A view of the Met's Schiaparelli and Prada exhibition (all images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

It’s inevitable not to compare the new show at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute to last year’s blockbuster, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, however unfair that might be. But it doesn’t matter, because Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, a pairing of two disparate designers that gives far too much precedence to the latter, falls flat, regardless of what preceded it.

The exhibition opens to a sleek viewing area with glossy plastic benches in front of a projection of Miuccia Prada interviewing actress Judy Davis playing Schiaparelli, reciting lines from her memoir, Shocking Life. The short movies, directed by Baz Luhrman, are sprinkled throughout the exhibition as a backdrop to the perfectly styled mannequins, and while clever, serve more as ambient noise than the eavesdropping they had intended, distracting viewers from the clothes on view.

A view of the show's attempt to compare and contrast the work of both designers (click to enlarge)

The first section of the exhibition situates the two designers’ strengths in terms of the parts of women they typically dressed. Schiaparelli’s designs tended to focus on the upper part of the body, most of her more creative constructions being jackets and chapeaux, whereas Prada centers her energies on laboring over skirts, shoes and other adornments for the lower half of the body. The curators juxtapose Schiaparelli’s hats alongside Prada’s shoes, and pair Prada skirts with Schiaparelli jackets. However, nothing matches, not in the strictest sense of styling nor the theoretical sense of curation. There’s an attempt to draw many of the pieces together through visual motifs, whether they clothes have similar geometric patterns, botanical embellishments or insectoid ornamentation (both designers seem to have a propensity for beetles), but the clothes have nearly nothing to do with each other outside of that initial visual cue, especially in terms of fabric, silhouette, color and construction.

The exhibition continues by exploring similar styles they experimented with in their oeuvre before fizzling out into the last gallery, which displays Prada outfits and digital projections of Schiaparelli designs behind them. The only iconic piece of Schiaparelli they can really boast exhibiting is her shoe hat, which is shoved up at the beginning until we’re left with very few (if any) bona fide Schiaparelli designs. Though clearly easier to receive, the numerous, flashy Prada pieces (some of which are from collections so recent I’ve seen them on eBay) overshadowed the small pool of Schiaparelli. It becomes apparent that the curators may have accepted one too many outfits courtesy of Prada, and the effort in combining these two minds gives way to opening a Prada outlet where nothing’s for sale.

Shoes, shoes, shoes (click to enlarge)

The interesting (and unfortunately unexplored) aspect of note in the pairing of Schiaparelli and Prada lies neither within their shared heritage (because, really, their Italian-ness is not enough to glue the two together) nor any juxtaposition in their styles. The shear camp glamour of Schiaparelli’s lobster dress or chest suit neither complements nor challenges Prada’s sleek sturdiness. It’s like curating the works of Salvador Dali and Damien Hirst in one show: provocative at first thought, but ultimately discordant in execution.

No, the truly fascinating thread between the two is their rich, strong connections with the art world. Coco Chanel herself once commented that Schiaparelli was that “artist who makes clothes,” as she spent most of her career commiserating and collaborating with the likes of Dali, Cocteau and Giacometti. Many of her designs skirted the typical mode of female dress in the 1930s and ’40s, incorporating surrealist subject matter in her designs, from tear dresses to lamb cutlet hats. Prada, alternatively, forged herself into a great patron of the arts, collecting works from the YBAs, setting up the contemporary art space Fondazione Prada and aiding artists Elmgreen and Dragset in their permanent interventionist installation Prada Marfa.

Impossible Conversations is the smallest show at the Costume Institute I’ve seen in a long while, and while it’s nice not to have an overload of garments to process, there appeared to be less care and thought put into the small selection. It seems strange to mount another retrospective after Savage Beauty, and a lot of the creative work often seen in the curatorial department was lost. The Met is very good at mounting provocative thematic exhibitions, like Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, where a large assemblage of high fashion as well as film costumes constructed an interesting and exhilarating show. Since McQueen had recently passed, and his garments had enough impact to stand on their own without much context, it made sense to give him a retrospective. But this show sits somewhere in between “wonderfully thematic” and “impressive retrospective.” It might have been interesting to explore “impossible” conversations angle across a breadth of different designers instead of limiting it to two, but as it is, it’s simply impossible to reckon with.

Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations continues at the Metropolitan Museum (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) until August 19.

Installation view of Brooklyn Utopias in the Old Stone House (photo by Rick Schwab)

This past weekend the renovations of Washington Park and the J.J. Byrne Playground outside the Old Stone House in Park Slope were unveiled to a cacophonous crowd of thrilled children and their parents. Fittingly, I was there to see Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space, an exhibit on the second level of the Old Stone House coinciding with the park’s reopening that invited artists to respond to the ideas of bringing play to public spaces while being conscious of community and urban development.

Washington Park viewed from the Old Stone House (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

While I talked with curator Katherine Gressel and Old Stone House executive director Kimberly Maier about public play space in New York City, it was possible to see the results of the years of community planning that went into the now vibrant greenspace outside. Where once there was an asphalt field and scrubs of patchy grass, there is now a swath of green adorned with climbing toys and fountains. The 19 artists and organizations in Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space take the concept of community play spaces further in their exploration of how art can be a strategy for addressing public parks and recreation spaces, as well as examining the eminent domain and gentrification that sometimes drives these developments.

Katherine Gressel, curator of Brooklyn Utopias

Brooklyn Utopias, an ongoing series curated by Katherine Gressel in the Old Stone House, asks artists to envision an ideal city using Brooklyn as a lens. Gressel said that she first had the concept for Brooklyn Utopias back in 2008, when Brooklyn’s rising popularity and subsequent boom in housing construction resulted in overdevelopment and other consequences. Many grassroots groups have responded by taking an active role in improving neighborhoods and bringing community ideas together, and Brooklyn Utopias is a way to see how artists are addressing these same issues.

Previous Brooklyn Utopias exhibits have focused on overdevelopment, community preservation and urban agriculture, and Park Space, Play Space, in bringing play into this urban development dialogue, has organizations like the Groundswell Mural Project presenting a video of their “Dreams (Infinite Dreams)” mural created in a partnership with the Trust for Public Land as part of a greater project to transform PS 164 in Borough Park’s blacktop schoolyard into a green play space, and artists like Bettina Johae investigating how eminent domain has been used for forming parks in Brooklyn.

Bettina Johae, "Eminent domain nyc - Brooklyn parks" (detail)

The Old Stone House is an appropriate venue for exhibits on idealized urban planning, as the house itself is the result of a 1930 Robert Moses project to create an idealized replica of a 1699 Dutch farmhouse that was a site in the Battle of Brooklyn. Katherine Gressel is a painter herself and has explored the development of Brooklyn in her work, including a painting that places the Battle of Brooklyn in the contemporary Brooklyn streets, which is held in the Old Stone House’s permanent exhibit downstairs. Modern battles over public space also inspired Park Space, Play Space, including Occupy Wall Street, represented through the art of Karen Kaapcke who did plein air paintings in Zuccotti Park. (She was featured on Hyperallergic in December 2011.)

