All posts by Tom Teicholz

Lorna Simpson’s Certainty: Art Is ‘Everrrything”


October 12, 2021

Tom Teicholz

By Tom Teicholz

Reocurring

Lorna Simpson, Reocurring, 2021© LORNA SIMPSON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH, PHOTO BY JAMES WANG

Lorna Simpson’s Everrrything at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles presents the wide spectrum of work Simpson produced during the pandemic – paintings, sculptures, collages, assemblages of found photos – and if there is one thing that unites them it is Simpson’s certainty: She is an artist at the top of her game, fully confident in her artistic instincts and her ability to execute whatever inspires her.

Simpson’s career has long been conceptual in its approach, and it is not without some irony as Eungie Joo, SF MOMA Curator of Contemporary Art pointed out in a pre-exhibition conversation, that Simpson has in recent years turned to painting – or more exactly, conceptual work that reads as paintings.

Simpson shared that during the first months of the pandemic she did almost no work. It was only as 2021 dawned that she decided to return to her studio where she found a number of works in various stages of completion.

In describing what creating these works during the pandemic was like, Simpson spoke of being possessed of a certain urgency – a directness – of knowing what needed to be done and not wasting time. There was, she said, certainty.

And it shows – some of the large canvases, combinations of ink and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass, look hurried but that is not a defect. They have a characteristic of speed, not unlike an action painting from the abstract expressionist days.

There are a series of tall, larger-than-life vertical canvases that rest on two stacks on slate bluestone. With titles such as “All Night,” “Zenith” and “Observer,” they present women who appear as apparitions from another time, perhaps even another world, figures of power and mystery, figures that contain multitudes.

Among her horizontal paintings (also displayed unframed), “Reocurring” features a rocky outcrop in the sea in which faces appear – while the canvas itself is mediated by three thin vertical strips containing word fragments, as well as a small dark square. I can’t tell you what it means. Perhaps it speaks to the solidity and turbulence of lives. Perhaps – but as a painting, as a work of art it conveys a haunting emotional impact.

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Lorna Simpson, Above Head, 2021© LORNA SIMPSON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH, PHOTO BY JAMES WANG

With Simpson’s large paintings, it’s as if she approached each canvas, saw the challenge, executed it and – Done! Moved on to the next. Similarly, Simpson had a collection of photobooth portraits of Black families, as well as vintage woodblock print clippings – Bam! These were a collection of 218 parts gathered, assembled, framed and hung, looking like a swarm of faces as a big as a map of the United States across a wall. Done! A collection of pin-up photos from Ebony and Jet –  Simpson made these into collages in which body outlines have been replaced with celestial maps in ways that add meaning and mystery. Done! They reminded me of the work of the Surrealists and also of Joseph Cornell, yet are entirely of Simpson’s own vernacular.

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Lorna Simpson, Everrrything (Detail), 2021© LORNA SIMPSON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH, PHOTO BY JAMES WANG

Last, but in no way least, there are Simpson’s sculptures, Stacked Stones/Vibrating Cycles. In her conversation at Hauser & Wirth, Simpson explained that she had ventured from her studio to a showroom that sold natural stone, tile and landscaping products. She saw these bluestone slabs or oversized pavers that immediately spoke to her and that she wanted to work with. She ordered a great deal of them and had them delivered to her assistant’s home where they were stacked into columns. Seeing the stacked slates, Simpson saw sculptures in them but felt they needed something. Simpson’s daughter Zora suggested that one of their singing bowls should go on top. However, all this is backstory to the impression the sculptures make when you see them installed.

13.LornaSimpson_InstallationView_HauserWirth

Lorna Simpson, Stacked Stones/Vibrating Cycles, 2021© LORNA SIMPSON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH, PHOTO BY JEFF MCLANE

At Hauser & Wirth LA, before you enter the two North galleries where Simpson’s new works are exhibited, you cross the large open-air courtyard. You come across the stacks of bluestone (with blue 2X 4s appearing among them to stabilize the stack) and with singing bowls on top (sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes as many as three bowls). The bowls appear to be blue stone on the outside and are surrounded by a repeating pattern. The insides are black obsidian.

At first view, one might consider these merely decorative. Or perhaps an installation recalling Greek or Roman ruins, or a new age installation. Yet these read as artworks. I’m not sure why – but there is something to pieces of stacked slate and the bowls above that seem placed just right – it is Simpson’s eye at work creating an installation that engages us in the very questions of what is art, while tapping into antiquity and the new age itself.

And then there is the surprise of the bowls themselves. If you have never experienced a “singing” bowl, one takes a striker with which one taps the bowl and then swipes the striker around the inside of the bowl, extending the sound, which changes as the bowl “warms up” and as the swiping continues. Tibetan singing bowls are used for an assortment of ancient and new age purposes, including for meditation as well as healing and have become popular.

What I was not prepared for was the way the sound of even one bowl fills the entire courtyard space in a way that is as fantastic as it is wonderful and joyful. But is it Art? I would have to say yes because it speaks to Simpson’s conceptual force.

Simpson’s eye, her creativity, her artistry, expressed in all the various media reminded me of old footage I’d seen of Pablo Picasso in his studio, working on several canvases, some classical, some in the post cubist style he embraced for portraits, as well as pieces of wire he turned into sculptures on the spot. Simpson is an artist at the height of her powers, in the full flowering of her creativity.

As concerns Lorna Simpson, “Everrrything” is Art.

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The Appearance Of Günther Förg

September 30, 2021

By Tom Teicholz
 

 1 Caption and courtesy information All images: Installation view, ‘ Günther Förg. Appearance ’, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles , 2021 © 2021 Estate Günther Förg, Suisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Courtesy Estate Günther Förg, Suisse and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Zak Kelley

‘Günther Förg. Appearance’, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 2021. © 2021 COURTESY ESTATE GÜNTHER FÖRG, SUISSE AND HAUSER & WIRTH. PHOTO: ZAK KELLEY

In the world of museums, art galleries and exhibitions, the artists we know are often just the visible part of the iceberg. Art historians and art critics, gallery owners and museum staff, collectors and donors participate, consciously and unconsciously, in a self-validating circle that determines both which artists we know of, and which artists are considered great or valuable.

This ignores the thousands of artists who work a lifetime, exhibiting locally, even internationally, and are known and celebrated by their fellow artists and their local fans and collectors. Despite the proliferation pre-pandemic of giant international art fairs, including the Venice Biennale, Art Basel and Art Basel Miami, Documenta, we know very few of the great artists of the world’s nations and populations including in Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and India to name a few. This is even true of European nations, such as Germany, whose important post-war artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter are among the few brand names known by all.

Which is why the exhibition “Günther Förg: Appearance” at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles (though January 9, 2022) is all the more surprising and pleasurable as it allows the discovery of a major German artist not well known to American audiences. The Hauser & Wirth exhibition in Los Angeles marks Förg’s first solo show in California in thirty years.

Recently, I toured the exhibition with Michael Neff, Förg’s studio manager of more than 30 years. As Neff explained, Förg (1952-2013) was considered an “artist’s artist” and one of the most significant post-war artists in Germany. For much of his career, Förg pursued his own obsessive investigations of modernism, creating conceptual works, paintings, drawings, sculpture, and photography. At times Förg’s work referenced, appropriated and re-imagined aspects of work by other contemporary artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Cy Twombly among others.

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Unititled, 1995. Günther Förg.© 2021 ESTATE GÜNTHER FÖRG, SUISSE / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK. COURTESY ESTATE GÜNTHER FÖRG, SUISSE AND HAUSER & WIRTH. PHOTO: BERNHARD STRAUSS.

The Hauser & Wirth exhibition presents a selection of Förg’s Grid paintings (“Gitterbilder”) from two distinct eras –the mid-1990s when he first explored this idea, and a decade later when he revisited it again.

The Grid Paintings were, Neff explained, inspired by Förg’s interest in and investigation of the works of Edvard Munch. What interested Förg was not Munch’s emotional or experiential representation of figures (such as in Munch’s most famous work “The Scream”) but Munch’s treatment of the backgrounds and his use of colors.

In fact, if one examines Munch’s painting The Death of Marat, one sees in the background a series of brushstrokes creating a green grid of cross thatched brushstrokes which we can readily recognize as the inspiration for Förg’s initial Gitterbilder paintings.

However, they are merely the departure point for Förg. At Hauser & Wirth, there are two large canvases from 1995 where various colored grids are surrounded by black cross hatching all against a grey background. The initial impression is of an abstraction of modern urban city life, with the blocks appearing like high-rise buildings and windows. Some of the grid paintings create the illusion of depth by which certain colors pop from the canvas, while others recede. But then one looks at the erratic, yet somehow precise, brushstrokes and it feels there is a deeper logic at work for us to ponder.

