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    What Does Music Look Like? A New Show Unpacks the Aesthetics of Sound

    A forthcoming exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is making the case that music is as much a sonic experience as it is a visual one. 
    “Art of Noise” will gather a staggering 800 art and design objects that have enhanced and vivified the experience of music over the past century. They range from product to graphic design, and span ages, but all of them have enhanced our relationship to music. Or, as curator Joseph Becker told me over a video call: “The artifacts that accompany the music lend presence to the music itself.”
    When it came to building the exhibition, Becker was spoilt for choice. Most of the works on view emerge from SFMOMA’s permanent collection, which include such highlights as record sleeves, ads, and flyers from the Bay Area’s psychedelic rock heyday. In particular, the museum holds the complete collection of rock posters printed by legendary promoters Bill Graham and Family Dog Productions during the 1960s and ’70s. All 460 of them are going on view as a set for the first time. 
    Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures poster (1979), designed by Factory Records after Peter Saville. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of Jenny Emerson and Accessions Committee Fund; © Peter Saville; photo: Tenari Tuatagaloa
    Also given an outing are works designed by the likes of Milton Glaser, best known for his 1966 poster of a fiery-haired Bob Dylan; Emmet McBain, who left his primary-colored imprint on jazz records; and Victor Moscoso, designer of the 1960s’ trippiest posters. 
    The show’s focus on music’s aesthetics stretches to encompass product and industrial design as well, namely the technology that’s made music playback possible. The gadgets arrayed here will trace a century’s worth of design and engineering evolutions from early phonographs to boomboxes and stereos to iPods. Sculptures by artists Ron Arad and Tom Sachs also feature. These devices, said Becker, “have allowed us to have different relationships to music.” 
    Ron Arad, Concrete Stereo (1983). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee fund purchase; © Ron Arad Associates.
    The curator is especially jazzed about interactive installations dotted throughout “Art of Noise.” One work by Teenage Engineering, titled Choir, will feature wooden figurines programmed to “sing” in various music genres in different tonal ranges. Another work, by celebrated engineer Devon Turnbull, will take over a gallery with giant custom speakers that will play a selection of rarities and master recordings in devastatingly high fidelity. For those conditioned to the playback quality of AirPods, Turnbull’s immersive installation promises “an awakening experience,” Becker said. 
    Yuri Suzuki’s commission, Arborhythm, offers a similar listening experience outdoors, where visitors can recline amid tree-like sculptures. “The natural and urban sounds are remixed into this wellness soundtrack,” Becker explained. “It gets a little bit like a sound bath, a sonic conditioner.”
    Teenage Engineering, Choir (2022). © teenage engineering.
    The show will be rounded off by SFMOMA’s latest acquisitions, including a 1965 Brionvega RR126 stereo system, designed by Achille and Piergiacomo Castiglioni, as well as the DJ deck custom-designed by Teenage Engineering for Virgil Abloh’s set at Coachella in 2019. 
    “This has been such a wonderful project to work on,” Becker reflected. “There are so many different access points to music because it’s so deeply ingrained in cross-cultural experiences. I think music just touches people in a way that is similar to art, but also in a way that is more universal.” 
    See more images from the exhibition below.
    Jason Munn, School of Seven Bells / Black Moth Super Rainbow (2010). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jason Munn, © Jason Munn; photo: Don Ross.
    Achille and Piergiacomo Castiglioni, RR126 Stereo System, manufactured by Brionvega (1965). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; photo: Don Ross.
    Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot, Braun SK-4 (1956). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot; photo: Katherine Du Tiel.
    Lee Conklin, Canned Heat and Gordon Lightfoot at the Fillmore West, October 3–5, 1968 (1968). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jim Chanin; © Wolfgang’s Vault; photo: Don Ross.
    Bonnie MacLean, The Yardbirds and The Doors at the Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, July 25–30, 1967 (1967). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jim Chanin; © Wolfgang’s Vault; photo: Don Ross
    Teenage Engineering, Virgil Abloh DJ deck (2019). © teenage engineering; photo: Pelle Bergström, Skarp Agent.
    Tom Sachs, Model Thirty-Six (2014). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of the FOG Forum; © Tom Sachs.
    David Singer, Grateful Dead and Taj Mahal at the Fillmore West, February 5–8, 1970 (1970). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jim Chanin; © Wolfgang’s Vault; photo: Don Ross.
    Mathieu Lehanneur, Power of Love (2009). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee fund purchase; © Mathieu Lehanneur; photo: Don Ross.
    “Art of Noise” is on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St, San Francisco, May 4 through August 18. 
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    A New Survey of Black Portraiture Rewrites the Art Historical Canon

