Silverlake Blvd.

Jacaranda presents Curlew River @ Santa Monica First Presbyterian

 

Britten’s experiment is at first off-putting and hard to take.

 

It’s a play within a play, performed by priests, so we have to contend simultaneously with, on one hand, extreme churchy seriousness plus, on the other hand, a female lead played by a man with a shawl over his head. The mash-up of stylized Japanese Noh and stylized medieval Mystery Play teeters on the edge of camp.

 

The music is also challenging: mostly austere vocal solo cantillation accompanied by a few bongo taps or French horn bleats. It’s a million miles away from Britten’s popular mode of Noye’s Fludde. Sonically it traverses centuries and the globe, from plainsong to Sixties avant-garde to Westernized East. It seems extremely out of step with the era of Mad Men, but at the same time Stravinsky was also working in a Biblical medieval/high-modernist vein, with his Sermon, Narrative and Prayer (1961), Flood (1962) and Abraham and Isaac (1963). Something going on there.

 

There were some ravishing moments when the singers stepped up to the plate. Reid Bruton was an appropriately sententious Abbott/Narrator. Almost exactly a year ago, Abdiel Gonzalez stopped the show with his devastating lament in Gabriela Lena Frank’s The Singing Mountaineers at Disney Hall, and here he basically did the same thing as the Traveler.

 

But the whole thing didn’t really come alive until Dean Elzinga’s extended solo, when the Ferryman tells the story of the little refugee boy who died at the riverbank a year earlier. Suddenly the strangeness faded away, and the drama took hold.

 

Of course the Madwoman riding in the Ferryman’s boat turns out to be the poor boy’s mother. Her shock, at hearing the news is so extreme that it renders her sane. Steven Tharp managed the impossible Madwoman part heroically.

 

From this point on, there was no camp distraction. It became a wholly earnest dramatization of forgiveness and peace.

The Albright Knox

My last day in Buffalo I took a cab first thing in the morning to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. And it’s “Art Gallery,” not “Museum,” as the hotel valet tactfully but clearly corrected me. Out in the northern suburbs, it’s a medium-sized Greek Revival gem with a 1960s corporate modernist gem stuck on one side.

 

I had a vague sense that there were pictures I would be familiar with, but—oh man! Miró’s Carnival of the Harlequins! The gallery with seven Clifford Still paintings was worth the trip to Buffalo. Balla’s Dog on a Leash! 

 

 

And then everything else. Not that there are such vast quantities, but that each thing is a perfect A++ specimen.

 

 

David Smith's Tanktotem IV (at the end of the hallway in the picture above) stands guard, solidly rooted to the ground, but ready to leap.

 

Smith faces Joan Mitchell's George went swimming at Barnes Hole but it got too cold, 1957. While I was there, an over-eager docent tried to get a little boy who was giving his mom trouble excited about the picture by telling this story about how it’s actually a realistic picture of Mitchell’s white dog George shaking off the water after a dip in a woodsy pond.

 

Confronting Warhol's 100 Soup Cans of 1962, it takes a few minutes of conscious effort to actually see the painting. I mean, instead of just registering Classic Warhol! like an art dipshit. The big impediment is no longer the tawdriness of the subject matter, but the prominence of the Soup Can series as an icon and index of Warhol, pop art, the Sixties, contemporary art, contemporary culture, etc. So you just have to stand your ground and look really hard. After a bit of time, it becomes clear that it's a very tough, gruff, in-your-face abstract painting—a Barnett Newman, an Agnes Martin, a Stella—disguised as a stupid, sloppily executed prank. I was particularly taken with the flicker effect, in which different cans of Beef Noodle acquired animation and flashed like electric signs.

 

In the main stairway, Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1268: Scribbles. It’s really a trick piece: from a distance, it’s a hideous exercise in chiaroscuro. But up close, the actual scribbled loopy lines were lovely. They had LeWitt’s ceramic bowls in the gift shop! But only navy blue and black—the outgoing director bought their last yellow one!

