exhibitions

(All photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“I never thought people would want to wear clothes with monkeys and bananas on them,” said Miuccia Prada of her spring 2011 collection, a retail smash that featured madcap cotton separates printed with baroque scrolls, embroidered monkeys, and thick stripes. And the bananas? A wink at Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker. More than 70 years earlier, when Miranda was still working the carnaval circuit in her native Brazil, Elsa Schiaparelli was feeling a circus theme. The designer described her summer 1938 collection as the “most riotous and swaggering” one she had ever created, and illustrator Christian Berard immortalized the “circus parade at Schiaparelli’s” in Vogue. “Clowns, elephants, horses, decorated the prints with the words ‘Attention a la Peinture,’” said Schiaparelli of her Barnum-infused couture. “Balloons for bags, spats for gloves, ice-cream cones for hats, and trained Vasling dogs and mischievous monkeys.” The two fanciful collections meet at long last in the “Naïf Chic” gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” which opens today.

Curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton reveal the striking similarities between Schiaparelli and Prada by focusing on seven areas of aesthetic kinship, from “Ugly Chic” and “Hard Chic” to “The Classical Body” and “The Surreal Body.” That last one is the showstopper, celebrated in a final gallery of mirrors (pictured directly above) that tricks the eye into perceiving an infinity of Dali collaborations, trompe l’oeil accents, furs, feathers, and pailletes, which Prada believes are irresistible to women. (“Paillettes are a typical form of eveningwear,” the designer has said. “Because I hate eveningwear, I try to make pailletes problematic—by making them so big or so heavy, for instance, that they become problematic.”) It can be a challenge to tell a Prada from a Schiaparelli, particularly when hefty fabrics and exotic textures are involved, but as Judith Thurman writes in an essay in the masterpiece of an exhibition catalogue designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, “Prada’s citations of Schiaparelli are an exercise in sampling, not imitation. They enrich and complicate, rather than merely translate her models, and they illustrate the way that critics and artists of every generation reinvent the formal language they inherit.” Prada is neither a copycat nor someone who is interested in translating the work of the contemporary artists she collects into covetable clothing. For her, art is an entirely separate barrel of monkeys.
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Will Anna Wintour wear a zany Schiaparelli chapeau and Prada cat-eyed shades? Will Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the evening’s honorary chairs, spread his infectious laugh from one end of the red carpet to the other? Will attendees be forced to swap their bejeweled clutches for shiny new Kindles? Who will stumble in their Prada racecar shoes? Find out for yourself this evening as the Metropolitan Museum of Art webcasts the arrivals to the Costume Institute Benefit that celebrates “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.” The livestreaming fun begins here at 6:30 p.m., when Vogue-approved hosts Billy Norwich and Elettra Wiedemann will chat up gala co-chairs including Wintour, Carey Mulligan, and Miuccia Prada, along with whoever else swans past them in a sufficiently whimsical and/or impossible ensemble. Special pre-taped segments will offer a sneak peek at the exhibition, which opens to the public on Thursday, as well as the history of the gala benefit. Look hard and you might just spy Pentagram’s Abbott Miller, who designed the exquisite catalogue.

“There may be only one designer more absolute in her confidence than [Miuccia] Prada: her fellow-honoree at the Costume Institute. [Elsa] Schiaparelli did more than any of her peers to promote fashion’s status as an art, and she would no doubt have found it natural to mingle at the Met with Phidias and Vermeer. Prada’s statements about art suggest that she must find her own enshrinement somewhat ironic. Her fortune has financed an adventurous private collection, an exhibition space outside Milan, and a foundation that supports cultural experiments. In 2010, she was invited to present the Turner Prize at Tate Britain, partially in recognition of her prominence as a patron. (She wore a pair of plastic banana earrings with a stark black coat.) She has also worked with the Dutch architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas on the design of her major retail spaces, which she calls ‘epicenters,’ in New York and Los Angeles. Yet Prada insists that her vocation and her avocation are unrelated. She has refused to collaborate on limited editions of Prada merchandise with any of the art stars in her collection. (‘Anything that doesn’t sell,’ she once said dryly, ‘is a limited edition.’) In her somewhat heretical view of a profession that often hankers after transcendence, fashion design may be a creative enterprise, concerned, as art is, with culture and identity, but it isn’t what artists do.”

