Silverlake Blvd.

Voices of Light @ Disney Hall

 

 

Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light is not a soundtrack to The Passion of Joan of Arc, but an independent work. It has its own libretto that only occasionally overlaps with Dreyer’s movie. The two proceeded along parallel but independent tracks last Sunday night.

 

At first there was a disconnect--at least for me. In the long opening trial scene—Dreyer’s monumental fresco of faces—the expressions vary from awe to irritation, absorption to boredom, and the mood shifts in a flash from solemnity to satire; Einhorn’s music was beautiful but too smooth. It flattened the complexity swirling on the screen

 

But the movie progresses—it’s one continuous accelerando—and the moods become more uniform, relentlessly so. By the scene where the sacraments are brought to Joan, the music and the movie were in perfect synch. From that point to the end Einhorn’s music framed and further focused the movie's intensity.The L.A. Master Chorale and the soloists sounded terrific. A tremendous performance considering the production renders them invisible.

 

Dreyer presents no evidence of sanctity or grace. He doesn’t even permit Joan to demonstrate her acknowledged charisma and decisiveness. What we see is a woman being harassed by men who consider themselves her superior. A timeless story, unfortunately. 

NYC

 

Artichoke Pizza

 

Chelsea Market

 

 

The Jane

 

Many, many (whiteface) jockeys on 52nd St

 

Swag

 

Rockefeller Center

 

Rockefeller Center

 

Life-size reproductions at Christie's

 

Morning Amazon deliveries, near the Met

Zero: countdown to tomorrow @ the Guggenheim

 

A blast.

 

I had never heard of most of these people. The big discovery for me was Henk Peeters. His plastic sheet with columns of burn marks was stunningly beautiful (Pyrography 60-06, 1960).

 

 

This is “zero” in the sense of a turning away from everything superfluous, everything flattering and comforting. The inhumanity is suffused with melancholy and pride—the defiance of staring reality down.

 

In a completely different mood, his Trembling Feathers 8-14 (1961-7) seemed to be just a tidy assemblage, but eventually the feathers started jerking—not “trembling”. Hilarious, weird, and actually “moving” in all senses of the word.

 

Hermann Goepfert’s Optophonium (1961–2) consisted of 18 white rectangular panels, from which protruded some metal slats. Eight attached lights cast shadows and flares of glare, plus an audio track of electronic music. The music was surprisingly engaging. It reminded me that the Group Zero moment coincided with similarly supersophisticated yet also naïve Darmstadt music scene.

 

 

 

I had also never heard of Dadamaino (three black rectangles with oval forms cut out of them) …

 

 

 

… or Oskar Holweck (a sheet of white paper with delicately accordion-folded tears).

 

 

Heinz Mack is perhaps not ready for revival, but Otto Piene is obviously an important artist who has been neglected (e.g. Proliferation of the Moon, 1957)

 

 

Lucio Fontana provided exhibit’s stunning moment of pure luxury and visual extravagance with a massive plate of copper with five vertical slashes.

 

 

 

The critics are panning the show but I thought it was a treat. A lot of the work—maybe even most of it—was exactly the gimmicky mechanisms that Sixties filmmakers featured when they wanted to poke fun at contemporary art. And, as always, a lot of the mechanisms weren’t actually working. Even if it wasn’t the apex of artistic achievement, the show was a refreshing rebuke to the present day art world. Here were people making art for the fun of it. 

The Met

      

The Greek and Roman art installation was new to me, though it was completed seven years ago. The Roman Sculpture Court, and the long gallery demonstrate the right way for a museum to allocate space: things that need room are given it, but lesser, smaller things are fit in ingeniously. The generosity is appealing after MOMA’s self-defeating selectivity. Where MOMA says, “You can see this one, because there isn’t time or space to show any more,” the Met says, “Here’s more than you can possibly digest, but this is the best of what we’ve got.”

 

Even more important is the lighting. It’s a perfect mix of full direct sunlight (on the kouros and kora), ...

 

... and then diffused daylight, and absolutely astonishing glareless amber spotlights.

 

 

I had time to take in Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. The Philistine pot, painted with decorative patterns makes you rethink the term “Philistine.” From Berlin were two ceramic reliefs from the Ishtar Gate: a lion and a dragon. And the “Taylor Prisim,” lion hunt reliefs from Nineveh, and other treasures from the British Museum, minus the BM’s chaos, and several amazing bronze cauldrons with animal-head-handles.

