October 11, 2007 5:55
J.M.W. Turner in Washington, D.C.
Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight/Turner, 1835 — The National Gallery of Art
I made it down to Washington a few weeks ago to catch an early look at the phenomenal Turner show that has since opened at the National Gallery of Art. I'm still rubbing my eyes. It's very large, the largest Turner exhibition to be seen in the U.S. in over 40 years. And it's absolutely smashing. It was a famously fascinating career arc. To his contemporaries, some of them, it seemed that as he got older his powers decayed, even to the point of madness. To us, now, it seems as though that's when his powers were unleashed.
Here's a link to my review in the new issue of Time. Later I'll add a link at this post to a slideshow we'll be mounting on Friday with 15 of Turner's paintings.
October 11, 2007 12:16
Alexandra Boulat: 1962-2007
Alexandra Boulat
Earlier this week, the French photojournalist Alexandra Boulat died in Paris. Boulat was one of the founders of the photo agency VII and her pictures often found their way into the pages of Time. Around the end of every year I collaborate with Time's photo editors on the special issue devoted to Images of the Year. Last year we were so impressed by Boulat's work in Gaza that we devoted a separate portfolio to her. We might just as easily have done the same in earlier years for the pictures she took in Afghanistan, Kosovo or Beirut.
Kosovo, 1999, Refugees flee fighting — Photo: Alexandra Boulat/VII
Boulat had a gift not only for images of war and turmoil, but also for the intimate side of people's lives. It was Robert Capa who said: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." She was close enough in more ways than one.
Afghanistan, 2001, An Afghan family prepares the body of an eight-year-old boy for burial. The child died from cold in a refugee camp near Herat. — Photo: Alexandra Boulat/VII
You can see a slide show of Boulat's pictures here. And a very readable tribute here from Tim McGirk, one of Time's Middle East correspondents, who often dashed aound with her.
October 10, 2007 2:38
Cut to the Crack
"There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
The line is Leonard Cohen's. It came to mind yesterday when I noticed that for her new installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London, the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has produced a lengthy and widening crack in the Tate's concrete floor.
Shibboleth, Doris Salcedo, 2007 — Photo: Tate
I was reminded immediately of another crack, produced a few years ago, half a world away. In San Francisco recently I made a trip over to the De Young Museum, where the first thing you run across, literally, is Andy Goldsworthy's Drawn Stone, a crack that procedes from the roadway in front of the museum, through the courtyard and up to the front door, along the way passing through a couple of large stone slabs used for outdooor seating.
Drawn Stone, Andy Goldsworthy, 2005 — Photo: De Young Museum
Salcedo's piece is about racism and cultural divides. Goldsworthy's, of course, is about tectonic plates and the San Andreas faultline. (Actually, it was originally called Faultline. Did the title make somebody at the museum nervous?)
In any case, I don't know if all of this represents a trend, or just proof that great minds crack alike.
October 9, 2007 4:53
Kara Walker at the Whitney
Darkytown Rebellion, Kara Walker, 2001 — Collection Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg
I made it over to the Whitney Museum this morning to preview Kara Walker's mid-career retrospective. You might say that Walker has just one subject, but it's one of the big ones, the endless predicament of race in America.
The Whitney show, which debuted in February at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, includes Walker's smaller works on paper, wood and canvas board. These are mostly watercolors and mixed media pieces that are like laboratory experiments in converting psychic energy into charged imagery. There are also two rooms set aside to screen the animated films that Walker has been making in recent years. If you manage to see the show before it closes Feb. 3 — it moves later to L.A. — set aside the 16 minutes it takes to watch 8 Possible Beginnings, Or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker, which calls on everything from Balinese shadow puppetry to Disney's version of Uncle Remus.
But inevitably the centerpieces of the show are Walker's now famous cut black paper silhouettes. Some of them are individual images on canvas, but more commonly she combines a cast of antebellum plantation characters into panoramic wall pieces. These form a phantasmagoria of whites and blacks copulating, farting, defecating, floating, giving birth and suckling one another, always locked together in the mutually degrading transactions of master and slave.
Walker's wall pieces represent the return of the repressed with a vengeance. She has a gift for finding her way by unexpected routes to uncomfortable places. A great deal of banal, hectoring, finger wagging political art was made in the '90s, but her cut paper silhouettes were nothing like that. With their wit and craftsmanship, their shrewd appropriation of old story telling techniques and their fearless and pitch perfect combinations of terror, anger and low comedy, they were some of the most unforgettable work of the last decade.
The question remains whether Walker's now familiar practices and preoccupations can sustain her for another decade or more. But there's no question that she's made something powerful and original from them so far. It was because of the wall pieces in particular that earlier this year, when my esteemed editors asked me to propose an artist for the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people, I knew right away who it should be.
October 9, 2007 4:04
The World's a Hard Place for a Picture These Days
First that Monet gets punched and ripped in Paris. Now this. The attack actually took place last week, but only made it into the New York Times today.
Wasn't it the Europeans who were supposed to be the guardians of culture?
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
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