cityArts January 18, 2012 by CityArts NYC

Jan. 18—Feb. 7, 2012 • Volume 4, issue 1

The year’s Best Music Page 8, Best Games Page 13, Best Dance Page 14 June Leaf at Thorpe; Edward Dickinson at Babcock Page 4 New york’s Review of Culture • CityArtsNYC.com

Howard Mandel on Winter Jazz Page 6

COMMEMORATION AND PROPHECy

2011 and the Future of the Arts: Spielberg’s Diptych of Tintin and War Horse Page 10

CityArts-2012:Layout 1

12/9/11

10:30 AM

Page 1

BOHEMIAN NATIONAL HALL 321 E. 73rd ST. Bet. 1st & 2nd Ave.

JANUARY 17–22

INSIDE GALLERIES June Leaf at Edward Thorpe Gallery P. 4 Edward Dickinson at Babcock Galleries P. 4

13TH ANNUAL

THE NEW YORK

CERAMICS FAIR

JAZZ Jazzfest and other 2012 happenings P. 6 CLASSICAL Gershwin and Bernstein ring in the New Year P. 7 Pop Kanye, Jay-Z and Picasso P. 8 Song of the year: Stevie Nicks’ “Soldier’s Angel” P. 9

32 Select International Dealers

FILM Spielberg’s game changers: Tintin and War Horse P. 10-12

Historical to Contemporary Porcelain, Pottery and Glass for the Collector, the Scholar, and the Elegant Home.

P.4

PREVIEW January 17 Tuesday, 5 –9 p.m.

ON GAMING The most interesting games of 2011 P. 13 DANCE 2011’s best dance P. 14 AUCTIONS A preview of upcoming events P. 15

Individual Tickets $90 includes wine and hors d’oeuvres and repeat admission.

No Admittance Sun. after 3:30pm

Admission $20 daily includes catalogue

CHIPSTONE LECTURE SERIES

8 Lectures presented call 310.455.2886 or visit: newyorkceramicsfair.com

INFORMATION 310.455.2886 www.newyorkceramicsfair.com

Photo courtesy: Sylvia Powell

FAIR HOURS

Wed–Sat 1 1am–7pm Sun 11–4pm

P.13

EDITOR Armond White awhite@manhattanmedia.com MANAGING EDITOR Mark Peikert mpeikert@manhattanmedia.com

ASSISTANT EDITOR Deb Sperling SENIOR MUSIC CRITIC Jay Nordlinger

SENIOR DANCE CRITIC Joel Lobenthal

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Caroline Birenbaum, John Demetry, Valerie Gladstone, John Goodrich, Amanda Gordon, Steve Haske, Ben Kessler, Howard Mandel, Maureen Mullarkey, Mario Naves, Gregory Solman, Melissa Stern, Nicholas Wells

DESIGN/PRODUCTION PRODUCTION/creative director Ed Johnson ejohnson@manhattanmedia.com advertising design Quarn Corley

P.10

PUBLISHER Kate Walsh kwalsh@manhattanmedia.com advertising consultant Adele Mary Grossman maryad@mindspring.com Account Executives Ceil Ainsworth, Mike Suscavage

MANHATTAN MEDIA PRESIDENT/CEO Tom Allon tallon@manhattanmedia.com CFO/COO Joanne Harras jharras@manhattanmedia.com Group Publisher Alex Schweitzer aschweitzer@manhattanmedia.com NEWSPAPER GROUP PUBLISHER Gerry Gavin ggavin@manhattanmedia.com director of interaCtive markeTing & digital strategy Jay Gissen jgissen@manhattanmedia.com Controller Shawn Scott Accounts Manager Kathy Pollyea

WWW.CITYARTSNYC.COM Send all press releases to cityarts@manhattanmedia.com CityArts is a division of Manhattan Media, publishers of New York Family magazine, AVENUE magazine, Our Town, West Side Spirit, Our Town Downtown, City Hall, Chelsea Clinton News, The Westsider and The Blackboard Awards.

2 CityArts | January 18–Feburary 7, 2012

LIGHT BULB ARMOND WHITE

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irtuosity—the quality that lit fident, commanding, rule-changing efforts up the best of arts culture dur- that keep us returning to galleries, museums, ing 2011—turns out to be the movies, albums, video games, dance troupes, quality least appreciated in this jazz clubs and theaters. The vision that Mario transitional period for technol- Naves finds in the paintings of June Leaf and ogy, economics and politics. It’s ironic that Edwin Dickinson, the soulfulness Ben Kessler artists like Steven Spielberg, Kanye West, feels in Stevie Nicks’ humane patriotism, the Jay-Z and Picasso (revived at a Gagosian richness Joel Lobenthal observes in the legacy retrospective), who had the inspiration to of Merce Cunningham and the personal revsee past the confusion and novelty of the elation that John Demetry sees connecting moment and create work that goes deeply Kanye West, Jay-Z and Picasso are what can into the essence of modern experience and be trusted when machinery, government and media leave you bewildered. our basic human needs, Taking assessment of the become the least appreciIf we don’t cultural year prepares us ated artists. It’s as if their recognize for the cultural future. This technique, brilliance, flair, the virtuoso requires bringing thinking talent, ability and expertise back to the arts. If we don’t are held against them. imagination recognize the virtuoso imagiMaking a diptych of and human nation and human expresSpielberg’s The Adventures expression in sion in contemporary art, of Tintin and War Horse, contemporary our cultural pursuits will be two distinctly different art, our meaningless. CityArts readfilms linked by their virtuers know that we depend on osity, carries forward the cultural expressive efforts of all pursuits will be artists to sustain our humanity—especially when politiof the cultural forms that meaningless. cians and pundits don’t. Our CityArts regularly covers. fascination for art should be, Gregory Solman joins my account of the two films by measuring the as Captain Haddock tells Tintin, unquenchscale of Spielberg’s achievement. It is time able. About the cover: Art director Ed Johnthat pop art such as cinema be regarded with the same intellectual respect as the son treats Spielberg’s great, head-spinning classical forms the cinema updates; thus double image from The Adventures of TinI link Spielberg to Gerhard Richter. (Go to tin, where 20th-century art meets the 21st CityArtsNYC.com for a different approach century. It recalls how all art is civilization’s self-portrait, even when the techniques and in my annual Better-Than List.) The critics at CityArts take this moment to media change. Right now, Spielberg’s doublelook back at 2011—and forward to 2012—in header best demonstrates that conscienorder to find the significance of those con- tious, virtuoso dynamic.

PIER 92, 12TH AVENUE @ 52ND TO 55TH ST., NYC

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Danièle M. Marin

I am pleased to invite you to:

“Ground line”

Mixed media paintings installation January 10 –February 4, 2012 - NOHO GALLERY 530 West 25th St., NYC 10001 Tues – Sat 11am - 6pm Tel. 212-367-7063 www.nohogallery.com www.DanieleMarin.com

Visit CityArtsNYC.com for online exclusive content, including movie reviews and more. January 18–Feburary 7, 2012 | CityArts 3

GALLERIES

GALLERy OPENINGS Nohra Haime Gallery: valerie hird: “the fifth day.” opens Jan. 18, 730 5th ave., 212-8883550, nohrahaimegallery.com.

