cityArts April 4, 2012

April 4, 2012 • Volume 4, Issue 5

The Steins Collect the parisian avantgarde by John Goodrich Page 9 New York’s Review of Culture • CityArtsNYC.com

Ben kessler on Mad Men mania, ‘Smart Tv’ Page 15

Damsels in Distress: Armond White reviews Whit Stillman’s comeback Page 14 CityArts Interview: Signature Theater’s James Houghton Page 19 Joel Lobenthal on FIT’s Youthquake Page 12

ICONIC AMBASSADORS kehinde Wiley’s one-world portraits Page 4

INSIDE GALLERIES / MUSEUMS Kehinde Wiley at The Jewish Museum P. 4 Exquisite Corpses at MoMA P. 5 Susanna Coffey at Steven Harvey P. 7 The Steins Collect at The Met P. 9 Bharti Kher at Hauser Wirth P. 10 POP Sonia M’Barek’s all-worlds music P. 10 CLASSICAL Bronfman and Perahia in recital P. 11

Storytelling tours in Jackson Heights Apr 14–15, 21–22, 28–29, and May 5–6

JAZZ Dr. John at BAM P. 11

How does one find calm and inner peace in the city? Experience four readings of newly commissioned works in spaces selected by the architects at Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO – IL).

P.5

Tickets at stillspotting.guggenheim.org

DANCE Youthquake at FIT P. 12 Barcelona Ballet at City Center P. 12 TheaTER Pipe Dream at City Center P. 13 FILM Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress P. 14 TELEVISION Mad Men and “Smart TV” P. 15 ON GAMING Sony’s new handheld: Vita P. 16

Support is provided by the Rockefeller Foundation NYC Opportunities Fund and a MetLife Foundation Museum and Community Connections grant. This project is also supported by the Leadership Committee for stillspotting nyc and the National Endowment for the Arts.

AUCTIONS Upcoming events P. 18

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NEW YORK CITY CENTER

Interview James Houghton of The Signature Center P. 19

EDITOR Armond White awhite@manhattanmedia.com

“EXPLOSIVE.”

SENIOR MUSIC CRITIC Jay Nordlinger

– The New York Times

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

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NYCITYCENTER.ORG TICKETS START AT $25 CITYTIX 212.581.1212 ®

BOX OFFICE 131 W 55th St (btwn 6th & 7th)

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City Arts_033012_Layout 1 4/2/12 2:00 PM Page 1

LIGHT BULB ARMOND WHITE

Sculpture Objects & Functional Art Fair April 20-23, 2012 Park Avenue Armory

Philipp Aduatz, Wexler Gallery

Opening Night Preview, Thursday, April 19

Kehinde Wiley, “Mahmud Abu Razak (The World Stage: Israel),” 2011, oil on canvas. Private collection.

Courtesy Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

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ccording to journalistic lore, the first casualty of war is the truth.

The same fact holds for cultural reporting, where there is an ongoing war between the status quo and creativity, lies and truth.

The art world often gets invaded by the misrepresentations of junk that falsify human experience or trash artistic standards. Media hype for the TV series Mad Men typifies this current cultural casualty, and CityArts gets to the cause of the problem in critic Ben Kessler’s essay “Mad Mania.” Kessler uncovers the egotism behind that series and exposes the charade of “Smart TV” as a shabby new form of cultural elitism. It is a must-read that sounds the alarm on the most deceptive aspect of today’s culture wars.

The artistic standards traduced by Mad Men can be found in the Met’s exhibition of the Stein family’s collection. John Goodrich reviews the trove of Parisian avant-garde landmarks and looks at the family’s intellectual endeavor and artistic commitment.

A similar commitment can be found in CityArts’ online pages, where Valerie Gladstone’s “Choreographers in the Classroom” follows those vocational artists who carry on artistic tradition by teaching movement and innovation to the next

generation of dancers. How those dancers’ bodies move in costume and give expression to the spirit of their times is the subject of Joel Lobenthal’s insightful review of Youthquake, an exhibition of revolutionary 1960s pop design at the Museum at FIT. But reporting the cultural wars also requires analysis, which Steve Haske brings to an assessment of new touch formats in gaming, a technological consideration that dovetails both Kate Prengel’s review of Bharti Kher at Hauser & Wirth Gallery and Elena Oumano’s interview with James Houghton of The Signature Theatre, a performance space brilliantly conceived for new appreciation of theater.

About the cover: “Mahmud Abu Razek,” 2011, is an image from Kehinde Wiley’s The World Stage: Israel now on view at The Jewish Museum. Wiley’s cross-cultural paintings depict young men who are Ethiopian- and native-born Jews as well as Arab Israelis. He combines American hiphop aesthetics with traditional, Old World cultural motifs. These vibrant, loud portraits dazzlingly illustrate one-worldism, uniting disparate youth as fascinating figures—countering the notion of segregated, self-obsessed mad men. Wiley’s icons fight the cultural wars as ambassadors of brotherhood.

Produced by The Art Fair Company, Inc.

April 4, 2012 | CityArts 3

MUSEUMS

CRITICS PICkS

Iconic Ambassadors keHinde Wiley’s CrossCultural Pageant

Piano Playful: following in the footsteps of Victor Borge and dudley Moore, igudesman and Joo (touting 28 million youtube hits!) blend comedy, classical music and pop culture in an evening of classical hilarity, a little nightmare Music at Carnegie Hall. april 17, 57th st. at 7th ave., 212-2477800, www.carnegiehall.org. 8 p.m., $29+. —JgM

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Jig Is Up: seven great contemporary irish artists mine the heart of traditional irish music with strings, vocals and uilleann pipes with the Masters of tradition on tour at symphony space. april 13, 2537 Broadway, 212-864-5400, www.symphonyspace.org. 8 p.m., $45, $38 members. —Judy gelman Myers CLASSICAL

BY ARMOND WHITE ehinde Wiley uses deliberately flamboyant colors. Loud as hip-hop music and just as assertive are the grand claims Wiley makes for the subjects he paints: Young men of, yes, color stand out among the traditional, time-muted tints of the ancient and holy fabrics that frame them in the exhibition The World Stage: Israel at The Jewish Museum.

Wiley picked his models, Ethiopian- and native-born Jews as well as Arabs, from dance clubs, arcades and street fairs in Israel. He looked for attitude that shows “how one puts oneself gracefully in the world.” This is not hipster exoticism; their postures recall the imperiousness of Old World doges and potentates. Outside the museum realm, these poses would be called “swagger.” The exhibition’s name reflects Wiley’s awareness that the eyes of world watch the underclass, whose members project exploitable, energized music and original personal style. He places their class struggle in flamboyant settings—in this case Torah ark curtains, wall hangings and bedcovers—that integrate alienated cultures.

T-shirted torsos are wrapped in ornamental patterns—vines, serifs, animal figures—that grasp and cling like psychedelic tendrils. For Wiley, these young men act as iconic ambassadors of desire.

Politicizing the ripeness of youth, Wiley demonstrates how hip-hop music and fashion, linked to foundational cultures that continually struggle for worldwide respect, have captivated the global imagination.

Previous shows in Wiley’s World Stage series featured brash young men from China, Africa, Brazil and India/Sri Lanka. It’s an eyecatching brotherhood similar to the effrontery of Benneton and Desigual billboards— and these portraits are ads, too. They are products that endow the working class with the bright vibrancy of fancily dressed comicbook heroes. They are meant to pop.

The Los Angeles-born Wiley was an impressionable 11-year-old when the L.A. rap group N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton, the album with the notorious single “Fuck tha Police.” It must have been strangely exciting to grow up on the outskirts of apartheid Hollywood, to see young black

DANCE

Learning Curve: if you’ve ever wondered how to accompany a band or singer, this panel discussion with demonstrations and a Q&a could change your musical life forever. accordion & guitar night school Master Classes at (le) Poisson rouge. april 4, 158 Bleecker st., 212505-3474, www.lepoissonrouge.com. 7 p.m. & 8 pm, $15 advance, $20 day of. —JgM FILM Moving Memories: terence davies’ masterpiece the long day Closes makes a rare return to the big screen. the ultimate postmodern memory movie, davies finds his autobiography in the films and songs of his youth. unavailable on dVd. film forum, 209 W. Houston st., 212-7278110, www.filmforum.org. —armond White GALLERIES Quiet Worlds, Brave Images: the luminous drawings and watercolors by British artist gwen John (1876-1939) remind us that sensitivity and fortitude can go hand in hand. through May 5, davis & langdale, 231 e. 60th st., 212-838-0333, www.davisandlangdale.com. —John goodrich JAZZ

Kehinde Wiley, “Leviathan Zodiac (The World Stage: Israel),” 2011, oil and gold enamel on Photo by Robert Wedemeyer. canvas. Private Collection. Courtesy roberts & tilton, Culver City, California.. kids challenge police authority and rival a legendary cultural institution with gangsta rap, its own impudent music culture soon to claim the world.

