www.cityartsnyc.com sept. 28–oct. 11, 2011 Volume 3, Issue 15
Why The Help Doesn’t Help Page 22 Stephen King Hacks Himself Page 19 Gadfly and the Virtuoso: Munk and Schwartz Page 4 Brad Pitt Strikes Out Page 20
When Snark Was Art
History of Caricature at Met Page 9
0358_4C_NY_4.917x11.25_13c_HR.pdf
1
11-09-20
8:22 PM
SPECIAL OFFER FOR CITY ARTS READERS!
$10 OFF ALL TICKETS
Expires Oct. 19 Code: CI T YARTS
INSIDE Galleries
Theater
The Gadfly and the Virtuoso by Mario Naves Page 4 Looming Large by John Goodrich Page 6 The Real and Surreal Juxtaposed by Kate Prengel Page 7
The Absurdity of Language, in French and Out by Mark Peikert Page 18
Museums
Sharks, Jets, Sting and Others by Jay Nordlinger Page 11
Moneyball and 50/50 by Armond White Page 20 Henry Jaglom’s Eating by Gregory Solman Page 21 The Help Doesn’t Help by Emma Lockridge Page 22
Jazz
Dance
When Snark Was Art by Armond White Page 9 Classical Music
Television
King Debunks the Art of Horror by John Demetry Page 19 Film
Chicago Jazz Comes to Brooklyn Dancing Through Five Centuries by Howard Mandel Page 13 in Three Days by Joel Lobenthal Page 24 Pop Music Critical Condition by Ben Kessler Page 16
C
M
OUT OF TOWN
Listings Page 25
Y
CM
EDITOR Armond White awhite@manhattanmedia.com
MY
CY
MANAGING EDITOR Mark Peikert mpeikert@manhattanmedia.com
CMY
K
ASSISTANT EDITOR Deb Sperling SENIOR ART CRITIC Lance Esplund SENIOR MUSIC CRITIC Jay Nordlinger
The Strauss Symphony of America Alexander Steinitz, conductor (Vienna) Patricia Nessy, soprano (Vienna) Thomas Sigwald, tenor (Vienna) Dancers from
Vienna Imperial Ballet
Sunday, Jan. 1–2:30 pm
SENIOR DANCE CRITIC Joel Lobenthal
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: John Demetry, Valerie Gladstone, John Goodrich, Amanda Gordon, Ben Kessler, Howard Mandel, Maureen Mullarkey, Mario Naves, Gregory Solman, Melissa Stern, Nicholas Wells
DESIGN/PRODUCTION PRODUCTION/creative director Ed Johnson ejohnson@manhattanmedia.com advertising design Quarn Corley WEB PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Lesley Siegel
PUBLISHER Kate Walsh kwalsh@manhattanmedia.com advertising consultant Adele Mary Grossman maryad@mindspring.com Account Executives Ceil Ainsworth, Mike Suscavage
MANHATTAN MEDIA PRESIDENT/CEO Tom Allon tallon@manhattanmedia.com CFO/COO Joanne Harras jharras@manhattanmedia.com Group Publisher Alex Schweitzer aschweitzer@manhattanmedia.com NEWSPAPER GROUP PUBLISHER Gerry Gavin ggavin@manhattanmedia.com director of interaCtive markeTing & digital strategy Jay Gissen jgissen@manhattanmedia.com Controller Shawn Scott Accounts Manager Kathy Pollyea
WWW.CITYARTSNYC.COM
TICKETS: (212) 721 6500 Info: 1 800 545 7807
salutetovienna.com 2 CityArts | September 28, 2011
lincolncenter.org Produced by Attila Glatz Concerts
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
92Y.org/worlds
92nd Street Y is a world-class, nonprofit community and cultural center that connects you to the worlds of education, the arts, health and wellness, and more. Open yourself to new possibilities.
But you probably knew that. Serving music enthusiasts for over 130 years. Learn, play, listen at 92Y.org/worlds.
SACKBUT.
We’re not simply aesthetes but are trying to make sense of our feelings ... This week’s CityArts finds the right connections to correct the fallacies that arise in the cultural tumult.
THE ORIGINAL NAME FOR TROMBONE?
A
s the Fall Arts season gears up, it’s the amount of cultural gate-keeping that possible to forget what it’s really sets the agenda of any arts season. It can about amidst the excitement of new be found in the Chicago jazz influence shows, discoveries and controversies. This at Roulette, as well as in the new Pop Art issue of CityArts surveys the season’s land- of “Ode to the Bouncer”—an uncanny scape, including Roulette’s jazz hub in depiction of the velvet rope aspect of culBrooklyn, a Balanchine revival in Manhat- tural life. Sometimes even adventurous culturetan and the lingering, puzzling national success of The Help. These are compass seekers face limited choices. Warner points where audiences use art to under- Bros.’ new Blu-Ray version of Citizen Kane is a welcome refurbishing, but the packstand their place in the larger culture. age’s real lure is the We’re not simply aesbonus disc of Orson thetes, but are trying Welles’ magnificent to make sense of our The Magnificent feelings. That’s what Ambersons which, links Robert Schwartz’s alas, is only available art to Stephen King’s at a certain web store. persistent denial of Fortunately, Henry artistry (misusing TCM Jaglom’s egalitarian same as his judgmenEating is revived on tal former perch at a DVD, a 20-year anniweakly entertainment versary that needs— magazine). This week’s and deserves—the CityArts finds the right scrupulous critique connections to correct it receives in these the fallacies that arise pages. in the cultural tumult. Readers should Emma Lockridge jump to www.Citybrings journalistic ArtsNYC.com and shrewdness and perenjoy an exclusive sonal passion to CityArts FORUM scrutinizing The where critics GregHelp, a cultural ory Solman and embarrassment John Demetry join to America’s Civil me in assessing Rights history— the recent Straw and present. The Dogs remake as a feel-good white moment signifysupremacy of The ing the state of Help continues to art appreciation: gain traction. Just Is Peckinpah’s three years after a unnerving original plebiscite where Art or Pop? Does America indulged remake mania lead “post-racial” fanto critical complaitasies, it’s like a sance or collusion? snowball in an avaAbout the cover: lanche: the bigger One of the seaThe Help gets, the On the cover: The Grimaces (Les grimaces), from son’s highlights lower and faster the series Recueil de Grimaces (Collection of we descend. I had Grimaces) Lithograph, lithographed by Delpech, 13 1/8 is Infinite Jest at the Metropolitan sought a bigger pic- x 10 in. (33.3 x 25.4 cm) Museum, a show on ture in my own New The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The the history of cariYork Press review, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959 cature from the 15th but Lockridge deals with the rhetoric of condescension that century to the present. Bouilly’s humorhas grown around its fabrications and ous/cautionary “Grimaces” graces our misconceptions. The Help phenomenon cover because it holds a mirror up to what has gotten worse, but Lockridge gets it every contemporary art lover feels in the cultural hubbub—it’s how honest viewers right. As arts journalism informs and cri- will no doubt respond to Money Pitt—or is tiques, it also has to correct. And that it Brad Ball? Art allows us to see through correction has lots to do with recognizing hype and see ourselves in others.
AN OPEN DOOR TO EXTRAORDINARY WORLDS
LIGHT BULB ARMOND WHITE
September 28, 2011 | CityArts 3
GALLERIES
Exhibit Openings
The Gadfly and the Virtuoso Munk and Schwartz spark the galleries
N
4 CityArts | September 28, 2011
Blue Mountain Gallery: Marcia Clark: “Travels: Paintings & Oil Sketches.” Opens Oct. 4, 530 W. 25th St., 646-486-4730, bluemountaingallery.org. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club: Pokey Park: “El Pensador.” Opens Oct. 4, 15 Gramercy Park South, pokeypark.com.
By Mario Naves ew Yorkers who make a fetish of artistic technique—of traditional verities adroitly set into place—should make a beeline for Babcock Galleries to view a handful of diminutive paintings-on-paper by Robert Schwartz (1947–2000). Schwartz employed gouache, an opaque form of watercolor, to meticulously representational ends, obscuring overt handiwork in the service of rounded volumes, uninflected surfaces and a pearlescent array of earth tones. Bring a magnifying glass to glimpse even the slightest evidence of touch: Schwartz’s precision was inseparable from a self-effacing temperament. He was a devotee of miniatures—of illuminated manuscripts, Netherlandish art and, I would guess, Indian painting. The crystalline approach inherent in The Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves is brought to bear on “Living on Grasshoppers” (1990), Schwartz’s metaphorical tableau about—well, it’s hard to say. Consider the scene: a proscenium is set up in the center of a courtyard surrounded by vaguely Mediterranean buildings. The stage is littered with art historical reproductions and occupied by four nudes—one woman and three men. A clothed woman of regal bearing sits on a stone column. She’s being presented with a series of canvases for her approval; she responds to one canvas with a highly affected gesture. (We don’t see what’s on any of these paintings.) Leaning on the stage are two older, working-class women; one engages in a fruitless conversation with the nude woman, the other gazes with admiration at a beefy male. At stage right is a middlemanager type, hand to his forehead, looking askance. The picture is airless, the context trans-historical, the tenor homoerotic and the humor mock-satiric. Metaphor is wrapped tightly within so many different guises that its purpose is confirmed even as its range is rendered moot. Some of Schwartz’s figures—his actors, really—appear in several pictures. The gray-haired woman at the center of “Living On Grasshoppers” is also seen in “Three Virtues, Civil in Domestic” (1991).
ArtGate Gallery: Peter Gregorio: “The Many Worlds Interpretation.” Opens Oct. 6, 520 W. 27th St., #101, 646-455-0985, artgateny.com.
Visual Arts Gallery: “The Masters Series: Edward Sorel.” Opens Oct. 7, 601 W. 26th St., 15th Fl., 212-592-2145, sva.edu. Last Chance Exhibits Heller Gallery: Jeannet Iskandar: “Trans Form.” Ends Oct. 8, 420 W. 14th St., 212-414-4014, hellergallery.com. Le Petit Versailles: Alexis Pace: “DisEmbodied/Re-Embodied.” Ends Sept. 30, 346 E. Houston St., 212-529-8815, alliedproductions. org/le-petit-versailles. Art Events Lower East Side Art Gallery Tour: Enjoy a guided tour of this week’s top seven gallery exhibits in the downtown center for contemporary art. Oct. 1, 196 Bowery, nygallerytours.com; 1, $20. Not Festival: On horns, hair, hens, haze and other (Orgi)anic things: 3RD Class Citizen, Luis Lara Malavacias & others present two weeks of site-specific installations, art exhibitions, dance classes, workshops, screenings and more. Ends Oct. 8, notfestival.blogspot.com. Robert Schwartz’s “Living on Grasshoppers” (1990), gouache on paper, 8 x 8 1/2 inches, part of Babcock Galleries Robert Schwartz exhibit. Courtesy of Babcock Galleries
A burly gent with curly hair can be seen striking a heroic pose in “Perspective At The Foot of the Tower” (1992) and tolerating the lament of a friend in “While You Are Waiting, It Is Only Fitting” (1993). Viewing Schwartz’s pieces en masse strengthens the theatrical nature of the compositions. Imagine an impeccably choreographed blend of the High Renaissance, Giorgio de Chirico and Tom of Finland, and you’ll get a good idea of Schwartz’s quixotic accomplishment. Actually, it’s not that quixotic. Schwartz can be fairly neatly fitted into the tradition of Magical Realism, a loosely aligned group of American painters— Jared French is one; Paul Cadmus, another— drawn to enigmatic narratives, hushed symbolism, painstaking craft and the male nude, both as historical touchstone (cf. Michelangelo) and object of adoration. Schwartz’s cloistered dioramas don’t necessarily trigger a “been there, done that” response. Their crisp detachment is preferable to French’s treacly mysticism
and, for that matter, John Currin’s unctuous pastiches of Durer and Internet porn. But Schwartz’s pursuit of “certain truths about being human” is too occluded, too remote and finite, for philosophical access. Which means they subsist primarily as feats of painterly virtuosity and, as such, have much to recommend.
Robert Schwartz Through Oct. 27, Babcock Galleries, 724 5th Ave., 212-767-1852, www.babcockgalleries.com.
