Hippie Chic at the MFA

We also went to the Boston MFA last week, first time in four years.  Not just to see the current special exhibit on Hippie Chic.  But we did see that.

As a fashion exhibit it was great.  That is, as an exhibit of clothes that even at the time would have been more expensive than I could have afforded and more fashionable than I could have pulled off (or put on), and that anyway I've only seen in photos, and that are thus are worth paying money to ogle in a museum, it was fine.  You know, if you listen to the music of the period, you've seen photos of Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Nicks, Grace Slick, Lulu all wearing stuff like this, so it's nice to see it in person, in a kind of starfucking sort of way.

I did take issue a little bit with the characterization of it all as hippie.  Predictably, given my own obsessions.  The exhibit did gesture toward the fact that this was, after all, for the most part haute couture trying to co-opt street fashion:  big business stealing kids' ideas and trying to sell them back to them.  And in the case of the hippies, who like the punks a generation later were pretty much a DYI kind of movement, into found and made objects above all, the ideological contradictions get pretty heightened.  Some of these dresses and suits were in-the-scene and of-the-scene, but some were the Man, pure and simple.  I can understand why, coming from an institutional context that's more or less dependent on charitable contributions from the Man, why that tension wasn't interrogated more.  But still. 

Yale Center for British Art

We were in New Haven for a couple of days this week, and I went to the Yale Center for British Art. 

I'm not an Anglophile.  At least, I don't consider myself one.  In fact when I was younger I had arguments with Americans who I thought were too Anglophilic - childish arguments, to be sure, but the point is that although I don't consider myself a cultural nationalist neither do I have a thing for British culture for its own sake.  That said, I do like my share of UK bands, writers, films, etc.  And over the last decade or so I've developed a real love for 18th and 19th century British painters. 

I don't think I realized quite what a love it was until I spent the afternoon at this gallery, though.  I'm not sure I can quite explain it, either.  I can explain my love for old portraiture in general - a good portrait that really captures the personality of the sitter is the best way I know to connect across the centuries, to feel common humanity from a remote age.  But why British portraits of that period, more than American?  More than French?  More than Dutch?  (Well, maybe not more than Dutch.)  I
have to think about this more.

So since I haven't thought about it enough I'll just link to a couple of masterpieces I saw and tell you why I loved them.

One is a painting that I think most viewers would agree is a masterpiece:  Reynolds's "Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue."  Reynolds makes her look utterly dreamy, yet completely conscious of her charm - you expect her to say something bawdy, or just to wink, at any moment.  She's so young, and so alive. 

The other is one that perhaps a lot of viewers would pass by:  George Beare's "Portrait of an Elderly Lady and a Girl."  Certainly it lacks the perfection of the Reynolds.  Mrs. Sgt. T once taught me that most portraitists used generic bodies and only had the subjects pose for the face, and you can really see it in the old woman's body and arms, which so utterly fail to match her face.  But that face - so unabashedly aged, so unglamorous, so real.  And the granddaughter, fresh-faced but a little awkward, a little bored.  Again:  real.

*

Is it connection that I feel?  Is it the conviction that, unlike the subjects of French or Dutch portraits, if I somehow met these people I could speak with them and understand what they said?  An illusion, of course, but a powerful one.  And yet they're British, and I'm not, right?  Does this mean that I don't feel American?  That I don't think there's a distinction between British and American culture, either in the 18th century or now?  Would I have been a Tory in '76?  Do I agree with the Booker Prize being thrown open to Americans? 

The Jazz Loft Project at the University of Arizona

Was down in Tucson visiting family last week, and we went to check out the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.  It is, from all available evidence, a pretty awesome thing, a world-class collection of art photography, housed in a big dedicated facility at UA.  The tragedy is that they have no permanent/rotating exhibit of their own stuff.  At least not on-site.  There's a room at the University of Phoenix that always features CCP holdings.  But that's in Phoenix.  An hour and a half away (on desert highways with psychotic drivers).

So at the CCP you're only going to see whatever traveling exhibit they're hosting at the moment.  Right now that's fine, though, because they're hosting a selection of images and sounds from The Jazz Loft Project. 

For those who don't know, the Jazz Loft Project is located at Duke, with UA collaboration.  It's devoted to the work of photographer W. Eugene Smith, who worked for Life before (in true mock-heroic Beatnik fashion) leaving his wife and kids to hole up in a loft on 6th Ave in NYC, where he let jazz musicians jam, artists and other bohemian types hang out, and his own talent flourish.  Between '57 and '65 he shot endless rolls of film (okay, 1447 is the official count), and also recorded, on reel-to-reel, a lot of the jazz. 

(This was all evidently a thing back in 2009, when the project was opened and a book published and a radio series aired and everything.  Being an inveterate non-listener of NPR, I missed it.  So it was pretty awesome to learn all this, as if by accident, last week in Tucson.)

The exhibit in Tucson consists of selections from the photos, with selections from the tapes playing in the background, along with some realia - a tape deck, etc.  It's a very well thought out exhibit, split more or less evenly between what seem to have been the two directions in which Smith's lens was pointed:  in and out. 

"In" was, of course, the scene inside the loft, jazz musicians working on their art, as well as scattered hangers-on who happen to cross into the visual field.  The photos on display are chosen very carefully, it seems;  they mostly focus on Thelonious Monk and a large band he was rehearsing, in the loft, for major concert appearances.  It was a little disappointing not to see a wider variety of musicians, but it was also really interesting to see this band, and Monk in particular, in so many different, often casual, situations.  Making music, getting ready to make music, talking about making music, coming down from making music.  As a jazz lover, this was heaven.

