cityArts October 12, 2011 by CityArts NYC

www.cityartsnyc.com OCT. 12–oct. 25, 2011 Volume 3, Issue 16

Paris Blues Revisited Page 6 Almódovar Hates Gaga: The Skin We Live In Page 14 The CityArts Interview: Paul Holdengräber Page 18

Pauline Kael: Criticism’s Last Icon Also: Eva Hesse Channels de Kooning at Brooklyn Museum

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We are obliged to follow Kael’s best instincts and oppose, as she did, the herd mentality and overweening hype that ignores and overlooks the actual content of art.

THE ORIGINAL NAME FOR TROMBONE?

Interviewer Paul Holdengräber sat with sented an acting prize to Belafonte for Kanwriter Elena Oumano for the first in what sas City and recalled “When I saw Harry in will be a regular feature: The CityArts Inter- Carmen Jones, I said ‘This is competition.’” view. As part of our pledge to bring thinking In Sing Your Song, Belafonte shows us how back to the arts, these interviews will feature to compete against injustice; he demonprominent doers in the arts, akin to what strates how art and career should be used. Elsewhere in this issue, Barbara BraaBoomers might recall from the old Dewar’s Scotch ads—this time with the intention of then’s look at Eva Hesse’s stunning work letting readers see what it is that makes the on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum resarts scene tick. Holdengräber’s impressive, cues an obscure visionary and brings her eclectic array of featured guests for “LIVE striking imagery and vibrant sculpture from the NYPL” connects reading to thinking; to our attention. Rescue is also part of it sustains the remix of high and pop culture Valerie Gladstone’s mission in her report on Paris Blues to which CityArts Revisited—the Jazz is dedicated. at Lincoln Center Calling himself exhibit of a Romare “the curator of Bearden and Albert public curiosity,” Murray collaboraHoldengräber tion that corrected sets an example the 1961 Hollywood art watchers can film Paris Blues applaud. This (Paul Newman, Sidweek, his NYPL ney Poitier, Joanne guest is Harry Woodward, DiaBelafonte, subject hann Carroll and of a six-degrees Louis Armstrong bio doc on HBO expatriating under called Sing Your Martin Ritt’s baton). Song. This film Sometimes truth reveals Belafonte and beauty will out. at the center of About the cover: major moments In 1980, Jill Krementz in the second photographed Pauhalf of the 20th line Kael’s return century. He’s conto the fold, holding nected—through forth in her New Yorkpassion and prin- Pauline Kael Photograph © JillKrementz, all rights reserved. er office. It reminds ciple—to Paul us how Kael’s influRobeson, Marlon ence in the seminal Brando, Eleanor period of the ’70s Roosevelt, CoretAmerican renaista Scott King sance produced and so many unending resentothers who set ment among film the standard for literati, who lacked ethical conduct the intellectual conand principled fidence to respect artistry. her distinctive point It’s an astonof view. A vengeful ishing view of Village Voice coterie Belafonte as a has since supplanted non-Zelig, a man the very memory of devoted to his ethnic, humane, social and artistic identity, Kael’s preeminence, encouraging hipster who could truly walk with crowds and keep his nihilism in everything from reviewing style virtue, talk with kings and not lose the common to film festival curatorship. We are obliged to follow Kael’s best touch and still give an unforgettable perforinstincts and oppose, as she did, the herd mance in Robert Altman’s 1996 Kansas City. While watching Belafonte walk the walk mentality and overweening hype that in Sing Your Song, I remembered Paul New- ignores and overlooks the actual content of man’s tribute at the 1997 New York Film art. I’m OK with appreciating Kael’s writing Critics Circle Awards gala when he pre- as literature, but I cling to it as thinking.

AN OPEN DOOR TO EXTRAORDINARY WORLDS

LIGHT BULB ARMOND WHITE

October 12, 2011 | CityArts 3

INSIDE Prendergast Paris Unearthed at Clarke Auction Auction Sunday, October 23, 2011 at 2pm View 400 lots at www.ClarkeNY.com

Galleries

Jazz

Paris Blues Gets Improvised by Valerie Gladstone Page 6 Barney’s New Anthro Art by Kate Prengel Page 7 Abstracting the Real by MaureenMullarkey Page 7

Why the Blues Rocks by Howard Mandel Page 14

Museums

Wet on Wet: Eva Hesse by Barbara Braathen Page 9 Revolution In and Out by John Goodrich Page 10 Classical Music

Carnegie’s Long Short Night by Jay Nordlinger Page 11 Dance

Democratizing Dance by Joel Lobenthal Page 12

Film

Skin Game by Armond White Page 15 Emilio Estevez’s The Way by Gregory Solman Page 16 French CanCan by John Demetry Page 17 Pop Music

Squirmingly Seeking Hipness by Ben Kessler Page 18 Books

Pauline Kael, Criticism’s Last Icon by Armond White Page 18 the cityarts interview

Paul Holdengräber Page 25

Maurice Prendergast Oil on Panel Woman in a Veil Est. $40,000-$60,000

Clarke Auction ∙ 2372 Boston Post Road ∙ Larchmont, NY 10538 Ph: (914) 833-8336 ∙ Fax: (914) 833-8357 ∙ Email: info@clarkeny.com

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SENIOR DANCE CRITIC Joel Lobenthal CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Caroline Birenbaum, John Demetry, Valerie Gladstone, John Goodrich, Amanda Gordon, Ben Kessler, Howard Mandel, Maureen Mullarkey, Mario Naves, Gregory Solman, Melissa Stern, Nicholas Wells

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WWW.CITYARTSNYC.COM Jean Pierre Cassigneul (B.1935) Femme Au Bord De La Mer 917.613.0868 www.Lindabernellgallery.com 4 CityArts | October 12, 2011

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GALLERIES

Exhibition Openings

Painting Silly and Smart Take the Jansons and Chisholm challenge

Alexandre Gallery: Brett Bigbee: “Recent Work.” Opens Oct. 20, 41 E. 57th St., 13th Fl., 212-755-2828, alexandregallery.com. Animazing Gallery: Bill Carman. Opens Oct. 22, 54 Greene St., 212-226-7374, animazing.com. Barbara Mathes Gallery: Enrico Castellani. Opens Oct. 13, 22 E. 80th St., 212-570-4190, barbaramathesgallery.com.

By Mario Naves

Bertrand Delacroix Gallery: Pietro Costa: “grace - 10 years since...” Ends Oct. 15, 314 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn, 212-627-4444, bdgny.com.

The Cotton Candy Gallery: “A Circus Posterus Event.” Opens Oct. 14, 235 South 1st St., Brooklyn, 718-387-3844, thecottoncandymachine.com.

ou’d be hard-pressed to find paintings sillier than those of Max Jansons, whose recent work is on display at James Graham & Sons. Saying so isn’t panning the pictures, and not panning the pictures isn’t damning them with faint praise. Freewheelin’ is the exhibition’s title and theme: Jansons’ amalgams of modernist abstraction and folk art contrivance, at once elegant and cloddish, are unapologetically blasé. “Eazy Breezy” is a title; “What’s Not to Love?” another. Jansons doesn’t don a hair shirt when putting brush to canvas. He chooses not to worry about anything quite so grave as Art. Frittering away his time, Jansons enjoys himself. How much the rest of us will enjoy the paintings depends on our taste for his flaky, off-the-cuff sensibility. Jansons’ dilettante-ish ways point to a constitutional inability to take things seriously, but also to an unmistakable erudition. Locating inspiration in “the beach, the ocean…hippies, surfers and kooks [and] sunny days,” he pursues a funky mix of bourgeois comfort and bohemian caprice. Did I mention Jansons is from California? Combining a wan and earthy palette with a touch that doesn’t break a sweat, Jansons flits between a decidedly American brand of abstraction—Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove and Myron Stout are brought to mind—and the lumpish ministrations of a Sunday painter. Vases of flowers and teapots, rendered with cack-handed contouring, are fitted with jutting zigzag patterning. When the work threatens to succumb to a cozy irony, it’s righted by pieces like “O.P.,” “Like A Sailor Redux” and “Yabble Dabble” (all 2011), wherein nonrepresentational ends bring much-needed ambiguity to an artist overly pleased by his own dry wit. Jansons bumbles for real when he settles on the female form. Granted, it was cute— kind of—to render “boobs” as if they were academic exercises in color, shape and space. But there are happier marriages to be made than between the pictorial rigor

DC Moore Gallery: Barbara Takenaga & Alexi Worth. Opens Oct. 13, 535 W. 22nd St., 212-2472111, dcmooregallery.com. Lyons Wier Gallery: Martin Wittfooth: “The Passions.” Opens Oct. 13, 542 W. 24th St., 212242-6220, lyonswiergallery.com.

Ross Chisholm’s “New Portrait,” 2011, oil on canvas in found frame, 23.62 x 19.69 inches.

of Joseph Albers and John Wesley’s brittle essays in cartoon erotica. Dumb is the last thing you want from a painter whose gift is yoking frivolous pleasures from sophisticated fun.

Max Jansons: Freewheelin’ Through Nov. 22, James Graham & Sons, 32 E. 67th St., 212-535-5767, www.jamesgrahamandsons.com.

hen was it that painters became smart—or at least affected smartness? Historians can undoubtedly point to precedents before the advent of post-modernism, but there’s no doubt that visual artists nowa-

days are ready-equipped with a spiel—literary and theoretical flourishes by which their efforts are invested with, you know, meaning. Painters have always looked to the broader world for inspiration. But what are we to make of Russ Chisholm, whose this, that and the other corpus is on view at Marc Jancou Contemporary? Chisholm’s exhibition, Garden of Forking Paths, takes its title from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges and, in particular, the notion that “time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.” Reading the press release, we learn that the paintings draw “attention to the shifting conventions of, but sustained urge for, self-representation.” Chisholm busies himself with

“subverting…iconic pillars of art history and the versions of the past they present.” How subversive can Chisholm be if he’s all but indistinguishable from any number of contemporary pasticheurs? Pastiche is Chisholm’s all—that and a fondness for Francis Bacon. Whether altering found photographs, quoting paintings by Joshua Reynolds and Allan Ramsay or bringing a fetching patina to musty runs of color, Chisholm is never truly in thrall to his medium. Instead, he indulges in heady games. Chisholm’s mock variations on classical portraiture are especially over-determined. As exercises in passive-aggressive desecration, they have their adolescent attractions. The piece of packing tape—left oh, so casually!—on the surface of “Seminal Queen” (2011) would be the envy of a sophomore painting student who’s only just discovered Duchamp. Chisholm misses the point. Aping the Old Masters isn’t the same thing as channeling them, and there’s only so much mileage to be gained from condescending to tradition. Would that Chisholm actually believed in something—then his art might do more than coast on mere expertise. And there are skills here, definitely. If Chisholm forgot about “destabilizing the authority of the image” and similar dead-end tropes, he might come up with pictures that are good rather than smart.

Russ Chisholm: Garden of Forking Paths Through Oct. 22, Marc Jancou Contemporary, 524 W. 24th St., 212-473-2100, www.marcjancou.com. October 12, 2011 | CityArts 5

Paris Blues Gets Improvised Rescuing Bearden from Hollywood By Valerie Gladstone

n 1961, jazz lovers couldn’t wait for the release of photographer Sam Shaw’s movie Paris Blues. With a score by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and co-starring Louis Armstrong, it sounded like a brilliant idea; a glorious celebration of the City of Lights’ devotion to jazz. Well, yes—until Hollywood got hold of it and the producer turned real events into clichéd fiction. The film eventually came with the message that jazz didn’t warrant a place beside Western classical music. Twenty years later, artist Romare Bearden, writer and historian Albert Murray (a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center) and Shaw decided to set the record straight by creating a book together, which they titled Paris Blues Revisited. But though they got more than halfway through the project, finishing 19 spreads, it was never completed. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s top-notch curatorial team, consisting of NYU lecturer Dan Dawson, Diedra Harris-Kelley, codirector of the Bearden Foundation and Bearden’s niece, and Columbia University English and literature professor Robert G. O’Meally, wasn’t about to let those efforts go to waste. Last January, they met with the Shaws at their archive and saw the book for the first time.