H
uffing and puffing through myriad YouTube postings, navigating New York City’s art districts on his trusty Schwinn, James Kalm has graduated from being a guerilla videographer to an art world fixture—a presence as ubiquitous as the umpteenth condescending gallerista or Jeff Koons’ shit-eating smile. Kalm is more endearing than either— quirkier, too. These qualities are readily apparent in his POV videos of gallery openings, museum press previews and sundry other public events. Document-
Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965–2006: The Public Art Fund presents a free, outdoor retrospective of LeWitt’s career, with 27 works spanning over 40 years. Ends Dec. 2, City Hall Park, publicartfund.org. ing the art scene with dogged persistence, Kalm has received kudos from out-oftowners eager for a glimpse of goings-on about New York City. He’s also earned the enmity of dealers whose sense of exclusivity frowns upon grassroots communitarianism. Watching Kalm being shushed out the door by a functionary at Pace Gallery—yes, you can find it online—is to realize that art is, you know, not for just anyone. Community counts a lot for Kalm as it does for Loren Munk, whose paintings are on display in Location Location, Location: Mapping The New York Art World at Lesley Heller Workspace. “James Kalm” is, in fact, Munk’s alias and one of the art world’s most badly kept secrets. Alongside his roles as “vlogger” and artist, Munk writes for The Brooklyn Rail, a journal that’s made a niche for itself as an arts community booster. Kalm/Munk is a geographer intent on
Continued on page 5
colors and with lumpish clarity, each canvas functions as an art world “Who’s Who” and “Who’s Where.” Munk has done his research. Take time to unravel his text-heavy pictures and you’ll discover not only the addresses of Alfred Stieglitz’s ground-breaking PhotoSecessionist Gallery and the fabled Cedar Tavern, but the studios of Edward Hopper, Ad Reinhardt and Eric Fischl, as well 212-675-4106 as those of LaPlacaCohen half-remembered figures like 212-675-4106 LaPlacaCohen Herman Cherry, Richard Nonas and AarJR
on Ben-Shmuel. Esoterica is embraced encyclopedic necessity. This makes for art for the sake of accuracy; for the sake of that is daunting in its details, impressively obsession, too. focused, a tad invasive and a little eccentric. Nodding to Edward Tufte, the Yale acade- Maybe a lot eccentric—extremity of charmician who pioneered data visualization, acter accounts for a lot of Munk’s charm. Munk is a statistician-cum-self-made folk Location, Location, Location is where the painter—an artist driven by inescapable cliché “one of a kind” earns its keep. categorical imperatives. There are pictorial smarts at play in Munk’s images. He Location, Location, Location; Mapping the traverses the divide between language and New York Art World SEPTEMBER 28, Workspace, 2011 imagePublication: more nimblyCity thanArts one might,Insertion at first, date: Through Oct. 16, Lesley Heller 54 Publication: City Arts Insertion date: SEPTEMBER 28, 2011 suppose. But the work is powered more by Orchard St., 212-410-6120, www.lesleyheller.com. PAGE - FALL PREVIEW , 4C NEWS
JR PAGE - FALL PREVIEW
, 4C NEWS
it’s it’s time time we we Met Met THE NEW SEASON THE NEW SEASON
Loren Munk’s “The Bowery and the New Lower East Sidet” (2008-10), oil on linen, 60” x 36” inches, part of Lesley Heller Workspace’s Location, Location, Location; Mapping the New York Art World exhibit. Courtesy of Lesley Heller Workspace.
INFINITE JEST: CARICATURE AND SATIRE FROM TOAND LEVINE INFINITE JEST:LEONARDO CARICATURE Through MarchLEONARDO 4 SATIRE FROM TO LEVINE Through March 4 NEW GALLERIES FOR THE ART OF THE LANDS, TURKEY, IRAN, NEWARAB GALLERIES FOR THE ART OF CENTRAL ANDTURKEY, LATER SOUTH THE ARABASIA, LANDS, IRAN, ASIA Opening CENTRALNovember ASIA, AND1LATER SOUTH ASIA Member begin Openingpreviews November 1 October 26 Member previews begin October 26
STIEGLITZ AND HIS ARTISTS: MATISSE TO O’KEEFFE Opens October 13 STIEGLITZ AND HIS ARTISTS: MATISSE TO O’KEEFFE Opens October 13 THE GAME OF KINGS: MEDIEVAL IVORY CHESSMEN FROM THEMEDIEVAL ISLE OF LEWIS THE GAME OF KINGS: IVORY Opens November at ISLE OF LEWIS CHESSMEN FROM15 THE The Cloisters Museum Opens November 15 atand Gardens The Cloisters Museum and Gardens
Join today at metmuseum.org/join Join today at metmuseum.org/join
Complete fall schedule at metmuseum.org Complete fall schedule at metmuseum.org
Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine is made possible by The Schiff Foundation. Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Ceil & Michael E. Pulitzer Foundation, Inc., and the National Endowment for the Arts. “Wonder of the Age”: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900 is made possible by MetLife Foundation. Additional support is provided by Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine is made possible by The Schiff Foundation. Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Novartis Corporation. It was organized by the Museum Rietberg Zurich in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe is made possible by the Iris & B. Gerald Ceil & Michael E. Pulitzer Foundation, Inc., and the National Endowment for the Arts. “Wonder of the Age”: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900 is made possible by MetLife Foundation. Additional support is provided by Cantor Foundation. The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen from the Isle of Lewis is made possible by the Michel David-Weill Fund. Above, clockwise from center: Georgia O’Keeffe, Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, 1931, Novartis Corporation. It was organized by the Museum Rietberg Zurich in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe is made possible by the Iris & B. Gerald The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1952; Head (detail), Nigeria, Ife, 12th–15th century, Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth; Attributed to Payag (painter) and Mir ‘Ali (calligrapher), Shah Jahan Riding Cantor Foundation. The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen from the Isle of Lewis is made possible by the Michel David-Weill Fund. Above, clockwise from center: Georgia O’Keeffe, Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, 1931, a Stallion (detail), Page from the Kevorkian Album, India (Mughal court at Agra), ca. 1628, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Rogers Fund and The Kevorkian Foundation Gift, 1955; Chess Pieces in the Forms of a The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1952; Head (detail), Nigeria, Ife, 12th–15th century, Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth; Attributed to Payag (painter) and Mir ‘Ali (calligrapher), Shah Jahan Riding King and Queen, ca. 1150–1200, Scandinavian, probably Norway, found on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, 1831, The British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.; Plaque a Stallion (detail), Page from the Kevorkian Album, India (Mughal court at Agra), ca. 1628, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Rogers Fund and The Kevorkian Foundation Gift, 1955; Chess Pieces in the Forms of a (detail), Reign of al-Hakam II (961–76), late 10th–early 11th century, Spain, Córdoba or Madinat al-Zahra, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913; and Louis Léopold Boilly, The Grimaces (Les King and Queen, ca. 1150–1200, Scandinavian, probably Norway, found on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, 1831, The British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.; Plaque grimaces), detail, from the series Recueil de Grimaces (Collection of Grimaces), 1823–28, lithographed by Delpech, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959. (detail), Reign of al-Hakam II (961–76), late 10th–early 11th century, Spain, Córdoba or Madinat al-Zahra, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913; and Louis Léopold Boilly, The Grimaces (Les grimaces), detail, from the series Recueil de Grimaces (Collection of Grimaces), 1823–28, lithographed by Delpech, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959.
MET-0091-FallPreview_CityArts_7.341x8.5(1.16)_Sept28_v2.indd 1 MET-0091-FallPreview_CityArts_7.341x8.5(1.16)_Sept28_v2.indd 1
met.org/metexh met.org/metexh
capturing each and every facet of his particular sub-culture. From the humblest Red Hook living room to the poshest Blue Chip gallery, no venue is beyond his ken or interest; all are an integral component of that living, evolving and consternating thing known as “the art world.” Munk’s paintings—labyrinthine diagrams of criss-crossing linear networks, innumerable factoids and the stray slogan (“There are over eight million paintings in the NAKED CITY, this is only one of them”)— embody a sense of the city’s cultural identity and standing. Location Location, Location consists of eight large paintings and one small study dedicated to a specific area of the city: Soho, the Bowery, the West Village (home of the famed Artist’s Club), East 10th Street and the Village of the Damned (the Lower East Side circa The Mudd Club and Keith Haring) and The New Lower East Side of Whole Foods and The New Museum. Munk has been around long enough—he set up shop in Red Hook in 1969—to witness the scene’s aesthetic, commercial and logistical shifts and, not least, the role of the real estate market in shaping them. (“What Manhattan Makes Brooklyn Takes” underlines the artist’s eternal search for affordable studio space.) Rendered in bold
HEROIC AFRICANS: LEGENDARY LEADERS, ICONIC Through January 29 HEROIC SCULPTURES AFRICANS: LEGENDARY LEADERS, ICONIC SCULPTURES Through January 29 WONDER OF THE AGE: MASTER PAINTERS OF INDIA,OF 11001900 September 28 WONDER THE AGE:Opens MASTER PAINTERS OF INDIA, 11001900 Opens September 28
Explore the New Season Explore the New Season
September 28, 2011 | CityArts 5 9/15/11 3:01 PM 9/15/11 3:01 PM
Looming Large Barnet’s Cards and Canvasses, Ingersol’s Fantasies By John Goodrich
F
ew, if any, artists have as lengthy exhibition histories as Will Barnet (some 75 years and counting). More impressive still, few have so regularly renewed their art with wholesale changes of style. The large retrospective exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Academy Museum provides a luminous overview of his evolution through stages of Social Realism, Synthetic Cubism, hardedged abstraction, lyrical realism and back to abstraction. By contrast, Alexandre Gallery’s current exhibition provides an intimate view of a seldom-seen portion of his oeuvre: the small works on paper from the ’40s and ’50s. Like his canvases from the period, these nearly 20 mixed-media works are taut, abstract patterns inspired by Native American motifs. But unlike his paintings— which possess a certain edgy poise, thanks to their deliberate line and color—these small works radiate a playful spontaneity. For them, Barnet employed a familiar palette of earth colors, typically oranges and reddish-browns punctuated by green and blue-gray notes. These are applied freely, as if there were no gap between his impulses and marks. Could this be explained by the casualness of their facture? All were executed on old postcards and gallery announcements, sometimes (according to the informative essay in the National Academy’s catalog) when the artist was engaged in telephone conversations. One imagines the artist cleaning out a drawer, and realizing, mid-way to the trashcan, that the old cards had one last use. And quite a use it is. These are no doodles; they have the vigor of complete, independent artworks. Bits of original handwriting and postmarks inspire intense, jostling patterns of totemic shapes. An announcement card from the Delacorte Gallery, with its name circled, is covered with horizontal notes of ochre, sienna and green, rising in tiers around a
6 CityArts | September 28, 2011
central vertical vein, as buoyant and resolute as a seedling. On another card, a kind of cartouche circumscribes the address, which has been overlaid by a stick figure with dramatically lifting arms. Peek into the gallery’s larger room, where a group show includes one of Barnet’s larger paintings from the same period. Over 3 feet tall, it features the same racing, angular shapes and modulated hues, but committed to the canvas with studied care. Though tiny in their dimensions, the compulsive designs of these cards feel almost as big.
Will Barnet at 100 Through Dec. 31, National Academy, 1083 5th Ave., 212-369-4880, www.nationalacademy.org Will Barnet: Works on Paper from the 1940s and 1950s Through Oct. 15, Alexandre Gallery, 41 E. 57th St., www.alexandregallery.com. While adhering to a fairly conservative realism, the paintings in Tonya Ingersol’s previous exhibitions at June Kelly resonated with complex references to race and class. One painting memorably depicted African Americans and whites performing a ritualized dance at a masquerade ball. In another, an elegantly dressed woman labored on a half-finished tapestry picturing an infamous slave-trading depot. Other paintings referenced classical art and myths. Her latest paintings, then, are something of a surprise. Though still figurative, they capture fairytale-like scenes in large, exuberant patchworks of color. Their minimally modeled subjects—often builtup three-dimensionally in paint—defy all usual concepts of scale and perspective, imparting a fantastical naïveté totally at odds with her earlier work. The fairytale characters populating these scenes are familiar, but combined in new, mystifying ways. Their busy, bright elements might easily have added up to mere decorative clutter, but the artist imparts to them a surprisingly clear order—and compelling pictorial rhythms in such paintings as “Mirror, Mirror” (2009), in which the flaming yellow-greens of a lawn give way to the subtler, textured band of wisteria and varying dark verticals of figures. The viewer
Tonya Ingersol’s “Garden of Delight” (2009), oil on birch panel, 90 x 60 inches, part of the June Kelly Gallery’s Tonya Ingersol: Through the Woods exhibit. Courtesy of June Kelly Gallery
arrives, eventually, at the only notes of deep blue: the Queen of Heart’s eyes, and a tiny cup clutched by another figure—the Mad Hatter? In “Change of Tides” (2009), a road of yellow brick nicely winds into the depths and to a discreet exchange between the Cowardly Lion and Tin Woodman. Other figures from Alice in Wonderland and Little Red Riding Hood put in appearances. Apart from the common background in fairytales, their relationships are obscure, and this predilection for multiple, oblique connotations remains the strongest connection with the artist’s earlier realistic work. For me, these narrational gambits are less interesting
than the pictorial ones. Why is the White Rabbit hanging out in Red Riding Hood’s “hood” in a painting titled “Apple of My Eye” (2010)? A crate of red fruit teases, but doesn’t illuminate. In “The Battle of the Seasons” (2010), a few snowflakes and a serpent’s flaming breath lend credence to the painting’s title, but what really sticks in the mind are the implacable intervals of the face of the Duchess from Alice in Wonderland, presiding like an enormous rising moon.