Strange infatuation radiates from the 14 portraits in The World Stage: Israel. Hip-hop’s original rebelliousness, by now reduced to commercialization, becomes part of these paintings’ mildly subversive undercurrent.

Wiley’s portraiture combines fashionable impudence with assimilation—an improvement from those black-and-white Vibe magazine mugshot covers that stereotyped youths of color as criminal, erotic threats.

Between the street and his studio, Wiley finds space to captivate and tease the social status of the Other, be it the host country’s

quizzical scrutiny or the second-class citizen’s preening. The portraits must be especially striking in the Middle East. The pastel and gold backdrops with contrasting electric, phosphorescent stylings create a demilitarized zone for pop contemplation.

Wiley says he means to “marry tradition with these painfully young and present models.” He needn’t pity them; the combination of modern and ancient contexts catch the beginnings of cultural change. His young men with liquid eyes stare back at you not to accuse, but so that you’ll see them in your dreams.

Kehinde Wiley / The World Stage: Israel through July 29, the Jewish Museum, 1109 5th ave., 212-423-3200, www.thejewishmuseum.org.

Masterful Melodious Modernists: trio M— pianist Myra Melford, bassist Mark dresser and drummer Matt Wilson—celebrate and perform the guest House, their latest recording, at the kitano’s Bar lounge. april 7, 66 Park ave., 212-885-7119, www.kitano.com. 8 & 10 p.m., $25 cover, $15 minimum. —Howard Mandel All-Stars Salute Sonny Fortune: trumpeter lew soloff, trombonist robin eubanks, pianist george Cables, bassist Buster Williams and drummer Billy Hart salute reeds master sonny fortune, their friend and frequent leader; plus singer tessa souter and a trio led by guitarist gene Bertoncini, in the Highlights in Jazz series at tribeca Performing arts Center, Borough of Manhattan Community College. april 12, 199 Chambers st.,212-220-1460, www.tribecapac. org. 8 p.m., $40. —HM String Symphony of Souls: spontaneous river, violinist-composer Jason kao Hwang’s improvising string orchestra, performs his newly recorded symphony of souls at the Brecht forum. april 14, 451 West st., 212-242-4201, www. brechtforum.org. 8 p.m., $15.—HM

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

More CUNY Award Winners Than Ever!

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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 April 4, 2012 | CityArts 5

Shake That Body Vital Parts Rearranged at MoMA

By Marsha McCreadie

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show to give you nightmares and rip through your subconscious, Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration at MoMA is not so much about decay as rearrangement. The slight misnomer of the title hints at the gothic quality of the 90 paintings, drawings, images, pen-and-inks—you name it—by artists as disparate and wide-ranging as Louise Bourgeois and George Condo, with a seedbed in de Chirico, Max Ernst, Miró and other artists, from 1917 through 2004.

With the displacement and exaggeration of certain body parts comes the questioning. What is that breast doing over there (and, then, what is the function of a breast anyway)? Why does “Whip Woman” (Georg Baselitz), with her huge body and minuscule head, work as art/caricature, and make us laugh like hell? Other titles terrify: “Hand Tree,” by Marcel Jean, with hands scarily reaching out of a tree trunk;

“The Flesh Fly,” by Andre Racz; “Baboon Bride,” by Chris Finley.

Then there’s that malevolent-looking leatherette phallus hanging overhead constructed by Bourgeois (with the paradoxical title “Little Girl”) which also— deliberately—suggests a female torso.

She explains, in an excerpted statement, “From a sexual point of view, I consider the masculine attributes to be very delicate.”

Grotesque, yes, and now I understand the moved-around features of Picasso women.

He’s shown too. It’s such a wild world that it can be fun to see it on a free (freaky) Friday night as I did, with the hoi polloi shaking their heads in wonderment. Plus, it’s a lot more imaginatively cinematic to see a human head turning into a lion, then a misshapen, ant-infested profile (Dali, 1930), than to pay $13 for a 3-D decapitation.

Is there an occasion for the exhibit or just a curator’s mind gone mad? Unclear.

Though there is the obligatory statement on the wall at the beginning of the show, a somewhat overwritten “stretching it” rubric about the game of “Exquisite Corpse” in Paris during the 1920s, when surrealist artists

Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater presents

Libretto by William M. Hoffman Steven Osgood, Conductor Jay Lesenger, Director

OPERA PREVIEW

PERFORMANCES

Greenfield Hall

Borden Auditorium

APR 25 / WED / 6 PM

APR 25 & 27 / WED & FRI / 7:30 PM APR 29 / SUN / 2:30 PM

Gordon Ostrowski, Assistant Dean of Opera Studies and Production FREE

$20 Adults | $12 Seniors & Students

This production is underwritten, in part, by the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation.

122ND & BROADWAY | 917 493 4428 | WWW.MSMNYC.EDU © 2012 MSM. Program and artists subject to change.

Marie-Antoinette by M.P. after Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun’s Marie Antoinette of Austria, Queen of France (1783).

6 CityArts | April 4, 2012

Manhattan School of Music

BY JOHN CORIGLIANO

topped each other’s work of “aberrant figuration,” taking a metaphor from the parlor game of expanding on the drawing of another, with the impulse continuing through abstraction and beyond.

Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration Through July 9, MoMA, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400, www.moma.org.

GETAWAY

Dona D. Vaughn, Artistic Director

THE GHOSTS OF VERSAILLES

Steve Gianakos, “She Could Hardly Wait,” 1996, Oil and ink on cut-and-pasted printed paper.

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From Self to City Susanna Coffey’s Outward Visions

By John Goodrich

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ost gallery-goers will be familiar with Susanna Coffey’s self-portraits—those upward-turning faces, small and closely modeled, set beneath panoramic views. One such painting greets visitors to Coffey’s current exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

The rest of the show, however, concentrates on another, little-known facet of her work: the tiny, nocturnal cityscapes and landscapes—rarely larger than 8 inches across—that the artist has been producing for at least 15 years now.

barely lighter green, the denseness of a damp lawn, stretches across the panel’s bottom edge, anchoring the trees’ rise.

A building’s retiring red answers across an interval of space, above which purple clouds slowly curl. An inverse arc is traced by a final series of delicate white specks— the Big Dipper, as the title tells us. But we really don’t need to know this; as marks

Susanna Coffey, “The Mill and Dipper,” 1998.

Courtesy of Steven Harvey

and colors it captures the mysterious dance between the large and the small, the light and the dark.

Susanna Coffey Nocturnes Through April 22, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth St., 917-861-7312, www.shfap.com.

Occasionally the paintings’ colors don’t live up to this promise; the darks feel immobile in hue or studied in their designs. But more often than not, colors have a vitality equal to their brisk facture.

Like the self-portraits, they convince in plastic terms: trees, buildings and streets settle believably into their own spaces.

Painted invariably in a single session, their looser, brushier strokes evince a greater urgency of technique.

Occasionally the paintings’ colors don’t live up to this promise; the darks feel immobile in hue or studied in their designs. But more often than not, colors have a vitality equal to their brisk facture.

In “Back Road” (1995), for instance, the rich glint of an ochre-green field, simmering next to a more absorbent, darker green, perfectly captures the lightfall from a small moon above. In “Grant Park 3/27/10 (2010), a view from an upper floor of a Chicago high-rise, pathways wind evocatively into the distance, dimly lit by a scattering of orange and yellow street lamps.

