The Civil War & American Art (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
And The War Came-
Martin Johnson Heade's Approaching Thunder Storm- this piece gives me chills. The black water, the dark curve of the wall of clouds, the quiet man in red, that poor sweet little white dog. That sharp white sail in the center, dividing the piece in two… man. Effective piece.
Sanford Robinson Gifford- A Coming Storm. Lake George in that fiery autumnal red, the water a cold mirror, the sky a circle of light- bright, pre-rain- with fire-like smoke and clouds encircling.
Melville saw this piece himself, in New York- exciting to get to share this experience with him. Frederic E. Church- Meteor of 1860- a beautiful piece, that perfect violet hue and the sparkling celestial fireworks.
Love Our Banner in the Sky. The red lightning on the tree- like it's already on fire. The proud and wounded flag.
The thing that really sticks with me is the American landscape, those fall trees, the hints of yellow- I don't quite know how to put it. American woods, American earth, has its own distinct look, something beautiful to it, familiar. I can smell it. I can feel the air. It's a very sweet and placid world this war came to.
At The Front-
Bierstadt's Guerrilla Warfare, Civil War. A slightly passive, distant view… like he's just lounging at his canvas, watching the soldiers… Homer's Skirmish in the Wilderness- I love these dark, wooded colors- also, terrifying. The smoke, the slumped over figure (a bullet through his forehead?)
I love Defiance: Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg. Something beautifully American, and utterly manly, about that characteristic of defiance.
Homer's Home, Sweet Home- love the color of the jacket. His details are so brightly rendered, I enjoy his texturing, largely created by those contrasts of dark and light. This was the other side of the war- the long waits…
Chapman and Gifford-
Conrad Wise Chapman- the only professional Confederate artist, it seems. A painting of the Hunley, a Confederate submarine- found in 2000. I wanna look up that story. Chapman's views of Ft. Sumter are beautifully lit. Fort Sumter, Interior, Sunrise. I didn't realize what a miserable heap of mud Ft. Sumter was- but it makes sense. Shelled all the time. Love the water and the light, the huddled crew around the fire. What an insane way to experience the war, guarding that muddy hole- feels like a weird dirty broken down Scifi story. Like something out of Firefly.
John Gadsby Chapman- Evening Gun, Ft. Sumter- love this one (painted by the father, after the son.) The bright pink, the purple smoke, the brave, defiant, sharp angles, the sharp lift of the flag. Gifford's Camp of the Seventh Regiment, Near Fredericksburg, Maryland. The light and the air in this piece is just Magnificent… and so open… I want to live this moment.
Bivouac of the 7th Regiment- a beautiful piece, another moment I want to live- the dark dream of camp life at night, stoic, the fire. Not til I sat down, some distance from the piece, did I admire the balance of the two lights, moon and fire, like Heaven and Hell, their realms divided on the picture plane by the angled edge of the tallest tree.
Sunday Morning at Camp Cameron, Near Washington- "exhibited in the Oval Office, 1976-1989." Two Republicans and Jimmy Carter. No surprise. I'll have to see if I can find it in a photo from that era. The Preacher and his American flag. Those folksy Preachers, doing their political American duty. I wonder if the soldiers enjoyed this part of their week or if it was boring- if they bought into it or if it was, "we have to wake up early for This?"
Abolition and Emancipation-
Love the bright clean colors of Eastman Johnson's The Old Mount Vernon. He painted the side and the rear- where the slaves were hanging out. Boy. That is Ballsy.
Johnson's Negro Life In The South- I saw this a few years ago at the Met's great American painting exhibit. I love the moss on the soggy planks- the setting is decrepit but still earthy, organic, vibrant.
A Ride for Liberty- the Fugitive Slaves. This is another chills piece. I can feel the cold air. This moment is thunderous and ice quiet, going back and forth in my imagination. Stunning.
Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia. I love the deep, rich tangle of greens- but the human element of this piece is dark and terrifying. Christmas Time, the Blodgett Family- a much more comfortable environment than the vast majority of this exhibit. Good life for that guy, ay? Especially startling in direct contrast to the Slave Hunt piece. Jesus.
A Harvest of Death-
Alexander Gardner, Photos of Antietam 9-19-63.
This is where it gets real. All the glory, the ideology, the soft lighting, is gone. This is just dusty fields, in gray and brown, and dead men. Those gaping, bloated mouths… everything goes stone silent. This is a haunting, horrifying funeral montage. It reminds me of the chamber of blackness and the LBJ library, where they address the JFK assassination- a touch over 100 years later…
President Lincoln on the Battlefield, Antietam- a classic image; until now I've never seen it close enough to read Lincoln's expression- the dude looks annoyed. In a funny, "ugh, you" kinda way. Like he just smelled shit and realizes he can't leave this spot for a while.
Reconciliation and the Reconstruction Era-
Homer's Prisoners From the Front- the space between North and South, and the destruction of the land… this was a beating into submission. Not a truce.
The Fire of Leaves- a poignant, slightly cloying piece- but you need that deeply sappy thread of hope after such devastation. The beautiful sunset violet glow over everything, and that utterly American landscape. Homer's The Veteran in a New Field- another poignant classic, a piece I've seen previously on exhibit.
The Cotton Pickers- really like this one. That sad and thoughtful blend of doubt and determination- what future is out there for these young women? Man, just thinking of each generation, the determined build over every generation towards freedom and opportunity, the long moral arc of the universe.
Dressing for the Carnival- for whatever reason, depictions of low status people having frivolous fun always make me feel like weeping, in the worst way. Even when it's a positive story.
The Girl I Left Behind Me- another chills piece. The gray on all sides, the windswept hair- she's Dorothy. Holding her books, stoic, waiting for the path forward to emerge- but not scared. Determined.
Landscapes of War-
Homer Dodge Martin's The Iron Mine, Port Henry, New York. A big, pretty picture, rusty reds and greens… the scars in the landscape. Reminds me of how useful it is to have superior resources available. That's the American way.
