“The power is with us all the time, in the things we make with our hands.” These words are intoned by the Juju Man, aka Ole Uncle Jerry and the village preacher, (Andrew R. Cooksey, Jr.) who serves as Greek chorus in this Reconstruction-era drama set in Athens. Georgia and centered around the life of legendary quiltmaker Harriet Powers, in an opening speech that pulls this period piece into a timeless consciousness-raising sphere. Quilting the Sun’s author, Grace Cavalieri, is Maryland’s Poet Laureate and author of dozens of books of poetry and 20 short form and full-length plays. Her resume pervades this work in the way it oscillates between the archetypal and the specific with compelling fluency. This is unabashedly a theater of ideas, and although the structure is episodic and often heavily symbolic, with emblematically rendered speeches and set-to exchanges – schematic like the quilt itself! – the  drama carries the audience along, especially in the tighter, more energized second act.

There is much back and forth in time as Harriet (Mimi B. Francis) and her ne’er do well philandering but loveable husband Armstead (Dan Kelley) wend their way to the purchaser of her quilt, a pained separation for Harriet who quilts in direct response to the voice of God and immortalizes a lost infant daughter in this particular piece. But bwhile it lays on thick the superstition of the black community (“We got Jesus and we got spells”) and the abject racism of their white overlords, and is set against the rise of the Klan, the play is as much about a collision of aesthetics as the usual antagonists of the Deep South. The idealistic, white young school mistress, Jennie Smith (Taylor Lynne), who teaches at the Lucy Cobb School for young ladies, is fresh back from Paris with ideas of L’art pour l’art. She is genuinely awestruck when she sees Harriet’s work. “Anyone can make something for the second time, but it’s God-given to create something original” she counters her skeptical school principal. At the county fair for colored folks she is introduced to Harriet and asks, “Miss Harriet Powers. Do you call this a quilt” “Yes I do,” replies Harriet. “I call it a quilt.” Jennie: “Well, I don’t. I call it a work of art.” Harriet doesn’t seem overawed by the compliment. Her quilt is then shown to the students and purchased by Jennie, though for half the $10 agreed. It hangs now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The production by Shela Xoregos and her company is energized by a fine ensemble cast led by Mimi Francis who strikes a masterful balance between the spiritual resignation and galvanic passion of her character. Cooksey and Kelley, in their more humorous character roles, are also engines of the performance, supporting nuanced interpretations by Lynne and by Sarah Kebede-Fiedler as a mischievous rival quilter. But arguably the real star here is the woefully underexploited silent role of the quilt itself, superbly reconstructed by Mary Campbell and Wendy Peck. I’d like to have seen a lot more of it: it has the power its maker would have wanted for it, of revelation.

The post God-Given to Create: “Quilting The Sun” at Theater for the New City appeared first on artcritical.

A Sony Picture Classics Release

It was hard to know what kind of cinematic experience was in store upon entering MoMA’s Titus Theater 1. My expectations were uncertain. The film’s relative connection to the renowned German painter Gerhard Richter was not entirely clear. Nor was I aware that the film was an extensive feature, partially fictional, yet based on actual historical events. During the introductory remarks made at this screening [the film is now in general release, presently showing at the Paris cinema in New York], I was curious to hear that the film is Germany’s Official Selection for the 2019 Academy Awards and that the Director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, had previously won an Oscar for The Lives of Others (2006). Indeed, Mr. Henckel von Donnersmarck’s intriguing, yet playful remarks were incisive and to the point. Rather than promote his career, he advocated the importance of keeping cinema as a social art form.

This somehow opened a door as to what Never Look Away might be and what indeed it may become. As the artist Thomas Demand has so eloquently put it: “I have never seen a film that depicts as plausibly as this one how art is created, and what it means.”

Historically, this film covers a crucial span of nearly thirty years beginning with the infamous Nazi-generated Entartete Kunst or “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937, which traveled throughout Germany to capacity crowds, while the concluding section focuses on the first solo exhibition of paintings by one Kurt Barnert in Dusseldorf, thus simulating Gerhard Richter’s important exhibition at the Galeria Schmela in 1964. Kurt Barnert is the fictitious stand-in, in other words, for Richter, deftly played by Tom Schilling.

It is curious how the two exhibitions are employed by the Director as “bookends” in the film. Whereas we see Barnert as a five-year-old child staring intently at works of “degenerate art,” questioning whether or not he wants to become a painter, the closing sequence is filmed during a press conference at a gallery revealing a thoughtful, provocative, and mature artist in his early thirties. Here Barnert’s confidence proves inexorable.

In either case, the principle overseer for doing the research and reproduction of these historical and contemporary paintings was Richter’s former student, Andreas Schon. His effects are what give precision to all aspects of these early expressionist works from Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter to the early “photo-realist” paintings of Richter. The attention to these details is largely what gives cinematic authority to Never Look Away.

The calamities of growing up are further played out in accord with the agonies of Richter. Kurt Barnert has grown from childhood into adolescence in Dresden during National Socialism. By the time of the post-war GDR period, he will have applied twice to the Dresden Art Academy before being admitted to the “free painting” department in 1952 at the age of twenty. Here we are given a series of glimpses as to Barnert’s frustration with what he is trying to do. Although a first-rate draughtsman, the artist feels limited as to how far his career will go under such circumstances.

