Chicago

Chicago Opera Theater, Everest/Aleko

Music by Joby Talbot. Libretto by Gene Scheer. November 16-17, 2019.

Climbing Everest is easy. It’s coming down that’s the hard part. Or so we would be led to believe by Everest, a one-act operatic retelling of the May 1996 Mount Everest Disaster, in which eight climbers died after being hit with a freak storm during their descent from the peak. Composer Joby Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer’s work provides the material for a deeply emotionally felt account of the tragedy, which Music Director Lidiya Yankovskaya and the Chicago Opera Theater (COT) did not fail to deliver.

Under the musical direction of Yankovskaya, the COT has made a name for itself as one of the foremost national champions of new opera, with last season’s critically acclaimed Moby Dick establishing the company as a major player in this role. The trend continues with Everest, in which a brilliant score, captivating performances from the soloists, and colorful and confident playing and singing from the orchestra and 140-member Apollo Chorus combined to produce a stunning artistic achievement.

The opera zeros in on the stories of three mountaineers as their attempt to climb Everest (minimalistically and effectively represented by a series of ladders and suspended platforms) becomes fatal as a result of the storm and the climbers’ poor decision to continue climbing a full two hours after the appointed descent time of 2:00 P.M. As the expedition spirals into chaos, members of the mountaineers’ families emerge on stage for conversations with the beleaguered climbers. These conversations are both real and imagined: Beck Weathers (Aleksey Bogdanov) hallucinates speaking with his young daughter (Anna Lorenzo) back home in Texas, and expedition leader Rob Hall (Andrew Bidlack) is patched through by the crew at base camp for a possibly final conversation with his pregnant wife (Zoie Reams) in New Zealand. By the end of the opera, Rob Hall and climber Doug Hansen (Zachary Nelson) are dead of hypothermia, while Beck Weathers manages to make it back to Base Camp, critically frostbitten but alive. Not one’s usual operatic fare in terms of plot, but nonetheless (or perhaps precisely because of its eschewing the melodrama and cartoonish villains more familiar to the genre), the narrative comes across as entirely compelling.

The brightest star of the production was Talbot’s music, which is deeply creative and often intensely moving. His score contains much that is thoroughly tonal and melodic, but Talbot also mines the orchestra for non-melodic “effects,” like the sliding violins, trilling piccolo, thrumming bass clarinet, and pulsating tom-toms evoking the howling winds and shifting ice of the Everest summit. Yankovskaya made the most of Talbot’s work, allowing the colors of the choral and orchestral writing to shine through, while ensuring that the soloists were never overpowered by the sometimes-copious forces arrayed against them. Perhaps there’s more going on here than simply successful conducting—in this opera especially it seems important that the individual human voice is not drowned out, even in the face of death on the impersonal slopes of the Himalayas.

Scheer has refreshing ideas about what a modern libretto can be: all of the characters speak in the language of everyday conversation (when the house lights came back up, my friend turned to me with a shocked expression and said “they used ‘fuck’ in an opera!”). The chorus was more of a mixed bag. They were at their most effective when Scheer allowed them to participate directly in the action of the plot, counting down the minutes until sunset, or speaking directly to the soloists in the fashion of Ancient Greek tragedy. In an opera essentially about the inner emotional worlds of three men in mortal danger, the chorus give the soloists opportunities to answer questions like “Were you scared?” providing an additional and meaningful look into the climbers’ psyches. The chorus was less well-used when they soliloquized in a more high-flown and philosophical lexicon which felt largely out of place amid the generally conversational tone of the libretto. Their pontifications were all the more unnecessary because the libretto demonstrated a real ability to deal with serious issues precisely without waxing overly philosophical. One of the best dramatic moments in the opera was when Beck Weathers sang, in common parlance, about the crushing depression he faced at home, and how only in climbing mountains could he find relief. Sheer deserves credit for recognizing that no grand verbiage is necessary for serious drama or depth. The extremity of the setting, and the mountaineers desperate will to live (captured by Sheer thanks in part, no doubt, to his forty hours of interviews with those associated with the tragedy) do all the work necessary to make Everest the stuff of intense theater.

Welcoming two of the three protagonists to the ranks of the Everest dead at the conclusion of the opera, the chorus sings, “Since 1922, our dreams have been woven from elegies,” a reference to the first abortive attempt by a British-led expedition to climb Everest. Talbot and Sheer’s work, by turns tragic, hopeful, and elegiac, is a deeply thought-out contribution to these dreams.

Aleko, written in two weeks by a nineteen-year-old Rachmaninoff as his final composition exam at the Moscow Conservatory, certainly had a tough act to follow. Despite able performances from the cast and the A&A Ballet, the traditional Romanticism of Rachmaninoff’s score felt more than a little anticlimactic after the exhilarating freshness of Everest. Nonetheless, there were some high points: the duet between Zemfira (Michelle Johnson) and her nameless lover (Andrew Bidlack) contained the most beautiful music of the opera, the hulking Aleko (Alexey Bogdanov) presented an easily loathable villain, and lush passages in the strings throughout the work revealed the man who would soon begin writing his great piano concertos and symphonies. And, if nothing else, COT and Lidiya Yankovskaya deserve credit for bringing a new work to the Chicago stage—though it was written more than a century ago, the work has never before been performed in this city.

COT returns to the stage at the Studebaker Theater in February with the world premiere of Dan Shore’s Freedom Ride, a COT commission.

Andrew J. Diamond, Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City.

University of California Press, 2020. 432pp. $29.95.

Reviewed by Bo McMillan

It is with apt timing that Andrew J. Diamond’ s Chicago on the Make arrives, given how Chicago has lingered in recent popular discussion as the broken mirror from which New York and L.A. draw glamorous contrast, or as a focal point which our current president sees himself as an impassioned savior ﬁghting back a ﬁctitious national crime wave. (Violent crime has plummeted at the national level since the 1990s, despite a few recent upticks of violent crime in Chicago and other cities.) From Spike Lee’ s contentious Chi-Raq (2015) or the fetishized postindustrial white victimhood of Shameless (2011– ), to the oft-hyperbolized but still problematic murder rate that editorial ofﬁces love to sporadically pump when all other wells run dry (New York had about three times as many annual murders during the 1990s), Chicago seldom invites anything more substantial than bluster or shock-value extraction from popular pundits and misconstrued attentions from audiences without Chicago ties. (Lena Waithe’ s The Chi [2018– ] showed promise, however, and I am eagerly waiting for more.) Yes, Chicago is broken, and in a singular way. But when it comes to this city, which once competed with and even edged out New York for the national spotlight as the nation crossed into the threshold of the 20th century, too many have learned to fetishize the “what ” while frequently ignoring or egregiously simplifying the very important questions of the “why ” and “how. ”

Diamond’ s book, for anyone looking to actually understand the “how ” and “why ” of what has been called the most American of cities, does both of these concepts laudable justice. Arguing at its core that the history of modern Chicago singularly impacted—and perhaps even gave rise to—the implementation of neoliberal policies in the US, especially in its cities, Chicago on the Make combines a “play the hits ” version of Chicago’s history with refreshingly new analysis and insight crucial to scholars interested in urban studies and in the real national signiﬁcance of Chicago.

While Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor’ s American Pharaoh remains the standard for information on Mayor Richard J. Daley (1955–1976); Upton Sinclair’ s The Jungle stays the luridly entrancing read about Chicago’ s industrial past; and Natalie Y. Moore’ s The South Side joins Arnold R. Hirsch’ s Making the Second Ghetto among the key sources for exploring Chicago’ s racial divides (Eve Ewing’ s Ghosts in the Schoolyard [2018] is another recent addition to that canon), the beneﬁt of Chicago on the Make is that it combines concise versions of these and other key aspects of Chicago’ s history into a greater historical narrative that traces them, in mosaic fashion, to the fragmented Chicago of today. As Diamond writes in the sprawling thesis:

Where this new history of Chicago diverges from most political histories of the American city in the twentieth century is in its effort to view the dynamics of inequality and demobilization as manifestations of a process of neoliberalization, which in the antidemocratic, political-machine context of Chicago advanced somewhat more rapidly and more aggressively than it did elsewhere. The term neoliberalization is invoked not merely to connote the implementation of a package of economic-minded policies that had inadvertent social and political consequences—such policies were in fact implemented and they did have important social and political consequences, especially in the early 1990s under Richard M. Daley. A more important dimension of the story of neoliberalizing being told here involves revealing how market values and economizing logics penetrated into the city’ s political institutions and beyond them into its broader political culture.

The claim is as massive as its length implies, but simpler than the jargon makes it seem. The term “neoliberalization ” tends to be capacious in its usage, but essentially Diamond’ s story tells as follows: 1) that the Chicago political machine’ s abuse of public power for patronage gain ensured political “quiescence ” and “demobilization ” at the local grassroots level, and so served as a method of increasingly turning city services and funds over to the whims of private and supposedly “economically minded ” interests, a method that culminated in the virtual partnership between Richard J. Daley’ s uber-mayoralty and downtown business in the mid-1950s; and 2) that this political foreground enabled his son Richard M. Daley to adapt the utterly deregulatory, free-market type of neoliberal practices, fully inaugurated by Ronald Reagan in the 80s, during his mayoralty from 1989–2011. To put it in Diamond’ s words: “While scholars like David Harvey have viewed the context of the mid-1970s as pivotal to the neoliberal turn, this history of Chicago views neoliberalization as a process that unraveled gradually and unevenly over much of the twentieth century. ” As a primogenitor, then, Chicago is an important place to look while seeking to better understand the emergence of American neoliberalism, as well as the consequences that neoliberalized municipal, state, and federal governments have since created and faced.

Whether or not Diamond manages to entirely defend that claim is subject to debate, especially when it comes to the primacy of Chicago’ s placement in his historical arc of American neoliberalism. True, the design of Chicago’ s city plans by business leaders, the privatization of its parking meters and garages, and its conversion of public schools into charter campuses are hallmarks of municipal neoliberalization, but they are not unique to Chicago—a fact which Diamond asserts time and time again: “in this, Chicago was and still is a lot like many other American cities. ” What is most important in his analysis, rather than an examination of the effects of neoliberalization itself, as the long thesis seems to suggest, is his focus on how Chicago’ s perfected machine politics brought neoliberalization to its most dramatic ends. After all, economizing logic can work to a city’ s social beneﬁt if it indeed takes into consideration the city and all of the people who comprise it as investors and beneﬁciaries—for instance, as Patrick Sharkey maps in his book Uneasy Peace (2018), the funding of community organizations proves a far more economical and socially beneﬁcial means of reducing urban crime than arrests and imprisonment. But in Chicago, as Diamond demonstrates, unchecked machine politics disrupted the nature of that balance and then magniﬁed the break, producing solutions entrenched in a skewed system of values that took machine and business interests as the equivalent of city interests—not “economic-minded ” as in “economized, ” but “economic-minded ” as in “for the sake of my own ﬁnancial well-being. ” Civil servants, empowered by the singular and virtual perpetuity of Chicago’ s Democratic Party, became self-servants in a way that continues to mark itself as distinct via its outright ﬂagrancy (e.g., in 2019 the sprawling trash ﬁre that has been Ed Burke’ s indictment), though the current national regime is doing its best to close that gap. Because of this, the book feels like more of an indictment of cronyism and the political-machine system perfected in Chicago than a critique of neoliberalization in itself.

No one seems to come out unscathed from Diamond’ s historical overview, and ﬁnishing the book, regardless of political orientation or preference, leaves one with the feeling of having just unfurled a scroll coated in an uncomfortable ﬁlm of grease. Though the jarringly grand workings of Democratic handouts and patronage projects under the ﬁrst Daley seem to get the most extensive lip service in the book, lengthy sections are devoted to more recent political events that don’ t have the comfort of residing in a dismissible past, and include among them extended discussions of how the kowtowing of mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel to business interests has left the city in a ﬁnancial malaise. Other than serving as a means to track “neoliberal ” consequences from the time of Richard J. Daley straight to contemporary Chicago, Emanuel strikes another keynote in Diamond’ s book by serving as an anchor to discuss the uncomfortable business of Chicago politics and its relation to the rise of Barack Obama, a difﬁcult task that the author handles with fairness and grace. Diamond discusses the beneﬁts accrued almost entirely by business interests and white, upper- and middle-class residents while Richard M. Daley deployed Reaganite neoliberal policy to save the city from economic depression in the wake of deindustrialization: “In view of all the links between Daley’ s City Hall and Obama’ s White House, it would be hard to argue that the political sensibilities that suffused the Chicago success story of the 1990s and the ﬁrst decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century did not shape the Obama administration in signiﬁcant ways. ” Michael Eric Dyson’ s work The Black Presidency hammers home the parallels. For a quick and nonencompassing survey, during the Obama presidency median Black household income dropped by 11.1 percent (double the rate of median white household income) while racial wealth disparities nearly doubled—with median white household wealth (around $110,000) settling at twenty-two times that of the median Black household (just under $5,000).

Obama grew within the Chicago political machine and it suffused much of his administration: from Emanuel to William Daley (Richard M. Daley’ s younger brother, who took over as White House Chief of Staff following Emanuel’ s departure and recently made a losing bid in the Chicago mayoral election), David Axelrod (advisor and campaign strategist to both Daley and Obama), Valerie Jarrett (Richard M. Daley’ s former chief of staff, and Obama advisor), and even Michelle Obama (a former assistant to Richard M. Daley and a Chicago planning ofﬁcial). This, as Diamond notes, does not discount the enormous strides, both political and symbolic, made by Barack and Michelle Obama, but calls into question a narrative of that moment that can sometimes fall into a partisanship-inclined form of uncritical hagiography, one that bears dangerous political implications for Chicago politics and the politics of the nation. Diamond grants the fact that for Obama to have opposed the Chicago Democratic Party would have been “political suicide, ” and repeats the common refrain of how Obama’ s personal beliefs stood opposed to many machine efforts. These necessary reminders of how politics are a dance of compromise also underline the fact that it is and has been a dance in which Obama and other African American political ﬁgures hold an incredibly fraught position because of their race, one which often leaves them vulnerable to hard concessions.

Diamond also draws a distinction between Obama and other Black political machine ﬁgures in Chicago who Diamond holds more closely complicit in the city’ s broken neoliberalized history. Obama’ s tale, as Diamond writes it, is instead more closely related to the story of Harold Washington, who, in Diamond’ s book (as with many Chicago histories), is the one person who rises from the muck unsullied due to his hard, anti-machine campaign:

Black mayors had headed major American cities since 1973, when Tom Bradley was elected in Los Angeles, Coleman Young in Detroit, and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, but this was Chicago—the city with the second largest black population in the United States, where the saga of black struggle was particularly well known. Moreover, it was an event of great signiﬁcance for the black diaspora—of lesser magnitude, of course, but not unlike the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008. Indeed, Washington’ s election was made possible by a breathtaking show of black solidarity and, as such, was a source of inspiration for blacks all over the world.

Hope, a parallel to that inspiration, is what accompanied and ﬂowed from a political ﬁgure who once doxed alderman Eugene Sawyer for caving to machine interests across the color line following Washington’ s death, as captured in Obama’ s book Dreams from My Father. Yet, the recent ﬁasco of choosing a location and setting a community beneﬁts agreement for the Obama Presidential Center is one example of how the machine has since taken its pound of ﬂesh from Obama’ s legacy.

In a way that has become sadly daring as of late, Diamond collapses illusorily neat equations of partisanship and sociopolitical values by resurfacing an oft-elided narrative that rubs against the grain of neat partisan indexing. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet ”—a cash-strapped public education system, police corruption, segregation, and crony contracts engineered by any party, as Diamond shows, would still reek of shit. It’ s a jarring and necessary reminder for everyone: good politics is not just party politics. And, to invoke The Jungle, it is rough, but imperative, to realize how the sausage of policy and political legacies gets made.

While neoliberalization is the buzzy framework through which Diamond outlines this point, his focus on the function of Chicago’ s machine politics forms the nexus of this historical case study into why and how “economic-mindedness ” can fail municipal governments—especially those singularly corrupted by an unchecked political juggernaut—and, from there, carry national implications, as such political machinery spreads from city to city and even bubbles up to the federal level. Remember, à la Diamond, Chicago “was and still is a lot like many other American cities, ” and it in fact may be the most American of cities. Du Bois captured it in his darkly satirical take on the political machines of 1920s Chicago in his novel Dark Princess, and it is as true now as it was then: “There was war in Chicago—silent, bitter war. It was part of the war throughout the whole nation… ”

This Review is in Chicago Review 62.4-63.1/2

Manual Cinema, No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks

Reviewed by Marissa Fenley

Written by Crescendo Literary (Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall). Music composed by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods. Directed by Sarah Fornace. Premiered in Chicago, November, 2017.

The Chicago-based performance collective and production company Manual Cinema ampliﬁes the theatricality of attending the cinema by creating “live ﬁlms ” onstage with use of overhead projectors, live-feed videos, hand-cut puppets, silhouetted actors, and original live musical scores. While the audience watches Manual Cinema’ s puppeteers, actors, and musicians create the various layers of their piece, the resulting images of their carefully choreographed shadow puppetry are displayed on multiple screens above them. The puppet company typically tells stories without spoken dialogue, where narrative context either appears in written form on screen or in accompanying lyrics. The novelty of their innovative theater is thus met by nostalgia for older media, such as the familiar classroom standby, the overhead projector, or the classic aesthetics of silent ﬁlm. In showing both the process of manually creating their “cinema ” and their polished multimedia scenes, Manual Cinema replicates a paradox of our contemporary media world. They deliver the seamlessness of popular cinema and TV, where the coherent, pixilated aesthetic of the screen is expected to present polished and palatable narratives, while also ripping open those seams, an aesthetic practice long familiar to the avant-garde. The audiences of Manual Cinema can delight in a tightly crafted narrative without the expectation of being fully absorbed by its ﬁction.

The techniques long associated with method acting in both theater and ﬁlm—in other words, the eruption of organic and spontaneous feeling that paradoxically comes from years of training and craft—is no longer located in the body of the actors, but in a series of magically coordinated technical elements: music, silhouettes, light, transparencies, and spoken, sung, and recorded text. The serendipity produced by seeing these elements conspire together is, like traditional approaches to acting, a product of masterful technique: the diligent timing and dexterity of the puppeteers, their well-crafted puppets, and the ingenuity of the musicians. Yet, by locating the illusion of theatrical invention outside the athleticism of the actors’ emotional recall and mimetic skill, Manual Cinema instead allows its audience to enjoy the pleasure of narrative while displacing the secret magic of their theater to the process of creating the world where that narrative lives as opposed to the believability of its players. Manual Cinema neither sanctimoniously preserves the aura of authenticity or “liveness ” traditionally attributed to the theater nor do they replicate the seductive veneer of the screen. Instead they offer their paper-cutout puppets and live-action silhouettes as a shadow medium that intercedes between the two: that which gives us both the pleasures of the crafted and the organic without placing these categories in false opposition. Manual Cinema’ s use of the incredibly malleable medium of shadow puppetry demonstrates how the use of an eclectic and diverse media landscape need not impede a practice of straightforward storytelling.

