The Beanery, by Kienholz

A detail from The Hoerengracht, the Kienholzes’ life-size recreation of a section of Amsterdam’s red-light district (1983-86), to be shown at the National Gallery. Photograph: Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz

The first time you see it is a blast, a rush, a shock. It’s a nightmarish place and yet utterly compelling; a seductive hell, a vision of the grotesque that is somehow more fascinating than beauty.

The second time, you can’t wait. It is the highlight of a holiday in Amsterdam. I’m talking about The Beanery by Ed Kienholz, one of the most compelling installations ever made, and one of the most memorable works of late 20th-century art. It belongs to the Stedelijk Museum, which is due to reopen after an architectural overhaul. I hope it will now be kept on permanent display there – it drove me nuts to visit Amsterdam a few years ago and find The Beanery had been taken off view in some kind of half-baked sub-Tate rehang. This is one of the masterpieces of modern times and it needs to be on permanent view in the same way the Rothko paintings at Tate Modern do, or the Richard Serra installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

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Jonathan Jones
Guardian

States of Art

Two weeks ago, I went to an evening in New York in honour of the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham…There was a form to all of it, but in the moment of performance it was ungraspable. Things were in constant motion, like overlapping ripples on a rainy pond. It was mesmerising – and hard to know where to look and who to follow…I meant to stay an hour, and remained for almost four. Sometimes I’d find myself taking respite beside a stage void of dancers, a visual equivalent to Cage’s silent work, finding myself looking at the clear patch of floor as if it might tell me something. I bumped into a few friends, but we mostly kept our distance, not wanting to break one another’s mood. As well as watching, there was space and time to reflect. The best art always returns you to yourself.

A part of me wanted to keep this experience to myself and not write about it. When it was over, I walked into the evening with a kind of aimless purpose – almost tearful, though it’s hard to say exactly why. The experience was complicated, a relationship between setting and dance, music and acoustics, the occasion itself and everyday life beyond…

The art world is in crisis. First there was too much money; now there isn’t enough. Newspapers and print media are in crisis. Theory is in crisis (does anyone have time to do more than look at the pictures in magazines nowadays?). Curating is in crisis. The professional critic is in crisis (they are dropping like flies in north America). Artists – well, they’re always in crisis, drama queens that they are.

But crisis is good. Crisis is sexy. Crisis shakes you up. And if it changes our habits when it comes to looking at art, reading about it, or even making it, then that’s probably good, too. Artists, if they’re any good, are engaged in a war against habit, complacency and indifference.

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Adrian Searle
Guardian

Henry Cowell: A Teacher’s Legacy

Henry Cowell

Which composer exerted the greatest influence on 20th-century American classical music? Thursday and Friday, Other Minds, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to such music, will make the case for Henry Cowell.

Cowell, who died in 1965, was a prolific composer whose own music was eclipsed by the works of his students. Other Minds director Charles Amirkhanian discovered Cowell through the pioneering percussion music of the composer’s famous pupils John Cage and Lou Harrison. “I found that a lot of the experimentation on the West Coast emanated from him,” he said. “The more I looked at it, the more he seemed like a key figure who gave American music an original vision when it had none.”

Born in Menlo Park, Calif., in 1897, Cowell toured the world in the 1920s as a pianist, winning amazed reviews and publicity when he, for example, smashed rows of adjacent piano keys with a forearm or played directly on the piano strings and sound board. Such techniques added musical color and atmosphere, and “moved music away from the idea that every pitch of a chord should be heard, and toward masses of condensed sound being used for novel kinds of harmony,” Cowell scholar Joel Sachs explains. Cowell would have a profound impact on succeeding generations of American composers, most notably Cage, who won fame with his 1940s “prepared piano” pieces, which were inspired by Cowell’s experiments.

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Brett Campbell
Wall Street Journal

Saarinen Reconsidered

The design for a rink on the Yale University campus. (Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times)

The architect Eero Saarinen was often knocked for being the equivalent of a talented P.R. man. And on the surface at least, few architects did more to glamorize postwar corporate America. General Motors, I.B.M., CBS — all eventually came knocking at his door. His architecture offered them the veneer of a supremely confident, progressive America, with all the roughness smoothed away. It made it easier to forget about those Soviet warheads and mushroom clouds.

The curves and glossy surfaces are as seductive as ever in “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future,” which opened at the Museum of the City of New York on Tuesday. But the story it tells is more conflicted.

Organized by Donald Albrecht, the museum’s curator of architecture and design, the show carefully peels back some of the gloss to reveal the anxieties and contradictions buried underneath. As Saarinen tinkers with his symbolic language, he also mines deeper architectural veins. Eventually even the hardened skeptic is forced to accept that his buildings can be both sophisticated works of propaganda and gorgeous — and humane — architectural creations.

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Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times

The Heidegger Problem: Still With Us

(Photo: Brittanica)

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

To be sure, every philosophy reference book credits Heidegger with one or another headscratcher achievement. One lauds him for his “revival of ontology” …Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or “Human Being”… A third praises his opposition to nihilism, an odd compliment for a conservative, nationalist thinker whose antihumanistic apotheosis of ruler over ruled helped grease the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It’s the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism’s “inner truth and greatness,” declaring that “the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law.”

