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Gabriel Orozco will show you art in a handful of dust. It is a rebuke to traditional art forms all the same, with a little help from Jacob Samuel.

Dust is a space, but not a landscape. Orozco makes that clear on the opening page of a series of prints. So what if it, too, is a work of art? Samuel, a printmaker in Santa Monica, has worked with some sixty leading artists over more than thirty years. Many of them would otherwise have refused to enter any space that reeks of fine art. That includes the space of “Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching,” at MoMA through March 23.

What kind of print is right for modern and contemporary art? It could be lithographs for their relative ease of making—and for a poster style going back to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It could be silkscreens, for the world after Andy Warhol, or monoprints, where anything goes. For Max Beckmann and German Expressionism, it could be woodcuts, with thick, jagged outlines that speak of a crude past and a still harsher modern world. But no, for Samuel favors a medium as disciplined as etching. He took it up in the late 1980s in the studio of Sam Francis, the abstract painter, and has been seeking collaborators ever since.

In etching, the artist makes incisions, akin to freehand drawing, in a protective layer over a metal plate. An acid batch then penetrates the incisions, leaving its cuts in the plate. Wipe away the protective layer, brush ink over the plate, wash away all but what has found its way into the cuts, press the plate against paper, run them through a printing press, and (voilà) you have an etching. Each of Samuel’s collaborations led to an entire series of prints, and many have entered the museum’s collection. It has been a learning experience for everyone, and he likes it that way, even if the artist gets the credit. It takes both parties out of their comfort zone.

The curators, Esther Adler and Margarita Lizcano Hernandez, open a modest show with a display case for portfolios, with elegant, intriguing covers tailored to the artist. They close with two walls for sample prints from many more. In between, they focus on series from a single artist—with the added interest that prints, however ephemeral, can come in multiples, as series of series. That includes series of series of dust. Samuel favors series in a single tone, and several artists favor limited tones within a single work as well. For John McElheny, that means an elusive white on white.

A video shows instruction from Francis himself, who pronounces himself indifferent to whether the work will sell. He wants only to try things—like his big splashes of primary colors. That must have been a daunting message for an aspiring printer with a career in mind, but if Samuel had reservations, he keeps them to himself. It certainly prepares him for some difficult artists. I never could decipher McElheny’s white text or decide whether his minimal forms represent champagne flutes. I am still searching for signs of a notorious social butterfly, Harry Crosby, in prints by Charline von Heyl, such as slippers and a silk scarf.

The artists had to learn something beside printing technique. Christopher Wool, known for his word paintings, says that it helped him find his way to drawing again. James Welling, known as a photographer, instead assembles quadrilaterals into larger shapes, starting with paper scraps and software. Samuel had to learn far more. How was he to transform dust into incisions with Gabriel Orozco—or, with Mona Hatoum and Matthew Monahan, masking tape and human hair? Jannis Kounellis keeps piling on the challenges, with molten lead, smashed glass, coffee grounds, and more.

They enlarged his view of prints as well, beyond etchings. They took him to aquatints with Dave Muller and to drypoint with Barry McGee (while Kounellis used both). They had professional needs, like dance notation for Meredith Monk,and personal ones, like Marina Abramovic making (she hopes) love potions, Chris Burden in the wilds with knives, and Muller sharing home turf with bears and dragonflies. They all had to learn new questions for art. How much line, how much texture, and how much text? The contemporary etching wants to know.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

An-My Lê could be a citizen of the world if she did not have so many memories. Her retrospective opens with a photograph of a schoolgirl. Could it be her?

I doubt it, but with Lê you never know. What looks later like ground action in the Vietnam War is only a recreation in North Carolina or Virginia—or a training exercise in California for wars closer to today. Wall text speaks only of her return to Vietnam in 1994, nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, and what she set out to see. Still, she is not saying, and she herself had barely entered her teens when she left for America. But then she is never saying, in photos that speak for all sides, apart perhaps from her own. She is forever “Between Two Rivers,” at MoMA through March 16—and I work this together with recent reports on photography from Lagos and from Tracey Rose in South Africa as a longer review and my latest upload.

That serious schoolgirl says little as well. She takes care with everything, right down to a proper hat, and her glance gives nothing away. Nor does that first series in Vietnam. Boys playing soccer dissolve in a blur, while adults mill about. A tiger cage and a vast interior with a single desk are devoid of life. Yet Lê is determined to see it all and to listen.

