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Before the thoughts leave:We had a nice slice of international theater this year. There was the Polish company TR Warszawa with their unforgettable production of "Krum". Then from Germany came the Thalia Theater's chilling production of Wedekind's "Lulu". Finally there was James Thiérrée's Nouvelle Cirque "Au Revoir Parapluie". Well two out of three ain't bad.I will state simply I have never gone in for the nouvelle cirque esthetic, and Thiérrée's production didn't change my mind. Hats off to the performers, who give their all to this piece of fluff.Much more intensely enjoyable was TR Warszawa's "Krum". Written by Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin, it tells the story of a man who comes home from travelling bearing nothing, not even for his mother! In Krum's world there is nothing. Sex is a bumpy, lumpy act. So is eating. It's not a pretty story, but this company of actor's are so physically rooted in their characters, we know their pain and sorrow on an empathic level. Despite all the gasps going in (two and three quarter hours and NO intermission?!?), no one left this clever production early.A similar severity was encountered with the Thalia Theater's "Lulu". Directed by Michael Thalheimer (whose earlier production at BAM Emilia Galante was mesmerizing), this production is stripped of every prop except a gun and a knife. A blank white wall marches incessantly forward, pushing these the sad doomed lives of it characters closer to our face as they come to their retched end. Lulu is not presented as a vixen or seductress, but as a young sexually precocious gamin. In her world, Lulu is everything to everyone, and so, ultimately, worthless.Again it was the actors great physical presence on the stage that allowed us to understand the rise and fall of this young woman, her dramatic impact on the lives around her, her utter despair and solitude when she turns her final trick with Jack the Ripper. (thank goodness since the supertitles were slow and not well translated)
We took in these two big shows at the Art Barn of Modern Art (ABoMA) yesterday with friends. The museum's exhibitions crew have carved out five nice galleries on the sixth floor to exhibit George Seurat: The Drawings. It should be mentioned that SOMEONE felt the need to pepper the show with several small painted canvases, whose soul purpose seems to be to add a bit of color to this very black and white show. But oh what blacks!! The first image to pop out at you as you enter the first gallery, which is dedicated to early works and academic drawings, is a female nude. It is a fine example of this artist's mastery of the conté crayon, and the plump soft curves of the model seem to spring off the paper. And we see lots of women throughout the exhibit: nurses with babies, women from behind, women with parasols, singers, his mother. All are rendered with incredible sensitivity to the medium on the paper. In one drawing, Place de la Concorde, Winter, this touch allows you entrée into a snowy winter in Paris years ago. In others, like The Veil and The Lamp, the unusual chose of subject or angle along with his lightness of his hand almost seem to put Seurat in the Symbolist camp. This show, which is not traveling, is comprised of many works from private collections. It also allows visitors to see seven of nine Café Concert drawings. Done by Seurat late in his life (he died in 1891 at the age of 31), they become both academic and social studies, showing not only the gaslight reflecting off the performer, but a feel of the urban mix of the milieu. The final one of these works, Café Singer, 1887-88, is done on Gillot paper, very likely for gillotage, an early reproduction method, and shows the artist reclaiming many subtle details that he had foregone in pursuit of Pointillism. In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, would the artist have returned to his more academic roots to reach the broader masses that he documented? Discuss amongst yourselves.
I have passed through Martin Puryear exhibits over the years at various galleries, usually wandering in and out without too much to say. But seeing them at the artist's current retrospective at MoMA allowed me to see this artist in a new light. Things that were "well-crafted" and "interesting" in smaller spaces, became much more mesmerizing and fascinating when seen among their brethren in ABoMA's behemoth sixth floor gallery and second floor atrium. Forms and materials are revisited; shapes emerge and grow. Titles can reveal meaning or hide it, but what remains with Puryear is his uncanny ability to reinvent certain simple shapes: wall circles made from tree branches, turn into long weeping ovals of thin veneer, turn into images of tribal Fang masks. We are presented again and again with some unenterable space; are we being kept safe or kept out? Two large sculptures in the atrium, Ladder for Booker T. Washington and Ad Astra, both give us a feeling of monumental striving, but towards what? The tip of the latter work can be seen near the balcony of the sixth floor galleries! Oh, why reach for the moon when we have ABoMA!!
