The Wende Museum brings memories of the Cold War to LA with elegance and good timing

A Museum of the Cold War in Culver City, California? The Wende Museum, a modest new jewel in a redone armory/bomb shelter by Paravant Architects with landscaping by Segal Shuart could be considered an odd subject choice for Los Angeles as its focus is strictly on the communist era in Russia and Eastern Europe.

And yet: what a treat. As I’m preparing for a trip to the region it was a welcome wealth of memorabilia, posters, photographs and and texts about this complicated period of public repression combined with private creativity.  On the outside, people had to conform to strict dictates. But in their homes and offices, outliers were able to continue their art or design practices. 

Some examples of facial recognition instructions for eastern block border guard training are scarily prescient but the decorative arts were still able to flourish out of sight of the watchful eyes. I am particularly looking forward to the upcoming exhibition they are jointly hosting with the Getty Research Institute on Hungary during this period.

It’s useful to go to the Wende in times such as ours to see that no matter how dictatorial and unfriendly governments become, the human spirit rises above. The Arcadia Fund, Benedikt Taschen and executive director Justinian Jampol, lead movers on the project are to be commended.

Eating Atom Bombs: Dana Schutz is not afraid to marry her art with politics

Eating Atom Bombs , the new Dana Schutz exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art Transformer Station features a series of paintings created mostly in the past year and shows that rather than being cowed by the protests which greeted her work on Emmett Till at the Whitney Biennal she has stayed the course in conflating the political with her practice. I commend her courage and applaud her efforts to encourage us not to look away in these challenging times.

Washington is mired in gridlock and grime.  “Many of the paintings depict dystopic scenes of conflict and shame,” Schutz says. “Subjects conceal and reveal themselves, trying to hold themselves—and the picture—together.”

Schutz is a semi-Clevelander, she attended art school there and clearly feels a loyalty as probably any museum in the country would have happily housed this exhibition.  I have always loved her work, now more than ever that she is wearing her heart on her canvas.  The black and white images hold as much anguish and emotion as the brilliantly colored ones, and becoming a mother has clearly made her fear for the future of our planet. Schutz has also been channeling Picasso, a self portrait and some heads are riffs on cubism and portraiture that felt very familiar and yet totally fresh.

I’m sorry the work isn’t coming to New York or LA, but truth be told, in these times, it’s almost better for them to be seen in Ohio where voters swing back and forth between reason and folly.

Beuys: a new film matches the energy and provocation of the celebrated artist

“Some people can walk into a room and see inside people,” says Joseph Beuys in a flak jacket (or is it a fishing vest?), white shirt and dark pants at the opening of a new film by Andres Veiel. Beuys then mounts a ladder. He takes some kind of gelatinous material off the wall and shakes it onto a tray.  A crowd of 1971 square black eyeglasses and dangle earrings surges around him.  It’s scary.  What will they do with or to this renegade?

Josephy Beuys was many things: artist, filmmaker, provacteur, socio-political agitator, activist, professor. He wore many hats, but his one hat, his fedora which both made him stand out and hid him, also covered up his extensive war wounds (he had been shot down as a rear gunner for the Luftwaffe after having been in the Hitler Youth). As Warhol had his blonde wig and Haring his dreds and Wegman his dogs, Beuys had his signature hat and his complicated and sad family history informed his work which was both monumental and delicate.

He was catnip to journalists. At the Guggenheim, Beuys is having his first US retrospective in 1979.  They are trying to get close, to explain him. Viewers are trying to understand. The yards of gray felt nestled like a beehive, over a piano, a chair with a resin slope illustrates his anti-theory that art can be anything, made by anyone. As a social philosopher, a public debater about the role of art, the artist and and politics, he had few competitors. At a symposium, he is dripping sweat, feisty and contrarian in front of an elite audience. As the others try to maintain calm,  he is voluble and passionate. He wants to provoke people. Expand their consciouness. Forget theory.

"Whenever people ask me if I’m an artist I say.' Oh cut the crap.'”

He participates in Documenta—puts it on the map- in a time when art biennials and fairs were sparse. He foments a revolution at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art where he teaches. He comes to New York to spend three days with a coyote in a gallery—one shaman to another-- and returns to Germany without setting foot in the rest of the city.  The natural world held out its mysteries to him as well, evidenced also in a tree planting project he pursed for many years.

Beuys’s life and work was much documented. The animated contact sheets we see are a good substitute for video  as they break down his process. And I appreciated no narration for a change, and very few talking heads. Beuys and his images tell his own story.

Alas, his sharp mind and a penetrating gaze was beset by chronic depression and despair.  After the war he grew emaciated and stopped work. Gradually he came back to life, but had periods throughout his life that were crippling. His phoenix moments came in tribal rituals in fat and felt.

Beuys felt art is a joint task: viewer and artist are complicit. The artist must reach inside the viewer and activate him. This film succeeds very well in that regard.

The Shape of Water: Whimsical, charming....and sexy.

