RIP Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter has died age 78.

Pinter's drama, like Beckett's, was always remarkable as much for its silences as for its utterances, but unlike Beckett, Pinter's characters tended to lay into each other and strip their relationships to each grievance and power position.

We have lost a great writer and thinker.

Random image.

Couldn't even stay away a month...

I was down at the NGA last weekend mainly trying to find a place to read where I wouldn't be bothered before I headed over to some friends on Capitol Hill who were putting me up for the night, since, after all, this was my first trip back to DC as a visitor rather than a resident in 15 years.

After a bit of reading and a little consternation that the movie that day, Antonioni's Deserta rossa, didn't start until 4:30 and would last until 6:30, therefore ruling out my being able to watch it, I decided I should really try to see something while at the gallery. For the past eight years it's been an incredibly rare opportunity that I've been at any museum without at least one child dragging me off long before I wanted to go, and you have to take advantage when you can. So I wandered into the West Wing to take a look at the Martin Puryear exhibition.

Puryear is from D.C., although his artistic materials seem more suited to some rural farm -- lots of rough wood and mesh enclosures that reminded me of chicken pens -- although highly stylized chicken pens. Some of the pieces are remarkable. I enjoyed the scale of the Desire (pictured at top of page, and hopefully you see what I mean about there being something rustic about the whole contraption. It almost seems like one of those old style threshing set ups but broken down to minimal form and shifted components. Very beautiful in my opinion.

I got my gallery fix in, but I couldn't help wishing I had a little more time to see the Antonioni film and maybe even the concert they generally have on Sunday evenings in one of the west wing atriums, staples of our pre-children days. Afterwards it was off to Capitol Hill and a delicious dinner with a little wine and lots of conversation -- after all, DC schools opened the next day and my hosts have a third grader -- and oh yes a little more reading.

Can you separate the dancer from the dance?

The name accrues.

We buy Warhols, Van Goghs, O'Keefes, Matisses, and the like -- shortened simply to the name. A mad scribble on a restaurant napkin by De Koonig -- hell, a restaurant receipt with a doodle -- would fetch more than a six foot by eight foot oil by the best art school graduate in the land, and while there may be money in a Basquiat, there's little in the way of a marketable skill for most graffiti bombers.

Except for Banksy, the British stenciler who not only decorates walls and overpasses but also manages to hang his art surreptitiously in some of the world's best galleries. In the last few years, Banksy's work has been highly collectible, which is no mean feat given that much of it is stuck (without authorization) on buildings along public streets and is therefore not really moveable and by default becomes the property of the property owner and nearly as impossible to guard as the previously un-defaced/decorated wall.

Aside from the originality of Banksy's stencils and his cleverness in eluding museum guards long enough to hang his work with adhesive on gallery walls, part of the allure was his secret identity. Who is Banksy? In a form associated with "the street," meaning urban, working class, and in America at least, minority, where would Banksy come from?

Over the weekend, both the BBC and the Guardian reported on Banksy's probable unmasking as a middle class and mid-thirties guy from Bristol, England (The Mail on Sunday ran the original story, but I'd rather link to the Beeb than to the tabloid). However, I can't pass up the Mail's self-satisfied chortling over their coup:

And far from being a radical tearaway from an inner-city council estate, the man we have identified as Banksy is, perhaps all too predictably, a former public schoolboy [meaning in England "private"] brought up in middle-class suburbia.

The story is complete with photos of the presumed Banksy's childhood home and Bristol suburbia. Which gets me back to the beginning: the art is attached to the artist and vice versa. Revelations of Banksy's identity now allow for biographical criticism, a form that is at its worst utterly useless in terms of finding meaning in art and at its best most penetrating in finding motivations for the artist.

The Mail, for its part, seems to think that it's performed the equivalent to the unmasking of Vanilla Ice as a middle-class kid from a good home rather than an edgy street kid...except in Vanilla Ice's case, there really was no there there. What Vanilla Ice's attempted comeback response showed (if you can remember this far back in pop culture, Ice tried to recuperate himself as a thug rapper...an astounding flop) was that he was all image -- his songs being unremarkable and his most marketable quality being showmanship.


