On the off-chance, may be a few places left tonight for :
Where is the Black Beast?
a film by Simon Lee and Algis Kizys
Screening at the IFC
December 16th, 2010 at 6:45p
To reserve a seat please contact catherine@rufuscorporation.com
,
/
'
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
more words soon, j'espère, from a Christmas tinselled out Viva .....
more photos of THE BLACK SWAN press conference HERE.
Colin Firth of THE KING'S SPEECH showing his physical as well as verbal prowess at the 54th BFI London Film Festival press conference
THE KING'S SPEECH press conference
more photos of THE BLACK SWAN press conference HERE.
Colin Firth of THE KING'S SPEECH showing his physical as well as verbal prowess at the 54th BFI London Film Festival press conference
THE KING'S SPEECH press conference
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Harry Potter and our meaning of life
A little Viva dalliance into film previews this week:
Made in Dagenham is one of those 'feel good' Brit films where human decency triumphs over social adversity- but not a John Sayles film or Rosie the Riveter this isn't. In 1968 the women of the Dagenham Ford Plant voted strike action demanding equal pay to their male counterparts. Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Secretary of State Barbara Castle (who until 2007 held the record for female MP with longest continuous service) had a register of of social achiements during her time in office that most men couldn't even shake a carrot at. And the granting of 92% to the Dagenham girls was just one of them culminating in her Equal Pay Act of 1970.
One of the many funny, quirky touches to director Nigel Cole's film is Rita (Sally Hawkins), somewhat oblivious to the hoards of press, discreetly comparing fashion notes with Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson) on their outfits as they emerge on the Whitehall steps after hashing out the pay deal over scotch and sherry upstairs. The film's theme song has lyrics by socialist singer/songwriter Billy Bragg and is sung by Sandie Shaw (a former Dagenham Ford worker).
Ahhh- BBC radio. While it's frustrating not to be legally allowed to see/hear much that is on the BBC iPlayer in the States, there's enough that is available (for weeks if not months) to keep one's brain alive. Midweek is as it suggests on a Wednesday and Nov. 3 had a great line-up of guests: Jane the astronomer who built a mini-observatory in her barn, Jo Wilding who wrote about running off in Iraq with the circus in Don't Shoot the Clowns.
Historian Amanda Foreman (of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire) has a new book out A World on Fire -about the 1000's of Brits who took part in the American Civil War - arguing that the Anglo-American special relationship was anything but! The textbooks hitherto were 'massaging' history yet again in to a slumber. Unless you were recipient of the Turkish bath pummeling from historian Simon Schama.
Peter Weller narrates Yony Leyser's documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within getting some great interviews just when you think the MAN has been done to death. Film director John Waters: "He violated the rules of even junkies worlds...and didn't respect any of the rules of the gay world [either]...he opened up to me not gay culture but gay rebels...a rap on the knuckles of poor, white, staid backyard America...he invented a style of book" never identifying with the media hype of the Beat Generation. Patti Smith (who Burroughs encouraged to sing in public): "William had a connection to anything and everything" his words developing as the Beat Shakespeare - blade runner, heavy metal, soft machine, steely dan.
Article in The Independent
Today's Special directed by David Kaplan casts Aasif Mandvi (of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) as the son desperately trying to revitalise his father's ailing Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens. A really hearteningly end of the week movie to sit back and enjoy. And not a whiff of Burroughs in the Queens night air;)
And what will non-Harry Potter fans make of the latest installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1?
Well, I confess to being one (a 'non' that is) though I also confess to having read the first book. And you do have to listen quite intently sometimes to grasp all the plot points. But then again, wouldn't it have disappointed fans if the film had 'signposted' everything and left them saying 'yeah, right get on with it'. What manifests itself in this penultimate installment (and what the franchise has always had going for it) is the art of wonder - perhaps giving the transitive verb 'wandering' a new sensibility with the importance of the noun 'wand' in Potter-dom.
Harry Potter has always been concerned with one's place in the world: where one's loyalties lie, 'the total eclipse of the heart', ways of seeing. And it's hard to imagine bursting into tears at the [is this where I say spoiler alert] death of a rather ugly CG elf Dobby (voice/movements by Toby Jones) but it really is incredibly moving. Am I sounding soppy girlie? Oh dear. Not so much the actual death itself perhaps, but everything that's lead up to this moment on the beach. Dobby's saved the trio (Harry,Hermione, Ron) from a tricky situation with Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham-Carter) and paid the mortal price gasping a final breath, but it is "a beautiful place...among friends" (actually Pembrokeshire, Wales).
It's the Leibniz monad theory of the many in one and the one in many that is so palpable in this film. Much of this seems due to the wonderful partnership of veteran HP director (last 3) David Yates and the world renowned cinematographer Eduardo Serra (Claude Chabrol's last 7 films, Girl with a Pearl Earing and many others). As the cast have said many times in interviews, their characters are for the first time in the big, bad world entirely away from the safety of Hogwarts. Serra exquisitely, painterly photographs nurturing symbiosis with them and the world. And one in which they must find themselves, find each other, as well as finding and destroying the objects harboring the shards of Voldemort's evil soul, the Horcruxes. Such philosophy does sound 'hokey' in description - and maybe is a bit. But the cast give it such a deep human interiority and Serra such a breadth of vision that the film is like watching a Grimm's fairy tale unfold - terrifying, romantic and sad. As is the silhouetted animation of the fable The Tales of Beetle the Bard where the Deathly Hallows symbol's origin is revealed. Definitely a film to see in IMAX cinemas.
Although not dying alone, Dobby's humble dignity, Harry Potter's characters' inner journey, and the film's almost Greek cathartic search reminded me of this poem about the town center of Sydney, Australia. The one in alone is always linked to the all of the many.
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
The word goes round Repins,
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis'
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:
There's a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can't stop him.
The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile
and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk
and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets
which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:
There's a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.
The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly—yet the dignity of his weeping
holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow.
Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
or force stood around him. There is no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us
trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.
Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit—
and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
as many as follow her also receive it
and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body
not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea—
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.
Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.
Les Murray-from The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969)
Made in Dagenham is one of those 'feel good' Brit films where human decency triumphs over social adversity- but not a John Sayles film or Rosie the Riveter this isn't. In 1968 the women of the Dagenham Ford Plant voted strike action demanding equal pay to their male counterparts. Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Secretary of State Barbara Castle (who until 2007 held the record for female MP with longest continuous service) had a register of of social achiements during her time in office that most men couldn't even shake a carrot at. And the granting of 92% to the Dagenham girls was just one of them culminating in her Equal Pay Act of 1970.
One of the many funny, quirky touches to director Nigel Cole's film is Rita (Sally Hawkins), somewhat oblivious to the hoards of press, discreetly comparing fashion notes with Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson) on their outfits as they emerge on the Whitehall steps after hashing out the pay deal over scotch and sherry upstairs. The film's theme song has lyrics by socialist singer/songwriter Billy Bragg and is sung by Sandie Shaw (a former Dagenham Ford worker).
Ahhh- BBC radio. While it's frustrating not to be legally allowed to see/hear much that is on the BBC iPlayer in the States, there's enough that is available (for weeks if not months) to keep one's brain alive. Midweek is as it suggests on a Wednesday and Nov. 3 had a great line-up of guests: Jane the astronomer who built a mini-observatory in her barn, Jo Wilding who wrote about running off in Iraq with the circus in Don't Shoot the Clowns.
Historian Amanda Foreman (of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire) has a new book out A World on Fire -about the 1000's of Brits who took part in the American Civil War - arguing that the Anglo-American special relationship was anything but! The textbooks hitherto were 'massaging' history yet again in to a slumber. Unless you were recipient of the Turkish bath pummeling from historian Simon Schama.
Peter Weller narrates Yony Leyser's documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within getting some great interviews just when you think the MAN has been done to death. Film director John Waters: "He violated the rules of even junkies worlds...and didn't respect any of the rules of the gay world [either]...he opened up to me not gay culture but gay rebels...a rap on the knuckles of poor, white, staid backyard America...he invented a style of book" never identifying with the media hype of the Beat Generation. Patti Smith (who Burroughs encouraged to sing in public): "William had a connection to anything and everything" his words developing as the Beat Shakespeare - blade runner, heavy metal, soft machine, steely dan.
Article in The Independent
Today's Special directed by David Kaplan casts Aasif Mandvi (of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) as the son desperately trying to revitalise his father's ailing Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens. A really hearteningly end of the week movie to sit back and enjoy. And not a whiff of Burroughs in the Queens night air;)
And what will non-Harry Potter fans make of the latest installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1?
