The Times Quotidian

Richter 858 – Part 2
By Nancy Cantwell

These really are extraordinary works. Frisell plays the classicist. His jazz roots are the underpinning, but the compositions defer strictly to late 20th century classical “New Music”. Frisell is no stranger to that world. In 1995 he World premiered Steven Mackey’s “Deal” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group as part of the Green Umbrella concert series, a legacy of Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director and principle conductor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1992 to 2009.

It is interesting to note that Richter 858 pre-dates The Tristan Project, another phenomenal pairing of “Art” (Bill Viola) and composition (Richard Wagner). And while The Tristan Project is firmly embedded in both the pioneering worlds of video art and chromatic opera, Richter 858 feels the more ground breaking by making an associative leap from the static to the fluid. Frisell delivers a classical infrastructure with big emotional bearing. He is able to not only extract the “character” of the paintings, but delivers in each composition an emblematic portrait, all strung together, tightly knotted and sitting pretty like Jackie Kennedy’s pearls. I have a particular fondness for 858-6. Very dramatic and very satisfying.

Notes are from Richter 858: Outline re: Structure, Aesthetics, Questions, Thoughts by producer David Breskin.

858-5
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

In all case’s, musical choices are “motivated” by visual stimuli, however vague and ineffable and mysterious those motivations happen to be. The idea is to use the paintings as not just “inspiration” but “motivation”: I believe that the deeper and more intimately involved you are with looking, the more perfect will be the relationship between your music and Richter’s paintings.

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858-6
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

The music should deal with the idea of “The Series”: that is closely linked pieces, painted/composed (executed/performed) at the same time, with consistent applications and modes of making. The music should have some narrative or relational sense-however abstract. A sense of story, development, layering, beginning, ending: one thing in relation to the other.

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858-7
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

The pictures have their own speeds. Their own velocities. Their own frequencies. The music in some way could/should deal with this. Richter paints to music – no surprise when you look at his work. There are a lot of rhythmic things happening in the paintings. The music should respect these speeds and rhythms, but not slavishly so.

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858-8
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on linen, 51×747 cm

I expect the music will delve deep into the language of Electric Guitar. These are shimmery “electric” paintings. They hold, bury, mix, and reveal a lot of visual nose – beautiful, aching, sweet, painful noise. In some ways you could say they are creations of different kinds if coloristic and structural noise, coming together to create an unusual composition, which – almost against its will – reveals beautiful melodies and harmonic cohesion.

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RICHTER 858, published by The Shifting Foundation/SFMOMA (San Francisco 2002), ISBN 0-9718610-0-5 In 2002

Richter 858 – Part 1
By Nancy Cantwell

Richter 858 is an extraordinary collaboration between the painter Gerhard Richter and musician/jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, first released on CD as part of the limited edtion book RICHTER 858, published by The Shifting Foundation/SFMOMA (San Francisco 2002), ISBN 0-9718610-0-5

In 2002 Bill Frisell was commissioned by producer/poet David Breskin to create the music for an elaborate art book project on the great German painter Gerhard Richter. The book, RICHTER 858, was published in connection with a comprehensive US retrospective of Richter’s work, although it focused entirely on a recent series of eight small abstract paintings numbered 858 1–8. There were poems, essays, superb reproductions of the works, and Frisell’s music on an inserted CD — one piece for each painting.

Here is the music paired each with its accompanying painting. Notes are from Richter 858: Outline re: Structure, Aesthetics, Questions, Thoughts by producer David Breskin.
The opening of the first track, 858-1, is very aggressive. Stick with it. The rewards are great.

858-1
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

There should be eight distinct pieces of music, each having a 1:1 relationship to the painting which serves as its “trigger”. Repeated motifs and/ or structures shared by a number of pieces are perfectly acceptable, indeed natural, as there are such motifs and structures shared by certain of the paintings.