Manual Cinema’ s recent production No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks draws heavily on untheatrical material. The piece was commissioned by the Poetry Foundation for the Brooks Centenary and written by Crescendo Literary, a collaborative partnership between poets and educators Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall.† In fact, the name Crescendo comes directly from a Brooks poem, and their mission, “to create opportunities for artists to think meaningfully about what it is to be in community, ” is inspired by her legacy. No Blue Memories not only turns Brooks’ s poetic language into visual, scored tableaus; it reconstructs the story of her life from archival material housed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In many ways, this is a product of Ewing and Marshall’ s training; while intimately familiar with poetry, and Brooks’ s poetry especially, Ewing in particular also has a background in social science work and archival research. In fact, this show draws not only from the archives at UIUC, but Ewing’ s undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, where further materials on Brooks are held. Yet, the passive act of letter writing, the reserved quietness of Brooks’ s personality, and the abstract quality of poetic language are difﬁcult to translate into theatrical action.

While No Blue Memories marks Ewing and Marshall’ s playwriting debut, through their collaboration with Manual Cinema they turned a scholarly endeavor into a dynamic and animated production that takes on characteristics of a live concert or music video—mediums far aﬁeld from what one expects of the pedagogical and readerly exercise undertaken in this piece. While Ewing and Marshall’ s work is largely text-based, Manual Cinema rarely uses text in their pieces, but rather uses almost exclusively visuals and sound to tell a story. And yet, Manual Cinema’ s visual and sonic medium has the unique ability to tap into formal features of pop culture that contain surprising opportunities for the poetic and pedagogical project of Ewing and Marshall’ s script. Their pieces not only deploy visual representations of rhythmic forms reminiscent of music videos, but in disclosing the makings of each performance, their techniques are also resonant with those of reality TV—a form that capitalizes on public exposure and scandal, moments where audiences are able to glimpse what goes on “behind the scenes ” of celebrity performances. No Blue Memories also used a sonic landscape to capture the different eras of Brooks’ s life. For example, the play takes its title from a 1948 Ella Fitzgerald song, “My Happiness, ” and Jamila and Ayanna Woods, who composed the show’ s score, deployed a wide variety of musical styles to mark the ways in which music differently shaped Brooks as a poet, educator, and Black woman.

No Blue Memories gives us intimate glimpses into the making of Gwendolyn Brooks—as poet and persona—but also the making of Gwendolyn Brooks the shadow puppet character—as a performative and academic reconstruction. In one scene we see a silhouette of Brooks talking into a phone against the backdrop of her book-lined living room. This scene alternates with a silhouette of her daughter, similarly situated against a projected backdrop of her own room, talking on the other line. Brooks asks her daughter to read back a letter Brooks has just dictated to her. (The letter is one of the documents uncovered by Ewing and Marshall in the archives.) Brooks has written to the publishers anthologizing her poems insisting that they include a broader spectrum of her work. As her daughter reads the letter back to her, Brooks insists that the words appear within their proper format. Her daughter begrudgingly conﬁrms that she has, indeed, typed them out correctly; she narrates the various emphases and stylistic ﬂourishes of Brooks’ s pen, from underlining to repetition to capitalization. In this way, one can see the archival process behind the development of the show: Brooks’ s letters, speeches, and poems appear within the narrative as textual artifacts. In fact, Ewing and Marshall were interested not just in individual letters but the way that letters as a form could represent different aspects of Brooks’ s teaching, craft, and legacy. They turn these static historical documents into dynamic theatrical events without erasing the evidence of the academic project behind their resuscitation.

Brooks was a poet writing out of two competing literary traditions: modernism and the Black Arts Movement, the former known for its formal experimentation and the latter marked by free verse and social critique. Much like Brooks’ s own divided poetic lineage, Manual Cinema’ s “live ﬁlms ” dance between a similar split in aesthetic tradition. In No Blue Memories, Manual Cinema stays close to a biographical and socially inﬂected portrait of Brooks. They present her poems predominantly as artifacts that contain social observations of Chicago’ s South Side and Brooks as an ethnographer of her environment. When reciting “We Real Cool, ” Manual Cinema represents the seven pool players at the Golden Shovel described in the poem. On one slide, Brooks is shown hesitantly peeking into the bar as another projector opens on close-ups of the pool players’ faces, their pool cues, and a bird’ s-eye view of the pool table as the balls break. We are looking at the poem’ s content through the eyes of Brooks as an observer. However, once soul singer Jamila Woods comes center stage beneath the screen and sings an R&B rendition of Brooks’ s poem, we see a puppet Brooks dancing in the Golden Shovel beside the pool players. The music shifts the poem’ s function from documentary form to an account of Brooks’ s own interior experience. Woods becomes the voice of the poem, adopting the position of outside observer, while Brooks becomes the poem’ s subject. Manual Cinema powerfully deploys the different registers of their hybrid medium to recreate Brooks’ s own struggle over where to locate identity in poetry. Brooks’ s poetry complicates the division between aesthetic experience and poetic content. She is concerned both with how to document the speciﬁc conditions of Black urban life in Chicago and how to represent Black identity and the experience of Blackness more broadly. In slipping between different media, thus repositioning subjects inside and outside the frame of the screen, Manual Cinema is able to represent the uneasy relationships between the personal and the social, the public and the private, the interior and the exterior.

The hybridity of Manual Cinema’ s “live ﬁlms ” is far more capacious than this self-description suggests. No Blue Memories does not simply combine live performance and ﬁlm; it is also a work of archival research, poetry, music, dance, and, of course, puppetry. While breaking down traditional boundaries between media is a now familiar practice within experimental performance and the visual arts, Manual Cinema’ s ability to retain divisions between the media they use—as their narratives visibly jump from projector to live actors, to screen, to live musical performances—is essential to their unique aesthetic practice. They incorporate the transformations these narratives undergo as they move between media as integral components of the narratives themselves. It is this feature of their practice that allows Manual Cinema to accomplish several intersecting aesthetic goals: they replicate poetic form, offer social critique, reanimate biographical history, and deliver both the narrative pleasure of a carefully unfolding story and the synesthetic exhilaration of a multimedia performance.

This Review is in Chicago Review 62.4-63.1/2

Big Camera/Little Camera

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, February 23 – May 5, 2019

Reviewed by Luke A. Fidler

Laurie Simmons, Brothers/Horizon, 1979. Cibachrome; 5 ¼ x 7 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, © Laurie Simmons.

In the original ending of the classic film noir Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), the femme fatale figure opens a box containing some unspecified nuclear material. The protagonists, played by Maxine Cooper and Ralph Meeker, stagger through surf and sand as the Malibu house behind them burns. Flashes of light irradiate the night in an uncanny scene that reads as a deliberate reference to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the impending threat of nuclear disaster. The meaning of the “cleansing, combustible element,” as critic Alain Silver put it, is drawn out in the film’s “appropriately hellish” lighting.[1] By the eighties, however, such earnest juxtapositions of war and American domesticity looked dated. In the wake of works like Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, the definitive exemplar of this strategy, artists tried to find new ways to represent the relationship between bourgeois America and manmade catastrophe.

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent comprehensive retrospective of photographer Laurie Simmons, Big Camera/Little Camera, presents an artist who has consistently returned to similar themes over the decades. Beginning with Simmons’s earliest small-scale photos and moving chronologically through her oeuvre, the show includes many of her most famous works, as well as judicious samples of her career’s major phases. It concludes with some recent projects, showing how she has developed, refined, and occasionally got bogged down in a handful of key themes. Long a sharp-eyed critic of fifties visual culture, she deals with big social issues through the visual language of the everyday (the language, that is, of a very historically particular, American middle-class “everyday”).

For example, Simmons yokes atomic disaster to everyday life in a telling print from her Tourism series that brings to mind the finale of Kiss Me Deadly. Tourism: Bikini Atoll (1984) shows four female figurines watching a nuclear test explosion. One leans back in surprise while her companions press eagerly forward, the leftmost figure tossing her ponytail with such eagerness that it’s difficult to read anything like horror or recoil. These are middle-class Americans enjoying the spectacle of imperial violence. But, especially when read in light of the works arrayed in the retrospective, they have none of Rosler’s polemical bite. For Simmons it’s not really a fundamental problem that Americans treat disasters in foreign places like Bikini Atoll or large-scale violence against foreign populations as spectacular tourist treats; the artist, mother of Lena Dunham, turns out to traffic in some of the same problematic white feminism as her daughter and to embody a theatrical, bourgeois politics. Her camera celebrates the gaze of white, middle-class women who suffered patriarchal repression and the scopophilic male gaze, to be sure, but who also dependably endorsed American exceptionalism and played up racial hierarchies ad nauseam.[2] If these issues show through most clearly in her portrayal of women from the immediate postwar period, they also crop up in her recent work where the few women of color inevitably appear as sexualized objects, props for a clumsy critique of the pornography industry.

Simmons is best known today for her pictures of animated objects. Beginning in the 1980s, she added legs and arms to houses, handbags, cameras, and guns, sometimes using elaborate costumes and props. The retrospective has a good sample of these works and, by placing them alongside her later works with dollhouses and ventriloquist dummies, the curators show how she developed strategies for exploring these odd human surrogates. Critics have read her interest in dolls and animated figures in light of the talking things that populated contemporary TV shows like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, but Simmons also gave her work a political slant.[3] “Conceptually, I loved the notion of ventriloquism,” she says, “men speaking through surrogate selves and not having to take responsibility for their thoughts or actions.”[4] In one of her oddest and most compelling series, she commissioned a dummy of herself and photographed it surrounded by male dolls. Does the artist seize the masculine power to speak without consequences for herself? Can a female dummy exercise that power with all the force of a male one?

Other works focus more explicitly on the middle-class home. The Underneath series (1998) inserts domestic scenes between the legs of anonymous women, all made with the glossy Cibachrome process that renders colors boldly garish. House Underneath (Standing) shows a woman lifting a white dress to reveal a single-family house replete with garage and an idyllic surround of grass and trees. The house sits on a slightly warped mirror, giving the viewer a voyeuristic glimpse up between the subject’s thighs. The photographs, rendering women as colossi, reference the ways that domestic mothers were vilified as well as worshipped in the forties and fifties. Philip Wylie’s widely read Generation of Vipers (1942) warned against “the destroying mother” who, among other things, dominated and softened husbands and sons.[5] Simmons’s work is a tongue-in-cheek response to this pervasive image, ironizing it by literally staging the massive mother.

But if Simmons acutely identifies and pictures the complex gender relations that governed bourgeois domesticity in the postwar period, pointing out just how strangely sinister that world really was, she looks less acutely at other issues. Her recent works look at Japanese cosplay culture and sex-doll technology in ways that can only be described as Orientalizing. The Love Doll (2009–11) features an elaborately posed Japanese sex doll customized by Simmons herself. “She is a peculiarly Asian fantasy, exquisite and insanely well sculpted,” says the photographer, who recalls that she visited Japan desperate “to bring something back that would change my work.” Where she once trained a critical eye on her own childhood, she now turns to essentialist, exoticizing clichés, raiding other cultures for inspiration. “I was very aware of her Japaneseness when I first got her. She seemed to spring from that culture so completely.”[6] This shallow engagement shows through in the pictures; Simmons herself seems to restage the blasé attitude with which toy American women regard the rest of the world in Tourism: Bikini Atoll. Ultimately, this retrospective demonstrates how an artist’s perspicuity in one area doesn’t always translate well, mirroring the ways that white feminists precisely dissected their own conditions of oppression while turning a blind eye to the logics of race and empire that sustained bourgeois domesticity.

Notes:
[1] Alain Silver, “Kiss Me Deadly Evidence of a Style,” Film Comment 11, no. 2 (April 1975): 24-30. Jean-Luc Godard’s most recent film (Le livre d’image, 2018) cuts the finale of Kiss Me Deadly together with footage from atomic explosions, making the allusion explicit.
[2] See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
[3] Kate Linker, Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying (New York: Aperture, 2005), 31.
[4] Ibid., 60.
[5] Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942).
[6] Quoted in Stephen Frailey, “Love Dolls Don’t Love You Back,” Document Journal, October 19, 2018, https://www.documentjournal.com/2018/10/love-dolls-dont-love-you-back/.

July 2019

West By Midwest

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, November 17 – January 27, 2019

Reviewed by Brandon Sward

Gladys Nilsson, The Big Green Man, 1972. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, gift of Dr. and Mrs. Peter W. Broido. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

West by Midwest at the Museum of Contemporary Arts circles around two ironies. First, many of the artists we’ve come to associate with California came from the Midwest. Second, many of the artists we’ve come to associate with the Midwest spent formative time in California. We learn, for example, that the “Chicago Imagists” Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Karl Wirsum moved to Sacramento in 1968, where they exhibited together at Adeliza McHugh’s Candy Store Gallery, which began selling art when McHugh couldn’t secure a food permit. We also hear of how Californian titan Ed Ruscha and his childhood friend took Route 66 from their hometown of Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956. West by Midwest is expansive in its scope, ranging from Senga Nengudi’s pantyhose sculptures to Andrea Bowers’s activist art to an entire room dedicated to Mike Kelley’s quasi-archeological stuffed animal installation Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991).

Edward Ruscha, Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, 1969. © Ed Ruscha Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Drawn in large part from the MCA’s collections, West by Midwest provides welcome respite from the blockbuster exhibitions that have become ever more common in the art world, as museums interpret each broken attendance record as a new challenge. The regional focus of West by Midwest has forced the MCA to move away from artists like John McCracken, whose impossibly smooth “finish fetish” planks are par for the course in showcases of mid-century Californian art. Nevertheless, the MCA continues to traffic in well-worn tropes, whether connecting Judy Chicago’s airbrush paintings to her time as an autobody student, or explaining Billy Al Bengston through surf and motorcycle culture. While these artists certainly had such experiences, their constant reference in discussions of Californian art reinforces stereotypes of the West Coast as the casual, anti-intellectual little brother of the serious, rarefied New York.

Judy Chicago, Sky Sun from the Flesh Gardens series, 1971. Courtesy the artist, Salon 94, New York, and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco © 2018 Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

But if West by Midwest fails to breathe new life in Californian art history, this is only because it has a bigger goal in mind. As the introductory text puts it: “Western art history is often viewed as a neat succession of individual artists and their singular masterpieces. This narrative runs parallel to the American story of westward expansion, propelled by the idea of individualism and independence.” The radicality of West by Midwest lies in how it refuses this conventional paradigm; by foregrounding the network, curators Charlotte Ickes and Michael Darling trouble the very notion of artistic “genius” upon which the museum is predicated. If the discipline of Western art history has more or less progressed from one great white man to the next, a focus instead on the networks out of which these artists arise suggests the idea of genius itself might be more a reflection of our presuppositions than an accurate depiction of historical reality.

Perhaps the most interesting question raised by West by Midwest, however, is how the similar geographical origins of these artists affected how they approached California, a topic the exhibition doesn’t fully explore. Although the show explores movement in both directions between California and the Midwest, the lion’s share of attention is devoted to the artists who left their small towns for Los Angeles, fascinated by its colors and light, as well as its culture and politics, fixations that surface in their work. Consider, for example, the light play in Chicago-born Melanie Schiff’s Spit Rainbow (2006), complete with backyard orange tree.

To speculate on some Midwestern “essence” becomes dicey rather quickly, of course, but it’s unavoidable in West by Midwest. We tend to think of the Midwest as the wholesome core of America, its breadbasket, its cornfields. We could easily imagine that such a vision of the Midwest could stifle the artist, drawn to the coasts as surely as iron filings to a magnet. One can acclimate but never truly shrug off the past: a permanent outsider, the quintessential artist. But if these outsiders were true artistic geniuses, there would be no need for them to uproot, at least insofar as we think of geniuses as self-sufficient, self-contained, self-reliant. The fact that these artists nevertheless felt the need to be around their kind shows that more is going on, that talent lies dormant without conditions in which it can flourish.

February 2018

John Singer Sargent & Chicago’s Gilded Age

The Art Institute of Chicago, July 1 – September 30, 2018

Reviewed by Luke A. Fidler

Although recent scholarship has uncovered new and interesting dimensions to John Singer Sargent’s art, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that, for all his prodigious talent, Sargent was never much more than a gun for hire. [1] He courted wealth and his services were, in return, widely courted. Although he painted some publicly minded murals and genuinely experimental street scenes, his reputation continues to rest on his portraits of aristocrats, tycoons, and the nouveau riche from Europe to the United States. This ill-timed show at the Art Institute, built around the faltering conceit that Sargent and Chicago mattered to each other, does nothing to shake the idea of the painter as Gilded Age apologist. Despite some intriguing pairings and a lucid, well-researched catalogue, it lurches from misstep to misstep.

Born into a wealthy American expatriate family, Sargent trained under the French specialist in high-society portraiture Charles Auguste Émile Durand (known familiarly as Carolus-Duran). He came to notice for his artful presentation of beauty, a French critic declaring in the early 1880s that “all pretty women dream…of being painted by him.” [2] This period is represented in the Art Institute’s exhibition by a full-length portrait of Louise Lefevre from 1882 which exemplifies some of Sargent’s unconventional strategies, not yet developed into a signature style. Loose brushwork suggests the walls and furnishings of a dark interior, contrasting powerfully with the delicate modeling of the subject’s hands and features; a virtuosic set of slashes and shadows highlight the sumptuous folds and fabric of Lefevre’s blue dress; the strong white light complemented by the gathered curtains curiously overshadows the subject’s face; the composition is radically asymmetric; and the reflective glass in the upper left hints at the influence of artists like Diego Velázquez who, more than anyone before Manet, made the painted canvas a machine for examining the philosophical dimensions of looking.

Nineteenth-century portraiture generally functioned as a conservative genre, not only in the sense that it flourished as a form of conspicuous consumption by bourgeois and aristocratic elites, but also in the way it relied on well-established visual codes of class and gender to portray sitters. But where his teacher followed the customary formulas of the day, the young Sargent didn’t. His full-length portrait of Virginie Avegno Gautreau, known provocatively as Madame X, caused a real stir for its transgression of social mores. (The shock didn’t last; when the Friends of American Art tried to buy the painting for the Art Institute of Chicago in 1913, its erotic frankness would have lost its frisson in a world of newly ordered gender relations, and its commitment to figuration would have looked passé in light of the gauntlet recently thrown down by the Cubists.) Four Venetian genre scenes on display, small studies that ably showcase the artist’s eye for color, underscore the fact that Sargent’s work from the early 1880s had started to rearrange a whole host of received conventions.