The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s interspecies love story is really Beauty and the Beast in a new disguise.  There’s also some of Wes Anderson’s rich vintage hues and Amelie’s plucky heroine.

There’s also something of a script I tried to get going some years back which was the story of a scientist who turns a monkey into a man and his girlfriend falls in love with him. I could not get anyone to buy this as their credulity was strained.

But del Toro and his team leap over this hurdle and deliver an all-too-believable fable about a swamp creature with the eyes of Bambi and Eliza, a heroine who also is something of a watery Cinderella--without a voice.  Del Toro also loves old movies in general, and uses clips and soundtracks from vintage Hollywood to spark some of the storyline. 

It’s also impossible not to summon E.T. the loveable alien. But Del Toro, who alternates between horror/sci-fi/dystopia and fantasy films which have not been as accessible to me has hit the jackpot on this one.  It's charming and whimsical, but also sexy. 

The Shape of Water is truly original and I fear it may get lost in a year when we have so many real live monsters. All I can say is the Creature in this film with his scaly skin which glows when he feels emotion—needs no bathrobe or hotel-room bait-and-switch to disguise his marvelous ardor.

I spent New Year's Eve In Bed with My Absolute Darling

It has become something of a tradition at the CultureZohn to stay in bed on New Year's Eve with a hunky luminary in the form of--his book. Well, let's just say in the past it has been with Keith Richards, Richard Burton and Warren Beatty and I promise you watching the Ball Drop on Times Square in frigid weather cannot in any way compare.

But this year, I had no celebrity I wanted to spent the night in bed with.  I was left to choose between essays by women who were heartbroken or non fiction to do with Florida or Sicily, none of which seemed very appealing. 

The one novel I did have was My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent, a book which had received critical raves, so I snuggled in under the duvet (yes, even in LA where the weather this holiday season has been sublime everyone forgets we are a desert and it drops at least 20 degrees at night and gets cold) and began the book, which truth be told, I had tried to begin at least three earlier times but with the distractions of the holidays had proved heretofore challenging.

We know we are in the Wild West right away when Tallent's first chapter opens on Turtle, a 14 year old girl cleaning and caring for her gun as if it were her pet turtle while she practices her spelling words under her father Martin's watchful, sardonic, impatient eye. In school she is distracted and slow and when she is called in for an after school conference with him she is passive and hostile, on high alert for her father's anger, a lone survivalist who keeps them off the grid in Mendocino. She keeps her own counsel while the corpulent principal and benevolent teacher try to pierce Martin's angry screed on environmental apocalypse which he feels will render all of Turtle's (nee Julia Alveston) spelling errors and everything else they are teaching her in school pretty much moot. Turtle's plentiful self loathing (which she has clearly picked up from her 'daddy') during the meeting gives us the second set of clues that this is no ordinary father daughter relationship.  On the way home she is petrified of the consequences and mentally dodges and feints with his impending rage. Tallent mirrors his lady bird (and there is something of the Saoirse Ronan character in her) with stealth and cunning for suddenly by the end of chapter one we are in the darkest territory imaginable and I was literally holding my breath.

It's hard to write about the book without giving away things so I will say merely the following. Turtle reminded me alternately of Harper Lee's Scout, Truffaut's Wild Child, and Lord of the Flies. She eats raw eggs. She's feral.  After guns--and there are a lot of guns-- there are knives. She's a smart, damaged teenager caught in a twisted bramble--and there are plentiful brambles and fields and hikes and beaches redolent of Tallent's deep knowledge of the area--of pain and suffering which with like all abused children (or wives for that matter) is inflected with deep love. "I am a girl things go badly for," she says at the outset and that is no understatement. It's the first time I felt I could describe a relationship as S and M with a child.

Turtle does escape every once in a while and we get to breathe along with her. She is befriended by Jacob and Brett, two precociously intelligent and well read boys a year older than she is (shades of the young Tallent?)  when they get lost in the woods and they become two of the outside forces she knows she could rely on were she to spill the beans. Problem is: she can't get herself to do it. Like so many victims, she loves her abuser madly. 

Martin is good looking and strong (Sam Shepard in his younger days would have been perfect casting) and he's smart too, but he's totally unhinged and there's not a few moments when I thought of all the crazies who have been shooting people in Las Vegas et al.   Tallent gives him as much intelligence and savvy and self reliant skill set as he can muster but nothing really ends up mattering except his sick fixation on his daughter, whom, as he makes her swear, 'belongs only to him'. 

Her grandfather's death (he, another tiny drunken outpost of semi sanity) triggers a series of events which grow more twisted and gut wrenching, and which, I had to often skip over. It was like a movie where I cover my eyes when it grows too violent only with a book you can't do that. It's New Year's Eve I kept reminding myself, but I couldn't put the book down. Eventually Turtle even joins her father in abusing another young girl Cayenne, whom he brings into the house.  Come on Tallent, I wanted to say, isn't it already enough?  But no, apparently it isn't. He needs to show us precisely how corrupting being a victim is. Martin himself was his father's victim--and so it goes. 

