by Martin Puryear, an artist I did not know. The objects are large and beautifully crafted, mainly of wood, often hollow. (The whole exhibition's viewable here.) The piece at right, C. F. A. O. (Compagnie Française de l'Afrique Occidentale), is uncharacteristically figurative and spiky - an inverted African mask, behind which a dizzying maze of pine struts evoke at once the nails and other objects hammered into the heads of masks, a construction site, and Piranesi (wonderful plays of light and shadow back there), all in a wooden wheelbarrow... It's magnificent and terrifying.And since I was going to MoMA anyway I had an excuse to check out their films series, where I was delighted to discover they were screening Lloyd Bacon's 1933 "Footlight Serenade," one of the most spectacular of the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. I brought along
my housemate and his Finnish girlfriend, and it blew their minds. How racy the early 1930s were - "honeymoon house" sure seems like a brothel, for instance! And what an extra- ordinary mind Busby Berkeley had, building castles in the sky of women's bodies... though the "Shanghai Lil" sequence (check it out!) is pretty amazing, too, cinematographically but also as a historical document about the American view of China... and what to make of the fact that the soft-porny fountain of women in "By a waterfall" (also available on youtube) is followed by these military formations of American sailors? The first time I saw this film I was working on Watsuji, and a Pan Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere made a lot of sense as a bulwark against the threatening tide of titillating triviality from America...
