Silverlake Blvd.

California dark. Under the Big Black Sun: California art 1974-1981 @ MOCA

 

Under the Big Black Sun is exhausting. The Geffen is stuffed to the bursting point with a gazillion works. Besides being a lot of work, the exhibit is also depressing. Depressing in the sense that most of the work is dead, dumb and pretentious.

 

But it is also depressing in the sense that most of the works on display are evocations of despair.

 

Susan Mogul’s 1976 August Clearance injected a very welcome note of silliness. And Mark Thompson’s 1976 film of a swarm of bees flying around against a blue sky was like a zany abstract painting with sound effects.

 

But these were overwhelmed by the investigations of a world of sordid, soulless, media-manipulated nothingness. I’m not saying that this isn’t reality. But the work seemed complicit rather than a critique. 

 

A few of the works seemed equal to their subject.

 

Chauncey Hare’s 1977 series of photographs This Was Corporate America freezes your soul with a vision of work completely evacuated of hope. And then you discover Jim Goldberg’s Rich and Poor photographic portraits on which the subjects added comments in response. “We look like ordinary people,” one woman writes of the dark image of her and her daughter, “We have a terrible life.” We get the message. It is serious and shattering.

 

Suzanne Lacy’s 1977 Three Weeks in May mapping ninety reported rapes on map of L.A.,made the nearby wall of 100% cliché activist posters look especially clueless.

 

The dumb installation of Raymond Pettibon concert flyers diminished his work. Not very surprising, since other exemplary artists like John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, and William T. Wiley were also poorly represented by second-rate examples of their work.

 

The Allen Ruppersberg on display was okay, but not within 20 million miles of his fabulous Picture of Dorian Gray—the one and only certain masterpiece produced in California during the designated time period. Where was it?

 

Titling the exhibit after the wonderful 1982 album by X should have been a warning. I doubt any visual art produced between 1974 to 1982 could compare with songs like The Hungry Wolf, or Love to Love You Baby, Coat of Many Colors, I Will Always Love You, My Tennessee Mountain Home, Born to Run, Stand By Your Man, Dancing Queen, Kung Fu Girls, Cherchez la Femme, Heroes, Alison, God Save the Queen, I Feel Love, Are We Not Men?, Warm Leatherette, Love Will Tear Us Apart, I Love a Man in Uniform, Fascination, Tainted Love, … ?

 

California light. California Design 1930-1965 @ LACMA

 

Usually design exhibits about about luxury. They provide an opportuntity to inspect up close the stuff you will never otherwise wear, sit on, or use. This is how the 1% lives.

 

California Design had a few seriously luxurious items. Two desks, in particular, wouldn’t be out of place in a Noël Coward play: one in satinwood, chrome, leather by Kem Weber from 1938, the other in walnut, formica and iron by Greta Magnusson Grossman from 1952.

 

But the main drift of the exhibit was style without luxury. Style without preciousness. Style without formality. Style that frees you up rather than freezing you up. Above all style that is for everybody, not just an elite.

 

E.g.

• Wally Byam’s 1936 Airstream Clipper.
• Alvin Lustig (1915-1955) covers for New Directions books, covers for Arts & Architecture magazine, stationary, and, best of all, his Incantation fabric design from 1947
• Mary Ann DeWeese’s Sweethearts in Swim Suits matching his and hers bathing suits with lobster pattern, 1949

 

There are lots of familiar icons of mid-century design here. But the Eames furniture looks good in this clutter of tables and chairs and lamps by less famous men and women. It starts to feel like a genuine cultural movement.

 

Of course it was too good to be entirely true. The lazy afternoon cocktails on the patio aesthetic was a post-war version of the pastoral idyll.

 

This beautiful dream, elaborated by advertisements, still provides the fuel for Design Within Reach, Shag, Dwell magazine, the city of Palm Springs, among others.

 

And since the 1990s there has been a Midcentury revival, with both good and bad results. The bad stuff confines people in a suffocating straightjacket of Good Taste. The good stuff frees people to be sophisticated, egalitarian, relaxed. 

 

How wonderful to spend a rainy day bathing in this optimistic sunlight.

 

[Illustrations: Alvin Lustig, Incantation fabric design, 1947; and Greta Magnusson Grossman’s 1952 desk]

David Greenspan’s Poetics & Plays @ the Getty Villa

 

I don’t know what I expected, but I can tell you I didn’t expect to sit and listen to David Greenspan recite a large part of Gerald Else’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics last night. There was some other material interpolated in there, hinting at a love/hate relationship between the speaker, Aristotle, and Plato as his teacher/mentor/rival.

 

I accept all of this without question. I can accept an actor presenting a nondramatic found text. I can accept the possibility that there might be some drama to be found inside a text about drama. I even discern a glint of cleverness.

 

As Aristotle’s text is not even the tiniest bit dramatic, Greenspan embroidered his recitation with a whole repertoire of little gestures, mimed movements, choreographed steps, and vocal inflections.

 

Now here’s the crux. If his gestures had been beautiful, interesting and significant, it would have made the recitation a delight. However his gestures were annoying, banal and arbitrary. Instead of illuminating the text, they reduced it to a pretext. And that is being generous. He might as well have been reciting the instruction manual for a new toaster. It explored new horizons of pretense and annoyance.

 

So at the intermission, we bolted. Along with quite a few other members of the audience.

 

I don’t think I could have tolerated more. Besides, in the second half Greenspan was apparently going to subject a Gertrude Stein lecture to the same treatment. I can tolerate somebody making muck out of Aristotle, but I am not going to sit around while somebody exploits Gertrude Stein for an unforgiveable thespian ego-trip.