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858-2
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

The main eight pieces may be roughly the same length as each other, but also are perfectly free to be very different lengths. Your reaction to the paintings will be wholly subjective and personal. One painting may simply not “ask you” for as much exploration and development as another.

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858-3
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

This is a natural tendency and should not be fought. While it is true that the first seven paintings are all exactly the same size and created with similar means, duration in music is not necessarily analogous to scale in the visual arts.

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858-4
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

Likewise, in music, one would never confuse duration with significance any more than one would dare to value a huge Julian Schnable painting over a tiny Vermeer simply because of size. Given you full freedoms in this dimension, it may still be your wish to explore the idea of uniformity between paintings.

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Quotidian photography by Paul Cabanis. India 2008. Cabanis, who travels often in India, gives us evocative, familiar insights. No longer tethered to nor compelled to seek the remarkable, these photographs instead, offer up an intimate conversation. Here asylum is at hand, automobiles possess a bovine nature and technology is on pause. What is “Cyclostyling’?

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Grotowski Festival 2009, Wroclaw, Poland
By Guy Zimmerman

The process by which a child learns how to navigate the world is, from beginning to end, profoundly theatrical in nature. The child imagines herself into the world of pencils, bookshelves and full-moons-in-the-sky by embodying them in the eyes of another, making the felt experience of the object personal, direct and surprisingly immediate. Watching this kind of “imaginative play” is completely engaging (“baby TV, Eliza channel,” my wife and I used to call it) and there is never any doubt that your witnessing presence is allowing the learning to take place. When a piece of theater is very, very good it attains a similar kind of startling immediacy, the performers drawing on the attention of the audience to travel into the vibrant, unnameable mystery of the real as it emerges from a gap in the veil of appearances.

No theater I have ever seen brought this more fully to mind than On Sunday Morning by the Ukrainian company Maisternia Pisni. It was my fourth night at the Grotowski Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Along with two dozen other Americans I boarded a bus near the main square in Wroclaw and drove out into the Polish countryside to see this new work directed by Sergey Kovalevich, featuring Natalka Polovynka (also the music director), Ulyana Horbacheviska and Olena Kostyuk. We drove out through summer fields and into the beginning of a forest…and then the bus pulled over at the head of a muddy path into the trees. In the quickly fading light the group of us walked a hundred yards or so down to a clearing, where an old water mill had been converted to a performance space. The company welcomed us into an antechamber and, a short while later, into the theater space, an open brick-walled enclosure with the kind of vaulted ceiling that must be typical of that part of Poland. We sat on risers against the near wall and the three women began to perform.

On Sunday Morning is organized around a sequence of traditional songs. Movement and some spoken text are drawn “from Ukrainian woman’s rituals…paying special attention to the role of women.” The piece, which seemed thoroughly Grotowski-an in its rigor and its approach to movement and vocal work, included several sequences that easily rank among the most remarkable experiences I’ve had in the theater. A description of the elements of the piece – a pile of earth, a basin of water hurled out onto the floor, three dancers moving in the deep, vaulted space spinning like dervishes, an episode of conflict with the two lead actresses facing off against each other in anger, a change of costumes toward the end, the performers now appearing in elaborate crimson headdresses – will not account for the powerful effect on the audience. The moments that had the strongest impact came during intensely present interchanges, the performers in a state that was at once completely relaxed but also hyper-energized by contact with the audience. The engagement was direct, immediate, electric and effortless all at once, and it didn’t matter at all that few among us could understand the language in which the performers were speaking. In between these moments were longer sequences of movement and singing, the women moving throughout the large, dimly lit space with a total command of their art.

The immediacy with which the performers engaged with our attention produced the kind of vivid surprise that is, in my view, the heart of artistic experience – the nourishing soul of it. We turn to art in order to be jolted back into the present moment by the encounter with the art work, which must be perfectly convincing and also perfectly surprising. Watching Maisternia Pisni it felt as if we were being tricked into presence where we hung for a while, sustained by the collective awareness that had formed between us in the room. Again, I thought of my daughter before the onset of language, immediately connected to the revelation of the world through the act of embodying it before a witnessing presence.

