ART EXHIBIT: Gustav Klimpt at the Getty Museum

The Beethoven Frieze -  The Hostile Forces, 1902

I’ve read a biography of Klimpt which focussed on his erotic nature and its expression, and his mature work - I don’t recall it included so much about his early developmental period of Art Nouveau -historicism-realistic-Academic style.  It is simply, unsurpassingly magnificent.  More lush, more poignant than David, more sympathetic.  What a leap the Vienna Secession truly made into modernity - in some ways more astonishing than the French Moderns; its natural energy was tragically cut by World War I, the flu epidemic, and the economic and political destruction suffered in the ensuing years.  

Klimpt was a decorative graphic designer mural artist with the soul of a German romantic expressionist.  In him, the element of line has an apogee that perhaps hasn’t been matched, though much emulated.  It combines with elegance, modern psychological insights, and a tragic view of humans always suffering, with little respite.

 portrait of a Lady with Cape and Hat, 1897-1898, Gustav Klimt. Black and red crayon. Albertina, Vienna (from Getty website)

One of Klimpt’s early  charcoal works - the elegantly languid, moody and remote Viennese women he loved to draw and paint.

DANCE REVIEW: LA Dance Project Review

DANCE REVIEW

Better curated than choreographed

BY LEWIS SEGAL

   As a choreographer, Benjamin Millepied arguably brings nothing new to the Southern California dance scene beyond the scale of his ambitions. But as a curator he’s made his L.A. Dance Project a unique cultural resource with an inaugural performance dominated by the kind of daring, world-class contemporary revivals that our homegrown companies lack the will or budget to attempt.

   In a three-part program at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday, Millepied’s quasi-local ensemble danced the first performance anywhere of Merce Cunningham’s controversial masterwork “Winterbranch”  (still photo left) since it left the Cunningham company repertory in1976. [Comment:  masterwork?  If you could see it or stand to listen to the extremely loud score - which followed another maddeningly repetitive and naively ageing off-key voice quavering endlessly about Jesus’ blood - ugh - I still can’t get it out of my mind.]  

   Abstract Expressionism at its most extreme, this1964 sextet remains oppressive in its pervasive darkness punctuated by occasional, random flashes of blinding light; in its silence shattered by a deafening, abrasive score (La Monte Young’s “2 sounds”); in its movement concept: all human activity — individual or collective — collapsing helplessly to the ground….The original production evoked the Holocaust to some observers… I do really want to see the dancers, not struggle to perceive their movements; I could only react by emotionally, aurally, and visually shutting down while this piece was performed.  What about Kronos Quartet “Black Angels”?   That’s tough enough for anyone’s apocolypse scenario, you think?

   If this seminal act of movement theater couldn’t display L.A. Dance Project’s technical prowess, ( because no one could see it, or the costumes touted as Rauschenberg’s “design” - what, he went shopping to Target and bought exercise clothes?   William Forsythe’s innovative 1993 “Quintett” certainly could and did, marred only by a sound system that reduced to mush the vital orchestral component of Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.”

   Against Bryars’ evolving, deepening sonorities, Forsythe turned classical ballet inside out: warping it, twisting it, adding infusions of sports movement, ordinary (pedestrian) action, gestural accents, even shake-that-booty pop dance — but never overloading it or making the dancers into faceless instruments.

... What’s more, the logistics of dance at Disney Hall served “Quintett” brilliantly, putting the audience in the same space as the dancers and helping all the choreographic components pop out with great immediacy.  I disliked the seeming inability to attempt lighting beyond placement of a few studio-type spotlights.

   Millepied capitalized on that immediacy in the premiere of his “Moving Parts” to a violin, organ and clarinet score by Nico Muhly, played live above the stage. music was fresh, living corrollary to the dancing

   But here, unfortunately, his very, very ordinary choreography was continually upstaged and eclipsed by the exemplary dancing and the cleverness of the staging.

