cityArts September 14, 2011

Sept. 14–Sept. 27, 2011 Volume 3, Issue 14

Facing the music of 9/11 Page 10 Mamet vs.

Letterman Page 16

BRINGING THINKING BACK TO FALL ARTS Antiques, Art & Design at the Armory September 22 - 25, 2011 • The Park Avenue Armory 643 Park Avenue, (at 67th Street) Complimentary General Admission for Two with this coupon •Visit avenueshows.com for full show details

INSIDE

“one of the most extraordinary productions of Baroque opera I have ever seen” —THE NEW YORK TIMES

Ronald P. Stanton presents

Galleries

Pop Music

Children of the Towers

by Maureen Mullarkey Page 4 A Tree Grows in Manhattan

by Melissa Stern Page 4 Liberating Liz

by John Demetry Page 6

Nevermind Kurt Cobain Here’s Jon Stewart

by Ben Kessler Page 14

Museums

Television

Memorial City

by Lance Esplund Page 7 Painting the Times with Color

by John Goodrich Page 8

David Versus David

by Gregory Solman Page 16

Classical Music

Facing the Music of 9/11

by Jay Nordlinger Page 10

Photo of Atys by Pierre Grosbois

Jazz

New York Jazz’s Resilient Rhythm

by Howard Mandel Page 12

EDITOR Armond White awhite@manhattanmedia.com

ASSISTANT EDITOR Deb Sperling SENIOR MUSIC CRITIC Jay Nordlinger

Jean-Baptiste Lully

BAM.org

By JeanBaptiste Lully

Les Arts Florissants

Opéra Comique

DESIGN/PRODUCTION

Sep 18—24 only!

US Exclusive Engagement Musical direction by William Christie

Atys is made possible with the generous support of Ronald P. Stanton and The Delancey Foundation.

Leadership support for Atys provided by The Devitre Fund; Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; The SHS Foundation; and The Florence Gould Foundation

2 CityArts | September 14, 2011

Film

Drive and Restless

by Armond White Page 18 Dance

Harlem Stage Keeps Dancing

by Valerie Gladstone Page 20 Troupers Retrench

by Joel Lobenthal Page 21 OUT OF TOWN

PRODUCTION/creative director Ed Johnson ejohnson@manhattanmedia.com

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

advertising design Quran Corley

director of interaCtive markeTing & digital strategy Jay Gissen jgissen@manhattanmedia.com

WEB PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Lesley Siegel

Controller Shawn Scott Accounts Manager Kathy Pollyea

Directed by Jean-Marie Villégier

Co-produced by BAM, Opéra Comique, Théâtre de Caen, Opéra National de Bordeaux, and Les Arts Florissants

Presenting sponsor for Atys

SENIOR DANCE CRITIC Joel Lobenthal CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Lance Esplund, Valerie Gladstone, John Goodrich, Amanda Gordon, Howard Mandel, Maureen Mullarkey, Mario Naves, Melissa Stern, Nicholas Wells

Les Arts Florissants

Frivolous Broadway

by Mark Peikert Page 15

Listings Page 22

MANAGING EDITOR Mark Peikert mpeikert@manhattanmedia.com

William Christie

Theater

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. © 2011 Manhattan Media, LLC | 79 Madison Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY 10016 212.268.8600 | FAX: 212.268.0577 | www.manhattanmedia.com

LIGHT BULB ARMOND WHITE

Bringing Thinking Back Looking forward from 9/11 requires the same conscientiousness as looking back.

All the arts should be part of this process, which is why CityArts, “New York’s Review of Culture,” is expanding its scope to mix popular with classical arts. Painting, meet photography. Symphony, meet jazz.

Sculpture, meet games. Theater, meet television. Opera, meet cinema—which is, we should remember, the evolved, ultimate form of all the arts.

Living for 10 years with a consciousness of terror hastens the transformation of civilized art appreciation from a casual interest into one of the ways New Yorkers survive. Our arts culture becomes part of how we preserve humane values—nothing less.

And so, to support that endeavor, CityArts brings thinking back to arts media.

Each fall season stokes expectation for what artists will reveal; after the need created by 9/11, it’s a robust, cultivated reflex. But while anticipating something new, audiences need to think critically, using an arsenal of imagination and helpful values informed by active awareness of our artistic heritage. For that reason, it is necessary that arts journalism bring thinking back.

Sure, we’re accustomed to the profitmaking corruption of life. Even before 9/11 it had perverted arts journalism’s criteria from aesthetic principles to box office obsession and celebrity worship. We’ve seen the commercialism that always entangles the popular arts ensnare and decimate New York’s classical art institutions. But this dreadful, market-driven reality should not compromise our standards or responses. Only arts journalism can maintain and explain art’s glorified pursuit of truth and remind culture consumers they should challenge what’s familiar.

Will anything in the upcoming fall cultural season be as thrilling as the late summer one-two punch of Attack the Block and Rise of the Planet of the Apes? As awesome as the Picasso L’amour fou show at Gagosian? As game-changing as Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne? Or as scintillating as Zoe Saldana in Olivier Megaton’s Colombiana? The way these

events roused feelings of liberation and guilt, empathy and vengeance should have complemented post-9/11 perceptions and informed discussion of recent social crises taking place in London and Philadelphia.

But the media’s tendency to treat art simply as fodder or product denied proper appreciation of those films. Arts coverage has obviously lost its ethical purpose.

Alarmingly, the idea of escapism has taken hold in the popular arts as a convention or necessity, and too many journalists promote the canard. But in the post-9/11 era, escapism is synonymous with cowardice—aesthetic cowardice. It’s a fear of facing ourselves, refusing to own up to the social and spiritual benefits that art—and artists—must provide. It’s those low standards of quality that cause Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Attack the Block, Watch the Throne and Colombiana to so suddenly recede from prominence and threatens appreciation of the upcoming season.

Arts journalism shouldn’t simply promote product but clarify how good, new ideas struggle against complacent success and the mediocre status quo. This requires what the word journalism implies: regular cultural vigilance. For 10 years we frequently endured the unhelpful post-9/11 phrase, “It’s too soon,” used in a cowardly way by power elite pundits against adventurous works (Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Otis”) that attempted to come to terms with the national, global, spiritual crisis. Now the coward’s question must be replaced with a defiant, “Is it too late?” Not if we can bring thinking back.

About the cover: “I’ve got an idea!”

Every work of art begins with that creative spark. Ideas are also fundamental to good appreciation of the arts in spite of our collective obsession with money and status, so CityArts uses Robert Fisher’s famous satire of Gen X’s indoctrination—the baby swimming toward money—and converts that icon to reintroduce the grasp toward ideas. Reimagining Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover (see Ben Kessler’s article page 14) symbolizes what CityArts is after as it brings thinking back.

NEW YORK CITY CENTER & JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER PRESENT AN ENCORES! SPECIAL EVENT

Our artS culture becomes part of how we preserve humane values— nothing less.

A R SA L I S ON M YNT W h t s p o t. with us nig TRA fa m o ost HES m C a’s OR eric ER t Am ENT sa C r a N ye OL n’s INC gto llin T L E A Z u ke JAZ gD atin r b e Cel MUSIC DIREC TION BY W YNTON MARSALIS DIREC TED AND CHOREOGRAPHED BY W A R R E N C A R LY L E

NYCIT YCENTER.ORG JALC.ORG CITYTIX 212-581-1212

BOX OFFICE 131 W 55th Street (btw 6th and 7th)

September 14, 2011 | CityArts 3

Image Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York.

GALLERIES

“American flags appeared everywhere” (2001), eighth-grade students at The Calhoun School.

“And people still miss the Twin Towers” (2001), eighth-grade students at The Calhoun School.

Children of the Towers Exhibit uses innocence as a political tool

By Maureen Mullarkey Political mythology is a more significant player than art itself in shaping a culture’s mentality. Commemorating 9/11 by means of children’s artwork sentimentalizes the event and allows us to avoid calling the events of that day acts of war. 9/11: Through Young Eyes severs its subject from the only thing by which it can be measured and understood: historical context.

On show is a collaborative series of 31 collages by then-8th graders at the Calhoun School on the Upper West Side. During the autumn of 2001, the youngsters attended an exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s narrative collages at the Whitney. The exhibition came packaged with a battery of lesson plans, timelines and web resources designed for the classroom. Kids set to work tapping their inner Lawrence by illustrating the story of 9/11 as they—and their classroom mentors— experienced it. The result is an oddly truncated exercise in sanitized storytelling that sacrifices historical understanding to a bien pensant avoidance of the obvious. Call it a pious commitment to denial.

A full quarter of the panels—8 out of 31— preen themselves on the sly implication that America is just one more rogue state.

There is no mention of al-Qaeda or enemy assault. Instead, cartoon marines head to Afghanistan. Bombs drop on Afghanistan.

4 CityArts | September 14, 2011

A soldier lectures on “bad” Arabs. People start “using the flag as a symbol of war.”

One panel growls: “War was glorified and commercialized.” Such wording hardly came unprompted from the mouths of babes who seem never to have heard the word jihad. The caption is as vague and reductive as the image that carries it. In context, the censure applies not to fanatics who shout “Allahu Akbar” in bloody ecstasy, but to America.

That and similarly weighted captions do

fact—or raw execution—earn a pass on the ground of expression. No one can bring to bear Lawrence’s achievement on childish simulations. The exhibition’s patchwork of Individual panels adopt bright color, simplistic shapes, occasional cartoony touches—visual tropes lazily associated with frankness. Each unit in this untrained ensemble offers the artless vivacity that mothers admire on refrigerator doors across the fruited plain. That is very nice for Mom. But it has scant relation to the

Viewers are simply expected to applaud the program for its enlightened refusal to see evil anywhere but at home, where “mosques were burned” and “Muslims were dehumanized.” nothing to increase understanding of 9/11.

Viewers are simply expected to applaud the program for its enlightened refusal to see evil anywhere but at home, where “mosques were burned” and “Muslims were dehumanized.” And “some Arab-Americans were even murdered.” (That one is especially grotesque, given that—then, as now—Jews are the preferred target of bias crimes.) In a perverse inversion of sympathy, the tragic splendor of victimhood accrues to Muslims, not to annihilated New Yorkers.

Art is not discursive; it cannot be argued with. Children’s art is particularly insulated from criticism. Adolescent distortions of

products of a cultivated hand: Lawrence’s compositional complexity and graphic subtlety. More significantly, the project is sorely impoverished as acknowledgment of the massacre of innocents.

Right-thinking, not art, is the point here.

Collage provides a pretext for commentary emblematic of the distance between political posture and observable reality.

But we cannot blame the 8th graders. Their recorded experience was filtered through the sanctimony of their elders and edited to the point of mendacity.

Viewed through the unripe eyes of Calhoun’s 13-year-olds, the collapse of the

Twin Towers might have been a natural disaster. Captions tell us that the “The loss was sudden and great”; “Smoke and dust were everywhere”; and “The streets were empty.” For all the project’s pretense to chronicle, nothing indicates why. “People donated blood.” So? Blood drives are commonplace. “The people were afraid.” But of what? Yes, “people still miss the Twin Towers.” But why are they gone? Did they just fall down of their own accord? Might their destruction have had something to do with the lethal ideology of Islamist jihadists? Or with Islam’s theological imperative toward war with the infidel and the religiously sanctioned violence of classic Islamic jurisprudence? The display keeps mum on the critical matter of responsibility.

Yes, “smoke and dust were everywhere” but what caused it? No hint appears that it came from burning skyscrapers in which 3,000 civilians were slaughtered. What was the instrument of mass murder? The Calhoun class noticed military fighter jets flying over the city but missed the two commercial jets hijacked by the Quran-inspired assassins. No one seems to know a shred of Islam’s long history, dating from the 7th century, of lust for conquest.

The Calhoun community—as DC Moore refers to it—believes in original sin. But only America carries the stain.

9/11 Through Young Eyes Through Oct. 8, DC Moore Gallery, 535 W. 22nd St., 212-247-2111.

A Tree Grows in Manhattan Landscape architecture brings majesty, rebirth to 9/11 memorial site

By Melissa Stern “We’re sometimes dismissed as the guys who put the trees in,” says David Walker about his firm’s seminal role in the design of the 9/11 memorial site. The 50-year-old Walker, who co-led the project for Peter Walker & Partners, his father’s renowned landscape architecture firm, is in equal measure self-effacing and self-assured, both traits that served him well throughout the seven-year odyssey that lead to this week’s opening of the site. Moreover, he is also part of what, by all appearances, is an extraordinary design accomplishment.

Madison avenue next to The WhiTney MuseuM

ated by granite slabs to create a boulevard feel. Viewed north-to-south, however, the planting is randomly placed, as in a natural forest. The oaks, cultivated in a New Jersey nursery for the past four years, are now 25-feet tall and pruned to enhance their 15-foot high canopies. Over time, the trees are expected to reach 65 to 75 feet, with their soaring canopies growing together to create “a cathedral-like appearance” when viewed east-west and a fulsome forest from the north and south. Approached from either direction, the site channels visitors through an urban forest to the solemn reflecting pools at its center. “The species of tree we chose creates a vaulted ceiling structure, evoking a religious architectural feel,” Walker explains. The effect also evokes the archways or tridents of the

941 Madison Avenue btwn 74th & 75th 212.288.2446

AnAmericanCraftsman.com

lesley heller workspace A rendering of Peter Walker & Partners’ design for the 9/11 memorial site.

