Something missing from the Frist’s African art show

To cut to the chase–Christianity and Islam. OK, let’s take a couple of steps back. The Frist Center’s current big show is a selection of African art primarily from the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. It’s a well-done show, chock-full of interesting objects. The primary organization is a sequence of sections that focus on the emblematic art forms of different cultural groups: Asante kente clothe and gold jewelry, Maasai beadwork, Dan masks, and so on. A critical part of the curatorial stance is that these are not archeological remains, but forms currently in use. For example, one of the kente is a pattern (or maybe it’s the cloth) worn by Kwame Nkrumah when he was released from prison by the Brits. Each of these sections has narration from a person from that cultural group, who put the works in cultural context. In almost every case, they refer to how these art objects fit into practices that continue into the present, maybe something they remember as a kid (and a lot of the speakers are relatively young). To stress the quality of the art as living practice, the show ends with work by contemporary Africans.

I reviewed the show in the Scene a few weeks ago: http://www.nashvillescene.com/Stories/Arts/Art/2006/02/02/Africa_as_We_ve_Never_Seen_It/index.shtml but there’s this gap that has been bugging me. The idea is that these artworks represent a contemporary African culture, not some pristine and lost cultural state. The exhibit jumbles artworks dated (generally imprecisely) as 19^th or 20^th century, indicating that you don’t need to segregate older and newer works. I have no trouble going along with that. I like the idea. And they didn’t shy away from works that reflect the contact with the West, which of course has been going on a long time.

But based on what I know about African society, I was surprised to see no reference (that I remember) to Christianity or Islam. As I understand it, a majority of sub-Saharan African identify themselves as Christians. Western Christians frequently hear about the rising influence of their African branches, whether it is in the controversies around homosexuality in the Anglican church or the selection of a new Pope. Several of Carlton Wilkinson’s photos from his travels to Africa show Christianity as part of the life of everyday, contemporary Africans (there were several in his show at the Parthenon, and you can see them over at In the Gallery). The displays in the Frist show don’t stress religious practice and traditional cosmologies, although that does come up from time to time. More of the works had to do with social, “folk” practices like European town festivals that have their roots in non-Christian ideas about the world of spirits.

I can believe that African Christianity is very syncretic, and that folk practices survive alongside the new religion, but I have trouble imagining that Christian images aren’t starting to creep into some of these forms, or that Christianity isn’t adapting some of the forms for worship and evangelism. And then you wonder if the curators have avoided these crossovers in the interests of an idea of authenticity, or a judgment of quality, that second-guesses the Africans themselves.

The same could be said of visual references to Islam, similarly lacking, although my understanding is that Islam is less pervasive than Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, the focus of this show. And I would expect that Islam is less likely to adapt older cultural forms, but maybe I’m wrong about that.

The one place where I saw the clear presence of Christianity was in video of Ghanaian funerals that involve wood coffins built to look like objects of importance to the deceased. At one point women are dancing around the coffin, and if you look close you see they are all wearing T-shirts with an image of Jesus on them.

I don’t have an answer to whether this show fails to show us this latest step in what African art looks like. Maybe somebody has some insight on it they want to put in a comment. Otherwise, it’s just something I’m going to keep an eye out for. The best answer would be to get to Africa myself. Not sure if that will happen.

A Couple of Fine Printmakers

Jerry Dale McFadden at TAG has a couple of really nice young printmakers on exhibit who are new to Nashville and to his gallery: Valerie Lueth and Paul Roden. They’re also engaged to get married soon and they have plans to open a press together.

Lueth does very detailed etchings that have qualities of cartooning and obsessive drawing, while Roden does politically oriented woodcuts. As a way of encouraging marital concord I suppose the proper stance is to praise each of them equally, or else you’re feeding some sort of movie melodrama. Oh well. Her stuff appealed to me more. She fills most of her pieces with detail, lots of biological, mechanical, and botanical entities that seem to have roots in geometric free association. You see it also in drawings, some of which are built on a base of crossword puzzle-like grids of dark and light squares. But I think the most striking piece in the show is one where she lightens the amount of information. Called Twins, it is a pair of figures partially rendered – faces from the nose up, one set of joined hands, another hand and arm holding a lock of hair, and the torsos ending in cocoon-like bundles rather than legs and feet. Their eyes have no pupils or irises, defined only by the shape of the eyes, but a sense of wariness and inscrutability comes from those shapes and the molding of the cheekbones.

Roden obviously has strong command over the woodblock medium, with the ability to shift between pieces that have that obvious woodblock quality of simple modeling to something closer to drawing. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil is a really good image, of a charging elephant with especially heavy feet, ridden by three monkeys brandishing swords and holding a large menacing lance. Just to keep the political balance, it is paired with an image of a donkey in a wagon being pushed and pulled by the three blind mice. I think one of the tricks with work like this is how much you are in the mood for political satire and allegory at the time you are looking at it.

Jerry Dale puts a lot of images of his artists on his website. Here’s the page for the Lueth-Roden show, with pictures of the opening:

http://www.tagartgallery.com/

Tomight's Olympics Spectacular

The Europeans do have a way with pageants. I wish I could get my hands on footage of the parade through the streets of Paris for the celebration of the Bicentennial of the Storming of the Bastille in 1989. It was just one odd image after another, ending with Jessye Norman singing La Marseillaise, which was a great touch – on the one hand a simple choice of production values over nationalism, but also making broader claim for the French Revolution as an event that shaped and belongs to the world. I guess. But c’mon, this was a national celebration.

So you see the same stuff in Cirque de Soleil, and then tonight in the Olympics opening ceremony. The athletes came in accompanied with cheesy 1980s disco music – it’s only fitting that a celebration of winter sports acknowledge the cultural contributions of the Eurotrash, high end Roma moving between ski resorts all winter long. Much opportunity for making fun of costumes. The Jack Abramoff fedora and trenchcoat look seemed popular. The Germans had colorful knit caps with visors for their athletes, but had to put strands of Heidi braids on the ones for the women. That was gratuitous.

The Olympics are now required to have an impenetrable and haphazard allegorical pageant in the opening ceremony. Women in elongated Amy Cutler clothes floated around in midair, a couple of them attached to big balloons of the moon and sun that wandered around aimlessly. A woman, I think she was singing, stood in a clam shell. But she had clothes on. Then there was a dance, and oh yeah, before that there were a couple of guys with things on their backs that shot out sparks like the circular saw girl on Letterman. A driver toured the stage in a Formula 1 racer. And some other stuff I didn’t see. All the time the athletes were standing in this big bowl in the middle of the stadium, like they would pour in water and cook them. It ends with a couple of speeches and the torch thing, which gets you back to Speer, Riefenstahl, and Nuremburg every time. Luciano Pavrotti closed it, nearly, with luridly dyed hair and eyebrows and a rendition of Nessun Dorma. He marshaled his resources for the final climax, and the athletes cheered it like one of their own had come out of retirement to nail a triple axel. Curtain down. But it’s not over yet. Then fireworks shot out of the roof of the stadium.

When the teams march in, a lot of them had digital cameras and were snapping away at the crowd, at themselves. It was cute, and broke the ceremonial illusion with people acting like people, excited to be there. I’ve known a couple of people who competed in the Olympics, not big media star types, and their international competition days were a great ride. For the people I’ve talked to most, they had not previously had a chance to travel, see the world and interact with people from all over.

With their cameras, the marchers are both spectacle and spectator. You can look at this a couple of ways. One is that with those cameras the marchers make the spectacle complete and all-encompassing, in that everyone gets incorporated into in the event in the role of spectator. Not even the actors can get behind the illusion. The other view is what I first mentioned, that exercising acts as an individual in the view of the spectators breaks the smooth image that the spectacle is trying to create. They are engaged in personal actions (getting a picture for their own memory purposes) that do not contribute to the creation of the spectacular form. I don’t remember anyone in Triumph of the Will breaking out of line to wave at the camera.

Thank You Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik died a week ago. Student of John Cage, member of Fluxus, groundbreaking in his use of televisions in and as art. His work always delighted me, even as a kid. This was stuff that made it absolutely clear that contemporary art is lots of fun. It rearranged your perceptions and made for remarkable sensory experiences.

http://www.paikstudios.com/index.html

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-paik31jan31,0,762356.story?coll=la-home-obituaries

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/arts/design/04paik.html

Chris Davis back on the air at WRVU

Chris is back on the air at WRVU, thank God. Sundays 10pm-midnight (and two hours after Brian and Elizabeth, who got moved from Saturdays to Sundays 6-8). Chris seemed to be in an apocalyptic mood, seemed like every song was talking about the anti-Christ. He started with a fascinating clip from Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who I think was an old evangelist, giving a sermon about the evils of rock music. She had the strangest delivery, kind of a monotone with a steady rhythm like the words were electronically generated. Here's Chris' playlist from tonight.

http://129.59.202.23/playlistarchive/playlist_detail.php?pop=display_show&sid=226034

And WRVU's website is

http://wrvu.org/

if you want to listen on the internet next week.

