Silverlake Blvd.

“… as if his song were being transfused in him” @ Disney Hall

 

This was one of those programs that at first seemed gimmicky but, ever since Saturday, has continued resonating. It began and ended with two very different works from the late 1930s. You could say both Britten and Shostakovich attempted to produce light at a moment of general darkness. Or you could say that both simultaneously honored and mocked classical serenity, by producing extravagantly over-the-top versions of classical balance and simplicity. In between came an earlier work by model and rival of both. Apollo is neoclassical Stravinsky at his most appealing, but even this is more than a venture into limpid austerity, the simplicity is complicated, the serenity reflects forces in agitation.

 

Young Apollo for piano and strings is flashy, fun, and probably bad for you—which is probably why it’s my favorite instrumental piece by Britten. Dudamel certainly seemed to enjoy it; Joanne Pearce Martin certainly made a splash at the keyboard. This was the L.A. Phil’s first performance! The audience response was their cue to continue exploring the music library for overlooked treasures. Check out the Kent Nagano/Hallé Orchestra recording.

 

I never realized before how hilarious Calliope and Polyhymnia are in Stravinsky & Balanchine’s Apollo. They’re out of a P. G. Wodehouse story, swanning around, sabotaging their own auditions with Apollo with ludicrous over-acting. The first accomplishment of the union of Apollo and Terpsichore is that the other two muses stop acting like idiots and become docile, decorative supporting players.

 

The union of Apollo and Terpsichore, as presented by Hee Seo and Roberto Bolle, was solemn and magnificent. I first heard about Bolle from the OperaChic's blog (now on Twitter), which always dropped her finicky critical qualifications to identify him flat out as “the hottest man in the world.” Well, Apollo is not a role that just anybody can pull off, but Bolle has the looks and, more importantly, the moves. It's not a happy story, or even a nice one. Apollo is a bully and ridiculously affected. The muses are worse. The point might be that affectations, done well, permit us to take flight.

 

When the otherwise astute critic at the L.A. Times tactfully depreciates Balanchine’s choreography as “dated”, I have to assume he must be talking about other program happening in town by somebody with the same name. The dance I saw was the surest guide to Stravinsky’s music anyone could want—the sequence of moods, the flashes of cheekiness, the animated patterns and detail work—everything visualized and clarified. Dudamel was right to present the dance with the music.

 

I’m beginning to think that Stravinsky’s ballets should never be presented without the dancing. Rilke’s poem “Early Apollo,” in which “this stone head commands / that nothing hinder the bright glow or dim / the fatal splendor of the poem’s blow” ends with an equation of the human form with music: “as if his song were being transfused in him.”

Salonen’s Karawane @ Disney Hall

 

In the first half of the program, our old Resident Conductor Lionel Bringuier—back for a visit—dragged Debussy’s Faune out as slow as it could go without breaking down. It was a wallow, but—Wow—what a sound!

 

Yuja Wang’s performance of Mozart’s 9^th piano concerto was first time I’ve ever heard her given an opportunity to be introspective. It suits her. She doesn’t need to slam the keyboard to smithereens: she can hold back, and play neatly and quietly. She radiated the kind of sympathy and tact we’re all very much in need of these days.

 

Salonen’s 2014 Karawane is also a kind of concerto--for chorus and orchestra. It calls for virtuosity and the L.A. Master Chorale delivered: muttering and lyric exhalations, shrieks and barks and shattering dense harmonies.

 

I detect Salonen’s conducting experience in two ways. One is the way his music echoes the music he conducts—in this case, the Requiem Canticles, Nocturnes, Daphnis & Chloé, even Carmina Burana. His earlier Nyx for orchestra had the same playlist behind it.

 

The other way his compositions betray his experience as conductor is that many performers are given star turns. The choir may have been the main attraction, but there was a show-stopping eruption from the cello. And L.A. Phil’s percussion team—including rock band drum kit—punctuated the choir’s exclamations and propelled everything forward.

 

The text for Salonen’s piece is a sound poem by Hugo Ball. I see Ball’s text as sweetly comic, but Salonen sees ebbs and flows of conflict and bliss. I suspect Ball would be amused by the attention. There’s a video of yet another impassioned reading of the poem by Marie Osmond! (Fast forward to 1:47.)

