April 26 to September 10, 2017
235 Bowery (between Rivington and Stanton streets)
New York, newmuseum.org

The exhibition’s opening room evokes her work’s recusancy to the notions of corporeal perfection or wholesomeness. A plump, naked woman (except for her dress shoes) sticks out her tongue while taking a big shit; a girl crowned with a laurel wreath blows the viewer a raspberry while grasping a snake rearing up from her vagina; a woman with exposed breasts kneels insouciantly as two men wag an improbable number of penises in her face. The images’ brazenness is belied by their delicate format, watercolors of relatively small dimensions. The sheer difference of Rama’s bodies is striking – a great number of them women in wheelchairs, or strapped to asylum beds. In this imagery lurks the shadow of her parents’ mental illness, source of an anguish that informs her entire oeuvre. Yet the women in Rama’s wheelchairs wear elegant high heels; they return the viewer’s gaze. Particularly for a time when differently abled bodies (and minds) – to say nothing of women at large – were hardly celebrated as active agents, Rama’s work is truly striking, and resonates with a decided contemporary relevance. As much as gallows humor, it is often an exuberant joy in the face of anguish which her work bears out.

Rama’s production proved consistently inventive over more than six decades – a period which saw her explore geometric abstraction, expressionist etchings, bronze sculpture, collage, and assemblage in a range of materials and formats. Interspersed alongside wall texts (often frustratingly huddled at the New Museum to one side of the wall), quotes by Rama lend context – and irreverent levity – to many of the works. Anchored by the opening room of early paintings and drawings, the exhibition wraps around flanking galleries in a continuous flow, beginning with work completed not long before her death in 2006, back along the stretch of various decades. Some of her most recent paintings feature anonymous, nude male bodies with sexual members in full spate. One of Rama’s quotes discusses how irrelevant to her such sex organs are compared to the mouth – “the mouth, that’s real desire.” We find, in fact, disembodied mouths in several instances (her watercolors, for example), along with other free-floating body parts. Over the drawing of a foot (from some treatise on classical statuary) (2005), Rama painted the toenails black, adding a hand-written note about the under-appreciated eroticism of the male foot: “with its toenails painted black and gold I’d want to lick it.”

The body also undergoes various levels of abstraction, as in a series from 2001 (Heroic I and II) which render crouching, cut-out forms almost as hieroglyphs. Rama’s figurative facility is matched by a keen penchant for abstraction, whether of urinals rendered as floating forms, or large-scale collages incorporating patches of leather and other materials, composed as recently as 1999. The formal equilibrium and sophistication of these works – still redolent of the shallow, post-Cubist space which was the domain of so much mid-century modernism – testify to Rama’s role in Italy’s Arte Concreta movement in the 1950s, one of her only associations with an organized movement or school. A few hard-edged, geometric canvases from the early 1970s reveal the lasting influence of this geometricizing tendency upon her work. Yet one would look in vain for some neat chronological or teleological progression. Just as Rama shrugged off Arte Concreta for Informalist-style works since the 1960s (themselves an anachronism by then), she returned to neatly composed abstract composition in the 1970s, wrought from sliced bicycle tires. One such work from 1970 (Even More Space Than Time) sets a bulging (but flat) black form and solid line against a white expanse of canvas, reminiscent of Motherwell’s Elegies, and revealing an astute feeling for the power of empty space.

In Rama’s paintings of the 1980s we find further echoes of Surrealist figuration, though here they find expression once again on paper, in a series of works centering upon exotic-looking bodies in reverie or some sort of ecstasy (Teletta, 1983; Venezie, 1983). Many of them are painted over maps or architectural elevations, creating layered fields of imagery and out of scale spaces. Edmo (1983) suggests an Etruscan painting (perhaps a funerary image) of two men, suggesting – to a modern audience –erotic impropriety. One wonders what she thought of the Italian Transavanguardia and its revival of figuration and its postmodernist citation during these same years. Indeed, something of Francesco Clemente’s work resonates with Rama’s whimsical figures and appeals to eastern tropes. Yet Rama remained her own individual to the end. Reprising assemblage and abstraction in her final years, she also painted large-scale male nudes on canvas and pursued other collages on paper. Rama once commented that she had once considered becoming a nun, but instead began to paint “coarse pictures.” There remains something of the prayer in her work – votive offerings to vitality in the face of death, and pleasure in spite of great pain.