In his Grid paintings, Förg is engaged in a painterly examination of abstract painting, questioning what sort of brush strokes belong in fine art, how colors interact and what is the interplay between line and negative space.

There is a 1996 canvas where grey brushstrokes are very dense and overpower the canvas. Grey being a color Förg had explored deeply in the early part of his career – its presence here seems to indicate that Förg has reached the vanishing point of his inquiry – almost like the late career works of Rothko – there is a haunting finality to the work.

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Gazzetta dello Sport XV, 2005, Günther Förg, Acrylic on paper on wood.© 2021 ESTATE GÜNTHER FÖRG, SUISSE / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK COURTESY ESTATE GÜNTHER FÖRG, SUISSE AND HAUSER & WIRTH. PHOTO: BERNHARD STRAUSS.

And then the Grid paintings reappear appear, from 2003 and 2005, and the colors are brighter, the grids less intense, the crosshatching looser to the point where in one painting the grid is no longer visible. Förg’s gestural painting here reminds one of other artists such as Cy Twombly or even Joan Mitchell, while at the same time Förg seems to be working in a vernacular all his own. The brush marks are far more serene with yellow undertones making the painting brighter (or sunnier as the case may be) with greater negative space between the brush marks.

The colors in Förg’s work are not without significance, as Förg made the colors on his own. He had pigments and employed a woman who was his color mixer, so that every color used was of his own making. In Förg’s work, nothing – not even the shade of a color – is there by accident.

Upstairs in the mezzanine, there are a series of Förg’s grid works on paper and a few made directly on wood (and mounted on wood). I found these particularly beautiful and captivating. As Neff explained, these works which date from 2004-2006 are not studies for paintings but original works. They were part of Förg’s concept of a “traveling exhibit” (a reference to Duchamp’s late career recreation of some of his earlier works in miniature).

Günther Förg’s paintings, which mark their “Appearance” at Hauser & Wirth, with the help of Michael Neff, is a reminder that Art is a conversation between works present and past, and that something as simple as a grid can be the source of deep artistic exploration and beauty by a German artist well known in his country who deserves to be better known in ours.

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Salgado’s ‘Amazonia’ Seeks to Save a World



March 13, 2013

By Tom Teicholz

 

Sebastião Salgado, the 77 year-old Brazilian-born Paris-based photographer who travels the world and whose work often invokes social activism on behalf of the exploited working poor, indigenous people, the consequences of climate change, ecological devastation, and the disappearing natural world, is exhibiting his latest epic project “Amazonia” about the Brazilian rainforest at Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica (on view until November 13, 2021) – Salgado’s main world gallery of the last 30 years.

Jaú River, Jaú National Park, State of Amazonas, Brazil, 2019

Jau River, Jau National Park, State of Amazonas, Brazil, 2019SEBASTIÃO SALGADO © AMAZONAS IMAGES / COURTESY PETER FETTERMAN GALLERY

 Amazonia is the result of some nine years and 48 trips, sometimes spending months at a time to capture the landscape – the rainforest, the mountains, and rivers, as well as the people, many of whom remain untouched by modern civilization. Salgado does his work out of a profound respect. “When we come to work with these tribes, we come home,” he says.

Peter Fetterman agrees that seeing the pristine forests and the indigenous people as photographed by Salgado, is itself a call to preserve a world that threatens to be lost. Or as Salgado put it himself: “My wish, with all my heart, with all my energy, with all the passion I possess, is that in 50 years’ time this collection of images will not resemble a record of a lost world. Amazonia must live on.”

Salgado’s images have become so celebrated and so iconic that it’s hard to believe he has not always been the champion of the beauty of remote places and tribal people. Salgado’s first career was as an economist (he holds a PhD from the University of Paris) for the International Coffee Association and the World Bank. When he turned to photography full-time in 1973, he was almost 30 years old. He began his career as a news photographer, shooting both in color and Black & White.

Salgado’s first major success as a photographer is one he does not speak of frequently or exhibit – Salgado happened to be one of the only photographers present at the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Salgado’s photos of the event sold all around the world very successfully.

Nonetheless, Salgado did not remain a news photographer. Instead, he decided he preferred to work in Black & White, and to conceive his own projects and assignments, which he has done for the last three decades, eventually shifting from film to digital.

Adão Yawanawá, village of Nova Esperança Rio Gregório Indigenous Territory, State of Acre, Brazil, 2016

Adâo Yawanawa, village of Nova Esperanca Rio Gregoürio Indigenous Territory, State of Acre, Brazil, … [+]SEBASTIÃO SALGADO © AMAZONAS IMAGES / COURTESY PETER FETTERMAN GALLERY

The images in Amazonia are pristine and have a timeless quality. You might imagine you were looking at a print by Edward Curtis or Ansel Adams. Salgado’s images are remarkable in so many ways, whether it is the interplay of light and dark in his work (Salgado has said that he loves the Dutch Masters), or the composition of his images, or the play between foreground and background. At times it is how he seizes on the natural harmonies of a landscape, or it is his ability to photograph individuals un-self-consciously. In each of Salgado’s images we feel privy to a world that he is privileged to access.

Luísa, Kampa do Rio Amônea Indigenous Territory, State of Acre, Brazil, 2016

Ashaninka, State of Acre, Brazil, 2016© SEBASTIÃO SALGADO / AMAZONAS IMAGES COURTESY PETER FETTERMAN GALLERY

Salgado’s activism does not end with a photo, or the sale of an image. Salgado, his wife and son and their foundation, the Instituto Terra have played a central role in the reforestation of the Atlantic forest in Brazil having turned 17,000 acres into a nature reserve and planting more than 4 million trees over the last several decades.

“Sebastião Salgado is more than just one of the greatest Master Photographers in the history of this medium,” Peter Fetterman said recently. “He is also a force of nature with a mission to help explain the Third World to the First World and to wake us all up to our social responsibility to protect the Earth we live in and to respect our common humanity.”

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The Art of Matthew Rolston

September 17, 2021

Tom Teicholz

T

By Tom Teicholz

02 Matthew Rolston, Hittorff, La Fontaine des Mers (Neptune), 2016, © MRPI, (Courtesy Fahey_Klein, Los Angeles � Laguna Art Museum)-001

Matthew Rolston, Hittorff, La Fontaine des Mers (Neptune), 2016.© MRPI, (COURTESY FAHEY KLEIN, LOS ANGELES, LAGUNA ART MUSEUM)


Matthew Rolston’s exhibition Art People: The Pageant Portraits on view through January 2, 2022, at the Laguna Art Museum is a show as beautiful, as mysterious, as life-affirming, and as much about human creativity and art, as The Pageant of the Mastersitself. And in a sense, it is also a metaphor for the career and work of Matthew Rolston himself.

At several exhibition-related artist talks by Rolston that I attended recently, including one where Rolston was in conversation with Merle Ginsberg at the Britely Social Club at the Pendry in West Hollywood, and another at the Laguna Art Museum where Christina Binkley was his interlocutor, Rolston discussed both his career and early influences.

Rolston grew up in Los Angeles and attended pretty much every art school in the area, including Chouinard (the forerunner to CalArts), Otis, and Art Center in Pasadena. He became enamored of Hollywood Studio Portraits that he found among the Collectors’ stores on Hollywood Boulevard. At an early age, his career was launched when he got an assignment to shoot Steven Spielberg for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine.

Rolston was fortunate in finding an early home at Interview, as fortunate as Interview was to discover Rolston. Back then, in the days when Warhol himself was very much a presence at the magazine, Interview was published as an oversize large format newsprint monthly, with cover portraits of celebrities stylized and colorized by Richard Bernstein very much in a Warhol-esque color/block style.

Inside were short features and longer Q&As with celebrities and other notables, done in a manner that was meant to convey an actual conversation you were eavesdropping on, rather than a 60-Minutes Mike Wallace grilling. Due to Interview’s large format, the portraits accompanying the text were also super-sized and often in Black & White (a money-saving strategy that became an editorial point-of-view). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, most mainstream magazine photography was focused on a casual hyper-realism – stars in jeans and white T-shirts, or stylized “real” portraits such as Avedon’s “The American West” of West Virginia coal miners that conveyed a hard-won beauty.

07 Matthew Rolston, Cyndi Lauper, Headdress, Los Angeles, 1986, © MRPI, (Courtesy Fahey_Klein, Los Angeles)-001

Matthew Rolston, Cyndi Lauper, Headdress, Los Angeles, 1986. © MRPI, (COURTESY FAHEY KLEIN, LOS ANGELES)

Interview tacked in a different direction – a post-modern return to Hollywood glamour. Rolston’s portraits were the opposite of casual: They were highly staged, with great attention to lighting, every element thought out, with specific references to classic images of stars such as Garbo or Dietrich, and no detail too small to be important.

