Artillery Magazine

Tag: Geffen Contemporary

Opera as Double Fugue: The Comet / Poppea
“Double Consciousness” and historical counterpoint

‘Man proposes, but [God] disposes’—or so went the biblical proverb as distilled more or less through various Christian medieval iterations. In this simultaneously sunlit and dark-star doubling of two operas—George Lewis’s and librettist Douglas Kearney’s dark distillation of the W.E.B. DuBois 1920 proto-Afro-futurist (and Afro-pessimist) short story, “The Comet,” pushed up and played against (and in and out of) a pared-down rendering of one of the foundational operas of the classical canon, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea—it is as if this fatalistic chain of causality is viewed in reverse. The ‘gods’ disport, while their human pawns, play at games of dominance, possession, power and pleasure.

Monteverdi’s own Incoronazione plays at ‘doubling’ both in composition and execution—the gods of love and ‘fortune’ (frequently secondary roles for the principals) wreak havoc with their human playthings and messengers, while the principal characters and their accessories plot, scheme, disguise and dissemble in the pursuit of, well—not love exactly—maybe simply a bit of light. (What would any coronation be without it?)

But Lewis and Kearney have put this doubling at the dark center of The Comet—in striking contrast to the bright, willful, triumphalist glow of Poppea. The constellation of characters surrounding Poppea and Nero plot and maneuver, disguise themselves and their motives, but know where they stand and where they want to go. Only the Emperor and Seneca (James Hayden—outstanding voice and stage presence), his counselor and former tutor—in essence the opera’s ‘conscience’ (standing in for what might—but obviously cannot—be Nero’s own) and its voice of Stoic virtue—have neither need nor inclination to be anything but themselves. Not so simple for the characters of The Comet, and more specifically for Jim (Cedric Berry): working class, clever but poor—and Black. In 1920s Manhattan, he is that ‘invisible man’ made suddenly visible amid masses of dead men in the wake of a comet’s freakish brush with some part of New York. From a vault that might have become a tomb, he has found his way to the street, and up an elevator to a still-elegant restaurant. Yet in what amounts to a mass displacement—unlike his privileged ‘foil’ (Ottone) on the other side of history in Poppea, returning “like a line to the center”—he has a clarified sense of place in this ruined landscape. “Where I come from, disaster is a home away from home,…” But the immediacy of his experience of the past, has not disappeared. “Now the avenue is crowded with the silence in my ear / and yesterday they would not have served me here.”

While the demigods of Fortune, Virtue, and Love (Joelle Lamarre—superb) contend with each other over the four-way tango between Nero (Anthony Roth Costanzo), Poppea (Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Nardus Williams in the June 16th performance) Ottone (Amanda Lynn Bottoms—who doubles as Virtue), and the out-going empress, Ottavia (Whitney Morrison), the practical New Yorker pushes himself past the dead, finds emergency flares and heads to the building’s roof. But predictably, the next arrival is no less random—however appropriately dressed for the setting: a woman (Julia—Kiera Duffy), elegantly attired (the costumes—by Oana Botez—are sumptuous), but reeling in shock—and white. Seeming to take stock of the situation, the two survivors are also—only slightly less consciously—taking stock of each other. Meanwhile in the sunlit domain of the mythically aspiring ancients, Poppea’s seductive spin on the dynamics of power and perception becomes an ironic counterpoint to what is unfolding in the soft lights of this posh restaurant.

“You say you see me. / You don’t see me. / Hidden in your heart, / I cannot be seen by your eyes.”

(The selected arias and duets from L’incoronazione di Poppea were sung in the original Italian–rendered for brevity and clarity in the English translation of the super-title cards.)

