'The Washington School of Color'

When I was recently in Bethesda, Maryland, on a visit to my mother, I saw a short review in the Washington Post about an art show at a commercial gallery right near my mom’s apartment, the Marin-Price Galleries on Wisconsin Avenue.  The exhibit was The Washington School of Color, a collection of works by members of the mid-20th-century group of artists in the Nation’s Capital who originated the movement of that name (more commonly known as the Washington Color School), the only art movement identified with Washingon, D.C.  The Washington School of Color, which ran from 2 to 27 August, featured works by Leon Berkowitz (1911-87), Howard Mehring (1931-78), James Hilleary (1924-2014), and John Chapman Lewis (1920-95).  Special emphasis was given to the hard-edged work of Hilleary whose Op Art-like canvases bear a striking resemblance to the brighter, more vivid paintings of Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), one of the Color School’s more prominent members who’s not represented in this show.  

In fact, of the founders of WCS in the late 1950s, none of the movement’s leading lights—Noland, Morris Louis (1912-62), Gene Davis (1920-85), and Anne Truitt (1921-2004)—were part of the Marin-Price exhibit—which may account for its short run of only 23 days as well as the low attendance; we were alone in the small gallery when Mom and I spent an hour or so there on Monday afternoon, the 25th.  (The likely prices of these artists’ work may explain their omission more than any aesthetic decision: the costliest pieces in the Marin-Price show were $10,000 and $20,000, far lower, I’d guess, than a Louis or Noland would demand.)  Normally, I’d have thought, the curiosity value for area residents and visitors combined with the sheer vibrancy of the WCS masters’ works would have brought out a large number of viewers (not to mention potential buyers).  As it was, however, The Washington School of Color was a disappointing affair, not only lacking in star power, but in verve and excitement—two of the principal responses I, at least, get from displays of the best of WCS art.  (Washington Post art critic Mark Jenkins, estimating that the undated works largely came from the 1960s, noted the lack as well: “The more elemental shapes and hues came later.”)  My disappointment, of course, may just have been because some of those artists’ work is among my favorite of modern art; I’ve described these works as “extremely colorful and enticing.”  I called the poured, “rich and intense” acrylic stains of Morris Louis “luminous,” for example.  Noland’s Op Art hybrids I described as “bright and striking” and “exciting to look at” as they “seem to pulse and spin.”  (I’ve reported on ROT on several exhibits of WCS artists, including Anne Truitt in “Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10)” on 18 January 2010, “Morris Louis” on 15 February 2010, and, in passing mention, Kenneth Noland in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin” on 26 June 2011—which also covers an exhibit of the work of Sam Gilliam, a later member of the movement.  I also mentioned the WCS and several of its member artists in “Washington Art Matters,” 5 September 2013.)

Marin-Price’s Washington School of Color, with its focus on the lesser lights of the movement, was basically a pale reflection of the power of the WCS.  The Post’s Jenkins also suggested that the display didn’t include the “mature styles” of some of the “less-celebrated” WSC painters.  Leon Berkowitz was represented, among other pieces, by a large (53" x 65") action abstract painting, Untitled (Spain) (1955), that was essentially gray (at a Color School exhibit?  Really?).  James Hilleary’s pieces were dominated by angular chevrons, mostly dichromatic (many of which looked to me as if they were different-colored versions of the same patterns) which reminded me of washed-out Nolands.  Where Noland’s stripes are bold and bright, Hilleary’s are pastel and pale, giving a watered-down feel to the work.  The offerings of John Chapman Lewis seemed like wannabe Mark Rothkos and the paintings of Howard Mehring, covering a variety of styles, also suffered, in my view, from lack of vibrancy and boldness in their palette.  My mother and I used to have a regular benchmark for art shows we liked: we’d suggest a “midnight shopping trip” to pick up the pieces we liked best.  I wasn’t moved to come back to the Marin-Price for a late-night raid on this collection

There were many practitioners of the Washington Color School movement including most notably Berkowitz, Davis, Noland, Louis, Hilleary, Mehring, Lewis, Thomas “Tom” Downing (1928-85), Sam Gilliam (b. 1933), Truitt, and Paul Reed (b. 1919).  Other artists associated with the group include Mary Pinchot Meyer (1920-64), Jacob Kainen (1909-2001), and Alma Thomas (1891-1978), among others.  The movement, which dealt with the effect of light on color, was a form of abstract art that grew out of color field painting, a type of abstraction itself that experimented with covering large areas of the canvas with solid pigment, as exemplified by the work of Mark Rothko (1903-70) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011).  (Color field painting is one of the two branches of Abstract Expressionism in the United States.  The other is known as action painting, the style which characterizes the best-known works of Jackson Pollock.)  The movement was a departure from the Abstract Expressionism then prevalent in New York art circles: “It was about color and light and form,” said Beatrice Gralton, curator of the 2011 Corcoran Gallery’s Washington Color and Light.  “It was about an all-over approach to imaging-making.  It was really this reduction to the most pure, elemental aspects of art making.”  

In 1953, Louis and fellow D.C. artist Noland visited New York where they saw paintings by Abstract Expressionists Pollock (1912-56) and Franz Kline (1910-62).  The two Washington painters also paid a call on Frankenthaler at her New York studio where she introduced them to the idea of pouring the pigment to stain unprimed canvases.  This newly popular technique created intense color and accentuated the grain of the untreated canvas.  Louis has said that Frankenthaler, essentially the founder of color field painting, created “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”  Returning to Washington and working with other Washington-based artists like Davis, Downing, and Reed, the two painters helped develop what became known as the Washington Color School.  The early Washington colorists were among the first artists to experiment with the newly-developed, water-soluble acrylic paints, which they diluted to stain the raw canvas with translucent color rather than paint a previously primed canvas with opaque oil colors.  They experimented with all kinds of new techniques, essentially trying whatever came to mind.  They poured, dripped, dabbed, and dribbled the acrylic pigments onto unframed and unstretched canvases, using the floor (in Louis’s case, of his dining room) as the easel, the technique used by Jackson Pollock.  

(Simplistically, the difference between staining and painting is that with painting, the pigment coats the surface of the canvas or other medium forming a thick, solid crust while with staining, the pigment seeps into the fabric and is absorbed by the fibers, creating a tint through which the texture and grain of the cloth is visible.  Furthering this distinction is the practice of priming the canvas for an oil painting; that is, covering the raw fabric with a coat of white or neutral paint before applying pigment.  The stained canvases of the WCS artists were unprimed so the thinned acrylic is absorbed readily instead of sitting on the surface.)