 

[Image: The Brücke Choir (George Baselitz, 1983)]

Matthew Barney's River of Fundament @ MOCA Geffen

 

A dozen years ago I caught the Cremaster Cycle extravaganza at the Guggenheim. By the time I passed all the sculptures made of self-lubricating plastic and the jacked-up, overcaffinated videos, I promised myself that I was done with Mr. Barney and need never trouble myself about him again as long as I lived.

 

But a dozen years is a long time. Barney’s debased 21^st century Wagnerism is still at large, but the way it’s delivered has changed. As in the Guggenheim show, the objects on display at the Geffen were related to an epic movie project structured accorded to a crackpot mythology that life is too short to sort out.

 

What’s different is that Barney's palate has changed. Instead of self-lubricating plastic, most of the artifacts on display were casts of elemental materials: copper, lead, sulfur, salt, gold, brass, bronze. 

 

Everything registered the process of its production. The work of conscious shaping is de-emphasized in favor of installations that highlight the natural beauty of the materials presented raw and in bulk. Which is to say that Mathew Barney now works in the tradition of arte povera. The idea was incredible; and the results were wonderful. The gold-plated bronze Water Casting: Yellow Dwarf (image above) is the most ravishing thing I’ve seen in a long time. A transcendental loofah for Apollo.

 

DJED (2011) in cast iron and graphite block, managed to be magnificent and sweetly dorky at the same time. Its three pieces looked like something had spilled on the floor: the half-dissolved ghost of a car, a giant comma of lead, and a big grey puddle with two skinny tentacles leaking out one side.

 

 

And then there was the show-stopper Trans America (2014) that looked like an abandoned dirty industrial bathtub transfigured into a brilliant De Chirico sun in cast sulfur, epoxy resin, and wood.

 

 

And so on, one jaw-dropper after another. I reveled in it because of the echoes of work of artists like Mario Merz, Giovanni Anselmo, Joseph Beuys. But of course there’s nothing povera about the sculptures Barney makes: it’s high-ticket arte bling if it’s anything.

 

And that’s where the trouble starts. For example Barney’s Canopic Chest (2011) resembles nothing so much as one of the Earthwork installations that Robert Morris would assemble circa 1968.

 

 

Morris’s piece was a heap of dirt, felt and rebar; Barney’s piece is a gigantic bronze casting. Morris scavenged; Barney went to a state of the art fabricator. The contradictions are perhaps where the fun of the work resides. And it shouldn’t be seen as a moral or economic issue: I’m sure Merz, Anselmo and Beuys would have jumped at Barney’s resources if they had had access to them. Their scavenged scraps were precious in their own way.

 

Delightful as I found the show, I'm troubled that Barney’s transformation into an elemental materials fancier is somehow a surrender of what was original about his work in the first place. The self-lubricating plastic was icky, but it certainly was an individual vision. Has MB put that aside in order to work in a pleasing historical style?

Robert Craft

 

Robert Craft died earlier this month. As the obituaries in the Times, Guardian and Telegraph report, he is indelibly linked to Stravinsky, as biographer, performer and live-in troublemaker who turned the septuagenarian maestro on to contemporary music in the 1950s. The wonderful late efflorescence of Stravinsky’s last two decades is arguably his responsibility.

 

For me, personally, his importance began after all that. I first heard about modern music in Craft’s books, but I heard the music in Craft’s recordings. And not just Stravinsky, but Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Varèse, Boulez, Stockhausen, et al. And this is in Rockford, in the mid-1970s, before the Internet. Perhaps these performances have been superseded, but he was there at the beginning. How in the world did he get Colombia Records to support his 8-box Schoenberg set?! 

 

And being in L.A., Craft means even more. It was in West Hollywood that he conducted his first Monday Evening Concert on September 20, 1954. The program was a Dylan Thomas memorial, featuring music by Gabrielli, Purcell, Willaert, Schütz, Gesauldo, Bach and a world premiere by Stravinsky, plus remarks on Thomas by Aldous Huxley. The next Feburary Craft premiered with Marni Nixon (the voice of Eliza and Maria in the movies) songs by Stravinsky and Dallapiccola. Then there’s a big Monteverdi Vespers of 1610. It goes on like that for 14 years.

