Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is the first privately funded art and culture center in the country dedicated to promoting Russian art, sponsoring research and publication, educating art viewers, and globalizing the local art scene. It was founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova — who combines stylishness and seriousness, as does the museum — and has the backing of her husband, Roman Aronovich, an oligarch and owner of Britain’s Chelsea Football Club.

Named after the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage where it was first housed, Garage moved to its permanent home in Gorky Park in midsummer, designed by the thought-provoking Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, out of the burned shell of a huge 1968 Soviet Modernist restaurant, Vremena Goda (“Seasons of the Year”). Gorky Park was built by Stalin in 1923, the first park in Russia not intended for royalty, and until recently was strewn with abandoned structures — including an old space shuttle.

Koolhaas has retained the character and history of the building, leaving evidence of the fire and preserving some of its unfashionable original features — such as a partly destroyed mosaic mural, showing a female personification of Autumn — while giving it new beauty. The building is wrapped in an insulating layer of polycarbonate, as if ready for the freezer, which gives it a silvery, ethereal presence, and creates a reflective transparency between inside and outside.

The first exhibitions to launch Garage fulfill all of its promises, but there is a scarcity of new Russian art. To see contemporary and 20^th Century Russian painting, sculpture and video art, you must leave Gorky Park and cross the road to Tretyakov Gallery, where there is a satisfying display of it, spread across three generous floors.

At Garage right now, however, is a series of exhibitions focusing on the 1960s, looking at life and art, and the effects of politics. They are quietly, even staidly, presented, and require time and study, but the content, at least for a foreigner, is mind-blowing.

One ongoing project has students create fictional 1960s characters, based on old films and archives in Garage’s collection, in order to investigate how life really was for their uncommunicative grandparents. The life and history of each character is described on video. The Working Mother whose job depended on her being able to leave her child with an older neighbor free of charge; the Inspector who checked on the cleanliness of communal homes; the Scientist, kept in isolation, prohibited from traveling, and obliged to live in one of the closed cities known as “boxes”; and the Nonconformist, forced to undergo psychiatric treatment.

The model gadget-filled American kitchen, scene of the famed 1959 Kitchen Debate between Khrushchev and Nixon, is recreated. Together with the “Family of Man” exhibition and a painting by Jackson Pollock, it was part of “Face to Face,” the only cultural exchange between Moscow and Washington during the Cold War. Russians were then beginning to move into “Khrushchevkas,” tiny flats with the privacy, for the first time, of their own kitchen, a place to talk without fear of the neighbors. They became the center of culture and debate.

The same long lines wait patiently at Garage as they do in New York, London, or anywhere else people to immerse themselves in the sparkling mirrored installations of Yayoi Kusama, who has also covered the trees outside the museum with spots. Or to participate in a game of ping-pong or meal of Russian dumplings in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibition, which turns the museum into a social hub, as the 1,200-seat restaurant originally was. Katharina Grosse’s spray-painted environment offers yet more opportunities for selfies and Instagram.

Eric Bulatov is one Russian artist who gets a good showing with two nine-meter-tall paintings at the entrance, telling the public in a slogan reminiscent of advertising posters from the 1920s by Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky: “Come to Garage!” It’s also a reminder of the banners that were hung from the gigantic gates of Gorky Park when it first opened: “Life has become better! Life has become more cheerful!”

An atmosphere of teaching and learning and eagerness is somehow generated throughout, both in the local, introspective displays and the high profile international art. But a young couple I was speaking with told me: “Garage feels as if it’s not yet ready. It’s very cool, but it’s like a baby. Let’s see what it will look like in a couple of years.”

On September 25, a comprehensive exhibition of Louise Bourgeois: “Structures of Existence: The Cells,” will open at Garage, and on September 22. And an exhibition of sculpture by Anish Kapoor, “My Red Homeland,” will open at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, which is located at Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, the original venue of Garage Museum. Both exhibitions will coincide with the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

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The history of publishers Lund Humphries is intimately bound up with that of British sculpture.  Originally based in the Yorkshire town of Bradford, this printing press was at the forefront of avant garde typography and color processes by the 1940s when, under the editorship of Herbert Read, it produced what would become the first in an ongoing series of catalogues raisonée of Henry Moore, a sumptuous production that defied wartime austerities.  Subsequently the firm, now part of Ashgate publishing, formed a significant relationship with the Henry Moore Foundation, which is a foremost sponsor of scholarship and publishing in British sculpture.  Jonathan Blackwood’s monograph on John Skeaping is part of a research series that includes titles on William Tucker, Reg Butler and F.E.McWilliam.  Skeaping was a pioneer of direct carving in Britain, and first husband of Barbara Hepworth—whose subsequent husband, Ben Nicholson, was an early subject of a Lund Humphries title.  A consummate animalier, Skeaping’s career as a figure carver followed a trajectory of classicism into primitivism into organic abstraction familiar to students of Hepworth and Moore.