From Interview, Rolston’s career exploded, doing work for magazines such as Rolling Stone (he’s shot more than 100 covers), VogueW, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine and O, the Oprah Magazine (he has shot Oprah for more than 40 magazine covers, more than any other photographer). There’s a sense of fun to many of his portraits, even a winking nod at the past.

Rolston went on to make films and music videos, including for Madonna, Jewel, Janet Jackson, Christina Aguilera, Foo Fighters, Beyoncé, Seal, and Miley Cyrus as well as advertising campaigns for brands such as Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, GAP (his Khakis Swing video is particularly memorable), Revlon, Polo Ralph Lauren and Burberry, among others.

Beyond his photo, film and video work, Rolston has also served as creative director on hospitality projects for clubs, restaurants, and hotels (such as the Redbury Hotels), bringing his attention to detail, style, and flair to every detail from marketing campaigns to staff uniforms.

Having reached the summit of so many facets of his professional career, several years ago Rolston decided to embark on a series of non-commissioned art projects, series that he conceptualizes and executes at his own initiative and own cost, spending at times years on the works. 

Joe Flip

Matthew Rolston, Joe Flip, 2010, from the series “Talking Heads- The Vent Haven Portraits”© MRPI, (COURTESY FAHEY KLEIN, LOS ANGELES)

Rolston’s found inspiration for his first Art project “Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits in a museum of ventriloquist dummies, the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. Rolston set up a portrait studio in the museum and photographed each of his subjects in an identical manner: square format, low angle, monochromatic backdrop, and a single light source. The square format recalls Warhol’s Polaroids, and the white backgrounds, Avedon’s late work.

Rolston has said that his photos of the dummies was, on one level, an investigation of what makes us human. Which is interesting when you consider no humans appear in the series.

06 Matthew Rolston, Art People- The Pageant Portraits: Exhibition View, 2021, © MRPI, Photograph by Craig Kirk (Courtesy Laguna Art Museum)

Matthew Rolston, Art People: The Pageant Portraits, Exhibition View, 2021© MRPI, PHOTOGRAPH BY CRAIG KIRK (COURTESY LAGUNA ART MUSEUM)

Art People: The Pageant Portraits, Rolston’s second art project, currently on view in Laguna (with a beautiful catalogue available from the Museum or the project’s website) consists of portraits of performers taken during the 2016 Pageant of the MastersThe Pageant is a 90-minute outdoor performance of a series of “Tableaux vivants” or “Living Art” in which volunteers are costumed, made-up and inserted into stage sets that, when framed and lit, reproduce art works for an audience of some 2600 attendees every night from the 4th of July to Labor Day, every year since 1933 (except for 1942-1945 during WWII and 2020 due to the pandemic). There is narration and although at times the figures move and even dance, the performers are neither actors nor dancers. They are more akin to reenacters. It is a most unique, uncanny performance and a memorable experience.

Rolston attended The Pageant as a child and many times since. On several occasions he approached The Pageant about doing portraits of the performers, to no avail. Then at a certain point, Rolston enthused about The Pageant sufficiently that journalist Christina Binkley pitched the Wall Street Journal on doing a feature on The Pageant – and then suggested that Rolston be the photographer. The resulting 2015 article, “At California Pageant, Volunteers Inhabit Works of Art” provided Rolston the entrée with Pageant officials such that they allowed him to make portraits of the following year’s 2016 Pageant performers.

Rolston set up a studio backstage for photographing the costumed (The Pageant uses two complete casts, so they can appear one week on, the other off) during breaks in rehearsals, at intermission, and immediately after performances, and shot the dummy heads that are used as makeup guides.

Rolston used an extremely high-resolution camera (100 megapixels) and then printed the color photos on 60-inch sheets of cotton rag paper. As a result, the detail is incredible, the colors rich, the effect otherworldly. Although each shoot was fast, Rolston nonetheless had ideas of how he hoped to pose the performers. Rolston shot them “as is” in their costume and makeup and did no retouching. To the contrary, the imperfections we see (acne, crow’s feet, sagging skin) are, here, critical to finding the human in the faked. Rolston did engage in some digital manipulation (for example, in one image the hands are enlarged for reasons of proportion, as a sculptor might do). And if you look closely enough at the photos, you can see Rolston’s reflection in their iris— taking the shot.

Golden Girl

Matthew Rolston, Barye, Roger and Angelica (Angelica), 2016.© MRPI, (COURTESY FAHEY KLEIN, LOS ANGELES, LAGUNA ART MUSEUM)

The results are striking: There is a golden girl, who seems very much a Greek nymph come to life. Her right palm faces forward in a sign we might see in a Hindu goddess. Although her eyes are open and piercingly blue, there is something of a somnolent haze about her, like a girl who has not yet awakened to her adulthood. In contrast, Rolston’s Eve, taken from Rubens and Brueghel the Elder’s Garden of Eden, is no youthful nubile, but a mature woman whose face carries its share of sorrow and who grasps the apple at her side as if its secrets were her own. The Laguna exhibition features a selection of images including portraits of the Pageant’s traditional closing image, Jesus and the Apostles from Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Rolston has said this project is an exploration of: “What is Art?” and “Why do we make Art?”

09 Matthew Rolston, Untitled, #Pa834-460, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series Vanitas- The Palermo Portraits, © MRPI, (Courtesy Fahey_Klein, Los Angeles)-001

Matthew Rolston, Untitled, #Pa834-460, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series “Vanitas: The Palermo … [+]© MRPI, (COURTESY FAHEY KLEIN, LOS ANGELES)

Rolston has also completed a third art project which he has not yet exhibited, Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits – which grapples with death. Rolston traveled to the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy, where there is a collection of upright mummified corpses, fully dressed, ready for the Resurrection. But there is also a message posted at the crypt that states simply, “What you are now, we used to be. What we are now, you will become.”

I confess that at first, I struggled with Rolston’s stated premises. What can wooden dummies say about being human? What can non-artists creating a staged derivative of a real artwork teach us about making Art? And what do mummified corpses in a crypt teach us about death?

The answer came to me when watching a TED lecture on YouTube: According to Historian Yuval Noah Harari, what distinguishes us from all other creatures, what makes us human, is our ability to be creative, to tell stories.

Therefore, in photographing ventriloquist dummies, Rolston is attempting to give life, as much as Geppetto to Pinocchio, or Dr. Frankenstein to his creature. In his portraits of the inanimate we see our own need to infuse objects with life – that is what makes us human.

Similarly, when showing us the human in those who make a tableau vivant, the element Rolston adds to the already costumed and made-up is his art. Simple but true.

And in photographing the corpses in the Capuchin Crypt in Palermo, Rolston is giving us a vivid demonstration that what us separates us from corpses is our ability to make art of them. What is death if not the end of our potential to create?

One can argue then, that in Rolston’s editorial and commercial work, even in his work as a creative director, the collaborative constraints imposed by his subjects or employers are an application of his creative talent, but not Art.

By contrast, in photographing ventriloquist dummies, or stand-in performers in tableaux vivant, or even the staged corpses in Palermo, we can see that without Rolston’s intervention, without his creative act, they remain inanimate, imitations of art, rather than Art itself.

In this sense, the answer to the fundamental and existential questions Rolston asks in his Art become simple: Creating is what makes us human. Because we are human, we make Art. And when we die, we cease to have the capacity to be creative. And, finally, as long as we are alive, we can appreciate Rolston’s Art People: The Pageant Portraits in all their beauty and mystery.

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A Day At The Beach: On Jon Bradshaw’s: “The Ocean Is Closed”

The Ocean Is Closed: Journalistic Adventures and Investigations

JON BRADSHAWJuly 11, 2021

By Tom Teicholz

THE OCEAN IS CLOSED: Journalistic Adventures and Investigations is a new collection of work by the late Jon Bradshaw, one of the leading practitioners of magazine journalism during the 1970s and ’80s. (This is the third publication of ZE Books, which produces beautiful volumes devoted to honoring writers and their work.) The articles gathered here, thoughtfully curated and edited by Alex Belth, share one feature in common: they are tales of excess, of personalities who talk too much, drink too much, gamble too much, who often live in a world beyond the boundaries most of us won’t cross. Bradshaw’s profile subjects range from literary figures, such as W. H. Auden, Tom Stoppard, and Hunter S. Thompson, to hustlers, such as tennis showman Bobby Riggs and pool magician Minnesota Fats, to notorious international criminals, such as Andreas Baader, the self-styled revolutionary terrorist and leader of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and Phoolan Devi, India’s “Bandit Queen.”