Cheryl Molnar, "Kent Ave. 2005-2011" (2012), ink-jet prints

The fact that one person’s utopia can be another’s loss is an undercurrent throughout the exhibit, as well as the impact of development on the natural and existing urban terrain of Brooklyn. Cheryl Molnar concentrated on the rapid transformation of Kent Avenue after the rezoning of the Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfront, and the sprouting of apartment buildings, along with the opening of public space and parks, shows how in only a few years this dramatic construction project has brought both new economic and community activity, as well as major changes in the area’s character.

Marina Zamalin, "Brooklyn Canals" (2009-2011), video (photo by Rick Schwab)

Much of the art definitely has its strength in the ideas behind it over exuberant visuals, but Marina Zamalin’s transfixing video, “Canals of Brooklyn,” is a beautiful journey over the waters of the borough to find surprising corners of nature that look more like untouched wetlands than waterways in a city populated with millions. Brooklyn’s nature was captured in more accessible, yet just as easily overlooked, places in Lynn Cazabon’s “Uncultivated” works, where the artist photographed uncultivated plants found in the perimeter of Washington Park at the Old Stone House. Both demonstrated that nature isn’t just corralled in fences and that landscaped park spaces are only one aspect of greenspace to be preserved in Brooklyn.

Husk, "T.U.B. Park (The Utopian Bath Park)," watercolor, graphite and ink on paper (detail)

Of the artists that propose park projects that could be realized in Brooklyn, Husk’s is the most whimsical, yet still appealingly possible. Their proposal for “T.U.B. Park (The Utopian Bath Park)” would have hot tubs made from repurposed water towers filled with rainwater and powered by the kinetic energy of children’s play as well as gravity, water and compost, the utopia coming from the adults getting their relaxation while the children play frenetically below.

Stephanie Beck, "Circle Park, From the Park Space Series" (2012), graphite, cut paper and glue on paper

Two artists have utopian maps proposed for urban parks, with Christine Gedeon’s “OSH, Brooklyn (Plot Re-visualized)” comprised of a fiber topography of an idealized revitalization of the Old Stone House park spaces, and Stephanie Beck’s “Park Space” series of relief-maps presenting an ideal layout of parks within the city streets. Both are direct takes on the theme of artists shaping community, and the artists’ potential to propose change.

Washington Park and Old Stone House

Public programming that involves the community is an essential part of Brooklyn Utopias, and this coming Saturday, May 19, is a whole day of events at the Old Stone House and in Washington Park. At noon, Bettina Johae will lead a bike tour in conjunction with her “eminent domain, nyc” project to selected park sites of eminent domain in Brooklyn, including Prospect Park and Calvert Vaux Park, ending at Coney Island. (Email b [at] ettinajohae [dot] com to register for the bike tour.) Will Pappenheimer is hosting an Augemented Reality workshop where he will demonstrate how to use smartphones to make the windmills of his app, Sky Mills, appear in the park and invite participants to add to the skywriting of the virtual plane that layers over the sky. Game-designers Gigantic Mechanic are bringing interactive games, including the Rubber Ball Battle of Brooklyn, which mixes dodgeball with capture the flag to replicate the Revolutionary War engagement, and Shadowplay, a live-action arcade game where players play with their shadows. Other upcoming events can be found on the Brooklyn Utopias blog.

After spending time in the tranquility of Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space in the Old Stone House and stepping out into the swirls of people drawn to the park in the spring sun, it was possible to imagine that although art can be much more romanticized than what usually ends up in city planning, it is possible to bring some of its spirit into Brooklyn, and that artists are an essential voice in imagining an exuberant, yet intelligently developed, future for the borough.

Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space shows through June 24 at the Old Stone House (336 3rd Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn). 

Caroline Cox, "Spin" (2012), installation detail (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

Moving through Caroline Cox’s immersive installations at the Clocktower, the venerable exhibition space on the 13th floor of a city-owned building in Lower Manhattan, is like peeling free from gravity.

Although you don’t literally leave the ground, the sculptures’ pulsing aureoles do their best to convince you otherwise. One moment you’re in the institutional-white hallway of a neglected municipal building and the next you’re among star clusters and jellyfish, crepuscular clouds and aggregating amoebae.

Cox melds a sculptor’s sense of materials, solids and voids with a stage designer’s gift for lighting and space. In her work, which consists of synthetic netting, mirrors, lenses and clear acrylic balls, abstraction is less a distillation of form than an analogy for the textures of life.

Caroline Cox, "Orangeblueorange" (2012), installation detail (click to enlarge)

She has transformed the two rooms of her Clocktower residency into contrasting domains, one glowing with unearthly pinks and blues, the other a netherworld of stark black and white. The door between them isn’t a demarcation sealing off opposites as much as a portal between complementary presences. Here, both light and darkness shimmer.

In a smaller installation set inside a deep and wide wall display, she has hung mirrors, lenses and netting on monofilaments above a floor dotted with concave, convex and flat circular mirrors. It is a small-scale version of an ongoing project that can expand to a height of 30 feet.

At once biomorphic and industrial, austere and eye-filling, the installation’s myriad reflective parts seem to dissolve the boundary between liquid and solid as they evoke architecture of the visionary sort and the psychedelia of long-ago rock’n’roll.  Its title is “‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky.”

In a cityscape where One World Trade Center has just eked past the Empire State Building to claim the prize as the tallest skyscraper in New York, the 13th floor isn’t all that high. But who needs to rise above 1,250 feet when you can float free of gravity?

Caroline Cox, "'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky" (2012), installation detail

Caroline Cox, "Orangeblueorange" (2012), installation detail

Caroline Cox, "Spin" (2012), installation detail

Caroline Cox, Spin continues at the Clocktower (108 Leonard Street, Financial District, Manhattan) through May 7.

Installation view of "Prepared: Strategies for Activists" (all photos courtesy Chen Shaoxiong)

LAWRENCE, Kansas — Mounting an exhibition anywhere in the neighborhood of occupation aesthetics can be precarious nowadays, for people are increasingly fed up with the same reiterations of ideological conceptualism and the ultra-politically correct, derivative works that skim the surface of real world problems precipitated by global capitalism, government incompetence, dictatorship and injustice.

But Beijing-based artist Chen Shaoxiong had a rather pragmatic impetus for reconsidering — through art — global phenomena from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to democratic elections that have sprung up in remote Chinese villages. Acutely attuned to happenings in the socio-political spheres since he began making art in the 1980s in Guangzhou, Chen observes that the geopolitical where and what always figure more prominently than how social activism can be effectively practiced. Chen maintains that “in our universities we have never established a discipline for technical approaches to protests and demonstrations,” both important aspects of a modern citizen’s political life.

