Jason Edward Kaufman on Art and Culture

IN VIEW: Jason Edward Kaufman

Venice Biennale: Overblown Spectacle, Shallow Content

June 20, 2011, 6:14 pm

Installation at U.S. Pavilion of 54th Venice Biennale

Allora and Calzadilla's "Gloria," an inverted tank with a runner on a treadmill on top.

Like so much of the art world, this year’s Venice Biennale is an example of the overblown spectacles, predictable politics and perverse performances that characterize cultural gatherings around the globe.

It seems artists no longer believe a canvas or a sculpture can make a sufficiently loud statement in a biennale. Instead they go for the grand gesture, creating massive theatrical environments whose scale and ambition cannot mask shallow content. New Yorker magazine critic Peter Schjeldahl dubs the phenomenon “festivalism.”

Click here or on an image to read my review in The Washington Post.

Here’s the scene in front of the U.S. pavilion: A sand-colored Army tank is flipped upside down with its turret on the ground. On top of its elevated undercarriage is a treadmill with an athlete dressed in red, white and blue and running in place, his action seeming to power the tank treads that roll with an ear-splitting clatter.

The contraption — conceived by the artist couple Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla — constitutes an unsubtle critique of American values.

Allora and Calzailla piece in U.S. pavilion.

In the U.S. pavilion, the "Freedom" sculpture from the Capitol dome lies in a sun-tanning bed.

The theme continues inside the Jeffersonian-style pavilion where a scale model of the “Freedom” sculpture from the Capitol dome lies in a sun-tanning bed, an ATM rigged with a pipe organ plays heavenly chords when visitors withdraw euros, and gymnasts perform muscular routines on painted-wooden replicas of business-class airline seats.

Gymnast performs on sculptures of luxury airline seats in U.S. pavilion. (Photo by Jason Edward Kaufman)

Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which commissioned the works, told me the exhibit is “an unabashed celebration of American commercial power around the world . . . richly dipped in irony.”

“Gloria,” as the conceptual installation is titled, may take issue with America’s devotion to militarism and mammon, but it also betokens our government’s respect for the First Amendment. How else to explain the State Department’s approval of an exhibit that satirizes ugly Americanism? (The selection was recommended by art professionals convened by the National Endowment for the Arts.) And if the overturned tank is “festivalism” writ large, it’s not alone at this year’s biennale.

I will have more on this year’s biennale in a forthcoming post. Meanwhile, click here or on an image to read my complete review in The Washington Post.

Jason Edward Kaufman

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Art for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations: Nothing to Ruffle the Eagle’s Feathers

May 17, 2011, 1:43 pm

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Colorful work by Ron Gorchov, Sol LeWitt, and Linda Benglis enliven the 22nd floor of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in NY. Offices and corridors feature mainly abstract prints that steer clear of social content. (Photo © Paul Warchol)

The art collection inside the new United States Mission to the United Nations, as curated by Yale art school dean Robert Storr, is American art at its least provocative. The decorative mix of mainly abstract prints by well-known U.S. artists is unadventurous and uniformly anodyne — about what one would expect for a government building: nothing to ruffle the American eagle’s feathers. In a year when Allora & Calzadilla are bringing politically-charged, challenging art to the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale, this reticence on the part of Storr — who was a controversial Biennale’s director in 2007 — suggests that the nature of the U.N. work requires a decorator’s eye and a Rolodex, rather than a scholar or critic.

For slide show and my complete review click here or the image above.

The mission building, designed by the late Charles Gwathmey, dearly needs art, and it gets some courtesy of the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE), a private nonprofit that since 1986 has fitted out U.S. diplomatic facilities around the world. It must be said that FAPE does good work. Many bland government buildings would be even blander were it not for the organization, which claims to have raised $56 million toward art and logistical costs to decorate U.S. facilities in more than 140 countries. But their art programs are dictated by their official setting and function, which is to say that they tend to be serviceable and dull.

Distributed about the cramped offices, meeting rooms, and corridors of the upper floors, which house the U.S. Mission and other Department of State personnel, are benign abstractions, mainly prints and multiples in pleasing colors. If the installation were an exhibition, it might be titled “American Wall Candy.”