    Since the very earliest art forms, artists have been compelled to depict the human figure. These images allow us to see ourselves, our societies, and our cultures reflected back and recorded for posterity. “The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black figure” is a new survey at the National Portrait Gallery in London that considers how 22 artists from the African Diaspora are currently choosing to reflect the Black experience.
    Some of the biggest names on show include Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Michael Armitage, and Lubaina Himid, and all of the works were completed at some point in the past two decades. The exhibition was initiated by Ekow Eshun, the writer, broadcaster, and curator behind the Hayward Gallery’s hit show “In the Black Fantastic” in 2022.
    At the “The Time is Always Now” opening, Eshun explained that the exhibition’s title comes from “an awareness that we’re in an extraordinary moment right now, a moment of flourishing when it comes to work by contemporary artists from the African Diaspora working in figuration.”
    “These works are thinking about a history of being overlooked, misrepresented, or depicted without agency,” he added. “These works are not a rectifier of that, per se. These artists are simply commanding space on their own terms.”
    Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Father Stretch My Hands (2021). Photo: Rob McKeever, courtesy of Gagosian.
    The show’s first of three themes, “Double Consciousness,” borrows its title from the great thinker W.E.B. Du Bois, who used the term in 1897 to encapsulate the Black experience of living within a white society but also outside, psychologically speaking.
    “It is a peculiar sensation, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Du Bois once remarked. If this feeling can be translated to canvas, it might resemble the fragmented portraits of Nathaniel Mary Quinn, which remind us that our perceptions of the world around us are never static or entirely coherent. His beguiling works are among the best on show.
    Claudette Johnson, Standing Figure with African Masks (2018). Photo: Andy Keate, courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.
    Out of a handful of sensitive and warm character studies, Jennifer Packer’s intimate portraits of family and friends attract the eye for how her painterly apparitions appear to almost melt or drip away. Claudette Johnson’s Standing Figure with African Masks (2018) offers a fun twist on one of the defining images of the avant-garde, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).  Johnson takes the West African Dan masks Picasso appropriated in his seminal 20th century painting and reclaims them as the backdrop for an assertive image of herself that she had originally planned to name Brazen Woman. By the entrance, gleaming under the gallery lights, is a towering gold monument to the Black figure, a young woman in sportswear by Thomas J. Price.
    Titus Kaphar, Seeing Through Time 2 (2018). Photo: Christopher Gardner, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
    The white gaze that has dominated so much of the art historical canon is sidelined in a series of galleries dedicated to the theme “Persistence of History.” Titus Kaphar takes to task a staple portrait set-up from the colonial era, that of a Black boy attending to a white female sitter. In his standout work Seeing Through Time 2, the central subject of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth is removed and the boy instead kneels in reverence to a Black figure who fills the empty silhouette.
    Barbara Walker’s drawings similarly foreground the Black servants or enslaved people that had been historically relegated to the status of background figures, filling them in with graphite while those who were once considered to be the composition’s obvious subjects are merely suggested by an embossed outline.
    Jordan Casteel, Yvonne and James (2017). Photo: Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.
    Finally, the theme of “Our Aliveness” unites works by artists like Toyin Ojih Odutola, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Henry Taylor, that display a sense of contemporary community. Jordan Casteel places the spotlight on everyday, easily overlooked passengers riding the New York City subway; in this case the sitters are James, who sells vintage vinyl records, and his friend Sylvia, who runs a soul food restaurant in Harlem. Meanwhile, Hurvin Anderson’s colorful yet subtly understated paintings center the barbershop as a site of kinship for people of Caribbean origin in Britain.
    Denzil Forrester, Itchin & Scratchin (2019). Photo: Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery.
    The exuberance of a crowd that fills a dimly lit but lively reggae dancehall in London in the 1980s practically leaps off the canvas in a work by Denzil Forrester. Opposite, the dense layering of imagery in Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens (2021) is masterfully achieved so as to never detract from the principal composition. A self-portrait of the artist with her child, the work is immediately striking long before the viewer steps closer and drinks in the intricate patterns and archival photographs imprinted onto the scene’s lush foliage.
    “The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London through May 19, 2024. 
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    Klimt’s Idyllic Landscapes of the Austrian Countryside Are on View in New York