September 7 - October 16, 2011

Rendering by Squared Design Lab, Courtesy of PWP Landscape Architecture.

Walker’s design, a stately and ever-evolving grove of majestic oak trees, is coupled with architect Michael Arad’s deeply symbolic but severe memorial pools. This design pairing and the inherent tension between life and death, historic memorial, and future renewal at the heart of it will likely be seen as the foundation of the success of this challenging and exceedingly high-profile site.

The Walker concept was a simple one: “We said that you need a forest to represent renewal,” David Walker says. “The basic notion is that of a forest in downtown Manhattan to communicate rebirth.” The “forest” evolved into the now largely complete installation of 400 swamp white oak trees and over 40,000 tons of new soil on the 7-acre memorial site and surrounding streets. In effect, the Walkers brought ground back to ground zero.

The layout of the trees themselves is at once cultivated and naturalistic, formal and organic. Viewed east-to-west, the oaks are arrayed along a tightly defined grid punctu-

GALLERY 1

first three stories of the fallen World Trade towers themselves. As the trees mature, the archways will rise once more.

Walker has little to say of the wellpublicized head-butting and conflicts of personalities that surrounded the project.

“It was an ego-driven process by everyone involved,” he admits, although one detects little of his own. “But it was all driven by a desire to create a lasting statement, and the net result is a design that will endure.”

And in one last study in contrasts, David Walker makes clear that part of the core concept of the memorial is that it actually becomes less of a memorial over time. “There was a lot of discussion about the fact that this will always remain a memorial, but as 9/11 fades beyond living memory, it will serve increasingly as an urban park more so than a memorial,” Walker predicts. “It may feel less like a grave site over time and more like a living, growing park. This is how we thought about it from the very beginning.”

Loren Munk: Location, Location, Location, Mapping the New York Art World

GALLERY 2

Don’t Fence Me In... Or Out curated by Lisa Corinne Davis, Katherine Behar, Rachel Budde, Dawn Frasch, Jaeeun Lee, Suko Presseau, Satomi Shirai, Sarah Young, Amanda Valdez

BACK ROOM

Loren Munk The Bowery and the New Lower East Side, 2008-10, oil on linen, 60 x 36 inches

James Reeder: Ominous Cloud

54 Orchard Street, New York NY 10002 212 410 6120 • lesley@lesleyheller.com September 14, 2011 | CityArts 5

Liberating Liz Andy Warhol’s Gagosian print show puts humanity back in celebrity

By John Demetry Chelsea’s Gagosian Gallery Liz exhibit returns Andy Warhol and Elizabeth Taylor to the uses of the post-9/11 audience. Elizabeth Taylor’s death on March 23, 2011, joined those of other popular artists who combined expressive and sexual innovation with political conviction: Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Robert Altman, James Brown, Paul Newman and Michael Jackson. It reads like the honorees of a War Dead Parade, figures who, in the enduring aftershocks of 9/11, constituted the last remnants of a shared culture (values).

These actors, directors and musicians appealed (through palpable—sensual— compassion) to the psychological and spiritual needs of the audience. Now, even the need to mourn their deaths in a communal fashion reflects the repressed trauma of 9/11 to our collective consciousness. Taylor herself gave healing comfort and articulation to fans (and a social body) rocked by the passing of her friend MJ—much of it through social media such as Twitter, continuing her legacy of moral instruction through radical cultural changes—e.g., AIDS and the Internet. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 revealed a society unmoored; 10 years later, gone are most of those figures who anchored the culture by revitalizing and commanding the expressive lexicon. It’s the difference between stars and celebrities.

Warhol knew the difference.

Warhol’s pop art liberates Taylor from camp and capitalism. “Blue Liz as Cleopatra” (1962) exemplifies that achievement.

Etched in pencil black on acrylic blue

background, Warhol’s painting isolates and repeats a frame (taken from a publicity still) from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963). It features Taylor in exotic Cleopatra regalia: ornamented African braids, hieroglyphic eye shadow, and ’60s-Hollywood cleavage-revealing dress. In lesser hands, such elements might lend the image to camp simplification and derision. However, Warhol frees the image—and its complex of signifiers—from the context of advertisement, narrative and ideology. He offers it up to the viewer to share his contemplation of its beauty. Warhol also did as much with a can of Coca-Cola.

Through the figure of Taylor, however, Warhol enables the audience to focus on the movie star’s meaningmaking apparatus. In his series of Taylor portraits, represented here by “Silver Liz” (1963) and “Liz #6” (1963), Warhol emphasized glamour and personality through the specificity and impact of color. Among the pleasures of the underrated Cleopatra and of Taylor’s unfairly maligned performance is the spectacle of Taylor and Richard Burton (as Mark Antony) bringing out the better in each other. Stage-trained Burton claimed to have learned from Taylor the movie actor’s talent for knowing how to communicate feeling and characterization to a camera. Warhol’s art gives form to Taylor’s intuition.

With “Blue Liz as Cleopatra,” Warhol distills Taylor’s expressive intelligence to its visual essence. Shakespearean Burton must also have appreciated how Taylor utilized this skill to convey how her character’s values and passions (country, cult, Caesar, Antony and son) expressed themselves in political and military strategy.

Following the humanist edict of movie star responsibility, Taylor makes vivid how the personal motivations of charismatic people move history. Warhol investigates

Consequently, the Gagosian Liz retrospective remembers a now-passed political relationship to art (and pop) through Taylor’s liberal humanism and Warhol’s post-modern appreciation.

6 CityArts | September 14, 2011

“Silver Liz,” 1963. © 2011 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ ARS, NY/Gagosian Gallery. Photo by Robert McKeever. Private Collection, NY

form (the down-turned, off-screen eyeline angle of Taylor’s pose) cutting into color (the subtle gradations in the distinctive hue of blue). Doing so, he captures the intensity of Taylor’s emotional and political acuity.

Consequently, the Gagosian Liz retrospective remembers a now-passed political relationship to art (and pop) through Taylor’s liberal humanism and Warhol’s postmodern appreciation. The retrospective features Warhol’s radically gendered and sexual perspective on Taylor’s movie art. His “National Velvet” (1963) literally and analytically breaks down—through repetition, composition and the delicacy of film stock—the image of a triumphant young Taylor astride a horse, a girl commanding nature. Appropriating Clarence Brown’s 1944 Hollywood masterpiece, Warhol makes the fleeting nature of movie memory—and its enduring inspiration— achingly tactile.

In the post-9/11 culture, however, spectators are alienated from their truest responses. Critics condition audiences to assess art (and pop) by a disastrous new criteria based on the degree to which art affirms one’s political prejudices. By assembling various expressions of Warhol’s personal pleasure in Taylor, Liz provides a forum for the post-9/11 audience to honor Taylor’s legacy while mourning the loss of individual thought and our shared cultural heritage.

Liz, Sept. 16–Oct. 22, Gagosian Gallery, 522 W. 21st St., www.gagosian.com, 212-741-1717.

John Demetry chronicles his search for new stars to meet the needs of the post-9/11 audience in his book The Community of Desire: Selected Critical Writings (2001-2007), available at www.lulu.com.

EXHIBIT 1500 Gallery: Julio Bittencourt: “Ramos.”

Opens Sept. 21, 511 W. 21st St., #607, 1500gallery.com.

Madison Square Park: Mad. Sq. Art presents Alison Saar’s “Feallen & Fallow.” Opens Sept. 22, madisonsquarepark.org.

Marlborough Gallery: Red Grooms: “New York: 1976–2011.” Opens Sept. 21, 40 W. 57th St., marlboroughgallery.com.

Salmagundi Club Patrons’ Gallery: “The Art of John Pierce Barnes.” Opens Sept. 15, 47 5th Ave., salmagundi.org.

Thomas Erben Gallery: “Come Closer.” Opens Sept. 15, 526 W. 26th St., 4th Fl., thomaserben.com.

Vilcek Foundation Gallery: Nicole Awai: “Almost Undone.” Opens Sept. 17, 167 E. 73rd St., vilcek.org.

LAST CHANCE EXHIBITS Minus Space: “Pointing a Telescope at the Sun.” Ends Sept. 17, 98 4th St., Rm. 204 (Buzzer #28), Brooklyn, 347-525-4628, minusspace.com.

Onishi Gallery: “Wa-Ring.” Ends Sept. 22.

“Japanese Contemporary Crafts by Three Great Masters.” Ends Sept. 22, 521 W. 26th St., 212695-8035, onishigallery.com.

MUSEUMS

Memorial City Arts responses as diverse as New York itself

BY LANCE ESPLUND There is faith—even among those who do not really believe in the power of art— that 9/11-themed art is as essential to our cultural survival as counter-terrorist police, full-body scanners and TSA pat-downs are to our physical survival; that to endure as a nation we must collectively bare not only our bodies but also our souls; and that in order to preserve our freedom and to persevere we must always remember— “Never forget!”

Artworks have been enlisted for this higher, though improbable cause.

Across New York City, there were no shortage of artworks, exhibitions and memorials observing the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. And although many people agree that those events require art, they’ve differed on what forms those artworks should take and what purposes they should serve.

Many photography and video exhibitions—at the International Center of Photography, the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York and Pace University, among other venues—focus on the noble cause of documentation. But I’m anticipating MoMA PS1’s moody September 11 (through Jan. 9, 2012), a group show in which the only work made in direct response to the terrorist attacks is “Ground Zero” (2003), Ellsworth Kelly’s proposed memorial: a trapezoidal mound of bright green grass.

Artistic responses to 9/11 vary widely, from the Guggenheim Museum’s recent screenings of Ten Years of Terror, a film featuring reflections on violence by Noam Chomsky, among others, to the controversial graphic coloring novel We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom—in which children can color in pictures of the smoldering Twin Towers and a Navy SEAL shooting Osama bin Laden, who cowers behind a Muslim woman.

Other works inspired by children include Faith Ringgold’s 9/11 Peace Story Quilt, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 22, 2012). Based on children’s drawings, Ringgold’s three-panel quilt gathers together feel-good words and images to

promote peace and multicultural sensitivity. In a similar vein, D.C. Moore Gallery’s 9/11: Through Young Eyes (through Oct. 8) has mounted artworks made by 13-yearolds and inspired by the collages of Jacob Lawrence. These exhibits reveal that our hearts are in the right place, but unfortunately fall into the realm not of art but of art therapy and community outreach.

One of the first 9/11 memorials to be erected was Eric Fischl’s bronze figurative sculpture “Tumbling Woman” (2002). I’m sure Fischl meant well. But his depiction

Wheel (through Oct. 9).

Artists who work with 9/11 debris, such as Weiss, Xu and Elena del Rivero—whose New Museum installation [Swi:t] Home: A Chant (through Sept. 26) comprises thousands of pieces of paper that flew into her studio across from the World Trade Center—bring us tangible relics. Through the allure of artifacts, they trigger our desire to revisit and reconnect to the tragedy. This impulse is why nearly 150 9/11 memorials throughout New York and New Jersey already do or will incorporate actual steel beams from the World Trade Center ruins—battleground-relics-turned-symbols that people can actually touch.

And our desire to bond with 9/11 artifacts as a natural process of grieving is acknowledged almost exclusively in ground zero’s memorial “Reflecting Absence,” whose two WTCfootprint waterfalls and surrounding bronze panels, inscribed with victims’ names, are unmistakably direct in their symbolism; and at the World Trade Center Memorial Museum (scheduled to open in 2012), which will incorporate a destroyed 9/11 fire truck; a piece of steel with a Bible fused to it; 7-story-tall steel “Tridents” from the North Tower’s façade; and the “WTC Cross,” a 17-foot-tall icon of hope discovered in the “Pile.” Also on view will be walls of photos of the 1993 and 2001 victims, supplemented by an extensive archive of victims personal mementos and videos of shared remembrances by their families and friends.

In its preopening state, the tree-filled plaza and waterfalls of “Reflecting Absence” are minimal and solemn. Crowded, though, by tourists and mourners (some of whom have already complained that as victims’ family members they shouldn’t have to grieve with strangers), the memorial will undoubtedly lose some of its contemplative appeal, especially when it has to compete with a business complex, transit hub and commercial mall.

Obviously, some of these works send shivers up your spine. But if 9/11-themed artworks are to be successful over time, they must do more than trigger personal grieving about specific events. They must explore themes of heroism, suffering, sacrifice and rebirth and encourage acts of reflection and empathy. They must poetically transform and transcend their subject. “Never forget” is a tall order— especially when much 9/11 art, so determinedly fixed on the present, neglects the unforeseeable future.

