Upcoming Summer 2008 Museum Exhibitions in New York

My picks for current and future museum exhibitions in New York for May, June, and July 2008. Blockbusters, as noted, are the big shows with catalogues, lots of gift store-related items (posters, tote bags, notecards, coffee mugs, T-shirts) and crowded galleries. You can impress your friends by telling them you went to one or more of these. Maybe you can find something for them in the gift shop.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy
May 7, 2008–September 1, 2008
Special Exhibition Galleries, 1st floor


American Landscapes
Opens May 20, 2008
Robert Lehman Wing
Nine large American landscape paintings from the collection to see during the closure and restoration of the American Wing. When I read that the American Wing would re-open in 2010, I had visions that we would all have personal spaceships by then, but really, it's only a couple of more years. It should be finished around the time of the interminable Washington Square Park renovation, a convulsive erasure of bohemian history and grave desecration that has cut into my personal lifestyle.

Jeff Koons on the Roof
April 22, 2008–October 26, 2008 (weather permitting) Roof Garden
Installation of sculptures by American artist Jeff Koons.

UPCOMING BLOCKBUSTER at the Met! Meet J.M.W. Turner

J. M. W. Turner
July 1, 2008–September 21, 2008
The Tisch Galleries, 2nd floor
BIG exhibition with 140 paintings and watercolors that's now making its way here.

International Center of Photography:

UPCOMING FORT WORTH, TEXAS-THEMED BLOCKBUSTER at the ICP

(Kidding about the blockbuster part, but I'm looking forward to this one.)
Bill Wood's Business
May 16, 2008 - September 7, 2008
All about the amateur and professional photo images spawned by one Fort Worth photo supply store, capturing Cow Town in vivid black and white glory during the years 1937 to 1973.

Guggenheim:

Cai Guo-Qiang. I Want to Believe, ongoing blockbuster, through May 28, 2008
Everyone should have seen this already, including me. Hey, I've been at the movies.

UPCOMING BLOCKBUSTER at the Guggenheim! Bourgeois Spiderwoman

Louise Bourgeois
June 27–September 28, 2008
Full-career retrospective.

Museum of Modern Art:

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson
Through June 30
at MoMA and P.S.1

TWO UPCOMING BLOCKBUSTERS at MoMA! MoMA has two Daddies: Dada, Dalí

Dada at MoMA
May 21–July 28, 2008
Cutest exhibit title that ever was.

Dalí: Painting and Film
June 29–September 15, 2008
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor

Jewish Museum:

Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976
May 04, 2008 - September 21, 2008

Morgan Library & Museum:

Philip Guston: Works on Paper
May 2 through August 31, 2008

Brooklyn Museum

Murakami, ongoing blockbuster, through July 13, 2008

Image: Joseph Mallord William Turner. Dido Building Carthage (The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire), 1815, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.

Elizabeth Peyton's Snapshot Romanticism: New Work at GBE (A Review)

"Snapshot romanticism" may seem like an oxymoron, but it was the first phrase that fired in my brain while thinking of Elizabeth Peyton's small paintings and drawings currently on exhibit at Gavin Brown's Enterprise on Greenwich St. Her use of photographic sources, especially the snapshot genre, with its qualities of chance and candid gesture, and her thought-out brush strokes, belying the choices of a careful painter, combine to create intriguing small portraits. They all pack a lot of punch for their size.

I remember seeing one of Peyton's portraits in MoMA just after the museum reopened and thinking how well she held her own in a room full of super-sized art. I think a big Andreas Gursky photo was nearby. At the GBE gallery, the paintings and drawings are more in competition with themselves, with most holding up under scrutiny. One of the largest paintings here, titled "The Age of Innocence," at 14 1/4 x 10 inches, an oil on board, revels in the beautiful kissing faces of Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis, the stars of the 1993 film by Martin Scorsese. Known for her celebrity portraits, Peyton revels in the beautiful.

Other recognizable figures include a stunning monochromatic portrait of Alice Neel, a sepia-toned painting of the handsome face of Diaghilev, a painting of the poet and artist John Giorno in his study, and a pastel and pencil drawing of Bob Dylan. In another work, Peyton paints a still life featuring flowers, the mythological figure of Actaeon (a hunter that Artemis turns into a stag after she catches him looking at her naked), and a couple of stacked books, one on Dylan, the other Truffaut. Isn't it romantic?

Without pop and myth references, the portraits of individual friends we may not know, such as the ones of Darren, Joe, Matthew and Pati, invite more interest and attention, as if we were meeting someone for the first time. We can look at the blue denim jackets, indigo jeans, a floral print sofa, and in the case of Matthew, his intense blue eyes. I once read that Peyton has a hard time parting with her paintings, and while separation anxiety is not unusual with artists, I can see that with these more intimate paintings, it would be hard to let them go.

Peyton demonstrates she knows the different rules for painting and drawing as opposed to photography. With her paintings, applied on top of copious amounts of dripping gesso that spread beyond the underlying frame, she shows off her strokes, often committed in transparent colorful washes with careful touches of solid color. With her drawings, she's economical in line. Of these works at GBE that I liked best is a painting of hurried pedestrians at an intersection on W. 11th. near Greenwich St. In the middle is the mid-century modern Curran/O'Toole building, a white structure with scalloped overhangs, or portholes, that's currently at risk of demolition. For 9 x 6 inches, she creates an enormous amount of visual interest with the "portrait" of this building. The bottom line might be, however, that the medium is the message. Friends and buildings can come and go. Oil paint lasts forever.

Image: Gallery, 620 Greenwich Street. "Elizabeth Peyton," through May 17, 2008. Gavin Brown's Enterprise.

Spring Art Cleaning: Out with the Junk-Yard Aesthetic and In with the Small Paintings

Can you smell the roses and linseed oil? There's a linen-fresh and sometimes, new mossy scent in the spring art air this week, a sign that this season's winter of artfully messy assemblage has started to off-gas a little and will soon be dragged back to the street from whence it came. At least that's the smell I'm picking up from the big boys and girls of New York's art critical print press, many of whom are publicly exhaling their weariness with the Unmonumentals and Whitneys of our late winter's discontent and are now bathing in the refreshing glows of Olafur Eliasson and elsewhere, all the small paintings. Smells like teen spirit!

