Wyeth Vertico at Shelburne Museum

WYETH VERTIGO

Shelburne Museum (Shelburne, Vermont)

Through October 31, 2013

Andrew Wyeth--Soaring: The painting that inspired the exhibit

The Wyeth clan continues to spark debate in the art world. To their fans, they are at the fore of 20^th century American realism. To critics, N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) was little more than an imaginative book illustrator; his son Andrew (1917-2007) a superb draftsman, but lousy painter; and Andrew’s son, Jamie (1946-), an undistinguished dabbler derivative of father and grandfather. Of these charges, I am sympathetic only to the last–I have never been a fan of Jamie Wyeth’s work or his use of (to my eyes) garish coloring. I do, however, admire his sense of whimsy.

No matter what the critics say, though, the Wyeths have proved popular with the larger public. Kudos go to Vermont’s Shelburne Museum–a treasure in its own right–for mounting a show that’s not a Wyeth “greatest hits” overview. It’s titled Wyeth Vertigo and contains three dozen works chosen to put viewers off balance, either because of their dizzying perspectives, or because of unsettling of enigmatic themes. In addition to works from N.C., Andrew, and Jamie, there is also one canvas each from N.C.’s assistant, Peter Hurd, and his daughter, Carolyn. Just a few of the works are widely known, which adds to the allure for veteran museum-goers.

Those familiar with the Shelburne Museum know instantly where the “vertigo” idea came from. The museum owns a certifiable Andrew Wyeth masterpiece, Soaring. Andrew worked on it over an eight-year period (1942-50) and when you get see it, you understand why it took so long. First of all, it’s enormous (48” by 87”). Look closely. What you see is constructed of countless dry brush flecks, dots, and squiggles, almost none of which are longer than a fraction of an inch. Think a cross between pointillism and anticipation of dot matrix imagery. It certainly fits the myriad ways one can think of vertigo. Three enormous vultures circle so high above an isolated farm house that their wings dwarf the structure below. Are they hungrily anticipating feasting on a corpse? Is this commentary on the smallness of man in nature and his transitory existence? Or is it just a happenstance event painted from a unique perspective?

The Islander--Jamie Wyeth

There are several ambiguous canvases such as this. What are we to make of dead crows, eerie moonlight, or empty boats? One of the latter, by N. C. Wyeth, is rendered in (for him) rather lurid colors–pinks, purples, red undercoating–and depicts an intact boat just yards from shore. It’s title? The Drowning (1936). Mostly, though, the works on display just challenge us to look at things from skewed angles–from cliffs high above, at sea level, from a bird’s eye view, foreshortening…. We see, for instance, a windswept peninsula from a rocky hilltop as a goat might experience it in The Islander (1976), one of the few Jamie Wyeth paintings that grab me.

N.C. Wyeth--Dark Harbor

A personal favorite was N.C.’s Dark Harbor Fishermen (1943), with its centered-weighted lighting, strong geometric shapes, and shimmery ovals (fish). He did several versions of this scene and this one dazzles. If you muse over it for a moment you realize that the “realist” painter has pulled a visual fast one. He wants you to believe that the night is so dark that the waters are pitch black and we cannot determine where it begins and the sky ends. The seagulls our eyes see as swimming and those we think are flying occupy the same plane. And if’s it’s that dark, where’s the light coming from that manages to spotlight just what we need to see? There’s not a torch or lantern in sight, nor is one reflecting upon a surface. How can we see the bow of the rowboat in the distance, but not the water upon which it floats? Now that’s vertigo for you–a magician’s illusion in which we never notice the manner in which we’ve been tricked!  

Rob Weir

Mass MoCA: all utopias fell and Phoenix

all utopias fell, 2010

Phoenix

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

Through October 27, 2013

 

Humanity's last gasp?

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) is often a challenging place. Housed in a sprawling repurposed factory complex in North Adams that from was headquarters to Sprague Electric 1942 to 1985 and a paycheck for some 4,100 workers, Mass MoCA presents the kind of art a lot of people don’t “get” and provides open space for installations that are too large for traditional art museums to touch.