When I first visited ground zero in 2001, people were collecting dust from the rubble. Covered in the white ash they scooped up from sidewalks and storefronts, they looked like ghosts scavenging the ruins. of an upside-down, falling nude (who looked like she had just hit the pavement) was deemed explicitly literal and, therefore, offensive. “Tumbling Woman” was quickly draped and removed from its site in the lower concourse of Rockefeller Center. Fischl’s lack of imagination and transformation closed down so tightly and illustratively on his subject that it brought the relationship between artwork and viewer to an uncomfortable dead end.

But Fischl is not the only artist who is perhaps too close to his subject. Other 9/11 artworks and memorials are so literal and rely so heavily on the inherent weight of their subject to carry the art that they risk exploiting individual loss; they risk becoming mere physical manifestations of personal grief rather than contemplative, commemorative public artworks with lasting, universal appeal.

When I first visited ground zero in 2001, people were collecting dust from the rubble. Covered in the white ash they scooped up from sidewalks and storefronts, they looked like ghosts scavenging the ruins.

Although 9/11 dust contains human remains, artists continue to be inspired by the ashes. In the exhibition 9/11 Elegies: 2001-2011 (through Sept. 25), St. Peter’s Church is exhibiting 12 Ejay Weiss paintings containing dust from ground zero. Also comprising 9/11 ash is Xu Bing’s Buddhist installation “Where Does the Dust Itself Collect” (2004), at the Spinning

Bronx Museum: “Muntadas: Information >> Space >> Control.” Sept. 29–Jan. 16, 2012.

“Alexandre Arrechea: Orange Tree.” Ends Jan. 1, 2012. “Urban Archives: Emilio Sanchez in the Bronx.” Ends Jan. 1, 2012. “Acconci Studio: Lobby-For-The-Time-Being.” Ongoing, 1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx, 718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org.

MoMA PS1: “Francis Alys: A Story of Deception.”

Ends Sept. 12. “September 11.” Ends Jan. 9, 2012, 2225 Jackson Ave., Queens, 718-784-2084, ps1.org.

The Morgan Library & Museum: “Charles Dickens at 200.” Sept. 23–Feb. 12, 2012.

“David, Delacroix, & Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre.” Sept. 23–Dec. 31. “Xu Bing: The Living Word.” Ends Oct. 2.

“Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts & Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.” Ends Oct. 2. “Ingres at the Morgan.” Ends Nov. 27, 225 Madison Ave., 212-685-0008, themorgan.org.

Society of Illustrators: “Rolling Stone & the Art of the Record Review.” Ends Oct. 22, 128 E. 63rd St., 212-838-2560, societyillustrators.org.

National Academy Museum: “Will Barnet at 100.” Opens Sept. 16, 1083 5th Ave., 212-3694880, nationalacademy.org.

New Museum: “Ostalgia.” Ends Sept. 25. “Isa Genzken: Rose II (2007).” Ends Nov. 13, 235 Bowery, 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org.

Rubin Museum of Art: “Once Upon Many Times.” Sept. 16–Jan. 30, 2012. “Quentin Roosevelt’s China.” Ends Sept. 19. “Pilgrimage & Faith.” Ends Oct. 24. “Human Currents.” Ends Nov. 13, 150 W. 17th St., 212-620-5000, rmanyc.org.

American Museum of Natural History: “Picturing Science: Museum Scientists & Imaging Technologies.” Ends June 24, 2012, Central Park West at W. 79th St., 212-769-5100, amnh.org.

Brooklyn Museum: “Raw/Cooked: Kristof Wickman.” Sept. 16–Nov. 27. “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk—An Introspective.” Opens Sept. 23.

“Eva Hesse Spectres 1960.” Opens Sept. 16, 200 Eastern Pkwy., Brooklyn, 718-628-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Infinite Jest: Caricature & Satire from Leonardo to Levine.” Opened Sept. 13. “Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures.” Opens Sept. 20. “Wonder of the Age”: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900.” Opens Sept. 28, 1000 5th Ave., 212- 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

Museum of Arts & Design: “Picasso to Koons: Artist as Jeweler.” Opens Sept. 20. “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions & Small Realities.” Ends Sept. 18.

“Stephen Burks: Are You A Hybrid?” Ends Oct. 2, 2 Columbus Cir., 212-299-7777, madmuseum.org.

Museum of Jewish Heritage: “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race.” Opens Sept. 15, 36 Battery Pl., 646-437-4200, mjhnyc.org.

Museum of Modern Art: “de Kooning: A Retrospective.” Opens Sept. 18. “New Photography 2011.” Opens Sept. 28. “I Am Still Alive: Politics & Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing.” Ends Sept. 19. “Young Architects Program 2011.” Ends Sept. 19. “Projects 95: Runa Islam.” Ends Sept. 19, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-7089400, moma.org.

September 14, 2011 | CityArts 7

Alexandre City Arts 9-11_4.917 9/8/11 9:16 AM Page 1

will barnet SMALL WORKS ON PAPER FROM THE 1950s September 10 through October 15, 2011

Painting the Times with Color Whitney’s Feininger show takes art to the edge of the world

By John Goodrich Some artists respond to the traumas of their time by engaging them; consider Goya’s “The Third of May” or Picasso’s “Guernica.” For others (Matisse comes to mind), art became a kind of sanctuary, a refuge for exploring the transcendent.

Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) falls squarely in the second camp. His delicate Cubist images tell us nothing about his conflicted allegiances to both America and Germany during wartime, but much about an artistic temperament quivering between the avant-garde and the beatific.

The current retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum—the very first to display all aspects of his production— reveals his extraordinary range of interests.

In addition to the familiar seascapes and

views of churches, the exhibition includes cartoons, early expressionist paintings, watercolors, musical compositions, carved toys, photographs and a series of late, supple Manhattan cityscapes. Two somewhat contradictory aspirations run throughout: an enthusiasm for caricature and the exotic, and a longing for a mystical synthesis of art and nature.

Born in Manhattan to musicians of German descent, Feininger was packed off to Germany at age 16 to study the violin. He was determined to pursue art instead, and his “temporary” stay lasted 50 years. The homesick artist always considered himself an American, and yet, as his career blossomed in Berlin—first as an illustrator, and then as a fine artist—he grew to prefer the German reverence for culture. Indeed, he later claimed that he would never have become an artist had he remained in the States. Exhibiting with both Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter movements, he eventually

LINDA BERNELL GALLERY

The Figure, 1952, watercolor and ink on paper, 85/8 x 55/8 inches

ALSO ON VIEW

w il l b ar n et at 100 National Academy Museum 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street September 16 through December 31, 2011 Fully illustrated catalogue by Bruce Weber available through the gallery

A l e x a n d r e Ga l l e r y Fuller Building 41 East 57th Street New York 10022 212.755.2828 www.alexandregallery.com

8 CityArts | September 14, 2011

Jean Pierre Cassigneul (B.1935) Femme Au Bord De La Mer 917.882.7008 www.Lindabernellgallery.com

Lyonel Feininger, Carnival in Arcueil, 1911

single side-gallery, are extraordinary. The characters that the artist conjured up for the comic strip “Kin-der-Kids” (appearing in the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1906) are the wholly original creations of a true pioneer. His figures, squat and rounded or achingly thin—all set within craftily shaped panels—practically burst with their own plasticity, and with this plasticity comes character. Details proclaim, rather than merely denote—that is, a tiny, mouse-like face reacts to the ridiculously broad sweep of a hat; a foot so suddenly catches the narrowing flight of a leg that it seems a mile away.

The children in these cartoons have

the wizened seriousness of the old; the old scamper with youthful enthusiasm.

Feininger’s idiosyncratic humor comes through doubly in this medium combining text and image. His characters’ semi-sensical utterances (“Begorrah, ‘tis a poor sowl in dishtress!” mutters a chimneysweep, rescuing a child from a castor oil treatment) provide all the explication necessary in his strange, wild worlds.

Feininger’s genius for caricature didn’t transpose as naturally to painting as it had for Daumier (1808-1879). Of all the paintings in the exhibition, only “The White Man” (1907), his very first, shows an urgency of color equal to his drawings’; his

hues in this canvas powerfully measure a figure soaring before the stolid, staggered structures behind. Having worked so long with commercial printing, did Feininger not fully grasp the possibilities of a painter’s palette? Or did he come to demand less complexity from the “high” art of painting than from the “low” art of illustration? We’ll never know, but “The White Man” marks the fascinating crossing point of two trajectories: the exotic urgency of his early work and the luminous solace of the late.

Lyonel Feininger Through Oct. 16, Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., 212-570-3600.

© Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photograph © The Art Institute of Chicago

headed the Bauhaus graphics department.

Finally, at age 66, he returned to the States under the gathering Nazi threat.

In 1907, Feininger had abandoned a highly successful career as a cartoonist to turn to painting. His earliest, Fauvisminspired canvases in the exhibition are riots of color, barely contained by the same racing contours that had distinguished his cartoons. With their planar forms and crisp details, they bear more than a passing resemblance to Japanese woodcuts. In “Carnival” (1908), several figures—emerald blue-green, a diamond-patterned purple, a pallid pinkish-white—stride across a town square, their postures echoing one another with tight, intense variations. Contradictions of scale abound; one horn-player measures only a third of the height of the figure immediately behind, yet weightings of form and color make everything fit.

Feininger experienced another revelation during a 1911 trip to Paris: the Cubists, whose faceted dislocations fit naturally with his own investigations. In fact, almost every subsequent work in the show suggests Cubist influence. Many are poignant; in “Pier” (1912), the pale sproutings of ships’ sails rise evocatively above the horizon; “Calm at Sea III” (1929) deliciously captures the vibrant depth between two boats’ masts. But color was not Feininger’s foremost gift, and in later works his hues occasionally feel decorative, filling in rather than measuring intervals. We get appealingly stylized “pictures” of an isolated ship or bustling town square rather than the plastic enactment of it. (Gris or Braque would have rooted such scenes in animate color.) Another gallery devoted to Feininger’s toys revealed to me…well, toys: whimsical carvings of houses and trains with little of Picasso’s muscle or transforming insight.

Anther aspect of Feininger’s work, however, gets far too little attention. These are his early cartoons, which, displayed in a

tHe NatioNal academy

Will Barnet, The Blue Robe, 1962, oil on canvas, (detail)

Newly ReNovated

FRee admissioN aNd aRt classes FRiday–suNday, septemBeR 16–18, 11am–6pm

ExpEriEncE AmEricA’s Art EXHIBITIONS September 16–December 31, 2011

An AmEricAn cOLLEctiOn Exhibitions from the permanent collection A Panorama of Great Artist Portraits National Academicians: Then and Now Parabolas to Post-Modern: Architecture from the Collection Aligning Abstraction

WiLL BArnEt At 100

A retrospective of the artist’s figurative and abstract paintings and prints Will Barnet in Conversation: October 12 Architects in Conversation: Thom Mayne: October 19 Will Barnet Symposium: November 5

1083 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10128 www.nationalacademy.org September 14, 2011 | CityArts 9

CLASSICAL

Facing the Music of 9/11 New York’s Hear Memorial concerts and other good intentions

By Jay Nordlinger After 9/11, there were several memorial concerts here in New York. Then, for the next few years, there were many, many “9/11 pieces”—compositions “about” 9/11 or having to do with 9/11 in some way. This month, there are, or have been, 10th anniversary concerts. And we have yet more 9/11 pieces.

Allow me a couple of memories, specifically of Leontyne Price. In the days and weeks following 9/11, the great soprano came out of retirement to sing twice. The first time was at a memorial concert in Carnegie Hall. She sang “This Little Light o’ Mine”—which she has always announced as her mother’s favorite spiritual—and “America the Beautiful.”

The second time was in Avery Fisher Hall, at the annual Richard Tucker gala. She sang “God Bless America.”

I remember when she went up for her final

10 CityArts | September 14, 2011

high B flat. She was really spinnin’ it, in that incomparable Price style. And the people around me began to roar. I was furious, thinking, “This is the last note I will ever hear Leontyne sing, live, and they are drowning it out.” Oh, well.

The 9/11 pieces came fast and furious— hundreds of them. This was a full-blown genre, the 9/11 piece. I think they petered out in about 2004. Almost all of these pieces were instantly forgettable, but, to be fair, that is true of new pieces in general.

In the early going, there were pieces written before 9/11 that were passed off as 9/11 pieces. Let me illustrate what I mean. On commission from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, William Bolcom wrote his Symphony No. 7. It is a good piece, in my view— not instantly forgettable. The composer said, “Sometime in the summer of 2001, I felt a great, inexplicable need to interpose a very slow, mournful Interlude” between movements. He continued, “The need for such a lamentation would appear to all of us the following September... I report this only

because I’ve found that so many other artists felt the same mysterious, prescient dread as I did...”

Make of that what you will.

Here is a fact that many people find very hard to swallow: Music without words means nothing, absolutely nothing (with a few exceptions). The composer may intend a meaning, and a listener can invent a meaning, in his head. But this is strictly personal.

