A friend from Philadelphia was visiting for the weekend, and she had said to meet her and another friend at the Guggenheim on Saturday. Going, I didn’t know what the current exhibition was at all; last thing I had heard, there was a big Kandinsky show up. Since I was running somewhat later than I should have been on Saturday, I received a text from my friend, which said something along the lines of “We will watch the people making out until you arrive.” I kind of laughed and didn’t think too much of it (people-watching in public places is a very legitimate urban activity), so imagine my surprise when I arrived in the Guggenheim to find that she was not referring to one of New York’s overly affectionate couples, but to the artwork.
The spiral of the Guggenheim was stripped bare, devoid of art to my eyes. In the center of the ground floor, a couple was rolling around, making out, groping each other, and occasionally striking poses from famous pieces of artwork, all in slow motion. My friends were positioned maybe twenty feet away, as were many other museum patrons, sitting on a free bench, watching the couple about as unawkwardly as it is possible to watch a couple make out in slow motion. This was a sculpture (dance piece?) by the artist Tino Sehgal, to which my reaction was, “Well. Okay,” and trying to watch without appearing too interested.
We headed up the spiral, and as I looked for whatever I was supposed to be looking for, a kid, maybe ten years old, walked up to us, said, “Hello. This is the exhibition. Can I ask you a question? (Yes.) What is progress?” I was totally disoriented and a little freaked out that someone had conscripted a child to work as a part of the exhibition, but followed him up the spiral with my friends somewhat hesitantly, talking about progress all the while. Then the kid led us up to a teenager, summarized our responses for her, and she took us up from there.
That’s the gist of the exhibition: talking and walking, a few big ideas posed to you by progressively older participants. It concluded at the very top of the rotunda, with a senior citizen, who finished by telling us the name of the exhibition and what a pleasure it was to have conversed. Simple, straightforward, direct in its methods and basic in its execution; disconcertingly one-note, but not a bad note to dwell on. I began thoroughly unconvinced, but finished energized, at the height of a spiral, looking down at a couple obliviously making out in slow-motion, feeling the same kind of subtle euphoria and optimism that I do after a good, long run.
It was effective because although it was one-note, that note wasn’t static; it grew and evolved and worked its way into my thoughts. It was staged, and it felt staged, which is part of why I was so disconcerted by both the couple and the child at first; but at a certain point, I came around to the realization that ideas spoken by actors are still ideas, that inauthentic shared experiences are still experiences shared. There was something about the medium of choice being conversation that made it invariably effective; a simulacrum of a conversation is, you guessed it, still a conversation. So that I do not know if what each actor said was utterly scripted or spontaneous, truthful or fabricated, but I do know that I had an interesting conversation with four or five different people (of increasing ages—a key point) no matter what. It wasn’t life-shattering, or even that revelatory, but it was true nonetheless. The best analogy I can think of is that it would be like taking a photo of the color red, and trying to distinguish between the photo and the original color; the distinction is in a way irrelevant: it’s still red. The truth of the perception is still there.
But with contemporary art, the question I almost always feel compelled to ask myself, explicitly or implicitly, is: is there something to mourn here? What is the loss? And with this: when all is said and done, what is left? I suppose there’s something to be said for art that is purely experiential (and this guy is all about the ephemeral, if documentation of the work is made, it becomes “inauthentic”), but something that constitutes a significant part of my art consumption is going back again and again, having the thing itself (or my experience of it) at my fingertips and eyes and ears. Perhaps part of the problem here is that this experience was good, but not great; compared to a great concert, or a great performance, I don’t think this would measure up. A lot of art that gets on my nerves confuses the intention with the result, and though I don’t think Sehgal’s committed that particular error, I don’t think it entirely works either. I often have to let things sit in the back of my head for a while before I can fully understand their impact, or before I can feel and not just know how they'll last. The problem here is that Sehgal’s piece isn’t in the back of my head; it’s still at the Guggenheim.
- the Guggenheim's page on the exhibition
- NY Times review of the exhibition
- interesting longer piece on him from NY Times magazine
*I believe the two works are called The Kiss and This Progress, though I could be wrong.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Olympics and Ceremonies
Coming from the meticulous Beijing extravaganza that opened the summer Olympics two years ago, Vancouver (thankfully) presented a different face. If the Chinese spectacle was all about the sublime heights that can be achieved by near unlimited resources, Vancouver shied away from grand cultural statements, which is not to say that culture was obscured by the incumbent light and noise; in fact, ostensibly, culture was at the very forefront of the ceremonies. But culture was not flung in your face simultaneously by thousands of identically dressed and choreographed extras; it was just kind of there, chilling out, doing it’s own thing, and if you wanted to join in, that would be great, but the future of the country was not hanging in the balance.