What is it about language that complicates the picture? Being a writer as well as a director, this was interesting to ponder while at the Grotowski Festival. Interesting too how many of the performances, assuming they featured a text at all, were based on the Greeks, Shakespeare, Beckett and, joining the canon, Sarah Kane. One way to understand the prominence of these writers is to think about how they manage to defuse the alienating effects of language by combining it with something else… Beckett, certainly, worked long and hard to find a way out of a fundamental impasse with language. His solution resembles Grotowski’s “via negativa,” which is about taking away, stripping back so that the word never loses touch with the silence it rose out of. Part of the relief we feel while hearing his texts has to do with an imbalance being temporarily redressed, returning us for a few moments toward the open present that once fully embraced us.

The Interview Project, Directed by Austin Lynch and Jason S., Produced by Sabrina Sutherland
by Nancy Cantwell

The Interview Project could very well be the perfect web experience. Austin Lynch, Jason S. and crew cross the United States from west to east and back again interviewing people as they stray by. Strays could be the operative word here, because unlike say a Studs Turkel interview, who aims to put forth a true cross section of society or lets say a Deborah Solomon interview who carefully spotlights each subject, Interview Projects picks up on who ever is walking, biking or just sitting around and poses up their version of a Proust Questionnaire. Interview leaves behind the high rises, takes to the back roads and is very comfortable with what they find.

This is one of the best examples I have ever seen of the form fitting the content. Everything about the navigation of the site brings you back and back again to the subjects at hand. Every dot on the map is a pop-up person. The All Episodes page is a great wall of personae and as your cursor glides across they all have their say. Each interview is a masterfully crafted portrait, but the true delight is to be found in the sound editing. The camera becomes a still shot and yet the voice continues to complete the thought. Or as the camera soaks up some local scenery it is impeccably matched with the sounds of weather passing through. One gets the sense that as Interview Project passes through so we all do in one form or another.

This is a David Lynch Presents project and he can be stylistically found everywhere. He introduces each interview setting the ordinary/extraordinary tone for what is to follow. His preamble in the About section is worth the price of admission. He’s his own finely tuned weirdo at this point and what’s not to like? Actually under the category of huh?, in the first couple of introductions it looks lie he has a note pinned to his chest and there is always some smoke or coffee steam?

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The project launched on June 1, 2009. Each episode is posted every three days, there are a total of 121. A few faves of mine are Rey, June 25th, Kee, June 7th, Jim Carter, June 28th, Lynn, July 12th and Traci, July 1st. There is lots of God, lots of alcoholism, lots of abusive fathers and lots of unemployment. None of these come as a big surprise, but it is good to hear and see the survivors tell it themselves and Interview Project lends a sympathetic ear, as should we all.

Special cudos to all the great music for Interview Project provided by Dean Hurley, Stoll Vaughan, Eugene Wasserman and Oto Gillen.

A little bit of fun. A little bit of Flavin.

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Night Tide, Directed by Curtis Harrington. US 1961, 35mm, b/w, 84 min.
By Nancy Cantwell

I start with the typography of Night Tide, not because it is special in itself or a beautiful execution of script, but, more for its clumsy portentous attempt to sell the melodrama of the action. Acting like a petulant child incapable of not giving away the ending, these titles just spell it out. And lucky for us because the story line of boy meets girl and girl turns out to be mermaid under the spell of the dreaded “Sea People”, probably needs all the help it can get.