Well, I confess to being one (a 'non' that is) though I also confess to having read the first book. And you do have to listen quite intently sometimes to grasp all the plot points. But then again, wouldn't it have disappointed fans if the film had 'signposted' everything and left them saying 'yeah, right get on with it'. What manifests itself in this penultimate installment (and what the franchise has always had going for it) is the art of wonder - perhaps giving the transitive verb 'wandering' a new sensibility with the importance of the noun 'wand' in Potter-dom.
Harry Potter has always been concerned with one's place in the world: where one's loyalties lie, 'the total eclipse of the heart', ways of seeing. And it's hard to imagine bursting into tears at the [is this where I say spoiler alert] death of a rather ugly CG elf Dobby (voice/movements by Toby Jones) but it really is incredibly moving. Am I sounding soppy girlie? Oh dear. Not so much the actual death itself perhaps, but everything that's lead up to this moment on the beach. Dobby's saved the trio (Harry,Hermione, Ron) from a tricky situation with Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham-Carter) and paid the mortal price gasping a final breath, but it is "a beautiful place...among friends" (actually Pembrokeshire, Wales).
It's the Leibniz monad theory of the many in one and the one in many that is so palpable in this film. Much of this seems due to the wonderful partnership of veteran HP director (last 3) David Yates and the world renowned cinematographer Eduardo Serra (Claude Chabrol's last 7 films, Girl with a Pearl Earing and many others). As the cast have said many times in interviews, their characters are for the first time in the big, bad world entirely away from the safety of Hogwarts. Serra exquisitely, painterly photographs nurturing symbiosis with them and the world. And one in which they must find themselves, find each other, as well as finding and destroying the objects harboring the shards of Voldemort's evil soul, the Horcruxes. Such philosophy does sound 'hokey' in description - and maybe is a bit. But the cast give it such a deep human interiority and Serra such a breadth of vision that the film is like watching a Grimm's fairy tale unfold - terrifying, romantic and sad. As is the silhouetted animation of the fable The Tales of Beetle the Bard where the Deathly Hallows symbol's origin is revealed. Definitely a film to see in IMAX cinemas.
Although not dying alone, Dobby's humble dignity, Harry Potter's characters' inner journey, and the film's almost Greek cathartic search reminded me of this poem about the town center of Sydney, Australia. The one in alone is always linked to the all of the many.
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
The word goes round Repins,
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis'
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:
There's a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can't stop him.
The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile
and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk
and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets
which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:
There's a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.
The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly—yet the dignity of his weeping
holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow.
Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
or force stood around him. There is no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us
trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.
Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit—
and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
as many as follow her also receive it
and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body
not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea—
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.
Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.
Les Murray-from The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969)
Monday, November 8, 2010
Screenings of Sharon Lockhart's Double Tide (54th BFI London Film Festival video HERE) Nov 11-17 at MoMA.
Video of a Q&A after the London world premiere of Wilhelm Sasnal's Fallout
Opening Nov 9 at the ISE Cultural Foundation is Another Roadside Attraction: An Exploration Into The Contemporary Art Genre Of The Neo Grotesque. Great 'ikky' poster.
And just opened at Scaramouche, Of many, one a show of 8 Brit artists on an Italo Calvino theme
Oooh - and tonight is An Evening with Josiah McElheny, Stephen Prina, and Lynne Tillman as part of MoMA's Modern Mondays. McElheny's film Island Universe using the chandeliers of the Met Opera auditorium is so fascinatingly simple it's almost sublime. (It showed at London's White Cube 2 years ago).
Now I shall stop toying with being a 'thoroughly modern Millie' and dream of my impoverished pixies creating all sorts of phantasmagoria on that great desert island of sleep.....
Video of a Q&A after the London world premiere of Wilhelm Sasnal's Fallout
Opening Nov 9 at the ISE Cultural Foundation is Another Roadside Attraction: An Exploration Into The Contemporary Art Genre Of The Neo Grotesque. Great 'ikky' poster.
And just opened at Scaramouche, Of many, one a show of 8 Brit artists on an Italo Calvino theme
Oooh - and tonight is An Evening with Josiah McElheny, Stephen Prina, and Lynne Tillman as part of MoMA's Modern Mondays. McElheny's film Island Universe using the chandeliers of the Met Opera auditorium is so fascinatingly simple it's almost sublime. (It showed at London's White Cube 2 years ago).
Now I shall stop toying with being a 'thoroughly modern Millie' and dream of my impoverished pixies creating all sorts of phantasmagoria on that great desert island of sleep.....
Saturday, November 6, 2010
VIVA: der werst blogger in the world :)
Methinks Viva is der werst blogger in the world;(
What she lacks in immediacy, though, she compensates her reader with content. I did have a very good excuse for not handing in my homework on time. Really!Ignominiously, on my NYC return, I tripped on the stairs to my apartment thence suitcase and all tumbled down to the next landing. Such was my vanity in wearing high heels when traveling! Even worse is that unless you've actually broken a leg and even seriously sprained something no one has much sympathy for you in New York City. So a hobbler I became for a few weeks.But the grin from my last blog was elicited by an all expenses paid trip back to London. Now, while some readers may surmise that Viva's become a belle de jour it's nothing of the sort (alas''';). But women must have secrets else they die of strangeness.
Just to make you all seethe with jealousy, Viva did cred attending the Raindance Festival Film (there's an NYC course Nov 15), got balls (and weary eyes) infiltrating the 54th BFI London Film Festival sassy'd down the aisles of the Frieze Art Fair ad much more. (See Cosmic Vivace for loads of photos etc)
Still running is The White Light Festival opening (NYT article with artistic director Jane Moss): as quoted by the New York Times, Jane Moss creator of the festival said in her opening remarks that what it is really about is to serve as “an antidote to the midterm elections...a focus on the personal interior spaces “where all music starts.”
Janet Cardiff’s sound installation Forty-Part Motet - based on English composer Thomas Tallis’s 1573 Spem in Alium (surround sounds - every 4o voice from the Salisbury Cathedral given a speaker- the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rehearsal and Recording Studio of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time Warner Building until Nov. 13) - arguably the best 'chill out' room in Manhattan.
Or make someone treat you (as I did - it won't cost you an arm and a leg) - and even if it did you'd be eternally soothed by the legend that is singer Jack Jones (NYT review) - only until Nov 13
For those who fear that the art of crooning and balladeering is vanishing, fear not that books are being devoured by pixels:
The Editions Artists' Book Fair founded in 1998 by Susan Inglett of I.C. Editions and Brooke Alexander Editions. Free admission.
Books as intellectual cultural status has Mickey Smith questioning in Believe You Me at Invisible-Exports NYC
At MoMA/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Printed Matter, Inc. presents The NY Art Book Fair take over all three floors (Nov 5–7) - 275 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, museums, galleries, and artists from twenty-four countries.
including the special exhibition You Are Her - a collection of over 1,000 Riot Grrl zines from the '90s for reading and photocopying. Loads of other great stuff. There's even a free bus (Sat Nov. 6 from 1–5) pootling among the Sculpture Center, Flux Factory, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Noguchi Museum.
Although it's probably grossly politically incorrect to compartmentalise male and female artists, on this site the woman go first;)
Joy Cuff discusses what it was like being the only woman working on the models for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
EXHIBITIONS CLOSING SOON:
Liz Cohen's Trabantimino is at Salon 94 Bowery (thru Nov. 11) (New York Times article) - a parallel universe to Marc Newson's Transport recently at Gagosian Chelsea
The paintings of Joy Garnett's Boom & Bust at Winkleman Gallery are sourced from photography of military events (thru Nov 13).
What with What at Thomas Erben Gallery is the first solo US show by British painter Rose Wylie (thru Nov 13)
ONGOING EXHIBITIONS:
Gladstone Gallery is showing the Early work of Marisa Merz (thru Nov.20) - a central figure and the only woman associated with the Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s and '70s.
Jo Ann Walters was hailed by William Eggleston as "one of the few independently original photographers working in color today.” These original color prints Vanity + Consolation (1985 plus) have never been exhibited in New York.
Australian video artist Tracey Moffatt's Montages (1999-2010) features in The Bronx Museum's tripartite show. The series of 7 videos explore tropes of cinema's motherhood, race, love.
Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 at the Brooklyn Museum (thru Jan 9) incl. Vija Celmins (whose recent show after many years absence was at McKee Gallery.
STUX Gallery is showing sculptures by Sokari Douglas Camp whose work, NO-O-WAR-R NO-O-WAR-R, was short-listed for London's Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth in 2003 and has a major public commission, All the World is Now Richer, for Burgess Park, London marking the bicentenary of the slave trade
abolition.
Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism continues at the Jewish Museum (thru Jan. 30)
MoMA's Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (thru Mrch 21)
New York Times obit of artist Sylvia Sleigh who died aged 94 NYT obit
At the Sputnik Gallery Moscow based artist Ekaterina Rozhkova's Veil of Happiness silkscreens and hand paints photos of traditional Chinese life onto Chinese patterned silk hopefully creating a dialectic between Western and Eastern representation.
Polish artist Monika Sosnowska is at Hauser & Wirth.
Luxembourg & Dayan usher back into our minds the ghosts of Jeff Koons' Made in Heaven Paintings (thru Jan. 21). Many, many critics including the NYT's Roberta Smith never wanted them around when they were alive ;): "Occupying some no woman’s land of female objectification, they are visual train wrecks."
Katrin Sigurdardottir continues at the Metropolitan Museum.
Still running is The White Light Festival opening (NYT article with artistic director Jane Moss): as quoted by the New York Times, Jane Moss creator of the festival said in her opening remarks that what it is really about is to serve as “an antidote to the midterm elections...a focus on the personal interior spaces “where all music starts.”
Janet Cardiff’s sound installation Forty-Part Motet - based on English composer Thomas Tallis’s 1573 Spem in Alium (surround sounds - every 4o voice from the Salisbury Cathedral given a speaker- the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rehearsal and Recording Studio of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time Warner Building until Nov. 13) - arguably the best 'chill out' room in Manhattan.
Or make someone treat you (as I did - it won't cost you an arm and a leg) - and even if it did you'd be eternally soothed by the legend that is singer Jack Jones (NYT review) - only until Nov 13
For those who fear that the art of crooning and balladeering is vanishing, fear not that books are being devoured by pixels:
The Editions Artists' Book Fair founded in 1998 by Susan Inglett of I.C. Editions and Brooke Alexander Editions. Free admission.
Books as intellectual cultural status has Mickey Smith questioning in Believe You Me at Invisible-Exports NYC
At MoMA/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Printed Matter, Inc. presents The NY Art Book Fair take over all three floors (Nov 5–7) - 275 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, museums, galleries, and artists from twenty-four countries.
including the special exhibition You Are Her - a collection of over 1,000 Riot Grrl zines from the '90s for reading and photocopying. Loads of other great stuff. There's even a free bus (Sat Nov. 6 from 1–5) pootling among the Sculpture Center, Flux Factory, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Noguchi Museum.
Although it's probably grossly politically incorrect to compartmentalise male and female artists, on this site the woman go first;)
Joy Cuff discusses what it was like being the only woman working on the models for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
EXHIBITIONS CLOSING SOON:
Liz Cohen's Trabantimino is at Salon 94 Bowery (thru Nov. 11) (New York Times article) - a parallel universe to Marc Newson's Transport recently at Gagosian Chelsea
The paintings of Joy Garnett's Boom & Bust at Winkleman Gallery are sourced from photography of military events (thru Nov 13).
What with What at Thomas Erben Gallery is the first solo US show by British painter Rose Wylie (thru Nov 13)
ONGOING EXHIBITIONS:
Gladstone Gallery is showing the Early work of Marisa Merz (thru Nov.20) - a central figure and the only woman associated with the Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s and '70s.
Jo Ann Walters was hailed by William Eggleston as "one of the few independently original photographers working in color today.” These original color prints Vanity + Consolation (1985 plus) have never been exhibited in New York.
Australian video artist Tracey Moffatt's Montages (1999-2010) features in The Bronx Museum's tripartite show. The series of 7 videos explore tropes of cinema's motherhood, race, love.
Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 at the Brooklyn Museum (thru Jan 9) incl. Vija Celmins (whose recent show after many years absence was at McKee Gallery.
STUX Gallery is showing sculptures by Sokari Douglas Camp whose work, NO-O-WAR-R NO-O-WAR-R, was short-listed for London's Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth in 2003 and has a major public commission, All the World is Now Richer, for Burgess Park, London marking the bicentenary of the slave trade
abolition.
Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism continues at the Jewish Museum (thru Jan. 30)
MoMA's Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (thru Mrch 21)
New York Times obit of artist Sylvia Sleigh who died aged 94 NYT obit
At the Sputnik Gallery Moscow based artist Ekaterina Rozhkova's Veil of Happiness silkscreens and hand paints photos of traditional Chinese life onto Chinese patterned silk hopefully creating a dialectic between Western and Eastern representation.
Polish artist Monika Sosnowska is at Hauser & Wirth.
Luxembourg & Dayan usher back into our minds the ghosts of Jeff Koons' Made in Heaven Paintings (thru Jan. 21). Many, many critics including the NYT's Roberta Smith never wanted them around when they were alive ;): "Occupying some no woman’s land of female objectification, they are visual train wrecks."
Katrin Sigurdardottir continues at the Metropolitan Museum.
the men come second...
And now for the boys...
Press conference for 127 Hours
(L-R) Christian Colson, Simon Beaufoy, James franco, Danny Boyle
Just opened in NYC (the UK Jan 7) is Danny Boyle's (Slumdog Millionaire) exhilarating latest film 127 Hours based on the true story and book of Aron Ralston whose hand was lodged against a boulder when he went exploring in one of the crevices of Utah's Blue John canyon. Video HERE of the press conference at the 54the BFI London Film Festival. You can see star of the film James Franco's foray into art, The Dangerous Book Four Boys, inhabiting the Clocktower Gallery, Art International Radio (thru Dec. 1).
Buddy/anti-buddy road movie Due Date teams the ever watchable Robert Downey Jr with Zack Galifianakis as they hack away at each other nerves while schlepping the road to LA. I can't be the only gal who, in her time, has briefly dated a guy fitting the description of Zack's character: lovable, loyal but infuriatingly nipping away at one's heels. Perhaps because he'd rather be wearing them;) Getting equal billing is his dog Sunny but as a whole the script lacks the rapid fire wit one was kinda hoping for from director Todd Phillips of The Hangover. There's a beguiling feminine side to Robert Downey lurking beneath, though. So not all your 96 minutes will be lost.
Just opened at The Kitchen is the U.S. premiere of Adam Pendleton’s new large scale video installation BAND - a reworking of Jean-Luc Godard's classic film Sympathy for the Devil about the Rolling Stones.
Director Anton Corbijn (Control), whose George Clooney pic The American was released in Sept shows B/W portraits of musicians, artists and icons ranging from Iggy Pop to Lucien Freud to Nelson Mandela at Stellan Holm Gallery.
Trace at bitforms gallery is the first solo NYC show of Spanish artist Daniel Canogar. Dial M for Murder is a network of tape crisscrossing the gallery and ripped from a VHS copy of Alfred Hitchcock's film. A video animation is precisely aimed at these radiating geometries and appears to constantly pump like blood along the tape, much as the head in the VCR would have done.
Exhibitions closing soon:
William Lamson's A Line Describing the Sun at The Boiler uses a mirror and Fresnel lens to burn an arcing, 366-foot line in the dried, cracked desert surface -dawn to dusk. The lens focuses the sun into a 1,600-degree point of light, which melts the dirt into bluish black glass. (thru Nov. 14)
At Sperone Westwater's new 8-storey Bowery premises designed Foster + Partners Guillermo Kuitca: Paintings 2008-2010 and Le Sacre 1992 (thru Nov 6)
Gerhard Richter's Lines Which Do Not Exist (thru Nov. 18) at the Drawing Center.
Ongoing exhibitions:
The New Museum's latest exhibition, Free (thru Jan 23), is curated by Lauren Cornell, executive director of Rhizome. Also showing is The Last Newspaper (thru January 9)
Alternative Histories at Exit Art (thru Nov 24) covers over 50 years and 130 spaces that promote(d) nonconformist artists and viewpoints.
Tony Oursler's Peak (thru Dec 5) at Lehmann Maupin (Chrystie St) is apparently the counterpoint to Valley, Oursler’s inaugural show at the Adobe Museum of Digital Media (showing online).
Simon Patterson (he of the The Great Bear of 1992- a reworking of the famous London Underground map) has his first solo NYC show since 1993.
Kevin Bourgeois' SYStm at Causey Contemporary
New show at Storefront
William Villalongo is at Susan Inglett
And anyone for Erwin Wurm's installation Selbstporträt als Gurken with painted pickles as the title suggests? (Jack Hanley Gallery)
MoMA's Abstract Expressionist New York: Ideas Not Theories (thru Feb. 28) including the great New Zealand animation forerunner Len Lye and architectural projects by Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemeyer. In Expressionist New York: Rock Paper Scissors (thru Feb. 28) 10 sculptors show alongside their work on paper including English artist Stanley William Hayter who should be better known in the States. Also at MoMA is Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement (thru Jan 3).