But a larger story pervades the film from start to finish— a narrative in which personal tragedy intersects with the overwhelming historical one in which heinous crimes and incarcerations were perpetrated against Jews and various dissidents who refused the Nazi protocol. A key figure in the film is a Nazi-sympathizing gynecologist Professor Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), who was responsible for unwarranted euthanasia and for sending innocent people to camps to be murdered in gas chambers. This included a beloved aunt of Barnert who cared for him as a child in Dresden and gave him the foundation for his desire to become an artist. (This clearly emits from a forceful memory instilled in Richter.)

During his years as a student in East Germany, Barnert meets a beautiful young woman, Elisabeth (Paula Beer). They fall in love, and unaware that Elisabeth is the gynecologist’s daughter, get married. Meanwhile as the culmination of WWII is slowly becoming imminent, a Russian military colleague warns Professor Seeband that he must leave East Germany and hide out in the West if he hopes to avoid being tried for murder. Inadvertently, Barnert discovers that Seeband is a Nazi-in-hiding, which more than likely accounts for previous incidents of intense hardship that have intervened in his marriage.

Never Look Away is a complex story, but also a griping one. We may question as Kurt walks through the hallways and studios at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf as to what possibilities will open for him there.  We may sense he is on the verge of doing something significant, but we also know he will go through many stages and passageways to get there. The character based on Joseph Beuys possibly had some role is guiding Barnert in the right direction, given that Beuys was hired by the Academy the same year Richter was admitted, 1961. But what finally stands out in this film is the commitment among the performers and participants in searching for what really makes an artist— that art is important because it is essential to the historical moment in which we live, and by which we learn to account for ourselves. There is no limit to the effort that needs to be made in order for this to happen.

The post Gerhard Richter: The Movie appeared first on artcritical.

When art and money are suddenly thrown together, oppositional mayhem soon follows, even in a film like Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary, The Price of Everything, (currently at HBO) where the director’s position appears to be held in abeyance. Regardless of how the content is presented, the differences continue to escalate on an uncharted scale in a way that is provocative and tendentious. Though not discussed in the film, the reference point to most of what I heard and saw was the early 1980s when big money overtly entered the scene only to transform contemporary art into a full-fledged commodities industry.

Still, controversy either rages or lingers, depending on one’s point of view, as to how major promotional and investment strategies got so quickly involved with artists across the board – mostly emerging or blue chip, usually ignoring less known mid-career artists– to the extent that the terms of qualitative criticism formerly applied to works of contemporary art would soon become extinct.

The manner by which the film dealt with the variety of interviews is impressive. Whether artists, dealers, collectors, auctioneers, or critics, they did not appear edited in a way that ensured instant closure. Rather each interview held a certain openness that allowed for an indeterminate dialogue to proceed randomly throughout the film. For example, when the curator Paul Schimmel speaks near the opening of the film, one may eventually find his comments reflected in the words of Jeff Koons who appears later in the film, despite the fact they never appear on the screen together. The same could be said of the opposition between the words of Sotheby’s Executive Vice President Amy Cappellazzo and those of renegade painter Larry Poons. Although both are bound to disagree on the connection between money and art, they are still maintaining a dialogue—perhaps on the defensive, but a dialogue nonetheless. While clearly aware of his cinematic tactics, Kahn avoids making universal proclamations as to where art is going once it has gotten the attention of auction houses, curators, and collectors who might actively engage with all three, most likely on separate occasions. It seems important that the point of view of the director stays hidden.

The film offers no blame as to who is responsible for the mess that has come about in recent decades once investors began to discover the logic of creating a market for contemporary art. How could they not? Rather the film points us in the direction of a selected few whose words regarding investment in art take on a character of their own. Even so, we are given opinions more than researched points of view, which will tend to leave some viewers in considerable doubt as to how art got that way and what will happen as a result. More than a few viewers of The Price of Everything have made comments to me to the effect that they thought the content backing the film was substantial, but also depressing.

A kind of business-minded art language is spoken throughout The Price of Everything that often takes the form of banal rhetoric. This occurs between established art world figures (mostly painters) and those who directly or indirectly sponsor them. Listening to the bland, superficial, and predictable jargon of major auction house representatives is not so different from hearing one of the collectors in the film identify a kitsch assemblage in her parlor as a work of “conceptual art.” Or, for that matter, observing artists prance and paint in their gorgeous studios while describing the aesthetic pulse of blue glass spheres or telling us the reason why it was important to paint over one figure in order to keep the other. As participants in the film, they all reside on the same playing field. Yet one might further detect a festering boredom or listless cynicism in their speech. At these intervals, Kahn rarely misses the opportunity to entertain his finely tuned audience by allowing irony to surface, specifically when the painter Gerhard Richter complains that it is not good if one of his paintings is the same price as a house. On another note, we read irony in relation to the various professionals discussing deals that involve hundreds of millions of dollars motivated by the belief that their purchases will ensure art for generations to come. Here, one might pause briefly before raising the question: Who is kidding whom?