Evidence abounds:

• "Stand Still; A Spectacle Will Happen," a review of the Olafur Eliasson retrospective at MoMA by Holland Cotter (and an excellent use of the semi-colon in headline, btw) for The New York Times.
Quote: "What a relief. Near the end of a decade crammed with junk-art collectibles geared to junk-bond budgets, and a museum season of ragbag sculptures and wallpapered words, we get bare walls and open space in the Olafur Eliasson survey..."

• Peter Schjeldahl's review of the Eliasson exhibit at MoMA for The New Yorker is titled "Uncluttered," signaling that the antidote to Unmonumental has arrived. Schjeldahl describes Eliasson's wall of moss as "exotic (and odorous)."

• "Wasted Youth," a review of Dan Cohen and Nate Lowman by Jerry Saltz for New York Magazine:
Quote: "looks too much like too many other shows—many of them excellent, some at Maccarone—to be taken as anything other than bad-boy shtick and hammy caricature. It radiates hipness and camaraderie, and is a warning that artists need to be wary of the point where influence turns into derivativeness."

• Roberta Smith's "Is Painting Small the Next Big Thing?" for The New York Times. Smith looks at the new phenomenon of petite abstract paintings in reviews of several painters.

You want to see wonderful small paintings by a major contemporary artist? Stay tuned for my review of Elizabeth Peyton's new small portraits at GBE on Greenwich Street. Roses, oil, linen canvases, and a portrait of Bob Dylan. Hmmm...nice...In comes the good air...hold, hold, hold....release gently....now exhale deeply....ahhhhhh.

See related posts from Walking Off the Big Apple:
Pack Arts Journalism in the Age of Un-Art: Writing About the Whitney Biennial
Unmonumental at the New Museum: Just Like Your Messy Friend's Place

The Shadows Cast Upon the Wall: Paul Chan's Luminous Narrative at the New Museum

When I walked by St. Patrick's Old Cathedral on my way to the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery, I had little idea that I'd soon find a relationship between the aged church with the exhibit I would soon see in the museum. Yet, while contemplating the secular and worldly engagement of Paul Chan's The 7 Lights, with its digital projections of falling objects in the light and darkness, I fell into a state of meditation that, while not worship, was like a religious pilgrimage in search of the truth. I could have been in a church, I thought, or at least the kind Le Corbusier would have designed.

Chan began the project of these digital projected loops of Lights, deconstructed with this titular strikethrough, in 2005, and the assembly of seven of them here, placed well on the smooth floors and finished walls of the third floor of the museum, creates an effective and moving exhibit. Framed as the lights and camera obscura images of the shadows cast through a window, the fourteen-minute loops begin with the warm colors of the break of day, proceed through the bright light of the afternoon, and end with the blue-purples of the evening. And begin again, without a seam. As the day unfolds, objects appear and fall or float or ascend. In 1st Light, it's a telephone poll, then a flock of birds, and at some point a falling body, and then more falling bodies. It's horrifically beautiful (or beautifully horrific).

With the 3rd Light, a long table adds an additional surface for the casting shadows, and the table becomes the Last Supper. One sequence in the beamed light in this iteration seems more uncannily like natural daylight than the light in the other projections, and the preternatural white glow strikes both awe and respect, even as the falling objects include chairs, forks, spoons, and dogs. Birds fly by as bodies still fall. The nightmare continues. The only break is some peace at the falling of a new day.

As individuals sometimes walked in front of the projectors, usually by accident or just to shift their points of view, they seemed to not be intrusions but appropriate additions to the passing objects.

The exhibit includes Chan's drawings, collages of paper and charcoal on Styrofoam, and a special drawing of the Marquis de Sade installed in an alcove. The Sade drawing, presented in the genre of costume design, is humorous on the surface, but there's a social message embedded in it, one with a point, so to speak. I can't say more, or I'll ruin it.

It was good to visit the New Museum again after all the hub-bub of the opening exhibit, Unmonumental, and see how well Chan's moving images work in there. I didn't feel the same about the configuration of Tomma Abts paintings on another floor, by the way, - they're too low on the wall, I think, and some a little crooked. Intriguing, well-crafted paintings, yes, but they're lost in space.

For more on the Chan exhibit, see the illuminating online exhibit of Paul Chan's The 7 Lights at the New Museum's website.

Image: First floor, New Museum of Contemporary Art. Walking Off the Big Apple. April 16, 2008.

Pack Arts Journalism in the Age of Un-Art: Writing About the Whitney Biennial

Though I have yet to see the newly-opened Whitney Biennial, I enjoy my biennial hobby of reading all the reviews before I go. I'm always looking to test my thesis that something I call "pack arts criticism" is at work. I'll explain. "Pack journalism" is a term often used to characterize the tendency of political journalists to cover a story with a single mindset, and I think arts journalism works the same way. Within days of the opening of any Biennial, I start to see a consensus building among the critics, often lead by critics at the major news outlets. The critical reception of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, which opened yesterday, is shaping up in a similar way.

Holland Cotter, in today's review of the Whitney Biennial for The New York Times connects the exhibition with an economy in recession. He characterizes the Biennial, with its "uncharismatic surfaces, complicated back stories," as an "unglamorous, even prosaic affair." Later in the review, he describes the biennial as a "hermetic, uningratiating show." Now that Cotter has set this tone, I'm watching other critics who are less sure of their art critical skills to follow his un-lead.

David Cohen and Alexandra Peers joined Cotter in setting the tone for future critics, penning early reviews, for their respective media outlets. Cohen, in his review at the New York Sun, prefers "anti" over "un" for his evaluation. He writes of the Biennial, "Instead, it is simply the lack of formal cohesion that suffices as the deflationary, antiheroic, anti-Art-with-a-big-A statement for most of these artists." Peers, writing about the opening for New York Magazine, veers toward the word "unfinished." She writes of the less-than-enthusiastic response, "The dominant aesthetic was so tentative and half-done that one rival institution’s curator wondered if artists racing to make deadlines hadn’t finished."

