Silverlake Blvd.

Twilight of abstraction?

LACMA’s exhibit of 29 newish paintings, sculptures and media works, Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting, failed to jar in the slightest my conviction that modernist abstraction is a dying form of art.

 

Of course there is fantastic work in an abstract mode being produced today, by sculptors from Richard Serra to Richard Tuttle to Roni Horn, and painters like Mary Heilmann. Two of them, Howardena Pindell and Amy Sillman, were the bright spots of this exhibit. But all these artists are 50 and older. Younger abstractionists like Tomma Abts strike me as revivalists, making, at best, agreeable historical pastiches.

 

Of the 50ish-and-younger artists I care about, only Jessica Stockholder could be called an abstractionist, and her vein of abstraction is willfully allusive and impure. Everybody else works with images that are either photographic (Jack Pierson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing), or handmade (Chris Ware, Elizabeth Peyton, Kehinde Wiley), or media-derived (Maruizio Cattelan, Walid Raad).

 

I hope I’m wrong; I hope there are masses of fantastic abstract pictures being painted by kids right now. But I’m preparing myself for abstraction to turn out to be an historical episode that lasted a century and a half. It required a focus that’s probably hard to sustain today. A few weeks ago I was at a gallery that was showing some carefully selected abstract paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s. They filled the space with warmth, light and silence. A tour group entered, and paused to listen to a smart, concise account of the work. I heard someone ask why artists didn’t paint this way today, and the guide responded, “I think that reflects the different way we all live now. Artists nowadays don’t have the leisure to spend all day reflecting in the studio.”

 

[Image: Ad Reinhard, from How to Look at Modern Art, 1946]

Marsden Hartley: The German Paintings 1913-1915 @ LACMA

I don’t remember ever seeing so much Hartley at once. The good paintings are so good you can’t believe he isn’t more famous. If he had born in Europe rather than Maine, he would have a museum dedicated to his work. He was a recluse, didn't promote himself, and died before artists became stars. He was never fashionable. His work is scattered all over the place, so assessing his accomplishment isn’t easy. Most of the paintings in this show were assembled from dozens of small town museums.

 

(Note that this exhibit was a collaboration between LACMA and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It was a tremendous treat. But why didn't LACMA promote it? Why do such good work if you're going to keep it a secret?)

 

From the first room it's obvious that Hartley arrived in Europe, saw what all the most advanced artists were up to, and assimilated it completely. No time wasted at all, he proceeds to forge an idiosyncratic personal style. The immediate pre-WWI work featured a repertoire of motifs—praying hands, seated Buddha, cavalry officers on parade, circles, rays, triangles, stars, blossoms, …--all packed together, with complete lack of concern whether something was abstract or representational, carefully delineated or dashed off. The colors and drawing are first-rate. Even the absurd pictures are compelling. MH brought an American earnestness to this swirl of impressions, memory and transcendental visions. The thing that overwhelms you is the complete frankness with which he presents it all, no holds barred. It’s extraordinary.

 

In 1913 Hartley painted The Warriors, with its concentric arcs of toy cavalry soldiers ... 

... and a Portrait of Berlin, which, instead of images of urban modernity you might expect, He’s trying to convey a place completely through the interior experience, without reference to any public clichés.

The eight “Military” paintings from 1914-5 arranged on the walls of one room made a tremendous impact. In different sizes, on backgrounds of black or slate, each presents arrangements of the same crosses, waves, check patterns, targets, etc. In some the colors are bright, in others they’re quiet, but in all of them the colors glow. All feature a distinctive orange-red that radiates warmth—sometimes red-hot, sometimes smoldering.

It’s as if a military parade is passing by, with all the medals and ribbons and flags, … but everybody's gone. The soldiers, the cheering crowd, have vanished. The flags and the ribbons still resonate, but only weakly, compared to the red-blooded passion they are supposed to prompt. At the moment when painters are discovering ways colors and forms by themselves can be intensely powerful, Hartley is also toying with irony, the weakness of abstract forms. It’s impossible to choose a favorite. They all employ the same language, but they delineate subtly different moods.

