So, what’s their point? Rest assured, you’re not the first to ask. And no one is more eager to tell you than the artist formerly known as Christo (now, officially, “Christo and Jeanne-Claude”) whose art is nothing if not Open to the Public. In fact, taking art public—that is, taking it away from the Uptown Museum-Gallery Complex by making it too big to fit in studios, museums, or galleries— was part of the original idea. Now that lots of artists have adopted what critics once dubbed the “New Scale,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude will tell you that their point is, literally, to rock your world. By temporarily disrupting one part of an environment, they hope to get you to “perceive the whole environment with new eyes and a new consciousness.” Along the way, it’s been nice to get tons of media attention, make buckets of money (Christo’s been known to issue stock in himself, redeemable in working drawings), and, as with so much that went before it, épater les bourgeois. LAURIE ANDERSON (1947-)
“Our plan is to drop a lot of odd objects onto your country from the air. And some of these objects will be useful. And some will just be … odd. Proving that these oddities were produced by a people free enough to think of making them in the first place.” That’s Laurie Anderson speaking, NASA’s first—and almost certainly last—artist-in-residence. She of the trademark red socks and white high-top sneakers, the seven-hour performance pieces, the lights-up-in-the-dark electric violin, the movie clip of an American flag going through the fluff-dry cycle. Anderson has spent the last quarter-century as a performance artist, yoking music with visuals, cliché with poetry, electronics with sentiment, slide shows with outrage, the intimate with the elephantine. Like Christo, performance artists do what they can to take art out of the institution; they also tend to quote that indefatigable old avant-gardist John Cage, who years ago declared art to be a way “simply” to make us “wake up to the very life we’re living.”
Over the years, performance art has tended to move farther and farther from its visual-arts roots to embrace, especially, theater and dance. In the process, it has more than once drifted toward the self-indulgent and the soporific, leaving some of us wondering what, exactly, the payoff was for sitting through another six-hour Robert Wilson piece on Stalin or Queen Victoria or for witnessing Karen Finley cover herself in melted chocolate, alfalfa sprouts, and tinsel in protest against society’s treatment of women.
Still, it has survived. Stripped down (Anderson, for instance, now wears mostly black, creates ninety-minute shows, and relies, for special effects, on what she can produce with her violin and a laptop), hitched more or less firmly to technology (you’ll find most emerging performance artists on the Internet), and straddling so many of postmodernism’s fault lines—where feminism grinds against male-bonding rituals, where stand-up comics hold forth on First Amendment freedoms, where multiculturalism vies for attention with simple autobiography, Dadaist absurdity with vaudeville pratfalls—performance art shows no signs of going quietly up to bed. JULIAN SCHNABEL (1951–)
Julian Schnabel and St. Francis in Ecstasy (1980)
He was arguably the most ambitious painter since Jackson Pollock, and for a time no American artist loomed larger or used up more oxygen. Schnabel specialized in Ping-Pong-table-sized canvases covered with entire cupboards’ worth of broken crockery, yards of cheap velvet, lots of thick, gucky paint, and the occasional pair of antlers. Also, as Mark Rothko might say, in “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on”—or what passed for same in the supply-side art world of the 1980s, where dealers such as Mary Boone frequently got higher billing than their artists. Schnabel’s work was everywhere and sold like crazy—until one day the Eighties were over and the critics began to refer to his mammoth neo-expressionist smorgasbords as leftovers from yesterday’s bender. Schnabel himself proved unstoppable, however; he’s since made a successful comeback, not as a painter but as the writer/director of critically respected—and surprisingly viewer-friendly— feature films, such as Basquiat (1996) and Before Night Falls (2000). MATTHEW BARNEY (1967-)
Worked his way through Yale modeling for Ralph Lauren and J. Crew, and had barely arrived in New York when his sculptures (especially the weightlifter’s bench made of petroleum jelly) and videos (particularly the one that featured the artist using ice screws to haul himself, naked, across the ceiling and down the walls of the gallery in which it was being shown) turned him, at twenty-four, into the art scene’s Next Big Thing. To date, Barney is best known for the Cremaster Cycle, a series of five lavishly surreal films made between 1993 and 2001, which attracted huge, mostly young, audiences; garnered wildly enthusiastic, if slightly bewildered, reviews; and taught museum-goers a new vocabulary word (“cremaster,” the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles in response to temperature and fear). The Cremaster films, which were made and released out of order, range from a forty-minute 1930s-style musical featuring elaborately costumed chorus girls, an Idaho football field, and two Goodyear blimps (Cremaster 1) to a three-hour allegory starring the Chrysler Building, in which the sculptor Richard Serra, playing the role of the Master Architect, and Barney, playing the Entered Apprentice, reenact elaborate Masonic rituals; a paraplegic fashion model pares potatoes with blades fastened to her prosthetic feet; and a bunch of Chryslers stage a demolition derby in the lobby of the building (Cremaster 3). The series, which we’re told has something to do with pregenital sexuality as a metaphor for pure potential and something to do with violence sublimated into pure form, is thickly layered with mythological references, historical details, and arcane symbolism and is, in Barney’s words, “somewhat autobiographical.” Before you could say “captures the Zeitgeist,” critics were hailing Barney as “the most important American artist of his generation” and comparing Cremaster to Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. We’d love to weigh in ourselves, but we have a hair appointment.
Raiders of the Lost Architecture
You don’t have to be standing in front of the Parthenon to be suffused with all those old doubts about what’s Doric and what’s Ionic and where to look, approximately, when somebody calls your attention to the frieze; almost any big-city post office can make you feel just as stupid. Ditto, Chartres, naves and narthexes, and even a moderately grandiose Catholic—or Episcopal—church. In fact, a little practice here at home isn’t such a bad idea before you hit Athens, Paris, and points in between.
Real-Estate Investment for the Aesthete
Contributor Michael Sorkin assesses the choicest styles, hottest architects, primest buildings, and pithiest sayings of modern architecture. And then we add our two cents’ worth. FIVE MODERN STYLES
Architectural fashion is like any other: It changes. The difference is that architects are forever looking for a Universal Style, something suitable for every occasion. This is hardly a new impulse. The folks who brought you the Doric order and the Gothic cathedral had something similar in mind. However, while it may have taken hundreds of years to put up Chartres, a smart-looking Hamptons beach house can get done practically overnight. The International Style