The WCS movement was formalized in 1965 when a group of painters who lived and worked in the National Capital, including Louis, Noland, Davis, Reed, Mehring, and Downing, displayed works in Washington Color Painters, an exhibit at the now-defunct Washington Gallery of Modern Art, a non-profit institution near the city’s Dupont Circle (where several art venues, including the Gres Gallery in which my parents were then involved and the Jefferson Place Gallery, a promoter of WCS painters, were located) that featured contemporary art between 1961 and 1968.  This show established Washington’s place in the nation’s art scene when Clement Greenberg (1909-94), the country’s most influential art critic in the middle of the last century, saw the exhibit and declared the staining of canvas with color a “school” (“I’m tickled by the idea of a ‘Washington School’ in art,” the critic wrote in a postcard to Davis.)  Washington Color Painters toured the country and defined what is now the city’s signature art movement and the name Washington Color School made it into the art textbooks and “put our city on the national art map,” as Jean Lawlor Cohen put it in Washington Art Matters.  “Everybody was into transferring their thinking from oil paint to acrylic,” said Sam Gilliam, “so that when you got together, you talked paint.”  So for about a decade, according to John Anderson, art reviewer for the Washington City Paper, “seemingly every artist in Washington was under the spell of Abstract Expressionism and the so-called Washington Color School.”

(Greenberg, a champion not only of Abstract Expressionism and color field painting, but Louis and Noland themselves, had introduced the Washington artists to Frankenthaler, thus perhaps sewing the seed of the WCS movement even before its inception.  By dint of his reception of Washington Color Painters, he was clearly the midwife of WCS; perhaps he was also the matchmaker who made it possible as well.  Though some art historians credit critic Clement Greenberg with originating the name Washington Color School, the show’s organizer, WGMA director Gerald Nordland probably coined it.  A few writers even deny either man came up with the phrase, but whatever the doubt for its source, art journalists needed a label in order to write about this new collection of hot young artists from the Nation’s Capital.)  

Washington had just become a true art center in its own right a few decades earlier because of the proliferation of museums (Corcoran, 1874; Phillips, 1921; National Gallery, 1941) and art schools (city universities established art departments: Howard University, 1921; American University, 1925; Catholic University, 1930 as the Division of Art and renamed the Department of Art in 1943; the Corcoran School of Art was founded in 1890).  This situation assured that the city would have regular exposure to the best art, including contemporary forms, and a steady flow of young artists.  Some historians note that Washington is close to New York City but not so close that its artists would lose their independence; as Clement Greenberg phrased it: “From Washington you can keep in steady contact with the New York art scene without being subjected as constantly to its pressures to conform as you would be if you lived and worked in New York.”  It also didn’t hurt that two local critics, at the Washington Post and Times-Herald and the Evening Star, were receptive and enthusiastic observers of the hometown art scene.  (Other art journalists dismissed much of the work of these upstarts as the output of monkeys with paintbrushes which “make Jackson Pollock look like Rembrandt.”)

At the same time, while the post-World War II generation of Washington artists were continuing the traditions of 20th-century American art, the next group broke with that model and, in the view of editor and curator Jean Lawlor Cohen, “entered love affairs with color and geometry, scale and materials, . . . intent on finding a breakthrough vision.”  Just as the previous generation of American artists had struggled to break away from the European model, their Washington successors wanted to break away from the influence of the New York Expressionists.  Though D.C. had a population of just under a million inhabitants in 1950 and ’60 (probably over a million in the whole metro area), it still had the feel of a small town, and discrete communities, like the art world, were even more communal.  The young painters all knew one another, at least casually or professionally: they attended the same talks and lectures, went to the same showings, taught or studied at the same studios, and got together and “talked paint,” as Sam Gilliam put it.  The “new” wasn’t just upon the Washington colorists, they were inventing it.  As Thomas Downing said of his own work, at the end of the ’50s, the young artists were “trying everything”; by the turn of the decade, Paul Reed declared, “We felt enormous momentum and excitement” and sculptor Anne Truitt quipped, “The brew began to boil up.”  

Following their initial impact at the WGMA show, as the original group of artists came to dominate the art community in the District from the ’60s into the ’70s, Davis, Mehring, Downing, and Reed exhibited at other galleries in the area. The original Washington Color School painters expanded into a second generation, which included Sam Gilliam and Rockne Krebs (1938-2011), and the movement continued to bear influence over the Washington art scene and beyond even as some of the original artists moved on to other work.  Some leading WSC artists didn’t survive the ’60s (Louis, Meyer) or the ’70s (Mehring, Thomas), but their influence and that of their Washington Color Schoolmates on American art stretched through the rest of the 20th century and on into the 21st.  Hilda Shapiro Thorpe (1920–2000), a color field painter who made large abstract paintings and handmade-paper, balsa, or sheet-metal sculptures, taught a generation of Washington-area artists and helped perpetuate the Color School movement into the present.  “I guess today you’d say that we learned to think outside the box,” Gilliam said, “but we also learned to think in the context of the larger art world.”  Among the later painters who bears the stamp of the WSC is Lou Stovall (b. 1937), a friend and colleague of Gilliam’s whose work I first saw in 2011 and have admired (read “coveted”) since.

The main tenet of the colorists was to cover their canvases with unified blocks of bright, pure colors.  In a review of a 2003 gallery show that featured James Hilleary’s work, Washington Post art critic Michael O’Sullivan wrote that he’s “able to distill lyricism out of pure line and color,” a founding principle of the colorists’ art.  Like abstract painters, with whom the colorists shared many parallels, color field painters rejected the representation of identifiable figures.  WCS artists generally painted abstracts, and there are parallels between the Color School and Abstract Expressionism, though there are significant differences as well.  The WSC adherents were more formalist than the Abstract Expressionists, more prone to decorativeness and less forbiddingly philosophical.  Though the use of stripes, washes, and fields of single colors of paint, for instance, was common to most artists in both groups, Washington colorists eschewed symbolism in their art, feeling that even abstract forms distracted viewers from experiencing the pure color.  There weren’t supposed to be any subjective, emotional connotations in the hues or forms on the canvas: red was just a color, not an expression of passion; the painting was just art, nothing more meaningful or symbolic.  It was all supposed to lead to a pure sensation of enjoyment.  Baltimore Sun art critic Glenn McNatt capsulized this art: “Swirls of color, limpid washes of pigment that jump out and envelop the viewer, eye-popping stripes that seem to march across the canvas to a syncopated, ragtime beat.”  Painter Thomas Downing spoke of “the expressive potential of pure color—the necessity for a form which was simple and direct to convey it.”  The focus on purity of form strongly links color field painting with Minimalist art, as you can see in Anne Truitt’s brightly painted, formalistic  wooden structures, for example.  Morris Louis pared his paintings down to just what he felt was necessary, the bare minimum to create his effects.