“Once we’d seen it, the planning for the show began in earnest,” says O’Meally. The work will be on exhibit at Jazz at Lincoln Center through Feb. 28, 2012, a collaboration with the Romare Bearden Foundation on the centennial of Bearden’s birth. Adrian Ellis, executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, considers it a terrific show for the center’s exhibition space at its headquarters in the Time Warner Center. “It’s exciting to bring this unrealized project to the public,” he says. “It gives a whole new perspective on the period and shows another dimension of Shaw, Bearden and Murray’s talent.” The Bearden Foundation leapt at the chance to show the contents of the long-lost book, which include the artist’s vibrant paintings and collages, Murray’s poetic writings and Shaw’s evocative photographs, all of them related to Ellington and Armstrong in Paris as well as to the jazz scene in New Orleans and New York. Using only the best reproductions of Bearden’s works, the curators and Linda Florio of Florio Design set up the show as a picture-and-word book on the walls, so viewers can experience it as they would a book. “The works give a wonderful flavor of the time,” says Harris-Kelley. “These artists were all friends who had experienced that wonderful period in Paris, New Orleans and New York. They worked together like a jazz ensemble.”

Portraits of Time and Place Lisette Model showing in Chelsea By Melissa Stern There are few galleries in New York City that approach their mission as thoughtfully as Bruce Silverstein Gallery. Silverstein’s exhibitions are curated with consistent care and intellectual rigor. The current show, Self-Reflections: The Expressionist Origins of Lisette Model, is a stunning examination of the relationship between

6 CityArts | October 12, 2011

Model and the German expressionist painters of her era. The show also seeks to link Model’s fabulous photographs of cabaret musicians to her aesthetic relationship with the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Personally, I could have done without the constant, somewhat grating record of Schoenberg that plays in the back gallery, but it ultimately doesn’t detract from the glowing vintage photographs. Model’s photographs were taken in parallel to the great, politically radical visual artists of the 1930s. Max Beckmann,

“No official title - work in progress,” Paris Blues Revisited, Duke Ellington and Billy Stayhorn in a cab in Paris. Art © Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY In Paris Blues Revisited, Jazz at Lincoln Center puts on view five photographs by Shaw, 19 collages by Bearden—which include parts of Shaw’s photographs—and two books by Albert Murray with covers illustrated by Bearden. O’Meally explains why this is no ordinary art exhibit. “What you see here,” he says, “is the visual equivalent of music. These artists present Paris as a city as swinging as New Orleans and Harlem, with musicians like Django

Reinhardt and Sidney Bechet making their homes there. Because some of Bearden’s works are unfinished, you get the feeling of a rehearsal and a sense of their improvisatory process. They did what the movie was supposed to do—but far better.”

George Grosz and Otto Dix are but a few of the brave artists who portrayed Germany and its coming nightmare in their work at the time. The pairings in this exhibition are sublime—Grosz’s ironic drawing “People Are Basically Good,” portraying three block-headed thugs sitting around a table, cigarettes clenched in their teeth, double chins hanging over their collars, is perfectly matched with three Model photographs of overfed German gents of the same era in various stiff, clench-jawed poses. Such parallels repeat throughout the exhibition. The very large man in a striped shirt that Model photographs in “Circus Man: Nice,” could have stepped right out of the adjacent drawing by Karl Hubbuch

entitled “On The Beach in St. Malo.” By making these connections, the gallery has placed Model’s photographs in a historic, political and visual context that grants her work a sense of place and an enhanced level of resonance. This is a gorgeous show. The luscious gelatin silver prints remind us of everything that digital can’t do, and their juxtaposition to potent and vibrant political drawings makes this a valuable art history lesson as well as an aesthetic delight.

Paris Blues Revisited Through Feb. 28, 2012, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at W. 60th St., 212-875-5350, www.jalc.org.

Self-Reflections: The Expressionist Origins of Lisette Model Through Nov. 12, Bruce Silverstein Gallery, 535 W. 24th St., 212-267-3930, www.brucesilverstein.com.

Junkyard of the Future Barney’s NEW Anthro Art By Kate Prengel

“T

his is some crap from outer space,” said one teenager admiringly as he circled the first room of the Matthew Barney exhibit in the Gladstone Gallery. And he was right: the works do look a little bit like asteroids. They’ve traveled a long way to get to us. The mammoth sculptures on exhibit here are full of information from another world. They show buried treasure at the very moment of being uncovered. The piece in that first room, “Canopic Chest,” initially looks like a dark mountain crumbling into rubble. But on closer inspection, you see that there’s an old-model car in there buried under a pile of tar. From the front, you can still see the car’s headlights and fender, tilted slightly upward, as if the car is lurching bravely up a hill. From the top, the remains of the car look like bones.

Barney’s sculptures make these ordinary cars seem fresh and intriguing; it’s as if we’ve blasted into the distant future in order to discover, with all the enthusiasm of pioneering archeologists, what our own era looks like. The theme continues in the next room with “DJED.” Again, the remains of a car lie half-covered in a tar pit. Here, the car parts gleam gently, like fossilized bones; everything carries the patina of age. It’s a strange experience, looking at these very familiar objects transformed by their setting. On the one hand, Barney’s sculptures make these ordinary cars seem fresh and intriguing; it’s as if we’ve blasted into the distant future in order to discover, with all the enthusiasm of pioneering archeologists, what our own era looks like. On the other hand, of course, the pieces remind us that America’s dominance, Cadillacs and all, is already a matter for the history books.

It is the last piece in the show that may be the most exciting. Climb the stairs to the second floor and you’re looking at “Secret Name,” a fluffy gray reef wedged against a blinding white slab, circled by a fraying rope. You can almost smell the salt air and hear the waves slapping against the pier. At the very tip of the reef, you can see that some primitive tool

made of plastic and metal is starting to be exposed. This is the first moment of discovery. What’s buried in the reef? Whatever it is, Barney is aiming to preserve it. The final sculpture, stuck in a corner near “Secret Name,” is a smaller piece called “Sacrificial Anode.” A sacrificial anode is a zinc rod used to prevent rust in, say, deep-sea vessels. Here, the rods are old and beat-up, half lovely found art, half practical tool, a neat complement to “Secret Name.” For visitors who want to climb a little

further into Barney’s mind, the gallery has included a series of his drawings. Done in rather intricate ink on a red background, these are far murkier than the sculptures. They revisit some of the same themes— ancient mythological figures and cars both appear. But the drawings lack the immediate thrill and sense of newness that the sculptures bring.

Matthew Barney’s DJED Through Oct. 22, Gladstone Gallery, 530 W. 21st St., 212-206-7606, www.gladstonegallery.com.

“As beautiful to look at as a show can possibly be” — New York Times

Heroic Africans Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures Through January 29

metmuseum.org The exhibition 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.

Commemorative figure (detail), Hemba peoples, Niembo group, Sayi region, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 19th–early 20th century, Private Collection.

October 12, 2011 | CityArts 7

Abstracting the Real Elizabeth O’Reilly’s Latest Lucid Display By Maureen Mullarkey

odesty is not a characteristic of contemporary culture. The prevailing emphasis on self-assertion and the pseudoprofundity that fuels it in the visual arts leaves little room for the quietude and lucidity that is the hallmark of Elizabeth O’Reilly’s painting. O’Reilly brings to her art an intuitive regard for man’s sense of place. It is a sensibility that makes the locks on the Union Street Bridge, which spans Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a significant aspect of home. Under her eye, urban details can as easily approach the same wellsprings of serenity as a Douglas fir on Long Island’s North Fork, where O’Reilly spends her weekends. This eponymous solo exhibit—her eighth at George Billis Gallery—marks O’Reilly’s return to pure painting after working in collage (painting’s alter ego) for several years. Her willingness to move

between means, to exchange an expected one for another, indicates a restless concern for getting it right. Mastery is rooted in self-possession no less than in technique. The trajectory of O’Reilly’s successive exhibitions points to a painter striving to possess herself in her art in order to suit her means of expression to her own temperament. It is her ability to work gracefully and persuasively within the sharp-edged constraints of cut-paper collage that best distinguishes her from her mentor, Lois Dodd. Both share the same beneficent light that is so generous with color, eliminating the harsh tones and discordancies that trap lesser representational painters. Both are adept at the free, fluid brushwork necessitated by working en plein air. These similarities between them serve to emphasize an unfashionable truth: that tradition—fertile inheritance—is the bedrock on which individual achievement is built. O’Reilly has not followed Dodd into fey or whimsical motifs. The character of her creative endowment does not permit it. For the last few years,

Elizabeth O’Reilly, “Red Truck, Reflected,” watercolor collage, 12x16”, 2011. she has been altering her means rather than her subjects. Her adventures in collage have proven fruitful in the recent paintings. “Green Triangle, Union Street” (2011) is a beguiling instance of the carry-over into oil of the tightening and clarifying of Last Chance Exhibits Accola Griefen Gallery: Ray Oglesby. Ends Oct. 15, 547 W. 27th St., #634, 646-532-3488, accolagriefen.com. Alexandre Gallery: Will Barnet: “Works On Paper from the 1940s & 1950s.” Ends Oct. 15, 41 E. 57th St., 212-755-2828, alexandregallery.com.

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David Nolan Gallery: Serban Savu: “Close to Nature.” Ends Oct. 22, 527 W. 29th St., 212-9256190, davidnolangallery.com. Leslie/Lohman Gallery: “Lesbians Seeing Lesbians: Building Community in Early Feminist Photography.” Ends Oct. 22, 26 Wooster St., 212-431-2609, leslielohman.org. Lesley Heller Workspace: Loren Munk: “Location, Location, Location.” Ends Oct. 16. “DON’T FENCE ME IN...OR OUT.” Ends Oct. 16, 54 Orchard St., 212-410-6120, lesleyheller.com. Marlborough Gallery: Red Grooms: “New York: 1976–2011.” Ends Oct. 22, 40 W. 57th St., 212541-4900, marlboroughgallery.com. Tibor de Nagy: John Beerman: “Recent Paintings.” Ends Oct. 15. Donald Evans: “Selected Works.” Ends Oct. 15, 724 5th Ave., 212-262-5050, tibordenagy. com. Tria Gallery: Clara Fialho & Kuzana Ogg: “Future Perfect.” Ends Oct. 15, 531 W. 25th St., Grnd. Fl. Ste. 5, 212-695-0021, triagallerynyc.com. Walter Wickiser Gallery: Ethel Gittlin: “Seasons 2011.” Ends Oct. 26, 210 11th Ave., 212941-1817, walterwickisergallery.com.

forms that knifed paper makes obligatory. The triangle of the title is simply a shaft of light falling across a faded green industrial building that fills the upper right quadrant of the canvas. The immediate foreground is empty of everything but light. The void recedes into the distance, broken dramatically by the verticals of a traffic light and the arms of a canal-crossing barrier. Bright candy-cane stripes on the moveable arms provide patterned, complementary relief to the subdued tones of the surrounding architecture and a loose tangle of street greenery. Low-slung, the building is a fitting synecdoche of a neighborhood erected on marshy ground that cannot sustain the weight of tall construction. Coloration, graceful yet still convincing, raises what could have been a dingy scene to an homage to quotidian places. O’Reilly’s gift for rendering is everywhere apparent. In that regard, the exhibition offers substantial nourishment to other painters. My own preferences tilt in favor of the collages. Composed from cunningly shaped and toned segments of watercolor wash, they strike the eye as paintings first. “Sunset at Carroll Street” (2011) is a small glory of darkling washes punctuated by pale strips of dying natural light and dots of street lamps emerging from mottled gloom. “Red Truck, Reflected” (2011) is another lovely performance. Deft, limpid reflections of a parked truck in the moving water of the Gowanus are at once faithful to reality and wholly abstract.

Elizabeth O’Reilly Through Nov. 12, George Billis Gallery, 521 W. 26th St., 212-645-2621, www.georgebillis.com.

