Zeitgeist Art

I finally caught up with the much-lauded Sigmar Polke exhibit at MOMA.   It was interesting for me from a cultural and political viewpoint, but as a whole it didn't do much for me.   When I go to see a major retrospective of an artist's life work, I
 usually have the expectation that I will see a kind of narrative of artistic ideas and development.  Sometimes you see a gradual evolution of a style; sometimes you see a initial burst of creative energy and not much else afterwards.  With Polke, I sense a constant, everpresent urge to invent, and to invent some more, to try this and try that.  Sometimes the results are fascinating; other times, of no interest.  Why do artists think that their unedited, hand-held-camera home movies are of artistic significance?  I don't know.   But some of the later experiments with different media are wonderful, though I am not sure about the "radioactive paint".   The other interesting thing in the exhibit was the extent to which Polke's work involves the culture and political narratives of living in Germany in the later 20th century.  Hippies!  Protests!  Orgies!  Drugs!  Nepal!  etc.  etc.

Normally I would avoid Jeff Koons like the plague, but our friend David convinced us that we should go see it. So we did, and I am glad we did.  It is one thing to see photographs of shiny dog ballon sculptures, and another thing entirely to see them in person.   To begin with, though, we were astonished to see long lines outside the Whitney to get in to the show.   Lots of families with young kids, tourists, etc.  Who knew?  Well, duh, kids like ballon sculptures.  (Hoping they don't wander in to the "pornographic" part of the show, expicit images of Koons having sex with his ex porn-star wife.)
 
Anyway the show begins with vacuum cleaners and florescent lights:

We are in some kind of Duchamp/Warhol ready-made territory.
Then basketballs suspended in water:

Then he starts to go deep into exploring bad taste, kitsch, etc, etc.  This doesn't really interest me.   There's stuff about his childhood and sex life and things like that.

The show starts to get interesting when he starts becoming obsessed with materials and reproductions and scale.   For example, he has taken some sort of cheap plastic gorilla toy (King Kong?), carefully measured it, and enlarged it to a huge size, and then reproduced the exact look of the toy in granite(!).   Thus reversing the usual process of granite monument to plastic reproduction.   This is rather perverse, but fascinating.
The head (the statue is about 7 feet tall):

He does the same thing for Play-doh.   I would have loved to listen to the teacher explaining to the kids why they were sitting in front of a giant mound of simulated Play-doh.  (Not to mention that the kids are dressed in Play-doh colors...)

 A Hulk statue (bronze), infused with organ:

Then there are all those shiny things:

Part of the dog balloon statues, immaculately cast in polished bronze:

(It's worth noting that photography is seemingly encouraged; in contrast to the Polke exhibit at MOMA, where it was strictly forbidden.)

The exhibit ends with Koons riffing on classical art, thus we get a Venus statue, in shiny blue metal.  I'm not sure what I think about the whole enterprise; compelling, in some ways, but you end up with a kind exhausted feeling afterwards.

In fact, I went to the fifth floor afterwards, where, after so much glitz, it was a relief to encounter a whole room of Agnes Martin "white" paintings.

Or, if you prefer, Ad Reinhardt in black:

This is the last show in the Whitney before it gets handed over to the Met.  I remember hearing a world premiere of an Elliot Carter quartet in one of the galleries.   I wonder what will happen to the Simonds "Dwellings" installation, which has been there forever?

World Trade Center

I went to see the World Trade Center site, now home to the newly opened 9/11 memorial museum.   I find the area to be very disconcerting.   There is still a huge police presence, with barbed wire and concrete security barriers everywhere. There are numerous souvenir stores, hawking NY Fire dept. memorabilia, Twin Tower trinkets, flags, t-shirts. etc.   While I was there, a fire truck was parking on the street; hundreds of cell phones were whipped out to take a picture.  Despite signs admonishing us to remember that the site is a memorial, the atmosphere is more like a carnival.   Though I think it is almost impossible to conceive of a public outdoor space that could function as a crowd-stopping memorial space.  Imagine the thousands of workers in the new buildings who descend to the open space for their lunch hour.  Are they really going to be thinking about 9/11 every day?  The two pools marking the footprint of the towers are mostly anodyne,  symbolic but hardly evocative, especially with the very strong smell of chlorine emanating from them.   And then, next to the pools, the newly built tower, bigger and taller than ever; which mostly serves to inflate the egos of those involved.