The more time I spend with Night Tide, Curtis Harrington’s iconoclast Art Film, the more I find a sincere ardent cinefile hard at work. Shot on the Santa Monica pier (and adjacent Venice neighborhoods), he picks up on the blatant displays of the carny undercurrent without overindulging in the carny turmoil. The neon of the hotel is kept simple, Captain Jack’s card is perfectly generic, as is the Ocean View Calendar. All these props seem to be just lying around in wait, not hand picked as harbingers of horror. I had to include the shot of Johnny, the impossibly young Dennis Hopper in his first leading role, reading the paper with the headline “CAL SNAGS POLIO SHOTS’, just as a reminder of the real “horror”, of the not too distant past polio epidemic, teetering on the edge of extinction.

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Grotowski Festival 2009, Wroclaw, Poland
By Guy Zimmerman

At a performance of Gospels of Childhood by the Zar Theater Company in Poland you are spared the indignity of applause. As the piece ends the performers fling open windows and exit, the sounds of the city filtering in, joining with the space. You feel the collective awareness that has formed in the room drift out into open air. The lights rise. After a time people stand as if on cue and begin to walk back into their lives.

Gospels of Childhood was part of this year’s Grotowski Festival in the city of Wroclaw, as was a second Zar piece called Cesarean Section. Essays on Suicide. The two pieces were billed as a diptych, but a third piece, a work-in-progress that I saw, but whose name I do not know, will soon complete the final triptych. The Festival also featured work by the world’s leading practitioners of theater as a fine art, including Peter Brook, Tadashi Suzuki, Pina Bausch, Krystian Lupa, Eugenio Barba, Anatolij Wasiljew and Richard Shectner among others. Theatre Zar, a local favorite, more than held its own in this exalted company.

If theater has one foot in the church and one in the circus, Zar leans heavily on the foot beside the altar. In Gospels of Childhood, performed in Polish, they almost lost me thirty minutes in with so much singing and staging I couldn’t get my bearings…and then won me back entirely with a coup-de-theatre that took place in the blackest darkness I’ve experienced since summer camp when we switched flashlights off in a cave. In that perfect darkness someone was digging in earth. We heard footfalls and erratic breathing…other indecipherable sounds and a weave of voices singing. When the lights rose up again the room was different. Something had shifted in the space and in our collective awareness too. In some uncanny fashion I felt I knew what Lazarus experienced lying in his grave – something coming to life deep inside. Gospels of Childhood is that kind of theater.

Largely musical and song-based, Gospels of Childhood keeps faith with the company’s stated intention to “create theater out of the spirit of music.” From 1999 to 2003 Zar traveled throughout the Caucuses researching sacred polyphonic songs with roots in the distant past. Texts from the Gnostic gospels of Mary Magdalene, Phillip and Thomas are interwoven with fragments from Dostoyevsky and Simone Weil. If I were fluent in Polish I would describe how these texts resonated with the beautiful singing, but since I don’t speak a word all I can say is it didn’t really matter.

The second piece, Cesarean Section, like the middle panel of most triptychs, is bigger and bolder, full of life and movement. The phrase “we always want to kill ourselves, but we never want to die” might describe the emotional terrain here. One of Cesarean Section’s more effective staging tropes involves barefoot dancers and a stage strewn with broken glass. There is an abundance of ancient sacred songs, though fewer than in Gospels of Childhood. Cesarean Section is movement-theater in a somewhat familiar Grotowski-inspired mode but performed with such fearless abandon the jaw drops. Humor here and there like dollops of blood. Halfway through, the ghost of Antonin Artaud shuffles in and sits next to the ghost of Grotowski in the back row, toothlessly grinning.

Before sharing the last piece of the triptych with us the director, Jaroslaw Fret, underscored that it is a work-in-progress. In the theater space a large, translucent sail is tied above the floor. During the piece the performers raise and lower it, and it takes light in various elegant ways while the performers sing. You can imagine how they might flesh this piece out with more staging, but it felt complete, producing again the glow beneath the chest bones, the sense of a definite transformation taking place, a subtle inner refinement. Again there is silence at the end, the sense of your life drifting back onto you like the descent of that sail as it settled over the performers, who now lay motionless on stage.