Nevertheless, the tale is told and the narration continues as it does between the wily “haves” (Jeff Koons) and the presumably overlooked “have nots” (Larry Poons). The resounding rhyme of these two names first presented themselves in the late eighties when then “postmodern” Jeff was showing in lower SoHo on Wooster Street directly across from an exhibition of new work by the rejuvenated “modernist” Lawrence. The change of Larry’s first name was apparently an act of promotion to clarify the fact that he was no longer painting dots but was extending his densely chromatic surfaces into heroically studded pours. Some of these works were alluded to as the subject of a forthcoming retrospective of paintings, shown in the artist’s studio in the early stages of preparation. This moment in Poons’ legacy was fortunately included by Kahn’s perceptive eye, which suggests the filmmaker’s rigor in coming to terms with the immanence of art as being more than an index of material fortune.

The post What “The Price of Everything” Says About The Value of Art appeared first on artcritical.

In the Jungle, 2017. USA. Directed by Stephanie Barber. 63 mins.
Saturday, February 17 at 7:30 PM; Sunday, February 18 at 7:30 PM
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, between First and Second avenues, New York City.

Two feature-length, distinctly personal films are having their premieres in New York this week. Stephanie Barber’s In The Jungle, playing at Anthology, is a lushly imagined artifice in which a botanical researcher — all alone with her obsessively articulate thoughts — gradually unravels. Amy Jenkins’s Instructions On Parting, screening at MoMA, is a deeply moving, tautly poetic diary of multiple loss and transcendence.

Barber is an experimental writer/filmmaker/musician based in Baltimore. Like Daredevils (2013), which premiered at the New York Film Festival, In the Jungle is text-forward and highly formal in its narrative structure and cinematography, though considerably more playful in language and set design than the earlier movie. Here the botanist (Cricket Arrison) types an erudite monologue on an oversized, somewhat funky cardboard typewriter. A cutout animation of a tiger is projected behind, running alternately through a jungle and a succession of suburban living rooms. At critical moments an actual pantomime tiger, perhaps an animus, manifests, as if to lead her astray. Adding a crucial sense of dislocation, Barber’s sound design is a jagged collage of jungle and machine sounds. Several of her moody, self-produced songs also interact uncannily with the narrative mix.

Two stunning 360-degree camera rotations allow for real-time set changes, the second of which ushers in an extraordinary third act in which a short-wave DJ, played with inscrutable magnetism by M.C. Schmid (of the band Matmos), invites listeners to “come and rub your earlobes against my radio waves.” Playing Barber’s songs and taking listener calls he helps get the botanist through the night, finally at home in a jungle, it seems, of her own making.

Amy Jenkins is a multidisciplinary artist primarily known for pioneering installations in which precise, nuanced video projections haunt a sculptural ensemble. With Instructions On Parting, Jenkins presents a harrowing narrative that seems to have arisen naturally from an undaunted practice of documenting her life and surroundings. POV footage of Jenkins’s family, voicemail messages and hand-written diary notes convey the agony, sometimes banal, sometimes profound, of three overlapping deaths to cancer within the passing of a few seasons, even as she gives birth and nourishes a new life. Shot in Utah and rural New Hampshire, the film pays attention not only to intimate autobiography –– a positive pregnancy test; beautifully filmed sequences in which her hands explore the naked bodies of her dying loved ones, or search for their traces on objects left behind –– but equally to landscape, weather, and close-up imagery of the delicate savagery of nature. Accompanied by a fine, stark cello score by Noah Hoffeld, Jenkins’s stoic montage includes, for example, bleak winter snowstorms and a sequence of a spider capturing a butterfly, which comment without apology on the reaping of lives. But the seasons turn, and we also spy on hatchlings in a robins’ nest, a child breast-feeding by a lake, and the exuberant springtime renewal of a garden. Late in the film, Jenkins’s brother speculates that death will be like “taking off a tight shoe —changing costumes,” and this transcendent insight, folded into the film’s rich, rhythmic structure, stays with you long after the ending.

The post Films by Stephanie Barber and Amy Jenkins Premiere in New York appeared first on artcritical.

The New York Film Festival’s Projections series is an often-overlooked selection of the finest in recent experimental and avant-garde film. Spread over 11 programs, this year’s subjects ranged from documentary to magical realism, from fades to found footage. Aggressive editing techniques and sound collage offered some new and provocative investigations, yet it was the modest program of two seasoned filmmakers — Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler — that beamed with the liveliest verve and curiosity. Partners in love and art for over 50 years, they have earned a following of poets, philosophers and artists steeped in as much affection as respect for “Nick and Jerry.” Like their legendary at-home screenings, this was a show-and-tell of gentle, beautiful things.

