by Judy Jones
So, what’s their point? Rest assured, you’re not the first to ask. And no one is more eager to tell you than the artist formerly known as Christo (now, officially, “Christo and Jeanne-Claude”) whose art is nothing if not Open to the Public. In fact, taking art public—that is, taking it away from the Uptown Museum-Gallery Complex by making it too big to fit in studios, museums, or galleries— was part of the original idea. Now that lots of artists have adopted what critics once dubbed the “New Scale,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude will tell you that their point is, literally, to rock your world. By temporarily disrupting one part of an environment, they hope to get you to “perceive the whole environment with new eyes and a new consciousness.” Along the way, it’s been nice to get tons of media attention, make buckets of money (Christo’s been known to issue stock in himself, redeemable in working drawings), and, as with so much that went before it, épater les bourgeois. LAURIE ANDERSON (1947-)
“Our plan is to drop a lot of odd objects onto your country from the air. And some of these objects will be useful. And some will just be … odd. Proving that these oddities were produced by a people free enough to think of making them in the first place.” That’s Laurie Anderson speaking, NASA’s first—and almost certainly last—artist-in-residence. She of the trademark red socks and white high-top sneakers, the seven-hour performance pieces, the lights-up-in-the-dark electric violin, the movie clip of an American flag going through the fluff-dry cycle. Anderson has spent the last quarter-century as a performance artist, yoking music with visuals, cliché with poetry, electronics with sentiment, slide shows with outrage, the intimate with the elephantine. Like Christo, performance artists do what they can to take art out of the institution; they also tend to quote that indefatigable old avant-gardist John Cage, who years ago declared art to be a way “simply” to make us “wake up to the very life we’re living.”
Over the years, performance art has tended to move farther and farther from its visual-arts roots to embrace, especially, theater and dance. In the process, it has more than once drifted toward the self-indulgent and the soporific, leaving some of us wondering what, exactly, the payoff was for sitting through another six-hour Robert Wilson piece on Stalin or Queen Victoria or for witnessing Karen Finley cover herself in melted chocolate, alfalfa sprouts, and tinsel in protest against society’s treatment of women.
Still, it has survived. Stripped down (Anderson, for instance, now wears mostly black, creates ninety-minute shows, and relies, for special effects, on what she can produce with her violin and a laptop), hitched more or less firmly to technology (you’ll find most emerging performance artists on the Internet), and straddling so many of postmodernism’s fault lines—where feminism grinds against male-bonding rituals, where stand-up comics hold forth on First Amendment freedoms, where multiculturalism vies for attention with simple autobiography, Dadaist absurdity with vaudeville pratfalls—performance art shows no signs of going quietly up to bed. JULIAN SCHNABEL (1951–)
Julian Schnabel and St. Francis in Ecstasy (1980)
He was arguably the most ambitious painter since Jackson Pollock, and for a time no American artist loomed larger or used up more oxygen. Schnabel specialized in Ping-Pong-table-sized canvases covered with entire cupboards’ worth of broken crockery, yards of cheap velvet, lots of thick, gucky paint, and the occasional pair of antlers. Also, as Mark Rothko might say, in “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on”—or what passed for same in the supply-side art world of the 1980s, where dealers such as Mary Boone frequently got higher billing than their artists. Schnabel’s work was everywhere and sold like crazy—until one day the Eighties were over and the critics began to refer to his mammoth neo-expressionist smorgasbords as leftovers from yesterday’s bender. Schnabel himself proved unstoppable, however; he’s since made a successful comeback, not as a painter but as the writer/director of critically respected—and surprisingly viewer-friendly— feature films, such as Basquiat (1996) and Before Night Falls (2000). MATTHEW BARNEY (1967-)