John Corigliano can call his Symphony No. 1 his “AIDS symphony” till the cows come home, but the music communicates nothing of the kind. After writing the symphony, Corigliano drew from it a choral piece, Of Rage and Remembrance—that is another matter. Peter Maxwell Davies announced that his String Quartet No. 3 was his “reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq.” Fine, but you’d never know it without that announcement: It’s just a string quartet (and a good one).

Another composer, Ned Rorem, once put it to me this way: “A piece without a text, without a vocal line, can’t mean detailed things like Tuesday, butter or yellow, and it

can’t even mean general things like death or love or the weather, although a timpani roll can sound like thunder, and certain conventions about love come out of Wagner.”

But again, music with words is a different ballgame. And on Sept. 10 of this year, the New York Philharmonic performed a piece with words in a concert of “remembrance and renewal.” The concert was free to the public. And the piece was one of the greatest we know: Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the “Resurrection.”

The next day, there was a different concert, also in Avery Fisher Hall. This one was staged by a group called Distinguished Concerts International New York. The bill of fare included a 9/11 piece composed by René Clausen in 2003. Clausen is a choir conductor and professor at Concordia College in Minnesota.

His 9/11 piece is Memorial, an oratorio.

It has four sections, “September Morning,” “The Attack,” “Prayers” and “Petitions.” The text, or texts, are ecumenical, in the modern fashion: a Buddhist meditation, a verse from Psalms, etc. That verse from Psalms is sung in Hebrew, Latin, English and Arabic. Clausen says that his hope is to “find a common ground of higher being.”

The music in the first two sections is emo-

Juilliard Joseph W. Polisi, President

Mon, Sep 19 at 8 Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Juilliard

Juilliard Jazz Quintet A New Day, A New Joy

Ron Blake, Saxophone Rodney Jones, Guitar Frank Kimbrough, Piano Ron Carter, Bass Carl Allen, Drums Daniel Saidenberg Faculty Recital FREE tickets at Juilliard Box Office

Wed, Sep 21 at 9 • Paul Hall at Juilliard

Oskar Jezior & Andrew Tyson Pianists Winners, 2011 Gina Bachauer Piano Competition

The controversial cover art for Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11. tional, exploitative and cinematic. This is hard to avoid. Later on, it is blooming, radiant and still cinematic. There are some quite pretty stretches. Memorial is not for me, as you may have guessed, but I don’t doubt for a second its sincerity, or its ability to touch hearts (or assault them?).

At the end of this month, the New York Philharmonic will perform a new work. This is “the first of several world premieres that the Philharmonic has on tap for the 2011-12 season,” which, to me, sounds as much like a warning as a promise. The work in question is One Sweet Morning, by the aforementioned John Corigliano. It has words, and is indeed a song cycle. It is also a 9/11 piece, which the Philharmonic specifically commissioned. Corigliano says that his piece reflects the hope that war may someday end.

Finally, consider a new work on CD: Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11 (on Nonesuch, this composer’s longtime label). The CD cover shows the horrible black-gray cloud the towers made. The piece is for three string quartets and “pre-recorded voices.” We hear, for example, chatter from NORAD: “They’re goin’ the wrong way . . . No contact with the pilot whatsoever.”

Reich is a very, very skillful guy. But why anybody would want to relive 9/11, so starkly, is a little beyond me. The piece is exploitative to the core. That Reich is so skillful makes the result all the more awful—and “awful” can be a term of praise.

Years ago, I attended a concert that featured a new work, a Holocaust piece. I was dreading this piece, because I think just about all Holocaust pieces stink: They are manipulative, empty, unhelpful, wrongly

disturbing, inadequate—I could go on. But this particular piece I liked. I wish I could remember the composer’s name so I could credit her. I spoke to her after, admitting that I had not looked forward to hearing her piece. She knew exactly what I meant, and seemed touched by my congratulations.

Perhaps I will welcome a 9/11 piece one day? As soon as later this month, at the Philharmonic? That would be nice.

CLASSICAL BAM Howard Gilman Opera House: Opéra Comique, BAM, Théâtre de Caen, Opéra National de Bordeaux & Les Arts Florissants present Jean-Baptiste Lully’s “Atys.” Sept. 18, 20, 21, 23 & 24, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100; bam.org; $30+.

Elebash Recital Hall: Balleke Sissoko & Vincent Segal perform chamber music with African traditional & European classical roots, as part of The Graduate Center at CUNY’s new Live@365 world music series. Sept. 27, 365 5th Ave., 212-817-2005, gc.cuny.edu; 7, $25.

Metropolitan Opera House: Anna Netrebko stars in the Met premiere of Donzinetti’s “Anna Bolena.” Opens Sept. 26, Lincoln Center, 212362-6000, metoperafamily.org.

Miller Theatre: In conjunction with Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Steven Schick, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), The Crossing, Red Fish Blue Fish, Ross Karre & Nicholas Houfek present the U.S. premiere of James Dillon’s “Nine Rivers” symphonic cycle.

Sept. 14–17, 2960 Broadway, 212-854-7799, millertheatre.com; 8, $40+.

Paul Hall: Juilliard Baroque performs in “The Three Fiddlers,” with music by Gabrieli, Pachelbel, Purcell & others. Sept. 27, 155 W. 65th St., 1st Fl., 212-769-7406, juilliard.edu; 8, free.

Mr. Tyson plays CHOPIN & FRANCK Mr. Jezior plays SCARLATTI & SZYMANOWSKI Recorded live for broadcast as the 34th season opener of the McGraw-Hill companies’ Young Artist Showcase on WQXR-FM. FREE concert; no tickets required

Sat, Sep 24 at 8 Peter Jay Sharp Theater

New Juilliard Ensemble SEASON OPENER

Joel Sachs, Conductor Morgan Jones, Saxophone HANS ABRAHAMSEN Wald (2008-9) WH SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES De Assumptione Beatae Mariae Virginis (2001) WH JING JING LUO TsaoShu (2011) J CARMAN MOORE Concerto for Ornette (2011) W J World Premiere; composed for NJE W World Premiere WH Western Hemisphere Premiere FREE tickets at Juilliard Box Office

Tues, Sep 27 at 8 • Paul Hall

The Three Fiddlers The strings and continuo of JUILLIARD BAROQUE

Monica Huggett, Cynthia Roberts, Robert Mealy, Violins Phoebe Carrai, Cello Avi Stein, Harpsichord Works by Purcell, Pachelbel, Gabrieli, Buonamente, Marini, Fontana FREE tickets available 9/13

Tues, Oct 4 at 8 • Paul Hall

Juilliard Jazz Ensembles

Wycliffe Gordon, Guest Trombone With Juilliard Jazz’s most advanced players FREE tickets available 9/20

Mon, Oct 10 at 8 Peter Jay Sharp Theater

David Afkham Conducts the

Juilliard Orchestra

BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 4 28-year-old Haitink protégé and award-winning German conductor, makes his NY debut VERY LIMITED FREE tickets available 9/26

Tues, Oct 11 at 8 • Paul Hall

Seymour Lipkin

Celebrating 25 years as a member of Juilliard’s piano faculty ALL-BEETHOVEN PROGRAM Piano Sonatas No. 2 in A, Op. 2, No. 2 No. 24 in F-sharp, Op. 78 No. 29 in B-flat, Op. 106 “Hammerklavier” Daniel Saidenberg Faculty Recital FREE tickets available 9/27

Thurs, Oct 13 at 8 Peter Jay Sharp Theater

AXIOM

SEASON OPENER Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor Works by GEORGE GRISEY, MAGNUS LINDBERG, SIR HARRISON BIRTWISTLE FREE tickets available 9/29

Sat, Oct 15 at 8 Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Jordi Savall Conducts Juilliard415

MUFFAT Florilegium, Suite IV “Impatienta” JS BACH Ouverture: Suite IV in D Major, BWV 1069 HANDEL Water Music Suite in D Major/G Minor RAMEAU “Les Boréades” Suite d’orchestre FREE tickets available 9/30

Sun, Sep 25, 6 – 7:30PM McClelland Drama Theater at Juilliard

SPECIAL OPEN HOUSE

FOR ACTORS interested in Juilliard’s

New M.F.A. program beginning Fall 2012

Register now at: Juilliard.edu/MFAopenhouse

J U I L L I A R D 155 W. 65th St. • Box Office M-F, 11AM-6PM • (212) 769-7406

events.juilliard.edu

September 14, 2011 | CityArts 11

JAZZ

JAZZ

New York Jazz’s Resilient Rhythm Amina Figarova’s ‘September Suite’ a highlight

Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola: Joe Chambers & his orchestra perform “Moving Pictures” & other works. Ends Sept. 18, Broadway at 60th St., 212258-9595, jalc.org.

By Howard Mandel Creators of jazz and other new music in New York are a resolute bunch, determined to make the best of circumstances that are tough even in the best of times. Immediately after the World Trade Center towers were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, local musicians I know reacted to the shocking incidents like second responders. They took it upon themselves to soothe, to reflect, to heal if possible, and by all means to go on and urge others to do the same.

When the Blue Note Jazz Club in the Village—just beyond the disaster zone—reopened four days after the attacks, I heard Cameroonian electric bassist and singer Richard Bona lead an ensemble there with an impressively quiet message of warmth and hope. Pianist Myra Melford, a good friend, told me about her duet gig with reeds specialist Marty Ehrlich at the Knitting Factory, very close to ground zero: “The vibe was that we had come together as a community, musicians and audience alike. The atmosphere was charged with the power of music and had an especially sacred quality.”

Musicians, of course, know their art brings people together but is generally more significant as symbolic expression than shield or weapon. They couldn’t restore the towers or change history, but they could go deeper into themselves to connect with core beliefs and bring forth their faith in the values of individuality and originality, the practice of freedom and the will to experiment. So the decade that followed has been marked by jazz and new music makers’ determination not to be deterred from what the Taliban and Tea Party alike may consider marginal activities, if not outright affronts to God’s dominion. Whether the city suffers attacks from abroad, natural disasters or economic collapses caused by the financial services sector that thrives in our midst, the minds of composers and the bands of improvisers play on.

So though few musicians in the wake of the Bush era’s early calamities set their sights on reverse jihad, many produced works out of the dramas they experienced or observed. One such was pianist-composer Amina Figarova. Born in Azerbaijan and educated at the Baku Conservatory, in the late ’80s she had converted to jazz, moved to the Netherlands, studied at Boston’s Berklee College and met and mar-

12 CityArts | September 14, 2011

Charlie Parker Jazz Festival: Postponed due to Hurricane Irene, the SummerStage festival features Kenny Werner, James Carter, Tia Fuller & The Gerald Clayton Trio. Richard Rogers Amphitheater, Marcus Garvey Park, Madison Ave. betw. E. 120th & E. 124th Sts., summerstage.org; 6–10, free.

Ella Lounge: Always stylish Dandy Wellington & the Made to Measure Band perform modern jazz, swing, pop & more, with inventive new takes on classic tunes. Every Thurs., 9 Ave. A, 212-7772230, ellalounge.com; 8, free.

Rose Theater at Frederick P. Rose Hall: Jimmy Heath, Jon Hendricks, Kevin Burke, Aria Hendricks, Michelle Hendricks, Bobby McFerrin, Dianne Reeves & Sachal Vasandani perform for the opening night of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Sept.

24, Broadway at 60th St., 212-258-9800, jalc. org; 8, $30+.

Amina Figarova ried Belgian flutist Bart Platteau. Over the course of 20 years the couple established their international concert and recording careers; last spring they moved from Rotterdam to Astoria. On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Figarova’s sextet with Platteau performed the New York premiere of her September Suite at the Metropolitan Room.

It was a resonant event.

Figarova was visiting friends in Brooklyn on Sept. 11, and was so disturbed by the destruction she awoke to that she refused to watch the endless video replays. However, a little later a BBC documentary caught her attention with its story of a 9/11 widow and her daughter struggling with the WTC death of their husband/father. Viewing their trials as a passage through stages of grief, Amina sat at her piano and conjured the dark bass line of “Numb,” the first of her suite’s nine movements. She likens that theme to pure evil.

Actually, Figarova is incapable of composing or performing music that evokes evil, violence or ugliness—she and Platteau live in a world where beauty is measured with purposeful nuance. In Septem-

Photo by Robert Beck

ber Suite, her flute-tenor sax-trumpet front line, crisp piano comping and probing or delicate solos with bass-drum support depict tension unto strife, sorrow met with compassion, denial running its brisk course, the bittersweet solace of memories, the urge for revenge but no unleashing of rage, attempts at reconstruction, the enduring pain of loss, tentative recovery of life’s promise and arrival of new maturity.

The suite is not programmatic; it can be listened to and enjoyed without reference to 9/11. But the fact of that day is part of it, not to be dismissed or forgotten. September Suite on record returns to where it began, with “Numb” reprised in only slightly recast (sadder? wiser?) form.

And so it is for the ongoing life of new music in New York City. We play and/or listen without hurt and fear haunting every moment, but always at least subliminally aware of the world’s troubles, dangers and unpredictability. We cling to our defenses, real or assumed, and music is one of the best of them. While people are engaged with music, it’s unimaginable they simultaneously hate. When the spontane-

ous joys of jazz or exploratory efforts of accomplished innovators reach us, we’re transported to our finer instincts and want to be joined there by everyone.

