New York Blitzkrieg Weekend

4 Museums; 2 Broadway shows; 2 dinners, 2 walks in Central Park; Times Square - Karen and I packed a lot into essentially 2 days. Here's some highlights:

ART
Martin Puryear at MOMA:
Over the last 30 years Puryear has created sculpture that defies categorization, examining identity, culture and history. Experiencing the sculpture first hand though you're immediately drawn to not only the materials Puryear uses (mostly wood), but the extent to which he explores interior and exterior space. The pieces take on a life, where secrets are both held closely and exposed in ways that make you want to sit with the pieces for much longer than you might usually do so for pieces of sculpture.

One of the revelations for me was the scale of the pieces and the incredible consistency of vision whether working large or small. The constant use of history and culture (Puryear worked for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone when he was younger) can be seen in pieces like "C.F.A.O." from 2006-2007, which evokes primitive African masks, while using a common wheelbarrow that might be found on any American farm (or any farm anywhere really), and the incredibly beautiful "A Ladder for Booker T. Washington" (1996), where a curving, alive 36' high ladder starts off the ground slightly and climbs to the unkown heavens, narrowing as it goes as if climbing into the horizon, but not the horizontal horizon, a vertical horizon of unlimited possibilities.

This show was the highlight of the trip for both of us, and the reason we made the trip in the first place. Even though the show is coming to San Francisco MOMA in 2009, after seeing it at NY MOMA, both Karen and I are having a hard time how SF will stage the show, especially the large pieces that were in the spacious (and tall) atrium, a space that SF does not have. But, we'll definitely go see it when it comes here and anyone interested in contemporary sculpture should as well.

The Drawings of Georges Seurat at MOMA
Seurat, known more as a painter and neo-impressionist who used the idea of pointillism to bring almost a scientific aspect to impressionistic painting was also a master draughtsman and this exhibit of his drawings was a great one for showcasing those skills. From simple, quick pencil or pen sketches to more refined conte pencil or charcoal drawings, the use of the paper itself and the mastery of light and shadow showed Seurat to be truly a great artist.

Lucien Freud drawings at MOMA
Well, if you like your art raw and honest, and less than focused on beauty, then Freud is your guy. You can't dispute that he is an accomplished artist, whether painting or drawing, and that a certain honesty in subject matter is not the issue. The issue is whether that rawness of drawing or painting all the people close to you (he got lots of friends and family members to pose), in all their obesity, elderness, ugliness (blotchy skin as an example) is what we want to see as art. It might be, art being subjective, but it wasn't something I was willing to spend a lot of time with.

Uwe and Gert Tobias at MOMA
At the end of a grueling, long day at MOMA, after flying all night to get to New York, this small show was mostly forgettable. What made it most interesting was the collaborative nature of it. Two people, in this case twins, working on the same piece can have interesting results. Sometimes the pieces work, sometimes they don't.

Moveable Type - a media installation by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen - Lobby, New York Times Building
This media piece is a dynamic way of portraying the daily New York Times. Using 700 small LED screens stretched over two walls, with 96' of the screend divided between the two walls, they've created a software program that they feed the Times into and then refract and parse all of that text into a flowing piece of art that asks questions and asks the viewer to not only think about how we consume news, but about the questions that the news raises, and how we interact with the news on a daily basis.

Housed inside the new Times building designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, the piece is a great addition to a new and interesting building.

Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt - Metropolitan Museum of Art
This was an exhibit from the great and vast collection of European painting that the Met owns, specifically focused on paintings acquired from collectors that were early supporters of the Met and bought, and donated many paintings from the Dutch School at the time of Rembrandt.

After a day of modern art, it's always interesting to come back to the Old Masters and to a show focused solely on painting, and no complaints about this show. Rembrandt, Hals, Cuyp - portraits and landscapes - and, of course, the 5 Vermeers that the Met owns. Oh, those Vermeers. Worth the entire trip.

Gustav Klimt at Neue Gallery
Having just purchased one of the famous Adele Blauer-Bloch paintings, the two primary founders of the Neue Gallery took the opportunity to put up an exhibit of their relatively extensive holdings of Klimt paintings, drawings and memorabilia. I always like these kinds of exhibits that focus on one artist and combine different media with historical information, including photographs of the artist, his studio (there was even a re-creation of the greeting room from the studio he worked in the longest). I especially liked the drawings in this show, many of which were studies for some of his more famous paintings, and which showed how prolific Klimt really was. And the Adele is everything it's made out to be.

The Frick Collection
And, that's exactly what it is - an entire museum of one man's collection. Yes, there was one special exhibit of Saint-Aubin drawings and paintings that was more interesting than I thought it would be, but it's hard to believe that in all the years I've been going to New York, I had never taken the time to visit the Frick.