But the bulk of paintings and charcoals in the exhibition were made after this period, and they demonstrate how his ambitions shrank. A dour portrait of Philadelphia millionaire Peter Widener from 1902 shows none of Sargent’s earlier painterly verve or gender-bending iconography. The few loose, black brushmarks overlaying the coat of his seated portrait of John D. Rockefeller from 1917 look like the forlorn vestiges of a forgotten heterodoxy. While Gilded Age millionaires did often patronize experimental art—the president of the American Sugar Refinery was lending the latest Impressionist pieces from his collection to the National Academy even as he brutally crushed strikes at his company’s factories—the show makes it clear that Sargent’s work began to reflect a certain kind of conservative taste as well as the financial arrangements that made his career possible. [3] A lifelong friend of industrialists such as machinery tycoon Charles Deering, whose 1876 portrait is on view, Sargent painted in sympathy with capital.

This sympathy is displayed even more garishly in Sargent’s paintings that aren’t straightforward, commissioned portraits. A Chicago millionaire bought The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy, and it became the first of Sargent’s works to enter the collection of the Art Institute in 1914. A sterling example of the painter’s wet-in-wet technique, it shows the English artist Wilfrid de Glehn and his American wife Jane, also an accomplished painter. Jane daubs at her canvas while her mustachioed husband reclines, eyes closed. This is the very picture of indolence, of two Anglo-American expatriates living on unearned wealth (de Glehn was the son of the Prussian aristocrat Robert von Glehn), of art as a pleasant pastime ennobled by the social status of its practitioners and patrons. Charles Deering himself took time off from his business concerns to paint seriously, and the show’s climax comes with Sargent’s deceptively casual depiction of Deering at the lavish Florida estate where he wintered. The elderly industrialist reclines in a cane chair, surrounded by palms and bathed in sun. In her catalogue essay, the show’s curator Annelise Madsen notes that the portrait was “undertaken informally as a result of the enduring bonds of friendship” shared by painter and sitter, with Sargent stopping off at the estate for a time after filling a commission from Rockefeller. [4] In spite of its dearth of critical framing, this exhibition shows, damningly, how the artist’s cozy relationship with the Gilded Age elite determined not just what he painted but also how he painted.

John Singer Sargent, The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy (1907). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Madsen should at least be commended for not trying to shuffle Sargent’s sympathies out of view. If Chicago and Sargent really were connected during the Gilded Age, as the exhibition’s advertising copy proclaims, it could only be through the wants and wallets of the city’s superrich. (Much of the wall text quietly omits any mention of Chicago rather than risk straining the viewer’s credulity; Sargent only made two brief visits.) His collectors included Martin A. Ryerson, son of a lumber baron and famously the richest man in Chicago, and Charles Hutchinson, who notoriously cornered the market in wheat in 1888 while serving as the Art Institute’s president. These patrons wanted Sargent’s paintings both as pawns in their game of civic humanism, buying up art to display to Midwestern audiences in dire need of aesthetic education, and as testaments to their elevated status. The catalogue, which I suspect will prove indispensable to future analyses of fin-de-siècle art’s complicity with capital, carefully chronicles the ways these elite figures supported Sargent and put his paintings to use.

Of course, few issues are more timely than the relationship between art and capital, except perhaps the relationship between money and power. As the American political scene witnesses a retrenchment of anti-labor laws, soaring inequality, and the stunning convergence of business interests with elected office, it’s vital to revisit the legacy of the last Gilded Age when, as Alan Trachtenberg describes in a classic study, “an emergent form of ownership,” defined by power “distributed inwardly along hierarchical lines and outwardly in new social configurations and cultural perspectives,” spun society on its axis. [5] Chicago, roiled by police violence and corporate corruption, perfectly illustrated these new distributions of power and Sargent’s patrons like Deering, Hutchinson, and Ryerson perfectly illustrated these new kinds of owners. None of this social context appears in the exhibition, leaving attentive viewers to conclude that Sargent’s artworks probably functioned as prostheses of Chicago’s business elite but equipping them with no tools to make sense of what this might have meant. You’d be forgiven for leaving with a decidedly rosy image of the Gilded Age, a time of ruffles and ironic sailor hats.

A close reading of the Art Institute’s advertising campaign and ticketing policies for the show demonstrates that the museum means to celebrate this reading of art as luxury good, construing Sargent’s paintings as desirable commodities first and transparent visions of aristocratic life second. The show’s advertising apparatus is shockingly amenable to the forms of the ideology critique advanced by postwar theorists like Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, and Raymond Williams, so much so that baffled friends texted me photographs of promotional posters for weeks, together with snippets from Mythologies. [6] Store windows on Michigan Avenue currently feature Sargent-inspired displays, from Bloomingdale’s to the Marriott to AT&T, with Macy’s perhaps the most outstanding offender. A pop-up bar at the Chicago Athletic Association featured a special event for pet owners: “Commissioned paintings during the Gilded Age weren’t always of moguls and divas, but also of beagles and dachshunds,” crowed the Facebook description, inviting the public to register by providing a pet photo that could be turned into a greyscale printed canvas. Dogs, owners, canvases, and “custom palettes” were invited to gather for cocktails.

And finally, Sargent’s distinctive portraits are covered with quotes culled from pop culture and plastered all over. Each iteration merits careful attention for the way it puts the elite art of the past in dialogue with the pseudo-democratic Öffentlichkeit of the internet. An Instagram ad overlays a woman’s stately head with the slogan “Yaaaaas Queen” and captions it with the words “OUTFIT OF THE DAY” and three fire emojis. The phrase, originating in queer communities of color, has now devolved to a form of digital blackface, part of a lexicon freely used by straight white consumers of popular culture. [7] “Gold Is the New Black” accompanies a detail from La Carmencita, an unsubtle allusion to the Netflix drama that chronicles life in a woman’s prison. “Damn Daniel” overlays the head of Sargent’s portrait of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ ten-year-old son, referencing the popular meme in which one Californian teen compliments another. The marketing campaign trades on the fact that conspicuous consumption is a major form of public entertainment these days (think of Rich Kids of Instagram, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the obsession with royal weddings), and that such entertainment depends on fantasies about participation; when the media reported that Kylie Jenner was close to becoming a billionaire, her fans tried to crowdfund an extra $100 million to push her over the edge. While the popular literature of Sargent’s Gilded Age saw an explosion of rags-to-riches tales, trading on the fantasy of becoming rich, these documents of our new Gilded Age ironize the impossibility of social transformation. I’ll never be a millionaire, but I can gorge myself on Kim Kardashian’s most intimate moments and debate the merits of her extravagant purse purchases. By analogizing the luxurious lives of Chicago’s bygone elites to the contemporary spectacle of inequality, and by analogizing the format of painting to the eminently accessible world of social media, these promotional images naturalize exploitation in the past and present alike.

“Promotion,” as the critic Harold Rosenberg presciently observed in 1968, “has become the vital center of aesthetic discourse.” [8] The advertising campaign supplies a dominant interpretive context for the show, filling the vacuum opened by the bland wall text and turning Sargent’s paintings into nostalgic icons—to borrow John Vlach’s felicitous description of plantation imagery—of wealth. [9] Nonmembers pay a hefty additional charge to enter the show, on top of the museum’s standard entrance fee which runs to twenty-five dollars for an out-of-state adult, despite the healthy array of corporate sponsors and the distinct lack of blockbuster loans that usually drive up special exhibition prices. (I set aside La Carmencita, lent by the Musée d’Orsay, which could only be called “blockbuster” if you squint hard.) There’s something deeply unsettling, in the era of President Trump, about asking Chicagoans to pony up extra cash to inspect a set of luxury commodities that aggrandized, and were owned by, the opulent figures who profited so handsomely off the working poor a century ago. But this demand squares neatly with the ideology underlying the marketing campaign; the middle class should fund and enjoy the spectacle of their own subjection.

Let me be clear. I’m not criticizing the Art Institute for capitulating to the pressures that all institutions face in the neoliberal age. As Matti Bunzl notes in his ethnography of the contemporary art museum, instead of seeing a “failure of nerve” in these nakedly anti-intellectual, ostensibly democratizing moves, we should probably see “a set of strategies devised to persist through a particular economic and cultural moment.” [10] Museums have to survive. But the Art Institute has made a damning set of choices about how to display and market Sargent’s work, which, the admirably historicist catalogue aside, rehearse a set of neoliberal commitments to the primacy of capital and exalt the old order of wealth.

Notes:
[1] See especially Alison Syme, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).
[2] Quoted in Juliet Bellow, “The Doctor Is In: John Singer Sargent’s ‘Dr. Pozzi at Home,’” American Art 26.2 (2012): 43.
[3] Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (University of California Press, 2004), 116.
[4] Annelise K. Madsen, “Second City Sargents: The Collectors Who Built a Sargent Legacy for Chicago,” in John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age (New Haven and London: The Art Institute of Chicago; distributed Yale University Press, 2018), 100.
[5] Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (Hill and Wang, 1982). Analysts like Larry Bartels have famously argued that we’re living through a “new Gilded Age.”
[6] For works that deal specifically with advertising, see Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (Hill and Wang, 2012); Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. (Vanguard Press, 1951); Raymond Williams, “The Magic System,” New Left Review 4 (1960): 27–32.
[7] Lauren Michele Jackson, “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in GIFs,” Teen Vogue, August 2, 2017, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/digital-blackface-reaction-gifs.
[8] Harold Rosenberg, “Art and Its Double [1968],” in Artworks and Packages (University of Chicago Press, 1982), 19.
[9] John Michael Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
[10] Matti Bunzl, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde: An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum, (The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 7.

August, 2018

Remembering 1968

“Ein Totentanz” drawing by Virgil Burnett. Chicago Review 20.4/21.1.

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago (August 26–29), during which the Chicago police, reinforced by the National Guard, violently assaulted protesters gathered in Grant Park. The roughly 10,000 protesters were vastly outnumbered by the armed forces, which included 12,000 policemen, 5,000 members of the National Guard, 6,000 soldiers, including the 101st Airborne, and 1,000 undercover agents that infiltrated the protesters and possibly instigated the violence.[1] Richard Vinen writes that the police put lead shot in their gloves prior to the confrontation and “sprayed teargas with such abandon that Hubert Humphrey could smell it in his room on the twentieth floor” off Michigan Avenue downtown.[2]

The protests brought together various groups—Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panthers, the Youth International Party (Yippies)—all united in opposition to the Vietnam war. The Yippies, more joyous and ludic in their resistance than some, decided that they would nominate a pig for president. They went into the country outside Chicago and bought a pig, which they named Pigasus, and scheduled a rally and press conference on what is now Daley Plaza (then the Civic Center), by the Picasso sculpture. The stunt led to the arrest of the “Chicago Seven,” as well as Black Panther Bobby Seale, who all stood trial in 1969 on various charges, including incitement to riot.

Last Thursday at Maria’s in Bridgeport, a theatrical reenactment of these events, “Flight of the ‘Pigasus,'” was staged as part of a series of events to mark the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, “68 + 50.” Planned by former CR fiction editor Paul Durica, now Director of Programs for Illinois Humanities, the reenactment condensed the moment of the trial and the original rally nominating “Pigasus for President,” with actors portraying the events off to the side of the “courtroom” as they came up during testimony, complete with a live pig.

The performance began with musician Phil Ochs, played by Bill MacKay, on the stand. As he was interrogated and gave his account of the events, they were acted out on the side by a group of actors dressed up as the Yippies. An interesting twist came in the middle, however, when the reenactment broke from the historical record to call living participants to the stand to give their actual eye-witness stories. Judy Gumbo, wife of Yippie Stew Albert, took the stand and, when sworn in with the Bible, said: “Where is God, and what is truth?” Gumbo also claimed that Pigasus was a woman and would therefore have been the first woman president had the police not intervened. James Lato then took the stand and recalled going to find the ugliest pig they could get, and having to fork out the $20 to buy it because Jerry Rubin and the other Yippies didn’t have any money. Finally, Vince Black (formerly Blakey) took the stand and recounted the moment when the pig was given to him on a leash in the plaza and went wild. When the police arrested Rubin and Albert, they supposedly quipped: “Sorry boys, the pig squealed.” Black contradicted the commonly repeated denouement that Pigasus was given to the Humane Society and lived happily ever after on a nearby farm; instead, Black claimed to have heard from a connection within the CPD that they had a BBQ and—well, you know what happens to pigs at BBQs. After he said this someone in the audience began yelling: “Cannibals! Cannibals!”

“Flight of the ‘Pigasus'” at Maria’s in Bridgeport, August 28, 2018. Bill MacKay as Phil Ochs singing “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” Photo by Eric Powell.

The event concluded with another revision of the historical record; Phil Ochs had tried to sing his protest song “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” on the stand, but was ushered out of the courtroom. Instead, at Maria’s he stood right up there on the stand and sang the song, the audience happily singing along. It was a creative way to commemorate one of the most famous instances of political theater in Chicago history, an event that foreshadowed the coming police violence. In an interview with The Chicago Tribune, Durica said: “It allows for an opportunity to interrogate those moments: how effective are these methods and techniques in terms of raising public awareness? It’s also a fairly accessible and animated way of approaching a very complicated narrative that still resonates within many communities throughout the city. I hope that this program can inspire us to address the more serious issues emerging from this story.”

Soon after the events of August 1968, Chicago Review (20.4/21.1) made its own “daring contribution to convention coverage,” in the words of poetry editor Iven Lourie. Arguing that the existing (and extensive) “reportage” offered “little that conveys the atmosphere and quality of the week’s events,” CR offered up the “raw transcript” of reel-to-reel recordings made by a PhD student and folklorist, Bruce Kaplan, “a fantastic tape made in Lincoln Park during the convention.” In a memoir that will soon be published in full, Lourie expands upon his brief introduction to the feature with further detail:

The Fantastic Issue…included a smattering of surrealistic pieces and a pièce de résistance which was a longish text edited from transcripts of a series of interviews from the Democratic Party Convention in 1968 in downtown Chicago. That was the infamous event that brought the Yippies to town to mock and harass Mayor Richard Daley and the party that would nominate Hubert Humphrey to run against Richard Nixon—at the height of the Vietnam War—and lose the election. The Yippies nominated a pig for the high office, and they refused to call off the demonstrations when Daley canceled all permits for demonstrating or camping in the downtown Chicago parks. This led to pitched battles in the streets, tear gas floating all through the downtown office district, the Loop, and battalions of Chicago policemen in riot gear making passes through the parks to clear them with tear gas, batons, and handcuffs when necessary to arrest resistors. The National Guard—platoons of young men around my age at the time carrying Army rifles—were bivouacked in Grant Park. It was a miracle that more people weren’t killed (there was one accidental death when someone was run over by a vehicle), but the injuries were legion…. I engaged my sometime roommate, Bruce Kaplan, who was a genius with a Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder, to walk around the park and do random interviews of participants. I did a few recordings myself, but the work was mostly Bruce’s. I knew Bruce from the Folklore Society at U. of C.—he was one of its leading lights. He helped plan and bring off the mid-winter U. of C. Folk Festival for a series of years in the 1960s, and this was my other extracurricular activity that got me a slice of education not available in the classroom.

Bruce was a Ph.D. student of Southeast Asian studies and Folklore, and he had great expertise in recording “field interviews” and simply a gift for getting people to loosen up and talk on tape. Bruce got interviews with people of wildly divergent views…. There were several dozen interviews, including tape of Black Panther Bobby Seale giving a speech in the park, and we paid a professional transcriber to type all of this out as a text. I then worked with Bruce to edit it down somewhat, and we published it in CR as our own version of Convention coverage, a collage of voices from the edge.

To mark the anniversary of the momentous events of 1968 in Chicago, we’re linking the entirety of that original documentary coverage here: Convention Coverage. The feature concluded with a poem, written on the spot by Burton Lieberman in Lincoln Park on Tuesday night, August 27: “We Serve and Protect.” Here’s a sample from the poem:

pigs! pigs! pigs!
motherfuckers—fascist pigs
cocksuckers pigs pigs pigs!

It’s a fascinating text—fantastic even; and fifty years on, the legacies and lessons of 68 seem more relevant than ever.

– Eric Powell, Editor

Notes:

[1] Richard Vinen, 1968: Radical Protest and its Enemies, (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 111.

[2] Vinen, 112.

August 28, 2018

The Maids, by Jean Genet

Directed by Michael Conroy

June 22–July 21, 2018, The Artistic Home

Reviewed by Max Maller

Left to right: Hinkypunk as Solange, Brookelyn Hebert as Madame, and Patience Darling as Claire. Photograph by Joe Mazza, Brave Lux.

“Acts have esthetic and moral value only insofar as those who perform them are endowed with power.” In his first prison novel, Jean Genet, the narrator in Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, 1943), off-handedly puts forward this theory of gesture as young Louis Coulafroy wanders unnoticed into the village chapel, where he profanes the altar and knocks over a ciborium. It is typical of Genet’s early style to be sententious in passing, but the notion that power transforms movement into actions of “esthetic and moral value” lays wide open the mechanism of his great play, recently at the Artistic Home in West Town, The Maids (Les bonnes, 1947), a one-act drama loosely inspired by the Papin sisters, who murdered their employer René Lancelin and her adult daughter at their home in 1933.

In Genet’s theater, as well as in the more documentary and diagnostic areas of his early prose writings, there is no disjunction of the aesthetic and the ethical for those in control of their destinies. What the masters do is beautiful because it’s what masters do. The rest of us primp and imitate, for better or worse. The symbolic gestures of priests imitate the first executant, Christ. Lovers morph into one another over time: “A male that fucks a male is a double male!” screams Darling Daintyfoot, the pimp in Our Lady. Danger, the creative threat of it, creeps into the frame wherever powerless, hounded people violate their born roles, either through blatant insurrections in manners or through shamelessly and covertly behaving like big shots. Claire, the one maid, trying on Madame’s red velvet gown from the closet, finds she looks better in it than her “flabby” boss ever did. Solange, her accomplice, speaks too heightened a language for a domestic in a French play. There is a tradition going back to Roman comedy that these breaks with appropriate class behavior will always be paid for in blood, to yips of applause, and nobility exonerated; Genet incurred scandal in his day by showing the maids’ crime while eliding their justice immanente. But we can’t imagine these unpunished moments of triumph lasting. And furthermore, Genet never lets us unsee what a maid in red velvet has always been in plays: an omen of social chaos. There are and always will be, as Solange says, “gestures reserved for Madame.” “The maids’ dilemma is that there is nothing they can do to Madame that would not confirm their identity as maids,” writes Leo Bersani, Genet’s best critic.[1] To muck around with Madame’s privileged gestures in secret—as we see the maids spend the better part of the play doing before their climax—is to expose, palpate, and in a bizarre way honor, life’s most fragile hierarchies.