Hence for his recent three-week residency at the University of Kansas’s Spencer Museum, titled Prepared: Strategies for Activists, Chen attempted to take matters into his own hands in what he envisions to be a wholesome dose of social-activism prophylaxis. Contending that “demonstrations and mass gathering … have been practiced in every conceivable manner, and have proven to be an effective aspect of the political language of democracy,” the artist believes that “people should be vaccinated with this mentality.”

In developing the project with the artist since late 2011, the museum’s curator of global contemporary art, Kris Ercums, also hopes to “dissect the anatomy of a protest,” thereby facilitating a better understanding of the “basic structures of social movements as contemporary phenomena” in the opportune setting of a university campus.

Banners outside the Spencer Museum

It’s an interactive project from the get-go. Events that Chen has planned include a fence box facing the museum, weekly workshops led by researchers and activists, open-air public speaking, dinner conversations and ongoing interviews with KU students from diverse cultural and ideological backgrounds that have cultivated diverging attitudes and experiences of social activism.

The local community in Lawrence, the small town where the university is situated, quickly jumped on board. Chen’s original banner on the fence box featuring a Guy Debord quote became enthusiastically overwritten with new slogans and eventually overlaid with new banners and objects. Insights were shared; ideas spread.

A short documentary edited from interview footage (where interviewees are credited with their nationality) was screened as part of the final exhibition, which opened on April 11. Answers to a succinct questionnaire of four questions offer telling insights into the perceived function and effectiveness of protest in different societies. (The questions: 1. Have you ever experienced/partook in a protest? 2. What do you know about protesting? 3. Have you any knowledge of the history of protesting? 4. Imagine getting involved.)

In addition, artworks made by Chen and other participants were juxtaposed with pieces culled from the museum’s collection, an impressive lineup including the Guerrilla Girls. Archival materials were supplemented with fresh specimens from such recent movements as OWS, among them a toilet lid sprayed with Bank of America’s logo. Collectively these revolutionary memorabilia, though plucked out of their original context, provide a new one for rethinking the latest global movements. It also reassures, as one of the interviewee put it: “so that we don’t feel isolated in our dissent.”

Chen's visual checklist for protesters juxtaposed with a poster of police equipment

The exhibition is richly informative, whimsical and thought provoking without any of the contrived scruffiness or coming across as feeling fashionable. Practical information also abounds: a poster Chen designed for the project provides a visual checklist for those planning to go into the streets. Juxtaposed with a similar poster illustrating standard police-force equipment, it acknowledges that, even as social media and new technologies continue to transform the ways people protest, incidents from the 1970 Kent State shootings to the recent pepper-spray cop incident at UC Davis serve as poignant reminders that the human body is uniquely powerful yet extremely vulnerable in the act of struggle.

After Kansas, Chen plans to realize his “protester’s training camp” to more locales, including his censorship-tight home country, where contemplating demonstration through art and research as a form of “vaccination” can be particularly meaningful.

Prepared: Strategies for Activists is on view at the Spencer Museum of Art (1301 Mississippi Street, Lawrence, Kansas) through July 22.

JODI, "LED Puzzled" (all photos by Cary Peppermint unless otherwise noted)

When I visited JODI’s current exhibition, Street Digital, at the Museum of the Moving Image, I wondered how the notorious duo would take their earlier net art practices into the “street” (or gallery). Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans of JODI became well-known in the 1990s for upending traditional internet experiences with their online artworks. From wwwwwwwww.jodi.org to http://404.jodi.org/, they presented abstract code and programming glitches as art, bringing the background source of digital works into the foreground. Their work looked more like a crash of your web-browsing program rather than a coherent, readable text.

“Untitled Game” is the work in Street Digital that best represents JODI’s 1990s aesthetic. It captures code dysfunctions in the video game Quake and recombines them to create a visual and sonic field of explosions, mechanical gasps and falling patterns. Within four scrims, the player is presented with joysticks to interact with the nonsensical bursts of sound and light. The experience is uncanny: You are literally immersed in the “game.” You are part and parcel of an attractive glitch.

JODI, still from "GEO GOO" (click to enlarge)

“GEO GOO,” a 2008 net art work exhibited on three screens, scrambles Google Maps so that the familiar images we’re used to seeing become abstract, rendering any sense of direction useless. As with “Untitled Game,” “GEO GOO” disassembles, dissects and rearranges individual parts of a new media experience. I was struck by how well the work illustrated what I try to teach my undergraduate students every semester: that we navigate space surrounded by the arbitrary colors, animations and shapes designed by a single corporate entity, that our grasp of the world is anchored by someone else’s construction.

JODI’s disruption of mapping and video games reminded me of Situationist artist Guy Debord’s calls for a “renovated cartography.” For Debord, when we blindly follow the same directions over and over, using the easiest paths, we get stuck relating to the world in “functional” ways and imagination withers. Debord wanted people to use the wrong map in the wrong place — to get lost in order that we might see our surroundings anew. Similarly, JODI strips away the usual instrumental goals of our engagements with digital media — to win a game, to communicate information, to navigate quickly. What we are left with is a bare awareness of the random components of our digital lives and a glimpse at the other possibilities for technology.

JODI, still from "YTCY (Folksomy)"

In “YTCT (Folksomy),” JODI edits and manipulates a series of YouTube videos of people violating technology, exhibiting them in a quadrant display. Kids and adults stab glowing desktop screens, throw laptops against houses, ax them into pieces and set once-valuable software and hardware on fire. Males are responsible for most of the destruction, sometimes even beating each other with keyboards. It’s interesting to note that when females do appear, they tend to violate their machines by dominating them in sexually suggestive ways. One woman lifts her skirt and sits on top of her computer. Another steps on her cell phone gently with gold high-heeled sandals and polished toenails, another does so assertively with sparkling silver stripper heels. Yet another does serious damage with the spike heels of her thigh-high boots.

The world of digital art is rife with artists reappropriating found materials, as JODI does here with user-generated YouTube videos. But this practice can conceptually short-circuit. Artists are often smitten with wonder at emerging tools and technologies, and they cut and paste without a vision. In contrast, JODI shows how this strategy can be used to study a transnational historical moment. Treating YouTube as an archive of cultural data, “YTCT” documents computers’ shift from scarce, precious technologies to obsolete, ubiquitous objects, too worthless to be respected. When my family got its first computer in the 1980s, we bought a special desk for it. My siblings and I weren’t allowed to eat or drink near it, and we fought with each other for sacred “computer time.” “YTCT” shows that our twentieth-century veneration of powerful machines has turned into a mass of e-waste. With JODI’s intervention, we see how YouTube users can act out this transformation for us dramatically.

JODI, “SK8MONKEYS ON TWITTER” (click to enlarge)

Street Digital includes “ZYX,” an iPhone app that directs users to perform a series of movements, and “SK8MONKEYS ON TWITTER,” through which participants stand on a keyboard-skateboard to type with their feet. I never got a chance to engage either of these decidedly more simple works: a group of kids was so excited to be playing with them that they wouldn’t share. But both projects read as minimalist jabs at the “feature bloat” of mobile operating systems and software: one pairs down apps to primitive body gestures, the other tweets gibberish.

