one piece

“Quartett” at Brooklyn Academy of Music

 Passion burns cold in Robert Wilson’s trance-inducing production of “Quartett,” Heiner Müller’s ruthless reimagining of Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Lights of many colors dye the all-too-mortal flesh of the figures assembled here to recall the blood-drawing games of lust they once shared. Sometimes their faces glow a reptilian green; on other occasions they are drenched in satanic red.

Yet the hues that seem to capture their spirit most exactly are a frostbitten blue and a pure Arctic white. The dying woman at the center of this forbidding journey into retrospect, which is being conducted at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, may have lived her life in the heat of a chain of carnal embraces. But her world is definitely ending not in fire but ice.

“Quartett,” which opened Wednesday night and runs through Nov. 14, may well be the sexually frankest play in New York this side of a backroom peephole. But with a cast led by the formidable French actress Isabelle Huppert in a magnificently mannered performance, it is the very opposite of an aphrodisiac.

via: "A Minuet Between Sexual Predators" By Ben Brantley

"My Manhattan"

 Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward--step aside. We've got John Wallowitch, composer and cabaret performer extraordinaire. And in this wonderful cd, he sings his songs of love for the greatest city in the world.

"While Noel Coward is no longer around to set the standards for a certain kind of sophisticated songwriting sensibility, John Wallowitch nimbly carries the torch."--Stephen Holden, NY Times

Available at: moss

"Adventures of Prince Achmed"

If you ask the average person what the first feature-length animated film was, just about everyone will answer Walt Disney's "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs". But Disney's film wasn't the first animated feature by a longshot. Arguably, that honor belongs to Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Achmed". 

In 1923, Reiniger and her husband and business partner, Carl Koch began work on an ambitious project... a feature length silhouette puppet film based on "The One Thousand and One Nights". She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. Reiniger continued to animate her distinctive silhouette films up into the mid-1970s. 

On Nov. 11 and 15 the artist Kara Walker will introduce one of the earliest feature-length animated films, Lotte Reiniger’s “Adventures of Prince Achmed” (1926), as restored by the Deutsches Filmmuseum.

Brassaï: Paris in the 30's at Edwynn Houk Gallery

Brassaï's images of 1930's Paris at night clearly belong among the masterworks of photography; they have become emblematic of the alluring and bewitching lights of the city and the provocative nightlife that goes on in the cafes and bars. 

This fabulous show includes a variety of Brassaï's signature nocturnal subjects: couples in cafes (alternately happy, bored, dancing, or blithely smoking), backstage shots of cabaret shows and dancers, semi-nude women in brothels, and shadowy dark views of foggy illuminated bridges and street corner assignations.

While many of the images on display will be familiar to most collectors, there are also a few surprises mixed in. Several of the cafe images were printed somewhat larger than normal, making the intimate vignettes of private encounters more striking; the larger size seems to have transformed them from stolen moments to spotlit studies in human interaction. There are also a handful of unexpected pure abstractions, made from soap and cotton, and a pair of scarce formal nudes.

This show is a great reminder that vintage work isn't by definition tired and stuffy, or somehow distant and unrelated to the world of contemporary art. There are plenty of masterclass lessons to be drawn from this show, especially for those who seek to document the seamy underbelly of life. 

via: DLK Collection

The Great Madeline Kahn in "Paper Moon"

" Madeline Kahn has eyes like sad soup, a jaw that is both long and vulnerable, and hair like unexplored jungle. Her voice is high and tinny, as though a midget were making a speech inside a beer can.

All these things are part of her comic equipment, but they aren't what make her a genuine comedian. What she has—as W. C. Fields and Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin had—is a kind of unwavering purpose at right angles to reality, a concentration that she bears, Magoolike, through all kinds of unreasonable events. What is funny is not so much her visible actions as her visible mind."

Excerpt from a movie review by Richard Eder for The New York Times -- May 27, 1976

Irving Penn: 1917 – 2009

Irving Penn, one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

Mr. Penn’s talent for picturing his subjects with compositional clarity and economy earned him the widespread admiration of readers of Vogue during his long association with the magazine, beginning in 1943. It also brought him recognition in the art world; his photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries and are prized by collectors.

Read more here.

 © Irving Penn "Irving Penn's Studio" in Paris, 1950.

Luchino Visconti's "Senso"

"If Stendhal had a camera, it would be like Senso," says Martin Scorsese of Visconti's elaborate melodrama. 

Scorsese's deconstruction of Senso is of vital importance for it seemingly explains how Visconti's communist-tainted aristocratic upbringing informed the director's Marxist approach to filmmaking. Scorsese draws our attention toward Senso's colorful cinematography and how it monochromatically crumbles by film's end. 

via: Slant

"Fascist Fascination"

"Fashion at the Time of Fascism," out later this month from Damiani, struck me right away. Its pages are a collage of women framed in soft focus, elegantly attired and wistfully posed, all cigarettes and silhouettes. The refined furs and extravagant draperies are enough to make the glancing reader nostalgic for the reign of Mussolini. 

via: "The Book Bench" The New Yorker Magazine

Audio slideshow: Art and politics in China

As China marks the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, Katie Hill, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Art at the University of Westminster in London, looks at how art has moved from the realm of propaganda to the international marketplace.

via: BBC

Ruiko Yoshida: "Harlem Black Angels"

Ruiko Yoshida's photographs of Harlem in the early 1970s brilliantly capture various aspects of the culture and the times, showing a side of the U.S. that she felt her Japanese contemporaries knew little about. In the process she created a compelling work that offers an incisive critique of racial hierarchies in the U.S. that, despite its deeply felt humanism, is missing from Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street. 

link: Harlem Black Angels