In Banksy's case, what we have is art before the artist, a body of work with no body to attach it to, except in our collective imaginations. In other words, the image issue was really a lack of his actual image and presence, the absence of which creates its own speculative presence (which is why most of our superheroes have nondescript "everyday" alteregos).

Of course, as graffiti is technically a crime and Banksy's most common method is to select canvasses without regard to ownership, it makes you wonder if he can continue with a style that was predicated on not getting caught.

In case you happen to be in London with time to kill.

I can't believe it, but I actually saw a Cy Twombly I liked. Normally, I don't think of art and Cy Twombly in the same sentence, mainly because his crap is so juvenile and derivative -- and by derivative I don't even mean it's a good copy...I mean it's watered down shoddy nods toward something that's already been done. However, I was checking out the Guardian's piece on Twombly's show at the Tate, and one of the preview pieces I found very nice:

It makes me think of waves crashing against the shore. There's a mood to it, and energy. "Untitled, Part VII" he calls it. Other than that one, the pictures strike me as the sort of dreck I've always associated with Twombly. No concept, no originality, just a lucky time: he happened to be painting when Rothko, Pollack, Johns, Warhol, and Lichtenstein were popular, and somehow critics mistook his juvenelia for art. Jesus, you can't even compare him to those other five. It's like comparing Coldplay to Radiohead or U2.

See the Phillips Collection Free on Saturday and Sunday.

The Phillips Collection -- one of those museums in DC you generally have to pay to see -- is opening its doors this weekend for a "Jacob Lawrence Family Free Festival" that will include great activities including a children's shadow puppetry re-enactment of Lawrence's Migration Series.

You can see the entire Migration Series -- which is normally split evenly between the Phillips and MOMA assembled in one place until October 26th...then they'll most likely be split up again or maybe they'll go somewhere else...MOMA doesn't list a Lawrence exhibit in its upcoming shows, so I don't know...

Here's what the Phillips Collection says about the Family Free Festival:

Jacob Lawrence Family Free Festival The museum will be filled with activities and entertainment during a weekend-long celebration of Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, including shadow-puppetry, interactive dance performances by The DanceFusion Jazz Project, a Lawrence-inspired play written and acted byMississippi students, 1940s jazz performed by The Potomac Jazz Project, collage making, gallery tours, and films.

More on that MLK memorial...

If you get the print edition of the Washington Post, you can see the side by side before and after shots of the proposed MLK sculpture to be placed on the National Mall near the FDR Memorial. For some reason, those shots are not available in the online edition, nor could I easily turn them up via google. I do know that my son, when asked which one was MLK, identified the original sculpture, not the new one.

Here's the original sculpture:

Strong, dignified. It's hard to tell the exact nature of the changes, because the Post only has headshots of the before and after, but the story indicates the changes are mainly in the level of detail:

The furrows in Martin Luther King Jr.'s brow already are gone, and his face looks less troubled.

The pen in his left hand is gone, too, replaced by a scroll. His hands seemed etched in more detail, down to the creases in his knuckles and the bones under the skin. There are buttons on his coat sleeves.

However, these changes apparently occurred before the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts issued their edict to tone down King's confrontational stance, apparently believing that leading movements to tear down racial and economic oppression in the United States were walks in the park. Racial oppression got you down? Don't worry....Be Happy!


Perhaps these changes will be enough to appease the Commission, although I hear they have entered their own design for the MLK memorial, something a little more to their desire to remember MLK as a great provider and helper to the oppressed masses:

Racists still don't get it.

It's bad enough, I suppose, that racists had to swallow the federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. Dick Cheney sure wasn't happy about it. But then again, he felt the Apartheid South African government was doing a fine job and voted against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.


Now that "massive resistance" has proven an utter failure, the racists have had to regroup and couch their objections to the lessons the rest of society has learned in more reasoned, if still ultimately indefensible, terms. So we have it that the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts is now complaining about the statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., that will go at the planned King memorial along the Tidal Basin.


