Museums Again

I saw a show of the work of the Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013) at the Asia Society.   It was an interesting exhibit; Zao is really a fusion artist.   You see echoes of Klee, Matisse, and the abstract expressionists in the context of clear evocations of traditional Chinese arts like calligraphy.   But what emerges is clearly a style all his own.  I liked some of then more than others.   Sometimes, when  I look at abstract art, there is a very fine line between what seems moving and of sustaining interest and what seems purely decorative.   When I look at some paintings in galleries, sometimes they look merely like stuff which decorators might add to make innocuous color additions to a residence.  Some of Zao's works came dangerously close to straddling that line to me.
Photos were not allowed, but here are a few images from the internet:

This one was quite large, and clearly refers to screen paintings:

This one was entitled "Le Mistral":

This one had a lot of Klee in it:

MOMA had a new exhibit of Russian art from the period 1912-1930, all things from their collection. It included paintings, photographs, poster, drawings, etc.  It was an excellent show and a good example of what they can do without a whole lot of effort and money.   The art is striking for its radical rethinking of what art should be, with artists talking about things like the dynamism of intersecting planes, along with the assumption that abstract art could empower the workers and create a sense of liberation and freedom from the old bourgeois thinking.  And there was also the notion that artists could create works that were part of daily life, like porcelain and movie posters.   We all know what happened, of course, when Josef Stalin laid down the law.   

Another striking thing about the art of the show was the number of women artists who were involved in the movement, like Stepanova, Goncharova, Exter, Popova, and others. Has any other art movement in history had so many women participants?  I can't think of one, other than those that were intentionally feminist.

Here are some things I enjoyed looking at.   Most of them are by women.


Larionov:

Exter:

Popova:

Stepanova:

El Littsky

Wonderful movie posters:

Also at MOMA was a big Picabia retrospective.  Or retrospectives, I should say, because every time you went into a different room, you got a new and different Picabia.    Picabia could be called a modernist, and clearly had the talent and will to do wonderful things with paint.   But he was also totally preoccupied with the subversion of most known assumptions about art.   Even at the beginning of his career, he was painting impressionist style landscapes, but not from real life but from postcards.   There are also paintings created from what passed for softcore pornography in France.    As Roberta Smith puts it, he was interested in "destabilizing notions of good and bad".    Well, that certainly sounds very contemporary to me.   The experience of viewing the retrospective, then, is very different from the conventional one of seeing an artist slowly develop his or her style.  It is bewildering, which, of course, is the point.  One fascinating and compelling painting is next to a garish and ugly one.   Here are a few photos:

The paintings are more or less in chronological order:

Impressionism from a postcard:

Cubism is around:

Dada and machines:

From a series called "Monsters":

Matchsticks:

Josef Stalin might have liked this one:

From a series called "transparencies", one of my favorite parts of the show:

Postwar;  abstraction is back:

One of his last works:

The Whitney had a show about film etc. entitled "Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art".   There are certainly a lot of different things you could put into this category; mostly you got video.    In general, I am not very happy with video works that are displayed in gallery or museum environments.   My main problem is sound.  Virtually none of these works are silent; all of them have sound, and I have never seen an exhibit that successfully isolates the sound of one work from another.   So while the visual qualities of the works are frequently respected, the audio qualities are treated with near derision.  Thus, when you are watching and listening to one work, you may well be hearing the sound tracks of several other works at the same time.   Ugh!     This proved to be the case for the most part in the Whitney exhibit.   That said, there were several things I was happy to see, including Bruce Conner's "Crossroads", with its astonishing slow motion footage of a Bikini atomic test, set to mushy music by Terry Riley.   My favorite was a work by Oskar Fischinger  "Raumlichtkunst", a recreation of a 1926 work, restored by the Center for Visual Music.   It consists of three separate visual tracks (originally each a different projector), all consisting of abstract color animations.   (Fischinger also worked for Disney on some of the animation for "Fantasia".)   It made for a very rich and involving viewing experience.   Unfortunately, the only record of what music was used mentions some "percussive accompaniment".  The solution proposed by the Center for Visual Music was to use Vareses's "Ionisation" and Cage and Harrison's "Double Music".   The choice could have been a lot worse, musically speaking (I've seen and heard worse), but the choices inevitably color our viewing in ways that Fischinger would not have intended.  I would have much preferred to watch it in silence.   It's kind of like taking a black and white photograph and adding color to it.   I was also happy to see Joseph Cornell's "Rose Hobart", though it was displayed on a small video monitor and I can't possibly think of in what sense this would qualify as "immersive".   Another favorite was "Imitation of Life" by Mathias Polenada.    I wandered in to it not knowing what it was;  what I saw and heard was a few scratchy lines on the screen and some vague blips in the sound.  I thought it was some sort of minimalist thing; then gradually, what emerged was a full fledged, 1930's Disney style color animation, with a singing donkey.   Checking the label outside to see which film it came from, I discovered it was an astonishing faithful recreation of the style, but made in the past few years.   It even had the full orchestral score and sound world recreated.   The point?   I have no clue.

