Culture

Now, why would anyone expect something sexy to happen in an opera about Don Juan? From MSNBC, the story of a production of Don Giovanni that had to be “edited”. It’s not enough for people to home-school their kids — they have to arrange for censorship of any arts productions they might see too.

Opera Colorado directors have scrapped a racy scene from a production of “Don Giovanni” that prompted complaints from parents of home-schooled students who watched a dress rehearsal. The scene featuring a woman in a one-piece bustier, fishnet stockings, garter belt and high heels cavorting with a sometimes shirtless Don Juan Giovanni will be replaced with a food fight in some performances.

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“It was kind of hard to miss what they were doing. It was pretty blatant,” said Candice Cirbo, who attended the rehearsal with the group and her sixth-grade daughter.

Opera spokesman Rex Fuller said earlier this week that the graphic action in the opera had been ordered toned down several days beforehand by the opera president and general director, Peter Russell.

My iBook has been in the shop since last Thursday, so I’m not posting too often. I’m relying on my Dell desktop running, yes, Windows 98 until it comes back. What follows is a random assortment of my adventures and observations over the last few days.

On Sunday afternoon we went to Greenpoint to see Meredith Allen’s show of Williamsburg art world people at im in iL. Since the G is not a train to be used lightly, we took the L to Bedford and walked the mile or so to the gallery in Greenpoint. I hadn’t spent much time in Greenpoint, and was pleasantly surprised by the number of 19th century buildings, plus stores and streets that still have some integrity. We even saw a Greek Revival house just off Manhattan Avenue! There are several independent Polish language bookstores in the neighborhood, when Chelsea doesn’t even have one independent “new books” bookstore. Another cool discovery was “Java and Wood”, a furniture / coffee shop at 1011 Manhattan Ave. Check it out when you’re in the area.

When we were waiting in the subway, I saw a young man with sunglasses, Capri pants, and an Aunt Jemima-style kerchief on his head. Fabulous! It was a welcome antidote to seeing a Chelsea boy at the gym earlier in the weekend wearing a du rag with his Abercrombie & Fitch cargo pants. Ugh.

Recently seen art of note:

• Stas Orlovski at Mixed Greens
• “Undesire”, curated by Vasif Kortun, at Apex Art — great, great show. There is a video of two young boys singing and dancing in an ATM room, by an artist named Fikret Atay. He lives close to the Iraqi border in Turkey, in a depressed village called Batman. I had trouble tearing myself away from the video to look at anything else in the show. The video by the Irish artist Phil Collins (not the singer), titled Baghdad Screen Tests, consists of several citizens of Baghdad sitting silently, looking at the camera — filmed before the war started. It is accompanied by recordings of various pop songs, ranging from Elvis to The Smiths. Finally, the drawings of Dan Perjovschi, which you have probably seen on the invitation, are sweet and scathing at the same time.
• Carl Scholz’s flawlessly “smoothed out” Jaguar at Momenta

One last art item is Emily Noelle Lambert at the Mini minimarket at 218 Bedford (near Earwax, etc.). We walked into the shop for the first time, and noticed Emily’s work on exhibit in the store. After a few minutes we decided we had to purchase one of the (very affordable) works. I don’t see something too close to what we bought on the web site, but check out a few interesting things I found on her site: Castle, Bird, and Charles and Smokey.

I’m sorry I missed this show by Eric Hollender at the fascinating little gallery around the corner from Plus Ultra, Dam Stuhltrager. Fired clay tablets!

I updated that post to add a link to Jeremiah Teipen’s home page.

Herein lies the tale of a Sunday in Williamsburg, in which our hero tours some galleries with friends, spots crack vials on Bedford, ogles hot tattooed (straight?) skateboarders with “lovely” in their vocabulary, and is accosted at Relish by people at the next table saying “Williamsburg really seems like a hotbed for real estate.”

I revisited two shows that I mentioned in an earlier post: “Decade” at Schroeder Romero and “Soft Cell” at Foxy Productions. I attended the openings of both shows, and I wanted to go back to spend a little quality time with them.