The program included three short films — Dorsky’s Autumn and The Dreamer, and Hiler’s Bagatelle II (all works 2016) — each imbued with the pair’s characteristically playful and patient observations of natural and interior life. Autumn, however, stood out as Mr. Dorsky’s most transient tapestry to date, and a significant interpretation of haiku — the pure poetic form that first seized him as a youth. Shot in 2015, during the last months in that year, as California’s drought continued, the film is dedicated to all autumns and ruminates on its essence through nature, using short shots of the California countryside. Inconceivably crisp and luminous, the 16 mm film is 26 minutes long and silent, complimented by the tick-tock of the projector. Dorsky’s films do without narrative structure, allowing the images to speak directly. By such standards, Autumn is verbose.

The film opens slowly, burying us eye-deep in foliage before clearing a space for Dorsky’s found treasures: broad-eared rhododendron and butterfly bushes, wayfaring between islands of light, fade in and out of a blackness that comes to linger within an organic, oneiric, day-for-night tone. Everything seems steeped in twilight — the violet hour, the day’s autumn — where partitions blur and something slips. Flora is constant, becoming a verdant ether, occasionally contrasted by the slick hide of a building, but we are always quickly pulled back under the brush. Each image, dyed in oscuro, is kernelled and then connected by a constant flow of gaze. Vegetation, despite its thirst, pulsates and vacillates throughout while, against reason, bushes blush green. Dorsky is reflective, more mirror than director; his subjects, once pinned to celluloid, are egalitarian: the darkening bough, a sun freckled path, light smeared like jelly across a window, an ache for life.

Such is the poetry of Dorsky, and his interest in haiku has long been shared among filmmakers. In the 1929 essay “Beyond the Shot,” Sergei Eisenstein precisely correlated the natures of montage and haiku. In both practices, it is the copulation of forms to create a “representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.” He offers the Japanese lexicon as example: the combination of water and eye mean to weep, knife and heart mean sorrow. Such laconicism describes haiku as much as Dorsky’s art; to see his film is to see master poet Matsuo Bashō’s 17 syllables glowing at the edge of winter:

Autumn moonlight —
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.

A self-proclaimed hunter of the Zen occurrence, of satori (the sudden enlightenment), Dorsky applies a number of poetic rules to the film, allowing his images to move us as consistently as Bashō’s cranes, cuckoos and moons. Vital to haiku are kigo (“season words”) — such as cicada, typhoon or grapes — that connote the time of year. Autumn is pregnant with the kigo-laden images of its namesake: rain slick streets, coy ochre moons, hexagonal light and tawny leaves glide down, across and over the screen. This is not simply a rummaging of diaphanous delicacies, however. Cutting is as essential to haiku as montage, and each cut is precise. Cutting works like a punctuation mark, and for Dorsky like a door. Throwing the juxtaposition into revelatory light, it links us to a new dimension — the moment of satori.

Such delightful turns happen throughout the film; seasoned and cut with care, Dorsky’s images become incarnations of linked verse. In one observation, light-tickled water meets a crush of velvet black reeds; the pair, now joined, transforms into an ominous sea urchin. Midway through Autumn, some late afternoon light falls yellow on the nubby back of an armchair or sofa. It glows, beginning to resemble a wheat field, but a crossfade exposes a dark landscape of whirling gears beneath: upholstery and infrastructure combine to reveal parallel universes of leisure and grind, flesh and mechanism. This all quickly falls away again, yet you can still taste a type of yellow, decidedly post-harvest.

In material as much as purpose, both film and haiku are attempts to bottle the moment of revelation, the fleeting experience. Indeed, the haiku is traditionally printed, like celluloid, as a single vertical line. Their kinship culminates towards the end of Autumn, the frame lingering on a voluptuous bit of vegetation. As Dorsky pushes and pulls us in and out by his signature dark fade, we move through a hypnagogic and hesitant collapse (or arising), towards a new vision: constellations of inestimably starry flora. In its final syllable, the film negotiates heaven and Earth: the Milky Way in milk thistle.

The post Flood of Images: Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler at the New York Film Festival appeared first on artcritical.

Dia: Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY, 845 440 0100

“Isn’t she so kind and warm?” Dia’s PR staff swooned as they took turns leaning into me. I watched the artist and host Isabel Lewis float past her guests while circling her wrists into widening arcs. “Hi, welcome.” Lewis cooed as she spun around and drifted through the clusters of curious people sipping their Summer Ale, lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery. I myself held an eco-friendly carton of water, which I had plucked out from one of the ice buckets scattered around the back of the immense space.

I was at Dia: Chelsea’s garage party loft, like one of those factory-turned-nightclubs in Williamsburg where you are a minority if you don’t have a tattoo. The music, interior, and vibes felt hip, too. Chic white couches were scattered throughout the space where exotic plants (Spanish moss and air plants) hung from the ceiling or sat on top of the furniture. Some visitors clutched their beers around the round tables with wiry legs. Mysterious speaker-like boxes emitted a faint scent concocted by the artist’s collaborator Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian chemist and olfactory researcher. The bass-heavy music (composed by Lewis herself) began as quiet pulses and escalated into mobilizing booms. A few couples got up from the long white couches to step to increasingly dance-friendly beats. I declined to take from a plate of vegan hors d’oeuvres; pickled vegetables, said one of the PR staff flanking me. The air felt sultry after the rainstorm had passed — the lingering humidity fit the environment created by the artist.