At James Cohan Gallery Distillation (thru Dec 11) by Roxy Paine (he of last summer's tree atop the Met Museum roof) shows his series of 22 Dendroids interweaving industrial pipes "a meditation on seeking purity, the pure essence of something, but at the same time the piece is very impure.” “I’m skeptical about the potential for horrible consequences, consistently realized,” he said. “But at the same time we are able to feed six billion people through science and altering nature. That’s kind of a miracle.” “I’m envisioning a kind of battlefield with these elements, which in nature would be vying for the same food source.” (quotes from the New York Times)
James Cohan artist (podcast on site) Fred Tomaselli - founding settler Williamsburg-ite is at Brooklyn Museum (thru Jan 2): perhaps Damien Hirst in a parallel universe for those who don't like DH. Hirst just lost out to the Serpentine Gallery in his bid for a new gallery space in Kensington Gardens.
For a full day, start at the new show at Laurence Miller.
Onwards to John Baldessari: Pure Beauty the show from Tate Modern is at the Metropolitan Museum (thru Jan 9). On the way of 5th Ave, stop at Central Park plaza for Ryan Gander's statue The Happy Prince.
Boetti now inhabits Marianne Boesky's wonderfully atmospheric upper East townhouse.
Knoedler's new show along the way- also check out Matt Magee in their Project space.
(thru Nov 13).
The Whitney's Paul Thek:Diver, a Retrospective (thru Jan 9) may well need another day to take everything in.
Back in Chelsea, Luc Tuymans' Corporate at David Zwirner
Matthew Buckingham at Murray Guy (thru Dec 23)
and Lombard-Fried have just opened at their new location.
The Raindance Film Festival 2010
The 18th Raindance Film Festival soldiered on last week through the UK economic downturn still looking pretty healthy. No off-site Raindance cafe this year, but passholders had free access to the members only Phoenix Artist Club and the very civilised surroundings of the Apollo continued for another year to give the festival its well-deserved kudos rather than lesser salubrious alternatives.
VIVA's VIDEO of the festival Q&A's:
Huge (in 3 parts)
The folks from All I Ever Wanted: The Airborne Toxic Event Live from Walt Disney Concert Hall gigged at the opening night party and the film (shot on 8 DSLR's and one digi master cam) proved great fun in classical maestro Gustavo Dudamel spirit. If only there was an Anna Bulbrook with her viola and tambourine on every street corner the world would be so much nicer a place to live and love. The DVD is available through their website.
Legacy the following evening with Idris Elba as a black ops soldier impressed with strong visuals and performances though not always engaging to the end.
Ben Miller's Brit comedy Huge (UK distribution through Luc Roeg's company Independent) could so easily have slipped into TV sitcom turned wannabe cinema but never did and proved that Noel Clarke and Johnny Harris can act more than just mean and menacing.
Ian Vernon's 'youths hot footing on the Northern moors having stumbled on loadsa drug money' Rebels without a Clue also impressed through it's sure direction and performances. So too was the theatrical version of a BBC 3-parter aired earlier in the year Five Daughters based on the 2006 Ipswich prostitute serial murders with '5-star' performances from all the actresses.
Too Much Pussy: Feminist Sluts in the Queer X Show was Emilie Jouvet's very sensitive, totally non-exploitative doco these 7 female performers trouping round Europe. Though often sexually explicit all the gals emerged with enormous dignity and courage as they voiced both their guilty pleasures and feminist concerns.
Vampires was a definite hit working on so many levels - a 'social realist' vampiric Belgian colonialist fangy jabby comedy.
Armless proved a flawed but interesting debut (based on a stage play).
I Believe in Angels was a conventional but quite touching love story of a Croatian postman - beautifully acted and photographed.
The festival opened with fun, English frivoulous animation Jackboots on Whitehall (released by Vertigo in the UK)
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
so long, dream well....
So what London experiences will linger in Viva's addled brain: what music will be bourne long after it's been heard no more, to paraphrase Mr. Wordsworth? In many ways the "detail of life" that Henry James wrote of a century ago is still ever present. London may be simulating New York in cosmopolitan and commercial attire but if one veers off the main thoroughfares it really is a different city all together. There's a quiet strangeness even in broad daylight. Perambulating along the Thames just is nothing like a jog along the Hudson or the Tribeca promenade- to state perhaps the very obvious. The air is now devoid of last century's coal smoke but remains mellifluous with Turner's brushstrokes. The juxtapositioning of Tate Modern's turbine hall opposite St. Paul's is rarely if at all equalled elsewhere in the world. But street-markets such as Brick Lane are essentially not that different from downtown New York on a weekend.
Nor are the bars and cafes, except you'll probably get a more decent glass of house red or Chardonnay for $5 than the Brit pound equivalent. And everything is so horribly expensive! Unless, of course, you're an Arab prince buying up real estate. You wouldn't think for a moment there's a financial slowdown with all the London folks swirling out of the pubs onto the pavements outside. Not something allowed in NYC - unless its the Chelsea gallery district with few passers-by. Quite how do they all fit inside those tiny watering holes when winter blows?
Still nursing my 'Viva flu' and sipping more of my friend's 20 year old malt, Viva listened on BBC Radio 3 to Proms pianist Paul Lewis devilishly dexterously, delightfully sail through Beethoven's Emperor piano concerto. It seemed spontaneous and almost impressionist as if if one were boating the notes down a quiet, sunny stream. The classical point of departure and return so obvious yet all those little eddies taking us someone entirely different. A few Proms (62) before, conductor Herbert Blomstedt with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (all under 26) weaved through every reef of Bruckner's unfinished 9th Symphony - a work when badly played may seem to suddenly drop dead of a heart attack at any moment. Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil (Prom 65) melded Mahler's First Symphony roar and glisten as if it really were the very first Rolls Royce out of the Mahlerian 'worldwerk' while on Saturday (Prom 66) proving they could equally needle the microscopic thread of Webern and Berg. And at very short notice Gil Shaham stepped in for Berg's Violin Concerto - a deeply dark threnody on the death of Manon Gropius with the Minnesota Orchestra inspired by great futures under Osmo Vänskä.
All this talk of the Proms isn't only because it's such an extraordinary music event but supping my malt (missing all the gaiety of the Notting Hill Carnival) and reveling in Prom 58, I mused that one could be quiet happy in London in the warmth and privacy of one's castle in a way (albeit eine kleine) something quiet improbable if not impossible in New York. Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducted the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra - a very different world to"aclimatise" as he described, and a very particular "local dialect of sonorities", he said, when they're reminded not to sound like an international orchestra. Martinů's Fantaisies symphoniques (Symphony No.6) (1953), composed for the 75th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was full of this surging inner and outer search of experience (the composer having relocated to NYC to escape the war). In his case literally because he fell of a balcony severely injuring his head. Eliot Gardiner noted how you could practically hear the tinnitus ringing in the almost microtonal sections of the symphony. Many parts sound like an Aaron Copland hoe down sunset on the wild open plains then splintered by alien abduction. A very different sound world to Leonard Bernstein's at the time (the only Martinů symphony not to use piano) but sharing that composer's ultimate optimism. There's even a hint of the Beethoven 9th's Adagio slow movement in Martinů's final movement (a nice parallel to the Eroica taste in Dvorak's 8th). He was thrown out of the Prague Conservatoire for being too individual. So that most certainly gives us all hope.
Oftentimes, Grieg's famous Piano Concerto (1868) is underrated as just one of classical music's 'warhorses' but Eliot Gardiner and soloist Lars Vogt resurrected every morsel of youthful excitement and vigor in the 24 year-old's composition. Again, more surging, struggling, grappling between major and minor keys - the initially jejune captain, now calm and prosperous after the long voyage proudly helming his great ocean liner as it sweept into harbor. It was to be Grieg's last large scale orchestral work. We even got Chopin's C sharp minor Nocturne as an encore!
Dvořák's Symphony No.8 was the last he wrote before arriving in NYC and nicknamed his English symphony given the composer's Brit connections (he received a Cambridge University doctorate). The work was to be premiered on a tour of Russia with Tchaikovsky but Prague was blessed instead. Oftentimes exquisite as if Verdi had laid his head down upon the grass to dream (end 1st movt), the clarinets seemed hewn from the forest trees and one wished we'd gone on all night without end. The brass in the finale can sometimes be mistaken as joyfully raucous but with Eliot Gardiner and the Czech Phil it was more the gentle end of a fairy tale - as if a tiny carpet of wildflowers had transported one home. And no my feelings weren't simply due to the malt I'd supped! There was even an encore of the Slavonic Dance No.1 and some Janáček!! I don't think I've been so blissfully surprised in a concert in quite some time, such a wonderfully thought through programme was this journey.
Eliot Gardiner conducts on Friday what has been more his early music trademark and passion over the years the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610.