One of the best ways to enjoy Mass MoCA is to follow filmmaker Jonathan Demme’s advice: stop making sense. It’s a place in which the visual is often its own reward. Suspend your narrative dreams. Give up the need for the representational. Don’t ask, “What is it?” Just enjoy what it is. Go ahead and read the artists’ statements if you must, but don’t be surprised if you’re no more enlightened than if you hadn’t bothered. Two current exhibits that demonstrate the fascination possible if you don’t insist on objective reality are Michael Oatman’s all utopias fell, 2010 and Xu Bing’s Phoenix. Hit Mass MoCA before the end of October to catch each exhibit–Oatman’s fantasy is in the courtyard and closes for the season sometime around Halloween; Xu Bing’s assemblage comes down after October 27.

Oatman’s project began with a fascination for the ruins of the Sprague buildings and the pragmatic and artistic possibilities a postindustrial canvass provides. You enter all utopias fell, 2010 through the remnants of the Sprague boiler room. (See “Sprague in Black and White” in the photo albums section of my Facebook site.) It’s like walking through a geometric graveyard constructed from iron and rust, and is the perfect welcome mat to part one of Oatman’s construction, The Shining. Oatman imagines a post apocalyptic world in which humankind has been conquered by an unseen alien force. He takes an old Airstream trailer and rigs it to look like a makeshift spacecraft that force landed by the Mass MoCA boiler room. Taking his cue from everything from the work of Giotto to Buck Rogers and Jules Verne, Oatman leaves resolution to the eye of the beholder. Are we seeing humanity’s final outpost, or the possible seeds of a new society?

What's going on in here?

The inside of the “ship” won’t enlighten you. It’s called The Library of the Sun and it’s a cross between living quarters, an ongoing chronicle, and an improvised laboratory. We don’t know where its occupant might be–hidden, taken by aliens, long dead…. There are cryptic references to the sun and other symbols that defy logic. Equally baffling is the stained glass window in the back of the trailer. Salvaged materials? A nostalgic attempt at simulating banal domesticity? 

A touch of home, or something else?

And from the trailer we also see part three, Codex Solis, an array of solar panels that is visually interesting and quite practical–they work and generate about 3% of Mass MoCA’s power needs. So maybe a slice of utopia after all?

In the belly of the beast

If this isn’t enough eye candy for you, check out Xu Bing’s Phoenix in about the only building that could house such gigantisms. Xu Bing is Chinese, but lived in the United States for two decades. He returned to Beijing in 2007 and, as anyone who has been there knows, he returned to a city obsessed with obliterating the past and building anew. For an artist working with found materials, it’s a trove akin to living inside a junkyard. Xu Bing’s vision was to marry the past with the future, which he has done by fashioning two massive dragons from materials salvaged from demolition and construction sites. Each of his two “dragons”–wires, machine parts, LED lights, steel rods, and broken tools–is nearly one hundred feet long. They are, at once, familiar looking and so alien that we might imagine them as Oatman’s bringers of the apocalypse. And like Oatman’s assemblage, Phoenix is so breathtaking that it’s best if you merely experience it, not try to comprehend it. 

Scales of the Dragon

Mass MoCA road trip? You bet! And while you’re there, check out what Tom Phillips and Johnny Carrera did with the written word (Life’s Work) and Mark Dion’s eccentric musing on preservation shelters (The Octagon Room). Rob Weir

Lee Daniels' The Butler Offers Lousy Service

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Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013)

Directed by Lee Butler

Follow Through Productions, 132 minutes, PG-13

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It’s seldom a good sign when a director slaps his name in front of a well-worn title. Consider that a metaphor for this half-realized film that could have used a strict editor in the green room and a team of historians on the set.

The Butler is the story of Cecil Gaines, whose improbable tale is based on the biography of Eugene Allen, whose story is much more interesting than the fictionalized account we see on the screen. The film follows Gaines from a Georgia boyhood on a cotton plantation in the 1920s, where he witnesses a white overseer murder his father for daring to protest his wife’s rape. In what passes for pity, the family matriarch, Annabeth Westfall (Vanessa Redgrave), takes Cecil into the house and teaches him to become a servant.