The Washington Color School wasn’t strictly a “school” in the sense that most art movements connote by that title.  The artist didn’t work together or collaborate on techniques and styles; the WCS wasn’t an organized group.  They didn’t socialize as a group (though they knew each other for the most part and some, like Louis and Noland, were friends, as were Kainen and Davis).  The commonalities they encompassed were designated by critics and curators for the most part.  Each of the WCS artists had an idiosyncratic and personal style: Howard Mehring favored Z shapes; Alma Thomas was influenced by patterns of light; Paul Reed painted elaborate spheres; Thomas Downing’s circles looked like discs; Kenneth Noland was known for his hard-edged lines, chevrons, and, most distinctive, circles which were sometimes called “targets”; Morris Louis poured broad stripes of color on mostly raw, white canvases; Gene Davis was all about straight lines; Anne Truitt made geometric wood sculptures painted in high-gloss colors.  What linked them was, first, that they all lived and worked in the relatively small art community of Washington, D.C., and that they shared certain significant stylistic qualities: they worked in oversized formats, focused on color in bold and striking ways, painted in abstract shapes and forms, and used hard-edged stripes and swaths of (most often acrylic) pigment.   

The Washington Color School continues to hold the interest of exhibitors and spectators alike.  In the years before Marin-Price’s Washington School of Color, there were many other exhibits focused on the art and artists of the movement.  Over 30 arts institutions in Washington mounted a city-wide celebration of color field painting, ColorField.remix, including exhibitions at galleries and museums of works by members of the Washington Color School (such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Thomas Downing, Alma Thomas, Gene Davis, Leon Berkowitz, and Sam Gilliam), during the spring and summer of 2007.  Later in 2007 and ’08, the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden housed Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited and in 2009-10, the same museum presented Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection.  In 2011, the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery in New York City’s Chelsea, the center of the newest of contemporary art, held Kenneth Noland: Paintings 1958-1968 and a group of Washington, D.C., art collectors began the Washington Color School Project, to gather and publish information about the history of the color painters, notably Davis, Louis, and Reed, and abstract art in Washington.  Sam Gilliam’s works have been displayed in D.C. shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2005-06 and the Katzen Art Center at American University in 2011, and in a site-specific project at the Phillips Collection, also in 2011.  (The Katzen show Washington Art Matters in 2013 spotlighted the Washington Color School in its survey of the art scene in the Nation’s Capital from the 1940s through the 1980s.)  Earlier this year, two galleries in Brookland, in the Northeast section of the District, mounted Under the Influence: Reverberations of the Washington Color School, a show devoted to  current “acolytes and a few antagonists” of the WCS.  

Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words

[In a recent post, “Words and Pictures?” (25 July), I ruminated on the way film writer Gerald Di Pego and director Fred Schepisi of Words and Pictures created a story pitting “words”—that is, language—against “pictures”—that is, images—told in a medium that relies on both words and pictures so significantly.  I noted in that article that there are “artists who use both words and pictures,” naming specifically William Blake, “who integrated text into his images,” and Jenny Holzer, “who uses words as pictures” in her work.  I also brought up the Dada poets, who “used words not so much for their meanings as for the pictures they could make on the printed page.”  One artist who also incorporated text into many of his paintings, drawings, and photographs whom I didn’t mention is David Wojnarowicz, and I’m sure there are several others as well.  I thought, though, that it would be an interesting exploration to examine the work of these artists and see what, if anything, we can glean from them.]

In the movie Words and Pictures, released earlier this year, screenwriter Gerald Di Pego and director Fred Schepisi set up a contrived conflict between Jack Marcus, a veteran prep school English teacher, once-renowned poet, and general word maven (played by Clive Owen), and newly-arrived art teacher Dina Delsanto, a celebrated painter with a successful New York career seemingly behind her (Juliette Binoche).  The two soon-destined-to-be-lovers tease and provoke one another right from the moment they meet in the faculty lounge over which medium is the better conveyor of ideas and feelings, words—that is, writing, Marcus’s specialty and obsession—or pictures—the focus of Delsanto’s world and life.  It’s not long, after Delsanto has disparaged words in her art class and Marcus responds in his English class (which share a large number of students), before the poet challenges the painter to a contest to prove whose metier is worthier: his students will compose pieces of writing and hers will create paintings and drawings and the best of each will be published in the next edition of the school’s literary magazine (which Marcus edits).  (The contest eventually evolves into a challenge for Marcus, who’s been blocked for years, to write a new poem from which Delsanto, who suffers from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, will draw inspiration for a new painting.)  In the end, the students and faculty of the school will judge the results and decide which creation has accomplished the artist’s purpose more effectively.  

I said this was contrived, not only because Di Pego and Schepisi have set it all up very conveniently, but because there’s not really a conflict between words and pictures to begin with.  This is especially so since most of Delsanto’s AP art students are also Marcus’s AP English students, portrayed as the school’s best and brightest who manage to use both words and pictures interchangeably as the need and circumstances necessitate.  When the final show-down occurs at the end of the movie, Marcus makes a passing concession that, of course, both writers and painters are artists who “take us to another place.”  (As I observed in the first article, the movie does use music in one scene in which Marcus expresses his feelings to Delsanto, a medium that’s neither words nor pictures, but that idea isn’t developed.  I’m not going to develop it here, either, except to say that there are other artistic means, like music, dance, and architecture, which don’t—or don’t strictly—depend on words or pictures in order to communicate ideas, moods, or feelings.)  

Not even considered in Words and Pictures is the phenomenon of artists who use both text and imagery to make their art, and what I want to do here is take a look at those creative spirits from that narrow perspective: their use of words and pictures together.  It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything at all, we get from this examination—because I honestly don’t know what the results will be; it’s an honest-to-God exploration and I have no idea what’s on the other side of this mountain.  (Talk about going to another place!)  Shall we have a look-see?

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

William Blake was an English poet, painter, engraver, and printmaker who was born in Soho, London.  Largely home-schooled (by his mother) and then self-educated—he left school at ten, after learning to read and write—he was seen as a visionary and a mystic.  An outspoken iconoclast in both his poetry and his visual art, he was something of a social outcast during his lifetime as well.  He’s also considered by some to be the first multi-media artist because of the books he made for his richly illustrated poems, particularly Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794).  

Blake self-published his books of poetry, using etched copper plates to effect the integrated text and images, tinting the engravings by hand with water colors afterwards or using a method he invented himself.  Many critics find this evidence that the artist and poet never intended his poems and illustrations to be separated.  Blake printed each copy of what he called “illuminations” by hand, in different colors, with different details, and sometimes with the poems in a different sequence.  In some estimations, the books are as beautiful as medieval illuminated manuscripts, “the words enhanced by decoration of design and colour,” in the view of Kathleen Raine, a poet, critic, and scholar with a particular interest in Blake.