Berlin-based artist Isabel Lewis comes from a background in choreography and literary criticism. While she lived in New York City from 2004 to 2009, she presented her dance works at major hot spots such as Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, and New Museum. She has created and presented site-specific “occasions,” such as this one commissioned by Dia, to choreograph not just the movements of people’s bodies, but also their olfactory, visual, auditory, and gustatory experiences.

At first I was skeptical. Wasn’t this just another party with some pretentious art people? The hostess and DJ happened to be an artist, but this Friday night “occurrence” didn’t seem so different from other exhibition openings, aside from the original music and some interrupting philosophical lectures. Surely this work is a reference to the happenings of the 1950s and ‘60s. But Allan Kaprow did weird things like throw tires; nothing seemed weird in Lewis’s occurrence at all.

Shortsighted judgment. Nothing weird is precisely the point of Lewis’s work. The artist had created a modern-day happening in a way that addressed our contemporary climate and needs. In the late 1950s and ‘60s, throwing hundreds of tires into a room made sense because it radically merged mundane everyday life with so-called elevated art. On the other hand, strange acts now do not merge the everyday and “high” art, but rather create a greater disparity between real life and the mysterious luxury called art. This is now truer than ever with the post-1980s art market and celebrity culture surrounding a select number of big-shot artists. Art is an inaccessible luxury of the 1% who can afford to visit a gallery or museum during work hours. Art is an inaccessible language spoken and understood by a select few — the more cryptic and exclusive that language, the better and truer the art it refers to.

Lewis brings art back to the rest of us. She understands the function and purpose of art to be a connector — among ourselves and between us and the cosmos. I agree. Art was once a practical necessity for survival. Art not only helped the people of the pre-writing age pass down wisdom, but also brought a community together through collective sensory experience.

During one of her lecture interruptions on the Friday night occasion, Lewis spoke of “erotic sociability,” a concept articulated by scholar Roslyn W. Bologh in Love or Greatness (1990). To the artist, erotic sociability can guide us back to where art should take us, but often no longer does. She invites the rest of us — the ones with full-time jobs to support ourselves and our families — to unwind after another day when we had to sacrifice true connection in the name of practical survival. She invites the rest of us to follow her on a short escape from the city to a languid waterside upstate, where we are allowed quiet contemplation and a return to the larger universe where we all belong.

The artist prepared an aperitif for our one-and-a-half-hour trip to Beacon. On the way to the occasion, Lewis primed us with a streamable mixtape with tracks that correspond with each stop, beginning at Grand Central Terminal. The mixtape is meant to be a companion to her occasions, and was a collaboration between the artist, Dia, and the MTA. The tracks begin with voices and familiar sounds of the city but slowly ease into a gentle rhythmic beat that continues at the site up north. At Scenic Hudson’s Long Dock Park in Beacon, the host didn’t work the room like on Friday, but stepped back after providing the tools for each of us to fulfill our private but neglected tasks of connecting to the cosmos, the natural world.

Lewis, leading us from the city to upstate, brings us back to where we must return, a place to meditate and to connect back to each other and the world. In the midst of human priorities, we often forget the importance of true connection to each other and to the natural world, so much that we become blind to the destruction that our oblivion and negligence has caused to ourselves. In a contemporary society in which screens and devices increasingly distance us from each other, feigned connections destroy genuine empathy and lead to destructive hatred. Lewis — as host, as choreographer — directed us to that place where she waited with music that beat to the splash of waves. She directed us to a place where 15 dancers came and went, swaying with their eyes closed as though they were intoxicated from the salty air and regular beat under the sound of water.

Lewis’s background as a choreographer is clear in her latest work at Dia: her aim is to direct people’s movements into a carefully drafted trajectory. And she succeeds. She does for us what we need from art. We often forget one of art’s most important functions, which is to unite us through a collective sensory experience. She provides us this platform, not through years of expensive art education or through knowing all the right people, but through something all of us do — eat, drink, dance, talk, and play — at a time when most of us can be there to do it together. Lewis gives us what is usually a luxury for the few who can afford not to work during gallery or museum hours: art that the rest of us can partake in too.

The post Back to the Rest of Us: Isabel Lewis at Dia appeared first on artcritical.

June 2 to June 4, 2016
512 W 19th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

What is dust but history settling itself? Yvonne Rainer’s latest permutation of the ongoing project, The Concept of Dust, performed at The Kitchen, began quite literally with the death of an author. The stage was empty save for a white towel, pillow, and grey folding chair. The dancers, as they walked on stage, appeared not serious but devastated. Rainer began to speak: “I have a sad announcement to make tonight. One of our members won’t be here; Pat Catterson died last night.” Before the audience could react, a voice yelled from offstage, “No, what the fuck, Yvonne? What are you trying to do, get rid of me?” The forced farce — Catterson’s response sounded like that of an overly dramatic television actress — triggered first nervous, then genuine laughter from the audience as Catterson and Rainer eyed each other warily in the center of the floor. Though as the dance progressed this beginning increasingly faded from memory, the concept of lost, disembodied, or assumed voices became the spine of the piece.