The curators set the tone themselves. Shamim M. Momin and Henriette Huldisch pitched the themes of un-ness in their conceptualization for the exhibit. Time Magazine's Richard Lacayo asked them their thoughts while organizing the show, especially what Huldisch terms as "lessness," a theme on which she elaborates more in the catalogue. In a blog post for Time, Huldisch defined "lessness" for Lucayo as follows: "One is a tendency towards non-spectable, non-monumentalism. I talk about three different directions. One is failure as a key motif. Another is an inclination to use modest, humble materials. And lastly there's this notion of people making smaller, more localized gestures that have an 'in the moment' aspect."

Well. Talk about lowering expectations. And she sure knows how to make up words. "Lessness" is the title of a Samuel Beckett story, but that's about the extent of its use as a real word, as far as I know. "Non-spectable" is also a non-starter. If the curator is arguing, and she may be, that the Whitney Biennial is less than spectacular, without any "spectable" attraction and in which failure is certainly an option, then I'm not too surprised that critics seem to be searching for an artist here and there about whose work there would be something nice to say.

Following the high-profile opening of "Unmonumental" (not a real word either), the inaugural exhibit at the New Museum, the Whitney has ushered in The Age of "Whatever." These early reviews, all restrained and tentative and probably more polite than they wanted, will likely set the tone for others over the next few weeks. In summation: Here's the Whitney Biennial. Come see it or not. Whatever.

Image: Photo of a chair in a gutter in Tribeca, an un-art artifact by Walking Off the Big Apple. March 2008.

See related posts: Best Chance to Get Into the Whitney Biennial? Don't Turn 40 and More on the 2008 Whitney Biennial Selections: The Global M.F.A.

Earning Her Wrinkles: Rosalind Solomon at Silverstein Photography (A Review)

Looking at photographer Rosalind Solomon's well-composed black-and-white self-portraits – the wrinkles around the mouth, her puffed eyes, the wild gray hair, ample sagging breasts, and the age spots that she presents to the world, I thought anyone mired in our youth-obsessed culture needs to visit this solo exhibit at Silverstein Photography in Chelsea and ask themselves, honestly, if they would have the guts to pull off anything as real as this body of work.

Two fingers on my mouth, one of several imposing self-portraits dating from Solomon's residency at the Macdowell Colony in 2002, says several things. Raising her fingers to cover her mouth and staring straight into the camera, she shows us the gesture of silence. Be quiet. Don't speak. Two fingers on the mouth can also be a thinking person's gesture. One of the other photographs from Macdowell - beautifully printed gelatin silver prints, by the way, presents the aging self in metaphorical terms. She's nude, naked even, squatting on a snow-covered stone path before a white gate. Squeezing the shutter release cable in her right hand, resting her chin on her left hand, she's not quite ready for the pearly gate to open.

Inside Out functions as a mini retrospective, including representative images of her early doll photographs from the 1970s, a collage about the confining expectations and duties of her married life, images from previous monographs, a sculptural configuration representing her dead and buried selves, and a terrific video installation.

With the video, Don’t Eat my Flowers!, displayed on three monitors in the back room of the gallery, Solomon performs the words of intimidating parental interjections -"Don't your dare!," being a memorable one, through menacing close-ups of her moving lips and jutting chin. There's little doubt that the little girl who might be on the receiving end of such words would end up as a defiant one.

The influence of Lisette Model, Solomon's teacher, is apparent, especially in the technical aspects of the work and in some of the content, such as with Nursing home, Lima Peru and Blind girl with dolls, South Africa, but Solomon turned out quite different than Diane Arbus, Model's most famous student. Solomon relies more on herself than Arbus, and she is hyper self-aware, articulate and probing of her own social masks. Photographing close-ups of the dolls that she found in Alabama establish the obsession with the social conventions of appearances, especially within the strict confines of gender expectations, but her other visual investigations outside the U.S. also point to the universality of mask-making.

She is her own best subject. I can't think of many photographs better than After 9/11, Self with frozen turkey, Macdowell, Peterborough, NH. Dressed in sleeveless black clothes and sitting on a stool off-center, Solomon stares matter-of-factly toward the camera, shutter release in hand. Night has fallen. The flash hits the place where two door frames come together. Solomon grasps the leg of a limp feathered turkey splayed out on her lap. After that, I thought, what else is there to say?

Rosalind Solomon's Inside Out continues through April 5, 2008. Silverstein Photography. 535 West 24th Street. New York, NY 10011. Gallery information.

Coloring in the Lines: Color Chart at MoMA

After visiting Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA last week, I wandered into Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today in the nearby galleries on the sixth floor. The exhibit features 44 contemporary artists who've explored the possibilities of color as a readily-available commercial product. The earliest work, Marcel Duchamp's painting, Tu m' from 1918, presents a cascading spray of color samples and establishes the thesis sentence for the exhibit.

Artists include Robert Rauschenberg, riffing on Duchamp and using paint right out of the can, Dan Flavin, the master of the florescent tube, and Sherrie Levine, borrowing LeCorbusier's palette in the same way she borrows everything. After seeing Jasper Johns: Gray at the Met, I found it humorous to come across a series of his numbers in living color. Curating an exhibit is so much about presenting an argument, I thought, that a clever curator could offer us an exhibit in the future titled "Jasper Johns: Green, Blue, Red, and Yellow."

Color Chart does make the distinction between academic traditions of the aesthetic use of color and the contemporary pop love of the readymade, although I think the word "reinventing" is too strong. The artists presented here often randomly play with the selection of colors available to them, as opposed to the artists who've pulled out the color wheel to make choices in the service of other motives. As a modern art phenomenon, color becomes the subject itself, often a dialogue with colors that are found, whether on an Italian sports car (Alighiero Boetti's Rosso Gilera, Rosso Guzzi, 1971) or landscapes in London (David Batchelor's Found Monochromes of London 1997-2003).

