Reconstructing Ballet

“GESTURES DANCE, AND DANCES TELL STORIES”

by Marina Harss

[This article first appeared in the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 30 May 2018.  I saved it because it speaks of reconstructing a historic ballet with the aid of dance notation—in this case, a system invented in 1892 by Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov (1866-96), a Russian dancer.  I’ll follow this article with a review of an earlier performance that included a dance reconstructed with Labanotation, another system.]

We think of ballet as a nonverbal art, but for the last few months, the words “tell” and “say” have echoed in the studios of American Ballet Theater. The dancers aren’t using their voices; it is their bodies that are doing the talking.

“Harlequinade,” which has its premiere at Ballet Theater on June 4 in a staging by Alexei Ratmansky, is a highly conversational ballet, inspired by the popular 18th-century theatrical form known as commedia dell’arte. Between the dances, the characters “speak” to one another in broad, legible gestures and glances that fit into the musical phrases like words in a song. The dancing, too, is full of details that add to the character of each scene. The gestures dance; the dances tell stories.

“The characters are almost putting on a show, talking to the audience as they go,” said Cassandra Trenary, who alternates in the role of Columbine, Harlequin’s sweetheart. “We’re breaking that fourth wall.” When Harlequin, the young hero — a trickster in brightly colored tights — offers a serenade to his beloved, he strums a mandolin, moving his lips as if really singing a tune.

This ballet isn’t Mr. Ratmansky’s invention, but rather a restaging of a comedy by Marius Petipa, originally called “Les Millions d’Arlequin,” or “Harlequin’s Millions.” It was first performed in 1900 in St. Petersburg, where it remained in the repertory for almost three decades.

Petipa, the principal choreographer at the Imperial Theaters in the second half of the 19th century, put on dozens of ballets, including many that are still repertory fixtures: “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Don Quixote,” “La Bayadère.” These were passed down mainly through oral tradition, as in a game of telephone, from teacher to student, with tweaks and additions compounding over time. Written notations for many ballets do exist, at least in partial form, but mostly they are ignored, on the theory that dance is a living, breathing art form, always changing.

This stylistic drift doesn’t sit well with Mr. Ratmansky, he explained over coffee near Lincoln Center. Until recently, he said: “I had lost my interest in these classical ballets. I didn’t want to see them.” Something, for him, was missing — but he wasn’t sure what.

There were later versions of “Harlequinade” in Russia by Fyodor Lopukhov (in the 1930s) and Pyotr Gusev (in the ’70s); and, at New York City Ballet, by George Balanchine (1965, with additions in 1973). As with most later stagings of Petipa, they were loosely based on the original — Balanchine made up his own steps, “in the style of” Petipa — but none made any claim of authenticity.

So, rather than patch together a “Harlequinade” based on the versions he knew or dream up his own, like Balanchine, Mr. Ratmansky went back to a trove of dance notations kept at Harvard: detailed scores written out in a system of lines, dots, arrows, X’s and O’s. Stepanov Notation, as the system is called, was developed by the dancer Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov in Russia in the 1890s. Note-takers sat in studios, scribbling in real time as the dancers rehearsed.

This labor-intensive system fell out of use after the Russian Revolution, when people had more important things on their minds. In the decades since, few people have bothered to learn how to decode the notes. (One of the few was Sergei Vikharev, who remounted several ballets using notes in Russia.)

Why bother with them at all? For Mr. Ratmansky, Petipa’s choreography mattered. “It’s about the steps,” he said. “Choreography is a text, and this is the text we have. You wouldn’t change Balanchine or Fokine, so why Petipa?”

Five years ago, Mr. Ratmansky and his wife, Tatiana, a former dancer who assists him in his reconstructions, sat down to figure out what the notes actually contained. What they found has surprised and delighted him. “The key is the simplicity of the phrases,” he said. “Petipa’s choreography is so simple, and so wise. Everything feels inevitable.”

The style has inspired him in his own work, he added. “You can see it in my ballet ‘Whipped Cream’ — it’s really structured after a Petipa ballet, with all the changes of mood, the stage pictures, the diversity of approaches to each scene.”

“Harlequinade” is Mr. Ratmansky’s fourth deep dive into the historical record, after “The Sleeping Beauty” (for Ballet Theater, in 2015), “Swan Lake” (for Zurich Ballet, in 2016), and “Paquita” (for Bayerisches Staatsballett, in 2014). In the fall, he’ll take on “La Bayadère,” for Staatsballett Berlin.

As he has become more conversant in Petipa’s style, his freedom within it has increased. In “The Sleeping Beauty,” he was adamant that the women should raise their legs up only 90 degrees and not point their feet when they stood at rest, but rather hold them in a semirelaxed position. Many of the women’s turns were executed with the foot on half tiptoe rather than fully on the tips of the toes.

These period details were difficult to maintain — the dancers kept going back to their old habits, he said — so he hasn’t insisted on them in “Harlequinade.” “It requires too much time to make it work, and there are never enough rehearsals,” he said.

What he hasn’t dropped is his focus on the specificity of Petipa’s style. “Even the arabesques and the arms and the angles of the body tell us something about the character or the situation,” Mr. Ratmansky said. Many of those details had been smoothed out over time. In a pose from the final pas de deux, for example, he asked the dancer to twist her shoulders slightly so that she could peer back at her partner: “There’s a lot of story here; you’re telling us about your fear.” The pose wasn’t just pretty; it carried meaning.

How much of this comes from Petipa and how much from Ratmansky? The line can be blurry. Some sections of the notes are fairly sparse, with only indications for the legs and feet, or a simple floor plan. Even when there is more detail, it requires interpretation.