Wow, what a collection. There was one point in the audio guide where they talked about how Frick used to come down at night, when everyone was asleep and the house was dark and turn on the lights in a room and just sit with his paintings, and after seeing the collection one can see why. In one room alone there is a wall with an El Greco sitting high above a fireplace and flanked on either side, lower down and next to the mantle, two Holbein's - the famous paintings of Sir Thomas More on one side and Cromwell on the other.

If you haven't been to The Frick Collection, then I highly recommend it. One man's vision and collection and paintings by many of the great painters of history - almost all European (Whistler and Glibert Stuart being the only exceptions) makes for a great art history lesson.

THEATRE
"The Homecoming" - Harold Pinter
Probably Pinter's best known and celebrated play, this production brought out not only the incredible language of Pinter - focused on the barbaric dysfunctionality of the family portrayed in the play, but the humor that a lot of directors don't necessarily allow to come out in Pinter.

My friend, Tom Bestor, http://www.rationalfeast.blogspot.com/, commented on this production on his blog and from his recent trip to New York, and I'm not sure I have much different to add. The cast, as Tom points out, is excellent and if you like Ian McShane you will love him here (though there was something about his handling, or maybe mishandling, of the cane he uses that bothered me and felt like the one false note), but Eve Best is amazing in her understated portrayal of the wife of the prodigal son who becomes the dominant personality in the play and becomes the matriarch in the end.

As Tom says, if you like Pinter, a show well worth seeing.

"August: Osage County" - Tracy Letts
Again, Tom wrote an excellent review of this show as well and you can find it at the same link as above. I don't have a lot to add.

It's long, but riveting. The acting and directing is excellent, with new twists, and new secrets revealed in every act. Interestingly, The New Yorker, found this to be a device that made the play somewhat corny, but I'm not sure I agree. It kept my interest for over three hours.

If you're up for dysfunctional families, then these two shows fit the bill - but the fact that they both had a level of humor and even compassion for that dysfunctionality made these eminently watchable and engaging.

We also had two good dinners, Bar Americain, a Bobby Flay restaurant on Friday night. Good, solid American food, nothing pretentious, but decent fare at decent prices. On Saturday we went to Aquavit, where the experience would have been really great but for a falldown in service at the end that caught us off guard and made us late for the theater, and where we missed out on our dessert and petit-fours from our 7 course tasting menu. Ah well, even great restaurants have off nights in the kitchen, I suppose. But it was a bit of a disappointment as we had made it clear that we had a show to get to.

All in all, a really worthwhile trip, even though it was so short. We missed the big storm in the Bay Area, but had really decent weather in New York, not all that cold, minimal rain and we were able to walk almost everywhere. When New York is like that, I could spend a lot of time there.

Joseph Cornell – Navigating the Imagination

2.
Echoes the imagined memories that time eclipses

III.
Like the ballerina as the snow angel
on a field of blue glass
caught in the pipe of a dream(scape)
A moment captured in dioramatic solitude
the word (or is it the world) recedes into the floating space between
the ice cube footlights of the stars

Prologue.
When my old (and lost) friend, Stephen Bickford, introduced me to Surrealism, Dada and the art of collage in college, it opened up a whole new vista of art for me. I had really only been to Europe once at that point in my life and had only just begun to discover and explore the whole universe of art. Now, this was something new and more mysterious than almost anything I had ever encountered. Europe at nineteen had been a novice at the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Sistine Chapel, the David at the Accademia, the National Gallery in London, Westminster Abbey – in other words, the old world of classics and masters. A great beginning and a great education which I would never trade, but to discover the avant-garde, the absurd and the sublime, well, this was something that I have never stopped exploring and being fascinated with.

1.
A museum is a box of found objects
the ephemera of curiosity
like a rose as spider web as the sail of a schooner

Four.
has Andromeda risen to the sun
bathed in the stars of 50,000 years ago
or frozen in a dovecote
are the stars the same 50,000 years from now

Prologue Too.
The world is an ever evolving continuum of time, space, memory, objects that are interrelated and have no relationship to one another except as how they are re-imagined and reconfigured by the artist.

Art as isolated engagement with the world, where the world produces and the artist reduces and re-uses. The artist as environmentalist, concerned with nature, but also as scientist, preacher, stenographer, historian – a recorder of humanity with an eye to exploring what is old with what is new.

