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Patti Smith raising up her hands and improvising some moving words of welcome to the rain is not what I was expecting at the Bowl last Sunday. And I confess the damp chased me away after her set and so I missed Bon Iver, who I really wanted to see, too. I was curious to see how he would perform the sound collages from 22, a Million. I’m told he was superb. Oh well, at least I saw Patti greeting the rain.
Among the magic tricks August Wilson was able to pull off in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is to create fictional artists who are neither jokes nor stand-ins for the author. Most writers fail at this, but Wilson created a band for Ma—brilliantly realized last night by Damon Gupton, Glynn Turman, Jason Dirden, and Thomas Silcott—that live and breath. It's probably key that Wilson never makes it clear whether Ma and her band are brilliant or hacks. They sounded really good to me (actors who can not only act but play trumpet, trombone, piano and bass?!?!) but that’s not the point. There are so many other things going on, in a recording studio, circa 1927 …
The Getty’s PR makes the “School of London” sound like a proto-Brexit Little Britain backwater that “rejected contemporary art’s preoccupation with abstraction and conceptualism in favor of the human figure and everyday landscape.” But is it true?
You might say they started with conventional intentions (capturing the model or landscape in front of them), deployed acuity and skill, but in the end created inventories of doubt. Like Dubuffet, Giacometti, De Kooning, and Wittgenstein—the most relevant literary parallel—the desire to observe and record is always frustrated by scruples about whether communication is possible.
Whatever the pretext, the show was a pleasure, though not every painter was well-represented.
I still remember with delight the Leon Kossoff show at LACMA sixteen years ago of prints and drawings after Poussin. Unfortunately this time around, only Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971) held its own. Likewise, the Bacons—except for one Reclining Woman from 1961—seemed intimidated by the company. Ditto the Kitaj paintings on view. But there were works on paper that more than made up for them. The world has been so full of lesser versions of The Rise of Fascism (1975/9) recently.
Michael Andrews is the name I didn’t know at all, but he certainly figures in. A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over (1952) is like a late- Neue Sachlichkeit spoof. I bet Hockney knew it. Melanie and Me Swimming (1978/9) is eerie and comanding. I gather it’s a popular favorite.
The selection of Lucian Freud’s paintings and etchings demonstrated that he had been John Singer Sargent reborn: incapable of making a mark that was ugly or insignificant. Leigh under the Skylight (1994) is a swagger portrait if anything ever was. David and Eli (2003/4) has, per square inch, more visual interest than many eminent museums.
The Frank Auerbachs were a revelation. I’ve never seen so much of his work before. His room was worth the trip. It seems a gimmick—tricking out wild, frosting-slathers of pigment with hints of figuration—but it’s not. Isn’t that De Kooning’s game? But FA dares to to use colors that can’t appease. His Oxford Street Building Site I (1959/60) is a Beckettian vision of nothingness. A towering expanse of vomit-brown and blood red, with details here and there worked in with care, but without fussiness. Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law (1966) splits the difference between ugliness and beauty, composition and chaos. But the best of all—best of show—was Primrose Hill (1967/8)—not a scene, or an event but residue of seeringly intense inaction.
I went to hear something I thought—mistakenly—that I knew well, and ended up being given unexpected gifts.
I went to hear Luigi Dallapiccola’s Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera (1952). Though the title commemorates the composer’s daughter, there’s nothing lightweight or sweet about it; it’s dark and introspective. There are the episodes of tenderness, but they’re cut off abruptly. It ends with a wistful Theolonius Monk solo that has the high modernist virtue of not being overly confident in what’s being expressed.
Kallay did it brilliantly, and—even better—he pared it with a different piece that had the same drama and intensity: the Impromptu for piano, synthesizer, and tape (1995) by Yves Daoust. Kallay and Genevieve Lee and the tape created a scene and populated it. The tape, the synthesizer and the piano each waxed and waned, dominated the conversation, got lost in a muddle.
In a completely different mode, Kallay started with Monroe Golden’s I'm Worried Now for retuned/remapped microtonal keyboard (2015) was mesmerizing, furious, transcendental. I simply didn’t understand what some of the sounds were, where they were coming from, or what Kallay was doing. When the tuning is not standard, questions of discord and concord go out the window. A genuine trip.
Last Saturday night I saw art I liked at “Human Condition”:
Otherwise, the work and the setting proved that there really is such a thing as too much abjection and horror, even in a fine art context. When I first arrived in L.A. in the mid-Eighties I marveled at all the exhibits of snot on sticks. It still happens, but now in ratty old hospitals, complete with gruesome abandoned equipment, stains and and signs on the wall. It was fun for a few minutes, then …. I’m not on enough meds to hack it.
I’m not a gala person; I don’t think I’ve ever been to one before. But the L.A. Phil’s season opening gala last Tuesday was a blast, especially from the $20 seats. It’s dangerous to sit in the back: you get so caught up in all the activities of the players. We were wondering why the drummer with kit and bassist were stationed next to Joanne Pearce Martin’s piano, but it turned out that the second movement of Duke Ellington’s Night Creature (1955/1963) was a concerto grosso for jazz trio and orchestra. We could see them better than the front of the house. Bliss.