Saturday's Alias concert

Alias gave their latest concert Saturday night. The usual sort of mix, perhaps with a higher obscurity quotient.

Listening to Zeneba Bowers play baroque is a real pleasure because of her absolute lack of stiffness. She plays fast parts fleetly, and draws out her lines expressively. She plays this music in a way that does not try to ignore the intervening musical events of Brahms, jazz, and even gypsy violin playing. On this bill she and a small ensemble of cello, harpsichord, and on one piece contrabass, played 17^th century pieces by Bertali and Pandolfi-Mealli. I believe Alias likes to try different things with the instrumentation on baroque music, and this time it was adding the contrabass. I would need to check how unusual it is to use the low orchestral bass in this setting, but to my ears the deep boom of the instrument’s bottom was a surprise, but pleasurable. It also allowed Matt Walker playing cello to switch between the continuo and solo lines. The second piece, the Sonata “La Cesta” by Pandolfi-Mealli, had an odd structure, with rubato fantasia sections dominating. And some of the melodic lines were strained and strange. All of which seemed like it would make this a hard piece to put together beyond finding phrasing moment-to-moment and phrase-by-phrase

The baroque pieces came late in the program. I’m switching everything around, which is consistent with my pick in the Scene where I jumped off from completely the wrong idea of the program order.

Before the baroque pieces came the best performance of the night, Michael Samis playing an elegy for solo cello by John Tavener called Thrinos or Threnos (the Alias program had the latter spelling, but I’ve found the former on a listing of his works and on recordings). Tavener is a British convert to the Russian Orthodox Church, and writes in an intensely mystical, modal style. I hadn’t listened to his music before writing this pick, but I liked it. He can pull off this musical mysticism. Samis’ performance was thrilling in its silences. It seems like he held them a little longer, which creates the tension of waiting and of approaching letting the performance fall into pieces but pulling up before it does, and he tended well to the ends of notes and beginnings. There were a very small number of miniscule infelicities of execution, which one noticed only because this piece is so simple as to make it unforgiving. It requires a virtuosity of concentration.

The program contained pieces that were not really the best examples of their genre, like the Pandolfi-Mealli. Hearing Chausson’s Chanson Perpetuelle live made it much clearer to me how sturdy and four-square it is, in contrast to Debussy who was active about the same time. The group also played a septet for winds, strings, and piano by Stravinsky that Bowers described as rarely heard, and you could see why. It was Stravinsky, so there were interesting aspects, like the use of baroque forms, the timbres of the families of instruments in the ensemble, and a modified serialism based on an 8-note cell that ends up sounding more polytonal than atonal. However, the melodies themselves were awkward, which is often my reaction to Stravinsky’s later works (i.e., after the heavily Russian works of his first period).

The concert had two premieres. One was a scherzo for String Quartet by a young violinist and composer currently based in Florida, Piotr Szewczyk. It was based on the half-diminished scale, and seemed a lot like Bartok. I was thinking Bartok’s 4^th quartet used the same scale, but that’s not quite right. The best part of Szewczyk’s piece was a con sordino interlude before the last rush of scherzo material.

The other premiere was a piece for viola, cello, and jazz trio by Matt Walker. It took a theme from the second movement of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony, gave it swing phrasing and used that as the basis for a series of mostly written sections that included solos. The piece stayed in a consistently pre-bop swing style. Think Duke Ellington’s version of the Nutcracker Suite. And in a way it didn’t sound that different from Hot Club of Cowtown. Walker had a jazz-based piece on Alias’s concert last Spring, and while this one worked better, I’m not convinced this is fertile territory for him. His jazz writing is pretty simplistic. Solos for viola and cello were stiff, although Walker was better playing his own material than the violist. The solos by the jazz trio were stronger – they sounded improvised. Which could be because they were improvised, or because those musicians (David Huntsinger, Jack Jezzro, and Christopher Norton) have a better idea how to make the music sound improvised. One of the problems with this piece is that it wasn’t really a jazz-classical hybrid, but more of a swing revival work, only without the energy of improvisation. The idea of using the Beethoven theme as a jazz tune is fun, but I’d rather hear Hot Club of Cowtown or the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra do it. Turning jazz into a piece of classical chamber music doesn’t improve it. Walker obviously loves jazz, and I hope he is getting a chance to play the music in its usual settings. I know he plays guitar, but I hope he is trying it on cello – there’s good precedents for it going back to Fred Katz in the Chico Hamilton Quintet and Ray Brown and leading up to guys like Erik Friedlander and Fred Lonberg-Holm.

Next Alias concert is Sunday, May 7 at Vanderbilt/Blair School.

Hustle and Flow, as informative as Dr. Phil

I saw Hustle and Flow on DVD last weekend. A masterpiece of location scouting. The exterior scenes really take in Memphis, lots of workaday parts of the city. The muggy Delta climate is a practically a character in the film. And the interiors look like places you might find in a Southern inner city neighborhood (I’m thinking of the scene in the market where DJay meets up with Clyde).

The basic plot was the same as every other music story. Guy from a down and out situation has dream of becoming a star and lifting himself out of his surroundings, he gets a lucky break, suffers a setback, then receives redemption and gets his shot at the big time. In this case the main character is a pimp with a heart of gold, although they don’t entirely romanticize the guy.

Even if the overall plot arc was pat, the movie has well-observed moments between characters. At one point DJay is telling Shug, who is pregnant with his child and more or less his romantic interest (it’s not clear there really is such a thing in this milieu, another one of the angles that seem honest) that he wants to stop pimping and selling pot. This actress is a little bug-eyed anyway (not unappealing though), but when he starts talking like this she looks even more like a deer in the headlights. The scene cracked me up, because it reminded me of the reaction I get at home when I start on some idle discourse speculating about potential futures that has that whiff of mid-life crisis that comes so easily to people who are, well, in mid-life. It had not occurred to me that even if you are a pimp and a small-time drug dealer, no woman wants to hear the phrase “I’ve got to make a change.” Who knew? If “stay the course” is preferred in this situation, little wonder, even in my somewhat less tawdry circumstances, I don’t always receive unbridled enthusiasm when I start going on about my life.

nym 310 Chestnut

A new group of Watkins students got into the one-night event act last Saturday with a show at 310 Chestnut. It unusually coherent and ambitious, with the pieces organized around explorations of language. Even the show title was intriguing, ____nym, with references to all of the switching implied by the “nym” suffix.

The best part were the sounds. Ken Nakamura’s Grain was a single grain of rice put on a spindle and rotating rapidly against a turntable stylus. The playback was a sweet rumble that varied within a narrow range. The piece had several levels of significance, like the presumed fragility of the setup, the centrality of a rice grain in the hands of a guy with a Japanese surname, and all the details of the construction, like the way the tone arm was lodged in the pedestal.

Parker ClenDening’s video with a title something like It’s OK to Get Mad showed someone dropping jars on a kitchen floor, edited to creation a steady stream of popping sounds that spelled out the title phrase in Morse code. Parker’s brother Will told me that the action in the video derived from something there mother would do when they got mad, give them a jar to break. My favorite part of this was the sound, which was juicy and contained the hollowness of the jars.

Other language elements in the show included Braille (Matt Christy), graphs of three versions of spoken phrase (Amethyst Stark), Christina Wing’s riffs on Barbara Kruger-like combinations of text overlaid on photos, and Chris Doubler’s video of women’s lips mutely mouthing words.

Allison Boyd did an installation that flashed images of dictionary entries and isolated words or parts of words on the wall of an alcove draped in white sheets. The words were usually blurry or moved too quickly to focus on, and the light cane in and out with a strobe effect. The effect was strongest if you sat in the schoolroom chair set down just inside the alcove. The movement of the light and the difficulty focusing quickly sucked you into this space.

The work on display Saturday night speaks well for the vitality of the Watkins program. Even with everything that went on last year, and with Barbara Yontz leaving this year, it looks like it is possible that there is still plenty of energy among the students.

Cast King show in Nashville Feb 3

Here’s notice from Chris Davis on a show coming up that looks great,
at the Primitive Baptist Church (that’s at 4602 Indiana, which I
think is in Sylvan Park). I haven't heard of this guy, but he sounds
like a direct line back to what lies underneath country music.


Feb. 3rd, 7 pm, $6. 