George N. Barnard's photos of the destructive aftermath of Sherman's march. The horse skull in Scene of General McPherson's Death- haunting. God damn- Ruins in Charleston, South Carolina and Columbia, from the Capitol- man. Sherman Wrecked that place.
And upstairs, some Mammoth canvases. Every one of them is magnificent.
Frederic Church's Aurora Borealis- Oh My God. Oh My God. Will I ever see such a magnificent and beautiful sight in my life? The mountain of ice, the explosions of red and the bright blue fire branded through the clouds, the tiny ship caught in the snow, the black sphere, like a sun or a rolling boulder; it all reminds me of Moby Dick, the massiveness of nature.
Love the gleaming red sun and orgasmically violent smoke, and the pouring waterfall, of Church's Cotopaxi.
The Icebergs: love the glowing green tunnel in the corner. Rainy Season in the Tropics- an optimist's picture, the grand hope for crossing over, the safe passage… Bierstadt's Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California- no corrupting human element, a New Eden. The dream of the West as a fresh Frontier. A depiction of that dream of the fresh start, the bloodletting over.
The gallery spans from the cold, overpowering, dramatic blue of Aurora Borealis, to the placid golden glow of Yosemite Valley. A passage from trepidation to hope, moving Prewar to Postwar. And to counter, John Frederick Kensett's Sunrise Among the Rocks of Paradise, Newport, 1859; and Paradise Rocks: Newport, 1868.
The golden violet spring glow of the young work; the somber wintry clarity, even down to the simpler and sadder title of the old work. It's a story of paradise lost; it's a story of getting older. I love it.
A good exhibit- there's not much America did better, artwise, than landscape painting- and I love all the ways landscape painting created allegories for the war. Tons more respect now for Homer and Church. Those guys are amazing.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
theatre #1
THE PILLOWMAN
June 22, 2005
ACT I- Scene 1
Jeff Goldblum reminds me of Ben's dad, so much. Billy Crudup- really overacting in this first passage, as the hood comes off, but maybe that's fair in this circumstance. Muted palette, all grays and blacks. Odd language- 'of what to what OR of what to what?' Serious tone, silly, silly dialogue… "my only duty is to tell a story"… clearly there's a terror in upsetting state power, he's frantically concerned about political material getting into his story- desperate to make clear that it is coincidental, never intentional.
Katurian Katurian- a Humbert Humbert reference? Children getting beat up by bad Dads- quite possibly a political message, to my ears, but Katurian doesn't want to claim it as such. A terrifying act of violence- Ariel throws Katurian to the ground, stabs him in the ear- nobody's laughing now. "I don't know what you want me to say"- reminds me of the stories I've read of Soviet interrogations.
His brother, Michal, is in there- the chamber next door. This angers Katurian. Man, Goldblum- funny, in control, scary. "I don't have themes! I'm not trying to say anything at all, that's my whole thing!" I love the passages of Jeff and Billy… I really like the Two Gibbets story. Haunting. The challenge of 'is there a solution'…
I'm excited to hear his 'best story' as he reads it… Creepy hearing the audience laugh along with the tyrannical bullying of the Detective. "we'll execute you at the end," delivered with smug callousness, is a triumphant laugh line. The story basically sounds like generosity betrayed, a tale of callousness- Oh! It's the Pied Piper. He crippled the child so that he'd survive the spell. "He brought the rats, it's the children he was after." What a compelling line. It's a powerful political allegory, the tyrants that engineer their own fear.
Ariel reminds me of Ryumin. The haunting scream across the hall. The "I hurt my hand" balanced against the torture. Katurian and Ariel screaming- oh man. Ariel has this tendency to the effete shriek. Katurian toughens up- "I believe you're trying to frame us. Because you don't like the kind of stories I write. And you don't like retards cluttering your streets."
Scene 2
Katurian's telling another story now. Shown on a screen. The creative child whose stories get darker and darker- his parents were torturing his brother in the other room. The note- "they have loved you and tortured me for seven straight years as an artistic experiment"- obviously false, the kid wouldn'tve known how to write- whoa! Fucked up! His parents wrote the note! and… oh shit! The corpse of the boy! And the story- 'it was better than anything he'd ever written.' And he burned the story… and the story was true- but that ending was false. He saw his brother, brain damaged- he killed his parents, the pillow held over both of them… haunting. An Insane story. Horrifying. Haunting. Man.
Scene 3
Now we go to the brother's cell. Now we hear Katurian's offstage screams. Now we hear the brother telling a story, the Little Green Pig.
I'm not buying the brother so far- he seems too positive… unless it's that his torture made him understand that he deserves any sort of cruelty. The brother, though retarded, seems decently emotionally adjusted- makes me think that horrifying story is Katurian's creation… don't believe everything you read- seems to be an essential lesson in this moment. We don't know if this is true at all. We don't even know if the children are killed. And it comes out- they didn't torture the brother. The brother, Michal, did whatever they wanted.
The moment of love- the quiet hug.
Michal asks to hear 'The Pillowman.' I'm expecting the nightmarish tale of the previous scene- but it's a nine foot tall man made of pillows. His job is to help men and women who have led terrible lives, and want to kill themselves- he brings them back to their childhood, before the moment of devastating trauma, and convinces them to kill themselves then- and make it all seem like an accident. It is sad, painful work. In his last job ever, he visits himself as a child- and he burns himself alive. The last thing he ever hears is the screams of the hundreds of thousands of people he had helped- who would now lose that help, and live out the agony of their lives as it had always unfolded.
Oh shit- the brother says he had hid the box of toes. OH SHIT- THE BROTHER KILLED THOSE THREE KIDS. "Woudlnt've thought there'd be that much blood in a little body"- THE BROTHER DID IT- FUCK. "Because you told me to!" "I was just testing your stories." "We'll never know will we, because you never did." (write happy stories)… "They're gonna destroy everything now." And now it comes out that the central story is True, "you're just like Mom and Dad." (*There's a pillow in this room… Czekhov's gun?)
