Morley Safer Defends His Take On Contemporary Art

 

[On 2 April, I posted the transcript of Morley Safer’s 60 Minutes segment on contemporary art from 1993.  That broadcast ignited a lot of opprobrium from various parts of the art world, as I noted in my comments accompanying the transcript.  I decided to continue the coverage of this event by posting some of the responses to Safer’s remarks, 

[I’m starting with the rather lengthy transcript of a panel discussion with Safer on PBS’s Charlie Rose.  I will follow this up with some written comments, including reviews of Safer’s broadcast.  Those will come out on 8 April. 

[One note on this post: it’s longer than my self-imposed maximum.  The discussion was long and all the participants had a great deal to say.  I didn’t want to split the transcript and post it in two installments because I feel that would cause it to lose some of its strength.  Please indulge me—but feel free to read it in installments if you prefer.]

“‘YES, BUT IS IT ART?’”

[The transcript (which I’ve edited and corrected as necessary) is the record of a talk show that aired on 25 October 1993.  The segment, moderated by Rose, presented journalist Morley Safer (Canadian-American broadcast journalist and reporter; 1931-2016), artist Jenny Holzer (American neo-conceptual artist; b. 1950), curator David Ross (b. 1948; at the time of this broadcast, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art), and art critic Arthur Danto (art critic and philosopher; 1924-2013) discussing Safer’s controversial 60 Minutes broadcast on contemporary art, broadcast on 19 September 1993. 

[Charlie Rose was a television interview and talk show with Charlie Rose (b. 1942) as executive producer, executive editor, and host.  The show was syndicated on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) from 1991 until 2017.  Rose interviewed thinkers, writers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, businesspersons, leaders, scientists, newsmakers, and fellow journalists.]

Charlie Rose: Welcome to our broadcast. Tonight, is contemporary art really art, or is it just media-hyped junk? Morley Safer takes on several art-world critics who are outraged at his 60 Minutes piece condemning some of the work in contemporary art . . . .

It is a rare occasion when the art world actually agrees on something, but when a feature entitled “Yes, But Is It Art?” aired on the popular 60 Minutes program, a cry was heard, “Unfair.” The reaction reminded us that new art can equal controversy. Battles and skirmishes arise when new aesthetics and ideas are introduced.

Joining me now to talk about some of the critical questions in contemporary art, Morley Safer, the co-editor of 60 Minutes, and reporter for the feature in question. Artist Jenny Holzer, whose work is shown around the world. She was the first woman chosen to represent the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1990. Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, author of the acclaimed Beyond the Brillo Box [Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992] and art critic for The Nation magazine. Also joining us, David Ross. He is director of the Whitney Museum of American Art [1991-98], and has been embroiled in some controversy at that place as well.

Welcome, one and all. I have said to you, what I want to have here is an engaging conversation. Morley’s piece has given us the opportunity to look at contemporary art. I start with that piece. Tell me why you did it. What was the point of view? What brought it to your attention that this was an appropriate subject now for 60 Minutes?

Morley Safer: First of all, it’s something I’ve been wanting to do for long time. Those people who know me well know some of my thoughts about some of that contemporary art. Along with John Tiffin, who is a producer I work with a lot in London, we’re both very interested in art, and in art history, purely as amateurs. I would not claim anyone’s expertise here in terms of art history.

Charlie Rose: And you dabble in painting a little bit yourself.

Morley Safer: And I paint myself. That was the genesis of the piece. The thing that surprised me, most of all about the piece, I knew there’d be some ruffled feathers. I had no idea it would cause the exposure it caused, which to me in a sense confirms the fragility of belief in much of the material we talked about, plus others. I think that it’s a very fragile belief, by the critics, by the dealers who may have no belief at all because they’re in the marketing business, even by the institutions, and perhaps by some of the artists as well.

Charlie Rose: You’re surprised by the controversy. What is it you think you said, or intended to say, that caused this uproar?

Morley Safer: I think—

Charlie Rose: What do you believe?

Morley Safer: I believe, the response to the uproar was to accuse me of being in league with Jessie Helms [Republican U.S Senator from North Carolina: 1973 to 2003, a leader in the conservative movement; 1921-2008], for repression, and for philistinism, among the other things. It’s the old [Joseph] McCarthy [1908-57; Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin: 1947-57] technique of don’t attack what the guy said. Create something that you think he stands for and attack that. [McCarthy is the namesake of ‘McCarthyism,’ the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.]

Charlie Rose: That’s why I’m asking the question. What did you say?

Morley Safer: To that?

Charlie Rose: No, no, to the – What was it you said that reflected your belief?

Morley Safer: You’ll have to ask them. I don’t know. I think everything I said touched a nerve here or there.

Arthur Danto: What was the belief, the fragility of which was exposed? You mean that people in the art world have serious doubts that this was art? Or Jeff Koons said, “I’ve been wrong all these years?”

Morley Safer: No. Certainly—

Arthur Danto: That wasn’t the kind of fragility.

Morley Safer: No, I think perhaps fragility of belief by Michael Kimmelman [b. 1958], for example, who’s the chief art critic for the New York Times [1990-2011; he’s now the architecture critic], who confessed a crisis of faith in—

David Ross: But I think the issue that your piece raised was that there’s a reality out there that artists are confronting, and artists use art to ask some very serious and interesting questions. You returned to a series of questions that seemed to be based on the assumption that what art is is what artists can get away with, that what art is is a kind of a sham, promoted by people marketing product, and promoted by magazines interested in supporting their advertiser base of dealers, and that’s what art is.

But in fact, art asks far more interesting questions about the society we’re living in, about our fragile lives as people living in the late 20th century. It’s those kinds of questions that your piece seemed to just gloss over by assuming that the basic question is, is it art? Is [Cy] Twombly [1928-2011] an artist because he makes scribbles? Is [Gerhard] Richter [b. 1932] an artist because he makes gray monochrome canvases? Is [Jean-Michel] Basquiat [1960-88] an artist because some kid says, “I could do that.” Well, in fact, what that kid was saying was wonderful to me. Because that meant that kid really understood the language that Basquiat, as an African American, was trying to bring out. [These artists are all mentioned in Safer’s 19 September broadcast; see referenced post.]

Charlie Rose: Let me interrupt you—

David Ross: So you asked the wrong questions, rather than any other problem. That’s what I thought. It was a terrific piece.

Charlie Rose: Wait, wait, wait, Morley. I want you to have a chance to respond to that. I’m going to come right back.

Morley Safer: I think that it would be wonderful if artists were asking these questions you speak about, asking truly interesting questions, and presenting their art in an interesting way, and getting to the core of some interesting things about this good country, or this society, or this world. I think what we are getting is this verbal blah, of juvenile questions being, verbal art so to speak. Don’t look at my art. Read my art. The questions are clichés. It makes bumper stickers art. It makes advertising copy art. It all becomes art, because I suspect that most advertising copy is written and believed in in the most heartfelt way possible.

Arthur Danto: You know, it’s really difficult to ask deep questions in the context of an auction room. That was your favorite venue. You showed these artworks up there, like so many slaves being auctioned off.