-Judith Thurman in “Radical Chic,” her New Yorker preview of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s imminent spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations”

Above: Elsa Schiaparelli in a 1932 portrait by George Hoyningen-Huené and Miuccia Prada photographed by Guido Harari in 1999. (Photos: Hoyningen-Huené/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive and Guido Harari/Contrasto/Redux)

“Take your breathing people and scram,” weren’t the words used by the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games when talking to artist Olafur Eliasson about a project he’d proposed, but rejection was the basic sentiment and it seemed like a good way to start a post. After being encouraged to submit a proposal by the Committee, Eliasson requested £1 million to put together a project called “Take a Deep Breath,” which the BBC describes as an “installation would have invited people to inhale and exhale on behalf of ‘a person, a movement or a cause’ and record it on a website in a personal ‘breath bubble.’” The Committee took a look and decided that not only was the project not “particularly attractive” but also “seemed very expensive.” So, to extend our opening to this post, the organizers were essentially saying “Take your overly expensive breathing people and scram.” But again, we’re putting words into mouths. The tragedy, of course, is that this rejection, however well reasoned, means that the world may never see a functioning “personal breath bubble” unless Eliasson finds someone else with the cash to build, assemble, or however one would go about making a “personal breath bubble” in this day and age.

If over the years you had developed a vague idea of what types of public talks and concerts the Metropolitan Museum of Art would be hosting over any given week, you’ll need to run out and get a new calendar. Yesterday, the Met announced that its annual performance and talk series will be renamed “Met Museum Presents” and would be varying fairly substantially from years prior, all due to last summer’s hiring of new Concerts & Lectures General Manager, Limor Tomer. While you’ll still see plenty of classical pieces being performed, Tomer has said that she’s interested in tying those performances together with current exhibitions, so there will be programs like composer Tan Dun performing a Chinese opera to go along with an exhibition devoted to Chinese garden imagery. In the business world, we think they call that “synergy.” The new “Met Museum Presents” will also introduce for the first time, a performing artist residency, kicking things off with DJ Spooky, the celebrated musician, artist, and writer, who will perform five times at the Met, as well as hosting “a number of panel discussions, conversations, workshops, and gallery tours for audiences.” He is set to begin the residency this October, which will run through to next June.

“The only valuable class I took in art school was from a guy who taught display lettering which was literally like sign painting,” says cartoonist (and screenwriter) Daniel Clowes of his formative years at Pratt Intstitute. “Everybody else was like, ‘Aww man, I can’t believe I have to take this cornball class,’ where I was front and center every week. Still to this day I use everything I learned in that class.” Clowes’s irresistible handlettering, groundbreaking graphic novels, beloved New Yorker covers, and much more are the subject of a retrospective that opens next Saturday at the Oakland Museum of California. “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” is accompanied by a splendid monograph out this month from Abrams ComicArts. Designed by Jonathan Bennett, the book includes essays by the likes Chris Ware and Chip Kidd. And feast your eyes on a test sample animation by Nicholas de Monchaux, who is masterminding the design of the exhibition:

The imminent museum survey earned the cartoonist a Clowes-up—”Humanity’s Discomfort, Punctured with a Pen“—in Sunday’s New York Times, where he shared the front page of the Arts & Leisure section with a Smurfily dressed Nicki Minaj. Among the diverse Clowes admirers that writer Carol Kino rounded up for the profile: Alexander Payne, who is directing the film adaptation of Wilson; Art Spiegelman; and (would you believe?) Neo Rauch. “Dan’s work stands out because of its precision,” Rauch told Kino. The artist was also “fascinated by its underground, slightly creepy aspect,” and added, “Plus, he has a very dark humor that appeals to me immediately.”

Better living through typography? See it, believe it, achieve it at The Happy Show, an exhibition of Stefan Sagmeister’s work that opens Wednesday at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (it will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles early next year). “I am usually rather bored with definitions,” says Sagmeister. “Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down.” The fruits, both literal and figurative, of the designer’s ten-year exploration of happiness will be on display through August 12.

The ICA promises a portal into Sagmeister’s mind as he experiments with potential happiness inducers ranging from from meditation and cognitive therapy to mood-altering drugs and maxims spelled out in jaw-dropping flights of typographic fancy. Visitors will also get a sneak peek at the Happy Film, his still-in-the-works documentary (check out the titles in the below video). Slated for release in 2013, the feature will offer “a proper look at all the strategies serious psychologists recommend that improve well-being,” according to Sagmeister, who decided to do the project as a film in part to stave off the complacency that can come from working in familiar media. “It might fail miserably,” he says. “But if I’ve gotten a hair happier in the process, it might have been worth my while.” Until you can make it to Philadelphia, check in with the ICA’s Happy Show Tumblr, which chronicled the preparation of invitations to next week’s opening party: slices of bologna laser-cut to reveal the word “HAPPY.”

