The Art in Aisle One

“Contemplating Prospect”

Finding art in the mundane is a theme I always return to, and a series of paintings with the evocative title, Cathedrals of Desire,” epitomizes how a unique sensibility can elevate the everyday to a transcendent level.

The “cathedrals” in question are those high altars of American consumerism, the Targets and Walmarts and the like that litter shopping malls across the retail terrain like giant repositories of instant gratification. Artist Michelle Muldrow was inspired by a treatise by the philosopher Edmund Burke that equated the sublime with aspects of terror: “My paintings of big box stores are intended to elicit fear and awe at the vast American consumer landscape,” she writes in a statement about the series. “These environments represent not only the actual structural space and overwhelming chaos of goods, but also the psychology and vernacular of American consumerism.”

I was taken with how Muldrow uses splashes of color and light to capture the underlying clamor inside these mammoth structures that “reveal the most naked of American consumer desires,” according to the artist. The unfocused images ironically convey an immediate familiarity, a testament to how deeply ingrained these contours are in the corners of our minds. If the paintings are intended to create uneasiness, they also result in a curious mix of both dread and recognition.

Something to think about the next time I step into that Home Depot…

Color My World

Best and worst lists were a dime a dozen at the end of 2012, but here’s one accolade that caught my eye: “Color of the Year.” It’s an annual designation that serves as a forecast decreed by Pantone, the venerable provider of color standards for the printing, design, and publishing industries, and which is well-known for its color wheel and Pantone Matching System (PMS).

Pantone’s “Color of the Year” for 2013: PMS #17-5641

For 2013, Pantone has chosen Emerald (or more specifically, PMS #17-5641) as the color to watch, for its influence on trends, tastes, and moods, and its expected impact on everything from home décor to fashion. Last year, the company tapped #17-1463, or “Tangerine Tango,” as its star, because it “provided the energy boost we needed to recharge and move forward.” (Quiz here about previous “Color of the Year” winners.)

Though not everyone is on board with this year’s selection (“For many people, it’s a flashback to your parents’ living room and big green couch,” says one interior professional), Pantone claims that Emerald is “the color of growth, renewal, and prosperity – no other color conveys regeneration more than green.”

(I decided to check out the PMS chart to identify the shade I’ve been most drawn to lately. Turns out it’s #315, which I guess is sort of a mix of teal and peacock blue. Somewhere in my subconscious, I remember it as the color of my favorite ink for the fountain pens we used in grade school. Maybe the fact that I went into the writing profession wasn’t a coincidence.)

But back to our hue du jour. Even Downton Abbey has been brought into the conversation, with some seeing the emerald color’s associations with luxury as a perfect complement to the American audience’s fascination with the opulent English miniseries. A bit of a stretch, of course, but no harm in a little (colorful) hyperbole…

Green permeates an interior from the series “Downton Abbey”

From Bauhaus to Bruce’s House

The name itself was enough to pique my interest: “Bruce High Quality.” I came across it in an article in Sunday’s New York Times Arts section, on the subject of public art installations that have recently appeared in Manhattan. Spurred by curiosity, further investigation led to the fascinating story of a NYC-based arts collective whose mission statement is to… “foster an alternative to everything,” as well as “invest the experience of public space with wonder.”

“The New Colossus,” on view at New York City’s Lever House

Its moniker as intriguing as only fiction can be, the Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF) is named for an apocryphal “social sculptor” who “died” in the 9/11 attacks. Made up of a revolving group of several young and fiercely anonymous artists, mostly postgraduates of the Cooper Union college community, BHQF has been drawing attention since its inception in 2004 and in a few short years was already ranked among the most important art entities in ArtReview’s “Power 100,” in 2010.

The “Bruces,” as they’re known (who also include women), specialize in smart, iconoclastic creations that serve as critiques of the establishment art world – a “curious mash-up of sober scholarship and juvenile pranksterism,” and a “brand of performance art that could be called the art stunt” wrote the Times in 2010 – and that, no matter how they’re described, have definitely caught on with audiences.