Poppea sings this against the brightly lit, tiled and imposingly stepped set for the Monteverdi opera—appropriate to a court ritual, an offering to the gods, or a luxury spa. (It’s a Roman bath that might easily become a sarcophagus.) In the dim light of the restaurant interior (on the other side of the circular, turntable stage), it is glaringly apparent that Jim is seen as more than slightly incongruous. “Have you had to work hard?” Julia asks Jim? Her question is already answered by Jim’s physical presentation; and his one-word response discloses nothing further. Lewis and Kearney use Poppea’s and Nero’s duet as a kind of echo to the “double-consciousness” at play here. (“You see me always, / yet you never see me.”) Place and placement are a kind of imprisonment here, regardless of the circumstances. Where Jim might be seen in one ‘light’ on the street, working in a bank vault, he is seen in quite another in an establishment of luxury consumption; and he clearly judges that distance, that displacement. Responding to Julia’s newfound perspective, “How foolish our human distinctions seem—now….” he underscores the social and racial brutality of his uncertain status in the 1920s—all the more striking against the plush rose and gold velvet Art Deco acanthus wall-covering of the restaurant backdrop. “Yes—I was not human, yesterday.”

The glass ‘windows’ and the elevator are important details. Lewis and Kearney—together with the production team’s superb scenic designer, Mimi Lien—have made the luxe restaurant a kind of telescopic vessel poised at an ambiguous remove from the mortal world below. Jim is also a kind of messenger (the program’s original cast credits list him as ‘Jim/Mercury’)—signaling to Manhattan and the boroughs beyond that life endures in at least one New York neighborhood; and the counterpoint between the two operas emphasizes the fraught ambiguity of the messaging. The message—whether to Seneca (or Seneca’s own admonitions to Nero) or Jim’s flares to the world beyond Manhattan—can only signal, not predict.

While Lewis’s score for The Comet sings of disaster and displacement, the counterpoint between the two scores seems to highlight the more interior oppositions and contradictions. Love and Fortune both are gods of chaos here; yet Love inevitably lends insight to Virtue. But the ‘triumph of love’ (or imperial whim) is brief (as history bears out). Neither the world of the Roman Empire nor any other will be ‘acting on Love’s commands’ any time soon. Lewis and Kearney, alongside director Yuval Sharon, emphasize the fickle transit of these ‘gods’ through these terrestrial and cosmic landscapes—each of them happy to step out of Nero’s Rome (and off the slowly revolving stage) only to step into Du Bois’s 1920s New York moments later. As Ottavia shoves off to obscure refuge, the gods celebrate both Poppea’s destiny and simultaneously Jim’s and Julia’s seeming meeting of hearts and minds—a moving but short-lived moment that makes for a bitter contrast with both operas’ finales. Hope is less a brilliant jewel than the bitter pill that must be swallowed.

July 11, 2024
PICK OF THE WEEK: Tala Madani
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

To experience Tala Madani’s exhibition is to be submerged in a world that rejects our dualist minds and embraces the proximity of attraction to repulsion, cleanliness to filth. Upon entering the museum, viewers are greeted by a large-scale painting depicting a pair of splayed ass cheeks resembling the rolling hills of a sublime landscape, which in turn mesmerizes a group of frumpy caricatured men who run frantically about with their arms outstretched, holding lumps of poop to offer the holy hole. Adjacent to this is a painting of a banana performing stand-up (its slimy peel limps in a gesture of vulnerability), which seems to make the disclaimer—this exhibition is a comedy, so bring a sense of humor. Madani makes drawings, paintings, and films that evoke primal-human themes such as shame, fear, and desire, depicting monstrous penises that slap and strangle their own bodies, cumming and squirming with delight and disgust—babies that feast on their mothers covered in shit, their tiny fingers playing in the curdled brown mush. In these absurd scenarios, shame hides in the shadowy spaces of a door slightly ajar or the crook of a Venetian blind. In the beams of blaring light that manage to seep into Madani’s scenes, my imagination conjures a roaring sitcom-style laugh track—a robust cackling laughter that sounds artificial because the spectator and spectacle are equally grotesque, equally covered in shit, piss, and cum—equally human. As Madani makes us viscerally aware of our own pimpled, porous, oozing bodies that are simultaneously distant and familiar, internal and external, she also points to (even if only to laugh at) the prescribed divisions and systems that order and attempt to regulate our lives. Madani’s corporeal carnival feels like a modern-day Gargantua and Pantagruel—it’s filthy but fun.