 

  

 

I had tea and a blondie on the roof. It turned out to be a spectacularly bright, warm day.

 

The Dia at Beacon

I’m a fan of the Dia. I support them, even when I don’t like what they do. They want art to be presented right, and taken care of—especially art that isn’t flashy, sexy or in vogue. They believe in showing a lot of examples of work by an artist, so the viewer can draw his or her own conclusions. They favor quietness. How can I not love them?

 

So I expected Dia: Beacon to be a sort of minimalist/conceptualist paradise. It is and it isn’t. The approach, the grounds are lovely, and polemically non-monumental. You hardly notice you’ve arrived anywhere.

 

 

The galleries are a mixed bag. There are conspicuous successes:

• Richard Serra’s Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2001) is the showstopper, but I preferred Consequence (2003), with the lower half of one wall in black facing an identical wall with the upper half black. 
• One of the unqualified delights of the place isn’t visual at all: a Max Neuhaus organ drone rumbles through the building for a few minutes every hour.
• Blinky Palermo’s Times of the Day II (1975) confirmed my suspicion that he was one of the supreme abstract painters. Matisse cut-outs meet Ulm design, plus irony and pathos.
• The suite of rooms devoted to Agnes Martin were perfect presentations of perfect paintings. There was a multi-part series presented whole (Innocent Love 1-8, from 1999), and two other rooms with paintings from the 1950s to the 2000s.
• There were several rooms devoted to LeWitt wall drawings. Both black and white (#1085) and color (#1211) of lines in four directions. It’s a vision of cosmological order. The #136: Arcs and lines / two lines crossing (1972) is in a different mood altogether: a Bacchinal celebrating the marriage of Matisse’s Memories of Oceania and a trig textbook diagram!
• There was a beautiful room of On Kawara date paintings. I don’t know how he did it, but these things get to me.
• The basement provided a perfect space for media works, the best of which was Bruce Nauman’s Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals (1966). They also had a room in which they were projecting his Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001), which had a nice sickly emerald glow. I watched a mouse dash around for a bit, and moved on.
• Michael Heizer might be the main beneficiary of the Beacon. I’ve always been on the fence about his work, and the big rock at LACMA annoys me, but here his North South East West (1967/2002) looked grand rather than grandiloquent.

 

There were places where the presentation was actually better than the work:

• One flank of the perimeter was devoted to John Chamberlain sculptures. They looked magnificent. They glowed in the daylight. But I had a suspicion that the perfection of the setting oversold the work. Chamberlain can be terrific, but I don’t know that any of the pieces on view were that great.
• Louise Bourgeois gets a creepy attic all to herself. The installation is so fantastic that you almost miss the fact that other than a few items none of the work is first-rate. The big spider lurking in the back turns out to be merely a minor one. 

 

 

 

 

Then there are the almost great spaces. Artists that I tend to like, but the presentation didn’t work. Most important was the Dan Flavin gallery, with dozens of fluorescent light installations. It should have been heaven, but they were displayed along the other flank of the perimeter, next to a wall of windows. His work never looks right in daylight, so why was it here? Why weren’t they in the basement, which seemed the perfect space for them?

 

Elsewhere there was a sprawling pile of lumber from Beuys, some scary glass-and-mirror Smithsons. Appropriate for the building and locale, there was a suite of Becher photographs of industrial building. But individual, large format images, not typologies; I was disappointed.

 

The Dia, bless its heart, has taken under its wing several artists I don’t get. Would the ideal viewing situation provided at Beacon change my mind? I’m afraid not: The Robert Rymans remained inert white squares, as always. The Donald Judds, even here, were to me just more bins. Fred Sandback’s yarn should be put to some better use.

 

 

 

The special exhibit was a Carl Andre retrospective. Of course it was well done, everything given just the right amount of space, but the installation didn’t do the work justice. The planks and logs desperately need direct sunlight to come alive. Under artificial plus diffused light they looked OK, but not compelling. They should have had the show around the perimeter rather than in the center of the building, so everything could have been illuminated by daylight.

 

 

After a nice lunch in the café, I caught the train back. I had had a vague idea of trying to catch the Koons show that evening, but decided it would just spoil my mood. I didn't love everything about Beacon, but that's as it should be. I got exactly the kind of in-depth, individual experience that MOMA and most other museums don't care about anymore. A light on the Hudson.

