When everything's Camp, nothing is or very nearly

"Camp: Notes on Fashion:" the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute show that opened on May 8 is full of color and feathers and already a big hit.  It's like a day at the circus for more- or- less grown ups; a circus where frocks and accessories are the performing animals sometimes literally. The Schiapparelli hat to the right looks like Big Bird taking a couple of flamingos on a honeymoon trip.

 For any who remember what it feels like to eat too much cotton candy; that's just how I felt by the time I'd walked through this exhibition from beginning to end. 

In spite of the pink catalogue's thousands of words that attempt to define it, and an opening historical section that is well- worth reading, full of unknown to me information (and images),  Camp as it is on display in these galleries gives shelter to a lot of extravagant frocks-- and some witty ones-- along with a few accessories. Most of it has a dubious connection  to Camp (see the Tiffany lamp below) .

The curators, of course, do not find the connections dubious: Take for example, The Tiffany lamp below. Susan Sontag, who we are told (as if this is somehow miraculous, used to visit the Met regularly) included it in her famous essay on Camp. If you think Sontag was a latter-day Moses and her essay consists of  58 commandments, you will agree. 

The actual criterion for what made it into this show was the stuff had to be Over the Top as for butterflies everywhere but in the stomach number by Jeremy Scott for House of Moschino. (I am a big fan of Moschino and not only because he chose Olive Oyl for his muse  .Fun yes, whacky also but Camp?


OTT is not Camp,  or let's say it is can be a part but the whole? Not. So anything from a dress with a Merry- Go- Round for a skirt and a frock embroidered with a Surrealist image by Jean Cocteau is classified as Camp but is not.

 Too much sugar is bad for the brain--and other important organs as for instance, the eyes. This show--and the gala that opened it is an advertisement for Enough is Too Much already.  

Frends in Zen:: Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa

It was a friendship that changed the thinking and the art of  Isamu Noguchi (1904--1988) an internationally famous sculptor and garden designer and Saburo Hasegawa (1906--1957) then celebrated but now a forgotten figure.
They met in Japan in 1950.


 "Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan," the exhibition that just opened at the  noguchi museum in Long Island City tells the story of how their contact in few years that followed inspired and shaped their ideas and their work.  The curators also seek to demonstrate that Hasegawa deserves an important place in the history of midtwentieth century art not only because of the influence he had on Noguchi but on Franz Kline and others including Jasper Johns.  The sculpture, calligraphy, screens, paper lanterns, woodcuts and ceramics on view are often arresting, frequently beautiful and ultimately unnervingly moving. In spite of the curators' passionate appreciation of Hasegawa's work, they fail to convince us of his lasting importance. Yet his late, powerful works, one of which closes this show, more than hint of greatness. Perhaps an exhibition devoted to his work alone is be needed to do him justice. Happily, even if they have failed in one of their ambitions, they have succeeded brilliantly in showing us the impact of the friendship as they struggled with how in what ways East and West might be in conversation. It is an exciting, instructive exhibition.


Hasegawa led Noguchi on a trip across Japan to some of its most venerated gardens, shrines and temples, The influence on Noguchi's work is clear (see "Garden Elements, 1958),left. In their conversation and their work they attempted to explore ways to reinvigorate Japanese culture after the destruction and fragmentation of the Second World War as well as finding ways of bring their two cultures together (Noguchi spent most of his life in the United States although there were periods in his childhood when he lived in Japan). Perhaps perversely,  it was Noguchi who believed that Japan must not dilute its traditions by incorporating too much from the West; a view Hasegawa did not share. Below is a Noguchi piece showing the influence of traditional museum.




 Here Hasagawa takes traditional calligraphy and turns it into a work that allied him with the New York School abstract Expressionists.








Hasegawa moved with his family to San Francisco. A heavy smoker he was diagnosed with mouth cancer. Many of the mural scale works he created as his illness progressed were on wall board and have not survived. One has only as a photographic record. It is a folding on 10 foot tall wall boards; used a broom as his brush. It quotes Basho's Death Poem:  

Sick on my journey, 

only my dreams will wander      

these desolate moors.

The calligraphy which gives the work its title of "Pure Suffering," using ink on burlap is the only surviving large, late work by Hasegawa,  It closes the show. It is reason enough to cross the East River from Manhattan to visit this show.

PURE SUFFERING (1956)  30 x 96 inches