Program note: MOCA is hosting a free lecture between Tala Madani and author Ottessa Moshfegh on today (Thursday, December 8th) at 6:30 pm.

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 N Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
On view through February 19, 2023

December 8, 2022
Doug Aitken – Electric Earth

Doug Aitken sings the earth and cosmos electric in a mid-career retrospective that could be a Pick of the Year exhibition. The Geffen space, which has never looked better, was entirely made over for the show – an immersive odyssey to mirror Aitken’s own process with its infinite expansion or compression of the moment, convergence of microcosm and macrocosm, and sense of harmonic decay. MOCA Director, Philippe Vergne has plotted a spriraling labyrinth for almost 20 years of Aitken’s architectural/sculptural/experiential multi-screen installations, along with various photographs, lightboxes, collages, sculptures and other objects that are its connective tissue; an emblematic road map to Aitken’s process, that invite the viewer to plot her/his own variably paced and idiosyncratic dance with the infinite (or the void), or another dimension altogether. Vergne sums it up brilliantly in his catalog essay: “This sense of pacing, of interrupted moments, of shifting and floating is simultaneously a summary of a narrative and the negation of that narrative.”

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 N. Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Show runs thru January 15, 2017

December 22, 2016
‘Are the stars out tonight?’ Harmonic convergence for a new art season

The beginning of another arts and culture season also marks a point where we really start to feel the impact of everything we’ve been experiencing over the preceding orbital/calendar year and start to take its measure. Events move swiftly; you can feel as if you’re stepping onto a speeding train just leaving your apartment; and to miss an event in one’s agenda, or just a day’s news can make you feel as if you’ve missed a station. Our connection to the everyday realities can seem so fragile, so contingent; yet that connection, those realities are themselves being continuously redefined and renegotiated. We need to make course adjustments, reorient the compass, re-navigate. We’re looking forward to the new – thrilled by the possibility of fresh ideas, sensations, beauties (and maybe a little desperate?); taking charge of the negotiations; but it helps to make sense of where we’ve been. (Then again – do we ever really know?)

This year, the best of the first major fall museum exhibitions and gallery solo shows collide, converge, fuse and spark to give us a hint of resonance, new direction, fresh looks at things we might have missed or overlooked, as well as those elements of course correction and perspective that always need to be refreshed.

We get more than a hint of resonance with Doug Aitken’s mid-career retrospective, Electric Earth, which (with MOCA Director, Philippe Vergne’s unstinting and hands-on commitment) practically makes MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary over into a resonant vessel of sight and sound. For Aitken’s show, the Geffen – which has never looked better – is splayed out into an open maze of almost 20 years of Aitken’s architectural/sculptural/experiential multi-screen installations, along with various photographs, lightboxes, collages, sculptures or other objects that offer a kind of emblematic road map to Aitken’s process, a connective tissue that invite the viewer to ‘walk this way.’ Vergne has reconfigured and plotted out the space to parallel Aitken’s process, with its infinite expansion or compression of the moment, convergence of microcosm and macrocosm, and sense of harmonic decay.

I thought the passage in Vergne’s catalogue commentary, expanding on Aitken’s [film] editorial process, summed up both his own installation strategy and Aitken’s fundamental approach: “ … a visual and temporal space conceived to suggest the expectation of narrative order, a tension toward ‘what comes next,’ a dynamic that is endlessly pointing forward giving rise to an open form – improvised and interfaced with thematic relations between sounds and images that strategically dissolve and reconstitute a visual, time-based, and harmonic landscape. This sense of pacing, of interrupted moments, of shifting and floating is simultaneously a summary of a narrative and the negation of that narrative.”

This is the museum exhibition as immersive experience; and the viewer floats away from it ready for pretty much anything that follows. Assuming you’re not spent from the experience (and pace yourself – you may need more than one), you might segue over to Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel for a museum-level exhibition of the work of the Austrian artist, Maria Lassnig, surveying in 31 paintings almost the entire span of her long and diverse career – a kind of prismatic kernel of the major retrospective of her work that appeared at the Tate Liverpool this summer and will soon travel.