Cast King (Sun Records recording artist with Country Drifters and
Miller Sisters; recently released debut album under his own name on
Locust Records; Old Sand Mountain, ALA)
John Allingham
Dan Tyler 
John Smiff XXV

There will be a potluck dinner beforehand starting at 6 pm. Attendees
are invited to bring a covered dish. Vegetarian dishes welcome. 

Bio information on Cast King is available at www.locustmusic.com 

A google search for Cast King should lead you to an Alabama
folklore Society web page with an excellent radio show featuring
some of the early 1950s sides King cut for Sun Records in his
group the Country Drifters and as a sideman with the Miller
Sisters. King also cut around 6 unreleased masters for Sun that
hopefully will see the light of day (past status as bonus tracks on
a multi-benjamin Bear Family box). 

John Allingham is co-leader of The Cherry Blossoms and The
Brambles and the leader of Arizona Drains.

Dan Tyler bio information available at www.dantyler.com 

John Smiff XXV is the stage name of clothing designer and
visual artist Michael Enright. 

Friendly people in Memphis

I was in Memphis Friday for Susan Maakestad’s opening at Rhodes College and met a few people. Here’s some of the folks, the ones with websites I could track down:

Elizabeth Alley
http://www.elizabethalley.com/

Hamlett Dobbins
http://www.hamlettdobbins.com/index.php

Beth Edwards
http://www.bethedwards.com/

Larry Edwards
http://www.mredwards.com/

Don Estes
http://www.destes.netfirms.com/

And here’s Susan’s website
http://www.susanmaakestad.com/home.html

So Guilty

This week 24 came back on the air, with 4 hours of grab you by the lapels and throw you onto the couch programming. It’s well done, and has a movie star and Actor as the lead, so it’s not technically a guilty pleasure. Except that it is, and guilty in a more literal way. It no less than draws you into complicity into human rights and international law violations. The current regimen of torture and extra-legal action is significantly abetted by the “24 Scenario.” You have in your custody a terrorist – mastermind or stooge – who holds the critical piece of information that will allow you to stop a dreadful attack in its tracks, but you must act within the next 15 minutes (timed either to fit in this hour’s episode or as a cliffhanger to next week). Should you torture the suspect? Of course, and Jack and his buds will show you how it’s done.

The problem with the 24 Scenario is that it is not clear it has ever arisen outside of TV and movies. In the real world, it seems like either you carefully construct intelligence and stop something before it gets too far (with unglamorous things like a border guard in Washington getting suspicious and doing a careful check of that car trunk), or it’s too late and you pick up the pieces and try to find the guilty. And from what I’ve read, torture doesn’t figure in carefully assembled, reliable intelligence. But we’ve never seen what that looks like – it’s secret after all. We do see 24, and on 24 we see this scenario, multiple times. The scenario has a similar ontological standing to anything we might have learned about but have not experienced first hand. By securing a place for this scenario in many consciousnesses, the TV show creates the conditions under which we can imagine and accept torture and see it as useful.

Of course, the thing about 24 is that most of the time the torture doesn’t really help. It can’t – if it did, things would get resolved and then what we do for the next 18 hours? Watch Jack and the CTU crew fill out paper work. What did Jack get from torturing Paul, Audrey’s husband, last season? Nothing, other than losing his girlfriend. For some reason when you’re dating a woman, she hates it if you subject her husband to excruciating pain, even if the guy’s a drip and she wants to be rid of him.

But I like 24. It works really well as TV. It is, like all TV shows, a procedural. I do not mean a procedural in the terms of investigative procedures, because I have a sneaking suspicion real spies don’t look and act like this and don’t work in offices that look like that. No, it’s a procedural about the mechanics of putting together a television show. First you set up your entertainment value proposition – we’re going to run one story over 24 episodes spread over several months of broadcast. Then you have to create mechanisms to deliver on it. So you have the clips at the beginning that give just enough for anyone to pick up on what follows. You throw in characters who exist solely to propel the plot by consistently making the wrong choice, which reshuffles the deck. Kim, Wayne, and now Derek this season. If Jack says stay put, they invariably run out and try unsuccessfully to fix things themselves. And you hold characters in reserve, like throwing Tony into a coma in the first few minutes, where he will be parked until it’s time for him to revive and jump back to action at a critical moment. And so on.

24 does this well, reliably stepping on the gas every time it looks like the machine might come to an idle. But I can’t help worry that if people in The Hague found out about the pleasure I’m getting from the show, they would be obligated to send a team of agents to surround the compound here in Tennessee, extract me and whisk me away to face justice.

All you need is anxiety

On red eye flights, your connection to reality comes unmoored. The whole business gets started when everything is shutting down, the streets are dark, the airport is closing up. Once the flight gets going, maybe I sleep, but more often I go into a semi-conscious stasis. That’s where I found myself on the redeye I took last week. So I watched the TV without the sound, listened to my iPod instead.

After the movie they show segments from TV shows. There were three segments. One was Rachel Ray doing a travel piece where she went to Jackson Hole and showed how you can eat out for $40 a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack all at cool places. Then there was a 20/20 segment with two reports, one on people whose kids eat so compulsively that they have to lock up food (there was a CSI episode on this syndrome this season so it must be a vital part of the culture), and parents who put their teenagers under surveillance, all of which seemed to be inspired by one guy’s book. Finally there was a bit by someone named Katie Brown who does home décor and cooking. She’s hyper like Rachel Ray, with the hand gestures and all, but not quite as cute.

These segments were consumed with anxiety, one after another. It’s obvious with the 20/20 stuff. The first bit, about the eating disorder, a biological problem where the person does not receive the signals that they are full and will eat so much to do damage to themselves, is no doubt extremely rare, but it gives every parent whose kid is overweight (or not) a reason to freak out even more. About something that basically won’t happen. Then you show families who have introduced the surveillance regimen into their households: video monitors, GPS tracking on the car. The footage made it seem like the kids were kind of going along with it. Of course I’m not listening to the soundtrack during any of this.

OK, the anxiety is easy to see there. Do my kids have a debilitating eating disease? Should I be using technology to keep a closer eye on them? But it’s there in the food and decorating too. Rachel Ray’s piece says you need to take the right kind of vacation, but make sure you eat at nice places but don’t get in over your head with the cost. Rachel will ease your concerns about how to take the right kind of vacation and not feel your poverty too much or feel like you don’t know what’s good. Moreover, the segment tells you these are things you should be worried about. Then it tells you a solution to the problem it has posited. There’s an easier solution to the “problem” of your vacation. Don’t accept the premise that it is a problem. But this is hard, because the creation of these false problematics is infused throughout the information environment in which you live. The obvious methods of entertainment, like an appealing host, pull you in and make the anxiety familiar and comforting.

Katie Brown also helps you solve problems you might not know you had. How to throw a charming dinner party. How often are you really doing that? In the atomized world we live in, you don’t entertain the boss like Blondie and Dagwood did very damned often. And she remodels this couple’s living room using very inexpensive materials (how can I have a fabulous house without much money to spend on it) and ends up with something more color coordinated but uglier and colder than the original room. With some really strange features like candle wall sconces made from copper tubes.

Sitting there in a transcontinental daze, I marveled at how unhealthy every bit of the video stream was. No comfort, no ease, no health. No pleasure, only the chance that you might avoid some humiliation by adopting things endorsed somewhere out there.

What Is Spanish Key Doing In This Movie?

I’ve been getting caught up on my 2004 movies. A bit of time warp, but it’s like the after-Christmas sale. If you wait until the movies go from the movie theatre to the video store and in there from new releases to the regular stock, they charge you less and let you keep them longer. So you can actually get around to watching the movie. It’s the same principle as waiting to buy music until you find the CD used. Cheaper, but definitely takes you out of currency.

One of my 2004 movies was Collateral. It’s a Michael Mann flick about a contract killer (Tom Cruise) and the cab driver (Jamie Foxx) he hijacks to carry him around town for a series of hits. It’s set in LA, and Mann gets some of Southern California’s visual qualities dead on, like the in-between spaces, under freeways or the more or less empty spaces along roads in industrial areas or warehouse districts. When he isn’t busy executing someone, the hitman rattles on like Dr. Phil, helping the driver be more self-assertive and face up to his relationship with his mother. I would say the film is a crypto-comedy, but I don’t think I can convince myself of that.

One scene has been bugging me since I saw it. One of the hits takes places in a swanky night club, with a jazz band on the stand. The band is a conventional combo, tenor, trumpet, and rhythm section. At least that’s what you see. When the band starts playing, what comes out is Miles Davis from Bitches Brew, the track Spanish Key. The music doesn’t go with that band, not the instruments visible, not the physical exertions of the musicians. Where are the electric pianos? Where is Bennie Maupin playing bass clarinet? And anyway, its a landmark performance from a landmark album. You know where it comes from. After the band gets done, the hitman, the cabdriver, and the trumpet player, who also owns the club, sit down for a conversation mostly taken up with the trumpet player telling a story about the time he sat in with Miles. You hear Miles in a kind of ventriloquism and then immediately the characters start talking about him, like they knew what the guys were playing on the soundtrack even though they were obviously making different kinds of noises themselves if they were making sound at all. Then Tom Cruise kills the guy, scene ends.