 

 

Upstairs there was a mini-Young British Artists exhibit in the atrium in the Greek Revival building dominated by the best Rachel Whiteread I’ve ever seen—a negative cast of a stairway, and a Tracy Enim white neon sign proclaiming, “Only God knows I’m good.” And suspiciously straight-faced signs above two locked doors, reading “Beauty, Life, and Spirit: A Celebration of Greek Culture.” Is this an art-prank? No: an exhibit that just closed.

 

 

The special exhibit was of the very earliest Anges Martin paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s. It began with a 1947 painting on Masonite that was the best thing of all. A dark olive background, on which sits a dark red oval. Inside the red oval are three smaller ink-black ovals. Inside these black ovals are scratched thin, tense, curt lines: ideograms vaguely suggesting a doorframe, a mountain, half a pine tree. It radiated the poised intensity of her mature work, without looking anything like it. It was interesting to compare it with a big almost-grid painting in the opposite corner, which didn’t have half the power of the Masonite panel. Other than this, a bunch of really painful student work: pastiches of Derain, Marin, Miró, Rothko, even Cocteau. A demonstration of purging ones work of everything merely borrowed from her contemporaries. Everything not authentically ones own ultimately reads as “period” kitsch. 

 

Outside, at the entrance was a lovely Nancy Rubins explosion of silver canoes ...

 

Western New York Book Arts Center

 

The best new addition to downtown Buffalo is this terrific place where you can learn how to use traditional printing equipment. Besides the fascinating and pungent workshop ...

 

 

... there was a gallery and a shop. I couldn't resist their most popular item:

 

Society of Architectural Historians @ Buffalo

 

The conference was terrific. Everybody acted so surprised that our panel on archives was so much fun. Don't they know? I showed clips of Pee Wee Herman, and a glimpse of Buffalo in 1901:

 

 

 

The Buffalo of today was very familiar; it reminded me of Rockford.

 

 

Apr 11, 2013

 

Buffalo: random wall and Louis Sullivan masterpiece

 

 

 

Lucretia and Cinderella deal with it

 

Last night was Benjamin Britten evening at the Colburn School.

 

At first Swinda Reichelt’s costumes were a big distraction. Why was Joshua Guerrero wearing Miss Havisham’s wedding gown? He looked like Divine. Whatever. It didn’t matter. He and Amanda Woodbury and Rebecca Nathanson presented a well-thought-out recital of songs by Britten and English composers who influenced him.

 

It set the mood, and suggested the significance of the main event. But even so, The Rape of Lucretia astonished. I was expecting something deliberately small and a bit arch. No: it’s a dramatic meditation on evil and injustice.

 

And Britten’s music is up to the challenge. The 13-piece ensemble provides what might be the richest and most varied instrumental music Britten ever wrote. And the vocal music was as good. The Male Chorus consists of one tenor and Benjamin Bliss was transfixing.

 

Reichelt’s funky costumes ceased to be a distraction, especially when illuminated by Anne Militello’s vivid and meaningful lighting effects. The staging of this intricately layered piece is a puzzle which Gulu Monteiro solved. The ensemble mourned Lucretia’s wronged innocence and the packed Zipper Hall went crazy.

 

 

 

Earlier this week we saw a completely different operatic treatment of the theme.

 

There is no fairy godmother or pumpkin carriage or glass slipper in La Cenerentola. But it’s the same story: Cinderella’s stepsisters and her stepfather mistreat her and put her down, but they're just stupid and vulgar, not evil. Anyway, in the end the prince marries her. Nbody's honor is stained, nobody has to die.

 

The production was fun, but the performers never really let themselves go. Isn’t the whole point to contrast the impossibly refined and difficult coloratura with slapstick clowning? The valet Dandini provides a perfect opportunity for this, and Vito Priante seemed willing, but it never quite came off. The principals Ketevan Kemoklidze and René Barbera had terrific voices, and obviously love the music, but didn’t seem to realize they were in a comedy.

 

The costumes by Joan Gullién were also unusually handsome, funny and appropriate. It was delightful to see the stepsisters and stepdad huddled together in their loud hot-hot-hot yellow, pink and lavender ensembles.

 

The treat of the production was a completely arbitrary addition—a troupe of dancers playing Cinderella’s mice pals. Xevi Dorca’s choreography was funny, beautiful and even practical (they helped arrange sets and props). 