Consequently, we find exciting potential in the new season. The opening of adventurous music and dance presenter Roulette’s new home, a 650-seat theater on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, is emblematic. Genius mavericks including Anthony Braxton, Morton Subotnick, Sally Silver, George E. Lewis, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, John Zorn, Henry Threadgill, Simone Forti, Elliott Sharp, Lisa Moore, Wadada Leo Smith and Adam Rudolph will now try to draw the larger audiences Roulette deserves across the river from its longstanding downtown precincts.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center schedule strikes a different tone. Maybe because Wynton Marsalis is turning 50, autumn at the Rose Theater starts on September with revered elders, the saxophonist Jimmy Heath and vocalist Jon Hendricks. Then stars of the past and present up’n’comers— alto saxists Phil Woods and Grace Kelly, composer Gerald Wilson with his guitarist son Anthony and the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra—are paired in a Generations in Jazz series at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.

JALC is emphasizing jazz’s Hispanic elements in 2011-12, but so is Symphony Space, where Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra will stage three ambitious programs of classics and commissions to mark its 10th anniversary. Dig that: the same year the Twin Towers went down, a big band was born. In the 21st century, jazz orchestras performing original repertoire are regarded as an endangered species. No one told Arturo O’Farrill. Talk about resolve.

jazzmandel@gmail.com.

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September 14, 2011 | CityArts 13

POP

Nevermind Kurt Cobain, Here’s Jon Stewart Political hipster turns grunge classic into bumper shtick

By Ben Kessler I had seen the singer interviewed on TV. He was a foppish young man who seemed thoroughly disgusted to find himself so liked.

—Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To As of this writing, the cover of Nevermind’s 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition has more than 45,000 Likes on the official Nirvana Facebook page. To promote this rerelease, the two surviving core members of Nirvana and Nevermind’s producer Butch Vig will participate in a live twohour SiriusXM Radio Q&A on Sept. 24. The interviewer will be Daily Show host Jon Stewart.

The curious choice of Stewart to focus on the album’s legacy all but guarantees that the Q&A will be a Like-fest rather than an interesting or revealing discussion.

Stewart will appear as yet another Gen-X

14 CityArts | September 14, 2011

authority touting Nevermind’s era-encapsulating importance. Nevertheless, the fact of his participation tells us a lot about how pop culture has changed since 1991.

What hasn’t changed is Nevermind’s inflated reputation. Now as then, it benefits from mainstream media’s longstanding, oft-noted rockist prejudice. The eventual dominance of hip-hop forced critics to come out of their rockist shells a bit, yet to this day no hip-hop record has gone canonical in the way of Nevermind.

As our culture’s fragmentation increases, so does the solidity of this album’s position as its era’s unmatched classic.

Yes, Nevermind is overpraised as “a great modern punk record,” but in at least one respect it is underappreciated. Twentyfirst-century praise for Nirvana’s loudness and rawness misses how Kurt Cobain actually spoke to his times. Wikipedia informs us that Cobain was inspired by the simplicity of children’s music, but an even more apt reference point might be TV theme songs and jingles—translated into a punk idiom by sarcastic, pop-addicted

kids. The album has a fairytale quality of inverted innocence, reminiscent of toys that scare the kid who owns them by seeming to assume scary shapes when the lights go out. It’s essentially a postpunk record (defying pop music convention with pomo idiosyncrasy), but without ’80s-utopian sonic experimentation.

Nevermind authentically portrays the inner world of the pampered postboomer youth class, alienated from their advantages, dimly aware that mass media, no less than their parents, are preparing them to accept predetermined social roles. Cobain’s lyrics, often mumbled like half-swallowed backtalk

from the back of the classroom, mocked the options available to white youth (e.g., “We can plant a house/ We can build a tree” from “Breed”). Rather than ener-

Continued on page 18

THEATER

Frivolous Broadway tuners-for-tourists play it safe after 9/11

By Mark Peikert Urinetown and The Producers may have been there first, but it’s hard not to cite Mamma Mia! as the beginning of the end for serious Broadway musicals.

Opening on the Great White Way just a little over a month after 9/11, Mamma Mia! with its infectious ABBA score and mindless plot, was immediately and thoroughly embraced by still-rattled critics and audiences—and remains a perennial crowdpleaser 10 years later. Giving rise to a legion of jukebox musical carbon copies, Mamma Mia!’s silly, smiley-faced success pointed the way to an increased reluctance to make the audience think too hard. Ambitious shows like Caroline, or Change, Grey Gardens and The Scottsboro Boys were undone by both their transfers from intimate Off-Broadway venues and outré material; Spring Awakening ran for just over two years, but mostly as a fresh rock musical replacement for the fading Rent. Instead of artistic stretching,

we get adaptations of hit films—not a new genre, but one that has virtually obliterated American musicals based on other source material. Think of Hairspray, Urban Cowboy, 9 to 5, Xanadu and Catch Me If You Can. The coming season is indicative of the current state of the musical. Along with the justopened revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, we have a revival of ‘70s hit (and perpetual choice of high school theater teachers) Godspell; Frank Wildhorn’s take on Bonnie and Clyde; Lysistrata Jones, the fluffy Off-Broadway adaptation of Lysistrata set amid a college basketball team; and a radical reworking of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, now featuring a sexual identity plot thread.

Where once Broadway seasons featured events like a new Sondheim or Kander and Ebb musical, the big-ticket items now are often limited-run, star-driven plays that require little financial fear. Downtown may have recovered from 9/11, but pocketbooks are still feeling its impact, particularly now during the recession. This year’s crop of plays boasts a who’s who of names. Samuel L. Jackson will star as Martin Luther King Jr. in The Mountaintop. Sex and the City icon

Kim Cattrall will import her starring turn in Noel Coward’s Private Lives from London and Canada; Alan Rickman, who starred in the 2002 revival of Private Lives, will return to Broadway in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar.

Even the list of producers behind shows now require a bold-faced name or two, in an attempt to get audiences into theaters.

Whoopi Goldberg and Bette Midler were both involved in Sister Act and Priscilla Queen of the Desert last season; this fall will see Alicia Keys’ name highlighted as one of the forces behind new play Stick Fly, a comedy of manners about class, race and identity politics. And surely one of the draws of Relatively Speaking, a trio of one-act plays, is that Elaine May, Ethan Coen and, particularly, Woody Allen are the playwrights.

One of the few shows avoiding the habitual name-dropping of late are Venus in Fur, David Ives’ hit Off-Broadway comedy that has hedged its bets by scheduling a 10-week run (Nina Arianda, a Tony nominee last season for her turn in Born Yesterday, will reprise her star-making performance). Like Venus in Fur, Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities is coming to Broadway on the crest of a wave of critical approval, while Man and Boy, a revival of a Terrence Rattigan play, arrives with a top-notch pedigree in star

Angelina Ballerina the Musical: The Vital Theatre Company performs this family-friendly show, based on the well-known children’s book about a dancing mouse. Sept. 17–Oct. 16, The Theatre at St. Peter’s, 619 Lexington Ave., angelinathemusical.com.

The Old Boat Goddess — Songs of the Ainu: Mask & puppet maker Ralph Lee’s Mettawee River Theater Company presents a work based on 3 traditional stories from northern Japan’s indigenous people. Sept. 16–18, Cathedral of St. John the Divine (outdoor garden), 111th St. at Amsterdam Ave., mettawee.org; 7:30, $10.

The Select (The Sun Also Rises): The final installment in a 3-part collection of original re-workings of classic American novels (after interpretations of “The Great Gatsby” & “The Sound & The Fury”), Elevator Repair Service performs a new take on Hemingway’s iconic work. Ends Oct. 9, New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St., nytw.org.

Wild in Wichita (Locuras en Wichita): Repertorio Español presents the world premiere of this off-beat romantic comedy in which a Puerto Rican woman & a Mexican man fall in love.

Ends Sept. 25, Repertorio Español, 138 E. 27th St., repertorio.org/wichita.

Frank Langella. And David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish, which boasts name recognition neither on stage nor off, will have to fend for its life based on the work alone. That’s an increasingly rare fate on Broadway these days, but certainly a worthy one.

The Maid by Jon Christensen (Bridgeman Art Library)

The Bald Soprano ∧ By Eugène Ionesco Translated by Donald M. Allen ∧ Directed by Hal Brooks

Now Playing through October 23, 2011 Honored with a 2011 Drama Desk Award www.pearltheatre.org

Tickets start at just $34 when using code 7973 (online orders only) Price good for performances through 9/18/11. Tickets subject to availability.

NYCityCenter.org

The Pearl is supported in part by

CityTix 212.581.1212 | STAGE II 131 West 55th Street (btwn 6th and 7th)

September 14, 2011 | CityArts 15

Tv

David v. David MAMEt AND LEttErMAN WAGE tV WAr At tHE croSSroADS oF 9/11

By GREGORy SOLMAN David Mamet and David Letterman both turned 54 having traversed a similar cultural/temporal landscape when arriving at the post-9/11 crossroads. Letterman veered left, and Mamet moved right.

Mamet is a religious man. Letterman, apparently, is not. More to the point, Letterman became a “believer” and Mamet listened, reasoned and read his way out of the cliché of Jewish-American socialism that was a profound Woody Allen joke by 1977 (Alvy Singer’s defense? “I’m a bigot, I know, but for the left.”)

“This is the essence of Leftist thought,” writes Mamet in The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, his new book of 39 short essays. “It is a devolution from reason to ‘belief,’ in an effort to stave off a feeling of powerlessness.”

Letterman came undone in Bush/ Cheney apoplexy, fell to adultery, was extorted by one of those scrupulous producers at CBS News, adopted a surly, saturnine view of America often indistinguishable from the antiwar radicals of Code Pink and, irony of unfunny ironies, now yucks up CBS’s Late Show under threat of death, a frat boy with a fatwah on his head. Apparently, the Islamic radicals in his audience don’t get the joke, much less credit his appreciation of their worldwide “struggle.”

Mamet, showing shades of the emasculated and latently enlightened detective of his intriguing movie Homicide (1991), fiercely reverted to conservative Judaism—and an Old Testament thirst for justice that one can trace to the climactic summation in his screenplay for The Verdict and his revision of The Winslow Boy. Mamet cleaved to his family, traded required reading with Jon Voight, listened to Glenn Beck and Dennis Prager and absorbed economists Thomas Sowell and Friedrich Hayek. In his book, Mamet restates the angst of Salem Radio talk show hosts in his own voice—the cover of fiction lifted, the lilt of dramatic rhythm retained, no hiding behind ad hoc or dramatis personae but for the inventive use of parable and metaphor, literary techniques that make the book lucid and entertaining. It is a righteous jeremiad.

“We’ve lost 5,000 fellow New Yorkers,

16 CityArts | September 14, 2011

and you can feel it,” said Letterman on his return to air after a week-long comedy blackout, Sept. 19, 2001. “And it’s terribly sad.” With nary a mention of Islam or Muslims—a pattern on TV as recognizable as the Indian wearing a feather headdress—Letterman said the perpetrators “were zealots fueled by religious fervor— religious fervor. And if you live to be a thousand years old, will that ever make any goddamn sense?” His audience was left awkwardly unable to applaud on cue.

That same night, what seems more than a decade ago, a weepy Dan Rather praised President Bush for calling for firepower, willpower and “staying power.” He characterized al-Qaida (though not by name or religion) as a “hydra-headed operation in 55 countries around the world” and urged a focus not just on Afghanistan but on the Sudan, Iran, Syria, Libya and Iraq. That was shortly before the reliably wrongheaded New York Times suggested Afghanistan would be the next Vietnam quagmire. They might still be railing that it is, but for later declaring Afghanistan/ Iraq as the good/bad wars. Had the Times likewise condemned the congressionally approved, Clinton-signed Iraq Liberation Act (1998), with its explicit goal of regime change? Like the best cons of Mamet movies, the switch takes place before your eyes.

In 2004, a perverse inversion was taking place at Black Rock: While CBS News was telling the demonstrable lies of Rathergate, CBS Entertainment was closer to the truth that’s always the value of good fiction. Thanks to The Unit, the series Mamet created, sometimes wrote, rarely directed and nominally supervised from 2006 to 2009, the network engaged in the rarest of realpolitik. With its deep source Eric L. Haney’s Inside Delta Force, Mamet’s show oozed authenticity and experience about the U.S. military mission, unavoidably entangled family lives, and its frisson with the intelligence apparatus and diplomatic corps (drop the “p”s, Mr. President).

Though it sometimes leaned on G.I. Joe the Explainer for its mass (and now military-distant) audience, The Unit just as frequently rewarded those in on the argot of soldier swagger: Sergeant Major Jonas Blane (Dennis Haysbert) barges into a hangar full of National Guardsmen awaiting orders during a terrorist hostage crisis and bellows with authority, “Who can show me a Ranger tab?”