Case in point is the group’s latest project (which can be seen through September 28 at the Lever House in New York City), a monolithic bronze called “The New Colossus” (or for most of us, “The Giant Rat.” Ain’t art grand?) Part of a three-part installation entitled Art History With Labor, “Colossus” is a play not only on the name of the famous Statue of Liberty poem, but on the massive inflatable rodents (“Scabby the Rat”) often engaged by union groups in their protests with management. Previous undertakings have included the sculptures (shown above right) from Happy Endings, a series of “portable museums” that explored a number of themes at 2009’s Art Basel in South Beach, where it was definitely cool to be a Bruce.

The collective (whose members keep themselves out of the public eye “not out of a distrust in celebrity, which proves useful, but out of a distrust in biography, which is not”), also stages its own “Brucennial” — an event they call “The single most important art exhibition in the history of the world. Ever.” — that coincides with the Whitney Museum’s celebrated Biennial every two years.

It’s the kind of tongue-in-cheek hyperbole that’s come to be expected from this provocative group of irreverently edgy artists.

Hues of Holi

A celebration that encompasses a tumultuous spectrum of colored powder, scented water, and sheer exhilaration, the “Holi” festival, shown here in an image that looks more like a painting than a photo, taken in Heidelberg, Germany on August 12, 2012, is one of many that have crossed over in time and place to Europe (and around the world) from their homelands in South Asia. An ancient commemoration that usually welcomes the beginning of spring for those of the Hindu faith, Holi has been embraced in several German cities, where revelers immerse themselves — and each other — in a prismatic array of pigments as part of events that have come to be known as “Festivals of Color.” (The largest in the western hemisphere takes place in Spanish Fork, Utah, where this year’s festivities drew over 80,000 in March.)

(Photo: Fredrik von Erichsen /AFP/ Getty Images)

Design: Earth Connections

Take ten far-flung places, ten accomplished designers, and ten fascinatingly executed eco-friendly creations, and the result is Design for a Living World — an exhibition that highlights a fundamental connection with earth’s natural resources — which wraps up a three-year tour in Miami after appearing at New York City’s Cooper-Hewitt and Chicago’s Field museums.

Curated by The Nature Conservancy, the project commissioned noted designers from several fields (including fashion’s Isaac Mizrahi) who traveled to locations around the world in search of indigenous natural materials, with a focus on their sustainable potential. Apart from their artistic value, the goal was to showcase items that could serve as examples for everyday use, while helping to ensure that the resources from these diverse locales – which are often victims of overdevelopment, climate change, and deforestation – remain viable and protected. (And it’s also a way of promoting more efficient and thoughtful alternatives to the often wasteful production and distribution of furnishings and other goods.)

Among the prototypes: the bench, shown top, created by architect Maya Lin from slices of harvested red maple found on the banks of the Upper St. John River in Maine; the chairs, center, by Abbott Miller, designed with Jatoba wood from Santa Cruz, Bolivia; and ivory nut palms from the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, carved by jewelry designer Ted Muehling into a necklace, right. (More photos in a slide show here.)

The works are expected to be auctioned at the end of the exhibit’s South Florida run on October 25.

Writing in the Huffington Post, Nature Conservancy president Mark Tercek noted that the project “reminds us that we can promote a global conservation ethic by choosing sustainable materials that support, rather than deplete, our endangered places.” Undertakings like Living World play an important role in raising that awareness.

Next Chapters

Maybe it’s because of her recent passing, but I couldn’t help but think of Nora Ephron and her last compilation of essays, I Remember Nothing, as I read Anna Quindlen‘s new memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. Their similar backgrounds as successful journalists may have something to do with it; certainly the perspicacity so characteristic of these two brilliant women plays an even bigger part. Probably, though, I recalled Ephron’s wistful “The O Word” from her final book — “O” standing for “old” — and its sentiments hovered as I pondered Quindlen’s counterpart exploration of the inexorable journey towards the sunset of life.