FAPE chairman Jo Carole Lauder — the wife of billionaire Ronald Lauder , former chairman of MoMA — led a recent tour of the building, and says the collection “captures the diversity and richness of our country’s unique culture.” But the selection represents a thin slice of the American pie, one that suggests the country’s culture is acritical and concerned mainly with aesthetics as decoration.

For slide show and my complete review click here or the image above.

Jason Edward Kaufman

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Glenn Ligon’s Self-Referential Elegies

May 13, 2011, 4:06 pm

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Glenn Ligon (via Accessibleartny.com)

Glenn Ligon, 50, is a Bronx-born African American who has devoted his career to making word-based art that elegizes his reflections on being gay and black in America. The New York-based artist’s retrospective is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through June 5.

Click here or on an image to read my review in The Washington Post.

Glenn Ligon, Black Like Me #2, 1992, paint stick and acrylic gesso on canvas, 80 x 30 inches, HIrshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (on loan to The White House)

Glenn Ligon, Black Like Me #2, 1992, paint stick and acrylic gesso on canvas, 80 x 30 inches, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (on loan to The White House)

President and Mrs. Obama decorated the White House with an artwork by Ligon. The 1992 canvas, borrowed from the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, is titled “Black Like Me #2,” and like a lot of Ligon’s work, it’s a painting with a racially charged text. This one’s a sentence pulled from the 1961 memoir “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who artificially darkened his skin to experience the segregated South as a black man. “All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence” is stenciled in black letters across the top of the canvas, and repeats line after line until the words at the bottom dissolve into murky blackness.

“Glenn Ligon: America” begins with expressionistically brushed oil paintings into which he scrawls phrases alluding to his homoerotic self-awakening. Then come series of word paintings with capital letters stenciled in black oil stick, some with coal dust and black backgrounds that render them more or less illegible. We are told they quote passages from Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and other writers, mainly African American. “I remember the very day that I became colored,” for example, is from an essay by Zora Neale Hurston.

More stenciled words, now in hot colors, recite racially loaded jokes by Richard Pryor. On another wall are Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotic photographs of black men accompanied by excerpts from critical and theoretical texts about the once-controversial series. Billie Holiday laments emanate faintly from packing crates that, according to the wall text, represent the way a slave once famously shipped himself to freedom (image below).

Glenn Ligon, from "Runaways" series, 1993, lithograph, 16 × 12 inches, Whitney Museum, NY.

Ligon’s most famous series, from 1993, adapts 19th-century runaway slave ads that substitute descriptions of himself supplied by friends: “Ran away, Glenn, a young black man twenty-eight years old, about five feet six inches high. Dressed in blue jeans. . . . ” In the Whitney’s Madison Avenue window is a neon sign Ligon recently made that reads, “Negro Sunshine,” an ambiguous phrase coined by Gertrude Stein.

In the past few decades, legions of visual artists have made paintings of words — canvases covered with dictionary definitions, synonyms, rebuses, jokes and admonitions. In general, they don’t do much for me. But Ligon’s lettered homages to writers amplify the borrowed words with a quivering sensitivity, and their repetition transforms the phrases into meditations on the plight of being black and gay in the United States.

Imagining himself as a runaway slave suggests a touching vault of imagination that — like Toni Morrison’s first-person slave novels — underlines the horror of the toxic erstwhile normalcy of slavery. The murmuring crates are a similarly doleful reminder of the lengths to which slaves sought freedom. And his reflections on the social perception of the black male, and on his own sexuality, add complexity to the artist’s examination of his identity.

Installation view of "Glenn Ligon: America" at the Whitney Museum.

These are grand themes hinging on the black and gay experience in America. Yet I have reservations about Ligon’s work. His technical range is severely limited and the imagery highly derivative of artists such as Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Jenny Holzer. For all the inarguable righteousness of his project, I cannot help but feel his work is overly self-referential, lacking the universality of great art.

Jason Edward Kaufman

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Culture Wars Revisited at the Philadelphia Art Museum

May 9, 2011, 11:16 am

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Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987, photograph.