This production, directed by Michael Conroy, stars two drag performers from Chicago as Claire and Solange. Very imperfect speakers, Patience Darling and Hinkypunk are stage actresses only to a point. They both, and Patience Darling especially, tend to overexaggerate the floweriness in Genet’s long speeches. (The parts that are written as spoken barbs aimed at one other’s throats fare better at their hands than the flashier ones.) But drag’s poetics of the overwrought lends a fruitful destabilizing effect to Conroy’s production.

Left to right: Patience Darling as Claire and Hinkypunk as Solange. Photograph by Joe Mazza, Brave Lux.

Acting is never just acting, though. Appearance is at a heightened register from the beginning. Patience Darling and Hinkypunk’s extraordinary makeup compounds and emboldens the eye until it dominates face and forehead. By virtue of casting drag queens in the first place, the drama of confinement to a specific gender plays out within the work’s pre-inscribed emphasis on class confinement, staging, in effect, drag’s rebellion against a society-wide theater of gender as allied to the maids’ struggle for reinscription and recognition at Madame’s house. Bold politics only excuse so much; cues do drop, and diction flutters; but we get electricity throughout, and whether these are great performances or no, they can’t easily be forgotten.

This production’s fixation on the visual and bodily is thanks in no small part to the suggestiveness of Zachery Wagner’s costume design. The back of Solange’s leather apron is in a harness shape, with harness fasteners. That’s not how maid’s uniforms work. It would usually be two gored panels in front and the same in the back, or a halter. Claire’s kinky buckling collar isn’t standard either. These are bondage outfits. The play as a whole is thick with bondage vibes, as when Solange pulls out a riding crop from behind Madame’s closet and twirls it over Claire’s hunched limbs on the line, “Take your place for the ball.” There is consent, we feel—it’s vicious, but it’s a game. Then the game goes too far.

Cooped up in the mistress of the house’s bedroom all day long while she’s out, Claire and Solange begin the play, not as Claire and Solange, but as “Madame” and “Claire.” In character, so to speak, they apply Madame’s perfume, rough up her Louis XV chairs, take pins from her vanity, and so on, purring with delight and occasionally slapping one another silly. What’s immediately clear about this sadistic round of recess is that our maids are horribly depressed, vengeful, and up to their noses in reckless fantasy lives. They dub their routine a “ceremony”; within it, no meaningful distinction obtains between disciplinary thrashings in character—that is, as Claire (“Madame”) tyrannizing over Solange (“Claire”), kicking and slapping her to pieces—and real ones, so long as Solange’s blood gets scrubbed off the steps before Madame, the actual Madame, played by Brookelyn Herbert, returns. To end the ceremony, to start the world over again on fairer terms, or simply to get out of this damn apartment once and for all, someone is going to have to die. That somebody is Madame.

But in the play’s atmosphere of dreadful imposture, Claire’s idea of murdering Madame with a drugged tea feels like something in a dream, even as it starts to happen. A degree of mistrust on the viewer’s part seems sane to me. What’s plotted, what’s carried through, and what’s simply a case of cabin fever and patent leather talking, is very much left up in the air. Are we to take Claire at her word that it was she, Claire, who fingered Madame’s beau (a “Monsieur,” who does not appear) to the police for petty theft? Does Madame die? Does Claire? Is Solange arrested? We need an outside perspective, a second opinion. With no Fortinbras to show up and inventory the Act Five carnage at Elsinore with a level head, no policeman to scratch his stomach in the doorway and say “What in the hell happened here?”, we can never know for sure what went down or was about to go down at Madame’s place. Additionally, there’s a Mario the milkman. Here, Genet’s arch faith in the blur, his refined taste for sham, is at its most troublesome. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his 1952 introduction to Les bonnes, describes the “whirligigs of being and appearance” in Genet’s prison books and early theater as a vast array of sophistic circles.[2] Okay, Epimenides. So either this milkman has gotten in through the window and raped both Claire and Solange, or else maybe, in a different telling that follows, he has impregnated Solange with an unborn fetus that she and Claire will somehow both be carrying and delivering in tandem—or perhaps, as feels more than likely, there isn’t any milkman at all, and we’ve gone a little crazy in here, what with the heat and perfumed air.

Director Michael Conroy never forces the issue one way or the other on these perplexities, but the late entrance of Madame at least compels a crude accounting for some of the incrimination and doom that the play claustrophobically bandies for its first hour prior to her arrival. She is magnificently bossy and fatuous. She wants to know who used her perfume: it was Claire. That clarity is so refreshing after our hieratic season in hell that, even if it’s fleeting clarity, we’ll take it. It’s fascinating to compare Herbert’s signature gestures with Patience Darling’s ventriloquism during the ceremony. One suddenly realizes just how much you have to love someone and study them in order to do a convincing impression, how much psychic real estate they will necessarily have to colonize before their moves can come out of your body, their voice from your mouth. But if some combination of envy and misfortune ever made you want to become that person, you would never be able to, and that might make you want to kill them.

This is a queasy play. Not the least troubling of its effects is the sense of a bedrock familiarity with human conduct, as seen through the cracked glass of Genet’s lifelong experiment in deformed life. The show ends, as it started, mysteriously, neck-deep in the rubble of Solange’s towering threnody of a final monologue. In a deposition to the invisible police, Hinkypunk calls up unbelievable power, which we have seen only the surface of until now, for almost ten whole minutes of speech. A shocking finish, out of nowhere it blazes on the wreckage of three ruined lives, is amazing, and signifies nothing.

[1] Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 173.
[2] Jean-Paul Sartre, “Introduction,” The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays, by Jean Genet, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1994), 1.

August 2018.

Waiting For Godot, by Samuel Beckett

Druid Theatre Company

May 23–June 3, 2018, Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Reviewed by Max Maller

Marty Rea as Vladimir and Aaron Monaghan as Estragon in Druid theatre company’s Waiting for Godot, directed by Garry Hynes, presented as part of WorldStage at Chicago Shakespeare for a limited engagement in the Courtyard Theater, May 23–June 3, 2018. Photo by Matthew Thompson.

Step right up, folks. See no-show Godot and the two forgetful farts. Get a load of Mr. Moneybags with his valet on a big leash. Liked it the first time? Stick around for the second act and catch the entire blooming, buzzing, epistemological potato sack race to oblivion once more from the top, only slower this time, with feeling, but not in the toes. I forgot the kid! There’s a kid in it. Isn’t he cute? But he won’t remember being there and neither will anybody, if he was even there to begin with. And so too will our cinders get flushed headfirst down the proverbial Abbey Theater jakes during a matinee showing of At the Hawk’s Well, as described in section six. Nihilism! Modernism! L’chaim! ǫᴜᴀǫᴜᴀǫᴜᴀ. Excuse me. Rinse and repeat.

Debility is the topic, virtuosity the condition. If you have the misfortune to be a character on the Beckett stage, as the gouty, landed behemoth Pozzo groans at one point, your “memory is defective”; there are no exceptions to this. Estragon has to be reminded seven times over why he can’t leave the place he’s in (County Nowhere, Ireland, or perhaps France) and who it is he’s waiting for (“‘We’re waiting for Godot.’ ‘Ah!’ [Pause. Despairing.]”). And yet, it occurred to me again midway through Lucky’s aria at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre—where Druid Theatre’s triumphal rendition has travelled from Galway for a limited engagement—that there can be few plays in literature that put harsher demands on an actor’s working memory than do Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape, each one chock-full with amnesiacs. The words themselves are short and common ones, by and large, as in the French version—pace Testew & Cunard and the “Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy”—but they can feel so elliptical that it’s no wonder rehearsals for the most recent Broadway Godot are said to have routinely skipped entire pages of lines without anyone noticing. The stock retort is that in a play full of dead air and fossilized dry dung in a suspicious hue of metaphysical amber, it doesn’t necessarily even matter what sort of order things are said in. Is it rather a play for an ensemble of droolers from the vegetable aisle to murmur and splutter us with at random? I wouldn’t say no, but let Beckett’s fondness for athletic former vaudevillians be always remembered—decrepitude as act, as vector. It’s the Belaquac effect, as in Beckett’s favorite moment from the Commedia: a vagrant under a rock, meeting Virgil and Dante with their heads full of steam on the way up Mount Purgatory, says, “You may be obligated, first, to sit down.”

I can’t go on. I’ll go on. You’re only playing dead. Amber, when rubbed, becomes electric.

Marty Rea’s Vladimir is a head and a half taller than Aaron Monaghan as Estragon. This serves to play up the duo in what I would call their Abbot-and-Costello aspect. It also reinforces Rea, with his Satanic whiskers, as at times the Quixote to Monaghan’s Sancho Panza, which feels deliberate (and begs a dissertation). They look too young to have been friends for fifty years, but, as I have said, dry decrepitude is not the focus here. (Emotionally, as Estragon points out in what may not be so harmless of a joke, Vladimir is stunted at eleven.) Nor is an aggressive poignancy or chumminess the focus, thank God. The production’s brilliant pace from beginning to end emerges instead from the brittle ground of a bond between two “irreducible singlenesses,”[1] which is constantly complained of as a kind of death, but which undoubtedly is the only thing keeping you alive. Tennis is the ruling analogy for conversation in all of Beckett’s works, and Rea as server knows how to lob the ball over the net to Monaghan in a doomed way for the play’s innumerable and miraculously timed false starts, or with a light flick of the wrist for its sparkling rallies. Monaghan, a famous actor in Ireland, seems born for this role. If his Estragon is often the one hurt when he, Monaghan, rears up at Vladimir, or tries to kick Lucky, or scorns Pozzo, it’s because the real derision was aimed not at the person opposite but at the fog enclosing himself, his never being fully awake or asleep, an occlusive boredom. He is the intelligence of his soil, as though wafted up from the dry, caked sod of the environment—a set designed to perfection by Francis O’Connor. The tree, the boulder, the grey sky, the balloon of a moon: all is as stipulated. Circumscribing the stage, however, O’Connor has incorporated a glowing light box, revealing the lineaments of a zone beyond change and duration, except for the sudden appearance of some leaves on that iconic, mysterious tree between the acts.

Rory Nolan is a bravura Pozzo, merely a pith helmet shy of settler-colonial in his tyrannical peevishness over Lucky. He doesn’t bark orders so much as wince them. He enters the play on a plane of sham largesse that dumps him over the cusp into blindness and horror by the end. Lucky is played by Garrett Lombard, who got a tremendous round of applause for his colossal gnostic monologue even despite rattling it off quicker than an auctioneer.

Bodies and voices are the theater. Tuned to the right pitch they can do anything, even if that anything is nothing. This intensely energetic reading from Druid of a show so often accused of being essentially Ambien in play form doesn’t so much inject life into lifeless matter as reawaken eight thousand latent local vitalities. Every beat is fluent; every repetition marks time with the cumulative charge of a sameness in difference that makes the whole thing tick. Its very Irishness is a joy. And if the bulk of the lines are played, and possibly even written, predominately for yuks verging on the hollow kind (Beckett distinguished three kinds of laughter, with a palm for the “mirthless…the laugh laughing at the laugh…the risus purus”), that doesn’t entail that other levels of response to what is accomplished here in director Garry Hynes’s multivalent staging with such steady mastery will be lost on all attendees. Hynes, who won a Tony Award for directing The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1998, knows how to space her people so that gestures project across an area in the middle of the stage where no one is standing. In an introduction to the play that is printed with the program, the novelist Colm Tóibín compares the layout to a “film set when the camera has not yet arrived, and may, indeed, never do so.” As the viewer’s gaze ranges flat and wide over Hynes’s action, it does feel distinctly for one night as though the cameras were missing, or had never been invented. Unlike with the screen, or admittedly in the vast majority of plays whose stagecraft parasitically derives from TV exigencies, you’re never forced, or even allowed, to take in only one performer at a time. Is “Godot” film? Add that to the innumerable list of nonanswers, why don’t you.

“How time flies when one has fun!” Vladimir’s jet-black chortle or blurt is what I—and what had to be the majority of my fellow playgoers on Navy Pier—had literally to say for ourselves at the end of the show’s two hours and thirty minutes. We walked out of this magisterial Godot and into the shock of a gaudy fireworks display over Lake Michigan for Memorial Day. I don’t know whether the boats waited for the end of the performance to start shooting off their cracklers and dahlias. But the juxtaposition was memorable.

Notes
[1] This phrase is from Beckett’s letters; it occurs in a description he once gave of the painter Jack B. Yeats’s portrait style: “The way he puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between” (SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 [August 1937]). The resemblance this quality of figural isolation in Yeats’s art might bear to the playwright’s later works has often been suggested.

June 2018

Accumulations of Influence: Stephen Lapthisophon’s Styles of Radical Will at Sector 2337

A Curatorial Essay

By Caroline Picard

Stephen Lapthisophon’s Eggbell (2016) is true to its name: literally, the top cap of an eggshell sprinkled with gold metallic pigment, weighted by a thick nail, and strung with fishing line from a larger rope. This larger rope is tied to track lighting in the gallery and slopes to the floor, ending under a well-worn hardcover book as thick as my fist. The book is unmarked, falling apart, and, maybe because it seems so perfectly book-like I never considered its contents until someone, inferring from the distinctness of its proportions, recognized it as a dictionary.

I mention the book to illustrate something that Lapthisophon does all the time: himself legally blind, he makes work that for various and often physical reasons is not wholly accessible to viewers. In Mumbling (2016), for example, he produced a single painting down the long wall of Sector 2337’s gallery corridor. Although two people can walk comfortably abreast in the passage, it is nevertheless impossible to step back far enough and see the entire composition at once. As such, the combined effect of the preexisting architecture and the painting’s length inflicts an embodied sense of limitation. It would be odd to say that the work actively withholds itself, yet it provokes a frustrating desire to know the work more and differently; in looking, I want the painting to lay itself bare with an unconditional—and perhaps unearned—intimacy that I had not previously realized I expected of the world at large.

Here we tend to think of meaning as something foreign, something that can be isolated from, selected, secreted from its container and then keep [sic] in a special place—a cell, or camp, possibly even a jar. Meaning becomes a substance extruded from its holder; something that cannot be squeezed back into matter no matter how hard one tries. Meaning is produced (cast out into the world) the way sheets of paper are expelled from their source, a printing device or some other inscriber of text.[1]

Numbers regularly appear in Lapthisophon’s work. This same wall painting includes 1989 and 1913 scrawled in a loose black ink brush. These dates appear within a longer line of seemingly less definitive letters and marks—a lower case g perhaps, a splash of ink, more numbers that stream along with less evident coherence. The marks impose a sense of amnesia for we cannot help but puzzle over their indication towards counting, in this case locking into the convention of time’s notation even as we remain dislocated from their specific meaning.

In a recently published notebook affiliated with a related body of work, Lapthisophon writes:

I can’t see my own writing. By that, I mean, I cannot see it. It’s not that I am unable to read—only that, without extreme magnification, or auditory aids, I do not read texts. The most difficult task is writing itself. Scribbling, making notes to remember a date or a specific detail. Sometimes, from memory, one can’t bear to read one’s own writing. The flow, the rhythm is blocked. How can one be blocked from one’s own words? I remember once recalling a sentence describing a kind of forgetfulness described as “fugitive utterance,” something palpable yet effectively lost; never to be a possibility again, an obsolete instrument. Sometimes these records can be recovered but without a great deal of work-scraping, dusting and polishing of the covering holding bashful silences. (N, 74)

Because his marks and objects in the gallery have an aura of familiarity, one has a sense of reaching for an elusive—yes, fugitive—meaning, only to see instead how accessibility is mistakenly presupposed. How the architecture upon which we hang significance is typically so common as to be taken for granted—is that really a g? The rise and run of a staircase is so habitual as to disappear until the tread is not where one’s foot expects it. The stability of our worldview quakes a little: the cartoon coyote running off a cliff and blinking before it begins to fall.

The preceding passage appears three times in Lapthisophon’s book, as though he is rewriting the words in order to reinvigorate a kind of embodied understanding—to see by making, or writing. Instead of remembering, or reading, he rewrites. Is it enough, therefore, that the anonymous dictionary lies on the ground unread but nevertheless present? Another book also appears in the gallery: a copy of Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, published under his earlier name LeRoi Jones, lies in a discrete corner. This vintage paperback sits on the floor against the wall, beneath a torn and paint-ridden black scrap of the t-shirt that Lapthisophon allegedly wore when working. It covers a thick piece of black paper and we see some of the artist’s marks underneath, peeking from the bottom left-hand corner, suggesting that something more lies beneath. Indeed, while not exposed to the viewer, Lapthisophon installed the torn page of a book by the Italian poet-philosopher, Giacomo Leopardi, reflecting on the idea of blackness.

The book divides in two. Propped upright, and spread out before the viewer for inspection, the reader divides in two halves for the sake of clarity. Seeking to glorify the act of reading, the supporting structures of the memory-system seek to reinforce the notion that what was lost can now be regained. (N, 101)

Just as we assume that the world allows some degree of legibility, so too we presume that the draped work shirt covering the painting is as much a part of the real object as it is a veil of obfuscation. Lapthisophon draws a connection between Baraka’s study of African American music and colonial European views of nation and race. Yet the connection is obscure and complex even if the two cannot be extricated. Similarly, we must assume Lapthisophon is writing meaningful notes upon the wall, although we cannot know their significance. Or do we? Where does that fugitive feeling come from? Is it the effect of a real absence? Or simply a necessary faith? “Facing the breaking point of meaning, the poet resists falling into the despair of meaninglessness” (N, 91).

Mumbling’s “1913” quotation glows a little in the mind, as both the single most important year for European modernism and a moment before two World Wars. Linking up with the exhibition’s title, Style of Radical Will (Italian Sculpture), the date ties the installation to Europe, recalling an aesthetic moment before the eruption of violence—a time before the trauma that we now cannot imagine living without. “The world of 1913 risks becoming viewed as nothing more than an antechamber to the Great War, rather than being looked at on its terms—‘as it really was.’… Of course, it is not possible to escape hindsight.”[2] But Lapthisophon also focuses our attention more specifically on Italy and, in particular, the Arte Povera movement. Coined by critic and curator Germano Celant in 1967, the term refers to a loose group of artists working in the late 1960s and the 1970s who passed over traditional high-art materials such as bronze or canvas and oil as a deliberately political gesture. Instead they aimed to uncover a latent poetic potential within everyday objects, and further to make art disarmingly humble. It was a rebuke not only to the Futurists, resisting additionally pervasive Modernist strategies, but also to their own Renaissance history, liberating themselves from the authority of the past.

