Turner, Pape, and the Biennial

There was an excellent small show at the Frick of paintings of ports by Turner.  The Frick itself owns two very large ones, and the show complemented those with several other smaller ones, as well as some watercolors, prints, etc.   The most striking thing in the show, though, was an unfinished version of one of the very large port scenes.   It looked like a very blurred version; apparently Turner painted the big washes of color on the canvas first, and then gradually added the detail that we see in the finished paintings.  In this case, he never got around to it.

A finished port scene (these are all very large paintings):

 The unfinished port scene:

Other "port" scenes:

The curators tried to make a point about the meaning of the port scenes in current times, but I am happy to look at Turner any time.   Looking at the large scale paintings close up and seeing what he did with color is amazing.

There was a retrospective at the Met Breuer of the work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, who began with fairly severe geometrical art in the 1950's and ended up following a number of ideas both in the realm of political and conceptual art, as well as investigating indigenous Brazilian culture.   She is not to be confused with another Lygia, Lygia Clark, who had her own retrospective at MOMA a while ago, and whose career followed a very similar trajectory.)   The early geometric work was a bit to severe for my taste; but her later, more liberated works were excellent.   Here are some:

A huge wall of red, yellow and blue:

 Detail:

Similar, in black and white:

There was an extraordinary installation in a room that featured very thin golden threads strung from ceiling to floor.   As you moved around, the only threads that were visible were those that were illuminated.   Hard to photograph!

Wall sculpture:

She was also interested in indigenous Brazilian art; there were numerous videos of her work in documenting her country's traditions.
There were also some small screen videos of performances of her two "concrete ballets".   You could watch and listen with headphones.   They consisted of abstract shapes moving around the stage, animated by the dancers within.   There was some interesting sounding early electronic music for one of them.  But the wall credits did not mention who did the music!
Could be a rant coming...
I did some research on the web, and found out who did the music for one of the ballets. but not who did the electronic music (or possibly it was added to the video reconstruction?)

Some info from Pape herself from the web:

The artist gave us an illuminating explanation about the Neo-Concrete Ballet: 
It was created in 1958, in the Special Presentation of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Rio de Janeiro. It was staged alongside Reynaldo Jardim, and produced by Gilberto Mota, who was a dancer. The work was structured around Reynaldo Jardim's poem Olho/Alvo, which consists of two words arranged in space into a choreography. For the word "eye" I created four cylinders, 2-meters tall and 70 cm in diameter each; for the word "white", four parallelograms painted with minium (lead tetroxide), all in wood and with rollers at their base, which gave the movements a sense of beauty and synchronicity. We used professional dances from the Municipal Theatre. And something interesting happened: our greatest difficulty was to convince them to do the show while hidden inside those objects, because our intent was to capture the motility of the body, its potential to dislocate through space, freed from the presence of the human figure; this is to say, to capture the movement that the body is capable of executing.  The music for the show was created by Gabriel Artusi, a heteronym of Reynaldo Jardim, and it was two tones, a kind of percussion on piano, all very rhythmic. 





I also took a look at the exhibit of Marsden Hartley's painting on the floor below.   The exhibit was about Hartley's return to his native state of Maine, and his subsequent desire to become a "Maine" painter.   I didn't find the paintings that inspiring; perhaps because of what I had seen upstairs, and perhaps because of my preference for his work from the period around WW I when he was headed in the direction of abstract art.




I went to see the Whitney Biennial, the first in its new location.   I usually emerge from the Biennials in a state of extreme disgruntlement; this year, there was certainly plenty to be annoyed by, but there was also quite a bit that I liked.  Including rooms full of paintings!   What is the world coming to?   While almost everything still tends to push the correct buttons, this year craft and technical skill seemingly were allowed.

But it's somehow still a strange phenomenon to me; sometimes I feel like I am at some sort of circus/variety show/funhouse kind of event; you look at something or a group of things and you are intrigued or annoyed or indifferent, and then you go on to another group of things, with another set of possible reactions.   Even when there is a room full of the artist's work, you don't really get a complete feel for what she or he is about, because you suddenly eye something else in the next room or area and are attracted or repelled by that.
But anyway, here are some things I enjoyed looking at.

