New York Scenes

Author: Zuzanna Osiecka

A Different Form of Art

November 11, 2015 / / 5 Comments

When I was nine years old my mom took me to see my first dance performance, The Nutcracker. Since that day, every year around Christmas time we go to any theatre we can find and watch the show in awe as if we have never seen it before. To me, dance is one of the most beautiful forms of expression. There is so much emotion and passion behind it, you can’t help but to submerge yourself in the allure of it.

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I was surprised while reading the history of dance in the black community. I have learned that slaves used songs to cope with their harsh conditions, but I have never heard of slaves using dance to build up their stamina to prepare themselves for uprisings against their white masters. Dance has been a part of their culture and a way to get by for centuries. I think it is amazing that choreographers, such as Kyle Abraham, include the traditions of their ancestors in dances today. For example, “The Watershed”, one of the performances he choreographed, is inspired by the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1960s, and the Civil Rights Movement. He considered the gains and losses that African-Americans have had over the years and how they view them today to create a story and convey those feelings through the choreography.Unknown In another one of his works, titled, “When the Wolves Came In”, he used a unique subject and related it to the message of the dance. Abraham came across a local news story in his hometown of Pittsburgh about a boy that fell into a pit of Africa dogs in the zoo and was mauled to death. Instead of building a higher fence or placing the dogs in a different part of the zoo, they killed them. The incident grabbed Abraham’s attention, and he connected it to our views about “perception, race and identity”. He was able to link modern human behavior with the history of maltreatment that African-Americans had to endure.

When we think of art, dance is not usually the first thing we think of. However, throughout history it has been a vital means of expressing ourselves. It is important to consider dance just as significant as any other artistic expression because it usually has a story and meaning behind it.

Implications of Love

October 28, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Turandot, written by Giacomo Puccini, is definitely not your typical love story. Prince Calaf falls in love with the cold hearted and unobtainable Princess Turandot, but the only way to acquire permission to marry her is to solve three riddles. Any wrong answer results in death.  Although Calaf answers all three of the questions correctly, Turandot still refuses to marry him. He gives her the option to learn his name by dawn, and if she succeeds he will die the next day. Although Turandot does learn his name, she refuses to say it. Instead, she changes her mind and marries him at the end, adding an unexpected plot twist to the story.

Having never read an opera, I had no idea what to expect with Turandot. From the beginning, there is an execution of a prince while a crowd is narrating what is happening. Although it seemed confusing at first, I quickly understood the situation. Prince Calaf, who reunites with his father at the beginning of the first act, is set on risking his life to marry Princess Turandot. Liu, Calaf’s father’s servant who helps him find his son, is madly in love with him and ends up committing suicide so that she does not have to give his name away. Princess Turandot, who is able to kill many suitors without a second thought, has a change of heart when she falls in  love with Calaf.

The story uncovers the truth behind love and the impact it can have on a person. Like in many love stories, people sacrifice their lives for the people they love. Without reciprocation, life becomes meaningless for the characters. It does not matter to Calaf that he has not seen his father in such a long time, because he is blinded by his feelings for Princess Turandot. I admit, it seems ludicrous to choose some princess whom Calaf does not really know over his own father. However, when in love, people do very illogical and questionable things. I feel that Calaf diturandotd not know the princess well enough to be in love with her. Loving a person requires you to love every part of them and in order to do that, you have to know every part of them. Calaf falls in love with Turandot simply based on her beauty, which makes me question if he was actually in love with her. He was willing to risk his life for a woman who not only rejected him, but whom he does not really know. Turandot, on the other hand, changes her mind about Calaf when she sees the kind of person that he is. She falls in love with him because of his good heart, rather than his looks. This could symbolize what each gender considers important in finding a partner. Men tend to focus on beauty while women base their decisions off of someone’s personality and kindness. Although this might not necessarily be true, it seems to be the case in a lot of love stories. Turandot shows us the implications of love. It might seem irrational to risk your life for another person, but it is a feeling that cannot be matched with any other. Love is the biggest motivator in life.

Jacob Riis- How the Other Half Lives

October 23, 2015 / / 9 Comments
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“Five Cents a Spot” (circa 1890)

As a New Yorker, it is hard to overlook the myriad of homeless people all over the city. Whether you are on the train, at the park or simply walking along the sidewalk, you will most likely encounter one. As a society, we are used to seeing poverty-stricken individuals, but this was not always the case. During the Gilded Age, Jacob Riis opened peoples’ eyes to the vile conditions that the Lower East Side immigrants lived in through his photographs. With the  recently discovered technology, people were more than willing to pay to see the poor of their generation. The Museum of the City of New York is now holding an exhibition titled “Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half”, presenting Riis’ capture of the “other half” of the city.

