483 Driggs Avenue, Williamsburg
Performances: Saturdays September 1o, 17 and 24, 2011
4:30, 5:30 and 6:30pm (tickets $15)
extentended: Sunday, September 25, 6:30 & 7:30pm

Noémie Lafrance, The Whitebox Project, dance performance at Black and White Gallery/ Project Space, Brooklyn, 2011

People gathered in the bleak concrete backyard of the Black and White Gallery, chatting in groups, milling about. “The Whitebox Project,” Noémie Lafrance’s performance piece, had already been described as being influenced by flash mobs, so everyone knew what was about to happen. Still, we stood and talked to one another in anticipation. The volume of human voices speaking out loud in the roofless room started to escalate unnaturally, to the point where to continue a conversation, you practically had to shout. Then the volume dropped drastically, and performers emerged from the mass of people, starting to make simple patterns of movement along the floors and walls.

Eventually, about 20 dancers revealed themselves to be a part of the piece, and proceeded to work their way through just about every existing postmodern dance reference. They walked, ran, talked, shouted, kicked, shimmied, sat down, stood up, laid down, and even created some strange cheerleader-like formations of movement and chanting. None of the sequences lasted too long—some of the performers undressed within the mob of people, a trope that didn’t shock and wasn’t tender or powerful, but did make me feel sorry for the dancers participating in the pretentious nod to vulnerability. They put their clothes back on; they herded us the way my parents’ border collie used to, running in circles around us a little too close for comfort, forcing a shift in location. They also encouraged us to join in and participate in the simple physical motions. I noticed one young woman who happily followed along with the Simon Says-like instructions from the score; most resisted.

At the post-show talk with the audience that comes at the end of every performance, and is actually a part of the piece, my fears about the breadth of the organizing concept for the project were confirmed. Underlying the somewhat interactive though hardly coercive gathering was a real desire to get the audience to dance. Lafrance and her dancers talked about the idea that once you “break the boundaries between audience and performer” or “challenge the conventions of the proscenium stage,” then the result will be a kind of physical participation by audience members—a democratization of the space whose perfect expression is the erasing of the distinction between performer and viewer. After over 60 years of this kind of thinking about the destabilization of theatrical conventions, including a popular resurgence in the 1990s, we’ve already had a backlash against it. Theorists have weighed in. Jacques Rancière pointed out, and I tend to agree, that there is nothing inherently wrong with recognizing the distinction between the roles of viewer and performer. What is wrong, he asserted in his book The Emancipation of the Spectator, is to assume that one role is less free, less powerful, or less interesting than another.

another view

As any critic will tell you, the experience of the viewer is always active—to initiate thought, to respond, and to feel are not verbs we should dismiss as non-participatory. Why, then, should viewers dance? And why should they be asked to verbally respond to the performance after the piece, in order to influence its future iterations?  My problem with the concept of the piece—despite its often striking visuals and a few lovely experiential moments in space—can’t be removed from a general frustration with our culture of affirmation. We assume that we can judge success by how many people have jumped on in support and participation, and longwinded, inane comments are dutifully welcomed, as if they embody democracy itself. This kind of climate assures that no one gets heard; there’s a jumble of opinion, very little thought, and an overall lowering of the bar because of too much awareness of audience diversity and limitations. Ironically, in this piece, attempts to draw out active participation and response take away the true power of an audience member to have his or her own natural reaction to the visual material. I never liked to be talked down to as a child and I don’t appreciate it much now; if you’re giving viewers something to look at, step back and believe in their ability to see.

September 5-7 at IFC Center, New York, and subsequent tour

Anna Stave (as "Girl On Street") and Steven C. Stewart (as "Paul Baker") in EVERYTHING IS FINE! Photo: David Brothers

Actor/Director Crispin Hellion Glover (best known for playing the most eccentric roles in mainstream Hollywood including George “Get your damn hands off her!” McFly in “Back to the Future”, the Thin Man in “Charlie’s Angels”, Grendel in “Beowulf” and the Knave of Hearts in Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” oh and yes, yes, he’s the guy who almost kicked Letterman in the face…) steadfastly continues his vaudeville- style tour performing as his most idiosyncratic character…himself!  On each evening, Glover personally presents one of two feature films (“What is it?” and “It is fine!  EVERYTHING IS FINE.” both considered part of the “It” trilogy though either stand alone just fine on their own) alongside a slide show presentation, critical Q&A and book signing.

Both films have received a great deal of ancillary attention due to their graphic and confrontational subject matter (including racism, self destruction, sexually aggressive tendencies and fetishistic urges), bold imagery (swastikas, black face, oral and manual sex performed for and by the handicapped and Charles Manson) and choice of cast, a majority being disabled actors with Down’s Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy and amputations. But casting actors with these conditions eased (or at least distracted) some of the tension away in both films and allowed for the seemingly guileless characters to unabashedly talk about the elephant in the room that most corporately supported films would try to avoid.  Since both films are independently funded by Glover, the director had the liberty to react instead of pander to the corporate restraints imposed on modern film and dive into one of our culture’s most “taboo” subject matters.

I caught up with the aberrant auteur to put a few questions regarding his cinematic feat.

You are such a showman!  I love the vaudevillian aspect of the Glover experience.  Other than the amazingly comfortable chairs, why did you choose a venue like IFC to host your event rather than say, a space at Coney Island or an art gallery/museum?