    Gustav Klimt, a Viennese Symbolist painter and co-founder of the Viennese Secession movement, first came to prominence as a mural painter. Later, he became known for his paintings of women, including those prominent in Viennese society around 1901–09. This period in the artist’s career was dubbed the “Golden Phase,” and was characterized by striking portraits adorned with glistening gold leaf, which have captured the public’s imagination for decades. Now however, the Neue Galerie is focusing on a significant part of Klimt’s oeuvre that has been overshadowed by the artist’s famed late portraits, with the exhibition “Klimt Landscapes.”
    Installation view of Klimt Landscapes, on view at Neue Galerie New York. Image courtesy Neue Galerie New York, Photography by Annie Schlechter
    Painted predominantly between 1898 and 1918, Klimt’s landscapes were produced for the artist’s own pleasure during summer vacations in the Austrian countryside, and in particular to Lake Attersee in the Salzkammergut region. These works form a substantial proportion of Klimt’s overall oeuvre and were celebrated during his lifetime.
    Moriz Nähr, Gustav Klimt in the garden of his studio at Josefstädter Strasse 21, 1911. Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York
    In the winter of 1903, around 20 landscapes featured in the artist’s only substantial one-man show in Vienna before his death. Known for their innovative square format, which betrayed the artist’s interest in photography, and produced en plein-air (outside), an approach also favoured by the Impressionists, these bucolic works were praised by contemporary critics and were highly sought after by collectors.
    Gustav Klimt, Printer: K. K. Hof-und Staatsdruckerei Reproduction of Sunflower (1907-08), Collotype with gold intaglio. First Publisher: H. O. Miethke, 1908-14. Reissued: Hugo Heller Kunstverlag, 1918. Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York
    The current exhibition combines highlights from the Neue Galerie’s Klimt collection with important loans from several private and public collections in the United States and Europe. Klimt’s nature scenes are contextualized in the broader trajectory of his artistic career, which developed from an academic painting style towards greater adoption of Symbolist and Art Nouveau tendencies.
    Installation view of Klimt Landscapes, on view at Neue Galerie New York. Image courtesy Neue Galerie New York, Photography by Annie Schlechter.
    Photography and design objects by artists of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Worskhops) accompany Klimt’s paintings and emphasize the artist’s central position in the vibrant artistic environment of turn-of-the-century Vienna. The exhibition also accentuates Klimt’s important personal relationships, for instance with fashion designer Emilie Flöge, whose family the artist often accompanied on his productive summer vacations.
    Heinrich Böhler, Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge,Kammerl/Attersee, 1909. Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York
    “Klimt Landscapes” is on view at the Neue Galerie in New York through May 6, 2024. See more images from the exhibition below.
    Gustav Klimt, Park at Kammer Castle (1909). Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York.
    Gustav Klimt, Two Girls with Oleander, (ca. 1890–92). Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York.
    Gustav Klimt, Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden), (1914). Photo: Hulya Kolabas. Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York.
    Gustav Klimt, Fable (1883). Design for Allegorien und Embleme, no. 75aWien Museum, Purchase, Verlag Gerlach & Schenk, 1901 Photo: Birgit and Peter Kainz, Wien Museum.
    Gustav Klimt, Idyll,1884. Photo: Birgit and Peter Kainz, Wien Museum. Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York
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    A New Exhibition Opens 100 Feet Below Sea Level