The next day we see Peter Brook himself in a crowded hall at the Lalek Puppet Theater. Speaking extemporaneously he weaves a complex thought in the air, pausing after each sentence for his earnest Polish translator to catch up. “We all know this is the century of religion,” he states, slyly planting in our temporal lobes this somewhat ominous notion. I think at once of the Zar triptych: rituals for a religion that will never fully be born, and therefore will always retain a generative mystery. If that’s what Brook means by religion, you can sign me up.

Later that night, across the city square, we watch Brook’s Fragments, five short plays by Samuel Beckett. Here we enter the circus tent, and experience the transformative potential of the profane rather than the sacred. Rough for Theatre I, Rockabye, Act Without Words II, Neither, and Come and Go… Up on stage is Marcello Magni, one of the founding members of London’s Theater de Complicite, along with Hayley Carmichael and Khalifa Natour. This is the work of two masters – Beckett and Brook – who understand the power of simplicity. In Act Without Words II Magni repeatedly brings the house down with a simple scowl.

Here, with the utmost economy of means, Beckett is able to fully capture what the Buddhists call dukkha. Famously hard to translate, dukkha identifies the basic shittiness of everyday experience, the sense of continuous low-grade frustration. The feeling is rooted, perhaps, in how confused we are by our basic groundlessness in this world and in our lives; the difficulties we have fully inhabiting our own being in any stable way. Watching these plays, I find myself wondering if this concept of dukkha is not the essence both of Beckett and of clowning in general. Hard as it may be to define, we are all intimate with what Magni and the others are manifesting up there on stage. And so, once again reconciled to indignity, we applaud at the curtain, rising to our feet.

At the National Gallery of Art, April 2009
By Rita Valencia

There is the airborne escape mechanism which is the airplane, or the effective instrument of destruction which is the war plane. Anselm Kiefer’s The Angel of History is a poetic antithesis of both forms, fabricated of lead, its wings laden with books of beaten lead sheets. The lack of utility makes it not only about art, but a sublime object with which to contemplate the idea of the plane, one of the great icons of the war years of the 20th century. Like all icons its pragmatic uselessness makes it sacred in an areligious way. Its payload of leaden manuscripts piled on the wings, pages stuffed with dried poppies, the better to fuel an auto-da-fé, is a righteous Dada juxtaposition. The nose cone of the plane is round, phallic, wrinkled and sagging. The plane’s contours inveigh against aerodynamism. They are angular, not sleek; crumpled and corrugated, edges torn and drooping, tailfin battered. This is an earthbound, organic form, a sad cousin to its perky commercial brethren.

The color is ashen gray, as in the ashes of burned buildings and bodies, alluding to the apocalypse of a society, or an individual; the darkest, most destructive chaos that preceeds a new year’s renewal. (see Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, Ch 2) Mr. K’s airplane speaks to what is left of the idea of the technological wonder once it has acted upon the world, borne its heavy payload, wrecked its havoc, and fallen to the ground again in shades of ash, the apogee of a once hysterically optimistic trajectory.

There is something left, some fuel for a fire. The end of this “angel’s” flight is the beginning of the thought of no flight, the bittersweet memory of flight, the tragedy of war, the failure of war: a stark history. Poppies–emblematic plant of forgetfulness–are dried and stuffed into the leaden books. The manuscripts burned to the color of ash, are the journals and the records of that history. There is a mystical dimension here as well, for People of the Book–whose extermination and whose mystical heritage (in the Kabbalah) is of deep concern to this artist. Who do they become, what do they become, once the Book has been incinerated, the stuff of ash? The Word is obliterated, one cannot know what has been wiped from memory, one can only contemplate the spectacle of its result.