Tonya Ingersol: Through the Woods Through Oct. 4, June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer St., 212-226-1660, www.junekellygallery.com
Real and Surreal Juxtaposed D’Apres Nature (and music) Rescue magritte By Kate Prengel
J
uxtaposition is educational. Set two unrelated objects side by side, and they’ll awaken entirely new ideas in the spectator. This, anyway, is the driving principle behind an engrossing exhibit— La Carte d’Apres Nature—at the Matthew Marks Gallery. At first La Carte d’Apres Nature can feel chaotic. The rooms are cut into odd, triangular shapes. Nineteenth-century photographs hang next to 21st-century audio installations. A sharp-edged diorama sits across the room from a case of old magazines. All this can be a bit overwhelming. But gradually your eyes and ears adjust, and chaos gives way to a strange kind of counterpoint. Thomas Demand, a photographer in his own right, curated the show. It’s built around three paintings by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, and Demand even took the show’s title from a magazine that Magritte used to edit. But there is much more to the show than Magritte. From my point of view, the show’s real star is the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, who has some 70 prints on display. These are wonderfully strange and warm photographs. They show us dowdy tourists looking at dreamlike mountainscapes; pink skies over castles, with telephone wires in the foreground; woodsy hollows, where a plastic brontosaurus sticks his neck up out of a naturalistic lake. Ghirri’s photos are homelike and selfcontained; each one brings together disparate elements to form a complete little world, bathed in soft light and governed by its own rules. The jagged mountain peaks do not clash with the frumpy tourists, who stand so awkwardly to look at the view. The ad for a soft drink does not take away from the beauty of the lush green park. Rather, these juxtapositions remind us just how rich and full the world can be. But the show’s other great star is Demand, the curator, who uses his own juxtapositions to change the way we look at familiar works. At this point I should admit that I’ve never liked Magritte. I’ve always found him cold and conceptual, emotionally detached. But I’m glad to say that Demand forced me to look at Magritte with new eyes. Here’s how: wandering through the exhibit, I started to hear strains of music. When I followed the sounds back
to their source, I found a video-and-sound installation by Rodney Graham, featuring a song by the same Rodney Graham. Both the video and the song are incredibly, oppressively sad. Graham bikes backwards through a park, tripping on acid, with the Queen of Hearts clipped to his bicycle wheel. He sits, drinks from a thermos and plays with a clothespin.
Meanwhile, the turntable drones heavily about lost love (“I’m the ‘i’ they forgot to dot”), with a mournful, crunchy electric guitar in back. The guitar riffs leak out to the next room, where one of the show’s three Magritte paintings hangs. And suddenly, in the middle of all that melodramatic music, I understood Magritte’s emotional side. The
painting is called “l’univers demasque,” or “the unmasked universe.” A roofless building stands in the foreground, looking like an astonished face; its windows have been stripped of their glass, and it’s completely open to the sky. Huge white clouds pass overhead, the grass and boulders below look stiff and unsympathetic, and there are cubic blue buildings hovering in the sky. Normally, I would have found the painting’s big, unyielding shapes to
Continued on page 8
THE NATIONAL ACADEMY NEWLY RENOVATED
Will Barnet, The Blue Robe, 1962, oil on canvas, (detail)
EXPERIENCE AMERICA’S ART EXHIBITIONS : On view through 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 28, 2011 | CityArts 7
D’Apres Nature Continued from page 7 be simply oppressive. But with Graham’s song playing in the background, I suddenly saw Magritte as a victim himself, oppressed by uncaring nature. Something of the same mood can be found in Sigmar Polke’s photographs, which hang in a nearby room. This rather dreary series shows us lonely, awkward men slouching sideways, like blasted trees; buttons arranged in the shape of a tree; a hand, slightly distorted, all alone in the frame. Man, apparently, has been defeated by nature. I want to end on a positive note, though, with one of my favorite pieces. Chris Garofalo has produced a series of 20 porcelain sculptures of desert plants, which sit in a big old-fashioned wooden case. Once again, these pieces surprise us by creating an unlikely combination. The cacti and succulents here are thickly glazed and glossy; they’re also plump and just a little bit larger than life. In other words, they look man-made. But that doesn’t stop them from also being highly
lesley heller workspace September 7 - October 16, 2011
GALLERY 1
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 8 CityArts | September 28, 2011
Chris Garofalo, “Protea Mus Auris,” 2010, Glazed porcelain, 14 x 11 x 7 inches, 36 x 28 x 18 cm © Chris Garofalo, Courtesy Rhona Hoffman Gallery
detailed and naturalistic. The sculptures’ charm is that they are neither purely realistic nor purely kitsch; they combine both elements to tell us something new about man’s relationship to the natural world.
La Carte d’Apres Nature Through Oct. 8, Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 W. 22nd St., 212-243-0200, www.matthewmarks.com.
Japan on a Screen Multi-media show brings Far East near By Phyllis Workman Japanese folding panel screens are a unique art form that Erik Thomsen Asian Art makes one of the highlights of this fall season in an exhibition titled Moon and Fall Grasses. It’s a perfectly timed show, especially when visitors to the gallery stop and behold the representative artifact “Musashino Plain, with poem cards.” This 17th-century panel dating from the Edo Period (1615–1868) stands 67 by 144 inches. Its symbolic representation of the fall season’s flora puts a viewer in the mood to contemplate nature. Part of the purpose of Japanese folding panel screens is to provide visual representations of nature that relate a viewer to his surroundings. “Musashino Plain” does this by separating the elements—moon, grass and descriptive text (poem cards)—to place life, natural phenomena and human perception in context with each other. The panel’s art achieves beauty to the degree that it achieves harmony with its separate parts. At Erik Thomsen, the exhibition harmo-
nizes with the current climate and time of year through its material. Made from ink, mineral colors, silver wash and gold leaf on paper, Musashino makes outside nature part of the indoor experience. By Japanese tradition, the fall is a period of closure preceding rebirth. The panels on exhibit at Erik Thomsen provide picturesque recall that this season is also a time of industry, reflection and planning for what Japanese agricultural tradition calls “the fallow winter.” There are over a dozen art works on view here, in assorted media. Screens, ceramics and scrolls are the work of artists who practice in the interior art tradition—from the 17th century to the present. It’s a multi-media show. The folding panels stand side by side with shikishi— the poem card art form that marries the art practice of collage to literature and to painting. These screens are equally vintage and modern. They awaken the senses on several levels. A trip to Moon and Fall Grasses is like an artful trip to the Orient.
Moon and Fall Grasses Through Oct. 6, Erik Thomsen Asian Art, 23 E. 67th St., 212-288-2588, www.erikthomsen.com.
MUSEUMS
The paliTz gallery presenTs
The prinTs Of seOng mOy OcTOber 3–December 8, 2011
Enrique Chagoya (American, born in Mexico, 1953) after George Cruikshank (British, 1792-1878), “The Head Ache,” 2010 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Stewart S. MacDermott Fund, 2010
When Snark Was Art Met’s history of caricature shocks and delights By Armond White
I
n our current, celebrity-obsessed media, snark is an attempt at leverage, a means of both wielding and flattering power that deflects from the perpetrator. Snark is cowardly caricature, but the Met’s Infinite Jest show provides an enlightening background to what caricature truly is and why modern day snark is deficient. Beginning with Leonardo DaVinci’s 1490 “Head of a Man in Profile,” the Met shows how caricature began in the scientific desire to know more about our species. “Caricature” comes from Italian carico and caricare, “to load” and “exaggerate.” Viewing the centuries of examples that follow Leonardo brings us to realize: Snark deprives us of empathic curiosity. The Infinite Jest show defines the public practice of deliberate mischaracterization as an art form. It is a history of “Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine.” Despite displays of pencil and full color drawings that move from art to tabloid illustration, this wide-ranging
show has been largely ignored by the media. Probably because it especially suits the Internet age of anarchy, spite and partisanship, which is not automatically an art form but easily a shameless and hostile corruption of journalism. Infinite Jest (the title quotes the gravedigger scene from Hamlet: “I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest”) presents the irony of what mankind’s wit leaves behind. The show forces a judgment on the habit and value of media characterization. Each drawing raises the question of truth and the recognition of ourselves in others. Invective doesn’t become literature just because a blogger who thinks he’s clever abandons rules of decorum and truth; in these drawings, a practiced hand mediates ire with style and curiosity into the nature of human form and observable behavior. The great names are represented: Brueghel, Hogarth, Daumier, Cruikshank, Nast and less familiar but key figures such as Thomas Rowlandson, who importantly mixed caricature with public and political satire to create a new, particularly British genre. Using wit to criticize, Rowlandson
Monday thru Friday 10 am–6 pm Saturday 11 am–4 pm
Palitz Gallery | Lubin House 11 East 61st Street New York, NY 10065 lubinhouse.syr.edu
syracuse universiTy schOlarship in acTiOn
The Palitz Gallery is a member of the Syracuse University Art Galleries
Irene Christensen Metamorphic
Paintings, drawings and books
October 3 thru October 28, 2011 Opening Reception Wed., Oct. 5, 5-8 PM
“These new paintings by Irene Christensen are inspired by her many stays in Costa Rica. Through the works she explores their history and culture.Colored inks and gouache are used to enhance the contrast to the softness of the rice paper. She has taken the small gold artifacts and made them part of us.”
Atlantic Gallery
135 W 29th St. Suite 601 New York, New York 10001 (212) 219-3183
Continued on page 10 September 28, 2011 | CityArts 9
Infinite Jest
Museums American Museum of Natural History: “The Butterfly Conservatory.” Opens Oct. 8. “Picturing Science: Museum Scientists & Imaging Technologies.” Ends June 24, 2012, Central Park West at W. 79th St., 212-769-5100, amnh.org.
Continued from page 9 drew with daunting purpose and integrity. What remains is his fully imagined draftsmanship, not simply the urge to snipe, The great caricaturists realized common vulnerabilities and strengths as signs of character—these artworks survive without political urgency because they detail essential traits even while addressing social controversy. Smug self-satisfaction (the basis of snark) is not enough to justify museum sanction. That’s why Siegfried Woldhek’s “The Bush Years: A Summary 2008” is outclassed in this exhibition. It’s insipid use of graphs and chart lines to exaggerate a former president’s face is facile and unimaginative, an attack typical of an era whose humor won’t likely stand the test of artistry. In Infinite Jest, the daunting past of artistic caricature and satire overshadows contemporary snark. A superb piece of visual characterization like Foulguier’s 1773 “All Who See Me Jeer at Me” marks the difference between insight, empathy and simple defamation. It should be studied by all those journalists who misused the terms satire, mockery, spoof and caricature when promoting the Obamas-as-radicals New Yorker magazine cover. Infinite Jest is more than a fascinating exhibition of holdings in the Met’s Department of Drawing and Prints collection; it’s also a panoply of human frailties. The show’s modern relevance cries out in Louis-Leopold Boilly’s “The Grimaces,” where caricature was indeed more than just a tool of power and flattery but a reflection of common anxieties. Like Leonardo’s early exaggerations of human deformities, Boilly dramatized varieties of stress and huddled-together—mobbed—social and psychological concerns that speak to the present condition. It’s a great caricature. It’s also a timeless mirror.
Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine Through March 4, 2012, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710, www.metmuseum.org.