But I should hasten to add that Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is anything but wistful. Quindlen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and novelist, who’s been called America’s “laureate of real life,”  infuses her recollections as a baby-boomer facing late middle age with relentless optimism — and humor. Whether she’s discussing marriage, raising children, or lessons learned as a beneficiary of the societal transformations brought about by the upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s, particularly as they pertained to the role of women, her razor-sharp perceptions harbor the wisdom of a participant who lived the changes uniquely first-hand.

Motherhood is one theme that she revisits from a post-feminism vantage point. In the chapter, “Generations,”  she talks about “my place in the succession of women who came before me,” including of course, her own mother, whom she describes as “a housewife, a rather reserved person with a sweet nature and a powerful ability to control her children through the simple exigency of spontaneous and utterly sincere tears.” In terms of her sacrifices, and in retrospective appreciation, the daughter recognizes that, among other considerations, “the closest thing my mother had to a windup baby bouncer was her arm and hip.”

March On

Program cover for the landmark suffrage parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.,1913

With its designation as Women’s History Month, March is awash in celebration of women’s innumerable contributions to society. Today marks International Women’s Day, an observance that saw its inception in the early 1900s and which is now an official holiday in many countries, with over 1,000 events scheduled to take place in some form or another around the world.

In Washington, D.C., plans are currently underway for a physical location for the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM), presently online in cyberspace, waiting for a legislative march through Congress to provide the site with a permanent venue in the nation’s capital.

A high-profile supporter should help in making that a reality. Freshly re-minted Oscar-winner Meryl Streep, left, who’s already donated $1 million to the project – as well as her salary from The Iron Lady – is something of the fairy godmother for a dream that is close to her heart. “There are museums in Washington, D.C. for everything from postage stamps to poetry to spies,” Streep ironically notes, while also stating that the project is vitally important “because our history was written by the other team.“ The facility would be located on the Washington Mall, alongside the National Air & Space Museum and the Grant Memorial, with plans for a design by a female architect, making it the first repository on the Mall to be fashioned by a woman. It’s expected to be funded with private donations.

Already in place and marking 25 years since its opening in D.C. in 1987 is the National Museum of Women in the Arts, an assemblage of women’s creative legacies through the centuries. Among the artists in the collection, Georgia O’Keeffe, below, who summed up the frustrations of many pioneers when she mused in 1923:

“One day seven years ago, I found myself saying to myself: I can’t live where I want to, I can’t go where I want to go, I can’t do what I want to, I can’t even say what I want to … I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.”

It’s that very same spirit that we celebrate today.

What’s in a Name?

The recent opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art spurs some thoughts about a pervasive practice involving philanthropy and the arts, and how (thankfully) there can still be an exception to the rule.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, AK

Created with a $800-million-dollar donation spearheaded by Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, Crystal Bridges is situated in a lovely locale surrounded by streams and woods in Bentonville, Arkansas. It’s unique not only in that its unassuming location belies the magnitude and scope of its collection, but the fact that its name is refreshingly devoid of its benefactor, in contrast to the long history of the rich bequeathing millions in exchange for immortality. (Among the more notable: the Whitney, Guggenheim, and Morgan museums in New York City, the Gardner in Boston, the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C.– and the list goes on.)

The Hidden Life of a Nanny

The story of a heretofore unknown photographer, much of which remains a mystery, will eventually be folklore, not only because her talent remained in the shadows until after her death at age 83 – but for the unlikely fashion in which her work came to see the light.

In a twist on one of those masterpiece-found-in-the-attic tales, a Chicago real-estate agent named John Maloof came across a box of negatives at an auction in 2007. Hoping they were historic photos of his Portage Park neighborhood, he paid $400 and stored the 30,000 negatives away for later review. When he took a look, what he saw, though not what he expected, was captivating – prompting him to hunt down what turned out to be another 70,000 pictures. When he posted some of the images on Flikr, his instinct regarding the greatness of the pieces was confirmed; hundreds of e-mails followed.