Leftover furniture, covered in polyurethane of some kind, and painted:

A mishmash of all kinds of junk, encased in clear resin:

Furniture after my own heart:

The most spectacular work was a site specific installation entitled "The Meatgrinder's Iron Clothes" by Samara Golden

It was a huge construction of mirrors, furnished rooms both right side up and upside down that took over most of the western wall of the Whitney.  It was in fact vertigo inducing; leaning over the railing, you could not tell what was right side up and what was upside down, or what was a reflection or not.  The installation seemed to go infinitely up and down in space; I could not look down.  (Museum goers were in fact encouraged not to lean against the railing, as it was apparently not that sturdy!)  The rooms featured various upscale and downscale interiors, along with melanges of hospitals and prisons, etc.  Well, you know what it's about.

Painting!:

Stained glass covering one of the big windows (actually plastic)

Red Glass, outdoors:≥

And at the end, an installation of trees, another site-specific art work designed to help you recover (chill?) from what you've seen.   One of them was dead already.

I was surprised to see a work by the jazz world's current hero, Kamasi Washington, as one of the chosen works in the exhibition.   It's a 37 minute recording of a suite entitled "Harmony of Difference".  The sound was quite dim, coming out of very small speakers.   A very small part of the music was accompanied by a rudimentary video.  I was very happy to see a jazz work represented in the Biennial, but I don't really understand how it is, with all the music being created in America, this somehow is the only musical work chosen, and that is so poorly exhibited.

One Last Concert

I went to an afternoon concert on our last day in New York for a while.  (It was also the first warm day after a very cold March and beginning of April.)   It was performed by the Argento Ensemble (yet another New York new music group).  It was in the St. Peters Church at Citicorp Center, a beautiful modern church, but a terrible place for a concert, as there was some kind of machine making noises on and off during the concert.  The ostensible theme of the concert was "Conjugal Music", though the first piece was entitled "Sterbetourismus", referring to the phenomenon of people coming to Switzerland to die because of the liberal euthanasia laws there.   Conjugal?   Well, whatever.
The reason I went was that there were two recent pieces for ensemble by Georg Haas.   It was disconcerting, though, when the ensemble started to play the third piece on the program listed as a piece by Haas, what began was Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll".   At first I though Haas had gone all conceptual on us (I have always wondered why some conceptualist composer hasn't pulled a Sherrie Levine, and appropriated something like a Beethoven symphony as her or his own work. I guess the music world is less avant-garde than the visual arts world.)   But it turns out that the program order had been shuffled, and although the conductor had made some introductory remarks, he had neglected to tell the audience of the program change.  I wonder what the guy in front of me who was taking cell phone videos the entire time thought.
In any case, the two Haas works were finally played; both were written to celebrate his recent marriage.  (The nature of his relationship to his spouse was covered on the front page of the NY Times arts section, I won't go in to it here.)   The works were not as interesting as others I have heard of his; both were more concerned with melody than sonority, and I found both to be repetitious.  They were also almost entirely for strings; I like Haas often for his diverse instrumental colors, which were lacking here.  The second piece, a "wedding march" was one consistent acceleration of some rather basic almost Bartokian ideas.  But when I realized that that was what was happening, and that was all that was happening, I became impatient for something unexpected or contrasted.  It didn't happen.   I did like the first piece on the program, by Ryan Beppel, which employed two conductors and created a dense and ever-changing sound world.  Though I don't know what it had to do with death tourism.

More Merce!

We went to hear French dance company CNDC Angers in a program of all Cunningham.  We saw them last year doing a Cunningham "Event", a mixture of different Cunningham pieces.  This year, they did three distinct pieces.  The first, "Inlets 2", was set to a score by John Cage, which featured three people doing things with different size conch shells and water.   They performed with the original shells from Cage's performance, courtesy of the John Cage trust.

The piece was a "nature" inspired piece.  I was fascinated by the rhythms that emerge from dancers who move without reference to a musical score.  It's hard to explain how it feels; it's just that the rhythms of body movement are somehow fundamentally different from the rhythms of music, and I find it so compelling when the dancers are moving together to their own, unheard rhythms.