Thank you! This will be my fourth time showing at the IFC. I have a comfortable association with them. If other venues wish to book me they can do so by contacting booking@CrispinGlover.com. People erroneously believe that I choose venues and then book those venues. Generally venues contact me and then I go to them. I have played in many museums, which I enjoy greatly. It is very important that the venue has a 35 mm projection system as my films are 35 mm prints. I am open to playing in almost any place that has good 35 mm projection.

Is the film component the main attraction or are all parts integral to each other?

I have been performing two different specific performances alongside the two specific feature films that then have a Q &A that follows each, followed by a book signing.  The live aspect of the shows is not to be underestimated. This is a large part of how I bring audiences in to the theater… For “Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slide Show” I perform a one hour dramatic narration of eight different books I have made over the years. The books are taken from old books from the 1800′s that have been changed into different books from what they originally were. They are heavily illustrated with original drawings and reworked images and photographs…

The fact that I tour with the film helps the distribution element. I consider what I am doing to be following in the steps of vaudeville performers. Vaudeville was the main form of entertainment for most of the history of the US. It has only relatively recently stopped being the main source of entertainment, but that does not mean this live element mixed with other media is no longer viable. In fact it is apparent that it is sorely missed.

In the future, will you ever show one without the other or do they always need to hold hands?

In this economy it seems like touring with the live show and showing the films with a book signing is a very good basic safety net for recouping the monies I have invested in the films.  There are other beneficial aspects of touring with the shows other than monetary elements….It is enjoyable to travel and visit places, meet people, perform the shows and have interaction with the audiences and discussions about the films afterwards. The forum after the show is also not to be under-estimated as a very important part of the show for the audience. This also makes me much more personally grateful to the individuals who come to my shows as there is no corporate intermediary. Both Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slide Show Part 1 and 2 are now set shows that do not vary. That being said there is an element of my own energy that will play a part on how either show is performed from night to night… They key is if the structure of the show itself works… Every once in a while there can be a technical problem that has to be dealt with and the audience actually always enjoys the aspect of “the show must go on!”

PHOTO CREDIT: DAVID BROTHERS

Critics and fans have welcomed you into the upper echelons of creative critical thinkers such as photographer Diane Arbus and filmmaker Werner Herzog – two names that frequently hover around yours.  At some point, even the most beauteous must feel like the hunched over giant in Arbus’ work (Jewish Giant, taken at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970) trying to assimilate into an oftentimes ill fitting world.  And many can empathize with the comical outsiders who fumble haphazardly in search of transcendence in Herzog’s films.  What facets of your own characters are relatable to the mass?  How important, overall, is it for your characters and/or your work to be understood and identified with by the populace?

I believe humans are a naturally curious species and when it comes to it anything that has questions or that can cause questions is something that humans in general will be attracted to. My interest is to make films that cause questions or thoughts.

I am very careful to make it quite clear that What is it? is not a film about Down’s Syndrome but my psychological reaction to the corporate restraints that have happened in the last 20 to 30 years in film making. Specifically anything that can possibly make an audience uncomfortable is necessarily excised or the film will not be corporately funded or distributed. This is damaging to the culture because it is the very moment when an audience member sits back in their chair looks up at the screen and thinks to their self “Is this right what I am watching? Is this wrong what I am watching? Should I be here? Should the filmmaker have made this? What is it?” -and that is the title of the film. What is it that is taboo in the culture? What does it mean that taboo has been ubiquitously excised in this culture’s media? What does it mean to the culture when it does not properly process taboo in it’s media? It is a bad thing because when questions are not being asked because these kinds of questions are when people are having a truly educational experience. For the culture to not be able to ask questions leads towards a non educational experience and that is what is happening in this culture. This stupefies this culture and that is of course a bad thing. So What is it? is a direct reaction to the contents this culture’s media. I would like people to think for themselves.

You’ve discussed the benefits of using actors with Down’s syndrome to play characters in your film.  What are your feelings on genetic testing for Down’s syndrome and recent aggressive scientific research to predetermine those with genetic “imperfections”?

Science and the understanding of how the human body functions and the universe around us is an important thing. It is up to the culture how it implements it’s laws regarding science. I believe one can argue almost any moral standpoint almost equally as well as the other. The sensitivity of this issue is not up to me. I had a great time working with all the actors in What is it? including all the actors with Down’s Syndrome. They are all great people.

You talk about your work as a psychological reaction to corporate media and how it has influenced culture – your work seems to not only be a humorous reflection of this but also an aggrieved backlash.  How does humor play a part in indignant resistance?

I am glad you know there is humor. Humor definitely helps to sooth information, concepts or thoughts that can be be difficult for some to deal with. When a human laughs they feel a part of something if there is a laugh accompanied with new information or concepts then the person who is laughing about this new concept/information has truly ingested that concept and information.

Has corporate media also altered our instinctive desire?

Corporate funded and distributed media’s goal is to alter the desire of people in order to serve the interests of the corporations that are funding the media.

