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April 2017
Detroit, March 2017
Lafayette Park ...
The skywalk between the Guardian building and One Woodward ...
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The Diego Rivera murals at the Institute of Arts ...
Night & Dreams: a Schubert & Beckett Recital @ Disney Hall
It was not a complete fiasco. There were moments when the performers were permitted to sing, play and recite without too many obstructions. Ryan McKinny and Julia Bullock have commanding voices and are electric presences. Pricilla Pointer gave a creditable performance of Rockabye, as did Barry McGovern in Ohio Impromptu.
It was not a terrible idea, complimenting Schubert’s concentrated dramatic songs with Beckett’s concentrated micro-dramas. The problem came in the attempts to blend them together.
Act Without Words II was well performed by Barry McGovern and Miles Anderson. So well done they could have risked doing it without Schubert’s Impromptu #3 in the background. Since when is Schubert background music?
And then, how can anybody think the right way to end Catastrophe is with the Protagonist bursting into a magnificent, full-bodied rendition of “Gravedigger’s Homesickness”? The whole point of Beckett’s chilling parable is the character’s tragic muteness. It’s beyond belief. Did anybody read the play?
Likewise, the perfect regularity of the the three ladies in Come and Go was destroyed when Flo stepped aside to sing “Laughter and Weeping.” Bullock was wonderful, but why spoil Beckett?
And then there were the even worse moments, when McKinney and Bullock were required to sing with props from other Beckett plays—the mound from Happy Days, the trash cans from Endgame—treated like gimmicks in a cheesy review.
Is it any surprise that the Beckett play that gave the evening it’s title—the one Beckett piece that specifies the use of Schubert’s music—was not presented?
Salome @ Dorothy Chandler
I was unprepared for the orchestra. It blasts you out of your seat. Strauss unleashes one outrageous salvo after the next. It’s glorious. I couldn’t resist it if I tried. But it also makes sense, dramatically. He never just throws notes out. He always makes sure you know what’s going on. I realized this is the secret to his popularity, why his dissonance is appreciated and that of Schoenberg is not. Every jolt has a dramatic purpose. He never gets ahead of the audience. I get why people love him.
But the drama itself? It’s not a drama at all, but a black comedy. The L.A. Opera audience got it—there was a lot of laughter. Both Wilde and Strauss were having fun on two levels. One was the comedy of an impossible, rebellious daughter cutting loose. For Wilde, Salome is another name for Cecily Cardew, the too-bright no-longer-little troublemaker.
Patricia Racette was excellent, making herself heard over the hooting orchestra, dancing, doing a strip-tease and fondling a decapitated head for twenty minutes. What a workout! This role is not for sissies!
The other level is the comedy of Authority struggling to hang on. Narraboth (the excellent Issachah Savage) gets what’s happening early on. Then no less than John the Baptist (also excellent Tómas Tómasson) arrives to proclaim that Herod’s whole world is finished. And Herod (excellent Alan Glassman) really is the protagonist. He suffers the fate of all fairytale characters that get their wishes granted.
Trisha Brown Dance Company @ Hauser & Wirth
It was a bright, clear Sunday afternoon. A teaser of a show—barely an hour long—but it was free, the atmosphere was festive, and the dancing exhilarating. Accumulation (1971) was like watching disco dancing in precisely synchronized slow motion.
Watermotor (1978) was engrossing, disturbing and funny all at once. It starts with a chorus line of women executing the same series of movements in synchronization. It goes on in perfect order until a guy grabs a woman and repositions her, as she continues with her routine. Then another guy repositions another woman. And so on. And the guys kept putting the women into positions that complicated their routines. They get knotted up, their legs and arms in each other’s way. It was satirical (this is real life) and exciting (where is he going to put her next?) and sweet (the dancers would crack up).
Dance as alertness, discipline and fun. I was still humming with the reverberations when, a week later, the news came that, Brown was gone.
