The Politics of Art & Authenticity

As everyone knows, I am new to the city… Like many of my classmates, it was my first time at the opera. Honestly, it wasn’t something that I was looking forward to. What is the point if I can’t understand what the actors are saying?

I had an idea of what to expect. It is after, all the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. I knew that people would be dressed up. And I kind of went against dressing up. I guess I’m a rebel.  I showed up, with two minutes to spare.  I didn’t have time to really admire the fountain or the outside of the building

When I got inside, a man just scanned  my ticket and told me that it was five floors up… Agh. I hate stairs. When I got up the five flights of stairs, it was aother five minutes before I was seated. Overall, the whole experience getting there wasn’t pleasant at all.

Now, on to the actual story. Since we read parts of the opera in class I had an idea of what to expect.  Carmen, a heartbreaker is the protagonist of the story.  And the overall plot is somewhat of a Shakespearean play. The drama is all there, and in the end we come to the realization that Carmen is a bloody free spirit who cannot commit to one man and loves to whore around. When you take a ring from a man, you honor that commitment—not throw the ring in his face after he’s forgiven you and has asked you to spend your miserable life with him.   Yet, all of this would be enthralling if you didn’t have to crane your neck to figure out who Carmen is.

The one thing I actually enjoyed was the set design. The revolving set that opened to reveal a castle and whatnot was very well done. Since it was so big, I actually could see it without trying to crane my neck and squint my eyes.

In general, the opera wasn’t something that I enjoyed. It was one of those events that I would rather not attend again. As cultured as I can be, it is something that I didn’t particularly didn’t find enriching or even worthwhile at all.

http://app1.kuhf.org/_images/content/photos/Carmen-image.jpg

The Barnard Project “Besotted Bumper,” by Reggie Wilson, one of four new works at New York Live Arts

Before I start to rant and rave about the awfulness and horrific performance know as “The Barnard Fall Project” I would like to write a disclaimer. It was not the dancers’ fault. I repeat! It was not the dancers’ fault. I think after that performance all of them need a hug. Again I do not blame the dancers for the performance but rather the choreographer and the drunk guy that chose the soundtrack or lack thereof. I mean it was a dance performance without music!! Who’s idea was that?! And when there was music it did not quite redeem the moments of silence.

The soundtrack sounded like it would be better suited for an adventure through a safari in futuristic Africa. If that can even do justice to the weirdness of the music. These were all problems with the production before the dancing itself which was barely recognizable as dance. Most of the production consisted of these girls being dragged across the floor in bizarre outfits that matched the weirdness of the soundtrack.

Also…

WHY DID SHE PUT TAPE ON THE FLOOR?!

I think this entire performance will haunt me for a while. From the mystery of the soundtrack, costumes, and random tape placing I will never recover from this “dance” production. All I can do is hope that the dancers recover from the weirdness they were put through. I just hope that somewhere someday the choreographer and producer look back at this performance and say “What the hell were we thinking?”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WLA_moma_Reflections_of_Clouds_on_the_Water-Lily_Pond_Monet.jpg

I have a confession. I do not understand modern art. Probably because I’m cynical, reductionist and not in touch with my artistic side. There are no shortage of reasons, but the truth is that when I see random shapes and colors splayed out on a canvas that is all I see, nothing more nothing less. The trip to the MOMA changed my perspective on art in general, and I’m not saying that I now love modern art ,but I have started to gain an appreciation for modern art. It was not due to The Scream or the New Photography  exhibit but rather it was in the Monet exhibit where I found beauty in art.

In all fairness, I looked at “The Scream” and other paintings but I kind of drifted over them with an uninterested gaze. I felt nothing when I looked at “The Scream” and the other paintings, so I decided to wander aimlessly. If we are being completely honest I only found the Monet section because it had couches and there was a cute European girl sitting down. Naturally I sat down next to her and she walked away. Heartbreaking as this was it was all for the best because I now turned to actually look at the art in front of me. It was Monet’s famous Reflections of Clouds on  the Water-Lily Pond painting(as shown above). And as any museum attendee would I sat and beheld the painting in front of me. But this time I did not think about the painting I just sat there and looked. I observed every stroke mark and  the shades of blues and greens that clashed and collided with each other to form a seamless painting. It was beautiful.