And a heartfelt side note regarding Steven C. Stewart…

Steven C. Stewart wrote and is the main actor in part two of the trilogy titled It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. Steve had been locked in a nursing home for about ten years when his mother died. He had been born with a severe case of cerebral palsy and he was very difficult to understand. People that were caring for him in the nursing home would derisively call him an “M.R.” short for “Mental Retard”… When he did get out he wrote his screenplay. Although it is written in the genre of a murder detective thriller, truths of his own existence come through much more clearly than if he had written it as a standard autobiography…. I read it in 1987 and as soon as I had read it I knew I had to produce the film. Steven C. Stewart died within a month after we finished shooting the film.  One of Steve’s lungs had collapsed because he had started choking on his own saliva and he got pneumonia. I specifically started funding my own films with the money I make from the films I act in.  When Steven C. Stewart’s lung collapsed in the year 2000 this was around the same time that the first Charlie’s Angels film was coming to me. I realized with the money I made from that film I could put straight in to the Steven C. Stewart film. That is exactly what happened… I am relieved to have gotten this film finally completed because ever since I read the screenplay in 1987 I knew I had to produce the film and also produce it correctly. I would not have felt right about myself if I had not gotten Steve’s film made…

I am very proud of the film as I am of What is it? I feel It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. will probably be the best film I will have anything to do with in my entire career.

People who are interested in when I will be back should join up on the e mail list at CrispinGlover.com as they will be emailed with information as to where I will be where with whatever film I tour with. It is by far the best way to know how to see the films.

Monday, June 27, 2011
312 Bowery, between Bleecker and Houston streets
New York City, 212 466 1100

Performance of "The Wall of Vagina" by the Girls of Karen Black, The Hole, New York, Monday, June 27, 2011. Photo by Rosalie Knox

Just one day after NYC’s monumental Gay Pride Parade, the flag shed its cloth and lent its colors to an evening of naked horror.  A sizable crowd of sexy misfits gathered Monday night at Bowery’s newest venue, The Hole, for a brief yet remarkable piece, The Wall of Vagina, a rare performance by The Girls of Karen Black (GOKB).

Prior to the highly anticipated performance, the bare breasted GOKB cavorted under bright scrutiny of the gallery’s 7-11-style fluorescent lighting, mingling with guests while painted head to toe in either red, blue or purple and sporting thigh high stiletto boots, a towering red-glittered black bouffant wig and an occasional pair of black undies.  In contrast to the typical NYC “whaddya lookin’ at!” attitude, these stylish shock monsters welcomed the gaze of curious oglers.  One fellow crouched behind a GOKB to take a close up snap of her crack.  After the admirer gained her attention from a light tap on the back, she giggled and nodded in approval at the photo as her vanished lips widened, exposing a mouth full of painted-upon crushed black teeth.  A blend of Alejandro Jodorowsky and John Waters, the scene was a refreshing mix of sex, camp and horror.

Eventually the lights lowered and the sweaty crowd swiftly gathered towards a platform, constructed specially for the performance. Cell phone cams quickly shot up to catch the unique event (I had a partial-view seat between a Nokia and an IPhone) as the ladies strutted through the audience onto the stage.   Photographer, video artist and GOKB member Bijoux Altamirano photographed from below as five ladies (the highest pileup to date) climbed one by one facedown, spread eagle on top of each other, exposing their colored cheeks and shaven cherryless pits to the audience, last one on being the much adored Kembra Pfahler (lead singer of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black from which the GOKB and their newest transgender member, Siobhan Meow, are recruited).

The remaining member on stage leaned over and squirted the crack pile with a turkey baster filled with thick white cream.  Immediately, the arching spurts of goo beautifully married ideas of infection and sexuality, a delicious combo.  Pfahler, who prefers the more delineative titles Anti-naturalist and Availabist to commonly used “performance artist” (rejecting the title, she believes “performance art” should rather be called “_____”), explains a bit of the comical yet purposefully disgusting intention behind “The Wall of Vagina”, “It’s important to have a different paradigm…we’re making fun of female sexuality.”  And her well orchestrated rejections to standards of feminine beauty and seductiveness resonate even during quiet moments of the act as the women stood still, horrifying, wide-eyed and robotic, conjuring semblance to an army of demonic inflatable sex dolls.

Cast Member of "The Wall of Vagina" by the Girls of Karen Black, The Hole, New York, Monday, June 27, 2011. Photo by Rosalie Knox

The attentive crowd cheered as the ladies unpiled, knelt down on one knee and raised their hands high in the air, an appropriate bow from so glorious a group.  And just like that, they trotted right out the door and the simple and saturated gesture was over.  As it was a loosely enforced invite-only event, I assume a good portion of the audience were fans who had a general sense of what to expect, so I was happy to see the brief resplendent horror satisfy their eager expectancy.

After the show, the ladies ventured back in the gallery posing for pictures while straddling one of their own handmade sculptures…real art on art action!  The piece, a larger than life black cat, meshed well with the gallery’s current exhibition, simply titled “:)“  A colorful playground of inflatable beings and cartoonish sculptures, the first NYC solo show by Miami duo FriendsWithYou provided a nice backdrop to the fun and playful feel of the night as well as setting precedent for what will fill The Hole in the future.

In keeping with its Soho predecessor, the sensational Deitch Projects, The Hole is a charming antidote to the usual hoity-toity gallery vibe.  “I want to provide a space for all of us,” proprietor Kathy Grayson, a former director of Deitch, tells me, “and that includes the big community of people displaced by Deitch closing and all these great young artists that are part of my network… I mean to stick by those guys and continue to present great works by them.”  Pfhaler, whose latest album “Fuck Island” will be released this October, described Grayson as, “…heroic and very intelligent, a huge talent.”  Defibrillators of our time, these ladies are set on shocking the pulse back into Manhattan.

By the end of the night, happy attendees piled onto the streets bearing residual bits of glitter and colorful streaks.  The brevity of the actual performance made the mixing and mingling of the unique personas seem as much a part of the event as the actual performance.  Personally, my love for the city has always been about these brief, fantastic moments where a varied crowd can come together and pay witness to the joy and horror of it all.   Please excuse their beauty.