Two Masters turning on to Leaf and dicKinson By MARIO NAvES

MUSEUMS

ny credible accounting of American art will place an emphasis on intractable individualism; the hard-won visions of sundry loners, originals and eccentrics speak more to the country’s can-do spirit than any spit-and-polished category you’d care to name. (An example: Abstract expressionism seems a false conceit at this late date, less a matter of shared stylistic interests than a convenient tag for a specific social subset.) Seen in this light, a contemporary like Leaf and a historical figure like Edwin

he Whitney Museum is honoring Sherrie Levine, an artist who helped usher in postmodernism—as if New Yorkers needed another reminder of that movement’s deadening intellectual certainties. Better the arbiter of American art should dedicate its institutional clout to June Leaf, a veteran painter and sculptor whose prodigious oeuvre needs a broader berth than can be provided by Edward Thorp Gallery, the venue currently exhibiting her recent efforts. Leaf’s art is included in the Whitney’s collection (MoMA’s, too), but that’s not the reason she deserves a full accounting. Over the 30-some years Thorp has been exhibiting her work, Leaf has proved consistently intriguing and hard to pin down. Though she makes Manhattan and Nova Scotia home, Leaf was born in Chicago and, during the 1950s, proved an integral player in shaping the city’s artistic identity. Since then, the gritty finesse and stern air of existential resignation typifying the work has garnered Leaf the sobriquet “The Best Artist Nobody Knows About.” How “best” is she? That’s where the Whitney should step in. June Leaf, “Untitled,” 2011, acrylic, collage on canvas, 20h x 16w in. At Thorp, we have diverting drips and drabs: scrabbled Courtesy of Babcock Galleries paintings of a post-apocalyptic Second Avenue; eggbeaters as signposts of mortality; anony- Dickinson (1891–1978) appear less marmous figures, rendered in paint and tin, ginal—though good luck convincing those ascending staircases that lead nowhere; sold on the received wisdom. The folks and “Untitled (Figure Cranking)” (2010– at Babcock Galleries, which is hosting an 2011), wherein a vintage sewing machine array of Dickinson’s canvases, know what is transformed into a parable about fate, they’re up against. When the gallery makes all the while channeling Dante, Bosch, a point of letting us know that Arshile Giacometti and Calder. It’s an impressive Gorky and Willem de Kooning admired achievement—one you’d think would Dickinson’s art, it does so as a means of make our culturati sit up and take notice. conferring popular legitimacy on a painter

4 CityArts | January 18–Feburary 7, 2012

The Pace Gallery: “Jean dubuffet: the Last two years.” opens Jan. 20, 510 W. 25th st., 212255-4044, thepacegallery.com. Brooklyn Museum: “newspaper fiction: the new york Journalism of djuna barnes, 1913–1919.” opens Jan. 20. “Question bridge: black Males.” ends June 3. 200 eastern Pkwy, brooklyn, 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. International Center of Photography: “Weegee: Murder is My business.” opens Jan. 20. “Perspectives 2012.” opens Jan. 20. “Magnum contact sheets.” opens Jan. 20. “the Loving story: Photographs by grey villet.” opens Jan. 20, 1122 6th ave., 212-857-0000, icp.org. Metropolitan Museum of Art: “new american Wing galleries for Paintings, sculpture & decorative arts.” opens Jan. 16. “breaking the color barrier in Major League baseball.” opens Jan. 18, 1000 5th ave., 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. June Leaf, “Untitled (Theater),” 20102011, mixed media, 53h x 23.35w x 36d in. Courtesy of Babcock Galleries

who is nobody’s idea of “userfriendly.” What, after all, are we to make of Dickinson’s dour meditations on the body, the landscape and dressing up in outdated military gear? That “Self Portrait in Uniform” (1942) is among the strangest self-portraits extant, sure. But mostly, Dickinson was incapable of putting brush to canvas without embodying the transitory nature of memory and, not least, evoking its burdens. Modern without being modernist, Dickinson’s poetic reveries are closer in tone and affect to Ingmar Bergman, say, than to either Gorky or de Kooning. But don’t kid yourself: Dickinson is in their league—and maybe better. Here is a superlative chance to acquaint yourself with this vexing and elusive master.

June Leaf: Recent Work through Jan. 28, edward thorp gallery, 210 11th ave., ste. 601, 212-691-6565, www.edwardthorpgallery.com. Edward Dickinson in Retrospect through Jan. 27, babcock galleries, 724 5th ave., 212-767-1852, www.babcockgalleries.com.

Museum of Modern Art: “Print studio.” opens. Jan. 23. “9 scripts from a nation at War.” opens Jan. 25. “sanja ivekovi: sweet violence.” ends March 26, 11 W. 53rd st., 212708-9400, moma.org. National Academy Museum: “the annual: 2012.” opens Jan. 25, 1083 5th ave., 212-3694880, nationalacademy.org. Whitney Museum of American Art: “sherrie Levine: Mayhem.” ends Jan. 29, 945 Madison ave., 212-570-3600, whitney.org. MUSIC & OPERA ChamberFest: the Juilliard school presents 7 free chamber concerts by 87 Juilliard musicians & 4 pre-college performers, featuring works by brahms, crumb, Mendelssohn, stravinsky & others. ends Jan. 21, juilliard.edu/chamberfest; free with advance tickets. Church of Saint Luke in the Fields: organist david shuler performs bach, buxtehude & others in “baroque blockbusters.” Jan. 19, 487 hudson st., 212-414-9419, stlukeintheﬁelds.org/ store; 8, $20. Church of St. Agnes: female-oriented vocal ensemble amuse, conducted by robert isaacs, performs in “angels + demons: from heaven to hell (& back again?)” with the music of Palestrina, byrd & more. Jan. 25, 143 e. 43rd st., amusesingers.org. Peter Jay Sharp Theater: Julliard singers perform songs about & with dancing—with works by brahms, berlin, sondheim & others—in “invitation to the dance,” a collaboration with new york festival of song & the ellen and James s. Marcus institute for vocal arts. Jan. 18, 155 W. 65th st., 212-769-7406, juilliard.edu; 8, free with advance reservations.

NYT Award-Winners_ManhattanMedia 1/13/12 3:47 PM Page 1

More CUNY Award Winners Than Ever!

4 RHODES SCHOLARS 8 GOLDWATER SCHOLARS 7 TRUMAN SCHOLARS 9 NSF GRADUATE FELLOWS

in 6 YEARS in 3 YEARS in 6 YEARS in 2011

UJAJA TAUQEER, CUNY’S 2011 RHODES SCHOLAR, is exceptional but not the exception. CUNY students are winning more highly competitive awards and scholarships than at any time in our history. The City University of New York is attracting an ever-growing number of outstanding students. Our Macaulay

Honors College is home to many of this year’s winners. Assisted by a world-class faculty, they achieved their success studying at the nation’s leading urban public university. They are exceptional but not the exception.

Matthew Goldstein Chancellor

ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: Zujaja Tauqeer, Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College, Rhodes 2011; David L.V. Bauer, Macaulay Honors College at CCNY, Rhodes 2009, Truman 2008, Goldwater 2007; Eugene Shenderov, Brooklyn College, Rhodes 2005; Lev Sviridov, CCNY, Rhodes 2005, Goldwater 2004; Ayodele Oti, Macaulay Honors College at CCNY, Truman 2011; Gareth Rhodes, CUNY Baccalaureate at CCNY, Truman 2011; Anthony Pang, CCNY, NSF Fellow 2011; Jamar Whaley, Queens College, Goldwater 2009; Christine Curella, Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, Truman 2007; Celine Joiris, Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, Goldwater 2011; Claudio Simpkins, Macaulay Honors College at CCNY, Truman 2005; Ryan Merola, Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College, Truman 2006; Don Gomez, CCNY, Truman 2009; Lina Mercedes Gonzalez, Hunter College, NSF Fellow 2011.