Yes JTLR readers, it's your opportunity to win two tickets to a screening of Todd Haynes' new film I'm Not There. Simply write to us at Join the Lean Rat: Art & Culture and tell us what you enjoy the most about our blog. Send your kudos and adulations to jointheleanrat@gmail.com and be sure to put I'm Not There give-away in the subject line. One luck blog reader will win two tickets to the November 29th 7PM screening at Film Forum, 209 W Houston Street, NYC NY.Don't miss out on one of the must-see events of the year! Then post your thoughts on our review right here on-line!! Help make our blogosphere grow!!!Enter today!!
Todd Haynes' new feature film, I'm Not There, can add its title to the recent string of cinematic nostalgia for New York City (his grainy vision of Greenwich Village in the early 60's is superb). But add to that a nostalgia for London in the Swinging Sixties and California in the Seventies during the Vietnam War. Haynes showed us in his last film, Far From Heaven, that period work is a snap for him. Haynes' idea here is create as unconventional bio-pic about America's most unconventional of icons, Bob Dylan. What we come out with is The Velvet Goldmine with music rights. Well, maybe a bit more.Well, maybe quite a bit more.I am not now nor ever have been a Bob Dylan fan. His vocal timbre has always caused my molars to clench. But he has written a good hook now and then. And others simply adore him. Often, during the course to this two hour and fifteen minute epic, I found myself tapping along, laughing out loud, and routing for our "hero" in all of his guises. By this I mean that Haynes has divided up Mr. Dylan's life into six different personae. The film is "narrated" by Arthur (Ben Wishaw), a poet whose responses to a faceless inquisitor comment on the arc and action of the films narrative. We first meet Woody, who represents the pre-New York City fiction that Dylan peddled on the streets there, and is played by the young, black actor Marcus Carl Franklin. This is followed by Jack, the successful protest singer played by Christian Bale. Jack's life is chronicled in lofty documentary style with many talking heads giving their thoughts and feelings on those time. Chief among these is Alice Fabian, a fictionalized Joan Baez, played with nice subtlety by Julianne Moore. The Jack character re-emerges later in the film transformed into Pastor John, representing Dylan's repentant Christian Revival period. We also have Jude, played winningly by Cate Blanchett, who represents Dylan in his 1960's post-folk, electric, in-your-face period. Shot in gorgeous black and white by cinematographer Edward Lachman, Haynes makes these scenes a loving homage to Fellini's 8 1/2, another film which studies the conflicts of the artist, both internal and external. Blanchett looks gaunt and fragile, chewing her nails and rubbing her eyes, but never too tired to put up a fight. Jude plays his electrified London concert on a stage backed with an enormous American flag. As his fans complain and boo, he shouts out "This is American music"! Which just brought to mind Gertrude Stein's comment on America, "There is no there there".In Jude we see the first fires of an artist facing failure, both personal and physical. This is further explored in the character of Robbie, a New York actor play by Heath Ledger. Jack's performance in a 1965 film biography of the now vanished Jack has brought him fame but not happiness. Robbie's troubled ten-year relationship with his wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is chronicled from sweet beginning to its bitter end, all against the backdrop of Vietnam War television broadcasts.Then we have Billy, nee "The Kid", gone into hiding from the world, only to re-emerge to help save the Halloween-loving town of Riddle, MO from the railroad and his supposed slayer Pat Garrett. Garrett is played by a wonderfully by a wizened Bruce Greenwood, who in the black and white scenes also plays Mr. Jones, a tidy, tight BBC culture critic who plagues and berates Jude. Billy is played by Richard Gere with an earnest earthiness, as well as a putty nose which makes him look a lot like Steven Spielberg. Forced to leave town, Billy hitches a ride on a passing locomotive, the same transport we first met Woody on. He even finds Woody's guitar case in his boxcar. And so Haynes has brought us full circle, Dylan rising like a Phoenix from the ashes. A very tidy package. Perhaps too tidy for this notorious shape shifter. So Haynes provides us with afinal image of the subject of his film. The "real" Dylan, close-up and back lit, wailing away on guitar and harmonica. I don't think I'll ever look at that face the same way again.Just don't ask me to listen to any of his albums, thank you!I'm Not There, a film by Todd Haynes, will be presented on two screens at Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St, New York, NY for two weeks beginning Wednesday, November 21, 2007. Click on the link above for tickets and screening times.