The exhibit presents these paintings as MH’s response to the death of Karl von Freyberg in the war. The work stands on its own merits, and doesn’t require this romantic biographical frame-story. However, for once, the frame feels right. Or at least it feels right to me. I can imagine Hartley feeling that his grief might be considered triply inappropriate: from one man for another, from an American for a German soldier, and addressed to a stranger (their relationship doesn't seem to have been anything more than a one-sided infatuation). Out of these admonitions to silence, Hartley found his voice. The homophobia and prudery of his era prompted an art of indirection, allusion, abstraction and—even in the middle of mourning—play. The same thing is at work in the work of Hartley’s colleagues like Gertrude Stein and Charles Demuth. I’m not saying their personal varieties of abstraction derive from self-censorship, but the queer situation they found themselves in prompted a fruitful exercise of the imagination.

 

Sitting alone in the room with these paintings, I suddenly remembered other occasions of queer public mourning. So many wars. Seventy years after Hartley’s personal war, the colorful, oblique, provocative canvases were arranged on the floor, as panels in a gigantic AIDS memorial.

 

The almost unbearable intensity is relieved in the third room of the exhibit, devoted to the paintings on American themes that Hartley did while in Germany. You could call them “Americana,” with their teepees, canoes, and Navajo blanket blocks of colors. Indian Fantasy (1914) is camp, but it’s also a stoutly constructed painting. ...

 

Himmel (1914-5) with his flat blocks of bright colors, and a different mixture of memory, allusion and abstraction seems to point the way to Jasper Johns’s work, a century later.

Saint-John Perse (III)

 

Reading SJP requires an extreme effort of focus, painstaking re-reading. If you don’t make the effort, you get absolutely nothing out of it. There’s no “take away.” It’s an experience that takes you away, to a place of nobility, confidence, joy, wholeness, health.

 

Open, open to the sea-wind our jars of fragrant herbs! Fleecy plants thrive on the headlands and in the drifts of small shells. Blue monkeys, stuffed with prickly figs, come down the red rocks. And the man who cuts an offering bowl out of rock-crystal yields up his offering to the flaming sea.

…

In vain the surrounding land traces for us its narrow confines. One same wave throughout the world, one same wave since Troy.

(Seamarks, 1957)

Saint-John Perse (II)

 

He appeals to my contrariness. His work is the antithesis of present-day knowingness, the current tyranny of epigram. People write in allusions, mistaking recognition of allusions for communication.

 

Teach us the iron word, and the silence of knowledge

like the salt of ages at the seams of great cast-iron vessels forgotten by the caster …

…

The great itineraries flash again on the reverse side of the mind, like scratches of a claw on the quick of silver plates.

(Winds, 1946)

Saint-John Perse (I)

 

I have been binging on SJP lately. You can still get the exquisite Bollingen bilingual editions of his books for a few dollars on Amazon.

 

And the child coming home from the Fathers’ school, affectionate, hugging the affection of the Walls that smell of hot bread, sees at the end of the street where it turns

the sea deserted and noisier than a fish auction.

(Praises, 1910)

Sondra Radvanovsky @ Dorothy Chandler

 

 

The word recital makes me lean forward, strain to hear—especially in the vast barn of Dorothy Chandler. Neither of those were necessary the other Saturday. SR filled the hall with her voice. And she seemed to do it without more effort than it takes to mutter, “Excuse me” in the supermarket. There’s a reason these people are called artists.

 

She began with Beethoven’s “Ah perfido!,” and concluded with a succession of encores, ranging from “I could have danced all night” and “O Mio Babbino Caro.” Amid the fireworks, the actual show-stopper was Aaron Copland’s quiet setting of “Long time ago,” which she introduced as her father’s favorite song, and fumbled, at first, from emotion. Since for her there are few technical issues, this song, and all the others, are communications, intimate and personal.

All Our Tragic @ the Getty Villa

 

I remember complaining after one of the annual plays at the Villa, that it was high time they presented a cycle rather than a single play. Last weekend I got my wish, and some. The Hypocrites presented All Our Tragic, a 12-hour marathon production of all 32 extant Greek tragedies. I couldn’t make it Saturday, but I saw all of Sunday (Acts 5 through 8). Which is to say I saw the whole of the Trojan War, from the sacrifice of Iphigenia that signaled its start to the absolution of Orestes for the murder of his mother, years after it ended.