    Campina de Cima, the rock salt mine underneath the city of Loulé in Portugal, provides salt mostly for animal feed and de-icing the roads. However, for the last five years it has also been the only salt mine in the country to open to the public for guided tours of its 25 miles of tunnels.
    It has recently taken on a new role as an exhibition space, which was inaugurated on February 17 with  ‘Ocean: Sea is Life’, an exhibition by artists from the Portuguese David Melgueiro Association which campaigns for ocean clean-ups. Its website states that the association’s purpose is “to provide operational and logistical support for scientific and technical activities, aimed at preserving the marine environment”.
    The mine’s salt galleries lie around 754 feet beneath the city of Loulé and almost 100 feet below sea level, making them Portugal’s deepest tourist site. The salt itself is approximately 230-million-years-old.
    Mining activities continue alongside guided tours, which explore the machinery used and the life of Saint Barbara. Legend says that martyr lived in the 4th century and was hidden from sight by her pagan father due to her great beauty. He eventually beheaded her when she converted to Christianity.
    Barbara is the patron saint of miners, as well as those in other dangerous careers such as artillerymen and military engineers. There is a tradition in the tunnelling industry of setting up a shrine to the saint underground, to bring protection upon the workers. “Saint Barbara, Patron Saint of Miners and Other Arts” is a permanent exhibition at the Campina de Cima, which also boasts one of the world’s largest collections of object relating to the saint.
    Saint Barbara statuette in Campina de Cima mine. Image via My Guide Algarve.
    The saint was also the subject of the first-ever art exhibition to be held at the mine, back in 2022. It featured the works of German painter Klaus Zylla, who began focusing on her story during an artist residency in the Algarve.
    These various artistic initiatives were put in place by the management company TechSalt SA with the hopes that the mine could become jewel in the crown of the Algarvensis Geopark, which has aspirations to become a UNESCO site. Their website lists TechSalt SA’s mission “to explore and commercialize the rock salt mineral resource at the Campina de Cima mine,” adding that they “want to reuse the mining space in an innovative way, contributing to the dissemination and promotion of Earth Scheinces, Mining Industry, and Art.”

    ‘Ocean: Sea is Life” closes at the end of April, and tickets to visit the mine are available through TechSalt’s website.
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    Why Portraitist John Singer Sargent Cared So Much About Clothes

    Endless rooms of 19th-century portraits might not sound like an immediately exciting prospect, even if they were the socialites, celebrities, and statesmen of their day. As soon as the name John Singer Sargent is mentioned, however, the exhibition is sure to be a blockbuster hit. The American painter’s widespread appeal has hardly been diminished since the days when the most fashionable members of society’s upper crust were vying to be immortalized by his brush.
    Like an antidote to the avant-garde, Sargent’s paintings have a timeless charm owed to his uncanny ability to bring subjects to life on canvas. The latest survey of his work, “Sargent and Fashion,” has just opened at Tate Britain in London after a successful run at the MFA Boston. Walking through the galleries, one feels almost like they are stepping into a century-old conversation between fully sentient figures.
    Faces full of character aside, Sargent’s subjects stand out for his richly resplendent renderings of their dress. Over the course of a lifetime, Sargent’s other interests inevitably shifted but his love of fashion and texture would remain a constant. Highlighting this pivotal part of his practice, the exhibition reunites the portraits with the original clothes worn or, in some cases, items of a similar type. Examples include the bright yellow dress donned by Spanish dancer La Carmencita and the magnificent black opera cloak worn by Lady Sassoon.
    Installation view of “Sargent and Fashion” at Tate Britain showing La Carmencita (c. 1890). Photo: Larina Fernandes, © Tate.
    “One thing that is striking to anyone that looks at his work is just how much he’s interested in the clothes,” said the show’s curator James Finch. “He’s evidently in love with the textures of clothing. The exhibition allows viewers to see what Sargent is doing in the process of painting: the details that he picks out, the things that he elides, and the process of transformation that is taking place.”
    Though some critics have struggled to understand the crucial role that fashion plays in constructing identity, its significance was obvious to Sargent and many of his sitters. It is well known that he kept a repertoire of props for this purpose and made careful but often surprising adjustments to each sitter’s costume as he saw fit.
    “We have enough evidence to give a clear sense that Sargent was very interventionist,” said Finch. “There was a class of patron who sought out this unexpected quality in the portrait and who left themselves open to working with an artist who would push back. If you knew exactly how you wanted to be depicted, you probably wouldn’t go to Sargent.”
    “He wasn’t an artist that relied on preparatory drawings,” Finch added, “but really worked his ideas out on the canvas. He never really smoothed out those edges even when he was extremely in demand. Every portrait was still an experiment on some level.”
    Artnet News asked Finch to pick out five portraits from the exhibition that exemplify Sargent’s meticulous fashioning of identity through dress.