Blake’s designs are immensely complex, full of symbols and mythology that he invented, requiring readers to use their imaginations to comprehend the dialogue the artist set up between his texts and his illustrations.  “At a time when painting had become a manner and a mannerism,” wrote Jacob Bronowski, a mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet, and inventor who wrote several books on the artist, “Blake crowded his paintings with matter.  It was not wholly a painter’s matter; but neither was it a writer’s matter.  It was common to all that he did, the single and compact matter of a great imagination.  And Blake knew how he wanted to put this matter.  He knew that it needed a manner of its own . . . .”  Literary critic Harold Bloom contends that Blake invented a new art form that combines design and text in varied ways so that the two “illuminate one another” and Raine wrote: “Such art comes from a source deeper than the individual experience of poet or painter, and has a power of communication to that same level in the spectator.”  

Literary critic Northrop Frye, who established his reputation with a book on Blake, wrote:

In the Preface to Jerusalem [1804–20] Blake speaks with pride of having developed a free and unfettered verse, but he hardly seems to notice that he had at the same time perfected a far more difficult and radical form of mixed art, for which there is hardly a parallel in the history of modern culture.  The union of musical and poetic ideas in a [Richard] Wagner opera is a remote analogy; but the poetry is not independent of the music in Wagner as it is of the painting in Blake.  Blake seems to have worked on his text and his pictorial ideas simultaneously: this is clear from the manuscript of The Four Zoas [1797], where the pencil sketches in the margins indicate that Blake did not think in terms of a poem to be written first and decorated afterward, but, from the beginning, in terms of a narrative sequence of plates.

Blake’s words and pictures weren’t just the two sides of a coin or a matched set, created merely to compliment one another.  They were both independent of one another and dependent on one another simultaneously.  Frye explained:

Blake . . . hit very early on a form in which text and design are simultaneously present and contrapuntally related.  From the start Blake avoids all devices that would tend to obscure either text or design at the expense of the other. . . .  The words are left alone to do their own work.

More surprising than the independence of the words from the design is the independence of the design from the words. . . .  In Blake the poem does not point to the picture . . . .  On the other hand, the design is not, like most illustrations, an attempt to simplify the verbal meaning. . . .   [W]e can see that, so far from simplifying the text, the design has added a new dimension of subtlety and power.

So, from this brief examination, it seems that William Blake, at least, “thought” in both words and pictures, if not simultaneously then with equal import and weight.  One medium for him wasn’t more “worthy” in its capability of communicating thoughts, feelings, and ideas, and they weren’t so much interdependent, either, but co-dependent.   His poetry books were, perhaps unique (and maybe we’ll see), specimens of “words with pictures/pictures with words.”

THE DADA POETS (1916-24)

Dada, or Dadaism, was an art and political movement that evolved out of the aftermath of the start of World War I, the first mechanized war, and lasted for about eight years.  It was first a reaction to the horrible destruction technology visited on humankind, but it quickly became a response to all forms of regimentation, oppression, suppression of thought and ideas, conventionality, and conformity.  Anti-establishment, anti-conventional, and anti-regimentarian, the Dadaists were purposefully provocative and relentlessly anti-establishment—even (or especially, perhaps) with respect to the art establishment.  They weren’t, however, without a considerable sense of humor; some of their work is profoundly silly.  (For the interested ROTter, I posted a report on a 2006 and ’07 Dada art exhibit on this blog on 20 February 2010.)

Dada artists turned their hands to almost everything: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and other usual forms of art; film, music, dance, theater and performance; printed works including posters and flyers for Dada events, books, journals and magazines; signs, illustrations; sound poems—and just about anything someone could come up with in the years between the World Wars.  Since some of the originators of the Dada movement were poets, Dada poetry was one of its initial mainstays.  In 1920, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963; born Samuel Rosenstock in Romania), one of the principal founders of the movement, even wrote out the process of creating a Dada poem:

Take a newspaper.

Take some scissors.

Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.

Shake gently.

Next take out each cutting one after the other.

Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

The poem will resemble you.

And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

What Tzara didn’t include in his instructions was the way the words were to be assembled on the page—the patterns the poet determined they should form.  The Dada sound poems focused on words as sounds and just vocal noises; some were recorded, but they wouldn’t work too well on a printed page.  The “literary” version of Dadaist poetry, if that’s even the correct designator, are sort of the reverse: they look interesting on the page, to the eye—but reading them, especially aloud, would be very difficult (if not even impossible).  In his 1918 “Manifesto of Dadaism,” Tzara affirmed of Dada writing: “Every page should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, timelessness, or because of its crushing humor, the enthusiasm of its principles, or the way it is printed” (my emphasis).  Using typography itself as a medium of communication, the “pictures” the words made on the page were equally important as the sense the words conveyed, if not more so, requiring readers to look “at” the words as objects rather than just “through” them to meaning.  Tzara, for example, wrote Bilan (“Balance Sheet”) in 1919 using 20 different typefaces, and German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) designed poems for Die Scheuche Märchen (The Scarecrow Fairy Tale, 1925) featuring anthropomorphic letters with feet and arms.  

Today, this kind of work, in which the typographical arrangement of the text is the significant element in conveying the meaning or impact, known as visual or concrete poetry, depends almost exclusively on what the poem looks like on the page rather than what the words say.  While some literary experts consider the two terms, coined in the 1950s, synonymous, others see visual poetry (called vispo by adherents to the form) as a subset or off-shoot of concrete poetry, while yet others consider them discrete forms.  The distinction between them is that concrete poems may still convey meaning semantically, through rhyme, rhythm, and other aspects of word meaning and poetic diction, while visual poems are entirely pictorial in their effect, the words frequently nonsensical.  I’m not going to enter into this debate, principally since Dada predates the use of either term and, therefore, Dada poetry is essentially sui generis.  (Dada poetry is what it is, let’s say.)

One significant point in Tzara’s manifesto is that he said that Dada writing should be characterized by great impact of what it says OR by how it’s printed on the page—either words as words, or words as pictures.   Unlike Blake’s illuminated poems, Dadaist poetry isn’t really an integrated, multi-media art form.  While Blake worked in both media at once, the Dadaists used an either/or approach.  They gave equal weight, perhaps, to both communications forms, but they didn’t make them work together.  Dada visual poetry (as distinguished from the sound poems) relies almost entirely on the typography, together with the fonts, which often include a wide variety in each work, and the lay-out, and less on what the words mean denotatively or even connotatively (which, as we’ve seen, are often haphazardly assembled).  In fact, when read, many of these Dada poems lose part or all their effect.  (I should confess here that I’m generalizing about Dada poetry.  Many of the artists and writers of the movement wrote decidedly avant-garde poems but still conveyed meaning through the semantic sense of the words.) 

JENNY HOLZER (b. 1950)

Born in Gallipolis, Ohio, conceptual artist Jenny Holzer went to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.  Having taken summer classes there in 1974, she enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program in 1975; a year later she moved to New York City and joined the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art.  Though Holzer started out to be an Abstract Expressionist—she “wanted to be soft like [Mark] Rothko and ruthless like Ad Reinhardt”—like many artists in that era, she became interested in a more socially-aware, even political art, especially in a feminist vein.  The young artist began “concentrating on work that had content—accessible work,” she said in a 2012 interview. “There was a lot of talking and reading in the ISP, so language was welcome.”  Looking for a way to insert narrative and commentary into visual art, she began putting words into her paintings.  “I used language because I wanted to offer content that people—not necessarily art people—could understand,” Holzer says.  Soon she abandoned traditional painting entirely and focused on language.  She started displaying messages, mottoes, verses, and quotations in public spaces, such as billboards, the sides of subway cars, projections on building façades, plaques on storefronts, stone benches, and baseball parks—eventually mounting lighted electronic signs and her work began to share similarities with Dada art. 

“Words, in fact,” wrote artist Kiki Smith in Interview magazine, “are the marrow of the 61-year-old Ohio-born artist's large-scale, technology-driven productions.”  Holzer felt the writings she’d read in the Whitney’s ISP could be reduced down to simple phrases everyone could understand.  She called them Truisms (1978), and she printed them anonymously on paper and pasted them on building façades, signs, and telephone booths in lower Manhattan.  “Maybe I can convey some of the valuable content [of the ISP reading list] in an accessible way,” thought the artist.  In 1977, Holzer had started writing her own texts, but since 1993 she’s focused on passages by others.  These have included literary texts by respected authors but also quotations from other sources, such as declassified (and much redacted) government documents, including autopsy reports, military maps of the Iraq invasion plans, FBI e-mails from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, and letters from Gitmo prisoners.  One large LED display presented testimony from soldiers interrogated about atrocities they committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; other works in this line are Was in Baghdad Ochre Fade (2007) and Redaction Paintings (2009).  

In addition to several successful exhibits at galleries and museums both in the U.S. (the Guggenheim, New York, 1989; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1991) and abroad (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1988; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, 2000), Holzer become the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.  The 1990 U.S. pavilion housed her LED signboards and marble benches.  Holzer was one of the first artists to embrace new technology for her work—later she began using computers to manipulate and generate her texts, offering her a greater variety of possibilities in both text size and configuration—and the lighted messages became the artist’s main medium after 1996.  In 2010, Holzer returned to painting on canvas, though her medium is still words.  As she explained to Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian of London in 2012: “I wanted to show time and care.  I wanted it to be an indicator of sincerity and attention.  I wanted it to be human.”  The artist also asserted, “The paintings seem true because nobody wants me to do them.”  She insists, “I hope to show the truth.” 

In 1993, while New York‘s Times Square was undergoing a massive renovation (some called it “Disney-fication”), Holzer created scores of signs and messages for the vacated storefronts of onetime porn shops and empty marquees of former grind houses along 42nd Street.  Slogans such as “alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries,” “abuse of power comes as no surprise,” “raise boys and girls the same way,” and “laugh hard at the absurdly evil.”  She has emulated the diction of advertising and political sound bites, and Smith asserts, “Holzer simultaneously honors the value of language to communicate and critiques its ability to control and contain.”  In the words of Stuart Jeffries, Holzer’s “characteristic” texts are “as punchy as a headline, yet confusing to unsuspecting passersby.”  

In contrast with William Blake, who was both a painter and a writer/poet, Holzer doesn’t perceive herself that way.  “I really wasn't—and I'm not—a writer,” she admits.  “[E]ventually writing wore me down because it didn't come naturally,” the artist explained.  “The visual is easier for me”—which is why she turned to quoting others in her messages, “people who really are writers.” 

The Dadaists were intent on ridiculing all that was conformist and establishmentarian.  Their messages were anarchistic and provocative, and often hidden in obscurantism and nonsense.  Holzer wants to illuminate with her messages, to throw light (if you will) on subjects previously hidden and secret, like the Abu Ghraib violations.  While the Dada poets and artists were political only in a general way, espousing a kind of muscular libertarianism, Holzer is conscientiously political in her art.  Her messages question consumerism and power; describe violence and torture; lament oppression, war, disease, and death; celebrate sexuality and feminism.  She doesn’t offer an opinion or commentary on the words she displays, however, leaving the viewers to come to their own understandings of what the texts import.  “I think the material speaks for itself,” Holzer told Jeffries. “There's no reason for me to give my pathetic opinion.”

“Ms. Holzer has infused Conceptual Art’s playful language with real-life seriousness,” wrote art critic Roberta Smith in the New York Times.  Her intent is to provoke a response in the viewer and, critic Smith says, her work “regularly succeeds in taking us deep into the machinations of human frailty and power.”  Holzer’s said, for instance, “The desperate things seem to require attention, the lovely things seem to elicit celebration.  If I had to choose, I would go to the awful in the hope that doing something could yield a happier result.”  In addition to the more substantial structures on which Holzer inscribes her words, they’ve also appeared on T-shirts, baseball caps, and even condom wrappers.  “I like placing content wherever people look,” declares the artist, “and that can be at the bottom of a cup or on a shirt or hat or on the surface of a river or all over a building.”  

DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1954-92)

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, painter, photographer, videographer, sculptor, writer, and activist (among other things) David Wojnarowicz dropped out of New York City’s High School of Music and Art at 16 and ran away from home to escape a violently abusive, alcoholic father.  Most of his short life was fraught with hardship, artistic, political, or personal.  After hitchhiking cross country and back between 1970 and ’73, Wojnarowicz settled again in New York, living for a time on the streets and working as a prostitute, thief, and hustler.  The world in which Wojnarowicz lived is recorded in a graphic (and autobiographic) novel, Seven Miles a Second (DC Comics, 1996), created with artist and cartoonist James Romberger, and in the monologues he transcribed from some of the people he met on the streets, published in The Waterfront Journals (Grove Press, 1996).  The artist’s own journals have also been published: In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz (Grove Press, 1999).  His world’s also visible in much of Wojnarowicz’s art, especially his paintings, which often contain images and sometimes words reminiscent of the childhood he always carried with him.  Sadly, when he died of AIDS in 1992—he was diagnosed in 1987—he hadn’t gotten very far chronologically from his childhood.  (I posted a profile of the artist, “David Wojnarowicz,” on ROT on 15 March 2011; he’s also mentioned extensively in “The Return of HIDE/SEEK,” 4 January 2012.)