I read that Tallent had been an outdoor guide himself, and it states clearly on the book jacket that he grew up with two moms which made me wonder if having a regular dad around might not have given him a shot at undemonizing Martin from time to time. Credulity is often challenged. Though Turtle is nervous the authorities are going to show up when she cuts school repeatedly or when people see her bedraggled, high strung state, they never do, so the hothouse, well, charnel house atmosphere is rarely pierced.

Tallent writes beautifully, the gorgeous prose still fragile ballast for the horrible things he is describing. All in all it was a fraught way to welcome the New Year and I spent New Year's Day lolling about in my nightgown making a vat of chicken soup.

Getty Gold and Concrete make for timely-and thoughtful- end of 2017 viewing

The Getty exhibition of Golden Kingdoms--part of PST-- is open for another month.  I am not normally a gold person but this exhibition is just so spectacular I urge all to race up the hill to see it. (Fair warning: the line for cars getting into the Getty from both north and south was at least an hour long. Perhaps wait until next week?). What especially drew my eye, even more than the magnificent masks, were tiny unpolished votive figures made by the Muisca who inhabited the Eastern Cordillera of Columbia.  These were placed in baskets or ceramic vessels and then deposited in lakes, caves, fields and mountaintops as offerings to divine powers.  

These two headed mini sculptures felt just right: we need to be canny and clever, thinking with two heads and not one in the coming year.  The gold, instead of being Trumpian and garish, is small, but even more powerful as it comes in on little wheels of hope. 

Also see the Concrete Art exhibition before it closes (here represented by a piece from Juan Mele, 1948).  Collector Patricia Cisneros looks positively prescient as her collection of Latin American jewels of another sort is equally refreshing.

Big, Mr. President, is not necessarily better.  Happy New Year to one and all. 

Contemporary architects take the time to look back in two rewarding tomes

It’s not often that well-known architects thoroughly engaged in their own contemporary practices have—or take—the time to look back at the work of their elders.  In a confluence of magnanimity, and, in the words of Thom Mayne, one of the authors, to serve as a prompt—“that students and laypeople alike would benefit from an awareness and appreciation of the most important and influential buildings that have come before and that will continue to inform the development of architecture beyond today,” these two, very giftable tomes reach out beyond the generations to some iconic, already-beloved structures, and bring to our attention some others that despite their excellence are still under the radar.

Mayne's book, 100 Buildings, a collaboration with Eui-Sung Yi and The Now Institute housed at UCLA, began when, in his role as architecture professor, he noticed that many of his talented design students were woefully uninformed about architectural history—much to their detriment.  He reached out to a broad swath of fellow practitioners to come up with this illustrated list of important buildings all over the world to which he wished to draw their attention.  Opening in splendor with Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and the Chappelle de Notre Dame at Ronchamp, both of which I have visited, and ending with the Yokohama International Port Terminal, which I have not, the book has many beloved treasures, but just as many which have now gone onto my ever lengthening bucket list.

Fred Fisher, in collaboration with Stephen Harby, both Rome Prize fellows, took as their underlying thesis the historic work that another generous architect and Rome Prize winner, Robert Venturi, had singled out in Rome in his legendary tome, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.  With the benefit of future sight, in Robert Venturi's Rome, Fisher and Harby revisited some of these buildings and in elegant and graceful watercolors and text showed why these buildings-some even twentieth century-- are still more than relevant today.

As someone who often travels the world with the organizing principle of architecture as the way into a foreign culture, I am grateful to Mayne and Fisher--both Los Angeles based--and their colleagues, for helping re-light the way.

I often accuse architects of being myopic and/or overly wordy and verbose when they write, as if the technical requirements of buildings with their exacting codes and mathematical precisions also have application in prose (n.b. to Mayne, they also should be teaching architects how better, and more simply, to convey their messages). In this case I am happy to say, it is the images with brief but engaging texts that makes both projects so rewarding, and as useful for the lay traveler or reader as for students. 

Two great stocking stuffers!  Happy Holidays.

The Fountainhead comes to Brooklyn by way of Amsterdam: is it still the over the top guilty pleasure we remember?

In the current Toneelgroep Amsterdam production of The Fountainhead that is playing at BAM for four performances only, the Belgian director Ivo van Hove makes the over-the-top Ayn Rand novel respectable. 

To get ready for the event, I reread the 1943 novel on which van Hove based his production over Thanksgiving (no mean feat, it’s 720 pages). Ok, I didn’t read every page, skipping the tiresome screeds that Rand-ites devour for their politically conservative perspectives on the power of the individual and f ---the masses. (Rand was Russian born, Alissa Rosenbaum and reinvented herself when she got to the US)  But I read every juicy scene about architect Howard Roark and journalist Dominique Francon and the twisted revenge scheme she puts in place by marrying two other men because she desires Roark so very badly. Francon and Roark are conjoined in a whopping narcissistic frenzy of love and revenge on each other, the people who care for them, their colleagues, and the dumb rest of us that makes the anti-proletarian pap that Rand spews sustainable. They are conjoined in body and in belief in Roark’s greatness. The plot of the talented architect who cannot get arrested, well actually he does get arrested, who sees through everyone else’s false humblebrag was still a sideshow for me. (In the new paperback copy that I took out from the library, there was a tear out insert to join the Ayn Rand Society.  Rand still is a touchstone for the Trumpian sector of society.  Damn the torpedos and the DACAs too.)  