Visit cuny.edu/awardwinners January 18–Feburary 7, 2012 | CityArts 5

JAZZ

Manhattan School of Music

Winter Wonderings

Jazz Arts Program

Justin DiCioccio, Associate Dean and Chair

n o t n e K n Sta Concerts

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0 PM FRI / 7:3 MAR 2 / m iu or it d u A

:30 PM / FRI / 7 JAN 27 m iu

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BY R F OR M E D MUSIC PEN T ON’S S TA N K E IONS ORCHE S T R A INNOVAT usic from the

Includin to End All Con Concerto 23º North – 82 º Machito, a recreation of ry d West, an an’s Contempora gm Bill Holm album Includin ity of Glass, , usic C Concepts albums ns in Modern M A ORCHESTR Innovatio Kenton Touch MSM JAZZ ccio, Conductor e h T io d iC an Justin D RMONIC

PHILHA MSM JAZZ A TR S E H C R ductor O ioccio, Con iC D in st Ju s

lts $10 Adu and Students rs $5 Senio

lt $10 Adu and Students rs $5 Senio

JACK VIERTEL ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

ROB BERMAN MUSIC DIRECTOR

O C EN

K OR WY

City jazz club reneged on its 2009 promises of pension fund contributions. May 2012 be the year of the 802 slogan, “Justice for Jazz Musicians.” The concert was amazing in part for the vigor with which men and women in their seventies and eighties perform—vibist Bobby Hutcherson, almost 72, struck a heartbreakingly beautiful final cadence in his duet with pianist Kenny Barron while getting oxygen from a tank. But the NEA, wanting to acknowledge and encourage young artists, included a handful of them onstage jamming with the Masters. Which was cool, because at the end of 2011, the jazz net was abuzz about self-described “Black American Music” trumpeter Nicholas Payton’s blog posts insisting that jazz is dead. He means especially the word “jazz,” believing it’s a dirty old denigration that keeps new developments from being embraced as “popular” music. That’s a long-standing complaint from musicians who dislike any classification. Counterarguments say that jazz has earned respect for its lengthy, noble tradition. That we all know what jazz is when we hear it, even if we can’t or won’t define it. And this word is a short wonder, fit for headlines and tweets, expressing sizzle and zip, akin to “wizard” and “pizazz.” Jazz, whatever it becomes in 2012, has been and remains jazz.

By HOWARD MANDEL

Manhattan School of Music

ial Centenn

JaZZfest reMains tiMeLy

azz 2012 in New York City began as 2011 did: with a Winter Jazzfest proving that a couple thousand fans in their twenties and thirties will flock to The Village in January for staggered sets by some five dozen original and emergent ensembles for one low price in multiple venues. The excitement and diverse styles of bands showcased at (Le) Poisson Rouge, Sullivan Hall, Kenny’s Castaways, Zinc Bar and The Bitter End demonstrated that there’s way more innovative art derived from American standards, blues, swing and improvisation than can be accounted for by the scant monies trickling through recordings, clubs and concert spaces to the players. Evidently, they make music for love. 2012 also announced itself with the gala concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center staged by the National Endowment for the Arts to celebrate its 2012 Jazz Masters: singer Sheila Jordan, drummer Jack DeJohnette, bassist Charlie Haden, Chicago saxophonist Von Freeman and flugelhorn player Jimmy Owens, designated an “advocate” for his teaching at the New School and work with American Federation of Musicians Local 802. From the stage (the entire show, which was webcast live, is archived at arts.gov), Owens announced that every New York

THE CONCERT WAS AMAZING IN PART FOR THE vIGOR WITH WHICH MEN AND WOMEN IN THEIR SEvENTIES AND EIGHTIES PERFORM

c.com rtsny .citya 2011 www t. 25, oct.. 12–oc Volume

3, Issue

Reach Howard Mandel at jazzmandel@gmail.com.

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MUSIC AND LYRICS BY

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

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ROB BERMAN DIRECTED BY

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The New CityArts Bringing Thinking Back to New York’s Art and Culture

JAMES LAPINE

6 CityArts | January 18–Feburary 7, 2012

•

Arts The Cityw: Rose Kuo intervie Page 19 Trier ter von Pranks s Page 20 Return

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CLASSICAL

Delivering Thrills gershWin and bernstein ring in the year By JAy NORDLINGER

New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert. Photo by Chris Lee

LaPlacaCohen 212-675-4106

the renaissance portrait from donatello to bellini

Publication: CITY ARTS Insertion date: JANUARY 18, 2012

Through March 18

metmuseum.org

The exhibition is made possible by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund, the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. The exhibition was organized by Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Portrait of a Lady (detail), ca. 1460–65, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, and Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of an Old Man and a Boy (detail), ca. 1490, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

January 18–Feburary 7, 2012 | CityArts 7

MET-0113-Renaissance_CityArts_7.341x8.5_Jan18_v2.indd 1

1/12/12 6:00 PM

7.341 X 8.5, 4C NEWS

hen the Vienna Philharmonic plays a New Year’s concert, the program is Viennesey—Strauss polkas and all that. When the New York Philharmonic plays a New Year’s concert, the program is New Yorky. At least it was this year. Their program on New Year’s Eve consisted of Gershwin and Bernstein. The former composer, of course, was a son of Brooklyn. The latter composer was an adoptive Manhattanite— but he symbolized the city for many. The Philharmonic played Bernstein’s two best works for orchestra (arguably): the overture to Candide and the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. Under music director Alan Gilbert, the overture was not a speedfest, which was good. But it was also rather heavy, even clunky. The music missed its zip and mirth. On the plus side, the chorale-like sections were quite warm (a surprise from this orchestra). As for the Symphonic Dances, they were mainly a profile in okayness. But they occasionally delivered the thrills and delights they contain. In common with other French pianists, Jean-Yves Thibaudet has an affinity for Gershwin. (Remember Philippe Entremont?) He played both Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F. Thibaudet, as we know, is a stupendous pianist: refined, adept, unfailingly musical. But there were some problems in the Gershwin pieces. He did some rushing, and he was less accurate than usual. Also, he often failed to produce enough sound. Thibaudet is sometimes curiously muted. Gilbert’s immediate predecessor as music director, Lorin Maazel, is probably the finest Gershwin interpreter in the world, along with André Previn. Gilbert conducted ably in the Gershwin works. In the concerto, however, he did not really swing. There was more swinging from him in the Rhapsody. Several first-desk players in the orchestra had lousy nights. An exception was Ricardo Morales, the clarinetist, who executed the music Gershwin gives him in the Rhapsody marvelously. Avery Fisher Hall is maybe the city’s homeliest concert venue, but it can really dress up, and it looked smashing on New Year’s Eve. There was a mile of roses along the stage. Female members of the orchestra were in festive dresses. At the end, everyone sang “Auld Lang Syne.” Several years ago,

I stood at the back as the crowd sang this song. Standing next to me was Paul Plishka, the Metropolitan Opera basso. I didn’t sing a word, and neither did he. Afterward, I said to him, “I didn’t dare sing with you standing there.” He pinched my cheek, I swear, and said, “Aww.”

POP

THE JUILLIARD SCHOOL | 28TH ANNUAL FOCUS! FESTIVAL | JOEL SACHS, Director

2012

Focus! SOUNDS RE-IMAGINED

‘Watch the Throne,’ Kanye West & Jay-Z; ‘Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou’

JOHN E CAG 6 FREE CONCERTS & A PRE-CONCERT DISCUSSION

59 ½” For a String Player (1953) Nocturne for Violin and Piano (1947) Living Room Music (1940) In a Landscape (1948) Theater Piece (1960) Postcard from Heaven (1982) Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2) (1951) Südwest Juilliard Radio Symphony Joel Sachs, Founding Conductor Aria 2 and 2B, from Song Books Vol. 1 (1970) with Solos from Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958) Lara Secord-Haid, Soprano Davone Tines, Bass-Baritone

The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) Nowth Upon Nacht (1984) But What About the Noise of Crumpling Paper… (1985) JPC Ensemble String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) Eight Whiskus (1985) Some of “The Harmony of Maine” (1978) Sonata and Interludes, Part III (1946-48)

