A poorly-informed trip to The Cloisters.

The exterior of The Cloisters.

(NOTE: this is a review I forgot to post from a 2014 visit to New York City.)

Museum-going is one of my favorite vacation activities as is evidenced by Art Lobster's many posts about museum visits.  So most people were shocked when I admitted that during all my visits to New York City, I had never been to The Cloisters, the satellite site of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

My friends seemed to lord this fact over me, as if finally they had been to a museum I hadn't. People cooed about how relaxing and beautiful the setting is. And they pontificated about how interesting the collection is.

So on my last visit to New York, I made the trek that is about as far north you can go in Manhattan, hiked the somewhat confusing roads and park paths, and entered the imposing entrance to the Cloisters. I showed my Met membership card, entered the museum, and was immediately embarrassed by how ill prepared I was for this museum experience.

In my defense, there are legitimate reasons why I had never attended the museum and why I was ill informed. Medieval European art isn't something that I actively seek out.  I tend to gravitate to living artists or artists of the last 100 or so years. The Cloisters doesn't really do special exhibitions.  That's usually how I choose the museums I want to visit.  I look for an interesting temporary exhibit, make that a destination, and then find other things in that museum that look interesting.

So having done little research, I walked into the first gallery and was surprisingly confused.  What was I looking at?  Was this an old religious convent that the Met had converted into a museum? And how was I to judge the objects on display.  The confusion was enough that I immediately returned to the information counter to do the only thing that made sense.  Get some basic info and pay for an audio guide.

The Unicorn in Captivity (ca. 1495 - 1505)

Turns out, The Cloisters was built specifically to house the Medieval European collection of the Met.  That's how they were able to incorporate many of the architectural elements right into the building. The Met's collection includes an impressive array of massive stone doorways, stained glass windows, and Cloisters, all of which have been thoughtfully built into the building.  Set among this are plenty of interesting art and objects.

The walls of one large room are covered with unicorn tapestries.  They are massive.  And while modern unicorns are usually rainbow-jumping cartoon characters, these animals were fierce creatures. Most of the tapestries involved hunting, trapping, or killing unicorns which was apparently a popular medieval activity.  The tapestries were spectacular.  And I can only imagine that they would have been all the more spectacular at a time when movies, videos, cartoons, immersive games, etc, did not exist. Not to mention the craftsmanship of the weaving.  I'm still not exactly sure how this was possible.  The work shown here is The Unicorn in Captivity (ca. 1495 - 1505, wool, silk, and silver and gilded silver-wrapped thread).

Medieval folk seem to thrill at the terrors of hell.  Gruesome images were to be found everywhere at The Cloisters. There was an entire collection of these small, stained-glass window medallions that featured truly awful scenes of hell.

Souls Tormented in Hell (ca. 1500 - 1510)

Much of what makes The Cloisters impressive are the soaring architectural spaces which feel authentic to the Medieval sensibility the museum is  trying to recreate.

Medieval craftspeople were nothing if not focused on difficult-to-execute details.  Hand carved flourishes and figures can be found everywhere.  And I'm sure the tools used to create them didn't make the task easy.  Many of those featuring people suggest that Medieval life wasn't all that fun.

Of course there are the actual Cloisters which have been painstakingly reassembled from locations in Europe and elsewhere. A cloister is a covered walkway usually found in convents or monasteries. Most feature a wall on one side and a colonnade on the other that opens to a court yard. And yes, now I too can now coo about how relaxing and beautiful the setting of these spaces can be. Here's Felix taking a casual stroll through one such space.

I'll admit I'm a little ambivalent about the intent of The Cloisters.  There were moments when it felt theme park-ish, as if the Disney imagineers had been called up and asked to create a Medieval European village.  At the same time, its quiet beauty and engaging content make for a lovely museum experience.

Of pots and pearls. . . and crabs and bicycles and rebar.

Ai Weiwei, Stacked (2014, 700 stainless-steel bicycles)

I lucked out on my recent trip to New York City.  Not only was there the Jeff Koons retrospective (one of the reasons I planned the trip), there just happened to be an exhibition of work by Ai Weiwei.  Ai is another art-world superstar who is at the top of my list of artists to experience.  There’s a big difference between these two shows.  First, Ai does not suffer from the negative criticism that Koons often confronts. In fact, critics are in love with Ai Weiwei, but it’s understandable.  It’s hard not to respect an artist as political and provocative as Ai.  The Chinese government has thrown the artist in jail because he’s annoyed them so much.  He’s also embraced the digital age in ways that other artists haven’t quite figured out, using Twitter and other social media to amplify the impact of his art.

While the two artists’ styles are very different they do share something in common.  Both understand the importance of creating sophisticated objects.  And neither of them do much of the actual production.  People often talk about Koons’ army of assistants in a highly-critical manner.  You seldom hear the same criticism of Ai, even though he also employs an army of assistants and production personal to create his elaborate works of art.

The show, titled Ai Weiwei: According to What? originated in Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum and then made several stops in the US and Canada before arriving in Brooklyn.  However the Brooklyn show features two large works that were not on display in the previous exhibitions.  I felt those two works make the show particularly interesting and wouldn’t have enjoyed the exhibition as much if I hadn’t seen them. Here are some of the works I found particularly interesting.