She is caught up in it all as well. That first series took her to the former South Vietnam, where she had lived, and to the north, which held childhood memories as well, but of her mother’s childhood. It also includes shots of Louisiana, where she had fled. The Vietnam War reenactment did not just allow her to participate, but demanded it in exchange for letting her observe. Naturally she fought on both sides. And could that be her playing pool with sailors?

Lê gives the show’s title in English, Vietnamese, and French, not just because Vietnam was once a French colony, but also because she spent much of her childhood in Paris. The two rivers are primarily the Mekong and the Mississippi, but also the Seine, the Rio Grande were she traveled to observe the border, and the Hudson, where she taught upriver from New York City. She also finds affinities. The Mekong and the Mississippi both have storied deltas and storied poverty, and the bayou has a parallel in Vietnam;s tall grass, swampy pools, and flat, parched land. It, too, might make a miserable place for a war. It also helps drive a lifelong conviction that landscape means as much as people.

How much do they mean? They are still not letting on. One might never know one side from the other in the reenactments without a photo’s title. Maybe that is what was so wrong with the war. For ever so many, as another title has it, it was Someone Else’s War at that. Events Ashore shows the U.S. Navy engaged in scientific research, earthquake relief, and flood prevention, but Lê knows that all these, a navy included, may descend on countries like a show of force.

Her latest series, a shift to color, takes her across the United States, looking for clues to its controversies and turmoil, and she herself may wonder whether she finds them. Students protest against guns, but half the time in the background. Migrant labor blends easily into a cattle drive, and the White House briefing room is breaking down or still setting up. Here Confederate statues are neither going up nor coming down. Her very artlessness can seem an evasion. The closest her reenactors come to war’s drama and fear is lightning descending on night ops.

The curators, Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan, take one series at a time. Think of them less as finished work than as personal projects, to which Lê can devote herself completely. She does arrange one series in an open circle, like an old-fashioned diorama. Its fourteen landscapes cover a lot of ground. Does that add up to common ground or telling contrasts? Once again, she is not saying.

Lê’s photos can seem all but artless, and well-meaning critics may praise her more for her history than for her art. The Navy removes unexploded ordinance, but with none of the poignancy of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, for whom Vietnam’s past is a minefield, or of boat people for Danh Vo. That diorama might be more immersive if its components meant more. Still, silence speaks to her own sense of helplessness or displacement. When she returned to her last childhood home, “I felt that I didn’t recognize anything,” but she kept looking. For her, a refusal to take sides is taking sides, but in a different war than either side ever knew.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

What do you do as a follow-up after inventing modern art? Do you take the summer off or reinvent yourself?

Pablo Picasso pulled off both. He and his young family rented a villa in Fontainebleau, a privileged Parisian’s weekend or summer getaway. Kings had stayed at a palace still worth seeing and hunted in the forest nearby. This artist, though, never could stop working, and he turned out two of his most ambitious paintings, each in two remarkably different versions. Just to focus on them with a bit of context would be an excellent excuse for a show, and “Picasso in Fontainebleau” supplies it, at the Museum of Modern Art through February 17. It also offers the occasion to ask what had changed since Cubism and whether he was still breaking ground in 1921. Meanwhile the Met sees his breakthrough work not quite making it to Brooklyn, and I work an earlier report on that together with a longer and fuller version of this one as a longer review and my latest upload.

A lot had changed in ten years, since those designs for Brooklyn failed to cross the Atlantic. The artist whose shows had looked revolutionary but sold almost nothing now had a prestigious dealer, Paul Rosenberg. He had a young wife, Olga, who was nursing his first child, Paul (bottle fed, by the way). He had a summer rental in the land of kings. Paintings and drawings of home were a celebration. Compulsive sketches attest to a love of drawing and close observation, but surely they were a celebration, too.

And then there were the big paintings, nearly eight feet tall and six feet wide. MoMA does its best to recreate the space in which he worked, a garage, where the two versions of Three Musicians face each other down from opposite walls. They seem more playful and deadly serious every day. The three figures share flat, broken fields of color, like playing cards, and one shuffles the musical score like cards, too. They could be staring out from behind masks, except that they are too polite and too absorbed to stare. They are too busy playing music and at play.

