Guggenheim to pick 20 YouTube videos for museum display

“YouTube Play, which launched Monday, is a partnership between the video site and the renowned art museum. It invites users to submit their short creative videos at http://youtube.com/play. The top 20, chosen by a jury of professional artists, will be on view this fall at Guggenheim museums around the world.”

Review of 2009 Art Exhibitions

2009 in Review: Museum Exhibitions – ARTINFO.com

Cherwell – C2 – Review: Turner Prize 2009

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From New York Times article

by Ken Johnson

“Tim Burton’s career is the ultimate revenge of the art nerd. Mr. Burton, the self-professed alienated child of a dysfunctional family in Burbank, Calif., who funneled his loneliness, pain and grief into drawing cartoons, has found fame, fortune and a beautiful companion (Helena Bonham Carter) by telling cinematic tales of sensitive misfits triumphing over, or succumbing to, a world of repressive mediocrity.”

I love having the time to think about things like, “what is the best Art exhibition I have ever seen?” My answer would be:

High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture

At the time the New York Times wrote a scathing article about the exhibition and Robert Hughes wrote an article for Time Magazine.  Kirk Varnedoe understood that the power of being a curator is going beyond interperting the works of Art and using the using the works to make a statement, which in 1990 was a new idea.

This exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, went beyond exhibiting the works of Art, it created a new vocabulary for looking at Modern Art.

Excellent exhibition catalog, out of print High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture by Kirk Varnedoe

BY KIE RELYEA
THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

BELLINGHAM – When the Lightcatcher Building opens to the public Nov. 14, visitors will be able to stand in the open courtyard and stare up at the gently curved glass wall that gives the new addition to the Whatcom Museum its name.

From Los Angles Times
By Mike Boehm

A year after being on the brink of financial collapse, the Museum of Contemporary Art museum is ready to show off. The deepest view of its holdings is going on display.

Ron Arad, Exhibition at MOMA

By ROBERTA SMITH
July 31, 2009

The designer Ron Arad has always had a lot of nerve, and it ricochets around his rambunctious retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art like…

A kettle by John G. Rideout (1936)

EXHIBITION REVIEW “What Was Good Design? MoMA’s Message 1944-56” runs through Nov. 30 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400

Museum of Modern Art Website

Article By Roberta Smith

From the New York Times, June 5, 2009

“What is good design?” may not be one of life’s great existential questions, but it ranks high among those that plague modern times. It is at least as old as the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying rise of factories, cheap manufactured goods and urban crowding. These developments created problems and opportunities that city planners, architects and designers have been triumphing or tripping over ever since. The results have ranged from brilliant to tragic, as a casual look at any American city will tell you.

This question became the title of a series of five exhibitions, “What Is Good Design?,” initiated by the Museum of Modern Art in 1950. But there were countless other shows not as effectively branded: a series titled “Useful Objects” that began in 1938, and exhibitions with more pedestrian names, like “Printed Textiles for the Home” (1946) or “New Lamps” (1951). The Modern also sponsored international design competitions that fed into these shows.

With these astutely coordinated efforts, the Modern promulgated not the High Modernism of Picasso and Braque, et al., but the modernism of everyday life. It was a museum with a mission: shaping consumer taste by presenting objects that people might want and could afford. The design ideals were largely Bauhaus derived, starting with truth to materials and forms that followed function and including the notion that good design should be available to all and like good nutrition was essential for a healthy life.

Now the Modern is revisiting its role as design arbiter with “What Was Good Design? MoMA’s Message 1944-56,” a selection of more than 100 objects from its design collection, organized by Juliet Kinchin, curator, and Aidan O’Connor, curatorial assistant, in the architecture and design department. These objects include furnishings, tools and implements of recreation. (For example a broom, rake, hunting bow and fishing rod, all in sleek metal, are on view now.)

Many familiar classics are on hand, like Tupperware, the Chemex coffee maker, Ray and Charles Eames’s multicolored storage unit and Greta Von Nessen’s ingenious “Anywhere” lamp (1951), which could sit or hang. Also here is the butterfly (or B.K.F.) chair. A staple of 1950s and ’60s American life, the chair was invented in 1938 by the Argentine designers Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy (hence, B.K.F.) and has been widely knocked off.

Nearly everything on view originally appeared in one or the other of these exhibitions. Among the veterans of the “Useful Objects” shows are the 1932 Wear-Ever rotary food press, which looks almost as primitive as a butter churn, and John G. Rideout’s 1936 tea kettle, whose hemispherical form and thick wood handle — at once streamlined and sturdy — seem almost timelessly modern.

The “What Is Good Design?” shows in particular were organized by Edgar Kaufmann Jr., one of the trust-funded, dollar-a-year curatorial types who were so important in MoMA’s early years, working under the optimistic title director of good design. The shows were essentially “best of” selections that Mr. Kaufmann drew from semiannual displays at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago.

