STAGING STRANGENESS

I’ve probably seen a hundred plays in New York City – Broadway, off-Broadway, and amateur. But I’ve never seen a level of stagecraft as high as at that in Robert Wilson’s opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramowic at the Armory. This piece is essentially a vanity production that stars the artist as herself. It’s more biographical than philosophical, and locates the roots of her complex body-centric art in predictable traumas including a wicked mother, a feeling of not being pretty enough, and a lover’s abandonment. The show mixes forms: music, film, fashion, poetry and dance. But it’s most remarkable for its stage sets and lighting, which plunge us into a series of worlds that are, as my friend described, “painfully gorgeous." The narrative recreates episodes from the artist’s life, and each unfolds onstage in a tableau as cunningly crafted as a fashion editorial. Actors are positioned on the broad, high black stage with geometric clarity, and brushed with cool white neon light that accentuates their acrid-colored costumes and stark kabuki-like make-up.

I’ve never seen scenes as archly beautiful as these. There is a man in yellow pajamas in bed under a sky full of pie-sized foil stars. There is a lady in a red feather-tipped gown on a chaise lounge who floats, carelessly, to sea. And there is, most thrillingly, a kind of surrealist playground, with four isolated, mime-type figures on stage at once: a man perched a swing, a lady spinning from a rope clenched in her mouth, a naked girl rolling down a staircase, and a clown anxiously dancing in place. Each scene in the play is brilliantly composed and, ultimately, empty, because it conveys no narrative or emotion. A whole lot of strange things happen on stage (figures run back and forth at back, drop down on harnesses, and join up in a parade to march away) and we don’t ask ourselves why. This strangeness isn’t like that in a David Lynch movie, which, similarly ravishing visually, erupts from puckers in ordinary life. And this strangeness isn’t like that in a Pina Bausch dance, which emerges from fevered concentration on a single action. Wilson here seems to be to producing strangeness for its own sake. Nothing in this production really gets at life and death of Marina Abramowic, or at the deep themes in her art. It’s all very pretty decoration.

Photograph © Lucie Jansch, courtesy of The Armory.

January 08, 2014 by Nalina Moses

There is no finer delivery system for pleasure than a good pop song. Sadly, this power is left mostly unexploited in Massive Attack’s multi-media concert/collaboration with documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis at the Armory. The Drill Hall is majestically transformed, with a small stage for the musicians at the center, wrapped with a giant U-shaped field of video screens. Curtis’ film, which traces, compellingly, western social culture from the 1960’s to the present by laying critical speech and text over archival news footage, flickers across them simultaneously. And Massive Attack becomes, for the evening, a cover band, performing songs relevant to moments in the film’s narration, most of them written by other artists. In following along so literally the band don’t do justice to their own dense, textured, enveloping sound, or to the film’s political verve. The show becomes another pop video, serving up music alongside imagery without engaging it incisively.

The film gives moments of astounding political clarity, as when clips from Jane Fonda’s iconic exercise tape, unnervingly glossy, illustrate how American culture collapsed in the 1980’s from shaping the world to shaping its body. There are moments of pop magic too, like when the growling vocals to Karmacona start up and the band breaks into its signature hypnotic torrents. But nothing is as enthusiastically received as their cover of Sugar Sugar, which is meant to illustrate the enforced jolliness of postwar, pre-Beatles pop culture. The accompanying film shows us minstrel shows, dog shows, dance contests, and other inanities, but we don’t feel them ironically; instead we surrender to the sweet, stupid power of the song. Throughout the 90-minute show the music and film move at different paces, overlapping at moments literally but rarely viscerally. What if the sonic and visual forces, both potent, were fully fused, the entire show choreographed thematically with original music from the band, so that it became charged with the sting of the film’s righteous, deeply troubling politics? We would accept both, ecstatically.

Image courtesy of Massive Attack.

September 29, 2013 by Nalina Moses

WS, Paul McCarthy’s multimedia installation at the Armory, fills the Drill Hall with spectral howls and lighting, thick-limbed artificial trees, a ravaged suburban house, and a three-screen seven-hour movie that’s projected simultaneously at each end of the space. The film is a dark, dirty retelling of the Snow White story. The house, a recreation of the artist’s childhood home in suburban Utah, is actually the stage set where it was filmed. That filming has left it wrecked, with soiled rugs, spoiled foods, overturned furniture, and naked, mutilated corpses. The whole experience might be shocking but instead it’s tedious; so over-the-top that it has little emotional punch. The most powerful view is from the Mezzanine, from where all the systems sustaining the fantasy (scaffolding, lights, wiring, security) can be seen. I visited on a beautiful summer afternoon, and after surveying the installation and watching the film for about ten minutes, waiting for the narrative to take hold, I was itching to step back outside. The Times hyped the show with a review that compared McCarthy to Jonathan Swift and Heironymous Bosch. I liked the review on Culturebot better, Paul McCarthy’s ‘WS’ is BS.

WS takes aim at the aesthetic and moral emptiness of middle class Americans, living in the suburbs and vulnerable to Disneyesque fantasies. It’s an easy critique for city-dwelling art world types, and one everyone is familiar with. But the show left me wondering why it’s so hard to be clear-eyed about the suburban house. When we see this loaded architectural form in the media it’s either sanitized (like the spreads in Living and Dwell) or trashed (like in WS). McCarthy vision of middle America is clear, but lacks the ravishing precision of David Lynch’s, which narrows in on common sounds, sights and juxtapositions – a poetics of the everyday– to expose latent strangeness and violence. WS adds little to our understanding of suburban life or the Snow White story. In fact its super-sized scale only highlights the emptiness of the artwork itself. It’s this installation, really, that has issues.

WS, by Paul McCarthy, Park Avenue Armory, 2013. Photograph by James Ewing.

August 08, 2013 by Nalina Moses

As I strode through the Armory at this year’s Print Fair I wondered what it is that makes a print a print, or what it is that only prints can do. It could be the memory of engraving, of scratching into the plates. It could be the sense of reversal, the way images are mirrored horizontally when printed. What I saw at the show only addled me further. Each print reminded me of some other thing: illustration, poster, painting, blueprint, and photograph. In fact the exhibitors themselves might have been confused. Several showed photographic “prints,” and one even showed a formica-and-wood construction by Richard Artschwager that was most certainly not a print.

Lots of the prints were made by painters, moonlighting because they wanted to investigate a different process, because they wanted to produce variations on a single image, because they wanted to reach a different market, or because they just felt like it. (The array of Picasso prints at one booth was so joyous that one believes he just felt like it.) While I think of prints as a graphic medium, of a web of black marks, many are built from broad fields of layered, porous tints that leave tantalizing swatches of paper exposed. The peopled landscapes of Isca Greenfield-Sanders have the freshness of wet watercolors. Prints by Swedish duo Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordstrom, both painters by vocation, fill the frame with strong shapes in eccentric, earthy hues. The scenes have a jittery, improvisatory quality, as if they only came together at the moment the ink hit the paper. That might be something that’s very print-like.

Hunter by Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordström

November 16, 2012 by Nalina Moses