Not having been allowed any guilt over my magic carpet Prom, Radio 3 followed with the more sobering Sunday Feature (The Art of Noises) exploring Italian avant-gardist Luigi Russolo- a 7 bar fragment is all that's extant of his compositions. Debuting in 1914, Stravinsky and Prokofiev attended a performance at Marinetti's house the next year. Apparantly Diaghilev's audible response was like that of a startled quail.
All tickets to see Jimi Hendrix's Mayfair duplex are now gone (Sept 15-26 - normally now used by the Handel House Museum staff as offices) in celebration or rather in memorium of his death 40 years ago. But access to the downstairs exhibition in Brook Street's Georgian town house is still available - many of the objects originating from a Seattle museum.
But now, Viva must fly, try and avoid the voracious eagles and return on wings of song to her tiny cube in Mondrian's Manhattan. But she's grinning from ear to ear. Stay tuned to find out why....
be in water writ
Performing the duties of a foreign correspondent methinks is not Viva's forte. More a collator of city experiences, leaving them all spread out on a work bench to air and dry and returning to them later. Or is that too much like Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape in which the older man (though could easily be a woman) scoffs derisorily as he listens to his recorded thoughts eons earlier? (Michael Gambon hits the West End with a production from Dublin's Gate Theatre). If you've never seen the San Quentin 'lifer' prisoners do Beckett then you should.
Remember when joking last post of avoiding a marriage like the Duchess of Devonshire? Well, the umpteenth Duke is having an Attic Sale at Chatsworth (Sothebys, Oct) with loads of all the original fixtures and fittings - all catalogued (by size) and preserved. The original Devonshire House is now Green Park tube station and instead of the once dry cellar floors you tip toe into the ticket hall for fear on a rainy day of slipping head first past the plastic warning cones.
And perhaps my life has been a sheltered one and animals avoid me like the runt of the litter. Yet never in all my days of sitting in Central Park has a squirrel, as one did under a quiet tree in Green Park, come so close it practically ate the few crumbs left in my hand. NYC squirrels, however, scrutinise you as if being offered swamp land for breakfast. nIf I hadn't caught 'Viva flu' and snuffled through the Bank Holiday weekend at home watching the buckets of rain alternate with the blazing sunshine, investigations would have been made into the 3-day Carribean inspired Notting Hill Carnival.
Just read that there's been a TV reality show on Channel Four (the station that hosted Big Brother) shot on location around Notting Hill streets. Lordy, lordy. While one-half of London scoffs at the 'celebrification' disease, the other half (or is the other three quarters) hungers for it: Seven Days will air Sept 22. Viva will no doubt attempt to watch 'TiVos' of Bravo's Work of Art reality show. Brit TV had something similar a while ago on the 'Saatchi" Beeb but with celebrity art mentors. Will it all never end? Viva will just have to show them all how it's really done.
Wander up through nearby Campden Hill where many a now famous and many dead creatives live eg Harold Pinter, Richard Branson, Hanif Kureshi and into Holland Park and through the serene Japanese garden. Will the Notting Hill TV show encourage those gorgeous peacocks roaming the park into celebrity as well? Now David Attenborough doing animal reality TV - for that's worth cancelling a human date. I didn't make it to any of the operas staged in the open air theater there (they even had a pay what you can night for one opera! and several theaters seem to do that too). Organic, make-shift theaters are also popping up such as The Oikos Project in Southwark on the South Bank. And though there aren't a lot of free summer movies in London alternatives are springing forth all the time: cineroleum, secretcinema, the deptford project, openaircinemas.
America is quick off the mark to withdraw its favours if you err in the public eye, but Britain seems to delight in raising you on high only to knock you down at the first available opportunity. (More allegations that former News of the World tabloid honcho Andy Coulson- the Conservatives new Director of Communications- was fully aware of his newspaper journos tapping phones of those in the public eye). One dating site declared recently that the English are far more open in discussing money than their American counterparts. Well, methinks that's true only in so far as they either pretend to have or pretend not to want those shekels when they clearly crave them (probably why their economy is in such a mess: why should the Americans always take the blame for everything?). Sometimes it's a cross between the guy mistakenly fawned upon at the restaurant as the Inspector General in Gogol's play, and the embarrassed Hugh Grant at the dinner party in Notting Hill when he innocently asks Julia Roberts (the unbeknownst movie star) how much she earned thus turning bright red at her reply.
Musing back to the old Duke and his chattels, an apparent Brit irony (all the more so under a Conservative coalition government) is that the upper classes (though their stately piles are crumbling while plumbers constantly investigate the cash flow) are the ones most at ease with money - and are often the most honest. For want of a better word 'socialist' i.e. maintaining a balanced society if not exactly an unattainable 'fair' one. We've all read about crazy aristocratic offspring but they're no different to the errant New York ones. And before everyone starts deserting me in droves for sprouting such seeming nonsense, all and sundry would be urged to see the restored version (this year's Cannes Film Fest and Vanity Fair party) of Luchino Visconti's film The Leopard (1963). "The middle-classes don't want to destroy us, they want to take our place," says the Sicilian prince (Burt Lancaster) whose son (with his blessing) - the delicious Alain Delon - has joined Garibaldi's revolutionary forces of Italian unification last century. French existentialist Albert Camus in Myth of Sisyphus wrote that absurd men are like princes only "they have this advantage over others: they know all royalties are illusory."
What is so enrapturing about Visconti's film is that one is shown the minutai of nature vs capital. There's a wry scene where everyone, noble and not, arrive at the church - their faces and clothes powdered with dust blown up by the wind. The director used Technirama whereby the negative was filmed 'on its side' horizontally using an 8-perforation frame and then squeezed down to the size of CinemaScope allowing the film to capture incredible detail. Of course, in every decade there are the wealthy and the obsequious hangers-on who wouldn't know 'reality' if it hit them between their zonked eyeballs. Visconti shows them too in all their cloying, clotted glory.
Little known outside America, artist Alice Neel (1900-1984: great show last year at David Zwirner) is receiving an East End retrospective Painted Truths (60 paintings) at the Whitechapel Gallery. Her early life was a tumultuous unhappy one, finally driven to a suicide attempt when left by her husband who also took their 2 year-old daughter. She inevitably became left-wing and a Communist sympathiser. After viewing the gallery work, it really is worthwhile sitting through the entire 90 minutes of her grandson Andrew's documentary and then taking another look at the canvases. Her so-called realism was way out of fashion with 40s and 50s abstraction. And though the more realist (for want of a better word) and spontaneous portraits she painted when living in Spanish Harlem (1938-62) are marvellous, it's the more abstract ones either side those dates that are truly breathtaking: still 'realist' but almost sculptural in her use of color or as one admirer observed "she has to be an open nerve to make those paintings". Pregnant women and children lay bare their souls through their naked bodies; Andy Warhol literally showing saggy bullet scars from his assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas. Yet there's never a feeling of voyeurism simply a peace and tranquility. Perhaps something she herself could only ever truly find in her art rather than the politics of life.
Last few weeks after which the show will tour to Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (10 October 2010 - 2 January 2011).
Just opened at the National Portrait Gallery, Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life (Baudelaire's bon mot as subtitle) is the extraordinary previously unsung work of this mid C19th French diplomat and amateur photographer turned professional. In so many ways Silvy prefigures modern photo techniques. Jeff Wall's choreographed scenes spring to mind or indeed Helen Levitt (though her photos of New York streets are 'real' and were'nt posed as are Wall's) they nonetheless manipulated social realism in her mind's eye. What were drawbacks for other photographers using the low light sensitivity of the wet collodion process proved a virtue to Silvy allowing him to experiment in manipulating images. Four different negatives were used to create Studies on Light: Twilight (1859) or as Henry James put it "the thick detail of London life". Working out of his Bayswater studio between 1859-67, Silvy funded his fascination for the light effects of London's streets by becoming one the the city's most sought after portrait carte de visite snappers - painting and photographing actors, royalty and costumed parties. Bearing in mind the furore over Annie Leibovitz's photo of Miley Cyrus or Richard Prince's 'Brooke Shields', the naked torso of Mrs.Holford's Daughter (1860) proves another interesting Silvy modern parallel.
For Silvy never stopped experimenting. The last gallery room of the exhibition's modest four (curated by Mark Haworth-Booth, formerly of the V&A- panel discussion Sept 16) shows him archiving manuscripts: as the paper photo negative recorded yellow as black, the faded yellowing print therefore appeared legibly as black, anticipating the modern use of filters and color correction. He also proposed a soldiers' clip-on continuos cartridge roll to record panoramic views of the battlefield. He went on to fight in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 before being diagnosed with folie raisonnante (manic-depression) aged only 41 and spent the last 30 years of his life in an insane asylum. A terribly sad end for such a great innovator.