Cecil is very good at his job–so good that by the 1950s he’s part of the White House servants’ staff. The Butler chronicles Gaines’ time in the White House from the Eisenhower administration through that of Ronald Reagan. The film also follows Gaines into retirement. Much of the script appears to have been cribbed from another Gaines– novelist Ernest Gaines and his magnificent Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In the latter work, Jane Pittman, a former slave, lives to see the salad days of the civil rights movement. The Butler takes us from sharecropping, Jim Crow, and the KKK to Rosa Parks, MLK, and the election of Barack Obama. Right away we have a problem. Instead telling part of the drama in poignant detail, Daniels seeks to tell it all through snapshots and vignettes that have the weight of butterfly wings and the depth of a sheet of paper.

Forest Whitaker is very good as the adult Cecil Gaines, but he really can’t do more than skate across Daniels’ thin surfaces. The biographical timeframe alone is daunting, but Daniels also wants to play out the entire civil rights drama, take us inside Cecil’s family life, make a point about the dignity of black servants, and take detours involving the Vietnam War, the Black Panthers, black politics in the 1980s, and South Africa. Each of these is a valid topic, but each also deserves more than a wink, a nod, and a grainy film clip or two. The lesson that black men in service quietly undermine racism through their very competence–allegedly delivered to Cecil’s eldest son by none other than Dr. King himself–is certainly an important one. It has been made, for instance, by numerous academics studying the dynamics of the Pullman Brotherhood. The Butler might have been a better film had moral witness been its sole center. Daniels doesn’t trust his audience enough to assume they have any knowledge of the civil rights movement; hence he tries to make sure he mentions everything. He may be right about American historical amnesia, but his cram-it-in filmmaking can’t even be called painting with broad strokes–it’s more like using a spray gun.

Still, Daniels’s truncated civil rights overview seems positively obese compared to the skeletal coverage given to presidential politics. I wish he would have asked Saturday Night Live to supply the presidents as Daniels’ take on presidents is every bit the caricature for which SNL is noted, but without capturing the essence of any of them. Robin Williams as Eisenhower? James Marsden as a rail-thin JFK? Ouch! Okay, so Liev Schreiber does a credible LBJ cameo and Alan Rickman is pretty good as Reagan, but nothing–and I mean nothing–redeems John Cusak’s embarrassing Nixon. He sports such a horrendous prosthetic nose that it looks as if he just rushed over from a production of Pinocchio. (One inspired casting choice: Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan!)

You’ve probably heard buzz that Oprah Winfrey will get a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her boozy, bossy, bored role as Gloria Gaines. She probably will because, well, she’s Oprah, but she doesn’t deserve one. David Oyelowo would be a better choice for his supporting role as eldest son Louis Gaines, but really, there’s just nothing here that warrants thinking of this film as more than an afterschool special for the Lifetime channel. Sloppy filmmaking aside, any point Daniels might have made about African-American struggle is lost in an unforgivably schmaltzy ending involving Barack Obama’s election. It’s as if all of the horrors of the past dissipated when Obama assumed the White House. We know better, don’t we? And I sure as hell recognize American triumphalism when I see it–that teleological pipe dream that deceptively casts the past as an unfortunate prelude to a redeemed present. It’s bad enough when we see this from Stephen Spielberg or Ron Howard; it’s doubly sad when it comes from a black director. --Rob Weir

Six Questions for Shannon Carey of Luray

Shannon Carey is the ethereal lead singer and banjo picker for Luray, a new presence on the bluegrass scene. Make that post-bluegrass, as Luray’s sound is an ambient mix of grass, country, indie folk, and splashes of lots of other things–a bit like the kind of stuff her brother Sean plays in Bon Inver. Luray have just released The Wilder, the band’s debut recording.

Your PR material mentions that your past has involved a lot of wanderlust. How has this affected your music?

SC: I grew up in Wisconsin and Arizona, but I’ve moved around a lot. I picked up country music from my dad, who was in bands that played at country fairs. I also lived in New Orleans for a year, where there’s so much street music. I learned about bluegrass in the Bay Area of California, where amazing musicians are creating new versions of it. When I moved to the Washington, D.C. area I decided to see how what I could meld together.

Were there specific musical influences you picked up in your travels?

SC: Well, you try not to sound like anyone else, but I love the singing of Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris. You also hear things you have to learn on your own. Bluegrass singing has a kind of yodel thing going on. I had to teach myself how to do that.