 

The books Craft did with Stravinsky and after have perhaps lost their authority as biographical documentation, but they endure as creative literature. Craft’s best, Chronicles of a Friendship, is one of the great American picturesque romps. It starts—appropriately enough—exactly like a 19^th century novel: a naïve twenty-five year old musician goes to a hotel to talk about a score with a venerable composer. In the lobby he’s waylaid by a famous elder poet (W.H. Auden) who shows him the libretto for the composer’s next opera. The musician and poet are admitted to the room of the composer and his wife. Within a few hours they’re all drunk and in love with each other. Bang! We’re off! The musician joins the composer’s household. Two decades pass in composing, recording, touring, gossiping, writing books, partying with other luminaries …. It’s amazing that it never got made into a Shakespeare In Love-type movie. Well, maybe now it will.

Mislaid by Nell Zink

Nell Zink’s Mislaid is a screwball/Southern Gothic romp. The point is the dry, sassy, nonchalant acuity with which Zink plays with sex, marriage, child-rearing, education, poverty, the South, and—imagine!—a white woman successfully passing herself and her daughter off as black. It’s like a post-Happy Hour collaboration by James Agee, Tom Robbins, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty, Richard Brautigan and Raymond Queneau.

 

Zink doesn’t care about your doubts or objections, her laconic, musical prose dashes headlong: on page three little Peggy decides that she’s really a man; a dozen pages later she’s pregnant via her predominately gay college poetry professor; twenty pages later she has abandoned Lee (poet/professor/husband) and Byrdie (older son) to live under an assumed identity with her younger daughter, Mireille (a.k.a. Karen). Two hundred pages later there’s a courtroom confrontation when Peggy/Meg, Mireille/Karen, Byrdie and Lee are reunited.

 

The concluding chapter is conclusive proof of the unconventionality of Zink’s art. Any ordinary novelist would have made it into a brief scene overflowing with sentiment. But Zink presents the reunited family at an unsuitable restaurant apologizing, fighting, storming off and coming back, and weeping. It goes on and on without any discernable point other than providing an excuse for marvelous lines:

“But I want to love you,” Karen said. “You’re weirdly fascinating, plus you’re my mom.”

 

The whole book could be seen as a pretext for a few such lines.

 

Peggy’s abandoned poet/professor/husband continues teaching into the Eighties, despite finding the new generation incomprehensible:

Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers.

 

Peggy/Meg’s drug business partner’s girlfriend Flea is carefully observed:

On her knees in the sand, she planted radishes she thought would sprout in three days and be ready to eat in two weeks. A typical country girl, raised between the TV and the car. Agriculture to her was clouds of pesticide raining down on corn. She knew traditional uses for many wild plants—as toys. Which seeds would fly farthest, how best to step on puffballs, how to make a daisy chain.

 

And best of all is the visit to Robert E. Lee’s birthplace, where Karen’s boyfriend, Temple, has an experience after which

… he stopped and walked toward her as calmly as if he’d been hired by the foundation to hypnotize goats into killing themselves and just gotten off work.

 

[Image: Untitled (Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1970-2)]

Beethoven & John Luther Adams @ Disney Hall

 

The highlight of yesterday’s matinee at Disney Hall was—unexpectedly—Beethoven’s violin concerto. This is a piece I’ve never cared for, but Sergey Khachatryan’s prodigious skill—reined in by tact and refined taste—made me hear it, finally.

 

It’s a strange beast: a 45-minute first movement—which is really a substantial symphony—followed by two brief, genial, extra helpings. It's classicism isn’t very classical; the symmetries are charged with heightened emotion. By the end I wondered if the violin wasn't Beethoven’s daemon—an voice of exhortation, of consolation, but not entirely natural for him.

 

John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean (2013) was a disappointment. At first the grey, lightless fog was engaging. But that’s all there was. I didn’t hate it, but at no point did I feel the thrilling immersion that rave reviews had led me to expect. Joanne Pearce Martin and the L.A. Phil percussion team were the heroes of the evening, pounding out the essential beats for 42 minutes. They were making engaging sounds, when you could hear them. The piece was neither fish nor fowl: not drone music, not a Morton Feldman epic of sound swatches, not a fiendish working-out of minimalist patterns. Adams flirted with them all without providing any of their rewards.