Just got our advance notice for booking Spring events at BAM and guess whose coming? Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner's production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days! We tried to see this on our last visit over the pond, but the run was completely sold out! Having seen Ms. Shaw in Ms. Warner's production of Medea at BAM a few years back, there's no way we intend to miss it here. The run will be from January 8 until February 2 at the Harvey Theater, so there should be ample opportunity!!This has bumped out of our previous 1st Place "not to miss" event of the new year, another British import, the Menier Chocolate Factory production of Sunday in the Park With George. This five time Olivier Award winner begins previews at the Roundabout's Studio 54 on January 18, 2008 and officially open on February 14th with Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell reprising their roles as George and Dot. We saw this production in London last year with great trepidation, but were completely won over by it. Mr. Evans' has a lovely tenor voice and brings a touching emotional life to George that Mandy Patinkin (its originator) could never muster. Even the highly flawed second act comes off much more smoothly than its original Broadway production. Kudos to the set and lighting designers as well, who make this show truly magical!!
Attended a PR extravaganza masked as a concert Tuesday night at Zankel Hall. This classical music performance event was a slight meditation on death featuring the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman reading excerpts from Philip Roth's new novel Everyman. Breaking up the actor's morose intonations of the text was music by Arvo Part (Psalom, Summa, & Fratres) and Philip Glass (String Quartet No.2 "Company") expertly performed by the Quartet. Part's music was a mix of Eastern drone harmonics with a slice of cantorial fervor on the side. Glass' music (done for a production of Samuel Beckett's "Company") had a nervous edginess which showed the composer at his best: concise, brilliant, light. The quartet gave thoughful, delicate performances of these works. We wish we could say the same for Mr. Hoffman. Sounding at times like he was on the verge of tears, the actors delivery was far too monotonous for these ears. He could have been reading from the Tibetan Book of the Dead or On Death and Dying and been as effective. Mr. Roth's text strives for poetry but fails miserably. What does everyone love about this writer? We can't finish a single book of his!! Are we supposed to 'ooo' and 'ahh' because he's finally coming to grips with his mortality? Writers like Claude Simon and Jim Crace have done it more effectively, creatively, and lyrically.The second half of the evening began with a (thankfully) brief, off-stage reading by Mr. Hoffman of Matthias Claudius' poem Death and the Maiden, which launched the Takacs into Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, which bears the same name. Here the quartet really shone, showing a vibrancy of musicianship and attack not seen in New York halls often. Judging from the rousing standing ovation the group received, we hope they return to grace our halls again soon.
Last night we went to BAM to see Charles L. Mee's Hotel Cassiopeia performed by Anne Bogart's SITI Company, a theatrical piece loosely based on the life of Joseph Cornell. Cornell's box constructions are delicate balancing acts, magical microcosms emerging from mundane objects that delight the viewer.This work presents Cornell's life in a dreamy, collage-like way that could have used some magic; there is no story line here, just pastiche and impression. The script is more of an act of dramaturgy than playwriting. The set by Neil Patel uses elements familiar to Cornell's boxes: a ladder, a horizontal line upon which rests a golden sphere, the floor and rear wall of the Harvey Theater lined with a romantic, deep blue star map. Brian H. Scott's lighting added to the otherworldliness of the piece, though many of the projects on the rear wall were hard to decipher. The cast of seven featured Barney O'Hanlon as a touchingly sweet Joseph. The remaining six shape-shifted through different characters: from ballerina to Lauren Bacall, from pharmacist to the artist Matta. Though some of the performances were very good, the piece itself never quite gelled for us and we walked away feeling rather cold about the whole thing. We've never felt that way about Joseph Cornell before. Pity.