Morley Safer: That’s where they are.

Arthur Danto: Your question was, how much are they paying for this stuff? How can they be such fools as to pay that kind of money? Without for a moment leaving the possibility that intelligent people are interested in it. Intelligent people discourse intelligently about it, because the art itself is intelligent work made by intelligent people. You made it seem like a commercial sideshow.

Charlie Rose: Jenny.

Morley Safer: Well, much of it is.

Arthur Danto: It is not.

Jenny Holzer: Before we have to start defending art, let’s go back to your original question, which is what you said to start all this. I know what you said that I objected to, which was, and I’ll probably only misquote you a bit, that most contemporary art would be worthless junk without the hype. That’s more or less equivalent to my saying most reporting is hopelessly biased, or most old white men are cruel and destructive. I think you would disagree with those things. I disagree with what you said, because it’s not true. But I had fun saying those things. Did you do the piece so you could have fun saying it?

Morley Safer: Oh, I do everything – I do what I do because it’s fun to do, of course.

Jenny Holzer: But is it true.

David Ross: But journalism might—

Morley Safer: Mostly it’s true.

David Ross: Journalism might—

Morley Safer: Most of all, it is true.

Jenny Holzer: Most contemporary art is—

Morley Safer: Most of what I do, mostly, I do it because it happens to be true.

David Ross: It would be equally unfair to try to analyze journalism, broadcast journalism, by following around an ad salesman for 60 Minutes, watching him pitch why they should buy time on your show, watching that commercial side of what supports your show and your livelihood, or watching the people out there raising money for Channel 13 [WNET, the PBS outlet in New York City, producer of Charlie Rose] and trying to pitch why they should support Charlie Rose, and why they support shows like this.

The commercial side of anything has its seamier aspects to it. Because selling is not something we appreciate, and we actually try to demonize it. But if you look at that work, you took Gerhardt Richter’s gray painting out of context and said it’s silly because they didn’t know which side is up. But Richter is an enormously protean artist, whose work is so complex and so valuable and so intelligent, but out of context to take one gray monochrome canvas and ridicule it, it’s too easy. That’s cheap shot stuff.

Charlie Rose: Before we go any further, let me roll tape. Here is one excerpt from the piece on 60 Minutes, reported by Morley Safer.

Morley Safer: [clip from “Yes . . . But Is It Art?”] For his pièce de résistance last year, he hired platoons of German workmen to erect a 40-foot puppy made of flowers, and the art world cheered.

Unidentified Male [I identified him as art critic Jeffrey Deitch. ~Rick]: It’s very much about something extremely banal, made into something terrifically heroic and important. It kind of bespeaks of our own sense of ego in certain moments in our life.

Morley Safer: Of course, most of this art of the ’90s would be worthless junk, without the hype of the dealers, and even more important, the approval of the critics. They write in language, that to this viewer anyway, sounds important, but might as well be in Sanskrit. Of the American artist Julian Schnabel [b. 1951], a critic wrote:

Unidentified Male: “His is an eschatological art appropriating the master meanings of life and the master languages of art to reassert the sense of hurt and loss that evades both.”

Morley Safer: A book on Christopher Wool [b. 1955], the 'Rat, Rat, Rat' [a reference to a Wool painting at auction] man, said of his work:

Unidentified Female: “They communicate not by facile appropriations, but as a honed perfectionist idea of that discourse, reduced to the irreducible, then starting all over again.”

Morley Safer: Arts Magazine said of Robert Gober [b. 1954], who specializes in arms, legs, sinks, and urinals:

Unidentified Male: “Installations function as utopian and dystopian spaces. The tableau arrests, and its own stillness suspends social time.”

Morley Safer: If you’re still stumped, let Jeffrey Deitch [b. 1952], critic, dealer, and fan, explain.

Jeffrey Deitch: This work in particular shows something of the uncertainty in which artists find themselves today in the human sphere. They don’t quite know exactly where they stand.

Morley Safer: So simple when you think about it.

Charlie Rose: That’s the 60 Minutes piece. I’ve got a couple of questions I want to come back to. Number 1 is that, with respect to the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, a lot of people have raised questions, is this art? Is this an appropriate thing for this exhibition to be doing? Correct?

David Ross: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: You’ve talked about it on this broadcast.

David Ross: Sure.

Charlie Rose: And other people have written about the Venice Biennale. My question is, why isn’t it appropriate for 60 Minutes, or this program, to do a program about the notion, is this art? To raise questions about whether a piece of work is art, and what’s the definition of art, and if in fact you do that, you’re going to raise this piece, and this piece, and this piece, and say—

David Ross: That’s an enormously important question to ask. It’s what artists ask every day that they work. If artists all understood what art is, they would stop making it. If any of us absolutely was sure what art is, this subject would become a dead issue. Art continues to grow and change and evolve. So to ask that question is fine, but you have to do it in a balanced way. The 60 Minutes piece had Hilton Kramer [1928-2012] speaking from the same—

Charlie Rose: Who believes that perspective and British – much of contemporary art is not art.

David Ross: Yeah. So there was no balance in that piece. It was filled with the kind of an approach that it’s all a game. You could have equally found people who – you could have brought Arthur Danto onto that show and had a different kind of balance. It was a piece filled with, unfortunately, cheap shots. I think that’s why people got upset by it, not because it was being questioned.

Charlie Rose: Not because those issues were raised.                                  

David Ross: No.

Charlie Rose: But because the other side didn’t get a point.

David Ross: I think it’s enormously important and raises issues.

Jenny Holzer: It was an editorial. It wasn’t a thought piece.

Charlie Rose: All right. Morley?

Jenny Holzer: The questions weren’t asked. They were asked and answered.

Charlie Rose: Is that a point, that you did not hear from the other side of people who really—

Morley Safer: I think that—

Charlie Rose: —may quarrel with a lot that is being done.

David Ross: I think Jeff Deitch plays the role of the fool on purpose. That’s part of his work. He’s like a Shakespearean fool. That is literally what he is trying to do. To just take that out of context and say, “Oh look at this guy he’s a jerk,” but he’s doing that as—

Morley Safer: Would you say – Would you go further and say conman?

David Ross: No he’s playing the fool. He’s not a conman. I mean—

Arthur Danto: Well, whether he’s a conman or not, the issue that you raised was not raised in the form of a question but in the form of a condemnation. “Is it art” was not a question except in the most rhetorical sense. Your mind was made up. What you wanted to do was implant in the viewer the answer, no it’s certainly not.

Morley Safer: Shall we talk about the creative works of Jeff Koons [b. 1955]?

Jenny Holzer: And worse than that, to jeer.

Morley Safer: Sure.

David Ross: And if we want to we have a chance to talk about other things, too, but I’m happy to.

Morley Safer: Well, it would take somebody extraordinarily creative to have made that puppy out of flowers. I mean that—

Arthur Danto: He didn’t make it.

Jenny Holzer: You kicked the puppy. You kicked the puppy. That’s low.

