Cloudy Concepts

Nairy Baghramian’s ‘Knee and Elbow’ PHOTO:NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN/MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY/PHOTO: THOMAS CLARK

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, January 25, 2021

Cloudy Concepts

At the Clark Art Institute, six new outdoor works engage with the museum’s 140-acre campus. A review of “Ground/Work.”

As the pandemic compels us to take our culture al fresco, outdoor sculpture is having its day in the sun. The next day, however, might be partly cloudy. And the next might bring a frost with the chance of freezing rain. In other words the outdoors, unlike the white cube of a gallery, can challenge sculpture itself as much as the scenery compels us as viewers.

When the Clark Art Institute looked to bring art into the wilds of its own backyard in Williamstown, Mass., the muddy, icy, windswept challenges of a New England hillside called Stone Hill suggested an opportunity to do something different with sculpture than just display art plopped in a plaza, as we often encounter such outdoor work. An exhibition called “Ground/Work,” organized by guest curators Molly Epstein and Abigail Ross Goodman and on view through Oct. 17, now presents six commissioned pieces by six contemporary artists (all created last year) scattered around a 140-acre woodland pasture. This landscape with trails that rise several hundred feet and connect with a larger conservation area means visitors should be prepared for more than a walk in the sculpture park.

As an institution best known for its collection of 19th-century European and American art, the Clark is wise to use this outdoor space to bring contemporary voices and its natural assets into the mix. Through a language of reserved modernist form, each of these new works is designed to engage with the weather and the vistas, the birds and cows, all in “active dialogue,” according to exhibition literature, with this specific environment. It’s just too bad we need a field guide to some of the works in order to understand the overwrought concepts behind their creation.

You could easily miss the first work on view, which is embedded in the museum architecture itself. Jennie C. Jones has attached a 16-foot sculpture of powder-coated aluminum, wood and harp strings to the end of a free-standing wall. Called “These (Mournful) Shores,” the work is an Aeolian harp, meant to be strummed by the wind, that, according to the label, refers to the Middle Passage. It’s an elegiac idea but with layers of conceptual meaning that muddy the effect. Its dark gray palette, meant to recall that of two seascapes by Winslow Homer in the Clark collection, further mutes what should be a more resonant work.

Head up Stone Hill for a three-part work by Haegue Yang. “Migratory DMZ Birds on Asymmetric Lens” focuses on three species found in the borderlands between North and South Korea. A lentil-shaped base of soapstone supports life-size clear resin models of these birds horizontally split in two. The bottom half of each model is an inverted form meant to serve as a birdbath for local species. If you missed all that, you are not alone. When it comes to innovative manufacturing, Ms. Yang cuts no corners. The Fresnel-lens-like striations of her soapstone are enigmatic and tactile. But derived as they are from specimen scans taken around the DMZ, her resin models are too clever by half and never take flight.

In a far corner of the grounds, Kelly Akashi’s “A Device to See the World Twice” trains an acrylic lens, over 6 feet tall, on an old ash tree that happens to have fallen after the sculpture was designed. Here an attempt at a rusticated frame holding up the lens detracts from the invitation to meditate on the natural ruin of the tree seen through it. For Eva LeWitt—daughter of Conceptualist Sol LeWitt—three thin “Resin Towers” of layered colored discs seem to bubble up like thermometers in red, orange and blue. On the day I saw it, the diaphanous forms got lost in the late fall light. But since “Ground/Work” will be on view through all four seasons, there will be ample opportunities for them to come alive again.

“Knee and Elbow” by Nairy Baghramian is the exhibition standout. This work of Carrara marble and polished stainless steel dances up the hillside in expressive skeletal form. Arching shapes mime the mountains beyond while two-toned stone refers to the white and pink facades of the buildings below. The bounding sculpture speaks for itself, no notes required. Now, if only it were bigger. This impressive work, just five feet tall, calls out for greater scale.

Returning to the Clark campus, we see a final sculpture. Analia Saban’s “Teaching a Cow How to Draw” is supposed to remind us of the cows’ presence on this active pasture by refashioning a working cattle fence into a visual tutorial for several theories of composition. It’s a conceptual joke, with forms built into the fence meant to represent the rule of thirds, the golden ratio, and two-point perspective. Having grazed on this last mealy offering of Stone Hill, I felt all-the-more ready to feast on the collection inside the museum.