   Yes, it was fun to watch the dancers manipulate Christopher Wool’s portable calligraphic scenic panels, reframing the performance dynamically many different ways.  Not so fun, they looked clunky and inserted - couldn’t Wool come up with anything more imaginative than just large canvasses, really now?  Furthermore, they looked like dated graphic design inspired by Stephen Heller or a student project at Art Center.  I liked the dancing but without toe shoes modern dance just doesn’t get the elegance or movements possible in dance, lifts almost always look clunky - can’t anyone do them?  And can’t white dancers jump?  Or is it just that white choreographers can’t create leaps and jumps as part of expressive movement vocabularies?    Nonetheless, I saw exquisite dancers and fascinating, sometimes difficult work that deserves to be in the repertoire of a truly modern company, especially the Forsythe work, which was  truly marvelous.     But the choreography itself had scarcely any movement invention to recommend it, except possibly in the second art during a throwaway cluster maneuver and a more developed duet for Lugo and Nathan Makolandra.

   Not wholly romantic, or competitive or out for gymnastic display, that duet was all over the map expressively — like most of the Millepied choreography that local audiences have seen — and ended with the dancers quizzically backing away as if silently asking the same question that some of us were asking: What was it that just happened ?

   You might argue that L.A. Dance Project is a New York company that had an extensive international tour booked about the time its local identity was signed and sealed with Music Center funding... Perhaps it will also become Lyon Dance Project or Sadler’s Wells Dance Project in its partnerships with foreign entities...  Besides the dancers mentioned, the Project personnel included Amanda Wells and Julia Eichten, plus musicians Phil O’Connor, Lisa Liu and Muhly.

BOOK REVIEWJack Reacher #14: 61 Hours

My 14th Jack Reacher novel!

I am enthralled with this series of mystery novels - I’ve been reading them for about 3 weeks straight through - kept me in suspense every time.  I love the vigilante justice Jack administers to the bad guys whom he finds like flies to honey.

In this novel, drug dealers discover a stash of WWII amphetamines buried in a deep underground bunker and seemingly forgotten.  It’s cold, very cold - the landscape is always a metaphor for Jack’s existential purity and isolation.  He doesn’t get laid in this novel-the first time this doesn’t occur.  (He usually slides into bed with one of the characters in an understated, adult consensual act of lonely coupling.)  Only a telephone flirtation.

The de rigeur torture component has to do with legs being sawed off as punishment for insulting the unusually diminutive bad guy.  

The betrayer is the chief of police, Hooker, who gets what he deserves, via Jack's inimitable justice system.

And the denoument is fantastic-an explosion in the cavern that mimics a missile-silo accident which Jack survives.

BOOK REVIEW:Jack Reacher: Worth Dying For #15

 Jack Reacher # 15 - Worth Dying For

A bloody, ghastly, story - perhaps the darkest of all the Reachers, and one you’d like to forget, except that it expands the paradigms of of possible evil that Jack ultimately avenges.

The Duncan family “owns” the farm country in the Dakotas in this Reacher novel - their terrible secret is that they smuggle Thai girl children and women for the sex trade, keeping one for themselves.  This one is dark and truly repulsive, as Jack discovers an old barn with the remains of about 60 children, used over many years by the nasty Duncans.  Jack and Dorothy, mother of one of the dead children, run down and over the Duncan family in farm trucks, satisfyingly wreaking vengeance on punishment upon the unspeakable evils committed.

The landscape is flat and revealing, cut only by highways and  lonely homesteads, filled with cornfields.  A drunken doctor redeems himself and a battered wife gets away.  

Jack doesn’t get laid, but seeks to go to Virginia to meet a woman he met on the phone who helped him solve the mystery.  

Why I love these novels:

suspense, closely worked details and specific information, strong mood/landscape metaphors, perfect American existential character creation, sardonic humour, and sadistic revenge fantasies get satisfied - Jack is truly The Grim Reaper.  

Tom Cruise is going to play Reacher in an upcoming film.