Dream One.
The man with the old valise, like a steam locomotive, carries his gentlemen’s cabinet of belongings along a parakeet-lined road. The barn owl in his cave, illuminated by the ancient moon, watches, ponders, watches the slow unfolding of steps across the meadow gathers in the shadows of black and white, all color subsumed into a constructed world of peripheral lines receding into a perspective distance. Giorgio di Chirico dances in a shadowless corner.

Epilogue
Joseph Cornell at SF MOMA returns to the box(es) January 6, 2008.

The Years Are Rolling By (But There's Some Awfully Long Days)

Thanks to Nan Parker for the title to today's post.

I'm pretty much a curmudgeon about "Christmas". I actually like the holidays, the turning of autumn to winter with the winter solstice, and this year the full clear moon and the nip to the air (yes, even in SF, it gets a little cold, but I won't claim to experience the bitter chill of other areas of the world). I love the rain, the snow (though we don't get any here), the warmth of the fire (though it's now no longer eco-friendly to burn wood in your fireplace). I love the lights and the greenery and the decor. I love giving small gifts to people I love and donating money to people that are doing good and important things.

I like (won't always claim love) seeing family and friends.

This year Karen and I were blessed to have a visit from my daughter, Gracia, and two wonderful granddaughters, Kelsey and Hailey (the sleepyheads in the photo). It's so impossible to believe that Gracia is 36 and Kelsey and Hailey are 16 and 13, respectively. The years truly are rolling by.

It's Becoming Clearer (for me anyway)

I have really been thinking (now that voting starts in a few weeks) about which direction to go in the presidential race. Black man (historic)?, white woman (also historic)?, fiercely partisan (white man)?, non front runner (a few interesting choices)?

Today's column by David Brooks in the NY Times may have finally clarified it for me - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/opinion/18brooks.html?ref=opinion.

The country, I think, is sick of partisanship, foot-dragging and failure of leadership on big problems, parsing of the political winds, politicians guided by divine faith more than reasoned discourse and facts, and the potential for political dynasties controlling the landscape and perpetually caving to limited interests over the common good.

So, ok, I'll throw it out there - the ideal ticket for me might be:
Obama/Biden (though I also think that Biden would make a great secretary of state).

Let the voting begin.

Is Global Warming Like Vietnam?

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing."
-Jack Kerouac

I just signed an emergency petition to try and stop President Bush from blocking crucial UN climate negotiations in Bali. The rest of the world has agreed on a schedule for carbon emissions cuts to stop catastrophic climate change, but with only 48 hours left Bush is blocking the agreement!

The petition is from Americans to world leaders at Bali, saying that Bush doesn't represent us -- it's going to be delivered directly to summit negotiators as well as in an ad campaign and demonstrations by activists there. It will help other countries to refuse to give in to the Bush team by showing they don't have the support of Americans.

There's just 48 hours to turn this around - sign up at this link! -
http://www.avaaz.org/en/please_ignore_bush/98.php?cl_tf_sign=1

So, how does all this relate to the title of this post?

There always has to be a grassroot start to fighting a war - and that is what is being waged right now - a war against the earth, a war against the future, a war against the generations that will need to live in a diminshed world if change doesn't happen soon.

The same was true of Vietnam. It took a grassroots effort, unpopular at the time, to start a mass movement to oppose the war and force the change that eventually brought millions of people to the streets to protest the actions of those that were waging a war that made no sense.

I often wonder what it will take to get that same level of commitment to forcing change to bring massive amounts of people into the streets to protest short-sighted governments that exhibit a failure of leadership.

Am I in the streets? No, but if I was in Bali right now, I would be out there with the activists, doing what I could to activate some kind of change.

Where the Ideas Are

One of the interesting things about watching this presidential race is to note where the good ideas are hiding (hint - it's not usually with the "frontrunners".)

This interview with Dennis Kucinicich http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/12/11/kucinich_qa/ is one example. People may laugh at him and call him kooky, and may even see some of the ideas in this interview as pretty out there, but what is of note is the bigness of some of the ideas, and the willingness to think in new paradigms as a way out of monumental problems.

An alternative view in this op-ed in the NY Times today - http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/real-action-on-climate-change/index.html?ref=opinion, is a reflection that we can think both big and small about monumental issues like global warming and sustainability of the planet, but that without real vision and leadership, as much as we would all like to do individually, it will likely always be a drop in the bucket without some big thinking and big change.

I've been trying to follow the discussion going on in Bali, as well as watching what our Congress has been (not) doing on this issue and it never fails to amaze me the failure of leadership that comes out of these consensus bodies.