SEE THE WALL STREET JOURNAL OF JANUARY 25, 2021 FOR THE FULL REVIEW

Haegue Yang’s ‘Migratory DMZ Birds on Asymmetric Lens Duiitt Vessel (Gray-Backed Thrush)’ PHOTO:HAEGUE YANG/KURIMANZUTTO, MEXICO CITY/NEW YORK/THOMAS CLARK

Porgy and Best

SPECTATOR USA, November 2020

Porgy and best

How the porgy became my preferred piscine

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed his esteem for a lifetime. There are few miracles greater than what rod and reel will conjure from the deep. So it has been for me as I cast away my cares in this uncertain year.

In early spring, I delighted for the first time in the freshwater lake fish of New England. In the cooler months, bluegill, pumpkinseed, yellow perch and largemouth bass all swim close to the Connecticut lakeshore. Fishing from the shore in one such lake in Litchfield County, I found that a simple spinning jig or, better yet, a nightcrawler on a hook and bobber are all that is necessary for a strike. These frisky creatures can be as colorful as their names.

The largemouth bass, the leaping gamefish that gives title to a chain of eponymous ‘pro shops’, is best returned to the waters to leap again. The others are excellent panfish — plentiful and delicious. To make the most of them, I scale and gut the fish dockside and fry them whole, minus the head and gills, breaded and seasoned however I fancy.

Fishing is the great social leveler. The sport-fisher hauling in some bluewater beast is no greater than the dock-fisher or ice-fisher. Or so I like to believe. I take a special pride in my humble rod and tackle, perhaps 20 to 30 dollars all said and done. What wonders they still deliver. Abbondanza!, I say at ‘fish on’, as the lazy line goes tight, playing out the drag.

In late spring and through the summer months I moved from freshwater to salt. I would take the fishing grounds of Atlantic New England over just about any other. Fluke and black sea bass populate the seafloor. The meaty, muscled stripers that feed off the rips of Montauk, New York and Block Island, Rhode Island are ample evidence of divine creation. When the fish are running, and the tides are just right, sea creatures of all stripes, from sharks to blues, will just about leap onto your boat. I last fished off Montauk with the artist Joe Zucker, trawling with umbrella lures from his boat, The Rodfather. I named my prized catch of the day ‘Mahmoud A. Bass’.

I grew up surfcasting off Block Island. In the late afternoons, my father, grandfather and uncles would drive giant rods with equally giant spoons and poppers out to Sandy Point, past the then-derelict North Lighthouse, on the northern tip of the Island. As the sun set over the western shoreline of Block Island Sound, with a beach fire of driftwood crack- ling in the background, they would cast and reel into the breakers with tremendous speed. We grandchildren meanwhile feasted on fire-roasted hamburgers and hot dogs, and our grandmother’s picnic of beans and slaw, all spread across the tailgate of their tan Chevy Suburban, which we called ‘The Gentle Giant’.

Sometimes the men came back empty-handed. Other times the stripers ran up the shoreline in packed races. In one picture, my six-foot-tall grandfather holds two of his catches stretching from beltline to floor. Then the stocks went down, the levels of PCBs and other chemicals in the fish went up, the state limits went sky high and there were very few gamefish left to catch in these shoreline waters.

Fortunately, stripers are not the only fish in the sea for surfcasting. My first casts in life were for fluke, otherwise known as summer flounder. Today these cockeyed bottom feeders can still be found around the sloping channel sands of Block Island’s Coast Guard Beach, at the cut to New Harbor. Rarely do they now reach the minimum 19 inches for keepers. It has been several summers since I brought one home to fillet and fry.

Yet with the same simple spinning rod and a weighted rig baited with cut strips of frozen squid, another fish now makes its appearance. It is the abundant porgy. The reason for its abundance is its disdain among sport anglers. This is not a gamefish. At just a foot or so in length, it produces no meaty fillets. I was brought up to believe its bony flesh was inedible. And yet, done right, as I learned this summer, porgies can make for a delicious family meal, grilled every day of the week.