Bouncing through the Serengeti, puffing cigars under boonie hats; puke-faced after being skyhooked a thousand feet from the ground to a HC-130 aircraft by only a harness; angrily pumping iron, minutes after a training-bullet grazing; defusing stray bombs matter-of-factly (not as a metaphor for insanity as in Kathryn Bigelow’s smug little contrivance, The Hurt Locker), it was a weekly shower of testosterone, impeccably cast with fresh scar-faced and smooth-cheeked stonecold studs. And just for fun, the occasional bad guy gets plugged through the heart after yelling “Allahu Akbar!”

In the end, Mamet’s counter-terrorist drama was a bracing tribute to unceasing, unapologetic interventionism of necessity. Consigning prime-time P.C. to subplots (a soldier’s wife has a crisis of faith for what is apparently the dark 42 minutes of the soul; the obligatory paean to the homosexual veteran; the rescue of insultingly characterized Christian missionaries; the collusion of whitesupremacist hillbillies—not university professors—with foreign terrorists), the show invariably overcame TV’s disastrous tendency to socio-political pandering.

Even when it threatened to run off the rails by the third-season introduction of a gorgeous female unit operative—jogging memory of The Simpsons parody when Poochie joins Itchy & Scratchy—it satisfactorily resolved into something Howard Hawks, maybe even James L. Brooks, might approve of. Meanwhile, it maintained its credible survey of the threat map, down to the detail of an Iranian woman spy nervously working at her embassy under the picture of smilingly anti-Semitic Ahmadinejad.

Here’s what Mamet’s The Unit sees around the world: Latino drug dealers smuggle across the California border an

Indonesian terrorist out to wreak nuclear havoc—like the real José Padilla, a name that would live in infamy if not for liberal media bias. Arab terrorists hijack business flights in Idaho. Biological weapons stolen from U.S. depots ride on autopilot toward Busch Stadium. The socialist Spanish government uses the unit through the CIA to absolve itself of assassinating a local terrorist—then hangs them out to dry.

Russians try to sell nuclear technology to Iran. Twenty-two men fall to an RPG at an insertion point because one of the wives talked. Even the episode on “rendition” avoids David E. Kelley agitprop, counterweighted by a depiction of the real torture suffered by soldiers as part of routine SERE training.

Above all, The Unit rediscovered something television had lost since Vic Morrow was wounded a hundred times in Combat!: It thoroughly respected American soldiers, not just as men, but as men at war, fighting men—not as the uniformed peaceniks, wisecrackers and cranks of TV’s M*A*S*H— as well as the choices they made every day to remain worthy of tribal loyalty.

At the beginning, all late night rebooted in a patriotic mood. Leno paraded celebrities past a 9/11 charity Harley to sign— in Hollywood terms, it was practically equivalent to a loyalty oath. Letterman conspicuously elevated Fleet Week with a nostalgic panorama of audiences filled with sailors. Letterman seemed sincere, in contrast to leftists who pay lip service to our troops as a way of parading their moral superiority not just to the right but to ’60s radicals.

But eventually Letterman lost it. His 2008 interview with celebrated-and-discarded ex-Bush press secretary Scott McClellan (appropriately named, as it were, for Civil War buffs), pushing a self-aggrandizing turncoat’s memoir. Letterman found no

more need to cloak his enmity in mono- recalled “my first personal experience logue tradition. Letterman’s unit—his of Political Thought in the Arts…to this increasingly liberal audience and fawning day, nearly 40 years after that review, I am band members—applauded McClellan’s asked in lectures, classrooms and intertreachery and asinine effrontery, telling views why I hate women.” For his part, Letterman that Bush “doesn’t spend a lot Letterman now routinely picks on-air of time reflecting. I think he should spend fights with conservatives like O’Reilly—try sleeping on that blowhard vs. blowhard— more time reflecting.”

“Is Cheney a goon?” Letterman asked. and chases Jon Stewart’s Daily Show Would Bush defer to Cheney because “he demagoguery, genuinely funny men who was intellectually lazy?” “There is cer- inflate their self-importance, then deflect tainly a lack of intellectual curiosity on criticism by claiming comic dispensation.

Yet, Letterman the part of the presihas yet to top Fox dent,” McClellan commentator Greg sheepishly grinned.

Gutfeld for political “My feeling about commitment: His Cheney and also response to a triBush is that he just umphalist mosque/ couldn’t care less madrasah near about Americans, ground zero was to and the same is true lease space to open a of George Bush,” Muslim-themed gay Letterman bawled. bar across the street “And all they really (he’s torn between want to do is kiss up calling it Suspicious to the oil people so Packages or Turban they can get some Cowboy). When The great annuity when Secret Knowledge they’re out of office. came out, Gutfield ‘Here you go, Dick, vowed to monitor nice job, here’s a what he predicts couple of billion will be Mamet’s for your troubles.’” declining reputaMcClellan smiled tion among New and nodded. “He In The Secret York’s critical appapretty much put Halratchiks in light of liburton in business Knowledge, Mamet Mamet’s much more and the outsourcing braves a political courageous coming to private mercenary truth while mere out. Trotskyite Chrisgroups,” Letterman entertainers like topher Hitchens, blathered. “Is there who usually writes any humanity left in Letterman arrogate for the socialist The these guys?” Could opinion vicariously Nation—43 issues an original 9/11 convia the cosseted for $32, all material spiracy theory be far Connecticut crowd copyrighted—already behind? The usual found a home at the intellectual self-depand Hollywood’s to irritatingly, recation aside—it’s dacha-on-the-Pacific Times smugly slam The only part of Lettersocialists.

Secret Knowledge man’s shtick—had as “irritating” and he in fact become a “smug.” “useful” idiot?

In The Secret Knowledge, Mamet braves The transformation fit Letterman’s version of comic-turned-dramatic figures, a political truth while mere entertainers trying Bill Maher-style band-wagoning like Letterman arrogate opinion vicaribefore anything but tough rooms. Late- ously via the cosseted Connecticut crowd night stooge McClellan would go on to and Hollywood’s dacha-on-the-Pacific endorse Obama. Letterman would lose at socialists. What Mamet knows from history is no secret, that the “supposed least one career-long admirer.

Now it’s Mamet who lives in career intransigence on the part of the Religious limbo, risking retrojected condemnation Right is far less detrimental to the health of his recent stage plays November and of the body politic than the Left’s love Race, which will come as no surprise to affair with Marxism, Socialism, Racialism the dramatist whose play about misogyny, and the Command Economy which,” he Sexual Perversity in Chicago, was naturally writes, “one hundred years of evidence branded misogynist by a female critic at shows leads only to shortages, despotism The Village Voice. “That was,” Mamet and murder.”

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www.rdtradepublishing.com September 14, 2011 | CityArts 17

FILM

No-Fun Gus and the Opposite of a Life Force Gus Van Sant’s latest takes seriousness deadly serious; Ryan Gosling delivers a dull Steve McQueen impersonation in the obvious Drive.

By Armond White Restless Directed by Gus Van Sant All that keeps the death-infatuated Restless from being laughably dismissed like last year’s Charlie St. Cloud is that it’s signed by Gus Van Sant. No mere sentimentalist who would employ a tween heartthrob like Zac Efron, Van Sant specializes in serious gloom.

Gloom, along with Van Sant’s special element of sexual pathology, sets Restless apart from the typical two-hankie liebestod. Shy boy Enoch (Henry Hopper) meets whimsical, fatally ill bird-lover Annabel (Mia Wasikowska, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, here wearing Mia Farrow’s pixie haircut from Rosemary’s Baby) and they muse on their sexual neutrality and the mystery of death. Together they visit cemeteries and crash funerals; both are bright and prone to brooding. She reveres Darwin (“single greatest idea man”) but is the opposite of a life force.

After a close call, Annabel reports to Enoch “I’ve been dead for three minutes and you know what’s there? Nothing.”

Van Sant peddles Nothing while other tragic teen love stories usually sell romantic overload. It’s part of his

Cobain/Stewart Continued from page 14 gized by its opposition to conformity, though, the album as a whole is anxious and uncertain, even heartbroken by the lack of satisfying alternatives.

From a vast remove, Cobain sought to recapture punk’s counterculture integrity for an infantilized generation. That’s why the title Nevermind references the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks but refracts that totem to recall Peter Pan’s

18 CityArts | September 14, 2011

hipster creed to cancel optimism and faith to muse on meaninglessness. In Restless, Van Sant emphasizes morbid whimsy, even employing Nico’s warbled elegy “The Fairest of Seasons.” (“Do I really have a hand in my forgetting?”) He shamelessly references the bombing of Nagasaki to justify teenage nihilism, and one shot lets Annabel’s bird book replace the Bible so this “naturalist” romance is actively, implicitly nihilistic. Their “romance” traces their individual lack of effect in society.

All this pessimistic calculation could maybe strike a chord with hopeless youth who feel misunderstood, even in a Lady Gaga world. But that would result in a freak hit—weirdly sanctioning Van Sant’s own grown-up Gaga hopelessness as in his very calculated Nicole Kidman hit To Die For, though, interestingly, not the formulaic Finding Forrester (Too gay. Too upbeat. Van Sant has learned his lesson.)

No-fun Gus shows the kids doing variations on snow angels, imitating crimescene body outlines—a boldly negative switch on the sprawled body outline of David Bowie’s Lodger album cover that was celebrated in Todd Graff’s joyous Bandslam.

Art photographer William Eggleston makes a cameo appearance in Restless as an X-ray tech, apparently just to authenticate Van Sant’s spare, elegant visual anatomization of soullessness. Restless contrives to turn Van Sant’s absurdly praised “Death Trilogy” (Gerry, Elephant and Last Days) into an ongoing series.

Drive Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn So many better movies echo throughout the wannabe thriller Drive—including bad movies, like the entire Michael Mann catalog—that the resonance nearly drowns out the film’s brazen imitation of one particularly good movie: Walter Hill’s 1978 The Driver.

That Ryan O’Neal film now becomes a Ryan Gosling vehicle—an immediate decline.

Gosling plays a loner stuntman who does underworld transport for Jewish mobsters on Hollywood’s fringe. His jaded view of life is part of his alienated cool, warmed over by a single mother waitress (cry-baby Carey Mulligan) awaiting the arrival of her ex-con Latino boyfriend. Director Nicolas Winding Refn shows no sense of how classes and ethnicities mix in L.A. He prefers evoking the sleek, unreal, existential cool of film noir loners.

But Refn’s cinephilia is specious and imprecise, while Hill’s revisionist modernism uncannily updated the aesthetic and spiritual essence of both American and European noir (Anthony Mann as well as Jean-Pierre Melville) into an original, idiosyncratic

Neverland. The way Jon Stewart’s Daily Show works is not so different: Stewart’s humor, meant to appeal to the “smart” youth market, holds today’s political commentators to a ’70s ideal of oppositional journalism and finds them wanting. Unlike Nirvana, however, Stewart entertains his demographic without first considering the import of his own corporate-media celebrity.

The Daily Show was an early adopter of red-state/blue-state humor. Even before Stewart became its host in 1998, the show frequently featured “field pieces” that exploited the eccentricities

of un-hip Americans with proto-Borat glee. Comedy Central paved the way for Jon Stewart to become our preeminent purveyor of political snark soon after the 2000 election. In the Obama era, we hear less about red states and blue states; the cultural divisions that now both intensify and disguise genuine American antagonisms correspond more closely to middle-class hegemonic tastes. And here’s where Stewart has proved himself the least subversive of satirists: In promoting “Sanity” (i.e., sanitized discourse), he is as slick a triangulator as Bill Clinton was in the ’90s.

Mia Wasikowska and Henry Hopper in Gus Van Sant’s Restless vision. Hill’s The Driver wasn’t a thriller it was thrilling, featuring the best on-screen car chases to this day. Refn, infected by Mann, produces fake toughness, fake sentimentality and fake style.

Drive is so relentlessly inexpressive of the modern world that it’s often inadvertently comic. Not just when the inadequate Gosling drops his dull Steve McQueen impersonation and lets slip Mickey Rourke’s old smile, but especially when his laconic Old Boy routine clashes with a group of vicious old goats— Ron Perlman and especially Albert Brooks as hypersensitive machers. Brooks’ zany turn as a psychotic has the best dialogue (“It’s not bad timing, it’s bad luck”), but it’s not quite as zany as Refn’s mannerisms, which get hilarious during Gosling’s rampages, especially a hammer attack in front of nude, siliconenhanced strippers who look on idly like the mannequins in Kubrick’s Korova Milk Bar. Refn’s good facial videography and portentous thrumming music turns hardboiled storytelling into obviousness. The monotonous, derivative Drive should be retitled Drone.

In fact, Cobain satirized American entertainment values more successfully than Stewart in “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” (“A mulatto, an albino/ A mosquito, my libido”). But the salvageable, sophisticated element of Nirvana’s legacy is difficult to appreciate in the context of today’s Like-based cultural economy.

