Old Museums, New Tricks

THE NEW CRITERION, February, 2017

Old Museums, New Tricks

On the Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History, the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia, and the lessons we can learn from older museums.

The best museums are often museums of museums—institutions that put their own history on display alongside their collections. The museums that fascinate me are never the buzziest models off the shelf but those that have been allowed to age. Either through conscious efforts at preservation or through the preservative fluids of neglect, such institutions invite us to experience history as a part of history. Rather than attempting to exist outside of themselves by erasing their past, museums that seem antiquated or even “out of date” can reflect the highest values of their mandates to protect and present the objects in their collections, which must include themselves.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is of course one example of a museum that has preserved its own history better than most, something I wrote about in these pages in December. Even as it has evolved into more contemporary forms, the museum has worked to reveal the ornamental details of its architectural past—from the Victorian Gothic heart of its initial 1880 building by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould (now its gallery of Medieval art), through its many later additions in the Romanesque, Beaux-Arts, and modern styles.

Such a presentation can be even more revelatory in museums of science. Here older buildings and displays serve a vital and often overlooked role in teaching us about the history of instruction and inquiry. By seeing what older halls get right and wrong (or what we now believe to be right and wrong), we gain perspective on our own scientific certainties and the charismatic methods through which museums now present themselves to the modern public.

The American Museum of Natural History, the grand institution just across Central Park from the Metropolitan, and with a similar history, has likewise developed as an accumulation of buildings in a wide variety of styles. The institution has also been blessed with generations of naturalists and craftsmen who were the best in their scientific fields. History has borne that out, and we can continue to see it in the wondrous animal dioramas that have become the hallmark of the institution and have fascinated patrons across the ages (including this reviewer, beginning with almost weekly visits as a child).

After the naturalist and taxidermist Carl Akeley died in 1926 on the slopes of Mount Mikeno in the Belgian Congo while developing his Hall of African Mammals—beneath the spot now represented in his gorilla diorama—background painters such as James Perry Wilson, foreground sculptors such as Raymond DeLucia, and taxidermists such as Robert Rockwell carried on his work though the Hall of North American Mammals, one floor directly below. A decade ago, Stephen Christopher Quinn, who has continued what is now a century-old legacy of dioramic design at the museum, published a history of their efforts in his book Windows on Nature.

The Hall of Northwest Coast Indians at the American Museum of Natural History, c. 1920

An equally interesting but less frequented area of the museum is the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians—in part because the room has been diminished over the years from its original brilliance. Directly off the museum’s Seventy-seventh Street entrance, now fully enveloped by later additions, the hall occupies the first floor of the museum’s first building.

This room is remarkable not only for its age but also for the work of the museum’s iconoclastic anthropologist, Franz Boas, who developed it at the turn of the last century. A curator and field worker, Boas was, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, one of the country’s primary Pacific Northwest explorers and personally responsible for acquiring many of the objects the museum now possesses from the region.

Anti-evolutionary, Boas was also anti-theoretical and argued for pragmatism and a high degree of intra-cultural observation in research. Departing with his day’s progressivist beliefs in the eugenic order of evolution, which grouped non-Western cultures together with primitive man, Boas displayed ethnographic objects on their own terms. He divided the large hall into sections and dedicated each to a certain tribe of the Northwest Coast: the Tlingit, the Haida, the Kwakiutl. Within these alcoves he further assembled the items of each group: ceremonial masks, pots and bowls, ceremonial ladles, the blankets and coppers of the potlatch. Extensive texts and descriptions were located with the objects, and additional pamphlets and monographs were available for museum patrons within the hall and in the museum bookstore. During his time at the museum, Boas himself even led tours of the collection in order to explain his advanced method of display.

Franz Boas with a ceremonial mask from the Northwest Coast

The result was distinctly non-hierarchical, allowing each object to exist in tribal specificity. But more than just recognizing the value of his objects, Boas also acknowledged the intelligence of his patrons. Far from the feeble-headed immigrant masses envisioned by his trustees, Boas believed his museum-goers were able to take on the complexities of his own field experience and understanding. (He was, unfortunately, less charitable to a family of Greenland islanders dying in the museum basement).