My initial reaction was this was just messy, like poorly synchronized overdubs. The guy doesn’t acknowledge that anyone who listens to jazz much would know that this band isn’t playing that music. But something related happens elsewhere in the film. Early on, Jamie Foxx is giving Jada Pinkett Smith a ride and when he fiddles with the volume on the radio she comments that he likes the classics too (the two characters of course share a deep connection). The sound track sounds like James Newton Howard’s score, not classics either of the symphonic or popular types, but the dialogue makes it clear they are talking about classical music even though that’s not what you hear.

So this starts to look like alienation internalized into the features of the film that acknowledges illusion on several possible levels by creating a discontinuity between the sound and the visuals. It reminds you of the illusion of natural experience in the intangible light and sound environment of the film. The illusion of continuity and coherence in the field of sensory experience. And the artificiality in the soundtrack tells you that you are looking at a story.

Like the some of the hitman’s bit with the driver, which are either comedic or ridiculous, I can’t decide whether I think Mann is trying to create a complicated phenomenological situation within the film (like Terrence Malick). Mann does seem to be someone who would have those aspirations, but that means I’d have to watch this film a bunch more to get the point and get beyond just having the suspicion there might be one.

Rau exhibit at State Museum ends next weekend

Everyone in the Nashville area, if you haven't been down to see the Rau Collection at the State Museum, it's closing next weekend adn you should really try to get down and see it. The collection has an El Greco, a Cezanne, and multiple Monets and Pissaros, but I think the greatest pleasures are in the paintings by people you haven't heard or don't usually give much thought to. The German section of the show had a couple of those for me: a Cranach version of a round-faced Judith holding Holofernes' head with two sweet attending maidens, and Judith seems to have a hat that doubles as a red halo - not sure what that means; or a painting by someone named Jakob Strub that scatters martyred legionnaires on the throny branches of trees. I was talking to Bob Durham about the show, and he was really into a couple of the older Italian portraits, one was an anonymous painting of an old woman, with text added to the painting describing who she was (a cook and a chambermaid). Some of what got Bob about these paintings was the technical means with which the flesh of the portrait is conjured up.

I'm told that attendance has really picked up the last few weeks, which is good to hear. The paintings ought to be seen, and the people at the State Museum deserve the satisfaction of getting a good response to their efforts to bring the show here.

The show's last day is this Sunday, Jan. 15.

http://www.theraucollection.com/data/exhibition.html

Anthony Appiah's Idea of the Cosmopolitan

The link is for an excerpt from a book coming out later this month by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor from Princeton (who left Harvard a couple of years in the dust-up between Larry Summers and the African/African-American Studies faculty). It looks like the book is good. While it seems to minimize the pain and loss from social, economic, cultural, and environmental disruption that occurs in the globalized world, there are things here I find immensely appealing. A decentered view of the world that sees influence between people that is mutual, not uni-directional–Now you look at Africa not because you want to fix it or save it, but because you can’t avoid its impact on you as well as yours on it. The embrace of heterogeneity as a moral stance. Fallibilism. The simple need to get used to one another. “I am human; nothing human is alien to me.” How you embrace cultural diversity as both desirable and inevitable but also resist cultural and social practices that themselves do not tolerate that diversity – once you let go of trying to maintain cultures in their purity, but assume that they are in a constant state intermingling, you have no reason to venerate what interferes with liberty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.html

Best of 2005: Playing Music

This, the last in my exciting series of Best of 2005 posts, is probably of little interest to anyone other than myself and the people involved. These are the best experiences I had this year playing music. In rough order of occurrence. It occurs to me that maybe there’s some stuff I’m forgetting about from early last year. So it goes.

Robert Pearson. Robert is a remarkable pianist in Houston who is not much known outside of Houston. He is completely self-taught, and has developed a style and vocabulary of total improvisation but with little or no swing – in other words, you don’t hear it as jazz, but more like classical music or some derivative from popular music. Really it is a kind of painting with sound. Robert trained as a painter. One of the things that I admire about Robert is that he has adamantly insisted on building his own approach. It would never occur to him to pattern himself on someone else, or get someone to show him how to play. The resulting sound has tremendous coherence and integrity. It’s a lot of fun for me to play with him. He plays a lot of notes, with gusts of energy, and it’s fun to throw yourself into it. I think what we do together often comes out very well, and I hope to get us recorded one of these days. I don’t think Robert has any recordings in circulation, not even informal CDRs, except he’s probably on some things from the Hawthorne Improvisation Collective or its subsidiaries.

Susan Alcorn. Susan and I played a duet after she finished her solo set in Nashville this summer, and it was really nice. Several years ago we did some in a practice in Houstonthat felt really great to me, but we haven't been able to get back to it until now. This time we were both pleased to find ourselves going into the Internationale, each of us enjoying the fact the other knew it. Susan is a person and musician who continues to be very influential for me. I’ve posted on her a couple of times. Enough said for now.

Chris Davis and Chuck Hatcher. We started playing together as a trio this year, I guess just played out once, but there are some recordings around. We were the Bloated Lackeys on that one show, but the name was in flux. This is the best place I’ve had to try out ways to express my affection for the Anthology of American Folk Music and Trad Gras och Stenar. Chuck and Chris have great frames of musical reference that I'm trying to soak in as best I can.

Cherry Blossoms. I got to sit in with the Cherry Blossoms a few times this year, playing tin whistles and stuff, and singing backgrounds once in a while. And they let me join in while they were recording with Josephine Foster, which for me as the guest was a delightful experience, one of those occasions when time just floats by blissfully.

Bluff. This always gets called Bluff Duo, but I think of it as just Bluff. Its Brady Sharp and me playing as a duet. We played on the Buzz and Click show in November, and I hadn’t been playing much, so I didn’t have a lot of lip to put into it, but I found a nice dodge by playing the clarinets without the mouthpiece. It makes funny noises, and they worked well with what Brady was doing and bought my lip some time.

Transcendental Crayon Ensemble Christmas/New Year’s show. I’ve been doing the Crayon Ensemble for years. Sometimes I find myself out of alignment with the energy required, but I was trying something new with my embouchure on soprano before this last show and was ready to see how that would work. When I’m not playing too frequently I have to warm up through the set, and late in the evening I got to a nice place on a version of My Favorite Things. We have some rotation with the drums and bass these days, and really everyone coming in is good, but on this show Greg Bryant was on bass and he is really adept at helping a horn player sound good. The other guys in the band continue to develop and change in interesting ways, like Andrew Tarpley hitting a strong stride as a soloist, or Zander Wyatt trying out new stuff.

Happy and healthy 2006 everyone.

Best of 2005: 10 Art Shows

Alright, I did a post earlier on individual pieces that stuck with me, now I’ll do 10 shows. Or serial encounters with an artist in a couple of cases.

Andrew Kaufman. His solo show at the Tennessee Arts Commission was inquisitive and heart-felt. He threaded together at least a couple of things. One was a pretty theoretical exploration of what happens when you ask what is a painting in a pretty literal way. You end up with things that emphasize the canvas itself, and a painting’s status as object of purchase. The other strand were pieces that pretty directly expressed sensations related to the affiliation of people in love and marriage. Even that was not without a lot of intellection. http://www.ajkaufman.com/information.htm

Terry Rowlett. He had a bravura show at Zeitgeist that borrowed the settings, styles, and motives from painting of earlier eras to portray contemporary characters. The characters maintain their contemporary character, in bearing and expression that capture distinct stances to the world, but the material of the paintings draws a line between them and the characters who fill the history of art. It gives depth to what is contemporary and relevance to what is antique. http://terryrowlett.com/

Leslie Kneisel. She had a show at Ruby Green and before that I stumbled across a piece by her in New York at AIR. She embroiders fantastic figures on cushions and the like, the figures detailed in elaborate lines. The images have overtones of fairy tales or horror stories, but they have a friendly-creepy quality. http://www.airnyc.org/artist.cfm?id=64, http://www.rubygreen.org/html/html_ArchiveFiles/MarchKneisel2005.html

Jiha Moon. I saw her work at DC Curators Space and Creative Partners in Bethesda and posted it on it this Fall. She makes surreal, complicated landscapes, skyscapes, and seascapes, starting with Asian ink drawings techniques and lays over flat cartoon elements and flows of color in acrylic. http://www.jihamoon.com/, http://thinkingaboutart.blogs.com/art/2004/10/jiha_moon_wilso.html

Pieter Claesz. This small exhibit at the National Gallery was one that left you with a lot better understanding of the artist’s work. Claesz was a Dutch specialist in still life. The curators classified his work into 4 groups and showed how he innovated from his immediate predecessors in the form. One of the best parts was the cases that included samples of some of the objects in the paintings - wine glasses, pipes, even the ornamental cup of Haarlem Brewer’s Guild that was pictured in one painting. http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/claeszinfo.shtm

Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun. Not a single show, but I kept running across work by this portrait painter who was part of the Ancien Regime court at Versailles just before the French Revolution and was able to escape to Russia and lived into the 1840s. There were examples of her work in the Frist’s show of European paintings from the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Rau Collection at the TN State Museum and I ran across a couple of the ones the National Gallery owns. In the Wadsworth show, you were surrounded by paintings of women by men. The women were often lovely and luscious, others were literally tortured martyrs. Only in the Vigée-Lebrun portrait did the woman in the painting seem alert and self-possessed. I have wondered if I am just reading this into the paintings, knowing who painted them, and I want to look at more to try to parse out specifics that might be making these images different.