The creator of those photos, Vivian Maier, had died shortly before Maloof could contact her after his big find. (It wasn’t until 2009 that he discovered her name, scribbled on an envelope buried in one of the batches of film.) It turned out she had been a nanny for several affluent families in the Chicago area throughout the ’50s to the early ’90s, toting her Rolleiflex on assorted trips and outings, quietly capturing just some of the images now featured in the book Vivian Maier: Street Photographer  — released this month and compiled by Maloof after the incredible acclaim that followed their widespread dissemination on the Internet, along with subsequent exhibitions in Norway, Denmark, and England.

In approaching Maier’s work, one is struck by the naturalistic similarities to the craft of the Depression-era photographer, Walker Evans: the second-in-time spontaneity, the cut-to-the-heart facial expressions, the prosaicness of the everyday street scene taken to a sublime level. Maier photographed people from all walks of life, young and old, black and white, rich and downtrodden. Like all great street photographers, she understood that moments matter. And the expansiveness of what would now be called her portfolio shows that her curiosity about what lay behind those moments never wavered.

Her pictures are not titled and can just be described by their subjects – faces, places, and instants that only an outstanding eye could grasp: the simple sidewalk scene of a group of women shot from the waist down, with a pair of rotund legs unexpectedly revealed by a sudden burst of wind; a quizzical glance by a bystander at a man inexplicably attired in a hat, jacket, and boxer shorts; an aging, wealthy doyenne in mink, her haughty look implying impatience with the camera.

There’s irony in the fact that Maier’s newfound reputation owes itself to the networking of the digital age. Described as a highly private woman, she never made a point of sharing her secret passion with anyone, and were it not for Maloof’s accidental discovery, and her photography subsequently going viral, the treasure trove would sadly have remained undetected – and unlauded. As it is, the Maier archives are a unique contribution to the annals of American photography.

[First published as Book Review: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer,
Edited by John Maloof, on Blogcritics.org.]

Gloria Ongoing

“I’ve learned only one thing: No matter how hard it is to do it,
it’s harder not to do it.”

Watching Gloria: In Her Own Words, a documentary about Gloria Steinem now airing on HBO, made me think of how this icon of the feminist movement impacted women’s lives in ways deeper than I realized in my formative professional years. (A time in the ‘80s when, as a magazine editor, my frustration at the lack of financial parity with a male art director – because he was married and had a family and I didn’t – was typical.) Polarizing aspects aside, I don’t think it’s exaggeration to say that most working women owe some little debt to Steinem, who took such a simple concept, economic fairness for half of the population, to the streets, and to the publishing world with the groundbreaking magazine Ms., in an in-their-face fashion that could not be ignored by the powers that were. She didn’t do it alone, that’s for sure, but (here we go again) as one of the more “attractive” faces of the movement, she got the lion’s share of the attention. (The sad and sexist ridicule by such antediluvians of the network news establishment as Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith has to be reseen to be believed.)

Listening to her now is a reminder that feminism is really only a part of the larger word “humanism” when it comes to addressing the continuing inequality that exists in so many sectors of society. And we’ve come a long way (maybe) — in no short measure thanks to pioneers like Ms.Steinem.

Silly Season

A craze du jour for the Facebook and Twitter crowd, featured in a prominent article in The Miami Herald, describes how the planking phenomenon — positioning yourself as rigidly as a wooden board face down in all kinds of places, the more unusual the better — has hit the streets of South Florida. (The point is to upload pictures of your exploits for sharing with other “plankers” across the Internet.)

Intrigued by this idea of social networking gone physical in public spaces, I found that planking (which caught fire over the last couple of years) may already be passé, with other offshoots like owling (left, crouching in the form of the night creature), teapotting  (posing with one hand on hip, other in the air, like a spout), and batting (below, hanging upside down like a bat and folding the arms in a v-shape on the waist) coming up the rear. And let’s not forget cone-ing (funny video here) — buying an ice-cream cone in a drive-thru and grabbing it by the wrong end, eliciting a predictably startled response from the provider. (Punked, with a taste of vanilla.)