Sure, they're pretending their objections have something to do with a similarity between the statue and statues in former and current "communist" states, but you can bet that a similar style statue of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush would have no problem passing muster with the commission. In fact, I'm willing to bet that somewhere in America -- perhaps not specifically commission certified, I'll grant -- a statue of Reagan in similar style exists. Just a hunch. Anyway, here's what Thomas Luebcke says:

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts thinks "the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries," commission secretary Thomas Luebke said in a letter in April.

So he makes it pretty clear that he sees MLK's statue as reminiscent of Lenin's statues. As if Martin Luther King didn't have enough problems with the FBI and right wing lunatics' attempts to tar him -- and the entire Civil Rights movement -- as a front for Communism, now forty years after his death we have this moron falling back on the same tired slanders.


The Post, in its entirely unhelpful way of making poor and leading comparisons, notes that the statue of King -- 28 feet tall -- would be "eight feet taller than the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial." Well, Honest Abe is sitting down.


At bottom, though, the sculptor, Ed Jackson, Jr., and artistic consultant James Chaffers got it right in their response:

The sense of confrontation in the sculpture is not a coincidence. "We see him . . . as a warrior," Chaffers said yesterday. "We see him as a warrior for peace . . . not as some pacifist, placid, kind of vanilla, but really a man of great conviction and strength."

King was a powerful man, a man who was killed not because he melted into the background, but because he took stands that powerful people opposed: he fought for the rights of the racially and economically oppressed. Therefore lies the discomfort of the commission and other critics, who are not interested in being reminded that King's struggle was against their complacency, their resistance, their inability to take responsibility for the inequalities being perpetrated and perpetuated in the United States of America.


And they're still turning their heads away.

Theatre Roundup: Argonautika

A few days ago we hit the Shakespeare Theatre for their production of Argonautika, a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts that's lively and inventive. Like many modern productions that are serious but don't take themselves too seriously, the influence of Brecht is occasionally felt, both in the stage props that don't even try to pretend to be anything but props (the models of the Argo are like Spinal Tap's Stonehenge...) and in the direct address to the audience. A particular moment of levity mixed with theme comes through towards the end when Hera and Athena change Medea's dress: Hera comments that the dress has a zipper and is therefore not very historically accurate, after which Athena chastises her for being so literal, telling her that if you're too literal you "miss so much."

As a retelling of one of the classic tales of ancient mythology, you're dealing with an audience that knows most of the story, and playwright and director Mary Zimmerman picks and chooses the episodes she wishes to bring to life, and a good bit of the carnage is toned-down (Medea and Jason don't chop Medea's brother into bits and toss him overboard to dealy Aeetes, for instance).

Try to catch it if you can. You'll love the Argonauts' roll call (and no it's not like MST3K's "Robot Roll Call").

Midweek day off.

Just to recap: today at 7 p.m. you could catch Richard Russo at Politics and Prose or Brock Clarke at Olsson's in Dupont Circle. Both talks, I'm sure, will be full of dark humor.

In other news, my son was off school yesterday since DCPS was having the parent teacher conference day, and after we received a glowing review of our second-grader, during which we were told he was a "pleasure to have in class," we went to lunch. Then my wife went back to work and I took the child to Air and Space Museum, where I broke down and took him on the flight simulator that the museum has taking up one of their galleries. It is an absolute piece of shit. The screen is fuzzy and the "simulation" is pretty crappy. Half the time it simply appears that you're watching the plane in 3rd person, rather than riding in it (caveat: this ride was the $7 ride simulator, not the $8 "interactive"). I had a more realistic simulation experience at the espnzone, where they've got a roller coaster simulator that costs far less. Seriously, the screen was so old and nasty, the company's name was burned into the screen.

After that enjoyable experience, it was off to the National Gallery of Art, where we managed to see the Hopper show again, this time without a 2.5 year old and the weekend throngs. I am simply enthralled by his watercolors, some of which are huge, and all of which have those same strong lines and contrasts that isolate everything in his oil paintings.