    Lady Helen Vincent
    John Singer Sargent, Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess d’Abernon (1904). Photo: Sean Pathasema, courtesy of Birmingham Museum of Art.
    Sargent’s tendency to toy around with the details is apparent in his portrait of Lady Helen Vincent, a diarist and celebrated socialite who also worked as a nurse anaesthetist during World War I. Sargent painted her while she was staying in Venice just a few years before he would swear off portraits in 1907. Though Lady Helen was in fact wearing a white dress during their sessions, Sargent decided to change the color to black halfway through to produce a more immediately striking effect. Reflecting on this last minute swap, Sargent quipped that he was both a “painter and a dressmaker.”
    “He would tailor what the sitter was wearing and make it look quite different,” said Finch. “Rather than simply documenting the latest styles he found a way to make them conform to his vision.”

    Ellen Terry
    Installation view of “Sargent and Fashion” at Tate Britain showing Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (c. 1889). Photo: Larina Fernandes, © Tate.
    When Sargent attended the opening night of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre in London in 1888, he was immediately moved to paint the actress Ellen Terry in the starring role of Lady Macbeth. She stood out on stage for her spectacular dress that was adorned with gold thread and 1,000 iridescent wings plucked from the green jewel beetle. When Terry described the dress to her daughter, she lamented that “the photographs give no idea of it at all, for it is in color that is so splendid.”
    Luckily, Sargent wasted no time in asking to paint Terry. He had originally picked a pose that directly quoted the play but ended up having the star raise her arms over her head instead.
    “The pose is devised to showcase the dress so that you really get a sense of how the sleeves and cloak fall in a very dramatic way,” said Finch. “Its a really extravagant outfit that shows the outsized personality of the performer.”
    Surprisingly, Sargent also chose to make the dress more blue than it appears in real life on the advice of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.

    Samuel Jean Pozzi
    John Singer Sargent, Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881). Photo: The Armand Hammer Collection.
    The French surgeon Samuel Jean Pozzi was a glamorous man about town who befriended notable cultural figures like Marcel Proust and Sarah Bernhardt, and had numerous affairs, including with Virginie Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most notorious Portrait of Madame X (1884).
    Pozzi’s more dapper side comes across in a black-and-white photo from the time, but Sargent made the bold choice to reimagine him in a totally different guise. Striking an elegant pose, Pozzi is shown wearing a statement red dressing gown and Turkish slippers in a disarmingly intimate domestic space.
    “Its an almost transgressive way of depicting him that says so much about subverting ideas of masculinity at that time,” said Finch.

