Art-ing in NYC

Culture consumption in New York is always exhaustive and never exhausting

There’s something in the New York air that makes sleep useless; perhaps it’s because your heart beats more quickly here than elsewhere.” This Simone de Beauvoir aphorism struck me when I was taking the bustling F train, which is also a hellish ongoing nighmare to the New Yorkers, to my hotel in Manhattan. I was returning from a late night movie show at an art house theatre IFC, a cute artsy space to watch movies that literally go under the radar. 

Adam Pally and Zoe Lister-Jones’-starrer Band Aid gave me chuckles unlimited over its feuding lead couple who decide to turn their marital arguments into songs by forming a band. This intoxicatingly honest movie about couples who tend to fall out of love, directed by Jones, has jokes ranging from Jewish ancestry to ISIS. I guffawed loud when Jones’ character says “it’s so cult-y” to the apparent trend of all her friends having kids. Fred Armisen, the couple’s neighbour and drummer, is sufficiently funny as the person brokering detente between the bickering couple.

Jones is a talent that will take ahead the proto-confessional path set by the likes of Lena Dunham, the Broad City girls and, more lately, Issa Rae. The only time I didn’t mentally convert the dollar amount into rupees (because budget travel) is when I forked out $15 at IFC for the absorbing documentary Swim Team. It’s about three autistic teenagers in a small New Jersey town making their way to a dignified future owing to their exploits in the swimming pool. 

My favourite character among the three is Kevin, a Chinese-American boy whose verbal tics are an embarrassment to his family but which also makes him the most endearing person on the planet. 

A still from Lara Stolman’s Swim Team, a sports documentary about three autistic teenagers in a small New Jersey town

Since my time was finite in the Big Apple and I couldn’t stop gazing at the high rises, I missed out on the much touted Girls Trip, Lady Macbeth and the new Amal Escalante but I did manage to find time to watch A Ghost Story. The David Lowery-directed movie is sensationally beautiful due to a bedsheet-swaddled spirit, apparently of Casey Affleck, who starts haunting his wife (Rooney Mara). So far so meh, but Lowery’s genius script starts throwing curve balls that no other American movie managed this year so far. 

Like Tree of Life, the movie throws existential questions and answers them in a vague but gorgeous way. 

Speaking of art, I spent around 90 minutes gawking at the exhibit of designs by the reclusive Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo who is the brain behind the Comme des Garçons label. The venue was nothing less than the imposing Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Her billowing, spine melting clothes at display were, no pun intended, bursting at seams with psychotic energy. They have a very Japanese zen energy to them while standing out as thoroughly original. I, however, went to Guggenheim, which is a stone’s throw away and an architectural marvel with its spiraling white facade and an equally impressive interior. 

I saw Henri Rousseau’s Football Players and Jackson Pollock’s Alchemy there. I can die a happy person now after seeing the latter for the complexity and the sleight of hand involved in it.

If I had to describe my trip to the modern art citadel Whitney it would be akin to a tabloid headline: Went for art, stayed for view. The splendid view of Hudson river near the High Line is worth the $25 admission fee. That said, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s “To Organize Delirium”, his first full-scale US retrospective in two decades, was very intriguing.

The exhibits ranged from a cavernous room full of hammocks and mattresses where audience are encouraged to lie down for minutes together and enjoy Jimi Hendrix’s music reverberating across the room and hallucinatory imagery. Oiticica’s Eden, meant to be a sort of oasis in a city, is constructed like a beach resort with pebbles and sand around and even a little tent where music is being played and a space for kids to roll around tattered books.

I knew I was back in India when UberX threw up a Wagon R at me at T-3 after four weeks of riding fancy cars, including Mercedes M-Class, in the States. So long, America.

jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in