So a short time ago I managed to see both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (closes July 22) and Hamlet (closes July 29) in the same week. The former is playing at the Studio Theatre and the latter at the Shakespeare Theatre. While I'd seen Hamlet staged before, I had never seen Stoppard's play staged before. I'm glad we saw the Stoppard before the Shakespeare, because the Shakespeare Theatre production made a few allusions to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead that would have passed right over my head, such as the coin flips executed incessantly in Stoppard's play.

It was also fun to see the central action of Hamlet pressed to the margins so the side characters and minor subplots could come out. At the Studio, the actor playing Hamlet put on a little campiness (not in a bad way) when he delivered one of Hamlet's leading and laden speeches to Polonius, and Floyd King's turn as the debauched Player is tremendous. The leads are both great, and I can only imagine how exhausting that play must be for the two of them, as they are both on stage nearly the entire time (really...the entire time, with one or two breaks that might be long enough to catch their breath).

Seriously, go see it.

The interesting thing to me about Shakespeare Theatre's production of Hamlet is that I last saw them produce Hamlet with Wallace Acton in the lead, and if you've ever seen Wallace Acton in a leading role, you tend to think he's the perfect actor for the part. He did an amazing Ariel in The Tempest several years ago, and a chilling Richard III (the most recent Shakespeare Theatre production of Richard III was so dead to me that my wife and I actually walked out of the theatre at intermission, and we've never done that before, even when she was ill with the inappropriately named "morning sickness" before our son was born), but sadly Wallace Acton is no longer in Washington, having deserted our little backwater for the bright lights of New York City.

So I was worried that I wouldn't find this Hamlet so very good in Hamlet. Not true, not true. Jeffrey Carlson's Hamlet comes across as far more disturbed than Acton's portrayal, and while Acton's Hamlet emphasized the calculating side of the Prince with occasional bursts of mania, Carlson plays the mania up with occasional bursts of calculation. It's a powerful performance, which is good, since the play is over three hours long. Michelle Beck's Ophelia is very good and in my mind highlights a recent trend at the Shakespeare Theatre: good actresses playing very solid roles with more depth than in the past. This production also brings forth the sexual interactions between the King and Queen, with one scene making it quite obvious that the two have been interrupted in the midst of lovemaking...ewww is pretty much what I thought.

Let me tell you, it's a busy month for theatre as far as I'm concerned. This weekend we're hitting the Imagination Stage production of The Araboolies of Liberty Street and then Arena Stage's EMERGENCE-See.

Meanwhile, across the pond...

Jonathan Jones, the Guardian's art critic, has a damning piece on British graffiti artist "Banksy," someone whose career I've followed for a few years, at first because I thought it was hilarious that he would sneak into major galleries and hang his own artwork there. More recently, I took a bit more interest in his exterior stencil work when the whole "Borf" phenomenon was happening around DC.

You remember Borf, don't you? He had a few mildly amusing stencils (more amusing for their location than anything else), but overall he was just scrawling his name on whatever surface he could find. Post-conviction, a group of people who badly need to have their own homes vandalized claimed that "Borf" was not an individual, but rather a collective or possibly a movement, and mounted an art show under the moniker of the "Borf Brigade."

Well, Borf is a pale imitation of Banksy. And when I say imitation, I should probably say that the only similarity is that they both employ stencils in their works.

Jones, apparently blind to the fact that most of the art world's history is full of mavericks who are rejected by the establishment (hello: Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain") believes that Banksy's work is nothing more than a visual gag, something that "If he had gone to college, he might be making good money in advertising by now." Meow.

Perhaps Jones is right. Perhaps Banksy is a passing fad, but I have deep doubts about the opinion of anyone who cites Cy Twombly in a positive manner.

Here's an example of Banksy's work:

For some reason Banksy's site is not loading properly, so I couldn't get a picture of some of his gallery hangings, but I'm putting my money on Banksy being more like the Dadaists, the Fauvists, and the Pop Artists than a passing fancy.