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March 29 – April 9, 2011
450 West 37th Street, east of 10th Avenue,
New York City, (646) 731-3200

Eiko & Koma: Naked, a performance, photographed by Anna Lee Campbell, courtesy of the artists.

Eiko & Koma’s Naked, at Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) through April 9th, is a living installation accompanied, in a neighboring room, by videos of historical performances; it  is the current installment of the three-year Retrospective Project highlighting the 40-year career of this artist duo. The durational performance, which inhabits a small, enclosed, nest-like area where viewers can either sit and stay or browse for a minute and move on, was designed for and originally installed last November in a gallery at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Despite the fact that Eiko & Koma have a long history as dance artists, the piece seems out of place at the destination theatre and dance venue of BAC. Installation in the 6th floor studios is not ideal for the work, which is a pocket of man-made nature more effectively stumbled upon than ticketed and controlled as in traditional theater. But the artists have done their best with this location; the work is free and open to the public any time and reservations are not absolutely necessary. You can enter and leave, at your leisure, a still space where the quiet, subtly painted naked bodies of a husband and wife barely touch, barely move, and yet pack a lifetime of craft, energy, and artistry into thoughtfully designed and extended moments.

Floor to ceiling canvas walls create a break between the entrance to studio 6A and Eiko & Koma’s bodies, which lie on the floor atop a messy swirl of leaves, twigs and black bird feathers. Holes in the canvas walls create little frames you can peer through to see the two of them, seemingly alone in the space. The small holes in the canvas, which itself is pasted with feathers and black marks as if intentionally dirtied by some natural habitat, creates a sense of distance between viewer and performer. Once around the corner and inside the small enclosure with the artists as well as the sometimes fully packed rows of floor and bench seating, this distance is completely gone. The artists’ two bodies were lying on their sides, facing one another, when I first entered. During the time I sat still and watched, there was no real change in their physical location, but there was an ever present tension of muscle, and ever-so-slight twists of each body open, exposing skin stretched tight over ribs, breath lifting bellies. After some time, the bodies closed into hiding, softly quivering fetal positions. The two did not move in unison, but played off of one another, appearing to sense and respond to the slight movements and occasional, always tender touches of their partner. One wonders how much of this action was planned and how much happened in the moment, and, after so many years of moving at glacial speed next to the same person, whether there is really any significant difference between planning and improvisation in their action.

Despite the nakedness of this performance, like Anna Halprin’s approach to nudity, the work is not sexual. The bodies on view are not specifically desexualized, but the actions themselves are already so fallen, closer to being of nature in the nearly dead sense than in the procreative animal sense—a seamless part of the landscape rather than an insertion onto landscape. There is no power struggle between the two bodies or with the bodies and the environment, which feels damp, like a cave; the only acoustics are random drips of water that fall from the ceiling and the rustling of dried leaves that hang in bunches from the overhead lights. Watching this nearly still tableau is unexpectedly riveting: time flies. In the next room, viewers are meant to understand the history of Eiko and Koma’s nakedness and its connection to the natural world, and how their work arrived at this point. Videos on display show works from the last 40 years in which the artists perform with nothing on. This room serves as an unintentional argument for the necessity of live performance—the performance documents, even the video installation that includes an underwater screen showing the couple’s Lament (1985) and Undertow (1987), clearly lack the moment-by-moment power of the living installation.

But the element of continuity and history that the accompanying videos bring into the work is the principal reason that Eiko & Koma are performing this week. Retrospective Project (2009-2012), of which Naked is a part, is designed after the museum-model concept for retrospectives: a visual art formula adapted and applied to performing artists. A large exhibition of the duo’s work will open at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art this summer, accompanied by a comprehensive 288-page monograph published by the Walker Art Center. With living performance artists, the video and ephemera based retrospective is a worthy accompaniment to an opportunity to see the real works, or at least the really interesting and exciting works, which are the new live performances by these artists. This was the case with Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at MoMA and it is certainly true for at least this portion of Eiko & Koma’s tour. Whether or not this model of performance artist as museum object can be sustained after the inevitable absence of the artist him/herself is a question curators will certainly be addressing in coming years as they rush to figure out ways to maintain famous but ephemeral works by canonized 20th-century artistic bodies-as-icons.  For now, at least, Eiko & Koma themselves are on the 6th floor at BAC, laying in a nest of sticks and leaves, slowly moving their aging, breathing bodies with what is transmitted as a feeling of complete acceptance of the viewers’ intimate gaze. If you sit for long enough, you’ll notice that sometimes, they even look back.

click to enlarge

January 13-22, 2011
512 West 19 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 255-5793

Dancer Rebecca Warner with paintings by TM Davy on the set of Sarah Michelson's Devotion at the Kitchen, January 2011. Courtesy of The Kitchen. Photograph by Paula Court.

In Devotion, Sarah Michelson casts two male actors—James Tyson and Jim Fletcher of the New York City Players—to dance alongside Rebecca Warner, Non Griffiths, Nicole Mannarino and Eleanor Hullihan. Griffiths, now 14-years-old, started dancing for the eminent downtown choreographer when she only 9; Michelson has explored, in the past, ideas about authorship and virtuosity through the “naïve bodies” of preteen girls. In Devotion, which is an epic two-hour, aggressively physical ballet inspired by a piece of text by Richard Maxwell, she creates movements in which highly trained female bodies interact with the literal interpretation and visible exhaustion of male partners. All are put through enormously athletic, relentlessly repeating movement sequences. Tearing apart and re-combining components of ballet with outsized yoga poses and substantial references to Twyla Tharp’s In The Upper Room (including the piece’s Phillip Glass score), Michelson meets the religious content of Maxwell’s text with pure dance—movement riding the line between possible and not.