As someone who was both awed and a little put off by the spectacle two years ago, it was kind of nice to watch something where not every choreographed triumph carried an onslaught of portentousness. When one of the giant icicle-things didn’t rise up out of the ground at the end for the torch-lighting, it was just kind of like, “Oh well. Woohoo Olympics!” instead of “This betokens shame for the public face of our nation in the world.” There were nonetheless some really beautiful moments and innovative presentations, executed in a soft, gently artistic style that contrasted with the Chinese event without diametrically opposing it. The video projection-floor was genuinely pretty cool and used in such a way that continually surprised, and the merging of the two dimensional with the space above it was lovely and startling. Some parts were kind of over-the-top and kind of ridiculous, but it’s the Olympics, so I guess I can’t really blame the producers for deciding that this was the time to just kind of let go.
I think it was a measure of the difference in approaches that after the Chinese ceremony, I felt the need to make grand cultural proclamations, to boldly differentiate between their culture and mine, while after this one I just wanted to go hang out with friends or something. Neither reaction seems to me bad, and both seem within the Olympic spirit. I’ve always loved the Olympics: the competition, the diversity, the way in which it remains such a defiant symbol of global communication and interaction. Both a fierce dedication to your country being the best and a willingness to relax a little bit seem compatible with those things.
And though I’m hesitant to set up this ceremony as the true counterpoint to Beijing, being winter instead of summer, the flipside of the openness and intimacy (relatively speaking) of these ceremonies is that there was perhaps a bit of a void left at its center. When the slam poet spoke, it was kind of interesting to me for two reasons: first, it was largely the kind of neo-romantic rhetoric that I associate with proclamations of Americanism (not that surprising I guess, but still it was a little odd to hear all these phrases about dreams and diversity and then hear “Canada” at the end of them); and second, that rhetoric, while inspiring and kind of wonderful, really does leave a bit of an empty hole at its center, as it is less about what is now than what will be. That impulse makes sense to me; but it also leaves me a little bit curious about what’s really at the other end of the spectrum from what we saw two years ago. London 2012 maybe?
- video of the opening ceremony, part 1
As someone who was both awed and a little put off by the spectacle two years ago, it was kind of nice to watch something where not every choreographed triumph carried an onslaught of portentousness. When one of the giant icicle-things didn’t rise up out of the ground at the end for the torch-lighting, it was just kind of like, “Oh well. Woohoo Olympics!” instead of “This betokens shame for the public face of our nation in the world.” There were nonetheless some really beautiful moments and innovative presentations, executed in a soft, gently artistic style that contrasted with the Chinese event without diametrically opposing it. The video projection-floor was genuinely pretty cool and used in such a way that continually surprised, and the merging of the two dimensional with the space above it was lovely and startling. Some parts were kind of over-the-top and kind of ridiculous, but it’s the Olympics, so I guess I can’t really blame the producers for deciding that this was the time to just kind of let go.
I think it was a measure of the difference in approaches that after the Chinese ceremony, I felt the need to make grand cultural proclamations, to boldly differentiate between their culture and mine, while after this one I just wanted to go hang out with friends or something. Neither reaction seems to me bad, and both seem within the Olympic spirit. I’ve always loved the Olympics: the competition, the diversity, the way in which it remains such a defiant symbol of global communication and interaction. Both a fierce dedication to your country being the best and a willingness to relax a little bit seem compatible with those things.
And though I’m hesitant to set up this ceremony as the true counterpoint to Beijing, being winter instead of summer, the flipside of the openness and intimacy (relatively speaking) of these ceremonies is that there was perhaps a bit of a void left at its center. When the slam poet spoke, it was kind of interesting to me for two reasons: first, it was largely the kind of neo-romantic rhetoric that I associate with proclamations of Americanism (not that surprising I guess, but still it was a little odd to hear all these phrases about dreams and diversity and then hear “Canada” at the end of them); and second, that rhetoric, while inspiring and kind of wonderful, really does leave a bit of an empty hole at its center, as it is less about what is now than what will be. That impulse makes sense to me; but it also leaves me a little bit curious about what’s really at the other end of the spectrum from what we saw two years ago. London 2012 maybe?
- video of the opening ceremony, part 1
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Of the Blue Colour of the Sky (OK Go)
I’ve been waiting for months—waiting for years—waiting for you to change; but there ain’t much that’s dumber, there ain’t much that’s dumber than pinning your hopes on the change of another. And I still need you, but what good’s that gonna do? Because needing is one thing, but getting, getting’s another.