Catterson soon, again, became the central figure as she began to tap dance, explaining as she danced:

During the voyage from Africa, slaves were occasionally brought up from the ship’s hull and made to dance. They were worth money now, and the physical exercise helped keep them alive. Imagine what this meant: they did routines that a month or two earlier had been part of the observance of their religion, or the celebration of a feast day, or the expression of their relationship with their grandparents. Anyone who hears this story will feel the burden of reconciliation built into tap.

With this speech — which was likely found text, as indicated by Rainer in her text on the piece — Catterson turns the once-comic atmosphere shades darker. While some of the dancers’ ensuing movements are intentionally stilted and quotidian, they can no longer be quite as amusing as much of the audience seemed to believe, laughing along. Instead, the movements and voices begin to feel hysterical. As slow violin music plays, a low and incoherent woman’s voice is subtly woven into the soundscape as if it were a subconscious murmur conducting the dancers, who improvisationally iterate small, choreographed passage of movement. Their imperfect coordination conveys informality reminiscent of rehearsal. Combined with the hysterical impulses woven into the choreography, this informality surfaces Rainer’s concern for the elemental chaos within the apparent order of daily life, which also comes through in her chosen texts. Dust is the ultimate mark of quotidian life, for it can only exist among whatever has become so routine as to be neglected.

The informality and familiarity of the dancers’ motions also allows each dancer to communicate their personality; with time, one notices how the same move looks different across bodies. Fifth position arms look best on the dancer who moves most lightly and elegantly. In ballet, the merging of body with gesture may be desirable, but in this choreography Rainer seems more interested in pointing to the citation of movement, paralleling the citation of text. Here, the same move looks best on the body that performs it most unnaturally, thus highlighting the difference between a routine and learned movement. And again, given the forced look of these movements on the dancers’ bodies,Catterson’s mention of being “made to dance” boils to the surface.

Rainer’s quoted texts are compiled in a stapled packet of papers, which she flips through during the performance, first while sitting in a chair at the edge of the stage, and then while running to the side of a dancer to ask them to read an excerpt. Most of them do so willingly, but some run away as Rainer approaches. When she finally catches up, she captures in her microphone only a gasp or guttural sound. But that appears satisfactory, as if “gasp” were part of the text. Though largely disconnected, and from sources including the Metropolitan Museum and New York Times, some texts are identified, such as excerpts from Kingsley Amis and from Maureen N McLane’s My Poets (2012). Rainer may introduce these partly for amusement, but also because they seem to be neglected stories: later in the dance, she reads a story about a young black man who was wrongly arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, beaten up in jail, and later released but with permanently damaged eyes. By blowing the dust off of these stories, one brings them back into the present, calls attention to their contemporary relevance.

Citations are defined by their removal from an original context. Because the performers may rearrange the phrases of the dance as they perform — and presumably Rainer may rearrange the order of the spoken texts — it is not their sequence or trajectory but rather their similarities that reveal Rainer’s intentions. In one phrase of the dance, the lights turn off completely. A voice speaks, that of an invisible narrator. She recites the history of a fossil. As she reads, one can hear that she is reading from a printed text, for she repeats some words and mispronounces others. Stumbling over words and imperfectly miming movements are both acts of citation. They also allow the voices and motions of history to become personalized, no longer omnipotent and objective. History is defined by its belonging to the past; it is made visible only in its residues, its accumulation of context: references, citations and dust.

The post Dust Settling: Yvonne Rainer Choreographs History at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

Had Eva Hesse lived, she would now be 80. In Marcie Begleiter’s new documentary profile we are treated to the story of her life and a textured portrait of the New York art world in the 1960s. It was Hesse’s good fortune to be part of a supportive art community that included Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Robert and Sylvia Mangold among others. Their focus was on art as self-discovery, rather than on art as commodity.

In order to tell Hesse’s story, the film moves back and forth among her past, present, and future. The film opens and closes with artists, critics, curators, and museum directors talking about her legacy and the widespread appeal of her poignant work. This contribution is evident at a recent opening of Hesse’s work in London at the Lisson Gallery where young artists were particularly drawn to the relevance of her accomplishment, which changed the landscape of what we mean by art, and, which continues to open up new options. Regrettably, Hesse could not exploit these options due to her premature death at the age of 34.

There is no omniscient narrator in the film.   Using a series of videotaped segments, we hear poignant stories about Eva’s struggles and successes from her closest friends, Rosie Goldman, Gioia Timpanelli and Sol Lewitt. We also learn how some of her masterpieces, conceptualized and designed by Hesse, were realized with the help of Doug Johns, a plastics expert, who was her assistant in the final two years of her life. Helen Hesse Charash, Eva’s sister, provides valuable insights on how Eva’s life was plagued by feelings of abandonment and how she courageously faced death in her last months.

The three key figures who are no longer alive—Eva, her father, and Sol Lewitt—speak to us through the voices of unseen actors against the backdrops of hundreds of photographs and silent video segments.   The script is entirely from primary sources, i.e., diaries, letters, and interviews.   These multiple vantage points allow us to observe the trajectory of Hesse’s development and gain insight into the intricacies of the generative art-world that surrounded her.

