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

Don't Sweat It

THE SPECTATOR USA

Don’t Sweat It

From the Baths of Caracalla to the Baths of Tenth Street

I miss my shvitz. At least once a week before the shutdown, I went to the Russian & Turkish Baths on 10th Street in Manhattan’s East Village. I saw it as my connection to the ancients. Here was a tiny remnant of classical bath culture surviving in the modern city. Or so I liked to believe. Like much else in New York, I now sweat for its return.

Back when I was studying classical archaeology, I spent a week or so crawling through the ruins of the public bath house of Ostia, Italy. Even in that Roman port town, something like the Brooklyn of the empire, bath design exceeded anything in the post classical world. Each room had its own distinct shape and purpose. After the apodyterium, you pass through the solarium, then the tepidarium, on to the caldarium, finish off in the frigidarium and do it all over again. The architecture and even the brick were designed for optimal bathing performance. The walls were hollow to allow the furnace fueled gasses to radiate from all sides in a system we now call hypocaust heating. Olive oil served in place of soap, with a tool called a strigil used for scraping off the dust of the Campania. No one in history was better bathed than a Roman.

The line of descent from the Baths of Caracalla to the Baths of 10th Street might represent the decline and fall of the bathing empire. From Rome to Byzantium to the East back West by way of the Pale of Settlement — to here, a dank, century-old New York City basement. Like the memory of Rome, the achievement of the Russian and Turkish Baths is that it has survived at all.

The Russian and Turkish Baths, photograph by Weegee

I’ve become known here as ‘professor’. The other regulars are mostly hipsters, oldsters and Jewish Orthodoxers. Before the shutdown, and hopefully again soon, I would go for a late lunch of borscht and Baltika beer. The unassuming canteen off the check-in desk served up highly respectable Russian fare surrounded by the fading autographs of television newscasters, Finnish diplomats and the stars of Superman II. As my order was prepared, I entered the changing room of mismatched lockers to the smell of cooked socks and put on the provided robe, which was more like a scratchy black sheet. The more you go, the more you know to opt out of the shorts and shoes they give you and bring your own swimsuit and shower slippers. I also started carrying my own Russian banya hat. It is a felted affair of elvish shape with Cyrillic lettering that I was once told reads ‘Queen of the Baths’. Oh, well. The sides curl up to transfer the water dumped on your head into a cooling trickle.

They say the Russian & Turkish Baths date back to 1892. The condition of the establishment leaves little doubt of its antiquity. The building is a tenement walkup with a basement long ago converted into a set of highly overheated rooms. In the 1980s, the bath’s two Russian owners, Boris Tuberman and David Shapiro — the latter died in May while planning the reopening — purchased the establishment and soon thereafter split their ownership to run it on alternating weeks. The unusual arrangement confused many and caused divided loyalties among the patronage, to which I remain a neutral party. But it also introduced the necessary inertia to ensure that few concessions were ever made to the changing times, including our own.

Everyone there knows what to do, or soon learns, with their own bathing ritual moving from one room to the other. I always start with the Aromatherapy Room, a steam room where someone covers the light with a wet towel and douses the spigot with essential oils. From there I head to the Turkish Room for the hot, wet heat. Inside are walls of overactive steam radiators surrounding three tiers of splintering bleachers. By the door is an ice shower, which contributes to the dankness and no doubt the spalling rust of the vaulted cement ceiling.

Last comes the Russian Room. It is the darkest and most Chernobyl-like. The temperature reaches over 200 degrees, fed by its own oven. When the oven door is left open, the radiant sensation has to exceed 3.6 Roentgen. Again there are tiers of benches, this time made of sizzling stone. I know not to take the top row on my own. Too hot. I like to leave easy access to the water trough, where you can cover yourself in buckets of ice water for some relief.

The “platza” as administered in the Russian Room of the Russian & Turkish Baths

On most visits I order up a service called the platza. Viktor, the bath’s most famous attendant, knows me well. His special treatment resembles the sensation of traveling through a car wash while being waterboarded. Administering the platza also greatly pleases Viktor, which is good because he must perform these duties in the burning heat. Into the Russian Room we go, cooling an upper corner bench by the oven with a towel soaked with a bucket of water for me to lie upon. Another towel then goes over my head, which Viktor splashes with water at semi-regular intervals when he is not cooling himself.