Lastly, “LED Puzzled,” JODI’s newest work: Curator Michael Connor describes this piece as akin to “the giant screens in Times Square run amok,” though “LED Puzzled” lacks the language of advertising. There is no product, no discernable image, no lifestyle being sold. We are presented with only an accumulating trash heap of cheap and ubiquitous consumer technologies. “LED Puzzled” displaces the disorientation performed cognitively by “GEO GOO” onto the senses. Its blue and white lights blink so brightly and chaotically that you must, at once, somehow both stare and look away, looking for meaning — much in the same way that one is drawn to play “Untitled Game” even though it leads nowhere.

JODI, "LED Puzzled"

In the two decades since JODI arrived on the digital art scene, a lot has changed, technologically and culturally. Street Digital continues JODI’s signature practice of exposing the behind-the-scenes workings of our daily interactions with computers while performing updates that respond to Web 2.0 and mobile computing. However, JODI does not only shift technologies, moving from yesterday’s desktops to today’s handheld devices and social media; the duo also examines the hidden assumptions and psychic transformations that the ubiquitous screens and networks in our lives have imprinted on our imagination. JODI plays with new media but not without awareness about the way it plays us.

Street Digital runs through May 20 at the Museum of the Moving Image (36-01 35th Avenue, Astoria, Queens).

Is there a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow? (press image by MoCAD)

DETROIT — When I was in high school, there was a small store by my school where all the windows were blacked-out. It was called the Groove Shop. I ventured in once, and I instantly recognized that it was cool place. It was dark, it smelled of incense and it had the type of paraphernalia one would expect from a place called the Groove Shop. A few years later, during my freshman year of college, I was hit by a deluge of black lights, lava lamps, LSD art and Op art. While the introduction to counterculture was fun, it eventually faded and failed to capture my imagination — at least the somewhat cliché tropes mentioned above did little to capture my imagination. That’s not to say work in this vein, including the art of 1960s underground cartoonist/musician/artist R. Crumb and Topher Crowder, who pays homage to Crumb in a novel way, doesn’t thrill me — although a lot of this 60s inspired stuff is just un-inspiring.

Interior shot of Light Show (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

These cliché tropes are now on full display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit during Joshua White & Gary Panter’s Light Show, which closes this Sunday, April 29. While this show is fun, it doesn’t capture my imagination or engage my intellect. As a whole, it feels like a successful backdrop to another event, but the problem is that the “event” doesn’t exist. The show is missing substance. It’s worth mentioning that the Light Show has been shown elsewhere as an event and not a full-scale installation such as this.

The Light Show fails to fill MoCAD. Rather than filling this large space with their collaborative vision, the artists display only fragments of what feels like 1960s subculture. This show does not change the atmosphere of the museum, and actually leaves a lot of the museum dark and empty. One large area of the museum mimics the Groove Shop. It has various glass displays with miscellaneous 1960s paraphernalia. The walls are covered with miscellaneous pictures of what appears to be previous lights shows and in one corner there are various tools from those presentations — this area of the show translates as a humdrum vintage shop.

Another large area of the museum (the largest display area) promises an exciting experience because it requires museum goers to walk through a carnival-like gapping mouth. Yet, once inside you feel as if you just missed something, perhaps a concert. The area has an band setup and color cardboard pieces with cartoon characters drawn on them. These mounds are sad little islands lost in the shadows of the cavernous MoCAD. Where are the lights? Where is the music?

A view of some pictures of previous Light Shows posted on a wall. (click to enlarge)

The exhibition, and this style of work generally, feels like it is merely there to distract. The artists create amorphous floods of color in an effort to entrance you. In addition to being accomplished graphic novelists and cartoonists, White’s and Panter’s professional backgrounds are in creating graphics, sets and designs for musical performances and television shows — Panter snagged a number of awards for his work on the 1980s cult classic Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. It is obvious they are comfortable creating cool zones. In fact, my favorite experience during the show was an interactive light wall where viewers are mesmerized by fleeting colors on a large rectangular screen. As an added treat, you can wander behind the scenes to see how the colors and forms are created using a rotating device with small, shaped mirrors.

You could argue that shows like this have to be “activated” to be fully appreciated, which means that an environment such as this can only best be enjoyed when people are engaging with them beyond the visual art, such as when a band plays music or an artist reads his or her poetry (all of which happened during the show’s tenure at MoCAD). But doesn’t this reinforce the idea of the show as a backdrop? This points out the issue that White and Panter’s exhibition probably does not deserve such a central and extensive focus at a major contemporary museum. Perhaps the lights and the pockets of darkness are meant to let your mind go and contemplate the moment — people on drugs must love this — but that’s not me. Walking through I felt like I was reading Voltaire’s Candide: While this light show provides colorful epithets that are fun and optimistic outlooks on life that offer momentary distraction. But I feel like I’ve seen too much and can no longer trust or value them as I may have done in high school or college. Perhaps I expect too much from artists and hold them up as a category of philosophers. And I should mention that the real experience wasn’t as slick and pristine as the press photos taken by the museum and published on media outlets without commentary might suggest.

A view of the mirror display that creates the light shown on screen at "Light Show" (press image by MoCAD)

I left the show scared about the museum’s direction. MoCAD’s highly praised director, Luis Croquer, left the museum in October. He organized shows that challenged museum goers, and he managed to introduce Detroiters to historical figures in the avant-garde, not to mention rising stars in the contemporary scene. His parting exhibitions highlight his talent. Barely There I and II focused on compelling pieces that ranged from the “World Question Center” (1969) by James Lee Byars to “Love Lettering” (2002) by the brother and sister art team Rivane and Sergio Neuenschwander. It was a joy to behold. He also closed out his tenure with an impressive show by Stéphani Nava, Considering a Plot (Dig for Victory). In her installation (which is intelligently labeled a work-in-progress), she explores the history of subsistence gardens using her intellectual talents and gift as an artist to create beautiful drawings, environments and structures. You leave the show wanting to know more.

A view of one of the display cases at "Light Show"

MoCAD was once on a difficult path that earned it praise from the contemporary art world. This current show, and MoCAD’s current Post-Industrial Complex call for “MAKERS, INVENTORS, PROBLEM SOLVERS, FABRICATORS, MODIFIERS, CREATORS, BUILDERS, CONJURERS, PRODUCERS, SCIENTISTS, STORYTELLERS, MYTH-MAKERS, URBAN LEGENDS, TINKERERS, VISIONARIES & HOBBYISTS!” [ALL CAPS theirs] to showcase locally made objects, represent an easier path for the museum to take. This may make some people happy, but I’m not one of them.