Moore is the meridian line of British scupture: There is an AM and a PM, the latter characterized by long anxiety-inducing shadows.  The midnight hour to avoid, however, is exact contemporaneity, as the illustrious yet in some ways wallflower career of Hepworth exemplifies.   Without it ever quite being possible to say who came first, her successes and developments were in uncomfortable near-kilter with the fellow Yorkshireman she once dated in Leeds, whether in the form of publications, representation of Britain at the Venice Biennale, moves into and out of abstraction, official honors and so on.  The major new museum opened in her name in her hometown of Wakefield this year has been accompanied by a volume edited by her granddaughter Sophie Bowness that documents the gift from her estate of the plaster originals from which her late bronzes were cast: once again, a recall to Moore, whose gift of plasters formed the bedrock of the wing devoted to his work at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario.  The volume includes an essays on Hepworth’s process by Bowness, on her relationship to Wakefield by Gordon Watson, and on the museum building by its architect David Chipperfield, whose streamlined purist aesthetic seems an offshoot of the same cultivar as Hepworth’s.

The protean nature of Sir Anthony Caro is attested to in the modernist sculptor’s bibliography: Dieter Blume’s catalogue raisonné, for instance, runs to 14 volumes, while Lund Humphries have brought out a set of five uniformly designed and presented books offering interpretations of his career with different thematic approaches—more phenomenological that chronological in their range.  The series is understatedly edited by one of its authors, Karen Wilkin, whose same preface runs in each volume in much the way Read’s did in the Moore catalogue, although only implicitly does this text acknowledge her leadership role.  Her own volume echoes the thematic approach of her 1991 Prestel monograph by examining Caro’s inside-outside sculptural preoccupation.  Paul Moorhouse, in “Presence,” explores the denial and recurrence of figuration in the more monolithic of his larger sculptures.  Moorhouse, who is now a curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery, was curator of a significant overview of Caro’s work at the old Tate Gallery in Millbank, and draws closely on the sculptor’s own words.  Other volumes in the series explore the recurrence of figuration and narrative in his later works, his Smith/Picasso-like drawing in space, and his small, table-top sculptures.  If there is one theme strikingly overlooked I would nominate Caro’s extensive reworkings in sculpture of old and modern master paintings and his allusions to sculpture history.

Phaidon’s weighty monograph on Anish Kapoor is a doorstopper at over 500 pages worthy of the Bombay-born, London-based sculptor’s global popularity and almost corporate success.   David Anfam, who is a long serving commissioning editor at Phaidon and one of the leading authorities on Abstract Expressionism, charts the sculptors evolution from an arte povera aesthetic (scattered piles of pigment on the gallery floor) to spectacular, breathtakingly monumental sculptures and installations that dominate city skylines.  Kapoor’s ongoing obsession with the void unites efforts in divergent materials and scales.  The volume also includes essays by Johanna Burton and fellow “new generation” British sculptor Richard Deacon.

The handsome volume on Thomas Houseago – oddly tall in a way that befits his lanky sculptures – keeps alive the Lund Humphries tradition of charting the efforts of acclaimed Yorkshiremen.  Born in Leeds in 1972, Houseago makes loud, boisterously clumsy tragic-comic figurative sculptures that directly reference modern exemplars like Brancusi, Jacob Epstein, Germaine Richier, Rodin, Giacometti, and de Kooning in a mix of critique and adulation.  Lisa Le Feuvre contributes the main essay while Rudi Fuchs offers an appreciation that draws on his aquaintance with Houseago as a student in Amsterdam.

BOOKS CONSIDERED IN THIS REVIEW

Jonathan Blackwood, The Sculpture of John Skeaping (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011). ISBN: 9780853319313. 152 pages, 12 color and 210 b&w illustrations. $90.00.

Sophie Bowness, Barbara Hepworth: The Plasters (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011). ISBN: 9781848220669. 200 pages, 85 color and 115 b&w illustrations. $70.00.

Paul Moorhouse, Anthony Caro: Presence (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2010).  ISBN: 9781848220539. 152 pages, 73 color and 9 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

Julius Bryant, Anthony Caro: Figurative and Narrative Sculpture (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009). ISBN: 9781848220324. 128 pages, 55 color and 23 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

Karen Wilkin, Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009). ISBN: 9781848220317. 152 pages, 80 color and 14 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

Mary Reid, Anthony Caro: Drawing in Space (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009). ISBN: 9781848220300. 152 pages, 66 color and 20 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

H.F. Westley Smith, Anthony Caro: Small Sculptures (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2010). ISBN: 9781848220515. 152 pages, 82 color and 14 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

David Anfam, Anish Kapoor (London: Phaidon Press, 2009). ISBN: 9780714843698. 304 pages. £59.95.