First Times.

Over the weekend I saw The Tempest at the Folger. It was the first time I've ever been to the Folger Theatre, although I have wandered through the tourist area of the Folger before, and while I knew the theatre was a re-creation of an Elizabethan theatre, I was amazed at how small it was: 250 seats in all. You'd think that would mean there wasn't a bad seat in the house, but apparently a few people on the sides felt their views were obstructed by the thick supporting columns that separated the main orchestra seating from the side orchestra areas. However, our view was fine.

Of course, one difference between the Folger's stage and a real Elizabethan theater, aside from climate control, is that the Folger incorporates a sophisticated sound and light show into their productions, which in my opinion often overwhelmed the small space. I'm not a big fan of music in the theater, because I feel it's a shortcut to conjuring drama, so maybe I'm making too much of it, but seriously I felt it was intrusive.

While I'm talking about things I didn't like, I might as well talk about the way the director chose to present Ariel. He stuck the actress behind a circular translucent screen elevated above and behind the center of the stage. This severely limited my attachment to the character and my interest in her plight as an imprisoned spirit. Yes, you saw more clearly that she was imprisoned, but most people are clever enough to figure out from the dialogue and the interaction between Prospero and Ariel that the spirit is in servitude and not happy about it. No need to hit us over the head with it, especially if the tactic ends up recreating the imprisonment of the character by limiting the actor to facial expressions and singing.

The rest of the production was very very good. Prospero came across as both kind and manipulative, and his ability to turn from happiness to rage hinted at controlling and slightly unhinged possibilities; the character is so interesting because he tells us early on that he lost his worldy status as a result of a too intense love of his studies, which I like to interpret as the dangers all scholars face when they abdicate social responsibility for the realm of "pure" research. One of the more interesting changes was turning Caliban his plotters into one character: rather than encountering Trinculo and Stehano, Caliban finds a bottle that Gonzalo has left behind and gets himself drunk and creates his co-consipirators out of the bottle and his hand. It's an exhaustive role for the actor, who must now play three parts, even if all are filtered through the main role of Caliban. I have to say the cast was very solid: the King of Naples was aloof, Gonzalo was both a blowhard and a noble soul, Antonio was dapper and conniving (really the actor displayed his cold grasping and final shame extremely well in what really was a small role), Miranda was innocent without being cloying, etc.

If you want to see it, well too late. The run ended yesterday.

As for other firsts, the first night of Fort Reno is tonight at, well, Fort Reno.

Mystery Shot.

Any guesses?

So how was the weekend?

We went to the Jasper Johns exhibit this weekend at the National Gallery of Art. I was unimpressed, and I like Johns's work. I think the problem with the exhibit is that it's too repetitive: two rooms full of targets, a few more of the "red, yellow, blue" motif, and then some body images. All in all, the repetition doesn't build meaning but rather implies, incorrectly I would add, that Johns is a one-trick pony.

We couldn't resist taking the chance to see the Matisse cut-outs, which are only open for a portion of the day:

Don't worry: I didn't use a flash. I am astounded by the amount of flash photography that goes on in art museums. I'm also astounded that the guards often don't say anything about it, or that museums don't have policies against it (the NGA doesn't bar flash photography, while the Smithsonian's American Art and Portrait Gallery does).

For children, the NGA has a "picture hunt" checklist that asks you to go from gallery to gallery: they give you the gallery number and the artist and painting names, and you go hunt it down. Our son was magnificently happy with this activity, and we went end to end after the paintings. The Shaw Memorial was on the list:

Doing the search made me realize how deep the NGA's collection is. I usually hang out in the late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century areas, so I hardly ever venture to the western end of the West Building. Several of our paintings were down on the western end, though, so we meandered over there to seek out such gems as Sodoma's St. George and the Dragon, which is not to be confused with other versions (for instance, it wasn't the version that our son has seen a million times reproduced to ridiculous size in the NGA concourse cafeteria):

It was a good way to spend a Saturday.