The young Claude Lévi-Strauss happened to be one such new arrival to absorb Boas’s lessons. Boas’s displays served as a visual structure for Lévi-Strauss’s developing methodology when he visited the hall in the 1940s. The opening paragraphs of The Way of the Masks, Lévi-Strauss’s book on ceremonial masks in the Pacific Northwest, is dedicated to the museum and its “outmoded but singularly effective museographic methods.”

Boas feared that elisions and simplifications of ethnographic material would delude the museum public into believing they had mastered complex information. “There appears a multiplicity of converging and diverging lines which it is difficult to bring under one system,” he said against surface conclusions and quick assumptions. Yet Morris Ketchum Jesup, then president of the museum and an ally, nonetheless objected to what he saw as Boas’s cluttered display. He wanted a presentation that combined didactics with entertainment, and set about instituting these changes after Boas’s departure in 1905.

While Boas’s tribal enclaves were maintained, the number of objects on display was reduced, large totem poles were commissioned for the room, and wax mannequins were created to add an element of theater to the large Haida canoe in the center of the hall. Between 1910 and 1926, the artist Will S. Taylor painted theatrical murals along the inside walls while the windows were blacked out and the architectural ornamentation covered over. Each of these post-Boas additions raised the stakes of spectacle but retreated from the radicalism of the presentation. What has resulted today is a muddle of intentions in a hall that calls out for a return to his original design.

The totality of the museum’s rich history, its masterpieces and its missteps, must now inform its latest efforts at building and development. Since its founding in 1869, the American Museum of Natural History has always been a work in progress. With a wide range of buildings, the museum has gradually expanded over a quadrangle between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue that was, in fact, set aside in the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which established the original street grid.

This past month, the museum unveiled plans for a 194,000-square-foot, $340-million new wing known as the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, to be constructed facing Columbus Avenue in line with Seventy-ninth Street and set to open in 2020. In recent years, a pocket of local residents has objected to any additional encroachment by the museum onto what is now known as Theodore Roosevelt Park, yet the museum has every right to build there. Arguments for green space ring hollow considering the proximity to Central Park, and new construction will fit within the footprint outlined in the museum’s nineteenth-century master plan, which remains incomplete.

More pressing should be questions of how the building—costing as much as a stand-alone museum—relates to the values of the institution and reflects the culture in which it has been conceived. It might be said that every generation gets the museum wing it deserves. The fanciful rustication of J. Cleaveland Cady’s south façade gives way to the Beaux-Arts grandiloquence of John Russell Pope’s Roosevelt Rotunda on up through Polshek’s vitrine-like computer-age planetarium. Such organic expansion at the very least allows for the preservation of older buildings and halls.

Model for the American Museum of Natural History’s Gilder Center, facing Columbus Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street.

The Gilder building, by Studio Gang Architects, will dispense with historicized style altogether in favor of sculptural concrete resembling “slot caverns, riverbank canyons, and hydrologic flow,” explains Jeanne Gang, who used water and blocks of ice to study the forms. The monumental effect will be post-diluvial—a natural history museum at the eschaton.

Inside, some of what is planned sounds very promising. A five-story “collection core” will line the interior with visible storage displaying 3.9 million specimens, or about 10 percent of the museum’s collection. Large areas will be dedicated to live butterflies and other insects as the museum continues to drift into a role traditionally taken up by zoos.

Still unknown remains the proper use of the building as a center for education—the same questions that dogged Boas’s original hall. With new “exhibition techniques for diverse audiences” offering an “authentic engagement with science,” here is a fully immersive diorama that promises seamless storytelling on the deleterious effects of humanity but one that may not fully consider the “multiplicity of converging and diverging lines,” as Boas put it, in the Malthusian shade. With a new building designed to “combat the post-truth era” and provide “wisdom for how to treat your environment,” according to museum leadership, it remains to be seen whether such mandates will also lay bare the history of science in the hands of progressivism. In this museum of natural history, the Gilder Center must not become a temple of doom.

The Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphi

It is taken as a given that museums must keep current with contemporary dictates and modern expectations. Yet just consider an exception to this rule, and a truly exceptional one at that. The Wagner Free Institute of Science, incorporated in 1855, has operated out of the same building in North Philadelphia since 1865. Much like Boas’s famous hall, but without a growing museum to envelop it, the institute and its displays remain nearly untouched since the late nineteenth century.

As a remarkable specimen of Victorian science, the institution deserves a visit by anyone interested in the history of museum culture. Yet more remarkably, even with its antiquated resources the Wagner continues to operate today as the oldest free education program in the country, teaching 18,000 low-income children annually while offering free access to its 100,000-object collection, mainly to an under-served local community. On the day I visited, while educators had organized a collection hunt upstairs, a paleontologist was unwrapping his findings for an enraptured assembly of children in an auditorium that still retains hat hooks beneath every seat.

With barely the resources to remain in operation, here is an institution that continues to instruct us on just what it takes—or doesn’t take—to learn from the objects of our fascinating world.

Take Five

“It’s got a great beat and you can dance to it.” You wouldn't necessarily think to apply the old chestnut from “American Bandstand” to the works of Igor Stravinsky. Yet in his swirling colors, counterposed in thrusting, angular relief, there is something obviously danceable to the modern master—and why his music has called out to such a wide range of dancers and choreographers over the last century.

Scènes de Ballet

“Stravinsky x Five,” a program from the winter season of the New York City Ballet, brings together five dances by five choreographers interpreting the music of this one composer. It begins with Scènes de Ballet, Christopher Wheeldon’s second work for the company that premiered in 1999. The work calls for sixty-two students, all drawn from The School of American Ballet, who dance in the imaginary reflection of the mirror at the barre of a ballet studio. The conceit is simple but brilliant and one that is ripe for exploration (and the first reason I came to see this program). But it rises or falls in its execution by the students, who must dance with synchronized precision. So here the work is also a demonstration of the next generation of NYCB, made more poignant as these young dancers do rise to the challenge of this ballet.

With a fanciful set by Ian Falconer, who envisions a soaring dance studio overlooking onion domes as though illustrated in a children’s storybook, the work recalls the Imperial Russian origins of both its composer and this company through its founder, George Balanchine. The dancers, starting with two of the youngest ballerinas and building to greater complexities of older students, perform not only as reflections in the imaginary mirror but also as reflections of the legacies of dance they carry forward.

Wheeldon’s choreography exhausts every permutation of the setup and goes too long, finishing in an Esther Williams finale. What should be saved for the conclusion now occurs halfway through. The reflection of a young dancer suddenly breaks from formation. A pas de deux of older dancers enters the “mirror” in a dream sequence imagined by the student on the other side. The unexpected break is the most meaningful moment of the dance, truly breathtaking, as the aspirations of countless hours at the barre are made real.

The Cage

Next up is The Cage, Jerome Robbins’s 1951 ballet based on Stravinsky’s 1946 Concerto in D for String Orchestra. Unlike the Stravinsky of Scènes de Ballet, an old-world phantasia he composed for a Broadway review in 1944, this high-modernist work is all fits and starts. Robbins visualized this music in “insect and animal life” with “the female of the species considering the male as prey. This ballet concerns the rites of such a species.” The result is a Rubies feel, with many pigeon-toed struts executed in formation. The inhumanity of the spectacle is heightened by Jennifer Tipton’s stark lighting, teased tufts of hair, a rope web by Jean Rosenthal, and costumes by Ruth Sobotka that render the dancers as sun-deprived and subterranean. The story concerns a “Queen” (Savannah Lowery), a “Novice” (Lauren Lovette), and two male “Intruders” (Jare Angle and Sean Suozzi). But even when well danced, especially by Lovette, the result now comes across as mid-century burlesque, with a femme who is cartoonish fatale.