"Out" was the world outside the loft, as seen from its windows.  The idea reminded me of the guy in Smoke who photographed the intersection in front of his shop every day, to track the change;  for all I know this is where Auster got the idea.  Smith gives us street views from above, people crossing the street, getting in and out of cabs, shopping at the florist's across the street, buying cigs at the luncheonette, talking about things the photographer can't hear, aging, playing in snow, pushing racks of dry cleaning, etc.:  totally mundane acts of city life.  If that was all they showed, they'd still be interesting from a documentary (and aesthetic:  some are quite striking compositionally or texturally) perspective.  But perspective is precisely what's fascinating about them:  since they're all shot from the loft windows, looking down, and sometimes are even framed by the windowsill or the fire escape he's looking through, you're constantly reminded of the separation between loft-dweller and community member.  You're forced to inhabit the point of view of the Man Underground (even if in this case he's above street level), experiencing ecstasies and debaucheries beyond society's understanding, gazing with detachment and perhaps muted adoration on the straight world below.  And once in a while he raises his eyes and catches a long shot of twilight traffic in the rain, and it's beautiful.

Really worth seeing.

Ukiyoe at the Portland Art Museum

Huge exhibit of Japanese woodblock prints going on now at the Portland Art Museum.  It's called "The Artist's Touch, the Craftsman's Hand."  They have a magnificent collection - not quite MFA-level, perhaps, but pretty damn good - and they've got a very large selection on display right now.  More than enough to intoxicate you, if you're at all prone to near-drunken ecstasy when looking at these things.  I am.

What's really nice about this show - I mean, beyond the amazing numbers of rare (even unique) and magnificent prints - is how it's arranged.  Rather than a chronological approach, they've laid it out thematically - a few rooms of kabuki-related prints, a few rooms of beauty prints.  And so rich is the collection that this gives them the chance to feature some really unusual stuff.  There's a whole room of prints depicting the 1923 Kantō Earthquake, for example. 

In short, it's extremely educational, as well as being just damn beautiful.  We've only been once, and for not nearly long enough;  we're going to swing an overnight trip sometime soon.  It's a show worth immersing yourself in.

Emissaries to the Tang exhibit at Narahaku

Part of our reason for going to Japan was so Mrs. Sgt. T could visit Nara. Nara is the focus of much of her research, and this year happens to be the 1300th anniversary of its founding as the first permanent (at least, it was intended to be permanent) Chinese-style capital in Japanese history. Those may sound like a lot of qualifiers, but believe me, it was a big deal.

Usually when we visit Nara we hit a lot of temples. This time we didn't have much time; instead we visited museums and special exhibits. The big one of these was at the Nara National Museum: "Imperial Envoys to Tang China: Early Japanese Encounters with Continental Culture." The Japanese title, Dai Kentôshi Ten 大遣唐使展, was much more concise. It can be, because basically everybody in Japan knows what the kentôshi were: they were official envoys sent by the Japanese court to Tang China. There were nearly twenty such missions between the 7th and 9th centuries, and their job was to not only do diplomatic stuff (that's historiographical terminology, by the way) but to bring back Chinese culture, as much and as thoroughly as possible. Basically they were supposed to learn a lot of stuff, and bring back a lot of stuff. What kind of stuff? Books. One of the things they did was to buy as many books as they could bring back in their ships.

Mrs Sgt T's joke this whole trip was that we feel like kentôshi when we go back to Japan. It's true: as academics whose subject is Japan but whose base is the US, in particular a part of the US where books in Japanese are not quite as plentiful or easily obtained as one might wish, one of the things we do when we get back to Japan is to buy as many books as we possibly can. Scholarly monographs and manga, weighty reference works and light trash novels: we order them used, we buy them new, we pile them up and put 'em on boats. We're kentôshi, no doubt about it. And it's some comfort to know we're following in illustrious footsteps. Those who study history are sometimes delighted to realize they're repeating it.

So that was one thing I got out of the Great Kentôshi Exhibit: a better understanding of these people to whom the Mrs was comparing us. I love getting the joke, on those rare occasions I do.

The other thing I learned was: dude, emaki are awesome. I mean, I knew about them, and that they're very important. I've known people who studied them. But they're a little before my own period of specialization, and for some reason I guess I'd just never paid much attention. But they had one on display, the Kibi Daijin nyûtô emaki 吉備大臣入唐絵巻, or (as the MFA, which owns it and lent it to Narahaku for the exhibit, titles it) "Minister Kibi's Adventures in China." I love how the MFA cataloguers (donor?) add that "Adventures," as superhero-ish as it sounds, and as unjustified a "translation" as it is, because it perfectly captures the direct, vervacious spirit of this scroll. Japanese government official travels all the way to China, braving horrible dangers, only to face more peril at the hands of the wily Chinese - but don't worry, kids, he outsmarts them all!

This part was on display: the Chinese challenged Kibi to beat their masters at go. He cheated - he swallowed a piece. They try to find it - the way you try to find any game piece one of your kids has swallowed. You examine his spoor. Awesome!

Only a portion of the scroll was unrolled for view, but what was there was great. Really made me want to know the whole story. Eight years in Boston, and I only discover this jewel now, in Nara.

Taliesin West

The last art-related thing on our trip to Arizona that I haven't blogged about is the first one we did, which was our visit to Taliesin West. This is the home/school Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built in the desert outside of Scottsdale, his winter home.

I've been putting off blogging about it because I feel I should really have something fine to say about it. Something worthy of it. I don't. I mean, it was awesome. We took the three-hour tour, and I'd recommend it. It really was worth the $60.

It was worth it because it was really nice to be able to see the whole place, or at least as much as is open to the public: the living areas, the working areas, the gardens, the guest house. It's still functioning as a school, the docents made clear; and those docents - what a trip. We were guided around by this elderly German woman who knew Mr. Wright, and spoke of him in very reverent tones. At break time we were seated at a table with this even older woman in a wheelchair who had spent most of her youth with Wright at the two Taliesins, and from her wheelchair she regaled us with tales of life at the school. Both of these women, as well as the way everybody stressed the self-contained nature of life at Taliesin (Wright really seems to have controlled all aspects of his students' lives) reminded me a lot of some of the religious colonies I've visited - Amana, for example. A totally secular modernist cult? Not so far-fetched, I guess...