Department stores could order promotional materials from the Merchandise Mart or MoMA that included the museum’s black-and-orange Good Design logo. There was advertising synergy all around. The Modern’s seal of approval helped promote consumer products and the museum’s identity.

This show is slightly camouflaged because it is installed at one end of the design collection’s permanent galleries and tends to blend in with the other displays (a testament to the inadequacy of the Modern’s recent expansion — a major design flaw in itself). In addition, many items on view are extremely familiar collectibles thanks to art and design fairs, lifestyle magazines and, in no small way, MoMA itself, especially its vaunted gift shop. But the show is full of interesting information and has a kind of transparency about the Modern’s history that is unusual. And there is a fairly high frequency of interesting trivia. For example the precursor to Tupperware, designed by Earl S. Tupper, was called Welcome Ware, as if it were something to be put out for guests.

Included among the classics are beautiful everyday objects not necessarily seen every day, like the brass-and-steel plumb bob, a must-have on any construction site, designed by O. J. Kuker of Seattle around 1948. And there are several little-known idiosyncratic pieces, including a chair made from an inner tube and string netting that William H. Miller Jr. designed around 1944 in an attempt to put surplus materials from the war to peaceful uses. The designer Davis J. Pratt achieved better results by covering a folded inner tube with a material so thickly woven it suggests a closely cropped shag rug; the fuzzy yet pneumatic shape that results is one of the show’s standouts and, were a poll taken, would probably be the one most people would like to try out. But the most elegant use of unexpected materials is Gio Ponti’s spindly Leggera side chair (1951), whose seat is woven from cellophane rush.

Several objects resulting from MoMA’s competitions are on view, along with the large panels that detailed their construction schemes. One surprise is a back-to-basics chair using wood and string, designed by Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director of Harper’s Bazaar. In contrast the historical aura hangs thick around the Eames white plastic chaise. Inspired by Gaston Lachaise’s 1927 “Reclining Nude” sculpture and wittily named La Chaise in his honor, this rather abstract form also evokes a cloud-and-moon motif by Magritte reinterpreted by Jean Arp. Entered in the Modern’s Low-Cost Furniture Competition of 1948, it was passed over for a prize for being too “specialized in use.” The original full-scale model shown here was given to the museum by the designers in 1973. It is surprising to learn from the label that it did not go into production until 1990.

Mr. Kaufmann, the Modern’s maestro of good design, appears here in a newsreel, impeccably suited and gallantly guiding an attractive young woman through one of the earlier exhibitions, demonstrating chairs, lighting fixtures and Lazy Susans. He also has the best line in the current show, quoted in a label: “A good design will never pretend to be more than one thing at a time.” An anti-Surrealist principle to live by, it annihilates much of what passes for contemporary design today.

Another idea is that good design should never be more than it needs to be, and that notions of restraint, economy and efficiency should be built into it. This may speak even more resonantly to our shopped-out, overequipped times, when it is nonetheless often lamented that today’s children may not enjoy a better, more comfortable standard of living than their parents. The idea that American materialism will not continue its unabated, soul-deadening growth seems more an occasion for celebration than regret. This exhibition suggests that when it comes to standards of living, a bit less in the way of consumables could result in a lot more spiritually.

Equestrian Figure: Portrait of a Chief,” foreground, from Sumatra, Indonesia

EXHIBITION REVIEW “African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Sept. 27, 2009

Metropolitan Museum of Art Website

By Holland Cotter

From the New York Times, June 5, 2009

Slide Show

In the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum you’ll find a tiny African copper relief that probably predates, and would surely have awed, the great Lorenzo Ghiberti. You’ll encounter a bust of a Nigerian beauty to rival Nefertiti; an Oceanic Apollo with the physique of an Olympian; and a Micronesian statuette that is, with its stacks of faceted planes, Brancusi before Brancusi.

These objects, along with 32 others, make up the exhibition called “African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting.” The show, an unabashed masterpiece display, is not only a gold mine of historical data and a connoisseur’s delight, but also a reminder of how perceptions evolve — a mere few decades ago everything here was referred to as “primitive art.”

This was a capacious category. It covered African, Oceanic and North American Indian material, as well as Pre-Columbian art from Central and South America and all things “tribal” from everywhere else. Only fairly recently have the political dimensions of “primitive” begun to be fully sorted out and reckoned with.

Meanwhile, long-established museum collections built on that catch-all concept are still with us, changed now in their thinking if not necessarily in their form.

The Barbier-Mueller Museum represents one such collection; the Rockefeller Wing, with origins in Nelson A. Rockefeller’s 1957 Museum of Primitive Art, another. At the Met the two converge, complementing and extending each other. In one sense the result is an old-fashioned sampler display of one-tribe-one-style sculptural types: a classic reliquary figure from Gabon; a textbook New Ireland mask; and so on.