Best of all is “The Mill and Dipper” (1998). Within its tiny dimensions, swirls of tawny greens—trees—climb up one side, becoming bluer and straighter as they gather height. A single stroke of a

PLAY HOOKY FOR A DAY! Join us May 22 for a 24-hour cruise from NYC to Boston with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Embark at 3pm from Chelsea Piers on May 22, and travel to the tip of Manhattan, up the East River, through the Long Island Sound, Block Island Sound (Rhode Island), the Cape Cod Canal, and along the coast of Massachusetts to Gloucester. Disembark at 3pm for transfers to Logan Airport or Amtrak’s South Station.

(Please allow for possible late arrival and traffic en route to Boston when making your return trip plans.)

• Two chamber music performances aboard ship • Dinner, Breakfast, Lunch • Complimentary wine with Dinner and Lunch; cash bar also available • Complimentary Transfers to Amtrak or Logan Airport (Return travel to NYC is on your own)

EARLY BIRD PRICING STARTS AS LOW AS $300 For more details visit www.chambermusicsociety.org/cruise All but $100 of your booking fee is a tax-deductible gift to the Chamber Music Society

CALL 212-875-5782 TO RESERVE YOUR SPACE CMSINS2179_CityArts.indd 1

April 4, 2012 3/30/12 | CityArts 7 3:38 PM

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Lead Corporate Sponsor of Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks

8 CityArts | April 4, 2012

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Broadway at 60th

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The Steins Collect spheric depiction of a languorous nude.

Other major works include Picasso’s “Boy Leading a Horse” (1905-1906) and “La Coiffure” (1906) and Matisse’s “Blue Nude:

By John Goodrich Memory of Biskra” (1907). Other notable ertrude was the assured and ambi- works include several figure compositions tious one; her brother Leo was intel- and a remarkable still life—a group portrait, lectually brilliant but conflicted. really—of apples by Cézanne, as well as Michael, the sensible brother, managed paintings by Renoir and Juan Gris.

And then there’s Picasso’s iconic portrait their money affairs, while his wife Sarah was thoughtful and empathetic—and just of Gertrude, completed in 1906. In this conpossibly the most insightful of all about art. text, its tender/brutal likeness becomes the This is the story, as related in the catalog and poignant harbinger of cubism; Gertrude and wall texts, for The Steins Collect, of the upper Leo were to purchase many of his studies for middle-class Jewish family that helped “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), and in shape the course of modern art. The Met’s 1912, Gertrude made her first independent installation of 200 of their acquisitions— acquisition, Picasso’s “The Architect’s Table” among them a spectacular assortment of (1912), a prime example of analytic cubism.

The major period of collecting for all of Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos—illumithe Steins ended with the post-war uptick in nates their remarkable legacy.

Leo, the first to catch the collecting bug, Picasso and Matisse’s prices. Only Gertrude’s collection, in fact, remained settled in Paris in 1903, long intact. The disenchantwhere he avidly visited Budgetary ed Leo left for Italy in 1914 museums and galleries. constraints with his Renoirs and several Gertrude moved in with Matisses, which he presently him later that year, and in confined Leo 1904, Michael and Sarah and Gertrude’s sold to cover living expenses.

Michael and Sarah never settled into a nearby apartacquisitions recovered 19 prize Matisses ment. Budgetary conshipped to a German gallery straints confined Leo and mostly to the Gertrude’s acquisitions work of up-and- just before the outbreak of World War I. (Several of these mostly to the work of upcoming artists appear in the show, among and-coming artists such as Matisse and Picasso, whom such as Matisse them the extraordinary selfportrait of 1906, in which the they befriended—and, and Picasso, artist conjures the complex indeed, introduced to one whom they masses of his own head out of another. an unlikely mix of icy greens, Within a few short years, befriended— ultramarine blues and varied the four Steins had amassed and, indeed, grays. The plastic realizaalmost 200 works by both introduced to tion of the face—as much artists, the most extensive as its expression—reflects a collections anywhere at the one another. triumphant moment for the time. The two Stein households also hosted weekly evenings for the anxious, intelligent revolutionary.)

Leo went on to lecture and write on art forward-looking artists, writers and collectheory. Michael commissioned Le Corbusier tors of the day.

The exhibition doesn’t include such key to build a villa in the Parisian suburbs. Geracquisitions as Matisse’s “Joy of Life” (1905- trude concentrated on her writing and col1606), “Le Luxe I” (1907) or Picasso’s “The lecting the comparatively weak Picabias, Acrobat Family” (1905). Even so, museum- Massons and Tchelitchews that dot the goers will recognize one masterpiece after installation’s final room. And Sarah, whose another, including Matisse’s “Woman with two bright, attentive paintings hang in a a Hat” (1905), which, with its blunt drawing room devoted to Matisse’s students? She and outlandish colors, was the scandal of the stayed in touch. In 1953, in her final ill1905 Salon d’Automne. Perhaps Leo sensed ness, she received a book sent by the artist, how, in its own exotic fashion, it forged the inscribed, simply: “To Madame Sarah Stein, real: the light on a tilting fan and a face partly who so often aided me through my weakshadowed by a voluminous hat. Alongside nesses.” it, Picasso’s tour de force, “Lady with a Fan” (1905), feels serene in color but electric in The Steins Collect its linear intensity. On the other side hangs Through June 3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Siesta” (1900), Bonnard’s exquisitely atmo- 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710, www.metmuseum.org.

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Antique, Midcentury & Fine Art Auction Sunday, April 15, 2012 at 2pm

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Joshua South Photography

Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde

Sacred Music in a Sacred Space N.P. Mander Organ Recital Series Presents

K. Scott Warren Organ

Sunday, April 22, 2012 at 4 PM EDWARD ELGAR Nimrod (Enigma Variations)

CÉSAR FRANCK Chorale No. 3 in A minor

DIETERICH BUXTEHUDE Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Fantasy and Fugue in C minor, BWV 537

MICHAEL PRAETORIUS Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren STERLING PROCTER Song to the Earth and Sky

PERCY WHITLOCK Four Extemporisations for Organ

Tickets $20 General | $15 Students/Seniors THE CHURCH OF ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA 980 Park Avenue New York, NY 10028

Tickets & information available at www.smssconcerts.org | (212) 288-2520 April 4, 2012 | CityArts 9

In Her Own Worlds Bharti Kher’s Sculptured Spaces

By Kate Prengel

B Musical Performance with Maria Pessino and David Oquendo: Thursday April 26th 6:30 PM, $15

enoteca & trattoria

harti Kher’s work manages to be big, open and intensely private all at once. Her pieces draw you in; they demand a certain amount of time.

The current exhibit at the Hauser & Wirth gallery, The Hot Winds that Blow from the West, contains only a handful of works, but each is as absorbing as a little world.

The title piece, a cube made of 131 old radiators, sits in its own room. I spent a long time walking around and around that cube. The radiators fit into each other as neatly as stones in an old wall. And yet, of course, they’re radiators—you look at each one of them, the different valves, the rusty bits of ornamentation. Taken individually, they’re nostalgic, evocative—they have the romance of all our old household objects.

Taken together, they’re overwhelming, an impenetrable block that you can’t see around. The wonder is that the piece man-

ages to give you both feelings at once.

“Reveal the Secrets” is as dark as a book of family stories. It’s a room full of cracked mirrors, each set in an ornate gold frame and covered with black bindis. Bindis, the forehead decorations worn by many women in South Asia, are used a lot in Kher’s work. Here they’re arranged in straight lines over the mirrors so that they look like bead curtains that could be pushed aside to reveal our secrets. But we’re caught in the moment just before that happens.

“Messenger,” the only traditional sculpture in the show, also feels like the moment before a big change. A woman stands on one leg, her other leg draped over her arm.

She has a long tail and holds a wooden staff. She looks full of energy, and yet she is perfectly still. Like the other pieces in this show she beckons you into her moment, into her world.

Bharti Kher, The Hot Winds that Blow from the West Through April 14, Hauser & Wirth, 32 E. 69th St., 212-794-4970, www.hauserwirth.com.

POP

Tarab! Allah! Sonia!

Sonia M’Barek’s All-Worlds Music In the heart of the Upper West Side ‘Cesca serves equal portions of elegance and relaxed ambiance. A “very fine, though unrelentingly rustic” authentic dining experience borne of its founders’ Italian heritage.

Executive Chef Kevin Garcia presents simple yet extraordinary fare and owner and Italian-wine expert Anthony Mazzola has put together an incomparable list of Italian wines.