You Are Here. Nashville’s Cranbrook alumni association (Julie Roberts, Armon Means, and Anderson Williams) put together this show from people they know, mostly with Cranbrook associations. It was a smart show, and everyone in it other than Julie, Armon, and Anderson was new to me.

I Love to Draw, I Live to Draw. This show at TAG was uniformly excellent. It was a good chance for me to look at pieces by Robert Simon, a self-taught compulsive drawer from Oak Ridge, but all of the artists were well-represented. I think they included Ian Pyper, Julie Murphy, and Andy Moon Wilson.

Fragile Species. The Frist Center did a good job of selecting the best younger career artists in the area. There were of course exceptions, people left out, but it was nice to see everyone getting the big museum treatment, and seeing Barbara’s piece on the side of the building.

Jin Soo Kim. Her construction, a series of tunnels delivering crisp packets of sound around the room was interesting enough, but the best part were all the sculptures she pulled out of the Vanderbilt collection. She mixed cultures, religions and time periods, so you get multiple visions of the crucifixion, multiple visions of Buddha, with a liberating effect for the art objects themselves and the viewer.

Best of 2005 – Music

I did a crappy job getting out to hear music or keeping up on recordings on my own this year. Mostly I followed Chris Davis around, Angle of View and then 310 Chestnut. Here are the shows I did hear that are most worth noting:

Cecil Taylor Trio. This was my second time hearing him, first time with a trio. This was surely a case where seeing him live helps you hear what he is building his music out of and how it fits together. At the Iridium in NY.

TM Krishna. I’ve been listening to Indian music a long time, although only slightly above idly. The performance by this Carnatic vocalist took me to a new level of connection to this music. I would say a new level of comprehension, but I’m not sure how well I understand what is going on. No, this had more to do with my emotional response to the music, to its details as well as larger form shapes. Krishna has a great voice, strong in all its parts, and as you go with him into the performance he creates tremendous energy, spinning out phrase after phrase that drives to tension points derived from phrasing and timbre, not always from piling up speedy runs. I’ve decided that vocal music is the ne plus ultra of Indian music, with all the instrumentalists huddled around aspiring to vocal qualities. At Sri Ganesha Temple in Bellevue.

No Neck Blues Band. This was one of Chris’ shows at Angle of View. The basic substance of NNCK is very good, a ritualistic practice of a catholic sort that absorbs everything good from music of the last 40 years or the last forever. From what I’ve heard their shows can be up and down. My experience was this was a good show, with real religious fervor to it.

Susan Alcorn. I’ve posted a bunch about Susan already. This is the second year running she’s come through Nashville during the summer. She played her piece about the twin shafts of light memorial in NY, which builds into a violent climax that resolves into Curtis Mayfield’s "People Get Ready". I had read about the piece but this was the first I’ve heard it.

http://perambulating.blogspot.com/2005/07/curtis-mayfield-saves-day.html

Ian Bostridge. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve heard a classical singer of this caliber. And he did an all-Schubert program, no lame show tunes or anything else intended to please the presumed masses. Bostridge dramatizes while he sings, sometimes leaning over and clutching the piano cover, that sort of thing, but you get used to it. The material is so good. That night I was particularly taken with the quality of the poetry, most of which wasn’t poets I think of as major in German literature, like Mayrhofer and Schulze. But I’m probably just showing my ignorance of German literary history.

Carol Genetti/Jack Wright/Jon Mueller. Carol’s a friend from Chicago, and this was her first time in Nashville. Their show had very nice focus, and created a nice visual set up around Erin Hewgley’s hair-covered bed frame. This was definitely in the low db school of small sounds, which means that you can hear Carol, although I have to say I get impatient with the style and want people to cut loose. That’s probably shallow of me, but I also know Carol and Jack can do that well.

W-S Burn. Another 310 Chestnut show courtesy of Chris. I posted on these guys. I had never heard of them, but thought the songs and sounds were great. I think what I liked best was how they come across as very loose, haphazard, but that turns out to be deceptive as the threads drop into focus at just the right time. http://perambulating.blogspot.com/2005/10/w-s-burn.html

Among the musical disappointments were Sandip Burman, a tabla tarang player who opened a Nashville Symphony Orchestra performance of Messiaen’s Turnagalila Symphony. The program sounded good in theory, but Burman’s seemed stuck between delivering a lecture and a performance. The Symphony’s reading of the Messiaen was good. Also, a concert at Sherith Israel by Moshe Tessone of Sephardic music. I thought this would be some of the exquisite Iberian and Moroccan stuff you hear on things like the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music, but this was more pop music, better than your usual wedding reception but not out of place there. It was interesting enough to hear, but not quite what I expected.

Like I said, I’m the last person to ask about new recordings. Philip Gayle finally released his recording on Family Vineyard, the Mommy Row. I’m going to review it here one of these days. And for Christmas my wife bought me Jim Baker’s solo album, which came out this year and was long overdue. And the Tito Puente 2-disc retro set that came out this year. These are all really good.

Best of 2005: 10 Pieces of Art

Since no one asked me for year-end best-of lists I’ll just have to do it myself. And since there’s no one exercising editorial restraint, I’m going to do different lists each of the next couple of days.

Today it’s 10 pieces I enjoyed this year. I’m focusing here on individual pieces that struck me on their own, with the effect of leaving out some excellent bodies of work shown this year by folks like Adrienne Outlaw, Barbara Yontz, Bob Durham, and Donald Earley. A lot of people really.

1. Beatriz Milhazes, Phebo, at the San Francisco MOMA. A very appealing lotus-pattern abstraction. http://www.jamescohan.com/artists/beatrizmilhazes/index.html?page=1&num_pages=1&image=1734

2. Wangechi Mutu, Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies, also at SFMOMA. The image is a little hard to make out, but it’s this stack of three figures, a man, a woman, and a monkey that grow out of each other in a collage form. http://www.vielmetter.com/exhibition_mutu_1.htm

3. Will ClenDening, acousto-kinetic sculpture, Watkins Senior show. I didn’t note the name of the piece, but it translated the minimal noise of a fan into movement (of a speaker surface) which he harnessed to a writing machine. I thought it was brilliant in effecting movement between states and dimensions.

4. Paul Chan, My Birds…Trash…Future, PS1 Greater New York show. I knew Paul a bit when he was finishing at the SAIC in 1996. He went off to New York and things started happening for him really fast. I’ve been reading about his work in recent years, but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to see it.

5. Kathryn Spence, Corcoran Biennial. Her section in the biennial included messy balls of threads, embroidered paper towel rolls, delicate little drawings of birds and with the centerpiece a construction of boxes filled with bound bunches of paper, cloth, balls of string, photos. Something massive and effusive coming out of the accumulation of mundane material. http://www.carlberggallery.com/exhibitions.php?exhibition=9

6. Maggie Michael, Explosion #8, G Fine Art (DC). A big drawing combining charcoal, pencil, enamel, and apparently entire bottles of ink. It had tremendous energy and presence. http://gfineartdc.com/show_sept05/show_sept05_8.jpg

7. Melody Owen, MGM Lion, Rhodes College. This was part of the traveling show by several members of the Fugitive Art Center. Gems float out of the mouth of the MGM lion when he roars. I was completely blessed out by it. http://www.thistlepress.net/video/mgmlion.htm

8. Cody VanderKaay, drawings, Finer Things. Each sheet is filled with closely-packed vertical lines in a single color of ballpoint pen. Patterns come out from variations in the line weight and places where the ink runs. There’s obviously an interest in process, and it results in very appealing forms. The drawings also reminded me of Wesley Willis’ ballpoint pen drawings he used to sell on the street in Wicker Park.