    Lady Hammersley
    John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (1892). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Douglass Campbell, in memory of Mrs. Richard E. Danielson, 1998.
    The London hostess Mrs. Hammersley stands out against a decadent gold background for her cherry pink velvet gown. We know just how faithfully Sargent reproduced the color thanks to the swatch that Hammersley kept, which has since entered the the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection along with the painting.
    “She clearly had such a strong sense of what it meant to sit for Sargent,” said Finch. “She was very interested in the arts and had a salon that was attended by Sargent, Walter Sickert, Augustus John, and other artists. She kept all her correspondence with Sargent and clearly had a sense of herself as her own archivist.”
    The painting caused a stir when it was exhibited in 1893, with critics expressing discomfort at its ostentatious emphasis on dress. George Moore described the work as “the apotheosis of fashionable painting,” that would have as short a lifespan as any other trend. One day, he concluded, “many will turn with a shudder from its cold, material accomplishment.” Needless to say, it remains a widely admired portrait.

    Eleanor O’Donnell Iselin
    John Singer Sargent, Eleanora O’Donnell Iselin (Mrs. Adrian Iselin) (1888). Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington.
    When Eleanor O’Donnell Iselin first sat for Sargent, she must have known that he preferred an interventionist approach because she brought an array of exquisite dresses from Paris for him to choose from. Ever unpredictable, Sargent was immediately taken instead by the simple black day dress she had arrived in. According to at least one account, Iselin was disappointed by the artist’s choice, but we can only assume that he saw in the more austere outfit a fitting tribute to Iselin’s reportedly serious character.
    “Its perhaps not what Iselin would have had in mind when she was first commissioning Sargent,” said Finch, but as always, “it would be a process of negotiation to reach the final outcome.”
    “Sargent and Fashion” is on view at Tate Britain in London until July 7, 2024. 
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    Acorns Planted by John Lennon and Yoko Ono—Then Promptly Stolen—Go on View

    The latest display at Liverpool’s Beatles Museum is the unlikely result of a 55-year-long saga involving John Lennon and Yoko Ono, an aborted peace monument, a drunk driver, and a retired traffic cop who does not care for the Beatles.
    The musical duo planted the acorns at Coventry Cathedral in 1968, intending for them to be part of a living sculpture, with a wrought iron bench surrounding the two trees. But in less than a week’s time, the acorns had been dug up and stolen, and a discouraged Lennon gave up on the gesture and removed the bench. 
    It turns out that a few days after the theft, a young man was busted for drunk driving nearby, and Mike Davies, a traffic sergeant with the Warwickshire Police, retrieved the acorns from him. The offender and his girlfriend, who were in fact Beatles fans, had dug up the acorns and coated them in clear nail varnish in order to preserve them. 
    “They walked and the acorns were left,” Davies, now 88, told the PA news agency, explaining that the acorns were, legally speaking, worthless and had no owner, so he didn’t bring charges. “It was no good taking them back and replanting them because they were covered in nail varnish so wouldn’t grow.”
    Davies simply kept the acorns in his desk until his retirement in 1980, at which time he brought them home in a cardboard box with other personal effects. He had forgotten all about them until he came across them last year.
    “They were two seconds off going in the waste bin when I thought, ‘That was John Lennon and Yoko Ono,’” he said.
    So, Davies sent them to the Liverpool museum, saying that if they weren’t interested in adding them to the collection, they should just throw them out, as he didn’t care to have them back. 
    The two acorns that John Lennon and Yoko Ono planted at Coventry Cathederal and were then dug up and stolen, now on display at the Beatles Museum in Matthew Street, Liverpool. Photo by Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images.
    The acorns have now gone on display at the museum after an unveiling by Lennon’s sister, Julia Baird. 
    “John Lennon and Yoko Ono kicked off their whole peace movement with this art installation, where the acorns were planted,” said Roag Best, museum owner and brother to original Beatles drummer Pete Best. 
    Lennon and Ono’s quest for world peace, which came at the peak of the counterculture movement, was well known, including “bed-ins,” one from their suite at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel and another from the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, and their slogan “War is over! If you want it.” At the Montreal bed-in, they wrote the song “Give Peace a Chance,” which as recorded as a Plastic Ono Band single in 1969 and became an international hit.
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    Yoko Ono’s Powerful Protest Art Has Taken Over the Tate. How Does It Meet With Our Present Moment?