The platza proceeds for some 15 minutes. The ablutions involve the application of oakleaf branches that have been soaked in oily soap. During the procedure Viktor says little aside from ‘Yes’, ‘Good’, and ‘I kill you’ as he brushes and smacks the branches across the skin. The action removes the body’s toxins and just about everything else. The sensation also makes everything seem even hotter and, in fact, induces a temporary fever in the body, which I understand can have salutary benefits. Fortunately, Viktor also has a special sense for just when the body is about to become sous vide, and so he will splash you once in a while with a little cold water.

When it is all over, and Viktor congratulates your strength and requests your tip, I head to the cold plunge. This dark, refrigerated pool with a chemical smell is cooled to 40 degrees. It feels like it. The feet hurt the most. But the experience has also inured me to extreme changes in temperature. It is a good reminder that we are not created to be reptiles; we are warm blooded creatures. I have since taken my cold plunging to Coney Island, where I have sometimes joined the Polar Bear Club on their Sunday swims. The body’s reaction to cold water is flight, then fight. After a few minutes of dizzying unpleasantness, the flesh energizes with rushing blood and starts to feel warm. But the experience is best left to knowledgeable companions. If you are in there too long past the 10- to 15-minute mark and start to feel overly excited, it is time to get out.

At the Russian & Turkish Baths, the experience is complete with a brief rest on the roof deck. At one time this area was modeled on a Russian dacha, or country house. There are some fading murals to attest to this, but with benches made of broken plywood and torn foam, the area now resembles a squatters’ encampment. No matter: whatever the season, after the baths, the atmosphere here always feels ideal.

Like the Russian & Turkish Baths, the bath houses of Rome were cultural pavilions, even more so than in Greece, where this bathing culture originated. The Roman baths had restaurants, performance spaces, massage areas and gymnasiums. The Egyptians can keep their great pyramids. Rome’s real achievements, the gravity-fed aqueducts that moved 300 million gallons of water a day, created the world’s best baths. At one time there were 900 bathhouses in Rome alone. The Baths of Caracalla covered 27 acres and were the inspiration for New York’s original Pennsylvania Station. When one Roman emperor was asked why he bathed once a day, he replied it was because he did not have the time to bathe twice a day. When I return to the 10th Street Baths, I know I’ll feel the same way.

Hungry like the rabbit

THE SPECTATOR USA, January 2021

Hungry like the rabbit

In the darkest hour, there emerged a new light. It was 1940 when the double-barreled shotgun of the world first took aim at a little hole called home. At first, it seemed as if the hole’s inhabitant would be taken in by the old carrot trick. At least he would be careful enough not to stick his neck out. With an unblemished, white-gloved, four fingered hand, he feels around his immediate borders and takes the carrot.

Of course, it’s a trap to draw him out. Did he know that all along? He would soon enough. The next time, it’s not a carrot but the hard steel of a gun aiming straight down his burrow. He flicks the barrels with his finger — plink, plink, plink — just to be sure. He tosses back the half-eaten carrot and pats the gun, but it is too late. The instinct to stay out of trouble will no longer do. Something is up.

Just what, precisely, is up was the question on the world’s mind. It was July 27, 1940 when a bunny named Bugs had the audacity — one might say, the insouciant foolhardiness — to go and ask what’s up of the world’s more doctoral minds in ‘A Wild Hare’, his first Merrie Melodies cartoon for Leon Schlesinger Productions, distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures.

There was a lot of rabbit hunting going on that season. Far too much. Despite the aggressor’s warnings to ‘Be vawy, vawy quiet — I’m hunting wabbits,’ the time for silence is over. That ‘scwewy wabbit’ is about to reveal Elmer J. Fudd for the gun-pointing fool he is. A moment later and that shotgun is tied up in a bow. Butts get roundly kicked like the bell striker of a carnival strongman game. The hunter is now the hunted. At his wits’ end, Fudd relents — ‘Wabbits! Guns! Wabbit twaps! Cawwots’ — in abject defeat.

‘Can you imagine anyone acting like that?’ Bugs turns to ask the audience. ‘You know, I think the poor guy’s screwy.’ Channeling the ‘Spirit of ’76’, the rabbit then holds his carrot like a fife. To the tune of ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’, he marches off stiff-legged back to his rabbit hole.

There are few American creations more endearing or enduring than Bugs Bunny. As voiced in the Noo Yawk accent of Mel Blanc, Bugs embodies a national character that combines street smarts with whimsy, reserve with reluctant but ultimately total engagement. He also emerged on the world stage at just the right moment in history.