"I killed her like the Little Jesus"- and Katurian is weeping. It must've been a truly horrific way to kill someone. "I used to love you so much," Katurian says, weeping. "The Writer and The Writer's Brother"- Michal's read it. (It's about what you leave behind. They're not gonna kill my stories. They're all I've got.) He should've killed his brother when he was a child- the moral of the Pillowman. YOU CAME IN FOURTH IN THE DISCUS! OUT OF FUCKING FOUR!
The Little Green Pig. The pillow getting closer… "It could never be washed off, it could never be painted over." A Green Rain- never could be washed off. Never could be painted over. Every single one of them was green- and now there was just the Little Pink Pig.
And after that story- as his brother is sleeping… the Pillowman. A startlingly long sequence. Katurian sobs on the floor. And calls for the guards- "I have a confession to make, on one condition! It involves my stories!"
My goodness- they fit an absolute full play's worth of drama and discovery in that first act.
ACT II- Scene 1
Opens with the story of the Little Jesus, acted out as before. She wore a beard. She was spunky. Cute, silly start to this story. The dark, dark turns… the sound of the hammer hitting the nail… is horrifying. "No, I don't wanna be like Jesus. I fucking Am Jesus." And she's buried alive. (so many laughs in this show hit at unsettling, confusing places. After the girl is crucified and the parents leave to watch TV- laughter. Did McDonagh even mean it as such? Such an eerie moment.)
Scene 2
And back to the detectives. The plea is to release his stories fifty years after his death. I'm surprised to see Ariel rather shaken up here. He's become frail and empathetic rather suddenly. (or maybe there were hints earlier- the fact that he was nice to Michal.) Now he says he has "an overwhelming hatred for people like you"… "I carry it with me on the bus"… and he Knows he uses excessive force. He wants to protect little kids. It seems obsessively important to him. This is his moment of emotional breakthrough, the character's confession, his opening up. "I stand on the Right side." He's a psychotic man with searing moral clarity. And Goldblum strolls in and dismisses it all with one mocking line.
Ariel had a pretty shitty childhood, too. Goldblum doesn't accept it as an excuse for today's cruelty. "My Dad was a violent alcoholic. Am I a violent alcoholic?" long pause. "Yeah I am." Biggest laugh of the night.
Oh boy- Ariel killed his own Dad, too. His Dad was a rapist. Killed him with a pillow. Goldblum has such a great presence. Funny, sardonic, total authority. "Ariel's a policeman, dogs can police; I'm a Detective." Love this line.
Now Goldblum tells his story; he's kinda making it up as he goes along. The old man sees "this retarded little Chinese deaf boy…" "How did he know the little boy was deaf?" Great challenge. A pause. "He saw his hearing aid." Another huge hit. And the old wise man doesn't help, but he throws his paper airplane out the window, with the essential calculations written on it- and the little boy dodges the tracks to catch the plane. It's cool as an accident- as Katurian sees it, and me- but Goldblum meant it as a deliberate action.
The Pillowman- that's a story that Goldblum liked. That it was the child's choice, sometimes.… the Detective's son drowned. Fishing, on his own. All these characters have a pat moment from their past that justifies it all. Not Sure I love that, but maybe that's just theatre. They use the whole buffalo. There are no untidy coincidences.
*She was still alive. The girl is here. Painted green. With piglets. The first thing on stage that's really broken the palette. What a crazy development (and she's unique…) and now Ariel cracks it. Katurian didn't kill the children. Doesn't even know the Jewish boy's hair color.
Fascinating thing happening here- I find myslef more tense, more scared, more uncertain, for what will happen to the stories than what'll happen to Katurian.
"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. And I've never said that to anybody in custody." The fire has started…
I was a good writer. It's all I ever wanted to be. And I was.
Katurian Katurian tried to think up a final story, or a footnote… The Pillowman visits Michal. AndMichael says he'd rather live, and be tortured, and let the stories exist. And then he grows up, and all the evil happens, and he dies, and the stories are burned anyway. But that dark ending was coming in the final 3 1/2 seconds- cut short by Goldblum's bullet. And as it turned out, that pessimistic ending was untrue. Ariel saves the stories…
Good ending.
This is absolutely a story that a writer writes- a story where keeping the stories alive is the most precious act. The creations are the children saved, the most precious children. It's an excellent piece of theatre, altogether.
Sometimes the character turns- particularly Ariel- are unconvincingly quick. Sometimes the justifications are too simple. And I'm still confused by how the Little Jesus and the Little Green Pig got mixed up. But there's a ton The Pillowman gets right- it's a powerful story of malleable facts; it's a searing political allegory in moments. It plays with dark comedy, and whenever you think you've allowed yourself to laugh at the darkness, it goes darker and crueler, and shames you, shakes you.
It's an interesting balance of moral visions- the dismissive, distant protector; the passionate rage, both heroic and hideous as the bullets fire; the poet, passively examining the dark side through art (maybe rewrite that part later); and the naked, amoral naivete of the tortured, brain damaged manchild- but not lacking in kindness and a tragic curiosity.
The moral argument in the very last minute- that Michal choosing his torture, so that the stories will exist, is somehow a redeeming moment rather than a grotesque tragedy- is creepy. And the laughter as I've said comes in dark and uncomfortable places, it almost makes you doubt the moral validity of the audience.
The stories are excellent. Art within art can often fail to live up to expectations, but Katurian's stories are dark, thoughtful, thought provoking, and they keep with you. They're very good. Well produced, well conceived, excellently cast; I was more drawn in than I thought I could be, sitting at that monitor. This one was a real winner.
June 22, 2005
ACT I- Scene 1
Jeff Goldblum reminds me of Ben's dad, so much. Billy Crudup- really overacting in this first passage, as the hood comes off, but maybe that's fair in this circumstance. Muted palette, all grays and blacks. Odd language- 'of what to what OR of what to what?' Serious tone, silly, silly dialogue… "my only duty is to tell a story"… clearly there's a terror in upsetting state power, he's frantically concerned about political material getting into his story- desperate to make clear that it is coincidental, never intentional.