9. Erin Hewgley, The Conundrum of Plumb, Frist. This lectern was made of a tangle of metal pipe. I said in my review it was Monty Python animation come to life.

10. Ludwika Ogorzelec, Nancy Margolis Gallery. She created a web from clear strips of film that filled the gallery, mostly about 4 or 5 feet up from the ground, so you ducked under it to reach gaps where you could stand up. One portion of it seemed to go through the gallery window and stick out over the sidewalk. I guess this is a variation in plastic with what Hewgley was doing with pipes, showing I’ve got a weakness for maze-like art. http://www.nancymargolisgallery.com/exhibitions1.htm

Tomorrow, either I’ll do something on a few full shows worth noting, or go on to music or maybe reading.

A Christmas picture

For Christmas, I want to talk about a painting I saw this week at the National Gallery in DC, a nativity by Petrus Christus:

http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?50+0+0

http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pdimage?50+0

Petrus Christus was a Flemish painter in Bruges in the middle 15^th century, considered a follower of Van Eyck. The National Gallery painting is dated around 1450.

Joseph and Mary stand in a stable, accompanied by a bunch of angels, looking down at the infant. The back of the stable opens into a deep perspective landscape with a city in the distance. The figures in the stable are strange. The angels are modeled like adults, but are less than half the scale of the parents (http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?50+0+17). The mismatching of the angels with the other figures makes clear the simultaneous presence of the natural and the supernatural in the event. The angels look human, but are not, unlike Christ who is both. The child lies on the ground, on the hem of Mary’s robe, but sort of haphazardly, like he was just dropped there. He’s oddly scrawny (http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?50+0+18), not a beautiful child, very vulnerable, and that weakness has got to be the point. God taking on human form with its most fragile aspects.

The scene in the stable is framed by a cathedral archway, filled with scenes of humanity’s Fall from the Old Testament done in grisaille, like stone: Adam and Eve covering themselves in shame http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?50+0+11, http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?50+0+13), being cast from the garden, working by the sweat of their brow, their child Cain killing his brother, and I think the last vignette is Jacob deceiving Abraham to gain his blessing. Adam and Eve stand on top of marble columns which in turn are held up by two squatting, straining human figures. The notes on the website describe them as symbols of humanity struggling with original sin, and they reminded me of Buddhist images where gods stand on top of a figure or a corpse, crushing ignorance, substance, ego, or the bonds of Samsara.

The composition’s structure provides a perfect summary of Christian doctrine. The old world, and the world of an individual locked in sin, is utterly changed over by the incarnate God. One passes from a realm without color into a glowing, rich landscape. Cold stone turns to warm flesh. Trying to explain the effect of God’s grace is like talking about dimensions in space past the third. One reverts to metaphors. The difference between third and fourth is moving from a flat drawing into the three dimensions of sculpture.

The multiple scenes of human sin show the same pattern repeating, all of it leading to the Incarnation, to the need for the Incarnation. The Bible is like that, telling the same story over and over, sin and redemption, a series of covenants all pointing towards the Cross.

The painting is packed with symbols. The beams of the stable form a triangle and a triangle inside it, which frames a broken beam with plants sprouting from it, premonitions of the Cross. In the corners of the picture are two small figures of warriors. One thrusts a lance, the other has a sword at ready behind a shield with an ornate lion’s head sculpted into it (http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?50+0+2, http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?50+0+9). I suppose these symbolize the fight against sin, but I couldn’t get the image of Reepicheep, the valiant mouse in the Narnia Chronicles, out of my head. Which of course gets back to the same idea. The same story over and over.

One can talk about art that is spiritual, but a painting like this goes further. It is religious and even theological. It is not clear how much art today succeeds in that integration of theological thinking and aesthetic invention. It’s also not clear how much aspires to it. It may be that our connections to theology are much dimmer now, so that to find aesthetic and theological fluency running together would be remarkable. Maybe artists of the Renaissance nailed it, and these paintings left to us are sufficient.

Merry Christmas.

Susan Alcorn's Texas

My friend Susan Alcorn, a great pedal steel player in Houston, had this piece in of all places Counterpunch.

http://www.counterpunch.org/alcorn12172005.html

It covers two nights of real world small town Texas country music, mixed in with her memories of the Houston music scene, the things she's seen and heard about.

Look up tonight

According to my wife the full moon tonight is the brightest it's been in 20 years due to its trajectory, at least in latitudes around these parts. It's going almost straight overhead, and the light is really bright. Enough to confuse our new dog, who's still a bit of clueless pup, who was sure when I sent him outside to pee that we were really getting ready to play a round of fetch.

Thanks to Claire Suddath...

I've been ridiculously busy with work the past week, but I've been comforting myself by listening to

www.pandora.com

It creates a stream of music starting with an artist or song you type in and then it pulls up tunes one at a time based on some characteristics of the music. The result is that it connects music you like with stuff you don't know about. I've heard stuff from Carla Kihlstedt from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, a Tim Berne project with Mark Doucet on guitar, Fred Anderson's duets with Hamid Drake, Jenny Scheinman. It's really addictive. And I found out about it from a post Claire Suddath had on Pith in the Wind.

http://www.nashvillescene.com/blog/pitw/archives/00000708.shtml

The downside is that by sticking to cuts that have similarities the stream can be kind of monotonous. It's the opposite of the iPod shuffle phenomenon to which I am also very attached. Oh yeah, the other thing is realizing that this post makes me a participant in a viral marketing phenomenon. Makes you feel like a lab rat.

Last Weekend's Revelation Thanks to the Secret Show

The Secret Show group currently has an exhibit of work by art students at MTSU and Sewanee. It’s a great idea, since these guys are so close but people in Nashville aren’t going to see what they are up to the same way the students at Watkins are visible.

I didn’t get a great look at the show, and I hope I’ll get a chance to go by again before they take it down. The work that stuck out the most for me was by Jacqueline Meeks, who I think is at MTSU. One piece was four dead feeder mice, hung by their tales from pins in the wall. Each had been frozen in water, I’m pretty sure just in an ice cube tray. Each mouse wore a block of ice that was slowly melting. Seeing them impaled on the wall was just a bit gruesome, but definitely worked in poetic ways. The feeder mice are sacrifice animals, sold as a pet supplies for things like snakes that need live food, or in lab experiments. They seemed to be carrying the ice as a burden, and being slowly relieved of that burden in a streak of water down the gallery's drywall.

Her other piece was a video showing a man seated, no shirt, facing away from the camera. His back was marked with a grid, and a fully dressed woman worked her way across his back, planting a hickey in each square. She converted an act of passion, or at least of teenage making out, into a technical exercise. Still, there was some tenderness in the way she approached him, put her hands on him gently to steady herself while she loudly sucked on his skin. And the tenderness was balanced by the inherent violence of a hickey, possibly the most common form of sado-masochistic practice. In addition to setting up these tensions, this is one of those pieces that establishes art historical references in a sly and simple way. The grid line is of course the painter’s grid from the Renaissance, used for the same purposes, to position the artist’s marks. It’s just she’s making marks with her mouth and teeth (or those of a stand-in). Bob Durham also pointed out a similarity to photos by Joel-Peter Witkin, and I think I know the ones he’s talking about, looking at sitter from the back. And it’s a good allusion all around, emphasizing the presence of disfiguration and deviant sexual practice. Of course the cleverness of Meeks’ piece is that the “deviant” erotic practice here couldn’t be any more common. Makes a similar point, just from another direction.

I spent too much time at the opening jawing and didn’t get a great look at everything. Hopefully they’ll have some open hours for the gallery and I’ll get over there at the right time (always a challenge for me).

Mahadevan Sings!

Sankaran Mahadevan is known to many people in Nashville for organizing a longstanding series of classical Indian music concerts at Sri Ganesha Temple and other venues. He is also a singer and a voice teacher, although he has no less a day job than a faculty position in Civil Engineering at Vanderbilt. With all of those responsibilities, it is no great surprise that he does not give a full concert very often, and apparently his concert at the temple this Saturday was his first in 10 years.

He was accompanied by a mridangamist from Memphis, M. Lakshman, and violinist S. Ramakrishnan from Chennai. Dr. Mahadevan was fully convincing in his role at the center of musical attention, not its enabler and organizer. He has a fine voice, sweetest in its bass ranges, and he seemed utterly at ease and joyful throughout. As one expects from Carnatic music, the performance reached its most intense points well into the concert, far from the distractions of whatever one left before coming into the sound-world the performers establish.

The visitor from Indian, Mr. Ramakrishnan was adept at using bow pressure to shape the music. He was particularly skilled in creating filigreed lines with lots of delicate ornamentation that he seemed to whisper from a bow that glanced across the strings. He also made use of surprising intervallic jumps and blues-like slides where again bow pressure seemed everything.