 

Jacob Riis’ determination to expose the lives of the poor may be directly correlated to the fact that he was an immigrant himself. Arriving to America without a penny to his name, Riis was staying at a police lodging house where one night his gold locket keepsake was stolen and his dog was clubbed to death. That night, he stated, “cured him of dreaming”. The tough times that he endured motivated him to become a journalist and to “galvanize the public in a campaign to improve housing, health care, education, parks and the assimilation of the nation’s growing immigrant population.”

Riis staged extremely popular slide shows which hundreds of people paid to see.  The eye-opening photographs were accompanied by anecdotes,  ethnic stereotyping, and Christian moralizing. He would tell his audience that usually consisted of amateur photographers,  “the most pitiful victim of city life is not the slum child who dies, but the slum child who lives”.

"Street Arabs in Night Quarters"

“Street Arabs in Night Quarters”

In today’s world, when seeing a homeless person asking for money we would most likely pretend we did not see anything. We excuse our behavior by saying, “he would spend the money on drugs or alcohol anyway”. Not much has changed when it comes to the way the poor die. As Riis said, “thousands of forgotten New Yorkers are buried annually in the same unmarked trenches on Hart Island off the Bronx”. Poor people are usually seen as burden to us, but if we change our thinking and consider the possibility that maybe the homeless are not much different from us, we can make a real change in the world. A warm meal or a dollar can change someone’s life.

 

Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind

October 4, 2015 / / 3 Comments

Awakening of Spring by Frank Wedekind depicts a group of teenagers raised in a rigid environment where abstinence is preached over education. Teenagers are forbidden from asking anything that has to do with sex or masturbation, which leads to catastrophic results. The fates of the main three characters, Moritz, Wendla, Melchoir demonstrate the dangers that a lack of knowledge can lead to.

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The play exposes how the minds of teenagers work as they approach adulthood. Moritz, Wendla, and Melchoir discover different sensations, but have never been told what those thoughts mean. Because the play is written in 1891, the topic of sex, abortions, and suicide is strictly off-limits. The characters battle with their emotions as they try to figure out what these feelings mean. Without a proper education, teenagers cannot be expected to simply transform into adults and know everything. Awakening of Spring proves that sheltering young adults from information simply because it is considered controversial only does harm. Adolescents have the right to correct and comprehensive sexual health information. Statistics have shown that abstinence programs actually increase risk for pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. Virginity pledge programs do not prevent teenagers from having sex and essentially do not deter them from starting younger. With the proper sexual education that has been implemented between 1991 and 2004, the U.S. teen birth rate fell from 62 to 41 per 1,000 female teens. These results further prove that hiding information from teenagers is not the proper path.

Wedekind did not only expose the dangers of a lack of information about sex, but also the dangers of organized religion. Moritz is shamed for committing suicide, and at his funeral the pastor talks about how sinful and immoral his acticonscience cartoonons are. Although Moritz commits suicide because he loses hope after trying his best in school and failing, people only listen to what the church tells them is right and wrong. This shows how the times have changed. People now question
their religion and look at what is morally right rather than what a pastor tells them. Melchior, who claims to be an atheist, is upset when Wendla tells him that she likes to help the poor. He finds it frustrating that she enjoys something that is supposed to be a sacrifice, but he could never share his thoughts with anyone else.

An Original Aboriginal Artist

September 25, 2015 / / 8 Comments

Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, an artist whose work is currently being displayed for the first time at the Salon 94 gallery in New York City, is not your typical small town artist looking for fame. In fact, until he was in his 20s, Mr. Tjapaltjarri belonged to the Pintupi Aboriginal group, in a West Australian desert. When the Pintupi were forced to move into settlements in the 1950s and 1960s, his family remained out of view, “hunting lizards and wearing no clothes except for human-hair belts”. In 1984, Mr. Tjapaltjarri and his family were discovered and moved into a Pintupi community. They were a sensation in the news, known as the Pintupi Nine, the last “lost tribe.”

Mr. Tjapaltjarri

Mr. Tjapaltjarri

Mr. Tjapaltjarri took on painting with his two brothers, modifying traditional designs that Pintupi men used on rocks, spears, and bodies. As a healer and keeper of ancestral stories among the Pintupi people, Mr. Tjapaltjarri captures the history of the natives in his art. His abstract style, which has made him famous in the Desert Painting Movement, is seen as unique and fascinating to many. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the owner of the Salon 94 gallery, said that she first saw Mr. Tjapaltjarri’s work in the remarkable Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, and his paintings stood out the most. “I also loved the fact that this abstraction had another kind of abstraction behind it — at least abstraction to us, because we’ll never be able to understand these stories in the way they do,” she said. “And I thought that they looked so contemporary at a time when abstraction is being practiced by so many New York artists.”

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The Central and Western Desert in black and white.

The unusual history behind Mr. Tjapaltjarri’s art is what makes it so exceptional. Every painting has a story behind it, although not every story is revealed to the public. The way the artwork tells a story has remained a secret. Fred R. Myers, an anthropologist at New York University who has studied the Pintupi and their art since the early 1970s, says, “I’ve been asking that question for 40 years, and I’ve never really gotten the same answer twice — it’s very inside knowledge, the paintings operate more like mnemonic devices than like representations of a narrative.”

