Made You Look
As we enter December, I wanted to highlight two museum exhibits in New York City, both closing in January, that concern music.
The first is “Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear” at MoMA through Jan. 1.
Many of Tillmans’ photos, taped to the wall at eye level, depict musicians, such as Philip Glass, Kae Tempest, and, of course, Frank Ocean.
After a 30-year hiatus, Tillmans returned to making music in 2016. His visual album, Moon in Earthlight (2021), plays in one of the exhibit’s “listening rooms.”
In “Celloloop/More That Connects Us” and “Celloloop/Stronger Than This,” Tillmans’s cello provides texture more than melody, sounding a bit like Arthur Russell.
In “Can’t Escape into Space” the colorful shapes cast by a disco ball evoke the films of Oskar Fischinger. The same is true in the earlier “Lights” (2002).
In these films, the queer nightclub comes to represent the perfect union of sound and image
The second exhibit is “Cubism and the Trompe L’Oeil Tradition” at the Met Museum through Jan. 22.
It consists of collages and paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. Many of them musical still lives built from sheet music, faux woodgrain, and even sawdust.
These are presented alongside the 17th-century “eye-fooling” works that inspired them.
One label draws a connection between intarsia — an example being the Met’s Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio — and the play between the two- and three-dimensional.
Another explains the Renaissance idea of paragone, or debate, about the superiority of painting or sculpture
But the exhibit is a missed opportunity for more collaboration with the Met’s world-renowned instrument department.
In one label, a violin’s pegs are mistakenly referred to as “tuning keys.” Another writes, “To judge by the violin's long, narrow form… Picasso had a ‘kit’ in mind.”
I’m dubious.
The exhibit also hints at, but never answers, an obvious question: Why were the Cubists so enamored by musical instruments?
Of course, there’s the allusion to the Trompe L’Oeil tradition, with its vanitas associations. Perhaps even the extension of the paragone to include music.
But I think Elizabeth Cowling really gets at it in “Feminine/Masculine,” the exhibit’s accompanying essay: “Picasso often resorted to the guitar-as-woman metaphor, which effectively became a Cubist cliché.”
The answer to the “Why musical instruments?” question, I believe, has to do, ultimately, with the fracturing, and literal “objectification,” of the female body.