Artist Bill Viola has a show of work from two decades titled Bodies of Light, at James Cohan Gallery, through Dec 19. He sat down to talk about his work last week.
You had a residency at WNET a long time ago?
The first time I did something at WNET was in 1976; I did a piece called Four Songs that had to do with the passage of time, death, resurrection, but in a slightly different way than I deal with those topics now. It was broadcast on television. The first time my work was seen by large numbers of people, it was not in a museum, it was on NET, then it got syndicated and went to other public TV stations. I was involved with the TV Lab from around ‘75 thru maybe ‘81. That’s how I learned how to edit with high end professional equipment.
So many people have large format HD screens at home now… it’s a readymade format for your work.
I totally agree. The advent of flat screens have reconnected video to the art forms that since the beginning of video I’ve felt it was connected to. The flat screen confirmed all that, and the connection between the moving image and painting. That’s what plasma screens have allowed. And people like Jim and Jane Cohan (of James Cohan Gallery) get artists’ work on a wall in a portable format, which is what the original notion of painting was—frescoes, or cave paintings. People in the late middle ages were able to travel much farther than ever before, and they wanted to take their little icons with them. So artists painted icons, and the paintings started to grow, and eventually it eclipsed fresco. read more
Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’re by now well aware of Glee, the new Fox TV show whose first full season starts this fall. The comedy centers around Will Schuester, a young high school teacher played by Matt Morrison, who tries to resuscitate the school’s ailing show choir, and judging from the one promo episode that aired last May, it is riotously funny—P.C., the show is not. (The creator of the show is Ryan Murphy of Nip/Tuck and Popular fame.) Fox has waged an unusually long, intense P.R. campaign that started with the airing of that single episode, followed by relentless advertising, online contests, and other promos. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Jane Lynch, who plays a wickedly cutthroat cheerleading coach at the fictional high school, is in the cast—my kids have been endlessly repeating her waterboarding and hepatitis jokes all summer. Yes, in the middle of the most serious economic mess we’ve seen in a long time is an extremely silly television show about … singing. Interesting.
A few weeks before Glee was set to air on television, I spoke with Ralph S. Opacic, who is the founder, president, and executive director of the Orange County High School of the Arts. Matt Morrison graduated from OCHSA in 1997, and went on to do music theater, including South Pacific, Light in the Piazza, and Hairspray.
Opacic and I spoke about how he went about starting an arts school back in the 1980s, the ongoing effort to get funding for his school, what Matt Morrison was like as a high school student, and what on earth “show choir” singing is. Full disclosure: I am old enough that when I attended public high school “show choirs” did not exist. read more
One of the more fascinating developments in contemporary art over the past 10 or 15 has been rise of a new, far-flung class of artists from China, India, Latin America and the Middle East. Though obviously varied, these artists all use techniques borrowed from the Conceptual and Minimal Art which first emerged in the United States and Europe during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and thus, their work does share certain characteristics: It tends to take the form of very large and dramatic installations, often created with found or recycled objects. Photography, video and film are likewise often incorporated. More to the point, while the work appears to be Western on the surface, it is rooted in the artist’s particular culture of origin, and usually mixes biography with larger historical or social referents. This work, in other words, represents the first art movement that is the direct result of globalism, and not surprisingly, these artists have become a staple of international art fairs and surveys like the Venice Biennale. Adel Abdessemed, whose show “Rio” is currently on view through May 9 at David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, is a good example.
Abdessemed, who was born in Algeria in 1971, is ethnically a Berber. He left his country in 1994 for France shortly after the start of a decade-long period of political upheaval precipitated by the Algerian military when it canceled elections won by the Islamist party in 1992. Recently resettled in New York, Abdessemed continues to spend part of his time in Paris, and his work could be easily interpreted as an allegory of his peripatetic life. Telle mère tel fils (which translates as “Like Mother Like Son”), for instance, was created out of the nose and tails sections of three commuter airliners; connected by a tunnel made of white felt, the piece twists and turns like a giant serpent. read more
It’s hard enough for anyone to make sense of historical events as they unfold, but imagine trying to create art out of them. That is, of course, what political artists try to do, though not without the danger of succumbing to tendentiousness. For the past three decades, however, Jenny Holzer has managed to avoid this pitfall precisely because she’s generally avoided references to current affairs. Instead, she’s focused on the broader issue of how language itself is used a political tool. Thus, her signature “truisms”— “strong sense of duty imprisons you,” “an elite is inevitable”—deconstruct the dynamics of authority by aping its voice; yet they don’t really say anything. That is the genius of her approach.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of “Protect Protect,” the 15-year survey of Holzer’s work now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 31, is that much of it departs significantly from her usual reliance on ambiguity. While the show features plenty of the L.E.D (Light Emitting Diode) installations for which the artist is rightly famous, it also includes oil on linen paintings based upon redacted government documents that pertain to our invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. There are, for example, field reports of civilian killings, as well as a letter from a father pleading for leniency for his soldier son about to be court-martialed. There are fingerprints and handprints of suspected terrorists and enemy combatants. Though heavily censored, the meaning of these papers are abundantly clear. I contacted Holzer, and she was kind enough to answer a few questions about this material via email. read more
I’m not sure at what point in Manhattan’s past the term “uptown” became interchangeable with “upscale,” and “downtown” was joined at the hip with “hip.”