Charlie Rose: Let me read in which Michael Kimmelman. He says, and this thing – this is from the New York Times – “A Few Artless Minutes on 60 Minutes” [17 October 1993] in which Michael talked about this piece. He said:

I admit to my own crises of faith in the midst of the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale. But I had no doubt about which side to stand on when the lines were drawn by Mr. Safer. No one who genuinely cares about art and aesthetics can feel anything but alarm while watching lampoons like the one broadcast into 17 million households the other night.

The show’s seeming blanket condemnation of the contemporary art world is important, then, in part as a reminder that to knock events like the Biennial requires reaffirming the familiar principles: that the new, the experimental and the daring are no less crucial to art than to science, and that raising informed and constructive doubts about some aspects of the contemporary scene doesn’t mean casting doubt on the whole of it.

Now I would assume you would agree with that?

Morley Safer: You assume correctly, however, what I don’t see much of out there, whether it’s a Robert Ryman [1930-2019] or a Robert Gober [b. 1954], forgive me, is anything new, daring or experimental. It’s filled with clichés. It’s all mainly been done before. Tired language, tired phrases. As I say, it makes bumper stickers into art. Anything you want to say, write it down and if that is art—

Charlie Rose: Well, now that’s an interesting question to have about contemporary art. Is it new and interesting and daring and who decides?

Morley Safer: If this verbal toboggan that the art world is sliding down on is art, I’ll go home and eat my library which is full of words.

Arthur Danto: Go home and eat your library, that’s a really good idea—

Jenny Holzer: Read it first.

Arthur Danto: Because the saying ‘it’s been done before’ is the least interesting observation anybody could make. No, each time somebody does something, even if it looks the same, some new statement is being made.

I want to get to a certain other point. I just came back from Canada where they’re also in an uproar over art. They’re in an uproar over [Mark] Rothko [Latvian-born American abstract painter; 1903-70] and [Barnett] Newman [American artist; 1905-70]. The National Gallery paid 1.8 million dollars for the Rothko, 1.5 million dollars for Newman.

Needless to say the Toronto Sun says a child could do it. Get out your crayons kids. The first three best Rothkos will get free passes to dinosaur park. A kid says I can do the Newman.

Here, so there’s a malaise in the country at this point. Last year one thought it might have to do with sex and censorship. In Canada one thought good money by the government which should be spent on other issues is going into that. Here we’ve got a free market. These were the most innocent looking works that you can think of and yeah, there’s this anxiety. How are people getting away with it and so forth.

David Ross: That’s what I was saying before. The problem of art’s value is undercut when the question that’s being asked isn’t did Jean-Michel Basquiat make art that talked about his own identity as a young African-American man.

By the way, wasn’t the greatest thing that could have happened to him that he died. It’s such a great tragedy that he died. For anyone to die of a drug overdose, it’s a horrible thing to lampoon in the way that you did in your piece. [See the post of Safer’s original broadcast.]

The fact that so many young kids came to see that show and understood that there was a vocabulary being involved that was being used by an artist being shown in a real museum that they could understand and would lead them to respect their own creative urges, I found terrific. I wish I knew who that kid was who said he could do it and maybe he can and maybe he will because he saw that Basquiat show. Maybe he won’t question the premises of art’s value to our society

Charlie Rose: This here raises an interesting question about some of contemporary art. Our people say exactly what these young men in this piece by 60 Minutes said. They look at something that is said to be contemporary art and they say, “I could do that.” They see some of Jeff Koons’s stuff and they say, “I could do that.” Now what’s going on here when you see a lot of stuff – They don’t say that about Picasso. They don’t say that about a lot of stuff.

David Ross: That’s not true.

Jenny Holzer: They do say that about Picasso.

David Ross: What is it about contemporary art that makes people say, “I could do that”? Of course they do. They say that because the craft tradition is changing. Because the notion of the kind of academic training that in the 19th century was absolutely necessary to be accepted into the Academy has shifted and now the notion of what’s an appropriate material, what’s an appropriate subject, what’s an appropriate approach to art-making is up for grabs. Take Jenny’s work.

Morley Safer: I hate the word appropriate. Appropriate sounds very conservative. It’s not a question of what’s the appropriate material or what’s the appropriate medium. I think the only appropriate thing is that this object, this painting, this anything somehow touches you.

David Ross: Did you see the Koons puppy in Germany?

Morley Safer: It’s ice cold.

David Ross: Did you see the Koons puppy in Germany?

Morley Safer: In person? No.

David Ross: You would have been moved by it. It was an enormously moving and wonderful experience.

Charlie Rose: This is the thing we saw. The Jeff Koons piece did the flower piece. Yes?

David Ross: An amazing thing. It’s easy to take it out of context and say it’s stupid but—

Morley Safer: Most of this art is ice cold. It attempts weakly to touch your mind. It does not even attempt to touch your heart.

Arthur Danto: Everybody’s in love with it Morley.

David Ross: Even people who hate Koons loved that piece.

Arthur Danto: People who hated Koons and who hated Documenta adored that piece. [Documenta 9 was an art fair near the site of Koons’s topiary Puppy. See the post of “Yes . . . But Is It Art?”]

Morley Safer: I’ll tell you, I thought it was a wonderful joke.

David Ross: If you walked into Jenny’s installation in Venice—

Morley Safer: It was full of wit.

David Ross: If you walked into Jenny’s installation in Venice, which was just words, it was so overpowering that I saw people there sitting crying in that piece. [I write about Jenny Holzer’s art in “Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words,” 16 September 2014.] Filled with colored light coming at you at a million miles an hour, it was almost frightening to be there and yet they were so emotionally moved by the experience of that, I saw people sitting there, reading, thinking, experiencing this color and light and yes, text and crying because they were so moved by it. It was a beautiful, wonderful – Look, that’s why she won the first prize in the Venice Biennale.

The world isn’t made of fools. The world is made of people who are thinking and who are serious. Hilton Kramer aside, who hasn’t liked anything in contemporary art since 1960, there are many serious, thoughtful people—

Arthur Danto: ’47.

David Ross: ’47. I’m sorry, I gave him too much credit. There are serious, thoughtful people who find value and reason in the kind of work that you too easily lampoon.

Charlie Rose: All right let me hear from Jenny because you’re the artist among us.

Jenny Holzer: Can you understand that it’s enormously insulting for your piece to say that artists would, for instance, be awake at night thinking about how to pull a scam, how to pull the wool—

Morley Safer: I don’t suggest that the artists—

Jenny Holzer: No. Wait wait wait. Unless you are saying that the conspiracy is all about the critics and the dealers and that the artists are just too dumb to know what they’re doing. Artists are awake at night trying to figure out how to find the most profound things and then once found how to express them so that other people not only see them but feel them.

Morley Safer: I could not agree more with what you’re saying.

Jenny Holzer: That is what most artists are trying to do. Some succeed better than others but there is no scam. There’s nothing about—

Morley Safer: Let me give you an example. I do not doubt your sincerity and indeed the only one whose sincerity I might doubt might be Koons. I think he is a jokester and a prankster and that’s fine.

David Ross: But he’s sincere about it.

Arthur Danto: But then sincerity’s not that big an issue.