164 West 75th St. at Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10023

10 CityArts | April 4, 2012

212-787-6300

By Judy Gelman Myers For 500 years, Jews, Muslims and Christians created an immensely rich multicultural society in Andalusia, bursting with fresh ideas in math, science and the arts.

This cultural fusion is epitomized in the music of the time, a unique form blending court music from Baghdad, medieval chant, synagogue hymns and local Iberian folk tunes. Religious persecution ended this golden age when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Muslims and Jews in 1492, but the music lived on as the exiles carried it with them to Turkey, North Africa and the New World. It has endured to this day; indeed, it’s being created anew by such exponents as Sonia M’Barek, whose March 23 concert at the CUNY Graduate Center attested to its continuing vitality.

Backed by a superb ensemble of violin, oud, kanoun, cello, double bass and Ara-

bic percussion, as well as the engaging Keystone Boys Choir, M’Barek presented a far-ranging selection of nine works by 20th-century Tunisian composers. “The Rain that Falls Upon You” (Jadakal Ghaythu) took as its text a 14th-century poem, while “Nights of Seville” (Layali Ishbilya) hails from a recent project honoring Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

Presenter Alwan for the Arts dubbed the concert “An Evening of Tunisian Tarab.”

Tarab refers to the emotional effect of music on its listener, a state of expanded consciousness; Arabs experiencing tarab cry out “Allah!” It is the “Olé!” moment in flamenco, the moment in jazz when your head drops back, your eyes drift shut and you murmur, “Oh my God,” under your breath without even knowing you’re saying it. With her honeyed voice and inspired vitalization of a long-lasting tradition, M’Barek coalesced past and present, Europe and Africa, Muslims, Christians and Jews, into one evening of transcendent tarab. Surely we need more of those.

JAZZ

Drawlin’ from Nawlins dr. JoHn goes BaM

BY HOWARD MANDEL

D

r. John’s nine-concert, three-week residency featuring three different programs at Brooklyn Academy of Music started last Thursday night with a classic example of New Orleans’ lackadasicality meeting institutional overkill. To have a good time in the Crescent City, you do your thing and rely on what’s always worked. To fill the 2,100 seats of BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, you set a theme and bring big names in to play it up.

So for a tribute to Louis Armstrong, Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack could have just planned to retool Satchmo’s best-loved hits for his rumba-boogie piano stylings, croaking vocals and eight-piece band. But to make it special, BAM paid for five trumpet soloists, three guest-star singers and the Blind Boys of Alabama to be a doo-wop choir.

The result was an on-stage party that gave the full house a good enough time. The finale, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” got a standing ovation.

Dr. John’s Locked Down program at BAM April 5–7, with Black Keys guitarist-song-

writer Dan Auerbach, based on their new Nonesuch Records album of the same title, probably won’t suffer (benefit?) from the same mashup of nonchalance and celebrity gathering. It’s likely, though, that his April 12–14 show spotlighting “Nu Awlins” favorites Irma Thomas, Ivan Neville, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, etc., will.

Now 71, Dr. John has enjoyed a somewhat bedraggled but ultimately triumphant career. Starting as a session guitarist during New Orleans’ pop rhythm ‘n’ blues glory years of the 1950s, he first gained national fame as “The Night Tripper, with a satchel of gris-gris in [his] hand.”

I heard the Doctor’s psychedelic swamp rock band in 1967 and fell under its spell.

His act was never again quite so voodoodrenched, but Mac has become a distinctive updater and popularizer of the New Orleans traditions established by the likes of Fats Domino and Professor Longhair.

He’s serious about that: His 2008 album, The City That Care Forgot, is a bitterly fierce yet musical indictment of America’s disregard for his hometown post-Katrina.

Armstrong is and always will be the towering musician out of New Orleans, and there’s plenty right about importing New

Orleans horn players Kermit Ruffins, Wendell Brunious and James Andrews, plus Floridabased Cuban émigré Arturo Sandoval and New York City’s own Roy Hargrove, to blow on Satchmo standards like “What a Wonderful World,” “Memories of You” and “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You.” The Blind Boys were soulful, if given little space to show off their gospel harmonies.

Dr. John.

Singer René Marie, out of DenPhoto by lisa Houlgrave ver with a powerful, refreshingly pitch-perfect delivery, provided fine contrast to Dr. John’s limited vocal range elsewhere—they didn’t connect.

Telmary Diaz, a Cuban vocalist, was more and beguiling drawl, which at its best resembles Bob Dylan imitating Ray Charles. Marie dazzling, with rhythmically intoned raps in was onstage for several numbers, her high- Spanish. The point that New Orleans is the light being an uptempo, funkified version of northern capitol of the Caribbean as well as the southern port of the United States is “Blues in the Night.”

Rickie Lee Jones, no longer 25, as she worth making, but by then Armstrong was was when she broke into pop with “Chuck forgotten.

Sandoval topped everybody with his braE.’s in Love,” did not fare as well, singing only one tune with Mac, “Makin’ Whoop- vado rendition of “The Peanut Vendor,” but ee.” She was in good form, her little-girl- I don’t care if I never hear “When the Saints grown-wiser timbre bouncing brightly off Go Marching In” ever again. New Orleans?

Mac’s cackle, but his attentions seemed New York? Las Vegas.

CLASSICAL

Pinnacle Pianists BronfMan and PeraHia in reCital

BY JAY NORDLINGER

I

n the space of three days, New York heard two recitals by two major pianists: Yefim Bronfman and Murray Perahia. The former was born in Tashkent and became a New Yorker. The latter was born in New York and became a Londoner. Go figure.

Bronfman played in Carnegie Hall, and one of his pieces was the Brahms Sonata No. 3 in F minor. This is a big, sprawling sonata, sometimes not very pianistic. It is orchestral, something like a practice symphony. Bronfman is very good at managing such pieces—at reining them in, cutting them down to size. He did this in a previous Carnegie recital, when he played Tchaikovsky’s Grand Sonata in G. Think of a man juggling telephone poles

with ease—as if they were ping-pong balls.

The first movement of the Brahms contained some of the simplicity of Mozart.

Because technique is no problem for Bronfman, he can concentrate on the music. He almost always gives a note the right weight; there are no wrong accents in Bronfman’s world.

This sonata’s slow movement is a beautiful thing, and Bronfman played it with perfect tranquility. He demonstrates a control that doesn’t stifle—that lets breathe. In the rest of the sonata, he was suitably Brahmsian, to use a shorthand. Brahms is sometimes called “the Classical Romantic,” indicating that he was a blend of the former era, the Classical, and his own, the Romantic. Bronfman’s playing of the sonata embodied that blend.

There was another big sonata on this program, the Eighth of Prokofiev. Here, Bronfman was just a little subdued for my taste. But you might call his playing judi-

cious. And the ending had both its thrill and its inexorability.

Murray Perahia, playing in Avery Fisher Hall, opened with Bach—the French Suite No. 5 in G. In the Allemande, Perahia went in for little hesitations that, to me, were annoying. But the question of rubato is highly subjective. The Courante was perfect, and the Sarabande nicely sculpted. In the Gavotte, Perahia missed several notes. It’s somehow comforting when a major pianist misses notes in a child’s piece.

In his Bach, Perahia did none of the pounding, banging or poking to which he is prone. That came in the following Beethoven, the Sonata No. 27 in E minor.

Why Perahia had to bludgeon the first movement is a mystery. The second movement is one of Beethoven’s best songs, a song without words. But its songfulness was largely absent in Perahia’s rendering.

So was its religioso feeling.

The pianist then played Brahms’ Klavierstücke, Op. 119. Perahia can produce a much better singing tone than he showed in this

set. The Intermezzo in C was strangely big, without bounce or charm. And the Rhapsody in E flat was just a bangfest—ugly.

Much superior to the first half of the program was the second half, which began with Schubert’s “little A-major” sonata.

Perahia started out with his own rhythm, rather than Schubert’s. But thereafter he did justice to the piece. The slow movement was enchanting, and the last movement featured some of the limpidity for which Perahia was once famous.

The printed program ended with a Chopin set, of which a mazurka—the one in C-sharp minor, Op. 30, No. 4—was the best played. Very stylish. The closing scherzo— again in C-sharp minor—was muddy and bangy, but Perahia had still scored a success in this set.