I am still intrigued, though, by the in-progress state Calatrava's transit hub, and the general architectural jumble of construction.

Some pictures:


I love the orange feeding tubes:

The World Trade Center in a nutshell:

Architectural behemoth and adjacent pool:

My ____ is bigger than yours...

Eric Comstock

We heard a wonderful show by the pianist/vocalist Eric Comstock.  Comstock, who we normally hear performing as part of the Comstock/Fasano Duo with his very talented wife Barbara as vocalist, now has a regular weekly gig at Cafe Noctambulo in the East Village. What the directors of the Cafe Noctambulo are trying to do is recreate the old fashioned supper club, with excellent food and music.  What Comstock does is perform what might be called the Great American Songbook; showtunes and popular music mostly from the first half of the twentieth century, as typified by the music of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and later by Rogers and Hart, etc.   I know very little about this music, other than the songs from musicals my parents took us to as kids.   But I love the combination of sophisticated harmony and witty lyrics, and it sometimes makes me think of the German lieder of the 19th century in its own 20th century way.    Comstock  is some kind of genius, with both an astoundingly encyclopediac knowledge of the repertoire and an evocative style of singing and piano playing.  He did a wonderful slowed-down version of Ellington's "Don't Get Around Much Any More" which changed my perception of the tune entirely.   He freely moves from tune to tune, with witty and perceptive comments and anecdotes in between.   He played from 8 PM to 12:15 AM, with a couple of short breaks.  In a better world, he (and Barbara) would be very famous stars, playing at the fanciest clubs.

Here is Eric (with tie) and Vera and our friends Krin and Paula, under the colored lights of the club.

Team Lab

I saw a show at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea of animations by a group of Japanese digital artists who call themselves "Team Lab".   The animations, on large screens in darkened rooms, were fascinating.  I was especially taken with one installation, with 10 or 12 large screens in a row, all of them animating and riffing on traditional Japanese screen painting.   Each individual screen was worth watching on its own, and the some total was overwhelming.   I had just seen an exhibition of Japanese screen painting at the Met a few days before. You can see the videos on You Tube.

Youtube videos

One of the other videos unfortunately had a terrible sort of Japanese new-ageish musical soundtrack; the others, mercifully, were silent.

Some still pictures:

I really enjoy scroll paintings because they are so wide that one cannot take them all in at once,  Your eye is meant to move and explore.  I also saw at the Met a widescreen video that was wider than anything I have ever seen.  It was commissioned for a show on Chinese calligraphy, and was a black and white continuously changing drawing.   Impossible to reproduce, but here is a snapshot of part of it.

The Morgan Library

I went to see a wonderful small show at the Morgan Library of assorted documents and manuscripts from the Bodleian Library.   I love looking some of these very old documents; for example, a copy of Euclid's "Elements", made in the 9th century.

Or a copy of Pliny's "Natural History", made in 1476:

Also, some papyrus fragments of a poem by Sappho from the 2nd century  (Not illustrated)



There was also a sight-specific installation in the main hall of the museum by Spencer Finch, consisting of a number of different translucent colored panels arrayed all around the windows.  Color everywhere!   I had fun taking pictures:

The floor:

Brahms

We heard the Bremen Kammerphilharmonie play an all Brahms concert.  I was excited to hear this concert because it was in Alice Tully Hall, a smaller venue normally used for chamber music; I was hoping to hear a clearer and more detailed sound.  Unfortunately, the conductor, Paavo Jarvi, was more interested in a tempestuous, impulsive version of Brahms, which emphasized fluctuating tempi and extreme dynamics over clarity.  Several extreme pianissimos brought the music to a halt.   The result was exciting at times, but, overall, I don't think Brahms needs that much interpretive reading.  The program included the first piano concerto and the second symphony.   There were two encores from the Hungarian dances, where Jarvi's showoff conducting was over the top.
Still, there is nothing like hearing Brahms orchestral works performed live, and hearing his endlessly (relentlessly?) inventive musical ideas is a treat.
  

