Robert Wilson’s brand of theater art was seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as early as 1969. Forty years after his debut there, Wilson’s work returned to BAM this month with a vivid of Heiner Muller’s Quartett, a 1981 reworking of the 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It opens with an almost 10-minute long tableau that introduces all five characters—Muller’s play calls for only two actors, but Wilson, like when he first staged the work back in 1988, adds three other actors who don’t speak—followed by the Marquise de Merteuil (played by Isabelle Huppert) reciting in breakneck speed (and in French!) what sounds like a letter to her former lover, Valmont (Ariel Garcia Valdes).
The rest of the play unfolds with Wilson’s now-familiar design: minimal sets, a few Parzival Chairs, some sleek, Samurai-esque costumes, and intense, deeply hued lighting changes. read more
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
As I write this, it’s 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, and I’m listening to WNYC radio host Terrance McKnight count down the last 30 minutes before New York City’s all-classical WQXR becomes part of the WNYC public radio family. The change to a new radio frequency is being celebrated with a live broadcast of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Carnegie Hall concert, which features Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks,” Webern’s Fuga from Bach’s Musical Offering, the Beethoven Violin Concerto, and the world premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Concerto with Echoes. In a few minutes I will move my Bose radio pre-sets so that there is a reserved spot at 105.9 instead of 96.3, and here’s hoping the signal makes it over the airwaves to where I live. The is the main worry that traditional radio listeners may have about the change, other than duplication of radio hosts and programs during the hours when both WNYC-FM and WQXR hosted all-classical programs. (You can view a WQXR program schedule at the WNYC website and a bunch of other FAQs about the switch can be found at here.)
Terrance McKnight sounds pretty happy and proud of the fact that an all-classical station has been preserved in any form in the city of New York. read more
If you believe the adage that no publicity is bad publicity, then perhaps the Met’s opening-night Tosca Monday night was a success. By now, you’ve probably read about the prolonged booing that greeted Luc Bondy’s new production, which starred Karita Mattila as Tosca, Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi, and George Gagnidze as Scarpia. Yes, in operaworld people get more than a little upset when you change the plot—the directorial equivalent of spitting on tradition. (You can read more about the brouhaha in HuffPo and the New York Times.)
I, however, was not in the house, surrounded by other lovers of opera and opera tradition, when this all transpired. Instead, when the evening began at 6:30, I was 20 blocks away in Times Square. I was curious to see what sort of reception Puccini might get in the noisy crossroads of the world. read more
There is such an wealth of culture in New York, particularly in the fall season, that it’s often difficult for presenters to make their offerings stand out. French Institute (FIAF), however, with its Crossing the Line festival (video here), has managed to both expand its genres and refine its mission to create a sort of core sample of contemporary French culture. This year, that includes culinary arts—so integral to France—in addition to many other events, most of which elude genre pigeon-holing. They blend varying strands of dance, art, film, and performance with one certain element—French essence. The festival is curated by Lili Chopra, FIAF’s artistic director, and Simon Dove, director, School of Dance at Arizona State University.
Festivities kick off in Central Park on Saturday, Sep 12 with Le Bal NYC, a mash-up of choreography, audience participation, and picnic outing. French choreographers (“established and emerging”) will teach short dances to the public, which gets a first-hand look at the dance performing process. Meanwhile, chefs—including NY’s David Chang and Wylie Dufresne, reportedly—will be prepping bento boxes of edible treats. read more
To be trapped in Soho in a hellish, multi-room environment that has been, or is, inhabited by mutants or delinquents—this might occur once in a blue moon, but twice in one week? Yup. (And I’m not talkin’ about Topshop.) Once at Here Arts Center, where Los Grumildos was on view last week, and again at Deitch Projects’ Wooster Street space, where Jonah Freeman/Justin Lowe’s Black Acid Co-op is up through August 15.
“Grotesque. Charming. Sordid. Tiny.,” is how the installation by Peruvian artist Ety Fefer is concisely described on the postcard for Los Grumildos, part of Here’s puppetry program. Foot-tall puppets—hybrids of humans and crustaceans, with lobster claws, scorpion tails, and extra limbs—in individual terrariums “play” various instruments, their herky-jerky movements driven by small motors. read more
Radio station WQXR has found a buyer. In the rough-seas economy we’re in, this news might qualify as a small miracle.
On Tuesday afternoon came the announcement that 73-year-old all-classical radio station WQXR—owned by the financially-troubled New York Times—has been sold to public radio station WNYC. The plan is for WNYC to continue broadcasting in an all-classical format at the new frequency of 105.9 FM, beginning in October. That’s in addition to WNYC’s existing FM and AM stations.
It’s been known for some time that WQXR was one of the assets the Times wanted to sell to free up some badly needed cash. read more
This week I’ve been re-reading sections of Oliver Sacks’s 2007 book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain in which the neuroscientist delves into the science behind his long-term interest in music. As Sacks said last October at Frederick P. Rose Hall, where Musicophilia was awarded an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, since he was about 5 years old he has had two loves: Bach and smoked salmon. Sacks, now 75, reports that both of these preferences have been remarkably consistent over time.
Finding out why we have the musical preferences we do is just one of the investigations of Nova: Musical Minds, which airs this month and was inspired by that book. read more
Why do we hear music the way we do? Why do human beings make music in the first place? Are its various components things that can even be explained by science? These were topics covered in just one of the events, “Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus,” at this year’s five-day World Science Festival from June 10 to 14. The festival was packing them in at events on topics like fMRI brain research, dark energy, quantum mechanics, microbiology, and behavioral science. Many of the presentations were affairs bringing together experts from diverse fields to bring their joint creative focus to commuter traffic, the earth’s atmospheric levels of CO2, and the question of nothingness.
So judging from the sellout response, New Yorkers are pretty interested in science—as entertainment, anyway, with renowned scientists mixing it up with Hollywood actors and poets and journalists and Juilliard-trained musicians in a sort of cross-cultural musico-scientific extravaganza. read more
Yayoi Kusama, born in 1929, has been a fixture in contemporary art circles for decades, and rightly so. Her obsessive canvases (“infinity nets”) and humorous, eye popping installations allow her work to traverse the verdant median between rigorous abstraction and loosely knit narrative. That her personal backstory, dealing with dark psychologial impulses and obsessiveness, manifests itself in her work and makes it all the more rich. Her popularity, in fact, is so widespread that her work suffers a bit from overexposure, even predictability. It can fit in just about any group show for the reasons above.
That’s partly why her current show at Gagosian is so impressive. read more
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