I don’t have specific influences for the banjo, though Alison Brown has been a strong role model for women for many years. Of course, I love Béla Fleck. But I also like a lot of the banjo that’s been in recent Indigo Girls records. Mainly I liked melodic banjo.

I like to ask musicians how they describe their sound and you’ve just released your debut record, so what’s it sound like to you?

SC: (Laughs) Well… I wrote a lot of the promo material, so I don’t want to repeat myself! The sound of the record is supposed to be textural and comforting. It has earthy, natural sounds, but also layers of banjo picking and vocal lines. I wanted it to be transporting and ambient, but with the sense of joy we get from country and bluegrass music.

I want to ask you, in turn, about my three favorite songs on the album, beginning with the title track “The Wilder.” Tell me about it.

SC: It was actually the song that inspired the entire project, which is how it ended up as the title track. It’s about trusting the universe and stepping into an unknown space both spiritually and physically. It came as I was turning toward music to reinvent myself after a career in social work. I had to step into that unknown space and trust that things would work out.

How about “Crying,” a sweet little song I really like?

SC: I wanted to see if I could write a country song. It’s about getting in touch with my feelings, even though the story is told from the perspective of a man trying not to cry. It also came out of my social work job that involved families and children. You try not to let it happen, but that kind of job can shut you down emotionally. I had to relearn how to be sad and cry. As it happened, my dog died and I cried for months!

Kalorama is bouncy and unlike a lot of the other tracks.

That’s actually the name of the D.C. neighborhood where my husband (Luray guitarist and Greenpeace employee Gary Wisniewski) and I lived. It’s in the northwest of the city and we had an apartment on the corner of Kolorama and Columbia. It was all new, including trying out apartment living, which we had never done before.

The song tries to capture the experience of being a newcomer and feeling like you don’t belong in the first place. The neighborhood is next to Adams Morgan (a historically black neighborhood in the process of gentrification), but it’s also a mixture of college kids, embassies, and middle and upper class people, all living near Kalorama Park. It often felt like being an alien. We live on a farm in Maryland now, which makes for a longer commute into the city, but it suits us better.

NOTE: Those living near Northampton, MA can catch Luray at the Parlor Room on September 6. Others can hear tracks (or order the CD) from www.luraymusic.com

Breathtaking Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker Release

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JOSIENNE CLARKE AND BEN WALKER

Fire & Fortune

Navigator Records 082

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New releases fall into categories such as old friends, familiar voices, and promising discoveries. But few are as delicious as those that make us exclaim, “Who is that?” The London-based duo Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker induce the latter reaction. Fire & Fortune is their third release and if it gets half the play it deserves, Clarke and Walker will be the hottest duo around. (Fortune is always problematic in folk music!) Clarke’s voice is the sort that only comes around a few times in a generation: crystalline clear, supple, and gorgeous. She lists Sandy Denny, Linda Thompson, and June Tabor among her influences and, for once, it’s no stretch to say that the new kid is equal to her mentors. Half of the album’s 12 tracks are originals, many of them evocative of Denny’s trad-based contemporary offerings. “After Me,” for instance, is bell-like in tone and fragile in feel, yet contains soaring register shifts that let you know Clarke’s nobody’s china doll. When Clarke and Walker draw from the public domain, though, they tend to evoke Lorena McKennitt and the John Renbourn Group, if we imagine stripped-down ensembles. Clarke’s take on “The Seasons” is especially McKennit-like in its mix of magic, mystery, and drama, and her voice is a dead ringer for Jacqui McShee’s on “Green Grow the Laurels.” Guest musicians add tasteful contributions throughout but it’s always Ben Walker’s fretwork that’s the foundation from which Clarke’s voice leaps. Pay attention, folks, a coronation is in order. --Rob Weir

Think I exaggerate Clarke's voice? Check her out. watch her quiet a restive crowd.

Miley Cyrus and Duns Scotus

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Color me bored, not shocked.

Yesterday morning I did something I've never done before: listened to a Miley Cyrus song. It made me think of Duns Scotus and I’ll bet you don’t know too many people who can say that with a straight face.