    When you ask most people what Yoko Ono has done, you’re likely to hear one of two things: that she sat in a hotel bed to promote peace alongside the late musician John Lennon, or that she singlehandedly broke up the Beatles. Or both. But the 91-year-old activist and widow of Lennon was always more than a headline or a muse to her famous husband, and this is well-evidenced at her highly anticipated retrospective at Tate Modern, called “Music of the Mind.”
    In fact, Ono did all her best work before she met Lennon in 1966. That much is obvious throughout the nine rooms across the Blavatnik Building display. From her celebrated experimental film Cut Piece (1964), where Ono invited the audience at a performance in Kyoto to cut off parts of her robe until she was left only in her underwear and the straightest of faces, to the irreverent and silly Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966), a close-up shot of a pair of pert buttocks, Ono pushed the boundaries of embodied expression and collective participation to make odd, compelling, and original works of art. Yet it is much easier to say that about her early work than it is about her more recent attempts.
    As a young girl evacuated from Tokyo during wartime, Ono found sanctuary in the constant presence of the sky. Sheltering in the countryside, Ono and her younger brother, Keisuke, would lie down in fields and gaze upwards, noting the traffic of clouds and the hues of blue and white. “That’s when I fell in love with the sky,” Ono said: “even when everything was falling apart around me, the sky was always there for me… I can never give up on life as long as the sky is there.”
    Given that lying about and letting the world around her do its thing became a hallmark of her practice, Ono believed that this experience from childhood was her “first work of art.” Indeed, as a symbol of something that we all share, the sky seeps into much of Ono’s best work of the 1960s, including Sky TV (1966), a video work that features a recording of the sky over 24 hours. It grew out of a wish to haul the sky into the white cube of the gallery space and force modern technology into dialogue with the natural world.
    Yoko Ono with Half-A-Room 1967 from HALF-A-WIND SHOW, Lisson Gallery, London, 1967. Photo © Clay Perry. © Yoko Ono
    She also encouraged a direct discourse between the artwork and the view. The foundational piece Painting to See the Skies (1961), one of her “22 Instructions for Paintings,” Ono wrote down the straightforward instructions to realize her artwork: Drill two holes into a canvas. Hang it where you can see the sky. (Change the place of hanging. Try both the front and the rear windows, to see if the skies are different.)’ We are challenged to make the work in our minds, or note down the rules and realize it at home.
    While I was visiting the gallery, an art critic in the next room was following instructions for Bag Piece (1964) on-site, gyrating in a black bag on the floor. “By being in a bag, you show the other side of you,” Ono said of this work: “which is nothing to do with race, nothing to do with sex, nothing to do with you know, age, actually.” By the end of the decade, Ono and Lennon invented Bagism based on this idea, a satire of all the prejudicial ‘isms’ that they believed falsely disconnected us from one another.
    Yoko Ono, Sky TV 1966/2014. Courtesy the artist. Installation view courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo © Cathy Carver. © Yoko Ono
    After studying philosophy in Tokyo (she was the first woman student on her program at the elite Gakushūin University), Ono moved to New York in 1956 where she threw herself into the frenetic downtown scene of avant-garde musicians and artists. With her then-husband Toshi Ichiyanagi, she helped to inspire John Cage’s fascination with Zen and I-Ching principles to make music (and was instrumental in bringing Cage to the Sōgetsu Art Center in Japan). Ono co-programmed the legendary Chamber Street Loft Series at just 27 with La Monte Young, and staged important performances at Carnegie Recital Hall alongside Yvonne Rainer, Jonas Mekas, and David Tudor. She was an entrepreneurial impresario who helped cultivate forums for experimental programming with choreographers, musicians, and artists. She was a five-foot-one bridge between the avant-garde scenes in New York and Tokyo.
    But everything changed when Ono met Lennon, at an exhibition of her work at the Indica Gallery in London. (Understandably for a Tate show there is an emphasis on “the London years,” from 1965 to 1971). So the story goes, the Beatle climbed the high ladder of Ono’s Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting (1966) to read the word YES through a magnifying glass. They fell in love. The rest is history. But that’s the problem. Ono abandoned the avant-garde for the spotlight and became an international spokesperson for the international peace movement. Commendable as that might be as activism, at times it made for some boring or sanctimonious art. For all the curators’ efforts to make Ono’s work seem relevant today, her practice has remained static since the 1970s, mired in the hippie utopianism of that moment.
    Yoko Ono, Add Colour (Refugee Boat), 2016, at MAXXI Foundation. Photo © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini. © Yoko Ono
    With that said, maybe there are other ways to read later works like Helmets / Pieces of Sky (2001) which features replicas of soldiers’ helmets filled with sky-printed jigsaw pieces, now suspended from the ceiling. “They are puzzle pieces,” curator Juliet Bingham tells me: “amidst the fragmentation of war and the destruction of home, embedded in these works is the conceptual idea that you would reform the world in the future.” Ono’s late works have a lot to do with breaking things apart and then asking the public to mend them.
    Sometimes the public doesn’t do what it’s told. In the re-staging of Add Colour (Refugee Boat) (2019), in which we are asked to write our thoughts on an installation of white walls, floor, and a boat, visitors to Tate scrawled protracted arguments with others about various conflicts going on around the world. Is this a sign that we need Ono’s message of peace now more than ever? Or is rather that her version of an abstracted and universal message, divorced from current realities, offers no hope for art to change the world?
    “It’s a message that remains consistently important,” says Bingham. “If more people can adhere of this idea of dreaming together, acknowledging difference, working towards resolution, her message remains relevant.’ I’d like to believe that.
    “Music of the Mind,” is on view until on view until September 1, 2024, at Tate Modern.
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    in Exhibitions