As early as 1970, Wojnarowicz began writing and taking photographs (with a stolen camera and film) to document his life and the life he saw around him, and also as a way to take control of his life, which was already painful and difficult.  He was bearing witness to the history that the official record didn’t tell because, the artist thought, “People should witness things.  They should, at the very bottom level, be witnessed.”  This might be called Wojnarowicz’s creed and would be the prevailing impulse of the artist’s work in all the forms, including his writing— perhaps particularly his writing.  His visual artworks were eclectic in their use of media, ranging from conventional canvas, to masonite, maps, advertising posters, photographs, trash-can lids, “found objects,” and such unlikely material as loaves of bread and plastic sharks—and he often incorporated texts into his paintings, along with other visual media.  Wojnarowicz offered his art as testimony of life he felt no one else acknowledged.  According to writer and cultural critic Cynthia Carr, “Art was his way of witnessing.  On some level, the work was about putting information out there, exposing what’s usually hidden and creating cultural counterweight.  Where the marginal were ignored, he would exalt them.”  Personally shy and reticent (as was Jenny Holzer), art and writing gave him a way to say what he couldn’t in a social setting.  It became the artist’s mission to call attention to any injustice he perceived in American society, especially (but not exclusively) where it concerned the gay community.  

Wojnarowicz saw himself as an outsider in the art world; in fact, Wojnarowicz at first didn’t think of himself as an artist at all.  “Artists,” according to him, “were such-and-such people,” people who were special, different from the rest of us.  Wojnarowicz “wasn’t particularly an artist,” he insisted; he was just a guy with something to say who tried hard to find ways to say it—like music, writing, or installations.  He’d been writing since he left the streets—poetry, transcribed monologues of street people—but photography was another way to chronicle the world he was witnessing and which few others, especially the established media, were recording.  “A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history,” Wojnarowicz asserted.  Some of his later works, including photographs, incorporate disparate visual media and written texts in the form of short stories, which, as in William Blake’s art work, are integrated into the painting with the other media (see He Kept Following Me and I Feel a Vague Nausea, both 1990).  

In his essay in the catalogue for Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz (New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), art historian and critic John Carlin wrote:

Simply put, David was not just an artist; he used art as a vehicle for something else, not as an end in itself.  David was more like a shaman, the witch doctor of our tribe, than someone purely interested in formal relations or being smart. . . .  He was less concerned with aesthetics than with communicating—about himself and society, about things that were real and actually happening but that no one wanted to talk about.

His artistic matrix, however, wasn’t beauty or even aesthetics in general.  He had no interest in being “decorative.”  Wojnarowicz wasn’t interested in design or composition—he hadn’t had any training in that anyway.  He wanted to communicate, to show people what the world he saw looked like—even if they didn’t want to see it.  He was a habitual truth-teller, even as a second-grader when he learned that everyone dies: “I remember running down the block and to every kid that I saw I said, ‘We all die, one day we’re all going to be dead!’”  The kids cried and their parents decided Wojnarowicz was a sick child—because he thought everyone should know the truth.  Leo Shapiro, the stage director whom I’ve mentioned often on ROT, believed that artists are society’s oracles.  “The point of an oracle,” Shapiro asserted, “—you support the oracle, you don’t support what it says.  It doesn’t always give you good news.” 

In a 2011 Brooklyn Rail review, Kara L. Rooney called Wojnarowicz’s art “often elusive, sometimes dangerous, and always brutally honest.”  Shapiro called Wojnarowicz “the canary in the mines—the ones that die first.”  Rooney put Wojnarowicz in the category of the “selfless” artists whose artistic impulse 

derives from a genuine passion for change, seeking to foster political and social awareness among disparate economic classes.  The work of these artists challenges the status quo.  It shakes things up.  It provokes.  It is groundbreaking in its execution and often only appreciated in hindsight.  In short, it haunts us.

While writing had long been a mainstay of the artist’s creative life--he started keeping a journal when he was 17—text began appearing in his visual art in the 1970s.  Wojnarowicz’s generation, in addition to being impelled to address issues of sex, race, gender, and ethnicity, was also drawn to mixing their media, including non-traditional ones like pop culture and even pornography and recycled materials like posters, maps, and even derelict cars.  Like his contemporaries, Wojnarowicz saw little distinction among the various means of making art or making his statements, working in paint, sculpture, photography, installation, and collage with equal force.  Wojnarowicz also made films and videos and was, as noted, a prolific writer and speaker as well. (He also played in a band, 3 Teens Kill 4, known as 3TK4, from a New York Post headline.)  “Often juxtaposing text, paint, and collaged elements with photography,” observed Melissa Harris in Aperture magazine in 1994, “his works animate ideas and images, playing them off one another both ironically and metaphorically.  Experiencing Wojnarowicz’s art is like being in the wake of a dream—or perhaps a nightmare.”  Richard H. Axsom concluded of the artist’s legacy in a 2002 profile on glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture: “Of all the media and formats for which Wojnarowicz is known, the works that combine image and text are the most complex and moving, offering the best summary of his art.”  

At a 2004 retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s work that combined image and text, Out of Silence, the Chelsea gallery PPOW asserted: “Wojnarowicz's juxtaposition and overlay of the two signifying systems, the visual and the linguistic, is central to his artistic development.”  In the works where the artist combined images and text, the words seem intended to be both read as text per se, and simultaneously to be seen as part of the overall visual message in tandem with the pictorial aspects.  Wojnarowicz’s words enhance the pictures’ points, illuminating and concretizing them.  In his graphic (in both senses) autobiography, 7 Miles a Second, for example, we can see very clearly that the text isn’t a direct narration of the pictures and the pictures don’t actually illustrate the words: they function separately and together, contrapuntally.  In his essay on the artist, English professor Bill Albertini points out that “the text and visuals comment ironically, and darkly, on one another.”  In some of Wojnarowicz’s mixed-media work, it’s not the picture that’s dominant, but the words: in Untitled (One day this kid . . .) (1990-91), for instance, the center of the piece is a ’50s-style photo of a freckle-faced boy, clearly the artist himself as a child, while all around the innocent-looking picture, occupying two-thirds of the space, is a text predicting the boy’s possible tragic future.  

More akin to Blake than Holzer, Wojnarowicz was impelled to use any and all media to convey his ideas for several reasons.  First, he just didn’t know any better: never having had any formal training in art or its establishment practices, the artist learned by observation, experiment, and imagination.  Second, he possessed an endlessly restless and curious mind, always searching for new and more effective ways to communicate.  Third, he was good at a lot of the forms, visual and textual.  His painting was raw, rough, and powerful, and his writing was just as moving and brutal, poetic and honest.  (He was an equally effective orator, by the way.)  Oddly, though, he innately distrusted words, especially the way they were used (or abused) by politicians, bureaucrats, and advertisers—a kind of Postmodern Newspeak—in what he called “the preinvented world”: “The bought up world; the owned world—the world of coded sounds; the world of language, the world of lies; the packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion.”  (In fact, he sounds a little like a less-gentle Dina Delsanto and less in tune with Jack Marcus.)  Yet, he subverted the establishment’s hegemony over words and turned them against those he saw as responsible for society’s ills and injustices or who should have helped but didn’t.  If pictures were successful in showing the world what no one else was revealing—the responses of people like Donald Wildmon, Jesse Helms, and William Dannemeyer proved that they were!—then words and pictures were even more effective.  If anyone wasn’t sure what the pictures meant, then the words would leave no doubt.