At the same time, by bringing certain comparable pieces from two different collections together, the show is an invitation to alter our habits of looking. We are encouraged to retain a sense of the context and history of objects, but to pay more than usual attention to interpretive inventiveness and formal finesse: in short, to get a sense of the many things that “great” in art based on non-Western models can mean.

In the Barbier-Mueller exhibition that spectrum is wide and deep. The collection was started in the early 20th century by Josef Mueller (1887-1977), the son of a Swiss industrialist. A young man with a hankering for the vie de bohème, he moved to Paris in 1907. Not being an artist himself, he became a collector, buying Picassos hot from the studio, and in due course buying what Picasso was buying: African and Oceanic art.

He eventually moved back to the Swiss family home, filling its 18 rooms with Cézanne landscapes, Baule masks, Olmec sculptures and local folk carvings of a kind we would now call outsider art. In 1955 his daughter Monique married another collector, Jean Paul Barbier, and the two assumed responsibility for the collection, adding to it, documenting it and finally in 1977 establishing the museum that bears their name.

The Met show — organized by Alisa LaGamma, the museum’s curator of African art, and Eric Kjellgren, associate curator of Oceanic art, with Yaëlle Biro, a research assistant for African art — opens with one of the Barbier-Mueller’s treasures, a serpent dance headdress carved by a Baga artist in Guinea, West Africa, in the 19th or early 20th century. Seven feet tall, patterned with chevrons and diamonds, and shaped with gentle undulations, the piece was brought out for initiation rites and worn upright on a dancer’s head so that it towered over everything in a great rainbow curve.

This piece was one of a half-dozen collected by Europeans in Guinea in 1957, when the spread of Islam had put such sculptures out of favor. Another example from the group, and a remarkable variation on a fantastic theme, is in the Met collection and on permanent view in the Rockefeller Wing. In this case the serpent bends dramatically just below midpoint, as if its upper portion were swaying outward in space. The vertiginous impression it must have made while in motion is easy to imagine.

Two Senufo figures from Ivory Coast, one in the Swiss collection, the other in the Met’s, make another eye-training comparison, though here the immediately noticeable difference is in condition rather than concept. The female figure from the Barbier-Mueller, her braceleted arms poised so that her hands rest on her thighs, is in fabulous shape.

Her male counterpart at the Met, though marvelously carved, is time-worn, with one entire arm and the hand of the other missing. You have the sense, though, that even intact, he would be the less dominant figure. He is sleepy-serene. She is a self-possessed spark.

Such comparisons tell us things useful to know. They tell us that African art is not a fixed set of forms repeated verbatim, with particular forms assigned to particular locales. It is an art of specificity, individuality, fresh responses and nuanced invention, with images and ideas in constant transformation: try this, add that, take that away.

So intense and extensive is this dynamic that the very term “African art” is at some important level useless, if not misleading. While obviously less pejorative than “primitive art,” it similarly ignores the reality of thousands of separate traditions, belief systems and talents, not to mention the factors of time and change.

The same is at least as true of Oceanic Art, an omnibus term embracing unnumbered cultures spread across thousands of miles of the Pacific, from Asia to Australia to Antarctica. The installation for the Met show, skillfully designed by Michael Batista, places African objects against yellow backgrounds and Oceanic objects against slate-gray. But even without those visual guidelines, it is easy to distinguish between the two “primitivisms,” and to get a sense of the diversity within each.

The big Oceanic entries from the Barbier-Mueller really pack a wallop. They’re like a series of startling confrontations, from a scrunched-up gargoyle made for a Papua New Guinea roof; to a bark-cloth mask of ferocious fragility — it looks to be made of tissue and syringes — from the Bismarck Archipelago; to a larger-than-life wood mask from the Torres Strait Islands, with a Frankenstein forehead, human-hair dreadlocks and a smile that might be a snarl.

All of these images are unalike, and none share visual common denominators with others around them. A Sumatran stone figure of a magician-king seems to exist in a world of its own. So does a small wood female figure from the Carolina Islands composed entirely of proto-Modernist planes with a couple of nicks for navel and nose.

True, all of these objects, like their African counterparts, served a general function: in one way or another they were conceived as links between human and spiritual realms. But the exact mechanics of communication, the precise purpose to which it is put, and the identities of the powers to which it is directed — these are as various, mutable and mysterious as the art itself.

In short, the Met exhibition is both a lesson and a feast. The lesson is that the variety of beauty hidden in words like “primitive,” “non-Western,” African” and “Oceanic” is greater than we ever suspected and that we are beginning to realize this. As to the feast, the table is set in the Barbier-Mueller show and in the Rockefeller Wing galleries beyond. Like any fine meal, this one fills you up and leaves you wanting more.

“African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Sept. 27.