10 CityArts | September 28, 2011
The Jewish Museum: “Maya Zack: Living Room.” Ends Oct. 23. “The Snowy Day & the Art of Ezra Jack Keats.” Ends Jan. 29, 2012, 1109 5th Ave., 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. El Museo del Barrio: “The (S) Files 2011.” Ends Jan. 8, 2012, 1230 5th Ave., 212-831-7272, elmuseo.org. Museum of American Illustration: “Rolling Stone & The Art of the Record Review.” Ends Oct. 22, 128 E. 63rd St., 212-838-2560, societyillustrators.org. Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology: “Sporting Life.” Ends Nov. 5. “Daphne Guinness.” Ends Jan. 7, 2012, 7th Ave. at W. 27th St., 212-217-4530, fitnyc.edu. Museum of Modern Art: “De Kooning: A Retrospective.” Ends Jan. 9, 2012. “Thing/ Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978.” Ends Jan. 16. “New Photography 2011.” Ends Jan. 16, 2012, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400, moma.org. Rubin Museum of Art: “Pilgrimage & Faith.” Ends Oct. 24. “Human Currents.” Ends Nov. 13. “Once Upon Many Times.” Ends Jan. 30, 2012, 150 W. 17th St., 212-620-5000, rmanyc.org. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: “Pop objects & Icons from the Guggenheim Collection.” Opens Sept. 30. “Intervals: Nicola López.” Oct. 11–25. “Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity.” Ends Sept. 28. “THE HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010: HansPeter Feldman.” Ends Nov. 2, 1071 5th Ave., guggenheim.org. Anonymous British, 18th century, “Top and Tail,” 1777, Hand-colored etching, plate: 12 11/16 x 7 13/16 in. (32.3 x 19.9 cm), sheet: 14 1/16 x 8 9/16 in. (35.7 x 21.8 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959
Studio Museum: “Spiral: Perspectives on an African American Art Collective.” Ends Oct. 23. “Evidence of Accumulation.” Ends Oct. 23. “Lyle Ashton Harris: Self/Portrait.” 144 W. 125th St., 212-864-4500, studiomuseum.org.
CLASSICAL
Sharks, Jets, Sting and Others Touring a trio of musical events By Jay Nordlinger
T
he setup in Avery Fisher Hall was this: West Side Story, the movie, played on a big screen. The New York Philharmonic played the orchestra part. The singing was left to the people in the movie (or those who dubbed for them). By some wizardry, technicians were able to separate the voices from the orchestra in the soundtrack. Very cool (or, as they say in the movie, coolie cool, boy). Our conductor this evening was David Newman, who made some remarks to the audience before the performance began. He pointed out that some of the movie’s scenes were filmed on the very site we were now occupying. He also introduced some special guests. “Representing the Jets,” he said, was Russ Tamblyn, who played Riff in the movie. The crowd went wild. And “representing the Sharks” was George Chakiris, who played Bernardo. The crowd went wilder. MGM’s lion roared— more cheers—and the show began. In general, the Philharmonic made a poor sound on this Thursday night. It was not really the sound of a major orchestra. And they committed some sloppiness. Newman did yeoman work in trying to keep the orchestra in synch with the movie. He mainly succeeded. The success of the evening rested on the music that Leonard Bernstein wrote (and the lyrics supplied by Stephen Sondheim). Bernstein himself made a recording of West Side Story with classical musicians. This was in 1984. His Maria was Kiri Te Kanawa, his Tony was José Carreras and his Anita was Tatiana Troyanos. In a kind of cameo, Marilyn Horne sings “Somewhere.” Carreras is a bit funny, singing the Polish American who woos the Puerto Rican girl, and doing this in a strong Spanish accent.
The story goes that Bernstein wanted the tenor Neil Shicoff, but, in some terrible mix-up, requested Carreras instead. Personally, I doubt that much of Bernstein’s classical music will last. His violin concerto (called a Serenade for Solo Violin, Strings, Harp, blah, blah, blah) is a good piece. So are a few others. But in general, I think the classical music will die out when his friends and groupies do. West Side Story is a different matter. As long as there is something like musical theater in the world, it will be sung, played, danced to and loved. It is a masterpiece. It has, what? Seven, eight, nine, 10 immortal songs? Isn’t that enough for one lifetime? For eight? EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK Passing through security at the 92nd Street Y, a man said, “I’m here to see Sting.” The British rock star was to have a hand in a new chamber piece, written by Stanley Silverman. His collaborators were the musicians of the Kalichstein-LaredoRobinson Trio. By the time I arrived at the hall, ushers were out of programs. This is a mistake that should not happen in a professional concert series. You pay your money, they should give you lights, toilets, music—and programs. Let me tell you what I gleaned from the 92nd Street Y website: The new piece is Silverman’s Piano Trio No. 2, “Reveille.” It was commissioned by the composer’s son, Ben, in honor of a friend of Ben’s who was killed on 9/11. Not having a program, I can’t tell you what the piece is supposed to be “about”— though I know it’s a “9/11 piece” of some type. Nor can I tell you what a person is supposed to think. All the better: I can only tell you what I heard. The first movement is eclectic, containing an assortment of styles and an assortment of moods. The music is bleak, reflective, playful. Pretty, sad, elegiac.
Your takeaway ?... Gallery-quality art for your home or office. The SquareOutdoor Outdoor The38th 39thGracie Gracie Square
Art Show
East East End End Avenue Avenue 84th to to 88th 88th Streets Street from 84th Saturday, October Saturday, October2nd 1st 3rd Sunday, October 2nd 10:00 p.m. 10:00a.m. AM – 5:00 PM Rain or Shine Free Admission www.graciesquareartshow.info 212.459.4455
Personally, I doubt that much of Bernstein’s classical music will last
Continued on page 12
Presented by
Proceeds fund the restoration and maintenance of Carl Schurz Park
CSC ART SHOW AD 1-2 PAGE VERTICA1 1
September 28, 2011 | CityArts 11 9/16/10 5:59:21 PM
Classical
Music & Opera Bed-Stuy Restoration: Mos Def & members of the Brooklyn Philharmonic play Derek Bermel’s arrangements of Mos Def’s music. The program also features Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together.” Oct. 8, 1368 Fulton St., Brooklyn, bphil. org; 8, free.
Continued from page 11 Mysterious, squirmy, distracted. There is a hint of an Ives-like remembrance. There are dances, which sound a little Hebraic, then a little Latin American. There are songs—instrumental songs—that are neither happy nor unhappy. An interesting ambivalence prevails. In the second movement comes a real song, if you will, and it was sung by our star, Sting. He sang roughly. And it took me a while to figure out what language he was singing in. Finally, I heard the word “chimney-sweepers,” followed by the word “dust.” The third and final movement brings more eclecticism, much more. Jazz, bluegrass, easy listening, rock ‘n’ roll. Modernist feints. A touch of Claude Bolling, a touch of Edgar Meyer. I’m not sure the various elements of this work ever really cohere. And I’m quite sure the work grows too long, trying the patience even of a sympathetic listener. I often quote Earl Wild: “Music ought to say what it has to say, then get off the stage.” I’m sure of this, too: that Stanley Silverman was utterly sincere when writing his piece, and that this sincerity has a winningness all its own. CAPTAIN VON TRAPP DOES KING HARRY Nine days after the West Side Story evening, another Philharmonic evening began with Wagner: the Overture and Bacchanal from Tannhäuser. On the podium was the orchestra’s music director, Alan Gilbert. The orchestra’s sound was much
Carnegie Hall: The Mariinsky Orchestra performs in “Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg” as part of Carnegie Hall’s 120th anniversary celebration. Oct. 5, 6 & 9–11, 881 7th Ave., carnegiehall.org. Roulette Performance Space: Violinist Mari Kimura performs 4 new works for violin, electronics & integrative graphics, as part of the New York Electronic Art Festival. Oct. 9, 509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn, roulette.org; 8, $15.
The New York Philharmonic’s performance of Henry V. Photo courtesy of Chris Lee
better than it had been for West Side Story. But Wagner was let down. His overture got too loud too soon, and was therefore robbed of its climaxes. You know that swirly thrill? Absent. The strings kept sawing away at the same dynamic level. The overture was without its magic, its scintillation. The horns were solid and unflubbing, which was nice. But they also lacked suppleness, simply bulling straight ahead.
Two violinists, however, gave pleasure. They were Glenn Dicterow, the concertmaster, and Sheryl Staples, the No. 2, and in their music they were sweetness itself. How about the Bacchanal, the Venusberg music? It ought to have an achy, yearny feeling. The notes were present, but not the feeling. The main work on this program was the score that William Walton wrote for Henry
V, meaning the Laurence Olivier film of 1944. An actor played upon Avery Fisher Hall’s stage, and he was Christopher Plummer, commanding at 81. He resorted to the use of a microphone. But he did not resort to the use of a script, having his (ample) material memorized. On the podium, Alan Gilbert was an excellent, alert manager of affairs. The orchestra played with rhythmic crispness. To single out a section, the trumpets were wonderfully bright. As for Walton’s score, there is much good music in it. He could do more than viola concertos and marches, you know. And that playwright, Shakespeare? Talented. The Philharmonic’s program notes told us that Olivier had recited two monologues from Henry V over the radio in 1942. This got the attention of people in the film industry, “who felt the tone of the play was right for the patriotic, bellicose fervor of the times.” Patriotism and bellicosity in the Britain of 1942? Imagine.
Ryan Brown, Conductor and Artistic Director
A chamber program of 17th-century French and Italian works, with musicians from the Opera Lafayette Orchestra
Sunday, October 30, 2011 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $50/$35
Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, tenor Gaële Le Roi, soprano with members of the Opera Lafayette Orchestra Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall Box Office 57th Street and Seventh Avenue CarnegieCharge (212) 247-7800 carnegiehall.org 12 CityArts | September 28, 2011
Opera Lafayette Box Office (202) 546-9332 operalafayette.org
JAZZ
Chicago Jazz Comes to Brooklyn Historic AACM relocates at Roulette By Howard Mandel
T
he big news about jazz and new music in New York is the re-location, opening and first season of performance space Roulette in Brooklyn, which may reconvene and reinvigorate a scene. A related, underlying theme is the vast influence a coterie of ex-Chicagoans from the 46-year-old grassroots Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians exerts on the sounds at Roulette and most everywhere else music encouraging originality over convention is heard. Roulette was born as a modest showcase in a Tribeca work/live loft in 1978, and grew up as founders Jim Staley and David Weinstein presented their large and expanding circle of Downtown (in spirit, at least) friends and colleagues—the experimental intelligentsia. Eventually Weinstein resigned. In 2006, Roulette moved to shared space in a Soho gallery. Now one block from Flatbush and the subway/shopping hub Atlantic Center, near BAM and a walk from Trader Joe’s, Roulette’s freshly refurbished, airy, comfy but uncluttered 600-seat theater seems perfect for a culturally sophisticated if not-so-well-heeled audience like the successful professionals, bourgeois bohos and jes’ folks living in Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene, Prospect Park and points south. Downtown icons John Zorn (who runs the Stone recital room—complementary, not competing—on Avenue C), Laurie Anderson (of the Kitchen when it was on Broome Street) and Lou Reed (the Factory, Max’s Kansas City) as a trio sold out one of Roulette’s first gala kickoff nights. Reedsand-winds composer Henry Threadgill with his band Zooid topped a polystylistic bill on another, and improvising trombonist/computer composer George E. Lewis, until recently director of Columbia Uni-
versity’s Center for Jazz Studies, performed last weekend with the Wet Ink collective. Both Threadgill and Lewis are stalwarts of the AACM—which impressed Zorn back in his college days. Lewis wrote a book on it, the incomparable study A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. So what’s the AACM already? The longest-running American artists-directed self-help group in any discipline, which has launched three generations of dynamic individualists by pressing no ideology except that everyone play their own original music. That dictum has bred composer-improviser-performers who’ve pushed past the idiomatic bounds of jazz while drawing on its depths, energies and spontaneity. No two AACM members sound alike, except they’re all virtuosic improvisers and genre omnivores. That describes Anthony Braxton, the 66-year-old multi-instrumentalist, composer and educator (at Wesleyan University) whose Tri-Centric Foundation partners with Roulette on a four-night festival of his work, Oct. 5–8. Braxton exemplifies Ezra Pound’s modernist imperative, “Make it new” and Star Trek’s “Go where no man has gone before.” His 1968 debut Three Compositions of the New Jazz featured pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, founding AACM president, who remains the association’s guiding force; as well as the late violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. No bass, no drums, but complexly structured interactions of probing if sometimes tenuous lyricism. Braxton followed that with an unprecedented two-LP solo alto saxophone album of systematic (not “free”) improvs. And my, how his oeuvre has developed. At Roulette, Braxton first presents himself with trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum, reedist Matt Bauder, vocalist Anne Rhodes and two dancers, some of his throughcomposed piano pieces and a quartet with bassoon, harp and violin/viola; next, playing electronics as well as reeds in his Diamond Curtain Wall Trio with prodi-
How’s it sound? Hard to say, probably different to everyone. But in general Braxton’s music is thick with incident and detail, atonal yet not lacking in melody, investigatory and productive of discoveries.
gious protégés Bynum and guitarist Mary Halvorson, and his 20-piece Tri-Centric Orchestra; third, a 12-member choir opening for his “12+1tet” blowing live along with samples from his recordings that its members deploy from iPods; and finally the world premiere concert reading of two acts of his opera Trillium J for 12 singers and 35-piece orchestra. How’s it sound? Hard to say, probably different to everyone. But in general Braxton’s music is thick with incident and
detail, atonal yet not lacking in melody, investigatory and productive of discoveries. It can be difficult to follow, though it has logic, passion and even humor. Listeners with open minds—Braxton calls them “friendly experiencers”—can be perplexed, amused and satiated with sound. We’ll know we’ve heard something of substance, but may leave his concerts wondering just what. Braxton cites influ-
Continued on page 16
enoteca & trattoria
In the heart of the Upper West Side ‘Cesca serves equal portions of elegance and relaxed ambiance. A “very fine, though unrelentingly rustic” authentic dining experience borne of its founders’ Italian heritage. Executive Chef Kevin Garcia presents simple yet extraordinary fare and owner and Italian-wine expert Anthony Mazzola has put together an incomparable list of Italian wines.