Katurian Katurian- a Humbert Humbert reference? Children getting beat up by bad Dads- quite possibly a political message, to my ears, but Katurian doesn't want to claim it as such. A terrifying act of violence- Ariel throws Katurian to the ground, stabs him in the ear- nobody's laughing now. "I don't know what you want me to say"- reminds me of the stories I've read of Soviet interrogations.
His brother, Michal, is in there- the chamber next door. This angers Katurian. Man, Goldblum- funny, in control, scary. "I don't have themes! I'm not trying to say anything at all, that's my whole thing!" I love the passages of Jeff and Billy… I really like the Two Gibbets story. Haunting. The challenge of 'is there a solution'…
I'm excited to hear his 'best story' as he reads it… Creepy hearing the audience laugh along with the tyrannical bullying of the Detective. "we'll execute you at the end," delivered with smug callousness, is a triumphant laugh line. The story basically sounds like generosity betrayed, a tale of callousness- Oh! It's the Pied Piper. He crippled the child so that he'd survive the spell. "He brought the rats, it's the children he was after." What a compelling line. It's a powerful political allegory, the tyrants that engineer their own fear.
Ariel reminds me of Ryumin. The haunting scream across the hall. The "I hurt my hand" balanced against the torture. Katurian and Ariel screaming- oh man. Ariel has this tendency to the effete shriek. Katurian toughens up- "I believe you're trying to frame us. Because you don't like the kind of stories I write. And you don't like retards cluttering your streets."
Scene 2
Katurian's telling another story now. Shown on a screen. The creative child whose stories get darker and darker- his parents were torturing his brother in the other room. The note- "they have loved you and tortured me for seven straight years as an artistic experiment"- obviously false, the kid wouldn'tve known how to write- whoa! Fucked up! His parents wrote the note! and… oh shit! The corpse of the boy! And the story- 'it was better than anything he'd ever written.' And he burned the story… and the story was true- but that ending was false. He saw his brother, brain damaged- he killed his parents, the pillow held over both of them… haunting. An Insane story. Horrifying. Haunting. Man.
Scene 3
Now we go to the brother's cell. Now we hear Katurian's offstage screams. Now we hear the brother telling a story, the Little Green Pig.
I'm not buying the brother so far- he seems too positive… unless it's that his torture made him understand that he deserves any sort of cruelty. The brother, though retarded, seems decently emotionally adjusted- makes me think that horrifying story is Katurian's creation… don't believe everything you read- seems to be an essential lesson in this moment. We don't know if this is true at all. We don't even know if the children are killed. And it comes out- they didn't torture the brother. The brother, Michal, did whatever they wanted.
The moment of love- the quiet hug.
Michal asks to hear 'The Pillowman.' I'm expecting the nightmarish tale of the previous scene- but it's a nine foot tall man made of pillows. His job is to help men and women who have led terrible lives, and want to kill themselves- he brings them back to their childhood, before the moment of devastating trauma, and convinces them to kill themselves then- and make it all seem like an accident. It is sad, painful work. In his last job ever, he visits himself as a child- and he burns himself alive. The last thing he ever hears is the screams of the hundreds of thousands of people he had helped- who would now lose that help, and live out the agony of their lives as it had always unfolded.
Oh shit- the brother says he had hid the box of toes. OH SHIT- THE BROTHER KILLED THOSE THREE KIDS. "Woudlnt've thought there'd be that much blood in a little body"- THE BROTHER DID IT- FUCK. "Because you told me to!" "I was just testing your stories." "We'll never know will we, because you never did." (write happy stories)… "They're gonna destroy everything now." And now it comes out that the central story is True, "you're just like Mom and Dad." (*There's a pillow in this room… Czekhov's gun?)
"I killed her like the Little Jesus"- and Katurian is weeping. It must've been a truly horrific way to kill someone. "I used to love you so much," Katurian says, weeping. "The Writer and The Writer's Brother"- Michal's read it. (It's about what you leave behind. They're not gonna kill my stories. They're all I've got.) He should've killed his brother when he was a child- the moral of the Pillowman. YOU CAME IN FOURTH IN THE DISCUS! OUT OF FUCKING FOUR!
The Little Green Pig. The pillow getting closer… "It could never be washed off, it could never be painted over." A Green Rain- never could be washed off. Never could be painted over. Every single one of them was green- and now there was just the Little Pink Pig.
And after that story- as his brother is sleeping… the Pillowman. A startlingly long sequence. Katurian sobs on the floor. And calls for the guards- "I have a confession to make, on one condition! It involves my stories!"
My goodness- they fit an absolute full play's worth of drama and discovery in that first act.
ACT II- Scene 1
Opens with the story of the Little Jesus, acted out as before. She wore a beard. She was spunky. Cute, silly start to this story. The dark, dark turns… the sound of the hammer hitting the nail… is horrifying. "No, I don't wanna be like Jesus. I fucking Am Jesus." And she's buried alive. (so many laughs in this show hit at unsettling, confusing places. After the girl is crucified and the parents leave to watch TV- laughter. Did McDonagh even mean it as such? Such an eerie moment.)
Scene 2
And back to the detectives. The plea is to release his stories fifty years after his death. I'm surprised to see Ariel rather shaken up here. He's become frail and empathetic rather suddenly. (or maybe there were hints earlier- the fact that he was nice to Michal.) Now he says he has "an overwhelming hatred for people like you"… "I carry it with me on the bus"… and he Knows he uses excessive force. He wants to protect little kids. It seems obsessively important to him. This is his moment of emotional breakthrough, the character's confession, his opening up. "I stand on the Right side." He's a psychotic man with searing moral clarity. And Goldblum strolls in and dismisses it all with one mocking line.
Ariel had a pretty shitty childhood, too. Goldblum doesn't accept it as an excuse for today's cruelty. "My Dad was a violent alcoholic. Am I a violent alcoholic?" long pause. "Yeah I am." Biggest laugh of the night.