Begleiter and Shapiro faced two significant challenges in crafting this film: how to avoid making Eva’s life into a soap opera and how to introduce a mass audience to a body of work which eschews beauty while exploring a powerful but often twisted path to aesthetic truth. They successfully walk these tightropes by showing scores of Eva’s works, evolving from expressionist painting to quasi-minimalist sculpture to non-art which “let it all hang out.”

Particularly well handled is Eva’s visit to Germany, the place from which she fled in 1938 and to which she returned in 1964 for 15 months with her husband, Tom Doyle, who accepted an all expenses-paid residency to work on his sculpture. These segments effectively trace how the shadow of the Holocaust penetrated every phase of Hesse’s life and aesthetic practice. Faced with nightmares and her inability to work, she was inspired by the encouraging letters of Sol Lewitt who told her to “Just DO!” Heeding his advice, Hesse, during the next months, made a crucial switch from being a painter to being a proto-sculptor, by exploiting the discarded materials around her.   Eva’s correspondence with Sol Lewitt provided some of the most tender and personal aspects of the film. The close relationship between these two artists is movingly portrayed beyond Germany. Friends expressed their disappointment when Sol’s romantic feelings for Eva were not reciprocated.

In the film, several artists described how Eva liked to use unusual materials such as polyester resin, latex, fiberglass and rope as well as industrial materials like metal washers and shell casings. She often played with them for long periods before deciding what form they wanted to take. In one of Hesse’s greatest works, Rope Piece, order comports with disorder, as was true in her own life. Using the force of gravity, Eva lets the wet sections of rope determine their own structure. In the film, Elizabeth Sussman suggests that there is no one right way to hang this rope piece. Such openness was a trademark of the new genre Hesse was creating, one in which her sculpture vacillated between comic tragedies and tragic comedies.

Finally, it is hard not to be moved by Hesse’s tragic death, due to a series of brain tumors, which cut short her relentless desire to keep producing great art. The film is at its best when it allows us to see how her aesthetic accomplishment and her fearlessness in the face of death were interwoven. Hesse’s life and art are embodied in the aphorism of Samuel Beckett, whose absurdist humor Hesse readily acknowledged: “I can’t go on; I will go on”.

Eva Hesse (Dir. Marcie Begleiter, 2016; a Zeitgest Films release) at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, (212) 727-8110. Screenings at 12:30  2:45  5:10  7:30  9:50

The post Vulnerable Visionary: Eva Hesse, A Film By Marcie Begleiter appeared first on artcritical.

February 18 to February 20, 2016
512 West 19th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

In the tradition of Trisha Brown’s dance diagrams, Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard presented an intricate work at The Kitchen, called For Claude Shannon, with its own palette of densities, gestures, and articulations. Each performance is individually coded “using the syntactic structure of a sentence by Claude Shannon,” the influential founder of information theory, which is translated into a combination of movement “atoms,” forming a kind of algorithmic lexicon.

As I entered the black box theatre, speakers emitted sounds like air vents blowing in an airplane, always too cold. My “vent” turns closed; my hearing shifts to another aisle.

After awhile, I begin to wonder if this performance will ever start, if the lights will ever dim, if the audience will begin to check their watches and then realize, half an hour into the performance, that it had already begun before they walked into the room. “The dancers begin to learn this particular choreographic sequence two hours before the public enters the space,” we have been told, “and continue this learning process during the performance.” We watch them learn.

The fans all close. Four bodies turn to face us.

One of the three female dancers lifts her arms, holding an expanding bubble. Her male partner’s left leg rises imperceptibly, then again more pointedly as hers lifts, too. Another female dancer’s torso turns. I concentrate on the small sound of a shoe’s sole — with tiny, pebbled bumps, it seems — lifting off a flat floor, as if adhesive.

They move so slowly that if I stop to trace one, as I would like to do, I miss the subtlety of the others’ movements. An arm held perpendicular or parallel to the floor, a leg either supporting or extending diagonally away from the body — these are the movements to which I become attuned, looking for symmetry or failure.

The farthest female dancer’s eyes blink rapidly, like shutters, as all turn to face each other. They are suddenly, now, in coordination, at least for a moment. Their slipper shoes create a soundscape, within which they weave closer together, folding their arms like leaves of creased paper to create an origami box. I feel tension, can’t breathe too hard for fear of coughing and interrupting the intensity of their concentrated gazes.

Closer, nearly intersecting, then apart, one movement at a time, they drift. The dance becomes a waiting game.

Then, a prick of disbelief: two touch! And one goes still. I read in her immobility the shock of having been interrupted during a mechanical sequence. Yet this is not an inhuman dance; if it were, we would not sense their effort and uncertainties, hesitations and unravelings.

Why these “atoms” of movement? Never two arms up together, never two legs straddled apart. Is the sequence there, written on the floor like Braille or Morse code in black strips of alternating lengths and positions? Is Shannon’s phrase a chain link through their limbs?