It was peaceful to be in the presence of such a painting and I sat there for the next half an hour. It was this experience that made me less cynical and helped me understand the purpose of art. I used to think art was just about making something aesthetically pleasing to the eye and thats why I could not understand modern art with its vague shapes and abstractness. However after my experience at the MOMA I understand that art is about capturing beauty and conveying it through any means. This was an important lesson for me to learn and the first step towards liking modern art and as a result I will always be grateful to the cute European girl that walked away.

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In the the simplest words possible: I loved this play. It was funny, emotional and quite moving at times. The acting was brilliant and so was the set design. Everything about this performance was executed perfectly. Also, the small theatre made the performance personal and allowed you to connect with the actors because they were only twenty feet away. Unlike another performance we went to see….the opera…ahem….but I won’t mention that and spoil the good taste I have in my mouth after leaving this play.

Although everything about this play was amazing I think it was the set design that blew me away. It sounds strange to say it but whoever created those intricate coffins should be given an award. I was awed by the creativity of the furniture and the different ways it was used. In one scene the furniture was used as a coffin and in another scene it was used as a closet or as a car. This also gave the play flexibility to change from the past to the present as the main character had repeated flashbacks. I also enjoyed the fact that you were able to watch them transform the furniture since it brought me back to my childhood days of playing with transformer action figures. I mean, who doesn’t like a car that can turn into a giant extraterrestrial robot. Granted, the coffins didn’t turn into giant robots yet I still found them to be pretty cool.

Additionally, I LOVED the acting. I do not say that lightly as I literally could not stop laughing anytime Gil’s aunt Glo came on stage. I think I was laughing so hard that I started to wipe tears from my eyes after one of her usual rants that ended with “praise the lord” this or “praise the lord” that. And her performance only complimented that of the Colman Domingo who played Gil. A homosexual, African American man in his forties who recently lost his mother. He played the part of a cynical son going through denial with wit and charm that made his character come to life. Especially when he ran into the crowd and continued the performance offstage. The audience must have also agreed with my assessment of his acting because when the show was over he received a five minute standing ovation, which was fully deserved.

Overall this play was one of, if not the best play I have seen all year. The success of this play can be attributed to the performance by the actors, stage design, good script and even size of the theatre. Yet it was none of these factors alone. Rather it was all of these factors working together that turned this play into the spectacle that it was.

Why the tape? Why? I was willing to forgive everything about Thursday evening, but the tape was just inexcusable.

The Barnard Fall Project was a series of…modern… dances choreographed to make the viewer confused and slightly less smart. Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly it, but that’s what it did for me. Modern dance has its merits, but the only way you’re going to understand any of it is if you’ve studied modern dance, or you’re tripping on something. (If the first piece was them swimming in a pond, why were they doing lunges? Dancing should be fun. Lunges aren’t fun.)

This was like the only picture on Google and we didn’t even see this dance.

I appreciated the performances, but that’s about it. They were filled with dedicated and skilled performers who do miraculous feats of jumping and prancing that makes me exhausted just watching, but I didn’t get any of it. It was just a lot of jumping and twirling. Whenever the music would stop and there would be five minutes of silent “dancing,” it was practically unbearable. I don’t want to see you marching like a penguin from one side of the stage in silence, alright? (I want that one song at the end as my ringtone though. That was the highlight.)

I could look past all of this though, because these were performances that people devoted time and effort too, and I’m sure they all knew exactly what they were doing and I’m sure whatever message they were trying to convey got across wonderfully. And then there was the tape. Which had no purpose whatsoever. They wasted tape. I was really looking forward for something to happen with the tape, but I got nothing. The tape went on the ground and then it got trashed afterwards. Why?

It was all one big “Why?”

Photo Credit

This has been the second time I’ve been to MoMA in the past year or so, so I’m ready to accept my “Cultured & Sophisticated Merit Badge.”