Oh boy- Ariel killed his own Dad, too. His Dad was a rapist. Killed him with a pillow. Goldblum has such a great presence. Funny, sardonic, total authority. "Ariel's a policeman, dogs can police; I'm a Detective." Love this line.
Now Goldblum tells his story; he's kinda making it up as he goes along. The old man sees "this retarded little Chinese deaf boy…" "How did he know the little boy was deaf?" Great challenge. A pause. "He saw his hearing aid." Another huge hit. And the old wise man doesn't help, but he throws his paper airplane out the window, with the essential calculations written on it- and the little boy dodges the tracks to catch the plane. It's cool as an accident- as Katurian sees it, and me- but Goldblum meant it as a deliberate action.
The Pillowman- that's a story that Goldblum liked. That it was the child's choice, sometimes.… the Detective's son drowned. Fishing, on his own. All these characters have a pat moment from their past that justifies it all. Not Sure I love that, but maybe that's just theatre. They use the whole buffalo. There are no untidy coincidences.
*She was still alive. The girl is here. Painted green. With piglets. The first thing on stage that's really broken the palette. What a crazy development (and she's unique…) and now Ariel cracks it. Katurian didn't kill the children. Doesn't even know the Jewish boy's hair color.
Fascinating thing happening here- I find myslef more tense, more scared, more uncertain, for what will happen to the stories than what'll happen to Katurian.
"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. And I've never said that to anybody in custody." The fire has started…
I was a good writer. It's all I ever wanted to be. And I was.
Katurian Katurian tried to think up a final story, or a footnote… The Pillowman visits Michal. AndMichael says he'd rather live, and be tortured, and let the stories exist. And then he grows up, and all the evil happens, and he dies, and the stories are burned anyway. But that dark ending was coming in the final 3 1/2 seconds- cut short by Goldblum's bullet. And as it turned out, that pessimistic ending was untrue. Ariel saves the stories…
Good ending.
This is absolutely a story that a writer writes- a story where keeping the stories alive is the most precious act. The creations are the children saved, the most precious children. It's an excellent piece of theatre, altogether.
Sometimes the character turns- particularly Ariel- are unconvincingly quick. Sometimes the justifications are too simple. And I'm still confused by how the Little Jesus and the Little Green Pig got mixed up. But there's a ton The Pillowman gets right- it's a powerful story of malleable facts; it's a searing political allegory in moments. It plays with dark comedy, and whenever you think you've allowed yourself to laugh at the darkness, it goes darker and crueler, and shames you, shakes you.
It's an interesting balance of moral visions- the dismissive, distant protector; the passionate rage, both heroic and hideous as the bullets fire; the poet, passively examining the dark side through art (maybe rewrite that part later); and the naked, amoral naivete of the tortured, brain damaged manchild- but not lacking in kindness and a tragic curiosity.
The moral argument in the very last minute- that Michal choosing his torture, so that the stories will exist, is somehow a redeeming moment rather than a grotesque tragedy- is creepy. And the laughter as I've said comes in dark and uncomfortable places, it almost makes you doubt the moral validity of the audience.
The stories are excellent. Art within art can often fail to live up to expectations, but Katurian's stories are dark, thoughtful, thought provoking, and they keep with you. They're very good. Well produced, well conceived, excellently cast; I was more drawn in than I thought I could be, sitting at that monitor. This one was a real winner.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
exhibit #3
CLAES OLDENBURG: THE STREET AND THE STORE/ MOUSE MUSEM & RAY GUN WING; THE SCREAM; ET AL (MoMA)
Painting & Sculpture Galleries
Jacob Lawrence- Migration Series- great as always. A beautiful story of adventure and ambition, those American colors, the simple, dynamic depiction of grit and resolve. The next room, all the old hits- Miro, the Dadaists, Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. I like Piccabia's M'Amenez-y, a goofy work with a lovely balance of gold and green. Magritte's The Empire of Light, II- a lovely and haunting, placid evening work.
Ernst's The Blind Swimmer- love the green and the detailed lines. Looks a bit like a wheat field. Is it a bisection of the eye? Is this what the blind swimmer sees? I like it. Next room, Modigliani, Picasso's Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians. I'm liking Giorgio de Chirico, his comic book palette. The lines remind me of Dali- an odd, haunted evening city, like a dream.
The Mondrian room… I'm drawn to Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow and Gray, 1921- the blue tint on his classic look. Lovely. Stepanova's Figure (1921)- love it. Looks like late-stage Kandinsky, pulled together and animated in a living form.
The Monet Room, lovely of course. The meditative pastel beauty of Water Lillies,(1924-1925) particularly dreamy. The autumn fire of The Japanese Footbridge draws me too. An interesting point- MOMA got these Monet panels in 1955. Timing was key- Pollock's style and scale made the abstract expressive qualities of Monet's work hip and relevant again. That's why MOMA got these.
The Klee room- Pastorale (Rhythms) reminds me of the Rosetta Stone. sigh… Fire in the Evening is a beauty- I'm virtually certain I've noticed and noted it on a previous trip (the Bauhaus, I believe.) Or the Mocked Mocker is pretty great. Reminds me of Lite Brites. Klee is probably the closest, among legendary artists, to my mother's style. He's just fun- and so detailed. I love so many- Introducing the Miracle, Demon Above the Ships (reminds me just a bit of a Chinese dragon, some sort of east asian myth), The End of the Last Act of a Dream, the Angler, Around the Fish- so many terrific pieces. Augustus Vincent Tack- Dunes, a pretty canvas. Almost like a satellite map. Kupka's View from a Carriage Window- a hint of a tropical dream. Kandinsky's four panels, and Kirchner's Street, Dresden, in the corner by the stairs. Lovely.
The Matisse room. The Red Studio is my favorite of his. Also I'm drawn to the beautiful grays and firm vertical lines of Woman on a High Stool.
The Scream
Here we are- The Scream. One of those pieces that gets the Mona Lisa treatment. Love the red sky. It's 3 shapes- the red divides two traingles and the sky creates a rectangle above. A nice balance of elements here. It reminds me of Nirvana- Nirvana brought the dark and unsettling into the mainstream, but they did it by crafting highly accessible, pretty pop music. Likewise, The Scream is a dark and unsettling piece, but it's that highly accessible, pretty balance of elements- the melody of the painting- that makes it a compelling classic.