In a 2012 interview with Matt Fennemore about a stage adaptation of Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives (Vintage, 1991), the performance artist remarked: “Visuals and soundscapes will support and underpin the text and further assault the senses”; that precisely captures, perhaps in reverse expression, the way Wojnarowicz’s words and pictures work symbiotically in his visual art as well.  It may be ironic (but only slightly) that this multifaceted artist was thrust onto the main stage of American culture because of words—“Post Cards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” his controversial essay in the 1989 catalogue for Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (Artists Space)—and then rose once again in a controversy over pictures—the excerpt in 2011’s HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (National Portrait Gallery) of his 1986-87 video, A Fire in My Belly.  

Most artists devote themselves to one medium or the other, pictures or words.  There have always been some who’ve shared the same spaces: N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), the father of artist Andrew Wyeth, made a career of illustrating boys’ adventure stories—one artist’s pictures encapsulating the words of another.  But William Blake and David Wojnarowicz, separated by two centuries, found they needed both words and pictures to make their art, integrating the one form with the other; and the Dada poets and Jenny Holzer both made the words into pictures—or at least visual images.  In all their cases, I’d say, theirs would have been poorer, far less powerful art (if, indeed, art at all) if they hadn’t worked simultaneously in both media, if both forms weren’t present in their work at one and the same time.  Gerald Di Pego and Fred Schepisi can make Jack Marcus and Dina Delsanto conceive a conflict between words and pictures, argue over which is a truer conveyor of meaning and emotion, but not all artists can keep the two separate.  Proving, I think, that words and pictures aren’t in conflict—it’s only the imaginations of some artists that are.  QED.

Theater That’s Out There!

[I’m always looking out for stories and reports about odd aspects of theater—new ways of doing it or new ways of using it.  Here are two brief articles, both from the New York Times, from earlier this year that describe a couple of strange notions of what theater is for and how it works.]  

 “THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE DOZED OFF? PERFECT!”
by Melena Ryzik

It’s the unspoken fantasy of so many theatergoers: a highbrow cultural outing that, somewhere between the opening and the ovation, includes a nap. But most directors and performers conspire to, at the very least, keep their audiences awake.


Not so for a small but ambitious new show that opened last week in Times Square, “Dream of the Red Chamber: A Performance for a Sleeping Audience.” As its title suggests, it is meant to be absorbed by a slumbering crowd: Attendees doff their shoes and doze off in beds underneath the Brill Building. Around them, cast members in elaborate costumes act out scenes and gesture repetitively as their images are projected onto screens surrounding the space. The lights are dim; the music, constant and droning. The idea is for the spectacle to permeate the visitor’s subconscious.


Nearly 1,000 people attended in the first week, organizers said, half of them on opening weekend, when one show ran overnight, lasting 13 hours. The second and final overnight performance, on Saturday, runs from 5 p.m. till 6 the next morning.

The recent mania for immersive theater in New York and other cultural capitals has shown no signs of waning: Eager audiences expect to dance, dine, drink and exchange secrets and titillation with performers, sometimes for hours at a time. Now a new breed of experience seeks to stretch that artistic dynamic further, drawing spectators not just for lively participation but also to share their REM cycles and reveries.

Last weekend, the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea held its fourth “Dream-Over,” in which each visitor is invited to sleep under an artwork that a curator has chosen for him or her, and then roused in the morning for a round of dream interpretation. (With tickets priced at $108, the event sold out.) And the British musician Steven Stapleton has been giving 12-hour “Sleep Concerts” in Britain, Ireland, Switzerland and Germany at which fans doze through ambient sounds and videos in what is sometimes billed as an “avant-D.J. somniloquy.”

“Sleepovers have become quite hot in recent years,” said RoseLee Goldberg, the founder of Performa, the New York performance art biennial, which offered an all-night symphonic installation in 2013. In a digital age rife with distractions, “people are trying to find as many different ways to rethink the audience and the intimacy” of live performance, she said. “It’s very much a question of the nature of theater itself, and how you get inside people’s heads. So, obviously, if you lay them out in a bed, there’s this romantic idea that you get inside their dreamscape.”

Although sleep-based performance has been common in recent years in Europe, in the United States “it’s the new frontier,” said Mark Russell, an international theater presenter and co-director of the Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater. “It is this sort of taboo — you’re supposed to be awake for art.”

Then again, Mr. Russell added with glee, “I think some shows are really wonderful when you’re half-asleep, and it’s washing over you.” Even when it’s not intended, “it is a legitimate way to experience performance.”

Daniel Varotto, 29, a film editor from São Paolo, Brazil, who is now living in New York, slept at “Dream of the Red Chamber” from midnight until 6 a.m. last Saturday. “Truly amazing,” he said, as he put his shoes and glasses back on afterward. “I was in between meditating and going through images, and also going through some of my nightmares as well. It gets in your mind in a way that you’re not really set for. They’re going into your dreams.”

The show, directed by Jim Findlay, a veteran theater director and designer, is an adaptation of Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century novel about Chinese aristocratic life, considered one of the premier literary works of the Qing dynasty. The staged version was developed over two years.

It began as so many experiments do: “We were joking” about making a play for audiences to sleep through, said Mr. Findlay, who wrote the script with Jeff Jackson. But they came to believe the production had real artistic merit, he added, especially in how it dealt with the book’s theme of questioning reality.

They were inspired by a visit to “Dream House,” the composer La Monte Young’s enveloping sound-and-light installation, first conceived in the 1960s as an altered-consciousness experience. In collaboration with the artist Marian Zazeela, it has been open to the public in TriBeCa since 1993; last year attendance jumped 50 percent, to 80 a day or more, Mr. Findlay said, with ever-younger groups staying up to six hours.

In performances that run from late afternoon to midnight or dawn, “Dream of the Red Chamber” is presented in the unfinished basement of the Brill, the onetime birthplace of Burt Bacharach songs and other venerable pop entertainment. Admission is free, and people are allowed to come and go as they please. Passing through an empty storefront lined with static-y television screens, visitors descend into a room of white walls and billowing curtains and red twin beds. It seems a world apart from the blaring neon streets above.

The detached experience “becomes more heightened by what you left to walk into the space, and what you walk into when you leave,” said Sherry Dobbin, director of public art for the Times Square Alliance, a co-sponsor of the show.

Randy Weiner, the impresario behind site-specific immersive theater productions like “Sleep No More” and “Queen of the Night,” said he felt jealous when he heard about it. “Damn it,” he said, “they beat me to the punch.”