Morley Safer: Well, I think it is because people jumped on me for being critical of Robert Ryman, and I’ll tell you why I think Ryman does serve a purpose in a moment, because Robert Ryman is a man in his 60’s and has spent most of his adult life working at this. How can you dismiss him as a conman or a charlatan? I don’t, but sincerity of purpose is hardly any measure. If sincerity of purpose was applied to novelists, they’d all be Tolstoy and we’d be praising them.

When I say Ryman serves a wonderful purpose – I went to the Museum of Modern Art  the other day to look at the Ryman show [26 September 1993-4 January 1994]. I went through three times, feeling as ice cold when I came out as when I went in. Then I went down 20 feet to the permanent collection. I’ve done the same thing at your museum [i.e., the Whitney], which, as you know, I love.

David Ross: Thank you.

Arthur Danto: There, suddenly, is this wonderful demonstration of the best of experimental art. From Francis Bacon [Irish-born British figurative painter; 1909-92] to [Arshile] Gorky [Armenian-American painter; 1904-48] to [Willem] de Kooning [Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist; 1904-97] and you’re just bathed in this warmth and you feel uplifted by it.

David Ross: But don’t you realize that what you’re revealing right now about yourself is your own comfort zone? The area where you see art that maybe relates to your experience growing up, looking at the art of the Seven in Canada or art that deals with landscape or art that deals the expressionist tradition, but they’re other generations.

[The Group of Seven were Canadian landscape painters from 1920 to 1933 with “a like vision.” It originally consisted of Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945), Lawren Harris (1885-1970), A. Y. Jackson (1882-1974), Frank Johnston (1888-1949), Arthur Lismer (1885-1969), J. E. H. MacDonald (1873-1932), and Frederick Varley (1881-1969). A. J. Casson (1898-1992) was invited to join in 1926, Edwin Holgate (1892-1977) became a member in 1930, and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890-1956) joined in 1932.]

Jenny Holzer: You’re speaking of your personal relation—

Morley Safer: I don’t know that de Kooning would fall under that category and certainly Francis Bacon wouldn’t.

David Ross: But there are other generations and other languages that are evolved by new generations.

Jenny Holzer: I think we’ve come to something. The piece was about your personal response, which was fine, but you abused your platform to say that because you don’t get it, this is a terrible thing and it must be a fraud. Your piece should have had this subtitle, “This is your lack of response to art.”

David Ross: Or you could have taken the—

Jenny Holzer: You were being – Exactly.

Morley Safer: Or I could say that that piece on 60 Minutes was our occasional attempt to put on a piece of art.

David Ross: Well, I would love it if you did a performance art piece on 60 Minutes and put it out as that, but you have such credibility as a journalist that when you put out a piece that pretends to be balanced and fair in the same way that you’ve looked at serious, hard-hitting issues throughout the years of that program, then it skews the issue.

Charlie Rose: Here’s my question. Is the anger, whatever the reaction you feel about what Morley did on 60 Minutes, in contrast to the reaction you feel about other critics of contemporary art who raise the question, “Is this art, is this art, is this art?” Is it only the impact and the power that 60 Minutes has that concerns you or is it something else?

David Ross: Well, it’s the fact that you know he’s—

Charlie Rose: Because now other people have had the same thing he said.

David Ross: Asking the question is not a problem. In fact, when we first met, I said I was really pleased with that show because it did ask a question. The difference is—

Charlie Rose: Then what’s the difference?

Jenny Holzer: To use a legal term, it was asked and answered.

David Ross: Exactly, and he answered it – you know, before asking.

Charlie Rose: Letting the wrong people answer him.

David Ross: And he didn’t balance the way the question was presented to an enormous public.

Morley Safer: I don’t think that it’s possible to do a balanced piece on contemporary art. Or maybe on art period. I don’t think it’s possible.

Jenny Holzer: That’s a ridiculous statement, that it’s not possible to do a balanced piece about contemporary art.

Morley Safer: I don’t think it’s possible.

David Ross: Why not?

Morley Safer: Because one’s own eye—

Jenny Holzer: Defend that.

Morley Safer: Taste, heart, and mind get in the way.

Jenny Holzer: One’s? One’s? Yours.

Morley Safer: But should that be the test as to whether your eye sees this as art?

Arthur Danto: But this is supposed to be investigative journalism.

Morley Safer: Should David Ross have the right to decide what’s going into a public institution? Of course he should.

David Ross: And I get criticized.

Charlie Rose: Here’s my other question, if we move along. I’m going to look at some art in a moment. Who decides, I mean what enfranchises, to use the word, something as art? You know, an exhibit?

David Ross: Well, it’s part of the process.

Charlie Rose: Does anything that someone who has a reputation as a good artist like Jenny, that she does, whatever she does becomes art because she’s an artist. What enfranchises it?

David Ross: That kind of defining process today is almost unproductive in a conversation.

Charlie Rose: To try to answer it?

David Ross: Yeah, because from my perspective, I believe anything an artist does is art. The rest of us then have to decide what has value and quality that is worth our attention.

Charlie Rose: Then what’s an artist? Who is an artist?

Arthur Danto: That’s when it pushes back. I think it’s an important question but it’s not the whole of contemporary art. To make that issue that’s been discussed throughout the 20th century the defining character of contemporary art and then choose a number of examples that are going to raise the hairs of people who are suspicious in the first place and not to try to give a balanced account of the extraordinary diversity of art in the first place. Secondly the complex institutional structures of the art world, in which that question has to be answered. That is to say how does somebody get into exhibition space?

Charlie Rose: The reason I raised the question in part is because Morley said he thought Jeff Koons was a prankster and essentially not an artist is what he’s saying.

Arthur Danto: But you know if you’d seen his show at the Sonnabend Gallery [Made In Heaven, 23 November-21 December 1991] those gigantic kitsch objects. Those were so frightening you couldn’t—

Morley Safer: That was also at the Sonnabend.

Arthur Danto: —walk into that room and not feel put on edge. He had taken an aesthetic out of everyday life, amplified it in a way that suddenly made it almost unendurable to be in the same space with it. That was not just a charlatanry.

Morley Safer: No, it’s a glorious prank and I’m all for it.

David Ross: It’s not just a prank in the sense that it’s a joke.

Morley Safer: I’m all for language if it has wit.

Charlie Rose: Enough about Jeff Koons. Enough about Jeff Koons. Let me move on. Let me just look [at] some things so that we have a sense of where contemporary art is. Is contemporary art in crisis today?

David Ross: Is society in crisis today?

Charlie Rose: I’m asking about art first, David.

David Ross: I’m not being rhetorical. Contemporary art is a mirror of modern life.

Charlie Rose: Because it reflects a period—

David Ross: How can it not?

Charlie Rose: —of a society that’s in crisis.

David Ross: It’s made by human beings living in this society. Some of it is gonna retreat into safe havens, and present a world of calm and peace. Some of it’s gonna reflect the world and all of its horror and brutality.

Charlie Rose: So maybe I’m falling into traditional criticism when you raise this question. Is there no predominant school of thought or something, and therefore we’re at loose [ends] about what’s going on?