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November 2, 2016 to January 14, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 76 and 77 streets
New York City, nahmadcontemporary.com

Across the room, one of Warhol’s “Rorschach” paintings imitates the legendary “inkblot” test developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach –evidently some of the only imagery for which the artist developed his own painting, rather than repurposing photographs. Like Warhol’s Rorschach, the silkscreened ink splatter of Christopher Wool’s Minor Mishap (Black) (2001) conjures up the death – or perhaps the afterlife – of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, much of Wool’s mature work has gone on to address such questions. The silk-screened reproduction of painted, gestural brushstrokes raises questions about autonomy and authority in painting – questions which Warhol’s work unleashed with a vengeance. In its chromatic austerity, this room obliged viewers to concentrate on formal rhymes and contrasts, many of which reward patient looking.

Individual canvases could also bear their own mysteries. In Warhol’s series of silkscreened crosses, a few of the white forms bleed into each other – exceptions that instigate attention to the rule of their order. Near the middle of the canvas one finds the faintest line, traced in such a way – however unwittingly – to suggest a horizon, which contravenes the relentless flatness of the painting. The formal details of Wool’s paintings frequently come in the form of the pixels of which they are composed, again suggesting an update of Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dots for the virtual age.

The exhibition’s second room bursts into color. From the slightly ribbed surface of Guyton’s untitled fireplace white dots seem almost to rise like ash or sparks from the proverbial fire, while red “paint” appears smeared upwards in one area. A more dramatic smearing appears in Wool’s Double Blue Nose (2003), which almost suggests an erased Brice Marden painting – evoking once again the fate of abstraction, this time by way of Rauschenberg’s erasure of De Kooning’s drawing. The slightly earlier Untitled (2001) appears looser in the skeins and loops of its red lines. Not all of the works here are painterly. The primary colors of Guyton’s wayward X’s (the red letter shadowed by a black counterpart) bring to mind Mondrian’s neoplasticism. Once again, the repetition of the two, seemingly identical blue X’s makes technological reproduction unavoidable as a point of reference. Based on a shadow photographed in his office, Warhol called his Shadow paintings silkscreens “that I mop over with paint.” A close view of the canvases reveals the almost impasto swirls of giant brushstrokes. Nearly all of the spontaneous, “autonomous” brushwork in this exhibition appears in reified form, in the abeyance of photographic or scanned reproduction. But the eddy of Warhol’s (or an assistant’s, however the case was) brush betrays – just on the eve of the 1980s – a renewed investment in the hand’s trace.

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May 27 to September 7, 2016
1071 Fifth Avenue, between 88th and 89th streets, New York City
www.guggenheim.org

In addition to a kaleidoscopic retrospective of one of the last century’s towering aesthetic figures, the Guggenheim’s Moholy-Nagy survey also serves as a history of the reception of abstract art in the United States. The prescient eye of Solomon Guggenheim is noted in the wall text of one 1926 canvas, which had hung – like so many of the Hungarian’s works – in the Museum of Nonobjective Painting, precursor to Lloyd Wright’s spiral temple of modernism. His work had likewise hung at the Brooklyn Museum’s Exhibition of Modern Art, organized by Katherine Dreier and the Societé Anonyme in 1926. It was thus with a keen sense of his achievements in a stunning array of media that the artist himself eventually landed on these shores, as an exile from Hitler’s Germany in 1937. Perhaps no other individual embodied more emphatically a kind of intermedia experimentation than László Moholy-Nagy, who not only helped to introduce the avant-garde to the United States, but navigated numerous, seemingly inimical strains of modernism from the start of his career.