Mark Morris

We heard the Mark Morris Dance Company perform Handel's "Acis and Galatea" the other night.   Morris is truly an original, and creates in his own world, which is different from much of contemporary dance.  In this case, the piece was a choreographed performance of Handel's early opera, "Acis and Galatea", in Mozart's arrangement.  To start with, the performance of the orchestra, the Berkeley-based Baroque Philaharmonia, was superb.  It was fascinating to hear Mozart's reworking of Handel; Handel with clarinets!   (The orchestration dates from the time of Mozart's writing the clarinet quintet, etc.)   The chorus was equally superb; and several of the singers were great as well.
What Morris did was to have the chorus in the pit, but have the singers on stage, interacting with the 16 dancers.  So what you saw was a fully acted performance of the opera, with the addition of nearly continuous choreography at the same time.  So your eyes could be attracted to the singers, the dancers, and of course the surtitles for the text. A lot to take in!   Morris's choreography is closely attuned to the music, and very quirky at times.   He sometimes imitates the text in a totally literal fashion; for example, a singer says the word "shakes" and the dancers start literally shaking.  This is goofy stuff, and happens frequently.   Morris also reflects the music literally in other ways, as in when the canonic entries in the music are duplicated in the choreography.   But somehow it all works as a whole in ways that are mysterious to me.  I remember being totally mystified by his "Socrate" the first time I saw it.  The second time I saw it it, I thought it was truly a masterpiece.   I would happily see anything Morris does a number of times.

David Kikoski Trio

We went with our friends Michael, Pam and Molly to hear the jazz pianist David Kikoski in a trio performance at Small's jazz club in the West Village.   Kikoski, who often plays with the Mingus Big Band, is a classical musician's type of jazz pianist.  He has a maniacal, madcap style, and loves to play with extreme contrasts in rhythm and harmony and texture.  In the middle of a solo, he will suddenly launch into a completely different meter, or a completely different key, and yet somehow it all hangs together (mostly).  Some of his original tunes were fascinating; Michael said he thought one was in a 19 meter (I can't count that high).  He had us on the edge of our seats, and sometimes laughing out loud at the audaciousness of his ideas.   He reminded me a bit of Jacky Byard (who also played with Mingus) in his stylistic facility.    I had never heard him before, and it made me wonder how many unsung brilliant pianists there are out there that I don't know.
I should also mention that the bass player, Ed Howard, and the drummer, Adam Cruz, were equally inventive and interesting.  A good thing, since I was sitting about 6 feet from the drummer; he was a constantly interesting to hear, always inventive and subtle, and never heavy-handed.  There are not many drummers I would want to sit 6 feet away from.

Gary Winogrand

We saw the Gary Winogrand photography show at the Met.   It was wonderful.   Winogrand is one of the quintessential street photographers, and most of his best pictures were taken in New York in the 1960's and 1970's.   Some of the photographs taken on the streets of New York, and during demonstrations and other manifestations of that era are truly spectacular in their dramatic and visual complexity; mini-frescoes of a sort.  Street photography is a very puzzling art, in the sense that it really is of the moment; people do not pose for their photographs, and it takes a talented and audacious photographer to somehow insert him or herself into the scene and come up with a photograph.  I honestly don't know know how he did it.  He may not have either.   He did take enormous numbers of photographs; and eventually stopped even developing them.  The sad thing is seeing the photographs he took later in life, when he seemed to somehow have lost the spark which made his earlier photographs work.  They are pale imitations of his earlier work, for the most part.  

Perusing the catalog afterwords, I was struck by how poorly the reproductions reflected the originals.   Photos that grabbed you in the originals seemed prosaic and ordinary in the reproduction.   This one, for instance, has a quality of menace in the light which is not visible in this reproduction, and the bigger brother(?) in the background of the diaper kid is just barely visible, adding more mystery.

Update:   I went back to see the show a second time, because my sister and her husband were in town.  I spent some time comparing his early pictures in New York with the late ones in California; and renewed my conviction that the later ones were not of much interest.  The New York pictures are filled with the kind of visual density which makes a picture interesting for me, primarily because the streets and street population of New York are so dense.   In the California pictures, the potentially interesting main subject is surrounded by the empty, bland streetscapes of California.   He should have stayed in New York!  (Sorry for my East Coast bias.)