These are tales of a bygone era — Bradshaw died in 1986, at the age of 48, of a heart attack on a tennis court in Beverly Hills. Most of Bradshaw’s subjects are also long gone (Stoppard and Chris Blackwell are still kicking around, if not raising hell), but it is a tribute to Bradshaw’s storytelling skills that reading his accounts of the exploits of dead outlaws remains entertaining and compelling. Bradshaw’s descriptions at times take on the hardboiled flavor of Raymond Chandler, such as when he says that Bobby Riggs “had the face of a man who sold encyclopedias from door to door; one was suspicious, but never offended,” or when he writes that Minnesota Fats “nursed his reputation like a sore tooth.”

To put all this in context, we are talking about the Pleistocene Era when print magazines ruled: thick weekly or monthly issues, filled with page after page of advertisements, run by storied editors such as Clay Felker (at New York) or the duo of Phillip Moffitt and Chris Whittle (at Esquire). During this era, magazine editors were cultural figures, media-worthy themselves, with Page Six items devoted to their comings and goings and Architectural Digest features on the decoration of their homes. Magazines had hefty budgets and could pay writers a king’s ransom for their work, including the travel expenses, hotel bills, and bar tabs they accumulated in the process. Writers could take as long as needed to report and polish their stories, which could run to whatever length they deemed necessary. It was a golden age of magazine features — of which Bradshaw’s pieces were prime examples.

Bradshaw was an ace in this game. His articles were the result of prodigious research and dedicated reporting, yet they read like extended monologues. The author is often present in these pieces, although usually in the third person, as “the journalist,” someone trying to keep up with the excesses going on all around him. He follows Stoppard from pub to home to theater, effortlessly capturing the voluble playwright’s torrent of conversation. He lets a cranky Billy Wilder make the case that his professional career is merely in a slump, not over and done with — although we understand the great screenwriter/director may be protesting too much. We watch Hunter Thompson — or “Gonzo,” as Bradshaw refers to him — avoid writing an article due on deadline covering an event he failed to attend. He catches JFK advisor Richard Goodwin beaching his sailboat, waiting for the tide to come in — and although they eventually do depart, Bradshaw makes us understand that Goodwin will never regain the luster of his days in Camelot. In Bradshaw’s world, what’s in the rearview mirror often looks better than what’s on the horizon.

Bradshaw had an unerring ability to find himself in the midst of the action, and an admirable willingness to at once wallow in it and share the experience with us mere mortals. He is there at Maxwell’s Plum, the swingles bar on First Avenue in Manhattan that was the Tinder of its time. Then, he’s at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, reporting on a young woman who pays her bills by making herself available to customers a few nights a week. He’s with British gossip columnist Nigel Dempster as he sweeps through New York, or hanging out with Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, most famous for his stewardship of Bob Marley. Here’s how Bradshaw sets the scene for the arrival of Dempster at New York’s Eurotrash nightclub Regine’s:

Regine’s had been open for about a week, and the club is crowded with the usual motley of stupefied white and Third World nightcrawlers. It is practically dark, and against the lac d’ambre plastique walls it is difficult to tell one from the other. Wandering from the bar through the dining room to the discotheque and back again are clusters of starved and foppish girls, hairdressers, actors, designers, entrepreneurs, the idle rich, their courtiers — the sort of people the trendy tabloids have taken to calling the hep elite.
Bradshaw strived to coin the apt phrase or striking simile, saying of the ambience at the Polo Lounge that “[t]he place creates an instant and malign impression on the mind and one turns away as from a lazaretto.” He describes one of his beloved gamblers, Pug, this way: “He had the round mischievous face of an elderly troll, a troll with a fondness for Cuban cigars.”

There are moments chronicled in these articles that would not pass today’s standards of acceptable behavior. For example, Hunter Thompson asks a woman if she would like him to rape her. “You’ll like it,” he tells her. “You have that look about you.” (Frankly, I am not sure how this got by at the time.) Bradshaw casually drops mention of various “neighborhood brothel[s]” he was acquainted with, and he accompanies that young woman at the Polo Lounge bar to her hotel room to complete his interview. Perhaps this is all just Bradshaw’s own nostalgie de la boue, but it reminds us that “the good old days” weren’t so good for everyone.

These occasional dissonances aside, one has to appreciate Bradshaw’s engaging ability to plumb the depths and skim the surfaces of so wide a collection of people and places, and to write in a style all his own. The Ocean Is Closed is a fitting tribute to a writer who might otherwise be forgotten, a magazine writer’s writer, whose talent and personality was such that all doors seemed open to him. Here is his description of backgammon players ending a long night of gambling:

Gathering their coats, they straggled one by one into the street. The player in the dinner jacket threw his umbrella, end over end, into the night. The elderly man thanked them for their contributions. The others exchanged the drawn farewells of truant boys. The man in the dinner jacket wandered south and east, reeling clumsily through the empty streets; he looked like a man attempting to learn the steps of a new dance.
When reading Bradshaw, we are all the man in the dinner jacket.

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Dancer Lauren Lovette Comes Home as a Choreographer

The Thousand Oaks-bred ballerina talks about growing into a choreographer and what inspires her

By Tom Teicholz 

May 21, 2021

lovette american ballet theater American Ballet Theatre in Lauren Lovette’s La Follia Variations (Photo by Todd Rosenberg) 

On April 25, a landmark event occurred at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts: American Ballet Theater (ABT) dancers performed for the first time in a year on a stage live in front of an actual audience. Uniting in Movement, as the program is called, featured new works by Lauren Lovette and Darrell Grand Moultrie and can be streamed on demand through May 26.

I was in the audience at that performance and it was exhilarating to see a company perform together on stage again, and also to be able to applaud and cheer them. ABT’s last performance before the shutdown last March was at the Segerstrom, so it’s appropriate that the company’s first pandemic live stage performance took place there. The performance ran without intermission for a little over an hour and was bracketed by Lovette’s La Follia Variations, a celebration of dance she originally developed for the ABT Studio company, and Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Indestructible Light, a crowd pleaser choreographed to music by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Billy Strayhorn.

The Segerstrom performance represents a new chapter, a new day, and a homecoming of sorts for California-born Lauren Lovette, 29, who was a principal dancer with New York City Ballet (NYCB) before deciding to retire during the pandemic. She has been choreographing for more than a decade and her La Follia Variations, which was originally created for the ABT Studio Company was only completed on the day ABT studios closed in March 2020. As Uniting in Movement was being planned, Lovette was invited to set La Follia Variations for ABT’s main company where it will now premiere at the Segerstrom.

lauren lovette
Lauren Lovette in rehearsals

CARLOS LOPEZ

Lovette grew up in Thousand Oaks where she was homeschooled until she began studying ballet intensively at the Cary Ballet Conservatory in North Carolina, and then the American Ballet Theater School in New York. In 2009, at 18, she apprenticed with NYCB, the house of ballet Balanchine built, joined its corps de ballet the following year, becoming a soloist in 2013 and a principal in 2015.

I feel like I know Lovette and I credit the pandemic for that. I spent a good deal of my late night pandemic viewing going down the rabbit hole of short dance films, ballet Instagrams and TikToks, watching members of NYCB, ABT, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Australian Ballet, and other dancers and dance companies, talking, teaching, cooking, making short films, and, yes, dancing online. There was a directness, a lack of pretension, an intimacy to these encounters, that felt like seeing behind the curtain—to see the person that was the dancer in a way that live performance on stage did not always afford.

So, given the opportunity to speak with Lovette about this momentous event for her and for ballet fans, I was eager to hear her thoughts on this performance and all things ballet. I began by asking about how she felt about having her first engagement as a choreographer in California.

“Every time I’m in L.A., it doesn’t feel like I’m visiting a strange place,” Lovette said. “I feel a great comfort in California, especially Southern California… everything from the weather to the way that things smell in the spring. It definitely feels like I’m home.” She added that given that she was staging her own work on a new set of dancers, and given the short time allowed by the bubble, and all the changes they made, she was nervous and being in California helped her.

For Lovette, becoming a choreographer was something she grew into. “When I was 18 and I had just joined the New York City Ballet and the corps, I remember doing a piece next to Justin Peck [a former dancer who is now the Resident Choreographer at NYCB]… and I thought, ‘That’s a choreographer. I’m not.’ I’ll just stick to dancing. I don’t think I have what it takes. And it was my boss. Peter Martins, who ever since that day thought that my piece was really good, even if I didn’t think so. Every year, iIn passing, he’d say, ‘She’s a choreographer.’ And I would just kind of chuckle to myself thinking, ‘What does he know? I’m not a choreographer. I’m just a dancer.’”