Sally Mann's always fascinating investigations into older photo techniques continues at the Photographer's Gallery and the show includes the rotting corpses from the University of Tennessee forensic Anthropology Center. Worth squeezing into the tiny viewing room to watch the documentary on her life.
Darren Almond's (his nocturnal Buddhist monk walk was recently at Matthew Marks Gallery) latest multi screen video installation Anthropocene: The Prelude proves to be a good 'chill out room' . He's very cleverly manipulated video of cracking ice and a wintry railway line to immerse the viewer in another world. Another great free show is Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries at the National Gallery. For an art historian it may all be second nature but to the uninitiated one leaves the exhibition seriously pondering the iconic nature of art and its presentation. How far does it matter whether Rembrandt actually painted a particular work himself as opposed to a very talented pupil from his studio? If a fake elicits the same emotions in the viewer as the original is art therefore always somewhat polarized between commodity and appreciation.
For those in a more pro-active Leftish vein, the Russian collective Chto delat? (What is to be done?) pervade the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) for the next 2 months - appropriate as the venue is losing its director and cutting costs left, right and center. And the new version that premiered at the Berlin Film Fest and at this year's LA TCM Classic Film Festival of Fritz Lang's classic 1927 silent Metropolis (96 extra fragments) opens on Sept 10 at the ICA. Bit of interesting trivia (though not of course to network TV execs ;) that the film's cinematographer Karl Freund developed what became known as the 3-camera method for shooting TV shows initially with Lucille Ball's I Love Lucy.
Meanwhile in New York:
Last week of Jennifer Dalton's Making Sense including her by now infamous graph of art critic Jerry Saltz’s Facebook friends.
And in Union Square Park, filmmaker and everything else creative Miranda July shows her 2009 Venice Biennale Eleven Heavy Things. Check out the full article on public sculpture art (didn't Viva pitch that idea?...only jesting ;) sort of...) in the the New York Times (Pondering Sculpture Under the Trees) that includes Stephen Vitiello's bell sound sculpture A Bell for Every Minute. Just missed (methinks) Leslie Thornton’s (of the groovy snake scales trailer for Anthology's Migrating Forms 2010 fest) Peggy and Fred in Hell still haunts at MoMA PS1's Greater New York show.
The Barbara Hammer retrospective opens at MoMA midtown Sept 15 with the world premiere of her new film Generations (2010)- she'll be present for audience discussions. And the techie minded can now access the museum’s offerings through iPhone and iPad touch.
Friday, August 6, 2010
La blessure secrète (the secret wound)
Oh dear, does Viva feel somewhat guilty about not having posted anything recently? Distant reports are always so nice to salivate over. Is it being too sentimental to remember that there was something so very special in receiving postcards - as if the beach sand was ever clinging to the card, lavender embedding itself from Arles. Can anyone hear the little voice amid the post-reportage roar of the Chelsea Clinton wedding? But in the words of Tom Cruise's mindless but fun caper Knight and Day, everyone was sure to be 'safe' and 'secure'. Wouldn't one have loved to be a mosquito on the pool to make the fly on the wall jealous;) But enough. Enough. And what wedding present do you buy a Clinton for Wedgewood's sake! Now that's a test of originality over protocol. The democrats are the ones in power for F*'s (Freedom*'s) sake! It's not as if Chelsea will sashay into a shoe store and be refused a sample, now is it?
Perhaps my lack of London newswire is a bit like getting a part in a play, a film or a new job but for various reasons it just didn't happen or work out. And though you're telling the truth, it's rather embarrassing to have to admit to it (through no fault of one's own) - particularly from a New York perspective where things either happen or they don't and in-betweeners are sticky issues. Let's just say that Viva's possibly the most untypical New Yorker ever to set eyes upon London. No gush, no goo, no ahhhh's. In New York things get done (or at least fixed - or at least for no other reason than someone will sue). In London they sort of do and most definitely sorta don't. Yes, yes we've all had the NYC building 'supers' who seemingly concoct excuse after excuse for not having repaired something - (In fact my NYC apartment sub-letter Raymond {that's with second syllable accent and an invisible, silent 'e' appendage}: managed to get some of my minor repairs done- even though he was forbade contact with any human life-form in the block.) But if that's what a silent 'e' achieves long may it sigheeeee....
And we all know that the subways are crap on weekends- just when all the possible 'resistance' of law suiters are away in their upstate Hampton hideaways. But compared to the London Underground, the subway seems if not heaven then certainly a most attractive alternative hell: one always feels room service will arrive even if it's served on a very cold plate.
Complain about the sweltering NYC summer whatyouwill but without air-con, temperatures are stifling (even on the buses) in the London summer. Journalists in the past have measured this and apparently the conditions (on tubes) wouldn't even comply with EU (European Union) criteria to transport live cattle. But the first air-con train has just arrived! Like the Paris Metro, compared to the subway, the 'Tubes' are remarkably clean - except for many who often just willfully leave their rubbish for fellow passengers to wallow in. As for cabs (taxis) one might as well commute from Trenton, New Jersey as regularly pay return cab fare across London. But there are so many Russian billionaires here now who really cares about the rest of us and our little journeys?
Well, Mayor Boris Johnson (Conservative) sort of does. Or thinks he does. Everyone thought of him as an Etonian buffoon before assuming office, as compared to the adroit socialist 'Red' Ken Livingstone. But he's surprised pretty much everybody. Including 'Ken'. In the last few days 'Boris' bikes (sponsored by Barclays Bank to the tune of some 25 million pounds, hmmm) hit the streets. He quipped that it took a Conservative to enact a Communist policy. Not being a cyclist myself, investigative reportage in such matters isn't a forte, but the bikes seem a brave, positive move when most other urban transport suggestions seemed doomed. Crossrail in 20?? is keenly awaited. BBC Four TV recently devoted a season to the bicycle.
A harrowing half-hour documentary every city dweller should see is One Under (available on demand from Channel Four). The title means 'tube' staff colloquial for suicides onto the underground tracks. Is it any different to the NYC subway? Well in essence perhaps not. Cities are cities and people, sadly, are people. Oh Mensch as Gustav Mahler said or rather Nietzsche. (Interesting to compare with doco The Bridge). But it would take several book chapters to elucidate my thoughts on Londoners. London is a fantastic place to visit but would one want to live here? Australian singer/songwriter (and Brit resident) Nick Cave once said that at least you can be miserable in England and for it not to be stigmatized (as it is in 'happy' down-under) - or indeed as we know in pill-popping America. (Remember watching the Tony Awards broadcast ( Next to Normal year) with all that joyous singing followed in every commercial break by all those drug ads and their stringent warnings that what you're taking my have cataclysmic side-effects)!
There is a above-all a sadness about London, though, garnered equally from my artistic knowledge of England - (...now don't get me wrong it's a fun, bustling, cosmopolitan joint). Many American composers have wide open intervals in their music e.g. Aaron Copland or those jarring, jagged or distilled minimalist rhythms yet compare this to the dying fall of English composers e.g. Vaughan-Williams, Finzi, Britten. But methinks you'll just have to wait for the Viva book :) as it's all far too complicated for a few paragraphs.
Perhaps my lack of London newswire is a bit like getting a part in a play, a film or a new job but for various reasons it just didn't happen or work out. And though you're telling the truth, it's rather embarrassing to have to admit to it (through no fault of one's own) - particularly from a New York perspective where things either happen or they don't and in-betweeners are sticky issues. Let's just say that Viva's possibly the most untypical New Yorker ever to set eyes upon London. No gush, no goo, no ahhhh's. In New York things get done (or at least fixed - or at least for no other reason than someone will sue). In London they sort of do and most definitely sorta don't. Yes, yes we've all had the NYC building 'supers' who seemingly concoct excuse after excuse for not having repaired something - (In fact my NYC apartment sub-letter Raymond {that's with second syllable accent and an invisible, silent 'e' appendage}: managed to get some of my minor repairs done- even though he was forbade contact with any human life-form in the block.) But if that's what a silent 'e' achieves long may it sigheeeee....
And we all know that the subways are crap on weekends- just when all the possible 'resistance' of law suiters are away in their upstate Hampton hideaways. But compared to the London Underground, the subway seems if not heaven then certainly a most attractive alternative hell: one always feels room service will arrive even if it's served on a very cold plate.
Complain about the sweltering NYC summer whatyouwill but without air-con, temperatures are stifling (even on the buses) in the London summer. Journalists in the past have measured this and apparently the conditions (on tubes) wouldn't even comply with EU (European Union) criteria to transport live cattle. But the first air-con train has just arrived! Like the Paris Metro, compared to the subway, the 'Tubes' are remarkably clean - except for many who often just willfully leave their rubbish for fellow passengers to wallow in. As for cabs (taxis) one might as well commute from Trenton, New Jersey as regularly pay return cab fare across London. But there are so many Russian billionaires here now who really cares about the rest of us and our little journeys?