I’m not going to talk about “The Scream” that much because I’m a rebel, it didn’t capture my interests like I thought it would. Frankly, it looked like a bunch of colorful, curvy lines on that eggshell-tinted paper the teachers gave you to color on in fifth-grade art class. Don’t get me wrong, after I stood there and looked at the picture for a little bit, I really did appreciate the bizarreness of it. The vividness of the lines of color, especially on the boardwalk, had an otherworldly hue to them, and the sheer mystery that is “The Scream” is something everyone should admire.

I took this picture. Try to steal it and I’ll see you on Judge Judy. (Also it keeps uploading sideways, so please turn your laptop 90 degrees clockwise to get the full effect.)

The painting that truly captured my interest was the first in a series of four paintings that were commissioned to be hung in the foyer of some rich guy’s Park Avenue apartment. The works, painted by Vasily Kandinsky, are just colorful images of nothing in particular. The plaque next to them stated that Kandinsky may have had a landscape in mind when painting them, and while I managed to pick out what could be a park walkway, or a lighthouse on a beach, the painting is inherently void of anything realistic. (Abstract paintings usually are.) I don’t know, it’s just a really great painting.

The “New Photography” exhibit was more interesting than I thought it would be. I went in thinking it’d be just a bunch of pictures of nature or technology in the same style as Tumblr hipsters, but it was more “really depressing Vietnam War” images. I assume the whole “New” portion of the exhibit was to emphasize the changing role of photography in our modern, technologically-advanced times; such as the series of typically normal photos taken from the 1970s, but then a gruesome image of the War is added in as the picture hanging on the wall, or behind the curtain that the woman has so carelessly vacuumed up. The juxtaposition of these two types of photos from the past, brought together with today’s technology is telling. Those two photos showed two distinctly different parts of the same time, but it’s by today’s experiments do we finally get a fuller picture of truth.

The same idea held true for the next series of photographs taken by Harrell Fletcher. Fletcher went to a Vietnam War museum in Ho Chi Minh City and took pictures of pictures shown there. The photos in that

I took this too, so it’s a photo of a photo of a photo.

museum weren’t those of American soldiers bravely fighting, but instead it was filled with images of women and children burned by chemical bombs – what Vietnam saw. Fletcher took these pictures of pictures to expose truth, which is what I believe is photography is meant to be: a truth-teller.

I’m usually not a person of many words. It’s not that I don’t like to talk, it’s simply because most of the time there is nothing really to talk about. Out of all the cultural events that we have attended because of this class, I think Wild With Happy has been the best so far.

In a way it has been the one I identify with the most.  It’s not the actual story, but the themes and situations within in.

I loved the location. The Public Theater was unlike some of the other theaters I have been to before. It was small, and the actors actually walked into the audience section of the theater. I got to say that the scenography was great. In the opening scene, the caskets at the funeral home transform into a park bench, a car, and into a closet. The use of the caskets in that way made it seem like it wasn’t as dark as one would expect s funeral home to be.

Colman Domingo wrote Wild With Happy, he is also the leading man.  The story is about a gay black man who’s in a way going through some sort of mid-life crisis.  While going through it, he neglected his mother, who in the end, we learn had Lupus, which was her cause of death.

Gil [Domingo] is an actor who holds a degree in English from Yale. Yes, it stuck. Just couldn’t help the fact that it was mentioned every five seconds.  Yet, with degree and all, he can’t find a decent job that takes him from living paycheck to paycheck to a somewhat comfortable life.  When he receives the call that his mother is dead, he heads down to Philly, hoping to take care of everything as quickly and cheaply as possible. He chooses not to follow ‘black’ tradition and instead cremates his mother. The play continues with Aunt Glo, Gil’s aunt, giving him a hard time because he chose not to follow tradition. And instead we see Gil running away to NYC and ending up in Orlando at the Disney Park because of his best friend Mo.

The last scene reveals a lot about Gil, but I think, that in revealing so much about a gay black man we learn a lot about ourselves. Sometimes we don’t follow tradition, and it’s okay to break from it. Trying something radical is good once in a while.

Overall, the plot of the play was maybe something that not everyone will identify with, but it definitely represents a real situation. It shows a lot of human emotion, which made it enjoyable, at least for me.