From left, “A Devil’s Bridge” (2011-2012) and “The Expulsion (or, The Rebel)” (2011). Portrait below by Diego Singh. (Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York)

“I’ve always been obsessed with the occult,” says Hernan Bas, standing among the shadowy figures, stolen souls, and devastated landscapes in his latest series of paintings. “But lately, it’s become not as scary as it used to be.” Today’s candy-coated demons and witches next door (Vampires! They’re just like us!) inspired the Detroit-based artist to put the “super” back in supernatural. The nine works in his solo show “Occult Contemporary,” on view through April 21 at New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery, replace the easy-listening version with darker stuff. But don’t look for the devil you know. “A lot of the paintings are based on original stories where the devil is the protagonist, but whenever humans make these deals with the devil, the devil always ends up getting screwed,” says Bas with a chuckle. “So I wanted to paint him as a sympathetic character, because really, he’s just trying to do his job.”

Born in Miami, Bas has made a name for himself with masterfully colored canvases that offer idyll glimpses. His possible paradises are often inhabited by young men prone to contemplation amdist craggy lagoons and swirling abstract skies. Lately, Bas has been increasingly tempted toward abstraction. He points to “One of Us” (2012), in which a mix of acrylic, airbrush, charcoal, and block printing depict a gentleman being beckoned to join a cultish pack. “If there was anything autobiographical about this show, that [figure] would be me, because it’s like ‘Join the Abstract Expressionist group! We’ll lure you in,’” he says, pointing to a field of blue at the bottom. “I flipped this one multiple times. That blue was originally the sky, not the water. That’s the thing with abstraction. You can hint at landscape so easily, but then I isolate one small part and it’s abstract again, like a mini-Rothko.” And is that a de Kooning we spot floating in the upper left corner? “De Kooning for sure,” he says. “I was floored by the show at MoMA. You kind of forget how good he is.” Read on for more from Bas, who talked with us about painting, the devil, and Detroit.

The natural world—forests, trees, bodies of water, mountains—usually figures prominently in your work, but in Occult Contemporary, the built environment and architectural elements loom large. What’s the story there?
I’ve been having leanings toward abstraction lately. When I take a step back from that, adding the architecture to it and making things that are more angular and grounding are a way to take it back a little bit from abstraction. It allows me to make it more readable as a location or a scene that could actually be happening, not just in your mind.

How do you begin one of these paintings?
I usually start with a general abstract composition. I just start throwing paint on it. They all usually look like 1950s New York School paintings when I first start them. I compare it to the whole idea of staring into clouds, when you start to see shapes, like “Oh, that could be a cliff.” That’s why I tend to lean toward landscape, because whenever I do an interior scene, I have to plan it a little more significantly ahead of time. So it’s a little bit of laziness, but also it’s just more fun.
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Apparently the city of Berlin isn’t as welcoming of branded art projects as New York is. The BMW Guggenheim Lab, which was met with relatively positive marks when it premiered this past August in the East Village, was expected to next move to Germany, where all 2,200 square feet of the mobile structure, designed by Tokyo’s Atelier Bow-Wow, would set up shop beginning in mid-May and run through the summer. As announced back in January, the site selected to host the next stop on a planned world tour was the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, “known for its engagement with social action and public art” and “centrally located.” Unfortunately for the traveling exhibition, they didn’t expect massive push back from left-wing activists. Bloomberg reports that due to numerous threats, “elevated risk,” and planned protests, the Lab has decided to cancel its plans and move elsewhere. Where that “elsewhere” might be (somewhere in Germany? Or moving out of the country entirely?) hasn’t been announced yet.

The Hammer Museum (of art), which is not to be confused with the Hammer Museum (of hammers), is introducing an $100,000 award as part of its “Made in L.A. 2012” biennial, opening June 2 across three venues: the Hammer, LAXART, and the Department of Cultural Affairs’ Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park. Funded by art-loving philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn, the Mohn Prize will be awarded to one of the 60 artists from the exhibition and will be accompanied by the publication of a book on the winner’s work. The twist? A jury including MoMA’s Doryun Chong and Rita Gonzalez of LACMA will select the five finalists, but after that, it’s up to the people. The winner will be chosen by visitors to the exhibition through online voting. Would-be voters can register during their visit (photo ID will be required, so there’s no monkey business) before declaring their top pick using a highly secure digital platform.