He added: “How do you break people free of the sort of conscious mind that we’re all used to exploring in our to day-to-day life? That’s literally the goal of every art piece.” He spent the next 10 minutes of an interview spitballing ideas for his own bedtime show.

Mr. Findlay said he was eager to explore the drama and perceptions within the third of their lives that people spend asleep. “I’ve been doing a little research on my own,” he admitted, “by purposefully falling asleep at other people’s shows.” He and Mr. Jackson worried that their staging might be too lively and disrupt snoozing, so they chopped up the narrative, allowing moments to happen randomly, the way a dream might be structured.

“The best is when people wake up and say, ‘Did this happen?’ ” Mr. Findlay said.

[Melena Ryzik is the lead writer of the New York Times Carpetbagger blog.  In addition to being a general assignment culture reporter, covering film, music, theater, television, visual art, and dance, Ryzik has chronicled cultural life in New York for the UrbanEye video series and written the UrbanEye e-mail, a daily events guide.  She joined the Times in 2001 writing for metro and investigative news, and got her start as a contributing writer for the Times column “Boldface Names.” This article was originally published in the “Arts” section of the Times on 17 May 2014.]

*  *  *  *
“ADMIT ONE: IT’S SHOWTIME. WATCH THE CLOSING DOORS, PLEASE”
by Anand Giridharadas

[This article was originally published in the “Weekend Arts II” section (section C) of the New York Times on 18 April 2014.  Anand Giridharadas is an author and newspaper columnist who writes for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.]

I entered the thronged train and at once noticed the man with long hair. He stood near the center of the car, telling some story about some man who had come back into his life: “He leaned down. I could feel his breath on my face” and “I knew what was going to happen before he told me what was going to happen.”

His voice trailed off. A woman in braids, who until then had been standing and reading the ads overhead, walked over to the same place and began telling a story of her own. The longhaired man melted into the crowd.

It is a testament to the interestingness of the New York subway that this episode, which happened to be part of an art show, didn’t have to be part of an art show. And it is a testament to the behavior that public transit arouses in us that it took time to realize that the braided woman was speaking the same words as the man she had replaced.

Platform, a new series at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights, is inviting commuters who happen to be artists and artists who happen to be commuters to propose and show work inspired by the city’s subways and buses.

And what happens when you ask artists to do this? All of our strange manners, mores and phobias as commuters are played back to us, too perspicaciously to be denied.

Which brings me to preconceptions — preconceptions being the reason I didn’t realize that the braided woman and the longhaired man were speaking the same monologue.


That particular performance, titled “What Happened ...” and produced by the Modern-Day Griot Theater Company, was an exploration of all the assuming and back-story projection that occur on the subway: my assuming about your burqa, your assuming about my shoes, her assuming about his briefcase, all of us asking: Who is he? Is she looking at me or the window? What choices did she make to get that smell? Where is he getting off? Maybe, just maybe, here.

This rampant assuming, occurring in silence, relying so heavily on semblances, inspired Stephanie Bok, the writer of “What Happened . . .,” to wonder about the distracting force of appearance. “If somebody who looks different from somebody else says the exact same words, is our preconceived notion going to affect what we hear?” she said, when asked about the idea behind the performance.

The answer, at least for this flawed soul, was a sheepish yes. The “he” in the story must be a lover in the case of that fetching woman doing the telling. Maybe “he” is the father of the man in the Muslim cap who took a turn at the tale. In the case of the white Southerner with the Kevin Spacey “House of Cards” accent, the “he” sounds like a former business partner coming to take revenge.

The performance poked sharply at our prejudices. Then again, we spend so much time facing one another on the subway, and have so little to go on. The show called to mind a friend who tends to stand near people who look Chinese to him when he’s on packed trains heading toward Chinatown, expecting that they will get off at Grand or Canal Street and reward his profiling with a seat. Having tried his trick, I can attest that it is frustrating when people turn out to be more complicated: “Why would that guy go to NoLIta?”

Pharah Jean-Philippe, the theater company’s artistic director, said the performance’s purpose was to suggest the sameness that lurks beneath the faces on our commutes. “Everyone wears a mask on the train, and you don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “But what happens when everyone drops the mask, and we all have the same stories?”

This April 10 show at the Transit Museum, housed in an out-of-use Court Street subway station, was the first in a series of “programs created by the public for the public.” The next is scheduled for June 25. The 10 people selected for the first show (out of nearly 40 who answered the open call for proposals) were mostly working artists, albeit many who pursue art as a side hustle.

There is a modern fashion in the arts to blur the boundary between performer and audience. And so here were artists, who ordinarily were the audience for what happened on the transit system, briefly becoming performers: playing the system, as processed by their vision, back to us.

“Neil,” another performance in another decommissioned subway car, explored the boundaries between personal and public space on the train. How much looking at a fellow rider is too much looking? At what hours, and in what circumstances, is it O.K. to touch — thigh against rush-hour thigh, shoulder blade against strap-hanging elbow?

The performance consisted of a woman in a cavernous dress made of paper, printed with headlines heralding Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, dancing a strange, ethereal, almost alien dance. The dancer (and choreographer), Shandoah Goldman, was accompanied by a man who at first seemed improbably stylish but turned out merely to be French.

Trailed by the man, Julien Delbassée Leflon, Ms. Goldman stepped over the laps of her audience, seated on the car’s benches; flicked her fingers in their faces; twirled glacially around the poles; lurched toward this window, then that one; and climbed onto a seat as if to escape through the roof.


She had promised herself beforehand to do the piece precisely as choreographed, even if that meant entering space where people were sitting. They would have to deal, because contested space was the point of the show.

“We’re very close in a subway car, but there are a lot of norms around keeping in your space,” Ms. Goldman said. What happens when you challenge those norms?

Sure enough, a fascinated horror crept across many faces in the car. People got that look they get when the subway break-dancing men dangle from the ceiling, and the commuters are happy to hear that the men don’t do drugs, but they still don’t want someone falling on their heads.

And yet, as another pair of artists suggested in their performance, it is precisely this contact, this possibility of mutual space invasion among very different souls, that makes the city’s transit system so thrilling and vital — and worthy of artistic processing.

Jamie Benson and his partner, Andrae Gonzalo, arrived in New York from Los Angeles two years ago. Their dance routine that night, “Party To-Go,” was a tribute to a transit system they have come to appreciate as perhaps only displaced Angelenos can.

Seeking to breathe joy and exuberance into the tedium of subway rides, they wore gray maintenance-man onesies and pranced on and around a subway bench, going underneath, coming out the other side, hovering over the wood in eerie stillness.

However bleak public transit may seem in New York, they said, it has the power of being a shared experience — even for those who can afford better. Their Californian past has taught them to appreciate that.

“If you tell people in L.A. you’re riding the bus,” Mr. Gonzalo said, “people are like: ‘Are you O.K.? Do you need help?’”