164 West 75th St. at Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10023
212-787-6300
September 28, 2011 | CityArts 13
More CUNY Award Winners 4 RHODES SCHOLARS in 6 YEARS 7 TRUMAN SCHOLARS in 6 YEARS 8 GOLDWATER SCHOLARS in 3 YEARS 7 NSF GRADUATE FELLOWS in 2011
R H O D ES
14 CityArts | September 28, 2011
TR U MAN
G O LD WATER
ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: Zujaja Tauqeer, Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College, Rhodes 2011; David L.V. Bauer, Macaulay Honors College at CCNY, Rhodes 2009, Truman 2008, Goldwater 2007; Eugene Shenderov, Brooklyn College, Rhodes 2005; Lev Sviridov, CCNY, Rhodes 2005, Goldwater 2004; Ayodele Oti, Macaulay Honors College at CCNY, Truman 2011; Gareth Rhodes, CUNY Baccalaureate at CCNY, Truman 2011; Anthony Pang, CCNY, NSF Fellow 2011; Jamar Whaley, Queens College, Goldwater 2009; Christine Curella, Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, Truman 2007; Celine Joiris, Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, Goldwater 2011; Claudio Simpkins, Macaulay Honors College at CCNY, Truman 2005; Ryan Merola, Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College, Truman 2006; Don Gomez, CCNY, Truman 2009; Lina Mercedes Gonzalez, Hunter College, NSF Fellow 2011.
N ATIO N AL SCIEN CE FO U N D ATIO N
Than Ever! Z
UJAJA TAUQEER, CUNY’S 2011 RHODES SCHOLAR, is exceptional but not the exception.
CUNY students are winning more highly competitive awards and scholarships than at any time in our history. The City University of New York is attracting an ever-growing
number of outstanding students. Our Macaulay Honors College is home to many of this year’s winners. Assisted by a world-class faculty, they achieved their success studying at the nation’s leading urban public university. They are exceptional but not the exception. Matthew Goldstein Chancellor
Visit cuny.edu/awardwinners 1-800-CUNY-YES September 28, 2011 | CityArts 15
Jazz Continued from page 13 ences ranging from lilting alto saxophonist Paul Desmond to Wagner and Schoenberg. He’s composed for 100 tubas and for four orchestras; he thinks large and urges us to do likewise, which can get a little dicey. Hey: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And AACM members always venture; that’s how they got from Chicago’s South Side to worldwide repute. Muhal Richard Abrams, who’s lived in Manhattan since 1976, founded a New York chapter back then which has produced concerts here ever since, though they’ve not been much heralded. In the first this fall, Abrams played piano in quartet with French horn, electric bass and percussion, then alto saxophonist Matana Roberts, a 36-year-old woman who’s one of the AACM’s young hopes, led a quartet. Follow-ups are soulful solo pianist Amina Claudine Myers and the Steve and Iqua Colson Quartet, melding husband’s quiet, elegant piano
with wife’s art-song-inflected vocal approach, on Oct. 21, and ensembles led by muscular drummer Reggie Nicholson and tart alto saxist Oliver Lake on Nov. 18. AACM-NY events are at the Community Church of New York, 40 E. 35th St. between Madison and Park avenues, and have a homey, welcoming feel. If you missed Threadgill at Roulette, he returns there Nov. 30 and Dec. 1. If you missed George Lewis at Roulette, on Nov. 12 he’s the subject of a Composer’s Profile at Miller Theater, performing with ICE (the International Contemporary Ensemble), introducing works for percussionist and stereo tape and mixed ensembles, including one with a narrator (either writer Quincy Troupe or actor Avery Brooks). Other recent AACM sightings: Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago celebrated his 74th birthday with a rare appearance at Trumpet’s in Montclair, N.J. Upcoming: Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton’s pal of more than 40 years, celebrates his 70th birthday Dec. 15 and 16 with multiple bands. At Roulette.
GETAWAY DESIGNER AND BUILDER OF UPSTATE COTTAGES $250,000 - $425,000 - LAND INCLUDED WOODSTOCK, SAUGERTIES, & SULLIVAN COUNTY
16 CityArts | September 28, 2011
POP
Stills from the “Ode to the Bouncer” music video: entertaining and liberating.
Critical Condition ‘Ode to THE Bouncer’ Liberates Pop Culture By Ben Kessler
I
s “Ode to the Bouncer,” Studio Killers’ debut single and music video, so liberating because it’s so entertaining, or vice versa? All good pop temporarily relieves us of the need to be respectable, but Pop Art also removes the obligation to be frivolous by freeing our wits and mimetic impulses. The music-makers of the British production outfit Studio Killers identify themselves only as animated personae—Dyna Mink, Goldie Foxx and female lead singer Cherry—and their pure comic imagination shows up the routine of mainstream pop’s frivolity. The song gives us Cherry’s in-the-queue attempt to make an impassive (never heard) bouncer “lift up the velvet rope.” She starts out flirtatious and cajoling (“I’ve got friends
inside/ It’s my birthday tonight”), but quickly gets openly desperate, then aggressive: “Bouncer, empowered and aroused/ I see it in your trousers/ And in the way you browse ’er.” Her helplessness, her feminine lack of threat, gives her license to rail at unfair authority in hilarious terms that compel the listener’s recognition and identification (including a priceless Pink Floyd reference). The irresistible refrain, with its bombastic synths and pulsing bassline, complicates the identification: “I just got to dance right now/ It’s critical.” Dancing to this chorus, we exercise a privilege Cherry (a literal outsider) doesn’t have, even as we realize that her need for release is basic to humanity. “Ode to the Bouncer” reminds me of the great Pet Shop Boys B-sides, “Sexy Northerner” (2002) and “The Boy Who Couldn’t
Continued on page 17
Continued from page 16 Keep His Clothes On” (1997). In these two tracks, singer Neil Tennant close-reads the behavior of individual clubland outsiders in order to tease out a sense of nightlife’s social complexities (race, class, regional tribalism), just as Cherry exposes gender hierarchy within her party microcosm. Tennant’s ironic-yet-riveted vocals express a concerted effort to see beyond the sexy, fancy distractions of dance culture into something even more fascinating. The “Ode to the Bouncer” music video
The bizarre fun of this video is also what makes it expressive of current popculture crises. (again credited to Studio Killers) also aims to depict dance culture differently by casting it in an animated, videogame-like milieu. Disembodied, hand-drawn body fragments—bare midriffs and muscular, flexing arms—populate the video’s dance floor. Cherry, by contrast, is rendered as a curvaceous CGI avatar with knee-high boots and mascara-dripping eyes. Her contours recall the smoothness and sheen of real flesh. To gain admittance to dancefloor paradise, Cherry must physically defeat the towering, death’s-head bouncer. The bizarre fun of this video is also what makes it expressive of current pop-culture crises. (The video’s deliberate robotic look harkens to the anime-anonymity of Jamie Hewlett’s Clint Eastwood for Gorillaz.) The ambiguous nature of Cherry and the bouncer’s grappling (he places a big black hand on her butt as she straddles and pummels him) at first resemble Jeff Koons’ inflatables but especially the blithe sex-and-death mashups in Lady Gaga’s music videos. The image of Cherry lounging next to the prone bouncer in what could be either a post-coital or a postbeatdown tableau might well be a direct parody/homage to the ending of the “Bad Romance” music video. But “Ode to the Bouncer” ends with Cherry entering the club through the window to the ladies’ room and dancing with Dyna Mink and Goldie Foxx. Studio Killers take their fun more seriously than they take themselves, so they instinctively avoid any of that fashionable death-fixated “darkness.”
Crafts at Rhinebeck & Decadent Chocolate Show Bring this ad for
‘Ode to the Bouncer’
Images from “Ode to the Bouncer” video by the Studio Killers
Early on in the video, Cherry is shown applying her makeup, dipping her fingers into thick pink goo and slathering it across her lips. This acrylic-like substance reappears in different colors and contexts throughout the clip; at one audacious moment it descends in a torrent to drench Cherry. Within Studio Killers’ scheme, it seems to represent the primordial stuff of creativity, the need to express oneself that brings together nightclub revelers and pop-culture creators. “Ode to the Bouncer” provides visual and aural validation of that need. Because it’s critical.
$1.00 off
One regular priced adult admission. One coupon per person. Not good with any other discount. Exp. 10/2/11
28
October 1st & 2nd
www.craftsatrhinebeck.com
New York State
Sheep & Wool Family Festival • October 15 & 16, 2011 •
Rhinebeck, NY
Hundreds of Sheep, Llamas & Alpacas, Fiber Artists & Crafts, Petting Zoo, Children’s Carnival & Activities, Hay Maze, Scavenger Hunt, Mad Science, Frisbee & Flyball Dogs, Punkin’ Chunkin’, Wine, Cheese & Specialty Foods and Much More!
www.sheepandwool.com
scan for deals!
For Advanced Tickets visit www.dutchessfair.com For more information call 845-876-4000 • Route 9, Rhinebeck New York • September 28, 2011 | CityArts 17
THEATER
(Left) Brad Heberlee and Jolly Abraham in The Pearl Theatre’s The Bald Soprano. Dan Daily and Robin Leslie Brown in The Bald Soprano, running through Oct. 23. Photo: Jacob J. Goldberg
The Absurdity of Language, in French and Out The Pearl Theatre dusts off Eugène Ionesco and The Bald Soprano By Mark Peikert
T
here was a time, back in the days of experimental, absurdist theater, when Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett were routinely referred to in the same sentence. In the 21st century, however, it is Beckett who is still produced in New York City, while an Ionesco revival is treated as a rarity instead of a necessity. Among the few companies still paying court to Ionesco is The Pearl, the sturdy repertory company dedicated to preserving and presenting the classics. In 2001, The Pearl produced the firstever New York revival of Ionesco’s Exit the King (almost a decade before Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon brought it to Broadway), and now they’re presenting what may be Ionesco’s best-known play: The Bald Soprano. A one-act about the comedy of language, The Bald Soprano
18 CityArts | September 28, 2011
is, when done correctly, a ridiculous and potent farce. For director Hal Brooks, The Pearl’s choice to revive this particular Ionesco is a chance to stake a claim for its presence in the theatrical canon. “It’s an opportunity to sort of present it as a classic,” Brooks admitted recently. “That is the spirit of the work that they do [at The Pearl]. It’s one of the more modern plays that they’ve produced, and I think they saw in it all of the ingredients that makes for a classic play. It’s certainly a play that requires an agility with language, and obviously the company possesses that and can master language. That is a very good fit to do something a little more modern and fun.” Ionesco’s first play, The Bald Soprano was inspired by his attempts to learn English and his discovery that the couple in his manual, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, didn’t seem to know each other. “As he was copying down [the lessons], it dawned on him that he saw in that the absurdity of language,” Brooks says. “So he claimed that he was trying to learn English and
that led him to writing a play.” Brooks, however, has his doubts about Ionesco’s honesty, even after spending time on The Bald Soprano, which he calls a “gorgeous soup of sound” in the original French. “It’s hard for me to take him at his word,” Brooks says. “He’ll say something like he wants it to be an anti play about the tragedy of language. But at the same time, you’ve got to know that it’s really funny! I just wonder sometimes about his sincerity in a certain way.” Regardless of Ionesco’s reasons for writing The Bald Soprano or The Chairs or the rest of his oeuvre, the question of why he lingers on library shelves and on the stages of college theaters remains unanswered. For an absurdist playwright still discussed and written about, who was once potent enough to have a film adapted from one of his plays (1974’s Rhinoceros, starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder and Karen Black), his absence from New York City stages is puzzling. Maybe Brooks is correct when he questions the English translations of the plays, many of
which date from the same period Ionesco wrote them. “Beckett wrote in French, but he also did his own translation. And so when Beckett was writing in French, in his mind he’s translating. And when he’s writing his plays in English, in a way he becomes more restrained,” Brooks says. “And that, I think, is a major difference. The translation of Ionesco, they’re never going to do it justice. You’re always going to do yourself a little bit of a disservice. It’s never going to have that flow that the French has.” In translation or not, The Bald Soprano remains a lark, one that The Pearl and its company will be presenting for a whole new generation of theatergoers to discover on their own. Including, possibly, some enterprising soul willing to take on the task of crafting an all-new English translation.