Serialism Invades Vancouver; No Casualties Reported

Last night we went to a excellent concert by members of the Vancouver Symphony.   The highlight was a performance of Stockhausen's landmark work from the 1950's, "Kontra-punkte".   This was a truly serial piece; pitch, dynamics, timbre etc. all being organized.   But the results were refreshing and exciting to hear.    Serialism has become the bogeyman of 20th century music, typified as music created by composers indifferent to their audience, and rejected by audiences in return.   But how would anyone know it these days, since the music is so rarely played?   I salute the courage of Tovey and his players in presenting this piece.   Did I mention that the concert, on a Sunday night, was sold out?  What we heard was representative of the generation of composers, especially German, that after World War II felt compelled to completely reinvent music from the ground up.   That their reinventions did not take hold scarcely matters; what we heard was music of a kind of extreme beauty, chiseled and precise.  (Stockhausen would proceed to spend the next few decades trying to reinvent music with every new piece.) The extremely difficult piano part was performed with great skill by the fearless Corey Hamm, and the performance was superb.   The rest of the program was equally interesting, including a piece by the great Morton Feldman, and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera Suite, which we heard recently performed by the Turning Point Ensemble.   The Orpheum Annex has quite a dry acoustic, enabling every single detail of Weill's fascinating orchestration to come through clearly.  
My only problem with the concert was with the spoken introductions.  Tovey's introduction to the Weill was mostly incoherent.   Riddled with his trademark dry humor, he didn't really tell us much about the music.  He brought up the fact of Stockhausen's piece representing one side of the "great divide" in 20th century music, without mentioning what Weill might have to do with the other side, if that is what he meant.  He also invoked Liza Minnelli, but without ever mentioning Brecht.   Perhaps the talks are just about warming up the audience and making the laugh a bit; in that case, musical information is superfluous.

Where Are You, Merce?, or Will the Thumping Ever Stop?

Last night we went to a performance by Ballet BC.  Ballet BC, is arguably, the best performing arts group in Vancouver.  Under the astute leadership of Emily Molnar, they have a stellar record of commissioning new work from choreographers from all over the world, and a corps of young and very talented dancers.  They seem to be on a sustainable path after a brush with bankruptcy, and have the young and excited audiences that other organizations dream of.
The recent show, though, got me thinking about dance and music.  As a composer who has worked with many dance companies over the years (including Ballet BC), I have a very biased way of experiencing dance.   I see it through the music, and the most significant thing for me is the relationship between the music and the dance.   In that way, I am quasi autistic; where others see a dance being about human emotions, I hear/see rhythms, patterns, lines, colors, and structure.  (Which is not to say that I am not moved by dance.) My two favorite choreographer/composer collaborations are Balanchine/Stravinsky and Cunningham/Cage; the two are certainly polar opposites in their approach to the connection between music and dance.   With Balanchine/Stravinsky, the music and the choreography are mutually intertwined; with Cunningham/Cage the two are completely independent.  (Often the Cunningham dancers would not hear the music until the first performance of the piece.)  This may seem paradoxical, but the complete independence of the music and dance in this case allows each to exist in a kind of clarity which is exciting.

When composers first began to synchronize music to film dramas in the early days of sound film, the paradigm was established by the composer Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone With the Wind, etc.)   Steiner said that the audience should be able to close their eyes, and by listening to the music, understand everything that was happening on the unseen screen.  In other words, the music should tell the same story as the visuals, and this became the standard Hollywood practice.  As the art of film music developed, some filmmakers and composers realized the aesthetic fallacy of this practice.  Hans Eisler wrote a long screed against the practice, and Jean Cocteau famously took the score he had commissioned for a film, and put the parts of the music in scenes different than that which they had been written.  Godard notoriously chopped up music into small fragments and scattered them around his films, and Alain Resnais often referred to music as a plastic element in his film compositions.  It was not there to illustrate anything.