I enjoyed seeing Andy Warhol's Do It Yourself series from 1962, his send-up of the popular painting-by-numbers hobby, Richard Serra's film Color Aid, 1970-71, a presentation of Joseph Albers' 220 sheets of color, and Byron Kim's Synecdoche, a color chart based on skin tones.

The concurrent Design and the Elastic Mind and Color Chart provide ample reason to visit the sixth floor of MoMA. See Design first, as it's intellectually the most challenging. On a whole different level, I recommend Color Chart as a way of dealing therapeutically with typical color anxieties, such as what color to paint the living room. Which reminds me - the exhibit is supported by Benjamin Moore Paints.

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today through May 12, 2008. Museum of Modern Art. Online site.

Related entertainment: A DIY website to turn your digital photos into painting by numbers - PhotoDoodle.

Image: Peppers for sale, market at SE corner of Broadway and Houston, New York, New York. Walking Off the Big Apple. March 3, 2008.

Monday Roundup: Chelsea Planning Tip, Whitney Biennial, Green Peppercorn Sauce, and Other Items

Visiting Chelsea. Maybe the following quick Descent Into Art Hell in Chelsea has happened to others: I hate when I'm in Chelsea and I've just realized I wanted to visit a particular gallery but it's four streets back now and I walked right past it earlier and I don't feel like trying to find the stupid door on the self-important gallery anymore and I hate looking at art in this part of the neighborhood in the first place where there are hardly any trees and curse the person that thought warehouses and factories for baking cookies were good places to view art and where there's no place to sit down and it's kinda far from the subway and I don't feel like going back there now. I'm going home.

Golly. WOTBA needs some HELP. Look at that little girl on the horse. She looks like she's spoiled and could cry. I'm better now, thank you. I've started planning my trips to this well-known art mecca in advance through the website chelseaartgalleries.com, and I am a better person for it. The website includes a feature that allows you to plan shows you want to see by organizing them by street, and then you can print out the list. With organizing my excursions, I can enjoy myself now and even include some impromptu gallery visits.

Food. I've found good places for hamburgers. I like Rare on Bleecker, Soho Park on Prince, and now, I like Stand on E. 12th. I went to Stand last night and ordered the hamburger with green peppercorn sauce. Best thing ever. I prefer the lighting in the other places, however. Inside Stand, the spot lighting is a little too theatrical for me, and where I was sitting I thought I'd be called upon to deliver a monologue.

I met some friends for lunch the other day near MoMA. We gathered at Sushiya (Menu Pages) at 28 W. 56th Street, between 5th and 6th Ave., and I thought the sushi was some of the best I've had in New York. Very fresh, sublime texture. They kept replenishing our green tea, so we had to cover the glasses with our hands.

Lecture on Raymond Hood. For those who enjoyed reading about the architect on this website and will be in NYC this week, Carol Willis, the director of The Skyscraper Museum (39 Battery Place), will be delivering a lecture titled "Raymond Hood 'The Brilliant Bad Boy' of New York Architecture" on March 4th, 6:30-8 p.m.$10. More info here.

The Whitney Biennial 2008 opens this Thursday, March 6. The website is up and running, with bios and images of the participating artists. Ideas of fluidity, ephemera and displacement prevail among this youngish group of artists, and it looks like we'll all be invited to blog along.

Image: Myself, on horse, as a small child. Place: A Bar A Ranch, Encampment, Wyoming. Year: Once upon a time in the West.

Feed Your Head: Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA (A Review)

A few months ago, when I read that a certain type of printer was capable of producing three-dimensional objects, I had a hard time getting my head around the idea that I could print out a lost toothbrush. I completely forgot about the invention until I came across some of the printed objects in MoMA's new head-blowing exhibit, Design and the Elastic Mind. Now that I better understand the technology that allows me to print out an attractive bowl for the table - it involves resin and layers, I think I want a 3D printer in the worst way.

The exhibit at MoMA, some of it interactive, does toy a bit with this sort of high-tech consumer fetishism, but its deeper motive is to explain the more profound intersection of design and science through the lens of "elasticity." Defined in the exhibit as "the product of adaptability plus acceleration," elasticity implies movement - soaring arcs between shimmering points of light, walls that bend, micro-organisms that grow and change in relation to passersby, organisms capable of carrying information or broadcasting images in motion, prosthetic ankles that walk like real ones.

As an active organism in the blogosphere, I am already well-versed in the art of virtual mapping, an intermediate player in Google mashups, and familiar enough with tag clouds to appreciate the structuralist fundamentals of analyzing my own language. The exhibit covers some of the brave new frontiers of the web in its section on "Harvesting the Internet." We're already moved past those items, however, as it's so elastic. Check out what's in your future at Google Labs.

While I'm fine with the Internet, in terms of appreciating the virtual frontiers of computing, it's the biological parts of the Design exhibit that give me pause. In nanotechnology, scientists and designers are working in various fields to visualize or engineer revolutionary processes at the molecular level. Researchers at Harvard have visualized the "inner life of the cell" to give students aesthetically pleasing cinematic renderings of cellular life, and surely, pretty pictures could lead to more successful recruitment for future majors in the sciences. Maybe these students will go on to design video games that track down and kill cancer cells in the body. That would be wonderful.

Contemporary visual culture, as an academic field, embraces the notion that we're hell-bound to visualize that which we previously thought could not be made visible. Our global culture, in turning from the text toward the image, produces pictures that suggest their own ineffability, their own inarticulate "Wow." Nevertheless, Design and the Elastic Mind, while showing the much dazzling "wow" of macro and micro design and science, reveals that we still depend on those old and fabulous bits of information that we call "words" to explain these wonders. Or vice versa. I loved looking at Brad Paley/Text Arc's structuralist visualizations for Alice in Wonderland and trying to glean the relationship of the words to the cosmic rabbit hole.

Happily, the exhibit's online site is terrific and awaits exploration. Explore it here for yourself. Be prepared for lots of WORDS.

Design and the Electric Mind continues at the Museum of Modern Art through May 12, 2008.

