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The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David, 1787/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
"All blogs must pass away."
Okay, apologies to the spirit of George Harrison for that one, but it sums up the purpose of today's post — to lay "Looking Around" to rest.
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The director Tim Burton doesn't just make enchantingly loony movies like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas. He also makes enchantingly loony paintings and drawings, which he's been scribbling away at since his suitably alienated childhood in Burbank, California.
This week the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a big show devoted not only to Burton's films but to those works on paper and in other media. I caught up with him last week in one of the galleries of that show, where we talked on camera about the role of drawing in his own creative processes, artists who influenced him, and whether some of his monsters don't look a little vulnerable.
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (rendering), Toyo Ito, 2008/Images: Toyo Ito and Associates
They tell us the Great Recession is in retreat, though it may not feel that way if you're unemployed. Even if it is, on the way out the door it took down a project I was looking forward to. Earlier this week the University of California at Berkeley announced that it was giving up on its plan to build a new home for the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive, with a design from the Japanese architect Toyo Ito that would have been his first in the U.S.
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The Gates, New York City, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005/photo: Lacayo
We got news this morning of the death of Jeanne-Claude, the artist and creative partner of Christo. They are of course the husband-and-wife team who wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin, ran a vast curtain fence for miles across the northern California landscape and created the completely enchanting New York City project called The Gates. She died yesterday of complications due to a ruptured brain aneurysm. She was 74.
Her full name was Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. The daughter of a French military officer stationed in Casablanca, she was born there on June 13, 1935. That happens also to be the birthdate of Christo, whom she met in Paris in 1958 when he was commissioned to a paint a portrait of her mother. Their collaborations began soon after.
Of all their far flung projects there was just one I got to experience personally, The Gates, but I was fascinated by it. (As a kind of farewell gesture I even managed to get myself attached for a day to the crews that were taking it down.) This is what I wrote a few years ago about their "strange power, the sheer enigmatic pageantry of The Gates...."
In their beckoning but impenetrable Other-ness, their aloofness from whatever meanings we would try to attach to them, The Gates always reminded me of that jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, the one that "did not give of bird or bush/like nothing else in Tennessee."
By which I simply meant, I had never seen anything quite like them.
Actually, the writer Raymond Carver never cared for the word "Minimalism" as the way to describe his taut, tight-lipped short stories. But that was the term they came to be known by in the late 1970s and '80s, when he was at the height of his influence in American fiction. In this week's Time I took a detour from my art and architecture duties to talk about a new account of Carver's hard-drinking, hardscrabble life and the new edition of his collected stories just issued by the Library of America. Alot of those stories may be downers, but they're also what you might call can't put 'em downers.
The Bauhaus-Dessau/John MacDougall - AFP - Getty
Okay, not the movie — but the podcast!
Last Friday, at the damp tail end of a very wet week in New York, I made it over to Alice Tully Hall to catch a collaboration between the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and the Berlin-based, South African artist Robin Rhode. Rhode is best known for short films and videos that owe an (acknowledged) debt to the low-tech animations of his fellow South African artist William Kentridge, but with more of a street art flavor. A lot of his videos mix live figures with animated backgrounds, very often painted life-size on walls or on the ground. What he and Andsnes have produced together is something they call "Pictures Reframed", a touring concert version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Andsnes performs on stage in front of a screen of animations and live action films that Rhode created to respond to the movements of Mussorgsky's suite. Think of this as Pictures with more pictures.
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The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a big new show devoted to the Bauhaus, the great 20th-century forcing ground of modernism in architecture and design. So I reviewed it in the new issue of Time.
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York/photo: Dean Kaufman
The New Museum in New York is getting spanked quite a bit lately for its upcoming show devoted to the contemporary art collection of one of its own trustees, the Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou.
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41 Cooper Square, Morphosis, 2009/All photos: Iwan Baan
Not long ago, in connection with a story I'll be posting soon on Time.com, I had a conversation with Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who heads the Santa Monica-based firm Morphosis. This fall New York got its first building by Mayne, a really compelling project in the East Village that holds offices, laboratories and classrooms for the Cooper Union, a college in Manhattan's East Village. It's striking, it's different, it really brings the streetscape alive and it turns its main interior stairway into a four-story coiling trip. I talked to Mayne mostly about his approach to that project.
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