I hate to be the wet blanket but this rigorous, well-staged, well-crafted touring production was not nearly the guilty pleasure of either the novel or the film, which in an interview van Hove said he had expressly chosen not to watch. I think that may have been an error. Though the film got terrible notices when it was released, it is the film that most people remember along with their other guilty pleasures.  It matched the lurid, pulp-iness if not the politics, of the didactic, wordy novel which Rand used as a mouthpiece for her anti-Communist ideals.

The set is a wonder of spareness and tech, the musicians and the overhead screen add elements that help the four hour production move along.  I admire van Hove, but watching The Fountainhead with supertitles in Dutch just did not work for me. (It’s not that there aren’t brilliant, sexy Dutch architects eg. Rem Koolhaas) His correct Dutch actors had not the heft or grace I had always imagined and rather a stolidity and aridity that just did not fit. 

Roark was a silent, cunning man, more like the Gary Cooper figure in the film. Roark’s power lay in his permanent intractability along with his pumping iron pecs. He did not yell to make his point, unlike Ramsey Nasr, the actor who plays him. The other characters, the conniving, opinion writer Ellsworth Toohey (Bart Slegers), the milksop, no-idea young turk Peter Keating who washes up (Aus Greidanus Jr), Guy Francon, the leading society architect and Dominique-pere and Henry Cameron ( both played by Hugo Koolschijn), the once great architect-mentor, acquit themselves well enough, but there is a sameness about them, the same size, the same volubility, that does not help us to leap over the language and to distinguish things in this four-hour production.

During the intermission, which does not come for almost two hours, people were talking about the many full frontal nude sex scenes and if they were gratuitous. (Roark has his pants on during the early rape--which is portrayed in the novel as quasi-consensual--but off for the rest.) The direction is so stylized and acted for an overhead camera that van Hove removes us from any stirring passion we, or they?, might have felt. It is not sexy.  (Does she have implants was all I could wonder besides her great, full Brazillian, and was that an erection I actually might have seen?). Their naughty secret relationship with its S and M-like verbal whips and chains of remonstrance is nowhere to be found.

There is instead an operatic quality to it: I’m thinking it could have been the basis instead for a wonderful opera as it has all the elements.

Architects design things. Others build them.  Roark is the rare exception: he does both. I don't know how many have been inspired by this novel or film to be architects in the damn-society Frank Lloyd Wright-iness of Henry Cameron and Howard Roark (and we now also have the secrets of Louis Kahn with his many women).  Was it Roark who fed the flame of arrogance and hubris that marked some of the starchitects of recent years? Roark is indifferent to most of his clients, they are not allowed to intervene after the first meetings, they are not allowed to make changes. Roark designs a low-income housing project and then detonates it because they’ve had the audacity to change some elements.  No, there are only two people who get it: Dominique and Howard.  The clients, the critics, the unwashed masses: Phooey.

As a young adolescent, when I came to The Fountainhead, I had little idea that I would become a journalist who married an architect and so perhaps I’m no longer able to see the glory of it all.  Architecture and journalism are laudable practices but also brutal: architects are put in public line ups and forced to compete against each other, often using their own funds (journalists too!). 

Still it’s nice to see us up there along with the other professions as larger than life.

Photo credit: Richard Termine, courtesy BAM

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Emma Dante's Le Sorelle Macaluso, a hot-blooded Sicilian import at Peak Performances

The elusive dream to take a trip to Sicily, infinitely planned and postponed, was reignited last night on a trip to the much closer Peak Performances at Montclair State presenting for the first time in the US, Emma Dante’s Le Sorelle Macaluso.  The first leg of my journey to Sicily, it was well worth the short trip to New Jersey. 

I was rewarded with an hour of the most nuanced direction and the most vibrant acting on the most profound of subjects—death and family—even as the piece came across as the most life-affirming and original I have seen in a long time.  Jed Wheeler, the Peak impresario, designated this year of his programming as one dedicated to women artists—not, as he insists because he wanted to lump them together—but because most of the work coming into his veteran sightlines was, indeed, by women.

That said, Emma Dante, who alas could not appear with her company, is a gem among gems and her actors, seven women (who play the sisters) and two men, later additions to a piece originally conceived for all women (the father and a son) are fierce, intelligent, fearless.  The sisters convene to mourn the dead, and as wakes must, summon their childhood memories: the harsh father, the angry, manipulative sister, the pushy mother, the eldest caregiver, the youth athlete on his way to success.  All of these potentially clichéd icons come fully to searing and individual life, giving lie to some of their most vivid recollections, as the sisters engage with each other and their communal ghosts.