MON, JAN 30 at 8 Peter Jay Sharp Theater JUILLIARD PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE DANIEL DRUCKMAN, Director BENJAMIN SHEEN, Organ “LAUNCHING THE PERCUSSION REVOLUTION” HENRY COWELL Ostinato Pianissimo (1934) JOHN CAGE Three2 (1991) JOHN CAGE Third Construction (1941) JOHN CAGE Credo In Us (1942) LOU HARRISON Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra (1973)

TUES, JAN 31 Peter Jay Sharp Theater 7 PM Panel Discussion

with JOAN LA BARBARA, PIA GILBERT, LAURA KUHN, and MARGARET LENG TAN; JOEL SACHS, Moderator

8 PM Concert

Music for Wind Instruments (1938) ear for EAR (1983) Music Walk (1958) “44 Harmonies” from Apartment House 1776 (1976) Arr. string quartet by Irvine Arditti 27’10.554” For a Percussionist (1956) with excerpts from 45’ for a Speaker (1954)

THURS, FEB 2 AT 8 Paul Hall Five Songs for Contralto (1938) Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard (1950) Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) Etudes Boreales, Nos. I and III (1978) Sonnekus2 (1985) with Satie Cabaret Songs Child of Tree (1975) The Perilous Night (1944)

FRI, FEB 3 AT 8 Alice Tully Hall NEW JUILLIARD ENSEMBLE JOEL SACHS, Founding Director and Conductor NATHANIEL LA NASA, Prepared Piano ALLEGRA CHAPMAN, Piano Fourteen (1990) with Litany for the Whale (1980) Lilla Heinrich Szász; Katya Guzgilna, Sopranos The Seasons (1947) Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950-51) Nathaniel LaNasa, Piano Excerpts from Sixteen Dances (1950-51) Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58) with Aria (1958) Allegra Chapman, Piano Lilla Heinrich Szász, Soprano The Peter Jay Sharp Theater and Paul Hall are located at Juilliard, 155 West 65th Street Programs subject to change

FREE tickets available 1/13/2012 at JANET AND LEONARD KRAMER BOX OFFICE at Juilliard 155 West 65th Street, Mon – Fri, 11 AM - 6 PM • Further information at (212) 769-7406

juilliard.edu/focus

8 CityArts | January 18–Feburary 7, 2012

Photo by Rhoda Nathans, courtesy of the John Cage Trust. Use of CAGE Variations II, courtesy C. F. Peters.

JAN 27- FEB 3

WED, FEB 1 AT 8 Paul Hall

personal, later style of cubism (“Fille dessinanat à l’intérieur” (1935)). “That’s My B**ch” similarly displays the multiperspective approach that distinguishes the entire Watch the Throne album. By John Demetry In the song, West’s gritty high-life portrait is powered by a sample of James Call Larry Gagosian Brown’s “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved.” You belong in museums Jay-Z’s activist ode to dark-featured vixens —Jay-Z, “That’s My B**ch” answers West’s yearning—that of a priviay-Z dreams of collapsing the class and leged black man—and Brown’s sexualized race divisions reflected in high art and political entreaty, acknowledging responpop art hierarchies. Reverse the title sibility. Although focused on the Spanish Picasof Kanye West & Jay-Z’s love song from their Watch the Throne album (“That’s My B**ch”) so’s love for a blond, blue-eyed French with that of the Gagosian’s Picasso retro- girl (The Other, as signified by the retro’s title), the Gagosian spective (L’amour collection reveals fou), which ran from those aspects of April 14 to July 15; Marie-Thérèse the switch-up might that appealed to give contemporary Picasso’s distinct currency to Picasso’s sexual identity: the artwork inspired by seductive shape of his love for Marienose, hips, breasts, Thérèse and afford sex. Equally perWest and Jay-Z the sonal, West comluxury of expressing bines the sacred pure romanticism and the profane to (“mad love”). describe his siren: This is a problem “Mary Magdalene of context and idefrom a pole dance.” ology rather than a Picasso crowns reflection of these Marie-Thérèse with artists’ limitations. a wreath in both Jay-Z knows this: “Femme lisant à la “[If] Picasso was table” (1934) and alive he woulda Pablo Picasso, “Marie-Thérèse avec une the sublime “Mariemade her.” Jay-Z’s guirlande” (1937). Thérèse avec un roll call of modern Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. guirlande” (1937). multiculti icons (Salma, Penelope, Halle, Beyoncé) chal- These artists draw upon Western religious lenges segregationist standards of art and iconography to signify the spiritual worth of their subjects. beauty. West and Jay-Z and Picasso give expresHowever, West and Jay-Z also honor and expand upon Picasso’s studies of sion to the women’s own longings with a desire and physiognomy. As L’amour fou woman’s voice and her postures, respecdisplayed, Picasso’s style emerged from tively. In the hook to “That’s My B**ch,” Elly the need to represent the whole of his Jackson sings the woman’s desires: “I’ve responses to his model. With Watch the been waiting for a long, long time/ Just Throne, West and Jay-Z revive hip-hop by to get off and throw my hands up high.” interrogating the cultural implications of The pole dance and hands up high imagery—signifying the need for release—sync their sexual responses. The Gagosian retrospective traced with the sensual contortions in Picasso’s Picasso’s radical development from con- representations of Marie-Thérèse (e.g., the ventional sketches to surrealism (“Figure au bord de la mer” (1929)) to his vibrantly Continued on page 9

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FRI, JAN 27 AT 8 Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Best Album and Best Gallery Exhibition of 2011

Song of the Year Saluting Stevie Nicks’ “Soldier’s Angel” By Ben Kessler

ears from now, 2011 may be remembered as the year postfeminism produced poster girls for the status quo. Female-fronted hits such as the movie Bridesmaids and the TV show New Girl were hailed as breakthroughs, despite their unremarkable content. (Bridesmaids even showed up on some confused critics’ year-end best lists.) Ironically, inordinate media attention turned this distaff escapist trend into a genuine threat to women’s cultural advancement. The “women in comedy” hype carries the suggestion that lucrative half-truths are the best female artists can hope to achieve; risking personal expression turns funny chicks into Debbie Downers. My choice for best pop song of last year, Stevie Nicks’ “Soldier’s Angel,” points the way out of hype. As if responding to Bridesmaids and New Girl, Nicks shows us how 21st-century pop artists can speak truth and navigate politics. In “Soldier’s Angel,” Nicks tells how her visits with wounded veterans at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital unsettled her

Watch the Throne Continued from page 8 tormented female figures in “Le sauvetage” (1932) or the repose of “Femme aux cheveux jaunes” (1931)). These artists instruct the audience to make the leap from desire to compassion. That is a quality befitting kings. Jay-Z expresses this compassion in the album’s closing track, “Why I Love You,” which stands as a summary of his whole career—a truth exemplified in his collaboration with West: “I tried to teach ni**as how to be kings/ And all they ever wanted to be was soldiers.” Watch the Throne defines a cultural calamity—nihilism—in terms of the hierarchy on the opening song, “No Church In The Wild”: human being < mob < King < God < nonbeliever (“Who don’t believe in anything”). With the penultimate “Made in America,” Jay-Z counters disbelief with vernacu-

as a woman, citizen and icon. Lindsey Buckingham’s resonant guitar notes ensure that the song is threaded through with dread in the face of mortality. Against this stirring backdrop, Nicks’ voice—scarred and pitted by time and trouble—expresses a veteran artist’s perseverance for inspiration. Imagining how the soldiers to whom she ministers must see her, Nicks sings, “I am a soldier’s girlfriend as I look upon their f a c e s / They make me remember my first love/ Goin’ out to dances.” Buckingham’s presence as guitarist and background vocalist connects her romantic recollection to our collective Fleetwood Mac memories. As “smart” pop critics might say, Nicks “implicates the audience” in her healing mission. The refrain of “Solder’s Angel” speaks of the “war of words between worlds” within which Nicks’ mission is enmeshed. This must refer to the partisan scapegoating that has infected American political discourse. While Hollywood entertainment like Bridesmaids and New Girl promises escape from political conflict, Nicks elevates the discourse to a philosophical, even spiritual plane. “Soldier’s Angel” was a 2011 highlight, but it may resonate even more profoundly in this election year. As Nicks warns: “No one walks away from this battle.”

lar faith and topples hierarchies with an outsider’s patriotism, a unifying, democratic impulse. To do so, he summons an image of womanliness as indelible as Picasso’s transcendently voluptuous and fertile “Femme nue couchée” (1932): “I pledge allegiance to my grandma/ For that banana pudding, our piece of Americana.” “Why I Love You” ends the album with West and Jay-Z trading off on, then jointly repeating, the revolutionary words of forgiveness from the King of Kings on the cross. To redefine “The Throne”—and thus power— the duo returns to sources of vernacular sustenance, channels physical desire into compassion and liberates Picasso from art world hierarchies. And so the peak pop art and high art experiences of 2011 challenge us all.