Martins then asked her to make a piece for NYCB which she did—and it wasn’t particularly well received. Some of the reviews were quite negative. So she was ready to put it aside. However, Lovette had already signed a contract to work with the ABT studio company, “and that was the thing that got me back on the horse [and when] I really thought, ‘I love this and I don’t care what the critics say.’ I felt like I’d already failed, on the biggest stage that I could imagine, in front of my peers, which was the most scary. So I thought everything after that is easier, so I’ll just keep going. So that’s what I’ve been doing. And I really love it.”

On a “Trina Talks” YouTube conversation between ABT principal Isabella Boylston and NYCB dancer Tiler Peck which I fell into one night, they discussed that NYCB ballet dancers are distinguished by the speed of their technique. Lovette acknowledged that her La Follia Variations is meant to danced fast. “This is one of the fastest pieces I’ve ever choreographed. The pace is relentless. It’s got the most challenging speed, unexpected turns in the music. It’s 12 minutes and it just goes straight. You almost don’t blink.” However, Lovette said the ABT dancers were more than up to the task. “I know that ABT is more known for moving slowly. I know that they do more classical ballets. Their technique is very precise in a very different kind of way, but I didn’t feel in any way held back by the dancer’s ability to do it. I just don’t think that they do it very often.

“And so what I had fun with was getting into the space with them and asking something that maybe they looked at me with disbelief, like, ‘Are you sure it’s going to be that fast?’ And I would say, ‘Yes, try it.’ And then they do it. And they were fantastic because they can point their feet. They can turn out their legs. They have such beautiful technique and here they are moving just as quickly as New York City ballet dancers can move. So I had a blast working with both the studio company and the main company, but especially this time around with the more seasoned dancers. It was very thrilling.”

I asked Lovette to talk about La Follia Variations, the piece she premiered at Segerstrom—what inspired her and what we should be looking for in this specific dance performance.

“The majority of the piece is just dance,” Lovette said. “It’s hopeful and youthful and optimistic  but there is a pas de deux in the middle of it, that to me, sounds like you’re underwater. But it wasn’t until I saw My Octopus Teacher [a Netflix documentary]… that I realized that’s exactly what it’s about. There’s an octopus. And all of these different moves started coming out of it. So I’m thinking of the ocean floor. And I’m thinking of the shells that the man is jumping on. And so if you want to look for something, I’d say look for the under the sea segment that happens in the middle of the piece, in the pas de deux. The woman has this lift and it’s like she’s floating over top of the water. And Chloe [Dancer Chloe Misseldine] moves so fluidly. She just has this way of moving her body that … I just looked at her and I said, “You are it. You’re the sea creature that I was waiting for in this piece, the whole time.”

“It’s a celebration. It’s got such a triumphant ending. It’s got such a hope about it. And that’s really why I made it, to have that feeling in the midst of COVID. And I’m so glad that now it’s going to be shown to an audience.”

Ballet is going through the same seismic changes cosseting the rest of society. It’s had its share of #MeToo moments and a much-needed push for greater diversity and representation. The Pandemic has given dancers, choreographers and dance companies time to rethink some of the very basic assumptions of ballet concerning body image and gender roles. And Lovette has been thinking about all this too.

“When I’m making something, I’m not thinking about trying to make a political statement. I very much love whoever’s in the room with me, having that piece be honest. And so there’s something to me about being able to make something new. And if I’ve got two men in the space who love men, that is their natural state, and they have to act every time they get on stage and pretend to fall in love the woman, when really they would be in love with a man. I want to give that to them. There’s something in me that goes, “Oh, that’s just so honest. And that’s so real. That’s so you. Let’s do that.”

“And I do care very much about the body image in ballet improving. I also take a stance of excellence into account that you have to be fit. You have to be in shape. You have to be strong. I think there’s been a little bit of an unhealthy standard [and] I don’t know exactly how it got there. I don’t know if we did it to ourselves. I don’t know if it came from directors. I don’t know if it came from a really long history of past preferences…I don’t want to reverse everything that’s been. That’s not really my stance on things. I just think there needs to be more room for what is found beautiful. Because what we do is subjective. What we do is art. It’s what people come to see to enjoy themselves, to have a good time, to feel something. It’s dance. And [for that] you have to be able to have a certain level of skill and talent. It’s an athletic field that you have to meet certain marks on a technical level.

“But when it comes to this other sort of subjective opinion of [what] one person decided was beautiful, I don’t think that relates to the audience well. I think audiences want to see themselves on stage. I think they want to see themselves represented in all different kinds of ways. I think there just needs to be a little bit more room.”

What struck me about Lovette was how the pandemic has brought her to this revelatory moment in her own journey, a crossroads where has made the choice to travel down a new road. The question I most wanted to ask her was:  You spent your first 15 years of your life under a certain very strict way of listening to people (your parents) and your next 15 years under a very strict way of listening to people (as a ballerina). And now you’re the decider. What’s that like?

Lovette did not hesitate: “It’s absolutely liberating,” she said. “It’s been an interesting life because the first part of it, I was homeschooled and very sheltered and just in a very, very closed world. And then my dancing life wasn’t all that different.

“I have been in ballet, which is a silent field. We speak up very little. We do very well what we’re told. It’s why I got into ballet in the first place. I was a very shy kid. I was drawn to the fact that I could express things without having to say anything. I could just use my body to speak for me, instead of having to bring physical words out through my throat, vocally in front of people.

“But what’s been beautiful in it too, is that I don’t think I would be as vocal of a person if I hadn’t done ballet, which I know sounds strange because [it’s] a silent art form, but I’ve been able to practice public speaking. I’ve been able to do interviews. I’ve been able to get on stage and speak in front of large audiences. I’ve been able to sing and scream on stage at times, and also face the fear of being in front of an audience, which is its own courageous experience.

“I think it’s ironic because, yes, ballet has this history of being this very subservient, quiet, obedient thing to do. But at the same time, I think in so many ways it liberated me as a human, as a woman, and it gave me a voice and things to say, and choreography only amplified that. And I only got into [choreography] as a dare to myself—because I wanted to do something brave. And I was reading a book that said, “Sign up for something scary.” So I did.

“And it was hard. It wasn’t this journey of…and then here it is. It was little practice, little baby steps of standing up in front of a room and talking to my peers and telling them what to do. And what’s my idea and placing it in front of people. And so it’s grown with time and now I am happy to say that I feel very liberated in the sense that I’m about to venture off on my own, making the decisions for my own life, the way that I see fit.

“I love creating ballets. I think it’s just one of the most empowering things you can do. It’s exciting to work with different types of dancers. And I get to oftentimes have a say in the casting. There are so many different decisions I get to make now concerning the art form. And I love doing that. I definitely feel free in that regard.”

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Dylan Casts A Surprising Shadow



August 10, 2021

By Tom Teicholz

This article appeared on Forbes.com: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomteicholz/2021/08/10/dylan-casts-a-surprising-shadow/?sh=29cc937768eb

Trailer for Shadow Kingdom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxwI_OtESIE&ab_channel=BobDylan


You’ve got to hand it to Bob Dylan. He continues to surprise. And delight. And confound. And to earn our respect simply, as he once wrote of Woody Guthrie, “Cause there’s not many men that done the things that you’ve done.”

Dylan just turned 80. In December 2019, he gave his last live performance before Covid/Pandemic lockdowns put a pause to his “never-ending tour,” so called because of Dylan’s steady touring since 1988.

Recently Dylan announced his first performance since then, a live stream event offered on Veeps.com that was available to stream between July 18-25, 2021, for $25. It was worth watching.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan performs on LiveStream “Shadow Kingdom”COURTESY OF BOB DYLAN SHADOW KINGDOM

“Shadow Kingdom” was not so much a concert as a performance of what was billed as “Early Dylan” songs, many of which Dylan has not played in concert for years. The performances were shot in black & white on a soundstage dressed to resemble a Juke Joint, a roadhouse, or perhaps, as credited, the bonbon club in Marseille (no such club exists), set in some earlier time (anywhere from the late 1930s- to the early Sixties); where women wear dresses and their hair is rolled into the kind of bun you picture when you imagine Billie Holliday standing at a microphone; the men wear hats indoors; where the audience is integrated; and everybody is smoking, and everyone at some point gets up to dance in a way that also belongs to an earlier time; and certainly is not the usual response to Dylan playing his songs. Dylan is at time in the shadows or obscure by the cigarette smoke.

We are encouraged to believe that Dylan is performing a live set at this imaginary club, but Dylan’s several costume changes, set changes (in which the checkerboard floor remained but the backdrop changed), and the players’ performances not always syncing — lets us know that this film was assembled from a series of staged performances directed and edited by Alma Ha’rel, the filmmaker known for her music videos and for Honey Boy.

As for the title: Who knows? Google informed me that “The Shadow Kingdom” is a fantasy short story by American writer Robert E. Howard, the first of his Kull stories, set in his fictional Thurian Age. It was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in August 1929 – but there is no acknowledgement that it is a reference for Dylan. Beyond that, a Shadow Kingdom is when there is an official government, but the States under its control are acting independently; or when behind the scenes there are others pulling the levers of government. As regards this performance, it appears to me that this is a Shadow Kingdom of Dylan’s original recordings – his revisiting the tunes to reveal their authentic core.

It seems to me that over the last decade Dylan has been engaged in a total excavation of his musical past, revisiting classics of American Roots music (such as Froggy goes a Courtin’), playing songs that Jimmy Reed or Hank Williams would have favored, playing those songs he heard on the radio growing up, Christmas songs he liked, American Standards as well as covers of the Sinatra catalogue. Dylan performed each in a style all his own as if to say: “All this music has flowed through me, and is part of me, so I’m going to deliver it back to you – in ways made my own.”

Now, just as Dylan interpreted Sinatra, Dylan has turned to interpreting Dylan. And why not? Most of the 13 songs in this 50-minute set are at least 50 years old (some older). If he can do Sinatra, why not his own songs? For these performances, Dylan is not backed by his touring band but rather a five-piece band, all wearing Covid-masks. A woman on standing bass, one guitarist on electric, two on acoustic and an accordion player. The credits list them as Alex Burke, Janie Cowan, Joshua Crumbly, Shahzad Ismaily, and Buck Meek. As for the performances:

Dylan opened with “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Dylan looks good: He’s put on some pandemic pounds and his hair is very long and still curly after all these years. His face is fuller and more jowly, his skin is more parchment-like, but it is neither taught nor excessively wrinkled. For 80, he looks great! Dylan’s voice is rich and deep, his tone strong, his delivery measured and in no way rushed. Dylan is singing better and clearer than he has in concert in years – all a happy surprise. The recent Rough and Rowdy Ways release had much the same vocal tone but some of those songs were several years old. In the Leon Russell produced original, “everything is going to be different, when I paint my masterpiece” seemed ironic and somewhat comic. Now, after a year and half of quarantine and covid, when Dylan sings that “someday everything is going to be beautiful,” that notion seems more elusive than ever.

 The second song was “You go your way and I’ll go mine,” which, if I recall correctly, is how Dylan and the Band opened their shows during his 1974 “After the Flood” tour – their return to the stage after Dylan’s self-imposed exile of the late 1960s – which seems on point for Dylan’s streaming re-emergence. This version has Dylan at the microphone doing some moves with his hands that recalled in some ways were reminiscent of Elvis, and in other ways reminded me of late-in-life Leonard Cohen performances.

Bob Dylan Records ″Bringing It All Back Home″

NEW YORK – JANUARY 13: Bob Dylan plays harmonica in to a microphone to record his album ‘Bringing It … [+]GETTY

 “Queen Jane Approximately” from Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan’s 1965 Studio album, a song which Dylan hasn’t played in concert since 2013, was a lovely surprise. Here, Dylan stood stage left at the microphone, infusing each phrase with emotion. In this rendition, the song and Dylan are one – Dylan makes the song timeless, as relevant and as true to Dylan today as when he wrote it. Dylan accompanies himself on harp, reminding us of the beauty and subtlety of his abilities on that instrument.

 “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” was somewhat less successful. It opens as something of a proto-rocker. This version lacks the original’s the original’s boozy romantic sweep. Slowing the version down makes Dylan’s lyric seem more plaintive, as if he is chasing a feeling rather than having it.

By contrast, on “Tom Thumb’s Blues,” Dylan takes his time to get the song across in an utterly convincing manner, crooning his rhymes. The song is rich with atmosphere and surrealistic despair. Over the years, some of Dylan’s renditions of this song have verged on the apocalyptic. Here, Dylan is more of a storyteller, a poet – again Sinatra and Leonard Cohen come to mind regarding the ability to get a song across as an invocation, or as the French poets put it, an “invitation au voyage.” Although the song’s conclusion that he’s “going back to New York City,” no longer carries the resignation of the original, Dylan puts the power of his song’s imagery front and center for us to appreciate.

On “Tombstone Blues” Dylan takes this a step further, delivering a spoken word poem, much like the songs on his recent album Rough and Rowdy Ways. It is a reminder that Dylan, at his core, is a writer. It is his songwriting that is why at 80 we still come to hear his songs, why his catalogue sold for such a fortune, why he has been awarded a Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

For years Dylan has used a spread leg stance to prop himself up as he stood at an electric keyboard or microphone. He adopts it here as if he were a French chanson singer, a Jacques Brel-type, delivering heartfelt renditions of the songs of his earlier self.

Brittany Doherty 2015 Twin ValleyGirls Bowling GBOWLWinter Scholastic Headshots  Photo by Jeremy Drey  11/23/2015

Bob Dylan “Nashville Skyline”, considered an essential album, in the Reading Eagle studio on … [+]MEDIANEWS GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Although Dylan does not get as much as credit for this as he deserves, over the course of his career Dylan has written many powerful ballads, wonderful love songs and lover’s pleas. He has certainly written more love songs than protest songs, or political songs, or songs about any other topic. “To Be alone with You” originally appeared on his 1969 Nashville Skyline album, and was last played in concert in 2005. Dylan sings with emotion and conviction, acting as if he is pouring out his heart, emending the lyrics by singing, “my mortal bliss is to be alone with you.” I’m not 100% sure I believe him but I appreciate the effort.     

In recent years, Dylan has bristled at criticisms that in concert he sometimes croaks or mumbles his lyrics. Or that others perform his songs better than him. Here, Dylan makes a very convincing argument that if he wants to sing his songs so you can hear each word, he can; and he does so in a more interesting way than anyone else.

To that point, “What Was It You Wanted” from Dylan’s 1989 album Oh Mercy has been rediscovered recently in powerful versions by Willie Nelson as well as by Bettye Lavette. In fact, if you’d asked me before this performance, I would have said Nelson did the definitive version. Here, however, Dylan delivers a powerful and moving interpretation. Once again, there is no separation between song and interpreter. He accompanies himself on harp with subtlety and mastery. Dylan’s version is full of mystery; full of dread. To me, this was the standout performance in the Shadow Kingdom.

“Forever Young” is probably the most popularly known of the songs Dylan performed – recited like an Irish toast at events, played at bar mitzvahs as well as intoned by sportscaster Howard Cosell when Ali defeated Spinks in their second fight. I have seen Dylan snarl this song as a challenge, play it as celebratory, or even valedictory. This time, Dylan plays it gently. It’s not quite a benediction, it’s more quiet than that. With a certain tenderness, Dylan delivers this song’s wishes like an old man speaking to a much younger one (which he was – both at the time of writing and now).

“Pledging My Time” which originally appeared on Dylan’s 1966 Blonde on Blonde and which Dylan last played in concert in 1999, is performed here as a straight ahead twelve bar blues version where his harp is never far away. This worked well.

Nobel Prize for Literature 2016 - Bob Dylan

The record ‘Blonde on Blonde’ by Bob Dylan lies in a record store in Munich, Germany, 13 October … [+]PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES

“The Wicked Messenger” is a deep cut from John Wesley Harding that Dylan has played some 125 times in concert over the years, most recently in 2009. This song is one of Dylan’s early biblical allegories (i.e. All Along The Watchtower, Highway 61 Revisited). Here Dylan stretches out the lyrics as he milks the mystery of the wicked messenger.

“Watching the River Flow” – this is also a popular Dylan song although it doesn’t get covered as much as it should. The Leon Russell produced original has a great feel – like tubing down a waterway. The first time I listened to this version I didn’t think it worked. Dylan’s energy seemed to ebb and I didn’t feel he brought the same conviction to this version that he did with other songs in this performance. Second time, I didn’t mind at all and thought the performance was fine. Which just underlines that everything Dylan does is subject to interpretation and reconsideration.

Before I could really reflect on this more, Dylan launched into “Baby Blue” (a/k/a/ “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”) – This is a very Rough and Rowdy Ways rendition. For me, it recalled the Beats (Kerouac and Ginsberg and their spoken word performances – Dylan very much emerged from this tradition, going back to his first songs, his early talking blues, to the word waterfall of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and his friendship and collaborations with Allen Ginsberg through to the recent “Rough and Rowdy Ways” – whether Dylan is “the first rap artist” as some have called him, or a performative poet, in Shadow Kingdom Dylan delivers the primacy of his words and images from the early songs of Dylan until his 80 year old present.

Across his more than 60 years of professional appearances, Dylan has never wavered from doing as he sees fit, performing the material he wants to perform in the manner he wants to perform it. At 80, Dylan continues to do things, in the words of one of few Sinatra classics he did not cover, “My Way.” And those of us who paid $25 to Veeps.com got to watch it. In this Shadow Kingdom, Dylan is King.

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Artist Amy Sherald Delivers ‘The Great American Fact’


April 16, 2021

By Tom Teicholz

Tom Teicholz

Amy Sherald’s new work, on exhibit at Hauser Wirth Los Angeles until June 6, 2021 (her first West Coast solo show) is a pleasure, a wonder, a breath of fresh air, a corrective, a display of mastery, brilliance, and soulfulness. It is about America, about the dignity of regular people, about being present and being seen, about painting, and about color (in every sense of the word).

The show consists of five paintings Sherald completed during the Covid quarantine. In some respects – as to overall feel, the colors and some of the subjects— it is a continuation of the work Sherald showed at Hauser and Wirth in New York in 2019 (reviewed here as “Sometimes the King is a Woman”). However, in other more important ways, these canvases represent a deepening of her work.

Although Sherald often uses real people whom she photographs as models for the figures in her work, she recasts them and their surroundings. Like a frame from a Hitchcock movie where meaning can be read into each detail, Sherald constructs her images in ways that ask us to take nothing for granted. Sherald paints, to quote the press materials for this show, “‘the things I want to see’ by depicting Black Americans in scenes of leisure and centered in stillness.”

A couple standing in front of house

As American as apple pie by Amy Sherald 2020 AMY SHERALD © AMY SHERALD COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH PHOTO: JOSEPH HYDE

In “As American as Apple Pie” (Sherald’s names her paintings after completing them, finding inspiration for titles in aphorisms, poems and written texts), one of the show’s larger canvases, a couple stands in front of a house. Everything in this painting says “All American”: The man is leaning against a car (of which we only see the rear half but recognize as an American car) dressed in a blue jean jacket, white T-shirt, khakis and white sneakers. The woman is wearing a pink T-shirt that says “Barbie.” She is carrying a pink flamingo purse – which matches her pink skirt, and pink shoes while her yellow-framed eyeglasses and gold hoop earrings match the house behind her. Behind them is a white picket fence, a green hedge and a yellow house with open white shutters. There is a crispness to the hard edges of the blocks of color – the jacket, the T-shirt, the house, that make the colors pop while the facial details recede into a more quiet zone. The sky is blue and there is something to the image that suggests we are in a town that is perhaps also a summer resort.

Sherald’s paintings are always hung low, at eye level, so the figures in her paintings often seem to be looking directly at you. Subtly, this adds presence to the figures who own the space in which they stand, naturally and organically.

In “A Midsummer Afternoon Dream” a woman in a blue dress and a yellow sun visor stands on the grass in front of a bicycle with a front basket in which there is a bouquet of daisies. Behind her is a white picket fence and behind it green stalks with daisies. A breeze is blowing her dress against her.

This image most brings to mind Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama and Sherald’s more recent portrait of Breonna Taylor for the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. Without in any way diminishing how great a painting the Michelle Obama portrait is and how important that painting has become for all who see it, I believe that “A Midsummer Afternoon Dream,” is indicative of the continued growth and expansiveness of Sherald’s technique as a painter. The Obama portrait was by design about the First Lady – and the flatness to the painting made Obama seem approachable yet regal. But in “Dream” the painting is so varied and detailed: The sneakers all finely rendered, The dress contains folds, giving a certain depth and dimensionality not present in the First Lady’s portrait, while the white picket fence and those daisies both gathered and wild speak eloquently about this moment, this woman, this dream. She stands like a windswept heroine of a Victorian romantic novel (or perhaps from Bridgerton!) transported to the present.

The exhibition features two striking individual portraits, one of a young woman, the other a young man. In “Hope is the thing with feathers (The Little Bird)” a young woman is wearing a dress that has a white bird in flight against a red background as its graphic adornment. The white bird recalls Picasso’s ‘Dove’ and the painting’s title is from Emily Dickinson. She stands before a baby blue background and I imagine that both dress and title are clues to her interior life that is hopeful, unformed yet in the process of formation. This is a painting about youthful idealism, about hopes and dreams.

Young man in cabana shirt

A bucket full of treasures (Papa gave me sunshine to put in my pockets…) by Amy Sherald 2020 AMY SHERALD © AMY SHERALD COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH PHOTO: JOSEPH HYDE

By contrast, Sherald’s “A Bucket full of treasures (Papa gave me sunshine to put in my pockets…)” presents a young man who is fully present. He is wearing a distinctive cabana shirt with a graphic of a lobster coming out of one pocket and a sun burst near his shoulder. He stands, cool, hip, self-assured, commanding his space. He needs no outside validation – and he is game, ready to engage.

My favorite painting in the show is “An Ocean away,” which like some of Sherald’s earlier paintings is set on a beach, yet unlike those images is not as carefree. There are two figures on the beach: A young man standing in a wetsuit holding a surf board, and an older man also in a wetsuit sitting on a different surfboard. The young man is gazing directly at us, and the older man is looking away. Sherald does not tell us what the man is looking at, or thinking about, but perhaps, as the title indicates he is looking out at the Ocean.

Two surfers on a red flag day

An Ocean Away by Amy Sherald 2020 AMY SHERALD © AMY SHERALD COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH PHOTO: JOSEPH HYDE

The boy is not fully confident, and there is in the painting tension between that which is rendered in hard edges and the softness and undefined nature of the sand. There is a red flag on the beach that the wind is making wave in reverse, away from the water. The Red flag means the ocean is dangerous and explains perhaps why the surfers are beached there.

To me, surfing speaks to a certain amount of status, class, privilege and leisure. However, perhaps being prevented by the red flag from enjoying doing so, causes the older of the two to ponder that they are, literally and metaphorically, “an Ocean away,” from the shores of West Africa from which, some 400 years ago, indigenous natives were captured, and taken to be sold as slaves in the New World.

That interpretation is solely my own. All the figures in Sherald’s work are Black which would be unremarkable if the appearance of Black figures in portraiture and art history were unremarkable. But it is not, and so Sherald’s work is, in part, not so much a corrective as way of opening our eyes (and that of art history’s) to the images, subjects, and persons who have always been there – if not represented often enough.

In this regard, Sherald is no more painting Black people than other painters were painting white people. She is painting the people she sees, much the same way as Alex Katz was painting the persons he came across. In fact, to render Black skin tones, Sherald uses grisaille, a method of using gray monochromes, historically used to render or imitate sculpture.

My point, however clumsily made, is that Sherald is not make paintings about Blackness or Black history so much as she is capturing those normal moments that are in no way race-based; in which Black people exist but in which they are rarely seen as present.

If, as Anna Julia Cooper, a 19th Century Black writer, activist and educator, wrote “Black Americans are ‘the great American fact,” then Sherald in her paintings is just stating facts.

As Ta Nehisi Coates has written, “Our notion of what constitutes “white” and what constitutes “black” is a product of social context.” In her paintings Sherald provides the social context for moments of Black joy and quietude. paintings about being seen that insist we look. 

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Inside The Newly Renovated Museum Of Modern Art

Tom Teicholz

In the waning hours before coronavirus shut down New York, I visited a more-empty-than-usual Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Christina's world
Christina’s World By Andrew Wyeth 1948 MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. COURTESY OF MOMA

The Museum re-opened last October after several months of closure for expansion, renovation, and re-installation of the collection. Let me cut to the chase here: I love what the Museum has done

MoMA has found a way to return to the spirit of early curators Alfred Barr and William Rubin’s embrace of Modern Art as a story, and found a way to free that narrative to be more inclusive, diverse and less of a patriarchal collection driven by the male gaze. All the greatest hits and visitor favorites are on display. There’s Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” There’s “Monet’s Water Lilies.” There’s Picasso’s “Demoiselles D’Avignon.” There’s Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World.” And there’s Jackson Pollock. They are surrounded by works of artists who should always have been part of the conversation from Berenice Abbott to Eva Zeisel (and including Faith Ringold, Frida Kahlo and Natalia Gonchorova). There is a flow to the rooms and the floors now, and they have also paid attention to creating views and vantage points to view the museum itself—the stairs going up and down, the garden from above and other. It all feels just right. Finally. Again.