—from OK Go’s latest album, the pleasingly titled Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the fourth track and my initial favorite, “Needing/Getting.” Like a lot of their lyrics, they’re clever, and unlike a lot of them, more than a little heartfelt. That seems to be where their latest is aimed, bringing the self-conscious, guiltlessly indulgent brashness of their particular brand of pop towards a place a little more enigmatic. It’s a worthwhile effort, one that even succeeds occasionally, but the problem is that the album equates restraint with sophistication, ambiguity with adulthood. The band distorts their lyrics nearly beyond recognition, a veneer of production—and it does sound very fine more often than not, crackling and crunching in all sorts of shades of white—usurping the feeling the words were meant to betray. The end result isn’t bad, just a little gray, and less saturated than you had hoped. It’s all surface, textured and nuanced but surface nonetheless. And that’s too bad, because what’s there is good enough to make you wish the band had decided to grow up in their own way instead of somebody else’s, forging their own paradigm instead of their idols’.
The album traffics in nostalgia, which is not a surprising move, for them or for us these days. It’s the flipside of that knowing sway, of that determined air that lends a direction to progress, the new adult who’s just a little too old to be young. It’s not a little expected, and because of that, disappointing in equal measure. When things seem as though they’re not working out, the wise choice, the right choice, is acceptance: acceptance without compromise. It’s an admission of fallibility but a wholehearted determination to invention, to moving forward even if it’s a little stupid to do so; because every once in a while a little stupidity is demanded, and never more so than when at the beginning of something. Nostalgia, while lovely and acceptable, is the easy route in a bad way when it constitutes the greater part of your reasoning.
And essentially, that feeling is: being lost. Whether citizens or rock stars, the one thing we can agree on is being stuck in that funk and wanting something to happen. The difficulty results from a plurality of options rather than their dearth, an experience that seems like growing up all over again and is confusing because it’s not. We understand that impulse to action and needing something to happen, and the call to hearken back is understandable but not excusable; there should be leaders, not shepherds, because when you’ve discovered something that feels disconcertingly like youth you’re not ready to be gently guided; you’re ready to be told what to do so that you can joyfully and ecstatically rebel. Moderation only means something in between extremes.
The first side of that equation is securely in hand. We have the brashness of youth underneath our belt, the boom years when everything was a discovery. But now we’re on the verge of finding everything a recapitulation, of letting that luxurious distortion of stored-up knowledge and sound obscure inherent originality. It’s easy to forget that things started in chaos, that seeming atrophy can be at least as much of a spur to newness as can order. You have to reject the false duality of escapism versus realism; there are escapes in this world that involve no compromise. It’s time to move forward.
Before the earth was round, there was no end to things; no one tried to measure what they knew. Everything was warm, and everyone would love, and every contradiction was true. The sun worked twice as hard, and the moon was twice as far, and the sky was still honestly blue. But when the time came, everything spiraled in, and everyone forgot what they knew.
—from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, track nine, “Before the Earth was Round”
- WTF?
- This Too Shall Pass
- This Too Shall Pass v2
—from OK Go’s latest album, the pleasingly titled Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the fourth track and my initial favorite, “Needing/Getting.” Like a lot of their lyrics, they’re clever, and unlike a lot of them, more than a little heartfelt. That seems to be where their latest is aimed, bringing the self-conscious, guiltlessly indulgent brashness of their particular brand of pop towards a place a little more enigmatic. It’s a worthwhile effort, one that even succeeds occasionally, but the problem is that the album equates restraint with sophistication, ambiguity with adulthood. The band distorts their lyrics nearly beyond recognition, a veneer of production—and it does sound very fine more often than not, crackling and crunching in all sorts of shades of white—usurping the feeling the words were meant to betray. The end result isn’t bad, just a little gray, and less saturated than you had hoped. It’s all surface, textured and nuanced but surface nonetheless. And that’s too bad, because what’s there is good enough to make you wish the band had decided to grow up in their own way instead of somebody else’s, forging their own paradigm instead of their idols’.
The album traffics in nostalgia, which is not a surprising move, for them or for us these days. It’s the flipside of that knowing sway, of that determined air that lends a direction to progress, the new adult who’s just a little too old to be young. It’s not a little expected, and because of that, disappointing in equal measure. When things seem as though they’re not working out, the wise choice, the right choice, is acceptance: acceptance without compromise. It’s an admission of fallibility but a wholehearted determination to invention, to moving forward even if it’s a little stupid to do so; because every once in a while a little stupidity is demanded, and never more so than when at the beginning of something. Nostalgia, while lovely and acceptable, is the easy route in a bad way when it constitutes the greater part of your reasoning.