But that's a little paranoid. Mostly it was just three hours of looking at beautiful, even noble modernist architecture that really does live up to its promise. Interacting respectfully with the landscape, while at the same time feeling extremely mod and aesthetically well-thought-out. In fact it almost felt comfortable - Wright's stuff, if taken to its logical conclusion, can lead to unhappy hipsters, but I don't think I'd be too unhappy living there.

Ted DeGrazia's Gallery in the Sun

So my experiences with the Heard Museum and thinking about Indian issues came a day after visiting a place in Tucson called the Gallery in the Sun, devoted to the work of a local artist named Ted DeGrazia.

That's the wrong way to put it: it makes it sound like somebody established a gallery to showcase DeGrazia's work. DeGrazia established the gallery himself, to showcase his work. The Art World Elites (which in this case evidently meant art historians and curators at the University of Arizona) didn't give him any respect and wouldn't show his work, so he decided to show it himself.

This was a point of pride to him and still is to his fans, evidently. And the resulting gallery is definitely something to see - whatever else I may say about him before I'm done, I want to make it clear that it's worth visiting this place. In the way it embodies DeGrazia's originality and (in some ways) cussedness, it expresses something essential to understanding the Southwest. And the buildings themselves are pretty interesting, incorporating local materials and designs ranging from prison doors to adobe walls, rock floors, junk sculpture in the gardens, and a sort of romanticized primitivist mission-style church on the grounds. The church in particular is pretty impressive: sure, it embodies an embarrassingly romanticized view of poor Indian spirituality, but it finds him pursuing his aesthetic with enough tenacity and scale to make you want to classify him as a visionary, an authentic American wacko.

The problem is his art. He's best known for, and his gallery is full of, Indian kitsch – adorable, utterly infantalized paintings of Indian children, either with no faces at all or nothing but big black eyes and teeny-tiny mouths. At best his work is picture-book quality, with a certain naïve charm, a kind of Madeline-like joy in color and motion. Very midcentury, and it's not hard to see why DeGrazia was given his greatest recognition, having one of his paintings turned into a UNICEF greeting card in 1960.

But the charm wears off pretty quickly once you start to think about those faces. Not just the faces, but they're emblematic of how his art totally erases the individuality of his subjects, and therefore their humanity. They're objectified in the most all-encompassing way imaginable - they're decorative, nothing but harmless and colorful urchins. His paintings are filled with an immense positive feeling toward his subjects - he loves these wide-eyes mouthless Indian children - but also a colossal cluelessness about how offensive it is to reduce the rightful proprietors of this land to mute ornament.

The kicker, for me, is the museum's boast that DeGrazia had not only studied at UA, but had worked in Mexico City with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. So he's not a "visionary" (okay, I'll stop using that term, since I don't even like it), not even really an outsider. In fact, I'd argue that he was an insider, or about the closest you could get to being one in midcentury Arizona: somebody with access to the institutions of high culture, and the opportunity to train with recognized masters. The problem is, he came out of these encounters just as clueless as he went in: to have studied with Rivera and Orozco and still paint native people the way he did speaks of a truly remarkable obtuseness.

I'm glad I went.

Contemporary art at the Phoenix Art Museum

So we went to a lot of museums and artistic things when we were in Arizona for Christmas, but I haven't blogged a one of them yet. I've been meaning to. Here's one.

Everyone told us that the Heard Museum of Native Cultures and Art is the one to see in Phoenix. We eventually hit it, too, but we needed to check out the Phoenix Art Museum, too: for professional reasons, we have to check out any collection of Asian art within reach, no matter how piddling.

And the Phoenix Art Museum's Asian art collection is pretty piddling. But its collection of contemporary art is surprisingly impressive. It takes up two whole floors, huge galleries, and what's on display is at least equal to what we saw at the ICA. (Looking back at what I wrote about the ICA, I figure I might as well note that the PhAM is a beautiful museum: on the gray day we went, the building's gray walls gave it an air of dignity and set it apart from the sand color of the rest of downtown Phoenix; also goes nicely with the palo verdes in the garden.)

What do they have? I wish I'd taken notes. Here's what I remember:

A huge pair of Morimuras, riffing on the Mona Lisa.

Another Josiah McElheny, complete with fulsome wall text - in fact, the wall text was clearly written by the same person. Which tells me that the curators at the MFA, PhAM, and ICA probably had nothing to do with writing it: it was him or his dealer. Interesting. This one wasn't as captivating conceptually as the other two I've seen, although it benefitted from being next to the Peter Wegner colored-paper installation (click on the link and scroll down). The McElheny reflect the Wegner in very drippy, psychedelic ways. No doubt it's not what McElheny intended, but it's cool.

The Wegner itself is magnificent. It's so bright that it dominates the room its in, and the sheer beauty of its colors makes me wonder why so much serious art shies away from bright colors. Is the pleasure of color suspect, because it's pleasure? Then again, I like psychedelic Fillmore posters, too.

My favorite piece was by Kusama Yayoi. Entitled "You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies" (a Japanese title if there ever was one), it's a big, irregularly-shaped, mirror-lined room, unlit except for hundreds of little lights on black cords hanging down from the ceiling. The lights, no bigger than fireflies, change colors, and sway as you walk through the room. They don't give off much light: once you're in the room you're lost. You don't know where the walls are, or where the exit is. You're forced to walk along with your arms outstretched, brushing aside fireflies and hoping you can find a wall. But all the while you're breathless from the illusion that you're in an infinite space of fireflies. Really amazing. Even now, a month later, I kind of feel like I'm subtly changed for having been there.

China Design Now at the Portland Art Museum

Saw a major traveling exhibit on contemporary Chinese design, China Design Now, at the Portland Art Museum yesterday. My understanding is that this is exhibit started at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in early 2008; I don't know where it's been since, but somebody at the PAM said it was the last stop.

My second reaction first: this seems like it was planned as a big global PR blitz (given that it's China we're talking about I was tempted to call it a propaganda effort, and really, what's the difference?) on the eve of the Olympics. That the Beijing Olympics are over now doesn't make it any less interesting, though.