 

I confess that I was expecting—and dreading—a conceptual performance in which actors read out loud from the University of Chicago Press Complete Greek Tragedies, or the Loeb Classical Library. But no such nightmare awaited us.

 

Instead of books, the eighteen young and fired-up performers all clutched Kindles. To my amazement, they only intermittently glanced at them. The text was also projected as supertitles above the stage, I suspect to aid the audience through some of the knottier tangles of Greek names. There were no other props (other than a fake head and a teddy bear), and no costumes or sets.

 

As the audience arrived, the actors were hanging out on the stage, warming up, chatting with people in the seats. The informality was sustained throughout the performance. Far from creating an air of relaxation, it sharpened the intensity. The performances were visceral, physical and exhilarating. The stunt aspect, the marathon of endurance, was present, of course, but didn’t dominate. It also sharpened the focus. It also added some welcome levity, with the inevitable mis-speakings and mis-steps.

 

Each of the performers played three or four characters. That in itself provided some eerie resonances, as when Tien Doman alternately spoke as Clytemnestra defending her daughter and as Odysseus demanding her sacrifice. It also created continuities, as the unwieldy multi-generational soap opera unfolded. The supertitles were probably useful here in helping the audience keep straight about which of so-and-so’s characters was speaking.

 

And the words were not painful professorial translatorese, but Sean Graney’s colloquial adaptation. There are no handy English equivalents to Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, but Milton’s Samson Agonistes is a reasonable composite facsimile. Graney wisely steered clear of the exalted Miltonic mode, while also avoiding pedestrian flatness. He clearly loves the way the speeches alternate between oracular flights and no bullshit bluntness.

 

And he did not engage with the plays as a task. There was no attempt to give them equal attention—another thing I feared. While some of the plays were presented in full (Iphigenia in Aulis, Agamemnon), others were represented by a few crucial scenes (Philoctetes, Ajax), and others were revised into something completely new (Helen, Eumenides).

 

One thing Graney did not accept were The Gods. I understand wanting to limit the cast—already unwieldy—to human beings, but eliminating the Olympians means eliminating the one source of humor. And so Graney added his own jokes. Some were shared confidences with audience about the strange twists of the soap opera (“Of course I’ll be happy to mourn for your dead, gay father, Neoptolemus.”). Others—such as Menelaus’s constant complaints about the inability to get a proper cup of tea—were complete fabrications, but valid readings of the character. Especially in Ryan Bourque’s hilariously agitated, acrobatic performance.

 

The jokes were necessary because of the darkness of the matter at hand. This re-telling of the tale was above all the story of how war debases everyone involved in it, turning civilized people into animals. We watched Agamemnon (Walter Briggs), at first merely unenlightened and conventional, descend into thuggery, and end up remorseful, only to be butchered by his vengeful wife. “Lighter” characters also exhibited related symptoms, including Emily Casey’s terrifyingly self-absorbed Helen and Erin Barlow as Helen’s too-eager-to-please daughter Hermione. And the corruption and fall of Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, is not a nice story, and isn’t meant to be. Zeke Sulkes was remarkable, growing from terrified child to middle-aged asshole before our eyes.

 

While I was reveling in the excitement and fun of it Sunday afternoon, I was also wondering anxiously, “How is this going to end?” Was Graney going to import the homecoming of Odysseus from the Odyssey? No: it ended with a version of The Eumenides, which—minus Athena, Apollo, and the Furies—was so watered-down that I think I actually watched the cast end the show with a group hug. A bit of a let-down, but pardonable after such a thrilling, memorable day.

Past & Present

 

 

I remember where I was and how I heard about the fall of the Wall. Delmar phoned me at work before noon, “The East Germans are permitting free travel.” 

 

Berlin had been a frequent topic of conversation at that time: Bryan Farr had just moved back to the States after an extended stay in West Berlin. And suddenly the Cold War, the Soviet experiment, was over—or at least was starting to end. Driving east on the 10, listening to NPR, I heard, “The Wall is irrelevant. There is still a border, but it is permeable.” I started to cry.