The highlight of the program was the next piece, "Places", created in 1966, and set to recorded score by Gordon Mumma for bandoneon and computer.  The piece was last performed in 1971 until its very recent reconstruction by CNDC Angers artistic director Robert Swinston.   It was very dramatic (for Cunningham) and I was mesmerized by the performance of the dancers.   Mumma's score was not dramatic, of course; it was a series of drawn out sonorities.   Which which worked perfectly for the piece.

The last piece was set to readings from John Cage's stories, with two live readers who sometimes overlapped with each other.  The choreography was in a lighter, humorous vein.   I initially found it somewhat disconcerting to be listening to a verbal narrative; I found it hard to focus on the movement when I was listening to a story.   But eventually I got to a place where it started to work, and once again Cunningham had expanded my perceptual abilities.  
The evening reinforced the notion that Cunningham is truly one of the greatest choreographers; and that I need to see much, much more of his work.  I can't praise the CNDC Angers enough for keeping this work alive; I wish more small dance companies over the world would do his work.   It does need to be stated, however, that Cunningham is not audience friendly in the way today's world thinks that art should be, especially in the realm of music.  Audiences are easily turned off by music that sounds really strange.



The choreographer Trisha Brown died recently.  In summing up her career, several people noted that in the beginning of her career she used no music.  Eventually she did start using music, and when she was asked why, she only half facetiously said, "I got tired of the coughing".  


One of the highlights of last fall was the performance of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's "Vortex Temporis" set to Grisey's  piece of the same name.  Recently  MOMA announced that an "installation" version of the piece, lasting some eight hours, would be performed in the atrium during museum hours.   Apparently Keersmaeker has created this version of the  piece and it has been performed before; the work has somehow been deconstructed and reconfigured to be performed in an open gallery space over an extended period of time.   I was curious to see and hear what this would be; but, on the other hand, I was pretty sure that I would dislike it, and that I would not be happy hearing Grisey performed in the noisy, cavernous space of MOMA's atrium.   So I didn't go.   I should have, I suppose.   But I was very amused to read of the review of the piece in the New York Times, when the reviewer mentioned the pleasure of hearing Grisey's avant-garde music echoing through the halls of MOMA.   For, as the reviewer put it, MOMA is really not "comfortable" with avant-garde music.   It's too modern for them.  They like Bjork better.

Idomeneo and Fidelio

The only Mozart operas I have ever heard have been the three DaPonte operas and the Magic Flute.   Since Vera wanted to go to hear Mozart's "Idomeneo", I decided to go.   "Idomeneo" is a opera seria; that is what Mozart was commissioned to write.  For those not familiar with the genre, it was a kind of opera that focused on serious dramatic subjects (usually the ancient Greeks), with a fairly rigid form, mostly a series of solo arias with virtuoso displays of singing.  Solo singing took preference over dramatic necessity.  Handel's operas are the most famous opera seria.
Not surprisingly, Mozart transformed opera seria into something Mozartian.   The opera was superb, featuring some of the best Mozart music I have ever heard.  There are people who sometimes claim that "Idomeno" is his best opera.   I wouldn't go that far, but it certainly has extraordinary moments.   One very interesting thing Mozart does is to write orchestral recitative, where the sung dialog is accompanied by very expressive short bits of orchestral music.  On the whole, though, the opera is not nearly as tight as the DaPonte operas; some of the arias go on for too long, and the libretto has its unwieldy moments, and the whole thing was over just barely before midnight.   The singers were all excellent in their very demanding roles, and the orchestra under James Levine was superb.   I had thought that Levine was near the end of his conducting career a year ago, but he seems to have regained physical control, and few people know more about conducting Mozart than he does.  There were some moments of imprecision, but that did not diminish the overall effectiveness of the performance.