What does this have to do with dance?  What I would suggest is that many choreographers today have very little sophistication about the aesthetics of music and dance.  While the connections between music and film and music and dance are certainly not functioning in exactly the same way, there is a similarity.  Nowadays music seems to be chosen because it inspires the choreographer, or projects the emotion that they are trying to convey in the dance.  And the same goes for Hollywood.   Or the music is chosen because it is popular, or, in Hollywood's case, the marketing department thinks it will help sell the film (and its soundtrack).    It used to be Philip Glass and Aarvo Part all the time for choreographers.  It seems very few choreographers these days are following Merce Cunningham's innovations.

The paradigm for many dance pieces I have heard lately is to take a piece with a very energetic and repetitive rhythmic pulse, and create movement with a very energetic and rhythmic pulse.  (You could close your eyes and know what's going on on stage.) (This is often "dance music", in the popular genre sense)   For me, it feels like I am watching a workout class.  The virtuosity of the dancers is appealing, but the thing quickly loses its appeal after a certain amount of relentless thumping.  The audience, of course, loves it.  

The other issue I have is with the use of recorded music.  It is hard to quantify, but somehow the relationship with the music and dance enters a different realm when the sound emanates from loudspeakers.   Unfortunately, for a majority of dance companies, like Ballet BC, live music is simply not an affordable option.

On the Ballet BC program, the first piece, a premiere by Cayetano Soto, began superbly with interesting movement counterpointing nicely with music from David Lang's "little match girl passion".  The beautiful austerity of Lang's music worked extremely well against the more vigorous patterns of Soto's choreography.   Things went downhill from there, though.    I also liked the beginning of Gustavo Sansano's work, with the andante from Bach's "Italian Concerto" contrasting with a beautifully idiosyncratic movement by a solo dancer.   But the piece as a whole lost me, owing in part to its being set to mishmash of mediocre recordings of bits from different Bach keyboard works, defying all musical logic.   Here is an instance where a choreographer could have set the piece to a single keyboard work, and even allowed for the use of a live performer.

The last piece on the program thumped me into a state of extreme fatigue.

Marx once said, to a man who had five children, "I like my cigar, too, but I take it out once in a while."   Groucho Marx, that is.



 

Lower East Side Galleries

I went gallery hopping in a different neighborhood. This time, it was the Lower East Side, which I had no idea had become a thriving art district.  It makes Chelsea seem over pretentious.  It is astonishing to me how many galleries there are; I don't know how they all survive.   As always, part of the pleasure is stumbling upon artists you have never heard of.  I was particularly excited by the work of Joanne Greenbaum, who paints large scale colorful abstract paintings that slowly reveal considerable sophistication in line and color.   She uses color boldly, but in a way that gradually makes sense.  It's nice to see painting without rhetoric.  This show was at the Rachel Uffner Gallery on Suffolk Street, in a beautiful space with a large skylight for natural light.  Some examples (the originals are about 9 feet high.):

Another intriguing show was by the Uzbeki artist Stas Volovik, who seemed to be channeling Kandinsky in some fashion.

And there were other shows of some interest, as well.  The whole neighborhood is a typical New York mixture of the old and new, bordering Delancy Street and its housing projects, the increasingly chic Bowery, and Houston Street on the north. Art galleries, Chinatown, Little Italy and some of the grunge of the past all rub shoulders.

The Metropolitan Museum

The Met is probably my favorite place to be in New York.  The old adage that it so big that you have to pick a destination  no longer holds true for me.   Rather, I revel in the opportunity to be able to wander from European medieval painting into Islamic decorative art to Cycladic statues, for example.  To see your notions about art constantly questioned and sometimes overturned is a delight.  One culture might venerate one kind of image, while another has a completely different sense of purpose.   For example, I recently saw a wonderful exhibition of Japanese screen painting of the Edo period.  Landscapes, traditional narratives, and contemplation of nature are often the subjects.

Then I wandered towards the European painting section, and the first thing I see is a room full of portraits of important people.  Why portraits?   (The answer, of course, as always, is that of Willie Sutton.  Because that's where the money was.)  Then you look at the carved statues in the Oceanic art wing.   They can scare you.  Why were they made?

Of course, sometimes I go with a specific destination in mind, but other times I want to be some kind of flâneur, wandering aimlessly and never knowing what I might see next.   And compared to the hordes that overwhelm  MOMA,  the Met is relatively uncrowded.  Especially if you ignore the high traffic areas like the French impressionists, etc.  Recently I have been in the room with the five Vermeer paintings and been the only one there.   And if you go to obscure places like the Lehman wing, there is no one there.