MUSEUMS

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz.” Oct. 12–Feb. 26, 2012. “Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe.” Oct. 13–Jan. 2, 2012. “A Sensitivity to the Seasons: Summer and Autumn in Japanese Art.” Ends Oct. 23. “Anthony Caro on the Roof.” Ends Oct. 30. “Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures.” Ends Jan. 29, 2012. “Perino del Vaga in New York Collections.” Ends Feb. 5, 2012. “Infinite Jest: Caricature & Satire from Leonardo to Levine.” Ends March 4, 2012, 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

Wet on Wet Eva Hesse responds to de Kooning By Barbara Braathen

t is rare to encounter an exhibition as coherent and revealing as Spectre, the Eva Hesse show currently at the Brooklyn Museum. Perfectly installed in a well-lit, airy space, this small group of paintings from 1960 was never seen before last year, when it was displayed at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque. The artist was 24 years old when she created these works and had just acquired her first studio in Lower Manhattan. Six years later she gained international recognition for her groundbreaking post-minimal sculpture, but died at the early age of 34. During her short career, Hesse was in the habit of destroying any works she considered unworthy; this series, rarely shown and unknown, was conserved intact. Even though most of the works are small, their intensity is palpable—visceral, in fact. They are painterly paintings, highly gestural, in the mode of the day, and basically neutral in color—grays, browns, whites, blacks and olives, with an occasional rust or pink. The subject is the persona and its many shades, hence the highly appropriate title of the show: Spectres. Configured as single heads or as bodies in pairs or trios, they shed an uneasy, ghostly light. In terms of making paint seem as flesh, de Kooning is clearly her mentor, but Hesse’s focus is different. While art cannot help but reflect its maker’s psyche, fundamentally, de Kooning paints the world out there, shifting between figure and landscape, whereas Hesse looked inward for her material. The first painting one encounters in the exhibit shows a frenzied female, immediately identifiable with de Kooning’s facture. Paint is almost viciously stained, piled, splattered and drizzled to define the body’s widely splayed legs, bulbous breasts and vagina, front and center as a gaping square cavity. The woman is consoled by her calmer, duller sister—or mother or other aspect of self— also with gargantuan breasts, who pushes close as if to offer some body heat and solace to one who is literally breaking down. Another “cavity painting” is a single head with a weighty orange helmet, sad, down-

turned inklings of eyes and an interior chasm of blood red at the heart area. But this area is not empty; there is something square lodged in there, something quite unnatural. The largest of these self-portraits, about three feet square, shows a sagging, torqued visage as a slab of sewage gray, offset by a slight hint of life in the rusty lips. Darker gray indicates the eyes but there is no glimmer at all there, so they focus on nothing— they cannot see. In the excellent catalog for the show, curator E. Luanne McKinnon describes blindness as a means of coping when one feels invisible or abandoned. In this series there are a number of sightless, faceless beings. The gray portrait is the only painting of the group “shown” in Hesse’s lifetime—she brought it to her psychiatrist. From the age of 18 on, Hesse was in psychoanalysis. Her parents’ divorce, suicide and a close experience with the Holocaust set her on shaky ground. In addition, she lived as an aspiring professional in a misogynist society and daily suffered its small and large abuses. Supersensitive and extremely intelligent, Hesse was a feminist years before it became a movement. In her bride painting, the protagonist sits in a white gown holding a bouquet of flowers. She has breasts but no face and is wholly transparent. Standing next to her is a dark, opaque figure with a face lifting off and moving out, perhaps a sort of determination primed to leave behind that most orthodox of conventions: marriage. Although Hesse did marry, her diaries recount her need for freedom and insubordination: “I will paint against every rule I or others have invisibly placed.” Another work that appears to further address the malefemale relationship is a small ochre monochrome with two upright figures facing each other. They hug opposite edges of the canvas, almost slipping out of the picture. Each emits a plasmatic trajectory in some groping attempt to communicate, and the space between them is filled with erratic horizontal swipes, like gossamer vibrations suggesting a primary interest in the other. Other paintings of couples are just women, or sexless figures; one seems like a student work, somewhat unfinished, in the manner of one of her teachers, Rico Lebrun; many are two figures facing each other from the far edges of the plane. Hesse would further this format years later in her sculpture with two

MoMA PS1: “September 11.” Ends Jan. 9, 2012, 22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens, 718-784-2084, ps1.org.

“No title,” 1960, oil on masonite. 15 3/4 x 12 inches. The Estate of Eva Hesse, courtesy Hauser & Wirth. large, identical, minimal blocks linked by a tangle of cords. Given the disturbing nature of Hesse’s work here, it is striking that mirth, wit, mischief and comedy are sometimes mentioned when describing her later approach. Perhaps this is reflected in another small ochre piece, which could be called the “fat painting.” A few grand masses—buttocks or stomach or thighs—are delineated by liquid black outlines. There might be two figures, but they are so closely formed that it is perhaps one figure dividing into two, almost suffocating itself as the vast bulges push out into the front and edges of the surface. The flesh expands, almost painfully, like too much food. It reminded me of the bloated ogre in The Rocky Horror Picture Show who inflates until he floats up, looming into the air, threatening until finally exploding into demise. Munch, Bontecou, Beuys, perhaps Samaras (his subject is “self”), even Tuymans— these are all Hesse’s artistic relatives. But the biggest surprise to me was her skull painting, which I had virtually seen before; it was Basquiat. This motif spans the decades—the centuries—as our very structure from beginning to end. While Hesse’s skull is comprised of full strokes of oil paint that, though rapid, are languorous, Basquiat’s strokes in acrylic are electric and graphically staccatto. Her skull ponders the void with an odd sense of understanding; his skulls shriek into the emptiness as if trying to scare it away. Not too long after Hesse painted this series, cutting-edge artists no longer wanted to paint—certainly not in a painterly mode. Painting, like the bloated ogre, hyperventilated and died. For two decades, in the ’60s and ’70s, artists concentrated on cultivating

The Morgan Library & Museum: “Treasures of Islamic Manuscript Painting from the Morgan.” Oct. 21–Jan. 29, 2012. “Ingres at the Morgan.” Ends Nov. 27. “David, Delacroix, & Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre.” Ends Dec. 31. “Charles Dickens at 200.” Ends Feb. 12, 2012, 225 Madison Ave., 212-685-0008, themorgan. 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. “Making Faces.” Ends Nov. 23, 128 E. 63rd St., 212-838-2560, societyillustrators.org. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: “Intervals: Nicola López.” Ends Oct. 25. “THE HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010: Hans-Peter Feldman.” Ends Nov. 2. “Pop Objects & Icons from the Guggenheim Collection.” Ends Feb. 12, 2012, 1071 5th Ave., 212-423-3500, guggenheim.org. Studio Museum: “Spiral: Perspectives on an African American Art Collective.” Ends Oct. 23. “Evidence of Accumulation.” Ends Oct. 23. “Lyle Ashton Harris: Self/Portrait.” Ends Oct. 23. “as it was, as it could be.” Ends Oct. 23. “Harlem Postcards.” Ends Oct. 23. “StudioSound.” Ends Oct. 23, 144 W. 125th St., 212-864-4500, studiomuseum.org.

other materials. For me, the most outstanding aspect of this show is apprehending what can only be called The Real Thing: painting as a luscious object in and of itself. In many of these works, Hesse applies the paint wet on wet, allowing for no changes once the image is down. This requires great drawing skill and absolute confidence in one’s original vision while simultaneously allowing for the unintended. Hesse is completely on top of her game here, making this a must-see show and a fascinating foil to de Kooning’s current blockbuster at MoMA.

Spectre Through Jan. 8, 2012, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Pkwy, 718-638-5000, www.brooklynmuseum.org. October 12, 2011 | CityArts 9

Revolution In and Out David and Delacroix from Louvre to Morgan By John Goodrich

ack in the 1990s, the Morgan Library lent some 200 drawings to the Louvre Museum. The Louvre has now returned the favor, and in impressive fashion. David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre, currently at the Morgan, is a stunning selection of 80 of the museum’s drawings. The works date from a particularly turbulent time in French history, from 1789 to 1852, when the country veered through periods of revolution, empire and monarchy. Befitting the era, the drawings reflect a kaleidoscope of styles, from the rococo frothiness of Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (son of the famous Jean-Honoré) to the neo-classicism of David and Ingres, the romanticism of Géricault and Delacroix and the earthy naturalism of Corot. But beyond historical context and style, the works glimmer with the power of the artists’ personalities. Mix conservatism and sensuality in equal parts and you might get something like Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, that micromanager of drawing represented by 10 sheets of drawings in the exhibition. In the unkind words of one peer, Ingres “wore his vest too tight and liked it that way”—indeed, aiming for the perfection of Raphael, he is prone to overshoot. But the results can be wondrous: On a sheet with two graphite studies for his renowned painting “Grande Odalisque,” the figure’s spine stretches like

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taffy and yet the intervals—hip to knee, knee to heel—fill the paper with complete conviction. On the same sheet, a close-up of a hand deliciously catches the crooks of fingers with emphatic, delicate shading. In several portraits, lively eyes peer from orchestrations of increasingly fainter details: collars, limbs and eventually hands. Among them, one self-portrait stands out for its rakish air. Did labor ever look so unlabored? (Sixteen additional Ingres drawings from the Morgan’s own collection are on view in a concurrent installation a few rooms away.) At the opposite end of the obsessivecompulsive scale, Eugène Delacroix famously held that an artist should be able to sketch a man falling from a fourth-floor window before he hit the ground. His nine sheets of drawings at the Morgan, however, locate the critical masses and details with an authority equal to Ingres’. Particularly fine is his study for the iconic painting “Liberty Leading the People”; Delacroix’s fervent marks neglect a hip in order to forge, palpably, something more crucial: the ardor of a young woman brandishing a flag. Several ink drawings—tempests of coiling lines and saturated darks—also stand out, but the biggest surprise is a pale graphite sketch of Dieppe harbor, with masts and sails rising tremulously into the light. Muscular and moody, Théodore Géricault’s drawings of figures and animals ply a darker vein of romanticism but hardly prepare you for the artist’s vibrant watercolor-and-chalk drawing of his own

left hand, produced when he was on his deathbed. In a sunset view of the Roman skyline, François Marius Granet’s wash drawing captures much of the mysterious, interior light of Claude Lorrain’s sketches from two centuries earlier. The exquisitely rich tones of Honoré Daumier’s tiny chalk portrait honor the hard-set features of a working class Théodore Géricault’s “The Artist’s Left Hand,” watercolor, with black woman. and red chalk, Musée du Louvre, Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Several chalk drawResource, NY. Photography by Michèle Bellot. ings by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon seduce with their blended, velvety tones, and his por- ion, a full sense of his pride and resolve. trait of a shyly smiling woman becomes The most striking works in the exhibiall the more affecting when we read that tion, though, tend to stand apart from the the subject, Prud’hon’s lover, was to take topical. And in some intriguing moments, her own life two decades later. And yet, the artists seem to depart even from their this artist’s work never achieves the kind usual selves. Two of the most remarkable of poignancy—the eloquence of interval— drawings are a pair of spontaneous studthat makes the compositions of Ingres or ies by the elderly Ingres for his celebrated Delacroix so momentous. “The Turkish Bath.” A tiny ink sketch No works tie more explicitly to contem- hacks out several figures with the alacrity porary events than the drawings executed of Matisse. The broad, robust crosshatchby Jacques-Louis David in various combi- ings in the second impart a supple chunknations of graphite, chalk and ink. Multi- iness to several female nudes, rendering figure sketches by the artist—including a them at once graceful and thoroughly scene of a lavish reception for Napoleon fleshy. It’s as if Ingres, approaching his and Josephine—impress for their com- 80th year, was subject to his own internal plexity. But more compelling is the small, revolutions. crisp portrait of a prison mate, produced when the artist was serving jail time for his David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary participation in the revolution. We don’t France: Drawings from the Louvre know the sitter’s name, but the portrait Through Dec. 31, Morgan Library & Museum, 225 conveys, in sensitive, straightforward fash- Madison Ave., 212-685-0008, www.themorgan.org.