MoCAD is located at 4454 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. It is open Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm, and on Thursdays and Fridays from 11 am to 8 pm.  More information can be found at www.MoCADetroit.org.

Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne, “9 Scripts from a Nation at War” (2007): details: “Veteran: I am thinking I should put on my uniform” (left); “Source: I couldn’t write about it. I just couldn’t” (lower right). Video, 40 min. 2 sec./45 min. Installation view, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The United States, under the leadership of George W. Bush, launched its unprovoked, premeditated invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.

On November 20, 2004, the Museum of Modern Art opened its 630,000-square-foot Yoshio Taniguchi-designed building. The new space was nearly double the size of the museum’s 1984 Cesar Pelli incarnation, which was a gut renovation of the Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone original from 1939. (At this rate of obsolescence, we should expect a new New MoMA in two years, give or take.)

Installation view detail, “Actor: And you just go on. And you just go on.” Video, 17 min. 54 sec.

The main building, which houses the permanent collection and temporary exhibition galleries, is named for David and Peggy Rockefeller, while the enormous atrium rising from the second floor honors Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron.

As masters of the universe go, the Rockefellers have the clear edge, securing an entire building — thanks to David (Chase Manhattan Bank) — and its adjoining sculpture garden — long ago named for David’s mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (Standard Oil) — leaving the Marrons (Paine Webber, UBS, Lightyear Capital) with its hollow core.

In 2007, the artists Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander and David Thorne premiered their collaboration, “9 Scripts from a Nation at War,” at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany.

In an interview with The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Ashley Hunt describes how the artists conceived the project, a 10-channel video installation:

We know of a lot of people that were looking critically at the policies of the war but this piece really came out of our own experiences, of figuring out how to cope with a war that is so disturbing to us but which we can do so frustratingly little about. So for us the question of what that frustration feels like, the isolation of one having dissenting views, views that you cannot give voice, how that feels, affectively — that is political. The questions of what kind of speech we do or do not have access to became of great political importance to us.

The Iraq War officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011, and six weeks later, on January 25, 2012, “9 Scripts from a Nation at War” (“recently acquired by MoMA,” according to the museum’s website) was installed in the Yoshiko and Akio Morita Media Gallery on the second floor of the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building, just off the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium.

On Tuesday, April 17, 2012, The New York Times published a graph showing a century’s worth of income trajectories for the wealthiest 10% of the U.S. population, with chart lines representing the top 1%, the next 4% and the next 5%.

The highest income levels since the Roaring Twenties for the richest 1% coincided with the Bush/Cheney wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Installation detail, “Detainee: Please tell me when it’s my turn to speak because I don’t know what’s going on here.” Video, 4 hrs. 4 min. 28 sec.

The graph illustrated a report on the work of Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, a pair of French economists who are advocating tax increases on the rich to the tune of 50 to 90% of their income. In a paper titled “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History,” which was published in 2011 in the Journal of Economic Literature, Piketty, Saez and co-author Anthony B. Atkinson note that:

… while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993 to 2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002 to 2007. Therefore, in the economic expansion of 2002–07, the top 1 percent captured over two-thirds (65 percent) of income growth.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s had a pulse for the past year or so, but what was interesting about the graph was that it showed a sharp cratering of the 1% line during the 1970s — just before it began its Reagan-era ascent (which has continued with barely a hiccup, save for 2008-2009, to this day).

That period is held dear, especially by those who didn’t live through it, as a golden age of artistic purity, in which the assiduously non-commercial forms of minimal, conceptual, performance and feminist art held sway.

Four of the five artists collaborating on “9 Scripts” were born at the beginning of that decade (the fifth, David Thorne, was born in 1960) and their project, the majority of which is presented in a darkened room outfitted with screens and earphones, is firmly within its aesthetic parameters (straight-on camerawork; interviews and reenactments; reliance on documentation and text).

Here is a sampling of the capsule descriptions of various “Scripts” offered (with video clips) on the project’s website:

Correspondent: But I have to tell it in a way that doesn’t lose you your credibility:

Interviews with foreign correspondents based in New York. Each discusses the ways in which they mediate information, the challenges of reporting from America out to foreign audiences, and the difficulty of removing or suppressing personal beliefs and feelings from their coverage of events.

Detainee: Please tell me when it’s my turn to speak because I don’t know what’s going on here:

A group of 8 persons reads the transcripts of 18 of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, held at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between July 2004 and March 2005. The reading enacts the tribunals through their documentation — volumes of transcripts available for download from the U.S. Department of Defense website — as a way of speaking and making audible a record of quasi-legal proceedings that had been closed to public scrutiny.

Lawyer: We are the good guys, at least in the storyline we like to stick to:

A lawyer, played by an actress, gives a presentation to an audience about her relationship to law and the extra-legal crisis of the Guantanamo detentions.

“9 Scripts” isn’t much to look at, which seems to be the point. In this regard it’s akin to Jenny Holzer’s Archive, a 2006 exhibition at Cheim & Read of large paintings derived from declassified government documents.

Installation details of “Correspondent: But you have to tell it in a way that doesn’t lose you your credibility” (foreground); “Actor: And you just go on. And you just go on” (background). Video, 19 min. 6 sec. / 17 min. 54 sec.

The flat and impersonal style of Holzer’s paintings, which were mostly unembellished enlargements of heavily redacted texts (ranging from Papa Bush’s first foray against Saddam Hussein in 1991 through a 2003 email exchange between military personnel discussing the use of “alternative interrogation techniques”) was a pointed attempt to distance the viewer from material that could easily be sensationalized.

The use of actors, reenactments and utilitarian sets in 9 Scripts is another way of removing the surface emotion from an emotionally fraught context. Like Archive, it is an effort to look at the issues squarely. As the project description from the “9 Scripts” website states:

This work is structured around a central question: How does war construct specific positions for individuals to fill, enact, speak from, or resist?

There wouldn’t be room for that kind of clarity if, as in the installations of Thomas Hirschhorn, we were picking our way through badly printed photographs of spattered human brains.

However, to encounter this work after the alleged conclusion of hostilities in Iraq is to deal with a patently transformed context. It takes a leap to imagine its impact during its first showing in Kassel in 2007; at MoMA it already feels permeated with the scent of history.

This also comes as no surprise, given the hyper-drive of current events. But the project’s unadorned installation, cocooned within the realm of nine-figure naming rights, gives it the feel of an austere pocket of penitence stranded in a corner of the Hall of Kings.

The presentation of “9 Scripts from a Nation at War” adds another episode to the museum’s long tradition of political cognitive dissonance.

While MoMA has aligned its profile with the progressive politics implicit in the bedrock principle of freedom of expression, it has also named its shiny new building after David Rockefeller, brother of Nelson (Governor of New York, 1959-1973; Vice-President of the United States, 1974-1977), confidante of Henry Kissinger (National Security Advisor, 1969-1975; Secretary of State, 1973-1975) and standard-bearer of “moderate Republicanism” — the kind that brought about the siege of Attica (1971) and the secret bombing of Cambodia (1969-1970).