We attended the Tuesday evening performance by the vocal ensemble VOICES OF ASCENSION under the direction of Dennis Keene. The performance was presented by the Sorel Foundation, with the ultimate goal of the evening being the presentation of the foundation's Sorel Medallion Competition for Women Composers. One should admire the foundation for its striving to bring women composers to the forée, and the three pieces presented, Lamentations for a City by Lisa Bielawa, Meciendo by Leanna Kirchoff, and Choral des Bêtes by Christina Whitten, showed an interesting and promising range of new choral music. At least as best as one could deduce from the performances that night, which did not serve any of the composers of the evening, alive or dead, very well.My favorite piece of the evening (and winner of the gold medal prize) was Ms. Kirchoff's Meciendo, or Rocking in English. One would think the conductor might have tried to produce the kind of soothing, rocking motion a mother would provide her upset child. Instead Mr Keene set a speedy tempo that brought to mind a nanny being chased through Central Park while pushing her pram!!In fact, the entire evening was lacking in subtlety. By the end of the first half of the concert, I felt the group only had two settings: soft and loud. Then Mr. Keene surprised us all by showing in the second half that they could also do REALLY LOUD!! If one was hoping that this group of fine professional singers might be able to produce a bit more color and variety to their performance, they were deeply dismayed. One also has to fault them for their sloppy diction of the texts: they were more than two thirds of the way through Ms. Bielawa's Lamentation for a City before I realized they were singing in English! It sounded exactly like everything they had sung before that moment: Mendelssohn, Schumann and Schubert. The evening ended with a raucous version of JS Bach's Motet VI: Lober den Herrn, alle Heiden. By this point the choir was joined by organ, viola, and cello and everyone puffed away at their own speed; violist tapping away to some erratic distant rhythm, chorus noses down into their music, and Mr Keene like some Hollywood swashbuckler jabbing away at some imaginary enemy. Poor Johann. Poor everyone! They deserve better!!
Finding ourselves over on the West Side today we paid a visit to several noteworthy exhibits:
1) SOL LEWITT @ PAULA COOPER
This memorial exhibit to the artist (who died in April 2007) is an elegy to a master of optical pleasure. The main gallery is filled with a HUGE cube, each side having black to white banding created by compressing and expanding circular pencil marks. The effect is a simulation of corrugated fiberglass in gray, with the bands alternating vertical, diagonal, horizontal, diagonal on the four exposed sides. As with so many of the artist's later works, it was executed by a team of artists following his written instruction. With the artist's death so recent, the cube seems like a mausoleum for the artist, a marriage of his later wall drawings with his first formal influence, the Cube. A series of early etchings remind us all of what a master of the Line he was. Adio Caro!!
2) KEITH TYSON @ PACE WILDERSTEIN
LARGE FIELD ARRAY is a monumental modular work that combines over 230 separate sculptural forms into a single Field Array work designed to operate as a gigantic experiential lens for viewing some of the fundamental forces that make up reality. Or so the press release says. I found it more of a grand circus sideshow, full of the commonplace and the creepy. Each module of the installation is two-feet squared and arranged at four-foot intervals in a roughly cubic array on the floor and walls of the gallery. High and low culture nestle up against each other creating odd visual "compare and contrast" views. Notable modules include a small model of a grand pipe organ, a white cube displaying stock and news reports from Reuters, a sculpture of a man spanking a boy's bare rear with a belt, a stuffed tabby cat curled up on a rug in front of a gas home hearth, and an eternally spinning roulette wheel. This item also adds a nice aural quality to the installation, as do several other modules, like the low percolating mud bath near the entrance. It's a lot to take in but worth a visit.
Be advised: Due to the nature of the installation only 30 people are allowed in the gallery at a time, so a weekday visit is advisable.
3) UGO RONDINONE @ MATTHEW MARKS
BIG MIND SKY is the name of this installation of works, which consists of twelve enormous cartoonish heads, each nearly nine feet tall displayed on pedestals of cobbled old wood, numerous small precise paintings done with graphite on gessoed linen canvas of "mundane" views which include doors, windows, and items in the artist's studio, and faint "poem drawings" dispersed on the walls of the gallery. There is also a large keyhole mounted to the rear wall of the gallery that dispenses warm air. The "drawings" consist of short poetic aphorisms like "I'm tired of having hands I want wings", with each faint word cascading vertically down the wall. Rondinone "date paintings" have a wonderfully exact delicacy that reminded me of Lyonel Feininger. And his gigantic "Moonrise" sculptures are incredibly silly and sweet. The whole effect is playfully melancholic: are we haunted by memories of our past or by the fear of an unknown future? Rondinone creates an interesting space to explore these questions.