Michelson herself does not appear onstage in person, but is the subject, with Maxwell, of luminescent portraits by TM Davy that hang high along The Kitchen’s black walls. When I first entered the Chelsea space—which was rotated lengthwise with the high tapered seating removed, fewer but longer rows of chairs lined up against the side wall—the images emerging from pure black background seemed alive, as if the hanging canvases were windows through which one actually saw human beings posed in stillness. Michelson’s voice was also present. It piped into the space over the speakers—alternating with or accompanying musician Pete Drungle’s loud, atmospheric score—as Warner, playing the Narrator, physicalized Maxwell’s personal, colloquial version of the Old and New Testament.

Dancer Non Griffiths on the set of Sarah Michelson's Devotion at the Kitchen, January 2011. Courtesy of The Kitchen. Photograph by Paula Court.

Warner worked her way around the room with a commanding yet neutral presence.  She lunged forward with her upper spine arched and arms outstretched as if they might reach out of even her own skin, tilted from the waist, and spun with one or two arms out. Meanwhile, Michelson read: “Eve settles down and says plainly: We really are simple things. Simple, fearful things.” She continued, “Mary holding babe in the oblivion of no sleep. Let this be ordinary. Let it be away from the current. Let her have her time with her child. Mary, Jesus.” Fletcher played the physically demanding role of Adam—during the second hour he was literally running around the space, catching the Eve as she threw her body repeatedly into his arms. Tyson was Jesus opposite Girffiths’ Mary.

Her white blond hair tied tightly back against nearly translucent young skin, Griffiths has a certain thin frailty that created palpable tension each time she quivered after landing a sharp, reductionist leap. Despite this, she seemed to have enough determination and devotion to the material or some idea of dance and performance, to push through. She was also the perfectly cast Virgin Mother for this work; when she approached Tyson’s figure, the partnering seemed both accidental and necessary for her survival. She almost seemed as if she might fall without him, and yet she shined in a way his Jesus did not, and was not supposed to.

Griffiths changed shoes in front of the audience from sneakers into black dance shoes, and without preciousness or over-intellectualizing, it was clear that this was also a dance about dance: a play with derivative forms reaching back into history yet breaking through convention all the same. Everything, it seems in this piece, is on the line, yet the humans making it are also so clearly real: a rigorous execution of craft that manages not to mask the dancers’ bodies with technique.

Vik Muniz at Jardim Gramacho in WASTE LAND, an Arthouse Films release 2010. Photograph by Fabio Ghivelder, courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio

Vik Muniz cuts a sympathetic figure as the star of Lucy Walker’s documentary film, Waste Land, which screened in New York last fall at the Angelika Film Center and will be available on video this coming spring.  His playful artistry has garnered him wealth and fame, and led him to the pursuits of the virtuous rich: philanthropy and social change.  Rather than simply writing a check, Muniz has embarked on a high-wire project of social reform through the transformative power of art.

Walker’s film charts the production of Muniz’s latest series, “Pictures of Garbage.”A consummate draughtsman, Muniz is known for re-creating images recognizable from art history (Warhol’s Marilyns, past masters’ Greek myths) using unlikely materials such as dirt, diamonds, chocolate syrup, and plastic toys, with a photograph of the completed image always the end result.  On this occasion, Muniz employed garbage pickers from the Jardim Gramacho landfill in Brazil to help him create large portraits of themselves out of refuse collected from the site and return the proceeds from the sale of the resulting artworks to the workers’ cooperative. The artist’s jovial demeanor and idealism carry him through the film like a benevolent ringmaster, under circumstances where a man with more self-doubt or heightened situational awareness might crumble under the moral ramifications of his stated vision;“to change the lives of a group of people [using] the same material that they deal with every day.”

Vik Muniz, Marat (Sebastião), from Pictures of Garbage, 2008. Digital C-print. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The film follows a group of catadores (pickers) who pluck recyclable materials from the dump, reselling it to eke out a living.  In Brazil catadores are among the most socially marginalized; coming from backgrounds where the only other options are the drug trade or prostitution, they have chosen trash. Though they take pride in their work and are quick to describe its environmental merits, it is unsanitary, unsavory, and deeply unpleasant. 7,000 tons of garbage arrive at Jardim Gramacho daily from Rio de Janeiro and surrounding areas. The stench is unbearable. At night there are fires, completing the illusion that this place is hell on earth. Though catadores can earn double the minimum daily wage, the hazards are extreme. Injuries from the garbage trucks are common, as is finding headless corpses among the trash (casualties of the drug and gang wars nearby). Suelem, who has worked at the landfill since childhood, tells a harrowing story of finding a dead baby. Then, there are the leprosy outbreaks. A worker named Isis states it simply: “There is no future here.”

The camera captures the squalor beautifully, and the catadores are quirky and quotable, easily lending themselves to the stereotype of the honest yet simple laborer popularized in the 19th century by Courbet, Van Gogh and many others. It is in this vein that Muniz casts the catadores – as in Picasso’s Woman Ironing and Millet’s The Sower.

Early in the film, Muniz asks his studio manager Fabio whether it will be difficult to collaborate with the catadores, fearing they might be criminals and drug addicts. “It would be much harder to think that we are not able to change the life of these people,” Fabio responds.  The unconscious hubris of this statement rankles in the background of the film.