 

That was 25 years ago. The end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe seemed a victory for humanity. It was all so painless, for the moment.

 

National Theatre Live’s revival of David Hare’s 1995 Skylight also prompts similar, if less, personal reflection. It’s a Condition of England play, part of a tradition stretching back 200 years. The allegorical conflict is between Tom, the bully entrepreneur and Kyra the saint who teaches mathematics to slum children.

 

There's no reason why a 19-year old diagnosis couldn't still be valid. The diagnoses of Carlye, Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Matthew Arnold et al, still command attention, plus have the advantage of not distracting us with mobile phones, the Internet, and pop culture references. But I don’t know that Hare gets deep enough. He charateristically puts all his faith in language, language that is so fluent and powerful that it almost disguises the simplistic conflict between the culture of getting ahead and the culture of caring for others … and the emotional dead end both can lead to. Which is to say that it’s a 1990s version of Major Barbara, unfortunately minus Shaw’s wit and willingness to look beyond appearances. The evening’s main consolation was Bill Nighy’s twitches and fidgeting. They were magnificent.

 

 

Bluebeard & Dido @ L.A. Opera

 

Four years ago when Salonen conducted a concert performance of Bluebeard’s Castle at Disney Hall, Bartók’s magnificent sonic brocade left no doubt that tremendously significant things were happening. But what those things actually were … was not at all clear.

 

After last Thursday’s performance at Dorothy Chandler, I still don’t know exactly what transpired between Bluebeard and Judith, but I was there, with them.

 

If I didn’t understand what they were talking about, I registered their love, fear, suspicion, guilt, anger, and doubt.

 

It’s very likely that Judith is a figment of Bluebeard’s imagination. And he might be a figment of hers. Which is a way of saying she is his psychoanalyst. And he, in turn, is--to borrow from another fairytale--her looking-glass that shows her what the world really is. She exclaims with joy at the first sight of his rooms filled with armour, treasure, and gardens; but then recoils when she notices the tell-tale bloodstains. She is experiencing what Walter Benjamin was getting at when he wrote, “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.”

 

At first I objected to director Barrie Kosky and designer Katrin Lea Tag’s austere set as a violation of Bartók’s artfully contrived naiveté. But it totally worked. Even without an architectural element in sight, they conjured up the Seven Doors. Robert Hayward and Claudia Mahnke as the tormented newlyweds were beyond praise.

 

The evening began less auspiciously with a performance of Dido & Aeneas.

 

I was willing to put up with sub-Brechtian mugging, the slightly off sounds coming from the pit, and the misguided overemphasis on visuals, but I gave up at the end, when Dido supplemented “When I am laid to rest” with a hearty and prolonged death rattle. It went on and on, upstaging the choral finale that I, in my ignorance, assumed was the thing Purcell wanted us to pay attention to at that moment.

 

Purcell’s work is a mix of broad humor and heart-rending tragedy. It’s ingeniously constructed, but requires delicate handling. Without tact and discrimination, the machine will run off the rails. Bartók’s work is a blunter and simpler proposition, and it made the evening.

 

[Image: Bluebeard (Gustave Dore, 1862)]

West Marin

 

There is probably farmland that is more lush, more picturesque, but West Marin seems the realization of what farmland should be like, and almost never is. No agribusiness billboards, no heaps of junked farm equipment. And it wasn’t on the other hand excessively tidy: it isn’t just a playground for rusticating rich people.

 

 

 

And then Cowgirl Creamery was everything I hoped. Even better. I had braced myself for a slick moneymaking machine, along the lines of a tasting room of a vineyard where commerce had totally displaced love. But not at all. A refurbished shed—handsome but not overdone.

 

The Cabot Clothbound Cheddar Tostie and the day’s soups: mushroom and tomato. I almost cried.

 

 

The western edge of Point Reyes was a tiny patch of a few streets: numbers 1 through 6 running vaguely east/west, and streets A through C perpendicular to them. Farm town in excelsis, with a fantastic old-style independent book store. I want to live there.