CLASSICAL

Carnegie’s Long Short Night Gergiev and Mariinsky orchestra start season By Jay Nordlinger

arnegie Hall opened its season with an orchestra from out of town—way out of town: St. Petersburg (and not Florida). This was the Mariinsky Orchestra, known during Soviet times as the Kirov. Carnegie Hall will feature other orchestras from abroad this season: the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics, most promisingly. It will also host the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra. There’s a curveball. There will be domestic orchestras, too, including ensembles from Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, Cleveland and San Francisco. In 2003, there was a deal between Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic to move the Philharmonic back into Carnegie, where it had once resided. A lot of us said, “But will other orchestras be crowded out? Will Carnegie retain its ability to be a showcase for orchestras at large?” In any case, the deal fell through. Conducting the Mariinsky on opening night was its regular maestro, the famed, talented and hard-working Valery Gergiev. He is also the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. The hall was decked out with attractive fall bouquets. Gergiev used no podium, having his feet flat on the floor, and no baton. These are his usual practices. We also saw his habitual “Furtwängler flutter”—those mysterious movements of the hands. Apparently, orchestras respond to them, as they did when Furtwängler fluttered. This was to be a short program, with an early start and an early finish—7 to 8:30, no intermission. It lasted well beyond that, in part because Gergiev did not take the stage till about 7:15. The concert turned out to feel a little long, in my judgment. The New York Philharmonic kicks off its season with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and so does the Metropolitan Opera. Not so Carnegie Hall. This program started with Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, one of the most delightful and exuberant pieces in the literature. It was written in 1954 for the 37th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik regime, of course, killed approximately 20 million human beings. But we can forget that while grinning to the Festive Overture.

ist. He was Yo-Yo Ma, probably the most popular cellist in the world. Even casual TV watchers are familiar with him. I know a cellist who thanks Ma every time he sees him. Why? Because Ma, he says, opened avenues for other cellists, getting audiences used to the idea of a solo cellist. Ma brought to the Tchaikovsky his usual enthusiasm. At his best, he played with loose flair. At his worst, he was just loose— loose and sloppy. His finest moment was probably the haunting D-minor variation that precedes the finale. In the finale—that joyous, irresistible thing—he seemed to lose his sound, his very volume. Curious. As he plays, Ma smiles, gesticulates, flirts with the orchestra and generally hams it up. This is harmless, if sometimes a little hard to watch. If the man is sincere, who can begrudge him? Still, I couldn’t help thinking, a little meanly, “If Starker had acted like this onstage, would he have been more famous and richer than he was?” Without really being asked, Ma played an encore—that is, he sat down to it at the earliest opportunity, before the audience could stop applauding. It was one of his usual encores: an arrangement of the beloved Andante cantabile from Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1. I Conductor Valery Gergiev, who led the Mariinsky Orchestra at once heard him play Carngie Hall’s opening night. this piece exquisitely— Photo by Joachim Ladefoged with no soupiness, only of this hall. This happens to me every year taste. He simply let Tchaikovsky’s line be on opening night. I leave Carnegie Hall in itself. Such was not the case on this occaMay, as we all do, and am in other halls for sion. He applied a vat of soup, and allowed the next four months. These halls aren’t his pitch to sag. The piece was slow, selfbad, just ordinary. Then I return to Carn- indulgent and almost dull. Frankly, Ma’s egie in October and am floored once more. encore put a damper on the evening, Very quickly, I get used to it—though we which had been moving along fairly well. It got worse with Scheherazade, the final should probably not take these acoustics piece on the printed program. Gergiev for granted. The next piece on the Mariinsky pro- loves this Rimsky-Korsakov hit, and rightly gram was Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a so. He told me in an interview years ago Rococo Theme, which needs a cello solo- that Scheherazade was one of the pieces It begins with a fanfare that always reminds me of halftime at a football game: “Band, take the field!” It proceeds with zippy merriment. Gergiev and the Mariinsky performed the overture ably. It can be faster and nimbler, but Gergiev gave it the appropriate charge. The audience’s applause was very brief. In fact, Gergiev came out for a curtain call, only to find that there was no applause. He stopped in his tracks, smiled bravely and bowed. It was one of the most awkward moments I have ever seen at a concert. Seconds into the overture, I was reminded of the extraordinary acoustics

American Academy of Arts & Letters: Miller Theatre presents Jennifer Koh in “Bach: The Complete Solo Violin Works.” Oct. 23, W. 156th St., 212-368-5900, millertheatre.com; 2, $40. Immanuel Lutheran Church: Delahanty/Mor Duo performs in “Furia d’amore - Love, Fury, and Despair in 17th-Century Italy” as part of the Midtown Concerts Series. Oct. 26, 122 E. 88th St., 212-289-8128, midtownconcerts.org; 1:15, free. SONiC - Sounds of a New Century Festival: Miller Theatre & American Composers orchestra present a new 9-day festival of music composed in the past 10 years by over 100 composers age 40 & under. Ends Oct. 22, sonicfestival.org. St. Ignatius of Antioch: Boston’s Blue Heron & the U.K.’s Ensemble Plus Ultra perform in “A 16th-century Meeting of England & Spain.” Oct. 16, 552 West End Ave., 212-580-3326, blueheronchoir.org; 4. Symphony Space: Mari Kimura & Cassatt String Quartet perform “I-Quadrifoglio,” a work for strings & interactive computer, written in response to the Japanese earthquake & tsunami. Oct. 13, 2537 Broadway, 212-864-5400, symphonyspace.org; 7:30, $30.

that hooked him on music. But he did not do his best job with it at Carnegie Hall. The piece started with a fumble and remained sloppy. The pizzicatos, for example, were a mess. There were some stirring moments, for Gergiev has too much musicality to lay a complete egg. But there were too many longueurs—longueurs that were not the composer’s fault. As quickly as he could, Gergiev offered an encore, and it was the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Here at last was music-making, real music-making. The piece was idiomatic, rousing and just right. So, at something like 9 o’clock, you could leave with a smile on your face. Gergiev and his Mariinsky Orchestra stayed in residence at Carnegie Hall, for a series of concerts centered on Tchaikovsky. The concerts included all six symphonies. Carnegie is celebrating its 120th anniversary, and Tchaikovsky conducted at the hall’s very first concert. So, that composer is being fêted today. Back in 2007, Lorin Maazel, then the New York Philharmonic’s music director, put on a Tchaikovsky festival. This did not sit well with many critics: Why was Maazel, that fossil, wasting time on that melodizing fossil of a composer? On Carnegie Hall’s opening night, I talked with a friend of mine who recalled a teacher at a New York conservatory years ago. If you admitted in his class that you liked Tchaikovsky, he kicked you out. Of course, no one remembers that man’s name. And Tchaikovsky’s will live forever, along with his music, as is perfectly just. October 12, 2011 | CityArts 11

DANCE

Above & Beyond Dance: The acrobatic aerial dance company performs in “RAW.” Oct. 13–15, Manhattan Movement & Arts Center, 248 W. 60th St., 212-787-1178, manhattanmovement. com; $22. American Ballet Theater: The company performs excerpts of works by Twyla Tharp, Merce Cunningham & others from its upcoming season, as part of Works & Process at the Guggenheim. Oct. 16 & 17, 1071 5th Ave., 212423-3500, guggenheim.org; 7:30, $30. Dušan Týnek Dance Theatre: The Czechinfluenced company performs new works & pieces from their repertoirew & teams up with postclassical string quartet ETHEL. Oct. 27–29 & Nov. 3–5, Tribeca PAC, 199 Chambers St., 212220-1460, tribecapac.org; 7:30, $25. Sachiyo Ito and Company: The company performs medieval & modern-day Japanese works in celebration of its 30th anniversary. Oct. 23, Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 W. 55th St., 212405-9000, dancejapan.com; 7:30, $25–$30. New York City Ballet’s Polyphonia, part of the 2011 Fall for Dance at City Center, running Oct. 27–Nov. 6. Credit: Paul Kolnik

Democratizing Dance Plus, Farrell revives Divertimento By Joel Lobenthal

ity Center’s eighth annual 10-day Fall for Dance Festival, Oct. 27–Nov. 6, reaffirms the home truth that, in New York City, people’s interest in seeing dance increases in direct proportion to its affordability. Uniformly priced at $10, tickets went on sale Oct. 2 and the sold-out shingle was up by the end of the day for 10 performances—nine evenings and one matinee—in the 2,000-plus-seat theater. As always, the festival’s roster features companies from around the world and includes New York debuts and premieres, a carefully calibrated blend of genres. City Center is the perfect venue for this venture because, when it was established in 1943 in a former Shrine meeting hall, its mandate was populist pricing. Making this year’s Fall for Dance extra jubilant is the fact that City Center will have just completed its renovations before the festival’s opening. They will celebrate the revitalized space in a gala two nights before Fall for Dance opens—but no $10 tickets for that, I’m afraid. In addition to its affordability, Fall for

12 CityArts | October 12, 2011

Dance demonstrates the importance of keepers have a very different idea of what integration—by which I mean different the American public wants and deserves. But does the future health of conservatypes of dance juxtaposed on the same program and dance mixed with other tory dance lie in the blending of small entertainment forms. At the turn of the amounts of different things? Wouldn’t 20th century, great ballet dancers from all joint seasons between companies be across Europe and Russia trekked to Lon- refreshing? A program with one Graham, one Cunningham and don to appear (for genone Taylor work? Well, erous remuneration) in But does the that’s kind of what Fall the city’s music halls, to future health for Dance is. which a vital cross secof conservatory Not to be missed at The tion of every stratum Joyce Theater Oct. 19–23 of society repaired for dance lie in the is a season of The Suzanne amusement. London blending of Farrell Ballet. The legendat that time did not small amounts of ary Farrell, a New York City have a major statedifferent things? Ballet star and Balanchine supported ballet commuse for more than two pany as Paris, Moscow Wouldn’t joint and St. Petersburg did. seasons between decades, bases the company she began 15 years In the music halls, the companies be ago in Washington, D.C., toe dancers were right refreshing? where it is a resident there alongside the affiliate of the Kennedy boulevard-style attracCenter. Farrell shrewdly realized that, since tions, trained animals and ballad singers. We saw an electronic sequel to this in NYCB is no longer doing some of the best the culturally as well as economically aspi- ballets by Balanchine as well as other chorational American society of the 1950s, reographers that were once prominent in its ’60s, and into the ’70s. In those years, pro- repertory, these works are now ripe for the fessional modern, ballet and jazz dancers taking. Thus, her all-Balanchine program were seen with some regularity on televi- includes his 1947 Divertimento, not seen in sion variety programs. Today’s TV gate- Manhattan in a very long time.

Wave Rising Series: 24 dance companies perform new & established works 3 times each during this 3-week festival. Oct. 19–Nov. 6, John Ryan Theater, 25 Jay St., Brooklyn, 718-8558822, whitewavedance.com; $20.

Balanchine created Divertimento in 1947 for Ballet Society, the precursor to NYCB. The original ballerina was Mary Ellen Moylan, while at NYCB it was danced most frequently by Maria Tallchief—in other words, its pedigree could not be more hallowed. The aura of crème de la crème attached to this ballet continued with the four soloist couples, into which Balanchine also slotted some of his greatest dancers. Divertimento’s score by Alexei Haieff as well as the steps that Balanchine melded to it embody that particular vintage of cosmopolitan, lyric and jazzy dance that so intrigued NYCB’s early audiences. Divertimento was a constant in NYCB’s long tour through Europe in 1952—so much so that, perhaps, following the tour, Balanchine had had his fill of it. But “we all loved dancing it,” former NYCB ballerina Patricia Wilde recently recalled to me. As the years went on, Balanchine’s dancers pleaded with him to revive it, and for some reason he always refused. In 1985, two years after Balanchine’s death, the late Todd Bolender, a member of the original cast, reconstructed Divertimento for the State Ballet of Missouri, where he was then artistic director. NYCB subsequently performed it during its 1993 Balanchine Festival, but then never again. Last year, Farrell took it into her repertory. She deserves all thanks for bringing Divertimento back to New York.