Lapthisophon quotes these artists and their methodologies so directly as to behave like a Duchampian cover band. In some cases, an artist is directly inserted—as with the red slide projected onto a stack of white boxes containing (but not revealing) Italian glasses. White, sans seraph text says “colore.” The slide itself is an original work by Giovanni Anselmo, on loan from the Nasher Art Center and installed in the gallery within a floor assemblage of boxes, slide projector, a looping orange extension cord, and a roll of bright orange duct tape. In other cases, this quotation is simply the methodology at work: a collection of potatoes piled on an upturned and small cardboard box that says “Trilingual,” or the vase of sunflowers that slowly rot, dropping their petals like dried yellow apostrophes. It is as if Lapthisophon is taking art historical modes and objects along with vases made by other contemporary artists and books that have been read by others as readymades or pop songs that resonate at equivalent frequencies, yielding to the artist like recyclable materials. Each thing both contains and withholds something of its original context, so that it cannot be re-experienced or remembered exactly as it was.

Lapthisophon’s writing adopts similar principles of copying. In some cases the original author is quoted directly (Marx, Lewis Carroll, and Paul de Man, for example); in others you can tell it is Lapthisophon’s voice we are reading—as with the story of how he mailed potatoes to a museum curator, or how “In 1968 [he] began an engagement with a kind of art through travel, books, and the influence of [his] mother” while working on a political campaign in Mexico (N, 39). “Many of these works were ‘political’ having been made during revolutionary times or created by artists fully engaged with and committed to progressive causes” (N, 39). At the bottom of the page, he admits a conflation in hindsight: “Unknown to me across the ocean some of the first exhibitions thought of as Arte Povera were taking place in Italy. Now almost fifty years later I find it difficult to untangle the strands woven together that make up my art and thinking: Diego Rivera and David Siqeros, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, Gene McCarthy and my grandfather, Guiseppe Penone and me” (N, 39). In still other places, the writing style leaps out as that which belongs to another author, perhaps even one you have read before but cannot place. For instance: “Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory back to them” (N, 48). In these ways, Lapthisophon plays with ideas of authorship and authenticity, exercising the sense that nothing new can be made: we are the accumulations of influence, and yet even in the effort of reproduction some difference occurs that transposes the pulse of an original object into a new, ephemeral now.

I fell in love with the eggbell. It had the strange ability to disappear, hanging mid-air, in the middle of the room, under the arc of the rope, just below eye level, the eggshell itself so thin and hanging like a skirt over the nail. I met with classes to discuss the exhibition; we sat in a circle around the rope and dictionary. “What I love about the eggbell is its ability to occupy such a liminal space as to disappear in a moment,” I’d say. We talked about this as a group: What does it mean that some things are more visible than others? How does visibility reflect the criteria by which we engage the world? And then, the minute the class was dismissed, I’d watch everyone put on coats, backpacks, stack chairs, turn—and in turning, I’d see the forgetting happen suddenly, the eggbell disappearing from thought and thus bumping against their shoulders or back or backpack, so weightless as to be unfelt, the small flakes of shell splintering off its base and falling to an ever-increasing pile on the floor. When I explained the situation to Lapthisophon it made him laugh. “That’s perfect,” he said. “Replace it if you have to.” In an artist’s talk he said he felt passive resistance was underrated. The fact that the eggbell survived this abuse for the three-month duration of the show, the fact that any poetry reading we had, or screening, or public event, caused staff members to guard the eggbell with often useless attempts to prevent it from colliding with visitors—as time went on, I projected more and more of my awareness onto that humble, Frankensteined object, inspiring more and more affection. I even started to love its slow destruction; I began to wait to try and catch the precise instant when it was forgotten, and then rooting for its endurance afterwards. How things slip in and out of consciousness, I thought, how I love their radical vulnerability.

Notes:
[1] Stephen Lapthisophon, Notebook 1967-68: September-January 2015 (Dallas: n. p. [self-published], 2016), 80-81. Hereafter cited parenthetically as N.

[2] Charles Emmerson, 1913: In Search of the World before the Great War (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 333.

June 2018

Mirroring China’s Past: Emperors and Their Bronzes

The Art Institute of Chicago, February 25–May 13, 2018

Reviewed by Luke A. Fidler

The Book of Documents (Shujing), one of the foundational texts of premodern Chinese thought, preserves an announcement by King Wu of the Western Zhou dynasty (1046–771 BCE) in which he remonstrates with his underlings: “the ancients have said, ‘Let not men look only into water; let them look into the mirror of other people. Now that Yin has lost its appointment, ought we not to look much to it as our mirror, and learn how to secure the repose of our time?’” As Eugene Wang points out, this trope of history-as-mirror seized the imagination of political commentators throughout ancient and imperial China and, significantly, went hand in hand with the increasing popularity and complexity of actual bronze mirrors. [1] To title a show of bronze vessels “Mirroring China’s Past” is thus to invoke the lengthy history of a political metaphor. (There are, ironically, very few bronze mirrors on display.) At stake for art historians are the relationships between objects, ideas, and the discursive tools of language that alternately informed and were informed by the reception of things, for the rich semantic exchange between mirrors and verbal images ran counter to, say, the ways that bronze casters deployed complex animal images on vessels. [2] And so, while the trope of history-as-mirror has a venerable status, thoroughly entwined as it is with an array of high-status objects, it’s impossible to generalize about the epistemological status of Chinese bronzes.

This exhibition, which brings together an unprecedented number and variety of bronzes from across the globe, underscores this point both by showcasing the sheer range of forms, uses, and decorative motifs included in the capacious genre of the “bronze” and by attending to the lengthy procedures of interpretation and reinterpretation that have characterized the reception of these objects over the past few millennia. It was not the lot of the bronze vessel to remain static or intact; this goes for their physical integrity, always subject to alteration by later collectors or artists, but it also speaks to the eagerness with which later viewers rewrote bronzes into new versions of the past. The taotie mask, the recurrent motif of two staring eyes surrounded by zoomorphic marks, provides a useful case study. It appears, for example, on a late Shang wine bucket in the exhibition, dominating the vessel’s largest panel and fixing the viewer with the baleful stare of an imaginary creature (or two?) that never quite resolves into something recognizable. By the fifth century BCE, the taotie, under the influence of art from the eastern steppes, came to more often depict recognizable animals like dragons, but it’s hard to say quite what the early images mean. Ancient bronze casters were capable of impressive naturalistic representation, so the abstraction must have been intended; but later commentators, such as an anonymous contributor to Mr. Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals (Lüshi chunqiu) from the third century BCE, found the word taotie used in catalogues of bronzes and interpreted the concept as a mythical creature in its own right. Scholars still describe the taotie as the paradigmatic enigma of Chinese art, “a salutary reminder of our ignorance” and a limit case for interpretation. [3] The repeated return to ancient vessels by politicians and connoisseurs—of whom the Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799 CE) is the show’s most prominent example—meant that concepts like the taotie accumulated a vast palimpsest of interpretation.

While the first half of the exhibition displays a wide range of vessels, together with ceramic precursors, in loose chronological order, the second half dilates on antiquarianism. Three objects show the varied forms that antiquarian interest could take. A diminutive vessel from the Palace Museum, carved from bamboo root, dates to the Qing dynasty (1644–1912 CE) and imitates the form of a bronze you (bucket). The sculptor has carefully carved a range of motifs on the surface and, by reproducing the small raised lines that constitute a geometrically-organized ground as well as the larger zoomorphic plaques that make up the vessels’ more recognizable decorative features, they have reproduced both the visual syntax of earlier bronzes and the unmistakable traces of their facture. In another accomplished kind of imitation, the so-called Bucket of Hezi from the Western Zhou dynasty is displayed next to an eighteenth-century bronze copy. Here, unlike the bamboo you, the later bucket demonstrates an interest in replicating form, imagery, and the robust set of material properties—weight, texture, heat, and shine, as well as the procedure of casting rather than carving—associated with ancient bronzes. Finally, a Ming dynasty album leaf by painter Qiu Ying (ca. 1494–1552 CE) depicts scholars surrounded by attendants in a garden, the elite space of reflection par excellence. A selection of bronze vessels occupies the picture’s lower left and an encyclopedic array of bronze bells and buckets awaits inspection on a nearby table. That Qiu Ying himself produced paintings—like this leaf—at similar gatherings, and for consumption by similar intellectuals as those shown appreciating their ancient wares, underscores just how thoroughly imperial audiences engaged with bronzes and just how eagerly they refashioned them. [4] A gallery dedicated to the Qianlong Emperor’s collections collects examples of antiquarian interest that span the spectrum I’ve just outlined, as well as showing how he literally recontextualized ancient bronzes by compiling mirrors into large albums replete with commentary.

The show omits to mention, however, that we’re now in the awkward position of having access to a wealth of archaeological evidence that scholars like the Qianlong Emperor lacked over the last few millennia, and the “doubting antiquity” debates that galvanized the field during the 1930s forced a reckoning with received textual traditions that still reverberates through the field of Chinese art history. [5] The received wisdom about bronzes turned out to often rely on Confucian rereadings of pre-Confucian history or the purely notional provenances recorded in connoisseurial catalogues. What does it mean, then, for the Art Institute to present these bronzes largely through the lens of premodern antiquarian interest? (To be clear, a final room features contemporary art by the likes of Hong Hao in order to suggest that the antiquarian interest still has some legs; but it fails to address just how much the stakes of investigating ancient art have changed over the course of the twentieth century.) And what does it mean to invoke charged practices like ritual through strategies of recreation in one gallery, where a series of videos present Chinese actors in period dress performing rituals with vessels, before persuasively showing that later antiquarian visions of vessels and their use owed much more to imaginative, historically-inaccurate comparisons of object and text in another? Consider, for example, that although scholars generally refer to ancient bronzes as liqi (“ritual paraphernalia”), we still know next to nothing about the forms that particular rituals took. One section of the exhibition foregrounds the contingency of knowledge and interpretation while the other, trading on the authoritative weight of wall text and televised reenactment, sets that contingency aside.

The exhibition’s title also places an undue emphasis on the person of the emperor. A seductive tactic that plays on the interest Western audiences have long demonstrated in Chinese imperial authority (witness the many blockbuster shows devoted to the first Qin emperor’s terracotta army), the titling belies the fact that most collectors of bronzes were, in fact, not emperors and, indeed, the Qianlong Emperor is the only ruler to receive in-depth attention. As with the vexed issue of ritual, the sleight of hand evidenced by the title isn’t so much a problem on its own terms. After all, it can’t be easy to get the same crowds who flooded the Art Institute for 2016’s record-breaking Van Gogh extravaganza to turn out for a large show of premodern bronze vessels from China, and the museum’s push to attract high-profile donors for a new wing of Asian art probably inflected the exhibition’s grandiose advertising. Nor can Midwestern museumgoers be counted on to have much background knowledge of the objects on display or the interpretive issues at stake. But these issues feel like significant missteps in an otherwise landmark exhibition, indicating that museums still have some way to go in the presentation of complex, non-Western art histories to general audiences.

Triumphalist accounts of the exhibition have stressed how unusually generous Chinese institutions like the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Shanghai Museum have been. Some of the objects on display are unlikely to travel much in the future and, for this reason alone, the show is worthy of note. The splendid selection of vessels, paintings, and ancillary artifacts clearly aspires to present an encyclopedic account of how bronzes were made and understood and the loans mean that, for the first time, North American museumgoers can get a real sense of how promiscuously they signified. (Racist responses, like a review in Newcity that describes the show as “frustrating—and occasionally exciting—as a flea market,” refigure this generosity through the Orientalist tropes of Asian inattention to quality and disorganized presentation.) [6] An accompanying catalogue, which notably includes several essays by women in a field that remains heavily male-dominated despite the impact of scholars like Jessica Rawson and Wilma Fairbank, considers the bronzes on display from a range of perspectives. In short, Mirroring China’s Past makes a valuable contribution to the study and display of premodern Chinese vessels and their antiquarian reception, setting the bar for future exhibitions of ambitious Chinese art.

Notes:

[*] I am grateful to Anne Feng and Sylvia Wu for their suggestions with this review.
[1] Eugene Yuejin Wang, “Mirror, Death, and Rhetoric: Reading Later Han Chinese Bronze Artifacts,” The Art Bulletin 76, no. 3 (1994): 511–34.
[2] See, for example, Robert Bagley, “Ornament, Representation, and Imaginary Animals in Bronze Age China,” Arts Asiatiques 61 (2006): 17–29; The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture, ed. Jerome Silbergeld and Eugene Yuejin Wang (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016); Wu Hung, “Rethinking Meaning in Early Chinese Art: Animal, Ancestor, and Man,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (2016): 139–90.
[3] David Keightley, quoted and discussed in Wu, “Rethinking Meaning,” 141.
[4] See the description of a gathering at Qiu Ying’s house in Stephen Little, “The Demon Queller and the Art of Qiu Ying (Ch’iu Ying),” Artibus Asiae 46, no. 1/2 (1985), 5.
[5] See the discussion in Sarah Allan, “Erlitou and the Formation of Chinese Civilization: Toward a New Paradigm,” The Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 2 (2007): 461–96.
[6] Chris Miller, “China Recollects Its Ancient Artistic Achievements,” Newcity, April 27, 2018, https://art.newcity.com/2018/04/27/china-recollects-its-ancient-artistic-achievements-a-review-of-mirroring-chinas-past-emperors-and-their-bronzes-at-the-art-institute-of-chicago/. Numerous scholars have discussed the flea market as an orientalist trope.

May 2018

The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago. Edited by Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach.

Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017. 376pp. $35

Reviewed by Tanner Howard

When a group of interdisciplinary Black artists called The Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) set forth their principles in 1967, they declared the intention that their community would find power in a burgeoning Black experientialism that the group sought to define and refine. In an “all-purpose handout” setting forth the organization’s principles, the group declared: “All of the people who might read this must find in it something which speaks to them.” It was an audacious vision—OBAC knew that aiming to inspire the entire Black community would mean reaching people in many different ways. But when they wrote, “we plead with the readers, whoever you may be, to search…find yourself in here,” they meant it.

Their quest would likely have gone unheeded without the Wall of Respect, a mural that sprung up the same year on Chicago’s South Side. Adorning a building on the corner of 43rd Street and Langley Avenue, the 20-by-60-foot composition was the product of intense collaboration among numerous artists involved in OBAC (pronounced oba-see, invoking a Yoruba word (oba) meaning “leader” or “chief”). With a gridded composition produced by Sylvia Abernathy, a tight-knit community of artists devoted themselves to enacting a vision of Black heroes and heroines, figures in jazz, R & B, sports, literature, theater, religion, and statesmanship that upheld the values of Black dignity and grace. Though the collective effort only stood for less than five years, and in its original form for only a few weeks before a series of controversial alterations began, the wall’s legacy has been remarkable, with over 1,500 wall murals estimated to have been painted in the US during the period in which the Wall of Respect still stood.

With its fiftieth anniversary on the books, the wall has finally begun to garner the official art-historical attention it merits. After an initial symposium gathered together important figures at the Art Institute in 2015, there were official exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center and Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art in 2017, bringing this history to a dramatically larger audience. While the publication of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago is another important step in cementing a retrospective appreciation of the work, this memorialization raises thorny questions about the nature of historical memory and the influence of institutional support, issues worth contemplating when discussing a work whose orientation was always community-oriented and politically radical.

As a collection, The Wall of Respect offers interested parties a trove of original documents, photographs, poems, interviews, and articles, richly contextualized by essays by Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach. Though the essays are vital to this project, its true power lies in materials that sprung forth during the wall’s short lifespan. Through these materials, readers will intuitively grasp the bombshell impact the work had on those who encountered it in its physical form. Though the passage of a half century has shrouded much of the ’60s in a haze of uncritical nostalgia and an ideologically driven historical revisionism, a visceral spark still permeates the contemporaneous creative production that surrounded the wall, lending the entire book an energy that cuts across time and reminds us of a radical artistic legacy worth revitalizing.

Photograph by Darryl Cowherd, featured in *The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago*. Courtesy of Northwestern University Press.

On its own, the wall made its intentions quite clear: by depicting the types of figures that embodied Blackness honestly, the artists sought to offer the community a sense of power and cultural ownership so long denied to African Americans. From the outset, the artists used their own supplies, seeking no external support that could introduce subtle sponsor-imposed censorship. As the various muralists began their work, surrounding residents responded energetically to the project’s freewheeling spirit, frequently engaging with those painting at the wall when they felt a given depiction wasn’t up to par. With the community rallying around the artists and the mural, the OBAC artists, already working within a collective ethos, found the bounds of individual authorship stretched even further as the community ensured that the mural faithfully represented their needs and desires.

OBAC set the terms of neighborhood engagement purposefully, and the response to their work exceeded their wildest ambitions. An incredible selection of OBAC documents, cataloging the nascent energy that quickly birthed the organization and soon thereafter the wall, reveals a set of self-consciously radical artists. Their inspired efforts made real Frantz Fanon’s observation: “Revolutionary art is both a product of struggle and a reflection of it.”

In “What Is A Black Hero?” a text handed out by OBAC at the wall, the group offered its justification for those depicted in the mural, including figures as diverse as Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Nina Simone, Marcus Garvey, and Muhammad Ali. OBAC, in presenting the mural to the people, declared “that a Black hero is any Black person who:

1. honestly reflects the beauty of Black life and genius in his or her life style;

2. does not forget his Black brothers and sisters who are less fortunate;

3. does what he does in such an outstanding manner that he or she cannot be imitated or replaced.

While photographs capture the original composition of the wall, showing the many facets of Black strength that residents could gather inspiration from, the book captures the complex cultural forces that produced the wall and led to its transformation. In this way, the text honors the debates fostered by the mural, showing it in dialogue with its environment and a rapidly evolving political climate that was reflected in and prodded by the work itself.