Then he played his go-to encore, the one he has played his entire career: Schubert’s Impromptu in E flat, Op. 90, No. 2. He played it with the old limpidity. The year could have been 1980, when he was an utter paragon.

April 4, 2012 | CityArts 11

DANCE

Spanish Steps Corella’s BarCelona Ballet fulfills a dreaM BY vALERIE GLADSTONE

M

any great ballet dancers dream of starting their own companies, though few get the opportunity.

Even as he performed with American Ballet Theater, Angel Corella was plotting to establish a ballet company in his native Spain.

Unlike most European countries, Spain had never been able to sustain a first-rate ballet troupe and ballet school, forcing Spanish dancers who wanted a career in ballet to leave home to make their names.

“Even though many of us have loved performing with the great companies of the world,” he says recently, “we miss Spain and bringing the art to our people.”

Corella went about the formidable task with determination, first establishing a foundation to support classical ballet in 2001 and slowly building enthusiasm among potential supporters and the government. By 2008, he had fulfilled his dream and was awarded a base in a small town near Segovia, not too far from Madrid.

The Corella Ballet started touring

Europe—and the United States, most importantly—winning a strong Spanish following almost overnight. But last year, with Spain suffering from a severe economic recession, he lost his original backing. Undaunted, he found support in Barcelona, and in February, the Corella Ballet became the Barcelona Ballet.

Within two weeks, it had sold out the city’s historic Gran Teatre de Liceu. “Audiences were standing up and cheering at the end of our performances,” he says.

“Over and over again, people came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for bringing ballet to our city.’”

When he brings his company to New York City Center April 17-20, Corella hopes for the same enthusiastic response.

Certainly the repertory should please. He will dance with the company in Clark Tippet’s Bruch Violin Concerto and bring back Soléa, the hit flamenco-influenced ballet from 2010. “It’s such uplifting choreography,” he says. “It’s like a bomb exploding on stage.” But what gets him really excited is talking about Christopher Wheeldon’s For 4.

“I have such amazing men dancers now,” he says. “Their turns and jumps are unbelievable. It’s a great showcase for male dancing.”

Designing Movement tHe Body reVolution at ‘youtHQuake’

BY JOEL LOBENTHAL Some profound connections between dance, fashion and individual as well as social transformation emanate from Youthquake: The 1960s Fashion Revolution, the exhibit of 1960s ready-to-wear now at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

In the same way that dance wear usually does, minimally constructed clothes like those that roiled the ’60s promoted an untrammeled body, projecting a silhouette defined by the body’s own muscle structure and texture. More so than in formally constructed clothes, movement was essential for the clothes designed by the bellwether designers showcased at FIT—among them

12 CityArts | April 4, 2012

Foale and Tuffin, Mary Quant, Courrèges, Betsey Johnson—to come alive fully.

And specifically as well, the clothes were often intended to participate in the new dances in the discothèque or the rock hall, which were prime integers of the new behaviors. Shown on monitors in the exhibit are contemporary looks at the London fashion scene, short documentaries in which, by no coincidence, we see runways alive with dancing models.

The Swinging Sixties clothes were designed by and for the young, not for the establishment rich, but nevertheless, many men and women who were “older” (which in those days meant 35-plus) and higher up on the economic ladder also used the fashions and the dances to liberate themselves. And cross-pollination appeared on the opera house stage as well: I always see

The Barcelona Ballet company in Pálpito.

Photo by Manuel de los Galanes

Then there’s Pálpito, by Ángel Rojas and Carlos Rodríguez, a dance that combines classical ballet and traditional Spanish dance.

And how does Corella feel about moving from a sleepy village in the countryside to Barcelona? “I didn’t mind the peacefulness of the country,” he says. “But my dancers Frederick Ashton’s 1964 The Dream, his balletic retelling of Shakespeare’s midsummer night, which he made for London’s Royal Ballet in 1964, as something of a (indirect, but definite) paean to the mores of Swinging London by the then-60-year-old Ashton.

But dancing at Covent Garden and Lincoln Center did not have to justify itself by a specific relationship of any kind to dancing dreamed up in the streets. Perhaps that was something healthy about that particular zeitgeist; the ’60s were a vital period in the “dance boom,” in which professional, conservatory-trained dancers achieved high visibility in the most popular mediums, such as television, without leveling themselves in the process. Today, by contrast, we are faced with a perverse situation where it has become an article of faith amid large segments of politics and the media that So You Think You Can Dance is a deeply meaningful expression of “the culture,” whereas professional dance is utterly irrelevant. They are wrong.

much prefer this elegant, exciting city, and the most important thing is to keep them happy. If they’re content, we are assured of success.”

Barcelona Ballet performs april 17-20 on the Main stage at new york City Center, 131 W. 55th st., 212-581-1212, www.nycitycenter.org.

FIT’s Youthquake is vest-pocket-sized, but still encompasses a lot of territory. It is brisk and invigorating, like the clothes. It made me reflect on the role of museums in fostering my own, and so many others’, fascination with movement—theatrical as well as social. I thought back to what were for me unforgettable glimpses of fine and applied artworks as wide-ranging as a Degas statue in the permanent collection of the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Mass., or Isadora Duncan’s Grecian chiffons in Diana Vreeland’s American Women of Style show back in the 1970s, or the real Grecian article itself as depicted in the Parthenon friezes at the British Museum. They all seemed powerfully on the move even when perfectly quiet and still, encapsulating a theater of the professional as well as personal self.

Youthquake: The 1960s Fashion Revolution Museum at the fashion institute of technology through april 7, 7th avenue at 27th street, 212217-4558, www.fitnyc.edu.

THEATER

Will Chase and Laura Osnes in Pipe Dream at City Center.

Photo by ari Mintz

In Leslie’s Light r&H’s ‘PiPe dreaM’ reViVed

a musical comedy follow-up to Cannery Row, creating a fantastical universe hoverBY JUDY GELMAN MYERS ing between fantasy and reality, a marginal landscape peopled by halfwits, whores and he stated aim of City Center’s con men whose social contortions appear Encores! series is to present rarely meaningless to the uninitiated.

Those who have read Sweet Thursday heard works from America’s most important composers and lyricists, beg- come to Pipe Dream already enamored ging the cynical question: If these com- of its characters, but those who haven’t posers are so famous, why are these works respond warily. This might also account for Pipe Dream’s underarely heard—could it be served unpopularity: they’re just lousy? After all,

BY THE END OF Sweet Thursday wasn’t every composer has off THE SECOND ACT, Steinbeck’s most popular moments, and who needs EvERYONE IS IN novel, either, and was to experience those? But perhaps the works are less LOvE—EvEN THOSE probably unknown to most of the audience popular because they’re WHO WERE WARY when Pipe Dream was unusual and not to everySTRANGERS AT THE first produced in 1955. one’s taste.

Such is the case with START OF THE NIGHT. Modern audiences, however, might recognize Pipe Dream, a surprising Rodgers and Hammerstein work based some of the characters from David Ward’s on John Steinbeck’s novel Sweet Thurs- 1982 film Cannery Row, in part based on day. With Leslie Uggams and Tom Wopat Sweet Thursday.

Everyone, however, can identify with brilliantly heading a cast co-starring Will Chase and Laura Osnes, Pipe Dream ran the characters’ simple need to bond with those they love. With a heavenly smile, March 28 to April 1.

Pipe Dream owes much of its oddity to Uggams as bordello owner Madam Fauna its source material, which consists of short, draws forth that languid generosity of episodic chapters that have the feel and spirit and bathes the theater with a special rhythm of a comic book; Steinbeck was an light, converting the unusual into the uniavid devotee of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner. Sweet versal. By the end of the second act, everyThursday is bizarre, and it is brilliant. Stein- one is in love—even those who were wary beck wrote it at Hammerstein’s request as strangers at the start of the night.

T

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FILM

Bouquet of Eccentrics Whit Stillman’s Damsels in the Clouds

By Armond White

Sitting on five-and-a-half acres with amazing views of the Catskill Mountains, Ranch 1 is the first in its series and sold in 2009.

Catskill Farms: Dream Homes on Demand

S

pring is a great time for Manhattanites to get out of the City, explore the Catskills and find a dream second home.

Catskill Farms designs and builds new single-family homes that are customized for buyers, specializing in merging the historic feel of properties in Sullivan and Ulster Counties while providing the most modern amenities.