Arthur Danto: We’re living in a very pluralistic art world, at the moment. There’s no single monolithic thing in which you can say that’s in crisis. There’s just too much of it and it’s too diversified.

Morley Safer: I think it’s very fragile.

Charlie Rose: Fragile is the word you’d use.

Morley Safer: I do believe it’s very fragile, and I think the rejection, of figurative painting for example and of drawing almost reached the point where people are questioning that rejection, and there will be—

Jenny Holzer: It hasn’t been rejected. You’ve missed it.

David Ross: Look at Chartreuse.

Arthur Danto: One of the best shows around at the Pace Gallery. I mean, since when is rejecting – it’s true that’s doing faces but he can do them figuratively.

David Ross: Look at Alison Saar [Los Angeles-based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist; b. 1956; her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity], look at people doing figurative work—

Charlie Rose: On this very show, if you remember. Let me look at some stills here guys. We put some together, and so let’s just talk about this. This is a de Kooning composition, 1955, everybody. What’s the point here?

David Ross: I’m not sure – who made the selection.

Charlie Rose: Beth Pollack made it, a producer who knows a lot about art.

David Ross: Obviously de Kooning is a great artist. Recognized as great now. When he made these, all the critics from Hildebrand on down said it was absolute garbage. Now he’s one of our most revered painters, whose career now we can see in retrospect.

I think the point is, Charlie, that we’re so close to what we’re doing right now, and those who are part of it are dealing with it in real time that we don’t have a real distance from it, and you know what? That’s okay. We’ll let historians in thirty years sort it out. Right now we’re engaged in watching it, looking at it. The Whitney and other museums are engaged in supporting those artists and helping put it out there and get the discourse moving.

Charlie Rose: You take me off course, but let me do this just one time. You had at the Whitney Biennial – I said Venice Biennial rather than Biennale. If you had at the Whitney the Rodney King video tape, correct?

[Rodney King (1965-2012) was an African-American man who was severely beaten on 3 March 1991 by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department during his arrest after a high speed pursuit for driving while intoxicated. An uninvolved resident, George Holliday, saw and filmed the incident from his nearby balcony and sent the footage, which showed the unarmed King on the ground being beaten after initially evading arrest, to a local TV news station. The incident was covered by news media around the world and caused a public uproar.]

David Ross: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: You said that was art in video. Video art because, what?

David Ross: Well, we believe that it was critical in the last two years of looking at independent film and video, to look at an image made in video by an amateur that transformed American consciousness during that moment.

Charlie Rose: So that becomes art rather than – because of the impact it had on American consciousness.

David Ross: I think you very properly focused on a very marginal work. Not that it was marginal in its impact, but in its definition. I think it was bold of the curator to select that work, because there was no way of looking at a media-influenced culture, whether it’s media art or traditional art, looked at over the last two years that wasn’t enormously affected by those images and what that said about a certain spirit in this country. And that’s what a show like the biennial was reflecting in a number of ways.

Arthur Danto: Well of course I really did object to that.

David Ross: I remember.

Charlie Rose: Where have you been?

Arthur Danto: I thought that was a deep mistake to include that in the biennial. That was supposed to be an art show, not a transformation-of-consciousness show. If art transforms consciousness that’s fine, but everything that transforms consciousness doesn’t belong in the museum. Lots of things, however—

Morley Safer: It may belong in the museum of natural history as an artifact.

Arthur Danto: We’re supposed to be beating up on Morley Safer, but—

Charlie Rose: We’re not supposed to be beating up on one another. What we’re supposed to be doing, and I think we’re doing, is allowing the fact that Morley produced a piece for 60 Minutes and reported a piece for 60 Minutes that’s got the whole art world talking, and we continued that conversation, and that’s important I think.

Jenny Holzer: We just demonstrated is that the art world is too diverse and too feisty to agree on a conspiracy that you seem to think you’ve identified.

Morley Safer: I’ve not talked about a conspiracy. That’s part of the McCarthy tent.

Charlie Rose: That’s just something – I don’t think she meant that. There’s no conspiracy. He may say that the process seems to be run amok.

Jenny Holzer: There’s a conspiracy. I’m taking it from the transcript among the critics and the dealers to perpetuate a fraud. That the art that’s really—

Charlie Rose: I don’t remember the language conspiracy.

Jenny Holzer: Not the word.

Charlie Rose: Let me move on here.

Jenny Holzer: Isn’t that a conspiracy? I think?

Charlie Rose: Fellow art lovers let’s move on, okay, slide two.

Arthur Danto: What happened to de Kooning?

Jenny Holzer: He’s gone. Next.

Charlie Rose: Next. All right—

Arthur Danto: We’re host co-pilots so I’ve actually written about this, now what are we supposed to do?

Charlie Rose: Just tell me why this is art?

Arthur Danto: Why it’s art?

Charlie Rose: Don’t criticize the question. Just answer it.

David Ross: Where we would overlap in like. You were right, we found two artists that we both like tonight. What I would urge you to do is just to open up your heart a little bit and recognize that what artists are trying to do is worth your time of looking and thinking rather than just so quickly and blanketly rejecting the impetus and the value of what you see. It may not have an immediate emotional response. What you did with that piece was give other people license to just walk away without doing the work it takes to really look hard and think hard about art. That’s what pissed so many of us off.

Morley Safer: I’ll tell you, what I would like is for all those people who, I’ll take your word for it, minds open, to really examine their conscience, not read the impenetrable language of Artspeak, but to think for themselves. Forget what the Larry Gagosians [American art dealer who owns the Gagosian Gallery chain of art galleries; b. 1945] and dealer says, what the Arne Glimchers [American art dealer and gallerist, and founder of The Pace Gallery; b. 1938] say, forget what they all say, and go and look and think. Don’t know about this producer just paid $3 million for one of these and to say it is not a commercial sideshow, it’s not beyond this planet and this city at this time.

Arthur Danto: I want to make a comment on that. These objects come embedded in a very wide culture. You can’t just look at them all by themselves and hope you’d get something out of it. You’ve got to have looked at other things and you’ve got to read some things. Some of it’s in not very nice language but notwithstanding you really have to work at art. You can’t just walk in and say, “Wow, I’m knocked out by that.” Sometimes it happens but you can’t count on it happening all the time. That’s why I write so that people will have a piece of thought to work with when they do go look at art.

Morley Safer: What you just described is what brings most people who really love art to art. It’s not really the tedious critics and art philosophers, it’s what it does to their eyes and their minds and their hearts.

David Ross: It’s both things. Either does not have to take the case.

Charlie Rose: All right, last word, to Jenny.

Jenny Holzer: The people will need to forget what you said to be able to enjoy the work.

Charlie Rose: I thank all of you for coming to talk about art and contemporary art. It certainly did what I hoped it would do which was to have an engaging discussion about contemporary art, and Morley’s piece certainly offered us the opportunity to do that. Thank you very much.

[I hope ROTters found this record of the TV program as interesting as I did.  Unlike “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” I didn’t see this Charlie Rose episode, so the transcript was my first time seeing what the art professionals had to say to Safer.