Oh, I love his painting, The Storm- dreamy, dark gray rain, the white figure. So compelling. Munch's Madonna, set at the moment of conception- sexy and scary. A compelling piece. Could be a '70s punk flyer.
Painting & Sculpture Galleries, Continued
The Futurist room. My favorite is Carras' Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, the dazzling, kaleidoscopic drama of reds, greens and darkness.
Ellen Auerbach- Elliot Porter in New York. Oh, I love this photo. I'm such a sucker for 1950s NYC photography. A room of Porter's bird photography. Love it. A bird's look does not change with the seasons- a cardinal in 1800 is the same as a cardinal now. I wonder if any animal besides man has "fashion," in that pop evolutionary sense. I love the intimacy of the feeding scenes and the exultant free spirit of the Blue Throated Hummingbird.
The Cubist room. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the most famous painting whose name I never remember. Picasso's Repose- haven't seen this one before. Love the caramel palette, the sense of peace. Reminds me of a poetry club in Washington Heights.
Another classic room. Henri Rousseau- The Dream, an old favorite of mine. Takes me back to my childhood doctor's office. The Sleeping Gypsy is here, my other love. It's only just now occurring to me, his two classics- the Sleeping Gypsy, the Dream- could exist in the same moment of reality, if one chooses so.
Odilon Redon, beautiful as always. James Ensor, some fantastic, creepy stuff- Boschlike. And Starry Night of course, fabulous. Such rich blues. The green golden moon. The village at peace, the Heavens turbulent. The marvelous motion in each line, each one a little sweep of a dream. Gaugin's Still Life with Three Puppies- charming! And they close out the floor with Warhol's cans. nice.
4th Floor- all the geometric minimalist stuff… I like Richard Hamilton's Pin-Up. The Johns & Rauschenberg room, always one of my favorites. Two Rauschenberg combines are here- Canyon is the star, a recent acquisition. Slowly but surely I'm getting through my lasting NYC art regret- missing out on his combines show at the Met.
*K
L and I love Green Target.
Next room, some Joseph Cornell boxes. Central Park Carousel, In Memoriam, (a wondrous dream of the stars), and Untitled (Hotel Beau-Sejoir) Mondrian and Newman. Pollock, de Kooning. Fernand Leger- The Three Musicians. Stoic, elegant, an image of dignified strivers. I like it. Humble and hopeful in the same motion, and a parallel to Picasso's dynamic musicians too. Picasso gets them in the heat of performance; this is their family portrait. (I zipped through that floor pretty quick, want to assure time for some other things.)
(Miscellany)
Dieter Roth- Six Piccadillies- pretty. Six interpretations of a postcard, Warholian. I particularly like the flat, bright, late 60s/70s piece. Applied Design floor- there's a minty teal-green setup that Katie would just love. Also on this floor- lots of video games, popular with the kids. I like the Pig Wings project. Kinda creepy, but aesthetically beautiful.
9+1 Ways of Being Political
An activist architectural design exhibit. Being Political here meaning 'an interaction with the urban realm.' I like Aldo Rossi's Urban Construction. I'm getting too tired to draw anything from this exhibit, it's got less politics and more dioramas than I was hoping for. I think it's about time I pack it in…
Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store.
"I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself." Love it.
The Street
Dirty, the Rauschenberg palette of cardboard, burlap browns. Street Chick is particularly striking. I like Street Sign I- looks a bit like a unicorn, or a chess knight. The little Letter Tenement, tiny, lost in the shuffle, clothed in rags- the city's orphan. The Big Man- reminds me of the Met's tribal art. He leans casually, confident, and blank, and stupid. A false God. Funny. A dirty, dripping exhibit. Everything he touches becomes a gruesome parody, overblown, ugly, fat, dripping, silly. he's one of the funniest artists I think I've ever seen. It's funny to imagine somebody back then, appalled and annoyed by this exhibit, and now- joke's on them. This is all in MOMA!
Flags (summer 1960)- Johnslike, though I like Johns' more. My two favorites- corklive flag (I think?) and Landscape with flag and moon- a bit of a dream. American Flag and Street Chick- a lovely blur of color, that turn of the head. It reminds me of a woman looking back just as a bomb explodes… shades of Boston darken my imagination.
The Store
(he had it all set up 107 E 2nd Street- Ray Gun Manufacturing Company.) Suddenly color enters his palette. Commercial objects, depicted in a saggy, vile, comical way. Mannikin with One Leg looks like fireworks, or Starry Night. a very pretty piece. Candy Container with Candy (looks like paint tubes to me), Upside Down City- an octopus.
Breakfast Table- it's fun to take all this in as the living embodiment of the real-time rejection of Mad Men- This is what was going down in the village, when the surface was all suburbs and gloss. Oldenburg's blunt, unimpressed depictions expose the emptiness of the dream.
His classic Floor Burger. There's a guard here, and her sole responsibility is to watch that burger. Cigarettes in Pack (fragment), 7 Up… it's all- there's not too much I feel like saying about it. It's a funny exhibit, a crude parody, it almost makes me laugh at these objects and ideas. It blows up the store. Bacon and Egg 1965- the colors of this one- particularly nice, lovely.
His big, soft sculptures- to draw aparallel to the vast car showrooms of the day. This big floppy piece of cake is pretty hilarious. It changes what a sculpture can be- no longer "rigid, austere"- and it brings the every day to fine art, blows up the pedestal a little bit. He's not just mocking consumer culture here, he's mocking the art world. and in a way, this is a retroactive parody- my classic critique of the Chelsea galleries is that it's all scale, no insight- gigantic magazine covers. You can consider Oldenburg a predecessor and inspiration to these guys, but I think he still mocks them- it's just so big, dumb and whimsical. a big dumb floppy hamburger. He's Showing us it's a silly idea.
