTS classical
Keyboard & Kingdom Indefensible, indispensable Lang Lang, plus Britten at the movies By Jay Nordlinger
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the F-minor étude? But in the last one—the étude in C minor, turning into C major—he reminded me of a point I have long made about him: For all his gifts, Lang seems unable to make a proper fortissimo. So strange. He fails to produce a big or solid enough sound. He sort of slaps, vigorously. He closed the evening with his second encore, La campanella, that piece by the devil via Paganini and Liszt. If you hang around long enough, you will hear just about everyone play it. I have—and have never heard it played more excitingly or brilliantly than by Lang. If there is a bigger stage than Carnegie Hall, it’s the movies. And Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, just released, opens with The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, by Benjamin Britten. Children are listening to it. The movie is filled with children, even dominated by them. The Young Person’s Guide is the piece of music most often fed to children, along with Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. Moonrise Kingdom includes some of the Carnival too. I did not hear any of Peter. The movie is absolutely stuffed with music, including Schubert’s great tribute to mu-
Photo by Felix Broede/Deutsche Grammohon
hen Lang Lang plays the piano, you never know what you’ll hear. It could be something ridiculously bad, it could be something historically good. Sometimes, you hear both of those extremes on the same night. Such was the case when the Chinese sensation played a recital in Carnegie Hall toward the end of last month. He opened with Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B flat. Immediately, he was all rubato, or, put differently, all license. It continued this way throughout the suite. Lang did whatever he wanted, with tempo, rhythm and phrasing. Whether this was what Bach wanted was doubtful. You would have hesitated to play a Chopin nocturne as freely as Lang played the sarabande here. Moreover, he committed some harsh, unreasonable accents, distorting the line. And when he emphasized inner voices—which is certainly no sin—he overemphasized them. Even for those of us who are liberal about Bach interpretation, Lang’s playing of the partita was hard to defend. It failed the test of musicality. In my experience, Lang never, ever plays badly. It’s just that he sometimes thinks badly. His fingers will do whatever his brain commands. After the Bach, he turned to an even bigger piece in B flat, Schubert’s sonata in that key. Beauty of sound is more helpful Lang Lang. in Schubert than it is in most composers. And Lang has ample beauty of sound. sic itself, “An die Musik.” Obviously, someone The Scherzo, particularly its beginning, was on this film—Anderson?—cares a lot about amazingly limpid. Lang gave no sense that a music. Someone on the film is smart about piano has hammers. He simply glided. Like the Bach partita, the Schubert sonata music too: The pieces selected fit the action and images on the screen like a glove. was unorthodox. Unlike the partita, in my Though many composers are represented, opinion, the sonata was interesting, defenBritten is the main one: We hear several of sible and musical. his pieces, not just The Young Person’s Guide. After intermission, Lang played the 12 Britten is a composer who stays close to the études of Chopin’s Op. 25. The first of these sea. The movie is set on an island off New is the “Aeolian Harp.” Lang was born to play England. A terrible, consequential storm it, because he can float like an angel. Other comes to the island. The movie uses Noye’s études require floating too. Still others reFludde (Noah’s Flood), Britten’s little opera quire deviltry or humor. Lang was persuabased on a 16th-century “mystery play.” sive in almost all of them. Each of them, he At the end of the movie, we again hear seemed to be improvising. bits of The Young Person’s Guide. The narraThis pianist can be a pain to look at, with tor in this piece explains how the sections of his gyrations and poses, but I must say I got the orchestra work together. The kids in the a kick out of him in the Chopin. He wielded movie have worked together too. the piano like a weapon. He was like some People say that music education in musketeer of the keyboard, swashbuckling. schools is dead. If that is so, we’ll have to rely Has there ever been silkier, more beaution the movies—along with cell phone rings. ful piano playing than what Lang showed in
film CITYARTS
Michael Fassbender in Prometheus.
A Noxious Burp Ridley Scott hiccups Alien fumes in Prometheus By Armond White
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he Alien franchise has become a quintilogy—a purely marketdriven neologism following the recent Blu-Ray box set that labeled the first four Alien films not as a “Quartet” but a “Quadrilogy.” Prometheus is made with the same contempt for the public—as if anyone wanted or needed another repackaging of the sci-fi horror tale. Even the 1979 original (the best, seconded by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection) was little more than what one critic condensed as “a gorilla in a haunted house movie.” Prometheus could have been concocted by a publicist taking advantage of the current gullible film culture that believes the hype hoisting Ridley Scott as an artist (or even interesting). Scott’s sales record is all that makes fanboys take him seriously; his formulaic, stultifying, calendar-art-pretty movies certainly don’t. The mere fact that Prometheus gloms on to a legacy—it is a prequel to the previous four films—is enough to convince the easily duped that something special is going on in this nonsense. What’s going on is a plot that is less coherent than any of the earlier films (even though it repeats them) with an unappealing cast babbling nonsense about faith, creation and let’s-get-the-hell-outta-here! The original film almost passes for art due to producer Walter Hill’s efficient adherence to genre storytelling and the unique exhibition of H.R. Giger’s unnervingly biomorphic designs for the monster and its
space ship, which simultaneously evoked outre genitalia and assorted seafoods. (The original’s signature motifs conveyed a palpable, nearly poetic fear of sex.) Now, ultrahack Scott reveals himself as little more than a production design freak; Prometheus (convincingly shot in 3-D) lacks the atmospheric awe of the first film, the undeniably well-paced tension of James Cameron’s sequel and the rich, evocative splendor of Jeunet’s capstone. Instead, Prometheus is marked by Scott’s typically shallow characterization, narrative confusion and disrespect for movie history. Not since the atrocious Wall-E has one movie so thoughtlessly trashed a superior film. This time, both David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence are dishonored through the characterization of an ominous automaton, David (played by Michael Fassbender, who has quickly come to emblematize crap cinema). David models his hair and speaking voice after Peter O’Toole’s classic enigmatic Lawrence, and David’s lack of “soul” refers to the conundrum of Spielberg and Kubrick’s neo-Pinocchio conception, scoffed at here as “not a real boy.” Just as Wall-E demeaned the spectacular movie musical romance Hello, Dolly! to the delight of ignorant film geeks, Prometheus plays with our culture’s most profound artistic expressions of human ambition merely for a series of unpleasant thrills: Noomi Rapace performing an abortion on herself, various decapitations, dispirited ruminations on religion and, finally, Guy Pearce in ludicrous Halloween makeup. It’s a foul repeat, a noxious burp. If you swallow Prometheus, you’ll swallow anything. Follow Armond White on Twitter at @3xchair.