 

Balanchine & Stravinsky @ New York City Ballet

 

I had seen the New York City Ballet before, but never until last Sunday in their home, the David H. Koch—formerly “New York State”—Theater. The mid-century luxe kitsch was in immaculate condition—thanks to the oligarch—and the gigantic Nadelmans were adorable. It seats 2500 but it felt cozy—my first-row-balcony seats were right up to the stage—and there are excellent people watching lobbies and balconies.

 

 

One complaint: why is the Reuben Nakian sculpture shoved in a corner next to the trash cans on the balcony? It's really nice! It should be shown off!

 

 

The matinee’s program was the reason I was in NYC that weekend: all Balanchine and Stravinsky collaborations. It was even better than I hoped.

 

It began with the first and oldest. I thought I knew Apollo (1928). It’s inexpressibly beautiful, but it also has some deliciously comic bits. It’s ballet, but there’s nothing conventional about it. The story could be described as Balanchine’s Origin of the Work of Art: a man gets bored with the adulation of his women, and turns them against each other, generating the distinct arts of poetry (Calliope), mime (Polyhymnia), and music and dance (Terpsichore). Robert Fairchild merely had to stand in his tight white tights with his back to the audience to generate palpable waves of adulation. He’s an Apollo all right. No wonder they can fill the expensive seats for a program of modernist ballet on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

 

Then they jumped ahead to the 1960s, to a completely different mode and mood. And the women—particularly Teresa Reichlen—took charge, starting with Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960), with Reichlen and Ask la Cour as the main couple among six other couples. It's a series of late-modernist versions of Renaissance-looking dances perfectly suited to Stravinsky’s late-modernist variations of Gesualdo’s music. Similar movements are constantly falling out of union: theme and variation, animated moiré patterns.

 

Reichlen and la Cour also led Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1963), each taking turns as the principal—though I guess in the end she wins. If Monumentum is genially stately and grand, Movements—which it’s always paired with—is spiky and hair-raising. The female corps takes over, doing jarring grand pliés with the feet wide apart, so the legs form a rectangle.

 

Clotilde Otranto conducted the NYCB band in the pit, and their performance threw Salonen and the L.A. Phil’s performance years ago in the shade. It was magnificent, aggressive and disconcerting: difficult music, and difficult dance.

 

Duo Concertant (1972) changed the mood again, with Ashley Bouder and Chase Finlay dancing to the onstage performance of Arturo Delmoni (violin) and Nancy McDill (piano). This piece offers another, later, and much more genial ars poetica. The dancers stand behind the piano during the Cantilène, listening. Or rather, performing the act of listening. From listening, they are moved to dance: first together, then apart. There is some disturbance, then a separation. The woman’s arm curls plaintively in the dark, under a spotlight, until the man gently spreads her fingers and kisses her hand.

 

Agon (1957) ended the program. Again, music that I thought I knew so well sounded brilliantly fresh and alive. It’s spiky and sec, but it also has a genial sassiness. And the dance is perfect: kids showing off what they can do. The two guys do similar acrobatics slightly out of synch to two trumpets in the Bransle Simple. Ashly Isaacs fairly stole the show walking back and forth to the accompaniment of the castanets of the Bransle Gay. Then there came Maria Kowroski and Amar Ramasar doing the heart-stoppingly poignant Pas de Deux. There’s a moment when, after all our attention has been focused on her upraised leg, that he collapses flat to the floor. They writhe and intertwine and suspend off each other slowly but precisely: sexy serialism.

 

 

 

I’ve been listening to this music, loving it, inhabiting it, for 40 years. I left the Koch in a daze, convinced that the only way to really hear Stravinsky’s music is through Balanchine’s dances. 

 

 

 

The Museum of Modern Art after 13 years

 

I know Taniguchi’s renovation is eight years old, but it was new to me. I left fairly depressed. It isn’t the crowds, it isn’t the building: it’s the collection—the embarrassing gaps in it—and the bad use they make of what they’ve got.

 

Granted, the old evolutionary narrative of modernist art doesn’t bear repeating, but isn’t there still some value in distinguishing good work from bad work?

 

For the alleged central museum of modernist art, one work each by Calder, Hesse, Kline, Kusama, Lichtenstein, Ruscha, etc. doesn’t seem adequate.

 

Even worse, sometimes the one sample work on view was uncharacteristic or just lame (Beuys, Kelly, Kiefer, LeWitt, Dennis Oppenheim, etc.)