Watch in a Red Box- like an alligator's mouth, or a turtle's. Sewing Machine- love the colors. Nice triad here- Mu-Mu, Sewing Machine, Auto Tire with Fragment of Price. The rule now is 'do not touch,' but I wonder if Claes allowed it back then. I can see how it would play with the relationship of work to artist to Allow the touch- but also it's a tighter parody to gravely, self-seriously disallow it.mall I can think about is how much I want to sneak a touch.
Mouse Museum & Ray Gun Wing
I'm gonna give Mouse Museum a try- Oldenburg's collection of objects. It's shrouded, a mystery, yet there are videos playing on a loop, showing off glances of the interior. Feels like a violation of a church's secret scrolls- or on the flipside, it's creating a celebrity effect, the replicated media image creating the hype of familiarity for the presence of the real thing. Two thoughts here- (A) if I were to organize a show, maybe I'd start with video screens to comment on exactly this. (B) That's exactly the effect it had on me- I was charmed by a little seal with a crystal, from the video; I was discouraged not to find it on my first visit, and came back, waited in line again, studied the video, for the specific cause of catching this celebrity.
Inside, pretty cool- felt like being in a submarine, warm, dark, an eerie waterlike soundtrack. Food, anatomy, toys, commerce, plastic- these seem to be Oldenburg's preoccupations. It reminded me a Lot of Mark, or Mom's things. It's fascinating to think of all the beautiful, incredible, intriguing pop culture deritrus collections there are- this one is in MOMA, but probably everyone knows somebody with a similar collection- we each have that one compellingly odd friend. My favorite object- the pink turtle cigarette dish! (and of course, the famed seal.)
Ray Gun Wing- fine.
*NOTE- email Mom about this! she'd love it.
Painting & Sculpture Galleries
Jacob Lawrence- Migration Series- great as always. A beautiful story of adventure and ambition, those American colors, the simple, dynamic depiction of grit and resolve. The next room, all the old hits- Miro, the Dadaists, Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. I like Piccabia's M'Amenez-y, a goofy work with a lovely balance of gold and green. Magritte's The Empire of Light, II- a lovely and haunting, placid evening work.
Ernst's The Blind Swimmer- love the green and the detailed lines. Looks a bit like a wheat field. Is it a bisection of the eye? Is this what the blind swimmer sees? I like it. Next room, Modigliani, Picasso's Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians. I'm liking Giorgio de Chirico, his comic book palette. The lines remind me of Dali- an odd, haunted evening city, like a dream.
The Mondrian room… I'm drawn to Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow and Gray, 1921- the blue tint on his classic look. Lovely. Stepanova's Figure (1921)- love it. Looks like late-stage Kandinsky, pulled together and animated in a living form.
The Monet Room, lovely of course. The meditative pastel beauty of Water Lillies,(1924-1925) particularly dreamy. The autumn fire of The Japanese Footbridge draws me too. An interesting point- MOMA got these Monet panels in 1955. Timing was key- Pollock's style and scale made the abstract expressive qualities of Monet's work hip and relevant again. That's why MOMA got these.
The Klee room- Pastorale (Rhythms) reminds me of the Rosetta Stone. sigh… Fire in the Evening is a beauty- I'm virtually certain I've noticed and noted it on a previous trip (the Bauhaus, I believe.) Or the Mocked Mocker is pretty great. Reminds me of Lite Brites. Klee is probably the closest, among legendary artists, to my mother's style. He's just fun- and so detailed. I love so many- Introducing the Miracle, Demon Above the Ships (reminds me just a bit of a Chinese dragon, some sort of east asian myth), The End of the Last Act of a Dream, the Angler, Around the Fish- so many terrific pieces. Augustus Vincent Tack- Dunes, a pretty canvas. Almost like a satellite map. Kupka's View from a Carriage Window- a hint of a tropical dream. Kandinsky's four panels, and Kirchner's Street, Dresden, in the corner by the stairs. Lovely.
The Matisse room. The Red Studio is my favorite of his. Also I'm drawn to the beautiful grays and firm vertical lines of Woman on a High Stool.
The Scream
Here we are- The Scream. One of those pieces that gets the Mona Lisa treatment. Love the red sky. It's 3 shapes- the red divides two traingles and the sky creates a rectangle above. A nice balance of elements here. It reminds me of Nirvana- Nirvana brought the dark and unsettling into the mainstream, but they did it by crafting highly accessible, pretty pop music. Likewise, The Scream is a dark and unsettling piece, but it's that highly accessible, pretty balance of elements- the melody of the painting- that makes it a compelling classic.
Oh, I love his painting, The Storm- dreamy, dark gray rain, the white figure. So compelling. Munch's Madonna, set at the moment of conception- sexy and scary. A compelling piece. Could be a '70s punk flyer.
Painting & Sculpture Galleries, Continued
The Futurist room. My favorite is Carras' Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, the dazzling, kaleidoscopic drama of reds, greens and darkness.
Ellen Auerbach- Elliot Porter in New York. Oh, I love this photo. I'm such a sucker for 1950s NYC photography. A room of Porter's bird photography. Love it. A bird's look does not change with the seasons- a cardinal in 1800 is the same as a cardinal now. I wonder if any animal besides man has "fashion," in that pop evolutionary sense. I love the intimacy of the feeding scenes and the exultant free spirit of the Blue Throated Hummingbird.
The Cubist room. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the most famous painting whose name I never remember. Picasso's Repose- haven't seen this one before. Love the caramel palette, the sense of peace. Reminds me of a poetry club in Washington Heights.
Another classic room. Henri Rousseau- The Dream, an old favorite of mine. Takes me back to my childhood doctor's office. The Sleeping Gypsy is here, my other love. It's only just now occurring to me, his two classics- the Sleeping Gypsy, the Dream- could exist in the same moment of reality, if one chooses so.
Odilon Redon, beautiful as always. James Ensor, some fantastic, creepy stuff- Boschlike. And Starry Night of course, fabulous. Such rich blues. The green golden moon. The village at peace, the Heavens turbulent. The marvelous motion in each line, each one a little sweep of a dream. Gaugin's Still Life with Three Puppies- charming! And they close out the floor with Warhol's cans. nice.
