Culture

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

— From September 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden

James and I went to an amazing concert by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on Thursday night. Go read his account.

We went to a couple of openings on Wednesday night. James has the details.

We visited several things of note today. One closed today (Barbara Pollack at Sara Meltzer), but the others are still up.

First, Barbara Pollack, from the press release:

Video Wall: Sara Meltzer Gallery is proud to present Barbara Pollack’s AIM. In this 3-channel video, four teenagers converse via AOL Instant Messenger. The monitors show the faces of the four participants—two boys and two girls—as they react and respond to this digital conversation. This video stems from an off-handed remark, “We donÂ’t flirt at school, we wait until we get home and then IM each other,” made by the son of the artist. In order to capture the humor, spontaneity and frankness of these conversations about sex and dating, Pollack used micro-cameras, a type of surveillance equipment now readily available and frequently used by parents to keep an eye on their children. The work demonstrates the impenetrability of the adolescent experience, even in this era when all forms of privacy seem to have been eliminated.

The gallery’s next show looks quite interesting: Andrea Bowers’s ” Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training” and “Damage” from Type A. We have a few videos of Type A, plus a diptych from the Twins Project.

I have mentioned Hiraki Sawa in the past.

He has three new videos at James Cohan. I will probably go back to see them again. They are quite wonderful.

Francis Cape’s new show opens tonight at Murray Guy. I love his architecturally-inspired art, and I’m not even that into architecture.

Slater Bradley’s “STONED & DETHRONED”, his homage to Kurt Cobain show, opens tonight at Team Gallery. I found it really moving, and not just because I lived in Seattle in 1992. The press release/essay is brilliant. Also, Mr. Bradley curated a group show at Wallspace gallery that should be worth a visit. I haven’t been yet.

Finally, the site hasn’t been updated for the current show, but Axis Gallery has a group show of photography from South Africa. I love the gallery, and it’s a great show. Go!

[Updated: a helpful person gave me the link to the Slater Bradley press release.]

Some interesting things I’ve read today:

Michael Bierut on The Final Decline and Total Collapse of the American Magazine Cover — with a discussion of classic George Lois Esquire covers from the 60s, like the one with Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian.

Tyler Green with tips and suggestions for galleries, inspired by this discussion at one of my new favorite weblogs, art.blogging.la.

I don’t feel so hot, so posting is limited at the moment. Here is an interview with Melissa James Gibson, the playwright who wrote [sic] (which we loved) and now Suitcase, both produced at Soho Rep. We saw it last week and really enjoyed it, as did the rather actorly (Nina Hellman of The Civilans, David Greenspan, etc.) audience. Apparently, I should have written about this earlier, as tickets just went from $15 to $35. Still, it’s probably worth going, and certainly is more worth your time than any Broadway crap.

There is an amazing, weird, disjointed quality to the dialogue in her plays. I had thought it was the way they are directed, but now that I’ve read the interview and seen an excerpt of the latest play, I realize that’s the way they’re written.

From the interview:

Rail: The idiosyncratic punctuation that you use for the character lines seems to offer an alternative to the more clichéd aspects of psychology in theater. Instead of rendering articulations of “emotion,” your characters seem to follow a musical score; one that expresses more ephemeral aspects of inner thought through pattern and rhythm. How did you begin to use these stylistic conventions?

Gibson: I was just finding, more and more, that proper sentences and punctuation werenÂ’t adequately expressing what was in my head, in terms of dialogue. Punctuation has its place, of course, but it can lessen the degree to which subtlety and contradiction and ambivalence reside in verbal communication. And since a play is a blueprint for an oral form, it just makes more sense to me, for my work, to keep the language open to the switching of tracks it must constantly accommodate. IÂ’ve come to rely on carefully chosen capitalization, line breaks and what I half-jokingly call “actor intention tips,” which basically alert the actor to the fact that the intention behind the line may be at odds with what actually is said. In terms of the rhythms of the words, I do sort of think of the line breaks as thought breaks. For me, these are just another signal to the actor about the patterns inside a characterÂ’s head. Obviously, IÂ’m borrowing some of the tools of poetry and music, though I am, much to my sadness, neither a poet nor a musician. So maybe itÂ’s like IÂ’m operating a power saw without wearing safety goggles.