[In an article called “Yes . . . But Is It Art?: Morley Safer and Murphy Brown Take on the Experts” that was posted on Aristos (https://www.aristos.org/backissu/yesbutis.htm), a website that styles itself an online review of the arts and the philosophy of art, Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi concluded that 

the heated media debate that followed the airing of “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” on 60 Minutes fizzled out in a series of ill-considered letters by Morley Safer to the New York Times and other periodicals, and in his ineffectual sparring with Artspeak experts on the Charlie Rose show.  Safer lost the debate, not because the purported experts’ arguments made any sense but because he, despite the best of intentions, had no consistent argument at all.

[On 17 January 1994, an episode of Murphy Brown entitled “The Deal of the Art” aired.  It was a parody of the Charlie Rose panel in which, according to Wikipedia, recounts: “After Murphy [the eponymous investigative reporter for FYI, a parody of 60 Minutes] makes snide comments about modern art, she has to debate a group of artists and critics on PBS [a reference to Charlie Rose].  Is a pile of sweeteners art just because important people say so?  Murphy tests the critics with one of [her 18-month-old son] Avery's finger paintings.”

[Don’t forget to come back to ROT for some more examples of the responses to Morley Safer’s opinions about contemporary art.  It’s still a topic of interest today: 60 Minutes aired a segment with Jeff Koons just this last 10 March—and the only difference in his approach to his medium is that he’s now older and more established!

[The follow-up to this post and my earlier one on 2 April will be on ROT on Monday, 8 April.]

'The Last Cyclist' – Part 2

 

[Thank you for returning to Rick On Theater for the conclusion of “The Last Cyclist.”  The first part of this post was published on Friday, 2 September, and covered the background and production history of the play, a bio of the author, and examination of the physical production (set, costumes, and make-up).  If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend you go back and pick it up before reading Part 2, below.

[The last part of this report contains a plot synopsis, my evaluation of the productions and performances, and a survey of the published reviews.  It will make much more sense if you read the first part before reading Part 2.]

The Last Cyclist’s premise, simply put, is that a group of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp known as the Terezín Ghetto are rehearsing a zany slapstick comedy in which escapees from an insane asylum (called simply the Lunatics: Ambrose Martos, Kirsten Hopkins, Timur Kocak, Craig Anderson) take over the world.  

As we hear Older Šedová’s voice-over, we watch the actors assemble for the dress rehearsal: one actress climbs the narrow stairs to the performance space carrying one of the bikes; others are putting on make-up, carrying props to the stage, sweeping the stage, and getting into their places.

“Acting nourished me in the face of starvation,” says Older Šedová.  “We were miserable and frightened and our director”—that would have been Karel Švenk—“made us laugh—and we made the audience”—other Terezin prisoners—“laugh.  It was a gift beyond imagining.”

Because the Lunatics hate their bike-riding physician (Kocak), they target all cyclists, blaming them for the troubles afflicting society.

At the heart of the play lies an old joke that was well-known in Europe and often repeated between the world wars.  After Older Šedová’s intro, Hitler (Eric Emil Oleson, holding a black plastic comb under his nose) addresses a small crowd:

My fellow citizens, our country is in crisis.  We must rid ourselves of the monstrous perversion that is destroying society.  Who is to blame for all our troubles?  The Jews!

A heckler at the back of the crowd (Clay Westman) shouts: And the cyclists!

After a quick, confused look at the young interrupter, Hitler returns to his harangue: Who is destroying our economy and robbing our wives and children?  The Jews!

The young man: And the cyclists!

Hitler, with a quizzical, impatient glance at the young man: Who is the parasite on the body of the nation?  The Jews!

The young man: And the cyclists!

Hitler, now studiously ignoring him and ratcheting up the rhetoric: Who is undermining our proud spirit with their whining and conniving?  The Jews!

The young man: And the cyclists!

Hitler, finally exasperated: Why the cyclists? 

The young man, shrugging: Why the Jews?

The goose-stepping lunatic leader, known as Ma’am (Jenny Lee Mitchell), who soon dons a black leather trench coat, and her followers exploit the growing anti-cyclist hysteria and plot to eliminate everyone whose family has had anything to do with bicycles for several generations back by sending them to Horror Island, where they will be inexorably starved to death.  She searches for a “slogan” to catalyze her rabble-rousing campaign and sets on “Death to Cyclists!” 

Ma’am and Hitler speak with German accents. With one exception, they’re the only two characters who do that; the third is Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld as Red, whose accent may have been meant to be Russian or Czech as Red is a socialist or communist, another group the Nazis sent to concentration camps.  (I couldn’t hear Red’s accent clearly enough to be sure.  It may well also have been German, as Germany had home-grown communist revolutionaries, as demonstrated in the 1919 Spartacist Uprising.)

Ma’am is aided by Rat (Oleson), who had been the doctor’s assistant, a sort of asylum trusty and habitual enabler.  As the doctor’s aide, Rat provided the inmates with liquor and other contraband and let them run amok in the asylum for his own amusement.  When they begin to take over and the doctor upbraids Rat for becoming the inmates’ friend, Rat chases his superior off the stage and, presumably, strangles him with his own necktie.

As Ma’am’s gofer, Rat little by little becomes her SA-like henchman, adding bits of uniform over his asylum garb until, by the end of the play, he’s wearing a complete military outfit, including a field cap, greatcoat, and shoulder belt.

A naïve, sometimes hapless hero, Bořivoj Abeles (Patrick Pizzolorusso—who slightly resembles actor Mark Linn-Baker)—the role originally played by Karel Švenk—buys a bike to impress his girlfriend, Mánička (Rosenfeld)—the part undertaken at Terezin by Jana Šedová—and becomes the lunatics’ prime enemy.  

Abeles has a rival for Mánička, though.  He’s the town’s collaborator, a survivor at any cost.  In the play, he’s known as Opportunist and Big Shot (Lynn Berg) and in one of his guises, he absurdly sells life insurance in a society where life is meaningless, cruelly hawking his ironic contracts. 

(A note about the name Bořivoj Abeles: it’s a humorous combination of the mythic ancestor of the Czech people and a Jewish last name [pronounced ah-buh-LEZ in the performance], derived from the biblical name Abel, the younger son of Adam and Eve in Genesis. 

(Bořivoj I [c. 852-c. 889] was the first historically documented ruler of Bohemia—his father was the mythical Prince Hostivít—and progenitor of the Czech nation.  Reportedly, Czechs who hear this name, laugh.)

Some writers, including the author of the Last Cyclist website, dubbed Abeles a shlemiel, which Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines as “a foolish person, a simpleton . . . [a] consistently unlucky person, . . . [a] clumsy . . . type . . . [a] pipsqueak.”  But he’s not.  He is a “naïve, trusting [to a degree], [sometimes] gullible customer.”

While trying to impress Mánička, he does smack himself in the nose when demonstrating his boxing prowess, and he does buy a bicycle just when the Lunatics have busted out of the asylum and decided to go after anyone with a bike, but otherwise, at least as played by Pizzolorusso and directed by Einhorn, mostly he’s kindhearted, rather stalwart, and pretty lucky at important moments. 