 

Even more exasperating were situations when MOMA actually owns the right piece, but doesn’t display it. Why not represent Rosenquist with F-111? And Richter with October 18, 1977? Are they too big? What was the point of the expansion?

 

Don’t get me wrong: sometimes MOMA gets it right.

 

Gallery 7 offers a good Leger wall, a good De Chirico wall, a scrum of Brancusis, and a very smart trio of 1916 still lifes by Matisse, Gris, and Morandi. You can survey a variety of works by each artist from different times. The format automatically prompts critical engagement: “I like this but not that. … This one is totally different from all the others. … All of them have lots of red. …” It’s very simple and very effective. The Leger wall even adds Gerald Murphy and Stuart Davis, so viewers can consider their work in relation to Leger.

 

The design gallery was also a pleasant surprise, with a special exhibit of design by women from 1890-1990. I particularly liked the wall of WWII-era posters, and—in the opposite corner—a wall of punk and new wave posters and ephemera.

 

 

 

But the design department is still waving that Bell 47D1 helicopter in our face, 30 years after Douglas Crimp pointed out that it was a favorite of regimes engaged in atrocities against their citizens. I guess we’ve outgrown that quibble.

 

 

The 1940s gallery is brilliant. Rothko’s Slow Swirl never looked better, facing down Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie. But it really marks the end of the collection, the end of the museum. Just at the moment when it really should get going, the show stops.

 

The 1940s through the 1970s were the apex of New York City’s reign as world capital of the visual arts, hence you would expect the city’s main museum of 20^th century art to make a big deal about it. But you would be wrong. MOMA didn’t buy the work when it was new, and now it’s out of their price range.

 

For example, Rothko’s #10 is a good picture, but MOMA should have a room packed with terrific Rothkos. (Even MOCA does!) Then we go on to two Rauschenberg paintings and three by Johns? That’s it? The only artist they get halfway right is Warhol: a corner with three A+ masterpieces: the Soup Cans, a gold Marilyn, and an Orange (really dark red) Disaster. … And the 20^th century ends with god-awful paintings by Ron Gorchov and Alan Shields. Where am I? The Burpee Museum in Rockford?

 

In Angel Borrego Cubero’s 2013 documentary The Competition, Jean Nouvel comments on the tendency of art museums to look more and more like stamp collections: one of these, one of those, a rare example of this series, …. He’s dead right. By doing so, museums provide only the shallowest kind of art history survey experience. And it certainly does not offer much of an opportunity to encounter an artist’s work in a halfway meaningful way.

 

Instead of the needs of the individual, the focus is on the managerial desire to circulate large crowds efficiently from Point of Interest A, then to B, and C, and so on. At MOMA the Points are presented with retail flair (“And around this corner … analytical cubism!!! And behind this wall … Brancusi!!”), and conceded generous room to accommodate tour groups (“Who can tell me what a ‘Demoiselles’ is?”)

 

Well, you always can find the bathroom.

 

I had a coffee in the sculpture garden, which is still nice, and cheered up. The hullabaloo from a nearby parade filled the space. Newman’s Broken Obelisk never seemed more apt. Or Henry Moore's Family Group, huddled together for protection.

 

Henri Matisse: the Cut-Outs

 

The work is all theme and variations:

• There is the palette—MOMA had a beautiful display of original paper samples—pumpkin, rose-pink, greenish-lemon, forest green, adobe or tomato red, lapis, aqua ….
• The basic unit: a motif on a contrasting background (e.g. Palmette, 1947)
• Units are combined into a composition. The archetype, and perhaps most straightforward and beautiful of all might be Snow Flowers (1951)
• The single units are not necessarily sketches. Palmette is a complete, complex, satisfying work of its own.
• Finally there’s the effect of all the works together. The curators are right to stress the significance of Matisse’s original studio arrangement: the boundaries between works were originally blurry. It seems right to see them all together, as one big party.

  

Palmette / Snow Flowers / Installation:

 

+++

 

Even the seemingly “simple” forms, on inspection, prove to be composed of many parts and patches fitted tightly together. It’s all about careful adjustments, over time.

 

The original cut-out assemblages are grotty, frayed, smudged with glue and fingerprints, dotted with pin-holes, layered with pencil marks. The planes of color are uneven, imperfect. Except for the pochoir stencils of Jazz, the translations of the assemblages (e.g. the stained glasses, rugs) are frightful misses.