This performance, by a man who obviously takes music seriously but has another career entirely to tend to, shows a level of talent and focus that is pretty much guaranteed to feed one’s – OK, my – sense of inadequacy. But concern for my fragile ego is no reason not to have the chance to hear Dr. Mahadevan’s interpretation of Carnatic music more frequently than once a decade.

Voluptuous ghosts at Sarratt

For a few more days (through the end of this week) Sarratt Gallery is showing work by a Belgian painter, Roland Delcol, who has been active since the 1960s and comes with a recommendation from Gilles Deleuze. The basic pattern here is a painting in highly realistic style that includes a youthful, sexy nude female figure with other characters in full dress, put in either an abstract dark space or an out of place setting like a garden or jungle. The nude and dressed characters occupy different spaces in spite of their proximity. First off, they either look through or past each other, or have reactions that don’t go together, fragmenting any dramatic mis-en-scene. Light and color also place them in a space outside of the setting. The human flesh in these paintings is rendered in a limited palette of browns, with even the eye color toned down in comparison to the more vibrant color of the clothes and whatever the setting is. Because the clothing on the dressed figures participates in the more dynamic color range of the remainder of the painting, it is the nude who seems most out of place in the setting, a voluptuous ghost. Some of the paintings borrow the groupings of classical paintings like Manet’s Olympia or other iconic figures like the RCA dog listening to the victrola.

The paintings are well-done and worth a look, and they certainly offer easy pleasures of the attractive figures. There’s a psychological interpretation for the proceedings, mixing the super-ego and id, the structures of social restraint and hungry sensual desire residing uneasily in the same space. This work also puts you in mind of a cosmopolitan Europe-centered cultural world several decades gone, when the recollection was still strong of the age when French surrealists ruled the visual arts. For some people, the recombinations of stock characters will have a stimulating effect, a form of geometric extension of images, but for me it felt too much like someone running through variations on familiar formulas.

http://www.w3art.com/RolandDelcol.html

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/sarratt/gallery/delcol.html

Sheryl and Lance at Halftime

I’m a big fan of football half-time shows. Part of it is waiting for the fiascos and disasters that occur with regularity, like Janet Jackson flashing the nation or the time a house of cards fell on the Orange Bowl Queen, and she had to kick her way out of them cussing and spitting. Unfortunately, very often the shows go on without a hitch, but even then we can enjoy the weird way they throw together completely unconnected cultural signifiers.

Today was Thanksgiving, big football day, and Sheryl Crow sang at the halftime of the Cowboys game. I like a lot of her songs, and she seems like an actual musician. Of course, being a halftime show, they couldn’t just put her and the band out there – I think that’s a real issue, trying to produce enough visual activity to occupy the large space. So in front of the bandstand were the Cowboys cheerleaders, dancers in “60s” costumes, ballerinas, children with streamers, and guys waving flags. There was an orchestra behind them, completely inaudible on TV, but they seemed to be working hard, and the bandstand shot off fireworks and sparklers. Oh yeah, it was meant to honor the Salvation Army, so they had some big red kettles set up. Obviously none of this made any sense together, and Sheryl Crow’s whole vibe is not exactly Vegas showmanship. She’s going for something more laid back, and at times the cheerleaders were thrashing around frantically at a completely discordant tempo. Maybe it was a tribute to Conlon Nancarrow’s piano rolls.

The strangest thing was that the TV kept cutting away to pictures of Lance Armstrong sitting some place with his kids watching the show. They weren’t in the stands, but clearly had been positioned for the purpose of being in these shots. Of course everyone knows Lance and Sheryl are an item. But think about it. The entertainment isn’t just the performance on stage (and the marginally choreographed mess all around it), but the tabloid-ready celebrity romance. It’s multi-media, with Lance and the kids as part of the act, but they are there to perform the celebrity gossip. And this was in Texas, so the shots also remind you why Sheryl Crow is singing at the Cowboys game. Since she’s going out with Lance, a bona fide Texas icon (unappreciated by the evil French people), that gives her a legitimate connection to the state, and we couldn’t have a singer here who didn’t have anything to do with Texas. In fact, I think the performance was mostly about Lance Armstrong – look, it’s Lance’s girlfriend singing – and it didn’t matter what she sang or what the song had to do with anything, and so it didn’t really matter what tempo they picked for the cheerleaders’ routine or what the ballerinas were doing.

And finally, since this is Thanksgiving, a time for family, and for divorced families that means splitting time somehow between the families. Doesn’t Lance need to get the kids to their mother’s house at some point in the day? Maybe she gets them for Christmas. Unless the publicists need them for another gig.

Dillingham and Mosvold Senior Shows

The latest round of graduating senior shows are up at Watkins now. My favorite pieces there were one by Amanda Dillingham called Blossoming Bodies and Gillian Mosvold’s Too Close.

Amanda’s piece is a series of botanical drawings on communion wafers. Communion is such a strange ceremony, with its consumption of the Lord, and the Catholic practice of making specialized wafers accentuates that. Little featureless discs designed to receive the Godhead. When Amanda draws plants and flowers on them (and these drawings are very finely and cleanly done), the wafers go to seed, but every other level of the transubstantiation transaction gets pointed in other directions. The spiritual feeding by the Savior gets connected to the everyday food provided by plants. The sacralization of the wafer extends to the plants, hijacking communion for a more thoroughly immanent concept of divinity extending to all forms of life. And the title makes this a piece about girls becoming women, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and such like, and the female body features in Amanda’s other work in the show.

The use of communion wafers is the latest in a kind of food obsession at Watkins students. In Amanda’s work you’ve also got honey in a couple of pieces, and it seems like several other artists have used that, and there’s a video piece that is projected on a pile of sugar. In other shows by other people I remember chocolate and tapioca at least.

The piece by Mosvold I liked best was a series of small drawings that could be parts of a nude body viewed way up close, and framed in some wax. She projects a sound from the ceiling, of water gurgling. The sound covers you more when you get closer to the drawings. The sound, which could be the sound of water in the plumbing system, gives you the sense of having violated the privacy of the forms in a way that’s hard to define. A nice effect, which she achieves through a very simple mechanism. This sort of thing is the artistic equivalent of an elegant mathematical solution.

If only we could all be like Truman Capote

Went to see the biopic on Truman Capote and the writing of In Cold Blood last night. The movie’s gotten uniformly good reviews, and I don’t have any reason to dissent. Philip Seymour Hoffman does an amazing job of convincingly being Capote even though he doesn’t look too much like him, and he does a version of the Capote accent without devolving into impersonation.

The movie concerns itself with the greediness at the heart of art. Capote insinuates himself into the lives of the killers in order to feed the demands of his book. He knows he can write a great book, a groundbreaking book, if he understands the men who killed the family in Kansas. The process of trying to understand the men, one of them in particular, looks like extending himself in friendship. At root Capore’s interest is about providing the material for this book, but it is complicated. He has to be able to empathize as well as analyze, and part of his empathy and his reason for wanting to spend the time writing this story resides in genuine interest. Whatever its motivations, the exchange involved in the writer’s investigations bestows benefits. One wants to feel understood. It also feeds Capote’s subjects own sense of grandeur to be known by a famous person, to be of interest to him.

In the movie, the William Shawn character tells Capote that his book will change the way people write, and this is right. With In Cold Blood Capote found a way to use non-fiction in a novelistic way, a character-driven narrative. Writing that aspires to follow that pattern now constitutes a huge part of literary output. One might argue whether literary non-fiction is a good development, but if you had a measuring system I imagine this genre would come up like most things, responsible for plenty of marginal stuff but capable of producing something worthy as often as any medium.

In the movie, Capote is shown to be aware nearly as soon as he finds the mention of the killings in the newspaper that he can write a great book on this topic, and that it will break ground. This interests me, how Capote could see so clearly that he was on the track of something great. At least as the movie shows him, he was insufferable but right. Does that well-placed self-confidence feel different from self-deluded illusions of grandeur?

The fact of being right about how good this book would be, plays into the big moral dilemma of the movie, whether Capote’s cultivation of a relationship with the killers violated their trust. The film shows Capote alternately agonizing over it and not, and implies the trauma of this experience led to his inability to produce another book in the remaining 20 or so years of his life. But what choice did Capote have, once he became aware of what he could do with this material? He could have kept his distance from the men, leaving himself with missing pieces in the story, or withheld parts of the story, in either case protecting the men’s privacy. With the result of no book or a lesser book. No, it seems the world is significantly richer for In Cold Blood having been written. The author makes a kind of moral self-sacrifice, compromising himself in order to produce something that readers will get more out of. It’s a grandiose idea, every artist as a kind of Christ or scapegoat, but it seems like you can’t really get away from grandiosity when making art. Modesty lends itself better to other enterprises.