At top: Screen capture of Google Analytics map showing locations of visitors to Walking Off the Big Apple during the month of February 2008. Click to enlarge.

Roundup: The Plaza Hotel, Sondheim's Seurat, the Texas Primary, and the Upcoming Gelato Showdown in the Village

As I gather my thoughts about the Chichester Festival Theatre's entertaining production of Macbeth that I saw last night at BAM, I would like to pass on a few updates and news items:

• I've now assembled all the posts from The New York of Raymond Hood, Architect self-guided walk onto new pages and placed them under the list of walks on the site's sidebar. I've added a small slideshow of more images of the buildings.

• The Plaza Hotel reopens Saturday, March 1, and I look forward to visiting. I've been meaning to comment on the story, "It's Lonely at the Plaza Hotel," by Christine Haughney from the February 17, 2008 edition of The New York Times. Apparently, the new condo owners are lonesome, as not everyone can afford a place in their legendary hotel. The story quotes one woman who told the reporter that she "wouldn’t mind meeting someone other than the decorators, real estate brokers and other service workers fussing over the apartments." I know exactly how she feels. All I can say is that I'm available. I would love to hang out in The Plaza. Anyone living at The Plaza who might be reading this and who would enjoy some company, please write walkbigapple@yahoo.com.

• Mapping Texas for the Primary. As a native Texan, I have many opinions about the upcoming Texas presidential primary. I recommend reading Randy Kennedy's NYT article, "Pieces of Texas Turn Primary Into a Puzzle," that explains the diversity of the vast Texas political landscape. My mother, a proper East Texan who wore skirts, hose, and high heels her entire life, thought I would become uncivilized if I spent any time with West Texans. Of course, I rebelled. No further evidence is necessary beyond looking in my closet and seeing what is not there.

• Art lovers suffering from a Seurat withdrawal after the closing of the exhibit at MoMA should make note that a new production of Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, now playing at Studio 54 (254 West 54th Street), has received good reviews and extended its run through June 15, 2008.

• (Image) Yesterday, I spotted the sign for the new gelato place coming to Bleecker Street later this spring. GROM's first NY location is up on Broadway on the Upper West Side. The Village location, an excellent site on Father Demo Square, will set up a showdown between this Turin-based upstart and L'Arte del Gelato on Seventh Ave. It will be like a spaghetti western but with gelato. As I posted earlier, I am observing a strict gelato diet for Lent. It's not going well.

Jasper Johns: On the Cold Gray Stones (A Review)

“Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.” - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Jasper Johns, the seafaring stranger," I thought. The sea kept sweeping through the galleries during my visit to Jasper Johns: Gray at the Met - images of a drowning poet, symbolized by Periscope (Hart Crane), Tennyson, the Poet Laureate who lived on the Isle of Wight, and the bridges, evoked by the Catenary series, leading voyagers to the edge of the sea. Johns has lived on many islands - Manhattan, the island, Edisto, the haunted sea island off the South Carolina shore, and the island of St. Martin, one of Johns' homes. Even circumstances of Johns' friends bring to mind the sea - Bob Rauschenberg, a child of Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf, and Frank O'Hara, the poet who died on Fire Island.

The Met arranges the grays thematically and, more or less, chronologically. After stating the thesis, well-made in the presentation of False Start and Jubilee, two paintings with the same subject, one with color and one with gray, the exhibit walks the visitor through the visual language of the artist - the objects (drawer, coat hanger, etc.), American flags in gray, the maps and targets leached of their colors, and then the splendid numbers and alphabets.

The targets, alphabets, and numbers function as our artist's semaphore - the "words" of his language, the "things the mind already knows." They are Johns' vocabulary, conveyed with all the tools of the trade - paints, graphite, encaustic, charcoal, watercolor, conté pencils, found objects, collage. Drawing is a gray medium. Letters and numbers - H means Hard, B means Black, and the HBs of the middle - 4, 5, 6, render grays.

And then comes Edisto. A drama unfolds. What happened to Johns here? It's the early 1960s, he's turned 30, and he's gone dark, sensitive, bleak, even tragic. Here's the room of Frank O'Hara and Hart Crane and a painting titled Liar and another titled No. Edisto, an old sea home of the Gullah people, is a moody, rocky, beautiful hard place. On those windswept days of gray rain and clouds, especially near the sea, pigmented colors announce themselves loudly, but at the same time a mood is struck. This sea island is the province of uncertainty, a place adrift, a Samuel Beckett play.

Beyond Edisto, the exhibit moves through a sculpture room and then to the hatch mark paintings. These short parallel lines become a new important part of the artist's pattern language. He's said that he saw the pattern on the side of a van. While crosshatching is a known technique in drawing, employed to render shading, Johns' hatch marks don't really cross. They're held in tension, graphic and flat, but full of motion in two dimensions.

Then comes the 80's room, shocking in its representations, the collage aesthetic, the busy bits of art history and the autobiographical archive. Winter, by the way, with the foregrounded snowflakes, its little snowman, and its looming outlined human figure, reeks of a midlife crisis. It's a moment where Johns looks like he's been swept up in a larger self-referential art history breakout and not really in his own element. He's included his own paintings in his paintings. They're all so social and conversational, even if it's mostly with the art history textbook. It feels like a phase.

He came out of it. Upon reaching the tenth room of the Gray exhibit, I sat on a bench and stayed long enough among the large gray Catenary paintings to watch the slight swaying of the ropes. Peace and quiet. With Near the Lagoon, 2002-3, a vertical canvas, the catenary becomes a drawing device and also a cosmic curtain. These gray surfaces are richer, bluer and creamier than the earlier paintings. Here's the Milky Way and the hints of the harlequin trickster. The jig is up. Johns has moved from his winter into night. I can smell the salt air in the astronomical twilight, the creaking of the pier underneath.

Upon leaving the exhibit, the gray flagstone pathway of Within, with its hints of many-colored lava underneath, carries the artist-as-Prospero, perhaps accompanied by a dog or two, to a new place on the island.

Jasper Johns: Gray continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 4, 2008.

See also the review of the drawings at Matthew Marks.