4) PAUL NOBLE @ GAGOSIAN
Another weird alien landscaper, this time the drawings are bigger and the sculptures are smaller. Entitled “dot to dot” it's comprised of drawings, ceramic sculptures, rugs, sound, and various other installation elements. Time and space are addressed best in the artist's large graphite drawings. Piles of primordial blobs create timeless landscapes of decay: are we looking at Incan ruins or the remains of a long lost moon colony? A display of small glazed ceramic works, each sitting on an elaborate wood pedestal, have a comic globular quality to them, a cross between a Smurf and a bong! They do work as three dimensional objects, although I found a lot of the glaze choices muddy. Least successful is the sound installation which requires you to take off your shoes and to stand on an artist's rug and listen to a Reichian tape loop of someone saying "dot to dot". The message is overly simplistic and the effect doesn't vary much as you move around the space. Dig those great beaded curtains though!!
5) DEBORAH KASS @ PAUL KASMIN
I love Deb Kass!! There I said it!
This exhibit entitled "feel good paintings for feel bad times" continues this artist's exploration of the intersection of art, culture and self. She combines references to post-war art history with hooks from pop culture to create smart works that always make us smile. This is her first major exhibition in New York in twelve years. Check it out!!
ALSO SEEN:
ROBERT ADAMS: QUESTIONS FOR AN OVERCAST DAY @ MATTHEW MARKS - If you see Rondinone, then check out this small suite of exquisite photographs next door. A meditation on a weather-beaten tree, many of the later images in the series are otherworldly and ethereal. Worth a look.
CANDIDA HOFER "IN PORTUGAL" @ SONNABEND - More large documentary photos of gorgeous private and public interiors. Done with the artist's usual eye for formality and lighting, many prove to be interesting studies of the meeting of Muslim and Christian cultures. Others are just simply sumptuous. Check out Teatro de Sao Carlo, Lisboa I in the first gallery!
DAVID STEPHENSON & TANYA MARCUSE @ JULIE SAUL - Him: Pictures of vaulted ceilings lit well and shot straight up creating very geometric-patterned prints. When successful they remind you of a set for Blade Runner or 12 Monkeys. Pretty and mindless. Her: Entitled "Fruitless", platinum print portraits of orchard trees destined to fall to development. Ho-hum.
KUNIE SUGIURA @ LESLIE TONKONOW - More photographs: early large prints and photograms from her Artists Paper series. So what are you doing these days Kunie?
T. J. WILCOX @ METRO PICTURES - Fun film narratives with accompanying prints. The prints are product but the films are the art here. Definitely stay for "The Jerry Hall Story"!! A+
LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY @ ANDREA ROSEN - check out the Friedrich Kunath installation in Gallery One if you must; I'd head straight to the back gallery for this small exhibit of color photographs and sculptures! Parfait!!
Finally found a moment in our busy schedule to check out this fellow blog.WOW!!Snug Harbor is a cultural center in Staten Island, New York, set within an 83-acre National Historic Landmark containing the finest collection of Greek Revival buildings in the United States, plus Beaux Arts, Italianate and Victorian style architecture. Visitors are always wowed by the magnificence of the grounds.As SHCC moves forward, many (including ourselves), are concerned about its future; once a home to many varied Staten Island arts groups and events, it has made a concerted effort to discontinue programs and allow art-used spaces to fall in to disrepair. Once a home for aged and decrepit sailors, itself now falling victim to its own dissolution. Its President and CEO Frances X. Paulo Huber seems more interested in making connections with the Smithsonian Institute, the stalwart American bastion of artifact, then supporting a local thriving community of artists, not to mention the general public who goes there to enjoy and learn from that community.What could be a gorgeous diadem in the crown jewels of city-owned CIG groups is being squandered away through acts of political nepotism and a general lack of knowledge about ANYTHING cultural.Please follow the link at the header of this blog to learn more. Then voice your opinion to the SHCC Board, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and to Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Went to the preview of the new exhibit Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last night. Which raised the questions: Who is Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman and where did she get all that money from? (note to self: next time round, marry money often.)