It is nearly half a year since the Smithsonian Institution bowed to congressional pressure and ordered the removal of an exhibited artwork deemed offensive by a religious group. But the “Fire in My Belly” controversy continues to spur reflections on the tensions between government, religious conservatism and freedom of expression in the arts.

Prompted by that controversy, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has mounted a photography exhibition that looks back to the so-called culture wars of the late 1970s through the 1990s, when social conservatives fought to prevent tax money from supporting art that dealt with homosexuality, feminism, racism or other contentious issues.

Click here or on one of the images to read my review in The Washington Post.

“Unsettled: Photography and Politics in Contemporary Art” (through Aug. 21) is not a comprehensive overview of the culture wars. Only three of the nine artists were central to the debates in that earlier period, and none of their most inflammatory works is included. But the exhibition is a timely response to the Smithsonian flap and a chance for younger viewers to learn about previous clashes between religious conservatives and advocates of freedom of expression in the arts.

David Wojarowicz, Fire In My Belly (still from film), 1986-87.

My review in The Washington Post chronicles the main incidents in the culture war, and notes that they typically involved politicians reiterating Catholic groups’ baseless charges of blasphemy. The hypocrisy is astonishing: The same legislators who for decades permitted the Catholic Church to self-police its pedophilia-plagued priesthood piously express anger over alleged affronts to public decency by artists whose work they misunderstand. As the Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis wrote, “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

More than one right-wing commentator attacked my review. (For example, one frothing-at-the mouth reader let me know that I am a Nazi.) One says that I pretend that the artists are not politicial — though my entire article is about art as political protest. He also says that the Church and the Reagan administration responded adequately to the AIDS crisis. And he notes that Serrano’s Piss Christ (above left) is a provocation, not a critique of religion, and that Wojnarowicz’ video is anti Catholic. I had suggested that the artists, both of whom are Catholic, were protesting aspects of the Church.

I suggest the right-wing critics look at the opening scenes of Sam Fuller’s echt-patriotic The Big Red One (1980), a film about U.S. GIs in WWII that opens with a shot of ants crawling over a wooden crucifix. Fuller – not the most sophisticated movie mind – intended the image as an emblem of the war’s apocalyptic degradation, and it works. But according to the thinking of my detractors, this sort of symbolism should be deemed a provocation, denied federal funding, and banned from exhibition.

Jason Edward Kaufman

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Calder in Washington

April 27, 2011, 12:32 am

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There was no decree naming Alexander Calder (1898-1976) the capital’s official artist, but walking around the National Mall, you’d think there had been. His abstract sheet-metal sculptures are in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden and on the grounds of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn and American History museums, and a mammoth mobile dominates the atrium of the National Gallery’s East Building. An abundance of his works is on display in these museums as well as in the Phillips Collection.

Alexander Calder, Josephine Baker, wire, The star work in the show was withdrawn by the Calder Foundation in protest of the National Portrait Gallery's censorship of a work last fall.

In fact, the first notable modernist public sculpture in town was a Calder. That’s the explosive mass of black metal on the corner of Constitution Avenue and 14th Street NW, named “The Gwenfritz” after patron Gwendolyn Cafritz. It was the centerpiece of a fountain created in 1969 outside the National Museum of History and Technology and later dismantled. Now the museum, renamed the National Museum of American History, intends to return the Calder to a reflecting pool planned for the original site, though no date has been set.

And one more bit of D.C. Calder trivia: His last trip was to Washington to fine-tune plans for the massive sculpture now in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building. (see image) When he returned to New York that evening in 1976, he suffered a heart attack and died.

What made him so popular? Those abstract sheet-metal sculptures from the 1960s and ’70s, and the kinetic mobiles he invented in the 1930s, were sophisticated but not aloof, whimsical but not silly. At a time when modernism was not entirely embraced, their mix of formal intelligence and accessibility appealed to nearly everyone.

It’s not surprising to learn that earlier in his career, Calder had invented another sculptural medium: wire used to make three-dimensional drawings in space. Using pliers and his bare hands, he twisted wire and combined it with other materials to create “Calder’s Circus,” a miniature troupe of acrobats, lion tamers, elephants, clowns and strongmen that he animated in performances (click for video) in New York and Paris, where he and his wife lived until moving to Connecticut in 1933.

