You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2011.
Top: Hong Kong; Bottom: Chimayo New Mexico
I am on the road for a few weeks. I will return to Slow Painting on March 2.
A floating metropolis … the Georgian Ministry of Highways Photograph: Frédéric Chaubin
Frédéric Chaubin was wandering through a market in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in 2003 when an old book snared his eye. Although unable to read the words, the French photographer was mesmerised by the images it contained.
Chronicling 70 years of post-revolution architecture, the book featured an extraordinary collection of buildings that drew on an extraordinary collection of styles: as well as the Soviet schools of suprematism (a controlled explosion of geometric forms) and constructivism (wild projections, provocative angles), there was a strong western undercurrent, with echoes of everything from Alvar Aalto and Antoni Gaudí to Oscar Niemeyer. And running through all this was a thrilling element of Soviet over-reaching, a hint of sputniks, space rockets and flying saucers.
Chaubin was hooked. And so began a seven-year odyssey to seek out and photograph some of the Soviet era’s most unusual architectural creations, many now under threat. Each one, says Chaubin, was amazing. “It was like finding an undiscovered monument – a Machu Picchu of your own.”
Jonathan Glancey
Guardian
News of a museum’s major art acquisition isn’t usually accompanied by the question, “Why?” So it’s interesting to see it crop up in reports that a huge cache of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, plus his archives and youthful mixed-media art, has been jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust.
The specific gist of the puzzlement seems to be: Why Los Angeles?
Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times
Left, “Wild Man of the Woods” mask has been attributed to the carver Willie Seaweed. Right, Jennifer Pray working on the newly reopened American Indian galleries at the Denver Art Museum. Denver Art Museum. Matthew Staver for The New York Times
When the Denver Art Museum’s signature American Indian art galleries reopened last week after a seven-month overhaul, the biggest change wasn’t the new display cases or the dramatic lighting. Rather, it was in a less obvious place: the wall labels.
For the first time many of the works on display are attributed to individual artists instead of just their tribes. It is a revolution in museum practice that many scholars hope will spread, raising the stature of American Indian artists and elevating their work from the category of artifacts to the more exalted realm of art.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
New York Times
Whenever I think of sustainable design, I think of the opening sentence of Victor Papanek’s book Design for the Real World. It goes: “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them.” Papanek, a designer himself, went on to call designers “dangerous”, the producers of “garbage”. And that was in 1972.
These days, designers have a rather different role as societal problem-solvers, leading the way to a cleaner, better future. But I suspect Papanek is still right. Notwithstanding this new conscientious breed, there is no getting over the fact that the majority of product designers earn their living supplying growth-dependent economies with novelties for our ever-more-insatiable appetites. Increasingly, many of those objects are being presented as sustainable. Perhaps packaged in brown cardboard with little green arrows on it.
“Sustainability”. I have never much liked the word. “Sustainable” is not an adjective you would use to describe something you love. To sustain something is to keep it alive, pure and simple – more of a duty than a passion. Once, we aspired to reach the moon; now, we just hope to hold on to what we’ve got. Sustainability suggests the flatlining of human ambition. So I did a double-take when I saw a new book called Sustainism Is the New Modernism. If sustainability is boring, “sustainism” is just grammatically freaky (adding “ism” to a verb?). As you’ll already have worked out, it yields the word “sustainity” (as in, from here to sustainity). Oh, and “sustainist”.
Justin McGuirk
Guardian
It’s all about the art. It’s not about the architecture. End of review—except for some persistent questions about museum design. Already judged a smashing success since its opening in late November, the $504 million, 121,307-square-foot Art of the Americas Wing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, designed by the London firm of Foster + Partners, does exactly what it was meant to do: This discreet addition at the east end of Guy Lowell’s original 1909 Beaux Arts building houses a radical reorganization of the museum’s American holdings, defined in the broadest possible terms.
Fifty three new galleries bring together the arts of North, Central and South America, spanning centuries and cultures. This vast expansion of the conventional definition of American art includes pre-Columbian artifacts, the museum’s unparalleled American collection from the prerevolutionary period and the years of the Early Republic, examples of Latin American art and Native North American work from ancient to modern times, and contemporary American art through the mid-1970s. Embedded in these exhibition areas are newly refurbished period rooms. And while it is a questionable stretch to enforce a geographic and aesthetic logic on arts with totally different cultural roots and influences, the case has been well made in a handsome accompanying book, “A New World Imagined: Art of the Americas.” Weaknesses revealed by the reorganization are acknowledged up front, with the promise of future acquisitions.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Wall Street Journal
An Egyptian soldier stands guard outside Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. Photograph: Marco Longari/AFP/Getty Images
In such tumultuous days for modern Egypt, does it matter what happens to the legacy of ancient Egypt? The answer surely has to be yes. There is no defence for the criminal acts of whoever damaged artefacts in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo , nor should it be seen as somehow detracting from the democratic cause to stress the world importance of these relics.
I will confine myself to pointing out why this museum matters so much. This central Cairo museum houses the greatest collection of ancient Egyptian art and antiquities in the world. This is something of a miracle, given that from the time of Napoleon onwards Europeans tried to get hold of as much Egyptian treasure as possible. Colossal statues were dragged on to ships, mummy cases became must-have curios. The reason so many great objects stayed in Egypt is that idealists fought to keep them in the country – and modern Egypt maintains its heritage supremely well. An attack on the Cairo collection is therefore an attack on today’s Egypt, as well as that of Rameses the Great.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