Rail: There is also a strong thread of narrative fragmentation running through your pieces. Your characters are often collecting found objects, listening to voices in the stairwell, seeing snippets of home video through windows. The stories are never really beginning or ending.

Gibson: Well, lives don’t behave. We are porous and susceptible beings and even when our intentions are definite we ineluctably veer. The veering is what interests me— that and the secret conversation that underlies every out loud one. I just feel such great affection for the evidence of our tragic, silly, smart and stupid selves.

Here is a sample of the play:

(Ring ring. Jen turns down the volume on the tape player and answers the phone.)

SALLIE
Is it
Bleaker or more bleak I can
never remember that rule Bleaker
doesnÂ’t even sound like a word
when you say it in
isolation Try saying it Bleaker Bleaker Bleaker
Ew thereÂ’s a guy outside clipping his
toenails into the sewer Jen
are you there

JEN
IÂ’m here I thought
you might be my advisor

SALLIE
Did you hear from your advisor

JEN
SheÂ’s trying to
Reach Me

(SallieÂ’s gaze has landed on an apartment in the building across the way, where the film is showing again. Sallie picks up a pair of binoculars and looks through them as she continues to converse. We see what she sees, a section of home movies from circa 1940:

A little girl, her father and her mother are sledding. The father wears a suit and overcoat, while the mother wears heels and a fur. They all take a turn on the sled.)

SALLIE
How do you know

JEN
SheÂ’s left
Messages

SALLIE
Uh oh

JEN
And yesterday I received a
Letter

(SLIGHT PAUSE.)

JEN
Are you there

SALLIE
Sorry I got distracted
Someone across the way is watching some old
footage What did you receive

JEN
A letter Old
footage

SALLIE
Home movies or
something What
sort of letter

JEN
She wanted to know where things
stood dissertation-wise

SALLIE
What did you tell her

JEN
It was a letter Sallie

SALLIE
(focused on the film)
Oh right
IsnÂ’t it beautiful Jen I mean is
there anything more beautiful Jen than
people who dress in blatant disregard of their
circumstances

JEN
Oh I donÂ’t know blatancy is problematic if you ask me Blatancy makes me
nervous She
said she was going through a messy divorce

SALLIE
Who

JEN
My advisor In her letter

SALLIE
ThatÂ’s too bad

JEN
So sheÂ’s trying to straighten out her affairs so
to speak

SALLIE
So she can focus her energy on her messy
divorce

JEN
I guess She said attachment is a
nasty business

(SLIGHT PAUSE.)

ThatÂ’s a quote from her letter Attachment
Is A Nasty Business

Brooklyn Rail has a John Waters interview. Given that it’s not the NY Times, it’s a bit more about art than the other one.

Waters: Andy Warhol used to say his movies were better to think about than see. Well, this is true here too. In Eat Your Makeup thereÂ’s a scene thatÂ’s important where we do the entire Kennedy assassination, where Divine plays Jackie. Two years after it happened we shot it and people were really pissed off about it.

Rail: Just like after 9/11, you couldnÂ’t do anything that related to it in content without being “respectful of the tragedy” or else youÂ’re suddenly a national traitor and “unpatriotic.”

Waters: Yup. And that’s what I’m saying, it was almost like that. Oh Andy [Warhol] would have. Andy would have done a beautiful painting of that— I think he would have. The rest of Eat Your Makeup is all right. It has some good stuff in it, but it’s a 40 minute film that should have been 15 minutes. I learned that as I went along. Now they can’t stop me from cutting. My movies now would be 10 minutes long if they didn’t stop me in the editing room. Just the good parts! That’s what this photo work is. Sometimes the good part is 1/24 of a frame. That’s really cutting it down. (Laughs).

I’m a city boy. In the big cities they’ve set it up so you can go to a park and be in a miniature countryside, but in the countryside they don’t have any patches of big city, so I get very homesick.

— Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

We saw work by this young artist on our trip to Mexico City. The gallery, Nina Menocal, has now put up a few images of his work. There aren’t any good details of his drawings, but the photo of the table gives you a feel for how the project room looked.