Some of the artist’s early works on canvas make plain his attention to the very objecthood of the support. Tilted Fields (1920-21) interposes bands of unprimed and unpainted canvas with diagonal lozenges of paint, effecting not only a dynamic pulsation of geometry but also a sense of the materials at play. Featuring wheels, pulleys, and other apparatuses, some collages from around the same time reveal Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the mechanomorphic imagery of Francis Picabia. While Picabia’s ambivalent treatments of modern machinery might seem diametrically opposed to Moholy’s earnest, lifelong dedication to the utopia of technology, the long arc of works on display makes plain spirited, and often lighthearted, dimensions which leavened the seriousness of his experiments. Moholy’s mesmerizing 1922 photomontage, Structure with Moving Parts for Play and Conveyance, evinces the sensibility of an artist as sympathetic to the work of Raoul Hausmann and Jean Arp as to the eventual productivist strains of Russian Constructivism. But while the works themselves – and the energy between them – remains crackling even in its coolness, the exhibition’s installation dampens some of the dialogue that might have been staged between its wide-ranging components.

Right from the start, a replica of Moholy’s most renowned inventions – his kinetic sculpture, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930) (often referred to as the Light-Space Modulator),– is cordoned off in in a walled-in small room off from the ramp. The viewer is plunged in media res, into a proposed construction of Moholy’s “Room of the Present,” a consummately modernist installation developed in 1930 but never realized. Bearing curving glass panels, perforated metal grills, and numerous panels of montages, film stills, and posters – both by Moholy and by others – the star curiosity of this futuristic cabinet is the Light Prop, which exemplified Moholy’s ambition to use light as a “new plastic medium.” The star of its own film by the artist, the Light Prop proposed a radical new integration of time and space, aesthetics and technology. Its seemingly incidental position here is egregiously anti-climactic.

To be sure, we find some of the Light Prop’s geometric integuments echoed right away in numerous paintings lining the museum’s upward spiral. The surfeit of these various Construction paintings, however, appears at times to reach overkill. The exhibition’s chronological tack accounts for this concentration. Still, the curator might have intercalated these works with some different, and relatively contemporaneous, work, to striking effect. For if any oeuvre bears the record of simultaneous experimentation in seemingly endless media, it is that of Moholy-Nagy. Nearly all of the show is grouped according to medium rather than motif, even when there is overlap in production. The eventual appearance of Moholy’s “photoplastics” – his pioneering photomontages of the mid-1920s – thus comes as a relief to the mediumistic monotony in this hang. The industrially produced enamel paintings from 1923 alsobear numerous points of contact with the contemporary works on canvas, as does his legendary 1921 sculpture, the Nickel Construction. All of these respective examples were displayed separately. The curator seemed more preoccupied with highlighting the ever more rarefied (or workaday, as the case may be) nature of Moholy’s material supports, from Galalith, to Rhodoid, to Trolit, to other unpronounceable industrial plastics.

At any rate, the number of photoplastics displayed together here affords an unprecedented consideration of their innovation, and their intersection with other of the artist’s experiments. Drawing upon Dada and international Constructivism in equal measure, they suggest just how much a sense of play and fantasy endured at the Bauhaus, due in large part to Moholy’s presence. Largely missing from the exhibition, however, is a sense of his legendary pedagogy. Some wall text accounts for his prodigious activity at the Bauhaus, which he joined in 1923 at the behest of Walter Gropius, who tapped him for the precociously technological orientation of his aesthetics (in contrast to the more mystical expressionism of former Swiss master Johannes Itten). We have to make do with a few Bauhaus publications consigned to vitrines. The somewhat awkward display is further exacerbated by the emptiness of numerous bays, in favor of large gray panels, mounted on spindly piers and placed at an angle. While these allow for a closer look at the paintings and other objects, they are incorporated less than gracefully.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Moholy-Nagy found his burgeoning career suddenly buffeted by the rise of Fascism. Shortly after the newly established Nazi regime shuttered the Bauhaus in 1933he relocated first to Amsterdam and then in 1935 to London. The range even of his advertising commissions is staggering, evinced in everything from posters for the London Underground to color coded price tags for a Berlin department store. While undertaking commercial work to support his family, Moholy pursued experimental work in some striking films from the early 1930s, in addition to writing on the modernist possibilities of the medium. Berlin Still Life (1931-32) reveals streets scenes and piles of garbage, while his Architects’ Congress (1933) documents a gathering of the CIAM (Congress Internationale Architecture) in Athens. Here again though, the films (transferred to DVD) were tucked off to the side, around a corner from the ramp and out of sight. Already in his own time Mohly-Nagy had complained about the inadequate circumstances in which some of his films were screened. At least his landmark Light Play (1922) enjoys a larger screen in one of the ramp’s bays.