The New England porgy is otherwise known as the scup. It cuts a jaunty, almost tropical profile. Pound for pound, it can also put up a fight with the best of them. Chefs have started to discover its merits and have added porgy to their locally sourced menus. You might now see it called Montauk Seabream or some similar iteration. To me it remains porgy, happily pulled in by my entire family. Not everything went remote last summer. Along the harbor coves inside Block Island’s New Harbor channel cut, away from the surfcasting multitudes, we found a school of these fish regularly in session.

Reel good: James and Lily, 10

It helps that this same cove supplied our summer share of clams and crabs, along with a marine biologist’s haul of aquarium-worthy specimens. There was always something fresh to prepare for supper, from chowders to linguine vongole to crab fritters.

For us the porgy always ended up grilled whole. That’s the secret, to prepare it much the same way as the lake panfish. We catch a handful. Then back home I scale and gut and clip the fins on my deck, hosing off the guts into a bucket as the kids get lessons in piscan anatomy. I hear a grill basket helps prevent sticking and keeps the flesh together, although I have yet to get one. No matter: once removed from heat, this flaky fish looks divine any which way when dressed in a topping of summer vegetables and fruits stewed in vinegar.

You can also prepare your porgy escovitch-style with onions and peppers pickled in malt vinegar, or seasoned with Magic Blackened Redfish Seasoning; just always do them whole. Once done, pull the spine up and out, and the meat falls off the bone. Nothing remains but a head attached to a cartoon-like skeleton. How I count my blessings bringing this fish to table. Like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the porgy is small but feeds multitudes.

Grilled Porgy

1. Catch your porgy or some similar abundant panfish. Scale it, gut it, clip the fins and wash out the cavity. Leave the head on, remove the gills

2. Score the skin and stuff the bodies with lemon wedges, then salt and slather with olive oil. As an option, season additionally with hot powder, or prepare a topping of grilled fruits or vinegar-soaked vegetables

3. Grill on high, 5-6 minutes a side for the larger ones. Baste with more lemony oil or your preferred sauce or seasoning, with the grill lid open to dissipate the flames

4. Serve fish whole for full effect. Separate the meat for any fishbone-fearing guests

Escape Vehicle

SPECTATOR USA, November 2020

Escape Vehicle

The automobile’s artifice is its art, but it is still an art of artifice: A review of “Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950-2020” at the Detroit Institute of Arts from November 15, 2020 through June 27, 2021.

One of the more unusual works in the family art collection is a concept drawing of an automobile from 1937. The car, identified by the angular writing on its nose, is the LaSalle.

To call this a drawing of just a car does a disservice to the concept behind it. With its shimmering grilles and Futurist forms, the vehicle might as well be an open-cockpit fighter plane about to strafe a runway. Automobile enthusiasts, as I recently learned, consider the drawing to present one of the first known examples of a ‘ripple-disk single-bar flipper hubcap’. Clearly, here is a machine meant to do more than just deliver you from point A to point B. It is a vehicle for transporting desire, for mowing down all obstacles in your path, for getting you wherever you want to go with whatever means it takes.

My grandfather, James Ross Shipley, created this concept drawing when he was a young art-school graduate working in Harley Earl’s Art and Color Section at General Motors. The fanciful sketch reveals much about the creative origins of car design. The man behind it — behind the way we even think about ‘the car’ — was Earl, my grandfather’s boss and the industrial designer who made Detroit.

The bones of the automobile have changed little in over a century. Even the electric-car revolution, so far, has not altered the basic construction of an engine on a frame with four wheels. And before Earl, a car was little more than just that. You bought your vehicle unfinished and sent it to a coachbuilder for body fabrication. Earl began his career customizing the early cars of Hollywood in this way, but he also gave them something more than just a hood, a trunk, a windshield and some seats. When he arrived in Detroit, his genius was to turn the car body into an object of love, to convey more than mere conveyance, to make it all something on an industrial scale that we would want to acquire, occupy and control. He also expected us to trade it in when the new ‘model year’ came out — built-in obsolescence being another one of his great innovations.

Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950-2020, a new exhibition organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts, reveals the driving influence of American car design over the post-war period. As a constellation of car companies consolidated into the Big Three — GM, Ford and Chrysler — their design teams competed to capture the evolving American spirit in mobile form.