The exhibit is formally divided into three parts: "Shenzhen: Frontier City," "Shanghai: Dream City," and "Beijing: Future City." But read as PRopaganda, the show essentially breaks down into two parts. The first half (in the PAM the break conveniently happens between the two floors of the exhibit) celebrates the explosion of design ideas that came with the opening up of the country to a market economy. The message: we're cool, we're hip, we're capitalist, we're market-savvy: don't fear us. The second half looks at designers who acknowledge social problems in their work, and architects and city planners who strive for sustainability. The message: we have an open exchange of ideas, and despite everything you saw in the first half of the exhibit, we're not about to let capitalism create new problems: don't fear us.

To all of which I think the only appropriate response is: maybe.

But that was my second reaction. My first reaction, just as honest and maybe healthier, was: cool. The first (ultra-capitalist) half especially is a garden of visual delights, a barrage of poster, video, textile, tactile, and audio pleasures. My favorite might have been the most low-key part of the exhibit: a wall of posters from twenty years of design competitions/exhibitions. Brilliant play with Chinese characters.

This is an essential exhibit, in spite of any qualms it may inspire. Or maybe partly because of those qualms: spend some time in the Nike corner, where Portland's favorite world-destroyer tries to convince you how authentically it's connecting with contemporary Chinese street culture and liberating underground design golpes. Don't fear us.

Diego Rivera, Shôwa Sophistication at the MFA

We went to the MFA last night, probably our last visit before we move. We regret not having gone more over the past year. We were busy.

The exhibit in the photography gallery has been changed: now it's work by Edward Weston and his associates from his time in Mexico. Nice, but even nicer is the companion exhibit of prints by Diego Rivera and his contemporaries. It included two works that stopped me in my tracks.

One is a copy of Rivera's famous (it turns out) lithograph of Zapata. You can find color versions if you google it, but this was the black and white lithograph. Pretty striking. Look at the expressions on the faces of the peasants behind him. Look at the horse, like the white steed in paintings of St. George. A very striking picture.

The other was a two-sided print Rivera made of Frida Kahlo, called La Mujer. On the front is a realistic, and beautiful enough, sketch of Frida nude. But on the back (I couldn't find an image online), Rivera had printed the image again, but twice, once facing left and once facing right. At least, that's how the caption described it, but I think he did more. It looked like Frida had six arms and six legs, or a hundred, all fanned out. She looked like a thousand-armed Kannon. This was the Frida Kahlo of myth.

An even better exhibit was this one: Shôwa Sophistication: Japan in the 1930s. About half of this was landscape or animal screens that, the exhibit noted, had decorated a wedding chapel in Tokyo until a few years ago, and they looked it: gaudy.

But the other half was a bunch of really striking nihon-ga of men and women in cutting-edge modern situations - the proverbial moga and mobo.

This image of two tearoom waitresses, by Saeki Shunkô, was a highlight. The setting is tres modern, as are the girls' uniforms, and that, rendered in the mostly 2D style of the nihon-ga, is already fun. The placement of the figures, drastically off center, is another striking feature. But look closely at their poses. The girl on the right is stiff from the waist up, looking expressionlessly at the viewer; but from the waist down she's relaxed, in an almost sensuous position. Sensuous, but also maybe recalling the graceful stances of ancient Buddhist statuary. The girl on the left is a little more demure in the placement of her legs, but her upper body is utterly relaxed, and she's gazing off beyond the border of the picture, bored or wistful. Really nice. There's another Shunkô there that's just as impressive, Umbrella - I couldn't find an image on-line. Two girls sharing an umbrella. These girls, one in a red flower-patterned kimono, the other in a solid red overcoat, form just as pleasing a contrast. I guess this was Shunkô's thing.

Then of course the MFA seized the opportunity to bring out their masterpiece by Tateishi Harumi, Clover. They had it out in another exhibit a few years ago. I just love this painting. The colors and composition, the texture (when you get to see it up close: the bamboo grass in the top left just leaps out at you), and all other technical aspects, sure, but more than that the way it captures this wonderful sense of freedom. The girls' school uniforms accentuate that: they're stealing time, stealing leisure. Quite a bold thing for 1934, but not just a political statement (if it is one); a universal human emotion, I think. At least, this painting speaks to me.

Horace Silver: The Blue Note Years

Let's talk about record covers.

As part of his ongoing periodic exploration of jazz he doesn't know (which is still basically of it), the Tanuki recently decided to pick up a Horace Silver compilation. How does one choose a compilation? By what you know, is one way to do it. The Tanuki knew just enough of Horace Silver to know about three songs he definitely wanted ("Song For My Father," "Filthy McNasty," and "Nica's Dream"). That settled it, because only one comp had all three, a Japanese import called The Blue Note Years, part of a 20-disc series of anthologies of Blue Note artists released in Japan in 2004.

Now if you're at all into jazz and you've traveled, you quickly realize that some other countries pay a lot more attention to jazz than the U.S. does. This is certainly the case in Japan, where the classic American jazz labels' back catalogs often receive more respect (i.e. more and better reissues) than they do Stateside.

That's definitely the case with the Horace Silver disc in question. Musically, I think it's a better selection, and a fuller disc, than what I saw available domestically, but you can always debate track listings. What we're here to discuss is the cover, and the Japanese disc wins there hands down, and in a way that tells you about the respective attitudes.

The thing about Blue Note is that in their heyday they had an impeccable design sense. Some of the most evocative jazz photography ever, combined with innovative approaches to typography and sleeve design, made them pretty much the index of cool in the '50s and early '60s. This Japanese comp respects that. Note first the photo: black and white, in the best Blue Note tradition. Horace hunched over the piano, gazing off to the side, tie loose and hair in his eyes, looking young, earnest, and hip. He's subtly reflected in the piano lid; some sheet music (?) is blurry in the foreground, and the background is pleasantly nondescript. It's a fine photo, telling you that here's an artist who's both casual and dignified, hard-working and laid-back. Or something. Superimposed on the bottom right corner of the photo is the Blue Note logo, and at the bottom is a strip of turquoise with the artist's name and the title of the disc. The color is restful, and the strip is wide enough to be bold but thin enough to avoid overpowering the photo. The whole thing is evocative of the fine visual traditions of Blue Note.