Moholy’s eventual move to Chicago found him briefly at the helm of the so-called New Bauhaus, eventually redubbed the Illinois Institute of Technology. He soon took up an irrepressible interest in Plexiglas – a material whose banality nowadays belies what must have seemed an almost revolutionary promise. By turns scored/scratched and painted, many of his sculptures push the material past any merely decorative or formal faculties. Moholy coerces its folds to cast shadows, to serve simultaneously as frame, painting, and transparency. While the photograms he completed in Chicago remain striking in their experimentation, his paintings from the period often reach into garish corners of kitsch. Conversely, his experiments with 35mm Kodachrome film reveal how a relatively ordinary instrument could be turned to sophisticated ends.

Verging on the decorative, the increasingly whimsical tendencies of Moholy’s late paintings–before his untimely death in 1946 – suggest a recoil from the terrors ravaging the globe in the early 1940s. What must the artist – who had held such utopian expectations for technology, coaxed by art– only have thought of the uses to which machinery had been put in Europe’s apparatuses of liquidation? A glimpse of the porosity between dream and nightmare comes early in the exhibition. A 1918 crayon drawing on paper reveals a thick copse of trees, likely from the hills above the city of Buda. It long bore the title Landscape with Barbed Wire, however, as Moholy’s widow believed it to represent a view from the front lines of World War One.

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Pop Art Design at the Barbican Art Gallery

22 October, 2013 to 9 February, 2014

Packed with two floors of objects and images in seemingly every medium – lounge chairs and television advertisements, collages and coke bottles, paintings and floor lamps – the Barbican’s ambitious Pop Art Design pitched itself as “the first comprehensive exhibition to explore the exciting exchange of ideas between artists and designers in the Pop age.” (The exhibition was previously seen at the Vitra Design Museum, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet.) As the show’s paratactic, three-word title would suggest, it is Pop that was posited as having mediated between the latter two phenomena: a sensibility, both historical and ineffable, that nourished art and design alike in the Cold War era.  Claiming a kind of insouciant reciprocity between the ambits of artistic experimentation and product design, the show consistently flattened out the differences between them, venturing instead a “thematic kaleidoscope [sic]” that adduced a range of loosely grouped works without much regard for their respective origins, intentions, or effects.

One of the first objects in the exhibition, a “Leonardo” sofa by Studio 65 (1969), hit all the right notes and suggested – in its play between use value and the ironization of signs – what the exhibition might have explored more thoroughly and carefully.  Conflating function and iconicity, the couch sets the stars and stripes of the American flag into an undulating, two-tiered assembly of interconnected parts.  Nearby, a Jasper Johns target painting lent some proto-Pop context (one of the painter’s flag paintings was presumably unavailable), while a Yonel Lebovici’s large Fiche Male (Plug Socket) sculpture (1977) duly recalled Claes Oldenburg’s giant objects and their outsized estrangement of even the most ordinary of household wares.  Like the nearby “La Bocca” couch, also by Studio 65, designers during the late 1960s and 70s indeed paid heed to certain artistic currents; the “La Bocca”’s inflated red lips conjure up both Man Ray’s legendary painting, Observatory Time: The Lovers (1936)and Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofa (1937).  But the appeal to art historical and even contemporary artistic iconography in strains of design cannot be seen as the mere equivalent of Pop’s varied, ambivalent, and often contradictory uses (and abuses) of design.  With its post-Cubist juxtaposition of collage-like imagery, including a car hood, cuddling lovers, and a plate of spaghetti, James Rosenquist’s I Love you with my Ford (1961) performs a very different operation upon its mass-produced object than, say, Oldenburg’s Soft Lunchbox (1962).