For example, despite being completed only a year after Martin Luther King Jr. had traveled to Chicago to stay in a North Lawndale tenement, his figure did not grace the mural’s facade, the growing tide of Black Power creating a resistance to King’s perceived nonviolent approach. And soon after the wall’s initial completion, OBAC founding member William Walker invited Eugene “Eda” Wade to replace the statesman section. His addition, the first of many changes that would see the wall’s ethos of collective decision making threatened, used a darker palate to depict H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X, alongside a raised fist. Viewing the wall as a newspaper, rather than a finished product, Walker sought to keep the work engaged with the changing circumstances that birthed it, a move that would create schisms within OBAC and fundamentally alter the wall’s appearance only weeks after its initial completion.

Despite the split within OBAC, the wall made its mark. In creating a work so closely tied to the community, OBAC lived up to its own virtues, ensuring that their artistry would be embraced and made whole by the people it served. As Lerone Bennett Jr., included on the wall as a “Historian of Black everyman,” put it: “For a long time now it has been obvious that Black Art and Black Culture would have to go home. The Wall is Home and a way Home.”

For those already familiar with the import of the Wall of Respect, the most significant aspect of the book is its emphasis on photography and its purposeful use on and around the wall. Photographs of the mural have long been integral to its study, of course, given that it only stood for a few years and in varying iterations. Yet Romi Crawford, in a set of essays introducing pictures taken at the wall, makes a compelling case that “photography is just as vital as painting to the Wall of Respect.” The photographs document not only the rapid changes of the wall, but also the vibrant street life that emerged during its creation, including musical performances, poetry readings, and a social framework that drew in countless curious onlookers.

The wall allowed photographers and onlookers to enact a form of seeing that offered a space of freedom from what Fanon called the “crushing objecthood” of being Black by producing an environment that was resolutely their own. In documenting the wall’s surroundings, such as the building across the street that became a popular hangout, these photographs capture “a communal and collective context in which Black persons might look even as they are being looked at.” These words would mean little on their own, but in dialogue with the intimate portraits of Black life at the wall, they illustrate a profound beauty. “Black beyond words one might say,” as Crawford put it in the introduction.

There’s no changing the conditions in which the wall has reemerged into popular attention today, sucked into the institutional realm of the Art Institute, the Chicago Cultural Center, and Northwestern University. Yet the publication of The Wall of Respect offers both curious newcomers and those long familiar with its significance a chance to further reflect on the relationships of power and ownership that govern the ongoing effort to assess the wall’s legacy. Many of these debates will continue to play out in these austere settings, divorced from the on-the-corner liveliness in which OBAC’s vision first played out.

The wall’s influence has considerable bearing on our political moment, making it imperative not to stifle these debates inside the academy’s walls. In a 1971 article, “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” reprinted in the book, OBAC founder Hoyt W. Fuller explored the tumult that Black artists faced in aiming to honestly represent Black life, in words that may as well have been written today:

Black people are being called “violent” these days, as if violence is a new invention out of the ghetto. But violence against the black minority is in-built in the established American society. There is no need for the white majority to take to the streets to clobber the blacks, although there certainly is enough of that; brutalization is inherent in all the customs and practices which bestow privileges on the whites and relegate the blacks to the status of pariahs.

While there’s a justifiable distrust in the long-overdue attention now directed at the Wall of Respect, its unalloyed significance to the present will hopefully remain at the center of these debates. “The revolutionary black writer, like the new breed of militant activist, has decided that white racism will no longer exercise its insidious control over his work,” Fuller wrote, recognizing in OBAC and so many other Black artists a vision for Black freedom that overcame the strictures imposed by the white gaze. The Wall of Respect was once capable of transcending the boundaries that whiteness had sought to impose upon Black creativity, sparking a mural movement of artistic consciousness-raising that empowered communities to rediscover and champion their suppressed histories. What should stop it from doing so once again today?

April 2018

Keith Haring: The Chicago Mural

The Chicago Cultural Center, March 3 – September 23, 2018

Reviewed by Luke A. Fidler

In 1989, Mayor Richard M. Daley declared May 15 to 21 “Keith Haring Week” in Chicago, as hundreds of students from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) descended on Grant Park to collaborate with the painter on a large mural. The declaration came just weeks into Daley’s term, after a special election was held to replace Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. Daley’s victory put the city on notice that the old days of corrupt governance were alive and well; the son of a notorious former mayor, he had served eight years as Cook County State’s Attorney, blithely overseeing a period during which the Chicago Police Department institutionalized the torture of black Chicagoans. He notoriously ignored the observations of a medical officer who raised concerns about the brutal treatment of suspects on the South Side, was a named defendant in a 2007 settlement with four torture victims, and, even as he signed his “Haring Week” proclamation, the Chicago press was reporting on several policemen from Area 2 who had finally been brought to trial. Of course, Daley made no bones about his racial politics during his campaign, famously telling a rally that, on the heels of a black incumbent, “you want a white mayor to sit down with everybody.” That 1989 election reverberates through Chicago politics today: David Axelrod, Forrest Claypool, and Rahm Emanuel, all of whom have conspired to systematically dismantle the city’s public resources under the current mayoral regime, each worked for the Daley campaign.

None of this context is presented in the Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition of the mural painted by Haring and his small army of CPS students, but it clearly shapes the ways that the work ought to be judged as a project of public art. It was made at the height of Haring’s international fame, at a time when his distinctive figures adorned clothing lines worldwide, his paintings commanded robust sums on the market, and his public projects were going up in Barcelona, Pisa, and Monte Carlo—an early commitment to making art outside the gallery and the museum bearing fruit in the form of high-profile gallery and museum shows. Extravagant claims for his importance were being made both inside and outside the art world, which Michael Kimmelman summed up in The New York Times just a year later: “The vehemence with which some people dismissed him as an embodiment of all that was wrong with glitzy, shallow, MTV-style 1980’s consumer culture was matched only by the preposterousness of the associations others made between Haring’s designs and major landmarks in the history of art, from the cave paintings at Lascaux through Picasso.”[1] Much as Daley’s father had recruited well-known artists to bolster the global fame of Chicago’s urban spaces—the monumental Picasso in Daley Plaza is a case in point—the Grant Park mural signaled that the younger Daley would likewise deploy high-profile art sponsorship as a smokescreen for his less savory activities. (The current mayor’s support for Theaster Gates extends this tradition.) Moreover, despite the polarizing qualities Kimmelman alluded to, Haring was a particularly supportable public artist. He lent a friendlier queer face to the AIDS crisis than more confrontational artists like David Wojnarowicz, and a whiter face to hip-hop culture than the artists of color who so often served as his interlocutors in New York’s graffiti scene. Towards the end of the eighties, his murals worked their way closer to liberal institutions of power, culminating in a set of plywood panels painted for Ronald Reagan’s 1988 White House Easter Egg Roll.

Keith Haring in 1989, photographed by Irving Zucker.

But this is not to say that the Chicago mural project can be reduced to crass propaganda for a corrupt administration. Things are rarely so simple in the realm of public art, and Haring’s mural is especially useful to reinspect in the wake of the controversies over statues and sculptures that have gripped the American imagination of late. Debates over if, when, and how Confederate monuments should come down have demonstrated just how contested issues of memory, public space, and participation remain, and just how strongly these issues remain yoked to artistic objects. Given how interested the city has been in the preservation and staging of Haring’s mural—this exhibition is just the latest iteration of the piece after part of it was reinstalled at Midway Airport, and a facsimile was repainted by high school students at the Museum of Science and Industry in 1999—it’s worth asking both what the work meant some thirty years ago and what resources it might make available to spectators now.

As correspondence displayed in the exhibition makes clear, the mayor may have latched onto Haring’s project, but the mural was the brainchild of a CPS teacher, Irving Zucker, who cornered the artist at an opening in New York. While in Chicago, Haring also designed a mural for Zucker’s home institution, Wells Community Academy High School. Fueled, in part, by his reading of Robert Henri’s classic text The Art Spirit, Haring embarked in his later years on a series of large-scale public projects on behalf of, and sometimes in collaboration with, the youth. A wealth of books, articles, and oral histories attest his interest in depicting children (“nobody else made such a tribute to babies,” Yoko Ono once remarked), something investigated by art historians fascinated by his encounters with the Jesus Freak movement during his younger years, but his journals also chronicle his genuine delight at painting alongside teenagers. “I feel more like a teacher all the time,” he wrote while working on a mural in Barcelona, “like in Chicago and also here the last week, I keep finding myself sitting with little groups of ‘students,’ answering questions for hours. I like it.”[2] The quotation marks he placed around the term “students” are an apt reflection of the degree to which Haring’s working method approached a collaborative, rather than a hierarchical, pedagogy even as he worked around a grueling schedule of AIDS treatment. After painting black outlines of his customary dancing figures on the Masonite panels, he tasked students with filling in the spaces with designs of their own devising, specifying only the color scheme and a few subjects (gang symbols, etc.) to be avoided.

Even the most casual inspection of the surviving panels demonstrates a wide range of abilities, approaches, and images. More than a few references to Batman abound, as do the names of students, leopard-like spots, and solid color fields. One or two sections display virtuosic skill, such as a pink rendering of pre-Columbian motifs and figures. The student artists transformed a fairly unremarkable Haring composition, typical of a working method that prioritized speed over study, into a repository of difference; the painted surface records and presents the work of hundreds of participants. Significantly, the mayor’s Office of Employment and Training paid each student for their daily artistic labor. The painters may have had their artistic choices constrained by Haring’s instructions and outlines, as well as the time limits imposed by the project’s logistics, but the whole business made stronger ethical commitments to its participants than many of the public art projects detailed in Miwon Kwon’s seminal One Place After Another. Taking Chicago as a case study, Kwon discusses the exhibition “Culture in Action,” which took place four years after Haring’s mural and which made “the active participation of residents in diverse communities” the driving force for eight public art projects. Conceived in opposition to Sculpture Chicago’s 1989 summer program, which featured artists working publicly rather than enlisting the public in a communal, creative enterprise, the exhibition nevertheless pointed up the failure of public projects to reconceive relations with communities (e.g., Suzanne Lacy’s Full Circle, which simply sought out Chicago-centric knowledge to provide local “content” for her art and Chicago residents to “perform and signify the decentralization of the artist’s authority” while still shoring that authority up).[3] For Kwon, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s work with pre-existing community organizations and high school programs in his own neighborhood exemplified the kind of ongoing “invented community” that could augur genuinely transformative public art.

CPS students painting the mural, photographed by Irving Zucker.

Thanks to the research of Kwon and other art historians like Rebecca Zorach, who describes how the Museum of Contemporary Art—another sponsor of Haring’s mural—only temporarily supported an “experimental friendship” with black gangs in the sixties, we’re now in a position to critically assess Haring’s project in light of the establishment’s relationship with other public art projects in Chicago.[4] If this exhibition aims to enshrine Haring’s mural and its teenage participants as a key event in Chicago history, for example, it does so, in part, at the expense of other histories of community art-making that did not receive such high-profile sanction and support and which, by virtue of both their makers and their aims, posed a more significant challenge to the centers of Chicago power. (One reason, by the way, that I’m able to make this claim confidently is because the Chicago Cultural Center has recently displayed a number of important objects made for various Chicago publics, including Eugene Eda’s doors for Malcolm X College.) During the 1980s, artists in the predominantly Latinx neighborhood of Pilsen produced antiwar murals that explicitly took aim at figures like Reagan. The massive community mural I Welcome Myself to a New Place was painted in 1988 by over a hundred residents of the Pullman and Roseland neighborhoods and depicts, among other things, Eugene Debs and an African mask. Héctor Duarte’s 1992 mural in Humboldt Park subordinates the Chicago skyline to a Puerto Rican flag, gesturing to the neighborhood’s powerful Puerto Rican ties. Each of these mural ventures served, in one form or another, to reclaim areas of urban space from the powerful interests of white politicians and racist police. Such claims cannot be made for Haring’s project in Grant Park. In a year when Congress finally began to discuss the issue of reparations and when trials of uniformed torturers like Jon Burge gave the South Side a sliver of hope for justice (a hope that would shortly be dashed), Haring and his collaborators produced a well-funded work of public art that largely evacuated issues of inequality in favor of a celebratory, pan-racial rhetoric of utopian togetherness.

And so, if Haring’s mural promised its participants more than Suzanne Lacy’s Full Circle, it promised them less than Manglano-Ovalle’s Street-Level Video, and it certainly contributed less in the way of critical intervention than the Wall of Respect (1967), which has garnered such attention of late. “Since the Enlightenment,” O.K. Werckmeister argued in 2002, “bourgeois culture has provided a forum for a principled, or abstract, reasoning about alternatives to the political status quo with no immediate venue of political enactment, whose impact on the conduct of politics has depended on the variable interactions between public sphere and political institutions in the democratic state.”[5] Examining Haring’s mural now, I’m impressed by the ways that the project enacted small aspects of political change by paying its teenage participants, encouraging their creative freedom, and transforming Grant Park, briefly, into a site of collaborative art production. But it also seems the perfect illustration of a proposed change to the status quo that depended on the good graces of corrupt institutions for its existence, and which left nary a mark on Chicago politics.

[1] Michael Kimmelman, “A Look at Keith Haring, Especially on the Graffiti,” The New York Times, September 21, 1990, sec. C, 19.
[2] Keith Haring, Journals (New York: Penguin, 2010), 348.
[3] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 118.
[4] Rebecca Zorach, “Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship between the Street and a Museum,” Art Journal 70, no. 2 (2011): 66–87.
[5] O. K. Werckmeister, “A Critique of T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 4 (2002), 857.

April 2018

Poliça and s t a r g a z e with Divide and Dissolve

Thalia Hall, Chicago, February 22, 2018

Reviewed by Max McKenna

The collaboration between Poliça and
s t a r g a z e is a collaboration in the most exciting sense—two strong talents, complimenting and pushing against one another. It has so far resulted in a lush and ambitious album, Music for the Long Emergency, out last month from the Minneapolis label Totally Gross National Product, and a brief but electric supporting tour, with only five dates together in the US, including a stop in Chicago.

Self-described “electro anarcho pop group” Poliça is the creative outlet for Minneapolis-based vocalist and lyricist Channy Leaneagh, and producer Ryan Olson, backed by an electric bass and not one, but two drummers. In teaming with s t a r g a z e—a Berlin-based orchestral collective, which, in addition to classical commissions, also often collaborates with pop and indie acts—the personnel has swelled to a dozen musicians (including an entire string quartet), a typically unwieldy number for contemporary pop music.

In certain lights, Poliça and s t a r g a z e look like they want to be a hook-driven synth pop outfit like you might see at a number of venues around Chicago; but in others, they’re straining to be the kind of art-music collective that you’d expect to find in a more institutional space, like a museum or a symphony hall. The collaboration was commissioned by the Liquid Music Series of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, which “develops innovative new projects with iconoclastic artists in unique presentation formats.” The result is kind of weird and indeterminate. The band has two drummers, a surplus that’s almost always impossible to justify. Even the name, Poliça and s t a r g a z e, is far less slick than your usual supergroup.

But it’s that excess that makes the partnership feel fresh, and fresh in a different way. For example, it would be inaccurate to say, as we say about so much pop music with experimental ambitions, that the project occupies a “liminal space” between electro and analog, or to overstate its Europe-meets-Midwest roots, or to say that it draws on classical conventions to subvert some set of expectations listeners have about pop. On their own, either Poliça or s t a r g a z e might fit any or all of these descriptions. But together, they feel large and bold rather than slinky and mutable, earnest rather than subversive.

Partway through their February 22 set at Thalia Hall, two interpretive dancers came onstage to perform to the song, “How Is This Happening.” The band locked into the open-ended coda, and front woman Leaneagh ceded the spotlight to the two dancers, who danced a pas de deux over a whining string drone. The number went from a brooding lament for the Trump era—“resisting him resisting us”— to a modernist ballet. Toward the end of the seventy-minute set, the dancers returned, dressed in red pajamas, for a longer and more complicated number that served as a climax for the entire evening. It seemed as though the dancers were brought in to embody the moments of both difficulty and ecstasy that emerge in the course of an atonal soundscape, lending it immediate and accessible contours that most ambient music makes a point of avoiding.

There’s that quality of emergency to the project, exemplified in the urgent message on Leaneagh’s T-shirt: “Destroy White Supremacy.” But Poliça and s t a r g a z e are also hunkering down for the “long emergency,” an indefinite state of affairs that will require creative solutions to provide sustained relief. One such solution appears to be an unapologetic and unironic commitment to artistic expression in all forms. Orchestral motifs flourish unhindered by the relentless meters of electronica. Moments of avant-garde indulgence exist comfortably alongside exuberant pop. Even the pairing with the opening act, Divide and Dissolve, an Australian noise duo, didn’t feel incongruous. The duo played for less than fifteen minutes, barely engaging the audience; the night before, in Minneapolis, they played for just eight minutes. It takes longer to set up and break down their stacks of amps and drum set than it does for them to perform. Musically, and in terms of performance, they felt quite remote from Poliça and s t a r g a z e. What they share is a common desire to create compellingly.

Poliça and s t a r g a z e want to reach their audience on any level possible. Take the terribly groovy “Fake Like,” the first track on their LP and the penultimate in this performance. The s t a r g a z e section of the band plucks out a mid-tempo pizzicato beat while Leaneagh hooks you in with the refrain: “You want it bad / But you only want it sometimes.” A lot of her lyrics are like this, rendering larger crises in terms of personal dramas. At the same time, as a listener, the words feel pointed. She’s speaking to the coquettishness of audiences who badly want art, music, entertainment, satisfaction—“it”—but who get distracted by a world of “likes” and slipperier gestures like “fake likes.” She wants to breach that in her own way. Poliça and s t a r g a z e are reaching out for peers, for comrades. As the band left the stage, the spotlights turned on the audience.

March 2018

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius

Block Museum of Art, September 23, 2017 – March 11, 2018

Reviewed by Sam Rowe

Frontispiece to Europe. A Prophecy. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

In 1948, a young Allen Ginsberg heard the disembodied voice of William Blake reciting poetry in his Harlem apartment. Blake, with his “deep earthen grave voice,” read several poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience, and “The Sick Rose” in particular induced, for Ginsberg, a sense of euphoric, apocalyptic transcendence:

like a prophecy . . . as if Blake had penetrated the very secret core of the entire universe and had come forth with some little magic formula statement in rhyme and rhythm that, if properly heard in the inner inner ear, would deliver you beyond the universe.

Ginsberg would come to understand this auditory hallucination or “apparitional voice” as formative in his poetic development. As he would have it, the specter of Blake, with Ginsberg as Ouija board, haunted the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde during its most euphoric phase.