I love photography. I don’t take pictures too often, but nevertheless I do enjoy it. The photograph tells a story unbeknownst to the naked eye. The camera captures a deeper aspect of the “picture that otherwise could not be seen. Photography often seems like a snapped picture of random objects put together, but of course there is more to what meets the eye.

Sometimes, as in some modern photography, it seems like the photographer just snapped a picture of a random object. But I think modernity allows for personal interpretation and expression. Perhaps, and most probably, this photo expresses something deeper for the photographer.

MOMA’s New Photography 2012 exhibit is great. I love the personality, the character, and the creativity behind the photos. Each photo is definitely worth a thousand words.

Okay, yes! Theatre! Finally! (Sorry House / Divided, but you were a little lax on the whole “acting” for my tastes.) I knew nothing about Wild With Happy, and I felt compelled to actively avoid any spoilers or summaries, because when you’ve got a title like that, you’re expecting something unique and surprising. I was right. Really, really right.

The show actually won me over before it even started, because any show that uses the famous Judy Garland/Barbra Streisand duet of “Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again” as its musical overture is bound to be steeped in perfection. As Gil (Colman Domingo) stepped out in front of the curtain to deliver a fast-paced, snarky, sarcasm-laden introduction, two things hit me: One, if the rest of the show is as witty and hilarious as this monologue is, I don’t think I’m going to survive. And Two, okay maybe he needs to slow down a little because I’m laughing three jokes back.

I loved everything about the production. The plot was minimal enough to the extent where I didn’t feel bogged down trying to remember little details about why the mom’s in the urn or why Gil’s so upset with…everything. The ending in particular is notable, because it somehow takes the cheesiest, most cliche conclusion ever, but it makes it work perfectly! Sure, it’s groan-worthy, but it didn’t cheapen the experience at all. Honestly, if the show had ended with anything less that fireworks, the full-circle of a aforementioned phrase now understood, and a Cinderella allusion… all while taking place in the Cinderella Suite in Disney World, the show wouldn’t of been half as good. The cheesy worked.

I’m fairly certain all my inner-monologues sound just like this scene.

The phenomenal double-casting of Adelaide/Aunt Glo (Sharon Washington) was one of the most genius decisions made by this production, and Ms. Washington deserves every accolade and rave review known to the theatre – and maybe a month off for vocal rest after all that screaming. Fingers crossed she lands a one-woman show on Broadway someday, I’d go every night.

The set design deserves special mention for finding a way to take a small stage and four coffins and convincingly create a church, apartment, funeral parlor, a park, two cars, and Disney World. Somehow it worked, and somehow the fact that a coffin was lifted up into an armoire filled with dresses fits in perfectly with the show’s theme.

Wild With Happy has easily been one of the best off-Broadway productions I’ve ever seen.

Photo Credit

I often look at modern art and wonder why I can’t produce the same piece to be hanging on the museum wall. Well, I guess perhaps I can… I’ll explain myself.
I enjoy marveling (longingly) at masterpieces that I know I could never create. Pieces of art with intricate detail, pieces that took the artist years to finish. Well, looking at Edward Munch’s scream made me realize that there’s another aspect of art that’s important. And maybe that other aspect is something I can put into my own art.
A piece like “The Scream” says so much, has so much character. Perhaps the artist was expressing how he felt towards nature or towards life. Perhaps this scream was stifled for so many years and he finally let it out. The possibilities are endless. The curator at MOMA pointed out that Munch used pastels rather than oil, which definitely effects the expression of the scream itself. The pastel gives the piece a rough feel, instead of the smoothness of oil on canvas. And the wavy lines of the pastel kind of create an image of the scream filling up the whole sky, as if it has a ripple effect. The interpretations for this are also infinite.
I think there is in modern art an extra level of expression. It’s an expression of the everyday, rather than the often lofty ideas and messages of the previous art genres. It’s the expression of the artist, speaking through the art he/she creates. Everyone can create pieces of art; everyone can put feeling and character into that art. Even if the art doesn’t hang on a famous museum wall, it’ll hang on the wall of your own personal museum – whether that’s your magnetic refrigerator or your bedroom wall.