Eight Easy Pieces

Eight Easy Pieces up next takes us from the 1950s to a work by Peter Martins that premiered in 1980. It also struck me as vintage PBS, a spare composition lighting up my Trinitron (which it just might have done). Through the dance Martins gives form to eight piano duets that Stravinsky wrote with easy left- or right-hand parts: three for the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev himself, and five for Stravinsky’s own young children. Here the piano and its shared players are brought right on stage. Martins’s minimalism can come across as fussy, but danced by Rachel Hutsell, Olivia MacKinnon, and Alex Maxwell, all new to their roles, the effect was a delight, with Stravinsky’s music distilled into pixels of color.

Scherzo Fantastique

I hope the next dancer-choreographer commission holds up as well, but I doubt it will. Justin Peck is ballet’s millennial machine, a soloist and resident choreographer whose lack of affect (at least as seen in the documentary Ballet 422) is in contrast to the ebullience of his work. For Scherzo Fantastique, which premiered just this summer in Saratoga (and is this twenty-nine-year-old’s eleventh work for NYCB), Peck takes a right at spring and lands his Stravinsky in the full light of summer. With a stunning Fauvist backdrop by Jules de Balincourt, the Bushwick-based French painter, this dance should have everything going for it in its return to modernist animism. But here Peck is all sun and no shade, more MGM than NYCB, with a sensibility that harkens to a golden age when ours calls out for iron.

Stravinsky Violin Concerto

Finally it was time for the two masters together: Stravinsky and Balanchine. George Balanchine came to co-found the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet through one of those grand twentieth-century odysseys. Trained in what was then the Imperial Ballet School of Saint Petersburg, he fled the Bolsheviks for Paris where he became Ballet Master in the final years of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Finally, after a turn in Hollywood, he came to New York, where he set about teaching American dancers classical technique infused with Modernist sensibility, with his School of American Ballet training all of his dancers for New York City Ballet. In a program that begins at the barre in old Russia with Scènes, “Stravinsky x Five” concludes with the full fruits of Balanchine’s cultivation of ballet in new America.

Stravinsky Violin Concerto, first choreographed by Balanchine for the Ballets Russes in 1941 and reimagined three decades later for NYCB, is presented here front loaded with principals of the company. “The capabilities of his dancers to dance as he wanted came from his classes,” writes Suki Schorer in the new book Balanchine Teaching. Through the discipline of daily exercises at the barre, the execution of the plié, the tilt of the head in épaulement, and the importance of the fifth position to a body’s vertical center, Balanchine fine tuned the instruments of his company.

Even in the current principals of NYCB, we continue to see his resonance: the fluid flexibility of Maria Kowroski, the floating leaps of Amar Ramasar, the swift strength of Robert Fairchild, and the stunning precision of Sterling Hyltin. ”Balanchine’s choreography, he made clear, came from the music,” Schorer continues—and was arguably never better than from the music of Stravinsky.

“Stravinsky x Five” continues with modified casting through this Friday, February 3, at the New York City Ballet.

Gallery Chronicle (January 2017)

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2017

Gallery Chronicle

On art in the age of Trump.

America’s cultural fault lines should have become apparent even before the seismic shock of the latest presidential election. Now we might ask what role art could play in bridging that divide. Our stratification has become increasingly unstable. Regardless of one’s political views, the solution should not be greater segregation but new efforts at cultural integration.

The country’s cultural division was the subject, of course, of Charles Murray’s penetrating 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010. Here Murray observed how a “high-IQ, highly educated new upper class has formed over the last half century. It has a culture of its own that is largely disconnected from the culture of mainstream America.” To prove the point to his readership, which he assumed would largely be of this new class, Murray posed a series of questions called “How Thick is Your Bubble?” The quiz has now been widely distributed through an online version published by pbs’s NewsHour. It asks questions such as whether you have ever walked a factory floor, known low academic achievers, or regularly eat at chain restaurants—experiences that might show shared experiences with working- and middle-class Americans.The quiz should be compulsory testing for any latter-day Pauline Kael who cannot understand a political outcome so out of step with elite expectation—which was the true shock of this election.

It was Kael’s fate for her life’s work as a film critic to become overshadowed by a single political quip: that she couldn’t understand how Nixon won, because no one she knows voted for him. That aphorism, it should be noted, turns out to be somewhat off from what Kael actually said. At a 1972 talk before the Modern Language Association, Kael remarked that “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” So Kael was acknowledging her own provincialism while also, perhaps, demonstrating relief at the segregation that created it—even as she could occasionally “feel” the presence of a Nixon voter in the demotic assembly hall of the American movie house.