[Image: Sketch of the Parthenon Fates by Alberto Giacometti]

Rx from Paris

 

Nothing’s changed. It's still the music (& poetry, pictures, novels, movies) of France that sustain. Here’s the playlist I assembled last Friday, when I couldn't stand listening to the news anymore. What were you listening to?

 

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Petite suite: En bateau

Guillaume Dufay (c. 1397-1474) L'homme armé Mass: Kyrie

Erik Satie (1866-1925) Ogive #4

Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-77) La Lai de la fonteinne: Pour ci te pri (Unfortunately not available online. Look for the Hilliard Ensemble cd)

Claude Debussy, Images: Et La Lune Descend Sur Le Temple Qui Fut

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) La Descente D'Orphée Aux Enfers: Soutiens-Moi, Chere Enone

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) Le Printemps For Piano: Doucement

Jules Massenet (18942-1912) Thaïs: Meditation Religieuse – Symphonie

Olivier Messiaen (1908-92) Des canyons aux étoiles: Appel interstellaire

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-94) Feuillet D'Album

Claude Debussy, Piano Trio: Andante espressivo

Maurice Ravel (1875-1935) 5 Greek Songs: Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques

Maurice Ravel, Trois poemes de Stephane Mallarme: Soupir

Marguerite Monnot (1903-61) Fais Comme Si

Claude Debussy, Pelleas et Melisande: Interlude

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) Persée: Ouverture

Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the end of time: Louange à l'immortalité de Jésus

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) Les Fetes de Polymnie: Overture

Pierre Boulez (1925- ) Anthèmes 2: Calme, sans traîner, d'un mouvement très régulier, libre

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) Poems of Max Jacob: Cimetiere

Maurice Ravel, Piano Concerto in G: Adagio assai

 

 

[Image above: Quai d'Orsay, Sunday, November 15, photo by AD

Image below: Window (Robert Delaunay, 1912)]

Edward St. Aubyn's A Clue to the Exit

 

 

I’m a bit uncomfortable saying A Clue to the Exit is a serious novel—though it is—because one of the threads woven through its exquisite fabric is a robust skepticism about seriousness in general and serious literary fiction in particular. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the book includes satires of writers and writing—continuing the vein St. Aubyn explored in Lost for Words—but the satire here is not an end in itself; it’s a detail of a much more ambitious composition.

 

With this book St. Aubyn returns to the Eurotrash/Transatlantic beau monde he dissected and presented as a moral anatomist in the Patrick Melrose novels. These characters and their haunts obviously inspire him. When writing about idleness, excess and self-destructiveness his writing becomes simultaneously intimate and precise.

 

For example, Angelique, the gambling addict the narrator hooks up with Monaco. He makes no excuses for her but you get her appeal. She lives and breathes. She's one of St. Aubyn’s most haunting characters.

 

The novel-within-the-novel elements may prove a stumbling block for some readers. St. Aubyn shares all his narrator Charlie’s false starts and disconnected drafts in the body of the text. There are some amusing lines, but unfortunately Charlie’s ambition is to write about the crux of his situation—and everybody’s situation—nothing less than human consciousness. Two men and a woman meet on the train to London after a conference at Oxford on consciousness. Their conversation progresses on parallel tracks, proposing and critiquing various current medical and philosophical models of consciousness, while, at the same time, revealing chunks of raw backstory from which Charlie intends to create engrossing narrative conflicts. It’s awful, of course. The real author has a ball. But this is another of St. Aubyn’s admirably slim and trim volumes, and I wonder if less of this bilge might not have been more.

 

On the other hand, I wondered if Charlie’s novel and St. Aubyn’s novel both might be parodies of yet another book, Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil—the irreproachably high-minded modernist doorstop reduced to a sheaf of breezy tweets.