A final point about the movie. It shows a time when there was glamour associated with writers. The writers were stars, hung out with movie stars (Arthur Miller marrying Marilyn Monroe), and there was public interest in what they would do next. Maybe the movie overstates it, or maybe there still is this kind of intense interest in NY, but I don’t think so. I doubt it’s any great loss to writing for people to do it outside a celebrity culture. But it is quaintly pleasurable to see it depicted in the movie.

More Airport Art, This Time Seattle

OK, so I better start by admitting I’m not getting out much due to the day job. Which leaves me with my default art experience, whatever I find in the airport. Then, this week it’s an airport that’s kind of over-the-top with its art, Seattle-Tacoma. They’ve always had a lot (there’s this Frank Stella painting that for a while seemed like they’d forgotten they had it), but there’s been a bunch of new construction and the airport and there’s even more.

Airports have a way of surprising you. It’s easy to go several years between visits to the same airport, and when you get back you can find that there’s been a massive construction and replacement project in the meantime, and you find yourself in a completely different space. Isolated as you are from the surrounding land except for a few glimpses, there is no practical connection between the place you find yourself and where you were before when your ticket had the same airport code.

I’ve had that experience a couple of times. I flew to Alaska after a couple of year lag, and they’d built a whole new airport (named after Ted Stevens of course). And then this trip west I found out Sea-Tac had added a whole new concourse.

So Sea-Tac has always had art, and they’ve probably got some percent for the arts program for all public projects. It’s the kind of town that would do that. There is talk from time to time of getting the Council here in Nashville to do that, but I don’t know what the status is with that. The result in Seattle is not just art hung on the walls in rotating exhibits, but art built into the structure of the place (http://www.portseattle.org/seatac/amenities/artexhibits/). And not just exhibits in glass cases, but ceramics in the bathrooms, sound pieces in the drinking fountains. There’s a set of thick columns in the new concourse covered with mosaics, each by a different artist. There’s one by Rudy Autio, one of the pioneering potters of the last few decades, others with an environmental political message (a quasi-photographic one by Peter DeLory of the blasted remains of a former champion red cedar), Franz Marc-y forest animals by JoAnne Hammer, a tribute by Amy Cheng to her father that crawls dragon scales up to the ceiling, highlighted with blue and gold. There’s a kinetic sculpture by a guy named Trimpkin that runs monkey-driven train-like contraptions along a single track next to a moving walkway. There’s something around every bend.

This display has a couple of effects. It is extravagant and prolific. It lets you know this is a wealthy city that can afford to cover its airport in art. We would never feel like we had enough in the budget to do something comparable in Nashville. It also brags on the city, it says this is an interesting place filled with interesting people – and by comparison different, probably from wherever you got on the airplane. But it also has an undeniable stimulating effect. It makes it worth your while to pay attention to your environment. So often, the institutional corridors of airports and many other spaces in our cities are blank, devoid of features. They encourage you to zone out, the way a parking lot does where there should be a building in a city. I don’t really know if the people who run things in Seattle see this, but towns like this are rich in details. There are interesting shops on the corners, details worked into the sidewalks, thoughtful plantings in the margins of the sidewalks. Some of it is sponsored by the government, but the businesses and residents seem to pitch in and make something of shared, public spaces. It’s hard not to believe that this is part of a complex of mutually reinforcing systems that promote a mix of economic and intellectual creativity. Wealth – of all kinds, not just economic – allows the conditions to encourage more wealth. The legacy of poverties becomes hard to break.

I’ve got one more trip in a long series of trips, but pretty soon I should be back to looking at art in the usual places more regularly. I appreciate a few hours in the Seattle airport, but it’s a tease when you’re on a layover.

Movie Night At Ruby Green

Ruby Green has fixed up the back room of their gallery and is going to use it for screenings, performance, and discussions/lectures. They're outfitting it with a bunch of couches, so it should be like hanging out in the living room. They inaugurate the new space this Friday with what looks like a really good set of underground films. The headliner is “Who is Bozo Texino” by Bill Daniel, a documentary on hobo and railworker graffiti. Apparently there are legendary graffiti artists on the railroads, and the tradition goes back a long way. It makes sense that this art subculture would exist, it’s just one of those things outside my experience. This film is built around the discovery of the identity of one legendary railroad artist. Daniel is going to be at the showin – this is part of a tour he's doing with the film. The other films on the bill include a documentary from 1970 on the hippie houseboat culture in Sausalito, and a film by Vanessa Renwick that assembles footage of children in South Dakota shot in 1938 and sets it to a newly composed soundtrack. Renwick’s film has won several awards for experimental film. The press on the showing says the doors will open at 7:30 and the films will show at 8:00. They’re charging $6 admission.

Fugitive On the Road Sort Of

For quite a while several members of the Fugitive Art Center in Nashville have been planning a traveling show as the next step in the development of that group. This became even more of the focus when the fire marshal shut down their gallery space on Chestnut Street – for which I have some responsibility since an article of mine on the group prompted him to check out the place.

The traveling show, with Fugitives Patrick DeGuira, Greg Pond, and Jack Ryan and fellow travelers Steven Thompson and Melody Owen opened this Fall in Sewanee, and then moved to Rhodes College in Memphis where I caught it last week.

I haven’t seen a lot of Owen’s work. This show has several collages and some videos, actually video collages. I liked the videos quite a bit, both of which borrow Hollywood material. In one, clips the MGM lion, in B&W, when he roars. Out of his mouth pop colored jewels that hover for a second in the air and then float off the screen. The lion turns his head in their direction, like he’s watching them. On the one hand you’ve got this vision of the Hollywood studio as spitting out gems. Real gems in their own eyes, aesthetic and commercial, maybe fake gems in the eyes of a critic or consumer. It also seemed like a line in a sutra – “his breath is pure gems of enlightenment.”

In a piece called “Waiting with Guns” Owen splices together images from movies of exactly that, people (maybe all men) with guns waiting or just in the moment before they fire. The clips include Westerns, war movies, crime and detective films. It’s a catalog of the delay before the gratification of action or destruction. An extended tease, a kind of sexual play. It also draws attention to these as moments of potentiality. As the men wait to fire, events could still turn away from the inevitable, from death to forgiveness or grace. These are the decisive moments.

Greg has several pieces here, and the one I responded to most is “Sugar Candy Mountain: The Final Resting Place for the Soul of Saint T.” Greg has created a frame of heavy wire forms like three peaks of a mountain that sit on the floor. Several bunches of small yellow and white plastic flowers (one of his signatures from other recent works) have been clipped to sticks attached to the metal frame. And a whole series of small speakers also poke up from the frame, forming a bed of speakers that play a clip of one yelp of Bruce Springsteen yodeling. Like a lot of his pieces, Greg gives form to the idea of the Western landscape (and the West, and the country, and the world) as constructed artifice that is taken as natural, or as a scene in which the natural has been replaced by constructed approximations – a metal mesh that looks like mountains, flowering bushes created by cobbling together plastic and sticks with metal clips. What set this piece apart for me was the clip. The yodel sound is direct, human, and emotional. I picked up the reference to Springsteen from a review by Joe Nolan in Number – when I heard it I thought it was from a Native American ceremonial song. This little clip could be from a field recording, which gives it resonance and universality. The emotion this sound brings into the piece, with its enactment of construction and substitution suggests that inspite of the apparent damage inflicted, it is also what humans do.

Patrick DeGuira installed his piece “Life Flower” which has in the Fragile Species show at the Frist. At Rhodes, the piece is installed in a room with a glass wall to a hallway and a doorway access. The piece includes filling the space with green and yellow paper strips, so you have to look at the piece from outside. There is a photo element and a sound element. At the Frist there was one access point from which you could take it all in. Here at Rhodes if you look through the door you can hear the sound but only see the photo in reflection on the windows, or look at the photo through the hallway windows and not hear the sound – so the work gets fragmented and there is no point from which you can take in the entire thing.

Jack has some of his typically brilliant drawings on mylar, combining iconography of Ted Kaczynski, snow owls, and Western geography. Also, a simple sculptural piece using a skull which reminded me of a recent piece by Patrick. Thompson also produces very fine work based on drawing, one of which is in this show. He builds up pieces from layers of what looks like tracing paper with drawing that I think is on both sides of the material, clear plastic strips, bits of paper and small wood sculptural elements, some of it marked with graphite. There are also two oversized felt suits, but I still get more out of the drawings which have a seemingly endless amount of detail to dig into.

This show is going to Austin sometime after it closes at Rhodes in December, and I think they are looking for other stops. I expect there will be plenty of interest in more iterations of this show.