Charles Petersheim founded the company in 2003 after working with families who were renovating their old homes pursuing what he refers to as a “this old house fantasy.”

“I saw that the challenge was greater than they understood or appreciated,” the former Manhattan resident says. “So we thought we would build a ‘house that works’ that accurately and intimately parallels the emotional and architectural feedback that an old house provides.”

Since then, the company has completed more than 100 homes with $32 million in sales. Homes range from around $300,000 to $500,000, starting at 1,300 square feet on five acres of land. Prices have stayed stable, with slight increases due to additional features like security systems, surround sound speakers and on-demand hot water.

The majority of Catskill Farms’ homeowners are metropolitan professionals from Manhattan and Brooklyn, with an increasing number coming from New Jersey, Westchester and Connecticut.

By using classic materials like cedar, local stone, plank walls and ceilings, the company not only emulated older neighbors, but exceeded them with energy efficient utilities and features.

“We also use salvaged barn beams, locally harvested blue stone and reclaimed metal roofing materials,” Petersheim says.

All homes feature high-efficiency heating systems, and on-demand water heaters that eliminate the wasted energy of storage water heaters.

“We have small footprints, which keeps the impact low; we use very enhanced soy-based insulation, which results in energy savings of 50 percent; we use on-demand hot water heaters so zero energy is being used to store hot water (especially nice on a weekend home where it’s not being used that frequently), and we use high-efficiency gas boilers,” he explains.

Petersheim adds that the scenic Sullivan and Ulster counties provide the perfect backdrop for those who want a break from hectic City life.

“These localities provide privacy without isolation,” he says. “Their close proximity to New York City allows homeowners to come up for a weekend after a stressful week in the City and have some ‘downtime.’”

And, perhaps, best of all, you can get a lot for your money in both areas.

For more information about Catskill Farms, contact 845-557-3600 or www.thecatskillfarms.com

14 CityArts | April 4, 2012

“I like my characters to walk in clouds,” said the great comedy director Leo McCarey.

“I like a little bit of the fairy tale.”

That confession well describes the McCarey classics that execute a precarious balance between realism and fantasy—The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow, Love Affair, The Bells of St. Mary’s, even his Ruggles of Red Gap (currently in revival at Film Forum)—which took a whimsical approach to the peculiarity of America’s historical identity. McCarey’s line also describes what distinguishes the films of Whit Stillman, whose new feature, Damsels in Distress, is his first movie in 14 years.

The volunteering girls at Seven Oaks College in Damsels in Distress occupy a peculiar world, set apart from working life. They walk in the clouds of the privileged pursuits of youth, enjoying the leisure of education and idealism about politics, romance and religion—in that order of importance, though not obviously so.

Violet (Greta Gerwig), a tall, healthy sophomore, is full of private tastes and philosophies—suicide prevention and tap dancing are her causes. She’s lucky enough to head her own beautiful-girl clique, a group who support each other and invite newbie Lily (Analeigh Tipton) to join them. They’re a bouquet of eccentrics, with names like Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and archly syllabic speech.

Yet, like the vulgar beer-and-cocktail boys they are attracted to, each is so pretty and engaging she conveys Stillman’s fascination with the same human qualities and conflicts that made McCarey’s films so moving.

Damsels in Distress is Stillman’s youth movie. His previous films, Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, surveyed young folk verging on the complications of adulthood, but his long absence has added charitable distance to Stillman’s take on maturity. This is, in part, his response

to Mumblecore and the opportunity that movement provided for his brand of noncommercial class comedy, but Stillman is too focused and articulate to be mistaken for Mumblecore.

His awareness of class has always made him the most idiosyncratic indie. Whereas Mumblecore directors take their social advantages for granted, Stillman makes those advantages crucial to his characters’ spiritual struggles. (It’s in their romantic gamesmanship and political one-upsmanship, as when Violet jousts with the campus journalist.)

Seven Oaks is a Cloud Cuckoo Land version of a WASP enclave, the class and ethnic milieu that is now so foreign to mainstream comedy. Its identifying characteristics disappeared from view with the ’60s’ social upheaval (a loss addressed by a character in Stillman’s Barcelona, who reproves the vulgar ending of The Graduate). This setting allows Stillman to observe and conserve the moral process of people fighting off their anxieties and pursuing contentment, the telling niceties of socializing that once belonged to that forgotten genre, the comedy of manners.

By bringing a sense of manners back to the chaos of modern social license, Stillman could inspire Mumblecore to rethink itself in less slovenly terms, as a true aesthetic.

(The already iconic Gerwig displays more delicate facets here than her exploitation in Greenberg.)

Stillman’s eloquent aphorisms and terse epigrams, too funny to repeat here, are spoken in an atmosphere of serenity and halation (photographed by Doug Emmett) that both satirizes and idealizes Ivy League seclusion. It is a world Violet and her gang long to escape by improving, bringing civility and joy in the courtly form of dance. This recalls how The Last Days of Disco, Stillman’s richest, deepest film, dared to look back to the waning disco era as a modern pilgrimage.

That was Stillman’s version of McCarey’s whimsical approach to the peculiarity of America’s historical identity. His youth movie hopes strongly for our present.

Whereas Mumblecore directors take their social advantages for granted, Stillman makes those advantages crucial to his characters’ spiritual struggles.

TELEVISION

Mad Mania “Smart” TV and the Gray Flannel Ego

By Ben Kessler

M

ad Men, like The Sopranos and The Wire before it, now enjoys a singular cultural status. Neither pop nor art, it is smart TV. And smart TV, we’re told, is not for analysis or even entertainment; it is to be dutifully let into our lives, much as we’re meant to bring in the newspaper every morning.

Smart TV is a unique kind of aesthetic nonentity, but even nonentities have to come from somewhere. Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner, like HBO’s three Davids (Chase, Simon and Milch, of The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood respectively), has a media profile that mixes elements of many leadership archetypes—he’s part film director, part producer, part CEO. Because they preside over a vast creative apparatus rather than yoking themselves to any particular aspect of production, Weiner and his fellow smart showrunners are presumed by journalists to be above the unfortunate susceptibilities that plague the individual artist.

As part of this postauteur framework, the protagonists of smart TV shows are usually distorted extensions of their creators.

Mad Men’s Don Draper is given to pronouncements that have no precedent in the early-1960s mainstream but could easily fit into contemporary liberal-bourgeois conversation (e.g., “You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts, but I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.”).

In Draper/Weiner’s case, Mad Men’s benighted ’60s perspective lends a transgressive thrill to this sort of sentiment. For certain viewers, there’s perfect perversity in a character embodying chauvinism and capitalism who carries on about the mean-

inglessness of existence like a dweeb from a recent Woody Allen film.

Someone of a New York magazine mindset might ask with fascination, “How’d a guy like that come by such deep thoughts?”

Set in 1966, Mad Men’s fifth season starts with a civil rights protest on a Manhattan sidewalk. Right away, Weiner proffers a scene designed to answer media folks’ demands for a deeper engagement with race on the show. But Mad Men’s makers show their true colors by ending the teensy protest prologue on a note of pseudoliberal self-congratulation. After being waterbombed by ad men (not our heroes) from the offices above, a black protester gets the last word, a tin-eared summation that deadens the civil rights dialectic: “And they call us savages.”

Season 5’s prologue is so oafish because its ideological purpose is made so plain. Weiner can’t help but flash his credentials as a contemporary right-thinker before ushering us into the presence of his familiar cast of characters. He won’t risk the potentially disorienting effect of imagining history afresh; his prologue is just long enough to transmit the ideological coordinates dictated by political correctness. From there, it’s on to more pressing business: Don Draper and friends coming up with an advertising campaign for Heinz baked beans.

If not on the wrong side of history, Mad Men is surely on the wrong side of the line that divides art from advertising. Pop artists often suppress their work’s subversive tendencies to accommodate the marketplace; advertisers labor to make commercials appear subversive, in effect tousling the hair of the status quo. Bereft of pop and art imperatives, Mad Men at its core really is advertising—for a certain dominant class’s point of view.

Class politics are central to both the phenomenon of smart TV and its aesthetic failures, which is why critic Daniel

Bereft of pop and art imperatives, Mad Men at its core really is advertising— for a certain dominant class’s point of view.