Or are they empty masks? The threat of emptiness looms over them all, especially with the darker version in the museum’s own collection. Art, it suggests, is role play with no one left to play the roles, and these are old roles indeed. The three musicians are a Pierrot out of the Italian commedia dell’arte, a harlequin, and a monk. A fourth character lurks all the more in shadow, the silhouette of a dog. The second version, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum, is lighter in color and maybe in feeling, and the figures sport comic mustaches, but Pablo Picasso developed them together.

A third work should be familiar from MoMA, too, its version of Three Women at the Spring. Picasso was thinking in threes, for a binary choice was never enough. He has set the women at ease, standing, kneeling, and seated—if only you could altogether reconstruct their pose. They have all the space they need, but barely, for their rounded forms need plenty. Their six hands talk to each other as well, in a wild conversation. Their bodies have an earthy dignity, but their emotions do not so easily break through.

So where was Picasso headed, to a Cubism on overdrive or to a Neo-Classicism? As with Henri Matisse and his Red Studio last year, MoMA places an early modern artist in a new studio and watches the sparks fly. Both artists were looking back at their own work in new surroundings. Picasso knew that the collaborative spirit of Cubism was over, and he must have wondered if Cubism’s experimental spirit was behind him as well. Should he lend it a greater stability, mystery, and color or ditch it entirely—and could he reimagine the heavyset women of his Pink Period, too? Two pairs of two multiply the possibilities.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Where would environmentalism be without architecture? Nowhere, of course, when so much depends on building for a sustainable future.

Nowhere, when planners can build away from endangered species, burning lands, and rising seas. Nowhere, when they can capitalize on urban density to fight suburban sprawl. Nowhere, when everyone deserves easy access to mass transit, parks, wilderness, and gardens, for greener cities in a greener nation. Nowhere, too, when buildings themselves can reduce their carbon imprint and their shadow. It could have the added payoff of more affordable housing without cookie-cutter houses. They could become responsive to nature, responsible to nature, and self-regulating.

Well, surprise, for environmentalism is not just a vision of the future: it is a vision of the past. The Museum of Modern Art finds “Emerging Ecologies” going back at least seventy years—and peaking long ago. Yet it stakes that claim on ignoring almost every one of those needs for the future. But then it is really asking a different question altogether, through January 20. When it sees architecture as essential to environmentalism, it means to the birth of environmentalism and its very existence, not its potential.

The curator, Carson Chan, takes the long view. A time line starts with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the New Deal program that provided electricity, flood control, and economic recovery—and, as its next date, the dropping of the atom bomb. If that already sends mixed messages, “Emerging Ecologies” ends soon after 1970 and the first Earth Day. It has no room for stronger federal regulation, greener lifestyles, cleaner skies, and a growing recognition of climate change today. It has no room, too, for the grayer architecture that long ruled. It has no time because it looks back to an alternative that barely existed.

Did environmentalism really peak long ago, and did architecture inspire it rather than the other way around? A show subtitled “Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism” opens with Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright, although almost all their urban visions never came to be. It can hardly help doing so, because the public cannot get enough of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum and Fuller’s utopias. It can hardly help it either because they were on to something, and others knew it. Aladar and Victor Olgyay, who used vents to ensure a “comfort zone” of temperature and humidity, worked in 1956, just ten years after Fuller’s Dymaxion Dwelling Machine. Eleanor Raymond and Mária Telkes designed a glass Sun House, a fitting sequel to Wright’s 1937 Fallingwater.

Still, that is slow progress, and it should set off alarms. Wright had designed a unique luxury home in western Pennsylvania that few will ever see. Fuller’s proposed machine depends on a mechanical nightmare within a harsh aluminum dome. Soon enough, his more inspiring geodesic dome became the U.S. Pavilion to an international exposition, Murphy & Mackey were adapting it to a Climatron in Saint Louis, and Eames Office with Kevin Roche and John Dinkaloo were constructing a National Fisheries Center in the nation’s capital. They, too, though, can seem more a self-indulgence than a model for today. When the Cambridge Seven imagine a rain-forest pavilion like a tropical snow globe, they are not preserving nature but enclosing it.

When Fuller himself proposes a glass dome over Manhattan, it looks merely silly. When a group called Ant Farm hopes to open a “dialogue” with dolphins, it may sound like fun. When Michael Reynolds conceives of a six-pack as the “basic building block” of a beer-can house, it is simply chilling. It is nothing less than marvelous when Carolyn Dry designs a port city close to dolphins, based on coral’s natural growth. It is nothing less than essential when Wolf Hilbertz outlines the restoration of a coral reef. Still, sometimes humans should know when to leave nature well enough alone.