The painting, partner to the plane, says Zim Zum, as in the sound of roaring engines reproduced by a happy child at play. Actually, there was no official onomatopoeic reference according to the art historians at the National Gallery. Ahem. ZimZum is a term from the Kabbalah which refers to the contraction, as in the drawing in of breath, of the Divine, which must contract Itself to produce the place for the creation. Here we have a suitable landing strip for the plane on display, a cosmic field of utter desolation and contraction. Of course, a painting/poem must inhabit an entirely other world, inaccessible to the literality of this sculpture/plane…the juxtaposition of painting and sculpture is wryly comical. The sky is leaden (and also made of lead–Kiefer is arch-practitioner of German humor) but as reflected in the large pool on the field, it is gray and white and smooth like glass. These are winter fields that surround waters, and though yes the perspective is like a landing strip, it would in fact be a horrific place to land any plane other than the Angel of History. The one point perspective of this landscape alludes to a metaphysical ultimatum which is handed all of us at birth. Ash and ice have covered this field in perpetual winter, but the rows of crop stubble suggest a latent fertility. The Divine contraction, the icey harrowed ground, are necessary for regeneration. Look twice and you could be far above, perhaps carried by an Angel of History, so far in the sky that you are seeing a planet whose ocean is bounded by lands that have gone from green to ash and ice. Look again and you may see at the single perspective point (a place that does not really exist) the face of the Divine one, a powerful organizing principle, sucking the ice-shocked fallen feathers of an angel into its tiny white maw. 

I became first drawn to the the Fire Sermon (Adittapariyaya-sutta) when reading Aldous Huxley’s Perrenial Philosophy’s chapter on Good and Evil. I went looking to penetrate and quantify the nature of these moral opposites and found instead a rousing poetic call to action. The sensuality of the dialectic, the simple audacity of the conclusive “Birth is exhausted…” make this a powerful and seductive read.

The Fire Sermon
Adittapariyaya-sutta

Thus I have heard. The blessed One was once living at Gayasia in Gaya with a thousand bhikkhus. There he addressed the bhikkhus:

‘Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?

‘Bhikkhus, the eye is burning, visible forms are burning, visual conciousness is burning, visual impression is burning, also what ever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the visual impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion; I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despair.

‘The ear is burning, sounds are burning, auditory consciousness is burning, auditory impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust….

‘The nose is burning, odours are burning, olfactory consciousness is burning, olfactory impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust….

‘The tongue is burning, flavours are burning, gustative consciousness is burning, gustative impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust….

‘The body is burning, tangible things are burning, tactile consciousness is burning, tactile impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust….

‘The mind is burning, mental objects, (ideas, etc.) are burning, mental consciousness is burning, mental impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the first of hate, with the fire of delusion; I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

‘Bhikkhus, a learned and noble disciple, who sees (things) thus, becomes dispassionate with regard to the eye, becomes dispassionate with regard to visible forms, becomes dispassionate with regard to the visual consciousness, becomes dispassionate with regard to visual impression, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the vusal impression, with regard to that too he becomes dispassionate. He becomes dispassionate with regard to the ear, with regard to sounds…He becomes dispassionate with regard to the nose…with regard to odours…He becomes dispassionate with regard to tongue…with regard to flavours…He becomes dispassionate with regard to mental objects, (ideas, etc.), becomes dispassionate with regard to mental consciousness, becomes dispassionate with regards to mental impression, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of mental impressions, with regard to that too he becomes dispassionate.

‘Being dispassionate, he becomes detached; through detachment he is liberated. When liberated there is knowledge that he is liberated. And he knows: Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived, what has to be done is done, there is no more left to be done on this account.’

This the Blessed One said. The bhikkhus were gald, and they rejoiced at his words.

While this expostion was being delivered, the minds of those thousand bikkhus were liberated from impurites, without attachment.

(Samyutta-nikaya, XXXV, 28)

Translated by Walpola Rahula for “What the Buddha Taught”, expanded 1974 editition, from the original Pali if the Samyutta-nikaya of the Sutta-pitaka.