Thomas Houseago, What Went Down (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011). ISBN: 9781901352504. 240 pages, 211 color and 7 b&w illustrations. $70.00.

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The impetus for the renovation project was to provide better circulation through the many modernist buildings dotting the campus—which had grown from 50,000 to 500,000 square feet of built space since the museum opened in 1965—and offer visitors a more logical route through its three major collection wings devoted to the archeology of the region, Jewish culture, and fine arts. In a way, the three artists turned that linear coherence upside down by pulling works from different time periods, geographies, and media and using them to support narratives formed from their own associations. This is underscored by having no labels in the galleries next to the art, leading viewers to approach the objects unfiltered and look at each room more as a whole (maps with captions are provided outside the exhibition, which are informative but encumbering). Yet the shows ultimately reinforce the interconnectedness of world cultures—one of the fundamental messages of the Israel Museum which houses everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to art of the present, in a city where the crossroads of history and cultures play such an immediate role in contemporary life. This message is embodied in the new monumental stainless steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor commissioned as part of the campus renewal for the highest point of the museum’s outdoor promenade. Shaped like an hourglass, the sculpture inverts the reflection of the Jerusalem skyline, which starts at the tapered center of the piece and levitates to the top as the viewer approaches. It’s a lovely metaphor for the sands of time not running out but continually filling to the brim.

Susan Hiller, a U.S.-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist, hewed closest to standard curatorial practice by drawing 34 works from one timeframe—modern and contemporary—but created a more dense and visceral installation than typically encountered at a museum. Depending on the day viewers come, they’re greeted by either a brilliant burst of 2000 red gerberas pressed behind three large panels of glass or else the flowers in some form of rot and stench in the piece “Preserve Beauty” (1991) by Anya Gallacio. It’s tapestry-like visual effect and themes of life and death, memory and loss, are echoed in Christian Boltanski’s “Reserve (Storeroom) (1989), a long wall hung ceiling-to-floor with limp used clothing. Two floor pieces carpeting large areas—Erez Israeli’s “Field of Flowers” (2005), a bed of artificial red blooms, and Dina Shenhav’s “City” (1997), a charred gray topographical model of architectural ruins—ripple associatively with the others around the ideas of beauty and decay.

Yinka Shonibare, who grew up in Nigeria and is now based in London, selected of more than 200 objects from across time and installed them in dynamic, geometric configurations on four square platforms organized around the elements of earth, wind, fire, and water. Each is punctuated with one of Shonibare’s trademark figures in Victorian-era clothes made from African fabrics that personify the four elements and were made especially for the show. On the “earth” platform, with Shonibare’s dandy that has a globe for a head and looks to be charging out into the world in animated stride, the artist has juxtaposed a contemporary Andres Serrano photograph of a black Christ with an assortment of prehistoric tools, an Egyptian funerary mask, a South African fertility doll, and a color image of an 18^th-century synagogue from Suriname among others, pressing viewers to consider elemental relationships and the cross-pollination between cultures.

While Shonibare’s platforms suggest the idea of a “cabinet of curiosities” using a very modernist-looking installation approach, Zvi Goldstein’s floor-to-ceiling installation of more than 400 objects on antiquated shelving overtly referenced those 16^th- and 17^th-century wonder cabinets of odd and precious items collected by noblemen that preceded the concept of a modern museum. A Romanian artist based in Jerusalem who combines objects with text, Goldstein here crowded commonplace objects he found in the museum’s offices and recesses—including old typewriters, eyeglass cases, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, a urinal not by Duchamp—together with photos by Harold Edgerton, Andre Kertesz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, designs by Charles and Ray Eames and Le Corbusier, and Japanese screens in a visually dramatic, non-hierarchical presentation. He was inspired by a hallucination he had of being haunted by objects, which he alludes to in 62 poems he wrote about the experience that hang on the walls amidst the shelves of objects. Some poems and items on the shelves are so high up they are impossible to really see or read, akin to the way memories can be tantalizingly out of reach while others remain vivid. Of the three shows, Goldstein’s most successfully transcends the individual objects and becomes an artwork in its own right.

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Anish Kapoor’s Memory, a 24-ton metallic blimp measuring approximately 47 x 29 x 15 feet overall, is imposing at a number of levels.  It requires the viewer to use his/her own memory to create an image of the piece.  It also manages, as Kapoor recently conceded in a talk at the Guggenheim in New York, to accumulate meanings that are context dependent.  “Memory”, while powerful in its own right in a museum setting, is also a magnet for associative responses that intrude from the broader setting.  It is more than an autonomous aesthetic object.  Therefore, it is not surprising that our reactions to seeing it in New York are quite different from our reactions to seeing it at the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin this past January.  In Berlin, in the context of Peter Eisenman’s “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, Berlin, we could not help but experience Kapoor’s sculpture as sharing with these works an attempt to capture the void, the gap in history created by the Holocaust.