Political cognitive dissonance goes back virtually to the founding of the museum, as documented by the wonderful Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art, which continues at MoMA through May 14.

Rivera (1886-1957), a Communist firebrand, was one of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s favorite artists, and that relationship reaped Rivera a solo show at the museum (the second in its history), the MoMA-commissioned frescos on display in the current exhibition (which feature anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist imagery), and the lobby murals for Rockefeller Center (which were destroyed, on Nelson’s order, when Rivera refused to alter a portrait of Lenin, among other details).

The intricacies of this kind of political-social-artistic complexity are endless, but they boil down to who controls the platforms and who can use them to speak truth to power. No single strategy exists — all are equally valid and equally suspect. The point is to get it done.

Burrowed within its darkened room hard against the Hall of Kings, “9 Scripts from a Nation at War” carries moral weight and, in its rigor, a measure of plainspoken poetry. Unlike the purism of the 1970s, it is not about dogma, but rather the forcefulness of indirection and of bearing witness.

Its astringent review of a government’s remorseless power grab may not be what most museum-goers, or what most museum-builders, come to see, but it’s as timeless as Matisse’s “Dance (I)” (1909).

Its roundelay, however, is not a string of graceful nudes but a nation-state’s cycle of violence. Despite the baldness of its lies, the Iraq War was hardly the country’s first outbreak of trumped-up aggression, and it won’t be the last. Not with the masters of the universe in charge.

9 Scripts from a Nation at War continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through August 6.

On Monday, April 30, 2012, at 7pm, the museum will present An Evening with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander and David Thorne. The artists will discuss “9 Scripts” and their collaborative practice. 

Elmgreen and Dragset's "Prada Marfa" (2005) outside of Marfa, Texas. (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

The Good

The 2005 Fall/Winter collectoion selected for the shop by Miuccia Prada. (click to enlarge)

Marfa, Texas is the uberchic rural town that the art world loves to visit when venturing out of the urban jungle. Sprinkled amongst its boutique shops and quaint restaurants are some of America’s, and arguably the world’s, most impressive art destinations. Donald Judd’s not-so-little cement block outdoor and indoor installation was the driving force behind the Chinati Foundation’s support and exhibition of major public art projects and it artist-in-residence program. The interplay between Judd’s installations — shape line and volume — is mesmerizing and much like their Minimalist aesthetic, an in-person confrontation with his work defies description. It seems incongruous to have such a monumental artwork happen in such a out of the way place — and this is what put Marfa on the map so to speak. As a result, like-minded projects such as Elmgreen and Dragset’s ”Prada Marfa” (2005) isolated on the side of the road some 37 miles outside of town has become another art visitor landmark. The 2005 Fall/Winter collection featured inside the shop still appears sexy and fresh despite the billows of dust that get thrown up at the shop with every passing truck.

The Bad

The El Paso Museum of Art is a mix of classical, modern and contemporary art. This year the museum boasts an exhibition Magnificent Mexico: 20th Century Modern Masterworks. This exhibition, which is comprised of three separate exhibitions dealing with painting, drawing and Diego Rivera’s relationship to Cubism, originated at two different museums in Mexico City — and have been awkwardly brought together in El Paso under a new umbrella title. Although the exhibition features highlights of works by heavy hitters such as David Sequiros, Jose Clemente Orozco and a masterful and gorgeously dark painting by Alberto Gironella, the exhibition is sadly and badly installed, the accompanying wall texts semi-coherent and although a significant cross-section of artists are represented many of the examples of work are far from the claimed “masterworks.” Fifty-one artists and 91 artwork may be a notable statistic but it does not an impressive exhibition make.

More Good

Margarita Cabrera, "Arbol de la Vida: John Deere Model 790" (2007), ceramic, slip paint and steel hardware. (click to enlarge)

A redeeming factor of the museum experience however is an exhibition in the museum lobby by Mexican-born El Paso-based contemporary artist Margarita Cabrera (the museum will be rotating her work in the lobby over the next year). It’s playful and cool, and her fabric and clay recreations of everyday and household objects smack of skillful craftsmanship and graceful innuendo. The objects she depicts are made by foreigners for US consumers. Expanding on this theme of labor the exhibition depicts a life-size tractor as a reference to the working agricultural community.

The Ugly

Last stop Las Vegas, which is not exactly a contemporary art hub. However there is something to be said for immense production capabilities of the city’s famous strip — and the mind boggles at what could be done if this kind of infrastructure could be placed in the hands of a artists like Matthew Barney, Jeppe Hein, Olafur Eliasson or Lang and Baumann (L/B).

Dale Chihuly's installation in the lobby of the Bellagio hotel, Las Vegas. (click to enlarge)

Unfortunately the furthest the Las Vegas strip stretched to embrace contemporary art is to showcase an installation by an artist who is second on the list of artists I love to hate (closely behind Romero Britto who tops my list). Runner up Dale Chihuly’s large garish blown glass overhang graces the center ceiling of the monumental entrance-way of the Bellagio hotel — one of the more upscale and “tastefully” designed Las Vegas destinations. Its not that I don’t have undying respect for Chihuly’s immense skill at glass blowing or the fascinating possibilities of the medium of glass, however the work is inescapably decorative, aesthetically over-the-top … and not in an ironic way, which would make it quite cool. Without a sense of humor to embrace the “culture kitsch” that oozes out of every pore of Las Vegas, Chihuly’s off-pastel shades and inability to diversify his floral products means his “serious” installations just misses the mark. It’s like hanging Swarovski crystal decorations on a plastic Christmas tree and pretending it’s a luscious fur, and the result is that Chihuly’s Sistine ceiling looks like a mangled cluster of sickly foliage.

Donald Judd’s installation at the Cinnati Foundation and Elmgreen and Dragset’s “Prada Marfa” (2005) are permanently on view in and around Marfa, Texas. Magnificent Mexico: 20th Century Modern Masterworks is on view at the El Paso Museum of Art until May 27. Dale Chihuly’s installation is permanently on view at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas … lucky you.

Rembrandt, "Portrait of the Artist" (c.1665), oil on canvas, 45"x47" (all images courtesy English Heritage, The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, via Met Museum) (all images can be clicked to enlarge)

Back in the day, before latex makeup and CGI, all that an actor like Charles Laughton needed to age convincingly onscreen was a precise command of his body language and facial tics.

As the title character of Alexander Korda’s Rembrandt (1936), he portrayed the Old Master from the time of “The Night Watch” (1642) through the years just before the artist’s death in 1669.

Over the course of the movie’s 85 minutes, Laughton goes from a robust 36 — his own age at the time — to a frail but impish 62 or 63. The transformation is remarkable.