 

Most of all while reading Clue I kept thinking about St. Aubyn’s distinguished Russian predecessors. There are Turgenev’s similar locales of lethal triviality (Smoke), a hero whose anguish is heightened by awareness of the stupidity of his infatuation (Spring Torrents), and the doomed Insarov in On the Eve, whose doctor was “interested as a young man in a difficult case.” Dostoevsky knew all St. Aubyn’s characters, and, in The Gambler, admired how “This complete ignorance of the realities, this innocent view of mankind, is what, in my opinion, constitutes the truly aristocratic.” And, above all, Nabokov. Not only are St. Aubyn’s pampered but uncomfortable transients Nabokovian but like the master of Lolita, St. Aubyn devotes the most exacting art to the evocation of vulgarity, unpleasantness and stupidity. For both, the writing comes from a place that is beyond approval or disapproval, beyond liking and disliking. 

 

[Image: The Cheat with the ace of diamonds (Georges de la Tour, 1635)]

The Broad on Grand

 

The Broad has been open for a couple weeks, but it’s still a Scene. Yesterday there was a line down the block of people waiting to get in. And it was not just any mob, but a young, 20-something mob. The excitement diluted my skepticism.

 

The exhibit consisted of big, loud works by the Big Names of contemporary art. All the boxes on the standard checklist were checked; no oddballs or outsiders were invited. It was without surprises, but not without pleasures.

 

There were magnificent rooms with strong works, well-installed by Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, and Glen Ligon.

 

The triumph of the building is the lighting. Everything is illuminated without a hint of glare or shadows.

 

There were other rooms with work by artists I don’t normally care for that were so well presented that they just sang. Robert Therrien’s Under the Table (1994) was so perfectly placed and framed by its room, that it naturally became a party-place, meeting-place and selfie station.

 

Likewise the big third-floor main hall was transformed into a crowded, lively public plaza, as visitors took turns photographing themselves and each other in front of the Jeff Koons sculptures. I’m no fan, but it was nice to see people enjoying themselves. The mirrored surfaces of the Rabbit, blue Balloon Dog, and the Tulips make them perfect backgrounds.

 

It was here that I began to suspect that the operational triumph of this museum is that all the work is owned by one entity, and so photographing the work is not only OK, it’s encouraged. This makes it instantly friendly and understandable and interactive in a way that older museums with complicated ownership issues can’t compete. See #broad, #thebroad, #broadmuseum, ….

 

There were a few zingers that jumped out at me: the Jasper Johns oil and newspaper White Flag (1960) and his four-panel crosshatch painting (1975).

 

Marlene Dumas’s Wall Weeping (2009).

 

But my favorite discovery of the day was Bernd & Hilla Becher’s six-panel Typology of Water Towers (1972). I had heard about it, read about it, but I don't think I had ever seen the real deal. It's beautiful, eerie, serene, funny and engrossing.

 

 

There was a lot of space devoted to art I don’t care for at all. The complete 1980s A-list Irony Squad was represented; I don’t have any patience for that junk anymore. The big Robert Longo drawing (White Riot, 1982) at least delineates something of its milieu.

 

Then there were the likable artists represented by dud selections: the only redeeming thing in the Basquiat and Keith Haring room was a John Ahern sculpture (Raymond and Toby, 1989)—which was also an atypical, unrepresentative work.

 

Despite the concrete veil façade and the dark, gastric lobby, the building is straightforward and user-friendly. Visitors flow up the capillary tube escalator to the third floor. From there, they can descend either via the snazzy glass cylinder elevator with a floor that lights up, or—better choice!—descend the stairs into the dark mid-section. Along the way, orifices offer views of the artwork on racks and in crates in the storage area. The administration offices, library and a meeting room with a terrifying chartreuse floor are right next to the bathrooms. It gives it the homey feel of a personable, small-town institution. I doubt that’s what this is, but maybe that’s the other Broad, The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing?

 

And when you escape from the building, there’s a little park with grass, stools and gnarled, ancient olive trees. There are bars and restaurants facing it. It might be the best part of all.

Hellenistic bronzes @ the Getty Museum

 

When I was studying classical art in college I was fascinated by ancient glass. Not only were the cups, dishes and jars beautiful, but they seemed intimately part of people’s private, everyday lives. And above all, every intact glass artifact automatically came with a reason for admiration: Somehow this fragile thing had survived!