This bequest to the museum is a veritable who's who of modern and post-war art: Ernest, Arp, Leger, Dove, Wols, Matta, Giacometti, DeKooning, Motherwell, Rothko, Kline, Pollock, Stills, Louis, Calder, Frankenthaler, Noland, Oldenburg, Artschwager.......
It's runs shotgun shack-style through galleries in the Met's Modern Wing with a display copy of the catalogue screwed to the wall at waist height (it's at the end between the Louis and the Noland). And if she really lived with all this stuff that must be some Lake Drive apartment she's got there!
Highlights: Although the title stresses the Abstract Expressionist works in the collection, its was primarily the "other modern works" that stood out. The Ernst portrait of Gala Eluard, the Schwitter collage, and the two dreamy Joseph Cornell boxes, kept me returning to the early section of the installation during the evening. Post- AbEx artists are also well represented. A large lazy Morris Louis stained canvas made me dream of having a wall in my home big enough to accommodate it. This worked nicely with its two nearby companions, a large Noland bull's-eye and the more cushioned ovoid shapes of a colorful Olitski. An Oldenberg soft-sculpture calendar page and a small Artschwager painting of a bean help bid the viewers a fond farewell to post-war AbEx excess and high-brow aesthetics for more low-brow, Pop ones without torturing us with more Warhols.
Thank you for that Muriel!!
Can anyone save Amy Winehouse?
It's a question I ask myself at least once a day.
I, for one, certainly hope someone can.... to a certain extent anyway.
After being introduced to this Brit "retro-soul" singer on a back porch in Burlington, Vermont, I admit to falling in love with this gravely-voiced singer/songwriter. I rarely listen to Pop Radio, so I haven't been as inundated with "Rehab" as other more "serious" on-line aficionado. But if it is being played to death, it's because it IS catchy; the hook is GREAT!! I find it interesting to see an artist embrace her addictions so blatantly. Bad habits and love gone bad have been themes of popular music for quite sometime, but I'm not familiar with anyone confronting that total image of self-loathing that the addict has quite like her.
I like "Rehab" a lot (I love singing it while grocery shopping), but what I really respond to on the album are the riffs and licks from soul and R&B hits from the 50's and 60's. "Back to Black" has a wonderful minor riff on the driving chords of The Supremes' "Baby Love". The driving rhythm of "My Tears Dry On Their Own" derives itself from the Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell version of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough". What's not to love?
Besides the Motown sound, I love the influences of a variety of soul sounds: those Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" chimes, early Etta James rockin' blues, Dusty Springfield lushness on "Love is a Losing Game". This songs transports me to some morbid senior prom where the boys finally get to slow dance with their dates, as Amy chastises the girls about what it all leads to!
I wish there were more string arrangements on the album, like those found on "Love is a Losing Game". "Just Friends", with its funky-reggae rhythm seems misplaced with the singer and its lyrics. Here she swoops through her pain and insecurity like a young Aretha Franklin in her Columbia record period; I think it would be sensational with a quieter arrangement with more strings. It would push the remorse of the song up to the front.
Let's hope that after Amy resurfaces, rehabbed or not, that she's still able to channel her emotions into more soulful serenades. I see her debut album "Frank" is being released soon here in the States. Does the title refer to "Old Blue Eyes"? Hard drinking, smoking, emotional "screw-it-all" Rat Packers are few and far between these days. But does anyone really notice that void these days? or care?
Let's just hope a lot of her recent "negative press" is just silly media hype! After all, she's brought to use by Universal Music, the same folks who released Kanye West's and Fifty Cent's new "rock'em - sock'em" records on September 11, 2007! Who got paid for that idea?
Attended a private viewing of LISETTE MODEL & HER SUCCESSORS at the Aperture Foundation last night. This over sized and, for the most part, mediocre show is up in the Foundation's gallery until November 1st and coordinates with the re-issue of two large Model catalogues.