In simple long-sleeved black shirts and pants the sisters march in formation to open the piece, almost Mussolini-esque in their presentation, but this bleak regiment soon gives way to a septet with colorful slips and ultimately bathing suits as the characters strip down to their very essences.  A cast member in the post performance Q and A said simply that Dante wanted to accentuate the fact that it is mourners who wear black---that the dead are in fact captured in the midst of life, of color.

The cast speaks Sicilian, a dialect I could not easily grasp even though I understand Italian, but the supertitles were elegant and not at all distracting.  The mere mention of Sicily brings colorful baggage (the Corrleones, Pirandello, the Greek influence, the refugees et al) but Dante instead imbues the work with surprising layers through her method of physical and emotional improvisation, which with aching specificity, wrenches our hearts.

It stood in unexpected weekend juxtaposition with Call Me By Your Name, a cool, beautiful film set in the very north of Italy about a gay love affair made from a James Ivory script by Luca Guadagnino, a master of surfaces, of masking emotion, of hidden agendas. I much preferred the Sorelle and their undisguised grasp of life and each other.

It is a shame that Peak is not in our NYC laps, one must take a bus, but so what.  Wheeler has drafted a season that is barely midway through and I could not recommend more highly keeping up with his keen eye.

Photos: Marina Levitskaya for Peak Performances.

Rakka Ta Bee Bee: William Kentridge re-mixes Kurt Schwitters in Ursonate for Performa 17

William Kentridge, in a burst of his usual high energy, premiered his Performa 2017 commission Ursonate at the newly refurbished Harlem Parish, a perfect setting for his updating or re-imagining of Kurt Schwitters’ Dada piece first performed by him in Potsdam in the home of a patron in 1925.

These images of Schwitters and Kentridge show a certain separated-at-birth of devlish and madcap, two essential qualities for Ursonate.

Schwitters was apparently at odds with his own Berlin Dada group and this sound poetry piece was itself a rebellion from the rebellion.  The Dada movement--founded to protest conventional ‘capitalist’,  ‘bourgeois’ art--was home to many splinter groups.  Once you have anarchy and nonsense as structural themes, all bets are off.

Alternately impressing me as Latin, Pig Latin, Africaans and an entirely made up nonsense language (Schwitters was German,after all) , Kentridge re-mixed the piece as a point of departure for his video work which typically combines his drawings (in this case, himself climbing endlessly over a chair, colored geometric shapes, newsprint, notebooks, a ballerina brandishing a rifle, portraits, birds in flight et al) and which come to impart a sketchy narrative of South African apartheid. 

Though Ursonate has previously been sampled by other artists, the thrill—and the challenge-- of a Kentridge piece, is his refusal to tolerate artistic boundaries. We must keep up with his synaptic segues which we would ideally have more time to process.You can hear an original recording of Schwitters' Ursonate piece here. 

Repetition of words and sounds bring attention to how language can be both a link and a barrier to communication. The art of listening closely to others is something in increasingly short supply

 In my 2010 interview with him at the time of his US museum retrospective, Kentridge was working on The Nose, an opera commission from the Met. Kentridge has worked extensively in opera (also The Magic Flute) and video, and his performance, ably joined in the end by a (Venice Beach-hooray!) singer Ariadne Greif, and musicians, is technically as demanding as an opera, the vocal rolling ‘r’s of the sound poem especially pungent in the vast vaultings of the former church. But by the finale, with Kentridge and Greif punctuating by leaning into each other, the piece felt ultra contemporary.

Rakka Ta Bee Bee is what the opening bars sound like—a hip hop like no other. 

(A friend told me he had tried to get one of the Performa 17 Barbara Kruger metro cards to no avail. I think they are still being randomly distributed at certain stations. What a souvenir that would be!)

Columbus and Ladybird: skinning the Coming of Age cat

Last night at the Architecture and Design Film Festival, besides the many architects in black in a lounge filled with Hastens beds which gave it the air of a Tinder musical-beds meet up, a dance performance piece therein which was apparently meant to say something about the human body in space but instead continued the vaguely sexual theme as they writhed-against-columns,  legendary Kevin Roche passing by in all his nonagenarian wonderfulness (also the subject of a film biography), Kogonada's film Columbus was being presented, the first time a narrative film had broken through the stated mission of the festival which is to show non-fiction documentaries. 

Columbus has been on the festival circuit and in sporadic release for a while and is now on Itunes, but it was an excellent film to see on the wide screen.  Beautifully shot in Columbus, Indiana, the home of Irwin Miller’s (Cummins Engine) city wide 20th century project to bring worthy modernist architecture to an industrial town in the Midwest, it is the coming of age story of a young woman, a high school graduate who is trying to find her way in the world—and it turns out her way is through the architecture around which she has grown up. 