Warner Brothers had been distributing short cartoon films since the early 1930s. Its two series, called Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were originally distinguished by their storylines and musical components (the Melodies were meant to promote Warner songs). By the 1940s, the distinctions quickly disappeared as Bugs became the breakout star of both franchises by presenting a new type of American hero. In ‘Super-Rabbit’ from 1943, echoing the finale of ‘A Wild Hare’, Bugs even ends up dressed in a Marine uniform — a ‘real Superman’, he says, with ‘important work to do’ — and heads off to ‘Berlin, Tokyo and points East’. Inspired by the episode, the US Marine Corps inducted Bugs as an honorary private. At the end of the war, he was discharged having achieved the rank of master sergeant.

Bugs appeared in over 150 Warner cartoons during the golden age of American animation. Directed by Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson and Chuck Jones, among others, and scored for a full orchestra by the musical-quoting Carl W. Stalling, the lavishly produced shorts were eventually eclipsed by cheaper television cartoons in the mid-Sixties.

In May, HBO launched its new Max streaming service with a relaunch of this vast Looney Tunes library. Last month, Warner added to the merrie trove by releasing a three-disc Blu Ray set, The Bugs Bunny 80th Anniversary Collection. Be forewarned: even such seemingly encyclopedic collections come to our censorious age with amendments and redactions. On HBO, with their skipped numbers, the episodes omitted from the 31 seasons of Looney Tunes are easy to spot. They are much harder to track down and see. When combined, copyright extension and political correctness are potent content killers, two of the horsemen of our oncoming techno-apocalypse.

‘All This and Rabbit Stew’, a 1941 Freleng episode, was among the original ‘Censored Eleven’ Warners shorts of 1931-44 that were pulled from syndication in 1968 for their ethnic stereotypes. ‘Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt’, a 1941 Freleng episode that was an Academy Award nominee, is also absent from the HBO archive. ‘Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips’ of 1944 and ‘Herr Meets Hare’ of 1945 established Bugs in full wartime mobilization as he outsmarts both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. These two historic episodes are nowhere to be seen as well. The latter episode, set in the Black Forest — Bugs gets lost on his way to Las Vegas — sees our hero face off against none other than Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler. Was this episode pulled because it might upset today’s Axis viewers? In its use of Wagnerian music and imagery — Bugs mesmerizes Göring by riding on a white horse dressed as Brünhilde to the tune of the ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ from Tannhäuser — Freleng’s ‘Herr Meets Hare’ serves as the key prelude to Chuck Jones’s ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ from 1957.

That episode, Jones’s masterpiece, has been called the best cartoon of all time. It was the first cartoon to be deemed ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ by the Library of Congress. Here the melodies of Warner Brothers all come together in one Gesamtkunst-cartoon. Elmer Fudd now plays the antagonist as he and Bugs take on quick-changing Wagnerian roles. The music of the ‘Ring’, Tannhäuser, Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman are all woven into the tapestry of the score. For many children, including this former one, their first exposure to the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ was set to the libretto of ‘Kill the Wabbit!’

Jones’s ‘Rabbit of Seville’ (1950) similarly recasts Rossini with Bugs and Fudd. In ‘Hare Trigger’ (1945), Freleng introduced Yosemite Sam as a new Bugs adversary packing double the firepower of Elmer. Here it was the Old West versus the new East, as Bugs’s cool wit sets Sam’s bluster to boil. Meanwhile, Marvin the Martian, who had been introduced by Jones in ‘Haredevil Hare’ of 1948, became a new Cold War villain for the Space Age, as Bugs sets out to diffuse Marvin’s Earth-shattering ‘Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator’.

In 1950, for the rabbit’s 10-year anniversary, Warner released a tribute short about Bugs’s life directed by Robert McKimson called, appropriately, ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ The episode purports to tell the story of Bugs’s career on stage and screen as he goes from ballet school to the Broadway chorus. Eventually he is picked up by Elmer Fudd, a big vaudeville star, and the two take their act to Hollywood. Again, you won’t easily find the complete episode online. A brief cameo by Al Jolson saying ‘Mammy’ most likely tanked the full show. But non-offending clippings do readily exist, in particular the final ‘screen test’ with Bugs and Fudd adding words to the opening theme song that well sum up the antics that made Bugs the star he is:

‘What’s up, Doc? What’s cookin’?
What’s up, Doc? Are you’re lookin’
For Bugs Bunny bunting…?
Elmer’s gone a-hunting
Just to get a rabbit skin…
But now the rabbit’s gone again!’

There are many such looney gems in the tunes archive. The best are infused with melodies that are indeed merrie, featuring a rabbit who well knows the score.