The exhibition tells this tale through ten vehicles, displayed along with the story of their designs, side-by-side with concept drawings and related automobile-inspired art. The exhibition begins with GM’s 1951 Le Sabre, a convertible of tapered nose and heavy chrome that resembles a fighter plane. With its wing-like hoodline and jetlike intake and exhaust grilles, the Le Sabre speaks to the power look of Earl’s GM. Glittering ornamentation is built right into its curving forms. Earl wrote in a 1955 brochure that he intended to make ‘these useful things beautiful, not in the sense of applying superficial ornamentation, but in developing a form of beauty exactly suited to the purpose’. ‘People like something new and exciting in an automobile as well as in a Broadway show,’ he added. ‘They like visual entertainment, and that’s what we stylists give them.’

There is power in Le Sabre’s bulging forms and cut lines, but the overall massing is also heavyweight and over-the-top — all muscle, no brains. Compare this to the next model on display: Chrysler’s 300C of 1957. Rather than roaring through the air, here is a car that looks like it could float on water. In the 300C, Chrysler’s design team, led by Virgil Exner, championed a ‘Forward Look’. With reduced chrome and a single grille, the car’s bulk is now ‘concentrated toward the rear, crowned by the upsweep of the tail,’ Exner explained. ‘Big racing boats take the same general form.’ The Chrysler’s tail is not a wing so much as a line of wake. You could imagine this elegant vehicle motoring through the canals of Venice, with headlamps like lashy eyes beckoning you on.

As the jet age became the space age, Earl set his sights higher. For his Firebird III concept car, he wanted ‘what you would expect the astronauts to drive to the launch pad on their way to the moon’. The result was the apotheosis of fin, as much Batmobile as automobile. This Firebird’s abstracted forms continued to influence 1960s car design even after its wings were clipped.

The Sixties proved there was more to car design than flying forms. Some cars took on natural shapes. The 1959 Corvette Stingray Racer, a stunningly attractive concept car from GM’s new head of design Bill Mitchell, conveys the teardrop shape of a sea creature. Meanwhile the 1967 Mustang, Ford’s wildly successful ‘pony car’, references the smoothness of a saddle mounted atop a galloping heart (made all the more apparent in the iconic equine grillework).

Fin de siècle: Dave Cummins’s ‘1960 Chrysler’ design, 1956 (Detroit Institute of Arts/Collection of Brett Snyder)

In the 1970s, Detroit doubled down on power. The 1970 Chrysler Plymouth Barracuda borrowed lessons from such cars as the 1966 GM Oldsmobile Toronado to represent strength in brutalist, hard-edged form. A straight beltline ties the body together from headlight to tail. A flat front end presents a menacing blackened maw with a hood scoop of simian nostrils.

A decade later, after an oil embargo or two, Detroit was ready to repent. With its chastened forms, the 1983 Ford Probe IV puts the car in an exercise leotard. Aerobics and aerodynamics now came to represent Detroit’s supposed new efficiency. Computers and wind tunnels, as much as the clay model, came to define car design. The 1987 Chrysler Portofino, a concept car designed by Sergio Coggiola at his Carrozzeria Coggiola near Turin, also shows the growing influence of European styling over Detroit. Here torsional forms replace lines of lateral speed. In a surprising Futurist move, the doors, hood, and trunk all rotate up to reveal an entirely open cabin.

By the 1990s, Detroit looked to the past as much as the future. Nostalgic designs appealed to the same car buyers who coveted the Detroit designs of decades before. As its name suggests, the 1998 Chrysler Chronos is a time machine back to the 300C and Exner’s Forward Look. In the Ford GT Concept of 2002 and the 2017 Ford GT, the final two cars of the exhibition, the end results are back to the future. The forward styling of the past now informs designs that are still to come.

I never got to ask my grandfather about his car-designing days. As he went on to become a professor of industrial design, all I heard of his time in Earl’s shop was that it was long hours for little pay. ‘Automobiles are hollow, rolling sculpture,’ said Arthur Drexler, MoMA’s curator of architecture, at mid-century. The automobile’s artifice is its art, but it is still an art of artifice — one designed, in the end, merely to sell you a new car.