The story is simple. An architecture professor is visiting the sites of Columbus. He collapses at   Eliel Saarinen’s glorious church despite the presence of his devoted but momentarily inattentive minder Eleanor (Parker Posey, the ever faithful indie actress), and he is taken to the medical center for an indeterminate stay. His son,Jim (John Cho) a translator, arrives from Korea to manage things, and instead falls in step with Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) as she shows him the city from her distinctly home grown perspective.  People are trying to push Casey away from home, but she has come to love and respect her hometown.The son who is estranged from his father ends up staying, the daughter who has been her ex meth-head mother-in-recovery caregiver, leaves. 

 What a pleasure to be able to see inside and outside so many thoughtful architectural projects, especially the Alexander Girard conversation pit at the Miller house. The film is the best advertisement for architecture I’ve seen in a long while and I am making plans to visit Columbus (along with another Midwestern pilgrimage to Cranbrook)  However, much self regarding, portentous dialog ensues.  Think Last Year at Marienbad, also a film about finding one’s way amidst architecture.

The filmmaker was on hand to discuss his reverence for architecture and his interest in familial relationships and portraying the concept of negative space. But alas, I had just seen Greta Gerwig’s marvelous film LadyBird which is also a young girl’s coming of age story  about her relationship with her parents and her much less architecturally splendiferous city, Sacramento, and it suffers in counterpoint.  Gerwig’s film isn’t a masterpiece, but it has some of the most un self conscious, truly inspired dialog I have heard in a long time, a very winning set of performances, no affectation, and very little negative space. The characters are instead bunched up against each other, amidst Sacramento’s largely pedestrian core (though a spectacular bridge) and its through line is the very opposite, in fact, it is centered around the girl’s overwhelming desire to get away from home.

The problem with Columbus is that it takes as its goals a mirror of architectural imperatives, which are not the same as film making imperatives, in fact quite the contrary.  Though its goals are admirable, in serving the architecture, it serves less well the film. Still, I recommend it as an introduction to a homegrown architectural wonderland. 

Jean Pigozzi and his Selfies: Me + Co

When I first met Johnny Pigozzi--probably before the time of this photo with Clint Eastwood-- we were both finding our way in the media landscape. We hadn't been out of school that long--I was working for the French Government helping French films find outlets in the US  and he was working for a French distributor.  Sometimes we would drive to my mother's house in his little Volkswagen and have a picnic with friends, and I remember being struck from the outset about his flouting of convention and his effervescent high spirits.  Tame would be the furthest adjective one would have used.

Johnny always had his little Leica with him.  I don't know if he had already been hanging out at the Factory with Andy Warhol and seen how Warhol used his camera, but I had never seen anyone deploy the camera quite as much as a diary as Johnny did.  

Now it's quite clear that he was one of the original purveyors of the Selfie and his new collection of photos, Me + Co is further testament to that.  Yes, it's true that he hangs out with celebs and can deploy his wealth to that end, but he has made his own way in that world as an original well before the concept of selfie was even on the horizon, and unlike most selfie-takers, not only as a photographer, but as a participant.  Johnny attributes his long arm and his flash for helping secure images of people like Mick Jagger and Cate Blanchett but he is just as apt to catch his shampoo technician or a cat.  

After the Blast: Zoe Kazan takes on the future at LCT3

This lighthearted image of Cristin Milioti as Anna talking with her Bot Arthur in Zoe Kazan's new play After the Blast at LCT3 is somewhat deceptive.  When she, at first reluctantly, agrees to "train" the Bot in lieu of being able to be approved for fertility treatments with her husband she is defensive and wary.  Then as with all 'mothers', she becomes completely obsessed with every sign of incremental progress, every utterance which shows language development, every movement which indicates intelligence, or communication and motor skills.  They can't go outside to the park, we are post-apocalyptic, deep underground in a global fallout shelter, hiding out with what remains of humanity. These playful interchanges between the two of them are the heart of Kazan's look into marriage and interpersonal relationships after a holocaust. In fact we too forget for a while that they are in the most dire of predicaments, and laugh and delight and hope along with Anna.

All too soon, the second act goes very dark, dystopian, filled with betrayal, anger, despair, and pessimism.  Kazan has to bring us back down--or up--to earth's scorched, bleak reality.

I, along with Anna, wanted to stay on the bright side.  I was tearful when she learns she has been duped by her husband so that she will pass their fertility test (even though we knew all along) but became impatient with some of their more prosaic interchanges. It can be dispiriting to eavesdrop on a tortured marriage, above or below ground.  Still, my admiration for Kazan who is managing a successful dual career as both writer and actress remains high. 

In these times when the renewed threat of nuclear devastation seems all too real, the play is a prescient reminder of what might befall us, and the need for vigilance. 

(The LCT3 theater, by recently deceased architect Hugh Hardy --full disclosure: my husband's former partner--which I am fully embarrassed to say I had not visited before, is really a jewel and another reason to catch the play.)