There were public declarations that the recent energy bill (that stalled in the Senate) was some kind of major "breakthrough" on the energy front, as if merely raising fuel standards over a 20 year period to a level that still don't even match much of Europe or current hybrid technology was some kind of great accomplishment, or that moving tax dollars from oil based industries to subsidizing ethanol and biodiesels that have severe implications for food supplies and still contribute massively to carbon emissions through their transport to market is such a great idea.

As we begin a period of history where we may find wars starting over other scarce resources, like water, ideas like Kucinicich are putting forward may be the only way out of the trap we keep falling into as a species, where self-interest and corporate interest almost always trumps the common good.

Politics of Rehearsal

Karen and I were in Los Angeles this past weekend for her Uncle Abby's 90th birthday and on Sunday we had some time to go the Armand Hammer Museum to see a show by an artist I had never heard of, but who is apparently (according to the show brochure), one of the most important artists working today - Francis Alys - a Belgian now living and working in Mexico.

Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal was a small show, but with some big ideas, focused on concepts of rehearsals and repetition, failure and success, storytelling and performance.

I was particularly drawn to the idea of rehearsals and repetitions as a metaphor for how to stay open to the possibilities of change, how change and the constant practice of preparing for and executing against ideas by using repetitive actions created both spaces of efficiency and an interesting counterbalance to the notions of efficiency and productivity in the clash of modern worlds and traditional worlds.

Alys uses some simple devices - a man pushing a block of ice through the streets while it slowly melts to nothing more than a puddle of water; a car driving up a hill to the music of a band rehearsing, and every time the band interrupts their playing, having the car roll back down the hill and start again and repeating this over and over; a stripper in a nightclub going through the process of undressing as a singer and piano player rehearse, and much like the car scenario, every time the singer and pianist interrupt their rehearsal, the stripper re-dresses herself and starts over again as well with varying amounts of success at the re-dressing until she finally gets through her act and is completely undressed. All of these scenes are videotaped, and video is the primary vehicle used in the show to communicate the art.

All of these different "rehearsals" were interesting investigations of time schemes, concepts of efficiency/inefficiency, productivity, the idea of development and modernity, and in many ways brought into mind things like the mechanics, poetics, politics and vocabulary of rehearsal as a form unto itself.

The video of the man pushing the block of ice through the streets, a piece called Paradox of Praxis, 1997, was fascinating to watch for both the idea of action and inaction - the concept of "sometimes making something leads to nothing" - another interesting take on the role of rehearsal in performance and life.

The other interesting piece in the show was When Faith Moves Mountains. Five hundred volunteers with shovels moved a giant sand dune outside of Lima, Peru, over the course of a day, but of course, only moved it somewhat figuratively and only an inch or so - kind of a massive collective effort for a minimal return on that effort where by the next day no one would even notice that this action had taken place. Alys called it a kind of social allegory where the piece is a true rehearsal for events that still remain potential, things that may or may not happen in the future.

Alys is interested in exploring and producing work that has a certain resistance to imposition of modernity on traditional cultures, especially in Latin America, but at the same time using the fluidity of rehearsals as a means of exploring the potential for change by addition, deletion, improvement, simplification - all doors to further exploration.

While I'm not sure that the execution of the pieces was all that interesting, the ideas conveyed were, and that made it a show worth my time.

The Religion Debate

My previous post was responded to thus:

Paul: I respect your views and do totally believe in the separation of Church and State. Religion has done many terrible things and I wouldn't ever condone what they have done. But regretfully many wars have been started by men who wanted power. Religion serves a purpose for many. Regretfully, many think their faith is the best. I don't agree with that at all. Each have much good and I would never criticize nor judge another's faith. John Kennedy spoke in front of Baptists and made it very clear that he separated his faith from what he would do governing.

Here's my response:

No doubt that religion serves some purpose for many, and has contributed to many people leading moral lives. I do often wonder though whether what is served is often an escape from living in and engaging with this world, and indeed a denial of this world, in search of some other world that may or may not exist.

I don't want to debate the purpose religion may serve for some people. What I do want to debate is the hypocrisy and intolerance I see from would-be leaders that have put forth a litmus test of faith and proclamations that this must be a religious nation to lead the fight for liberty and freedom, both here and around the world.

What I want to debate is whether we are a nation of human beings that have values that transcend religion and are based on the morality, ethics and need for cooperation and what that means in terms of the political life of the country.

Unfortunately, times have changed radically since JFK. He needed to convince a nation that the role of church and state were distinct and that his personal church (religion) had nothing to do with the functioning of the state. Now, we're faced with people that bring their religion into the running of the state, make claims that there is no state and no freedom without religion, use their religion to guide public policy for the state and have visions of a one religion state in this country.

This is what I find reprehensible and unacceptable and worthy of debate.