Schroeder Romero’s show is worth spending a bit of time with, since there are over 50 artists in the show. Make sure you check out the Williamsburg art timeline near the entrance. A trip to Williamsburg just doesn’t feel right without a chance to visit with Sara Jo and Lisa. They even offered to introduce my friends to some single gay men at their next opening!

I really love the work at Foxy Productions by Teresa Moro — you might have to use Internet Explorer to get the page to display. Ask to see her gouaches that they have as well. They’re exquisite.

The painting show at Black & White by KK Kozik, titled “Ashcan Rococo”, is pretty cool. There is a sly humor in them that’s not always apparent when you first see the brightly colored canvases. Those aren’t your father’s oil colors — I thought they were acrylic at first. If you haven’t seen Austin Thomas‘s sculpture out in the “sculpture garden”, go check them out. I first encountered this gallery when they showed work by my friend Meighan Gale.

The group show at Parker’s Box, titled “Grounds,” isn’t totally successful, but there are some sweet sculptures/installations by Ezra Parzybok and some photographs by Ravi Rajakumar, who collected moments in cartooons where no characters are present.

Robert Grunder

The show of paintings by Robert Grunder at *sixty seven, inspired by his growing up in a planned community, is quite nice. Don’t miss the selection of works by other gallery artists in the back room, including the video titled “Your Head is a Cloud” by Jeremiah Teipen.

Tamara Zahaykevich
smoke-pillow-ghost, 2002

I loved Tamara Zahaykevich‘s show of foam core sculptures in the back at Bellwether. The front room has work by John Bauer. I like him, and I like some of his work I’ve seen in the past — especially works on paper — but I don’t know where he’s going with his paintings lately, and I can’t say I’m excited about them.

I haven’t made it to Meredith Allen’s show at im n iL (in Greenpoint) yet, but it’s there through May 11 and I need to make a trip to see it. I ran into her on her bicycle as we were headed over to Schroeder Romero, next to Brooklyn’s most fabulous Laundromat. Have you seen that thing? It has aisles wider than my apartment! Soon I’ll be able to link to her homepage which I’m working on…

I picked up cards for a couple of shows in Manhattan that I need to go see: Anxiety at the Chelsea Art Museum, and Airport ’03 at HERE.

We spent the afternoon checking out some Chelsea gallery shows.

Lothar Hempel’s show at Anton Kern was the highlight of the day. Their web site is “under construction”, so try here for some images of his work. I have loved everything I’ve seen from him. He is a smart artist whose work is aesthetically pleasing even before you start to notice or read about the conceptual content.

The upcoming Dan McCarthy paintings show (opens May 15) at Anton Kern looks promising too.

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Noguchi Rika’s “Rocket Hill” at D’Amelio Terras: The exhibition consists of ten large-scale digital c-print photographs taken in and around the Tanegashima Space Center, an island complex from which NASDA, the Japanese space program, launches nearly all of its flights. I chose this picture in honor of Dan, since it reminds me a little bit of Space 1999.

Their next show is Cornelia Parker.

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Wayne Gonzalez at Paula Cooper is worth a visit, but I wasn’t bowled over the way I was by his previous show there.

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Omer Fast at Postmasters was really powerful. The image is an installation view of “Tank Translated”, which is a compilation of video interviews (in Hebrew with English subtitles) with four crew members from an Israeli tank, conducted separately after they were no longer in service. The one at the front was the one I spent the most time watching. At various times he talks about not wanting to be “exploited for your overseas audience”.

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Marco Maggi’s “Constructing and Demolishing” at Christinerose|Josee Bienvenu is a great show, both as installation, and for the skill of the individual works such as the drypoint on aluminum foil works. Their web site only has one image, so go here to see more.

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Philippe Parreno’s highly conceptual show, “Alien Seasons,” at Friedrich Petzel has good production values, and is visually interesting, but I don’t know if it’s a great show. I’m leaning towards “no”.