An exhibition at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art amply substantiates Ginsberg’s intuition that Blake was a prophet of mid-twentieth-century counterculture. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius, curated by Stephen Eisenman and Corinne Granof, juxtaposes a judicious selection of Blake prints and watercolors with an array of artifacts from sixties painting, printmaking, writing, and music. Eisenman and Granof make a compelling case for the sixties as a Blakean decade. On one hand, as W. J. T. Mitchell points out in the exhibition catalog, this was roughly the era of Blake’s academic recuperation, the point at which he ceased to be a notable eccentric and began to be a major romantic poet. On the other, Blake cast a long shadow over the period’s counterculture, from Ginsberg to abstract expressionism to the Doors and Jimi Hendrix.

The Blake section of the exhibition is a blend of old favorites and lesser-known gems. A generous selection from Songs of Innocence and Experience is on display, as well as several plates from The First Book of Urizen and the iconic frontispiece (“The Ancient of Days”) to Europe a Prophecy. This last image in particular was central to the 1960s Blake revival. In a delightful personal reminiscence included in the exhibition catalog, the veteran scholar of Romanticism Frederick Burwick recalls that “there couldn’t have been more than one dorm room in ten that didn’t have a poster of a work by Blake, often The Ancient of Days.” (The first class Burwick taught at UCLA, it turns out, included a theater major named Jim Morrison, who wrote a paper on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.) The countercultural enthusiasm for this particular image, however, may be ironic. It depicts not an act of imaginative creation but a circumscription of imagination by reason: Urizen—Blake’s avatar of dispassionate, blind rationality—measures out the world with his compass, his eyes bent to earth.

From *Visions of the Daughters of Albion*. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

The highlights of the exhibition may be among the less well-known Blake prints. A complete run of Blake’s late engravings illustrating the book of Job display both contrast and continuity between the prints from the 1790s, with Blake’s characteristically statuesque figures set in sharp, static lines and framed by imposing borders. Several of Blake’s intricate illustrations of Dante, including an erotically suggestive rending of the Paolo and Francesca episode, are also on view. And Blake’s millenarian strain (drawn out helpfully in Mark Crosby’s contribution to the catalog) is present in the form of The Number of the Beast is 666, one of a set of stunning watercolors inspired by the book of Revelation.

One set of colored prints included in the exhibition remains all too relevant: Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion. This proto-feminist work, often interpreted in light of Blake’s 1790s acquaintance with Mary Wollstonecraft, is a tormented meditation on the aftermath of sexual assault. The poem merits revisiting now, when the #MeToo movement has brought consent, victim-blaming, and the routine exploitation of women to the foreground of political consciousness. Blake’s protagonist, Oothoon, has been raped by Bromion and estranged from her partner Theotormon. Oothoon, sneeringly labeled a “harlot” by her attacker, delivers a remarkable address that attempts to reestablish her connection to Theotormon. Her peroration concludes with a line that would reappear in Ginsberg’s ecstatic footnote to Howl as a mantra of pan-eroticism: “every thing that lives is holy!” How, Oothoon asks, can one recover eroticism in a body and a relationship damaged by sexual violence? How to affirm sexuality after it has been used as a weapon?

Blake’s answers to these questions may not be exactly right—in many ways, he is closer to the sexual liberation ethic of the 1960s than the gender equity ethic of the 2010s. But his brief for sex-positivity and against toxic masculinity remains startlingly fresh. The haunting frontispiece to Visions—a particularly beautiful version of which appears in the Block Museum show—depicts Oothoon and Theotormon bound back to back in Bromion’s cave. Sexual violence, in this image, is not simply an offense committed by men against women, but a set of mind-forged manacles that binds both feminine and masculine sexuality.

Charles Seliger, *Old Corruption*, *from Illustrations to the songs from William Blake’s “Island in the Moon.”* Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Michael Rosenfeld.

The bulk of William Blake and the Age of Aquarius is devoted to tracing the Blakean currents in 1960s art and culture. The curators make a good case for a Blakean influence in mid-century abstract expressionism. An intriguing 1940s engraving by Jackson Pollock shows the master experimenting with Blake’s medium. Impressive canvases by Jay DeFeo and Robert Smithson are on view, along with a video by Bruce Connor documenting the removal of DeFeo’s monumental Blake-inspired masterpiece, The Rose, from her East Village apartment. One highlight is a stunning Sam Francis canvas, with the painter’s trademark deep blue set against aggressive red, and with a title that quotes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Damn Braces,” as in the infernal proverb “Damn braces: Bless relaxes.”

One particularly fun item of mid-century abstraction included in the show is a set of Charles Seliger’s illustrations to An Island in the Moon. An oddity in the Blake canon, this unprinted early work is a send-up on philosophical erudition and over-specialization, working in the mode—more reminiscent of the early eighteenth century than of Blake’s own nascent romantic moment—of allegorical satire. Seliger, who found An Island in the Moon in a Jersey City library copy of Blake’s poetry at the age of 19, illustrated the personages of Blake’s absurd lunar salon with white ink on a layer of black ink. His spindly, apparitional figures are both silly and menacing. In comparison with, for example, Blake’s celebrated watercolor of Sir Isaac Newton, Seliger’s drawings draw out the evolution of Blake’s complex, ambivalent reaction against the Enlightenment and natural philosophy.

Later practitioners of Blake’s profession, printmaking, make a strong showing. In the 1940s, the printmaker Stanley William Hayter and the Blake editor Ruthven Todd collaborated on an attempt to revive Blake’s method of printing and text illustration. Using Blake’s distinctive technique of acid-wash relief, Hayter engraved poems by Todd, framed by abstract embellishments. The results are not particularly distinguished, either as prints or poems, but do demonstrate Blake’s ongoing relevance to the mid-century avant-garde.

Blake continued to inspire fellow printers into the Age of Aquarius proper. Hayter and Todd’s prints are shown alongside several 1966 screen prints by Ad Reinhardt. Composed of stable geometrical blocks of subtly contrasting matte colors, Reinhardt’s prints demonstrate Blake’s artform at its finest, even if their link to Blake himself is a bit tenuous. (Reinhardt’s friend Thomas Merton, as the curators point out, was a Catholic mystic and a devoted Blakean.) A series of ten screen prints by Richard Anuszkiewicz, each titled with a Blake quotation, are aggressively hallucinatory. With their sharp geometrical figures and hyper-saturated colors, the prints are more Blakean in inspiration than in appearance. In a nice touch, however, Anuszkiewicz’s experiments in color perception are across the gallery from a set of Victor Moscoso’s psychedelic posters for Bay Area concerts. (Anuskiewicz and Moscoso, in fact, both studied with Joseph Albers.)

The scope of the Block Museum exhibition extends from visual arts to writing and from the avant-garde to the broader milieu of 60s counterculture. Ginsberg is a central figure here, and his 1969 recordings of Songs of Innocence and Experience, with modal, folksy musical accompaniment, serve as testimony to ongoing engagement with the master long after his Blake vision (or audition). The curators make a case for reading Kenneth Patchen’s illustrated poetry books as Blakean in descent. And Maurice Sendak, a lifelong lover of Blake, gets his due, from a 1967 re-illustrated edition of Songs to the late My Brother’s Book, which contains striking visual resonances with Blake’s Milton.

Helen and Pat Adam, “*I Had Sweet Company Because I Sought Out None.,”* San Francisco collage, 1950s-1964. Copyright © the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York and used with permission. Photograph by James Ulrich.

Another unexpected treat is In Harpy Land, a sequence of collages by Helen Adam (whose work was recently featured in this magazine). In Harpy Land illustrates terse, Blakean proverbs with images of avian-themed feminine decadence. In what may be a response to the mad printer of Lambeth, these images seem to discover a kind of primordial innocence in feminine auto-eroticism, finding freedom just where the iron laws of Urizen would find sin and degeneracy. The curators, finally, make the case that this Blakean influence seeped into the broader counterculture, exploring Blakean visual resonances in ephemera like Moscoso’s screen print posters and underground publications like The Chicago Seed. They make much of the appearance of an echo of Blake’s Milton in Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile”: “Well my arrows are made of desire . . .”

Ginsberg, it seems, was right to think that his supernatural auditory encounter with Blake heralded a new dawn of cultural possibility. Ginsberg’s relationship to both Blake and this new countercultural Jerusalem, however, evolved over the years. Thirty years after his Blake vision, in a 1978 lecture at Naropa University, he would look back at both Blake’s historical moment and that of his own creative peak:

Blake was struggling with some of the same emotions we struggle with, which I assume are more or less common, for his revolutionary times—post French Revolution—and the destruction of idealism, radical disillusionment. There are similar revolutionary conditions now as in Blake’s time, similar social and emotional problems. Blake’s books are useful now as explorations of the same problems we have, somewhat related to the revolutionary fervor of the Sixties in America and the subsequent so-called “disillusionment.”

If the young Ginsberg found a universe of revolutionary imaginative potential in Blake’s works, the older Ginsberg found a set of reflections on what it means to outlive a revolution. As Blake might put it, the key to both the 1790s and the 1960s is to understand the relationship between Innocence and Experience.

In addition to William Blake, then, the 1790s have something else in common with the 1960s: in historical perspective, it’s hard not to regard both decades as a terrible waste of potential. The democratic and egalitarian fervor of the 1789 gave way to the Terror and then to Bonaparte, and Tom Paine is now safely misread and absorbed into narratives of American exceptionalism. Something similar can be said of the 60s: their liberation of sexuality and perception has been transmuted into professional-class virtue ethics, their resurgent Marxism cloistered in academic bowers or curdled into hard-left nostalgia. As Haight-Ashbury tripped out and barricades went up in the Paris streets, Bill Clinton, final betrayer of the twentieth-century social democratic tradition, was smoking weed without inhaling. The pairing of Blake and the hippies suggests a crucial question: what survives from these two tumultuous decades after their Innocence has passed into bitter Experience?

February 2018

Dumpster Tapes

The independent Chicago tape label recreates the waning pleasure of finding a box of old stuff

Reviewed by Max McKenna

Dumpster Tapes has a broader reach in the Chicago music community than might be expected, given the boutique nature of what they do: that is, making cassette tapes to be sold on the DIY circuit. Specializing in garage rock—specifically, the music coming out of Chicago’s sizable garage rock scene—the local tape label has become a fixture at shows, thanks to both its eye-catching analog offerings and its tireless support for its scene. In a world where everybody checks “Interested” on every Facebook event, and, in the end, attends nothing, Dumpster Tapes remains on the ground, creating a kind of gravitational presence around the bands and shows it supports.

Part of that presence comes from the sheer amount of music Dumpster Tapes has managed to release. In just over four years, the label has put out, on average, nearly one cassette per month. That consistent output combined with the quality of the acts they release has paid off. On Monday, November 13, Dumpster Tapes hosted a four-act bill at the Empty Bottle as part of the Bottle’s recurring “Free Mondays” series, which doubled as a release party for their latest cassette (their 35th), the lovely four-song Gemini Moon by Chicago-based musician, Mia Joy. It was one of the busier rooms you might find on a Monday night in November.

Joy was supported by two other Chicago acts, Cupid Youth (whose own EP recently came out on Dumpster Tapes) and psychedelic rockers, Head; as well as Rosali, a singer-songwriter from Philadelphia. The acts covered the range of traditionally lo-fi genres that have always shadowed a more popular mode of alternative rock, itself shadowing mainstream rock: shoegaze, psychedelia, punk, dreampop—modes that come out of a domestic tinkering with the rudiments of pop songwriting and performance, be it in your bedroom, garage, or attic.

There’s little reason to be coy about your influences anymore; a lot of bands wear them on their sleeves. Cupid Youth, for example, is an excellent homage to Sarah Records–style dreampop; meanwhile, Mia Joy easily draws comparisons to Mazzy Star. The echoes feel intentional. What counts as innovation at this moment is less the cavalier model of the avant-garde and something more representational: a revisiting of the male-dominated indie music canon to open it up to women and people of color. (Mazzy Star, it should be noted, was fronted by Hope Sandoval, who, along with a couple other women artists in the 90s, was already working to expand alternative music communities in these lateral ways.)

But these bands aren’t throwbacks by any means; their songs feel very current. Take “10,000,” the lead track from Joy’s Gemini Moon. It’s a gradual washed-out crescendo, content with skirting pop song structure, instead stacking vocal harmonies and varying the melody with uplifting chord changes. Joy sings, “I should be doing 10,000 things but I’m not / I should be thinking 10,000 things but I’m not,” and over the course of three minutes, the burden of those 10,000 things lifts. The angst gives way to a cathartic refusal fitting for an age where our imaginations are so easily crowded by all the things we’re told we should be doing.

DIY music scenes are famously tight-knit. However, in recent years, those scenes have thrown up bands like Waxahatchee and Mitski that have been able to enjoy crossover success while maintaining their DIY ethos. Although it’s rare that you’ll hear an explicitly political DIY band, the DIY ethos is increasingly defined by progressive politics and efforts to increase representation in the music industry. “DIY,” here, is to be distinguished from “indie,” which is less a scene or even business model and more an aesthetic—much as it is with “craft” in beer. Moreover, many “indie” labels, like Matador or Merge, while not subsidiaries of the majors, have become significant players in the music industry and are no longer the scrappy operations they once were. They’ve become tastemakers in their own right as the line between “independent” or “alternative” music and mainstream pop blurs, exemplified so well in Chicago by the multimillion-dollar, corporate-sponsored Pitchfork Festival.

This is not to pit pop and “authentic” music against each other, which has long been the M.O. of music aficionados, and a stance that Kelefa Sanneh has rightly called “rockist.” There’s still some reckoning for critics to do on that front, but for artists and listeners, the loosening of rock’s stranglehold on “serious” music-making has made room for other identities. But there’s a familiar bigger-picture trend happening, too: money keeps getting concentrated in select pockets of the music industry at a time when digital audio and high speed Internet has made it possible for almost anybody to distribute music, their own or others’. What then, in this landscape, can a label accomplish—a label, no less, that specializes in archaic media?

For Dumpster Tapes cofounder, Ed McMenamin, it’s about community. “Labels can help solidify or bring together a scene,” he told me. “They introduce bands to each other who might not have already been friends, and they introduce listeners to bands they may not have already known.”

The spirit of forming open communities based on friendship is a mission critical to the politics of DIY and stands in contrast to the connoisseurship that long defined alternative music appreciation, where elite male-dominated clubs guarded their fandom at all costs. That Balkanizing of creative communities feels out of step with today’s crises.

It’s precisely as a catalyst for community building that Dumpster Tapes proposes the curious format of the cassette tape. It could be argued that, in the twenty-first century, tapes are antiquarian, creating a high barrier for appreciation: few people have cassette players anymore, whether at home or in their cars. While the label does not sell digital-only versions of its releases, it does offer a download code with a purchase of each tape (and sells tapes online via Bandcamp and Big Cartel). Nevertheless, the choice to sell physical things in an ephemeral market has an interesting effect. According to Alex Fryer, the other founder and owner of Dumpster Tapes, the presence of either herself or McMenamin (or often, both) at all of the shows they support allows them to sell a good number of tapes in person. There’s an undeniable aura about the materiality of tapes, too. “As tape and record collectors ourselves, we understand the sentimental value that comes with owning your favorite music on a physical format,” Fryer said. “It connects you to it in a different way.”

That connection plays out in a few different ways. There’s an immediacy to tapes, a gritty instantaneousness, like a Polaroid. Whereas small bands might wait more than six months to get vinyl LPs pressed, with tapes, it takes about four weeks tops to assemble the finished product. They’re cheaper, too, and much more portable than vinyl. The course of action that DIY proposes is not as rugged and individualistic as it might seem. Rather, DIY advocates for a way of working that’s steady, that makes filtering out the noise a priority, that’s democratic, and, finally, that’s joyful.

And finally—crucially—tapes are fun. “A tape reminds people of childhood,” McMenamin said. “There’s that element of play to it.” It’s true: for a generation in its twenties and thirties, tapes might have been our first musical purchases. They were a big part of being in the car, of listening to a Walkman, of making mixes, of the work that used to go into copying and sharing music. Dumpster Tapes recreates the waning pleasure of finding an old box of stuff and getting to share it with a friend. And while nostalgia seems like a mood antithetical to the progressivism of DIY, Dumpster Tapes isn’t merely trafficking in nostalgia. There’s a sense that the label is revising the blind spots of the past, going back to an earlier moment in music fandom to uncover new ways forward. Encountering their eclectic catalog is like one of those dreams where your home has an extra room you’ve never been in before—it’s a feeling of possibility that limbers up the imagination.
December 2017

A View from the Bridge, written by Arthur Miller and directed by Ivo van Hove

The Goodman Theatre, September 9 – October 22, 2017

Reviewed by Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Ivo van Hove’s revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the Goodman Theatre’s 2017–2018 season opener, oozes cynicism. This production offers nothing defensible on its own terms, and yet demands, aggressively, to be celebrated on the basis of its star director’s alleged genius. Van Hove camouflages incongruity and pompousness as rawness. He appears persuaded that no one will notice the subterfuge. Or perhaps he’s too contemptuous of his audience to care if anyone does.

Miller’s play begins in 1955 as Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone (Ian Bedford) welcomes, not without some reluctance, his Italian cousins, Rodolpho (Daniel Abeles) and Marco (Brandon Espinoza). Whereas Marco, a hardworking husband and father, is self-effacing, Rodolpho’s effeminacy—he sings at work—yields discomfort. Confrontations erupt when Rodolpho starts going out with Eddie and his wife Beatrice’s (Andrus Nichols) niece Catherine (Catherine Combs), of whom Eddie is zealously possessive.

In A View from the Bridge, Miller spells out misogynistic and homophobic ideologies with characteristic didacticism: in order to maintain the incest taboo, Eddie must give his niece away, though not to the queer figure whose illegibility throws into disarray the family unit and its symbolic integrity. Every theater season, of course, revivals of regressive plays profuse. But Van Hove shows no interest in commenting on the politics here deployed. Van Hove insisted in interviews published last summer that the play’s depiction of immigrant workers and their monitoring and surveillance supplied enough evidence of the work’s contemporary relevance. Van Hove mistakes references to immigration with trenchant commentary.

Van Hove’s production, which transferred to Broadway in the fall of 2015 after runs at London’s Young Vic and Windham’s Theatre, earned the 2016 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. The set, imported from the show’s previous runs, accomplishes the unlikely feat of making minimalism showy. A fluorescent-lit prism, deeper than wide, cracks the Goodman’s traditional proscenium configuration. For no apparent reason other than to provide, as an ad pledges, “the ultimate theatrical experience,” rows of seats are added on each side of the thrust stage. For Van Hove and his scenic and lighting designer Jan Versweyveld, proximity to the action, no matter the content of the action, enhances viscerality.