Fifths of Beethoven & Shostakovich @ Disney Hall
When the concert ended I said, “We are so lucky to have such an amazing orchestra in town!” Jaap van Zweden, the soon-to-be music director of the New York Philharmonic conducted, and he and the LA Phil really sang.
Beethoven’s Fifth unspools from the clearly defined cell. It’s almost minimalism. But it’s the opposite of pattern-making: there’s an urgency to it. The stately second movement is like a diagram of grandeur—there’s the pomp, but it is ordered to symmetries beyond any specific occasion.
Then came the contrast of the Shostakovich Fifth, in which nothing is clear. Is it earnest? Is it ironic? There are moments of jubilant ruckus, and moments when the ruckus seems presented as a nightmare. He follows his moods where they take him—an assertion of individuality that seems heroic as Beethoven’s.
It was a funny evening, with the hall packed with visiting high-school band members from across the nation. And then four days later came the bombshell that JvZ was taking Deborah Borda back with him to NYC!
John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction @ LACMA
The sequence wasn’t rigorously chronological, but the paintings were given a lot of room to breathe. The second and third rooms were stunning. It had a similar quiet power that was similar—though different—from the Agnes Martins that just preceded them in those spaces.
Rectangles within rectangles, frames within frames. Blasts of high-keyed, not very natural colors, especially the tart contrast of aqua and lemon.
Sometimes the mood is sober and calm. Rectangles that interlock and fit together with a pleasing snap. Sometimes the mood is a bit more kinetic. A low-key, droll touch of op art. The push/pull, foreground/background implies not only space but time. There is a hint of sequence: first reading, second, third ….
I was struck by the marks of age on many of the paintings: dings, smudges, creases. More importantly, there was evidence that the paintings were made less-than-immaculate: clumps of paint from a loaded brush.
The painting (designated #7, 1970) at first glance seems merely nice. Waves of visitors to the BCAM galleries at LACMA gave it an approving nod, and passed on. Pleased, no doubt, to have spotted an inoffensive artifact of mid-century refinement.
But for those who lingered, the experience evolved, acquiring overtones. The more time you spend with #7, 1970, the less uncomplicatedly nice it feels. The unity disintegrated into discrete parts; the straight edges were revealed to be only as straight as careful hand-craft can make them, not intimidatingly crisp or clean. The picture surface that seemed uniform is revealed to have contrasting matte and semi-gloss finishes, …. Moreover, the flat planes of pure color resolve, on inspection, into horizontal bands of distinct brushstrokes.
These pictures were discovered rather than pre-determined. Their final appearance was the result of fine-tuning, adjustments by hand and eye. Immediate responses, in the moment.
The catalog is a handsome, welcome addition to the literature on JM. However it seems the case with McLaughlin’s work that reproductions capture the design, but falsify the actual experience. And the conventions for writing about the McLaughlin are fixed as a product safety warning. The required elements include …
- Expressions of outrage at JM’s omission from the standard histories of modernism (ranging from heated to mild, depending on the writer’s identification with Southern California)
- Writer’s story of delight at discovery
- JM’s reputation as an artist’s artist for the more celebrated younger So. Cal. Contemporaries.
- Discussions of the impact/lack of impact of the Four Abstract Classicists exhibition in 1959 that traveled around the U.S. and the UK
Michael Duncan’s essay “Driving Home in Neutral” stands out. It starts as a treasure hunt through the McLaughlin archives, and ends with a serious attempt to articulate what looking at McLaughlin’s paintings feels like:
The bare-bones nature of the works leads to awareness of phenomena as basic as light and dark, enclosure and void, elevation and descent. The works also invite contemplation of the more abstract concepts such as the disturbance of symmetry and the differences between the continuous and severed, the parallel and the intersecting, the partial and the whole. These visual and perceptual tropes are the building blocks of the objective and natural worlds, inherent in such essential phenomena as the earth’s horizon the contrast of light and shadow, human erectness, and skin. These primal concepts also relate to fundamental issues of social life: community, enmity, servitude, leadership, and partnership.