All told, he made a few hundred wire figures before abandoning the medium for abstraction in the 1930s. Among them were several dozen celebrities, athletes and art-world friends that are the main focus of “Calder’s Portraits: A New Language” at the National Portrait Gallery through August 14, 2011.

Click here or on one of the images to read my review in The Washington Post.

Jason Edward Kaufman

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Washington Portraits – and a correction about my take on museums and private collections

April 24, 2011, 8:00 pm

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Gene Davis, Self-portrait, 1982, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 inches, Xavier Equihua collection.

When I heard that the National Portrait Gallery was organizing an exhibition drawn from private collections in the Washington area, I figured it would be a good one to miss. These sorts of community-based shows tend to be mediocre affairs. Institutions mount them in part to reach out to new patrons, and curators — against their better judgment — can be obliged to lower standards to comply with the exigencies of politics and fundraising.

But when I saw “Capital Portraits: Treasures from Washington Private Collections,” I realized that I had been dead wrong. It’s hardly an ingenious or groundbreaking curatorial conceit, but it’s a wonderful show on many levels.

There’s no denying that it’s a miscellany, but the curators have stuck with museum-quality works, many by such top-notch artists such as John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart, Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase and Andy Warhol, to mention a few.

Click here or one of the images from the show to read my review in The Washington Post.

A blogger, Tyler Green, condemned me for not attacking the National Portrait Gallery show as a corrupt vanity project. I wish to set the record straight. [See note below.]

John Singleton Copley, portrait of Myles Cooper (1737–1785), oil on canvas, c. 1780–85, private collection.

In his mini screed, Green equates the National Portrait Gallery exhibition with shows of the collections of commedian Cheech Marin and Greek businessman Dakis Joannou. Had he seen the NPG show — which covers 250 years’ worth of art from dozens of private collectors — he would know that it is a different undertaking from those single-collector contemporary shows. But I bet he hadn’t seen the NPG show when he trashed my take on it.

He certainly didn’t read my article closely. Had he done so he would have noticed the lede about the dangers of private collector loan shows. He’s have acknowledged that I call the show “a miscellany” – not unlike museum permanent collections, it is incomplete and imperfect — but that I conclude that it’s worth seeing because it contains many fine artworks. No, I don’t love every one, but I like a lot of them and enjoyed learning the stories behind their commissions. I thought readers would enjoy the show as well, and it could even result in gifts for the National collections.

Whatever, he had it in for me — as he has for virtually every museum director, curator and journalist.

Gilbert Stuart, portrait of Elizabeth Bowdoin, Lady Temple (1750–1809), oil on wood panel, 1806, private collection.

One of his pet peeves concerns museums exhibiting works that are privately owned. He seems to believe that were it not for his petty moralizing, corruption of curatorial standards would be rife in the land, and tax-exempt public museums would routinely be harnessed for private profit.

In truth, there are few museum professionals insensitive to the ethical issues at stake in exhibiting privately owned works of art. There are occasional lapses of discretion, but neither is any museum professional unaware of the necessity of working with private collectors to borrow their works for public presentation and developing ties that can result in financial support and donations of artworks.

My position on these matters – clear to anyone who reads my criticism and reporting – is that museums should exhibit privately owned works when they are useful to a valid curatorial purpose. I could name dozens of private collection shows that have been well worth mounting, despite their inevitable flattery of the private collectors’ acumen. It is not necessary to secure the works as a gift. Even if great works belong to trustees, museums should not shy away from showing them in a proper context. It’s a matter of judgment.

Rembrandt Peale, portrait of Catharine Peabody Gardner (1808–1883), oil on canvas, 1827, private collection.

For the NPG, exhibiting rarely seen portraits from various private collections is a proper function so long as the standards of quality remain high. (That the works were not from trustees of the museum seems to say more about the the board than it does about any deliberate avoidance of potential conflict of interest in presenting property of museum insiders.)

None of this seems to concern Green, who smugly fulminates with opinonations calculated to elicit outrage and attract attention. But as Green’s readers know, he is a classic reactionary. He is wont to glom onto or overheatedly criticize others’ work with glib judgments, often declaring himself “gobsmacked” at the “jaw dropping” perspectives he encounters among his perceived rivals.