Fischender stills, from the internet:

Polenada:

There was also a small show at the Whitney of work by Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera, who is now 101 years old and still painting.   These were hard-edged abstract works from 1948-1978.   I gave them some time, but I didn't get much out of them.   Somehow the hard-edge aspect puts me off; I like things that are more smudged and ambiguous.    But they are colorful.

Theme de Yoyo

We continue to go back and forth between jazz and classical music, with stops in between.   We heard the Maria Schneider Orchestra at the Jazz Standard.   Schneider is a composer, and has worked with such luminaries as Dawn Upshaw and David Bowie.  Her medium is the jazz orchestra; in this case, four trumpets, four trombones, five multi-instrumental sax /flute players, guitar, accordion, bass, piano, and percussion.   She has a wonderful ear for sonorities with these combinations.  (She was a student of Gil Evans.)  The instrumentation certainly suggests jazz, and she employs the conventional practice of solos versus ensembles, but her overall approach is more classical.  Everything is notated and carefully developed, and she conducts the ensemble (except during extended solo sections).     I liked the music a lot, but I felt she had a too predictable structure for her pieces, always beginning with a quiet, meditative mood and gradually building up to a louder and more rhythmically and harmonically complex texture.  It all feels very classical, somehow.  A new piece, "Big Data", was my favorite, with a more lively tempo and some wonderful ensemble writing.    It was interesting to compare this music with the Mingus Big Band we had heard eight days earlier.   Part of the excitement of the Mingus Band is the sense in which things are not in control; that everything might fall apart at any minute, and that the unpredictable is always on the horizon.   Each band has its virtues, of course.

An old picture from a different show:

After a Thanksgiving break, we heard Eric Comstock and Barbara Fasano in a new show at Birdland.   Comstock and Fasano get better every time we hear them.   Fasano has become more and more capable of using beautiful shadings and colors in her voice, and the blend of the two of their voices is superb.  I also think Comstock and Fasano are really an extraordinary arrangers (I have no idea who does the arranging among them).  No song is ever done routinely; they are always thinking of creative and interesting ways of making a song work.   And Comstock's piano playing is equally creative; he is always using all the registers of the piano with a witty and inventive musicality.   And sometimes he just stops and lets the amazing Sean Smith on bass keep the tune moving. Their last number "Broadway", was a real knockout.


A few days later, it was time for more Mahler at Carnegie Hall, this time the Fifth Symphony with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Semyon Bychkov conducting.   The Concertgebouw Orchestra has a reputation of being one of the world's greatest orchestras, and they certainly sounded like it.  The concert began with a 25 minute piece by the German composer Detlev Glanert  "Theatrum Bestarium".   It was about humans as "beasts".  In other words, it was program music. It was strikingly orchestrated, with some fascinating sonorities, but it was genre of music that doesn't really excite me that much.  At a certain point, I started hearing it as cartoon music in the manner of Carl Stallings, music for a cartoon of said beasts.   It was also notable for the extensive use of Carnegie Hall's organ.
The Mahler, though, was truly extraordinary.   Semyon Bychkov is an exemplary Mahler conductor; he seems to concentrate very hard on ensuring we hear everything in the music that Mahler wrote, and with an orchestra of the caliber of the Concertgebouw, the results are amazing.  Incredible details of orchestral balance emerge, especially in the acoustic of Carnegie Hall.   Every time I hear a Mahler symphony I get different ideas about what Mahler is doing; this time, it felt like he was an alien who had come to Earth around 1900 in Vienna, heard a lot of music, and then put it all in a symphony without really understanding how it all worked.   (OK, this is a little exaggerated.)   But I constantly hear these very familiar little chunks of music that you expect to do certain things, and then they don't.   That little landler tune comes in a beat too late, and then the harmony goes in the wrong direction.   Or that triumphal march suddenly gets interrupted by something completely contrasting.   In other words, it's modern.   But it all depends on using very predictable bits of music.  (In contrast to the Glanert piece, where very little is predictable, thus there are no really unexpected happenings.)  
It is an extraordinary privilege to hear an orchestra of the caliber of the Concertgebouw; the extended ovations and bravos for many the the individual players in the orchestra at the end were truly deserved.   New York concert goers are lucky to have all these orchestras come to visit.