The woodworking skills in many of Ai’s works are impressive.  Take Moon Chest for example. On display in Brooklyn were seven large wooden chests that are from the larger work which features 81 chests.  Each chest has four holes cut into it that mimic the stages of the lunar eclipse.  The chests are constructed using traditional Chinese methods using no nails or screws. 

Ai Weiwei, Moon Chest (2008, seven chests in huali wood)

Ai Weiwei likes to use antiques in his works, often those antiques are in the form of furniture.  For his series started in 1997 he uses old furniture built without using nails, a technique perfected during the Ming and Qing dynasties when China's furniture production reached a pinnacle of excellence. In Grapes, humble stools are transformed into a space-like constellation, asking questions about how much tradition should influence the now.

Ai Weiwei, Grapes (2012, 27 antique wooden stools from the Qing dynasty [1644 - 1911])

Ai is notorious for creating works that feature enormous quantities of the same item.  The most famous of these was the installation at Tate Modern that included millions of handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds.  There are no sunflower seeds here, instead there are two enormous porcelain bowls filled with cultivated freshwater pearls.  Also, there was a great big pile of porcelain crabs. The word for river crab in Chinese is he xie which also sounds like the word for harmonious, part of the Chinese Communist Party slogan. In 2010, Chinese authorities announced they would demolish Ai’s new Shanghai studio.  In response, Ai used Twitter to invite guests to a feast of 10,000 river crabs to protest the control of information.  Ai was under house arrest so he was unable to attend the party.

Ai Weiwei, Bowls of Pearls (2006, porcelain bowls and freshwater pearls)

Ai Weiwei, He Xie (2010, 3,200 porcelain crabs)

Another of Ai’s favorite art world tricks is to destroy antiquities. Frequently the antiquities in questions are Han Dynasty vases.  One Ai’s most famous works is called Dropping and is seen in the photographs featured in this image.  In it, Ai destroyed a 2,000 year old vase.  Ai also has a penchant for painting Han Dynasty vases. For me, these works once again ask questions about the value of tradition.

Ai Weiwei, installation view featuring Colored Vases 
(2007 - 10, Han Dynasty vases [206 B. C. E. - 220 C. E] and industrial paint)

Ai is no stranger to New York.  He lived there from 1983 to 1993. During that time he was strongly influenced by the work of Marcel Duchamp. (It’s interesting that both Ai and Koons list Duchamp as a significant influence in their work.) I like this simple portrait made from a coat hanger that references some very Duchampian ideas.  There’s the readymade everyday object and the self-portrait of the artist in profile.

Ai Weiwei, Profile of Marcel Duchamp in a Coat Hanger (1986, wire clothes hanger)

One of my favorite works in the show is Straight.  I like this work because you can read it on two levels.  Without knowing the story behind the work, it’s still an impressive work that forces an immediate emotional response.  It too speaks to the idea of the readymade as it’s nothing more than a pile of rebar. But what a pile?  Laid out in varying lengths, the rebar evokes the landscapes of Maya Lin.  As you learn what you are really looking at, Straight becomes even more powerful.  The work consists of 73 tons of rebar recovered from the rubble of collapsed schoolhouses following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Ai had every piece meticulously straightened through a laborious process. Suddenly the landscape-like canyon feels like a crack in the world. And the emotional response is ratcheted up.

Ai Weiwei, Straight (2008, 73 tons of steel rebar)

Ai Weiwei, Straight (2008, 73 tons of steel rebar)

Ai Weiwei, Straight (2008, 73 tons of steel rebar)

Ai Weiwei likes bicycles.  And he’s taken to using them in spectacular fashion in large installations. He uses them to celebrate the bicycle’s importance to the Chinese people. For his Brooklyn show, he used bicycles made from stainless steel and ditched the handlebars and seat, creating a dizzying structure. The result is a work that suggests in “China the individual is often undervalued and seen only as part of the whole.” This again is an even more obvious reference to Duchamp who also used bicycle parts in his work.

Ai Weiwei, Stacked (2014, 700 stainless-steel bicycles)

Ai Weiwei, Stacked (2014, 700 stainless-steel bicycles)

I’ll finish with another particularly powerful work featured in Ai Weiwei: According to what? The Chinese government regularly gets tired of Ai and his political activism and criticism. In 2011, the Chinese authorities threw Ai in jail for 81 days. In response, he created S.A.C.R.E.D. to document the unpleasantness of the affair.  In the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum were six very large, imposing metal boxes with no ornamentation.  Cut into each box were two small windows that allowed the viewer to peer inside. Inside were dioramas representing Ai’s life in prison, including the moment he was led into his cell, the periods of interrogation, and the daily activities of eating, sleeping, showering, and using the toilet. All of these views include his seemingly constant companions, guards. It made me appreciate the sacrifice of an artist working so hard to change his society.

Ai Weiwei, S.A.C.R.E.D. (2013, six dioramas in oxidized metal, wood, fiberglass, polystyrene, and sticky tape)

Ai Weiwei, S.A.C.R.E.D. (2013, six dioramas in oxidized metal, wood, fiberglass, polystyrene, and sticky tape)

Instagrams from this visit:

• Warhol and Ai
• Me and the Moon Chest

Other Art Lobster posts about Ai Weiwei:

• Never retreat. Retweet.