Homepage New Orleans Prospects

I came back to New York in 1998 after having lived in New Orleans, with some interregnums, for a long time. (“20 to life” I used to say, reflecting how long it took me to embrace the city, but not acknowledging all that it had given me in return.) I’ve revisited NOLA just twice, and these trips inevitably have come to be thought of as the post-Katrina visit and, last November, the post-BP-spill visit. The residual anguish of the oil spill is largely invisible in the city, confined to the devastated shrimping and fishing communities of the coast and waterways. In town, the vulturish impulses of disaster tourism are in decline: the Lower Ninth Ward, still scarred by hundreds of desolate lots, shows a defiant if too-small number of reb… Read More

Homepage: Michelangelo and Ugo Eye to Eye

"MICHELANGELO EYE TO EYE" is the English title given to the final work of Michelangelo Antonioni, a brief documentary of 2004 in which the frail, 92-year-old director communes with his namesake's great carved figure of Moses. This month brings a more mediated but nonetheless suggestive encounter between two Michelangelos: the publication by Steidl of Antonioni's Blow-Up, a monograph on the landmark film with trim, penetrating essays by Philippe Garner and David Alan Mellor, and the opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art of the deeply researched retrospective "Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974," curated by Carlos Basualdo. Beyond the calendar coincidence, the connection grows personal. For me, like many others of my generation, Blow-Up triggered a lifelong fascination with the processes, seductions and puzzles of photography. I've long kept my art historian's eye on the complex role played by photography in Pistoletto's work as well as on the photographs taken of his art by Ugo Mulas. Indeed, seeing Mulas's photographs in the late 1970s was for me the first revelation of a connection between the two modern-day Michelangelos.
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Sculpture Under The Influence

In December 2007, the New Museum inaugurated its Bowery location with “Unmonumental,” a four-month presentation of a determinedly unheroic strain of recent assemblage that embraces humble materials and low production values, the piecemeal, the contingent, the nonhierarchical. Midway through the exhibition’s run, and just a stroll away at Deitch Projects in SoHo, filmmaker Michel Gondry opened his show “Be Kind Rewind.” He re-created the derelict video store from his unspeakably bad film Be Kind Rewind, in which two buddies set out to reshoot the movies one of them inadvertently erased in the shop, using materials at hand to fashion the props and scenery. Visitors to the gallery were invited to make their own films using makeshift se… Read More

Home Page: Memory Aids

On July 20, as I was roughing out an essay about Berlin for this page, a settlement was announced between Vienna's Leopold Museum and the estate of Lea Bondi Jaray. The estate had contended that Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally (1912)—seized by American authorities while on loan from the Leopold to MoMA in 1998—had been stolen from its Jewish owner, Jaray, by Friedrich Welz, an Austrian Nazi, in 1939. According to the agreement, the museum would pay the estate $19 million; the estate would release its claim to the work. Portrait of Wally would return to Vienna after a brief exhibition in New York at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. An additional stipulation established how the painting will forever be shown to the public: the Leopold Museum will permanently display signage next to the Painting at the Leopold Museum, and at all future displays of the Painting of any kind that the Leopold Museum authorizes or allows anywhere in the world, that sets forth the true provenance of the Painting, including Lea Bondi Jaray's prior ownership of the Painting and its theft from her by a Nazi agent before she fled to London in 1939

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