“There is this section where Harlequin does a diagonal of batterie” — jumps in which the legs beat together in the air — “and each time you jump, there’s a turn,” Daniil Simkin, one of the dancers alternating as Harlequin, said during a rehearsal break. “Exactly when that turn happens is up to discussion.” (The other Harlequins are Gabe Stone Shayer, James Whiteside and Jeffrey Cirio.)

Mr. Ratmansky described the process of reconstruction as “finding the little bits in the dust, and then placing them together to create a picture.” It is not a science, after all, but an act of the imagination.

[Harlequinade ran from 30 May through 9 June 2018 at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan.

[Marina Harss is a freelance dance writer and translator in New York.  Her dance writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Nation, The Guardian, Playbill, Dance Magazine, DanceTabs, and elsewhere.  Translations include Irène Némirovsky’s The Mirador, Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip and Pier Paolo  Pasolini’s Stories from the City of God.]

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“A TWO-FOLD HISTORY LESSON, COURTESY OF FOUR MIDCENTURY MASTERS”

by Alastair Macaulay

[This review was first published in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 26 April 2010.  The reviewer, Alastair Macauley, the New York Times’ principal dance writer,  doesn’t say so in his notice, but all the dances in this program were reconstructed one way or another from historic productions.]

In reviving little-known little gems by four leading mid-20th-century choreographers, as it did in the “Signatures 10” program on Saturday at Gould Hall, New York Theater Ballet confirms its status as an invaluable company. Very few in the audience can have seen all these gems before; fewer can feel that they know even one well.

The program — an entirely happy one, with music played live on piano — teaches us plenty about dance history. Not only are these unusual views of how dances were made over 50 years ago, but in each case the choreographer was also thinking about the historic past.

Antony Tudor’s "Soirée Musicale," one of his few pure dance and plotless works, recaptures engaging aspects of early-19th-century ballet style in response to the Rossini items that Benjamin Britten had arranged in this score. Frederick Ashton’s “Capriol Suite” follows Peter Warlock’s score in reimagining aspects of the Renaissance. Agnes de Mille’s “Three Virgins and a Devil” is a comedy in medieval manner. And in “Suite From Mazurkas” José Limón addresses the Polish heritage of the mazurka as presented in Chopin’s music.

These ballets look forward as well as back. No lover of Ashton’s choreography can miss the “Capriol” moments that suggest ballets to come, like his 1960 staging of “La Fille Mal Gardée.” And, as one of the “Suite From Mazurkas” male dancers takes time to place the palm of his hand on the ground, anyone who knows “Dances at a Gathering,” the 1969 Jerome Robbins work that also makes use of Chopin mazurkas, must wonder if Robbins had seen Limón’s work. This year is Chopin’s bicentennial: too few dance companies are commemorating it, but in this Limón revival Theater Ballet does the composer honor.

All four works place their faith in lively through-the-body dancing. Feet, hands, torso, neck, pelvis, shoulders, eyes: all make memorable contributions here, and in striking coordination. The dancers of New York Theater Ballet look extremely but endearingly young. Above all they look happily fulfilled. In each of these pieces I felt I was seeing the choreography true and understood, as if the performers had found themselves.

This achievement proved most remarkable in “Capriol Suite.” Like all of Ashton’s choreography this needs dancers as vivid in their torsos as in their feet and a group sense that each dancer may be continuing a neighbor’s line. The Theater Ballet performers bend from the waist, exhibit vivacious insteps and elegantly catch one another’s eyes in best Ashton style. The blend of formal grace and comedy in one pas de trois for a woman and her two suitors is extraordinary. The placing of the heel of a flexed foot on the floor and the change of the body’s angle from addressing one diagonal to another become as expressive as the fleeting dance suggestions of each lover’s frustration.

Tudor was known as a great ballet teacher, and many of his alumni regretted that he seldom applied the inventiveness he showed in the classroom to dance-for-dance’s-sake choreography. “Soirée” is surely the best view we now have of that side of him.

His historical sense is, like Ashton’s, uncanny: at times he seems attuned to Romantic-style ballets by Bournonville that he was unlikely to have seen. His three couples evoke the worlds of “La Sylphide,” “Giselle” and “Napoli” ; jumps, lifts, traveling hops interconnect in seamless phrases. Three other women dance trios with marvelous effects of arm-and-foot coordination. And Tudor brings all nine dancers together in harmonies that, like everything about this work, extend our idea of this great choreographer.

I’d like to see de Mille’s “Three Virgins and a Devil” again: its droll absurdity is fun. Still, it was the slightest and least subtle work of the evening. By contrast, “Suite From Mazurkas” emerged as one of Limón’s finest. You feel the layers of his thought — Poland as home, the mazurka as tradition, Chopin as Romantic — but principally he’s immersed in dance itself rather than communication. This aspect of his inventiveness has the upper hand here, and it shows him to be, as seldom in other works, a true poet.

[New York Theatre Ballet’s Signatures 10 ran at Florence Gould Hall at 55 E. 59th Street in New York City on 23 and 24 April 2010.  I saw the performance on Saturday, 24 April.  The co-stager of Antony Tudor’s Soirée Musicale was Oona Haaranen, a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, and dance notator who was a writing student of mine for a while when she was working on a graduate degree.  Oona and her co-stager, Ray Cook (the “choreographer” was Tudor), wrote in the program:

Soiree Musicale dates from the same period as Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas and Dark Elegies.  It was first performed in 1938 at London’s Palladium Theatre.