John Demetry topples critical hierarchies in his book The Community of Desire: Selected Critical Writings (2001–2007), available at www.lulu.com.

Ryan Brown, Conductor and Artistic Director

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January 18–Feburary 7, 2012 | CityArts 9

By Armond White

Spielberg’s Game Changers Cinema’s past and future in Tintin and War Horse

10 CityArts | January 18–Feburary 7, 2012

ovie watching can never be the same after the doubleheader of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, his first animated film, and his live-action War Horse. Each film upgrades the way our imaginations construct the world, the way we see ourselves in the digital age. All art devotees should recognize the history being made. Tintin, the intrepid boy reporter from Belgian author Hergé’s cartoon storybooks, and Joey, the young stallion traversing World War I-era Europe as in the hit Broadway stage play, both emerge from the childhood reveries that often start Spielberg’s fictions. These imaginary protagonists go through largescale comic and dramatic escapades that not only span the breadth of human experience but apotheosize it. In the language of pop immediacy, Tintin and Joey’s stories are immersive—a term for the right-now gratification encouraged by both digital media and the exhausted cultural legacy recently eulogized in Godard’s Film Socialisme. Tintin’s childhood curiosity and resourcefulness and Joey’s natural grace and endurance are captivating on so many levels that the usual terms of film appreciation hardly apply. This may be key to why many critics underappreciate Spielberg; they react conventionally to these unconventional films and are bewildered by Spielberg’s refinement, precision, piquancy and vision. Perhaps the best way to understand the achievement of these two revolutionary films is to realize that they do nothing “new.” Their revolution is in Spielberg’s technique—very familiar after almost 40 years of popular and profound entertainment—but now with a new impetus and subtler depth. As a modernist filmmaker, he turns Tintin into a commentary on traditional genre expectation and pushes beyond it, toward the personal feelings about history and legend that are stirred by fantastic exploits and imaginative catharsis. In War Horse, Joey is at the center of the historical events that define what came to be known as modernity—eternal class struggles intensified by war that level all our ambitions and vulnerabilities, whether English, German, French—or American. (It purifies global human values, as Denis Villeneve’s Incendies also showed.) Embarking on digital anime methods, Spielberg has answered the need to reconceive the pleasure to be had from the adventure genre and war movie—The Adventures of Tintin is state of the art, War Horse is commemoration. Both are prophecy.

or Spielberg, entertainment equals enlightenment. Not realizing that, critics take Tintin’s on-screen miracles for

granted. There’s too much for ordinary critics to look at, starting with the opening scene of Tintin having his portrait made at a street fair: “I think I have captured something of your likeness,” he is told by a painter. When we see it, it is, of course, a Hergé drawing— now a caricature of a cartoon. From that image onward, Spielberg toys with ways of seeing. Lenses, binoculars, window reflections, magnifying glasses and mirrors pop up everywhere (clever self-consciousness in the script by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish and Steven Moffat). A less thoughtful filmmaker, such as coproducer Peter Jackson, would settle for telling Tintin’s story (maybe even making it as convoluted as the awful Lord of the Rings trilogy, which set back the intellectual development of digital fantasy). But Spielberg continues the modernist ethic of heightening viewer awareness. Intrepid Tintin becomes our digitalage surrogate, reenacting chase movie traditions like River Pheonix in The Last Crusade (the basis of the credit sequence’s silhouette overture) but at waterslide velocity. This is far beyond the hackneyed talk of dreams in Scorsese’s banal film school lecture, Hugo—Spielberg believes in cinema as kinetics, prioritizing movement, not antiquated “cinephilia.” As ultimate cinema, The Adventures of Tintin features the bliss of camera movement. A sequence in Tintin’s apartment where the model ship he purchased at that opening street fair becomes the object of an action-ballet burglary has ingenious slapstick speed. It was Hitchcock who famously exclaimed, “Spielberg doesn’t think in terms of a proscenium”; Tintin’s P.O.V. is positively gyroscopic. The images are always vertiginous, as when sailors slip-slide in their bunks or pet shop canaries circle a man’s head after he falls. This wittily stylized activity evokes how we dream. As we watch, we live the history of cinema and animation just as spectacularly as André Bazin theorized our recognition of nature and experience in photographic realism. Tintin advances the motion capture technology that Robert Zemeckis has fumbled with for years (hideous faces in The Polar Express, Halloween expressiveness in Monster

House). The improvement allows animation to affect cinematic realism (unlike Scorsese’s outof-scale CGI) but as aestheticized dream play. Spielberg’s narrative escalates when Tintin, seeking the secret of the Unicorn model ship, encounters drunken Captain Haddock and learns the ship’s history. In Haddock’s meta-narrative, legend segues into visions, then flashbacks, and vice versa. These endlessly inventive transitions (a ship in a desert mirage morphs onto roiling seas) salute David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia as well as Roman Polanski’s Pirates (the latter particularly in Haddock’s Walter Matthau-countenance and bluster). Yet, Spielberg’s sensibility controls the fable’s crescendo—the friendly confidences that Haddock, Tintin and his white terrier Snowy share recall the emotional connections to history and family in Catch Me if You Can and The Last Crusade. Haddock chronicles a legendary competition between his ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock, and the pirate Red Rackham that ties the Unicorn to three lost scrolls and leads to even more awesome spectacle. Spielberg shows lyrical inspiration: an amazing sea battle where one pirate vessel swings on the mast of another ship, leaping from churning waters to aerial sparring. Nothing in Pirates of the Caribbean compares. Mere fancifulness is heightened in favor of centrifugal force. These vectors are repeated in a later joust between gigantic cranes that surpasses the dynamism of Michael Bay’s Transformers 3. Chief among Tintin’s climaxes is an extended chase sequence that may be the greatest in movie history; it juggles characters, narrative strands and those scrolls, plus Snowy and a mischievous falcon, and stretches across the screen. This ribbon of hurtling delight recalls Temple of Doom but with clearer, brighter imagery. Spielberg uses 3-D width, not just background-foreground depth, which is more than practitioner James Cameron ever conceived of and closer to Paul W.S. Anderson’s panoramas in Resident Evil: AfterLife and The Three Musketeers. Scorsese’s sad, dull use of 3-D in Hugo just seems part of contemporary Hollywood’s techno hoodwink to sucker family audiences and intimidate cineastes. But Spielberg

Perhaps the best way to understand the achievement of these two revolutionary films is to realize that they do nothing “new.” Their revolution is in Spielberg’s technique.

utilizes the gimmick as an occasion for reexamining cinematic imagery. Confronting Hergé’s Tintin rendering with his own greenscreen Tintin startlingly brings together 20th- and 21st-century modes. Ready or not, the double image of cartoon and 3-D Tintin propels us forward.