They dance in dress clothes. The lights never change. How are the pauses, turns, positions, and relative durations of each movement determined? What portion of sequences are repeated? Does a choreography determined by a form of speech count as one of chance? What was the phrase that we now must exhaust?

Eventually they return again to their original positions. They pause, then begin to move in synchrony. Gradually, the air pressure changes, which we experience as shifts in pitch, crackles like static in the soundscape, and popping ears in a disjointed physicality. One dancer breaks out of line and another follows, then returns. Was that a mistake? A moment of learning?

The sound is now regular, having incorporated the static clicks into a new beat. Each body moves in sync, but each turns individually until none face forward.

A word is uttered. Was it from the audience?

Again. No, it came from the stage.

“Either”
“Accidentally”
“Passage”

They are revealing the phrase.

“Selecting”

But this is too easy, too obvious, for them to expose the mechanism behind the dance.

“Use”
“One”
“Wait”
“A”
(“Minute”?)

I want to think. But the phrase is incomplete.
The clicks pick up, coordinating time and dictating movement.

“Point,” spoken all together. They move quite quickly now, nearly fluidly. The clicks sound like two blocks clacked together, as in Joan Jonas’s Song Delay (1973). The spatiality of sound seems important but does not clearly correspond to their configurations on stage. The words come too quickly to record now, and I wonder when the sound will mark a tempo too fast for them to follow. Who will collapse? Which atoms will be sacrificed?

Then, the dancers are still. Can they not continue? Has the phrase ended?

One dances again, so quickly, as if tap dancing. Another begins, too. The clicks pick up again to the point of becoming static, so loud that they obscure the sound of the dancers’ voices. Sometimes a body will pause, as if to remember its place in the sequence. Is this learning? What are the stakes? How can we know when they have failed?

Static turns to hail. They speak louder but move elegantly. They must fight their inertia.

New movements emerge out of transitory positions: a leg raised too high, a jump kick, a sideways stance, a lunge.

Then a diagonal movement by one dancer across the floor— there have been none thus far — and the heaviness of the bass begins to parallel the new heaviness of their bodies.

Yet this improvisational segment lasts too long; rather than demonstrating a collapse of the code or a fracture, it becomes a new segment in itself, forcing me to lose my hold on the atoms that seemed so clearly defined from the start. Or was that the intention, for us to unlearn what the dancers had learned only “two hours before the public enters the space”? The chance of subjective improvisation has trumped the chance of an atomic composition.

Finally, the beat slows. The bass fades and the clicks return to irregular taps. Jostling bodies move but without grandiose gestures.

All face the front.

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Sunday November 15, 2015 at 7:15 PM, Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas
Wednesday November 18 at 5:15 PM, IFC Center

David Shapiro’s “Missing People,” which won Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival earlier this fall, shadows art gallery director Martina Batan in her twin missions better to grasp the past lives of two people now gone. One is Roy Ferdinand, an African-American man in pre-Katrina New Orleans – crime capital of America at the time of his death – who, at the urging and funding of a local art dealer, chronicled the culture of destruction around him. Martina has collected around 200 of his sometimes lurid drawings, keeping small pictures of them on hand to show to other people. The second missing person is her younger brother, Jeffery Batan, who in 1978 was violently killed, aged 14. His body was found in a yard near the family home in Queens, but murderer and motive remain unsolved.

The film opens with her description of this event, accompanied by news footage. Restless since that day, then a freshman at School of Visual Arts, Martina, now in mid-life, believes that something like closure is due, a resolution that will bring her some measure of rest. The accumulation of Ferdinand’s artwork, untutored illustration essentially, is an ongoing stopgap offering provisional or stand-in meanings, as if the depictions of murder and social decay by this artist, who often lived on the streets, could fill in her brother’s untold story. Martina visits Ferdinand’s sisters, Fay and Michele, in New Orleans, to learn more about him, which becomes a process of familial bonding.

Home in New York, Martina engages a private investigator to pursue the still-open case of her brother’s murder and surface what he can. This, too, is a form of progress, but its disclosures, ever more unexpected, throw her into new narratives that answer sets of questions she’d never know to ask. The speed and intrigue of the film move in a golden ratio, where a slow arch gathers momentum as it centers in on itself. Several points in the story could be a feasible ending, but as it continues, its psychological depth intensifies and keeps turning.

The documentary is about meaning-making as much as it is about Martina, in the film’s search for connection with her – finding her within a fog of her growing emotional vacancy – as she ties together what she can of her memories, her fears, and recent revelations about her brother’s life. Our contact with her is threaded through her contact with herself. Meaning is in moments suspended for the sake of continuation; continuation is sometimes halted for finding moments of reflexive meaning.

The film runs back and forth between clips of Martina’s present life and footage from decades past, the unfolding of who Roy Ferdinand was alongside the piecemeal construction of Jeffery’s life and death. This fluid structure is consistent in the way it keeps the viewer involved, on every level, as seemingly disparate elements of people’s lives, their interiors and exteriors, come in and out of view. Most remarkable is the balance the filmmaker maintains in documenting Martina’s ongoing struggles and snapping points. Ultimately, Shapiro respects the craft of non-fiction cinema as much as he does Martina Batan.

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