In New York, the fragmentation of “Memory” is more directly carried by the properties of the installation.  To see the complete work in New York you have to enter three successive vantage points in the Annex Level 2 Gallery.  The first requires you to mount a few steps to a cordoned-off space to see a taller than life-size rust-colored metal structure of indeterminate shape pressed tightly against the left and right walls of the room.  It isn’t until you walk around to the second viewing area that you can see the shape of this object.  It resembles a large dirigible that feels like it has crash-landed into the museum and is protruding at an angle from its landing site.   It appears to be bursting the boundaries of the room, thereby dramatically increasing its scale.  You can stand back at least 10 feet but you can’t walk around the edges because of their proximity to the wall.  You’re temped to squeeze by, but it’s impossible.  At the Berlin Guggenheim one also had to experience the piece from three different viewing areas, but they were visually more generous with lots of room to enter the spaces and walk right up the piece.  As a result, “Memory” in Berlin seemed like it had been installed whereas in New York it seemed to have landed.  It looked more contained, more static and smaller in scale in Berlin than in New York.

A third space within the sculpture, as experienced in both cities, seems to open to “A Heart of Darkness”, a setting where one is confronted with a void, a black aperture, where the massive work is suddenly revealed to be open and cave-like.  The void greatly complicates one’s experience of “Memory”.  First, it slows one down.  Active exploration suddenly shifts to quiet meditation.  Physically, the strong impressions of massive materiality are undercut by what now seems to be the hollowness of the work.  The void functions as a kind of reversible figure, shifting from a radiant black monochrome painting to a pitch-black terrifying abyss.  A long sonorous echo gives further evidence of its deep space, one that draws you in (see Homi K. Bhabha’s 1998 essay, “Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness”).  Such voids can be interpreted as an embodiment of the unconscious or a womb-like portal for creation.  Overall, the void shifts one’s impression from the materiality of “Memory” to its immateriality, what Kapoor has referred to as a proto-object, built out of fragmented experiences that the viewer needs to integrate over time.

Freed of the weight of the Holocaust in its New York venue, the work becomes less of a dialogue between long and short-term memory and more a demonstration of psychologist J. J. Gibson’s proposition that memory can become collapsed into perceiving-acting cycles.  What one sees is informed by what one does; what one does is informed by what one sees— in a continuous loop.  In this context, memory is an extension of perceiving, of the processional aspects of the sculpture, not unlike the effects of Richard Serra’s massive sculptures of Cor-Ten steel (such as those currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea).  Both Kapoor and Serra create complex viewing experiences.  Apart from the more obvious similarities of massive pieces of rounded Cor-Ten steel, both are physically and psychologically disorienting.  Both require you to explore the entire piece in order to create a mental image of the whole.  And both have either a dark void or a closed in void-like area in the center.   However, while the center of Serra’s “Blind Spot” (2002-2003) creates confusion and feelings of being trapped, Kapoor’s void offers the possibility, or better the aura (given the limitations of a museum setting), of a meditative experience.  As one is drawn into Kapoor’s seemingly endless black hole, it is possible to begin a mental  journey of self-exploration.  Kapoor’s “Memory” is not as disorienting perceptually as Serra’s “Blind Spot” within which one loses track of how to depart.  Yet, “Memory” is disorienting at another level—one has difficulty categorizing what one has seen and one’s relationship to that experience.  For example, is what I am experiencing fear, surprise, or exhilaration—or perhaps all three, as in a Hitchcock film like Vertigo?

Robert Smithson’s perceptive interpretation of the minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd is useful here.  His term “uncanny materiality” seems even more apt for Kapoor’s “Memory” sculpture than it was for Judd’s.  Kapoor’s sculpture creates various dilemmas of inbetweenness.  “Memory” is both material and nonmaterial.  It resembles both agents of destruction, a bomb or grenade, and those most generative of forms, an egg or womb.   We don’t think, however, that Kapoor meant for us to choose.  In “Memory” opposite states can co-exist.  Most generally, Kapoor’s work is about complementarity—it is this and that, rather that this or that.

So, what is it that makes “Memory” memorable?  In both cities, it defamiliarizes the act of seeing and leaves us feeling uncomfortable.  We are not accustomed to being offered only partial views of an object and having to use our eyes, our bodies, and our minds to construct an image of the whole.  Furthermore, the parts we do see are alien—like a space ship with a seemingly endless dark hole.  In Berlin, “Memory” is also engulfed in the force-field of the Holocaust and takes on added meaning.  Therefore, whatever Kapoor’s specific intentions, in Berlin, the piece reflects the intertwining of collective as well as individual memory.

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