Worked his way through Yale modeling for Ralph Lauren and J. Crew, and had barely arrived in New York when his sculptures (especially the weightlifter’s bench made of petroleum jelly) and videos (particularly the one that featured the artist using ice screws to haul himself, naked, across the ceiling and down the walls of the gallery in which it was being shown) turned him, at twenty-four, into the art scene’s Next Big Thing. To date, Barney is best known for the Cremaster Cycle, a series of five lavishly surreal films made between 1993 and 2001, which attracted huge, mostly young, audiences; garnered wildly enthusiastic, if slightly bewildered, reviews; and taught museum-goers a new vocabulary word (“cremaster,” the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles in response to temperature and fear). The Cremaster films, which were made and released out of order, range from a forty-minute 1930s-style musical featuring elaborately costumed chorus girls, an Idaho football field, and two Goodyear blimps (Cremaster 1) to a three-hour allegory starring the Chrysler Building, in which the sculptor Richard Serra, playing the role of the Master Architect, and Barney, playing the Entered Apprentice, reenact elaborate Masonic rituals; a paraplegic fashion model pares potatoes with blades fastened to her prosthetic feet; and a bunch of Chryslers stage a demolition derby in the lobby of the building (Cremaster 3). The series, which we’re told has something to do with pregenital sexuality as a metaphor for pure potential and something to do with violence sublimated into pure form, is thickly layered with mythological references, historical details, and arcane symbolism and is, in Barney’s words, “somewhat autobiographical.” Before you could say “captures the Zeitgeist,” critics were hailing Barney as “the most important American artist of his generation” and comparing Cremaster to Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. We’d love to weigh in ourselves, but we have a hair appointment.
Raiders of the Lost Architecture
You don’t have to be standing in front of the Parthenon to be suffused with all those old doubts about what’s Doric and what’s Ionic and where to look, approximately, when somebody calls your attention to the frieze; almost any big-city post office can make you feel just as stupid. Ditto, Chartres, naves and narthexes, and even a moderately grandiose Catholic—or Episcopal—church. In fact, a little practice here at home isn’t such a bad idea before you hit Athens, Paris, and points in between.
Real-Estate Investment for the Aesthete
Contributor Michael Sorkin assesses the choicest styles, hottest architects, primest buildings, and pithiest sayings of modern architecture. And then we add our two cents’ worth. FIVE MODERN STYLES
Architectural fashion is like any other: It changes. The difference is that architects are forever looking for a Universal Style, something suitable for every occasion. This is hardly a new impulse. The folks who brought you the Doric order and the Gothic cathedral had something similar in mind. However, while it may have taken hundreds of years to put up Chartres, a smart-looking Hamptons beach house can get done practically overnight. The International Style
A coinage of the early 1930s, this label recognized that modern architecture actually did have a “style” and was not, as many had argued, simply a force of nature. The movement’s major perpetrators tended to argue that their work was essentially “rational,” that what they did was as scientific as designing a dynamo or a can opener. Le Corbusier, the most vigorous polemicist of the time, promoted the gruesome slogan “A house is a machine for living.” Thanks to which analogy, machine imagery is one of the hallmarks of the style, especially anything with vaguely nautical overtones such as steel railings and shiny metal fittings. Also popular were glass-block-and-strip windows mounted flush with a facade. International Style buildings are almost invariably white and conceived in terms of planes—like houses of cards—rather than in terms of the solidity of neo-classical and Victorian architecture, against which many of these architects were reacting. (A sense of mass, it is often said, was replaced by one of volume.) Key monuments include Gropius’ buildings for the
Dessau Bauhaus (1926), Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie (1929), and Aalto’s Paimio Sanitorium (1928). Fifty years later, the style would be much appropriated by restaurants: For a while there, it was next to impossible to dine out without staring at a wall of glass blocks from your Breuer chair.
The Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany; Walter Gropius, architect
The Yale Art and Architecture Building; Paul Rudolph, architect Brutalism
The name, like so much in the modernist lexicon, comes from the French, in this case béton brut. Which is not, as you might suppose, an after-shave, but rather unfinished concrete, the kind that shows both the grain of the underlying wooden formwork and lots of rough edges. The French have a special genius for referring to the presumed ardors of the natural—“Eau Sauvage”—and nature has always emitted strong vibes, one way or the other, for modern architects. This is no doubt because the ideological basis for modern architecture (as for everything else worthwhile) comes from the Enlightenment and its problem child, Rationalism. On the one hand, it’s resulted in a lot of buildings that look like grids; on the other, in a preoccupation with a kind of architectural state of nature, like that which preoccupied Rousseau. (Perhaps this is why renderings of modern buildings so often feature lots of trees.) Brutalism represents a reaction to the flimsy precision of the International Style, a reversion to roughness and mass. Characteristics include large expanses of concrete, dungeonlike interiors, bad finishes, and a quality of military nostalgia, a sort of spirit-of-the-bunker that might have gone down happily on the Siegfried Line. The style—popular in the Sixties and early Seventies—has pretty much taken a powder, but it’s left behind the likes of Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale University and Kallman and McKinnell’s Boston City Hall. Expressionism
A style whose day was, alas, brief. Concurrent with Expressionism’s flowering in the other arts, architects (mainly German, mainly in the Twenties), managed to get a number of projects built in a style that will be familiar to you from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. As you will recall, with Expressionism, things tend to get a little skewed, not to mention a little sinister, with materials often seeming to be on the point of melting. More than any other, this is the style that best embodies the kind of looney tunes sensibility, with its working out of the aberrations of the unconscious, that we all identify with the fun side of Twenties Berlin. The two greatest works in the genre are Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, an observatory in Potsdam that looks like a shoe, and Hans Poelzig’s interior for the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, an auditorium that looks like a cave. The latter was commissioned by theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt, no slouch when it came to the visual. Expressionism is easily the funkiest of the modern styles. Postmodernism
A kind of portmanteau term (no relation to John Portman, the architect of all those ghastly hotels with the giant atriums), meant to describe a condition as much as a style, the condition of not being “modernist.” As you have undoubtedly noticed, “modern architecture” in the 1980s came in for more than its share of lumps, with architects shamelessly scrambling to disavow what most of them only a few years before thought was the cat’s pajamas. Postmodernism’s most exemplary figure: Philip Johnson, the architect of the cocktail circuit and, until his death in 2005, the leading arbiter of architectural fashion. His premier contribution, as a postmodernist at least, was a New York skyscraper headquarters for American Telephone and Telegraph that looks a lot like a grandfather clock, or, according to some, a Chippendale highboy, allegedly the result of the postmodernist preoccupation with “history.” Look for Corinthian columns in the foyer of such extravaganzas, as well as dirty pastel colors and ornament and detailing out the wazoo.
The AT&T Building; Philip Johnson and John Burgee, architects
Just as postmodernism was beginning to seem really cloying, along came the deconstructivists, most of whom were into a deliberately chaotic, fractured, highly aggressive look: you know, skewed (not to mention windowless) walls, cantilevered beams and staggered ceilings, trapezoids where rectangles ought to be, slotted dining-room floors (one client actually got his foot stuck in his), a stone pillar in the bedroom, positioned so as to leave no room for a bed. Schizophrenic in those places where postmodernism had been merely hysterical, “deconstructivism”—a play on Russian constructivism and the largely French intellectual movement known as deconstruction—was nihilistic but preening, an all-out attack on architectural embellishment and couch-potato comfort. Most often cited as practitioners: California’s Frank Gehry, in his early days, and New York’s Peter Eisenman. The Chicago School