A week later, we went to hear Beethoven's only opera, "Fidelio", which is not often done.   Beethoven was not an opera composer and his opera was the result of a long and arduous struggle.   It's not really a successful opera in the conventional sense; it's really a curious hybrid of Beethoven's instrumental style of composing and the conventions of opera.   And you end up listening to it in that way, which is nevertheless very interesting.   The singers were mostly excellent, but for once I found the performance of the Met orchestra to be substandard.  There was very little in the way of dynamic nuance, and the orchestra seemed to be operating mostly in a fortissimo mode.  
The last scene of the opera is very special; a heroic ode to liberty and freedom with soloists, choir and orchestra.  And yes, it sounds very much like the last movement of the 9th symphony.   With the newly liberated prisoners and the villagers celebrating on stage, it was certainly music to cheer for.

Mark Morris Does Opera and Schumann

We went to BAM to hear and see the Mark Morris Dance Company perform what was billed as an evening of opera.   The first piece was a performance of Britten's "Curlew River".  It was performed as an opera, with no dancers, but it was directed and choreographed by Morris.  "Curlew River" is really a chamber opera; for seven instrumentalists on stage and a cast of male singers and an all male choir.   It was inspired by Britten's encounter with Noh theatre on a trip to Japan, and contains many elements of Noh, as well as things like Gregorian chant, etc.   It is really quite austere and spartan, especially in the use of instrumental resources.   The directing and singing were excellent, but there was one major problem: you could not understand the words.  Sung in English, the singers had little sense of diction.   Normally these days, one gets supertitles, so that it doesn't matter, but, in this case there were none.   The program helpfully printed the entire libretto, but then the house lights were turned all the way down so there was no hope of reading it.   This problem certainly diminished the effectiveness of the performance, and, perhaps in a smaller house than BAM's opera house, the diction might have been clearer.  But the direction was superb; Morris and choreographed the movements of the musicians in a way which added a great deal to the performance.

The second half of the program was a performance of Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas".  The orchestra and singers were in the pit, and the dancers had the stage to themselves.   Morris himself conducted.   It was an astonishing performance.   The piece dates from 1989, when Morris was in Brussels.   What is striking when you first experience the piece is that you are getting two strands of narrative at once.   There is an onstage dancer for each vocal soloist, and a larger group of dancers which embodies the choir.  So the movement literally follows the musical structure and meaning.  So when the Sorceress sings about doing nasty things, the dancer "dances" doing nasty things.   This is fairly normal practice for Morris, and sometimes verges on cliches.   But at the same time, once you enter this realm, astonishing things begin to happen.   First of all, the movement is anything but "baroque"; it is very angular, modern, and energetic and even outlandish or transgressive at times.   I was reminded of both Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch at various times in the way the movement incorporates very stylized versions of routine, pedestrian gestures.   At times, I felt Morris was doing everything he could to contradict the style of the baroque music; there are moments of pure slapstick that made the audience burst into laughter.   At the same time, this opera is a tragedy.  To my eyes and ears, this was an unsettling juxtaposition.   Which is good.    Morris also makes point of being indifferent to the gender of his dancers.   The parts of Dido the Queen and the Sorceress were danced by the same woman in this performance, but in the original production, the same parts were danced by Morris himself. You can see excerpts on YouTube.  
The musical performances, with an excellent period orchestra, were excellent.   The singers were good, though again there was very little in the way of understanding the words that were sung.   I should also mention that the soloists were singing nicely in the now normal baroque style, except for Stephanie Blythe.   Blythe is normally featured in Wagnerian roles, and her voice has a full, auditorium-filling heft and presence.   It was thrilling when she belted out Dido's Lament at full volume, although to my ears it jarred with the stylistic norms of the rest of the ensemble.   But maybe that was part of Morris's intentions.

Web photos:

A week later we went to hear another Mark Morris work "V", set to Schumann's Piano Quintet and performed by the Juilliard students at their annual repertory show.   It was again extraordinary.   The piece was created in 2001, and performed by 14 dancers, with (as always) a live performance of the music.  It is very difficult to describe how Morris works with the music; he is certainly heir to the Balachine tradition of creating ballets which are only about the music and the dance, but Morris does something quite different from Balachine.   With Balanchine, I always get a sense of a dialog, or counterpoint between the music and the dance. There are two independent lines which interact.  Morris, on the surface, seems to be almost literally illustrating the music.   Dance movements closely correspond with musical counterparts, and when a theme in the music returns, so does the movement associated with it.   But at a certain point, I get beyond the point of thinking about it that way, and the dance and music merge into one single thing.   And then you also begin to appreciate exactly what kinds of movements Morris has chosen, and sometimes they are very striking.   The slow march of the second movement, for example, is done with the dancers on all fours, moving irregularly across the stage. It was both totally unexpected and totally right; I may never be able to hear that movement again without visualizing that movement.  And the last movement is pure joy, both witty and exultant.   I can't wait until my next chance to hear and see it.   Mark Morris really deserves the overused term "genius".   His next premiere is in Liverpool, in a festival to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper, with a score based on Sgt. Pepper composed by the Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson. I can't imagine what that will be!

And, by the way, the Juilliard students, both musicians and dancers, were great.

Hercules Segers, Eliot Greene, Anne Ryan

I saw an amazing exhibit at the Met Museum of works by the early 17th century Dutch  artist Hercules Segers. Very little is known about him, and not many of his works survive, but most of them were at the Met.   What is interesting about Segers is primarily his print making.   He was an inveterate experimenter, and devised all kinds of ways of making prints, often times from the same plate.  He was even using sugar at a certain point.  (I was reminded of the Degas show we saw last year; Degas was also experimenting.   The prints are mostly landscapes, with a fascinating variety of colors and textures.
Here are some of my favorites:

Could he have seen any Japanese or Chinese art?

Speaking of landscapes, I also saw a show of paintings by Elliott Green at a Lower East Side gallery.  Greene works with paint and landscape ideas; the paintings are of mostly mountain landscapes, but also work with different ways of representing these landscapes with paint.  I liked them.

I also saw a great show of the work of Anne Ryan, a painter who was hanging out with the abstract expressionist crowd in the late 1940's.   She had a moment of revelation when she saw her first show of Schwitters collages, and spent the last six years of her life (1948-1954) making collages.   They are small, intimate works, carefully detailed with a wide variety of material and textures.   Photographs give you some idea of the visual appearance of the works, but cannot convey the textures of the works.

Red Hook

Continuing in my efforts to walk through most of New York, I went to the neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn.  Red Hook has a more complex streetscape  than many New York neighborhoods.   Surrounded by water on three sides, it was originally a port area (and still is, in part), and what residential community that was there was there for the people who worked in the port and the industry around the water.  It then became home to the Red Hook projects, one of the city's largest public housing projects, which eventually became a high crime area.   And now it has become home to both new artisanal industries like a winery, home to artists and other urban frontier types, and, of course, eventual gentrification.  It is far from any subway, though, which helps keep its character a little more distinct from other areas of the city.  So now you have scrapyards, polluted sites, wineries, artisanal gelato, empty lots with junk, an IKEA store, art galleries, abandoned buildings, etc.   It's all there.  Red Hook also took a big hit from Hurricane Sandy; the flood level was about six feet above the streets.  It all makes for fascinating walking.   Here are some things I saw:

I loved these bundles of scrunched up scrap metal:

 A typical view of a vacant lot with random debris:

Some of the industrial areas are painted bright colors, though:

This is an amazing enormous abandoned building, built as a grain terminal for barges coming down the Hudson River from the Erie Canal.   It was quickly made obsolete by the railroads, and has been empty ever since.  It's made of very solid concrete.

In front of this building are several ball-playing fields, except that they are now closed on account of too much pollution in the ground.

Detail of above:

Storage for those wire scaffoldings they use in concrete:

The main street of Red Hook is a curious combination of high-end bicycle shops, hip restaurants, and assorted abandoned lots like these.   Though they will clearly be gone in a few years.

And some odd store windows:

And some colorful piles of assorted stuff along the same street:

Eventually you get to some very active modern port facilities for container ships, etc.

But there are still the odd buildings overlooking the container port.   This one was isolated on a corner, and had views of the port.   Me too!

Don't know what this was about:

Or this:   (If I removed the green barrel, it would make an excellent red, yellow, blue picture.

And finally, home for the ice cream trucks:

There is a lot more that I didn't see, so I will be back for more.