The takeaway of Murray’s study might be that we are all Pauline Kaels now, increasingly divided not by a wall but by the cultural fortifications that surround the city-states from flyover country. I say this as a critic, not unlike Kael, writing from inside the battlements. When I took Murray’s latest quiz, in which lower numbers indicate greater degrees of insularity, I scored a mere eight out of a hundred—a number so impenetrably low that it falls below even the average median of 12.5 for my boyhood neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which Murray reveals to be the “bubbliest zip code” in the United States. And I must say even as I have moved on and up (two zip codes north), most people I know still live in this “rather special world” of separatist identity that run deeper than presidential preference. It is a cultural deficiency I acknowledge, and one that I have tried to confront in this column by looking to the tributaries and backwaters of the artistic mainstream.

After all, such separation does not make good culture. It is certainly not a healthy culture, but rather one made of equal parts disdain and resentment. It is also not a rich culture, with the dynamics of America at full throttle. Just what could be done about these divisions is a question that should now be posed by our cultural institutions, our artists—and by government itself. What follows are a few possible answers.

In the museum world, one of the most successful recent examples of bridging our cultural divide has been the creation of the (appropriately named) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2011. Tucked deep in Ozark hill country, with a complex designed by Moshe Safdie that spans a bubbling body of water called the Crystal Spring, the museum is a literal bridge of American art in a culturally underserved area of the country. If you haven’t been there, I encourage a visit, with fifty flights a day landing in nearby Fayetteville and a boutique “museum hotel” that connects by sylvan bike paths to the institution, which should increase the comfort level of even the bluest of blue-staters.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Founded by Alice Walton, the heiress of the Wal-Mart fortune, and constructed with funds north of one billion dollars by the Walton Family Foundation, Crystal Bridges bucks all conventional wisdom on who, where, when, why, and what a major museum should be. “Swim upstream,” wrote Sam Walton, Alice’s father, in his 1992 autobiography, published the year he died. “Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.” By choosing to locate a new world-class museum far beyond our wealthy urban centers, Alice Walton has been an iconoclast in culture just as her father was in business, all while giving back to the hometown that still maintains the original “Walton’s 5&10” (which is now also the company’s museum).

Crystal Bridges’s truly counter-cultural formation has also been reflected in its maverick programming—so unlike many other inland museums that operate more like colonial outposts of coastal elitism camouflaged in pandering condescension. Two years ago I visited Crystal Bridges for a survey of contemporary art called “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now,” an exhibition I covered in these pages in October 2014. In search of artists whose “engagement, virtuosity, and appeal” have gone underappreciated, the museum’s director and curator hit the road on a 100,000-mile coast-to-coast visit of 1,000 artist studios. They logged 218 flights and 2,396 hours in rental cars, recording 1,247 hours of audio conversation and extensive video as they narrowed their selection down to the 102 artists to include in their 19,000-square-foot exhibition. “The vision on which Crystal Bridges was founded, and its mission today, is to share the story and the history of America through its outstanding works of art,” Alice Walton told me at the time. “That’s exactly what ‘State of the Art’ is about—sharing works that are being created in artist studios all across the country, in our own time.” “The mainstream is very narrow,” added Don Bacigalupi, the museum president who spearheaded the initiative with Walton. “Our exhibition is outside the mainstream structure of the art world.” Granted, such a wide net will necessarily bring in a haul of various quality, but at least this diverse selection of contemporary American art, created in just about every corner of the country, was a refreshing departure from our art fairs and biennials. It was also an indication that we all need to hit the road.

A decade ago an artist named Scott LoBaido did just that—he went on the road to paint the American flag across fifty rooftops in fifty states. He crossed back and forth over the country nearly two times. In the process, he went broke. He was attacked by wild animals. He dodged twisters. He took a container ship to Hawaii. He slept outside on a twenty-two-hour ferry ride to Alaska. He relied on strangers for food and shelter. And as curators look to the state of political art post-election, they might consider giving equal time to the conceptual and painted work of this self-styled “creative patriot.”