    A Towering Replica Statue of Roman Emperor Constantine Lands in Rome

    The Colossus of Constantine has returned to Rome, recreated from existing fragments with the help of latest 3D scanning and modeling technologies. Produced by the Madrid-based digital preservation nonprofit Factum Foundation, the statue was first exhibited at Fondazione Prada’s 2022 exhibition “Recycling Beauty.” Early this month, the 42-feet-tall, 1:1 facsimile of the Colossus arrived in Rome, and will remain in the garden of Villa Caffarelli of Musei Capitolini at least until 2025.
    It is believed that the original Colossus, commissioned by the emperor Constantine and produced between 313 and 315 C.E. was itself a “remake,” adapting a pre-existing pagan statue. Placed in the Basilica of Maxentius, it commemorated the rule of emperor Constantine, marking his and the Roman Empire’s conversion from paganism to Christianity. This was also where the marble fragments used in the recreation of the Colossus were discovered in the 15th century, now on view at the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome. Missing parts of the monumental seated figure are thought to have been pillaged for bronze sometime in the late Antiquity.
    The surviving portions of the statue of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great on view in a courtyard of the Capitoline Museums. Photo: Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
    Fragments from Rome and one chest fragment from the Parco Archeologico del Colosseo were scanned using photogrammetry and a LiDAR scanner, technologies increasingly popular in heritage preservation and conservation. Missing parts of the statue were modeled by 3D sculptor Irene Gaumé in consultation with experts and curators at the Musei Capitolini and with reference to coeval statues from Ara Pacis Museum, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and the Museo Nazionale Romano.
    In place of the original white marble and bronze clad onto a brick and wood structure, the facsimile features contemporary materials and techniques. 3D printing, reinforced resin, polyurethane, marble dust, aluminum, gold leaf, and plaster were combined to produce a durable facsimile that closely imitates original materials, Factum Foundation reported in an extensive write-up.
    Detail of replica of the statue Roman Emperor Constantine that was rebuilt using 3D technology. Photo: Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
    Digitally reconstructed parts of the statue were visually distinguished from facsimiles made from scanned fragments. “We’re not trying to build a fake object,” the founder of Factum Foundation Adam Lowe told the New York Times. “We’re trying to build something that physically and emotionally engages and that intellectually stimulates you.”
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