 

Kehinde Wiley @ the SF Contemporary Jewish Museum

 

 

Kehinde Wiley doesn’t hide his light under a bushel: He makes big, loud paintings. His fabulous technique combines mastery of traditional drawing, monumental scale, brilliantly saturated colors, and carefully controlled explosions of multiple, intricately clashing, decorative patterns. The room of Wileys at the CJM was like stepping into a seething, noisy but lively and fun market in a strange city.

 

Which is the point, exactly. These paintings are part of The World Stage, an ongoing project of portraying Black men around the world. Wiley has done portraits in Brazil, China, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and these were all from Israel—Ethiopian Jews, mostly, but also—Wiley isn’t doctrinaire—Israelis of Arab and European descent.

 

If this sounds suspiciously like recreational colonialism, the tricky ethics of the project is further complicated by the ardent erotic charge. Without being the least bit lewd or porn-y, they’re about as homoerotic as pictures can be. The curators at the CJM have been brave.

 

What rescues the work from the charge of sexual tourism is that the eroticism is, for Wiley, a means rather than an end in itself. Rather than being anything to apologize for, Wiley’s cruise-y gaze grounds in the concretely personal work that might otherwise be glib. Think of Raphael’s regard for shy Italian girls, or Watteau’s eye for intelligent court ladies: it leads to a more subtle psychological characterization, and a more acute realization of the milieu.

 

The personal charge, and the psychological acuity and attentiveness to details become the solid foundation for Wiley’s latest venture. The introductory video shows Wiley visiting a club in Tel Aviv, admiring the kids rapping in Aramaic and Hebrew. There's something reasuring about the good-nature with which Wiley saunters into the mythological and political minefield of contemporary Israel.

 

He captures it in his paintings: enmeshing their global youth culture t-shirts with patterns from Torah curtains and traditional paper cut-outs. Even the frames were embellished with verses, commandments and symbolic lions, eyes and hands. Wiley’s jubilant embrace of it all is a vision of hope. The clash of epochs, cultures and patterns, doesn't necessarily end in an annihilating ADD chaos; it can resolve into polyphony, a richer, livelier music.

 

 

 

[Images: Benediter Brikou, 2011; and Leviathan Zodiac, 2011]

 

Garry Winogrand @ SFMOMA

 

I have my personal Garry Winogrand playlist; other people have their own, different ones. Mine is centered around the World’s Fair picture. Winogrand made this indelible image at a time and place in which at least three dozen other artists were engaged in making equally indelible work, but Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, et al weren’t recording how people and places looked.

And more than an indelible record of how things looked, Winogrand’s photograph is the Great Society’s analogy to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa—an image that reveals the tragedy of world it came from with a terrifying concreteness. There’s the whole disaster of the Sixties to come, disposed on a bench with haphazard grace—a fragment of a Parthenon pediment updated to 1964.

And so on with the other images on my Winogrand playlist: the three women walking down a sun-blasted L.A. sidewalk past a man slumped over in a wheelchair, the woman with the icecream cone with her head thrown back giggling (perhaps), the seals staring at the zoo visitors who are ignoring them: the couple absorbed in each other, the woman wiping her tears …. Instead of photographic colleagues, the most relevant citations are Velazquez and Goya.

 

Winogrand liked working in series, and if some of these series lack a dense central masterwork, they provide a lesson in sustained attention. The images of airport interiors in particular, seems to unfold like the chapters of a brilliantly all-American funny/horrifying nouveau roman.

The show, in its ambitious massiveness, included a lot of posthumous prints. Other than the image they used in the banners of a woman in downtown L.A. buffeted by the wind, they were unwelcome dilutions. They belonged with the contact sheets, snapshots and ephemera presented clearly as ephemera, which I was happy to look at. In this category the most compelling souvenir was a fragment of 8mm film footage of the aftermath of a ticker-tape parade for some astronauts. The footage focused on the streamers gracefully spiraling above the tombstones of an old graveyard.

 

 

 

[Images: The World’s Fair, New York City (1964); Los Angeles, California (1969); from The Animals (1963)]