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Carlin Romano
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Ah…Duh

Peep Show: Canova sent a copy of his “Naiad” to George IV of England — an infamous playboy and a collector of pornography. (Courtesy National Gallery Of Art)

After well over a century of prim coverups, literal and metaphorical, of the sexual content of the greatest nudes in art, experts have been waking up to the erotic, even pornographic, potential. “I think it’s essential that we understand them as objects in the context of men wanting to look at naked women,” says Amelia Jones, a pioneer of feminist art history who teaches at the University of Manchester in England. Over the past decade or two, most of her colleagues have abandoned the genteel distinction Sir Kenneth Clark insisted on, in a famous lecture series in Washington in 1953, between the chaste “nude,” cleansed by an artwork’s aesthetic and philosophical ambitions, and pictures of the pruriently “naked,” meant to get a rise out of viewers.

The new view: Flesh is flesh is flesh. Any culture that thinks “sex” when it sees naked bodies will still think “sex” when it sees pictures of them.

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Blake Gopnik
Washington Post

Hadid in Rome

The interior of Maxxi, the new contemporary art museum designed by Zaha Hadid, looking up from the lobby. (Photo: Roland Halbe)

What would Pope Urban VIII have made of Maxxi, the new museum of contemporary art designed by Zaha Hadid on the outskirts of this city’s historic quarter? My guess is that he would have been ecstatic.

This 17th-century pope, one of the most prominent cultural patrons in Roman history, understood that great cities are not frozen in time. He loved dreaming up lavish new projects over breakfast with his artistic soul mate, the Baroque sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini. When Bernini needed bronze for the baldachin in St. Peter’s, the pope simply ordered it torn out of the Pantheon. Neither was afraid to make his mark on the city.

Since then the architectural scene here has become a lot duller. True, Mussolini commissioned some impressive civic works, most notably for the fascist EUR district. But for most of the last half-century Romans have been content to gaze languidly toward the past. The handful of ambitious new cultural buildings that have appeared, like Renzo Piano’s marvelous Parco della Musica, tend toward the dignified and respectable.

Maxxi, which opens to the public on Saturday for a two-day “architectural preview,” jolts this city back to the present like a thunderclap. Its sensual lines seem to draw the energy of the city right up into its belly, making everything around it look timid. The galleries (which will remain empty of art until the spring, when the museum is scheduled to hold its first exhibition) would probably have sent a shiver of joy up the old pope’s spine. Even Bernini, I suspect, would have appreciated their curves.

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Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times

Aqua, in Chicago

Aqua, the spectacular new Chicago skyscraper with the sensuous, undulating balconies, is the pearl of the long-running, now-ending Chicago building boom, a design that is as fresh conceptually as it is visually.

A skyscraper typically consists of repetitive, right-angled parts, a money-saving device that frequently produces aesthetic monotony. But in this defiantly non-Euclidian high-rise, almost nothing seems to repeat.

Its white, wafer-thin balconies bulge outward, each slightly different from the other. They race around corners and shoot upward in fantastic, voluptuous stacks. This is a new vision of verticality, and it makes Aqua one of Chicago’s boldest — and best — skyscrapers in years.

Located just north of Millennium Park at 225 N. Columbus Drive, the 82-story tower is still in the finishing stages, so it is impossible to fully assess whether its function is as successful as its form. Nonetheless, it can be said that Aqua is remarkable on several counts.

It is the tallest building designed by a female-owned architectural firm and the first skyscraper from Chicago’s Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects, who is only 45 years old. Aqua also is a real estate miracle: Its financing documents were signed in late August 2007 — just before the credit crunch hit it. Had the tower been delayed by 60 to 90 days, says the building’s architect-of-record and co-developer, Jim Loewenberg, it might never have been built.

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Blair Kamin
Chicago Tribune

Curator’s Art

“Pink Tons” by Roni Horn (Photo: Hauser & Wirth Hermann Feldhaus/Hauser & Wirth)

From a review of the Roni Horn show at the Whitney:

Ms. Horn’s work has both benefited and suffered from being what might be called “curators’ art.” Curators’ art is indisputably, even innocuously, elegant — with clear roots in Minimal and Conceptual Art and not much else. It tends to be profusely appreciated by a hermetic few, curators, artists and theorists, who fetishize its refinements and often take its creators pretty much at their word. Ms. Horn has always had a lot to say about what her work means and how it is to be viewed, and some of it is quite interesting, but artists don’t own the meaning of their artworks.

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Roberta Smith
New York Times

High Line as Gallery

“Autumn on the Hudson River”, by Jasper Francis Cropsey (National Gallery of Art)

How would you go about updating, reinterpreting, a Hudson River School painting? We’ll soon see one answer, from artist Valerie Hegarty.

On Wednesday, Hegarty will install a site-specific work on the High Line, the elevated park built on a disused rail corridor along the Hudson River, which is turning out to have a snug connection with contemporary art even before the Whitney Museum branch is built there (if it is)…

This installation…references a painting by Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson River, 1860…For the Cropsey, the High Line says, she “imagines a nineteenth century Hudson River School landscape painting that has been left outdoors, exposed to the elements.”

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Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts