Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Art vs Society
“Art’s task is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities, to destroy clichés and prejudices. Most people don’t see it that way.” - Pipilotti Rist
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Hamlet: A Terrifying Coward
Some Hamlets are just pure cowards. And what’s worse—they know it. It is with sinking heart that they deliver the lines, “O cursed spite/ that ever I was born to set it right,” when they hear of their fate, because they are well aware that they are too scared to do it. But it’s not just the reality of actually taking a life to avenge their father’s death that frightens them, they are knock-kneed at the thought of the confrontation that is necessary and inevitable before the final decision to enact revenge can be made. In the play, Shakespeare has Hamlet delay by feigning lunacy; he has him avoid simply asking Claudius outright to answer to the ghost’s charge of "murder most foul" by having him put on a play to test Claudius (and his father's ghost) instead. It is the boldest choices that Christian Camargo, who plays Hamlet in the latest Theatre for a New Audience production, makes in the role—sitting down in a chair with its back turned to Claudius and Gertrude, or adopting the fetal position when the ghost delivers the details of his murder—that create a Prince of Denmark literally unable to confront anything. He has no choice but to find some power by handling his women with a terrifyingly rough touch.
In direct contrast to his inability to call Claudius on the truth without the use of bratty huffing and puffing or innuendo, Camargo (of TV's Dexter fame) uses an excessive (I would say abusive) amount of physical strength to grab Ophelia from behind, muzzle her mouth with his hand and then almost throw her off her feet as if she is some rag doll with no capacity for physical, let along emotional, pain. Then he straddles Ophelia (played here by the diminutive Asian actress, Jennifer Ikeda), his more than 6-foot” bulk making her tiny, birdlike frame seem even more vulnerable, in order to tell her “Get thee to a nunnery.”
In comparison, Alyssa Bersnahan makes a blissfully unaware, giddily glamorous, and maddeningly empowered Gertrude. Unlike Ophelia, here is a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality. She wears it on her sleeves—a fact that her many silver-hued gowns and stilettos only serve to highlight. (This is a modern production of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark in black collar shirt, jeans and boots and Ophelia in a 1940s-style dress until she goes made and runs around in her knickers). Gertrude's physical presence incites great lust in Claudius who cannot keep his hands off her (and one would hope so considering the lengths he has gone to marry her). Yet the same pent up powerlessness sees Hamlet take Gertrude by the throat and smear her red lipstick, psycho killer-style, across her mouth, almost as if to cross her out.
This Hamlet’s madness is not strong enough to create confusion as to whether he is actually losing his marbles. Camargo clearly shows the audience that he is merely acting loopy. Ophelia may lament, “What a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” but why that same noble mind, now done with its cover of craziness, not use its reason to calmly express anger and disappointment at Gertrude’s swift marriage to Claudius, and suspicion over the circumstances of the king’s death without resorting to what begins to resemble an almost-rape remains a question.
Ophelia has historically had a hard time in this play. If she is allowed to actually speak all of the comparably few lines that Shakespeare assigned her, it is still merely to tell us something about Hamlet. Director David Esbjornson has Ophelia tell us that her Liege is murderously furious with his mother—and taking it out on her first.
The absence of Fortinabras in this production is Esbjornson's way of focusing on the domestic situation in Elsinore. So the bigger and more difficult question is: Is Esbjornson perpetuating this tendency for men to use women as their scapegoats, or is he laying it bare for us to recognize how it works? You will have to decide for yourself.
Hamlet is on at The Duke on 42nd Street
In direct contrast to his inability to call Claudius on the truth without the use of bratty huffing and puffing or innuendo, Camargo (of TV's Dexter fame) uses an excessive (I would say abusive) amount of physical strength to grab Ophelia from behind, muzzle her mouth with his hand and then almost throw her off her feet as if she is some rag doll with no capacity for physical, let along emotional, pain. Then he straddles Ophelia (played here by the diminutive Asian actress, Jennifer Ikeda), his more than 6-foot” bulk making her tiny, birdlike frame seem even more vulnerable, in order to tell her “Get thee to a nunnery.”
In comparison, Alyssa Bersnahan makes a blissfully unaware, giddily glamorous, and maddeningly empowered Gertrude. Unlike Ophelia, here is a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality. She wears it on her sleeves—a fact that her many silver-hued gowns and stilettos only serve to highlight. (This is a modern production of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark in black collar shirt, jeans and boots and Ophelia in a 1940s-style dress until she goes made and runs around in her knickers). Gertrude's physical presence incites great lust in Claudius who cannot keep his hands off her (and one would hope so considering the lengths he has gone to marry her). Yet the same pent up powerlessness sees Hamlet take Gertrude by the throat and smear her red lipstick, psycho killer-style, across her mouth, almost as if to cross her out.
This Hamlet’s madness is not strong enough to create confusion as to whether he is actually losing his marbles. Camargo clearly shows the audience that he is merely acting loopy. Ophelia may lament, “What a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” but why that same noble mind, now done with its cover of craziness, not use its reason to calmly express anger and disappointment at Gertrude’s swift marriage to Claudius, and suspicion over the circumstances of the king’s death without resorting to what begins to resemble an almost-rape remains a question.
Ophelia has historically had a hard time in this play. If she is allowed to actually speak all of the comparably few lines that Shakespeare assigned her, it is still merely to tell us something about Hamlet. Director David Esbjornson has Ophelia tell us that her Liege is murderously furious with his mother—and taking it out on her first.
The absence of Fortinabras in this production is Esbjornson's way of focusing on the domestic situation in Elsinore. So the bigger and more difficult question is: Is Esbjornson perpetuating this tendency for men to use women as their scapegoats, or is he laying it bare for us to recognize how it works? You will have to decide for yourself.
Hamlet is on at The Duke on 42nd Street
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Harlem - The Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode? -- Langston Hughes
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode? -- Langston Hughes
Friday, February 20, 2009
Jack and Meryl in Chelsea
“What’s wrong with marriage anyway?” asks Meryl Streep. “It’s a wonderful marriage, isn’t it?” she tells herself, sounding enthusiastic and uncertain at the same time. Then her voice sinks into a more plaintive tone: “You make concessions when you’re married a long time. When you’ve slept together a thousand nights.”
What film are these lines from? No one film. They're spliced from the many films that make up the two video installations that were on “Him+Her,” Candice Breitz’s recent solo show at Yvon Lambert in Chelsea. The second installation, housed in an identical blacked-out room next to the first, saw Jack Nicholson—“Him”— engage in his own schizophrenic internal dialogue, although it goes without saying that he was more worried about his mental state than his marriage.
For some years now, films have been far more than mere inspiration for the Berlin-based South African artist; they are the raw material that she slices, dices, manipulates and reshapes. To make “Her,” Breitz sifted through 30 years worth of films that Streep has starred in; for “Him,” she went through movies headlined by Nicholson over a forty-year period, beginning in 1968. Separate installations of seven plasma screens each on a minimalist steel structure played twenty eight different versions of Streep in flicks from Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie’s Choice all the way to the more recent The Devil Wears Prada, and 23 Nicholsons taken from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Shining, As Good As It Gets and more.
Treating Hollywood movies like found objects is nothing new. Jack Goldstein and Dara Birnbaum were appropriating from film and television in the early 1980's, and in the nineties the video work of Douglas Gordon and Christian Marclay dominated. Still, “Him + Her” seems timelier and fresher in the late noughties, probably because as a society we’re more obsessed with celebrity than ever before. Streep and Nicholson are arguably the most charismatic actors alive today and Breitz’s brilliant editing essentially creates two new 23-minute films. It is riveting to watch the screens alternate close-ups of their faces—sometimes using a filmic shot-counter-shot technique or running two of the same images at once—to play the revamped monologues. And once the nostalgia for all of their fine films passes, not to mention the impossible-to-resist comparison of how the two Oscar favorites have aged, focus shifts to the text of the pieces being communicated through the lines that the artist has culled. “Her” traverses men, love, marriage, divorce; “Him” is more self-reflective, about integrity, fear of commitment and also the anxiety of losing one’s mind.
If these works seem like opportunistic attempts to cash in on the notoriety of the famous subject, Breitz counters by saying that Nicholson and Streep are not the true subjects of “Him + Her.” Her focus lies instead on “the unconscious of mainstream cinema, the values and layers of meaning that slowly start to make themselves legible when the big plots are stripped away.” Breitz reshapes her borrowings enough for her work to achieve autonomy and to induce deep reflection on the gender biases that Hollywood has perpetuated for close to half a century, but there is no doubt that the popularity of her show (it was mobbed on opening night), has something to do with Streep and Nicholson.
Breitz, 36, is considered one of the most important video artists working today. She has her own famous fans like Princess Caroline of Monaco and Francesca Von Habsburg, wife of Archduke Karl of Austria, Prince Royal of Hungary and Bohemia, and her videos are in the permanent collections of museums including the Guggenheim. But how she manages to pay for the rights for any of this material—or how she gets away with not paying—is still anyone’s guess. “Him + Her” follows on from a previous piece by Breitz, “Mother + Father,” first shown in New York in 2005. Here, the artist stripped the sentences of 12 Hollywood actresses and actors—including Streep and also Faye Dunaway, Dustin Hoffman and Steve Martin—from various films to form new discussions about parenthood. The result then as now, is an experience so intensely mesmerizing and emotionally gripping, it is hard not give the actors—and the artist—a standing ovation.
This article appears as a review in the June/July issue of Art South Africa
What film are these lines from? No one film. They're spliced from the many films that make up the two video installations that were on “Him+Her,” Candice Breitz’s recent solo show at Yvon Lambert in Chelsea. The second installation, housed in an identical blacked-out room next to the first, saw Jack Nicholson—“Him”— engage in his own schizophrenic internal dialogue, although it goes without saying that he was more worried about his mental state than his marriage.
For some years now, films have been far more than mere inspiration for the Berlin-based South African artist; they are the raw material that she slices, dices, manipulates and reshapes. To make “Her,” Breitz sifted through 30 years worth of films that Streep has starred in; for “Him,” she went through movies headlined by Nicholson over a forty-year period, beginning in 1968. Separate installations of seven plasma screens each on a minimalist steel structure played twenty eight different versions of Streep in flicks from Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie’s Choice all the way to the more recent The Devil Wears Prada, and 23 Nicholsons taken from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Shining, As Good As It Gets and more.
Treating Hollywood movies like found objects is nothing new. Jack Goldstein and Dara Birnbaum were appropriating from film and television in the early 1980's, and in the nineties the video work of Douglas Gordon and Christian Marclay dominated. Still, “Him + Her” seems timelier and fresher in the late noughties, probably because as a society we’re more obsessed with celebrity than ever before. Streep and Nicholson are arguably the most charismatic actors alive today and Breitz’s brilliant editing essentially creates two new 23-minute films. It is riveting to watch the screens alternate close-ups of their faces—sometimes using a filmic shot-counter-shot technique or running two of the same images at once—to play the revamped monologues. And once the nostalgia for all of their fine films passes, not to mention the impossible-to-resist comparison of how the two Oscar favorites have aged, focus shifts to the text of the pieces being communicated through the lines that the artist has culled. “Her” traverses men, love, marriage, divorce; “Him” is more self-reflective, about integrity, fear of commitment and also the anxiety of losing one’s mind.
If these works seem like opportunistic attempts to cash in on the notoriety of the famous subject, Breitz counters by saying that Nicholson and Streep are not the true subjects of “Him + Her.” Her focus lies instead on “the unconscious of mainstream cinema, the values and layers of meaning that slowly start to make themselves legible when the big plots are stripped away.” Breitz reshapes her borrowings enough for her work to achieve autonomy and to induce deep reflection on the gender biases that Hollywood has perpetuated for close to half a century, but there is no doubt that the popularity of her show (it was mobbed on opening night), has something to do with Streep and Nicholson.
Breitz, 36, is considered one of the most important video artists working today. She has her own famous fans like Princess Caroline of Monaco and Francesca Von Habsburg, wife of Archduke Karl of Austria, Prince Royal of Hungary and Bohemia, and her videos are in the permanent collections of museums including the Guggenheim. But how she manages to pay for the rights for any of this material—or how she gets away with not paying—is still anyone’s guess. “Him + Her” follows on from a previous piece by Breitz, “Mother + Father,” first shown in New York in 2005. Here, the artist stripped the sentences of 12 Hollywood actresses and actors—including Streep and also Faye Dunaway, Dustin Hoffman and Steve Martin—from various films to form new discussions about parenthood. The result then as now, is an experience so intensely mesmerizing and emotionally gripping, it is hard not give the actors—and the artist—a standing ovation.
This article appears as a review in the June/July issue of Art South Africa
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