Staged by Oona Haaranen and Ray Cook from the Labanotation score prepared in 1962 by Ann Hutchinson Guest by arrangement with the Dance Notation Bureau which has preserved, enhanced, and furthered the art of dance for 70 years, 1940-2010.

The cast learned to read Labanotation as part of this project.

[Labanotation, invented in 1928 by Rudolf Laban (1879-1958), an Austro-Hungarian dance artist and theorist, is another form of dance notation like Stepanov Notation, used in reconstructing the ballet in the first article, above.  (Ann Hutchinson Guest [b. 1918] is an American movement and dance researcher and an authority on dance notation.)]

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“ARCHIVING DANCE: THE NECESSITY OF COLLABORATION”

by Heather Desaulniers

[Most people, even inveterate balletomanes, don’t know anything about dance notation.  I’m presenting two articles that focus one way or another on that technique for preserving and restaging historic dances.  To help make it a little easier to understand the subject, I’m adding an article discussing dance notation to this post.  There is, of course, lots of material on dance notation and the many specific techniques like Stepanov Notation and Labanotation, the two types mentioned above (including Wikipedia entries on “Dance Notation,” “Vladimir Stepanov,” and “Labanotation”) and interested readers can look further if they wish to pursue the topic.  This article was taken from the website of Burgeon, an arts magazine written by artists, produced by the non-profit Day Eight, posted on 23 January 2010 (http://bourgeononline.com/2010/01/archiving-dance-the-necessity-of-collaboration-by-heather-desaulniers/).]

The re-staging of work establishes a genealogy in dance. Many companies reproduce historical compositions, and as new pieces are created these works enter into the collective ouevre of the field. Technology, notation and personal recollection can all help in re-staging dances, but no one means of archiving can capture the totality of a choreography. Past analysis has tended to evaluate the use of archival methods separately. Only a collaborative archival network combining technology, notation and personal knowledge can ensure the future of repertory.

Technology has provided indispensable archival opportunities in the field of dance. In particular, video has transformed the creative, marketing, and archival process. Live performance is fleeting and impermanent by nature, and the power to film these transient moments creates an un-paralleled resource. With good reason, video is usually the first step in re-creating an earlier work, but it is imperative to acknowledge its limitations. First, traditional video obtains only a two-dimensional image. This provides a good first glimpse of the movement, but not enough detail to re-stage with any precision or rigor. It is impossible to remain true to the nuances and intricacies of complex movement styles – such as the choreography of Twyla Tharp, Bill T. Jones or Trisha Brown – with a two-dimensional view. Second, when looking at video, there is a limited perspective. You are at the mercy of who took the video and who was dancing the work when it was taped. Even professional videographers can miss things, and what if they miss something that is a crucial part of the piece? Dance is changeable. No one piece is ever performed the same way twice. There are always slight, or sometimes not so slight, adjustments for different spaces and different dancers. The expectation is that video captures the most accurate depiction of the work, but this is more a hope than a certainty.

Three dimensional image capture is an exciting technological alternative to conventional video because it can convey a more complete representation of movement. This relatively new technology requires multiple cameras positioned at different angles and heights so as to record a three dimensional figure. The archival applications for this technology are incredibly exciting, but sadly, untapped. This type of filming can be very expensive and thus, not an option for many dance companies. In point of fact, a minority of companies dedicate resources toward preparation of archival material. In addition, 3-D technology has become stalled and somewhat stuck in the performance arena. Choreographers today seem to have an obsession with how ‘mixed media’ and ‘corporeal presence’ (the new go-to buzz phrases in dance) can transform a work within active performance. For all of these reasons, 3-D imagery has not penetrated into the field of archiving.

The most under utilized archival method is dance notation. Labanotation and Benesh Movement Notation are the two primary systems that can provide a written record of choreography. Both employ a specific system of markings that indicate which body part is moving, the impetus for the motion, the direction, speed and duration of the choreography. Both Laban and Benesh are like hieroglyphics: they are an entire language, very detailed, extensive, and providing a directional map to unlock the minutiae of movement. In theory, dance notation is a great idea, but because the number of people fluent in dance notation is small, and the time/expense of notating a dance significant, written notation exists for a fraction of the important ouvre of modern dance work, and is accessible to an even smaller number of practitioners.

The importance of personal coaching and personal experience cannot be overlooked when staging previous works. Having individuals with experience of the staged work (whether the choreographer, one of the original dancers, or a dance historian) present during re-creation significantly informs the reconstruction process. These individuals may not be able to ensure an exact replication of the steps, but many essences and ‘isms’ are beyond the capabilities of technology and notation. Admittedly, as with technology and notation, individual memory/personal coaching does have its limitations. One challenge is that this type of knowledge cannot be institutionalized, and so is uncertain from generation to generation.

Every archival process can make a positive contribution, yet on their own, each system is insufficient. To preserve our important cultural heritage, what is needed is the application of a thoughtful, reliable, and collaborative archival practice integrating technology, notation and personal resources to the fullest extent possible. Dance companies generally lack the funds to utilize all available archival systems when re-staging choreography. And, the limited funds that exist to create or stage work tend not to include the funds necessary for integration of archival concerns (money to access the newest technology, arrange for a notation, etc.) Archival policies for the field need to be developed, both to ensure preservation and performance of important works, and to encourage the funding mechanisms necessary to institutionalize appropriate archival/reconstruction policies.

[Heather Desaulniers is a freelance dance writer and critic, based in Washington, D.C.  She contributes regularly to criticaldance.com, and is currently pursuing historical research on choreographers Sophie Maslow and Pola Nirenska.  She is also an associate editor of Bourgeon.]