The heavy responsibility inherent in changing lives becomes clear to Muniz and Fabio as the project approaches completion. Fabio articulates this concern saying, “They totally forgot about Gramacho. They don’t want to go back. At the beginning I had the impression, and I think now that this is wrong, that they were happy there.” As the portraits are finished, photographed, and dismantled we begin to see the catadores dissolving in tears as the realization dawns that they must now return to the landfill – their temporary employment at Muniz’s studio at an end. Isis weeps as her portrait is completed, confessing that she implored Fabio to give her a job at the studio, so she wouldn’t have to return to the dump. The catadores thank Muniz over and over.

Tiaõ, the handsome and charismatic union leader, watches as his portrait (fittingly styled after David’s The Death of Marat) is sold at Phillips auction house in London. Surrounded by contemporary art built upon ironies that have no place in his life, he is overwhelmed and breaks down, knowing the proceeds ($64,097) will fund the pickers’ co-op he founded.

Vik Muniz takes the photo of Tiao as Marat in WASTE LAND, an Arthouse Films release 2010. Courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio

Since the film premiered, several of the catadores have found work outside the landfill, and the proceeds from the sale of the artworks have paid for numerous benefits for the workers’ co-op: a new truck, computers, a business training program. Those who modeled for portraits and helped to construct them each received their own photograph as well as monetary compensation. Some returned to Jardim Gramacho, begging the question posed by Muniz’s wife Janaina, “If you shake them up…show them life can be different….what can they do with that afterwards?” The dilemma is as complicated as the workers’ reality. Muniz takes responsibility, saying he hopes they come up with a plan to get out of Gramacho, and that it is hard for him to imagine doing much damage to these people to whom so much has been done already. It is that uncharacteristic lapse of imagination on the artist’s part that gives the film its uneasy subtext: there is altruism, but is there also inadvertent exploitation?

Unrated. English and Portuguese with English subtitles. Available March 29, 2011 from iTunes, amazon.com, and newvideo.com. Waste Land will be broadcast on PBS in April 2011 – check local listings. www.wastelandmovie.com

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December 3, 2010 – January 6, 2011
643 Park Avenue at 66th Street
New York City, (212) 616-3930

installation shot of Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway at the Park Avenue Armory

If ever the art-going public needed a reminder of the wisdom of the dictum “show, don’t tell,” it needs look no further than Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway, on view now at the Park Avenue Armory.

Greenaway, a filmmaker long fascinated with the visual arts, is well known for films (The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982; Nightwatching, 2007) in which artists and their creations are central figures. With his series “Nine Classical Paintings Revisited,” begun in 2006, Greenaway has gone directly to the source, selecting acknowledged masterpieces from the canon as the objects of a digital-age reappraisal. Greenaway’s vision is presented to us in three acts played out in two adjoining spaces that are set off by giant digital screens massive enough not to be dwarfed by the Amory’s cavernous unlit drill hall.

The first act sets the scene of Renaissance Italy through Greenaway’s awesome command of the technological landscape, like the opening orientation at the IMAX Theatre where all the audio/visual bells and whistles are explained so that one doesn’t faint midway through the show. Tremendously vivid digital and animated images are presented in 360-degrees on four massive screens surrounding the audience and a fifth screen on the floor (it can be walked on), all backed by a powerful, violin-fueled audio track. Act two includes a full-scale replica of the original chapel for which The Last Supper was commissioned in Milan. Here Greenaway presents his interpretation of Leonardo’s masterpiece, before returning to the first room for Act Three, an exploration of the Paolo Veronese’s painting The Wedding at Cana.

Greenaway uses his vast technological vocabulary to give a virtuosic audio-visual tour of these two great paintings as he re-imagines and re-presents them chiefly by altering lighting conditions to explore their space.

At one point in The Last Supper, the light emerges from Jesus’ figure alone, casting shadows over the entire tableaux as if it existed in the round. Later, a point of light dances through the space, leaving a vapor trail, that traces the path it has traveled.

Composition, too, is explored through the illumination of various aspects of the painting against a dark ground. The apostles’ heads alone are lit, then their feet. Their hands­—gesturing, pointing, clutching—are bathed in a warm light, a rhythm of abstract shapes playing across the surface of the painting. In this way Greenaway literally gives each aspect of the painting its moment in the sun.

In one compelling contrast, diagonal shafts of light emerge from the grid in the ceiling in the painting, filtering over Jesus and his apostles from behind and presenting them as solid sculptural masses. This is followed by a similar movement of light from a window in the chapel, which moves flatly over the painting, revealing it as a two-dimensional surface. Although the painted surface is flat, somehow for a moment one expects the figures again to be sculpted volumes. It is this kind of set-up that delights Greenaway. Look what can be done with light and space! In these moments the experience is truly magnificent.

To go from The Last Supper to The Wedding at Cana, as presented here, is to go from looking at a painting with a friend to looking through the eyes of a literal-minded museum docent. A didactic audio track picks apart the painting’s composition, effectively killing the mood. Not only is the delight of mutual discovery gone, the content of the lecture is a major disappointment. To hear Greenaway tell it, Veronese’s chief accomplishment as a painter is to put the figure of Jesus smack-dab in the middle of his composition.

installation shot of installation shot of Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway as installed in Milan in 2008

The most magical moment of the entire experience is in the final scene. The 120-plus figures that make up the composition of Wedding at Cana are reduced to bright white contour lines against a black ground. For a moment they are held there, in their actual relationship on the surface of the painting. But then something marvelous happens, as we go from seeing this world head-on to seeing it from a partial bird’s-eye view, as if lifted twenty feet above the wedding party. Looking on from above, one can’t help but smile in wonder at the vast three-dimensional space Veronese compressed into his painting.