Monet
Claude Monet, Water Lilies 1914-26. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund/ Museum of Modern Art. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. COURTESY OF MOMA

It’s no secret that I wasn’t fan of MoMA’s previous expansion and the choices they made in displaying their permanent collection and how they reorganized the garden. The last time I visited MoMA, it was a nightmare: the entry lobby was as crowded as Grand Central Station, the permanent collection was installed in a manner that lacked coherence, and you moved through the museum as if through a department store. Moreover, the garden was arrayed in a way that was not prone to contemplation. I searched the garden for Rodin’s Balzac, once the anchor of the sculpture garden—but it was not there. A staff member inside informed me that the sculpture had been rotated out of service and she couldn’t say when it would return.

I am happy to report that Balzac is back. He stands in the North West corner like a sentinel looking out over the garden, which itself is more open and less congested and feels, again, like an inviting public space, as it was always meant to be.

Another change (or corrective if you will) also pleases me greatly. They have hung the paintings lower at or beneath eye level and dispensed with old or ornate frames. The effect is to make the paintings more inviting, more approachable, less like an out of reach cultural totem.

The permanent collection proceeds chronologically for the most part, but also thematically, or with a certain curatorial grouping here and then. Painting, Photography and Sculpture or no longer separate but part of the flow of MoMA’s didactic presentation. They have also created moments within that narrative for the art to be in conversation with itself over time. One example of this is their ‘Artist’s Choice’ program that has one artist, current Amy Sillman, curate a room from the collection and juxtapose works in ways that challenge and engage the viewer. The total effect of MoMA’s reinstallation is to return the thrill of discovery to seeing the collection again. At the same time, given that this is no longer just a greatest hits collection and there are so many works to see, they have designed the rooms and the spaces surrounding them with attention to allowing visitors places to sit and contemplate the art. That is a luxury that has been missing for some time at MoMA.

Artist Choice
Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman, The Shape of Shape – MoMA – www.moma.org MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. COURTESY OF MOMA

MoMA since its inception erred on the side of believing that art history developed as a recognizable progression from one artistic movement and style to another. Impressionism was followed by Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and so on and so forth. Recent art critical thought and curatorial practice has exploded this notion of art history as antiquated. Recently Yale University canceled a popular art history survey course for a number of reasons. The course focused on artworks that were considered as too predominantly male, and not diverse. The course was criticized because it hewed to these very rigid notions about what makes art worthy of being including in its history. They are right about all that.

But great art does speak to us. Important artworks do tell us a story – about the painters, about questions and concerns posed and/or addressed in their work (some of them artistic, some of them cultural, some of them even political) and about the artists and their times. However, the story they tell should be not be limited to white male artists or only devoted to the male gaze – there is a larger, more inclusive story that has always been there – it just hasn’t always been told.

All of which is to say that MoMA has recommitted to telling the story of Art as it was made, historically, in a way that broadens our knowledge, challenge us and that continues to life our spirits.

Welcome to the new MoMA—which is like the old MoMA in all the right ways, improved and enlarged not only in its physical space but in its breadth of vision.

MoMA is now closed for the safety of its employees and its visitors. It will be there in all its renewed splendor when we are allowed to social again. In the meantime, MoMA on its website is offering tons of free classes, home art projects for families, resources for teaching and learning about art online, and they are promoting #museumathome for more activities. They also have 84,000 artworks viewable online. Even from home one can enjoy MoMA at its best.

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My Cousin Mike: Michael Sherwood 1923-2018

My Cousin Mike: Michael Sherwood 1923-2018

April 8, 2018

By Tom Teicholz

My father’s cousin Michael Sherwood, 95, — died this week. He was probably the last person who knew my father in Poland and knew of their life then. Here is the eulogy I wrote to be read at his funeral (which I was sorry that I could not attend).

I would like to say a final goodbye to Mike – Misha- born Meyer Teichholz in Tarnopol, Poland. Mike who chose the name Sherwood, because Teichholz means Pond Wood and that made him think of Robin Hood’s Sherwood forest
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My first memory of Mike is at the swimming pool of the Paris Hotel on 97Th street and West End Avenue. I must have been four years old and he was splashing with me in the swimming pool. My father, Bruce, or Bronek as Mike called him, was there too, sitting by the side of the pool. I also remember Mike swimming with me in the Swimming pool of the Hudson Hotel on West 57th Street, at the time a Vic Tanny’s Health Club where my father was a member. Once again Mike was watching me swim and playing with me in the pool. It would be years before I learned that my father didn’t know how to swim, and brought Mike who did, to swim with me – rather than tell me.

I mention this because although my father and Mike were cousins, they were nothing alike — they shared a grandfather Meyer whom Mike was named after. My grandfather Isaac and Mike’s father Henrik were brothers. But Isaac lived in Lvov and Henryk in Tarnopol. It’s not really that my father and Mike were nothing alike, it’s just that they were very different. They both shared tremendous stamina, and tremendous energy. Mike referred to this as the Teichholz in us.

My father was button-upped, proper, religious if not observant, tight-lipped, soft-spoken, a man of few words, very organized, very business-minded and success-oriented. Mike was none of these: He was effusive, emotional, opinionated, he spoke at length, at great volume, often with no filter, he was inappropriate, invasive, and profane. He kissed and hugged. He called me, “Tommy, Baby.” He was not a businessman. He was a mess – a wild shock of hair, T-shirts,, a mess of papers, photos, books, computers and cellphones that never worked properly. He was a very Jewishy atheist. And I loved all of it.

It was really after my father died that Mike and I became so close. He told me that, as he was what he called a “double survivor,” a survivor of both the Holocaust and the Soviet gulag, he wanted to write his memoirs and asked for my help. It was a great pleasure for me to work with Mike, editing his story which he wrote himself, helping him publish it and deliver it to Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Library and New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. He called his memoir “Odyssey” (it’s available from Lulu.com) – and I have to say, it’s a must read.

In his book, Mike details his childhood in Tarnopol, the 1939 Soviet occupation of Poland, after which Mike joined the Komsomol, the Communist youth party; and, after the Germans invaded, he joined the Red Army of the Soviet Union. Mike was at Stalingrad, shortly after which the Soviets arrested him for the crime of being a Jew and sent him to the Siberian Gulag. Amazingly, the Soviets eventually released him and he was able to make his way to Israel, where he met Muriel before coming to New York.

However, what makes Mike’s memoir unique and like no other Holocaust memoir I’ve ever read, is that his account of his Odyssey, is all about SEX. The Book opens with his first memory: the plump behind of his family’s housekeeper bouncing down the street in front of him; and continues with descriptions of his sexual adventures while bombs are falling, in hospitals during the war, in the Soviet Gulag – in prison he was finding female convicts or doctors to have sex with, and his adventures continued after the war, in Israel and in the Army there. I mention this because what comes through loud and clear is the essential truth that the LIFEFORCE WAS SO STRONG IN MIKE.

He was engaged with politics in all its dimensions. When I’d visit him, the TV was often on and Mike was often in dialogue with the News. He watched RT the Russian news service (and even had crushes on the news presenters). He was a great reader. There was no greater expert on Russian literature. While he still could, he read and re-read many of the great classics of 20th Century Russian literature. We discussed Vassily Grossman, and Sokholov’s ‘Quiet Flows the Don,” and writers like Sorokin and Bakunin. Mike had opinions about all of them.

Was he crazy? Maybe a little. Was his wife, Muriel, a saint? No question. But he was life itself, effusive and messy, chaotic, loving, tender, intimate, and at times vulgar and obscene. He loved to complain in the most loving way. He was so happy and excited when his brother Fedor was allowed to visit him in the US. He loved his trips to Texas, and driving around there. He loved having Emily around and living with him. He loved having Dory there and he loved when Rochelle came over. And he loved complaining about them. He was so proud of them, and of his grandchildren, he bragged even while he complained. He loved his coffee and his pastries. You could not leave his home without having some of both. He didn’t filter his comments. It was all part of the stream of his life.

Mike was my connection to the Teicholz lifeforce. We shared a passion for our family history and for gathering in Teicholzs wherever and whenever we could – he would have me check out possible Teichholzs in San Francisco, and we connected to Belgian Teichholzs in Israel. He gave me the conviction, if I did not fully believe it before, of the uniqueness and specialness of being Teicholz. But mostly, he gave me love. And there was nothing about Mike that I did not come to love. And I did love him so.

The last time I saw Mike several months ago, he told me that he’d had enough. His legs were no longer working properly. He couldn’t swim (he’d almost drowned in a pool in Brooklyn). He told me that at 95, he was finally losing interest in Sex. And of course, he told me: That until 94, he was still interested, still had girlfriends (in their 70s). But no more. He was done. I tried to tell him he might feel different at 100 – and to wait and see what developed. I told him ‘Biz Hundredt and Tvanzig’ To 120 – He laughed.

That, Mike said, was too much. Even for him.


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