 

[Claes Oldenberg, 1967, Floating Thames monument]

 

P.S. After posting this I ran into a sympathetic and astute friend in the lightbulb aisle of Gelson's. After listening to my description of Greenspan's performance, she sighed, took a deep breath and asked, very earnestly, "He wasn't naked, was he?"

 

Roméo et Juliette @ Dorothy Chandler

 

Has any play been adapted more often than Romeo and Juliet? I suppose it was a historical inevitability that there would be a 19th century French version, and Charles Gounod complied in 1867 with Roméo et Juliette. As Gounod was no slouch, his R&J contains excellent bits.

 

However the excellent bits are not enough to redeem the whole. L.A. Opera tried very hard, but Gounod’s grand machine inevitably collapsed into a pretty inert lump of clichés. Other than the hyper-intense balcony scene and the grand finale of the tomb scene, which a cynic might point out are so sure-fire that they can’t be botched, the work had no dramatic oomph.

 

I wonder if part of the problem is the dissonance created by presenting a dramatic production of Romeo and Juliet without Shakespeare’s language. However hardy the myth of Romeo and Juliet may be, you can’t help but compare the hideous libretto by Jules Barbeir and Michael Carre, line by line, with memories of the original language, which the ostentatiously unromantic T.S. Eliot conceded to be perfection, simultaneously the best kind of poetry and the best kind of drama. Moreover the music of Shakespeare’s language is so rich and subtle that it makes Gounod’s agreeable Parisian academic romanticism seem silly.

 

Vittorio Grigolo looked the part and filled the hall with his voice. He is apparently a Roméo specialist, and he proved it. He was amazing and the two above-mentioned scenes were overwhelming. If only Gounod had provided more of them!

 

[Illustration: Grandville, 1844, Another world]

 

A symposium @ the Getty Villa

 

It was fun to spend a whole (rainy!) day at the Villa, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Getty’s yummy cookies and tea, but the symposium never strayed out of the shallow end of the pool.

 

I had been misled to think Antiquity in the twentieth century: modern art and the classical vision would be substantive. One of the coordinators was Christopher Green, whose Art in France 1900-1940 achieved the impossible a few years ago by presenting a new way to look at early modernism. But he just did a brief intro.

 

Kenneth Silver excited some hopes at the beginning with an overview in which he presented a range of possible topics. I suspect he assumed the subsequent presenters would talk about 20^th century approaches to classical mythology, classical forms, and the politics of style.

 

Instead we got a detailed account of Picasso’s summer vacation destinations 1919-1939, a summary of everything that has ever been written about Picasso’s painting The Pipes of Pan, and the depressing spectacle of a senior scholar who has apparently just discovered the concept of intertextuality, and used it as the proverbial hammer that turns everything into a nail.

 

So it goes when cronyism gets out of hand—the organizers apparently invited their pals rather than searching for scholars working on something relevant.

 

The intertextuality rap was part of a presentation on—guess who?—Picasso. Since the symposium was allegedly in response to the Villa’s new exhibit of classically-inflected work by Picasso, De Chirico, Léger and Picabia, it would have been nice to have heard something—anything—about the three other artists in the show.

 

In this context it’s perhaps not surprising that the most interesting part of the day was Elizabeth Cowling’s presentation on Barbara Hepworth. Hepworth was not part of the exhibition, but we’ll let that slide.

 

Cowling’s fascinating talk was followed by the most scholarly moment of the whole day—Whitney Davis’s review of forgotten early 20^th century writings on the art of antiquity. It was dense and serious and should have come first rather than last, when all of us in the audience were ready for naptime and/or the open bar at the reception.

 

As if to crown the joke of the symposium, the exhibit on display at the Villa is one of the best they’ve ever done. It mixes old favorites with novelties, points out connections and differences, and provokes idea after idea. The Picabia's were terrific. Léger and De Chirico are closer than I suspected. The bits of antique sculpture and painting that the Getty juxtaposes with the 20^th century work never looked fresher. You leave with your head spinning. It would be interesting to hear a bunch of experts talk about it ….

 

Anna Bolena @ the AMC Burbank

 

 

This was the Met’s first production of Anna Bolena? Incredible. Is the world so full of surefire melodramas with spectacular turns for all the principals? And melodramas featuring Henry VIII in full wife-recycling mode, with nonstop passion, betrayal and executions of the kind audiences love most?

 

Whatever the reason, the Met assembled an excellent cast and Donizetti’s unstoppable machine did the rest. Which is not to say it provided an evening of fine-grained realism. It was full-on traditional, gown-swishing operatic artifice. Ildar Abdrazakov was a perfect stagey Henry VIII, imposing his bulky frame over Anna, eyes popping out, shouting his head off. Stephen Costello as Anna’s old flame Lord Percy, almost stole the show by standing like a statue and singing with all his might.

 

The video crew obviously has acquired a new toy which permits them to make super-close-ups. They should return it to the vendor. What point is served by constantly reminding the audience that Anna Netrebko has no physical resemblance whatsoever to Donizetti’s Ann Boleyn, and that Ekaterina Gubanov could not be little Jane Seymour’s second cousin? Even worse, there were constant close-ups of mouths mid-song. Who, other than dental hygenists, wants to see that?

 

Another camera problem was caused by the production’s sets. I’m sure the dingy greys and blacks that predominated were stunningly effective live on stage. On the screen, however, the scenes were just too dark. Grand entrances were lost in shadows. I suppose these problems are part of the bigger problem of the misfit between the camera—which tends to demand a naturalistic performing style—and opera, which is the extravagant opposite of naturalistic realism.