Read more by Joel Lobenthal at Lobenthal.com.

Wrestling with History Ouramdane dances our times By Valerie Gladstone

dancer spins round and round on the shadowy stage, first with her arms held tight against her body and then with them spread wide. Another dancer stands straight and tall then falls to the stage, then stands, falls again, stands. They move in extreme and unnatural ways, only stopping when a man begins speaking, his image on video partially hidden by a screen. Quietly and unemotionally he describes how he was tortured, electrical wires affixed to his hands and legs, water poured over his head until he could hardly breathe. In this scene and others from Ordinary Witnesses, Rachid Ouramdane goes where few choreographers fear to tread: beyond civilization into the realm of barbarity. This provocative 40-year-old choreographer, whose parents endured anguish and torture in their native Algeria at the hands of the French Army before immigrating to France before his birth, has been studying the ambiguity of identity and the effects of violence since the beginning of his career. In this work and in World Fair, which will be presented on two separate programs Oct. 11–15 at New York Live Arts in conjunction with the Crossing the Line Festival, Ouramdane continues to examine these subjects. He takes on torture and its ramifications in the lives of its victims and perpetrators from countries all over the world in Ordinary Witnesses and the conflict between individuals and the state in World Fair, a collaboration with composer and instrumentalist JeanBaptiste Julien. “I want to bring real facts based on the lives of singular people to the stage,” he says on the phone from Paris, where his company, L’A, is based. “I attempt to depict the unpresentable—but poetically, not with a shout. Violence isn’t remote. Refugees from it live all around us. I’m especially interested in their capacity to cope and come back to their humanity.” Acclaimed in Europe and fast building a reputation in the United States, Ouramdane wants to do in dance what history books can’t: tell the truth about human experience. In previous works, he has examined the lives of boxers, wrestlers, athletes, people and

their relationship to technology and young men close to suicide. Devastatingly and movingly in Far, presented by Dance Theater Workshop in 2005, he dealt with his own family’s experience of torture—a preface, in a sense, to Ordinary Witnesses. “Rachid is never didactic,” says Carla Peterson, New York Live Arts’ artistic director. “He has no agenda. He’s searching for what history writes on the body. His works mesmerize audiences. He brilliantly marries dance and technology with a real economy of means. That doesn’t happen often. He’s an artist with a capital ‘A.’” For Ordinary Witnesses, Ouramdane visited Cambodia, Rwanda, Iraq, Brazil, Palestine and Chechnya, interviewing people who had been tortured. On his return, as he began reviewing the interviews. he felt overwhelmed. “I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “I felt stuck. I didn’t know what to do with what I had gathered. I lost my confidence. I had to rethink everything that I knew.” Finally, he began looking for what he describes as “an echo of the events in movement…seeking images for those moments when humanity disappears.” This necessitated a different way of choreographing. He didn’t want to use ordinary dancers. Instead, he found people who could do extreme things with their bodies—including a whirling dervish and contortionists from the circus. “The interviews deal with extreme situations, so I didn’t want them to be normal,” he says. “I also couldn’t have them on stage at the same time the people spoke of their experiences. It would have been as if I were illustrating events.” Ingeniously using lighting, soundscapes and video, Ouramdane combines these elements to create unsettling moods in all his works. World Fair begins with him standing on a revolving platform as a metronome ticks a steady beat. Then, abruptly, everything changes. To a cacophony of sounds, he starts moving in a mechanical fashion, arms stiff, twisting his torso into awkward shapes, as a single light follows him around the stage. Once again, he shocks, engages, challenges and haunts with a choreographic story. “My biggest thrill,” he says, “is the moment of contact with the audience.”

Bard Graduate Center Gallery presents

Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones in the Main Gallery through April 14, 2012

American Christmas Cards, 1900–1960 in the Focus Gallery through December 31, 2011

Hats: A Field Guide Gallery Talk with milliner Melinda Wax Thursday, November 10, 6 pm

Hats-in-Progress: A Study Day with milliners Gretchen Fenston and Rodney Keenan Friday, November 11, 10 am–4:30 pm

The Surrealist Hat

Lecture by fashion curator Dilys Blum Thursday, November 17, 6 pm

Women Designers and Greeting Cards of the Arts and Crafts Movement

Lecture by historian Anne Stewart O’Donnell Thursday, December 1, 6 pm

For complete information and tickets please visit bgc.bard.edu or e-mail programs@bgc.bard.edu

“With Every Christmas Card I Write” Concert of American Holiday Songs, 1900–1960

with Robert Osborne, Katie Geissinger, and Richard Gordon Sunday, December 11, 2 pm

The Hatmaker’s Muse: A Conversation with New York Milliners

Lola Ehrlich, Albertus Swanepoel, and Patricia Underwood. Moderated by costume and textiles curator Phyllis Magidson Thursday, December 15, 6 pm Stephen Jones for Christian Dior Haute Couture. ‘Olga Sherer inspirée par Gruau’ Hat. Autumn/ Winter 2007/2008. ©Christopher Moore/ Catwalking.

Gallery Hours Tuesday through Sunday from 11 am–5 pm Thursday from 11 am–8 pm The Main Gallery and Focus Gallery are both located at 18 West 86th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, in New York City.

bgc.bard.edu

Ordinary Witnesses & World Fair Oct. 11, 12, 14 & 15, New York Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St., 212-691-6500, www.newyorklivearts.org. October 12, 2011 | CityArts 13

JAZZ

OCTOBEr Jazz EVEnTS mSm COnCErT Jazz Band Justin diCioccio, Conductor KIRCHE TöNEN: THE MUSIC OF BILL KIRCHNER $10 Adults | $5 Seniors & Students

Manhattan School of Music Jazz Arts

OCT 18 / TUES / 7:30 pm Borden Auditorium

Why the Blues Rocks NY music goes hardcore By Howard Mandel

he Stone, a recital room for the avant-garde, is the size of a corner Borden Auditorium bodega, and its artistic director John mSm afrO-CUBan Zorn maintains a strict no refreshments/ Jazz OrCHESTra no hanging out policy. It’s an odd place to Justin diCioccio hear a bustin’ loose electric jazz power trio Bobby Sanabria, Director such as the Free Form Funky Freqs, who MAMBO NIGHTS IN HOLLYWOOD: LATIN JAZZ IN THE MOVIES did a set there about a week ago. But it says something about the current state of All seats $5 hardcore funk-jazz-blues in New York City. OCT 24 / mOn / 7:30 & 9:30 pm Time was, the Freqs—very postJazz at Lincoln Center | Columbus Circle Hendrix guitarist Vernon Reid (of Living UpSTarTS! mSm aT Colour), ultra-propulsive electric bass dizzy’S CLUB COCa-COLa guitarist Jamaaladeen Tacuma (best mSm afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra known for his 15 years with Ornette Bobby Sanabria Bobby Sanabria, Director Coleman’s iconoclastic Prime Time) and drummer G. Calvin Weston (also a Prime For tickets call 212-258-9595 Time veteran)—would have headlined at Manhattan School of Music a not chic but fun Manhattan venue like 122nd STrEET aT BrOadway | 917 493 4428 | www.mSmnyC.EdU Danceteria or the Peppermint Lounge. © 2011 MSM. Program and artist subject to change. Those joints were comparable perhaps to today’s Webster Hall and Bowery BallRyan Brown, Conductor and Artistic Director room, chaotic and crowded places, far less artsy than The Stone or (le) poisson rouge are now. Back then, concoctions like the Freqs’ spontaneous riffs extrapolated at blistering speed over earthy street rhythms comA chamber program of 17th-century French and Italian works, with musicians from the prised the sub-genre called “No Wave.” Opera Lafayette Orchestra No wave was a term fraught with ironies Sunday, October 30, 2011 posed by downtown punkish types such 7:30 p.m. as James Chance and Lydia Lunch against Tickets: $50/$35 the ’80s Anglo-American pure-pop new wave bands. , tenor It was an open secret on the no wave , soprano scene that its best music was made by with members of the Opera Lafayette Orchestra black musicians. Sometimes this was Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall acknowledged—James Chance also billed himself as James White and the Blacks. Carnegie Hall Box Office Opera Lafayette Box Office 57th Street and Seventh Avenue (202) 546-9332 Besides Prime Time, ensembles such CarnegieCharge (212) 247-7800 operalafayette.org as Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decodcarnegiehall.org ing Society, Oliver Lake’s Jump Up! and Joseph Bowie’s Defunkt all featured hot young instrumentalists out of African America. Reid, who played in Defunkt and The Decoding Society, joined with writer CityArts NY. Greg Tate and producer Konda Mason to organize a broad coterie of players (basswww.cityartsnyc.com ist Melvin Gibbs, guitarists Jean-Paul All images and artwork must be CMYK. 79 Madison Ave., 16th floor Bourelly, Kelvyn Bell, the brothers David Do not use compression on images. NY, NY 20016 and Marque Gilmore and many others) Make Acrobat 4.0 compatible. and singers (Nona Hendryx, Cassandra 212-268-8600 Please do not insert pictures into Word Wilson, DK Dyson) into the Black Rock OCT 20 / THUrS / 7:30 pm

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Coalition, so named to remind the world that Muddy Waters, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard created rock ‘n’ roll just as surely as Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley copped the proceeds. What set black rock no wavers above their pale counterparts was that they took music seriously. That’s why they’re still around—anyone hear from James Chance or Lydia Lunch lately? Black rock was and remains an assertive, rousing, often celebratory step into the future rather than a postmodern appropriation of old R&B and soul tropes. In the image of our God Jimi Hendrix, the Black Rock Coalition members weren’t retro- or neo- but fast-forward folks bending feedback, dissonance and blue notes to loud, lyrical, honest purposes. They were and are free with song form and might abandon Western harmonic conventions if so moved, while maintaining primordial blues modalities—the ache, the edge, the escape. Black rock, like the blues and true jazz, can be many things, but it always keeps in touch with the gritty nub of life. The Free Form Funky Freqs at The Stone sweated their improvisations, for real about interacting, with each man taking the others’ backs as dependably as the Three Musketeers. That sense of united cause raises rockjazz-blues, whoever plays it, into a necessity. No art form other than improvised music gives its participants the opportunity and responsibility to work together, contributing immediate ideas and personal skills into an affective whole. The bond thus forged gives spine to American expression, which is why it’s disturbing that blues and its modernist offsprings, like freewheeling funk rock and gutsy jazz, are so marginalized, even here. About 60 people packed The Stone for the Freqs. Most were white middle-aged men who recalled when Hendrix played to thousands. Genuine hard blues is at present a rare commodity in town, even at B. B. King’s Blues Club & Grill—wait for Buddy Guy, genre standard-bearer, to play there Nov. 14 and 15. Singer Shemekia Copeland, last June crowned “Queen of the Blues” by official proclamation of the Chicago Blues Festival, the City of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois, has