The Bald Soprano Through Oct. 23, City Center Stage II, 131 W. 55th St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), 212-581-1212, www. pearltheatre.org; $39+.
TV
Stephen King Debunks the Art of Horror Two gallery artists subvert TV doc
The achievements of De Palma and Boorman suggest an alternative (auteurist) history of horror to the one presented in The Horrors of Stephen King. Carrie and Exorcist II represent high points in film history where the genre market provided the possibility for an artist’s personal expression to reach a mass audience. At the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Haim Steinbach’s Creature show makes hilarious spectacle of the connection between subconscious processes and consumer culture. On the first floor, Steinbach deliberately arranges found objects (toys, figurines) on shelves. He encourages the spectator to consider how the mind constructs narrative (the bather) or finds pleasure and meaning in harmonious—yet fantastic—shapes, color and scale (robot poetry). In A Night at the Movies, King geeks out on the suspension of disbelief signified by the audience’s acceptance of a man in a rubber suit as “the most horrible creature there is” in The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). He observes a psychological and social phenomenon, but succumbs to its exploitation for unthinking thrills. Steinbach goes deeper. On the second floor of Creature, Steinbach challenges the spectator before reaching the exhibit’s unexpected final destination: “You don’t see it, do you?” The unseen made seen: Steinbach reveals that there are subconscious, human impulses behind mass-produced products and popular culture. The more you think about the profound punch line to Creature, the scarier it gets.
By John Demetry “The horror genre is not trying to make you think.” Stephen King spends an hour arguing this thesis in Turner Classic Movies’ original documentary A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King (airing 8 p.m., Oct. 3 on TCM). King emphasizes the way scary movies get the spectator to recoil, rather than their potential to enlighten. He pantomimes “the gasp, the turning away” to define the “reaction a filmmaker is going for in a horror movie.” Consequently, he traces the history of horror as a progression of shock tactics. King reduces horror to novelty. Such an approach inevitably, yet misleadingly, comes to the film adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie (1976). The terror/elation of director Brian De Palma’s climax—a hand reaching out of the grave—opens up a revelation about the subconscious space of dreams and one’s waking-life relationship to the Other. This is familiar territory in Surrealist art. With the ending of Carrie, De Palma devised a radical the-horrornever-dies shock ending that spawned a legion of imitators, some of which King catalogs here. Carrie’s hand seems to extend across time and art snobbery to a current Chelsea gallery exhibit. “I draw and then I think,” Marko Velk explains regarding his process of setting charcoal to paper. The results, on display at the Cueto Project’s Transitation exhibition, reflect a relationship between the artist’s subconscious and the iconography of Western culture: Christian, literary and folkloric. Velk’s “Ophelia” conveys the relief of relaxed hands, floating in darkness, that once grasped onto flowers and life. The charcoal medium provides a hauntingly palpable sense of the delicacy of flesh. The gallery presents “Seduction” as the flip side to Velk’s “Ophelia.” Flesh signifies in “Seduction” through Velk’s evocation of tension in the richly detailed hands embracing a skull. In all of the Transitation pieces, Velk attunes the viewer to the fear of mortality at the core of Horror— and finds beauty in its essential humanity. With Carrie, De Palma innovated genre to express complex human truths. Yet King’s doc lecture cheapens De Palma’s gesture
Installation views, Haim Steinbach: creature, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2011, Photo: Jean Vong, courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
of mortal and emotional vulnerability— shared by the pop audience in one awesome gestalt. In A Night at the Movies, King diminishes De Palma’s achievement as a “terrific piece of work.” King repeats variations on that term—“piece of work”—throughout, as if horror films were only reaction-making machines, thus limiting the value of all horror films to the level of product. This might explain King’s own prolific output. However, De Palma transformed King’s “piece of work” into a work of art. King’s voice-over lands on a still from John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977): “Even psychologists who’ve stud-
ied the genre don’t understand what works and what doesn’t work.” Boorman takes film audiences way beyond King’s conception of how horror “works.” The freedom afforded by the horror genre allows Boorman to realize astonishment: primal imagery (tapping the collective unconscious) and mystical social metaphor (the wings of Pazuzu). This visionary (corrective) sequel to William Friedkin’s 1973 film contradicts King’s thesis. Transcending the realm of “psychologists,” the engaged spectator discovers the full terror of The Heretic: Evil exists. But so does Good. It represents a total metaphysical statement.
A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King Oct. 3, 8 p.m. (ET/PT), Turner Classic Movies, www.tcm.com. Transitation Through Oct. 29, Cueto Project, 551 W. 21st St., www.cuetoproject.com, 212-229-2221. Creature Through Oct. 22, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 W. 21st St., www.tanyabonakdargallery.com, 212-414-4144. John Demetry erases the border between pop and art in his book The Community of Desire: Selected Critical Writings (20012007), available at www.lulu.com. September 28, 2011 | CityArts 19
FILM
Nerds Strike Out Taking the fun out of baseball and life By Armond White
Moneyball Directed by Bennett Miller Five decades after Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, we still suffer the delusion that men who play professional baseball enjoy the sport. Bennett Miller’s Moneyball exists to prove that America’s pastime is subject to the same greed, envy, anguish and disappointment as any other corrupt American institution. Leave it to pseudo intellectuals like Miller (who perpetrated the hideous Capote, not the emotive, funny Capotesque Infamous), smart-ass screenwriters Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin and poseur producer Scott Rudin to take all the fun out of baseball. Moneyball is a sequel to last year’s dispirited but slick The Social Network: It uses the real-life story of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics ball club and his 2002 strategy to beat the overly financed New York Yankees, to demystify American ambition. (Beane piously gives up a $12.5m offer to manage the Boston Red Sox.) Moneyball is also an Indie-movie metaphor and flush with Indie pretenses; Bennett implies that pyrrhic victory is greater than the satisfaction of doing what one loves. His glum sanctification of Billy Beane is a peculiar kind of B.S. (not far from his defamation of Truman Capote’s success). All that makes this perverse riches-to-hairshirt tale interesting is Brad Pitt’s glamorous presence. As Beane, Pitt acquiesces to the pretense that athleticism and success (the proof of appreciation and achievement) are meaningless. Pitt must have learned this lie from Steven Soderbergh’s Oceans caper films. Bennett, Zaillian, Sorkin and Rudin’s caper reduces baseball to a numbers game (“Your goals should be buying wins. Baseball thinking is medieval”). They defeat old-fashioned patriotic romanticism. Their con job wagers that audiences love cynical dialogue and loser desolation—the same TV pretense that made The Social Network both overrated and unpopular. Just as The Social Network glorified Mark Zuckerberg’s insensitivity, Money-
20 CityArts | September 28, 2011
ball glorifies Beane’s anti-heroism. His loser status is sentimentalized yet rigged because Pitt—a bonafide movie star— distracts from what the filmmakers are trying to pitch as nonsense. Flashbacks to Beane’s own failed career as a ballplayer are meant to explain why he opposes his tradition-minded staff. Bennett never conveys Beane’s love of sport and prowess, or Pitt’s enjoyment of pretty-boy privilege. Pitt isn’t yet enough of an actor to ace the average jock bravado that Paul Newman captured in Slap Shot, Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty and Blue Chips and Bernie Mac in Mr. 3000. Or even Tom Cruise’s money-minded nice-guyness in Jerry Maguire. It’s rare for actors to delineate an athlete’s physical assurance; Pitt doesn’t even try. His Billy Beane is a beerbelly characterization by a pin-up (while Philip Seymour Hoffman as a disapproving coach congratulates the audience’s appreciation of his own obvious acting). In Moneyball, Pitt stands in for working class blandness—an implausible Indie hoax. Miller is such an obvious unerotic nerd (the film looks b&w even though it’s in color) that he totally evades baseball’s Pleasure, Tension and Sunshine—its AllAmerican sensuality. Miller and team undermine Pitt’s Everyman effort (as when Beane defies the maxim “Nobody reinvents this game!”) simply by refusing to let the game be played on screen. Instead, there’s long shots of walking, dour memories of Beane’s rookie years and repetitive protestations: “We’re being gutted” and “It’s an unfair game.” As usual, Miller mistakes glum for profound. Moneyball may be the most cynical baseball movie every made. Denying baseball’s kinetics, it also rejects Bernard Malamud’s Americanizing identity myth in the novel The Natural. This is a nerd’s revenge: namechecking real-life athletes, fake-scrutinizing the game’s economics and ending with Pitt’s close-up shakey-cam tears in order to exploit the current national sense of hopelessness. Tom Hanks’ humanistic Larry Crowne wasn’t cynical enough to seem hip. The profit-based self-righteousness of Moneyball is Recession-ready.
50/50 Directed by Jonathan Levine On the flip side of 50/50’s sweet view of human relations (Adam’s cancer diagno-
Brad Pitt and Jonah Hll in Moneyball (above). Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 50/50. ses brings out the clumsy caring of his best friend, mother and a sympathetic therapist) is a new brand of irreligious blandness and hopelessness. It’s a story without a spiritual element, about people who are content in their mortal misery and banality. We watch their half-lives. Director Jonathan Levine, who made the charming, sensitive hip-hop ode The Wackness, tilts towards pure, plain sentiment. Noting various styles of loneliness, he brings tenderness out of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anjelica Huston and—less and less surprisingly—Seth Rogen as Kyle, Adam’s affably rude and real best friend. (He kicks ever-bitchy Bryce Dallas Howard to the curb when Adam can’t.) Rogen’s starting to redeem Judd Apatow’s heathenism, replacing it with credibly gruff male-bonding. Other than that, 50/50 has
no elevating belief in anything besides the mundane fumbling of earthly, mortal life. Like the moment in Moneyball where a guy promises, “I’m going to be praying for you and your family,” and Pitt dismisses him, “No problem,” 50/50 normalizes a new kind of feel-good atheism. Adam’s attraction to his therapist (Anna Kendrick) substitutes religion, faith and thoughts on the hereafter with godless cuteness. Only the moment where Rogen winces at Adam’s pre-chemo haircut is nicely emblematic of helping and cringing and change. That’s the film’s superficial, unfulfilling panoply of non-spiritual affection. After escaping the spell of 50/50’s niceness, I realized this is essentially the same story as Patrice Chéreau’s Son Frère but without the amazing emotional/spiritual rigor.