MoMA PS1

Diana called me on Saturday, 6 June, and asked if I was interested in going out to MoMA’s PS1 in Long Island City, Queens.  I’d never been there, so I said yes.  She picked me up at about quarter to one on Sunday and we drove over to Queens by way of the FDR Drive and the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge (also known as the 59th Street Bridge—especially if you’re a Simon and Garfunkel fan), arriving at PS1 on Jackson Avenue between 46th Avenue and 46th Road at just after 1 p.m.  (Diana even found a parking place right in front of the museum.  Is this New York City or what?)

LIC, as the area’s known, was originally an independent city, founded in 1870, until it became part of Greater New York City in 1898 when Queens County merged with Bronx County, Kings County (Brooklyn), Richmond County (Staten Island), and New York County (Manhattan).  It’s been undergoing a transformation for the past decade or so as it’s changed over to a residential and commercial neighborhood from a largely warehouse and factory district.  In 2001, LIC was rezoned from an industrial neighborhood to residential and underwent gentrification.  

While there are many starkly modern luxury highrises, mostly combined residential and office spaces with retail businesses in the ground-floor premises, there are still the remnants of the area’s previous appearance as a utilitarian, unaesthetic area of storehouses, manufacturing plants, loading docks, truck bays, and parking lots.  

Several arts organizations have opened in the area; aside from PS1, there’s the SculptureCenter, New York City’s only non-profit exhibition space dedicated to contemporary and innovative sculpture, founded in 1928 and expanded in 2014; the Socrates Sculpture Park, an outdoor museum and public sculpture park created in 1986 and given official status in 1998; See.me, a web-based arts organization founded in 2007; and the Fisher Landau Center for Art, a private foundation offering exhibitions of contemporary art established in 1991, closed to the public in November 2017.   Sculptor Isamu Noguchi, 1904-88, established his museum in LIC in 1985 in a former plant building; his studio had been across Vernon Boulevard in an old warehouse.

The organization that became MoMA PS1 began in 1971 as the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, whose mission was turning abandoned and underused buildings in New York City into artist studios and exhibition spaces.  In 1976, founder Alanna Heiss (b. 1943) opened the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in a deserted Romanesque Revival public school building in LIC.  The building, built in 1892, was the first school in Long Island City and functioned until 1963, when it was closed because of low attendance (probably because the neighborhood had slowly shifted from residential to industrial) and the building was turned into a warehouse.

In 1999, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and Manhattan’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art merged, a process which was scheduled to take 10 years; MoMA PS1, the museum’s new name, and the Museum of Modern Art formalized their affiliation in 2000.  Today, MoMA PS1 is the oldest and second-largest (after the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known as MASS MoCA) non-profit arts center in the United States solely devoted to contemporary art.

An exhibition space rather than a collecting institution, MoMA PS1 has no permanent holdings like its parent museum on Manhattan’s West 53rd Street—though PS1 does display long-term installations.  PS1, with 125,000 square feet of space, has four floors of exhibit space, plus a courtyard that is currently the site of a gigantic installation, Pedro & Juana’s Hórama Rama (2019).  The first and second floors have the most exhibit spaces while the third floor also houses the museum’s administrative offices and the basement includes the cloakroom and the building’s infrastructure plant. 

Within PS1, are performance spaces, rooms for art-education programs, artist-in-residence studios, and site-specific installations.  There are large galleries for expansive exhibitions and small rooms that are ideal as project spaces or for video screenings.

Visitors enter PS1 through the newly created entrance on a spur of road (unnamed, as far as I can tell) that connects 46th Avenue to Jackson Avenue.  In 1994, PS1 underwent a major renovation to repairs decades of wear and frequent ad hoc remodeling that had left the original 102-year-old building severely deteriorated.  The renovation included the creation of an entranceway and the Courtyard just beyond.  

(Unlike MoMA in Manhattan, PS1’s admission is “suggested”: $10 for adults, seniors and students $5, children free; Fridays evenings are free and since 2015, admission is always free for New York City residents.  The museum is open Thursday through Monday from noon till 6 p.m. except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Days.) 

Leaving the entrance kiosk, museumgoers cross the Courtyard to enter the old school building, which houses the exhibit spaces.  Like the entranceway, the Courtyard is constructed principally of unpainted concrete with a gray gravel floor; parts of the yard look like they’re still under construction while other areas look to be storage for equipment for Warm Up, PS1’s summer music program that runs every Saturday from July through early September.

As I said, the Courtyard is occupied through 2 September by Hórama Rama by Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (Mexican, no date of birth) and Mecky Reuss (German, no DOB), founders of Pedro & Juana, a research, design, and architecture studio in Mexico City.  Unveiled in June as the 2019 winner of the Young Architects Program, an annual competition of MoMA PS1, the installation occupies the whole courtyard and towers dozens of feet above it.  Young architects are invited to submit design proposals to YAP for PS1’s courtyard.  The winning entry is then converted from concept to reality and becomes the architectural setting for Warm Up. 

Hórama Rama (I couldn’t find a translation for the title; it may not have one) is a large-scale cyclorama featuring a panoramic image on scaffolding that projects above the Courtyard and transports visitors into a wild jungle.  Nearly 40-foot-tall and 90-foot-wide, the structure looms over the Courtyard, setting visitors in an urban rainforest.  The exterior of the structure features protruding wood “bristles” that create a sense of movement.  

The presence of this large circular structure reconfigures the Courtyard into an immersive environment that visitors can move in and out of, contrasting with the cityscape just outside PS1 and visible over the Courtyard wall.  Amplifying the experience are bright pink hammocks handwoven in the south of Mexico and small wooden stools placed around the gravel terrain, along with a two-story, artificial waterfall. 