We went to a house party/concert at a brownstone in Brooklyn to hear the singers Sanda Weigl and Libby Shapiro, accompanied by Shoko Nagai.  We have been to a number of house concerts lately, and it's a pleasure.  (The Microcosmos Quartet in Vancouver is doing this, too.)   In this case, Weigl and Shapiro did a wonderful set of songs, primarily from Germany around the years 1927-1931, by composers such as Theo Mackeben, Werner Heymann, Friedrich Hollander, and others.  Part of the fun, too, is to see the homes of the hosts of the concert.   This one was in an old brownstone in the Fort Greene section of Brookyn, and the owners had a wonderful collections of both of art and odd sorts of things, all of which reminded me of my old family home.    The highlight was their collection of coat hangers, beautifully displayed on a stairwell wall.  I am not being sarcastic; it was a truly memorable sight.   Like the Becher's photography of the typologies of German industrial sites, this collection showed an astonishing variety of shapes designed to perform the basic function of hanging clothes.


At the Met, we heard Kaija Saariaho's opera "L'Amour de Loin" in a production by Robert Lepage.   The opera, which was first done in 2001, was done at the Met for the first time.   It has a cast of thee solo voices and a choir.   The plot is quite simple; in medieval times, a troubadour falls in love with a princess who he has never seen.   The first three acts, were, to my ears, too static.   Saaraiho's music, while sensuous and subtle, can sometimes lack the necessary drive to sustain my interest over longer spans of time.   The fourth and fifth acts, though, were considerably more involving and dramatic.   The Lepage production was visually spectacular; the stage was covered with some thirty or so parallel strands of LED lights which could change colors and go on and off.   The strands could also move up and down.   All of this computer controlled, of course.  The sea is an important character in the opera, and the lights were usually meant to convey the sea.  The opening of the fourth act was a stunning invocation of the sea, with Saariaho's powerful music invoking a stormy sea, and the lights moving in great waves.   The choir was nestled between the strands of lights, and would appear and disappear.  (They functioned both a a chorus in the plot and as a pure sound color in Saariaho's sonic palette.)   There was one major miscalculation to my ears; Eric Owens, the bass-baritone, was the troubadour.  His voice, though, is more of a stentorian Wagner type, with a heavy vibrato and little in the way of tone color or dynamics.   Saariaho often invokes medieval music for her medieval tale, and it would have been better to have a male voice who could sound like a troubadour, and not like an Alberich.   The female voices also were singing more in a nineteenth century operatic mode, but I gradually warmed up to them.   Needless to say, the Met Orchestra under the baton of Susan Malkki was superb.

And to end the fall season, I went back to where I started with a premiere of a new dance work by the great Pam Tanowitz.  In this case, it was a work created with the Juilliard dance students, as part of their end of semester performance of four newly choreographed works for the students.  I went specifically to hear/see Tanowitz's work, and it was excellent.   She really is the best choreographer who is carrying on the Cunningham tradition; the work is about the movement and the music, and she is consistently inventive, unpredictable, and original.  Patterns interact in asymmetrical ways, and her vocabulary is always a bit quirky.   The music in this case was Andrew Norman's "Companion Guide to Rome", played by a live string trio of Juilliard students.  (It is helpful when a dance program is part of a school of music; you get live music!)   I wasn't familiar with the music. On first hearing, it made a wonderful dance score and went very well with Tanowitz's choreography.
One of the great things about having a student company is that a choreographer can afford to work with a lot of dancers.   Each piece on the program used twenty or more dancers.  And I thought the student dancers were excellent.  The rest of the program was not as good.   A piece by the choreographer John Hegenbotham was set to the first movement of Schubert's profound C Major string quintet.   It's not something I would recommend doing for any choreographer.   Hegenbotham has danced with Mark Morris, and I couldn't help but see some similarities with Morris's approach to music, with a sometimes excessive correlation of the choreography with the music.   It can become goofy sometimes.   In Morris's case,  he somehow makes it all work.   It didn't work so well in this case.  Schubert doesn't take well to choreographic imitation.   The other two works were forgettable; the last, choreographed to soporific recordings of Rufus Wainwright, reminded me of many things I don't like in dance.   And beware of dances where the costumes include madras shorts and suspenders!