Scott LoBaido

A self-taught artist living just a ferry ride from the heart of the art world, LoBaido hails from that other New York City—the middle class, flag-waving, Republican-voting borough of Staten Island. I first met LoBaido in September 2004, at a show of his paintings at a gallery in lower Manhattan, off Broadway, timed to the Republican National Convention (“Gallery Chronicle,” October 2004).

A year after I met him, I got word that he was in Mississippi working in the relief effort after Hurricane Katrina. He had driven a truck of supplies down from Staten Island, offering his skills in wood and paint. It was in Mississippi that LoBaido made a connection between Katrina and the other great tragedy of his life: the terror attacks of 9/11. In Mississippi, he saw a spirit of hope, renewal, and patriotism that he believed could unite people from very different worlds. He was then inspired to paint an American flag on one of the Gulfport rooftops. He donated his truck to the relief effort, and on his twenty hour bus-ride home, the idea for “Flags Across America” was born: a visible display from the ground and from the air. He said he wanted to send an artistic message to the troops flying home from war. Back home at bar on Staten Island called The Cargo Café, where he was artist-in-residence, LoBaido loaded up a 1989 Chevrolet Suburban named Betsy, a replacement gift from a friend painted in the colors of the American flag: this was the beginning of “Flags Across America.”

LoBaido’s efforts earned him a profile as “Man of the Week” on abcNews. Yet when I told his story at a conference of the College Art Association and made the case for him as a legitimate political artist, the audience, needless to say, wanted none of it. Most recently, LoBaido has made a name for himself again: this time for painting a red-white-and-blue “T”-shaped billboard in Staten Island. This sign, and his flag murals, have been the repeated targets of vandalism and arson. LoBaido’s dissent from cultural orthodoxy is not mere novelty; it is heretical, which should say much about the diversity promises of the cultural establishment. Until this changes, much of America will never see themselves reflected in those mandarin surveys of contemporary American art such as the Whitney Biennial, despite their overtures to inclusion.

Even beyond the National Endowments, there are now dozens of presidential appointments and thousands of Federal employees dedicated to American arts and culture. The new administration could do worse than seek out the cultural analogues of those “forgotten men and women” who have become estranged from the political establishment. Moreover, the power of celebrity can bring comfort, rather than just disdain, to the culturally forsaken, such as Gary Sinise’s outreach with soldiers and veterans through his Lt. Dan Band or Dolly Parton’s efforts for childhood literacy. I have also been moved by efforts such as the Joe Bonham Project connecting illustrators with Wounded Warriors as they undergo rehabilitation, shining a light on the hidden faces of war.

Concept for Wheels of Humanity, a sculpture by Sabin Howard to be displayed
at the National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C

A final mention should go not only to our culture’s geographic outliers, but also to those who have been aesthetically pushed aside. What I mean are to those many artists, undoubtedly a majority of the country’s artists, whose creative urge has driven them beyond the pale of narrow, establishment style. You might have your pick of this category, but it would include every artist who does not fit within the Happy Meal of Contemporary Art now served up the same way across the country (Gerhard Richter burger; Kehinde Wiley fries; Jeff Koons toy). So consider the religious artists, the plein-air painters, the formalists, the classical realists, and the many, many others now on the outside looking in.

All this will be a bitter pill for the art world to swallow. “Trump lost the art vote by a wide margin,” writes Ben Davis. A critic on the Left, Davis it should be said contributed the most comprehensive coverage of artists across the political spectrum this election season, including the activism of Scott LoBaido. “The entire cultural establishment . . . threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton (or at least against Donald Trump) in the final stretch of this campaign.” Still, Davis concedes, “mainstream culture failed to be the decisive factor where it was needed. It is even likely that this anti-Trump unanimity may have helped give a false sense of his weakness.”

Davis is right when he suggests that the “dynamic of this election should raise some critical questions on the limits of cultural activism.” It is a conclusion with which the world of culture must reckon as it considers art in the age of Trump and the best application of its creative and institutional energies in a divided landscape.