It brings to mind how every decade seems to create its own set of faddish adventures, be it goldfish swallowing, flagpole sitting, or the hula-hooping of the last century. (Actually, 1920s flagpole sitting is remarkably similar to 2011′s owling.) In the case of planking, one psychologist says that young men use it to establish their place in the male hierarchy, and to impress and attract the opposite sex; but just as many women do it too, which makes me guess that these rituals provide some sort of communal outlet for distraction from the difficulties of trying times, a form of societal escapism that reinvents itself in a never-ending cycle.

As for this year’s choices, I think I’ll stick to planking – in bed.

A Hybrid “Social Animal”

In The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, the New York Times bestseller by Times op-ed columnist David Brooks, the writer attempts what could be called a hybrid socio-novel, featuring the lifelong journey of an allegorical couple named Harold and Erica, whose lives serve as paradigms that springboard into broad-ranging examinations of subjects ranging from genetics to culture, economics to education, and towards the end, a familiar forte for Brooks: politics.

Brooks the intellectual has it all over Brooks the novelist in what is ultimately a highly disjointed effort to meld the world of fiction with what is essentially a big factoid of a book. Using outside characters to make larger points about the basics of the human mind and existence turns out to be unnecessary and obtrusive; no sooner are you connecting with Harold and Erica than the narrative jumps right back into data mode.

The fits and starts ultimately make it impossible to see them as anything more than stick figures around which Brooks builds an assortment of stats and abstracts – all valuable, no question – but making you wonder whether a straight-on sociological treatise may have made more sense.

Though the fiction conceit falls short as a whole, the research studies cited by the author are impactful. One, “The Famous Marshmallow,” has to do with impulse control and groups of four-year-olds involved in a 1970s study. Apparently, those kids who were able to refrain from devouring a marshmallow by several minutes in anticipation of another one if they did so, would go on to execute SAT scores a full 210 points higher than those who could only wait a few seconds. Naturally, they were also more successful in later life. (The experiment proved to be even more predictive than actual IQ tests.) Another interesting discussion in-volves something called “Metis” (reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of “The Tipping Point”), where an individual’s acquisition of practical skills allows him or her to preanticipate change.

Many other make-you-ponder moments permeate, such as philosopher Andy Clark’s observation, “We use intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence.” And Brooks’ own definition of wisdom as “a willingness to confront counterevidence and to have a feel for the vast spaces beyond what’s known.”

The megainformation (much of it tidbits and percentages, and supplemented by 26 pages of notes) is consistently compelling. More importantly, Social Animal lays out Brooks’ breadth of mind as a thinker, which, though misguided in the basic construct of this book, is nevertheless extraordinary in its expansiveness.

[First published as Book Review: The Social Animal: 
The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks, on Blogcritics.org.]

Empty Chairs

I can’t help but be struck by two symbolic images over the past week that are reminders of what a long road remains in the struggle for elementary freedoms. The stark photo at left, of a Cuban flag draped over a solitary chair at the EU’s presentation of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, held in Strasbourg, France and awarded to the dissident Guillermo Fariñas, follows last week’s absence at the Nobels (and again, the empty chair, below) of Liu Xiaobo, winner of this year’s Peace Prize. The Cuban government did not allow Fariñas to travel to Europe to accept in person, and Liu Xiaobo sits in a Chinese jail serving an 11-year sentence. Both men are guilty of no more than a simple belief in basic human rights.

I’ve long maintained that had the same global shunning and sanctions (economic and otherwise) that brought down apartheid rule in South Africa been shown towards Cuba (with its own brand of day-to-day apartheidism) the end of that island’s dinosaur-relic regime may have been hastened as well. (China is, of course, a more complicated story). As it is, one feels diminished as a citizen of civilized society that these two sad images can even exist in a circa 2010 world.