It almost seems churlish to say that the installation didn’t make me or Diana imagine being in a jungle.  The Courtyard, with its bare concrete walls and bland gravel ground, wasn’t inviting, especially on this hot, humid summer afternoon, and I certainly wasn’t inclined to hang out there, as it were, in a hammock.  As for the waterfall, it’s off to the right (as we entered the yard) in an area that was partially closed off and disused except as storage the day we visited, less attractive even than the “jungle.”

We didn’t linger in the Courtyard but made our way to the main museum building across the gravel yard and up some concrete steps.  There’s a terrace of sorts in front of the old school building with some picnic tables and chairs—intended, I assume, for use by patrons of the café, Mina’s, on the right side of the terrace (as you go up the stairs) that didn’t appear to be open this Sunday afternoon.

After orienting ourselves in the building—there’s a sort of reception lobby just inside the entrance from the Courtyard—Diana, who said she’d been expecting air conditioning and had brought a sweater, decided to leave it at the checkroom in the basement, so we went down there first.  It’s not truly an exhibit floor, but there are some spaces visitors can look at.  The most prominent is the lower part of a two-story installation that can also be viewed from the first floor, Maypole (2007) by Nancy Spero (American, 1926-2009). 

The space is called the Duplex gallery and contains Spero’s last work completed before her death, a 20-foot vertical steel pole from which images of decapitated aluminum heads (some with protruding tongues) are suspended by ribbons and metal chains.  Maypole (through 2 September) was created during the second Iraq War (“Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 2003-11) but was derived from Spero’s drawings from the 1960s inspired by the Vietnam war.   

Spero sees her work as simultaneously reflecting the celebratory and the grotesque.  The maypole is the universal symbol in the West of the coming of spring, recognizing the recurring cycle of nature, while the images of violence represent the recurring cycle of war.  Having watched the U.S. enter into a disastrous and destructive war in Southeast Asia based on the lies and manipulations of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and  Richard Nixon, Spero was horrified to see George W. Bush lead us down the same road in Iraq.  

In some previous incarnations of Maypole, viewers could walk around the installation, the aluminum heads hanging just above the visitors’ own heads, but at PS1, we saw the work through a sort of unglazed window into what looked like two flights of a former stairwell from which the steps had been disassembled—or maybe an elevator shaft with the car removed.

Also in the basement is a screening room running a short documentary, Autoportrait (1971-2012), on the life and work of Simone Fattal (Syrian-born Lebanese-American, b. 1942), associated with the exhibit of her work in Works and Days in a series of galleries on the first floor.  As the black-and-white film, which the artist herself edited from footage taken when she invited a crew into her Beirut kitchen in 1971 to help her make a video self-portrait, was over 40 years old, Diana and I decided to skip it.  

We also passed up the installation known as Central Governor residing in the Boiler Room of the old school building (no longer functioning) in the form of the gold-leafed furnace.  The work was executed in 2010 by Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Saul Melman (American, b. 1968) and I walked down the wooden stairs into the Boiler Room to see what was up, but Diana walks with a cane from a knee replacement, so I advised her not to venture down.

On the first floor, through another window into the Duplex gallery, I stopped to look again at Spero’s Maypole.  On the basement level, we looked out at the bottom of the pole or up at the rest of it; from the first floor, we could see the middle of the installation, look down on the bottom part, or up to the pinnacle.  For me, this was more a curiosity, seeing the work from several different perspectives, than truly revealing or artistically engaging.  (At the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2017 Biennial, Samara Golden’s multi-story installation The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes was much more interesting and engrossing; see my report on the Biennial, posted on Rick On Theater on 22 June 2017.)

The principal exhibit on this floor is Fattal’s Works and Days (through 2 September), a retrospective of over 200 of her works created over the last 50 years that includes sculpture (abstract and figurative), paintings (watercolor and oil), drawings, and collages on subjects and themes drawn from war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, mythology, and Sufi poetry.  Fattal’s sculptures, the bulk of her oeuvre, are often tiny and frequently parts of series which tell a story when viewed together.  She works in ceramic, stoneware, terracotta, bronze, and porcelain and takes inspiration from myths such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Dhat al-Himma. 

There are simply too many pieces in this show to report on even a small portion of them.  Depending on personal taste and interest, some of Fattal’s work is more appealing than others—something that’s true of all prolific artists.  In the very first gallery however, are two pieces, both sculptures, worth remarking upon.  

Arguably the most unusual piece is the 1988 Torso Found in Today’s Downtown Beirut, Fattal’s first sculpture.  It’s a piece of alabaster the artist found and which resembled the body of an ancient statue from an archeological dig.  She added to the carving and mounted it on a simple, white-painted wooden box.  The sculpture looks like it had been pulled from an ancient ruin, but at the same time, it suggests a recovered body from the rubble of a contemporary war—a kind of artificial palimpsest.  (The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-90, was raging at the time Fattal created Torso.)

The other sculpture that struck me—solely because I liked it—is The Lion (2008).  An absolutely charming small, umber-colored stoneware statue, it’s recognizable as a little lion without being Realistic; it’s not exactly Impressionistic, either, but sort of free-form, sitting on the floor, right in the middle of the room.  Ariella Budick of the Financial Times described it perfectly: “A craggy lion with a sunlike mane and pussycat tail lolls apprehensively on a plinth.”  (ROTters will know about my mother and my “Midnight Shopping Trips” when it comes to art shows.  This is what I’d come back for out of the while museum!)

In one of the last galleries were several small, abstract ceramic figures, including The Guard (2006) and The Wounded Warrior (2008), from the little-known Arabic epic of the 7th through the 13th centuries, Dhat al-Himma.  (Fattal made a series of figurines from this legend.  The title varies and there are differences in the narrative depending on the version and the translation.)  