Today’s pop artworks are judged by how well they inflame or distract from our repressed conflicts. Jon Stewart’s refusal to acknowledge the placating purpose he serves for his youthcult audience, or even who signs his paychecks, makes him mad Likeable in a way Nirvana never were.

September 14, 2011 | CityArts 19

DANCE

Harlem Stage Keeps Dancing Sundiata’s spirit lives among Da Peoples

DUMBO Dance Festival: White Wave presents the 11th annual DUMBO Dance Festival, featuring new works from over 100 choreographers in locations throughout DUMBO. Sept. 22–25, 718855-8822, whitewavedance.com.

By Valerie Gladstone Poet and educator Sekou Sundiata masterfully combined entertainment and political activism. Only a year before his death in 2007, he introduced the hugely popular WeDaPeoples Cabaret to Harlem Stage, dubbing it a “dance to the revolution.” The show was a natural outgrowth of his brilliant America Project, conceived after 9/11 to bring Americans together.

In honor of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, WeDaPeoples Cabaret starts humming again Sept. 15 and 17 at Harlem’s The Gatehouse. Vocalist and composer Samita Sinha curated the first night’s program of dance, poetry, music, film and spoken word and poet/playwright/ recording artist Carl Hancock Rux took charge of another great mixture of the arts for the second night, with performances by Toshi Reagon, Greg Tate and Queen Esther, among others.

“We’re reaffirming our connection to Sekou with the cabaret,” says Ann Rosenthal, co-producer of MAPP International Productions and Sundiata’s long-time presenter and friend. “The tragedy spurred him to explore the meaning of citizenship in a globally interdependent world through artistic performance and community conversations. That’s what the America Project is all about. Every performer in the cabarets understands the connections.”

Sundiata’s death inspired MAPP to revive his People’s Potluck Dinners. Created to bring artists and people from communities all over the country together over a meal to talk about their concerns, the dinners became a fresh way at looking at citizenship and its responsibilities. Topics might range from housing to access to fresh food, with artists discovering ways to incorporate aspects of these discussions into their works. Theater director Patricia McGregor and her sister, dancer Paloma McGregor, together the founders of Angela’s Pulse, thrived as hosts of dinners this summer. On the first night of the cabaret, they will present an excerpt from their multidisciplinary work, Building a Better Fishtrap: Water, Memory and Home, which owes something of its spirit to those stimulating meals.

The McGregors grew up in St. Croix, daughters of an artistic fisherman who

20 CityArts | September 14, 2011

Dance New Amsterdam: Monstah Black & Major Scurlock present the world premiere of “Black Moon (La Lune Noir) Act 1.” The multimedia operetta re-works Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” through an African-American lens, using popular music genres like Afrobeat & house. Sept. 15 & 16, 280 Broadway, 2nd Fl., 212-625-8369, dnadance. org; 8, $12+.

Èriu Dance Company: As part of Imagine Ireland, the company presents “Noctú,” an at-times risqué Irish step dance show choreographed by Riverdance’s Breandán de Gallaí. Ends Oct. 2, Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 W. 22nd St., 212-727-2737, irishrep.org; $55+.

Heather Olson: Levi Gonzales, Erin Gerken & the 6-months-pregnant Olson perform Olson’s new work, “Shy show off,” which examines the line between internal worlds & external presentation. Sept. 21–24, The Chocolate Factory, 5-49 49th Ave., Queens, 718-482-7069, thechocolatefactorytheater.org; 8, $15.

A performance by WeDaPeoples Cabaret. designs handsome fish and lobster traps.

It’s why water figures so prominently in their new work. At one dinner, most of the guests were Russian Jews. “When we started talking about what water meant to us,” Patricia says, “they told us that when they put their feet in the water in Coney Island, it reminds them of Odessa. This led us to talk about how water connects all human beings, as it connects all lands on the earth.”

At another dinner with a different group, the conversation turned slightly comical as some guests confessed their addiction to water. “The idea was to get

across our personal responsibility in conserving water,” she says. “A lot of people talked about their disproportionate use of water, such as running a shower for ages to get the right temperature or dumping out water in a half-filled plastic bottle or watering plants at high noon rather than in the evening. We joked that it was like an AA meeting, except about water.”

Works such as the McGregors’ are exactly what Sundiata hoped would evolve from the conversations he initiated after 9/11. “He called into question all our beliefs,” says long-time Sundiata collaborator musician Marc Cary, whose

remarkable band Indigenous People will play at the first cabaret. “He connected so many things. I became dedicated to the concept of freedom in the broadest sense because of him.”

Sinha also drew inspiration from Sundiata in her artistic life. “He saw 9/11 as a moment of deep unsettling,” she says, “a time to open up new paths for individuals, communities and the nation. He drew something incredibly positive out of it, seeing it as a time when we could begin to face the future with our deep collective humanity. He wanted to galvanize that energy to plant seeds for a better, more responsible future.”

Because of his influence, she became a more adventurous dancer and choreographer, opening herself to possibilities outside her original genre of classical Indian dance. “I began to examine how the internal and external related,” she says, “and how dance, song and poetry can be good for communities as well as for individuals and one’s self.” These thoughts inspired her to start Community Sings. As she began creating the program for the cabaret, she says, “I looked for artists who are highly interactive, who draw on various genres—people who will not only entertain but also make audiences think and sing and dance. This is absolutely the best kind of party. We know so much more because of 9/11; we just have to use it.”

WeDaPeoples Cabaret Sept. 15 & 17, Harlem Stage Gatehouse, 150 Convent Ave. (at 135th St.), 212-281-9240, harlemstage.org.

Troupers Retrench How New York’s dance world rebounds and recovers

yes, the reason must have at least in large part been that film. As biased and shrill a picture of the ballet world as it gave, it did supply at least a short-term boost to mainBy Joel Lobenthal stream media interest and audience attenWhat I would like to be writing: after dance—if only for Swan Lake itself. Not the cataclysm of Sept. 11, 2001, New York surprisingly, NYCB opens its fall season dance awoke with a new sense of purpose. Sept. 13 with a run of its own production.

Certainly there are cases in the dance Dancers moved as if every performance would be their last, artistic and admin- world in which crisis has created opporistrative directors began to consistently tunity. Fall for Dance, which runs at City make sensible and judicious decisions, Center Oct. 27 through Nov. 6, has hit critics started reviewing responsibly and upon a successful formula combining a objectively, and audiences rushed to sampling of all genres of dance with a uniembrace with new fervor this most life- form ticket price of $10.

Paul Taylor’s 2002 Promethean Fire was affirming of art forms.

What I must write: none of the above hap- said to be his response to the twin towers, pened. What is undeniable, however, is that but it’s debatable how much influence 9/11 has been traumatic for the NYC dance 9/11 has exerted on actual new dance world, contributing to the erosion of fund- content. Modern dance was once politiing, attendance and media attention that cally engaged, much more so than it is was already occurring. This season we will today. The Martha Graham company’s be seeing no shortage of interesting events, season earlier this year at the Rose Theater included a program but we are unequivoof overtly political cally looking at Perhaps 9/11 was solos created in the retrenchment. New indeed the beginning 1930s by Graham York City Ballet is no longer selling tickets of a wake-up call to and her disciples. to its Fourth Ring on the dance community, These, as well as more abstract a regular basis: a foolwhich simply cannot other works in her canon, ish policy, a waving ignore geopolitical remain an eloquent of the white flag. But it has become a perand economic policies reminder that aeshaps unsightly and as they have unfolded thetics and political commentary can demoralizing reality since the attack. successfully go hand that empty seats proin hand. liferate at the upper Perhaps 9/11 was indeed the beginning tiers of both NYCB and American Ballet Theatre performances. When I began watching of a wake-up call to the dance community, these companies more than 30 years ago, which simply cannot ignore geopolitical the peanut galleries were frequently packed. and economic policies as they have unfoldWhat is clear is that the middle class has ed since the attack. One example: the drasconsistently been a bedrock of attendance tic inflation of our military budget since and the middle class, increasingly since 9/11 means that for the U.S. government, arts funding is not going to be a priority.

9/11, is being battered.

Last spring, NYCB presented a new proThis year, ABT’s fall season at City Center is a single week, running Nov. 8-13, where- duction of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s as in the past it has been two or three. Last 1933 The Seven Deadly Sins. It was interyear it didn’t have any City Center season esting to read in interviews the way that at all, preferring to concentrate instead the choreographer, Lynne Taylor-Corbett, on bringing Alexei Ratmansky’s new Nut- as well as the cast members drew healthy cracker to the Brooklyn Academy of Music parallels between the initial production last December. But the City Center sea- and current economic priorities that were son is crucial for the company because it even more explicit than its creators might have imagined. For we spectators, the allows for more variety in repertory.

For more than a decade, the company’s beauty of Sins is the way it remains gripprogramming during its annual spring ping and relevant and universal. We are season at the Metropolitan Opera has con- free to connect it—or not—to pre- and sisted almost entirely of chestnuts. These post-9/11 worlds, or to never-never nevold reliables are not, however, sure-fire erland. Fortunately, Seven Deadly Sins box office stimulation—nothing is sure- returns to NYCB in February. fire anymore. An exception last season was Swan Lake, both at ABT and NYCB. And Read more by Joel Lobenthal at Lobenthal.com.

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September 14, 2011 | CityArts 21

OUT OF TOWN THE ALDRICH: Brooklyn-based art collective MTAA presents “All The Holidays All at Once,” a months-long all-inclusive display of loaned lawn ornaments from every conceivable holiday. Ends Oct. 2, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Conn., aldrichart.org.

BRUCE MUSEUM: “Drawings by Rembrandt, His Students & Circle from the Maida & George Abrams Collection” features 10 of the artist’s works & over 50 drawings by his students & followers. Sept. 24–Jan. 8, 2012. Also on view is “Picasso’s Vollard Suite: The Sculptor’s Studio,” which ends Oct. 16. 1 Museum Dr., Greenwich, Conn., brucemuseum.org.

CARAMOOR FALL FESTIVAL: The 3rd annual festival features the New York Philharmonic, Tony Award nominee Kelli O’Hara & a special showcase of young musicians. Sept. 23–25, 149 Girdle Ridge Rd., Katonah, N.Y., caramoor.org.

THE CLARK: In “Spaces,” large-scale photographs by Candida Höfer & Thomas Struth capture the emptiness of public spaces. Ends Sept. 15. ”Pissarro’s People” provides a representative sample of the impressionist painter Camille Pissarro’s work throughout his career.

Ends Oct. 2. An exhibition of the work of El Anatsui features the artist’s large-scale sculptures that weave literal Nigerian trash into Ghanian tradition. Ends Oct. 16, 225 South St., Williamstown, Mass., clarkart.edu/ museum.

CONCERTS AT TANNERY POND: Chamber & solo musicians perform classical, romantic & newer works in an intimate, casual setting: a barn-like building constructed by Shakers in 1834. Ends Sept. 17, New Lebanon, N.Y., tannerypondconcerts.org.

THE DEMUTH MUSEUM: “Chasing Inspiration: The Art of the Newswangers” explores the lives & works of father-son artist duo Kiehl & Christian Newswanger & their contrasting perspectives on the Amish way of life. Ends Nov. 27, 120 E. King St., Lancaster, Penn., demuth.org.

DIA: BEACON:The gallery presents “Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977” & artist-led programs. Talks & walkthroughs are free with museum admission.

Ends Oct. 10, 3 Beekman St., Beacon, N.Y., diabeacon.org.

KATONAH MUSEUM OF ART: “Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage & Yves Tanguy.” Ends Sept. 18. “Stephen Talasnik: Elusive Landscape.”

Ends Sept. 18. “Sarah Perry: If...” Ends Sept. 18.

“Joseph Wheelright: Tree Figures.” Ongoing, 134 Jay St. (Rte. 22), Katonah, N.Y., katonahmuseum.org.

Maya Lin, “Storm King Wavefield,” 2007-08.

LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS’ QUARTERS: Vicky Culver & Robert Grunke present another edition of their photography exhibit “Around & About.” Ends Oct. 30, 84 Mercer Rd., Fort Hancock, N.J., nps.gov.

MASS MOCA: Stephen Vitiello’s “All Those Vanished Engines”—a site-specific sound installation created for the museum’s boiler house—fuses story excerpts & ambient sounds to create an eerie, dynamically varied portrait of the building’s identity. Opens Sept. 25. Also on view is Jane Philbrick’s “The Expanded Field,” a publicly accessible “industrial garden” for rest & meditation. Opens Sept. 25, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, Mass., massmoca.org.

MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM: “Marina Zurkow.”

Sept. 17-Jan. 8, 2012. “Engaging with Nature: American & Native American Artists (A.D. 1200-2004).” Ends Sept. 25. “What is Portraiture?” Ends Nov. 4, 3 S.

Jason office products

22 CityArts | September 14, 2011

Mountain Ave., Montclair, N.J., montclair-art.com.

NEW BRITAIN MUSEUM OF ART: “One Man’s Passion: The Art of Carved Birds.” Ends Sept. 25.