"Things the Mind Already Knows:" The Drawings of Jasper Johns (A Review)

Forty of Jasper Johns' drawings of the last ten years, currently on exhibit at Matthew Marks (522 W. 22 St.) in Chelsea, recommend themselves on so many levels that it's hard to know where to begin. I was struck not just by his continuing obsession with the images he's made famous over the years but by his obvious love for drawing and drawing materials. He's said this before, but it's clear he loves seeing how his targets, flags, numbers, etc. change from one medium to the next, how they emerge so differently on various material surfaces. He makes them all look new.

As much as I like looking at Johns' canvases, I love seeing these images played out on paper, created with all sorts of combinations of ink, acrylic, pencil, graphite, watercolor, etc. Artists with a large body of drawings gain my trust, as I believe that there's something deep about a compelling need among true artists to express themselves visually with whatever materials are at hand.

The exhibit at Matthew Marks certainly dissuades one from thinking that any one of Johns' images belongs to a specific decade and then abandoned in later years. He continues to recycle the whole bag of tricks - flags, flagstones, numerals, crosshatch patterns, alphabet letters, harlequin imagery, the bridge catenary, cruciforms, and maps of the United States. He's referred to these images, most of them from everyday life, as the "things the mind already knows." They're in his artistic DNA now and perhaps emerge involuntarily.

Johns' interpretation of Juan Gris, as depicted in a pair of drawings, suggests that he acknowledges his connection to many of the Cubists. Indeed, the imagery of the cubists find new echoes in Johns' works - the harlequins of Pablo Picasso, the target-like objects of Robert Delauney, and the presence of letters in cubist collage. "After Picasso," an ink and graphite drawing from 1998, explores the kind of hands and eyes that Picasso created in Guernica and related works, combined with Johns' characteristic crosshatching. The fact that Johns points to a longer artistic heritage in which he plays a part, in addition to his habits of drawing, elevates his work above that of many contemporary younger artists who feel compelled to substitute concepts for actual work.

I had one overarching impulsive reaction to seeing all this fine recent work by the elder statesman of American arts. It was "Johns wins."

Jasper Johns: Drawings 1997-2007 at Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 W. 22 St., continues through April 12, 2008

See also the review of Jasper Johns: Gray at the Met.

Luc Tuymans' Wonderful World of Painting (A Review)

Belgian-born artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) brings his painterly virtuosity to the kingdom of the mouse in his new solo exhibit, Forever, The Management of Magic, at David Zwirner. The image fragments of Walt Disney's electric magic empire, painted here like faded film stock in the blues and mauves of cotton candy, conjure a dusty collection of peripheral memorabilia. With these eight wonderful paintings and a side room of gouache drawings, Tuymans opens up a service entrance to the back lot of utopia. No mice here, this is Walt, the utopian urban planner, the maestro of the energy-draining world of tomorrow, the extravagant Robert Moses with electric turtles. Pay no attention to that man that Tuymans has almost cropped out of the painting.

Wonderland, one of the two largest paintings (at 138.98 x 215.35 inches), is based on a still from a family home movie made at Disneyland. Tuymans paints the trip through the Alice in Wonderland attraction from the perspective of the amateur filmmaker, and the painting functions as its own amusement, a kind of old fashioned play for the virtual reality that paintings once represented.

It took a trip to the Internet to get a fix on what I was looking at with the equally enormous Turtle, because I didn't recall that Disney's twinkling turtle from the Main Street Electrical Parade sported large round spectacles. These circles, then, of glowing light poking off the turtle's head represent the turtle's "vision." What a weird thing to think about - a glorious painted representation of the Disney electric twinkling turtle that needs glasses. What a ghostly spectral spectacular!

Wow - paintings. You remember them - stretched canvas and the application of paints with a paintbrush. Oils, no less, as Tuymans could not possibly make this work in the plastic technicolor world of acrylic but only with the creamy applications of oils. In passages, they remind me of seascapes. Tuymans has this wavy surf-like action going on with his brush strokes that leave marks that look like angel's wings. After coming across so much assemblage this year, I thought it wonderful to encounter aesthetically-pleasing two-dimensional painted canvases in seductive oils. Some of the works were so fresh I could smell them.

Walt Disney, famously frozen in time and space, manipulated and shaped the American psyche in profound ways - from the everlasting orphan search for Daddy to escaping unpredictable American reality for the safe ordered haven of Disneyland. I'm not sure we learn anything new here. I think types who show up at David Zwirner already see through the ideology of the mouse and the production of desire. There have been books. Actually, when I was looking at Tuymans' Wonderland, I think my mouth dropped open a little as I imagined myself riding on the train through the tunnel. Daddy, it was like magic. I want to go on that ride again.

Luc Tuymans, Forever, The Management of Magic continues through March 22, 2008. David Zwirner. Chelsea.

The Aesthetics of "Slow": Reflections on The Slow Movement and the Arts

I'm a slow poke, as they say. I hate to rush, and as the proponents of the Slow Movement advocate, I like to engage in activities that just creep along and force a break with the frantic rhythms of the city. I like knitting, all sorts of crafts, baking bread, growing plants from seeds, and strolling more than I like race walking.

The Slow Life Picks Up Speed, an article by Penelope Green from the January 31, 2008 issue of The New York Times, calls attention to the emergence of Slow Design as an aspect of the slow movement. One designer, Natalie Chanin, sells crafted items made out of recycled goods. Another group of designers in London have refurbished a cast-out sofa with fictional visualizations about the sofa's past.

Is "slow," with its emphasis on the recycled, repurposed, and handmade, emerging as the cohesive aesthetic in the contemporary visual arts? Perhaps. The New Museum's inaugural exhibit, Unmonumental, is all about the repurposing of both found or cast-off objects and insistent mass media images. Archive Fever-Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography takes as its curatorial point of departure the images of photography's past. In addition, many photographers now prefer the slow-cooked older photographic methods over the digital revolution.