The direction proves just as baroque as its setting. Cast members are confined to one-note portrayals. Catherine, a human projectile, throws herself in all directions. She repeatedly jumps into Eddie’s arms, wrapping her legs around his torso. The blocking screams, “Theirs in an inappropriate intimacy.” Van Hove’s direction slips from unsubtle to outright gimmicky when, as the climate grows hostile, a metronome marks the cadence of the actors’ line delivery. The stunt quickly gets old, but it is somehow reprised a few scenes later with an added element: the stage directions are now read aloud. Such manufacturing of dramatic tension would be distracting if there were anything from which to be distracted. And still, the ending takes the cake. After a clash with Eddie’s cousins that leaves him stabbed, blood rains on the white stage. Rubbing salt in the wound, Alfieri (Ezra Knight), an American lawyer raised in Italy who serves as the play’s narrator or chorus, delivers a monologue regarding Eddie’s “perverse purity.” Nothing is as pure as toxic masculinity, indeed.

Van Hove may be a leading figure of avant-garde theater, but his staging of A View from the Bridge amounts to little more than ideological business as usual supplemented by tacky pyrotechnics.

November 2017

Seeing Eldzier Cortor

Written by Liesl Olson
First published in Chicago Review Issue 59:4/60:1, 2016.

Eldzier Cortor died on Thanksgiving Day, 2015, about seven months after I interviewed him. He was ninety-nine years old. According to his son Michael, Cortor worked as an artist up until the day he died.
The New York Times ran a generous obituary of Cortor, which included a photograph of him, sitting upright and bow-tied, taken by the photojournalist Gordon Parks in 1949. This photograph presented Cortor just after winning a Guggenheim fellowship, which would take him to Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti. The Times also ran a front-page story titled “Black Artists and the March into the Museum,” in which Cortor was featured, and which included several short video-interviews with black artists. An assessment of black art in the twentieth-century art market, the Times piece underscored a bittersweet irony in the age of modernist formalism during which Cortor and other artists developed their careers. If a black artist chose to work in a figurative mode, then his or her work was likely to be pigeonholed by the white establishment as expressive of the “black experience.” But if he or she chose to work in abstraction, then this work did not ﬁt the category of “black art” as conceived by the country’s leading museums.

Has the art world caught up with the idea that modernism was many things? Cortor—whose range of work is difficult to classify—remained skeptical.

David Lynch: A Complete Retrospective

The Music Box Theatre, Chicago April 27 – May 4, 2017 Programmed by Daniel Knox

Reviewed by Eric Powell

“Shut the fuck up,” said Daniel Knox, but good-naturedly, to the packed audience waiting to watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) at the Music Box Theatre. This was, as he said, a point of “etiquette,” and he went on to tell everyone to hold in their self-conscious, I’m-in-the-know laughter and other noises. It wasn’t a misplaced request. There was an odd feeling of camaraderie among the crowds that attended the complete retrospective of David Lynch’s work at the Music Box Theatre, as if it were a convention for some rare association, such as the International Association of Professional Conversational Hypnotists (yes, it exists). There had been self-conscious laughter on the previous two nights. But it didn’t annoy me much because it was coming from a place of genuine love for the films, a love that wanted to be shared. I assume that, like myself, many of the people in the audience had never had the chance to see many of Lynch’s films in the theater, and had been watching them in solitude at home; we all finally got to come out of the closet, together. (Of course, not everyone was already initiated. When we arrived at the first scene in Eraserhead (1977) of the monstrous premature baby, a woman a few rows in front of me, clearly aghast, held her arms up in the air for at least ten seconds in utter disbelief.)

It was a rare opportunity that probably won’t come around again any time soon. And it really was a complete retrospective: in addition to showing all of Lynch’s feature-length films in 35mm (yes, even Dune (1984)), Knox included all of the deleted scenes from the films, and all of Lynch’s shorts. It was a marathon. Try walking out of the theater after having watched Blue Velvet (1986), David Lynch: The Art Life (2016), Industrial Symphony No. 1 (1990), and the deleted scenes from Wild at Heart (1990), all in one go. Talk about defamiliarization! I doubt that even the most hardened Lynch fans could do it all each night of the retrospective.

The impetus for this retrospective was clearly the new Twin Peaks, which premiered on Showtime on May 21—Lynch’s first major film endeavor since Inland Empire came out in 2006. I was, as many others no doubt were, happy to have this retrospective as preparation for the much-anticipated return of Lynch, and of the now-legendary Twin Peaks (1990–91). It was also a tribute to the career of one of the most important filmmakers alive. It is, after all, impossible to conceive of the landscape of contemporary American cinema without Lynch. If he didn’t exist we would have to invent him.

Watching everything altogether allowed me to track and connect themes that run throughout Lynch’s work. Not themes, rather, but pathological obsessions: with domestic violence and marital infidelity, with 1950s Americana, with curtains (typically red), with fire, with desolate stretches of road at night, with mirrors and doubling, with the dualism of public and private lives, domestic and hidden lives. This latter dualism is one of the most persistent aspects of Lynch’s material, and it often shows up symbolically in the form of two different women, blonde and brunette (which Lynch perhaps takes from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, echoes of which abound in his films). I had never noticed this before, but it is a constant feature of his work: Mary X and the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall in Eraserhead; Sandy Williams and Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet; Lula Fortune and Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini with her hair dyed blonde) in Wild at Heart; Laura Palmer and Donna Hayward, as well as Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks; Renee Madison and Alice Wakefield (both Patricia Arquette) in Lost Highway (1997); Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn and Rita Hayworth/Camilla Rhodes in Mulholland Drive (2001); Nikki Grace/Susan Blue and the Lost Girl in Inland Empire. The blonde/brunette binary symbolizes a kind of Blakean dialectic of innocence and experience, rooted in sexuality. As with so much of Lynch’s work, it has its origin in Eraserhead and finds its prototypical expression in Blue Velvet, where Jeffrey Beaumont is in love with the innocent blonde Sandy (Laura Dern) but finds himself passionately desiring the older, more experienced brunette Dorothy (Rossellini).

Another dualism that Lynch obsesses over is that of the inside and the outside. This often takes the form of holes, whether in bodies or in structures (doors are incredibly important in his work). Characteristically Lynchian: the camera zooms in on, eventually entering, a hole of some sort, drawing us into another reality. Think of the opening of Eraserhead, where the camera passes over that richly textured surface of the undisclosed planet, until it finds a hole and slowly zooms into it; or the moment in Mulholland Drive when Rita opens the blue box, and the camera dives into the black hole, resulting in a kaleidoscopic reordering of the reality of the film. This obsession with holes runs as far back as The Grandmother (1970), a minor masterpiece, in which a young boy plants a seed in a pile of dirt on a bed; the seed grows over time into a monstrous organism that is seemingly half-plant, half-animal. Then, in the film’s most unforgettable scene, this organism gives birth to the eponymous grandmother, fully formed. The boy takes the role of a doctor, helping to pull the body of the grandmother out of the hole. The inside/outside duality takes us to the heart of Lynch’s work, connecting as it does with the opposition of surfaces and depths. That opposition, in a way, could be said to tie the various aspects of his work together.

There is by now a set of received ideas about Lynch: he’s a sensualist; he exposes the dark underbelly of suburban American life; his work taps into the subconscious, or unconscious; he’s a surrealist (Pauline Kael: “the first populist surrealist—a Frank Capra of dream logic”). These things together supposedly produce that utterly unique style that has earned its own adjective: Lynchian. In David Foster Wallace’s formulation: “An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term ‘refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.’” This isn’t bad; but to his credit Wallace isn’t fully satisfied with it, saying “Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart–type words that’s ultimately definable only ostensively—i.e., we know it when we see it.” What is it about Lynch’s work that makes it so difficult to discuss analytically?

Received ideas about Lynch are getting in the way of thinking about his work at this point. It’s helpful , as it often is, to consider Lynch’s work in phases: the first phase would begin with Lynch’s first experiment with film, Six Figures Getting Sick (1967), and culminate with Eraserhead in 1977; the second phase would be his brief detour into Hollywood cinema with The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune in 1984; the third and essential phase—the one in which the Lynchian is born, matures, and, arguably, dies—would run from Blue Velvet in 1986 to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in 1992; the fourth phase would encompass Lost Highway in 1997, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire in 2006. These phases, I think, are justified not just historically, but also stylistically. The element of camp, for example, that is so strong in the third phase mostly drops away in the fourth phase, in which Lynch becomes more and more involved self-reflexively in making films about film and Hollywood, and with creating complex, nonlinear narrative structures.

Now for the received wisdom about Lynch’s work. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker had already called Lynch a sensualist filmmaker in her review of Eraserhead. But Lloyd Rose in 1984 came closer to the truth: “Lynch is one of the great movie sensualists,” she wrote, “but his is an odd sort of sensuality, because there’s no overt sexual charge to it. Even when he’s dealing with directly sexual symbols, there’s something cool and dry, clinical, in his attitude. And his technique has no lush pleasures.” This insight is confirmed by a comment that Lynch made in an interview in 1985: “I love flesh, too,” Lynch said, “but flesh, just beautiful flesh, everybody loves this texture, but sometimes flesh in other forms also is very beautiful.” “Such as?” the interviewer asks. “Such as the Elephant Man, really. Or just maybe sores…. As soon as you put a name to it, it stops you really from seeing it as an interesting texture, but if you just saw it in an abstract way—nature is so fantastic…so many things you stop looking at because you know exactly what it is. But if you would look at it and not know what it was it would be a fantastic thrill. There’s many medical books that have a thrill on every page.”

These comments from Lynch are very revealing. Most of us cannot see the Elephant Man, or, say, a photograph of someone undergoing open-heart surgery, and find them beautiful. The reason is that we can’t distance ourselves from the fact that these are human beings. There is an amoral aestheticism to Lynch’s films that I find hard to call sensualism. If Federico Fellini, for example, is a sensualist, then Lynch is something else. Even the prosaic, ugly sexuality of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films has much more of sensuality than Lynch.

Deeply tied to this is the core ethical problem posed by Lynch’s films. How can he make such beautiful works that are so disgusting from a human perspective? Eraserhead is simultaneously a profoundly beautiful and a profoundly disgusting film, made even more disgusting when you think about the fact that Lynch made the film after just having had an unwanted baby. The critical controversy over his work has essentially revolved around exactly this dilemma. In “My Problem with ‘Blue Velvet’,” Roger Ebert conceded the brilliant craftsmanship and style of the film, but nonetheless felt that it was, essentially, unethical: “The movie is powerful, challenging and made with great skill, and yet it made me feel pity for the actors who worked in it and anger at the director for taking liberties with them.” He objected in particular to the treatment of Isabella Rossellini: “there are some scenes in which a woman is degraded and humiliated and made to suffer obscenely, and other scenes in which we’re supposed to giggle because the call letters of the local station are WOOD, and they give the time ‘at the sound of the falling tree.’” Indeed, the treatment of women in his films is deeply problematic. In my mind, more disturbing than even the most disturbing scenes in Blue Velvet is the infamous “fuck me” scene between Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) and Lula Fortune (Dern) in Wild at Heart. What makes the scene truly fucked up is that Lula is made to want it, at least for a moment. Patricia Arquette admitted that she cried between takes during the filming of Lost Highway. Lynch’s response to the criticism of Blue Velvet is hardly adequate: “If it’s just Dorothy, and it’s her story—which it is to me—then everything is fine.”

It might seem counterintuitive, but I believe there is in fact a deep-seated, Christian-like hatred of the flesh manifest in Lynch’s work. Such hatred is almost always a male hatred and fear of the woman’s body, tied up in envy of the fact that women give birth. In David Lynch: The Art Life, Lynch hints suggestively at the fact that his mother was a deeply religious woman. In this light, Lynch’s clinical detachment takes on the same kind of hue as the detachment from one’s own body required by Christian mortification of the flesh.

One reading of Lynch, as Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, is a Manichaean one in which there are two opposed spiritual forces in his universe: good and evil. There is the good simplicity of everyday small town or suburban American life, in which people are basically decent and fair to each other (think of the Double R diner in Twin Peaks), and then there are the hidden dark forces of evil (think of the Black Lodge, or One Eyed Jack’s in Twin Peaks). This is a viable reading. But, as Žižek himself does, I find it ultimately unsatisfactory. It’s too simple, in Lynch and in life, to say that there are evil individuals in the world that are responsible for all the evil deeds. This is the naïveté displayed by Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet when he asks Sandy why there are people like Frank Booth (the brilliant Dennis Hopper) in the world. What Jeffrey learns from his encounter with Dorothy, however, is that he has exactly the same potential for sadomasochism that Frank does. The dark underbelly of suburban life, in the end, is just as essentially of it as cherry pie and coffee and small talk are.

It’s not quite right to call Lynch a surrealist, either, though it’s obvious that he was influenced by the surrealist filmmakers, especially Cocteau, and that he is interested in dream logic. Rather, I would suggest that Lynch presents, at least in the proper Lynchian third phase of his work, a combination of hyperrealist depictions of the mundane juxtaposed with an infrarealist penetration beneath these surfaces. The two are deeply interconnected in the work, however: the hyperrealist treatment of surface ‘reality’, of ordinariness, dialectically resolves into the infrarealist—Jeffrey Beaumont finds a severed ear and takes it in a paper bag to the Sheriff. What makes it so difficult to adequately describe—and makes it so easy to just describe as surrealism—is how seamlessly surface and depth resolve into one another. It’s a very fine line. (Just how fine is revealed by the second season of Twin Peaks, which, in the absence of Lynch after the first few episodes, devolved into a regular old soap opera.) That Lynch has walked this line successfully several times is a mark of his brilliance, at least as a stylist. Ultimately, we might say that Lynch’s work shows that hyperreality is infrareality, and vice versa. He’s in fact just taking us in too close to reality itself for comfort. There are fathers, like Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks, that live normal lives, enjoy dancing to big band jazz, and then rape their daughters (or wives, or other women) at night. Žižek makes a similar point, in his own way, when he says that “one cannot simply oppose this violent ‘subconscious’ to the good one—in Hegelese, one should assert their speculative identity. Doesn’t Lynch’s ultimate message reside therein, as in ‘Twin Peaks,’ where Bob (Evil itself) is identical to the ‘good’ family father?” Lynch could be said to present a particularly stylized filmic expression of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis.

But, as remarkable—I almost want to say dazzling—as the evil characters can be in Lynch, it’s the ordinariness, in the end, that makes Lynch’s films terrifying; he has a remarkable ability to instill into the familiar a pervasive sense, yet unidentifiable in any single detail, that something isn’t quite right. Watching again that justly famous opening sequence of Blue Velvet—the movement from the too-bright roses and the too-white picket fence in a too-idyllic suburbia down into the soil and the writhing hell of insect life underneath it—I was reminded of a striking and, I think, profound passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” The truth of this is borne out by David Lynch’s work, for he has been blessed, or cursed, with a keener vision and feeling of all ordinary human life than most of the rest of us, and he wants us to at least hear something of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

July 2017

Bootycandy, written and directed by Robert O’Hara

First production of the Windy City Playhouse’s 2017 Season

Reviewed by Jean-Thomas Tremblay

A mountain of lime green Jell-O shots greeted theatergoers in the lobby of the Windy City Playhouse on Saint Patrick’s Day. A brash, acerbic, overly sweet welcome, and yet a relatively tame prelude to a bold production of Bootycandy, written and directed by Robert O’Hara.

The play contains what at first appear to be a series of vignettes linked, if narrowly, by common thematics: the expression of desire and the negotiation of gender and class identities in primarily black settings. Concluding the first act is a conference panel at which four exasperated African American playwrights indulge an exasperating white moderator by describing current works in progress—works that we, the audience, have just witnessed. If this mise en abyme comes across as somewhat of a gimmick, the second act cleverly mashes up the different storylines, in addition to abolishing the boundary between said storylines and the brand of meta-commentary on display in the conference scene. What emerges from this creative chaos is an impressionistic epic that covers the journey from childhood to adulthood of Sutter, a black gay man.

A different epic could be written about each actor’s journey through a performance. Krystel McNeil, Travis Turner, debrah neal, Osiris Khepera, and Rob Fenton, who are simply identified as Actors One, Two, Three, Four, and Five, jump from one part to the next, maintaining, over two and a half hours, a spectacular level of energy. Actors show conviction and enthusiasm as they navigate a script that switches back and forth between hysterical comedy and melodrama. All acting here is—it seems on purpose—a kind of overacting: the comedic moments are so broad and dramatic ones so histrionic that Bootycandy’s frequent tonal shifts are especially jarring. As one of the playwrights in the conference scene claims, art should induce discomfort; it should choke its audience.

In one scene, Sutter (Turner, masterful) and a closeted white man (Fenton) flirt and agree to have sex. The sultry vignette, in which Setter gets his coy interlocutor to state, in detail, the sex acts that he wants to perform, becomes increasingly unsettling as we learn that the closeted man is in fact Sutter’s brother-in-law, Roy, and that Sutter had his first sexual encounter as a teenager—a consensual encounter, he insists—with Roy’s own father.

We return to Sutter’s childhood in the second act. At the dinner table with his mother (neal), stepfather (Khepera, fiery), and sister (McNeil, memorable), Sutter, torn between fear and shame, reveals that a stranger, who we understand to be Roy’s father, followed him on the way home from the library. The scene veers into sardonic comedy when Sutter’s mother and stepfather list dozens of guidelines for appearing less effeminate, as if Sutter’s look and demeanor—he’s clad in Michael Jackson’s signature sparkling glove and “Thriller” jacket—warranted the harassment.

Bootycandy invites us to consider the many parts played by a given actor in relation to one another. Players not only move across registers, but also create voices that harmonize with each other. Actor Five’s parts are especially, and eerily, coordinated. Fenton, the only white individual in an otherwise all-black cast, becomes a figure of white lameness as he embodies a sequence of characters seeking validation from people of color.

Bootycandy takes place as much on the stage as in the audience. (A blessing, really: the backdrop of Katie-Bell Kenney’s uninventive set, the silhouette of a skyline onto which is projected the title of each scene, resembles the set of a 1980s late-night talk show.) Cast members repeatedly break the fourth wall, notably as they venture onto the runway that cuts across the main floor of the auditorium, set up like a cabaret. Actors listen and respond to the audience, compelling us to notice our own and each other’s reactions. Who’s still laughing uproariously when physical comedy has turned into cringe comedy? Who, on the North Side of Chicago, gets to laugh at a joke about a black person having to deal with white imbecility? And who gets to choke?

Don’t be fooled by the gelatinousness of the Jell-O shots. Bootycandy is a real jawbreaker.

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