He’s a grocer with his own shop whose grandfather had been a pack-peddler.  In the shtetl, that’s movin’ on up!

And when Opportunist pulls a Harold Hill on him to get him to buy insurance, though he’s briefly caught up in the salesman’s spiel, he resists at the right moment and sends the goniff of with a flea in his ear!

He also truly loves Mánička, which is more than can be said for Opportunist, and she loves him back, which scarcely makes him a hard-luck guy.  Irrespective of the real-life fates of Karel Švenk and Jana Šedová, Bořivoj Abeles and Mánička get their happy ending.

After Ma’am has promulgated her new anti-cycling laws, Rat rounds up the townsfolk with bikes and they’re shipped off to Horror Island.  Among the exiled cyclists are Red (Rosenfeld), a socialist revolutionary, and her counterpart, the wealthy capitalist, Rich (Westman)—because he is—who are among the townspeople required to play a travesty of the actual Red Cross inspection of Terezin that had taken place in June 1944.

Švenk’s Horror Islanders are given a script (“Dear Red Cross Guest,” a fragment of an unpublished song Švenk wrote at Terezin) that they must follow during the Red Cross visit, but unlike the real Terezin prisoners, they can’t keep up the pretense and blurt out the truth of their situation and they’re marched away to be punished. 

This was, in my judgment, the play’s most effective scene.  The humor was mordant, but the drama was devastating.

Abeles, too, had been arrested for owning a bike, but in a stroke of luck, he fell overboard from the transport ship as it was sailing out of the port for Horror Island.  He swam ashore and found Mánička looking for him, determined to make her own way to Horror Island to be with him.

Unluckily (okay, he’s a bit of a shlemiel—but just wait), he’s caught again by Rat’s cyclist-hunters, and incarcerated in a cage at the zoo.  (The sign by his pen reads: rare and exceedingly dangerous last living specimen of the condemned cyclistic species.)  Nearby is the rocket ship on which he will be transported to the moon as his sentence.

Now, Spoiler Alert:

As a last request, Abeles asks to smoke a cigarette.  There’s a vaudeville routine with the butt between Ma’am and Lunatic 2 (Kirsten Hopkins), and Ma’am and her cohort go inside the rocket to inspect it.  Opportunist/Big Shot (Berg) gets an oversized match to light the condemned man’s cigarette, strikes it, and inadvertently ignites the rocket’s fuse, sending the dictator and her minions to the moon (in the absolute lowest-tech special effect ever seen on a stage outside a kiddie play!).

(By the way, that makes Opportunist the shlemiel—the guy who spills his soup—and Ma’am and her crew the shlemazels—they guy he spills it on!)

On this note, Abeles runs to the front of the stage and shouts to the audience, “Go home!  You are free!  The rule of lunacy is over!”  But Mánička knows better.  “No,” she says sadly, “only here on the stage have we been freed.  Out there, where you are, the rule of madness continues.”

In the real “real” world, the Terezín prisoner-actors—all but one—and their fellow inmates faced their fate among the six million Jews worked or starved to death or outright murdered during the Holocaust.

Patz’s bookend additions bring the performance back to Terezin and Švenk’s reality.  After a reprise of the Jews-cyclists routine, the cast sings the chorus of Švenk’s “Terezin March,” augmented with some of the text from one of the verses:

Where there’s a will there’s a way.
We’ll survive another day,
And together, hand in hand,
We’ll laugh at hardship.

(Švenk’s original music for The Last Cyclist had, like the script, been lost forever, but music for some of his other cabarets, such as the “Terezin March”—written for his first show at the camp, but used as a finale for several others—is, however fragmentary, still around, thanks to the Terezín Music Foundation in Boston.

(The music for Patz’s reconstruction of The Last Cyclist, commissioned by the TMF, is by the award-winning composer Stephen Feigenbaum.  A songwriter, and singer as well as a composer, Feigenbaum has won a 2005 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for Piano Quartet and a 2013 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.)

The play comes to an abrupt ending and the rehearsal concludes when Švenk (Pizzolorusso) reads the news of a prisoner round-up for transportation.  As they file out of the theater, the actors reveal the names of the real people, the original cast members from Terezin, they represented in the performance.  As the actors say their avatars’ names, they lay the hats they’re wearing in a line across the front of the stage behind the footlights.

Only Rosenfeld, who represented Jana Šedová, the sole survivor of the cast, doesn’t put down a hat.  The last shot of the film, as the credits roll, is of the line of hats standing for the prisoner-actors who perished at the hands of the Nazis in the war’s last year.

Except for the opening scene with Hitler (who isn’t named), nothing in the play talks about the Holocaust or Nazis or Jews.  It’s an allegorical warning about the dangers of totalitarianism, herd-like obedience, and the frightening extremes to which bullying can lead.  (I wonder . . . is there anything like that happening today in this country?)

The Terezin Council of Elders still banned the play after its dress rehearsal.  They were afraid of reprisals because Švenk’s satire and the play’s references to the irrational behavior of dictators and their followers were so blatantly and transparently anti-Nazi.

In the live stage version of the play, the conceit is that the spectators are fellow Terezin prisoners attending the dress rehearsal of Švenk’s cabaret play in 1944.  For the film, the live audience at La MaMa takes on that same role, and we in the movie’s audience join them in that capacity (however metaphysically). 

Einhorn has said that the film technique let him use camera angles to give the viewers the feeling that they are right there, too.  (I’m not sure I buy that.  If I were at the theater in person, would I get so close up, as I did with the film, that I can see the hairs in Rat’s mustache?  The laugh-lines under the make-up around the actors’ eyes?)

Several of the critics of the 2013 production (see below) remarked that the performances in the West End Theatre production of The Last Cyclist were “amateurish” or “unsophisticated.”  The cast is clearly less experienced than most New Yorkers are used to paying to see on the city’s stages, even at schools like NYU or Juilliard. 

Off-Off-Broadway, though, is often uneven in its stagecraft, and the West End Theatre production was an Off-Off-Broadway endeavor.  But I’m inclined to give the actors the benefit of the doubt.  Yes, most of the actors in The Last Cyclist are probably just starting out on a theater career, but it seemed to me that what most of those reviewers dismissed as amateurishness is an attempt by director Einhorn to recreate the performance style of Švenk’s Terezin cabarets, a kind of rough theater.

I think Naomi Patz, when she reconstructed The Last Cyclist based on Jana Šedová’s recollection and her own research into Švenk’s other work and the other Terezin performances, intended the play to be farcical, slapstick, and clownish.  Without that element, it would never get past the camp censors.  (I’m pretty sure that the Hitler scene that opens the play is an addition by either Šedová in 1961 or Patz forty years later.)

Now, I know from my own performing experience that the kind of low comedy which I believe was Einhorn’s—and probably Švenk’s—aim, is hard to pull off.  It not only takes practice and work, but a certain kind of genius that not every performer will have.  I’m convinced that what we saw in The Last Cyclist is a company of young actors who aren’t natural clowns or farceurs, trying like hell to get what their director and playwright(s) conceived.