A wall text noted apropos of one Pop painting on display that it was “difficult to tell if it is critical or appreciative.”  Such a description goes some way in underscoring the indeterminate premise of Pop at large, at least in its early phases.  If post-war design made use of popular imagery to enliven forms bound up with function, Pop’s reproduction of consumerist codes aimed to question the very mechanisms of their incessant repetition.  To be sure, not all (indeed, hardly any) of the show’s appliances and apparatuses fall into the category of “good design.”  And certain twentieth-century designers (Bruno Munari’s bent forks come to mind) often undermined the clockwork of utility even as he contributed to its development.  Yet the exhibition took no pains to distinguish between the semantic registers of either the artworks or objects on display – or to probe the point at which artwork and object in the postwar period often seemed to trade identities.  One glimpse of such slippage came in Allen Jone’s Chair (1969), in which a functional seat rests on the upraised legs of a submissive female mannequin wearing S&M gear.  That Allen is commonly referred to as a sculptor, rather than furniture designer, at least complicates the work’s aesthetic and material status in interesting ways.  An early, hand-painted room divider by Andy Warhol on display undeniably conjured up questions about hand-wrought artifice as opposed to use value.  Likewise his nearby Close Cover before Striking painting – which flattens the American Match Company and Coca Cola advertising into the same pictorial and conceptual plane – highlights early Pop’s critical engagement with mass-produced imagery.

Yet the later paintings that peppered subsequent rooms (like Warhol’s ubiquitous Marilyn Monroe) appeared as mere filler on the wall, related to design in only the loosest sense.  In a similar vein, making cameos in nearly every gallery was the work of Alexander Girard, known chiefly for his work in fabric and textile design, but also celebrated for his comprehensive design environments from the 1950s and 60s, particularly the La Fonda del Sol restaurant in Manhattan’s Time-Life building.  Aside from a penchant for bright colors and simple shapes, Girard’s relation to Pop is difficult to trace except in the most ample dimension.  Ed Ruscha’s painting, Honk (1962) hypostatizes commercial typography to the dimensions of monumental architecture; the work implicitly insists upon the rapport between commercial design and a (visualized) language of the everyday.  By contrast, his photographic series Every Building on the Sunset Strip appeared entirely out of place here, and once again stretched the exhibition’s conceptual parameters past any discernible limits.  The section titled “Everyday Life Made Public” in fact seemed to dispense altogether with questions of design, while, conversely, the ample space dedicated to work by Charles and ray Eames – from chairs to films – related to Pop art in only the loosest of senses.

Perhaps most poignant in synthesizing the exhibition’s dizzying “kaleidoscope” were the numerous examples of Italian design, whether Ettore Sottsass’s willfully kitsch plates and mirrors, Studio D’s “Pillola” Lamps (1968), or the “Passiflora” lamp by Superstudio (1968).  While the influence of Pop and proto-Pop imagery upon these examples of post-war design is relatively straightforward, the role of design in Pop art itself is a far more thorny matter, shot through with questions that cut to the ambivalent origins of Pop itself.  While not in the exhibition, Man Ray’s infamous object, The Gift (1921) makes literal the potentially barbed nature of appropriation, as practiced first by Dada artists and again after World War Two by neo-Dada and certain Pop figures.  Gluing a row of tacks to the surface of an iron, Ray transfigures the object into a menacing weapon, but also renders it useless as an appliance.  Artists like Rosenquist and Oldenburg did not merely rehearse the visual pleasures of commodification, but probed the relationships between them: the extent to which every aspect of our daily lives is implicated in an economy of consumption and desire, including a consumption of signs, codifications, and spectacularizations of those desires.  Appropriating the language of advertising (and hence, implicitly, of design), Pop Artists frequently troubled the spectacle of consumerism, as much as simply reproducing its mechanisms.  The exhibition’s hesitancy to acknowledge that nuance proved as disappointing as its individual objects were thrilling to see.

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