This has got to be a ludicrous proposition on the face of it - JR is six-five and blonde, more like a Liam Neeson than the short, stumpy, cocky Tom Cruise we know and sort of still like because of Top Gun.  JR is much more an early Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry kind of guy - what Tom will do with this task?  I hope to be surprised, but it seems laughable, except to Lee Child who’ll make a lot of money for his careful years of deeply plotted suspenseful stories.

BOOK REVIEW: Jack Reacher # 13: Gone Tomorrow

Jack Reacher #13

Jack spots a woman on the NY subway at 2:00AM he identifies as a potential suicide bomber. She kills herself in front of him after he tries to intervene.  Then he has to make it right when he concludes that she did it because she was afraid of him.

ART: MOMA Favorites

Don't know this artist, but this is suspended from the ceiling and I found it very witty - Home Sweet Home is a dream for Americans today.

ALBERTO BOETTI: The Maps Series

I have loved these from the first time I saw them, love them with lyric fervor, before I thought about the implications - that there’s no way to stop “it”...only partial restraints work part of the time, but always yield to time - a kind of economic model of over-determined causation which is our real and existential condition.  

Afgan tribal women weave the rugs and hangings Boetti designs, but communications being what they are - the final product contain alterations of design made by the women in the process of their work - more of this color yarn is available, what color did he intend?  So one weaving has a black field of ocean, another pink, astonishingly beautiful, the 

Each country’s borders are defined by a partial section of its flag, suggesting power, conflict, border struggles, and a harmony of diversity- the controls of politics produce the form of design, the design of form.  

And there’s a plenitude, a fullness, combined with floating - a decorative border encloses the generous scale of the artwork, delighting in the folk energy of the decorative,  the sustained life force of human expressive possibility.

These Boettis are 100 combinations of digitally possible arrangements of black and white squares, with much randomness integral to the design concept.

Sol Lewitt, MOMA

Ideas about doing more work with maps - just don’t come up with any concept or artistic response other than a sort of decoupage low relief approach that looks decorative.

I was so moved by the tenderness and physicality of this small sculpture - if one had never been a mother, one would still know and yearn to hold the baby forever close, forever young, in everlasting arms, to know the joy and gratitude of being a part of the great power of Creation, to accept the yoke of care that grows ever outward to Oneness.

ART: The Met, Permanent Collection Gems

Camille Pissaro,  Morning, an Overcast Day, Rouen , 1896

Richard Pousette Dart, Symphony # 1, the Transcendental , 1941-42

An artist I’ve loved for a long time.

Add Jackson Pollock, Phaisephae, 1943  

Miriam Schapiro, Barcelona Fan,  1923

The only Picasso period I actually like - the others I merely appreciate.

Camille Corot,  A Pond in Picardy/Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar in an Armchair, 1939

Bust of Gustav Mahler 

Paul Klee,  Monument at G., 1929

ART: The Rinpa Aesthetic in Japanese Art/The Met

Flowers  of A Hundred Worlds - Kamisakka Sekka, Japanese Rinpa Aesthetic Tradition (Woodblock print book)

 This exhibit was stunning to me - how I respond to the decorative content in artmaking!  Japanese design, printmaking, textiles, ceramics, baskets:  how I value and treasure them all.

These drawings seem miraculous to me, I’m in awe here of their lyric power - the artist’s full sense of the beauty he saw- I know he Knew, and this is what comes of it, the gift - it’s a gift to self, first, and then whatever else comes after. 

Isamu Noguchi, Fountain   How lovely to find this strongly machined and hewn shape cut to make the rock a kind of geode, water gently brimming over its edges and into the ground so slow so slow. 

It's a huge conflict for me as I paint - that I love the delicate decorative, cherished revelation as much as I love what is expressive and painterly.  Of course, it's to be balanced and fused in one's style - I can hope.

ESSAY: East Coast Traveling

Neil Welliver - I used to like this painter - yesterday he looked flat, posterized, lifeless to me, with a wonderful compositional sense.