Mendelsohn’s 2011 consensus-breaking critique of Mad Men in The New York Review of Books doesn’t quite make the grade. Mendelsohn wrote, “[T]he show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera.” Both melodrama and soap opera open doors of emotional expression that Mad Men pointedly slams shut. Neither term is classy or unsophisticated enough to suit the show’s accuracyobsessed production design (too literalminded to be called fetishistic) and the draggy pace of each episode.

Yet the show’s undeniable watercooler factor points to possibilities Mad Men itself could never realize. Its product tie-ins and pop culture impact indicate that despite Weiner’s best efforts to infuse 1960s glamor with dark sociopolitical undercurrents, viewers are spitting out his “serious” political point-making and savoring the surfaces. And it is only on the surface that Mad Men is (sometimes) tolerable. Curvy Christina Hendricks certainly seems capable of subverting current beauty standards…until she opens her mouth and that stilted, overcerebrated dialogue comes spewing out like tickertape.

The new season of Mad Men could justify the series’ existence if it were to honestly depict how Madison Avenue co-opted the

signs and symbols of ’60s counterculture, thereby helping to define the decade for posterity (pace Thomas Frank’s famous book The Conquest of Cool). But here, as with the race issue, we’re off to a disappointing start. In that baked beans pitch scene, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce creatives have to be persuaded by the client to incorporate youth-chasing counterculture tropes into Heinz ads. When convenient, Mad Men’s characters seem to trade the unbounded cynicism of advertising pros for the cynicism-within-limits of journalists in classic newsroom comedies.

So it’s fitting that friend-of-Weiner Tina Brown bulldozed what was left of the barrier between journalism and marketing by devoting an entire issue of Newsweek to Mad Men promotion. The people at the controls of our culture want to believe there’s progressive, if not revolutionary, potential in their cynicism. In the Season 5 premiere, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce starts to advertise itself as an equal-opportunity employer not out of principle but as a joke meant to one-up a rival agency.

Here’s how the cultural authorities at The New Yorker described this: “In Weiner’s world, this is how progress is made: one sleek, phony-baloney stage act at a time.”

And they call us savages.

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S

ome friends have asked me what I think of the Playstation Vita, Sony’s new handheld console that was released in February. I always have the same answer.

“It’s a slick, impressive piece of hardware that I couldn’t care less about,” I tell them.

Why? Because for all its fancy tech, the Vita carries the underlying threat of unchecked console gimmickry. As a follow up to Sony’s last-generation PSP, the Vita is a touchscreen-oriented machine designed to take on competitors outside of a strictly gaming space, with improved features commonly found in mobile, non-gaming devices. It’s also one whose primary function is supposed to be playing video games.

There’s an unnatural dichotomy that arises from this. Before the Vita, touch incorporation in console games—relegated to touchscreen interfaces on Nintendo’s DS and 3DS—has historically taken a different approach than the touch implementation of, say, iOS games.

Non-gaming platforms are a different story. They usually play host to less complex games, mostly driven by dumbeddown mechanics where one can play simply by deftly swiping or tapping at things on-screen (I need not explain how this limits the scope of what most mobile games strive for). Should a developer want gameplay that feels closer to a console experience than a casually oriented mobile one, the only available compromise is resorting to obtrusive on-screen virtual controls.

The DS and 3DS solution is that only one of their two screens has a touchscreen interface, so that functionality generally complements, rather than headlining. But the Vita’s single screen has multi-touch sensitivity in addition to the console’s regular controls. Almost overnight, the line separating simple, casual game design and more traditional console-oriented gameplay has morphed into a disconcerting Venn diagram

connecting two fairly disparate markets.

Why does this matter? Because with its foundations firmly set in gimmickry, Vita developers now have the ability—and moreover, are likely bound by a certain amount of pressure—to dilute a “pure” game with obnoxious, extraneous elements designed to take advantage of the console’s more superfluous features.

As is the case with any hardware release, a certain amount of this is to be expected.

(See the blatant 3-D effects featured in Nintendo’s 3DS launch lineup as a recent example.) Where, then, do traditional games qua games fall when they can be stuffed with shallow console-specific features?

Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series, a won-

derfully written, modern-day Indiana Jones-style love letter to pulp adventure on PS3, is an alarming wake-up call on the Vita. The series is one of Sony’s biggest cash cows. Naughty Dog, for its part, is regarded as one of the most talented game studios in the world.

The Vita’s Golden Abyss was outsourced to another Sony team; from the get-go, the big news was that you could use Vita controls.

“You can still play it like a traditional game,” Abyss’ developers assured us. “It’s your choice.” Whether by corporate meddling or not, this is a lie. It’s true that touch functions for the primary actions of series protagonist Nathan Drake—platforming, gunplay and surviving thrilling set pieces—can be mostly ignored with traditional controls. But the Vita-exclusive garbage remains prominent enough for concern.

On Gaming: No Apology continues at www.CityArtsNYC.com.

You can follow Steve Haske on Twitter @afraidtomerge.

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AUCTIONS

Going, Going Auctions

By Caroline Birenbaum Photos in New York The New York auction houses schedule their spring photo sales to coincide with the annual AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) fair, which attracts throngs of photo-enthusiasts. This year, AIPAD ran from March 29-April 1; Sotheby’s held its sale on April 3, and previews for several other auctions will have ended before this issue of CityArts appears, but if you act quickly you can check out the online catalogues and catch the sales themselves.

On the morning of April 4, Swann features photographs and other items from the estate of filmmaker Gary Winick, including fine art prints and drawings, vintage movie posters with emphasis on Hitchcock, books and film memorabilia. A wide-ranging selection of photographs and photobooks from various consignors is offered in the afternoon.

Swann, April 4, 10:30 a.m. & 2 p.m. www. swanngalleries.com.

Phillips de Pury also offers a two-session photo sale on April 4. Face of Modernism in the morning consists of a focused private collection that includes European and American works from the first part of the 20th century, notably a gorgeous shot of Georgia O’Keeffe gardening by Alfred Stieglitz. The afternoon session has many dashing fashion photos and an emphasis on contemporary works.

Phillips de Pury, April 4, 10 a.m. & 2 p.m. www.phillipsdepury.com Christie’s two-session auction on April 5 boasts many images with significant provenance, such as a collection of Curtis orotones originally given to his Seattle patron J.F. Douglas, a Christian Schad photogram once owned by Tristan Tzara, photographs from the family of W. Eugene Smith and 71 lots from the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, being sold to fund future photo acquisitions.

Christies, April 5, 10 a.m. & 2 p.m. Preview April 4. www.christies.com.

We also call your attention to a benefit photo auction for Proof: Media for Social Justice, an effective nonprofit organization that uses photography as a tool to effect social change by educating global audiences about violence and genocide, focusing on

18 CityArts | April 4, 2012

rescuers who cross lines of hatred to save the lives of others, survivors of atrocities living in fragile societies, and child soldiers coerced into committing acts of horror.

Proof’s successful projects to date include three photographically illustrated books accompanied by international traveling exhibitions: Darfur: 20 Years of War and Genocide in Sudan, Child Soldiers: Forced to be Cruel and Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage.

All auction items are donated and all proceeds go directly to the work of Proof. The first benefit auction in 2011 resulted in five workshops in Cambodia and an exhibition in Sarajevo, in addition to ongoing work at college campuses and museums across the U.S. The proceeds from this year’s auction will support a theater project to combat child trafficking in Cambodia and Legacy of Rape, an exhibition and workshops in four countries concerning survivors of armed sexual violence.

Proof, April 9, 6–9 p.m., Splashlight Studios, 75 Varick St., www.proof.org. Tickets online or at the door, tax-deductible to the extent of the law.

Books in New York April also brings the annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, and the auction houses rise to the occasion with top-notch book sales. This year, the fair runs April 12-15.

Christie’s claims center stage in advance of the fair, presenting the extraordinary private library of renowned Chicago dealer, cartographic scholar and author Kenneth Nebenzahl the evening of April 10. Don’t miss the chance to see many rare exemplars of cartography and exploration dating back to the 16th century, as well as Americana including fine sets of Catlin’s “North American Indian Portfolio” and Curtis’ “North American Indian” on Japan vellum.

Christie’s, April 10, 6 p.m. Previews April 4-10. www.christies.com.