Photo by Jeremy Daniel

Benjamin Millepied makes Philip Johnson's Lincoln Center theater newly fabulous

Over the years, the critical assessment of the architecture of the original Lincoln Center project has risen and fallen with changing tastes.  I remember leaving the Moorish splendor of the New York City Center where ballet was red carpet magical and beginning at the NY State Theater (always, always it will be named this in my mind instead of its current incarnation) and finding everything so antiseptic.  

No longer! I've come to love the NY State Theater (and the Met, though not Phil/Avery Fisher/Geffen Hall) especially for it's clean lines and nicely raked orchestra (redone). I admire the Jasper Johns and the Lee Bontecou in the lobby. But mostly I have always enjoyed going to the first ring level at Intermission and wandering among the oversized Elie Nadelman sculptures. 

Last night Benjamin Millepied made this Johnson space newly fabulous.  Working with terrific, high spirited young dancers from the Jacqueline Kennedy ABT School who rushed the interior courtyard balconies like a plethora of modern day Romeos and Juliets they undulated and kicked up their heels (literally) in a short but excellent presentation Counterpoint for Philip Johnson at the intermission.  Though Millepied's premiere of his new ballet for ABT (I feel the Earth Move) and his Daphnis and Chloe were also on the program (hats off to Herman Cornejo who thrilled in both pieces), for my money, it was this entr'acte that made my heart beat faster. 

Millepied thinks big.  His LA Dance Project now has a permanent home in LA and tours the world,  he is directing a film of Carmen, he partners in a website.  Leaving the Paris Opera seemed wildly Call me crazy but the dancers of yore could never have kept up with his vision and ambition.  I think Philip Johnson who loved new things would have been delighted.

(I am eager to see a companion exhibit at NYU's Gray Art Gallery on Johnson and Alfred Barr introducing design into America at MoMA)

Kara Walker bears witness

The Kara Walker show at Sikkema Jenkins is only open for one more week.  You do not want to miss this if you are in New York.  The galleries were full when I was there on Saturday.  Like when Misty Copeland is dancing at ABT, the diversity of the viewers is so welcome and apparent.  The show which has been ebulliently received is really spectacular. Walker repurposes some of her earlier imagery but the scope and ambition of this work seems beyond anything else she has done. Besides the content, her style is more and more fluid and expressive: each face, each body, each hatchet jumps off the wall.  Walker does not choose the easy road or even the high road.  Her work is both pure art and scathing documentary. Like Louise Bourgeois (see below), she is exorcising her demons.  Or rather our demons. She is bearing witness on behalf of all of us. 

Faces Places: Agnes Varda and JR team up in a film that prizes reaching out

Agnes Varda, a heroine of mine from the New Wave and beyond is still challenging herself, looking forward. At 89, she is truly a force of nature.

And yet: Varda looks back to the past as well.  Her newest film, Faces Places, an ingenious collaboration with photographer/muralist JR, has as a point of departure her desire to meet new people and hear their stories, beginning with JR himself.  Varda and JR visit the last inhabitant of a condemned miner’s dwelling, an independent farmer, a mother of two, a cheese maker, three wives of dockworkers, slowly piecing together their stories while writing them large on the sides of silos, buildings, containers.  JR’s camera-on-wheels which blows things up so that we can really see them, slowly makes its way towards Varda's own infirmities (her eyes), and her friends and colleagues: (the tombs of) photographers Henri Cartier Bresson and Martine Franck,  photographer Guy Bourdin, and in the end, Jean Luc Godard, erstwhile collaborator and friend, who after agreeing to meet her does not show up or even answer his door when she calls.

Though it goes dark as her revenge is to show this depressing episode in the film, it is still as inspiring a document as one could find.  JR, who has insisted on wearing his hat and sunglasses throughout (very much like Godard always did) despite Varda’s pleas to remove them so she can really see him, finally does so once he sees how upset she is by Godard’s betrayal. Godard was quoted as saying all you need for a film is a girl and a gun. Well, he’s got them here.

How we reveal ourselves to the world, how others see us, how we age, how we grow up, how we maintain our old friendships (or do not), all this is present as we journey with these two very talented, insatiably curious artists. 

Paul Rudolph's Modulightor Building: A hidden masterpiece

When I first came upon Paul Rudolph’s Modulightor building as part of the wonderful series of events that comprises Archtober , I was kicking myself. I’ve lived in NY for a good part of my life and must have walked by the building countless times. 

There’s no way you can miss this modernist structure at 246 East 58th Street.  Unlike Rudolph’s more brutalist works (Yale Architecture School), once threatened themselves, the Modulightor builiding which houses a ground floor showroom for the company he began with his business partner Ernst Wagner (who still lives in the duplex) is a light, airy, white structure that has not come under the withering, revisionist glance of the architecture fashionistas who readily take up one mode for another.

Wagner, now one of his most ardent preservationists, says this house will not be eligible for landmark status for a few more years.  Fie on the Landmark’s Preservation Commission if this interior/exterior is not maintained.  Wegner is refurbishing the top two floors for Rudolph’s centenary a year from now and if you want a thrilling place to give a cocktail party or private dinner you can do that. (Rudolph apparently gave great parties.) 