In the legend, Delhemma, the heroine, is a “woman of noble purpose” (the translation of the tale’s Arabic title); she’s a warrior and a female djinn (a magical spirit, often called a genie in English) falls in love with her.  Guarded by the djinn and assisted by her son, Delhemma fights the enemies of her people and her prince   If you’re looking for a successor to TV’s Xena: Warrior Princess or the movie Wonder Woman, a feminist action hero with exotic trappings, here’s a great prospect.

In several locations around the museum, most notably on the wall beyond the reception area at the entrance to the old school building, are rectangular aluminum placards resembling no-parking signs with texts alluding to the Trail of Tears forced relocation of Native peoples from the East to Oklahoma (then designated Indian Territory) between 1830 and 1850.  The signs, white backgrounds with red lettering and a red border, bear the phrases “do you choose to walk”; “were you forced to walk”; “trail of tears 1836”; “walk to oklahoma” (Trail of Tears, 2005). 

                                                                                                                 

These are the work of Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation, b. 1954), an artist, activist, and educator known for text-based conceptual art.  (Born in Kansas, Heap of Birds is a Southern Cheyenne.  The Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, both originally from the northern Great Plains, were forced to migrate to western Indian Territory after the Civil War.)  

At PS1, his main exhibit on the second floor is Surviving Active Shooter Custer (through 8 September), a large show with over 200 works which presents new and recent large-scale prints.  By using the contemporary phrase “active shooter” to characterize massacres committed by U.S. troops against Native Americans over a century ago, Heap of Birds refers to the legacies of state violence against Native communities while drawing parallels to the present day. 

All the prints in Active Shooter are not just word-based, but words exclusively; they’re mini-texts, hand-written protest posters.  The panels are presented in groups, each dealing with a particular theme or issue, unified by the background color.  

Health of the People is the Highest Law (2019), which references the health issues that affect Native Americans, is a series of red panels imprinted with white-lettered, somewhat cryptic (if often poetic) phrases such as “dance in wheel chair drum beats circle” and “she learned well gum her food.”  In Blue Tree (2005–2017), an assemblage that seems more personal to the artist, the prints are all on shades of blue with texts like “over rated human just fine animal” and “lean close be brown to me.” 

The panels are monoprints and corresponding “ghost prints” (a second print from an original monoprint plate that’s substantially different from the original print) on sheets of paper that vary from 22" high by 15" wide to 30" by 22".  They’re assembled into panels ranging from 66" by 135" to 90" by 352".  

The passages are a collage of song lyrics, references to historical events, political speeches, and other sources.  Heap of Birds strictly limits himself to six words.  The title panel, from 2019, is the artist’s evocation of “the genocide of America inflicted on the indigenous people” and contains a print that references one of our most popular patriotic songs, “American the Beautiful”: “cities gleam foul our blood stream” (“Our alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears”).

In yet another panel on the same topic, Genocide and Democracy (2016), Heap of Birds continues the implications of America’s patriotic myth-making with prints, again in bloody shades of red, with passages like “shed grace on thee american brutality” and “indian health decay twilights last gleaming.”  Our most sacred prose phrases come in for attack as well: “poverty sadness for which it stands.”

The source of the artist’s title for the assemblage is in another print in Surviving Active Shooter Custer: “stop active shooter cadet autie custer.”  (“Custer was the main terrorist that came to our country,” declares the artist.  “Autie” was Custer’s childhood nickname among family and close friends, derived from his early attempts to pronounce his middle name, Armstrong.)  

This print and the others in this panel, also in shades of red, all reappear in another panel on the next wall in ghost form—second, paler-hued impressions made from the original plates.  Heap of Birds explains in a video interview that after the genocides, “what we have left are the ghosts of a whole culture.  These prints will be like their memory or their expression of the survivors, of the ghosts of what happened in the 1800s.” 

Another print in Surviving Active Shooter Custer, connecting the atrocities of the past to the present day, reads “indians still target obama binladen geronimo.”  It’s not entirely clear if Heap of Birds means that Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden have been targets like the 19th-century Indians, but inclusion of the name Geronimo in the print is telling for another reason.  

The Apache leader was looked on as a terrorist in the middle and late 1800s and the object of a vast manhunt.  But Geronimo was also the code name for bin Laden during the search for him and upon his death in 2011, the SEAL team that killed him radioed back the news by reporting “Geronimo is dead.”  Heap of Birds points out: “They named the most hated terrorist an Apache name, you know, when they were hunting him. . . .  They don’t see the insensitivity or the pain of the history.”

As with much of the work on display at PS1, I found Surviving Active Shooter more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.  I have no trouble agreeing with Heap of Birds’s message, but that’s a socio-political response, not an artistic or aesthetic one.  I also have no doubt about the artist and activist’s sincerity or passion, but reading through hundreds of slogans soon gets wearing and they all blur into one undifferentiated image.  (I also must add that the constant anger, however justified, gets exhausting, too.) 

Also on the second floor is MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018–19, part of a multi-year partnership among the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1 that commenced in February.  While the Studio Museum in Harlem is closed for the construction of a new building at West 125th Street, site of its longtime home, PS1 will present the Studio Museum’s annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition.  

MOOD, the inaugural exhibition of this partnership, features work by Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984, Lexington, KY), Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, New York, NY), and Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA).  It will be at PS1 through 8 September. (Construction on the Studio Museum’s new home is expected to continue through 2021.)