But one thing that has happened as cross-cultural borders get fuzzier is that we are seeing so-called “uptown” performers—musicians you’d have expected in the past to see only at places like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center—now appearing in club settings where food and liquor are served. One new such event is the Monteverdi Coronation of Poppea being staged by Opera Omnia from August 21 to 27 at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street. Opera Omnia’s Wesley Chinn has chosen this more casual pub venue, where perhaps younger concertgoers will go with a group of friends in place of a standard bar night.
Also this week, the renowned Emerson String Quartet is performing—literally and figuratively—both uptown AND downtown. The quartet’s members are violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton, and cellist David Finckel. Their downtown evening at Joe’s Pub on Wednesday, August 20, features a … read more
Since 2005, Australian native Kathryn Bennetts has been artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders, which makes its full-company Manhattan debut with William Forsythe’s Impressing the Czar at the Lincoln Center Festival in the Rose Theater. Impressing the Czar, described simply as a history of western civilization conveyed with humor, was choreographed in 1988, and has not been performed in the US since 1989. Bennetts spoke from Antwerp by phone on July 12, prior to coming to New York.
Impressing the Czar seems like an ambitious work with which to acquaint New York with the company.
It’s a great way to acquaint New York with the company, because it shows the many talents they have. It’s a piece on a very large scale, and it shows off the company very well. read more
In April, Esquire magazine did a photo spread called “Symphony in Black,” profiling some on-the-rise musicians on today’s classical scene. All were young, talented, hip. One musician I was surprised to see didn’t make it into that piece is José Franch-Ballester, a 27-year-old clarinet whiz who is a native of Moncofa, Spain. New Yorkers take note: Franch-Ballester is giving a recital (free!) on July 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. The concert is part of the summer-long series of free events in lower Manhattan called the River to River Festival.
There’s absolutely nothing bad-boy about Franch-Ballester (pronounced FrAHnk Bai-yess-TAIR), who judging from my recent conversation with him is completely down to earth and rather endearingly modest, considering his accomplishments and talent. He only mentions in passing that at age 27 he is simultaneously on the roster of three of the most prestigious … read more
I’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train at least six or seven times, including when it recently aired on Reel 13. With its tight screenplay adapted from the book by Patricia Highsmith (author of the Tom Ripley books), fabulously evil villain played by Robert Walker, pivotal train scenes and tense back-and-forth between Farley Granger’s Forest Hills tennis match and Walker’s evidence-planting trip to the scene of a murder, the film has always been one of my Hitchcock favorites.
Of course, music plays a huge part in Strangers on a Train, as it does in all Hitchcock movies. Many individual Hitchcock films have been studied for their music—particularly the films scored by Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the most famous film-music cue, the shower scene in Psycho—but Jack Sullivan’s detailed guide to music in Hitchcock films, which comes out in paperback on May 20, appears to be the most comprehensive. The book, Hitchcock’s Music, covers all the Hitchcock films, from the early silents to the British films like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes and the best-known films like Rebecca, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. The book, which won a 2007 ASCAP Deems Taylor Best Book of the Year award in the concert music category, is so detailed that you may feel the need to go watch numerous scenes again, just to listen to the music cues you somehow missed.
Recently I spoke to Jack Sullivan about Alfred Hitchcock’s film music, how the director’s carefully plotted approach to making movies extended to its music, and the post-Hitchcock era of film scoring.
Jennifer Melick: How far back does your interest in Hitchcock’s movies go?
Jack Sullivan: Back to my childhood. I was just old enough to probably sneak out and see Vertigo. Then right after that I saw North by Northwest and Psycho. As a kid, I remember being riveted by the music. read more
Composer David Lang, one of the co-founders of New York’s Bang on a Can, has been a prolific presence on the city’s contemporary music scene for more than twenty years. But even he admits that it came as something of a surprise when he was announced as the recipient of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music for his work The Little Match Girl Passion (click here to hear the work on Carnegie Hall’s website), a heartbreakingly humble “opera” scored for just four voices and percussion. Lang sat down for an chat about the inception of the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired piece shortly after the Pulitzer announcement.
Download the interview as a podcast here, or listen to it as streaming audio after the jump. read more
The opera stage is filled with tragic characters who have lost touch with reality—one of the best-known examples being Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, seen in Mary Zimmermann’s new Met production earlier this season with the high-flying soprano Natalie Dessay.
But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez tells it in his new book The Soloist, out from Putnam on April 17, real-life tragedies with mental illness at their center are playing out on our streets every day, and some of them involve musicians. Lopez literally stumbled on a story one day three years ago: a middle-aged, schizophrenic homeless man playing a violin in Pershing Square, who clearly had had some serious musical training in a former life.
The story of this man, Nathaniel Ayers—who once attended Juilliard—was originally the subject of a series of newspaper columns. Readers began donating musical instruments, and Lopez became more and more involved in trying to get Ayers off the streets and into treatment. The book is now being made into a movie for release later this year, directed by Joe Wright (Atonement) and starring Jamie Foxx as Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez. read more
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