Now let's look at what's available domestically. There's a four-disc set that's pretty attractive, but I want to confine this discussion to apples and apples: single-disc comps. The most widely-available one seems to be this 1990 disc called The Best Of Horace Silver. It's subtitled The Blue Note Years, but the tracklisting is different from the Japanese edition.

Again, though, let's forget about the tracks and look at the cover. The photo is nice enough; maybe not as attractive as the one on the Japanese comp, because Silver's expression is less complex, less intriguing; but nice enough. But the photo is overwhelmed by the color band that half frames it on the top and left. But the real problem is the lettering. Why is the S in Silver so damned big? Why is it alone given a white shadow? Why is Silver written with caps-and-lowercase when everything else on the cover is written in all caps or small caps? Above all, why are they using a serif typeface (a very serif typeface) when Blue Note was known for its sans-serif? The kicker is that uneven strip of dark blue at the very top. It's not quite a fade, not quite a stroke of paint or a piece of torn paper: what is it? And why is it there?

In short, the message this composition sends is confused. It's off balance, but not in a pleasing way, and it doesn't send a confident aesthetic message. It's not cool, and it never was, not even in 1990. But it looks like it might have been trying to be cool in 1990, and that's the problem. It suggests a crisis in confidence - a desperation. The very opposite of what the Japanese cover suggests.

There was a sequel to the 1990 disc, and it's even worse. Same layout, but an even less impressive photo, and now the half-frame is two-tone, with an awful peach color. The less said here the better.

There's a newer disc, but it doesn't seem to be that easy to find. It's on the big river site, but it doesn't come up early in your Horace Silver search. It's Horace Silver The Very Best, and its cover suffers from similar problems to the 1990 design. This is not an unattractive cover, although it has its puzzling elements. Why the almost psychedelic yellow-to-pink fade? Why is the photo treated so heavily? Why the cowboy movie font? But most of all, why doesn't this look in any way like a Blue Note record? No Blue Note logo on the front, an even more serify font, wacky colors, and photo that distances us from the artist. Once again we have a total lack of confidence in the whole proposition, a desperate attempt to appeal to clueless kids with a contemporary look, or a lame facsimile thereof.

Okay, so here's "Nica's Dream." And here's United Future Organization's version.

Shepard Fairey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Excellent exhibit all around: great works presented well.

1. All the way through (and it’s a large exhibit), I was struggling with Fairey’s work on a conceptual level. I get that he’s trying to sensitize us to the controlling messages that capitalism surrounds us with; I get that the Obey Giant is making explicit the propagandistic nature of advertising. We’re meant to come away from Fairey’s work questioning what we’re told.

But this just reminded me of one of my favorite t-shirts from the ‘80s: it said in big block letters “question authority,” and then below it was scrawled, “why?”

That is, I think Fairey’s determination to undermine authoritarian iconography sits uneasily next to his obvious political motivation. His work pushes a specific set of leftist (that’s the right word for his style, at least: not liberal, not progressive, not big-d Democratic, but old-skool leftist) opinions. More to the point, his work mobilizes in support of these opinions all his considerable skill at manipulating imagery.

Cool is a dictator, he’s saying. But he’s also using cool to push his leftist ideas. Doesn’t that make him a dictator, too? Obviously it does. Doesn’t that undermine his message - both his question-authority message and his leftist message?

Obviously it does. Let’s take an example that doesn’t have much to do with politics. One room of the exhibit focused on his music-celebrity related work: it has the Zeppelin album cover, the Jane’s Addiction concert poster, and a series of portraits of punk and rap stars. This series comes complete with (the wall text informs us) a playlist “curated” by the artist himself. In other words, if you want to be cool like Shepard Fairey, here’s what you listen to.

If you’ve been paying attention at all through the previous rooms, your bile is going to rise when you get to this one. Like, I’m really supposed to like Joe Strummer and Biggie just because Shepard Fairey does? As it happens, I really do like the Clash – but for the five minutes I spent in that room, I hated them.

The question is, is Fairey aware of this contradiction in his work? Are we supposed to be wary of his political message – are we supposed to stand back and see it as an example of propaganda to be distrusted? Or does he not get this, and seriously expect us to reject all authority but his own? After all, how many “question authority” t-shirts do you see without the “why”?

For the record, I think he is aware. He can’t not be. I think we’re supposed to struggle with the political message, to realize that even the most laudable expression of ideals (if you find his political ideals laudable, which I mostly do) can all too easily shade into authoritarianism. The protest sign can always turn into a control mechanism.

Does this neutralize his political message altogether, then? I don’t think so. He’s so consistently leftist in his message that I think he’s hoping it can get through, somehow. And this is maybe what I find most compelling about his work. All propaganda is suspect, and all ideologies that utilize propaganda are trying to control you: but he doesn’t let that excuse him from taking a stand. It makes his stand an extremely tortured one, undercut at every turn (I think) by his suspicion of his own authority, but it’s a stand nonetheless.

I don’t think he’s solved the dilemma. There are always going to be people who adopt Fairey’s political stances simply because it’s cool to do so – because he, along with Strummer, Biggie, and the other beautiful people on his playlist, have made leftist politics cool. People who won’t see the contradictions in his work. People who think “question authority” simply means “épater la bourgeosie.” No matter how carefully he balances his images, some people will allow themselves to be manipulated by them.

2. The other thing I was doing all the way through the exhibit was getting off on how cool his work is. Undeniably. He’s got a great design sense.

