Make room on your summer schedule for
this sculpture exhibition; “it is an astonish-
ment,” said Holland Cotter in The New
York Times. For four decades, Indian artist
Mrinalini Mukherjee produced “sculptures
of a kind no one had seen,” and we are
unfortunate only in that her output was
cut short when she died four years ago
at age 65. Of the 57 works in the Met
Breuer’s current retrospective, roughly half
are large pieces rendered in a medium of
her own creation: dyed hemp rope that’s
been knotted in “a macramé technique of
finger-aching ingenuity.” Some hang from
walls, others are freestanding, and many
“suggest human-scale insects—voluptuous
without feeling warm, magnetic without
feeling friendly.” You can feel the year
of labor invested in many of them, and
their “sheer formal daring” makes them
as arresting as temple deities. As in such
figures, “the line between freakish and sub-
lime is slight.”
The daughter of two artists, Mukherjee
was encouraged to seek out new materials
at a young age, said Ariella Budick in the
Mukherjee’s otherworldly Van Raja I (1981)Exhibit of the week
Phenomenal Nature:
Mrinalini Mukherjee
The Met Breuer, New York City,
through Sept. 29
24 ARTS Review of reviews: Art & Music
Financial Times. In 1972’s Squirrel, “you
can already see [her] tactile genius”; this
wall hanging “wants to leap into the center
of the room.” Mukherjee found inspiration
by visiting Hindu temples and other holy
sites, but her approach put her in a con-
versation with a global vanguard of femaleartists—Ruth Asawa, Yayoi Kusama, and
Louise Bourgeois among them—who were
demolishing the boundary between art and
craft. She finally abandoned rope weaving
in the 1990s—when the ropes and dyes
she preferred became unavailable. But the
forced transition—to clay, in this case—
“neither squelched her creativity nor damp-
ened her brilliance.” Earth Bloom, a 1996
ceramic work, features a “volcanic” central
mound that’s “encrusted with tumescent
bubbles, like so many breasts and bellies.
It’s gory and menacing and gorgeous.”Mukherjee, throughout her career, had to
navigate “a sometimes tense and confusing
conversation,” said Ben Davis in ArtNet
.com. Should an artist in post-colonial
India invent a new modernism or tap into
tradition, “reclaiming the value of cultures
degraded by a century of foreign domina-
tion?” Western critics wrongly presumed
her works expressed Hindu beliefs, while
critics back home accused her of pandering
to Westerners’ taste for exoticized mysti-
cism. Fortunately, “she held her own.”
Consider Rudra (Deity of Terror), a 1982
work that’s “not really a representation of a
Vedic deity” but not without divine conno-
tations. “With its radiating patterns, tower-
ing presence, and strangeness of form,” it
evokes the larger wildness in the world that
religions so often spring from.“Long live David
Berman,” said
Kayleigh Hughes in
ConsequenceOfSound
.net. Ten years after he
disbanded his indie-rock
band the Silver Jews,
a cult favorite, Berman
has returned with a new group and a “gen-
uinely brilliant” new album that confirms
him as “one of our greatest living song-
writers.” Recorded shortly after Berman’s
mother died and after he separated from his
wife of 20 years, Purple Mountains is down-
cast music of “the highest, holiest order.”
But don’t let the dark mood discourage you
from listening to the opener, “That’s Just
the Way I Feel,” and its parade of stinging
lyrics. “The relentless self-laceration lets up
only occasionally,” and though Berman’s lyr-
ics can be laugh-out-loud funny, he’s laugh-
ing into the void, said Mark Richardson
in The Wall Street Journal. There are
exceptions, though. “I Loved Being My
Mother’s Son” is as “disarmingly sweet”
as its title suggests, while “Snow Is Falling
in Manhattan” is “a powerful tribute to the
idea that music, if it finds you at just the
right moment, can save your life.”
Whatever you think
of the new Lion King,
“this album is moun-
tains, valleys, rivers,
and savannas better
than the movie,” said
Carl Wilson in Slate
.com. Not a soundtrack
album but a tie-in project, The Gift features
several new Beyoncé songs, and A-list
guests (Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino,
Jay-Z) as well as a cavalcade of African pop
stars. “There’s scarcely a guest who doesn’t
earn their invitation,” from Cameroonian
crooner Salatiel to art-rap auteur Tierra
Whack. “And, as usual, the pleasure that
Beyoncé takes in matching their pace and
then doing her best to outmaster them is
contagious.” Though her voice is as strong
as ever, the tracks on which she sings are
of uneven quality, said Alexis Petridis in
TheGuardian.com. “For every song as good
as the brilliant ‘Black Skin Girl’ or ‘Mood 4
Eva,’ there is something underwhelming.”
Not that the arrangements are ever less
than meticulous, said Mikael Wood in the
Los Angeles Times. Beyoncé, as usual,
“puts more thought into her records than
anybody else in music.”“Right now, America’s
rap underground is
thriving,” said Tom
Breihan in Stereogum
.com. Consider Maxo
Kream, a 29-year-old
former gang member
from Houston whose
major-label debut “makes the case that
he’s one of the best rappers working
today.” As on his 2018 mixtape, Punken,
Maxo is “still telling stories about what it’s
like to grow up as a criminal in a whole
family of criminals,” including on the single
“Meet Again.” Brandon Banks was in fact
the criminal alias used by Maxo’s Nigerian
father, a man who haunts and inspires
these 15 tracks. The result is “not a pon-
derous memoir,” though—it’s “a hard,
nasty rap record.” Maxo’s go-to flow is “a
deliriously simple, no-breath every-beat
canter, as elemental as prime Gucci Mane,
but with some of Killer Mike’s linebacker
nimbleness,” said Clayton Purdom in
AVClub.com. The productions, meanwhile,
vary widely between sinister bangers
(“3 A.M.”) and slinky, strip-club bounce
(“She Live”). “You will not believe it, but
Maxo sounds great over all of them.”Purple Mountains
Purple Mountains
++++
Beyoncé
The Lion King: The Gift
++++Maxo Kream
Brandon Banks
++++