The first thing one is struck by is the monochromatic presentation: black and white photos on grey walls. The only color pictures are two muddyish, over sized head portraits by Gary Schneider (does any other artist these days struggle so hard at showing us just how ugly we humans are?). Who really comes out shining in this show is Peter Hujar: These photos just gain more grace and beauty as they themselves begin to age. The other standout to me were Larry Finks pictures. Its taken me some time to be won over by this photographer, but as I studied the varied selection of prints taking up a whole wall, I couldn't help but notice the strong sense of humanity that runs throughout his work; no matter where he is shooting, we get a sense of our fragility as humans and our dependency on each other. And how often does that happen these days?
Don't forget to check out the lovely little Model photo of Billie Holiday in her coffin!!
I attended a performance last night at the Woodstock Fringe Theater of a work-in-progress entitled "O, Virgil! A Musical Portrait" A quasi-biographical theater work on the life of Virgil Thompson, one of America's most formidable composers and critics, it intermingles imaginary moments in the artist's life with selected songs and musical portraits.
There appears to be a kernel of something interesting in there. Let's hope the writer Wallace Norman and his collaborator Larry Alan Smith can flesh it out into something real and relevant. They might pay more attention to the lyrics of "English Usage", an art song by Thompson with lyrics by Marianne Moore. In it Moore dissects the English language with her usual New England thoroughness, and it was decidedly delivered by Watson Heinz. A bit more attention to what works on the stage and what doesn't seems needed.
The music was the star of the evening (even with the score being misplaced and forcing the singers to stand BEHIND the piano while the musical director, Jeff Middleton, banged away on it). i admit to being a long-time Thompson fan and it was wonderful to hear the portraits and song done so well. Mark Duer's rendition of the Thompson/Blake song "The Little Black Boy" was the one moment of truth in a workshop production.
"My heart is like an upside-down flame." Those are the words of the poet Apollinaire. In Heddy Honigmann's documentary FOREVER these words are read to us by a short, grey-haired woman named Leone Desmasures. They are carved on the top of his tomb the largest cemetery in Paris, Père-Lachaise. Located in the 20th arrondissement, it is not merely the size of the cemetery which brings it notoriety, but the large number of artists, musicians and writers buried there. (I have a very distinct memory of my first visit there: the old man sitting by the entrance selling maps which showed where the tombs of the well-known were located. I felt as though I were entering Paris' "cemetery of the stars".)
Ms. Honigmann's film, which will run for two weeks at Film Forum in Manhattan starting September 12th, is a beautifully realized meditation on life & death, art & legacy. From the opening shots of graves being dug, stones being carved, and monuments being spray washed, the film allows the viewer into a world where the living and the dead mingle in a refined delicate pas-de-deux.
Ms. Desmasures is a "regular" to the cemetery, visiting the tombs of artists she knows and respects, giving the viewer mini-lectures on the entombed as she scrubs down their marbles, waters the plants, and picks off any unwanted debris. We are introduced to a range of "celebrities" by Bertrand Beyern, a Père-Lachaise guide, from the more fully-lived, such as Simone Signoret, to Elisa Mercoeur, a poet who died in her early 20's. For us Americans, Mr. Beyern provides a "continental" view of death, relating stories of walks with his grandfather in the local cemetery where he was born, learning his letter and numbers off of tombstones, as well as an early encounter in his life with a young woman in Père-Lachaise which changed his entire view of life. He also reminds us how modern society has cut itself off from its inevitable encounters with death. Later in the film we meet David Pouly, an embalmer, at the grave of Modigliani, who discusses the artist's paintings and their serene melancholy. We then get to see Mr. Pouly at work, continuing his discussion of the artist's work and its influence on his.
Ultimately, this is a film about life; the ties that the living have with the dead as well as the influence the past has on the present. This is probably best summed up by Stéphane Heuet, an illustrator who has produced graphic novel versions of Proust's Remembrances of Things Past. He tells the film-maker "Take Leonardo da Vinci. Go to the Louvre and you'll find 4 Cubans, 10 Chinese, 15 Dutch and 20 French people all staring at the gaze of a woman who has returned to dust. The painter is no longer with us, but both continue to move us. Isn't this eternity? Isn't that the power of art?" Go see it!!