Continued on page 19

FILM

Skin Game Almodóvar’s fear and loathing of Gaga By Armond White

fter making several unintentionally horrible films—Broken Embraces, Volver, Bad Education—Pedro Almodóvar has finally made an actual horror film. The Skin I Live In offers the weird, unnerving and repellent story of Spanish plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), who experiments with making inflammable skin grafts, a mad scientist’s response to his wife’s death in a fiery car crash. Ledgard imprisons his human guinea pig, Vera (Elena Anaya), in his Toledo mansion—a fortress/museum—attended to by mother/ housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes). Almodóvar intentionally compounds this horror plot with Freudian, gothic, absurd and surreal affectations. The Skin I Live In is the most self-conscious, intellectually ambitious film yet from a director who has previously used self-consciousness in the form of camp irony—the source of his merry and moving 1980s movies. In Matador, Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Spain’s repressed counterculture joined the decade’s androgynous multicultural pop. Impudent and inspired, those films felt like underground masterpieces. Almodóvar leapt beyond LGBT flamboyance to a kind of world-class feminist humanism—the tradition of Cocteau but with Latin bloodiness and a brazen pop streak that last surfaced successfully in 1997’s Live Flesh. Since then, international success and acclaim have allowed bad boy Pedro to hone his rough, subversive filmmaking toward mainstream classicism. This superficial advance led to missteps as Almodóvar stumbled into the self-pitying kinky masochism of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, Kika, All About My Mother, Bad Education and Talk to Her, which suited the fragmented, emotionally isolated mood of the century’s end. These films resembled doctrinaire queer cinema (as by Almodóvar’s lessers) rather than his instinctive, multicultural, ambisexual celebrations. The Skin I Live In charts Almodóvar’s long road back to his original

compassionate impulses. Skin’s plot convolutions (flashing back and jumping forward to show how Ledgard, his mother and Vera came together) result in Almodóvar’s least humorous movie. It sheds, then layers its own narrative as Almodóvar simultaneously works through his enormous career ambitions and the psychological conflicts always at the root of his taboo-snubbing cinema. No longer simply laughing at social conventions, Almodóvar risks offense in Skin even while appealing for sympathy. Ledgard’s madness interweaves with his mother’s; Vera’s reflects the tragedy of actual and psychic victimization. Some cumulative statement on sin, desire and social acceptance is under construction. “Our face identifies us,” Ledgard says at the film’s opening, but Almodóvar seeks identity beneath the skin and past the body’s often misleading allure. Surface identity is teased by the large paintings that decorate Ledgard’s home, a gallery of art declarations that also announce Almodóvar’s bid for status. Skin is a compendium of art references, from Louise Bourgeois’ experimental The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine to Alice Munro; Franju’s Eyes Without a Face to Mario Bava; David Cronenberg to Hitchcock—even William Wyler’s The Collector. Almodóvar creates his own l’amour fou cosmos through the cinema of obsession. His free-association references unlock a film geek’s id but also deliberately—recklessly—indulge the nightmarish aspects of personality. The mad elegance of Skin’s flashbacks (cinema’s equivalent to painting’s pentimento) show Almodóvar grappling with the torment of gender—its confused politics and morality. This is no Lady Gaga stunt; it is, in the end, a soulful threnody on the mess of sexual politics that Gaga merely exploits. Skin goes to extremes, yet Almodóvar holds on to the emotional needs that our society cannot fully escape. Cutting from a terrified scream to a mother coincidentally searching for her lost child masterfully connects experiences in the universal condition. José Luis Alcaine’s photography achieves psychic clarity and Alberto Iglesias’ score rouses sensitivity. Altogether it’s pure human intuition

Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya in The Skin I Live In. Photo courtesy of Sony Classics

that Almodóvar’s recent showing off has lacked. I’ve avoided plot details because Skin would not synopsize well. But it’s full of feeling—a genuine art experience, even when Almodóvar fights his own conceits. Villainy and martyrdom overlap, as do dream and terror. That’s why the film embraces Buñuel’s acerbity yet neglects his humor, evokes the narrative flow of De Palma’s Femme Fatale then shrinks from the omniscience that De Palma synthesized out of Hitchcock, Michael Powell

and Warhol. The title The Skin I Live In has to do with Almodóvar coming to terms with sexual awareness in a world he, alas, did not create. Vera’s desperate graffito, “Art is substitute for health,” admits Almodóvar’s own struggle for acceptance. By finally admitting his fear of nature and human cruelty, Almodóvar speaks to the avant-garde’s pretense that we can brazen our way to satisfaction. The Skin I Live In leaves our progressive social assumptions disturbed. October 12, 2011 | CityArts 15

Lapsed Vision Emilio Estevez seeks The Way By Gregory Solman

espite the persevering earnestness of filmmaker Emilio Estevez, The Way wanders off a well-trodden path down too many dead ends to find the epiphany it seeks. Dispirited and dour company among the golf buddies of his southern California suburbia, ophthalmologist Tom (Martin Sheen) undertakes a somber journey to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, to collect the body of his son Daniel (Estevez). An all-but-doctoral-thesis anthropologist, Daniel’s novice fieldwork ended in his unseen accidental death at the start of the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage through the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where tradition places the tomb of St. James. When Tom arrives, remembering the time his son lectured him on the virtues of living in the moment rather than deliberating over choices—a philosophy impractical for medical practices that can support such caprices of children—he decides to pick up Daniel’s backpack and complete the nearly 500-mile journey his son could not, seeing the world through his eyes. Along the way, Tom collects fellow travelers Joost (Yorick van Wageningen), a jovial Dutch hash smoker who claims to be dieting to save his failing marriage, seeing the way as a fitness trail strewn with gourmet temptations; Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger), an acerbic, abused Canadian divorcée, trekking under the guise of curing her chain-smoking vice but hiding a malady of the heart; and Jack (James Nesbitt), an Irish writer suffering from writer’s block, an exasperating excess of blarney and the isolation that follows. As a group, they puncture American parochial notions of Western worldliness while still providing a welcome turn from Hollywood’s romantic fixation with an uncommitted Eastern mysticism that derides Christian experience as ignorant and ultramontane. With a light hand, writer/director Estevez tweaks the artificiality of contemporary pilgrimages without giving in to

16 CityArts | October 12, 2011

Martin Sheen in The Way, directed by Emilio Estevez. cynicism. In one of the liveliest scenes, their case is mild; Daniel delivers his juveTom’s companions critique false suffering nile bromide as his father calmly drives and pretend poverty while hiking along a him to the airport, and Tom complains to comfortably touristy trail laden with mod- a colleague that gadabout Daniel checks in ern gadgets and credit card conveniences too rarely—hardly evidence of irreparable and retreating to luxury hotels for those estrangement. That’s crucial, because Estevez’s story for whom even a hostel means roughing it. Still, Estevez can’t—or at least won’t— implies that the lapsed Catholic Tom’s pilgrimage should be penipenetrate any of his characters’ mysterThough Estevez filmed tential. Though he shuns company and seeks ies. Their revelations the story IN a place silence to meditate, he lack the profundity of with supposedly rejects (but later mouths) reflection and their prayer; though the selfactions lack meaninginspiring vistas, described “Easter and ful distinction. his vision of the Christmas” Catholic at In the case of Tom, Camino de Santiago least goes through the at least, this is unparremains surprisingly motions of ancient ritual donable. Introducing practice, he adds his own him warmly interactuninspiring, the skeptical twists, including with an elderly cinematography ing the New Age sacrilege patient who wants to of Juanmi Azpiroz of spreading his son’s cheat on her eye exam by memorizing the compositionally dull. ashes along the way— a practice his church charts, Estevez sets up a metaphor that conflicts Tom’s see- nearly exclusively forbids. That motif at ing in time against lugging the baggage of least leads to an appealing excursion when his past, presumably the memories of his a boy steals Daniel’s remains along with recently passed wife. This dovetails with Tom’s backpack and the group gives chase. Daniel’s impertinent advice to Tom (“You In the angelic-sprite storytelling tradition, don’t choose a life, Dad, you live one”) but they find themselves drawn into the old ignores the dichotomy between ophthal- world of the gypsies, rediscovering a tradimology (the practical healer who helps tion of father/son honor. Though Estevez filmed the story in a men see) and anthropology (the idealistic academic who dispassionately studies place with supposedly inspiring vistas, man). And as father-and-son fevers run, his vision of the Camino de Santiago

remains surprisingly uninspiring, the cinematography of Juanmi Azpiroz compositionally dull. This is particularly disappointing because the Camino was last prominently visited for cinema when Luis Buñuel littered the trail with sophomoric anti-Catholic garbage in The Milky Way (1969); Estevez here shows a contrasting humanism and tolerance of his characters’ peculiarities and beliefs but doesn’t deliver visual elan. One would expect any filmmaker in this place to balance contemplative meaning with the magisterial landscape and Romanesque architecture of millenniumold churches functioning as spiritual allegories; recall Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky or Powell’s A Canterbury Tale; Hudson River School painters like Albert Bierstadt showing the luminous hand of God among the Sierra Nevada; or even Kerouac’s Dharma Bums appreciating “the work of the quiet mountains, the torrent of purity at my feet” and “wishing there were a Personal God in all this impersonal matter.” Estevez suitably defers to his pilgrims— even showing Joost finally blessed with humility on his knees before the statue of St. James and depicting the ghost of Daniel among the friars swinging the oversized thurible in the church at the trail’s end— but can’t make out their modern spiritual malaise through the incense haze. More’s the pity, because few filmmakers today have the passion to try.

Putting Impressionism on Film Renoir restores family tradition By John Demetry “An idea.” That’s how (fictionalized) impresario Henri Danglard (Jean Gabin) introduces his latest discovery Nini (Françoise Arnoul) to a dance instructor in Jean Renoir’s French Cancan (1954). The Museum of Modern Art’s annual presentation of a Gaumont restoration returns more than just the luster to Renoir’s first color film; it restores a modern “idea” that art can simultaneously explore human mystery and socioeconomic reality—the dual circumstances of an artwork’s creation. In the background of the deep-focus shot in which Danglard announces his “idea,” a woman bathes behind the frame of an open door in the dance studio. Renoir doesn’t mimic the nudes of his father, impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir—though he approximates his father’s affinity for the curvaceous. Instead, Renoir dramatizes the vernacular experience (a woman bathing) that the impressionists radically recognized as worthy of being the subject of painting, as studies of light, color, nature, flesh and fashion. Eschewing narrative function, Renoir ends sequences or shots to impress a sense of place (as when a dog enters the frame and pauses to look toward the camera), sociology (when a man exits the frame to reveal a woman sleeping in a dance hall) or feeling (a long-shot tableau of a woman looking away

from her suitor beneath a tree). Through such motion pictures, Renoir captures the consciousness of the impressionists. Renoir’s nude also signifies the desire that motivates Danglard’s idea to revive the cancan and the complexity of the motivations behind those who participate in the founding of The Moulin Rouge. Danglard is inspired when he meets Nini (an Auguste Renoir-like redhead) at The White Queen, a lower-class dancehall where he and the clientele of his upper-crust revue, The Chinese Screen, go slumming. There Danglard witnesses, and then participates in, the cancan—a dance characterized by rhythmic, petticoat-baring high leg kicks. Nini gushes to him about the cancan: “It’s better than working at the laundry!” Danglard recognizes the common need for release. To serve that need, Danglard conceives of a new venue for the working class and the aristocratic class to mingle—and, consequently, for a new, formalized, chorusline version of the cancan as the venue’s signature entertainment. Danglard marks the difference by dubbing it “French Cancan.” “It’s progress!” declares a bystander as The Moulin Rouge rises from the rubble of The White Queen. Renoir patriotically made the story of The Moulin Rouge the subject of his first film after his return to France following World War II. He shared the unifying impulse—the egalitarian ideals and liberated sensuality—of the impressionists and Danglard (as embodied by national treasure Gabin). The film evokes the Belle Époque, chronicled by

the French impressionists, to secure a compact through their shared cultural heritage. The film’s dazzling conclusion features the premiere of the cancan at The Moulin Rouge. Renoir constructs a montage of the appreciative crowd in which the audience’s responses are isolated—but not solo—portraits. Each shot contains a romantic coupling, each pair perfectly matched. Through montage, the scene constitutes a social cross section (assembling the film’s cast of characters)— and a social phenomenon. The colorful, dynamic cancan that bookends this montage expresses the idiosyncratic passions that form the foundation of a popular art.

“Only one thing matters to me—what I create,” Danglard says as he defines his solitary passion. Renoir crosscuts between the dancers’ triumphant premiere and Danglard’s pantomime (from memory) of the choreography. In French Cancan, Renoir films the perceptual reality of an idea dancing.

Gaumont Presents: Jean Renoir’s French Cancan Oct. 17, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., 212708-9400, www.moma.org. John Demetry restores ideas to a critical relationship with our shared popular culture in his book The Community of Desire: Selected Critical Writings (2001-2007), available at www.lulu.com.