According to the museum’s PR, MOOD, a four-gallery exhibition, is supposed to be an exploration of “site, place, and time as they relate to American identity and popular culture, past and present.”  The art reflects the social-media hashtag #mood, which, the PS1 press release says, “describes moments both profound and banal: anything can be ‘a #mood.’”

As I understand this (a perhaps unlikely circumstance), #mood is related to the ordinary sense of the word ‘mood,’ but its social-media incarnation is, first imagistic—that is, pictorial—rather than merely rhetorical.  It’s also sort of Yiddish-esque, if you’ll excuse the ethno-centric view, in that, like Yiddish words and expressions, an image representing a feeling or a state of being can mean dozens, scores, even hundreds of variations depending on who’s sending the image, who’s receiving it, how either of them feels at the moment, and the spin either sender or recipient puts on the image.  It’s all nuance.  (How’d I do?  Did I make any sense?  Am I close?)

Using a range of media and materials, including video, sculpture, found objects, collage, printing, painting, and photography, the pieces express the artists’ perceptions of the current moment in the United States.  This isn’t, as you might guess, an easy exhibit to characterize; each artist-in-residence works in multiple styles and means, making it hard to pin any of them down to simple or familiar (a least to me) categories.  As the press release asserts, “MOOD maps out each artist’s psychic landscape, presenting distinct snapshots that travel through and beyond the fabric of digital culture.”  

Hamilton created an installation that envelops visitors, making them wrestle with a mysterious Old South, its racial realities, and its mythic past (Metal Yard Sign with Sabal Palm Fronds I and Metal Yard Sign with Sabal Palm Fronds II, both 2019); Self’s series of eight paintings (most from 2019), Street Scenes, is a large-scale, mixed-media homage to street life in Harlem; and Smith’s conceptual sculptures and two-dimensional works examine the injustices of mass incarceration in the U.S. and calls attention to its consequences.

I must create a Master Piece to pay the Rent (through 2 September), in a second-floor gallery into which a monitor only lets a small number of visitors to enter at a time, is the first survey exhibition of the work of interdisciplinary artist Julie Becker (American, 1972-2016).  When Diana and I first stopped by, the monitor was holding people at the door, and we decided to move on and come back instead of hanging around in the hallway.  

I must create (the title comes from a phrase from one of her drawings) alludes to the kind of temporary living spaces Becker lived in in Los Angeles, where she was born.  The exhibit of 53 works made between 1993 (when Becker was still a student at the California Institute of the Arts in L.A.) and 2015 includes mixed-media installations, models, films, photographs, and drawings.

Interior Corners (1993), a series of photographs of corners of rooms, shows two wallpapered walls and a triangle of carpeted floor.  Some of the rooms are real and others are models built by Becker; it’s unclear from the photos which are which.  There are also model rooms the artist built displayed on the floors of the gallery (not necessarily the same models from which the photos were made). 

The installation Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest (1993–96) is in a separate space within the Becker galleries, and yet another monitor ushers in visitors one by one as previous viewers leave.  I entered the installation, which might be seen as a life-size model, through an office-like room with a desk, sofa, and table piled with magazines. The nameplate on the desk reads “waiting room,” but there are other nameplates—“psychiatrist,” “concierge,” “real-estate agent,” “entertainment agency,” and so on—displayed on the floor, as if the use of the office were flexible. 

Beyond the waiting room are other spaces set up diorama-like, including one that’s supposed to evoke the hotel in the 1980 thriller film The Shining—of which there’s a drawing hanging on the waiting room wall!  There’s also an artist’s studio in which miniature versions of Becker’s work hang, suggesting that the occupant is the artist herself.  There are several other room installations, leading the visitor to a workspace that has clues that this is where Becker did her research and preparation for the creation of her models and other pieces.  There are evocations all around, also, of Stephen King’s The Shining and Eloise, the 1950s children’s book series by Kay Thompson. 

I found, unfortunately, that the wonder of Becker’s work wore off after a few exhibits.  It all struck me as the efforts of an obsessive child (Becker was only 43 when she took her own life after struggling for years with drugs and mental illness)—or perhaps a mad set designer,  Yes, the work is meticulous and detailed, but it reminded me of the kind of art created by some outsider artists (who are often mentally ill or otherwise psychologically altered).  After a while, the repetitive nature of Becker’s creations, the focus on the single theme of living and working spaces, made my mind go numb.

The third floor has only one exhibit, Gina Beavers’s The Life I Deserve (through 2 September), which opened in March and is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.  Beavers (American, b. 1978), born in Athens, Greece, is known for her bas-relief (and some that are decidedly haut-relief) paintings of food, makeup, and images derived from the internet.  (At first glance, her paintings reminded me of the cafeteria and diner cakes and pies of Wayne Thibaud from the 1960s.  Besides being 3-D, Beavers’s work is darker, more grotesque, and slier—sort of Thibaud 2.0.) 

This survey of Beavers’s thickly layered acrylic paintings on canvas, wood, or linen, range from her early “food porn” pictures from around 2014 to later work that's almost sculptural.  LipBalls 3 (2018), for instance, shows a human mouth in bright lipstick with huge sports balls (basket, tennis, base, and so on), plastered all over it, protruding from the canvas way more than just bas. 

The exhibit’s title is a food reference, taken from one of the exhibit’s paintings, The Life I Deserve (Ice Cream), 2016.  Beavers explains that “it’s a foodie thing.  The photo [of a rainbow ice cream cone on social media] was just tagged with #thelifeIdeserve.  It’s this very humble subject, a soft-serve cone, but at the same time, it’s self-centered: what I deserve.”  It was curator Oliver Shultz who selected the painting’s title as the name of the entire exhibit.

