Ruin porn?

I was taken aback recently to be told by Arts & Letters Daily that my fascination with urban decay, as photographed by people like Jose Gaytan and Nathan Kensinger, means that I am indulging in “ruin porn”—or, as the linked article calls it, ”economic disaster porn.”

According to Noreen Malone, “photosets of blighted places have been, and were described variously as wonderful, as beautiful, as stunning, as shocking, as sad. They are all of those things, and so I suppose they are good art. But they are rotten photojournalism.”

True, I suppose. But then, that’s not what they were intended to be. And even if they are not intended to generate help for devastated areas, I think they do dramatize the devastation. At any rate, I doubt they are doing any actual harm. I find it hard to picture anyone actually impeding economic aid and development because he likes the way the light falls through a collapsed roof, or the colors of the giant gas bubbles rising up in the Gowanus Canal.

Did Piranesi worry about this? Or Shelley, contemplating those vast and trunkless legs of stone? Or the other romantic poets as they mooned around the Roman Forum and Colosseum? Perhaps there’s a statute of limitations, and it becomes okay to enjoy ruins once the people who lived in them have been gone for a certain length of time. 

Herbert Katzman at the Museum of the City of New York

Large sections of the Museum of the City of New York are currently closed for renovation, and to prepare for a new exhibit on the Apollo Theater, which opens February 8. But it’s worth visiting before February 21 if only to catch Glorious Sky: Herbert Katzman’s New York.

Though Katzman, who died in 2004, produced many portraits and self-portraits, some still-lifes, and scenes from Paris, Prague, and Martha’s Vineyard, this exhibit centers on his paintings and drawings of New York Harbor and its bridges. The museum website gives only a taste of what his work is like. More images from the exhibit are at DNAInfo (though the slide show contains almost none of my favorites), and more about his entire career is at the website Herbert Katzman Museum.

The exhibit begins with a 1952 painting of the Brooklyn Bridge (the first image in the DNAInfo slide show). I disliked it quite a lot, though it helped make Katzman’s reputation.

But in the big gallery beyond are many chalk drawings (though some look like watercolors) in which the iconic images of the Statue of Liberty, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn and Queensboro Bridges dissolve into misty or stormy skies. I thought of the way the Woolworth Building dissolves into the fog, and of Marshall Berman’s wonderful book All That Is Solid Melts into Air, about cities and the experience of modern life.

The grayscale images reminded me of Whistler, some of the others of Turner, and the series in which Katzman returns to the same image using different colors of chalk on different colors of paper made me think of Monet’s haystacks and cathedrals repeated in different lights.

Caillebotte and the Super Bowl

I never thought I would read the words “Gustave Caillebotte” and “Super Bowl” in the same article, but so it goes.

There’s apparently a newly created tradition of museums swapping works of art (temporarily) based on the outcome of the big game. “Boating on the Yerres” isn’t one of my favorite Caillebottes (and I was a bit disappointed by the Brooklyn Museum’s most recent exhibition), but he is one of my favorite painters, so I’m pleased to see his work singled out for this, uh, honor.

Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou

There are certain books that I’ve had on the shelves for years and still haven’t gotten around to reading. In some cases (The Hour of Our Death, The Graves Are Not Yet Full, Escape from Sobibor) it’s because the subject matter is a little ... heavy.

In other cases, as with my hardcover copy of A Suitable Boy, the book itself is too heavy. When I’m reading a book, I like to carry it around with me until it’s done. In fact, much of my reading is done while clinging to a pole on the C train. With certain books, like A Suitable Boy, this is awkward to do, and with others, like The Satanic Verses, it seems inadvisable.

I did finally accept the challenge of hauling around A Suitable Boy until I had finished reading it, and was glad I did. But I thought it would be a long time, maybe forever, before I read Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, the massive and beautifully produced volume created to accompany an ambitious museum exhibit mounted by UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 1995.

It turns out that the Christmas break is the perfect time to read this book. I have blocks of time to devote to it, and especially since a blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow on the city, no reason to go anywhere. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou looks like a coffee-table book, and in fact it would be well worth having just to go through the photos and their captions. There are numerous images of vodou flags, sequined bottles, paintings, sculptures, and complete vodou altars from Brooklyn to West Africa to Haiti itself. But there are also in-depth essays by many authorities on Haitian vodou, including Karen McCarthy Brown, Laënnec Hurbon, and Donald Cosentino, the editor of the book.

I have a long-standing interest in Haiti, and in 1996 I traveled there on a vodou-oriented tour organized by Global Exchange. Halfway through this book I was regretting that I never got to see the exhibit it’s based on. Then I realized that I did see it. This was the same show that appeared at the American Museum of Natural History from October 1998 to January 1999, and that I made a special trip from Cambridge to see (about a year and half before Jenn and I moved to New York.)

The museum still has pages on its website devoted to the show, and for anyone who wants to plunge into the book and isn’t already familiar with the difference between the rada and petwo rites and the various manifestations of Ezili and Ogou, they make a useful introduction. 

Fred Tomaselli at the Brooklyn Museum

On the first Saturday of our staycation in New York, Jenn and I set out for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden but ended up stopping for coffee at the little cafe in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum.

Descriptions of the Fred Tomaselli show at the museum focused on his use of pills embedded in resin, which didn’t interest me much. But I did like the Big Raven image used to promote the show, and since we were there we thought we would take a look.

The exhibit turned out to be one of the high points of our time off. Tomaselli’s highly intricate work has been compared to traditional Indian painting, but with its emphasis on birds and eyes, its obsessive detail, and its use of mysterious halos and energy waves, it reminds me of the psychotic art (including this series of cat pictures, done by an increasingly disturbed artist) that I first saw in a book that I read as a child. I remember it being called The Time-Life Book of the Mind but can’t locate it on the Internet. (Tomaselli himself seems quite sane in his interviews.)

A feature of Tomaselli’s collages that doesn’t come through in reproduction is the way in which one element of a man or bird is built up from many smaller images of the same thing. The beak of a bird will be composed of many smaller beaks of many shapes and sizes, and a snake (as in the image pictured) looks as if it has swallowed a reptile house full of tinier snakes.