In the bittersweet closing scenes, he wears a floppy white turban, not unlike the headgear Rembrandt sports in several of his self-portraits from the 1660s. Among them is “Portrait of the Artist” (ca. 1663–65) from Kenwood House, London, which has just landed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a seven-week run (through May 20).

This painting is one of the artist’s richest and most profound self-portraits, rendered in earth tones softly illuminated by raking, flaxen light. Rembrandt, who would live for only three or four more years, may be staring mortality in the face, but his expression bespeaks stillness and calm, even as his posture – chest forward and arms akimbo — betrays a subtle, ineradicable haughtiness.

Which is all the more remarkable for a man who should have been humbled, if not broken, by circumstance. The conditions of his life, as Julius Bryant describes them in his book, Kenwood, Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest (2003), were mortifying:

By now he had become an employee of his son Titus to escape his creditors, the contents of his house had been sold as a result of bankruptcy and he had even had to sell his wife’s grave. His mistress, Hendrickje Stoffels, had died in a plague in 1663 and soon he was unable to pay the rent for her grave.

And yet, as Bryant quickly adds, “in the last ten years of his life he was almost as active as an artist as he had been [during the peak of his fame] in the 1630s.”

The Rembrandt we meet in the Kenwood House “Portrait of the Artist” is a man whose personal peaks and valleys, very high and very deep, have taught him how “to care and not to care,” as T.S. Eliot prays in “Ash-Wednesday” (1930): “Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood / Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still / Even among these rocks…”

The painting is considered unfinished for obvious reasons, namely the lower half. As Bryant discusses in his study:

Comparison with an X-radiograph … shows how originally he stood more at an angle to the viewer, painting as if with his left hand, while holding more brushes and the mahlstick in the other hand. Rembrandt was not left-handed, and he must have realized his mistake in copying his reversed mirror image (which is surprising, given his lifetime of painting self-portraits). But in correcting his mistake … he goes further, obliterating the hand, sharpening the sleeve contours and turning full-face to the viewer. He creates this more formal, pyramidal composition, transforming a self-portrait into a monumental Portrait of the Artist.

The brushes, palette and mahlstick (or maulstick), which is the long wooden rod used to steady the painting hand for finely detailed work, are barely sketched in. I’ve pored over this painting in books for as long as I can remember, and that patch of canvas, particularly the mahlstick, has always disturbed me — which is strange, given our thoroughly modernist acculturation in the unfinished and the fragmented.

The reasons for the unevenness in Rembrandt’s paint handling are perfectly understandable – he was old (for his time), distracted and pressed by financial concerns, and so why should he stress about a few negligible details on a personal project? And yet, as soon as “Portrait of the Artist” arrived at the Met, its first-ever showing in the U.S. (thanks to renovations underway at Kenwood House), I felt compelled to go and check out those brushes for myself.

The ghostly mahlstick is more solid-looking in person than it seems in books, but only slightly. The brushes and palette, which recede into shadow, are even more insubstantial than I expected. The hand holding them is barely a smudge.

Maybe the decision to change the brushes from the right to the left hand was for the sake of verisimilitude (as Bryant suggests), but what it does, formally, is destabilize the composition. What surprised me the most upon seeing the work in person was the prominence of the painting-within-the-painting, indicated by the edge of a stretcher bar at the top right corner and tapering down the side of the canvas to just below the midpoint.

The diagonal created by the stretcher bar, combined with the angle of the mahlstick, form a vector that attempts to pull attention away from Rembrandt’s spotlighted hair, face, turban and collar, knocking the triangular design of the head, shoulders and torso off kilter. The composition’s monumentality is, in this way, dramatically compromised, and the shift in balance is exacerbated by the countervailing angle of the palette and the two mysterious circles on the wall behind.

There has been much scholarly speculation about those two circles, which Bryant summarizes with allusions to Apelles, Giotto and geography (it has been hypothesized that they are the outlines of unfinished maps, one of the Old World and one of the New). Be that as it may, the relatively finished state of these two circles, which would be, one would think, just as peripheral to the painting’s main event — Rembrandt’s face, hair, hat and fur-trimmed cloak — as what he’s holding in his hand.  And yet one is worked through and the other isn’t.

The final sequence of Korda’s Rembrandt begins with Laughton bumming a handful of florins off a well-meaning burgher with the promise that he will use the money to buy food. With coins in hand, he shoots straightaway to the pigment merchant, who tries to throw him out until Laughton slaps the money down on the counter.

This is one of the hoariest and, to my mind, most disrespectful clichés of art history — just how long can an artist continue to choose to buy paint over a meal? Not very. Still, the next and final scene is quite interesting, but only for the way Laughton plays it.

Apparently forgetting his hunger, Rembrandt rushes into his studio and immediately busies himself with his brushes and palette, glancing into a mirror as he begins a self-portrait, which is hidden from the audience’s view. His expression, however, conveys none of the artist’s familiar gravitas; it is more one of delighted, childlike narcissism.

But then the camera angle shifts, and we see his face in the mirror, which is cracked along the upper left corner. He pauses for a moment, and then quotes, deadpan, the words of King Solomon from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

Might the incomplete and strangely discordant rendering of the painter’s tools in “Portrait of the Artist” (accentuated by the above-described compositional tensions) be an outward manifestation of a raw internal conflict? Are the brushes and palette barely sketched in because he wishes they would disappear, ridding this compulsion from his life? Does he recognize that, at bottom, he’s just another junkie getting by on cigarettes and candy bars, doing anything he can to score his next fix?

All wild conjecture, but questions worth asking. Laughton’s biblical quote is highly ambiguous but curiously germane — just what, we ask, is this vanity of vanities? Is it the narcissistic vocation of the artist, symbolized by recurring treatments of his own likeness? Or the absurdity of making art in the teeth of personal tragedy? Or the presumption that art can create order, or make sense of anything at all?

These are dilemmas we are familiar with today; why should past practitioners have been immune? And did their doubt, pessimism and regret find their way into the facture of their work?

That is to say, do the translucent strokes denoting Rembrandt’s brushes, mahlstick, palette and all-but-invisible hand hold the ghosts of his wife, Saskia, his mistress, Hendrickje, and his three children who never survived infancy?

Again, wild conjecture, but art being in the present tense, no options are off the table. And for the next several weeks, if you’re anywhere near New York, you can seek out the ghosts as well.

Rembrandt at Work: The Great Self-Portrait from Kenwood House continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through May 20, 2012.

Reliquary of the True Cross (Staurotheke) Constantinople (?), early 9th C. ACE, gold, silver, silver gilt, cloisonné enamel, niello 10.3 × 7.1 × 2.7 cm (4-1/16"× 2-13/16"× 1-1/16"), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.715a, b) (im © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Visitors who venture to the Metropolitan Museum’s Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition exhibition expecting the gold shimmer and polychromed glitz of the empire’s capital may be disappointed. This exhibit is instead characterized by the earth tones of Jordan’s floor mosaics, creamy carved ivories from ancient animal tusks and limestone architectural elements of the desert — in other words, the richness of the empire’s southern provinces in the seventh to ninth centuries as social and political control of the area slipped away from the Christian Byzantines when Muslims rose to power. This is no mere nod to provincial charms; the scale and scope make it a gathering of works that is unlikely to happen again. It is a must-see for scholars of late antiquity and early Islam, and all viewers will appreciate the ways that power and continuity are expressed in both luxury items and everyday objects.