And essentially, that feeling is: being lost. Whether citizens or rock stars, the one thing we can agree on is being stuck in that funk and wanting something to happen. The difficulty results from a plurality of options rather than their dearth, an experience that seems like growing up all over again and is confusing because it’s not. We understand that impulse to action and needing something to happen, and the call to hearken back is understandable but not excusable; there should be leaders, not shepherds, because when you’ve discovered something that feels disconcertingly like youth you’re not ready to be gently guided; you’re ready to be told what to do so that you can joyfully and ecstatically rebel. Moderation only means something in between extremes.
The first side of that equation is securely in hand. We have the brashness of youth underneath our belt, the boom years when everything was a discovery. But now we’re on the verge of finding everything a recapitulation, of letting that luxurious distortion of stored-up knowledge and sound obscure inherent originality. It’s easy to forget that things started in chaos, that seeming atrophy can be at least as much of a spur to newness as can order. You have to reject the false duality of escapism versus realism; there are escapes in this world that involve no compromise. It’s time to move forward.
Before the earth was round, there was no end to things; no one tried to measure what they knew. Everything was warm, and everyone would love, and every contradiction was true. The sun worked twice as hard, and the moon was twice as far, and the sky was still honestly blue. But when the time came, everything spiraled in, and everyone forgot what they knew.
—from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, track nine, “Before the Earth was Round”
- WTF?
- This Too Shall Pass
- This Too Shall Pass v2
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Avatar: A small footnote to a large movie
Upfront and to say it right away, I enjoyed Avatar. I was mesmerized for the better part of three hours, drawn thoroughly into a world so vividly rendered. Furthermore, the 3-D—about which I was more skeptical than not beforehand, expecting at worst to have to dodge crap flying at my face and at best a gimmick the novelty of which would wear off quickly—was kind of beautiful, underwriting the lushness of the film with an almost minimal elegance, a new aesthetic. The world had a depth which made immersion that much more effortless, and the varying planes of depth brought to mind those staggered dioramas, or those animations where everything takes place on two or three discrete fields of action.
It is a testament to the success of the world created by the film that I found the story within it compelling more often than not, a triumph of technique that emerges as artistic. That said, it’s a shame it wasn’t a better movie. If it was as awesome as it was with a narrative as lousy as it had, it makes me wish to see the movie that could have been made if the graphics weren’t the only thing doing the heavy lifting. And though it’s beside the point to say that if Avatar were rendered as a stage script with a minimal set it would be nigh-unwatchable, it’s worth saying once anyway if only to get it out of your system. What happens in its world is oddly, inexplicably compelling (I almost said subtly, but say what you will about it, Avatar is not a subtle movie), but that stems not from anything exceptional in its plot or characters or all that jazz, but the need to stay in its world for just a few minutes longer. That need could have been tied to virtually any motivation and be rendered nearly as urgent, as its environs would still demanded to be lived in, breathed in and stared at longingly through surprisingly cool glasses in wave-of-the-future 3D.
That its narrative is one of the most self-congratulatorily tolerant and fundamentally imperialistic narratives in the cultural lexicon is a matter of convenience rather than any deep-seated malice on the film’s part. The natives in this film—a mashup of virtually every quote-unquote indigenous or primitive cultural stereotype the film could get its hands on (real and fictional both)—are, as usual, in tune with nature and love one another and in really good shape and stuff. As the story dictates, their worth is uncountable as compared with the malignancy of what is corporate, and they deeply deserve to be left in peace after the friendly imperialist shows them the way to war, salvation, and their need for an enlightened leader.
But this is (rather unfortunately) nothing unusual; these convictions are skin-deep at best, because apparently that’s all three dimensions are good for. After we cast aside any noun to which the modifier “nominal” can apply, what are we left with? With what is still an engrossing world, a thoroughly awesome film. I admire the work’s dedication to that childish joy of creation and fantasy, and its success in reinvigorating the experience so thoroughly that to complain seems almost beside the point. I truly fell into the scope of its world, and there is also the critic’s satisfaction to be had of a pop-cultural phenomenon that can be legitimately got behind. But now, after having had some time to let it mull and stew in my head, it turns out the film was perhaps shallower than it seemed, that the resonance that comes from true depth was lacking. So while it was awesome, I wish it were better.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
From back home
As our time in Providencia was drawing to a close, I kept compiling ideas and little notes to myself to mention in the last blog post before I left. I kept putting off writing it, because I was perhaps a little tired of writing, and I figured I would have plenty of time in the coming days given that the rest of our stay there had been fairly low-key. Of course, the last week or so in Providencia managed to make up for the calmness of the earlier period by erupting into a kind of organized frenzy right before we left, so that the three month stay there revealed itself as a long, calm interlude bracketed by near-chaos on either end.