Recently I spent a lot of time looking at the Dutch still life paintings from the 17th century, which I usually ignore.  But then you take your time and look carefully, and they start to reveal their secrets.

There's something about being in a non-crowded room and not being in a hurry that puts me a receptive state.

In the next room, a Dutch painting of a cathedral interior, which I had glanced at before.

Then you realize there is a dog peeing in the church.  Was this normal in churches of that time. Or is there a message from the artist?  I have no clue.

I eventually ended up looking at Roman wall paintings.  They are very old!  Beautiful colors and the texture of the aged surfaces is fascinating.

 As I said before, the Met is my favorite place to be in New York.  The sheer diversity of artistic endeavors on display is inspiring, and the respect with which all kinds of art are displayed is equally inspiring.  While other museums do very trendy things to make themselves relevant; the Met simply presents its amazing treasure in an environment which facilitates the true enjoyment of art.  And combine that with a web site which allows access to both high resolution images of the art and information.  Bravo!

Photography In New York

I have always enjoyed going to photography exhibitions.   I saw a number of them recently in New York, with the result that I began to change my thinking about photography.  The first show I went to was the AIPAD show at the Park Avenue Armory.  This show, like the similar art shows that take place at the same venue, is a large event featuring many photography galleries and dealers, some of them familiar New York ones, and others unknown to me.  It was that familiar combination of showing art for its own sake, and selling it.  The emphasis was on selling.   I found very little of interest; almost all of the work was that of the tried and true photographers.   It was also disconcerting that many of the dealers had open bins of photographs that you could riffle through like at a flea market, except that the images were normally priced between $2,000 and $10,000.   At first I thought they were just fake reproductions!   All of which made me think more about the nature of photographs.  When you buy a painting, it is one of a kind (unless it is by Damien Hurst).   When you are buying a photograph, presumably you are buying an image that has been personally produced by the photographer, usually in some limited quantity.  But what strikes me is that, in this day of increasingly sophisticated printing techniques for books, it is increasingly harder to tell the difference between an original print and a high quality book reproduction.   For example, the late Henri Cartier-Bresson was relatively indifferent to the visual quality of his prints; they don't look that different in books.   What matters is the content of the image.   On the other, a carefully produced gelatin silver print can be a truly sensuous object.   Joseph Sudek's prints come to mind.     All of which is to say that often times these days, what you are buying when you buy a photograph is an image for both its content/meaning and for its certification as a genuine object produced in limited quantities.   If I can just as easily cut a Cartier-Bresson photo out of a book and frame it and put it on a wall, why pay many thousands of dollars for an original print, that, for most viewers, from a distance would look the same?  Then you see an absolutely gorgeous print that cold not possibly be reproduced, and in theory, one would understand paying a big chunk of money for it.

I did succumb to the general aura of the market place by buying several very cheap photographs.  They were aerial photographs, taken in WWI, of the front. Mysterious patterns of trenches and bombardments, seen from directly above.  Photographs meant for military use, but possessing a visual poetry of their own.

The other shows I saw resonated with the above.  There was a show of photographs taken by the renowned photojournalist Robert Capa.  The novelty was that they were in color.   Recently printed from his slides, they were mostly produced for magazine commissions.  The photographs showed no particular aesthetic quality; the most interesting were the ones shot in the Soviet Union, where the reds of the Stalinist propaganda were enlightening. (We expect photographs of the Stalinist era to be in grainy black and white.)  We look at them for their content, for what they tell us about people and places and history.  The Morgan Library now has a photography department.  (Mr. Morgan did not collect them, no surprise.)  Their show was something rather silly; a roomful of photographs, with each adjacent photograph sharing an obvious and usually trivial connection to its neighbor.  (This photograph has a hand in it, and wow, the one next to it does too!)  What was more provocative was the juxtaposition of work by renowned photographers with vernacular, found photographs.  I do like vernacular photographs; like the kind where the amateur photographer has somehow managed to visually decapitate his subjects.  But what does this say about the medium?  I have never seen a painting exhibition that does the same thing.   Imagine a show which juxtaposed a Rembrandt portrait, with, say, a portrait painted by an ex American president.
(For a very funny review of Bush's paintings read this in the Guardian.)  It might be interesting, but I can't imagine it ever happening.