I was previously able to escape Miley because I don’t have cable and good old WUMB doesn’t play her music. But the uproar over her VMA routine made me curious enough to seek an online video. I wasn’t shocked by Miley’s performance because that’s exactly what it was–a performance that no rational human should confuse with music. Instead of quaking with outrage or fearing the moral corruption of America’s youth I roared with laughter at the tacky banality of it all. And, like I said, it reminded me of Duns Scotus–sort of.

Duns Scotus

That name probably doesn’t many ring bells. Scotus is Latin for Scotsman and Duns the Scotsman lived a long time ago (1268-1308). Although he is considered by scholars to be one of the most important thinkers of the Middle Ages, his very name gave us the English word “dunce,” a person too dense to learn. Scotus wrestled with some of the weightiest questions imaginable, but he is often discredited as the author of the ultimate stupid question: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Leaving aside the possibility that Duns wasn’t the first to ask that kind of question and probably never posed it that way, it’s actually a very profound way of contemplating the differences between the natural and supernatural realms. If the latter exists, it would not be subject to the laws of physics. In a Duns/dunce-like way, the answer to the question is: As many angels as want to twerk and they can bring dates. No pin could contain them.

Scotus may have asked that “dumb” question because he was the victim of bad timing. Brilliant as he was, he had the misfortune to follow in the footsteps of one of the most stunning intellects in all of Western history: Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Aquinas was the apex of a religious/intellectual movement known as Scholasticism. The anti-intellectualism of the modern evangelical movement would make Scholastics spew if they were around today. Scholastics didn’t battle their culture or its ideas; they engaged in intellectual query that sought to harmonize faith, reason, and science. Aristotle occupied a lower throne than Jesus, Moses, and the prophets, but only slightly lower. The problem for Scotus was that Aquinas was so good at this kind of thinking, that he answered most of the good questions! (He mused upon 631 of them in his Summa Theologica.) The Scholastic movement hung around for another century or so, but it was on the downslide by the time Duns came along. And, really, what more was there to add to what Aquinas said?

By now you must think I slipped off the stripper pole. What the hell does this have to do with a twit like Miley Cyrus? Let’s go back to timing. I’m shocked all right–shocked that anyone would be shocked by Miley’s twerking. Have such people been living in a bubble even bigger than my cableless living room? The whole point of a lot of pop culture is to shock. Or did you think The Beatles really preferred Edwardian suits, or that Mick Jagger was simply ‘more comfortable’ in purple stretch pants and a leopard-print open jacket? Pop music has been the repository of outré costuming forever: Little Richard’s pompadour, Elvis’s tight-trouser gyrations, the glitter gay of Liberace and Elton John, the androgyny of Alice Cooper and Prince, glam rock, Flower Child psychedelia, punk safety pins and Mohawks…. But let’s hand the crown to one who topped them all: Madonna. Love her or hate her, Madonna didn’t just push the envelop; she ripped it open and tore it to shreds. Expose the hypocrisy of virgin versus whore images of women? Consider it shattered. Parody religion? Check–several times and several traditions. Nudity and lesbianism? Flip the pages of Sex. Death by copulation? See Body of Evidence (1993). Foul language, bullet bras, crotch shots, bondage, celebrity marriages and breakups, cowgirl sluttery, Kabbalah mysticism, outspoken political commentary…? Done that. Hell, the woman has even gotten away with playing a wholesome mom who writes children’s books.    

Did Madonna leave anything? If she did, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry grabbed it. So what’s a half talent like Miley riding the coattails of her old man’s career to do? The VMA spectacle was an attempt to push boundaries (plush toy sex anyone?), but it’s a vacuous flop–and not just because she can’t really sing or dance very well. It failed because Miley doesn’t have a vivid enough imagination. Her act is just soft porn with a Disney twist. In other words, it failed because it is neither original nor shocking–it’s just stupid and lame. What a dunce!

Ten Food Trends That Are So Over

Among the collateral damage of TV food shows is that foodie culture has become as trendy as any other form of popular culture–and in some ways, just as vacuous as the rest of television. Here are some “gourmet” (word used ironically) trends that should just go away.

