I’ve just had a week in New York doing exactly what I wanted to do every day. In the evenings, that meant attending Mark Morris performances (always a deep pleasure) and having dinner with friends (ditto). In the daytimes, I went to see art shows—just one per day, so as not to tax my feeble attention span.
I began by catching up with the huge Marcel Duchamp show that has been at MOMA since the spring. I’ll have more to say about that in a future print issue of The Threepenny Review, but for now let me just single out the wonderful painting that opens the show: Duchamp’s The Chess Game from 1910. It has now joined my pantheon of favorite paintings from that year, including masterworks by Picasso, Matisse, and Bonnard. Who knew Duchamp would ever warrant inclusion in this crowd?
The next day I set off for the Metropolitan Museum to catch something that sounded interesting: a smallish exhibit called Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur, where his attenuated sculptures would be shown against the background of this transplanted Nubian monument. As is my wont, I entered the Met on the exact opposite end from the Temple of Dendur—the southernmost side as opposed to the northernmost, and one flight down from the main level—so I had the equivalent of about four or five city blocks to traverse inside the museum’s eternally enticing corridors. Not long after I had made it to the first floor, and just as I was about to leave behind the wondrous Antiquities rooms, I glimpsed through an open doorway a sign that said Musical Bodies. Intrigued, I entered the most serendipitous show I’ve ever seen at the Met. It was serendipitous in the way I found it (an unheralded wonder, encountered just by chance) but it was also serendipitous in the way it had been put together. Some bright soul had managed to think creatively about, and assemble industriously, a large number of examples connecting the human (or occasionally animal) body to the performance of music. There was everything from a guitar-shaped full-sized coffin for a musician, through Savion Glover’s tap shoes—accompanied by a great clip of Glover dancing—through Le Violon d’Ingres, Man Ray’s photograph of a woman posing as a cello. There was a huge variety of stringed instruments, from a gorgeous seventeenth-century lute to an original Stradivarius violin to a wooden clog with bowable strings attached. (I’ve actually heard that last instrument, or one just like it, played by a member of the Danish String Quartet.) Second to strings—many of which, of course, echo the female human body in their everyday form—came the human-shaped percussion instruments, in every possible size, material, and place of origin, from Africa to the Americas. There was a looped cartoon I recognized from my childhood, of someone playing percussion on a skeleton’s backbone, and other death-linked features in the In Memoriam part of the show. But there was also plenty of Eros, from painted harpsichord lids to just plain paintings of sexy musicians. As I moved from room to room, the sound-track changed, so that often what I was hearing was just around the corner from the next vitrine. The whole adventure was a delight, which I thought I could prolong by buying the catalog at the end. But alas, the experience was like a soap bubble that popped as soon as I got it home; the printed pages cannot begin to evoke the pleasure of actually being in those rooms.
(I did, by the way, eventually get to the Giacomettis, and they looked predictably stunning against the gigantic columns and slanted Met glass roof of the Temple of Dendur. But it was the surprise exhibit which really captured my fancy, as opposed to the one I had set out to see.)
The Peter Hujar show of contact prints at the Morgan Library and Museum took up part of another day. But it was only a small part, because the show itself is rather tiny—just four or five small rooms—and the satisfactions comparatively professional. That is, if you were a Peter Hujar fanatic (which in some moods I can be), you could get a charge out of looking at the array of thumbnail prints in a single sheet and finding the one he had chosen to make a full-sized print out of. But the museum did not make it easy for you to do this, because some of the intermittent full-size prints did not actually appear in their nearby contact sheets, and sometimes the most famous images—Hujar’s self-portrait balanced on his heel, for example, or his sublime photo of a supine Susan Sontag—were not given in their full size at all, so you had to retrieve them from memory. What I was left with, mainly, was a sense of how much Hujar’s work related to the body in motion: not just the face as it moved from one expression to another, but also the body itself, dancing or prancing or just plain sitting still.
The final show I saw was something called “clinamen” at the Park Avenue Armory. I have not read about it anywhere—I only know about it because a friend attended the June opening—and it’s going to close on August 9, so you had better hurry to see it if you can. But “see” is not quite the operative verb: you need to hear it and even, dare I say, sense its subliminal effects on you. “I think it’s a bit too meditative for you,” my friend said, snootily predicting I would leave in five minutes. But in the event I was entranced.
The creator is a French artist named Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, but it is not your standard artwork, by any means. Located in the vast Drill Hall of the Armory (a space where I have seen performances but never art shows before), “clinamen” consists of three circular pools of water set in a wooden surround, which functions as a platform on which people sit cross-legged, lie down, rest on backless benches, or even stroll around while they contemplate what is going on in the pools. Within the blue water there is a constant sense of movement, as white ceramic bowls made of some kind of high-fired porcelain jostle for space while they circulate in all directions. Every time one bowl touches another, you hear it as an audible clink, and the size of the bowls determines the range of tones, so the whole effect is rather like that of wind chimes, but less familiar and less persistent: you can hear the spaces between the clinks as well as the clinks themselves. If the sound alone is not enough to soothe your savage breast, there is the gently darkened room (with just a single moonlike lamp shining down from high above), the appealing blue of the water, the constant flowing motion of the variously drifting bowls, and the commendable silence of your fellow watchers, sitters, and contemplators.
The corner of Park and 67th, where the Armory is located, is not the most stressful of New York’s neighborhoods, but it is still a relief to come in out of the summer heat and rest in this cool, welcoming place. If you buy a single $30 admission ticket, it will last all day, from noon to 8:00 p.m., so you can actually go in and out of the exhibit; I recommend starting at the show in the early afternoon, exiting for lunch somewhere nearby, and then going in for a second bout after you’ve appeased your appetite. I suppose you could even use the intervening hours to catch one of the other shows I’ve described—the Met and the Morgan are both served by roughly the same stretch of the 6 subway as the Park Avenue Armory—but that would be exhausting, and why should art be exhausting instead of surprising and pleasurable?