Well, Mayor Boris Johnson (Conservative) sort of does. Or thinks he does. Everyone thought of him as an Etonian buffoon before assuming office, as compared to the adroit socialist 'Red' Ken Livingstone. But he's surprised pretty much everybody. Including 'Ken'. In the last few days 'Boris' bikes (sponsored by Barclays Bank to the tune of some 25 million pounds, hmmm) hit the streets. He quipped that it took a Conservative to enact a Communist policy. Not being a cyclist myself, investigative reportage in such matters isn't a forte, but the bikes seem a brave, positive move when most other urban transport suggestions seemed doomed. Crossrail in 20?? is keenly awaited. BBC Four TV recently devoted a season to the bicycle.
A harrowing half-hour documentary every city dweller should see is One Under (available on demand from Channel Four). The title means 'tube' staff colloquial for suicides onto the underground tracks. Is it any different to the NYC subway? Well in essence perhaps not. Cities are cities and people, sadly, are people. Oh Mensch as Gustav Mahler said or rather Nietzsche. (Interesting to compare with doco The Bridge). But it would take several book chapters to elucidate my thoughts on Londoners. London is a fantastic place to visit but would one want to live here? Australian singer/songwriter (and Brit resident) Nick Cave once said that at least you can be miserable in England and for it not to be stigmatized (as it is in 'happy' down-under) - or indeed as we know in pill-popping America. (Remember watching the Tony Awards broadcast ( Next to Normal year) with all that joyous singing followed in every commercial break by all those drug ads and their stringent warnings that what you're taking my have cataclysmic side-effects)!
There is a above-all a sadness about London, though, garnered equally from my artistic knowledge of England - (...now don't get me wrong it's a fun, bustling, cosmopolitan joint). Many American composers have wide open intervals in their music e.g. Aaron Copland or those jarring, jagged or distilled minimalist rhythms yet compare this to the dying fall of English composers e.g. Vaughan-Williams, Finzi, Britten. But methinks you'll just have to wait for the Viva book :) as it's all far too complicated for a few paragraphs.
BBC Four is also broadcasting many of the BBC Proms from the Royal Albert Hall. The Proms are a Brit institution where die-hard 'promenaders' queue for hours to stand in the downstairs arena - the front rows often shouting clever remarks in unison at interval (and info about their charity collection) to those in the gallery up in the gods. Viva dutifully queued but wasn't able to get into Mahler's massive 8th Symphony of massed choirs on the First Night (it's the composer's 150th birthday). Instead you can see some great jazz improv footage the same evening (HERE in 3 parts- ONE, TWO, THREE) from the Victoria and Albert Museum (the V & A-another amazing free entrance museum).
More photos HERE of the 1:1 Small Spaces
Conductor Donald Runnicles, now of the BBC Scottish Symphony (after years of this Edinburgh native having to defect and prove his talent overseas) showed what a loss he was to America and blessing for Scotland in Mahler's 3rd Symphony. This has arguably music's most soul-searching final movements as those who are blessed to see stand proudly, dignified: cascading tears hidden within hearts.
The week prior, former English National Opera maestro Sir Mark Elder conducted the Australian Youth Orchestra claiming he'd be only to happy to hire at least 95% of the soloists to play in the Halle Orch. While someone like Valery Gergiev (he conducted the World Peace Orch last night in more Mahler birthday celebrations) may have demanded a touch more frost bite in Shostakovich's 10th Symphony from these sunny dispositioned Ozzie players (aged between 16-25), theirs was undeniably a world-class performance by any standards, cherishing and brandishing every note of Shostakovich's searing writing for clarinets and bassoons, the siren screeching piccoli, all in Tchaikovsky orchestrating lineage (with acknowledged debt to Mahler). Plaintive, robust and reborn. The AYO opened with Oz composer Brett Dean proceeded by more than marvelous mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova (touring with the orchestra) in excerpts from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn:
An angel appeared and tried to turn me aside
Oh no! I would not let that happen
I come from God and will return to God
Beloved God will grant me light
he shall light my way to the life of eternal blessedness
And the encore of Percy Grainger's arrangement of the Londonderry Air (Danny Boy) reduced this music-lover to tears.
Proms performances are available to watch on BBC iPlayer (though not 'officially' available to those in the United States)
Another unmissable performance was tenor Placido Domingo singing the baritone role of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra (in a semi-staged performance of the recent Royal Opera House Covent Garden production). The curtain calls can be seen HERE and hopefully a DVD will be made of the BBC 2 broadcast from the Royal Opera House. Once or twice, some may have preferred Antonio Pappano's conducting to be a touch more vehement but that would really only be personal taste and his interpretation easily will withstand the annals of history. And though some might have tiny qualms about the tenore of Domingo's baritone, in a way it mimics the longing for calm sea and prosperous voyage of Verdi's score most obviously heard in Amelia's famous aria. Boccanegra the pirate who become the people's democratic Doge and probably in his darkest moments stared out of the Palace window consoled by those specs of white sails on the sea always chastened by the scent of his past while the sewage wafted ripe from the harbor docks. Domingo is now 70 years old. What an achievement to behold.
And if all that wasn't enough there was an 80th birthday tribute to acknowledged musicals genius Stephen Sondheim. An unforgettable Sweeney Todd from opera singer Bryn Terfel (he even cajouled to join the dance in Everybody Ought to have a Maid), and an equally unforgettable rendition of Send in the Clowns from doyenne Dame Judi Dench.
Catching the final performance of Eugene O'Neill's first published full-length Pulitzer Prize (the 1st of many) winning play Beyond the Horizon (1920) was well worth it. Directed by Laurie Sansom (transferring from the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton), it played in repertory at the Royal National Theatre's smaller Cottesloe space with Tennessee Williams' Spring Storm (1937). On a Connecticut family farm, the educated, bookish Robert (Michael Malarkey) looks out into the distant hills dreaming of travel and escape.
The conductor Donald Runnicles recounted the story of a meeting between Richard Strauss and Mahler after composing the 3rd Symphony. They went hiking together in the mountains. Mahler stopped and said, "You don't need to look at those mountains, I've composed it." It's the more gregarious brother Andy (Michael Thomson) who goes to sea in Eugene O'Neill's play. There's a naive, haunting, simple universality about this post WWI play. If one compares it to what was blazing concurrently in Russian avant-garde theater then it seems pale. But compared to the American and British theater of the time it's as if Ibsen's characters have been stripped bare of their ostentatious socio/political utterances revealing only the burning desires beneath-Maeterlinck crossed with Strindberg. In all honesty actress Liz White probably made a better Heavenly Critchfield (a precursor to Blanche Dubois) in the Tennessee Williams than revealing the raw nerves of Ruth in Beyond the Horizon, a girl caught between two loves. But to think that this was a regional theater production gives credence to the oft spoke idea that Britain has the greatest pool of actors in the world.
Outside the RNT free events have been taking place the last month or so- some video HERE of the Gandinis juggling show Smashed. And on BBC News 24's Meet the Author, former escort girl Catherine Arnold reveals some of fascinating facts in her latest book and what happened in centuries gone by on the Southbank i.e. that the Bishop of Westminster was essentially a pimp with his "geese".
Unlike NYC, most outdoor summer film events in London have a somewhat hefty ticket price. Instead of the winter ice rink, Somerset House (in the Strand) have a pretty good programme this year with talks or shorts before each screening.
And some more photos HE
RE of the new show of French post-WWII art at Timothy Taylor, The Tightrope Walker curated with great insight by Emma Dexter and Oscar Humphries and with not often seen work by Hans Hartung's wife Anna-Eva Bergman and furniture designer Charlotte Perriand.
Jean Dubuffet's L'Effraye (1951)
Meanwhile, Brits in New York:
* Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's harrowing doco Mugabe and the White African (First Run Features at Cinema Village)
* Sony Pictures Classics have re-released a new print of Sally Potter's Orlando (based on the 1928 Virginia Woolf novel) co-inciding with MoMA's recent retrospective.
* MoMA also have on the 3rd Floor London Transport posters,1920s-1940s or visit the London Transport Museum itself just off the Covent Garden piazza.
* While the Yale Center for British Art has Art for All: British Posters for Transport (until Aug 15)
------------------------
The Christian Marclay Festival continues at the Whitney
The must-see Brion Gysin: Dream Machine continues at the New Museum. In his notes for a 1971 album of Moroccan music released by the Rolling Stones, Gysin wrote: “Magic calls itself The Other Method for controlling matter and knowing space.”