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I wanted to like Eric Ringsby’s show “The Indian Wars / Palestine” at Cornell DeWitt. I think bringing up parallels between the Indian Wars in the U.S. and Israel/Palestine question is an interesting way to start a discussion, but the work in the end is more political than aesthetic, and I believe that it is important for an artist to try to transcend the political message. I did like his use of this 1937 quote by Winston Churchill, who believed that the Jews were a “better” race than the Palestinians:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

Emily Jacir’s show at Debs and Co. does a better job of achieving both political and artistic ends. That said, I give credit to Cornell DeWitt for putting on a show that many galleries wouldn’t touch.

The highlight of attending the opening at Cornell DeWitt was meeting the parents of Adam Shapiro, the peace activist who works with The International Solidarity Movement and Seeds of Peace. They received death threats after their son became trapped in Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah while it was being shelled by Israeli forces. He had breakfast with Arafat and compared the house-to- house raids on Palestinians in Ramallah to Nazi raids during World War II.

If I lived in LA, I would definitely be at this opening for asianpunkboy at the fabulous Peres Projects. Check out their list of past exhibitions.

Via Sean, I just discovered Patrick King’s weblog. He has a very nice post on Madonna, which I shall excerpt here:

i may be one of seven people on the planet willing to say this, but here goes: madonna is a terrible artist. watching the current brouhaha over whether or not she should pull a video is, at best, embarrassing.

the fact that she’s trying to ascribe social relevance to her work through its messaging in the first place is asinine — and, i might add, an embarrassing case of an artist listening to her own press. she obviously believes that she is important and has a responsibility to make “good art,” which is so sad. madonna’s work has never been about a conscious social statement. in fact, she’s at her absolute worst when trying to make some sort of statement on an sort of level other than the personal. madonna is narcissistic and publicly paranoid. the two never make for a socially-aware artist willing to take the necessary risks to create a statement. she is at her best when simply talking about her own role as either empowered woman or party person. her relevance shines through in both those subjects, when she’s not in control of the subject matter. frankly, she’s not good at much else.

I am reminded of a very amusing speech from Ryan Landry’s play Madame Ex. In the production I know, Little Clay (a boy of 10 years) is played by a little girl.

HOLLY: Clay. Sometimes in this life. Things aren’t always what they seem. Do you know what keeping up appearances means?

LITTLE CLAY: Sure. It means to be a complete phony amongst your peers so that they don’t suspect that you may be as scared of the world as they are. It means buying things you can’t afford so that you look rich because rich is “good” and poor is “bad.” It means never being happy with the physical features God gave you because you’re such a self absorbed megalomaniac you think that people are constantly looking at you; judging your face and not your heart. It’s really the backbone of the American Classist System. A great example would be the majority of gay men who make up the “circuit” culture. Being an oppressed minority group of non-traditional, financially independent individuals, they have a wealth of opportunity to make great change in the world. Instead they choose to create an elitist circle of ignorance hosted by “Madonna.” Everything’s a party so they might mask their loneliness with “celebration;” their fear with sex and drugs. It’s tragic, really. I mean when you consider that there are alternatives to such a vapid lifestyle. However, most choose to shut out the rest of the world and simply run themselves into the ground. Then, when they reach the age of 45 or so, they start hanging around in leather bars and calling themselves “Bears.” Does that answer your question?

We saw a dress rehearsal of Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” at BAM’s Harvey Theater last night. There are only a few performances through May 2 so go buy your tickets right now! It was one of the most satisfying opera performances I have seen in a while — as music and as theater.

James has a good post on it.

Female Figure
From Ma’mariya. Predynastic Period, Naqada IIa (circa 3500-3400 B.C.). Terracotta, painted.

I have always meant to attend one of Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturday events, and this sounds like the one to choose. Not only has the “Egypt Reborn” exhibit opened, but the entertainment includes:

From 9 to 11 p.m., dance to Afro-beat and Middle-Eastern pop tunes spun by DJ Neva. A student of world music for 27 years, DJ Neva Wartell is resident DJ for “Nu World Soul,” a weekly world music dance party at Liquids in Manhattan.

Newsday has an article on the exhibit.

I suspect it will be an attractive crowd…