Henry Jaglom’s Eating By Gregory Solman
A
work of fiction freely intermixing real and written confessions of bourgeois women’s neurotically distorted self-images and food obsessions, Henry Jaglom’s 1990 movie Eating can elicit a feeling of binging and purging at once. Structurally sluggish, Jaglom’s set piece transpires entirely in a Los Angeles manse, incorporating a lazy subplot of film-withinthe-film allowing Jaglom to intersperse cutaways of first-person monologues and linger on faces while maintaining a documentary rhythm. A conceit removing it from realism, Jaglom populates it almost entirely with attractive women approaching midlife, attending a triple birthday party as a pretext for sharing their food obsessions— almost tediously, food substituting for love, attention, men and God—defined by conspicuous male absence and pitiable spiritual starvation. Jaglom fills the house with actresses such as Lisa Richards (One Life to Live), Mary Crosby (Dallas), the always queasily real Gwen Welles (Jaglom’s A Safe Place and Nashville) and Frances Bergen as well as non-actresses Jaglom recruited from Overeaters Anonymous. With the possible exception of the Brenda Vaccarolike Marlena Giovi—who hides any excess below her neck well—none of this bevy is heavy. Jaglom’s not interested in breadand-butter dieting problems—with women unhappy, or even nonchalant, about their objectively fat bodies—but in food obsessions, the mental illness of fat women trapped inside thin bodies. Jaglom’s time capsule catches a generation of Hollywood women who, absent the proper affect and stuffed full of feminism that contradicted their upbringing, talk casually, guiltlessly about their abortions, but bawl over chocolate and pass a plate of birthday cake around the room with no takers, lest anyone see they want it. Jaglom intelligently suggests the two sicknesses are related. Neither the interjection of the international nor the intergenerational (Bergen plays Lisa Richards’ mother) provides
relief from the monotony of neurotic misery. Even some of the heartfelt admissions come off as scripted fauxbia, à la Real World, such as French dish Nelly Alard sunbathing nude by the pool with a typically Gallic absence of self-consciousness one moment, then complaining that she always felt “too big,” alienated and awkward the next. Bergen’s character, a former model of the excessive-cocktail generation, scolds the women for their self-flagellation, only to admit that her contentedness comes with accepting adultery as part of the male nature. Oh, any cake left? At it’s best, when Jaglom attempts a Robert Altman manqué, the eating disorders seem inseparable from regional West Coast nutty-ness. Women assault each other with nurfmaterial weapons, yell into silver plastic shells to relieve aggression, believe in the power of crystals and dress ridiculously theatrically. Welles delivers the performance of the film in an upstairs bathroomturned-vomitorium when she admits sabotaging all the friends in her life for reasons she can’t fathom. The 20th anniversary edition DVD release includes an episode of Jaglom’s fellow female flatterer Phil Donahue’s talk show and, ironically, a select group of the most telegenic of the movie’s actresses. A greater moment than anything in the movie appears here, when a vivacious black woman with a twist of pearls interrupts Jaglom’s more-sensitivethan-thou spiel about food and eating being “a metaphor for how hard it is to be a woman in this society.” She speaks truth to psychobabble: “There’s no difference between being thin and heavy—it’s you.” She talks about being 78 pounds on her wedding day and having gained weight ever since (“I’m now heavy. I’m happy!”). She ends with a line no Altman writer could top: “If my husband had enough money to buy me more clothes as I got larger, I’d keep right on eating!” She brings down the house. That recalls the Alfre Woodard eruption on bee-pollen-as-snake-oil in Health. It’s the deliciously Altmanesque moment Jaglom may have sought but never found.
Discovering—and Enjoying— the Lesser Known Paris By Joseph Alexiou With more than 15 million international visitors a year, Paris sees more tourists than any other city in the world. And a great way to get there is on one of American Airlines’ two daily flights. One uses a Boeing 767-300, with 28 seats in business class and 195 in coach, and the other a Boeing 757, with 14 business class seats and 166 in coach. Cultural institutions like the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre and the Picasso Museum are home to some of the most celebrated works of art across the globe, while world famous cafés like Les Deux Magots, eternalized by Ernest Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast, continue to serve chic salads and steaming espressos to a fabulously dressed clientele of Parisians and visitors alike. All of these places are the grand tradition during a visit to the City of Light, and it’s easy for even the savviest traveler to get caught up in the cachet of visiting the popular sites. But the most rewarding challenge is to find a corner of Paris that hasn’t been discovered by the endless deluge of camera-wielding tourists. With some comfortable walking shoes, anybody can find their own favorite corner of this ancient city. One of the most unsung of Paris’ unique cultural landmarks is the Halle Saint Pierre, also known as the Musée d’Art naïf Max Fourny (www.hallesaintpierre.org). An often ignored destination at the foot of the Montmartre hill in the north of Paris, the Halle Saint Pierre was built in 1868 as a covered market. Since 1986, it has housed a permanent collection of more than 500 pieces of “outsider” or “raw” art—creations by artists who fall outside of the mainstream, ranging from underground art collectives to the literally insane. Created by artists you’ve likely never heard of, many of the works in the Halle Saint Pierre are weirdly ephemeral and sometimes creepy, but always a guaranteed unique cultural experience. Temporary exhibitions have included Art Brut Japonais (Japanese outsider art), Art spirite (art inspired by spiritual quests and medium readings) and the works of creature creators from horror and science fiction films. At minimum, the visit will be great conversa-
tion fodder for before-dinner cocktails or even yummy pastries in the charming lobby cafe. Not far off, a quick stomp through the twisting streets of Montmartre can provide at least two refuges from the offbeat art that are below the traditional tourist radar. The wildly inexpensive Le Refuge des Fondues (17 rue des Trois Frères), with its crowded bench seating and walls graffitied by past visitors, has a cheerful, all-night party ambience. Run by mustachioed Obélix lookalikes, this unpretentious restaurant is fueled entirely by tasty fondues and wine served in baby bottles (careful, refills cost only 2 euro!). For a somewhat more upscale, low-key environment, Le Kokolion (62 rue d’Orsel) serves classic French dishes like confit de canard (preserved duck cooked in its own fat) at especially reasonable prices. Adorned with old movie posters and dimly lit by appropriately kitschy fixtures, Le Kokolion is at its best before the late-night theater crowd arrives—get your seats by 9 p.m. Another relatively unknown spot is the Musée du Fumeur (Smoker’s Museum) (7 rue Pache) in Paris’ recently hip 11th arrondissement—a private museum of the history of all things tobacco. Although it appears to be little more than a storefront head shop, the exhibition inside features some fantastic colonial photographs of all types of smoking in former French colonies, not to mention some original and archaic pipes and smoking tools used in this once-ubiquitous pastime. After the museum, explore this neighborhood by the Voltaire métro stop to stumble across small art galleries, boutique shops run by up-and-coming clothing designers and a bevy of artisan studios that have set up shop in the last few years. While the 11th and 18th arrondissements are well known to Parisians, they are decidedly less marked on the tourist maps than the central Parisian neighborhoods. However, much like in New York, rising rents have forced the most innovative and unique places in Paris toward the northern and eastern edges of the city. After all, the secret for continued success of any world-class metropolis is the constant striving to evolve as much as it stays the same. September 28, 2011 | CityArts 21
Why The Help Doesn’t Help When Cinema is Both Personal and Political By Emma Lockridge
A
fter toiling through Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help, I vowed never to see the film because the book trivializes Jim Crow with its mean girls gone wild. Far worse, the film comes across as a perky comedy with a murky message. There is nothing funny about the brutality of the Jim Crow South. When I think about my young black mother ironing clothing for a white family in Alabama in the late ’50s and her boss purposely walking into her work area naked, when his wife was away, it breaks my heart. Mom fled the job and did not tell my father because she said he was “crazy” enough to confront her boss and end up dead. I broke my boycott of The Help film to respond to an obtuse column, “‘The Help’ Isn’t Racist. Its Critics Are,” written by New Republic contributing editor John McWhorter. The critics he targets as racist are primarily black people who have issues with the depiction of black culture during the Jim Crow era in Stockett’s novel and the film version of The Help. McWhorter, like Stockett, thinks research is overrated. Labeling black critics of The Help racist is a fallacy. He should check the definition of racism, then extend an apology to those he offended, particularly the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), for his unmerited and paternalistic accusation. The ABWH issued an Open Statement condemning the novel and film version of The Help due to “widespread stereotyping.” The organization of scholars was particularly troubled by the omission of the sexual harassment of black domestics under Jim Crow in Stockett’s storytelling. It was recently revealed in an Associated Press story that civil rights trailblazer Rosa Parks wrote a “detailed and harrowing” essay of a rape attempt by a white neighbor when she worked as a housekeeper in Mississippi. “Critics also seem uncomfortable with the fact that the film includes comedy,” notes McWhorter. Humor certainly had a place in the Civil Rights Movement, and was a survival tool. But the ongoing Chocolate Pie punch line in The Help is absurd and unrealistic. If Minnie had confronted her boss about her defecating ways, she would have been brutally murdered, along with her family.
22 CityArts | September 28, 2011
Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer in The Help. The Help misrepresents and devalues black oppression in the 1960s apartheid South with its Disneyesque delivery, but McWhorter asserts that black self-loathing accounts for the criticism. “Told they were nothing for centuries, many black people are choosing to keep that legacy alive by assailing the depredations on an abstract and evil other, rather than adopt a more self-directed and positive self-image.” The black critics of The Help cannot be bundled into McWhorter’s self-hate group. Most are living the so-called American Dream and represent many professions, including college professors and journalists. When McWhorter gives a plot summary of The Help, I do not think he realizes the thin story had to be fixed for filming. In the novel, there was no Eureka moment for the maids to be willing to subject themselves to loss of livelihood, or worse, to help Emma Stone’s Skeeter write a book. This failure of premise early in the book annihilated the novel’s narrative. Frankly, I did not understand why such a poorly constructed novel became a bestseller until I discovered that Book Club Queen Oprah Winfrey had given it her anointing. McWhorter also thinks critics of the film are upset about its mass-market
appeal. It is not the success of the film that offends. It is the misleading content that is troubling. I am concerned when a widely viewed, flawed book/film becomes a “teaching tool.” I read a Facebook post of someone highly recommending the film for parents and their children. Borrowing words from Shoah producer Claude Lauzmann in a New York Times interview where he blasted Schindler’s List, I think The Help is “pernicious in its impact and influence.” This film does not liberate, as McWhorter suggests. It distorts the paradigm of Jim Crow by putting “catty kids” in control of a southern town. In reality, it was more likely Granny and Grandpa in pointy-headed hoods. In addition, The Help product merchandising on Home Shopping Network is insensitive to the black women who suffered as domestics. It is not liberating to be reminded, through a flowery dress and hairstyle, of a terrible period in U.S. history. McWhorter conjures up a hypothetical version of The Help that he thinks might appease black critics. His facetious rewrite completely dodges the complex problems inherent in the story. More realistic would be an ending of the film imagined by Donna Ladd, a white, forty-something editor of the Jackson Free Press based in
If Minnie had confronted her boss about her defecating ways, she would have been brutally murdered, along with her family.
Jackson, Miss. In her column, “Of Anger and Alternative Endings,” she said the film made her laugh and cry. However, she goes on to say: “The Help just could not have ended as it did. Hilly, or her man, would have called the Council [white collar KKK] on Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter. My guess is that Aibileen would have been severely beaten and never hired again in the state; anyone related to Skeeter would have been destroyed economically and at least one cross burned in her mama’s yard; and Minny would have been killed and her house burned.” Number one at the box office for multiple weeks, The Help has grossed more than a hundred million dollars. Filmmaker Terry Gilliam, criticizing Schindler’s List in a TCM interview, stated, “The success of most films in Hollywood these days, I think, is down to the fact they’re comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows. It gives you answers, even if the answers are stupid.” Recently, I tearfully toured The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, which includes the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The museum graphically captures the horrors of Jim Crow. I would suggest the bigoted McWhorter take the tour, because he sorely needs to hit the racism refresh button to fully comprehend black criticism of The Help.
Emma Lockridge is a former NBC News Writer. Based in Detroit, she is writing a children’s creativity book.
September 28, 2011 | CityArts 23
DANCE
Dance
Dancing Through Five Centuries in Three Days BAM Breathes New Life into the Baroque By Joel Lobenthal
L
ast week, ballet went back to its source with a concentrated dose of Baroque dance—as well as 20thcentury Jazz Age response. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, JeanBaptiste Lully’s 1676 mythological opera Atys was saturated with dance, befitting its creation under the patronage as well as supervision of King Louis XIV. Louis didn’t invent ballet but he systematized it in a way to shape its future development. An avid performer as well as champion, in 1661 he established the Académie Royale de Danse. Atys was a revival of the 1987 production by France’s Les Arts Florissant and the Opéra Comique, which proved a signal event in the reintroduction of French Baroque opera into the active repertory. The choreography is by Béatrice Massin, based on what the late Francine Lancelot created in 1987. Throughout Atys we are aware of the dual objectives of Louis himself. He projected the divine right of majesty through an imperturbable bearing and gestural command, as well as asserted his fitness for the job via the agile traversal of virtuoso difficulties. Even at its most strenuous, however, Louis’s ballet maintained a distinct distance from the rambunctiousness of country and folk celebration. Ballet since then has gone on pointe and become much more technically intricate, often needlessly so. Atys provided a worthy brief for simplicity and the illusion of effortlessness. And more Baroque was approaching at the crunch of my deadline: the New York Baroque Dance company was due to perform at the 92nd Street Y last Saturday. Balanchine’s Apollo, performed at New York City Ballet last week, gives us a response to the same lineage by a very different epoch and a singular creative sensibility. Balanchine made Apollo for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1928, following a run of ballets Diaghilev had commis-
24 CityArts | September 28, 2011
Robert Fairchild in George Balanchine’s Apollo. Photo Credit: Paul Kolnik
sioned that channeled the Baroque. Massine and Nijinska had had their say: now it was 24-year-old Balanchine’s turn. Louis XIV himself had allied himself to the Greek sun god Apollo. But following Stravinsky’s score, Balanchine emphasized Apollo’s sometimes clumsy, untamed nature. Balanchine acknowledged Baroque protocol, as well as contemporary athletics, and the
recent past of ballet itself. (A kinetic quote from Swan Lake is singularly appropriate given the high esteem Apollo was said to harbor for this particular bird.) True to Balanchine form, this ballet is as much about the ballerina(s) as the male hero: Apollo meets three Muses on his way to maturity. They are companions, catalysts, teachers and maternal protectors.