Swann typically bookends the fair, welcoming bibliophiles with an auction on opening day, followed by another related sale after it ends. On April 12, they offer a wide array of fine books, including incunabula, early printed books, sumptuous illustrated travel books, fine bindings, desirable modern first editions such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, livres

Page from one of five albums of hand-colored art deco type designs, probably Paris, circa 1930.

Estimate $10,000 to $15,000. At auction at Swann April 12. d’artiste and an unusual group of five albums of boldly colored hand-drawn art deco typographic studies. A twopart autographs auction on April 17 begins with Revolutionar y Americana from the Allyn Kellogg Ford collection, property of the Minnesota HisPhoto print by Dominic Chavez. At auction as part of Proof: Media for Social Justice benefit at Splashlight Studios April 9. torical Society, whose core comprises letters from many major Revolution- favors hand-colored plate books and ediary figures to Gen. George Weedon, acting tions of Aesop’s Fables, April 16.

Bonhams, April 14, 10 a.m., previews April adjutant general to Gen. Washington. The afternoon multi-owner session contains a 10-13. April 15, 1 p.m. & April 16, 10 a.m., prelarge Civil War section, examples by every views April 10-15. www.bonhams.com. president from Washington to Eisenhower April 20, Sotheby’s presents the library and numerous public figures.

Swann, April 12, 10 a.m., previews April 7 of the late Jacques Levy, whose discern& April 9–11. April 17, 10 a.m. & 1:30 p.m., ing eye and delightful taste are evident previews April 7, April 9-14 & April 16. throughout an eclectic collection of works on travel and costume, natural history, www.swanngalleries.com. fine bindings and ethnographic watercolBonhams treats book and travel aficio- ors, along with French livres d’artiste and nados to three successive mid-April auc- modern first editions. The catalogue is tions: Mapping & Discovery of America arranged alphabetically by author, leading April 14; R.M.S. Titanic: 100 Years of Fact to unexpected juxtapositions of subject, & Fiction, with rare ephemera and cor- genre and style that make viewing the sale respondence from survivors, April 15; and especially enjoyable.

Sotheby’s, April 20, 10 a.m. & 2 p.m. PreFine Books & Manuscripts featuring the collection of actor Michael Lerner, who views April 13-19. www.sothebys.com

THE CITYARTS INTERvIEW

James Houghton

I

n 1991, actor/director James Houghton founded the Signature Theatre with the mission of dedicating each season to key selections from a single playwright’s oeuvre—a grand summation of a lifetime’s work and thought. The first so honored was Romulus Linney; this season it’s Athol Fugard and Edward Albee, alongside emerging talent Katori Hall’s Hurt Village, her debut play in the multiple award-winning Signature’s new 70,000-square-foot complex designed by star architect Frank Gehry, with Houghton, and funded by true believers with deep pockets.

A theater-lover’s fantasy made real, this square block of three contiguous theaters (where each seat costs only $25 for the length of a play’s run) and rehearsal studios woven together by intersecting hallways all gives way to a vast connecting lobby. Everyone who enters or exits Signature must pass through this communal space with its café, bookstore, concierge ticket desk, cozy sofa and chair groupings and wall lined with huge interactive touchscreens packed with visuals and information on past productions.

There’s an unmistakable political dimension to this deep accessibility, this democratic collapsing of distance between theater maker and theatergoer, and it speaks, along with everything else about Signature, to Houghton’s fervent belief that the essence of art is transformation of the human condition.

Houghton escorted CityArts on a tour of the complex, warmly greeting and bantering with actors, writers and other Signature denizens along the way, while talking about Signature and The Juilliard School, where he heads the drama division. [Elena Oumano] What you’re doing here is the antithesis of profit-driven commercial theater.

Ultimately, the relationships you build and the connection to what the work is trying to speak to is what’s always appealed to me. It’s always been about bridging communities, reflecting back on ourselves. The idea really came out of my own desire to understand. Playwrights provide opportunities to reflect our stories back at us and help us understand each other in a broader context. At Signature we elevate the writer to a position where we understand and contextualize his or her work and also personify it with the individual writer-inresidence directly engaged in the work with us. You know that what you’re experiencing

is his or her authentic and genuine perspective. By empowering that writer, I believe you empower the community. The writer is engulfed and engaged in a story, and we go on that ride with him or her. We experience that together and we’re all the better for it.

There don’t seem to be any bad seats and there’s little of that fourth wall in these theaters.

We’re sharing the same space; we’re breathing the same air. Whether you sit in a seat or stand on the stage, you understand on a visceral level that your participation matters.

Ultimately, that’s what this company is about.

We start with the writer and we say, “You matter and the context of your work matters. Your commitment to a life’s work matters.” And that empowers ourselves.

Intimacy is an incredibly important aspect of the experience for me. You can’t distance yourself from the work in any of our spaces.

You are actively participating. We took that basic tenet and made it accessible to everyone with the Ticket Initiative to create a dynamic that’s really compelling. You’re talking about quality of work here, about artists that are very important to acknowledge and celebrate in a place designed by a world-class architect, and it’s completely accessible to everyone.

Right now, Edward Albee is revisiting a work [The Lady From Dubuque] that was completely dismissed on Broadway, that has been embraced and rediscovered in the End Stage theater. In the Jewel Box a few yards away, Athol Fugard directed Bloodknot, a play he wrote, directed and acted in in 1961, that confronted apartheid head-on by putting a black man with a white man onstage.

Across the hall in the Courtyard, Katori Hall, a young African-American writer, has Hurt Village, about displacement and the disparity of wealth and within our social construct by focusing on the demolition, displacement and reinvention of Hurt Village in Memphis.

These three plays are in conversation with each other in that central lobby where audiences come at the same time, drink at the bar, have a salad or a soup, stand at the bookstore.

They’re colliding with each other, and for me, those three audiences coming together and all that work happening under the same roof addresses why we go to the theater and contextualizes the work within itself. You know all this other activity is happening, so something greater than its parts is happening—a vitality,

James Houghton drops by a Hurt Village photo session to strike a pose with cast member Corey Hawkins.

Photo by Gregory Costanzo

an energy—and you can’t isolate yourself in that environment.

With all your work here and with other theater companies, why did you take the Juilliard position?

I just loved the idea of working with those young people and demystifying the profession for them, making it accessible and helping them understand that they’re already part of the profession and that their passion matters. Their points of view are important, and they will be influencing where theater goes.

To be able to do that at a place like Juilliard with such a distinguished commitment to training with an incredible faculty and leadership in Joseph Polisi—deeply committed to providing real excellence and access to the arts for everyone. I’m about to enter my seventh year, and in that time, we’ve collectively reevaluated the entire curriculum so the division’s culture has been made richer by a real

emphasis on community and a sense of connectivity—not only to each individual within a group, but also across groups, within the school and within the broader community.

There’s a true sense of service there, a sense of the artist as a citizen.

Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque through april 15 Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!

May 1-June 10 Will Eno’s Title and Deed May 8-June 3 Kenneth Lonergan’s Medieval Play May 15-June 24 the Pershing square signature Center is located at 480 W. 42nd st., 212-967-1913, www.signaturetheatre.org.

April 4, 2012 | CityArts 19

Last chance to see 2012 program in New York World’s premier classical chinese dance company UniqUe orchestra blending chinese & Western instrUments exqUisite costUmes & breathtaking backdrops

“An extraordinary experience...

— Cate Blanchett,

Academy Award-winning actress

“A mesmerizing performance...

reclaiming the divinely inspired cultural heritage of China.”

REVIVING 5,000 YEARS OF CIVILIZATION.

— Donna Karan, Creator of DKNY

A

fter selling out shows at Lincoln Center this past January, New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts is returning to Lincoln Center in April for a limited six-show engagement. Shen Yun cannot be seen in China today, where traditional culture has been mostly destroyed under communist rule. Yet, Shen Yun has become a global cultural sensation, bringing the virtues and wisdom of traditional Chinese culture to millions of people across four continents.

APRIL 18-22 LINCOLN CENTER DAVID H. KOCH THEATER

Less than two weeks left. Buy tickets now

Ticket hotline: 800-818-2393 ShenYun2012.com/NYC

Ticket prices: $200, $180, $150, $120, $100, $80

20 CityArts | April 4, 2012