“New Media: Deb Todd Wheeler.” Ends Oct. 9. “The Tides of Provincetown: Pivotal Years in America’s Oldest Continuous Art Colony 1899-2011.” Ends Oct. 16. “NEW/NOW: Sarah Lamb.” Ends Oct. 30, 56 Lexington St., New Britain, Conn., nbmaa.org.

NORFOLK CHAMBER FESTIVAL: Young artists & established musicians alike perform in a series of classical music concerts, with many events free & open to the public. Ends Oct. 20, Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate at Routes 44 & 272, Norfolk, Conn., music.yale.edu/norfolk.

NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM: The museum has a packed schedule, with classes, workshops,

Photo courtesy of the Storn King Art Center

tours & other programs for children & adults alike.

On view are “Robot Nation,” an outdoor exhibition of weatherproof 3D robot sculptures, & “Ice Age: To the Digital Age: The 3D Animation Art of Blue Sky Studios,” an interactive exhibition on digital animation. Ends Oct. 31, 9 Route 183, Stockbridge, Mass., nrm.org.

STORM KING ART CENTER: “5+5: New Perspectives.” Ends Nov. 14. “The View From Here: Storm King at Fifty.” Ends Nov. 14, Old Pleasant Hill Rd., Mountainville, N.Y., stormking.org.

WADSWORTH ATHENAEUM: In Shaun Gladwell’s “MATRIX 162,” the artist captures death-defying feats on video. Ends Sept. 18. Also on view are two paintings by American artist iona rozeal brown & woodblock prints by Japanese artists Ippitsusai Buncho & Kitagawa Utamaro. Ends Sept. 25, 600 Main St., Hartford, Conn., thewadsworth.org.

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Meet the

Bugatti furniture from Milano in 1900 and a piece of sculpture by Franz Hagenauer from 1930.

Exhibitors

Richard Lavigne of Knollwood Antiques LLC

This season’s AVENUE Show at the Park Avenue Armory

represents a tremendous variety of styles and eras, with more 20th-century pieces than ever before. We sat

Jerome Jacalone Fine Arts.

down with a few of the show’s exhibitors to talk about

bring earlier pieces, since they require a little more contemplation.

Are you seeing any trends in the way people mix older and newer?

I deal a lot in Baroque and neoclassical art, and both go very well with the clean lines of modern and contemporary furniture and interiors. A select placement of classic paintings that I deal with go very well in contemporary interiors. I’ve also noticed that Old Master paintings have gained interest in contemporary living environments.

If you were asked to pair one item of yours with something older or newer, what would the pieces be?

I have a wonderful portrait from 1680 by Luca Giordano of a young boy. It’s a very moody picture that has a lot of emotion to it.

It would go very well with an Art Deco sideboard or a modern console. Even though the piece is 350 years old, it has a contemporary feel to it.

the innovative ways in which designers, collectors and consumers are mixing and matching items from across the centuries to create timelessly tasteful spaces.

J. Lohmann Gallery

Joern Lohmann of J. Lohmann Gallery Do you mix your merchandise differently for a New York City show than for those in other markets?

The New York market is very sophisticated and educated. They know quality, so I always try to bring my best pieces.

Are you seeing any trends in the way people mix older and newer?

I’ve noticed that people are increasingly mixing old and new. In the past, you saw people collecting only 18th-century Baroque, for example, but now people are mixing it up.

If you were asked to pair one item of yours with something older or newer, what would the pieces be?

I like very much the very early 19th century, like the empire style of furniture, mixed with contemporary artists, whether it’s a painting or a print or a vessel. The empire style has very many straight lines and not a lot of ornaments, so it has a very modern look. I would say, for example, an empire chair paired with a contemporary print.

Robert Lloyd of Robert Lloyd Inc. Do you mix your merchandise differently for a New York City show than for those in other markets?

Yes I do. I’ll be bringing more of an eclectic mix: 17th- and 18th-century pieces as well

as mid-century modern pieces. People in New York come in from all over the world, so it’s a very eclectic market—you can show anything here as long as it’s suitable quality.

Are you seeing any trends in the way people mix older and newer?

Yes, especially with younger clients. For the most part, they’re into a lot of mid-century modern and not so much into the 18th century, but we try to show them how well it mixes together. I have 18th-century furniture mixed with 20th-century items all over my house. It goes. There’s really no wrong way to do it.

James Infante of James Infante

Robert Lloyd Inc.

If you were asked to pair one item of yours with something older or newer, what would the pieces be?

I have an American tankard made in New York circa 1730, very simple, with plain lines, and I’d love to pair that with a 1950s piece of very high-style furniture. That piece of silver works on almost anything.

Jerome Jacalone of Jerome Jacalone Fine Arts Do you mix your merchandise differently for a New York City show than for those in other markets?

Yes. I tend to bring more intellectual and less decorative pieces to a New York show and I bring more well-recognized artists. I also

Do you mix your merchandise differently for a New York City show than for those in other markets?

I bring the best examples of the collections that I own. I will start as early as the 1880s with some Art Nouveau pieces and go up until the 1970s, but with a specific focus on Austrian decorative arts, many secessionist things, Hagenauer objects. I try to show a mix.

Are you seeing any trends in the way people mix older and newer?

Good design is timeless. Different styles from different centuries work together. I’ve seen many eclectic collections that span centuries and work perfectly in their environments, and that thread starts with good design.

A few years ago, there was a focus on mid-century modern—and it’s still there, but people are now opening up once again to a broad level of collecting.

If you were asked to pair one item of yours with something older or newer, what would the pieces be?

I can answer that question 50 different ways, but I’ll say a piece of Carlo

Do you mix your merchandise differently for a New York City show than for those in other markets?

Absolutely, because of the diversity of the marketplace. We have 17th century up until about 1970 for this show. The range is expansive, and we have some pieces in the

Knollwood Antiques LLC

warehouse that are geared just for this show.

Are you seeing any trends in the way people mix older and newer?

We’re seeing a huge trend—a lot of publications are featuring traditional or classical homes but the artwork is nothing but fabulous photography, or really great abstracts mixed with 18th-century French chairs. Or ancient classical sculptures, and then there’ll be some lucite furniture. Or 19th-century pieces mixed with pieces from the 1920s. Or a room filled with really beautiful mid-century pieces, and then on the wall an 18th-century Venetian mirror or a classical painting. It works when it’s done correctly.

If you were asked to pair one item of yours with something older or newer, what would the pieces be?

I’m doing it for the show. We’re featuring a rare and spectacular pair of human-carved, life-sized sculptures from the early 19th century paired with a Paul Evans cubist console table.

James Infante.

September 14, 2011 | CityArts 23

AVENUE SHOWS

defined by quality and design

Antiques, Art & Design at the Armory

September 22–25, 2011

EXHIBITOR LIST WITH BOOTH LOCATIONS: Exhibitor A.B. Levy Aiston Fine Art Services Alexander’s Antiques Antique American Wicker The Barakat Gallery The Englishman Fine Art & Antiques Camilla Dietz Bergeron, Ltd. Cavalier Galleries, Inc. Dallas W. Boesendahl Daniels Antiques David Brooker Fine Art Dinan & Chighine Domont Jewelry Dragonette Ltd. F. L. Braswell Fine Art FraMonT N & I Franklin Galerie Curial Fine Arts Gallery Afrodit Gary Rubinstein Antiques Gilden’s Arts Gallery Giraffics Gallery Haynes Fine Art of Broadway Hollis Reh & Shariff Il Segno Del Tempo J. Lohmann Gallery James Infante Jerome Jacalone Fine Art John Atzbach Antiques John Jaffa Antiques Joyce Groussman Jewelry Knollwood Antiques LLC Lame Duck Books

Booth # 56 26 47 64 15 45 24 55A 7 46 81 23 14 27 68 78 2 70 76 32 16 51 41 44 39 28 17 58 59 55B 48 81 38

Exhibitor Linda Bernell Gallery Lobel Modern Inc. Linda Gumb Lynda Willauer Antiques M.S. Rau Antiques LLC Macklowe Gallery Mantiques Modern Marion Harris Mark Helliar Vintage Murano Glass Mary Deeming Michael Pashby Antiques Michael S. Haber Ltd. Milord Antiques Moylan-Smelkinson/The Spare Room Myers Huffman Antiques Nula Thanhauser Antiques and Signature Purses Ophir Gallery Pat Saling Patrick Bavasi Percy’s Silver Philip Chasen Antiques Potterton Books R.M. Barokh Antiques Richters Robert Lloyd Inc. Robin Katz Vintage Jewels Sabbadini Scott Estepp Gallery Steven Neckman Inc. The Silver Fund Stephen Kalms Antiques Valentin Magro William Cook Antiques Yew Tree House Antiques

Booth # 6 36 73 9 53 3 69 66 77 8 31 48 63 43 13 75 29 67 22 54 35 37 65 52 42 20 1 40 20 72 30 21 19 62

Images: courtesy of Dragonette Ltd, Myers–Huffman, Patrick Bavasi, Steven Neckman Inc. 24 CityArts | September 14, 2011

AVENUE SHOWS

defined by quality and design

Antiques, Art & Design at the Armory

September 22–25, 2011

SHOW SCHEDULE, EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS All events are complimentary – Please RSVP at www.avenueshows.com

Thursday, sepTember 22 Show Hours: 11 a.m.–7:30 p.m.

Designer Breakfast Panel Discussion 10 a.m.–11 a.m.

“The Influence of Women in Interior Design,” moderated by Susanna Salk, featuring Ellie Cullman, Celerie Kemble, Amy Lau, Amanda Nisbet and Katie Ridder.

Jewelry Panel Discussion 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

“CIRCA Presents The Art of Collecting Susanna Salk Photo by John Gruen Estate Jewelry,” moderated by Chris Del Gatto, Chairmain and CEO of CIRCA, featuring Camilla Dietz Bergeron, Joyce Groussman and Robin Katz.

FrIday, sepTember 23 Show Hours: 11 a.m.–7:30 p.m.

Designer Breakfast Panel Discussion 10 a.m.–11 a.m.

Front facade of San Simeon

saTurday, sepTember 24 Show Hours: 11 a.m.–7:30 p.m.

“Decorating with Antiques in the Modern World,” moderated by Susanna Salk, featuring Campion Platt, Jamie Drake and Maureen Footer.

Special Presentation 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m

Designer Book Presentation and Signing 12:30 p.m.–1:30 p.m.

The Royal Oak Foundation Lecture 3:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m

“Room for Children: Stylish Places for Sleep and Play”, presented by Susanna Salk.

Book signing to follow presentation

Royal Oak Foundation Lecture 4 p.m.–5 p.m.

“The Legacy of Angelo Donghia” presented by Crans Baldwin, President of Donghia, Inc.

“Maverick’s Country House: William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon,” presented by Victoria Kastner, author and Hearst Castle historian.

Special Presentation 4:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

“All My Worldly Goods”: English Royal Weddings, presented by Curt DiCamillo, Executive Director, National Trust for Scotland Foundation, USA.

“The Timeless Designs of Billy Haines – As Relavant Today as Yesterday” presented

by Patrick Dragonette or Dragonette Ltd.

Exclusive New York City Book Preview Discussion 6:30 p.m.–7:30 p.m.

suNday sepTember 25

“Home Sweet Home: Sumptuous and Bohemian Interiors,” presentation and live discussion with Oberto Gili, Susanna Salk, Milly de Cabrol, and Mary Randolph Carter.

Angelo Donghia’s 72nd St. townhouse

Show Hours: 11 a.m.–7:30 p.m.

PLUS EXCLUSIVE BOOK SIGNINGS IN THE POTTERTON BOOK BOOTH (#37) THROUGHOUT THE SHOW. All events are complimentary – Please RSVP at www.avenueshows.com September 14, 2011 | CityArts 25

THE GRAND BALLROOM AT THE PLAZA HOTEL

Celebrate the art of

hospitality

greatperformances.com | 212.727.2424 26 CityArts | September 14, 2011

AVENUE

SHOWS

defined by quality and design

Antiques, Art & Design at the Armory

Italian Baroque Venetian mirror with carved giltwood frame, circa 1750, from R. M. Barokh Antiques

Designer Committee Co-chairs :

Ellie Cullman and Jamie Drake

September 22 - 25, 2011 The Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, New York City For lecture series, book signing & general information, please visit avenueshows.com or call 646.442.1627

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September 14, 2011 | CityArts 27

Erik Thomsen Asian Art

Full moon rising over fall grasses, with shikishi poem cards Edo Period (1615 – 1868), 17th century, Japan · ink, mineral colors, silver wash and gold leaf on paper Detail from a six-panel folding screen · size: H 67 ¼" × W 144 ½" (171 × 367 cm)

Japanese screens · paintings · makie gold lacquer · bamboo baskets · tea ceramics

Fall Exhibitions: September 12 – October 6 Moon and Fall Grasses 23 East 67th Street gallery October 14 – November 23 Cornelia Thomsen: Stripe Paintings 23 East 67th Street gallery

28 CityArts | September 14, 2011

October 21 – 27 International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show Park Avenue Armory, New York Japanese Art Dealers Association of New York www.jada-ny.org