JOURNALISM

There was a time, abruptly undone, when an Instagram feed – that stream of exquisitely-curated single images – was the consummate expression of social identity. Then it all shifted and the Zoom video chat – an array of live, grainy, eerily shifting, beloved human faces – became the standard.

I’d like here to plead for physical expression, and more specifically the journal – a catchment for all manner of writing, drawing, recording, collecting, sorting, and salvaging. A friend in Europe, whose sensibilities are fundamentally literary, observed that the one-of-a-kind crisis we’re living through now resembles a war, and that we should all be looking around closely, taking notes, keeping track. A recent piece by Sloane Crossley in the Times, thoughtful and fantastically premature, wonders what kind of novels this period will produce, concerned that a universal experience like this “is poison to actual book writing.” But there are surely millions of perspectives and many millions of stories to tell.

Short of a novel, a journal might be the richest, most supple form. One’s journal can be a book or box in which one leaves things: lists, poems, Post-it notes, receipts, rants, sketches, snack wrappers, lists. It’s a loose, low-tech, capacious form that requires no deep artistic or literary skill. As one’s ideas, feelings and observations build, the journal can take on an infinite number of shapes.

At a moment when looking outward is painful and necessary, looking inward might offer some comfort, distance and, for those privileged to remain in quarantine, a way to mark the strange, stubborn stream of days. One’s journal is private and typically remains unseen, which might trouble some, especially youngsters. But it captures, if only for our future selves, what is happening now, and who we are becoming.

Notebook by Kengo Kuma, 2009. Photograph courtesy the Moleskine Collection.

April 04, 2020 by Nalina Moses

FREE SPEECH

At an open reading I was part of long ago, after about a dozen amateurs (including myself) shared bits of self-conscious prose, a woman with dishevelled hair and a very big handbag shuffled to the mike, unfolded a piece of paper, and read a poem dedicated to her dead stepmother, which began:

She combed my hair every morning

She took me to school on time

She packed me sandwiches with jam

After she was done she looked up, smiled, and said, “She was the only person who really cared about me.”

The Pencil is a Key, the recent exhibit at the Drawing Center in SoHo, reminded me of that moment. There’s an immense rage of drawings here, by artists from different cultures and ages, with different degrees of talent and training, who all completed these works while they were incarcerated. But each artist drew with the same urgency – the same fundamental need to communicate. And in the end the skill with which they’ve drawn (linework, perspective, composition) matters less than the fact that they’ve drawn at all.

There are accomplished, professional renderings are, including works by political prisoners Honoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet. All the works are rich in feeling: sadness, pity, confusion, rage and grace. But the most affecting are those by untutored artists, perhaps because the content comes across so plainly. I was stunned by Angola prisoner Herman Wallace’s drawings. During more than forty years in prison he drew, over and over again, with relentless clarity, his cell in solitary confinement (bed, door, toilet) and the dream house he hoped to move to (two floors, bay windows, a one-car garage). Completed with pencil and ball point pen on scrap paper, these sketches were mailed to relatives and friends.

It’s facile to compare art to language, and drawing to speech. But this exhibit makes a strong case that drawing is, like speech, a human need.

Herman Wallace, 2002-07.

January 23, 2020 by Nalina Moses

OF TWO NATIONS

I walked into the exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963 - 1983 with questions. Was black power achieved in these years? Would all the artworks featured have a strident political focus? And would this art be good?

This art is great. The exhibit features a cadre of American artists executing museum-caliber work in styles conversant with the dominant aesthetics of the time: expressionism, conceptual art, and the new figuration. Yet almost all of the artists were unknown to me, as if they had been working in a parallel hidden universe.

Photographs by Roy DeCarava have spare compositions and a shadowy graphite-like finish. They render daily scenes with gravity, distance and mystery. Painted portraits by Barkley Hendricks honor their subjects, often himself, with particularizing details but without sentimentality. These life-size renderings possess awesome graphic authority, and bring the white-walled gallery to life. Canvases by Carolyn Mims Lawrence – packed with figures and words – carry the narrative force of epics, and call one closer.

Why haven’t these artists been featured in prominent group shows or individual retrospectives, as their art world peers have? Are they best considered when isolated culturally, as they are here? Certainly many of the artworks tackle political themes, but all can also be understood formally. These artists are producing work that complements or exceeds that of their peers. So why do most of them remain undersung?

Barkley Hendricks. Blood (Donald Formey), 1975. Oil and acrylic on canvas.

August 19, 2019 by Nalina Moses

MIXING MOODS

Diller Scofidio + Renfro call the building they concocted for The Broad in downtown Los Angeles The Veil and the Vault. A better nickname might be The Worm in the Box. This museum opened in 2015 to house the contemporary art collection of Eli and Edyth Broad. It’s a three-story concrete block with, at the center, a knot of dark, narrow passages enclosing the escalator and stairs. The building’s functional spaces – offices, archives, restrooms and mechanical rooms – are packed on the second floor. At the stair landing here there’s a window into the vault, where hundreds of canvases are hung, as if asleep, on metal racks. The main gallery is on the top floor, where daylight falls through sculpted ceiling coffers.

The veil is the building’s exterior screen of lozenge-shaped concrete panels. Each one is the size of a car door, with an opening at the center the size of a basketball. Along the front facade, on Grand Avenue, these panels are suspended, dramatically, six feet off the building’s glazing. One enters through the corners here, where the panels have been sliced away. There’s nothing veil-like about this outer shell. It’s a stark, brutalist element that allows only pinched views of the outside (especially north, looking to Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall) and virtually nothing of the inside. From the sidewalk below or across the street, the building’s inner organization remains a mystery.

The parametric geometry of the concrete panels give The Broad a slick contemporary sheen. But its interior staircase feels neolithic, a rupture through layers of geological time. Its low, dark, rounded passages, finished in smooth concrete, have the contours of a cave dug by hand. The stair folds back on itself at a pinched angle on the second floor, as if its route hadn’t been plotted beforehand. The contrast between the building’s clotted, intestine-like passages and its hyper-modern shell give it an energy and tension that’s missing from the bloated contemporary artworks inside. At its heart are two very different tempers.

Photograph by Iwan Baan. Courtesy of The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

December 25, 2017 by Nalina Moses