A lot of the time, I think they came pretty close.  There weren’t a lot of guffaws in the audience at La MaMa on the night they filmed the play—but there were a fair number of titters and giggles.  Listen, it’s hard to get people to laugh at Nazis and the Holocaust.  The creators of Hogan’s Heroes (1965-71) did, and so did Mel Brooks—at least twice: The Producers (film, 1965; Broadway, 2001-07), with the play-within-the-movie/play, Springtime for Hitler; and his 1983 remake of To Be or Not to Be.)

I watched the film twice—that’s why I DVR’d it, so I could do that—once straight through to see it as a whole performance and once stopping and starting so I could make notes for this report.  I saw what the reviewers adjudged amateurish acting that first time, too, and was prepared to call it that way.

Then, on second viewing, I saw the coherence of the performance with the material.  It fit.  It didn’t always work, but it didn’t clash with the material.  It was consonant with the world of this play as conceived by Patz and Einhorn, this absurd place where loonies take over not just the asylum, but the whole society.  Where enmity was declared against anyone with a bike. 

Mitchell, as Ma’am, was pretty far out there, with the goose-step and the loose flaps of fabric that had tied the arms of her straitjacket behind her fluttering about at the ends of her sleeves whenever she moved her arms, the very image of nuttiness.  She, like Oleson, her cohort Rat, really went with the eccentric performance style.

So did the two craziest Lunatics, Anderson and Hopkins.  They totally committed to the mad world of this play.  There’s enough Brechtian distancing going on—the face make-up and the tattered-pajama costumes, for instance—to make it impossible to identify with these characters, so I can’t say I “believed” them, but I did understand what they were up to and what Švenk/Patz/Einhorn were trying to communicate through them.

When it came to Pizzolorusso and Rosenfeld, the two lovers at the center of The Last Cyclist, since their behavior was pretty natural (as far as farce will let that be), I could identify and empathize with their characters.  Like the unerwünschte Personen (undesirable persons, personae non gratae) of the Third Reich, they had no idea, I felt, what was happening to them. 

They put that across well, especially Pizzolorusso, whose performance I found most touching and poignant.  He underplayed just right for my dough, on a stage filled with high-voltage scenery-chewing—a little island of humanity amidst a world gone nuts.

I usually do a round-up of published reviews at the end of my play reports.  I’m going to do this for The Last Cyclist, but my tack will be a little different.  For my usual reports, I stay with reviews of the production I saw for the most part, sometimes regardless of the home base of the outlet. 

In the case of The Last Cyclist, I’m going to make an assumption.  I’m positing that the 2013 stage version at the West End Theatre was essentially the same production (with minor differences, I grant you) as the 2020 film version I recorded last 22 August.

There weren’t many reviews of the Theater Close-up broadcast of Švenk’s play.  There were, though, a fair number of notices for the West End Theatre mounting.  They had the same director, the same composer, the same lighting designer, and mostly the same cast.  Therefore, I’ll take the liberty of quoting from 2013 reviews along with the sole 2020 one.

In Jewish Renaissance, a magazine covering Jewish culture, arts, and communities in Britain and beyond, Judi Herman, dubbing the play “important and moving drama,” proclaimed in 2020, “From the get-go Patz’s film captures the defiant spirit.”  She reminded readers, “In the theatre, the audience is cast as the audience of Terezin inmates at that dress rehearsal.  The film is shot with a live crowd, but watching online at home, you too become part of it.”

“To composer Stephen Feigenbaum’s plangent score,” found Herman, “the actors seamlessly establish the playing style.”  The JR reviewer felt, “Although the acting and movement style are exaggerated in keeping with the stark satire, it is subtly calibrated.”  Pizzolorusso/Abeles (whom Herman characterized as “wonderfully appealing”) and Rosenfeld/Mánička were a “tad more naturalistic in dress and playing style” than the rest of the actors/characters.

In conclusion, Herman declared, “Hats off to the 11-strong company, to Patz and to director Edward Einhorn for ensuring Švenk and his fable reach a wider audience at last.”

The New York Times’ Neil Genzlinger explained in 2013:

“The Last Cyclist” isn’t participatory theater in any of the usual senses. . . . .  But if you’re attending this intriguing exercise in Holocaust history, you should plan to show up in character.  To appreciate what you’re going to see, you need to be not a 21st-century theatergoer but rather a prisoner at Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp near Prague.

Genzlinger labeled Švenk’s play “a scalding satire” and added, “If Ms. Patz’s ‘Last Cyclist’ is at all like the one rehearsed by Svenk . . ., it’s easy to see why the Jewish Council stifled it.  The work is a not-at-all-subtle allegory that portrays Hitler and the Nazis as insane.”

As for the present-day “reimagining” of The Last Cyclist, the Timesman declared that it “is amateurish absurdism, and the production here . . . is deliberately rickety, as it would have been in 1944.” 

In the end, the Times review-writer advised:

Watching “The Last Cyclist,” you realize that this performance is being presented for an audience that isn’t there.  You and your fellow theatergoers are its stand-in.  This isn’t theater as entertainment; it’s theater as a chance to bear witness.

Also in 2013, Jennifer Farrar in the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant characterized The Last Cyclist as a “crude but well-performed and affecting production.”  The reviewer praised Einhorn’s “spirited direction,” reporting that “the homespun, frenetic action unfolds on a small stage within a stage.”

“While the action and characters are often heavy-handed,” Farrar found, “the play credibly conveys the necessity for people to take personal responsibility in resisting prejudice and racism.”  The costumes were “colorful, cartoonish” and “[w]ith slapstick and broad, vaudevillian humor,” the actors “parody the random illogic and racism of a world where people were killed just for being Jewish.”

Farrar praised Jenny Lee Miller’s Ma’am for her “chilly superiority” and Eric Emil Oleson’s “villainous derangement” as her “increasingly insane partner in crime.” 

At the end of her notice, the HC reviewer observed, “The resurrection of this ironic parable serves as a chilling reminder of the valiant spirits lost in the unthinkable human destruction of the Holocaust.”

In its capsule review in “The Theater” in the “Goings On About Town” section, The New Yorker asserted:

Šedová’s play has value as a historical document, but this production is unsophisticated—an overlong and cartoonish skit played by adult actors behaving, under the direction of Edward Einhorn, like giddy children.

On The Komisar Scoop, blogger Lucy Komisar asserted, “‘The Last Cyclist’ is fascinating in its conception and existence as a satirical political cabaret put on in 1944 by prisoners of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.”

“Judged as an ordinary a piece of theater,” thought Komisar, “the play falters because with one, perhaps two, exceptions, most of the performers are amateurish.  On the other hand, the original in the camp also mixed professionals and amateurs, so perhaps this production provides verisimilitude.”

Nevertheless, Komisar praised Mitchell as Ma’am, labeling the actress “a brilliant satirical performer.”  She also said “Pizzolorusso does a credible job as Svenk and Borivoj Abeles.”

“Svenk’s play survives as an emblem of his and the actors’ courage,” summed up Komisar.