Roundel with a Byzantine Emperor, Probably Heraclius Egypt, possibly Panopolis (Akhmim), 8th C. ACE, tapestry weave in red, pale brown and blue wools and undyed linen on plain-weave ground of undyed linen 28.7 × 26.6 cm (11-1/4"× 10-1/2") Victoria and Albert Museum, London (T.794-1919) (image © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London) (click to enlarge)

Specialists will see a few old friends in the cases, albeit in new circumstances. The famed Rabbula Gospels, a sixth-century manuscript from Syria, is turned to the canon tables with a series of small narrative scenes instead of its well-known images of the Crucifixion and the Annunciation. The Fieschi Morgan Staurotheke, an exquisite, enamel box called simply a Reliquary of the True Cross in this exhibition, is not far from its usual home at the center of the permanent Byzantine collection downstairs. One of the few pieces in the show that was made in Constantinople, it is now tucked into a case with a number pilgrimage souvenirs.

Traversing the galleries does, in fact, feel a bit like a pilgrimage with a clearly defined route. Visitors should take particular note of the large map tucked into a corner of the first room, pointing out the geographic parameters of the show: Alexandria and Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus, Baghdad and Ctesiphon. Curator Helen Evans’s organization focuses on a shift in political power from Christianity to Islam, beginning with early Christian objects in the first rooms, adding in items that show influences of secular traditions such as motifs used by Christians and Muslims alike, followed by Islamic items and architectural elements. This change is subtly hinted by the shape of the doorways connecting the rooms — round arches in the Christian rooms and pointed, Islamic-style portals in spaces holding Muslim art.

While this linear narrative drives home the idea of transition, it does not allow for many side-by-side comparisons. A juxtaposition of an 8th-century copy of the Book of Isaiah written in Coptic displayed alongside a Tunisian Qur’an with gold, Kufic script would have been welcome, for instance. Posters in each room do explain particular curatorial themes that offer ongoing narrative to the transition taking place, but the slant of the show is decidedly toward specialists, with the more user-friendly, didactic messages embedded into the audio guide or the Met’s website. Viewers who need a refresher course in Islamic art or belief should explore the newly reopened Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia (essentially the Met’s new Islamic wing) before entering this exhibition. While the new wing plus the special exhibition may be too much for a single afternoon, considering the two in tandem is worthwhile. They highlight the complexities of the term “Islamic art,” demonstrating that religious and secular arts of these lands represent diversity across geography, ethnicities and time.

Pair of Earrings with Birds from Egypt or Syria, 7th–8th C. ACE, Gold wire, granulation, cast details, pearls Each 6.6 cm (2-5/8"×2-1/8"), Benaki Museum, Athens (photo by Strefanos Samios/Courtesy of the Benaki Museum, via Met Museum)

What can be readily deciphered, though, is the exhibition’s theme of objects as bearers of information and carriers of both cultural norms and mutable motifs. This is most discernible in the vibrant and numerous textiles, a highlight of the show. It is a rare treat to see so many examples at once because Byzantine textiles are delicate, most of them chance survivors from burials in the arid desert that conspired to preserve them.

A huge, red tapestry dominates the first room, beckoning viewers to lean closer to the woven medallions with images of stylized Amazons and personifications of Abundance. Made in Egypt in 640-60 ACE, it has been radiocarbon dated to 95% probability, demonstrating a perk of scientific study. Motifs such as these, along with scenes of hunters, musicians or vines, were used as secular decorations by Christian Byzantines and were adapted again by Muslims. For example, a different, smaller roundel with Amazons and a cross shows the ancient mythological figures with a Christian addition and, according to a wall label, the same Amazons were later depicted with Arabic inscriptions as well.

Detail of folio from a manuscript of the Qur’an probably Tunisia, Qairawan, c. 900–950 ACE, gold leaf, silver and ink on parchment colored with indigo 28.5 × 37.5 cm (11-1/4 × 14-3/4 in.) LACMA, Los Angeles (image © 2011 Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY) (click to enlarge and view whole folio)

Cosmopolitan tourists and fashionable urbanites who flocked to the Alexander McQueen show last summer will be interested to note that male and female Roman dress was differentiated mostly by accessories, visible in a variety of embellished, t-shaped tunics. A Persian-style riding coat is contrasted with these garments, and a child’s tunic with a fringed hood has been lovingly adorned with ornamental bands of whimsical dancing figures. Side by side, these are telling examples of fashion history.

Because reconstructing ancient history is such a precarious endeavor, audiences have to supply a little imagination. In this case, the excellent design of the space itself is an asset. Many item labels have helpful contextual photos demonstrating the object’s original placement or use. A damaged Umayyad architectural element is displayed with a line-art representation of its original design, helping the viewer fill in the missing pieces to imagine its former splendor.

A short video of the richly painted interior of the Red Monastery at Sohag, Egypt adds an element of monumentality and three-dimensional space to the exhibition. In the paintings, darkly lined saints in frontal poses and intricate geometric designs in the “jeweled” Coptic style are silent and otherworldly. The film pans quickly through the church sanctuary, projected almost life-sized on the gallery wall. In the screening room, a number of exhibition catalogues are available for perusing. While the 332-page book is an excellent piece of scholarship, more casual enthusiasts might prefer to investigate the free exhibition blog. On the Met’s website, enjoy the same video with accompanying narration by art historian Elizabeth Bolman, who describes conservation efforts that have taken place at the Red Monastery over the last decade.

Saint Mark Preaching From Ivories of the So-Called Grado Chair Eastern Mediterranean or Egypt, 7th–8th C., 18.9 x 10.5 x .95 cm (7-7/16"x 4-1/8"x 3/16") Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Applicata — Castello Sforzesco, Milan (image courtesy Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Applicata, Castello Sforzesco, Milan)

By placing material culture artifacts alongside treasures, the exhibition challenges us to decipher the value, beauty, and messages of objects that are, strictly speaking, not art: weights and measures, coins, papyrus contracts, jewelry and silks. For artists, this is a lesson in material culture studies, an opportunity to “read” information in the motifs that graced everyday objects and to consider the changeable meaning of images that were altered by patrons, uses, convenience, and changing political structures. A New York Times review laments the lack of loans from Egyptian collections, offering today’s political turmoil as a foil for that of the Byzantine transitional period in question. But there is no need to review the exhibition that might have been — in its current state, academics, artists and all curious visitors will appreciate this commendable effort. It is a collection of multi-faceted artworks representing a diverse population.

Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through July 8.