Maria Lassnig is quite simply the greatest painter you’ve never heard of – except you actually may have, in recent years anyway, only to … well, … push her off the radar again. Lassnig finally began to achieve the recognition she deserved in the last quarter of her career; but her growing audience had really only the barest clue of her daunting scope. The Tate curators – and here in L.A., Lassnig Foundation Chairman, Peter Pakesch and our own Paul Schimmel – have done us all the favor of seizing upon the breadth of this extraordinary career and unfolding its varied objectives and mechanisms of inquiry, its approaches to media, its psychology and overall consciousness, sheer mystery and abundant humanity, into a kind of compact narrative of the artist’s life that, spread out through only five beautiful galleries, is quietly breathtaking.

Grounded in a figurative tradition informed by expressionism, Lassnig veered early into abstraction of varying degrees of painterliness and coolness, but always true to herself and her own artistic investigative spirit. The bodily, performative aspect of her gestural style turned her toward a more distinctly psychological, introspective and body-conscious approach, and her work in the 1960s and 1970s took on a more self-conscious, even surreal cast. Her later work, though cooler in palette and approach, partook of even more intimate, diaristic detail. Her subject is, above all else, consciousness itself – and she is true to it to the end.

Helen Frankenthaler, “Brother Angel” (1983), acrylic on canvas, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Across town, there are two other museum quality surveys – and no less breathtaking. The Gagosian Gallery’s 25 year survey of Helen Frankenthaler’s painting, Line Into Color, Color Into Line, clarifies (with some curatorial help from Yale art historian Carol Armstrong and the eminent writer and curator, John Elderfield) the complex genesis and structural sophistication of work that is occasionally viewed through an over-simplistic ‘color field’ prism. The 18 canvases that span the years 1962 to 1987 demonstrate a complex and evolving dialogue, not merely of drawing/line/design and color in the classic sense, but formal conundrums of the line in two-dimensional color-zoned space; line and/or color and edge; mark, subject and (colored) ground; and depiction and mark-making generally. They’re also, quite simply, gorgeous paintings; and if you’re heading to Gagosian to ‘educate the eye,’ be assured that your eyes will also be satiated with pleasure.

John Altoon, from the Ocean Park series

You may experience a sensation of time warp or displacement at the Kohn Gallery’s exhibition of painting and drawing by John Altoon (but then, hey – after the Aitken show, you’re ready for it, right?). ‘Didn’t I just…?’ Sort of – especially if you were at the Altoon retrospective at LACMA in 2014. But rest assured, you’re at Kohn – it’s just that good. Just about everything you would want from an Altoon survey is here, from the more densely abstract paintings (some from the 1950s, some from the 1960s); the commercial pastiches of the early 1960s; the slightly surreal and brilliant color abstractions of the 1960s; the Ocean Park series; those tussles between the abstract and figural that occur throughout; to (finally!) the virtuoso erotic and quasi-sexual farces and fabliaux executed well into the late 1960s. It’s all here – so just go crazy and try not to spend all your money. It’s a commercial gallery, not LACMA, goddamnit!

Okay – so naturally, you’re now thinking of heading to LACMA – and why not? It’s not too far and there two more superb shows that demand your attention: The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L., a 50^th anniversary survey, an elegant and compact survey of the classic best of Gemini’s groundbreaking editions; and an absolutely sublime show of 17^th century Chinese landscape painting, Alternative Dreams: 17^th –Century Chinese Paintings from the Tsao Family Collection.