4th Floor- all the geometric minimalist stuff… I like Richard Hamilton's Pin-Up. The Johns & Rauschenberg room, always one of my favorites. Two Rauschenberg combines are here- Canyon is the star, a recent acquisition. Slowly but surely I'm getting through my lasting NYC art regret- missing out on his combines show at the Met.
*K
L and I love Green Target.
Next room, some Joseph Cornell boxes. Central Park Carousel, In Memoriam, (a wondrous dream of the stars), and Untitled (Hotel Beau-Sejoir) Mondrian and Newman. Pollock, de Kooning. Fernand Leger- The Three Musicians. Stoic, elegant, an image of dignified strivers. I like it. Humble and hopeful in the same motion, and a parallel to Picasso's dynamic musicians too. Picasso gets them in the heat of performance; this is their family portrait. (I zipped through that floor pretty quick, want to assure time for some other things.)
(Miscellany)
Dieter Roth- Six Piccadillies- pretty. Six interpretations of a postcard, Warholian. I particularly like the flat, bright, late 60s/70s piece. Applied Design floor- there's a minty teal-green setup that Katie would just love. Also on this floor- lots of video games, popular with the kids. I like the Pig Wings project. Kinda creepy, but aesthetically beautiful.
9+1 Ways of Being Political
An activist architectural design exhibit. Being Political here meaning 'an interaction with the urban realm.' I like Aldo Rossi's Urban Construction. I'm getting too tired to draw anything from this exhibit, it's got less politics and more dioramas than I was hoping for. I think it's about time I pack it in…
Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store.
"I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself." Love it.
The Street
Dirty, the Rauschenberg palette of cardboard, burlap browns. Street Chick is particularly striking. I like Street Sign I- looks a bit like a unicorn, or a chess knight. The little Letter Tenement, tiny, lost in the shuffle, clothed in rags- the city's orphan. The Big Man- reminds me of the Met's tribal art. He leans casually, confident, and blank, and stupid. A false God. Funny. A dirty, dripping exhibit. Everything he touches becomes a gruesome parody, overblown, ugly, fat, dripping, silly. he's one of the funniest artists I think I've ever seen. It's funny to imagine somebody back then, appalled and annoyed by this exhibit, and now- joke's on them. This is all in MOMA!
Flags (summer 1960)- Johnslike, though I like Johns' more. My two favorites- corklive flag (I think?) and Landscape with flag and moon- a bit of a dream. American Flag and Street Chick- a lovely blur of color, that turn of the head. It reminds me of a woman looking back just as a bomb explodes… shades of Boston darken my imagination.
The Store
(he had it all set up 107 E 2nd Street- Ray Gun Manufacturing Company.) Suddenly color enters his palette. Commercial objects, depicted in a saggy, vile, comical way. Mannikin with One Leg looks like fireworks, or Starry Night. a very pretty piece. Candy Container with Candy (looks like paint tubes to me), Upside Down City- an octopus.
Breakfast Table- it's fun to take all this in as the living embodiment of the real-time rejection of Mad Men- This is what was going down in the village, when the surface was all suburbs and gloss. Oldenburg's blunt, unimpressed depictions expose the emptiness of the dream.
His classic Floor Burger. There's a guard here, and her sole responsibility is to watch that burger. Cigarettes in Pack (fragment), 7 Up… it's all- there's not too much I feel like saying about it. It's a funny exhibit, a crude parody, it almost makes me laugh at these objects and ideas. It blows up the store. Bacon and Egg 1965- the colors of this one- particularly nice, lovely.
His big, soft sculptures- to draw aparallel to the vast car showrooms of the day. This big floppy piece of cake is pretty hilarious. It changes what a sculpture can be- no longer "rigid, austere"- and it brings the every day to fine art, blows up the pedestal a little bit. He's not just mocking consumer culture here, he's mocking the art world. and in a way, this is a retroactive parody- my classic critique of the Chelsea galleries is that it's all scale, no insight- gigantic magazine covers. You can consider Oldenburg a predecessor and inspiration to these guys, but I think he still mocks them- it's just so big, dumb and whimsical. a big dumb floppy hamburger. He's Showing us it's a silly idea.
Watch in a Red Box- like an alligator's mouth, or a turtle's. Sewing Machine- love the colors. Nice triad here- Mu-Mu, Sewing Machine, Auto Tire with Fragment of Price. The rule now is 'do not touch,' but I wonder if Claes allowed it back then. I can see how it would play with the relationship of work to artist to Allow the touch- but also it's a tighter parody to gravely, self-seriously disallow it.mall I can think about is how much I want to sneak a touch.
Mouse Museum & Ray Gun Wing
I'm gonna give Mouse Museum a try- Oldenburg's collection of objects. It's shrouded, a mystery, yet there are videos playing on a loop, showing off glances of the interior. Feels like a violation of a church's secret scrolls- or on the flipside, it's creating a celebrity effect, the replicated media image creating the hype of familiarity for the presence of the real thing. Two thoughts here- (A) if I were to organize a show, maybe I'd start with video screens to comment on exactly this. (B) That's exactly the effect it had on me- I was charmed by a little seal with a crystal, from the video; I was discouraged not to find it on my first visit, and came back, waited in line again, studied the video, for the specific cause of catching this celebrity.
Inside, pretty cool- felt like being in a submarine, warm, dark, an eerie waterlike soundtrack. Food, anatomy, toys, commerce, plastic- these seem to be Oldenburg's preoccupations. It reminded me a Lot of Mark, or Mom's things. It's fascinating to think of all the beautiful, incredible, intriguing pop culture deritrus collections there are- this one is in MOMA, but probably everyone knows somebody with a similar collection- we each have that one compellingly odd friend. My favorite object- the pink turtle cigarette dish! (and of course, the famed seal.)
Ray Gun Wing- fine.
*NOTE- email Mom about this! she'd love it.
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