 

I didn’t realize then that in terms of survival and fragility, antique bronzes were actually much more astonishing than glass. Much rarer, much more fragile. How many large scale bronze figures are extant? A handful, plus some fragments. The scraps are scattered throughout museums in Europe, Africa and the Mid-East.

 

And beyond being rare and geographically dispersed, antique bronzes are not usually displayed very well. Their rarity makes them curiosities. We think of Greek and Roman sculpture in terms of stone. Besides familiarity, stone has an automatic gravity and impressiveness. Compared to marble figures, bronze figures can look odd. Frankly, they can look like toys rather than serious works of art. And when the bronzes heads have still have their inset eyes—as many do—they can look like cast-off dolls.

 

Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World has permanently demolished that strangeness. I feel like I’ve been given a whole new field of classical art to enjoy. And not only was it a good idea to have a whole exhibit devoted to works in the one material, the idea was perfectly executed. At the Getty, the sequence and juxtaposition of works clearly communicated technical and historical information, while maximizing aesthetic impact.

 

A fantastic show. I’m still trying to digest it all.

 

The first thing that struck me was how various the colors of bronze are. Within the one material are lots of variations: chestnut and burnt sienna browns, and then the range of greens: shamrock, jade, moss, algae, pistachio, laurel, ….  The scientists at the Getty and elsewhere have been determining the exact chemical composition of the different works, revealing regional or chronological patterns, and even specific workshops. Plus there were the amazing stories of what has happened to these objects since they were made. It's heartening that so many of them have been fished out of the water so recently, since the 1990s.

 

 

 

The Medici Riccardi Horse might be the most beautiful sculpture of an animal ever made. The veins under the skin are alive. Bronze evokes skin better than stone and the entire head is electric with animation. As with so many of the pieces, the surface seems living skin, revealing the muscle, bone and living flesh rather than impassive stone. 

 

 

And if the bronze artists of antiquity were masters of evoking skin, they delighted in drapery. The Minerva of Arezzo, patched-up and pasted together, nevertheless commands respect. She stands erect but at ease, her wrist resting on her hip, as if daring you to get familiar. The beauty of her pose is that it’s mostly hidden: her hand, wrist, hip and projecting shoulder are evoked indirectly, from underneath the fabric of mantle. Likewise the Ierapetra Boy is completely bundled up under his himation. But every swelling and knob of his shoulders, elbows, wrist joints, and hands are clearly discernible. His back is an abstract terrain by Henry Moore.

 

I suppose I’m guilty of mis-reading conventional nudity as sexual provocation, but I found the show seriously homoerotic. The jade, pistachio, and walnut brown head and torso found off the coast of Brindisis in 1992 might be, we’re told, an official portrait of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the Roman consul who served the Republic worthily in the Illyrian Wars ...

 

 

He is not portrayed as a warrior or strategist, but as the perfection of male beauty. The chain of conventions that made this normal and understandable has been broken. To us it’s so bizarre that it can only seem satirical: imagine the head of Eisenhower on the body of a male porn star. But once upon a time six-pack abs and erect nipples were attributes of power, as much as a today it is conveyed by a well-tailored (but conservative) suit. Carlyle joked about it two centuries ago: “Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords? Imagination, choked as in mephitic air, recoils on itself, and will not forward with the picture.”

 

 

However no obvious questions of political messaging intrude on the Terme Boxer. His body is magnificent: this is the body of a boxer who has just won a fight. But it’s the furthest thing possible from an image of victory. First you notice how the swelling arms and legs are marred with inset silver-colored scars and drips of blood. And a whole tragedy is expressed in the expression of the face—exhaustion, exasperation—and the awkward twist of the neck. This boxer may have just won his fight, but he’s too exhausted to raise himself up from his hunched-over pose. A triumph of sympathy and observation. But on the other hand, his arms do not actually rest on his knees—they’re slightly raised. He’s not what he seems.

 

The pistachio green head from Copenhagen was striking not so much out of realism as from the suggestion of informality. These bronze figures can seem as if they’re not “posing,” but caught mid-gesture, caught in a snapshot. On the other hand, this head’s damaged eyes neutralize the verisimilitude, and inserts a fat wedge of the uncanny in the middle of my direct communion with the past.

 

 

[Image at top: the Terme Boxer being discovered in Rome, 1885]