To levitate above a painting and for a moment to experience the world of that panting in three dimensions is Greenaway’s great gift to us. In showing us his exploration of light, space, volume and composition, Greenaway succeeds because he trusts us to make discoveries alongside him. It is only in the telling, when this essential process of discovery is undermined, that Greenaway’s vision fails.

At its best, Greenaway’s work remains a tremendous homage to painting. In all its technological wizardry, it never loses sight of the greatest wizardry of all: the painter’s depiction of a three-dimensional world on an unapologetically two-dimensional surface.

NY premiere by Ralph Lemon, BAM Next Wave Festival, October 13-16, 2010

Ralph Lemon's How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? at BAM, October 2010. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

The first part of Ralph Lemon’s new performance piece “How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Do Anything?” consists of the artist, seated by a microphone and playing narrator to “Sunshine Room,” the video that plays behind him on a large screen. In it, new material and found footage combine, mainly to display overlapping themes from his previous body of work as well as heartfelt thoughts on the death of his partner, the Odissi dancer Asako Takami, who died of cancer in 2007. Excerpts play from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris— the 1972 film about a man who is visited by his wife’s ghost—along with re-creations of scenes from that film. The new footage features 102-year-old ex-sharecropper Walter Carter and his 80-year-old wife Edna. Lemon met Carter back in 2002 in Mississippi when he was researching “Come Home Charlie Patton,” 2004, and Carter has been showing up in Lemon’s work ever since.

In the ending portion of “Come Home,” which was Lemon’s last full-length work for the stage, dancers throw themselves about in an ecstatic, aggressively physical movement sequence without discernable pattern. This was also featured prominently in the video. We see footage from the old performance as well as recent rehearsals of work being created in the same vein. Lemon, as the live-narrator, explains the footage: “What you are watching is a ‘drunk and stoned dance’ with a few rigorous parameters…and in this zone, gap, void, where they diligently want to follow the rules but can’t—that is where I want this work to live and flourish.” After the video and narration portion, part two of the performance features Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Darrell Jones, Gesel Mason, Owui Okpokwasili, Omagbitse Omagbemi and David Thompson dancing this beautiful but confounding piece of material, sober of course.

Underlying the lecture-performance Lemon designed for part one is a lot: a riff on the visiting artist’s talk; an evolution of 1990s European non-dance dance made popular by the French choreographers Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy; a performance of theory, specifically of the ideas of spectator emancipation developed by Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière. But Lemon’s explicitly stated intention in this piece, overarching the three distinct sections, is to move beyond or outside of form itself. To do so—to be free of form—is nearly impossible when dealing with bodies that have ingested and, in a sense, become their physical training and technique; hence, perhaps, the idea of drunk and stoned dancing. Likewise, disruptive cross-disciplinary forms like combines of lecture-performance and staged video are by now so established, his attempts to disrupt form are obvious failures.

Lemon, however, is more interested in the questions and problems he poses, and is just fine without the achievement of answers or solutions per se, as he continues to posit the unanswerable. In the film from the first half of the performance, Carter, we’re told, asks dancer Okpokwasili (who plays “the Hare”) the performance’s title question, “How can you stay in the house all day and not do anything?” In response, Lemon our narrator says, “The hare stares blankly. The question is, of course, the answer and the form in which the answer exists.” So in a search for formlessness, we come to this: a question as the essence of form.

Okpokwasili and Lemon perform the third part of the evening-length performance in a section titled “Come Home,” which starts with Okpokwasili’s loud, long off-stage wailing. When she enters the stage and picks up a tambourine—back to the audience, audibly crying with her broad, strong shoulders slightly hunched—the slight gesture seems to indicate both the necessity and the futility of art at moments of desperation and despair. Later, Lemon walks onto the stage wearing one sock, removes it halfway through a weightless-seeming movement sequence, folds it, places it on his knee, and then dances tenderly with it. Finally, the two brilliant dancers move together on stage to close the work. Quieter and more resolute, their minimal duet was a distillation of the massively physical ending sequence from “Charlie Patton,” where this thread of meaning began. It looked the way pain feels as it fades over time. Internal violence is replaced by nagging sensation; memory intact, but you still have to show up to dance on stage with your one white sock.

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Photo by Michael Hart

Back in March, after repeated visits to the Guggenheim to secretly record an audio score for Tino Seghal’s “The Kiss” (2002), Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly directed two male performers at the Volta Art Fair in a disruptive “corrective” of Seghal’s original work. Performance critic Claudia LaRocco suggested they post the video documentation of this and a subsequent performance on her now-defunct blog on WNYC’s website, which resulted in the creation of their video work, “You Call This Progress?”  The video itself, a political performance document with overlaid text, is limited as an aesthetic product. However, over the last five months, Gerard and Kelly have developed the video’s content into a more mature, layered, if at times intellectually overwrought (even amid Lady Gaga references) performance for three dancers. “Ideological Formation,” shown August 14^th at Mount Tremper Arts, is a mash-up of high and lowbrow references that, even as they are decontextualized and collaged together, stay concretely based in militaristic and sexual representations of the male body.

