another eye opens

(click photos to enlarge)

If you have an hour to kill in midtown between now and February 7, 2016, you could give yourself no better treat than to take a walk through the show of Picasso sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.

The sculptures Picasso created are so free and fun to look at, so simple and so sophisticated at the same time. It makes sense that he was turned on by African and Oceanic work he saw at an ethnographic museum in Paris — many of these pieces remind me of the vivid masks and ritual objects you can see in the Michael Rockefeller collection at the Metropolitan Museum. I especially loved tracking the faces, which are so simple and varied and often comical.

These drawings (part of a series called “An Anatomy”) reminded me of Roz Chast cartoons.

I also had a look at the show by Lebanese multimedia artist Walid Raad, which has two parts, one of which occupies the museum’s central atrium (below) and is called “Scratching on things I could disavow.”

It’s an intriguing, complicated, dense, somewhat impenetrable Borgesian conceptual work involving fictionalized artifacts reflecting real contemporary events. I’m not sure it’s really possible to grasp the work without attending his lecture-demonstration “walkthroughs,” which occur many times in the course of the week. I’ll have to go back for one of those.