f 3-D is ever to be an acceptable narrative technology, it will have to unlock viewers’ imaginations, as in Zack Snyder’s The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga‘hoole, and not blatantly repeat the primitive “realism” of early movie hucksters, which Scorsese unhelpfully romanticizes. Neither Wim Wenders’ Pina nor Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, recent exercises in 3-D documentary realism, were as good as their fictional predecessors, Altman’s The Company or the 1959 Journey to the Center of the Earth. Tintin’s cartoon mode defies Wenders’ and Herzog’s banal gimmickry (which is why it will also work in 2-D, offering as much carnival delight as Temple of Doom and 1941). Tintin’s 21st-century artistry redeems our corrupted taste for narrative and spectacle—it’s the best kind of restoration. This rediscovery inspired the aesthetic behind Spielberg’s follow-up project: War Horse looks like a cinematic version of an illuminated manuscript. Its cavalcade of human longing and suffering during World War I has an uncanny spiritual tow, thanks to the way cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s glowing frames combine storybook and Hollywood epic grandeur. Joey, the horse bought at auction by a struggling farmer, becomes a surrogate for young Albert (Jeremy Irvine), whose attachment and faithfulness are tested when Joey is taken into service by the British army and on the continent becomes part of the lives of two German brothers, a young French girl (Celine Buckens) and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup) and anonymous soldiers on the battlefield. Anyone who takes for granted the emotions elicited in War Horse fools themself to think they’re slogging through clichés. The human emotions reflected in Joey’s sojourn are purified to a spiritual essence. There is an uncorrupted, presexual belief in human potential in this series of tales. The critic Dennis Delrogh insightfully caught Joey’s resemblance to the African slave’s travails in the criminally neglected Amistad. Indeed, War Horse views Western “civilization” from an indentured soul’s distance (same as in The Color Purple) that is almost prelapsarian—not just anti-war but wartime seen with honest, not idyllic, moral complexity.

Continued on page 12 January 18–Feburary 7, 2012 | CityArts 11

Bravery and Mastery Spielberg’s “lost” treasures By Gregory Solman

hough it’s tempting to dwell upon Steven Spielberg’s superior visual aesthetics—his mellifluous and unstudied reimagining of the Ford and Lean “scene” in War Horse, the extra-dimensional lighting and thrillingly untethered camera of Tintin— it’s the storytelling project that distinguishes both films. A mark of what jazz musician Kenny Werner calls effortless mastery, Spielberg’s facility renders the impression of a relaxed spontaneity, an immediacy that completely belies the artistic maturation, thoughtfulness and the natural aptitude underlying it. As he did in 1993 (Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List), then again in 1997 (Lost World, Amistad), 2002 (Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report) and 2005 (War of the Worlds, Munich), Spielberg has achieved one of those double-down years not seen since the days of the studio masters (see Preston Sturges or John Ford’s ’40s). He traversed hours of daunting movie terrain without seeming to waste a single shot while preserving a rollicking Raiders of the Lost Ark pace in Tintin and the deceptive simplicity and story-space intimacy of War Horse. The news that the once redoubtable American Society of Cinematographers ignored both Spielberg films in favor of trendy, unremarkable and insider nominees (a sure sign

Spielberg Continued from page 11 The first battle scene brilliantly confronts us with the horror of undefended Germans attacked by brutal Brits; the unexpected shock is matched by the poetic startlement of riderless horses seen leaping over machine guns. This image is as haunting as Griffith’s seminal “War’s Peace” in The Birth of a Nation, capturing the irony in ritualized killing. Spielberg uses Joey’s story to achieve the equivalent of an outsider’s unbiased detachment, fair to the tragedy and beauty of worldly experience. This richness derives from concentrating narrative skill with popular perceptual needs. It shames the shallow view of war (and Germans and violence and love) that Tarantino disgraced in Inglourious Basterds. QT’s nihilistic revisionism negated the humane values previously held in wartime narratives. Spielberg challenges such cynicism while

12 CityArts | January 18–Feburary 7, 2012

that the Academy will follow) is, as expected, execrable. That’s no longer a matter of mere prejudice or professional envy: It’s entirely possible that Spielberg doesn’t impress his colleagues because they’re no longer his fellow artists—or, rather, they’re not really in his class. Spielberg now makes movies for the blind. Remember how Ford dared black-and-white and tableaux vivants in 1941 for How Green Was My Valley—a masterpiece War Horse hearkens and recollects—yet Arthur C. Miller was not forgotten by awards season, as, apparently, virtual camera operator Spielberg and the great Janusz Kaminski will be. While other filmmakers gloat over box office numbers and seem content to impact the business (something Spielberg accomplished as early as Jaws, the first summer release in history to become the year’s biggest blockbuster), Spielberg settles for nothing less than influencing the art. In The Adventures of Tintin, Spielberg deinfantilizes adolescent adventure by remembering and reimagining Hergé’s prewar comic book rather than revising it for modern delectation. Contrary to the way his work is always mischaracterized, Spielberg understands the youthful yearning for par-

ticipation in the adventure of adulthood. He elevates the yarn’s levels of visual and narrative sophistication. Cub reporter Tintin pulls a pistol to greet dastardly interlopers with the familiar ease that Indiana Jones tossed a revolver into his luggage. He embraces real-world comic references to rum, tobacco, whiskey breath and the French Foreign Legion (a Frank Sinatra song every modern should rediscover), rescuing the story from the perils of moralistic American P.C. when the genre is on the precipice of being lost forever. It’s a sonorous echo of the American serial genre, filtered through the Old World and coming back in mesmerizing modern style. Spielberg’s triumph in War Horse is literal, figurative and moral clarity of vision. In his sensitive handling of Great War realism and the exquisite depiction of Albert’s youthful earnestness, unworldliness and decency, Spielberg corrects an adult genre gone fatuous, cynical and fashionably nihilistic. He teaches the lesson on how to corral a galloping metaphor of innocence lost without ever seeming precious by returning to the deceptively simple style of the masters: Ford and Lean and even the underappreciated Clarence Brown, none of whom (heretical spoiler to follow) could command an action sequence the likes of the one in War Horse as Joey, terrified by tank and trench, is lost

in No Man’s Land. In contrast, Spielberg depicts the battle death of gentleman Captain Nicholls by showing galloping Joey’s empty saddle. He selects notes like a jazz master soloing. Spielberg’s stripping the movies of Hollywood’s overwrought style and anti-war agitprop—his humanistic judiciousness— has the contrary effect of strengthening the repellent horror and making the story’s points about the many faces of courage. Just as he deployed contrasting iconographic resonance of the tireless American Indiana Jones attacking a Panzer headlong on horseback—the cowboy in the fedora against Nazis in helmets—Spielberg showing a team of horses forced to literally break their hearts to pull gargantuan field artillery up a hill ranks among the most persuasive and tragic images in anti-war movie memory. The fact that Joey’s life depends on either that or pulling ambulances underscores the futility of battle without the easy irony. Now, Spielberg turns Tintin sequels over to lesser directors, having exhausted the comic’s meaning yet leaving an indelible watermark that other directors would be foolish to blemish (particularly Peter Jackson, whose sequel should, for starters, be shaken out of his nauseating King Kong computer-game camera swooping). If Spielberg pipes up at all about his movies’ maltreatment, it will be on behalf of the artists who deserve more than dismissalby-proxy for working with him. America’s greatest film artist is its most humble. As War Horse’s writers would have it, “Think how brave he is, refusing to be proud.”

encouraging viewers to recover their basic emotional responses. QT wants audiences to enjoy killing and vengeance—the folly of the post-Vietnam unengaged, anti-military sensibility. Spielberg steps back from that and resurrects the profundity of war service. What he learned from the research for and reactions to Saving Private Ryan causes him to practice the same scrupulousness as earlier generations of war vet artists, from John Ford to Kurosawa. The result produces either catharsis or the confusion felt by those who have grown comfortable with cynicism and are inured to the beauty that comes through Kaminski’s supernal images. Spielberg’s flaming sunsets are more referential than QT’s film geek echoes; they evoke Gone With the Wind romanticism but with the same modernist sentiments as Coppola’s The Outsiders and Téchiné’s French Provincial, films that use the movies’ past to articulate a contemporary longing. It’s the height of sophistication, achieving complex expression with phenomenal simplicity.