Which is not to say that his work is useless – he sometimes draws attention to worthy reads and passes along news items (breathlessly self-promoted as “first on MAN,” a reference his blog’s name Modern Art Notes). But the number of stories that he has deeply researched and properly reported can be counted on the fingers of two hands.

His most original enterprise of late was the museum popularity contest he cooked up as a ruse to increase traffic on his blog. I’m not kidding: he set up mutiple-choice battles among U.S. museums and asked readers to click on their favorites, goading the institutions to alert their on-line followers to “vote” in the meaningless popularity poll. We never got the numbers (probably because turnout was low) and I don’t remember who won. But I do know that this overtly and embarrassingly self-promotional project was laughably dumb — the kind of project one might expect in a highschool social-media class.

Green knows he is not our best guide to what is or is not appropriate to exhibit in museums. He should let more of his readers in on the secret.

Jason Edward Kaufman

Note to readers: Tyler Green wrote to the editor at Louise Blouin Media (which hosts our blogs) to complain that my response to his attack contains inaccuracies. Here are his objections and my responses:

1. Kaufman states: “One of his pet peeves concerns museums exhibiting works that are privately owned.”

Green objects: I have never objected to museums exhibiting artworks that are privately owned. I have consistently objected to significant museums launching exhibitions solely motivated by who owns what — and in this case where they live — rather than by art historical or scholarly inquiry.

Kaufman responds: The statement is accurate. Green frequently voices concern when museums exhibit works that are privately owned. In particular, he condemns exhibitions of single-owner collections, one category of exhibitions of works that are privately owned that has peeved him on more than one occasion. I am not aware if he also has condemned regionally based private-collection shows.

In any case, not all single-owner or regional surveys of privately owned works are objectionable. The public, including me, has benefited from numerous worthwhile exhibitions in both categories: “Sixteenth Century Drawings in New York Collections” at the Metropolitan Museum did no disservice to its audience. Neither did the Morgan Library’s “New York Collects: Drawings and Watercolors, 1900–1950,” or the Art Institute of Chicago’s presentation of Italian Renaissance and Baroque drawings belonging to Jean Goldman. Not every exhibition need illustrate an academic conceit. If that were the case there would be no reason to look in the permanent collection galleries, which are invariably filled with historical gaps. If privately owned work is of exceptional quality that can be sufficient reason to show it.

2. Kaufman: “I thought readers would enjoy the show as well, and it could even result in gifts for the National collections.”

Green: This is false. The United States has no “National collections.” American museums that has the word “national” in its name – be it the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery or the National World War II Museum – is incorporated independently of the federal government.

This is nitpicking. I am aware that the Smithsonian, though chartered and funded largely by the federal government, is technically independent. My reference is to the collections held by the Smithsonian, which for good reason have been described as “the nation’s attic.”

3. Kaufman: “[T]he number of stories that he has deeply researched and properly reported can be counted on the fingers of two hands.”

Green: This is false. MAN [Green’s Modern Art Notes blog] has published for nearly ten years and has “deeply researched and properly reported” scores of stories.

The figure of speech connotes a limited number. The depth of research and reporting is a matter of opinion, not fact.

4. Kaufman: “We never got the numbers (probably because turnout was low) and I don’t remember who won.”

Green: This is false. On August 30, 2010 I posted the results and reported that over 5,000 people voted in the final matchup.

I overlooked the post in which Green provided numbers for the “final matchup” of his museum popularity contest. Here he graciously provides the figures.

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George Condo’s Slapdash Mediocrity Spoofs the Masters, Fools Collectors

April 21, 2011, 7:55 am

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George Condo at the New Museum

A recent New Yorker magazine profile about George Condo – a 54-year-old American painter widely collected by U.S. and especially European private collectors and some museums — gave equal space to his profligate lifestyle and his claims to have mastered the techniques of the Old Masters. He says he paints like the greats but applies their technical finesse to subjects of his own invention. Don’t believe it.

A 20-foot high wall carpeted with his canvases from the last three decades is a bizarre spectacle for a major museum, even the New Museum of Contemporary Art, where “George Condo: Mental States” closes May 8.