Like Seghal, Kelly (a former New York City Ballet dancer) and Gerard have earned crossover art world appeal because of the critical foundations of their choreography. They just completed the theory-heavy Whitney Independent Study studio program and tend to focus on contemporary ideas about the commodification of the body (hello, Marina and Tino) and the fetishistic elitism of live art.  But this particular piece is grounded in seductive, historically and pop-culturally aware danced movement, which at times feels like a guilty pleasure. Perhaps that’s because in it, three beautiful young men are actually dancing to music—a rarity in contemporary interdisciplinary dance works, though the tides may be changing—and that music happens to be “Material Girl” and “Alejandro.”

Kelly performs with Jose Tena, a lanky 15-year-old who attends high school at LaGuardia, and the exquisitely present Ben Asrial. As a trio, “Ideological Formation” recalls, abstractly, Brown’s choreography, and explicitly, a petition for human relationships moving beyond the conformity of the couple. Tena and Asrial—both deeply vulnerable performers—are used in sexually or emotionally suggestive formations that challenge the assumed neutrality of Seghal’s male-female couple. The work claims a broad heritage by inhabiting other artists’ movements, something Seghal has famously, and revolutionarily as far as the economics of performance go, sought to make impossible.

They also trace a lineage from Martha Graham through Madonna, who was once her student, to Gaga. By recreating these women’s choreography directly, gay culture is, in a sense, stolen back or re-appropriated. (Madonna and Gaga are commonly critiqued for poaching and repackaging a queer aesthetic.) Young Tena performs Graham’s iconic contractions, which she designed with a sexually mature woman’s body in mind, and even speaks her words: “I am a dancer. I believe that we learn from practice…” More formally, the piece uses the minimalist aesthetic of Trisha Brown’s early work as well as certain of Robert Morris’s dances, referencing his use of performers hidden under and then interacting with white cardboard boxes. These Morris references, like every aesthetic choice, are also loaded with questions about gender representation and intellectual property in danced movement; he’s rumored to have stolen much of his choreography from Simon Forti when they were married.

Video and installation artist Chelsea Tonelli Knight collaborated with Kelly and Gerard on a video, which was screened halfway through the performance. It featured the same dancers and choreography, only the performers stood waist high in the Esopus River, which is just a short walk from the performance venue at Mount Tremper Arts. Again, Brown’s formal challenges to theatrical conventions during her heyday in the late 60s and 70s get a nod. But beyond that, the video succeeds because it is used simply as another medium through which to present these male bodies in motion as both formal aesthetic instruments and as human beings with thoughts, lovers, and a shared representational history.

Mount Tremper Arts gardens, Photo by Mathew Pokoik

Ryan Schultz, Self Portrait with Christmas Lights, 2008. Oil on canvas, 18 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

One of the most obvious reasons for this lies within the format of reality television itself: editing. Twenty-four to 48 hours of time and footage comprises each 45 minutes episode. The compression involves the omission of a large amount of back story, detail and dialog. What is cut too often appears to be a deeper, fuller explanation (although, it could be rambling) by artists or judges about the work itself. As an artist, I am curious about whether these contestants are aware of when their work uncannily resembles other contemporary artists’ works: When Jacyln made a tank filled with water that vaguely resembled her former employer Jeff Koons’ early equilibrium pieces, did she, rather than her peer Trong, acknowledge this likeness? And what about Miles’s “shocking” drawing of cartoon genitalia that strongly evoked Sue Williams’ similar paintings?

This editing may be more extreme than the producers want us to easily know. A friend of mine advising a contestant’s participation was disturbed to find in the contract very draconian stipulations. In addition to creating severe environments for the contestants through deprivations of sleep and food sans alcohol (is this what we artists consider ideal working conditions?), Work of Art reserves the right to manipulate dialog, in fact to completely rearrange and transpose conversations. The example the contract gave is that if a contestant answered “yes” to question number one and “no” to question number two, in post-production, the contestant can be presented as answering no to question one and yes to question two. The “reality” of the show entails a significant degree of artifice.

Maybe these insider details are all too obvious revelations for those in the entertainment industry. While the episodes’ selections of winners and losers have seemed reasonable, I noticed that the weaker personalities tended to be the first to go. This led me to wonder: do the “art world judges” only deliberate amongst themselves? After examining the show’s closing credits in paused increments, I found some phrasings flashing across the screen in a time too brief to read: “Winning and elimination decisions were made by the judges in consultation with the producers.” So, when the loser’s dismissal is recited, “Your work of art didn’t work for us,” what the host neglects to say is neither your art nor your personality any longer works for the show.

Judith Braun at work on one of her finger paintings

When I watch this show, I am reminded of numerous projects from art school. In the real art world, however, artists don’t compete for exhibitions through assignments like “Make a work of art based on your drive through a city in an Audi” or “Design a cover for this Penguin classic novel.” In cases like these, beyond unabashed commercial advertising, the show becomes more about adaptability of creative approach than about deeply developing concepts or visual languages. Furthermore, it demonstrates that artists who do have distinctive, engrained stylistic approaches have difficulty working outside these modes, such as Judith’s abstract hand painting and Ryan’s self-portraiture.

Ultimately, I am curious about the winner’s prize: not the $100,000 cash “grant” (is the MacArthur Genius the only other grant of a larger amount?), but the solo show at the “world reknown” Brooklyn Museum. How will this show be presented and what will it do for the winner’s career? And more importantly, will the work stand alone on its own merits, or require the explanation, “that art reality show winner?”