I was particularly glad to see this stuff in a museum, because he really rises to the occasion. His most famous work is in posters, designed to be seen from a distance, surrounded by (or covered with) graffiti and/or other posters, or (increasingly) seen on computer screens. In those contexts you get to appreciate his mastery of color and form and context, and maybe not much else.

But a lot of the work on the walls of the museum was incredibly textured. A lot of the pieces were his familiar iconography executed on a background of, for example, vintage newspaper clippings or scraps of wallpaper, making for a very delicate and multilayered work that would be hard to pull off on a brick wall or t-shirt. And some of these works are huge, allowing him space to recycle some of his own iconography (various manifestations of his Obey logos) as if they were benday dots, or pastiches of ancient wallpaper designs.

I found these recent works – the ones whose main motif is the soldier girl, the woman in her hijab (see the ICA's page), or the boy with the rifle – to be the most powerful. Partly because of what I just discussed, the intricate texturing with which they’re executed, resulting in (among other things) this overwhelming demonstration of how all iconography, maybe all ideology, is recycling other iconography or ideology. An empire of signs, indeed.

But I also loved these works because of their sheer beauty. They’re rich in the aesthetic qualities that make us glory in art: color, shape, texture, motion, balance, etc., etc. For an art that uses socialist realism as its foundation, Fairey’s work provides a pretty decadent level of pleasure. But there he goes undercutting his message again – it’s really hard to remember the Viet Cong girl is supposed to inspire you to realize a socialist utopia when he’s got you dreaming about picnicking with her in a field of daisies…

P.S. Yes, the Obama poster is there, or rather one version of it, a version that works better for a museum show than it would have for a campaign. And, speaking of the Obama poster, this is pretty funny.

Kurosawa Akira's Dreams (1990)

I've seen this film as many times as I've seen any of Kurosawa's, although I wouldn't place it very high on a list of his most perfect films.

It's deeply flawed. As mesmerizing as it can be (I'll get to that), it's almost devoid of drama. It can take you a pretty tall glass of green tea to keep you awake to the end. Part of this is due to the fact that Kurosawa decided to make it a message movie, and in the clumsiest possible way. Most of the dreams are, storywise, little more than a setting and a sermon. And the messages are trite at best (the survivor's guilt/futility of war theme in the fourth dream) and annoyingly naive at worst (Ryû Chishû's Luddite monologue in the eighth dream).

I keep coming back to it, though, for the visuals, which are simply stunning. Among other things, I see Dreams as Kurosawa's freest and most passionate engagement with the purely visual aspect of cinema. His most painterly work (I'm sure somebody else has said that).

The fifth dream, the one about Van Gogh, exemplifies what's right and wrong with this film. It's short on drama. Terao Akira as the Dreamer is in a museum looking at Van Goghs, then he's inside one of them. He tramps off through other Van Gogh landscapes brought to life, then finds the master himself. Van Gogh talks about how his obsession to paint is like a locomotive driving him, then rushes off. The Dreamer then walks through more Van Gogh scenes.

Scorsese as Van Gogh is one of my favorite examples of miscasting. Terao addresses him in French, and then Van Gogh opens his mouth and we get: New York. Right. To be fair, Japanese audiences wouldn't necessarily have noticed the accent, or indeed the fact that Scorsese's not really a great actor. They would have been able to focus on all the meta goodness of Kurosawa putting a fellow film director in this role. A painter of a different kind, you see.

Van Gogh's monologue is obvious stuff about the artist's need to capture what he sees. Kurosawa bolsters it with some particularly boneheaded filmmaking, cutting to a shot of a locomotive barreling down the tracks. Yes, I get it.

But the shots of the Dreamer wandering through the world as Van Gogh sees it are revelatory. We start out with real-world landscapes that have been tweaked slightly (vivid paint on wagons, etc.) to make them look like Van Goghs. Then we enter his world entirely, with Terao wandering through VG's sketches, and some paintings shown as paintings. My favorite is a cut we get to the Dreamer standing in front of some mammoth brushstrokes - so enlarged that we can see the shadows cast by raised ridges of paint. As he starts to walk we zoom out until the abstract brush-daubs resolve into a recognizable painting.

The result of all this is a surprisingly tactile engagement with Van Gogh's art. Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki, who happens to know something about art, is often pointing out wonderful brushstrokes and paint textures when we're in museums; clearly Kurosawa appreciates them too.

Here and elsewhere in the film he's fulfilling the promise he made by casting Scorsese: he's showing us the intimate connections between the art of the painter and the art of the filmmaker. On this level, if no other, Dreams is a masterpiece.

The American Visionary Art Museum

I probably shouldn't be allowed to write about the AVAM - in fact, I probably shouldn't be allowed to mention "Baltimore" in the same sentence as "art" -without having seen a couple of John Waters movies. And I haven't seen any. So, you know, make of this what you will.

Lemme say right up front that I really enjoyed this museum. I dug things like the big falling angel sculpture in the main building, the glass encrusted hearse in the barn, the photos of crop circles, the kinetic sculpture of the guy at his desk... (Wish I'd made notes on the names of the artists and titles of the pieces. Wasn't really thinking about blogging that day.)

That said, I found that my reaction to it has a lot in common with how I feel when I listen to David Byrne - (probably not) coincidentally, someone else who grew up partly in Maryland and then went elsewhere.

I.e., I usually really enjoy his music, but as often as not there's something in the way he sings, if not his lyrics, that tells me he's embarrassed about the music (if he's in his American Naive mode) or embarrassed in the face of the music (if he's in his World Music mode). And I can identify - boyoboy can I identify - but at the same time, sometimes you just want him to shaddup and let the music be what it is. The best example of David Byrne being David Byrne is Rei Momo, an album with some real nice Latin music, real hot stuff, and Byrne playing Self-Conscious White Guy on top of it all. There's art in the tension that creates, of course - hell, I like the album - but sometimes you just want to enjoy the music without the precious ironic positioning. That's when I reach for my revolver.