The house is not wide (20 feet) but its white backgrounds, kilims, African sculptures, fenestrated Picasso knock-off, see through kitchen shelving, indoor outdoor greenery, thin, elegant lighting, multi level flooring and Plexiglas chairs all make for a light-filled space which does not feel confined in any way.  Because it is lived in, it has the added charm of feeling lively.

Alas, a California buyer (who is this?!!) bought Rudolph’s Beekman Place residence—purportedly even more spectacular-- and after promising to preserve it, gutted it. All that’s left are some marvelous photographs. And behind Rudolph's diminutive Modulightor masterpiece you can see the hulking Macklowe tower as a symbol of an entirely different aesthetic. 

Having recently read Wendy Lessser’s wonderful biography of Louis Kahn, I have my antennae up for the men behind these architectural wonders.  Rudolph had his travails with the Yale Architecture School (now brilliantly refurbished and sparkling) where he had been dean, and had some rough years after his brutalist style went entirely out of fashion but now has come roaring back into the public eye as the true innovator he was.

A number of his Florida residences and projects near Sarasota  are open to the public from time to time and it’s easy to get to Yale (New Haven). I once was lucky enough to see another private commission from the 70’s which though much larger still had an elegance within its heavier modernist structure that shone through.  Rudolph gave all of his archives to the Library of Congress but Modulightor is a great place to begin a Rudolph expedition. 

The Times are Racing: Justin Peck's latest for New York City Ballet captures the pulse of our contemporary world

Justin Peck’s latest work for the New York City Ballet, The Times are Racing premiered last spring but I just caught up with it as their short repertory season opened after weeks of Swan Lake. All I could think was, as much as I love Swan Lake (and I do still love it even after umpteen viewings since I was a girl and George Balanchine did his one act Swan Lake-lite version at City Center), the company was ready to let loose on some more contemporary work.

And revel they did in the hip-hoppy, tap-dancey, lightening speed steps that Peck has created for them to the the last four cuts on Dan Deacon’s America album.  The Opening Ceremony costumes don’t add much (ok, for me Opening Ceremony design is like my closet when I’m ready to shed years worth of swap meet stuff) but this ballet, or dance, really, is so high energy and fast paced that Balanchine, who prodded his dancers to always go faster, would certainly be impressed. 

Peck himself dances in this piece with Ashly Isaacs looking unisex in her white ‘wife-beater’(don’t like that term) and jeans and he samples Dorrance style tap (which summons all the other great tap dancers) and jerky moves from music video. But the really show stopping moments are the great pas de deux from Tiler Peck and Amar Ramasar, here, the stupendous couple dancing their hearts out, bicycling their legs and arms, freezing, faking, just giving it up for Peck.

After what I felt was one of Alexei Ratmansky’s lesser efforts (Odessa) with its chorus lines and messy combinations, The Times Are Racing came as a contemporary-if musically jolting-- tonic. The times are racing, the news cycle is racing, the internet is delivering everything too fast: we hardly can catch our breath waiting for the next shoe to drop.  Peck captures all that and more. 

(Please forgive the blurry images. I requested some from NYCB and did not receive)

Spoor: Agnieszka Holland's film Spoor joins the conversation about animal cruelty

Agnieszka Holland, long a favorite for her uncompromising filmmaking on diverse political subjects as well as long form episodic television looks at the subject of animal rights through the lens of one upper middle aged woman living a solitary life in the Polish countryside.  The film is achingly beautiful, harsh, romantic, multi-generational and quiet.  It makes its point without histrionics even though Duszejko (Janine, but she won't let you call her that) has a number of very public meltdowns as the hunters in her village continue to lay waste to deer, hedgehogs, raccoons and even her beloved dogs.

It is not knee jerk, and though it will please PETA, it approaches from the personal rather than the didactic. The suppression of any art is not a good thing.  The suppression of animals is not a good thing.  When these two things come up against each other, as in the recent Guggenheim Chinese Art exhibit debacle,  its anyone's guess as to how to adjudicate.

But watching depictions of animal cruelty is the same thing to me as watching child cruelty: I must turn away. 

Items: Is Fashion Modern?

Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s veteran design curator, has taken it upon herself to assemble our iconic fashion designs in Items: Is Fashion Modern, tipping her hat to Bernard Rudofsky who took on design for MoMA in the fifties.   Opening night guests were ooing and ahing over things they recognized or in some cases owned. In my case, I regretted the Armani pantsuit I had somehow mislaid along the way, I celebrated the Patagonia fleece that my children have recycled amongst themselves, I coveted the 40’s era black suede sandals  that would still look perfect today.

Unlike most of the museum costume shows this does not focus on one designer which sometimes makes its discursiveness distracting.

Nevertheless, a few spectacular designs that did not feel that they could have ever been incorporated into my family did stand out. Among them, an Issey Miyake red number generated by a computer from only one thread, and a Paul Poiret ensemble that is a smashing precursor to today's see-through-everything trend.