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The Gibson Desert, Mr. Tjapaltjarri’s current home.

Regardless of his growing fame, Mr. Tjapaltjarri will always be an important figure among the Pintupi people. In Kiwirrkurra, the community where he lives in the Gibson Desert, he is well respected for his knowledge and experience. His artwork tells the mythical stories about the Pintupi people as well as about the formation of the desert. For example, one of his paintings, which may simply look like lines and curves, tells the story of a group of ancestral women who appear only at night in the desert around Lake Mackay, an immense saltwater flat that is the main focus of his paintings. His art has a deeper meaning, one that may or may not be understood by everyone, but holds a place in the hearts of the Pintupi.

 

Reading Response 9/10/15

September 10, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Portraits are bland, monotonous, boring, at least, that’s what I used to think before I was exposed to “Every Portrait Tells a Lie” and “How John Singer Sargent Made a Scene”. These pieces highlighted two different, yet profoundly deep interpretations of what a portrait is.

L2008.87 025 Working Title/Artist: Gertrude SteinDepartment: Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary ArtCulture/Period/Location: HB/TOA Date Code: 11Working Date: 1905–6 photography by mma, Digital File DP220028.tif retouched by film and media (jnc) 9_22_10

In “Every Portrait Tells a Lie”, Deborah Brehmer draws attention to the way a portrait is made and the contradictions that come with it. It is actually ironic how sometimes the subject of the portrait may be the one that is visually captured in the piece, yet they are not at all actually feeling what is being portrayed. Rather, I feel that on some occasions, the artist’s desires and emotions are what constructs the feelings that are transmitted through the work. The person portrayed is a mere vessel being used to convey the artist’s feelings. For example, Picasso tried to paint a portrait of Gertrude Stein, yet 90 sessions and over a year later, he gave up in frustration and left for an extended vacation. He would go on to complete the painting by memory without the subject there. Only after he put in his own feelings on how she should look, rather than just accepting what reality presented him with, did he feel comfortable with the piece. This goes to show that even though a portrait may depict one thing or evoke one emotional feeling, it does not necessarily represent reality. It just represents what the artist wants to be immortalized.  Brehmer points out how a portrait is trying to do the impossible, to capture a perfect still moment and keep it forever, while somehow maintaining the depth of the feeling and the energy of life in a single still shot.  It is the narcissism of man realized, the ultimate form of manipulation.

 

DT91 “How John Singer Sargent Made a Scene” brought to light the impact that portraiture had on the scene at the time. Madame X, now viewed as a priceless masterpiece, was viewed as an abomination. Sargent’s entire work was at one point criticized, and his legacy as an artist torn down from being an innovative creator to just being a slick craftsman. His message was misinterpreted and seen as hedonistic rather than groundbreaking or revolutionary. He was trying to change the way portraits were perceived, using both new methods of representing the subject, such as the sharply dark back ground with the models profile brightly lit, as well as deep rooted, almost provocative emotions to try and evoke an emotional and mentally stimulating feeling in the viewer. I feel that this proves the idea that a portrait can preserve the emotion and message that the artist tried to implant. The fact that Madame X still is able to captivate the masses and has only gone up in popularity and value is a testament to that.

Reading Response 9/9/15

September 10, 2015 / / 1 Comment

John Singer Sargent was a well-known Italian-born American artist whose unique paintings became famous in the 19th century. His works, mostly portraits of the wealthy and privileged, exhibit realism as well as impressionism of the era. Although Sargent was a very independent-thinking artist, his travels around the world inspired his style through the work by the “old masters”. For example, some of his portraits show the influence of artists such as Claude Monet.

Sargent’s best known portrait, Madame X, caused his reputation to take a turn for the worse. The portrait illustrates a woman in a low-cut, exposing dress. The painting was a “succès de scandale”, due to the social standards during those times, and it led to Sargent losing a lot of fans. However, this did not stop him from creating even more amazing art. He turned to England, where he could start over. Sargent began impressionist projects and created well-known paintings such as Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

Sargent’s work is not just realistic; it feels as if someone is truly looking back at you. Every portrait is full of life and unique in its own way. Henry James, the author of “Picture and Text”, describes Sargent’s work as “not only a portrait, but a picture, and it arouses even in the profane spectator something of the painter’s sense, the joy of engaging also, by sympathy, in the solution of the artistic problem” (p. 3). Some of his paintings, such as the Lady in Black, is a simple portrait yet it feels as if it projects life out of the h2_32.154canvas. James describes it as “impossible to forget, of which the most striking characteristic is its simplicity, and yet which overflows with perfection” (p.3). Sargent created this work after a trip to Spain, where he began to idolize Velasquez, a Spanish painter from the 15th century, even more. Sargent used Velasquez as an inspiration for many of his paintings. Some even say that Sargent is second to Velasquez in the art world.

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