So: the American Visionary Art Museum. Which is to say, a big three-building museum devoted to what seems still to be known to most as outsider art, but which the AVAM prefers to describe as visionary. There's the Byrne effect, positioning the art for us a little too forcefully. Like, isn't there a lot of art that could deservingly be called visionary, but not outsider? That doesn't fall under the AVAM's brief?

Similarly, you read the wall texts (I spend far too much time in museums reading wall texts, I know), and they spend all this space talking about the biographies of the artists, always emphasizing the same things. It ends up constructing this sort of hierarchy of outsiderness: you know, like, the more time the artist has spent in a mental hospital, the more we're supposed to respect the art. Mmm. I understand the message: you don't have to go to the Right Art School and get your stuff displayed in a Hoity-Toity Soho Gallery to be an artist worth looking at. But overturning the hierarchy isn't destroying it. Reverse elitism is still elitism.

The thing is, the stuff on display doesn't need all this. There's some really cool stuff in there. That is, stuff that satisfies any definition of Art you'd care to give. My definition of art is pretty all-inclusive, but even by a narrower definition: high degree of craftsmanship, high degree of thought, lots of Meaning, challenging subject matter, tantalizing intertextuality, startling imagery, etc. All the hallmarks of Art. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.

Did somebody step on a duck?

Franz West and the Baltimore Museum of Art

So, on the same trip to Baltimore that showed us the Basilica, me and Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki also went to the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Looking around the web at blogs that discuss Baltimore, it's clear that a lot of people feel compelled to write and talk about how the place is falling apart. I don't have much to say about that, at least not here; partly because that's not what this blog is about, and partly because, well, what is there to say about it? Parts of Baltimore make you realize that The Wire really isn't exaggerating. It's important to understand, but on the other hand, that's not all there is. For what it's worth, the city also has some good museums. Enough, at any rate, to make it worth a weekend trip, if you're into that kind of thing.

I've been to three museums in Baltimore: the BMA, the Walters, and the American Visionary. The Walters I've been to a couple of times before, but we didn't go this time, so I won't blog it. The AVAM I'll try to get to soon. Meanwhile: the BMA.

My overall impression is that it's not well-rounded enough to make it one of the great museums, but some of its collections are world class, and they make it well worth a trip.

The Cone Collection is probably the best part. Some really first-rate work by Picasso, Matisse, and their contemporaries. The highlight for me was a room that recreates one end of one of the rooms in the Cone Sisters' apartment, so you can get an idea of what this art looked like in its natural habitat. Quite revealing, even decadent. I firmly believe great art should be available for public viewing, which conversely gives the idea of the private collection sort of the thrill of vice for me...and like most vice, I wouldn't want to do it, but it's fun to look at sometimes.

The Cone Collection proper is complemented by some choice modernist works in other rooms, both adjacent and on the floor below. Some good representative Surrealists, a fun Klee (is there any other kind? asks Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki). Some Bellows that was a revelation if all you know is his boxers and New York street scenes.

But I also found - and this was true last time I visited the BMA, before I really developed the distrust of the modern that I've sunk into now - that their collection of European masters was quite exciting, if not necessarily all that voluminous. A couple of Halses, a Rembrandt or two, a couple of wonderful van Dycks, and the like.

The special exhibit on right now is Franz West. About whom I'll freely admit I knew nothing before we got there. Very intriguing exhibit. It got me liking things I never thought I'd like. Such as The Ego and the Id (check the link; look at the slideshow; watch the assembly video). You really have to sit in it before you start to get it; when I did, I decided I disagreed with the wall label that said the pink one is the id and the multicolored one the ego. I think they're both the id. Also I liked Mirror in the Cabinet with Adaptives: you pick up this oddly shaped objet and go into this cubicle with a full-length mirror on the wall. Don't worry: nobody can see you. And before you know it, you're doing weird things with the objet. Twirling it like a baton, shouldering it like a musket, whatever. Thing is, the things are so curiously made, with such perfect heft and provocative form, that you can't help but want to play with them.

Play. Like. That's about where I'm going to leave it with West. I'm sure there's something more complicated going on - his 2D work, collages and paintings, make your brow hurt with the insistence that There's Something More Complicated Going On (rather than earning your interest) - but his sculptures are real friendly, while somehow escaping the wiseass feeling that a lot of interactive installations give me. So: I played. I liked.

Karsh 100 and the new Ritts room at the MFA

There are two, count 'em two, photography exhibits going on at the MFA in Boston right now. The Tanuki got to take a good long look at both of them a couple of weeks ago.

One is Karsh 100, a big retrospective on Canadian portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh. I've been aware of Karsh for a long time, although for an embarrassing reason: he did a portrait of Rush for their album Grace Under Pressure, and as an incredibly nerdy Rush fan in high school, I noticed this. Also caught an exhibit of his work at the BYU art museum in '95 or '96, must've been. The MFA's show is far more extensive, though.

It includes selections of his non-portrait work, to give a better picture of him as a technician, an artist, and I guess as a person; some of his experimental early work, before he discovered his gifts (and patronage) as a portraitist, and some of the photoessay work he undertook in his maturity, social-realist views of Canada's cities, industrial utopian jobs for corporate brochures. All interesting, but not as interesting as his portraits.

Which I'm not sure are interesting, at least not in a high-art way. I kept looking for something deeper in the portraits, but all I found was what the sitters wanted me to see - what, presumably, the people who commissioned the portraits (who weren't always the sitters) wanted me to see. Famous things like the iconic picture of Hemingway, all manly beard and weatherbeaten face; this is how people wanted to see him, and Karsh gave it to them, larger than life. Or, to pick an example less well known to people in this country, his portrait of Robertson Davies (can't find this anywhere on the web to link to - sorry), which makes the man look like a palimpsest of Dickens and Pound, which is kind of what his books read like.

And yet: there's usually a startling beauty in the portraits, because Karsh was a master of light and texture. Flesh takes on the luster of marble, hair becomes silk; he'll often focus not just on the face, but on one point in the face, the nose or the chin, and everything else is just a little blurry, but that one point is indelibly captured. How you feel about one of his portraits will often depend on how you feel about the sitter, and the persona he or she projects, but if you can ignore that, there's a lot of surface beauty to lose yourself in.