Not to be confused with the Chicago School of Criticism, which is known for its neo-Aristotelianism, or the Chicago School of Economics, which is known for its monetarism. The Chicago School of Architecture, which flourished around the turn of the century and comprised such immortals as William Le Baron Jenney, Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John W. Root, is widely touted as having been the source for modern architecture, American branch, and as having invented the skyscraper. Lecturers often show slides of the Monadnock Building (Burnham and Root, 1892) and the Seagram Building (Mies van der Rohe, 1958) side by side to demonstrate this lineage, citing such shared attributes as simplicity, regularity, and structural candor. This isn’t really wrong, but it’s not quite that simple, either. Most standard architectural historians take the technological determinist line with regard to the birth of the skyscraper. For them, the seminal event in the history of American architecture is the invention of cheap nails, which made possible the “balloon frame” (houses made of lightweight timber frameworks, nailed together and easy to erect), which in turn led—via the Bessemer steelmaking process and the Otis elevator—to the rigid steel frame, and thence to the profusion of tall buildings that sprang up in Chicago like mushrooms after a shower. This formulation may be too schematic, but there’s no doubt that the Chicago architects made the first concerted and systematic effort to find new forms for the new type of building, often with lovely results. FIVE MODERN ARCHITECTS
What would architecture be without architects? The five listed here, all dead, constitute the generally agreed-upon list of the modern immortals. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)
The Seagram Building; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect
Mies van der Rohe (always referred to simply as “Mies”) is the one behind all those glass buildings, most famously the Seagram Building in New York. Although Mies is hardly to blame for it, one of the big problems with this kind of architecture is that it is fairly easy to copy, and that while one such building on a street may be stunning, fifty of them are Alphaville. The reason for the ease of imitation is that Mies was essentially a classical architect. That is, like the Greeks, he invented a vocabulary (cognoscenti use linguistics jargon as often as possible when talking about architecture) of forms and certain rules about how those forms could be combined, all of which he then proceeded to drive into the ground. Although his early work was influenced by Expressionism (as with the famous glass skyscraper project of 1921) and de Stijl (the brick houses of the Twenties), projects after the early Thirties were more and more marked by precision, simplicity, and rectilinearity Prime among these is the campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, first laid out in 1939, on which Mies continued to work through the Fifties. To sound knowledgeable about Mies, you might admire the way in which he solved that perennial architectural problem, the corner. Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
Le Corbusier (a.k.a. “Corb” or “Corbu,” depending on where you went to school) is a self-appropriated pseudonym of obscure meaning, like “RuPaul” or “Bono.” His real name was Charles Édouard Jeanneret. Like so many architects, Le Corbusier was something of a megalomaniac, who, perhaps because he was Swiss, thought that unhygienic old cities like Paris would be better off if they were bulldozed and replaced by dozens of sparkling high-rises. Fortunately, Parisians ignored this idea, although it did achieve enormous popularity in the United Sta
tes, where it was called “urban renewal.” On the other hand, Corb’s buildings were superb. His early houses, including one for Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo at Garches, outside Paris, are legendary, supreme examples of the International Style, the most definitive of which is the Villa Savoie of 1929 (a big year indeed for modern architecture). Later in life, Corb discovered Cubism and concrete, and things began to change noticeably. Instead of thin planes and relatively simple geometries, Corb got into thick walls and sensuous, plastic shapes. Of this later work the best known is Notre Dame en Haut, a church whose form was inspired by the kind of headgear Sally Field wore as the Flying Nun. Toward the end of his life Corb did get to do an entire city: Chandigarh, in India. Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
To be perfectly frank, Gropius was not really such a hot designer. He was, however, the presiding genius of the Bauhaus School, which, you scarcely need to be told, was the Shangri-la of modern architecture. Which makes Gropius, we guess, its high lama. The Bauhaus building—bauen (to build) plus haus (just what you’d imagine)—was designed by Gropius and is his most memorable work, the epitome of the International Style. During its brief life, before it was closed by Hitler (whose views on modern art and architecture we won’t go into here), the Bauhaus was a virtual Who’s Who of the modern movement, a home to everyone from Marcel Breuer to László Moholy-Nagy Its curriculum, which was ordered along medieval master-apprentice lines, embraced the whole range of the practical arts, and its output was staggering in both quality and quantity. After it was shut down, Gropius (and most everyone else associated with it) came to the United States, bringing modern European architecture with them. This was either an intensely important or utterly dreadful development, depending on where you went to architecture school and when. Gropius was married to a woman named Alma, who was also married to Gustav Mahler and Franz Werfel, although not concurrently, and who is sometimes described as the first groupie.