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Jean Renoir’s French Cancan Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

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October 12, 2011 | CityArts 17

POP

Squirmingly Seeking Hipness Erasure and Frankmusik survive By Ben Kessler

n the face of our current cultural upheaval, Erasure’s new studio album almost defiantly compresses a broad range of inspired and inspiring pop references. Neither comeback nor throwback, Tomorrow’s World attempts to sum up the legendary synthpop duo’s 25-year career in just 30 minutes. This concision may be necessary for survival in the 21st century (and beyond). If so, consider this imperfect yet exciting and memorable album a time ca(m)psule. Tomorrow’s World takes its title from a BBC program that aired from 1965 until 2003. A collapsed British cultural institution like Top of the Pops (canceled in 2006), the show introduced the U.K. public to the latest technological innovations by demonstrating them via live TV broadcast. When an iconic program dedicated to showcasing new technology becomes obsolete itself, we know that the relationship in the West between science and culture, art and commerce, has been radically reshaped. Of course, Tomorrow’s World survives today in the form of Apple’s megahyped product demo videos, but these are straight-up commercials, without pop culture’s crucial, civilizing buffer effect. For the last 25 years, Erasure’s songwriter/performers Vince Clarke and Andy Bell have been rightly celebrated for their glitzy, campy dance anthems—pop

surfaces buffed to a high sheen. But as popular culture hurtled into the new millennium and Clarke/Bell’s biggest hits (“A Little Respect,” “Chains of Love,” “Stop!” etc.) receded in the rear view, it became enough just for pop critics to point out Bell’s out homosexuality (groundbreaking in the ’80s), reducing Erasure’s identity politics to label aesthetics. This widespread assumption of their irrelevance wasn’t exactly contradicted by unambitious Erasure albums such as the very fine Nightbird (2005) and the not-so-fine Light at the End of the World (2007). With Tomorrow’s World, Erasure, in collaboration with dance producer of the moment Frankmusik, reclaim and repolish their pop ambitions. The opening track, “Be with You,” dives right into the pop moment with a synth line and chord changes similar to Kylie Minogue’s recent single “All the Lovers.” Erasure adopts the latest trends with a romantically minded pledge of faith to their audience: “And if the sky should ever fall/ Then I’ll come running/ Just you call/ I could be with you.” The trance-inspired “Then I Go Twisting” plays out an ambivalence provoked by this attempt to ride the zeitgeist. From within an Auto-Tune cocoon, backed by a lonely click track, Bell sings, “Bored of this modern town/ Sick of this techno/ Monophonic sound.” But his reservations dissolve with the swell of the refrain as Bell is borne along by the teenage hormonal surge of Frankmusik’s production. The coming together of Erasure and

Musical Ambassador Aurelio Martinez introduces Garifuna By Teofilio Colon Jr. Singer, composer and guitarist Aurelio Martinez comes from the remote coastal fishing village of Plaplaya, Honduras, to Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall 10 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 15. It’s an ambassadorship from a musical region far off mainstream New Yorkers’ maps. Martinez performs the music of the

18 CityArts | October 12, 2011

Garifuna people, an ethnicity and culture that brings new reverberations to the Carnegie setting. The Garifuna are black people of mixed ancestry (Carib Indian, Arawak Indian and African) who live primarily in coastal villages in the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and Nicaragua. Traditional Garifuna music—the most popular being punta and paranda—is played and performed during social events such as parties, weddings and funerals. While Punta is a percussion-driven

Frankmusik creates a pleasurable, piquant friction. A shameless maximalist, Frankmusik piles up inorganic noises and arranges the piles into unconventionally melodic pop-trash soundscapes, which he shakes with seismic drumbeats. This style derives from Clarke’s classic, intricate, layered synth compositions but totally lacks his Kraftwerkian discipline. Evenly split between ballads and dance floor stompers, Tomorrow’s World’s restive production doesn’t always do justice to the songwriting’s more emotive moments. Bell never really gets to dig in his heels on the closing track “Just When I Thought It Was Ending”; his torch-song delivery is undermined by skittering beats that seem to be straining for a faster tempo. On the other hand, “You’ve Got to Save Me Right Now,” a girl group and gospelinspired track, swings with an endearingly awkward—deliberate—heaviness that is well-suited to Bell’s blue-eyed electrosoul. The album’s highpoint is also its midpoint: the banger “A Whole Lotta Love Run Riot.” Here’s where Frankmusik’s dumpster-diving sensibility and Erasure’s pop-encyclopedic ambitions reach their apex. The excesses of these two imperfectly matched aesthetics seem to reflect upon each other, heightening the humor and irony inherent in both. Bell’s heavily Auto-Tuned declaration, “She had such a glittering caree-eer,” comments on heedless pop fashion with a wry, mature awareness of venality. Frankmusik concludes “Whole Lotta Love” by deconstructing it;

sound, Paranda adds an acoustic guitar, which not only complements the Garifuna drum rhythms but provides majestic melodies to produce music unlike any other in Central America. A tradition-bearer and master of the two musical forms, Martinez brings with him the tension and drama commonplace among his region’s working musical artists. Martinez respects his musical heritage (his father was a famed local troubadour and his mother was a local singer-songwriter) yet works to move beyond tradition and transcend those musical roots, creating a new form in the process. Martinez does this in dynamic, unforgettable fashion. Martinez is recognized for being at the

the pounding disco track breaks apart, showing its innards. It’s an ironic reminder of what makes pop music so powerful and dangerous: Though the product of industrialized forces, it can never be entirely controlled. It can get away from you. Unfortunately, Frankmusik’s solo album, Do It in the A.M. (released last month), proves that his career as a producer and performer has gotten away from him to an extent. His new work—adept as ever but disappointingly faithful to dance-pop formulae—represents a step away from the extravagant sensitivity he displayed in his 2009 debut album, Complete Me. As with his uneven work on the Tomorrow’s World’s ballads, Frankmusik now seems uncomfortable, even suspicious when circumstances loom that call for an expression of vulnerability. His fear of exposure is common to a culture squirmingly seeking hipness. Tomorrow’s World, by contrast, gambles for relevance by confronting us with a pivotal choice between hipness and survival.

forefront of the recent reemergence of the music of the Garifuna people, which initially gained notoriety in the ’90s and lately bobbed to the surface with the success of friend and mentor, fellow Garifuna singer-musician Andy Palacio from Belize. With his powerful and expressive voice and virtuosic musicianship, Martinez’s stage presence pierces through any language barrier—provided you give in to feeling. As is the case with great opera singers, you can understand the music even if you do not know the language.

Teofilo Colon Jr. is a filmmaker and photographer who writes for the Being Garifuna Blog, www.beinggarifuna.com/blog.

Blues Rocks Continued from page 14 a two-night stand at the elegant Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center on Nov. 6 and 7, which is sort of like Bessie Smith performing for the House of Lords. But hey, it’s more down-to-earth than the filmed version of last spring’s Wynton Marsalis-meets-Eric Clapton JALC concert, shown as a one-nightonly movie theater event in September before it was released on DVD. Face it: The Apple has never been a particularly blues-loving city. During the decades of the Great Migration, there was no wealth of manufacturing jobs here as there was throughout the Midwest to draw black workers from the South. New York likes its sounds more polished—hence our pride in jazz. There is to my knowledge just one blues-dedicated club in the city: Terra Blues on Bleecker Street, where you can drink and every night hear lesserknown but worthy acts. Junior Mack is among the best of

these; a big man with a strong voice, deft guitar chops and an encyclopedic knowledge of traditional blues repertoire, though he eschews songs of misogyny or violence, retaining the proprieties of his gospel upbringing. Mack can handle both acoustic and electric blues, solo or band contexts. He projects the calm of a seasoned pro, though he’s only been a full-time bluesman since getting laid off from a corporate position in the middle years of the Bush administration. Mack digs jazz but doesn’t go freeform, seldom dips into down ‘n’ dirty funk and seems like anything but a Freq. What he does share with the Free Form Funky Freqs, though, is the certainty that music and life are what you make of them, and that extending oneself to one’s bandmates and audience is the main thing. America’s got troubles these days; the blues, whether edgy, loud and free-form or traditional, can offer wisdom and solace. If we have to go to small rooms in offbeat places for it, OK. Sure beats not having any blues at all.

jazzmandel@gmail.com.

GETAWAY DESIGNER AND BUILDER OF UPSTATE COTTAGES $250,000 - $425,000 - LAND INCLUDED WOODSTOCK, SAUGERTIES, & SULLIVAN COUNTY

Catskill Farms, a historic feel and customized touch By Roland Li Designed and built by Catskill Farms, Cottage 28 is a charming 1,276-square-foot home with two bedrooms, one-and-a-half bathrooms and a covered porch. Courtesy of Catskill Farms.

When Charles Petersheim left the city for the upstate county of Sullivan, he sought, like many new arrivals, to renovate his own historic home. Although he was a builder by profession, Petersheim soon learned the process took time – and money – a realization that was reinforced when he did the same for others. Petersheim realized that while typical buyers craved the aesthetic of a centuries-old building, there might be a market for new properties, if he could capture the same atmosphere. In 2003, he founded Catskill Farms – a designer and builder of new single-family homes that are customized for buyers, mostly Manhattan residents looking to stretch their legs. His typical customer is a 30to 45-year-old, many in a design or creative industry, who have been sheltered from layoffs or a plummeting 401(k). By using classic materials like cedar, local stone, plank walls and ceilings and salvaged barn wood, the company not only emulated older neighbors, but exceeded them with energy efficient utilities and features. Spray foam insulation and high efficiency gas boilers reduce the costs of heating and cooling. “Our homes have a sense of history and style to them,” said Petersheim. “And as importantly, they work.” The company has completed over 100 homes with around $32 million in sales. And although the recession has stymied virtually all new construction outside of major cities, Petersheim continues to churn along, finishing a home every three weeks, at prices comparable to the peak. Homes are sold for around $290,000 to $420,000, starting at 1,300 square feet on five acres of land. Prices have stayed stable, with slight increases due to additional features like security systems, surround sound speakers and on-demand hot water. “I think the real marvel is that our prices have held our own,” said Petersheim Although construction labor prices have lowered slightly, materials remain about

the same. The key to the company’s profits is its organization. Catskill Farms takes a comprehensive approach to development, with in-house land acquisition, construction management, architectural design and relationships with local banks that provide financing for building, and occasionally buyers as well. Having been in business for eight years, Catskills has developed relationships with such lenders, and while underwriting standards are tougher, the company’s buyers are all well qualified for mortgages. One of the developer’s first tasks, after securing a buyer, is locating a sprawling parcel of land. And while upstate doesn’t have the furious density of Manhattan, an ideal plot is still elusive. “There is a real challenge of marrying good land with the right house,” said Petersheim. But Catskills saves the buyer the headache of searching, and it assumes the risk of construction by assuming ownership over a project until it is completed, after which it is sold to the buyer. Catskills also managed to shift one ubiquitous profession in-house: real estate brokerage.“We found brokers couldn’t sell our homes,” said Petersheim. Instead, the company uses digital and social media marketing, connecting directly with buyers. Catskills has grown from three employees in 2008 to 14, occupying a historic steel building that has been converted to an office loft. It is now expanding to the neighboring Ulster County, and its pace of development has made it a small, but steady job creator and economic engine for the area, said Petersheim. The new arrivals also contribute thousands to the county in property taxes. Although he’s carved a niche for himself in upstate, and has experience in constructing commercial buildings in the city earlier in his career, don’t expect to see Petersheim breaking ground in Manhattan. “We’re happy to visit,” he said. October 12, 2011 | CityArts 19