Spielberg has arrived at David Lean/John Ford’s visual grandiloquence and emotional clarity—greatness is at his fingertips, but it’s also the result of artistic integrity. Every sequence in War Horse may seem summary because its episodes—whether of Albert and his family or various civilians and soldiers, including Tom Hiddleston as the figure of sacrificial British rectitude—suggest a parable on anguished human aspiration and arrive at their point with stunning elegance. This is especially true of Joey’s wild attempt at escape, enmeshing himself in trench wire. An extended metaphor for the terror and absurdity of No Man’s Land, it eschews warfare but symbolizes tormented flesh and anxious spirit—Joey as one of God’s noble creatures. It is a sequence of sustained agape, the stark animal-equalssoul image suggests the full range of torture, enslavement, cruelty and finally—breathtakingly—hope through mankind’s humility. War movies inherently memorialize, but Spielberg uses his gift for action to capture

frenzy plus its moral implications. The scene goes beyond mere genre filmmaking but also brings us back to reflect on genre and what styles and methods of storytelling mean to modern consciousness. War Horse has a different kind of resonance than The Adventures of Tintin, but it isn’t necessarily better. Each is an experiment that could only be possible after the distillation practiced in The Adventures of Tintin. Spielberg’s reconsideration of cinema aesthetics allows him to refine the cinematic image; to create, as critic Robert Storr said of Gerhard Richter, “works of art that attempt—and I believe succeed—in fundamentally repositioning the viewer in relation to…the 20th century’s running narrative of utopianism and despair.” Tintin and War Horse range between utopianism and despair through comedy and drama, but it’s important to note how their nearly abstract visual styles address our changing perception of the moving image narrative.

Spielberg’s triumph in War Horse is literal, figurative and moral clarity of vision.

Continued on page 13

ON GAMING

2011’s Most Interesting Games By STEvE HASkE

hen the video game industry makes it easy to view gaming as little more than a hub for adolescent power fantasies and play-land warmongering, it can be trying to find the evocative experiences present in other mediums. But if the titles I’ve picked from the past year are any indication (and they are), 2011 was a good year for games showcasing a broad range of creative direction. First up: a commitment-phobe cheating on his longtime girlfriend defines the bizarre Catherine, which flip-flops between drunkenly chatting with barflies (while texting your preferred partner) and a horror-themed Catherine: One Qbert. Despite its of 2011’s most puzzle design keeping interesting games. deeper psychosexual themes in check, Catherine’s aim is exploring relationships, something almost unheard of in games. By contrast, Shadows of the Damned’s Robert Rodriguez-meets-Seijun Suzuki camp horror might nearly be the antithesis of romantic intention. Still, with its unapologetically juvenile demeanor and Hell-asa-Mexican-shantytown aesthetic, “punk rock” auteur Suda 51’s demon-hunting tale is a darkly comic treat that carries as much personality as violence. Equally puerile is Epic Games’ Bullet-

Continued from page 12 Only dullards would misunderstand these visions as either trivial or clichéd. By altering the imagery of his Indiana Jones cycle and stylizing Hollywood’s pictographic classicism, Spielberg uses cinema “in a way which is both extremely personal, even idiosyncratic, and extremely pointed, even polemical…verging on the abstract,” to quote Peter Wollen, also writing about Richter’s paintings-based-on-photographs.

storm, whose meathead feel belies a surprisingly smart design, mandating unique kills. Every level is an executioner’s playground—combine environmental hazards with weapon-specific tricks or risk running out of cash for ammo and ordnance upgrades, all against an unexpected metacommentary on game design and revenge tropes. Switching gears entirely, Yakuza 4 is delightfully, awkwardly Japanese, with quirky gameplay that mixes street brawling with an impressively detailed Tokyo lifestyle simulator and a similar narrative split between humorous mundanity and serious crime drama. Then there’s Dark Souls; brutal, arcane and intelligent, this bleak fantasy demands players’ utmost attention. Encounters with everyday foes are hard-won, progress is excruciatingly meticulous, victory indescribable. Ultimately, Dark Souls lends death an uncommon weight. Runner up: El Shaddai’s kitschy Japanese Book of Enoch has designer jeans-clad archangels. Trust me. Yakuza 4 is available now on PS3; all other titles are available now on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Steve Haske is a Portland, Ore.-based freelance journalist. You can follow him on Twitter @afraidtomerge.

In the digital era, our basic assumptions about movies have changed with the methods of their exhibition and consumption. Movies won’t be the same—we know that from the way critics settled for the shoddy look of the Iron Man and Harry Potter flicks, The Artist, Hugo, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris and others that have no visual quality to speak of. Movies as we knew them are over; today’s increasing artifice concedes to digital, but Spielberg finds the perfect expression of new imagining.

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DANCE

Up, Down and Sideways 2011’s dance “haPPenings” By JOEL LOBENTHAL

he year 2012 can wait until my next column. But let’s hope for—let’s go so far as to look forward to—dance events as memorable as those that took place in the closing week of 2011. Winding up its annual City Center season, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gave an admirable rendition of Paul Taylor’s 1981 Arden Court, a new addition to its repertory. It wasn’t always easy or comfortable for them to recreate Taylor’s overarching and paradoxical tone of balletic burliness, but they pulled it off—and with panache, I almost don’t have to add. A couple of days later, at the 19th-century Park Avenue Armory, came the final performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. It put on one of its venerable “events”—a reweaving of excerpts from company repertory—and did so in singular

fashion for the occasion, simultaneously occupying three argyle-shaped stages at the Armory. Cunningham’s work has always had a sense of the antic, and indeed this “event” could have registered as the company’s own take on a three-ring circus. But the Armory was very dark for the 50-minute duration, suggesting a planetarium, as the ceiling seemed to vanish into the vault of the infinite. Ostensible cloud formations that looked like clusters of ping-pong balls were suspended above the dancers, diffusing beams of light that shone from indirect vantage points. It had the faint flavor of 1960s happenings, in which Cunningham and his company once participated. At the same time, there was the recollection of a Renaissance ballroom, where dance spectacles were once made to embody a microcosm of the galaxies. The presence at the Armory of musicians perched on parapets, lodged against all four walls, resulted in sounds that

were sometimes near, sometimes far off in the interstellar ambient. You could watch from observation platforms one story above the dancers and thus view the action in wide-range perspective. You could also sit—or most likely stand— by one stage and let the action come to you. Keeping an eye on the middle and far distance ensured a realization of moments when the three stages coalesced into epic synchronization. More often, each stage contained independent and disjunctive incidents. There was a certain poignancy in not being able to totally apprehend all of the movement information being transmitted, particularly since this was our final opportunity to see this company. The dancers performed with an intensity appropriate to the momentous occasion. The year in dance thus closed in a fabulous setting with a farewell to a great company and a provocative experiment in perception.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Linda Celeste Sims and Kirven J. Boyd in Paul Taylors Arden Court. Photo by Paul Kolnik

Read more by Joel Lobenthal at lobenthal.com.

WHAT ARE YOUR KIDS DOING THIS SUMMER?