Drive to Quonochontaug, “Quonny”, Rhode Island

I considered carefully, looking at Impressionists in particular.  I concluded that even they “failed”; I don’t think capturing light on canvas is possible.  Turner seemed to be the only one.  Monet’s two water lily paintings had a reflectivity that was very subtle and pleasing, as was a “Grainstacks, Snow”.  The “Rouen Cathedrals” and other Monets weren’t as great, somehow, as the presence the grainstack conveyed, resting with its substance so palpable, so rooted, so endlessly sentinal.  It glowed with orangey-Indian yellow tone against the cerulean-phalo blue sky beneath the snow.  

It still seems to me that it’s simply putting the Indian yellow glazes down and over against complementary tones that produce that quality of light so beloved by my teacher, by the Cape Cod School.  It’s so stereotyped and emulated now, overdone, overused, that it looks impossibly saturated and frothy, decorative, the “D” word, so dreaded among serious painters.

Better to work for more strucure, more subtlety.  I don’t need to get that unless I want it - it’s not something I need to master or achieve.  I think I’d like to be able to paint subtly luminous water more, or moonlight.  

I bought some iridescent paint and will just work with that.

Friday, September 7, 2012 – Page 2 

Manet’s drypoint etchings -

“Le Fleuve” illustrations.  Manet is my favorite right now.  He did botanical/biological work along with the figure, with the lightest, most elegant line.  

Drive to Quonny, Old Salt

It’s wonderful to be on the East Coast.

Such a different place, such a contrast to our western lifestyle and urban quality.

Saturday, September 8, 2012–  

At Old Salt, Date and Peggy’s beach home

It’s still, quiet, and a gentle wind moves casually across the back yard.   There are boulders, massed shrubs blooming and butterflies flutter between buddleia.   The house looks like something from Coastal Homes or Architectural Digest, it’s so welcoming, luxurious, and comfortable.  There’s a lovely screened porch that everyone sits on and evening dining happens.  

Date cooked buefish with breadcrumbs, lemon, and wasabi and it was truly delicious.  

Peggy has a very cute little dog that we played with and took for a walk down to the beach. 

We had a wonderful rainshower after dinner, tails of hurricanes which passed over Brooklyn and Queens last night.

ESSAY/NOTES: The Democratic Convention

THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

from the New York Times, Bill Clinton’s speech:…Democratic values would restore the promise of the middle class.

... no question the country was in a better position than it was four years ago.

“We simply cannot afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double down on trickle down,” ...“We believe ‘we’re all in this together’ is a better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own,’ ” Mr. Clinton said.

“Some people just have to have it spelled out for them,” said Linda Brooks, 64, of Hampton Roads, Va. “He speaks in plain words people can understand.”

In the 45-minute speech, Mr. Clinton paid tribute to a spirit of bipartisan political cooperation that he lamented was now missing...

“Democracy does not have to be a blood sport,” Mr. Clinton said. “It can be an honorable enterprise.”

... the magnitude of the problems Mr. Obama inherited when he took office in 2009:

“President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did,” Mr. Clinton said. “No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, could have repaired all of the damage he found in just four years.”

...“People feel like the system is rigged against them,” she said. “And here’s the painful part: They’re right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay less taxes than their secretaries…”Elizabeth Warren 

ART: The Met

To the Metropolitan yesterday, going into Manhattan on Metro North railway line.  Such a pleasant journey.  It terminates at Grand Central Station and one can walk through the magnificent Grand Concourse and feel the grand excitement the possibility of travel offers.

We’re staying in Peggy and Date’s magnificent home, a four-story building on a small bluff with a creek running at the footings.  At night one falls asleep to the sound of flowing water. 