Environmentalism thrives on data, and architects can help collect it. Ian McHarg and his students make a long-term study of the Delaware Upper Estuary, and Willis Associates has its Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis (or CARLA), while Fuller’s World Game is no more or less than a world map. Still, that map takes up as much space as a football field. Environmentalism also thrives on science, and NASA or Princeton’s G. K. O’Neill has every reason to think about space colonies. Discovering the laws of physics will take long observation up close. Still, can taking the human footprint into space seriously reduce it on earth?

The problem is not an excess of idealism. It is what counts as environmentalism. The story really does end too soon. Other shows have called for “Space Between Buildings” and garden cities, but not this show. If anything, it calls for suburban sprawl. James Wine does with his Forest Building, and so does Malcolm Wells in going underground, even if he covers his suburb with soil. Protests have their place, like those of Anna Halprin, a choreographer, but they are not green architecture.

Maybe the problem lies in taking them too seriously. These are indeed idealists, and their environmentalism has less to do with design for a healthy future than with inspiring. Eugene Tssui creates images worth remembering with his wind-generated dwelling. So do Ralph Knowles with his “solar envelope” and Glen Small with his “green machine,” of trees on a tiered roof. I have never seen a model of Fallingwater as large as the one at MoMA. More than anything that came after, it takes my breath away.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

New Yorkers know irony. Detachment, not so much.

We have irony in the very air we breathe, with or without haze from Canadian wildfires. We value a quick mind, even as we know that everything we know is wrong. We know the city’s pace and passion, too, and Ed Ruscha opened to members at the Museum of Modern Art right after Labor Day, the same day as the Armory Show. He has the entire top floor, through January 12, and yet no artist speaks so deeply of and to LA. When he paints maple syrup or screen-prints chocolate onto all four walls, he is dripping with irony. As for detachment, you bet.

I have climbed the Pepsi sign in Long Island City, because a New Yorker takes nothing for granted as just part of the neighborhood. Ruscha paints both sides of the Hollywood sign, front and back, as if each were equally iconic, and perhaps it is. He photographs Every Building on the Sunset Strip, for an artist’s book. Where a New Yorker would look around to cherish small differences and to remember the haunts that fate has left behind, he loves their collective anonymity, or does he? A retrospective teases out what drew him to California and what he fears for today. It asks where he enters the work and when he vanishes—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

That first accordion book, from 1966, folds out impressively, to almost twenty-five feet. The Strip runs just a mile and a half, but the act of photographing was impressive, too. Ruscha shot from a flat-bed truck. Was he erasing differences or asking one to discover them for oneself? He is not saying, but he returned to the medium to photograph LA apartment complexes and their architecture. He also paints a popular restaurant, on La Cienega south of Sunset Boulevard, as if it were on fire.

He paints LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also up in flames. Is he mocking its status, fearing its demise, or celebrating a city on fire? He could be deriding its pretension, soon after its construction in 1965, but not its art, right? Was he himself still making art? Hostile critics were asking that about an entire generation, and he was among its instigators. He seems to place everything in quotes, and the quotes are not just his alone.

Still, this is Hollywood, and so is 20th Century Fox. Ruscha paints it in 1963 as The Big Picture, and it is another breakthrough—clean, clear, bright, and big as its name. He shows the film studio’s logo with projection beams behind it, crossing one another against a dark sky. The text in text painting has grown and entered three dimensions. Its overall shape tapers off behind the logo, facing front at left. Hollywood is myth-making, and so is he, while claiming the myth for himself.

The curators, Christophe Cherix with Ana Torok and Kiko Aebi, present his career in sequence, but every step brings a change in theme. Ruscha does not give up a single motif. He just revisits it askance and afresh. Norm’s restaurant, LACMA, and the very sky are on fire, a word that enters text painting as well. A C-clamp tugs at the text of another painting, while other text takes on the illusion of muck and goo. He backs off painting entirely for a few years, with such media as tobacco stain, blood (his own), whisky, and gunpowder.

I prefer the deadpan optimism that brought him halfway across the country from Oklahoma City to the Sunset Strip. (He took the same highway to revisit family now and then.) It infiltrates even his chocolate room from 1970. Its wall covering, printed on paper, does not so much as stink. A New Yorker’s hopes may lie elsewhere, and so may many a history of postwar art. Still, most of all in the 1960s, he keeps you guessing as he carries Pop into conceptual art.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.