SATURDAY, JAN 21, 2012 Upper East Side St. Jean Baptiste School 173 E. 75th St. 12PM - 3PM

SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2012 Upper West Side Congregation Rodeph Sholom 7 W. 83rd St. 12PM - 3PM

SATURDAY, JAN 28, 2012 Downtown Grace Church School 86 4th Ave. 12PM - 3PM

SUNDAY, JAN 29, 2012 Park Slope Union Temple 17 Eastern Pkwy 12PM - 3PM

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Newyorkfamilycamps.com 14 CityArts | January 18–Feburary 7, 2012

AUCTIONS

Going, Going Auctions By Caroline Birenbaum Rarae Aves Christie’s devotes a Jan. 20 auction to a single, formidable lot: A complete first edition of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, 1827–38. Of some 200 sets originally issued, this copy, which has remained in the collection formed by the Duke of Portland since it was published, is one of only 13 in private hands. Four enormous volumes bound in crimson Morocco leather, elegantly decorated in gold, contain 435 hand-colored etched and aquatint plates on double-elephant folio sheets (approximately 2 by 3 feet) after Audubon’s lifesized watercolor drawings of birds in their habitats. Accompanying the plates are five octavo (i.e. regular book size) volumes of descriptive text in matching bindings. Christie’s: Jan. 20, 10 a.m. Previews Jan. 18, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Jan. 19, 10 a.m.–noon. www.christies.com. OLD MASTERS The preview exhibitions of the auctions briefly described below deserve lengthy viewing. If you delight in connoisseurship, you will have a field day reading the catalog entries discussing provenance and attributions. Many of the works come from esteemed private collections, are fresh to the market or have not been publicly exhibited before. There are many museum-quality offerings to savor at Christie’s, starting with a major sale of Old Master Paintings the morning of Jan. 25. The 60 lots range from luxe 15th-century Italian domestic works, such as panels from a birth tray and two wedding chests, to a previously unpublished oil sketch of “The Assumption of the Virgin” by Peter Paul Rubens, four painted roundels of proverbs by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, a tender roundel of “Virgin Mary Nursing the Christ Child” by Hans Memling, Giambattista Tiepolo’s theatrical oil sketch for a fresco, “Arrival of Henry III at the Villa Contarini,” from the Robert and Clarice Smith Collection, and an elaborate “Still Life” by Cornelis de Heem from the John W. Kluge Collection, being sold to benefit Columbia University. A second session of lesser Old Master Paintings Jan. 26 includes some works from the collection of the late art historian Leo Steinberg; drawings from his collection are featured that afternoon. Meanwhile, Christie’s groups 144 18th-

Christie’s concludes the series of sales the morning of Jan. 26, offering Old Master & Early British Drawings & Watercolors. The auction begins with 21 pieces from the Steinberg collection, quite a few of which bear his research notes and attributions, followed by landscape drawings by Edward Lear from the estate of St. Louis attorney Christian B. Peper, whose paintings by Lear and others are included in the Jan. 25 and 26 paintings sales. Other highlights include J.M.W. Turner’s pencil, ink and watercolor drawing, “The Chain Pier, Brighton,” from the series Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England; a black-and-white chalk sketch by Thomas Gainsborough of his dogs, “Tristram and Fox”; and a brown ink pen and wash Venetian capriccio by Francesco Guardi. Christie’s: Jan. 25, 10 a.m. & 2 p.m.. Previews Jan. 21–24. Jan. 26, 10 a.m & 5 p.m. Previews Jan. 21–25. www.christies. com.

by Fra Bartolommeo, from the Rosekrans collection; a grisaille (tones of gray) “Rest on the Flight Into Egypt” by Anthony Van Dyck; a modello for a painting of the “Adoration of the Magi” by Peter Paul Rubens; a modello for an altarpiece of the “Circumcision of Christ” by Federico Barocci; an early version of “Lucretia” by Lucas Cranach the Elder; an elaborate floral still life on copper by Jan van Huysum; a rare interior Venetian Carnival scene of masked figures by Francesco Guardi; and a view of the Redentore and San Giacomo in Venice by Canaletto, as well as a charming pair of allegories of Fame and Virtue by Elisabetta Sirani and Lavinia Fontana’s closely-packed portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli with six (of her eventual 19) children and a little lap dog, which bears a striking resemblance to the family. The afternoon session contains more works but of less interest. On the afternoon of Jan. 27, Sotheby’s offer a miscellany of Old Master & 19thCentury European Art, including a group of works from the Forbes collection related to the “Panorama of the Battle of Champigny.” Sotheby’s: Jan. 25, 10 a.m. Previews Jan. 21–24. Jan. 26, 10 a.m. & 2 p.m. Previews Jan. 21–25. Jan. 27, 2 p.m. Previews Jan. 21–26. www.sothebys.com.

Reversing the sequence, Sotheby’s offers museum-quality Old Master Drawings on the morning of Jan. 25, with special focus on a large pen and brown ink portrait of a young Helen Frankenthaler, “Sunshine After Rain” (1987), color etching, man attributed to Piero aquatint and drypoint, at auction at Phillips de Pury Jan. 25. Estimate $10,000 del Pollaiuolo and such to $15,000. highlights as a male nude in red chalk by Pietro da gillière’s grand but not grandiose “Gaspard Cortona, a pencil drawing of a seated lady Peteau de Maulette”; a delectable double by Thomas Gainsborough and a two-sided portrait of two young boys dressed as sheet of early Watteau studies of women. Sotheby’s blockbuster sale of Important Montagnards by François-Hubert Drouais; a rare portrait by Jean-Siméon Chardin Old Master Paintings and Sculpture on the depicting obstetrician André Levret; a won- morning of Jan. 26 boasts works from a numderfully fresh and informal pastel of Lady ber of highly regarded collections, including Ann Somerset, Countess of Northampton, the descendants of Clarence Palitz, Dodie attributed to Jean-Étienne Liotard; and Rosekrans and the estate of Lady Forte, wife Elisabeth-Louise Vigée le Brun’s affection- of the hotelier. Among the 86 lots are a portrait of a fashate and admiring depiction of her mother, Madame le Sevre. By contrast, François- ionable young woman against a green velvet Joseph Navez’s portrait of Théodore Joseph drape by Lucas Cranach the Younger; a panJonet and his two daughters borders on el of the Virgin Annunciate from a portable parody—the handsome young Belgian diptych, likely by Simone Martini; a tondo of father appears either embarrassed by his the Madonna and Child with a young John daughters’ ostentation or worried about his the Baptist by Sandro Botticelli and his studio; a panel of St. Jerome in the wilderness ability to afford their taste for finery.

Modern & Contemporary Editioned Works If you need a break from the past, check out Phillips de Pury’s auction of classic to cutting-edge modern and contemporary artist’s editions Jan. 25. Works on paper range from lithographs by Paul Klee to Andy Warhol’s “Flash—November 22, 1963,” a complete portfolio of 11 screenprints based on the JFK assassination; Jasper Johns’ color etching and aquatint “Face with Watch”; Roy Lichtenstein’s “Mirror #1,” screenprint with embossing and collage; Helen Frankenthaler’s color etching and aquatint, “Sunshine after Rain”; minimalist-inflected prints by Sol LeWitt, Cy Twombly, Robert Mangold, Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra and Richard Tuttle; and photo-based works such as Sophie Calle’s “Mother; Father; Sister; Brother,” Marcel Broodthaers’ “Portraits Photographiques” and Vik Muniz’s “Scissors.” Three-dimensional editioned works include Lynn Chadwick’s “Walking Cloaked Figure,” Richard Artschwager’s “Book” and Tom Otterness’ “Cone Figure.” As usual, Phillips’ exquisite catalog layout enhances the works, and the gallery exhibition will undoubtedly do them equal justice. Phillips de Pury: Jan. 25, 1 p.m. Previews Jan. 18–25. www.phillipsdepury.com.

century French Paintings in a separate session on the afternoon of Jan. 25. Among the rococo delights are “Fête Champêtre” by Jean-Baptiste Pater, “The Union of Comedy and Music,” an unusual emblematic painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau, and diverse works by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, including the oval painting “The Good Mother.” Notable portraits include Nicolas de Lar-

January 18–Feburary 7, 2012 | CityArts 15

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