Which reminds me of a conversation I had recently about a Van Dyck in the Baltimore Museum of Art. When you look at a portrait of a wealthy Dutch patron, do you see the loveliness of light on silk, or do you see capital? They're both there, of course.

The other photography exhibit at the MFA right now is the inaugural rotation of the new dedicated photography rooms they've opened, the Herb Ritts and Clementine Haas Michel Brown Galleries. The theme of this one is the body, and it's a splendid collection of stuff to look at. It ranges from the most experimental of things to the most accessible, and it's all great.

The accessible end of things is Herb Ritts his very own self, and it's hard to argue with his humongous (that's an art historical term) portrait of Sinead O'Connor. I guess I really am hopelessly bourgeois, if this grabbed me as much as some of the thornier pieces in the exhibit. But it did.

Baltimore Basilica

Me and Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki were in Baltimore for the Thanksgiving holiday. While there spent a pleasant afternoon wandering around the Mt. Vernon area, and we ended up at the Baltimore Basilica.

Like the city it graces, the Basilica is off the beaten path for most tourists, but it's one of the great buildings the Tanuki has seen in this country. Take a look here, and read up on its history here.

In brief, it was designed in 1805 by Benjamin Latrobe, who also designed the U.S. Capitol. The Basilica uses a lot of the same ideas: classical columns and a dome inspired by the Pantheon. All of this gives the exterior an unexpected look for a cathedral.

The interior is just as surprising. The ornamentation is not exactly minimalist, but definitely understated. Most remarkable is the color scheme, which has recently been restored to Latrobe's original vision: lots of white, with delicate pink and blue accents. In all, it's entirely different from, say, the shadowy, suggestive depths of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, or the dizzying detail on every interior surface of the Cathedral Basilica in St. Louis, or the colorful Southwestern primitivism of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City (which happen to be the other important U.S. cathedrals the Tanuki has visited).

The windows complete the vision. Evidently the Basilica had stained glass windows until a recent restoration, but that wasn't what Latrobe had originally intended, and in the renovation they went back to the clear glass windows he had called for. As a result, the interior is flooded with calm white light which interacts with Latrobe's airy color scheme to create an atmosphere of lightness and glory. It uplifts you, gently, rather than overwhelming you. The Old Cathedral in St. Louis has something of the same feel, with its clear windows and delicately modulated colors, but architecturally, that building feels little different than a normal church. The Baltimore Basilica is unmistakably monumental.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it feels closest to some of the monuments and early government buildings in D.C. It shares the same vision of rationality and spirituality supporting each other, and finding expression in an aesthetic that is at once direct and elegant.

It's one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever been in.

Josiah McElheny: Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism

Saw this sculpture/installation today at the MFA. The photo on the MFA website doesn't do it justice; there's a better photo of it here.

First of all, it's a beautiful piece. Entrancing is the word I'd choose. What it is is: a bunch of vases made of some highly reflective material lined up along the four sides of a glass-fronted box. The glass you see through is actually a two-way mirror: we can see in but the vases can't see out, so to speak. They get their reflection, and then reflect that back, infinitely. Behind the vases are more mirrors - the center of the box is another box, mirrored on the outside. The effect is of these vases infinitely reflected and infinitely reflecting. The lighting is soft white light, not overpowering - the thing doesn't shine inside so much as glow, and that glow diminishes with every reflection until the vases are just marching away into a sort of ethereal half-light.

The piece itself is just beautiful, in a really unexpected, haunting way. Then you read the card on the wall telling you about it. The artist is Josiah McElheny: you can read a little more about him here. The title of the piece is "Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernisms." A little tendentious, but okay.

But here's the text:

"Deploying the most sophisticated and virtuoso glass-working techniques combined with a conceptual rigor, McElheny creates sculptures and installations that explore crucial moments in the development of modernity, its visual and theoretical undercurrents. Over the past four years, McElheny has produced a series of works based on a conversation between sculptor Isamu Noguchi and designer/architect Buckminster Fuller that took place in 1929 during which they discussed a world of form without shadow; totally reflective forms inhabiting a totally reflective environment that would be totally self-enclosed - the perfect utopian environment. 'Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism' presents the viewer with a seemingly infinite repetition of reflections of modernist design (decanters, vases, boxes, and bottles based on designs from Scandinavia, Italy, the former Czechoslovakia, and Austria from c. 1910 -1990) that attempts to depict the capitalist notion that all objects are eternally repeatable, that everything can be remanufactured endlessly without regard to era, geography, or culture. McElheny has stated that he aims to explore how "the act of looking at a reflective object could be connected to the mental act of reflecting on an idea."

Starts out nicely. I was interested to learn that the tendentious title wasn't pulled out of a hat, or an overheated graduate seminar, and finding out that he was inspired by this utopian idea of Noguchi and Fuller's made me see the work in a new light - opened it up for me.

But then we get to the "capitalist notion that all objects are eternally repeatable" business, and suddenly I want to heave (that's a sophisticated art-criticism term, by the way).

First of all, does capitalism really believe that? Maybe; it's arguable, at least.

Regardless of that, though, suddenly the wall text is telling me that I should see this beautiful sculpture as a critique of this or that or the other thing, a satire, a political statement.

I don't mind seeing art as any or all of those things. But if this piece is a critique of capitalism, it fails miserably, because the world inside this mirrored box is beautiful, just as beautiful as Noguchi and Fuller probably imagined it would be. It's a utopia of gracious forms, completely self-contained, completely peaceful. Nothing dystopian about it. (And really, nothing capitalist, either.)

So either the art is lame, because it fails to do what it tries to do, or the wall text is lame. Guess which one I'd side with. And most of all, this part of the wall text is unnecessary. It doesn't open the work up at all: it closes it down, by trying to control how we feel about it.