This painting by Rockwell Kent seems the most marvelously beautiful work to me - why do I love this so much?  He’s not a particularly valued artist - I love the ruggednes and the violet and silver blue snow, the frigid water, the strange yellow sunset event over the water, far far north of any comfort zone.  Maybe it’s the color harmonies, not so much the narrative - it’s classic early 20th century landscape style, with more hardened, saturated color moving it away from subtlety.

ART: Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Looking at Luminosity depicted on Canvas

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

A spectacular day at MFA.  What a pleasure and luxury a large metropolitan museum provides…”...how way leads onto way, and I doubted I would ever come back…”

What I loved today were ceramics, baskets, classic abstract painting, and Ori Gerst’s remarkable operatic, cinematic HD videos.  If I were home now, I’d rush out to the garage and start an abstracted sculptural collage that I could paint with encaustics.  

Now why should I feel so compelled by 3d suddenly?  I always have, actually - but I feel it in my body and my bones, to shape pliable matter, to hold it, to find the form, to build it, to express subtlety, muted tones, gradations, earthly somatic presence.  

FILM REVIEW: What to Expect When You're Expecting

Film” What to Expect When You’re Expecting”  

Viewed on the plane” a coercive fantasy about affluent beautiful  self-absorbed couples who become parents because it’s time now, and parenthood is trending, the new thing to do.  Parts of it, like paintings, are very good.  No one decides to have an abortion or worries about money: the men worry about their lives closing down, the wives pressure their husbands into fatherhood.  They are like parent versions of Cinderella, turning into loving parents when they see their newborn for the first time. For me, the truly moving and intriguing film narrative involves a luminous JLo and her fearful reluctant husband’s experience as they adopt an Ethiopian baby.  They journey to a third world orphanage, and a procession of babies draped in white emerges from a hut, and each is presented to their new mother and father. It’s a truly moving and beautiful scene, fully believable.  It opens the heart, implicating an unjust world and celebrating those who try to make things right.

GARDEN: Roses

The autumn is coming, I can feel change.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012 – 

GET READY FOR ANOTHER

GOLD MEDAL - web photo - I just planted this old favorite of mine in May.

TRIP:  The Rose Garden

I’m mulching and feeding the roses once again, carefully grooming them again after letting them go for several years.  It’s very satisfying - they are heavy feeders and very responsive to care, and the extreme pruning I did in July, though unrecommended and unusual, reset them very successfully and they responded with a grand, healthy bounteous flowering.

I’ve put in three yellows, and they are doing well.  When we come back,  I’ll finish adding new fragrant-only selections and colors.  I may remove a few more.  I’ve removed all other plantings and so access is very good now, and I can move easily around them to work on them.

Very stiff!  It’s fun working with Florentino, the gardener.  He suggested I put in a climber, and I think we will during bare root season.

PERSONAL:September Arrives - The Rose Garden Yellows

GET READY FOR TRIP:  The Rose Garden

Carol Burnett

I’m mulching and feeding the roses once again, carefully grooming them  after letting them go for several years.  It’s very satisfying - they are heavy feeders and very responsive to care, and the extreme pruning I did in July, though unrecommended and unusual, reset them very successfully. They responded with a grand, healthy, bounteous flowering.

I’ve put in three yellows, and they are doing well.  When we come back,  I’ll finish adding new fragrant-only selections and colors.  I may remove a few more.  I’ve removed all other plantings and so access is very good now, and I can move easily around them to work on them.

 It’s fun working with Florentino, our gardener.  He suggested I put in a climber, and I think we will during bare root season.

Gina Lollabridgida

Gold Medal

TRAVEL: The Pinnacles National Monument

Saturday, September 1, 2012 –  

Driving Home from Palo Alto

Stopped off at Pinnacles National Monument, impromptu while trying to avoid traffic on 101 and the boredom of the I5.  A wonderful discovery - a beautiful lush California chaparral oak woodland with mixed pines and eroded boulders and needle mountain formations.  I saw birdlife immediately while we were driving and there’s a stream, dry now, but promising run-off in the springtime.  

I was enchanted with the place and we will go back.