The best show I saw was that of the photographs of Paris by Charles Marville at the Met.
The best of these photos were the ones taken before Hausmann's demolitions; documenting a much older Paris, without its Grand Boulevards.  Marville's photos combine both a documentary interest with a beautiful sense of composition.  They also exhibit an extraordinary technical skill, given the limitations of photographic equipment of that period.  They do resemble the later photographs of Atget, who was also interested in documenting the streetscapes of Paris, but they lack the peculiar poetry of Atget's photos.  I  love the vision of the street beyond the entrance to the courtyard in this one.

There was an adjacent show of photographs of Paris by other photographers; Atget, as always, was my favorite.

So what did I think?  Not easy to say...  Traditional photography is a strange brew of reality, visual composition, technique, and happenstance.  Nowadays it is one aspect of the larger artistic practice of image making, while at the same time part of the domain of the billions of images that are uploaded and shared constantly. A photographer like Marville needed a lot of heavy equipment, patience, and time to create an image; in the present, all we need is our everpresent cell phones to create an image.

Charpentier X 2

Up until a month ago, I had never heard a Charpentier opera.  Now I have heard two.  The first, in Victoria, BC, was a Boston Early Music Festival production of Charpentier's
Orpheus opera.   The singing and instrumental performance were truly superb; every rhythmic nuance came through, and the blending of the voices in Charpentier's frequent ensembles was superb.  The opera itself is more of a pastoral than a real drama, and a little disappointing.   The second opera we heard, "Acteon", though also a kind of pastorale, was more compelling. It was performed by Julliard students, conducted by the renowned William Christie. Again, the rhythmic pacing and instrumental performance were outstanding, but the voices were problematic.  Several of the singers seemed to have very little sense of baroque style and seemed unacquainted with the notion of dynamics.  It was fortissimo and vibrato all the way.   Surprising, given Christie's reputation as a developer of voices.  
I once wrote a ballet score based on the music of Rameau, and fell in love with his unique phrasing and rhythmic style, which is characteristic of the French baroque.  Charpentier, though earlier, has a lot of the same stylistic proclivities.   I much prefer the French style to the more rhythmically square rhythms of other Baroque composers, such as Telemann, for example.

Johns and Gauguin at MOMA

I saw two absolutely wonderful, and complimentary shows at MOMA today.  One was of very recent work by Jasper Johns, and the other of work by Gauguin.   The Johns, two rooms, showed a series of works based on this photo of painter Lucian Freud:

This was the theme; and what you see is two rooms of variations on this theme.  It really works just like a musical theme and variations; we recognize aspects of the theme in each.   Johns is astonishingly creative as he transforms this image through different kinds media.  (In most cases, he mirrors the image.) Here is just one:

Who would have thought in the 1950's that Jasper Johns would become our Grand Old Master in 2014?   Not to mention that his technique and imagination put most contemporary artists to shame; he is definitely out of step with today's ideological art.
(If he were a young artist today, would he be summarily dismissed?  Craft and technique?  How quaint.)

The Gauguin show was equally exciting, though my enthusiasm was somewhat tempered by MOMA's characteristic teeming hordes.   It completely transformed my ideas of Gauguin's work.   We are all familiar with his paintings; they are instantly recognizable.  What this show does is focus on all the other media that he used; woodcuts, relief carving, and even a technique he called oil transfer.  We see him working in exactly the same fashion as Johns; making variations on themes (and there are not many themes).
He does woodcuts, and then prints out many different versions, sometimes adding watercolors or other materials.

Here are a few examples:

 

I still find the overall environment of MOMA extremely unpleasant; too many people, stifling air, overwhelming noise .  In addition, I notice things like the second floor "MOMA books", which was originally established as a bookstore within the museum with the idea of a more comprehensive selection that the gift shop downstairs.  Now the tables that used to have the latest and most interesting new books on art have piles of Van Gogh calendars and knick-knacks.   Appalling!   We need to put the true cultural connoisseurs, Jim Jarmusch's vampires, in charge.