And finally, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Franklin Evans, the last week of Lush Life (inspired by Richard Price's 2008 novel about where the truth lies) takes over 9 galleries (most on the Lower East Side each referencing a chapter in Price's book). Really disappointed Viva's missing those shows - it must be on the short list for best NYC curatorial project of the year.
And beware but the American Embassy in London has been flooded with calls about an internet dating scam.
"He must hasten to this wound- incurable as he himself - and to this solitude where he will find the force, the audacity and the agility required by his art."
Jean Genet, Le Funambule (The Tightrope Walker)
More photos HERE of the 1:1 Small Spaces
Conductor Donald Runnicles, now of the BBC Scottish Symphony (after years of this Edinburgh native having to defect and prove his talent overseas) showed what a loss he was to America and blessing for Scotland in Mahler's 3rd Symphony. This has arguably music's most soul-searching final movements as those who are blessed to see stand proudly, dignified: cascading tears hidden within hearts.
The week prior, former English National Opera maestro Sir Mark Elder conducted the Australian Youth Orchestra claiming he'd be only to happy to hire at least 95% of the soloists to play in the Halle Orch. While someone like Valery Gergiev (he conducted the World Peace Orch last night in more Mahler birthday celebrations) may have demanded a touch more frost bite in Shostakovich's 10th Symphony from these sunny dispositioned Ozzie players (aged between 16-25), theirs was undeniably a world-class performance by any standards, cherishing and brandishing every note of Shostakovich's searing writing for clarinets and bassoons, the siren screeching piccoli, all in Tchaikovsky orchestrating lineage (with acknowledged debt to Mahler). Plaintive, robust and reborn. The AYO opened with Oz composer Brett Dean proceeded by more than marvelous mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova (touring with the orchestra) in excerpts from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn:
An angel appeared and tried to turn me aside
Oh no! I would not let that happen
I come from God and will return to God
Beloved God will grant me light
he shall light my way to the life of eternal blessedness
And the encore of Percy Grainger's arrangement of the Londonderry Air (Danny Boy) reduced this music-lover to tears.
Proms performances are available to watch on BBC iPlayer (though not 'officially' available to those in the United States)
Another unmissable performance was tenor Placido Domingo singing the baritone role of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra (in a semi-staged performance of the recent Royal Opera House Covent Garden production). The curtain calls can be seen HERE and hopefully a DVD will be made of the BBC 2 broadcast from the Royal Opera House. Once or twice, some may have preferred Antonio Pappano's conducting to be a touch more vehement but that would really only be personal taste and his interpretation easily will withstand the annals of history. And though some might have tiny qualms about the tenore of Domingo's baritone, in a way it mimics the longing for calm sea and prosperous voyage of Verdi's score most obviously heard in Amelia's famous aria. Boccanegra the pirate who become the people's democratic Doge and probably in his darkest moments stared out of the Palace window consoled by those specs of white sails on the sea always chastened by the scent of his past while the sewage wafted ripe from the harbor docks. Domingo is now 70 years old. What an achievement to behold.
And if all that wasn't enough there was an 80th birthday tribute to acknowledged musicals genius Stephen Sondheim. An unforgettable Sweeney Todd from opera singer Bryn Terfel (he even cajouled to join the dance in Everybody Ought to have a Maid), and an equally unforgettable rendition of Send in the Clowns from doyenne Dame Judi Dench.
Catching the final performance of Eugene O'Neill's first published full-length Pulitzer Prize (the 1st of many) winning play Beyond the Horizon (1920) was well worth it. Directed by Laurie Sansom (transferring from the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton), it played in repertory at the Royal National Theatre's smaller Cottesloe space with Tennessee Williams' Spring Storm (1937). On a Connecticut family farm, the educated, bookish Robert (Michael Malarkey) looks out into the distant hills dreaming of travel and escape.
The conductor Donald Runnicles recounted the story of a meeting between Richard Strauss and Mahler after composing the 3rd Symphony. They went hiking together in the mountains. Mahler stopped and said, "You don't need to look at those mountains, I've composed it." It's the more gregarious brother Andy (Michael Thomson) who goes to sea in Eugene O'Neill's play. There's a naive, haunting, simple universality about this post WWI play. If one compares it to what was blazing concurrently in Russian avant-garde theater then it seems pale. But compared to the American and British theater of the time it's as if Ibsen's characters have been stripped bare of their ostentatious socio/political utterances revealing only the burning desires beneath-Maeterlinck crossed with Strindberg. In all honesty actress Liz White probably made a better Heavenly Critchfield (a precursor to Blanche Dubois) in the Tennessee Williams than revealing the raw nerves of Ruth in Beyond the Horizon, a girl caught between two loves. But to think that this was a regional theater production gives credence to the oft spoke idea that Britain has the greatest pool of actors in the world.
Outside the RNT free events have been taking place the last month or so- some video HERE of the Gandinis juggling show Smashed. And on BBC News 24's Meet the Author, former escort girl Catherine Arnold reveals some of fascinating facts in her latest book and what happened in centuries gone by on the Southbank i.e. that the Bishop of Westminster was essentially a pimp with his "geese".
Unlike NYC, most outdoor summer film events in London have a somewhat hefty ticket price. Instead of the winter ice rink, Somerset House (in the Strand) have a pretty good programme this year with talks or shorts before each screening.
And some more photos HE
RE of the new show of French post-WWII art at Timothy Taylor, The Tightrope Walker curated with great insight by Emma Dexter and Oscar Humphries and with not often seen work by Hans Hartung's wife Anna-Eva Bergman and furniture designer Charlotte Perriand.Jean Dubuffet's L'Effraye (1951)
Meanwhile, Brits in New York:
* Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's harrowing doco Mugabe and the White African (First Run Features at Cinema Village)
* Sony Pictures Classics have re-released a new print of Sally Potter's Orlando (based on the 1928 Virginia Woolf novel) co-inciding with MoMA's recent retrospective.
* MoMA also have on the 3rd Floor London Transport posters,1920s-1940s or visit the London Transport Museum itself just off the Covent Garden piazza.
* While the Yale Center for British Art has Art for All: British Posters for Transport (until Aug 15)
------------------------
The Christian Marclay Festival continues at the Whitney
The must-see Brion Gysin: Dream Machine continues at the New Museum. In his notes for a 1971 album of Moroccan music released by the Rolling Stones, Gysin wrote: “Magic calls itself The Other Method for controlling matter and knowing space.”
And finally, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Franklin Evans, the last week of Lush Life (inspired by Richard Price's 2008 novel about where the truth lies) takes over 9 galleries (most on the Lower East Side each referencing a chapter in Price's book). Really disappointed Viva's missing those shows - it must be on the short list for best NYC curatorial project of the year.
And beware but the American Embassy in London has been flooded with calls about an internet dating scam.
"He must hasten to this wound- incurable as he himself - and to this solitude where he will find the force, the audacity and the agility required by his art."
Jean Genet, Le Funambule (The Tightrope Walker)
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Fantastic Ordinary
Korean Eye founder David Ciclitira giving his daughter some spotlight at the opening and thanking his curator wife Serenella.Fantastic Ordinary hosted at the Saatchi Gallery (sponsored by Standard Chartered) presents new contemporary Korean work. Skira has an accompanying book with text by one of the show's curators Serenella Ciclitira.
Photos from the opening (July 5) on THIS SITE.
Systematic is the latest show at the Zabludowicz Collection's great new space (what was once the home of The Drama Centre acting school (Mike Leigh et al)
Photos from the opening (June 30) on THIS SITE
Charles Sandison's The Blind Watchmaker (2005)Video of Charles Sandison's work
Video of Haroon Mirza's Climate Change
Video of Haroon Mirza's Climate Change
3pm Saturday artist talks beginning with Katie Paterson (July 10)
Bischoff/Weiss have migrated up market from the East End to Mayfair without forsaking their experimental coterie of artists. The last show was Bangladeshi born Rana Begum whose rather intriguing 'light sculptures' can be seen on video HERE.
The latest show is Six Play by Ruairiadh O'Connell who when asked if his work could be considered conceptual wasn't sure. Perhaps not, as his personal connection to the work in re-imagining the images he's taken (screen printed aluminium) is more akin to the tactility of a sculptor. Yet if one isn't made aware of this is the viewer's response to the work equally as strong. Find out for yourself.
Viva immersing in the art - a portrait of artist Ruairiadh O'Connell in front of his Number 3.
Number 5Modern Art is another East End gallery that upped East End sticks and moved West End- just north of London's Soho. Los Angeles based Dutch artist Lara Schnitger's damned women opened last night (July 9). She has a solo show this September at the Sculpture Center, New York.
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