George Condo, Dreams and Nightmares of the Queen, 2006, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

It’s a coterie of figures, mainly female, that make superficial allusions to old masters from Velazquez and Zurbaran to Ingres, Gorky and mainly Picasso.

His stock in trade is a kind of deformity – the faces often bulge like the tri-lobed snouts of bunny rabbits, the necks sometimes merging phallically with the lower jaws. He says they have to do with madness or dark visions, but they look puerile and silly.

Maybe that’s the point. Who knows?

As to the old master technique, the paint handling is muddy and effects of light and shade, volume and texture inexpertly rendered. Many are thinly painted, showing little effort, which underlines their deficiencies. And he makes gilded Baroque-style busts that are garish tchochkes. His success in the market – new paintings can sell in the mid six figures – indicates the herd mentality of some collectors.

George Condo, Uncle Joe, 2005, oil on canvas, 53 x 46 inches, private collection (courtesy Simon Lee Gallery). © George Condo 2010

A few works rise above the general atmosphere of slapdash mediocrity. One is a giant canvas papered with colorful crayon drawings in the manner of mid- to late-career Picassos. It’s fun to see Condo trying to get inside the creative mind of Picasso, but pathetic to witness his failure to match his idol’s fluid and confident line and solid compositions. Thrusting up through the center of this cloud of mimicry is a large bust painted in the manner of Picasso’s late ink drawings, but with a confused abstract face that is all Condo’s own. I suppose it could be the artist’s self-portrait immersing himself in Picasso. In any case, from a distance the expansive collage has a visual and chromatic profusion that is appealing.

George Condo, Female Figure Composition, 2009, acrylic, pastel, and charcoal on linen, 78 x 108 inches, private collection. © George Condo 2010

His best work is his most recent, including several mural-sized horizontal canvases that are mashups of de Kooningesque women peaking out amid pale pink brushy color fields. Derivative, but visually intriguing, these canvasses hint that more compelling work may be yet to come.

Jason Edward Kaufman

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Ife: Challenging the Notion of African Primitivism

April 20, 2011, 12:27 am

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Torso of a King, Ife (Nigeria), early-mid 16th century, copper alloy, H: 14 5/8 inches, National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria (Photo by Jason Edward Kaufman © 2011)

Chances are that when you think of the term “African art” what comes to mind are figures and face masks carved out of wood.

Right?

Well, you’re not wrong. Most sub-Saharan art fits that description. But an exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond reveals another tradition that puts the lie to this stereotype.

“Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria” opens our eyes to the astonishingly realistic human figures cast in metal or terra cotta more than half a millennium ago in the ancient West African city-state of Ife (pronounced EE-fay). These elegant and captivating statues change the way we think of Africa and Africans, and for that reason this might be the most important African art exhibition anywhere right now.

Click here or on the images to read my review in The Washington Post.

Jason Edward Kaufman

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Heads from Wunmonjie Compound, Ifef (Nigeria), 14th-early15th-century, cooper, H: ca. 11-13 inches, National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria (Photo by Jason Edward Kaufman © 2011)

Mask called "Obalufon," Ife (Nigeria), 14th-early 15th-century, cooper, H: 13 inches, National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria (Photo by Jason Edward Kaufman © 2011)

Head, Ita Yemoo, Ife (Nigeria), 12th-15th century, terracotta, H: 9 1/8 inches, National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria (Photo by Jason Edward Kaufman © 2011)

Vik Muniz’s Oscar-nominated “Waste Land” on PBS Tonight

April 19, 2011, 12:59 am

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The contemporary art world may be an orgy of the rich, but occasionally it shows a glimmer of compassion for the poor. That’s the takeaway from “Waste Land,” a film about the Brooklyn-based, Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz, which recounts a celebrated artist using his work as an instrument to promote social justice.

Vik Muniz at Jardim Gramacho

The documentary accompanies Muniz to Brazil, where he plans to harvest garbage from one the world’s largest landfills and use it to assemble portraits of people who scavenge the dump for their livelihoods. Expecting to be met with hostility, he and an assistant visit the site and discover instead a community of amiable and well-mannered workers. Rather than proceed on his own, he decides to collaborate with the workers on their “garbage” portraits and to return proceeds from sale of the artworks to improve their lives.