BOOKS

Pauline Kael, Criticism’s Last Icon By Armond White

auline Kael’s reputation as America’s most distinguished film critic is secure. She is defended by highplaced friends fighting the misogynists and elites who have spent the 10 years since her death trying to erase her influence on film culture. Several new books maintain Kael’s legacy—The Library of America’s compendium The Age of Movies, Brian Kellow’s appreciative but unfortunately titled biography A Life in the Dark and James Wolcott’s diaristic Lucking Out. Yet Kael’s 13 books of collected criticism are all out of print. This tells us that criticism has lost its cachet in the 21st century’s media free-forall, revealing the dire state of pop culture and the fine arts. Celebrating Kael isn’t that simple. It means looking back at the glory days of film criticism (when Kael outstripped Clement Greenberg, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe and Meyer Shapiro) and lamenting the passing of those titans’ critical acuity and intellectual openness. Nowadays, criticism is subordinate to the consumerist reflex of media hype. Kael’s legendary maxim, “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising,” goes unacknowledged. Box office numbers now drown out aesthetic curiosity. There’s hardly an independent source of arts information left. And Kael’s reputation, based on good writing and personal assessment, gets reduced to gossipy recollection—that is, celebrity. Kael’s output towers over the profession that still shamefully calls itself criticism. It’s criticism—Kael’s life’s passion—that’s in trouble. Despite the publishing world’s flattery (and a New York Film Festival panel discussion on Kael), there is little enthusiasm for movies as a sensitive, thinking person’s amusement. Schools don’t teach critical thinking and mainstream media warps it. Yet, Kael’s revival is propitious because there are now generations of people who don’t know what criticism is. They’ve pacified themselves sucking Roger Ebert’s thumbs, unaware that an honest, intelligent response to art (and not just movies) has nothing to do with numbers, grades or tomatoes. Desperate for groupthink, not Kael’s educated individuality, millennial

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Pauline Kael Photograph © Jill Krementz, all rights reserved. mobs see art (and that includes movies) as less important than consensus; movies become fashion statements or confirm one’s status. Audiences have lost the feeling for revelation and challenge that vital pop art once regularly provided. “Perhaps more deeply than any other writer, Kael gave shape to the idea of an ‘age of movies,’” art critic Sanford Schwartz writes in the Library of America collection he edited. “Deeply” is a Kael euphemism; she actively attacked the lofty heights of intellectual pretense. Her style transformed the once staid New Yorker—and culture writing in general. Kael significantly diverged from the haughtiness of film critic authorities Graham Greene, James Agee and Robert Warshow— men who all harbored mid-20th-century guilt that there were greater, more intellectual pursuits than movies or movie criticism. Kael, no less professional than they were, bran-

dished guilt-free enthusiasm, not because she was illiterate or a vulgar sensationalist but because she was a literate, sensual aesthete who appreciated those qualities in the most kinetic of art forms. Kael never received the same intellectual respect as her contemporaries Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, credited as ’60s New Journalists for bringing personal flair and temperamental commitment to the duty of intellectual reporting. Schwartz cites another contemporary: “Her overall thinking, which was that of a liberal writer admonishing what she saw as the myopia of her fellow liberals, had much the same drive [as] Jane Jacobs in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Schwartz’s best implication is that Kael made film criticism matter. “As concerned with audience reactions as with her own, she could be caught up in how movies

Nowadays, criticism is subordinate to the consumerist reflex of media hype.

stoked our fantasies regardless of their quality as movies.” But it’s this notion of “getting caught up” that stymies many Kael followers who insist on going down a hedonist path. (That way lies Ebert.) It misses out on the important development of political analysis (that other, personalized criticism out of England and France) that scrutinized social ideology in movies and has been the profession’s only advance since Kael appeared. Readable as the new Kaeliana may be (Wolcott’s memoir is the most captivating), there’s no substitute for the actual volumes of her reporting/criticism. Against the age of hype, Kael’s criticism stands as a demonstration of how an active intellect can function despite the ebb and flow of trends and fads. It’s regrettable that the Library of America omitted Kael’s 1974 cri de coeur “On the Future of Movies,” the best display of critical thinking in the cultural moment. In that piece, Kael did what’s now unfashionable: She looked skeptically toward the future but weighed the value of what was at hand.

LEON BOTSTEIN, MUSIC DIRECTOR presents

BAUHAUS BACH Fri, Oct 21, 2011

7 pm Conductor’s Notes Q&A 8 pm Concert

at Carnegie Hall Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage

In conjunction with the Whitney Museum’s exhibit on the artist Lyonel Feininger, J.S. Bach gets a modernist bent in these 20th-century orchestrations by Arnold Schoenberg, Max Reger and others. The program also features Feininger’s own composition based on a form that Bach perfected—the fugue. BACH (orchestration by Max Reger) O Mensch, Bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross

BACH (orch. by Arnold Schoenberg) Komm, Gott Schöpfer, heiliger Geist

FEININGER (orch. by Richard Wilson) Three Fugues

SCHOENBERG Variations for Orchestra

BACH (orch. by Schoenberg) Prelude and Fugue in E flat Major, “St. Anne”

BACH (orch. by Wolfgang Graeser) The Art of the Fugue

All Seats $25!

Explore the whole season at americansymphony.org, or call 212.868.9ASO

ASOrchestra

ASOrch

Hundreds of recordings now at iTunes and Amazon

Tickets at CarnegieHall.org, CarnegieCharge at 212.247.7800, or the box office at 57 St & 7 Ave. OPENING NIGHT VIP PACKAGE: $100. Details at americansymphony.org ASOINS1875_CityArts.indd 1

October 12, 2011 |10/7/11 CityArts 21 1:20 PM

THE CITYARTS INTERVIEW

Paul Holdengräber N

ew York City’s reigning nightlife impresario may well be Paul Holdengräber, director of public programs at the 42nd Street Library. His cheerfully inclusive “LIVE from the NYPL” interview series blasts away fusty cultural assumptions by featuring Patti Smith as well as Zadie Smith and such unlikely pairings as Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens. Holdengräber tunnels under the withered call-and-response rituals that shape most Q&As to take his onstage conversations to deeply emotional, invariably surprising places. Born in Houston, Texas, to Austrian immigrant parents, Holdengräber was founder and director of the Institute for Art & Culture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. In 2003, he was named a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 2010 he received the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art. Holdengräber spoke with CityArts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, exactly “547 steps away” from his Fort Greene home. [Elena Oumano] CityArts: You created a dream job. Do you think of it that way? Paul Holdengräber: Yes. A little over seven years ago, the then-president of the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc, asked me to oxygenate the library, which really impressed me. Ever since then, my goal has been to make the lions roar, as I’ve repeated 5,432 times, make a heavy institution levitate, make it dance—make it rock and roll when we have Patti Smith; rap when we have Jay-Z; or God knows what when we have Harry Belafonte. It’s important that all and everything under our roof is represented in some way, and we have much more than books. We have ideas we need to animate. So this is a dream job in a way, and it’s partly a job I created in a dream. I created it in the way I live and work. I made it clear that the most important thing was creating a series that would interest much of New York—where we’ll start, as we did with 500 names on an email list and now have 25,000—and, hopefully, bring the average age from 63 to 36. I like the fact that, in a way, my job is antithetical to what we believe a library is. But it’s the only hope because what are

22 CityArts | October 12, 2011

libraries for today? To some extent they’re for the exchange of ideas, for forms of congregation that bring people together. They are certainly not the way people do research any more. So my role is to excite people to think, to make them discover something new each and every time and, in the process, also myself. It’s important to keep surprising oneself, that’s what I’m really after. For example, what did I know about Jay-Z? Nothing. I approach all these things with the euphoria of ignorance. I notice interviewers often interrupt and don’t have the patience to sit while the person pauses. One of the most important parts is to listen, slow things down and be silent— seeing what happens when nothing seems to be happening. A lot does happen. It’s anguishing to be quiet. Talking is much easier. At one moment, Colm Tóibín and I were talking about literature and learning by heart and I asked, “Colm, do you know any poems by heart?” He said, “What?” “Do you know any poems by heart?” After nine seconds of silence, he turned to the audience and recited a Sylvia Plath poem. After that, all I could do was say, “Thank you very much.” It was amazing, staggering. Your series has been described as “quirky,” which to me reflects a resistance some people have to eclecticism and a holding on to arbitrary and pointless differences between high- and lowbrow. They are arbitrary and pointless because we don’t think this way. The constructions are made by organizations and institutions, but not if we let our mind and soul and heart think freely. I love this quote of Napoleon’s regarding one of his generals: “He knew everything but nothing else.” It’s dangerous to live that way. When you read a great book, you wonder, who is this person? On one level, you feel you know them intimately but you want to know more—are you standing in for the audience that wants to know more? I am the curator of public curiosity. It’s important to be the stand-in for what I imagine to be the public curiosity, ask questions I imagine the audience will have to satisfy the general curiosity and, hopefully, ask questions people didn’t even ask themselves but would want an answer to. And I don’t always speak to people about

Paul Holdengräber, host of “LIVE from the NYPL.”. what they’re known for. I’ve had discussions with Werner Herzog about everything, sometimes everything but film. It basically means I become the vessel of my subjects. Vassal or vessel? In some ways both. In some ways I am surrounded by the voices of others. But I’m unlike some people who interview; I do like my own personality to come through, maybe more. One’s body comes into play. I’m not neutral; I’m deeply subjective in some way as I try to be the spokesperson for the public curiosity that’s in the room. Unlike some people, I don’t believe people are less interested now and there’s a dumbing down. If you offer people substance, they actually want more. People don’t just want to be fed; they want to be nourished. There’s a way of nourishing them, there’s a way of thinking, reading, watching, smelling. When you prepare for an interview, do you think of specific questions? I do, but I think more of the arc of a conversation. Where do I begin, where do I

Photo by Jocelyn Chase

end?—and what happens in between. God knows. I try to get minimally involved with fear of what the next question is. You can get so anxious about “and, and,”—I’d love when I grow up to have a conversation without any notes. I’m not there yet. To see what happens, respond to what the person is saying rather than what you’ve prepared. Maybe it’s questioning in the deeper sense of question—the notion of quest, the notion of trying to go deep into a subject. Sometimes, actually, my job is deeply rooted in dissatisfaction. You do not feel content, it’s not working, and so what? Like any collector you continue, and you hope that the next conversation is better. You have to try. My dissatisfaction comes from the notion of a platonic ideal of the perfect conversation that hasn’t yet happened; it’s always in progress.

LIVE from the NYPL features Harry Belafonte Oct. 12 and Def Jam founders Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin Oct. 14.

MARYLYN DINTENFASS Souped Up/Tricked Out

October 11–November 18, 2011

Opening Reception and Book Signing with artist Marylyn Dintenfass and author Aliza Edelman Thursday, October 13, 5–8 pm cash and checks accepted

MARYLYN DINTENFASS PARALLEL PARK a new monograph available by Hard Press Editions

BABCOCK GALLERIES

724 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10019 212 767 1852 www.babcockgalleries.com info@babcockgalleries.com Mon–Fri 10 am–5 pm

October 12, 2011 | CityArts 23

ILLUST R ATI ON A RT AU CT I O N OC TOb e R 2 2 -2 3 | N e w yORk | L I v e & O N L I N e

Preview: Thursday, October 20 & Friday, October 21 10:00AM – 6:00PM Saturday, October 22 9:00AM – 10:00AM Ukrainian institute of America at the Fletcher Sinclair Mansion 2 east 79th St., New York, NY 10075

HOWArD CHAnDLer CHrIsTY Nymphs in Summer, 1946 Oil on canvas 60.5 x 72 in. estimate: $60,000 - $80,000 HA.com/5066-80001

Also featuring a special stand-alone catalog devoted to

The ComiC ArT of PlAyboy Over Five Decades of Playboy Illustration and Cartoons Visit HA.com/5066

For a free auction catalog in any category, plus a copy of The Collector's Handbook (combined value $65), visit HA.com/ArtA22613 or call 866-835-3243 and reference code ArtA22613.

InquIrIes: Todd Hignite 800-872-6467, ext 1790 ToddH@HA.com

Annual Sales Exceed $750 Million | 600,000+ Online Bidder-Members 3500 Maple Avenue | Dallas, Texas 75219 | 800-872-6467 DALLAS | NEW YORK | BEVERLY HILLS | SAN fRANcIScO | PARIS | GENEVA TX Auctioneer licenses: Samuel Foose 11727; Robert Korver 13754; Andrea Voss 16406. Heritage Auctioneers & Galleries, Inc.: NYC #41513036 and NYC Second Hand Dealers License #1364739. NYC Auctioneer licenses: Samuel Foose 0952360; Robert Korver 1096338; Kathleen Guzman 0762165; Michael J. Sadler 1304630. This auction is subject to a 19.5% buyer’s premium. 22613

24 CityArts | October 12, 2011