1. Food as architecture. Remember the 1950s TV dinners that came in tin foil trays with ridges that walled off the potatoes from the peas and the meatloaf? We should stock restaurants with these so that chefs stop stacking the food. What am I, six months old? I don’t want my food smushed together so that the flavors “marry.” (Read: Every bite tastes the same.) Some of us actually like to taste the distinctiveness of vegetables, or enjoy the mouth feel of buttery potatoes. Can we please lose the food towers? If not, let’s go the next step and put everything into a blender and serve it adult-Gerber style.

2. Raspberry has been done to death. I used to enjoy raspberry picking. I associated it with a brief moment in summer in which Nature ripened and yielded her bounty. Now I hate raspberries. Thanks food industry. Raspberry is a very singular taste that shouldn’t  be consumed year ‘round. Tell that to chefs that put in on everything and proudly taut their raspberry coulis and raspberry drizzle. It’s as ubiquitous as parsley used to be. Unlike parsley, you can’t just push it aside and ignore it; raspberry gets into everything on the plate. I want roast beef au jus, thank you, not roast beef swimming in strained fruit. And I sure as hell don’t want it drizzled on chocolate, because...

3. Chocolate doesn’t need any help. I routinely send back chocolate desserts that come with unwanted raspberry. I do the same with mint sauce, orange swirls, and other such unadvertised overkill. You only need to dress up molten-center chocolate cake or a mousse if the chocolate is crap, in which case the chef should be sent back! There are just a few ingredients that should ever be mixed with chocolate. Peanut butter is one. I’ll get back to you with another. I’ve no objection to a dollop of cream and a strawberry on the side, but if I wanted to eat the equivalent of Neapolitan ice cream, I would have ordered it.

4. Pomegranate is an acquired taste. I actually like it, but it’s on its way to becoming the new raspberry–or so trendsetters would like you to believe. It won’t succeed; as more people dislike it than enjoy it. So lose it already. Like you did with mango, the last fruit you told everyone they’d love and they didn’t.

5. Panko is Japanese for breadcrumbs. Sorry, but I refuse to be impressed by “golden cod encrusted in panko.” When I was a kid we called that what is: a fried fish cake. Look up the word panko and it tells you that it’s an “inexpensive filler” to extend meat and other entrees. It doesn’t say this, but it should; its other meaning is: “ordinary bread crumbs under a pretentious name that adds 20-30% to the price of a so-so restaurant offering.”  

6. Greek yoghurt is no better than any other kind. Yes, it has a slightly different texture. It also tends to be a tad more sour. It’s hyped because it’s strained to remove more whey, which theoretically makes it healthier. Except that it has way more calories than fat-free regular yoghurt, which tastes just as good. Mainly Greek yoghurt just costs twice as much.  

7. Grapefruit and beet juice. They are very au courant. Just two thoughts: You’ve got to be kidding. Why?

8. Coffee and beer should be flavored with coffee and beer.  Infused coffees are like drinking a cup of Beyoncé’s perfume. I mean it. Hazelnut and other flavored coffees engage my gag reflexes. Restaurants serving this kind of swill should be required to state so on their menus. A cup of Maxwell House would be preferable.

            I once enjoyed the occasional seasonal beer flavored with things such as blueberry or pumpkin. Then a friend bought me a case of blueberry ale and I had the raspberry reaction. Mainly I just think coffee and beer should be what they are–not fruit and/or nut delivery devices.

9. Bacon is farm food. These days the only thing longer than a list of foods with bacon in them is Lindsay Lohan’s rap sheet. Bacon is yummy because it’s mainly salt and fat. It’s one thing to load up on bacon if you’re a farmer burning a few thousand calories before noon; it’s another altogether to pig out on bacon if you’re going to park your fanny on a chair in front of a computer.

            Chow down on artery clogging bacon if you must, but can you please keep it out of food combos that border on the surreal. Among the weird places it shows up these days are in ice cream, beer, fudge, vodka, and peanut butter. That’s just gross! 

10. Bring back bread and water. Enough with the gluten-free diets already. Bread should be eaten in moderation, but if you eliminate it altogether, you’ll crave it and binge. Note to restaurants: If you really want me to order another glass of overpriced wine, bring me some bread so my body can absorb the alcohol. And bring some water too, lest the alcohol cause dehydration. And, no, I won't walk away thinking your establishment is saving the planet because you didn't automatically bring water to the table.