One example of Beavers’s “food porn” paintings is Cake (2015), the depiction of the naked torso of a man, lying prone as if he might be sunbathing in the nude.  Out of his right buttock, a cake-server is lifting a slice, which looks like the layers of an iced cake about to be served to someone.  

Another food porn piece is Van Gogh’s Starry Night as Rendered in Bacon (2016), which is just what the title says: the iconic van Gogh painting made of slices of cooked bacon!  (The Starry Night, 1889, is one of my all-time favorite works of art—I even use it as my desktop wallpaper—and I couldn’t decide if Beavers’s take is grotesque or hilarious.)

The van Gogh parody isn’t Beavers’s only paean to renowned artists of old and their iconic paintings.  Mona Lisa Nail (2015) is a rendering of a woman’s hand with one nail painted with an image of the famous Leonardo da Vinci portrait.  In Mondrian Body, Beavers shows a woman’s nude torso, neck to knees, covered in a Piet Mondrian-like geometric design in primary colors.  She’s standing in front of a red curtain holding a gold frame hung around her body with her breasts and belly protruding out from the canvas.  (This might be another piece for my Midnight Shopping Trip.) 

I found many of the exhibits at PS1 to fall outside my area of comprehension.  I’m glad I went because I had no idea what this MoMA satellite was all about—though I suspected it was really current art, which hasn’t appealed to me since the Post-modern period began.  This isn’t an unfamiliar response for me.  I noticed my lack of engagement with the latest art when I first went over to the then-new galleries in Chelsea, which began opening in the mid-1990s, in 2011 and it was undeniable when I went to the 2017 Whitney Biennial. 

I find almost all of this art self-indulgent and hyper-personal—and I’ll try to define and explain what I mean by that in a bit.  The artists all seem to be talking to themselves or to a very narrow audience of their own group (whatever that is).  Nothing is universalized or generalized so that it speaks to me, too (old dude that I am . . . ahem).  This is true even when the point the artist is making is entirely comprehensible to me and even something with which I agree or sympathize—the artistic expression of that point just doesn’t move me. 

As you’ve read earlier, I found several of the artists’ work more curious than aesthetically stimulating (Spero’s Maypole).  Another way of phrasing this is that much of this work was more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging to me, such as Heap of Birds’s Surviving Active Shooter Custer, with its word-dominated prints.  

Still other works, like the Studio Museum artists’ creations, were so hyperlocal (and perhaps hyper-generational, if I may coin a word) that I couldn’t respond to them other than academically.  Art like that of Julie Becker felt not just hyperlocal, but hyper-personal—so focused on her own life, feelings, and experiences as to be a private communication with her own psyche. 

[A few weeks ago, I posted a report on a collection of installations at the Park Avenue Armory, Drill (15 July).  The exhibit comprised 10 separate installations and I decided to try to describe each of them in my report.  In contrast, even though I visited all but one of the exhibits at PS1, I decided to cherry-pick what I’d write about in this report, so I’ve left out several about which I find I have little cogent to say. 

[The one exhibit Diana and I skipped was the Young Architects Program 2019 Exhibition (first floor; through 2 September),  Having seen the winners’ installation, Hórama Rama, in the Courtyard, we decided not to spend time with the other contestants.  (The runners-up for 2019 are Cannibal’s Bath by Matter Design [Brandon Clifford, Wes McGee, and Johanna Lobdell; Boston], Bambot: Fufuzela by Low Design Office [Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare; State College, PA], Seriously Fun by Oana Stănescu and Akane Moriyama [New York and Stockholm], and Refugio by TO [Carlos Facio and Jose G. Amozurrutia; Mexico City].)

[In the basement, Diana and I checked out Simone Fattal’s Autoportrait but decided not to stay for the whole film, principally because, as I said above, it was so old we felt it wasn’t really relevant to the exhibit upstairs.  I looked in at Saul Melman’s Central Governor in the Boiler Room, also in the basement, but found it uninteresting and, given Diana’s disability, decided it wasn’t worth her putting herself out physically for it.

[I’ve also elected not to report on rootkits rootwork by Devin Kenny (second floor; through 2 September).  The reason is simple: I didn’t understand this show at all and couldn’t formulate anything intelligent to say about it.  That’s not a condemnation; I’m sure there are many other people who will find this exhibition engaging.  The museum promo explains that “‘rootkits’ are a form of computer virus that undetectably alter the underlying operating system; ‘rootwork’ alludes to practices of Black-American folk magic, and both reference the DNA kits that allow people to explore their heritage.”  The PS1 materials go on:

In more than a dozen works across a range of media—including some created for the exhibition—Kenny draws particular inspiration from network technologies, locating unsettling intersections of complicity and exploitation, which his work often resists.  Employing the popular cultures of memes, music, fast fashion, and viral media, the artist subtly reveals ubiquitous and often invisible structures of injustice and exclusion.

[Perhaps you can see why I was uncomprehending.  On the other hand, perhaps you can follow this description and would get something from Kenny’s work.

[One more comment: when I do a report for ROT on a theater performance or an art show, I usually do a review round-up at the end.  I like the idea lo presenting a summary of the published critical response, especially if the pros have opinions that differ from mine.  This time’s a little different, though: “MoMA PS1” is a report on an entire museum, not just one specific exhibit.  I covered seven separate and distinct shows in about four hours and though many of them received reviews both in print and on line—I saw many of them while writing this report—it would be hell to track them all down, read them, and summarize them.  (It would also be a very long summary, more than doubling the length of this write-up, I suspect.)  As a result, ROTters will have to look up the reviews themselves—or be satisfied with my judgments.]