Slow is a way to deal with our increasing guilt as over-consumers, and I think it's not a coincidence that the slow movement arrives at a time of economic slowdown. What will be interesting is how the American economy, dependent as it is upon consumer spending, will recover if consumers slow down not out of absolute necessity but out of desire. For so long marketing professionals have linked the words "consumer" and "desire," but what happens if we are sick of the pace of our own spending and want to stop or at least slow down?

The slow aesthetic, especially in its collage form, may look like a crazy quilt, or just crazy, and that upsets the minimalists. I think that the reason some people who don't like the artwork in Unmonumental is that they don't like the surface messiness and the funk. They find disorder, randomness, and too many rough edges. The slow aesthetic makes visual the irrefutable fact that we've accumulated too many goods, and for some people, slow art looks too much like the compost heap. On the other hand, slow art, like those handmade items of clothing that bear a "warning" label of their own imperfections, can produce objects of lasting beauty.

What about the fast Internet in the age of Slow? Sometimes I would like to write faster posts so I can be as popular as Gawker. But it's just me here, and I like to take my time. I'm a deliberate slow-poke. I like to think and ponder. I won't write a post just to fill a daily quota. In a way, this website, with its accumulation of eclectic stories of New York cultural history, archival sensibility, and an emphasis on the hand-made, exemplifies the Slow aesthetic. I want readers to think of it as a big homemade cake. Walking Off the Big Apple is a Slow Blog.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Georgia O'Keeffe at The Met

I went to the Met on Tuesday to look at Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, but first I had to find them. A couple of museum workers thought they had seen one or two in the Modern Art section, but they also recommended that I check with the woman that runs the tiny shop next to the American Wing on the opposite side of the museum. I hadn't planned on my visit being another athletic adventure, but I nevertheless ended up pounding a couple of miles inside the Met.

Fortunately, I found the O'Keeffe paintings early on. After winding my way through Roman art and through the Michael Rockefeller Oceanic galleries, I made my way through the first rooms of the Modern Art section and could reassure myself I was in the right century. After a turn to the right and then around another corner, I saw paintings by Charles Sheeler and Arthur Dove. Surely she is near. And, yes, voila!, a room of Georgia O'Keeffes, and more than a couple. Ten.

After spending the week with her story, I was happy to see these particular paintings. While the Met routinely switches out artworks, the O'Keeffe paintings on display on Tuesday included (in chronological order here, not how they were displayed):

Corn, Dark, Number 1 (1924). Painted at Lake George
Grey Tree, Lake George (1925)
Black Iris (1926) The magnified iris, painted in plums and grey pinks, fills and pushes the boundaries of the canvas - a terrific tension of light and dark and the scandalous vulval core imagery that shaped the direction of feminist art in the 1970s.
Clam Shell (1930)
Ranchos Church (1930) O'Keeffe ventured out to Taos to stay at Mabel Dodge's and discovered the Saint Francis of Assissi Mission in the Hispanic community of Ranchos de Taos. Painting the church from the back side, the church takes on the essence of a natural earth formation. I love how the grey sky pushes on the outer surfaces of the structure.
Cow's Skull: Red, White and Blue (1931) See image. O'Keeffe's satire on the search for the Great American painting at the time of the Great Depression and the blossoming of American regional painting. In reaction to the depictions of decrepit buildings in the heartland, O'Keeffe sets a cow's skull, like a crucifix, on top of red, white, and blue, as her homage to American Art.
From the Faraway, Nearby (1937) A turn toward surrealism with the scale of the mountain range dwarfed by the hovering antlered creature that dominates the scene and sky.
Red and Yellow Cliffs (1940) The view of the striated coral and ochre cliffs from Ghost Ranch.
Pelvis II (1944) Highly sculptural and abstract, the blue sky seen through the interior of the bones renders the image a metaphor for mortality. She applies the white paint on the pelvis in strips, maybe with a palette knife, that gives a cracked texture to the bones.
Black Place II (1944) A dark and desolate but beautiful image of a stretch of hills she often liked to paint.

I decided to check to see if there were more O'Keeffe paintings by visiting the American Wing on the other side of the museum, but I knew that several galleries in that wing were closed and that access was tricky. So I spent the next hour, I think, wandering through room and after room of decorative art from various centuries, taking the wrong turn in musical instruments and again in medieval armor and then winding my way back to the main entrance. At that point I was told that the only way to get to the American Wing was from the Temple of Dendur, the expansive room that houses the Nubian temple to the goddess Isis. After passing the entirety of Egyptian civilization to get there, I felt like I was in an old video game.

I walked through many rooms in the American Wing but I didn't see another O'Keeffe. I found the woman who tended the gift shop, and yes, she said, I had seen all of them in Modern. Somewhere in the American Wing, a man approached a security guard and asked him how to get out of there.

Note: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the final stop on the Fifth Avenue and the High Road to Taos self-guided walking tour.

Museums As Gyms, Part One: The Met

For the first of my Museums as Gyms series, I must say that the Met, as a fitness center, sets a high bar. This Fifth Avenue art palace features miles of walkable areas, a challenge for even the most athletic of cultural tourists. Walking is stimulating all by itself, and here at the Met, there's also too much to see.

When I was visiting the other day, I overheard several discussions in the Met's cafeteria about whether it was wise to see "just one more exhibit" or move on. I was taking a break myself, scooping out a cup of yogurt and wondering if my strategy of trying to walk through all the Met was completely stupid. "Yes," I told myself, "Art history cannot be compressed in an hour and a half. You are a superficial person. This is idiotic." But I pressed on for another 30 minutes.

According to my pedometer, I clocked 5,500 steps inside the Met, a little over 2.5 miles. In the process I scanned some of the most iconic images of creative human history - Roman statues, medieval altars, Central African reliquaries, Rembrandt's self-portraits, Jackson Pollocks, American Civil War photographs, Federalist furniture, and on and on. All these went by in the blink of an eye. I felt like I had flipped rapidly through most of the pages of an art history textbook, cramming for a final exam.

Artwork in several of the Met galleries stopped me in my tracks, quite literally. I visited the Met in the first place to see the new 19th and early 20th century galleries, and when I arrived in these extraordinary rooms, it was as if the entire 19th century opened like an unfolding accordion. I also stopped and marveled at Tara Donovan's installation - a shimmery patterned display of metallic loops. They looked like snowflakes on a windowpane, echoing designs of an earlier era I had seen elsewhere in the museum.