We accomplished a couple of activities we wanted to: kayaking through the mangrove forest (spectacular and tiring), snorkeling around Santa Catalina. But the more significant events involved our making friends, after three months and all at once. From the waitress at our restaurant to the owners at the hotel to friends who landed in the middle of our life there from absolutely nowhere at all, we spent the last week actually getting to know people and experiencing the island in a radically different way from before. It was a sensational way to end the trip and just a little sad, as we managed to make connections just before we left for good, but perhaps we needed the impetus of a departure date to spur us across that unseen divide. I’m not going to recount everything that happened here, because I’m feeling lazy at the moment, and as I’ve discovered with having a blog, telling a story here denies me the pleasure of telling it to friends in person.
But we left for Bogota in a lovely blur of activity, and then arrived to the warm embrace of Silvia’s family for several days. In addition to hearing more Spanish in the last few days than I had heard in all of Providencia, we ate quite a lot and saw a good bit of Bogota. It’s always nice to have residents showing you around a place, so that the city becomes more than just a name on a map and an assembly of sensations, and Bogota was no different. Spending time with a Bogota family (and since it was the holidays, there was a lot of that family around) was just as fun and educative as seeing the city, and also provided a final test of my meager Spanish abilities, which if I passed, I did so just barely scraping by.
Bogota is an interesting city. It’s big, which I had been told before, but that wasn’t quite driven home until we were standing on top of Monserrate and watching the vista of the city from mountain to mountain. It’s a sprawling breadth, too: I was totally unconfronted with the overwhelming density of New York or even Paris, finding instead a spacious, even sparse agglomeration that struck me almost as a smaller city that was larger than it should be. There are small, beautiful historical quarters in the city, but to me they seemed to function less as the pulse of the urban life now than as museums for what it once was. Four days is not enough to truly get a grasp on a place, but Bogota seemed to me a city unlike others I have seen.
Then I got back home, immersed in a comprehensible language and winter air that is actually cold, not just the-ocean-is-so-cold-today kind of cold. There was some reacclimation for sure, but having spent time abroad before I was fairly well prepared for it.
And thus ends the chronicle of Providencia. I will continue to keep writing and posting moving forward, though the content will be less centered around my day-to-day activities than before. But for the moment, I’ll just end with a Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
We accomplished a couple of activities we wanted to: kayaking through the mangrove forest (spectacular and tiring), snorkeling around Santa Catalina. But the more significant events involved our making friends, after three months and all at once. From the waitress at our restaurant to the owners at the hotel to friends who landed in the middle of our life there from absolutely nowhere at all, we spent the last week actually getting to know people and experiencing the island in a radically different way from before. It was a sensational way to end the trip and just a little sad, as we managed to make connections just before we left for good, but perhaps we needed the impetus of a departure date to spur us across that unseen divide. I’m not going to recount everything that happened here, because I’m feeling lazy at the moment, and as I’ve discovered with having a blog, telling a story here denies me the pleasure of telling it to friends in person.
But we left for Bogota in a lovely blur of activity, and then arrived to the warm embrace of Silvia’s family for several days. In addition to hearing more Spanish in the last few days than I had heard in all of Providencia, we ate quite a lot and saw a good bit of Bogota. It’s always nice to have residents showing you around a place, so that the city becomes more than just a name on a map and an assembly of sensations, and Bogota was no different. Spending time with a Bogota family (and since it was the holidays, there was a lot of that family around) was just as fun and educative as seeing the city, and also provided a final test of my meager Spanish abilities, which if I passed, I did so just barely scraping by.
Bogota is an interesting city. It’s big, which I had been told before, but that wasn’t quite driven home until we were standing on top of Monserrate and watching the vista of the city from mountain to mountain. It’s a sprawling breadth, too: I was totally unconfronted with the overwhelming density of New York or even Paris, finding instead a spacious, even sparse agglomeration that struck me almost as a smaller city that was larger than it should be. There are small, beautiful historical quarters in the city, but to me they seemed to function less as the pulse of the urban life now than as museums for what it once was. Four days is not enough to truly get a grasp on a place, but Bogota seemed to me a city unlike others I have seen.
Then I got back home, immersed in a comprehensible language and winter air that is actually cold, not just the-ocean-is-so-cold-today kind of cold. There was some reacclimation for sure, but having spent time abroad before I was fairly well prepared for it.
And thus ends the chronicle of Providencia. I will continue to keep writing and posting moving forward, though the content will be less centered around my day-to-day activities than before. But for the moment, I’ll just end with a Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
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