The Music of Elliott Carter Interpreted New Choreography by Emery LeCrone and Avi Scher: As part of Works & Process at the Guggenheim, two choreographers create dances set to the same pieces of music. Oct. 2 & 3, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Ave., 212-423-3500, guggenheim.org; 7:30, $30. Soaking W.E.T: The Bang Group’s David Parker & Jeffrey Kazin present 8 artists in the 9th season of this explosive choreography series. Oct. 6–9, West End Theater, 263 West End Ave., 212-3379565, thebanggroup.com/wet.php; $20. As currently presented by NYCB, Apollo is not fully accorded its divine or royal prerogatives. I saw it performed on the heels of Balanchine’s Episodes, following a short pause. The two ballets should have been, and would have been until recently, separated by an intermission. No doubt due in part to the influence of marketers, ballet in America now seems to want to get more people out of the theater as soon as possible, thus generating a faint flavor of self-abasement. I can certainly understand people wanting to go home early on a work night, but is ballet really something you want to get over with as fast as you can? Louis himself would be outraged. Opera audiences are surely bewildered. Opera intermissions are disappearing, to, but at BAM, Atys clocked in at four hours, and it seemed to me that very few people left during either of its two intermissions. At NYCB today, Apollo is also given short shrift due to Balanchine’s decision in 1978 to eliminate the Prologue that described Apollo’s birth. This truncated the full progression limned by Stravinsky and Balanchine himself until then. Nevertheless, Apollo continues to thrive. Last week the god was danced by 24-yearold Robert Fairchild, who at this point is most suited to Apollo’s earlier stages of development. Fairchild was at his best zigzagging through Balanchine’s appointed thrashings of discovery and actualization, though his broad shoulders lent an authority to carry him through to the ballet’s lofty conclusion. Fairchild is sometimes undone by his determination to give a “performance.” He doesn’t oversell but sometimes he puts too much spin on the ball. Last week, he wanted to make every encounter with his three Muses “read” to us in the audience. But since they are ballerinas as well as Muses, sometimes it’s necessary simply to accept that they don’t communicate entirely the way flesh-andblood women might.
Read more by Joel Lobenthal at Lobenthal.com.
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 artists’ works & over 50 drawings by his students & followers. Ends 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. THE CLARK: “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 artists’ large-scale sculptures that weave literal Nigerian trash into Ghanian tradition. Ends Oct. 16, 225 South St., Williamstown, Mass., clarkart.edu/museum. 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.
MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM: “What is Portraiture?” Ends Nov. 4. “Marina Zurkow.” Ends Jan. 8, 2012, 3 S. Mountain Ave., Montclair, N.J., montclair-art.com. NEWARK MUSEUM: “Patchwork from Folk Art to Fine Art,” and the accompanying exhibition “The Global Art of Patchwork: Asia and Africa” explore the history of quilts as an outlet for expression and storytelling. The exhibition includes over 30 quilts—many crafted by New Jersey natives—and is accompanied by a host of related special events. Ends Dec. 31, 49 Washington St., Newark, NJ, newarkmuseum.org. NEW BRITAIN MUSEUM OF ART: “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.
KATONAH MUSEUM OF ART: “Joseph Wheelright: Tree Figures.” Ongoing, 134 Jay St. - Rte. 22, Katonah, N.Y., katonahmuseum.org.
NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM: The museum has a packed schedule, with classes, workshops, 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.
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.
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.
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. Ends Jan. 9, 2012. Also on view is Jane Philbrick’s “The Expanded Field,” a publicly accessible “industrial garden” for rest & meditation. Ends Jan. 9, 2012, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, Mass., massmoca.org.
WADSWORTH ATHENAEUM: “Patti Smith: Camera Solo.” Opens Oct. 21, 600 Main St., Hartford, Conn., thewadsworth.org.
DIA - BEACON:The gallery presents “Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977” & artist-led programs all summer long. Talks & walkthroughs are free with museum admission. Ends Oct. 10, 3 Beekman St., Beacon, N.Y., diabeacon.org.
Jason office products
Joseph Wheelwright “Pine Man,” 2006, 24 feet high. Courtesy of the artist and Alan Stone Gallery.
INVENTORY SALE Pens at 30% off
Great savings on Aurora, Sensa, Pelikan, Cross, Waterman and more! Shop online at www.jasonoffice.com
212-279-7455 • 800-875-7455 Monday-Friday 7am-6pm 140 West 31st Street between 6th & 7th Aves September 28, 2011 | CityArts 25
AUCTIONS
Benefit Auctions:
Going, Going Auctioning
George Eastman House, Oct. 3 at Metropolitan Pavilion, NYC. Previews: Oct. 2 & 3, eastmanhouse.org. Center for Photography at Woodstock, Oct. 9 in Woodstock, N.Y., cpw.org. Aperture Foundation, Oct. 17, aperture.org. Photo Review, Oct. 22 in Philadelphia. Previews Oct. 16–21, photoreview.org.
New auction season takes off By Caroline Birenbaum These days, you can navigate the entire auction process digitally, from consulting the catalog to bidding in real time. Of course, it’s best to examine items of interest in advance of bidding because condition is a major factor in determining value. Most important: auctions are a great cultural resource. They are by no means limited to prospective buyers or sellers. New York is a hub of the international auction world, and with so many houses conducting sales practically non-stop from September through June, it is an ideal place to regularly see—and handle—a wealth of material during the public preview exhibitions that precede each sale.
Lot 67, ARTHUR ROTHSTEIN, Group of 21 images (the complete set) of Jewish refugees in a Shanghai Refugee Camp, 1946, the largest image approximately 11 3/4 x 9 inches (177 x 125 mm), 13 signed in pencil by Arthur Rothstein (lr), all titled by him on verso, the balance of eight images unsigned, with the Rothstein Estate Stamp on verso. Fine condition. Estimate: $4,000-6,000. The Arthur Rothstein Photograph Collection. To be sold at Doyle New York on Oct. 13, 2011.
Charles White, “Work,” crayon and charcoal on board, 1953. Estimate: $200,000 to $250,000. To be sold at Swann on Oct. 6, 2011. Photo: Courtesy Swann Galleries
Photo: Courtesy of Doyle New York
PHOTOGRAPHS Perhaps nowhere is the difference between the digital image and the actual object more palpable than when it comes to photographs. Five New York auction houses and four organizations devoted to photography will hold photo sales in the coming weeks. Take a look at the digital catalogs, fit some preview time into your daily rounds, and immerse yourself in just about the entire history of photography. Phillips de Pury leads off on Oct. 4 at their Park Avenue location with a two-session daytime sale presenting striking fashion and celebrity photos, including Richard Avedon’s psychedelic 1967 Beatles Portfolio and a platinum-palladium print of Irving Penn’s elegant high-contrast portrait of model Jean Patchett that graced the April 1950 cover of Vogue. The evening session, dubbed “The Arc of Photography,” comprises a private collection of portraits and self-portraits ranging from Nadar to Warhol. Previews until Oct. 3, phillipsdepury.com.
26 CityArts | September 28, 2011
Sotheby’s two-session auction Oct. 5 offers rare historical works such as an early copy of Alexander Gardner’s Sketchbook of the [Civil] War and an imperial-sized copy of his seated portrait of Abraham Lincoln, as well as a complete set of the journal Camera Work. Also featured are a mural of Ansel Adams’s famed “Moonrise, Hernandez, NM” (1941, printed circa 1970), a lifetime print of Diane Arbus’s uncanny portrait of nude, spaced-out Warhol star “Viva at Home” (1968), and a huge mixedmedia piece by Peter Beard centered on a night-time photograph of statuesque Maureen Gallagher feeding a giraffe. Previews Sept. 30–Oct. 4, sothebys.com. Christie’s wide-ranging two-session daytime sale on Oct. 6, showcasing photographs by Eugene Atget, Robert Frank, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams and Peter Beard, is followed Oct. 7 by “The American Landscape,” some 200 masterful black and white images
from the collection of Bruce and Nancy Berman, who clearly had a penchant for visual puns and strong rectilinear compositions. Previews Oct. 1–5, christies.com. On Oct. 13, Doyle offers a single-artist sale of photographs by the late Arthur Rothstein from the collection of his wife Grace Rothstein. Compare later printings of his iconic “Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma” (1936), marvel at his delightful shots of children and discover his amazing 1946 series Jewish Refugees in a Shanghai Refugee Camp. Previews Oct. 8–11, doylenewyork.com. Swann’s eclectic selection on the afternoon of Oct. 18 includes Berenice Abbott’s Retrospective Portfolio with 50 signed prints, an uncommon German World War II album and contemporary photos such as “Cindy Sherman as Marilyn Monroe” (1982). Previews Oct. 13–18, swanngalleries.com.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN FINE ART Also coming up Oct. 6 is Swann’s autumn auction of African-American Fine Art. Swann’s first sale devoted entirely to works by African-American artists was held in 2007 and ever since, these auctions have succeeded in expanding awareness of acknowledged masters as well as introducing under-represented artists to the public. Of special note in this sale are “Work” (1953), a monuwmental drawing of a laborer by Charles White; a recently discovered landscape painting by Robert S. Duncanson, late 1850s; an unusual painted folding screen by Jacob Lawrence from the early 1940s; and major paintings by Hale Woodruff, 1958, Norman Lewis, 1961, and Barkley L. Hendricks, 1977. Previews Oct. 1–6, swanngalleries.com.
For information on everything photographic, refer to the venerable, accessible Photograph Magazine, photographmag.com.
Choose your place. Choose your date. Fly Economy one way. Fly Business or First on your return. It’s that easy with the award calendar at AA.com.
Sample round-trip results as of 10/15/09. AmericanAirlines and AA.com are marks of American Airlines, Inc. oneworld is a mark of the oneworld Alliance, LLC. Š 2011 American Airlines, Inc. All rights reserved.
September 28, 2011 | CityArts 9/20/11 3:41 PM 27
A0353-1_10x11.25.indd 1
JOB #: A0353
Specia City Ar l All fo ts Off ur lec er! ture s for
only $
enter
code:
2 1 . T C O CI DA VIN
85
CityA
rts
REMBR
19 . T C O ANDT
G O G N A V
T D AN TURE SERIES WITH
N O T N E B D L O
B E R A T T E N A .J
A LEC
To g n i m o oC
Als OCT.
15
P
Janetta ring Dr. b o t ersity sed is plea ce Univ a s P t n d e e s re guish at the Pace P ctures a distin le , n t o u t o n Be l this s soldRebold chimme S present e o h h t w o or, Art t , fastProfess eum of ct-filled s a f u r M e n h lita and for Metropo known rmative o is f in n o t ly n , us Be d a new ultaneo e fall. Dr. n im ig s s e , ally d lectures es an in specific id s paced v a o h r p e t ce tha ing. Sh , each s for Pa ie entertain r e masters s r e r u o u f t f c o a, al le erent er nd work f a if inaugur d e f a li e living in ok at th ture is onality, s depth lo r e ach lec p E . e le iv t y t c s e in ist nal e websit h y perso t with a d r it e v is v a enton, rking in ith Dr. B and wo w h c n by a lu followed ils. for deta
S R E T : N I S E A C P PIE
T R A E E T S GR HEIR MA DR
H
O C T. 2 6
.2 V O N O ICAS S
l
al F s i h T Pace OCT.
MPTON 21 A H N AN AWAY CALL IZ CALLAWAY AND L
! M O O B
M O R F TALES AHEL: THE S H
ING WIT
AN EVEN
NOV.
5
E C N E R E T D R A H C BLAN ET QUINT
AAL
M BAABA
TICKETS: schimmel.pace.edu OR BY CALLING 866.811.4111 | STOP BY THE SCHIMMEL BOX OFFICE MONDAY – FRIDAY 1:00PM – 6:00PM
28 CityArts | September 28, 2011