And now this ‘brief list’ is getting out of hand, so before I break off (to pick up again before the week-end), let me just give you a quick list of the remaining essential shows so far:

Henry Taylor, Blum & Poe, Culver City

Tom Knechtel: Astrolabe, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills

Tom Knechtel “The Reader of His Own Self” (do you get the impression we might be going somewhere with this? See, Artillery’s “Pick of the Week” for this week) – with

Mira Schor: “Power” Frieze and War Frieze (1991-94), CB1 Gallery, downtown Los Angeles

Edith Beaucage, Luis de Jesus, Culver City

Ry Rocklen, Honor Fraser, Culver City

Rodney McMillian, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City

Jun Kaneko: Mirage, Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Culver City

And we haven’t even talked about music or theatre (or opera) or movies – or fashion. But we will. Before I go, here’s one thing that’s definitively out of fashion: the Peter Zumthor ‘Gumby’ blob that wants to eat Wilshire Boulevard. Do we have to resurrect Godzilla and Mothra to dispatch this thing? Calling Roger Corman….

Tom Knechtel, “Avery (2)” (2015), ink on paper, courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art

September 21, 2016
Flea Circus of Books: Printed Matter’s L.A. Art Book Fair

There may have been a ‘great thing’ or two (literally) amongst the millions of pages on display at the Geffen; but good luck finding them. I shouldn’t have to be telling this to Printed Matter (a fabulous art book store that’s a must whenever I’m in Chelsea)—but when it comes to art books (or magazines or zines, pamphlets, broadsides, comic books—or should I say, ‘comix’?), or even the posters, prints, photographs or other visual art itself, the same rules apply: re-write, re-write, re-write, and edit, edit, and EDIT (goddamnit!—and then proofread).

I was actually looking forward to this fair; and I have to wonder whether I gave it enough time. I was only there for two and a half hours; and I probably needed a full afternoon to do justice to all of the booths and zine tables that almost entirely filled the Geffen’s exhibition space. I should have invested in a catalogue—you almost needed one to negotiate your way through the goods (sic). But a full afternoon of this would have been exhausting and, had I hit the right string of loser-zines, would have probably triggered a massive migraine. Let’s bear in mind that there are only so many ways you can display books (including artbooks), catalogues or magazines and published artwork. I love bookstores and libraries—they offer space to browse and focus even amid the distraction of thousands of titles, to pause and reflect, to breathe. Here—even more so than at other fairs or conventions—the imperative was to keep moving. In fairness, I did manage to pause and see (even purchase) a few things; even mustered a personal connection or two. But I felt weighed down by the poverty of the offerings. Do I really need to add another half-dozen slender volumes, pamphlets or zines to my growing warehouse of art world ephemera? Yeah–there just might be two or three things that end up in some gallery or museum–no doubt enclosed and untouchable in some vitrine. But odds are half this stuff is going to end up over the next few years in someone’s garage or spread over the lawn at a garage sale.

If you were looking for any kind of quality/editorial control, you found it in the predictable places: Steidl, Mousse, Ridinghouse, MACK, REDCAT, Insane Dialectical Posse, etc. But it was hard for a newer imprint to make a significant impression amid the aisles of blight. And then there’s the other matter I discussed in my last post about the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair: it’s not enough to be new; it should have something new to say, an original point to make; and it should be fabulous.

So again: do we really need this fair? Certainly we do not need this fair. Nor, would I argue, do we need more than one or two incarnations of a few other prominent art fairs (I’m thinking about the Art Basel Hong Kong announcement I just got in this morning’s e-mail). More specifically regarding book fairs: we could use a fair that placed some emphasis on local literary (as well as visual) culture and afforded opportunities for exposure (and expanding audience, dialogue) for local presses and authors. It is as important to identify the local ‘voice’ or voices as it is to ‘blend’ (and maybe lose) them amid the global polyglot. There are quite a few local presses (and writers and graphic artists) who could use our support. A fair should be more than just another occasion for the eco-catastrophic tourism of the .1 percent.

Quick disclaimer: this is not to be read as an aspersion on local book/magazine retailer, Circus of Books, which is a treasure. I only wish the L.A. Art Book Fair had come within a few light years of Circus’s retailing standards. As a repository of printed porn—which I sometimes fear is an endangered species—it has my enduring respect and affection.

February 2, 2015