I can now rationalize that my Met workout was worth it. In walking from one end of the Met to another, I encountered many rooms I had never visited - musical instruments, the pre-Columbian room of gold, the swords and other firearms, and peaceful rooms of Asian art. I especially enjoyed seeing an opulent Venetian bedroom from a palace off the Grand Canal, even if I don't know how to find it easily again. I was so exhausted by that point that I wanted to hurl myself over the barrier and onto the ducal bed.

Museums As Gyms: A New Art & Exercise Series From Walking Off the Big Apple

Readers of Walking Off the Big Apple know I like to combine walking and looking at art. They also know I don't like going to the gym and staring at myself in the mirror while walking absolutely nowhere. When I compiled the list of forthcoming museum exhibitions the other day, I began to think of the physical effort that seeing these exhibitions would require. Visiting the Met alone, I thought to myself, involves walking through miles of galleries and courtyards and ascending and descending stairs. When I walked around the New Museum last month, I immediately noticed the potential value of the museum's narrow staircase as a stairmaster. All the museums, in fact, afford excellent opportunities for exercise. The Guggenheim has that lovely circular ramp, and MoMA's stairs are preferable to the department store escalators.

I have decided, accordingly, to introduce the WOTBA Museum As Gym series. In this series I will evaluate New York's major museums (including the American Museum of Natural History) for their potential as exercise venues. I will not run through the museums, but I will walk purposely around and through the rooms and up and down the stairs. Many years ago, humorist Art Buchwald popularized the Six-Minute Louvre, the story of one American's achievement in visiting the three major attractions of the Paris museum - the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory, and the Mona Lisa, in record time. This New York version won't be anything like that. Well, it may be, sort of, but without the anti-cultural implications, I hope.

While exercising my right to look at art, so to speak, I intend to stop regularly, look at artwork, and take my pulse. I don't have a locker at any of these places, and I don't need one. I intend to wear regular clothes. I am a member of four of the major museums, so I expect this project to provide an economical alternative to real gym membership.

I'd like to get started with this series right away. I want to see the new galleries devoted to 19th century art at the Met, so I intend to start there. I will report back later with my evaluation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fitness.

Image: Any exercise program starts with just a few steps. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as seen behind the snowcones. 2006. New York, New York.

Forthcoming NY Museum Exhibitions: My Short List of Blockbusters, Early 2008

What follows is my selected list of museum exhibitions opening in January and February that should cast away the winter blues.

The Met:
In the Light of Poussin: The Classical Landscape Tradition
January 8, 2008–April 13, 2008 and Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions
February 12, 2008–May 11, 2008

New Museum:
Collage: The Unmonumental Picture
January 16 - March 30, 2008

International Center of Photography:
Archive Fever – Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art
January 18 – May 4, 2008

The Morgan Library & Museum:
Close Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers
January 18 through April 13, 2008

The Met:
Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks
January 22, 2008–May 11, 2008

Grey Art Gallery (NYU):
Diebenkorn in New Mexico
January 25 – April 5, 2008

The Met:
Gustave Courbet
February 27, 2008–May 18, 2008

Guggenheim:
Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe
February through May 2008

MoMA:
Design and the Elastic Mind
February 24–May 12, 2008

Whitney:
The 2008 Biennial opens in March

Image: Cai Guo-Qiang, Move Along, Nothing to See Here, one of a pair of life-size replicas of crocodiles cast in resin, pierced with objects confiscated at airport security checkpoints. The Met Roof Garden, summer 2006. The Guggenheim will host the first major retrospective of the artist beginning next month.

New York Art Highlights of 2007

The opening of the new Roman and Greek Galleries at the Met and the unveiling of the New Museum on the Bowery are two memorable high-profile events from the year, but I also still vividly recall many other exhibits that opened earlier in 2007. Top among these was the Stephen Shore exhibit of photos from the 1970s at ICP, so inspiring that I saw it twice. I didn't start Walking Off the Big Apple until the summer, otherwise I would have loved to have written about Shore's colors, cars, road trips, and most of all, his journal (he wrote down everything he ate).

My personal favorites from 2007:

Georges Seurat: The Drawings (MoMA)
Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1969-79 (ICP)
Thomas Struth, "Making Time" (Marian Goodman Gallery)
Alfred Leslie, "The Radical Theatre of Alfred Leslie (Ameringer-Yohe)
Venice and the Islamic World (Met)
Painted with Words: Vincent Van Gogh's Letters to Emile Bernard (Morgan Library)
Keith Tyson, "Large Field Array" (Pace)
Van Gogh and Expressionism (Neue Galerie)
Raymond Pettibon, "Here's Your Irony Back (The Big Picture)" (Zwirner)
Folkert de Jong, "Les Saltimbanques" (James Cohan)

Also near the top 10 - Barbara Kruger, "Picture/Readings: 1978" at Mary Boone, Butch Hancock at Cue Art Foundation, and "Open City: Tools for Action" at Eyebeam. "Unmonumental" at the New Museum is not on my list. Though I appreciated its role in the inauguration of the building, I thought that the idea swallowed the individual artists. Looking over my top choices, exhibits focusing on one artist worked the best.

Image: cover, Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places. The Complete Works. Aperture, 2005.

Weekend Frivolities: Tour de Bears, Real, Imagined, and Stuffed, of Central Park

Now that the winter solstice has passed quietly in the night (approx. 1:08 a.m. EST NYC), I continue to dream of hibernation. I have feasted on nuts and berries and slumped into carbohydrate narcolepsy, and I dare not disturb my slumber until the vernal equinox. But I cannot rest up here in the frosty north. Some rotund bearded guy keeps me awake at night, my obese compadre of El Norte, and the frozen tundra has started to melt under my den. I shall seek out then quieter caves and lazier company in Manhattan's Central Park.

Da Bears -
• Real live polar bears named Gus and Ida live in the Central Park Zoo.
•