 

Composition by intricate adjustments continues, at a heroic scale, HM’s longstanding concern with depicting objects as moments of intensification in a field. The individual leaves and bodies and fruits are as much negative space as positive. They are not bounded and distinct, but polemically open to their environment, and part of it. 

 

+++

 

There was a breathaking room of the blue works: the four Blue Nudes, the Acrobats, Standing Blue Nude, Venus and Wave of 1952, and the two versions of Woman with Amphora of 1953.

 

There was one misstep in the installation. After going to all those years of painstaking restoration work-pulling the old burlap apart thread by thread—why did MOMA exhibit the Swimming Pool behind glass!

 

 

But then there also was a place you could stand and bathe, simultaneously, in the radiance of the Hammer Museum’s Sheaf (1953), Blue Nude with Green Stockings (1952), Parakeet and the Mermaid (1952), and Large Decoration with Masks (1953).

 

+++

 

The drama of the cut-outs is not psychological, historical or social, but physical. It is the conflict between bodies and gravity: balancing, rising, falling, floating, flying, blossoming, waving, …. The double Acrobats of 1952 might be the archtype, and apex.

 

The subject matter is that of humanist surrealism of Matisse’s friends and colleagues: Char, Ponge, Eluard, Reverdy, Pévert as well as Miró and Arp: Stars, flowers, fruit, women, sunshine.

 

It’s not their fault that their social-democratic Arcadia never actually materialized. Dream or not, it’s an assertion of values that are probably more urgently needed now than in the immediate post-WWII era.

 

The work isn’t just decorative but frequently clowns in the sense of cartoons (The Eskimo, 1947). An unexpected sense of the grotesque. The work of distant followers like the Gladys Nilsson and Karl Wirsum are not so distant after all.

 

The Thousand and One Nights (1950) features a line from the Arabian Night: “She saw the light of day, she fell discretely silent.” Now there’s an epigraph. 

  

[Installation shots from the NY Times]

The High Line

 

Yes, it’s a line, but a wiggly-squiggly-loopy one, with lots of dodges and turns.

 

Just being up in the air three stories was exhilarating. And crowded as it was—it never was not crowded—it didn’t have the manic tempo of the sidewalk.

 

 

It turns the neighborhood into an exhibit. Carefully positioned niches with benches offer a glimpse of Hoboken across the Hudson River, or century-old industrial buildings on both sides of the street. It celebrates history, of all things.

 

Of course it is also celebrating The Standard, Zadig & Voltaire, Intelligentsia, Comme des Garçons, Hugo Boss, and all the retailers and galleries and other wanting-to-be-visible business that will eventually move into all the eye-level spaces that are currently being renovated.

 

It also, with great ingenuity, suspends tiny bits of green space mid-air. There are remarkable little lawns, and even overgrown patches where you can get out of the sun.

 

 

I concede that it’s not an efficient way to get from A to B. But the point is promenading, seeing and being seen.

 

 

The design seems a respectable compromise between high style and durable public infrastructure. My only complaint is that it doesn’t frame the girders and shadowy spaces underneath, which might be the best part of the original structure.

 

Fortunately I was staying near the south end, so I visited every day. 

 

Beethoven & Adams @ Disney Hall

 

Leif Ove Andsnes doesn’t have a flashy personal style, and isn’t one of those musicians who mime to the music. Even so, his performance of the Emperor Concerto was mesmerizing. He sat at the (tinny-sounding) piano and concentrated, focusing all his attention on the music. He demonstrated by example how to listen. By the time they got to the slow movement, Andsnes was playing so quietly and slowly and seemingly simply that even the obtuse Disney Hall audience held its breath. I could be prejudiced, since this piece, for me, justifies the existence of the whole classical music world.

 

The best thing about the Harmonium of John Adams was the intricate and rich sounds coming out of the percussion section. The choir did its thing admirably, but Donne and Dickinson aren’t suitable for shouting out by mobs. 

 

The concert ended with the Choral Fantasy. If the Emperor Concerto is Beethoven at his most genial, wholesome and grand, this is Beethoven at his most eccentric, willful and naughty. For about a quarter of an hour the piano abruptly starts and stops engaging but rather aimless duets and debates with various instruments of the orchestra, as a large chorus looks on. What are they doing? Somehow the effect of watching the act of listening is diminished by the large numbers. Only at the very end, do they pipe up for a concluding phrase. But what a phrase!

 

[Image: Portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Willibrod Maehler, circa 1804]