Scene from Lucy Walker film "Waste Land" about Vik Muniz's socially engaged project in Brazil

An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary this year and winner of the Audience Awards at Sundance and the Berlin Film Festival, the 93-minute film — directed by Lucy Walker (“Devil’s Playground,” “Countdown to Zero,” “Blindsight”) and with a soundtrack by Moby — was recently released on digital and DVD and has its television premiere tonight (April 19 – WNET 13 at 10 PM) on PBS’s “Independent Lens.”

Click here or on an image to read my review in The Washington Post.

Jason Edward Kaufman

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At the Met Opera, Balancing Novelty and Tradition

April 3, 2011, 8:48 am

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The Metropolitan Opera’s season is in full tilt, with intriquing additions and changes to the standard repertory. More new productions — and renowned talent — are slated for 2011-2012.

Should The Metropolitan Opera stick with its celebrated traditional productions or should it innovate and risk alienating its graying audience? The question came to the foreground this past year with the first part of a new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle directed by Canadian Robert Lepage, and a minimalist production of La Traviata imported from the Salzburger Festspiele. Not everyone greets innovation with open arms. When one critic complained at the season preview press conference earlier this year, general manager Peter Gelb responded, “It is necessary to renew the repertory productions from time to time.” And indeed, the 2011-12 season brings seven new productions along with the revamped “Ring,” not to mention a world premiere.

The Met’s new productions promise to generate the sort of excitement lacking at many institutions. The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for example, was recently pilloried by The Washington Post for planning a season devoid of the risk-taking and innovation that the center’s president, performing arts guru Michael Kaiser, preaches in his Arts Management Institute. But new is not always better. Das Rheingold opened last season in a production whose innovation is a huge stage machine composed of motorized upright planks, a kind of palisade that morphs into angled ground planes and serves as a screen for abstract projections. I found this high-tech behemoth distractingly anachronistic and I longed for more traditional staging.

The new production of Siegfried will feature three-dimensional projections. (All photos Met Opera)

For the coming season’s rendition of Siegfried, Lepage is adding a new effect – a three-dimensional projection that will create the illusion of deep space behind the singers. We’ll see if it sufficiently masks the planks. In any case, we can look forward to Deborah Voigt, Bryn Terfel, Erich Owens, and Gerhard Siegel in leading roles, and to James Levine in his 40^th season conducting. Sidelined by back problems and kidney surgery, the maestro has stepped down as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but there is every hope that he will be in form for the Met season. (Die Walküre is presented throughout April and May, Siegfried begins in November 1, and the final component, Götterdämmerung, opens January 27, 2012; three complete cycles will take place in April and May 2012. )

La Traviata: a Thrilling Import

Stripped down decor in La Traviata at the Met.

Then again, new productions can be bracing and heighten our attention to the music, players and dramatic tensions. In these respects, the current season’s recent La Traviata, though far more radically innovative than the Rheingold machine, was brilliant. The minimal set – invented for the 2005 production directed by Willy Decker – consists only of a semicircular wall facing the audience with a banquet seat running along the interior, a couch or two center stage, and a giant clock on the right. Above the wall, reaching into the fly space, a flower-printed scrim remains grey during the parts when love is vexed, and blossoms passionate red during Violetta and Alfredo’s brief period of happiness.

The stripped down décor and raked stage focus attention on the figures in a way that emphasizes their acting and the singing. Marina Poplavskaya as Violetta rises to the occasion. She enters during the overture, escaping from a party, and through her body language silently conveys angst and fatigue. A swarm of black-tuxedoed men arrive and she – in a striking red cocktail dress – rallies her strength and in the classic anthem “Libiamo” she captivates them with her allures, leaping onto the couches, wielding a champagne bottle, and flirting with aplomb.

Marina Poplavskaya in La Traviata at the Met.

At the performance I attended, Poplavskaya’s voice was agile, attractive and expressive of the heroine’s roller-coaster emotions. She was more convincing in her role than Matthew Polenzani as Germont, though that has more to do with his flaccid physical demeanor than his voice, which was satisfyingly masculine and sincere in the “Un di felice” duet. Andrzej Dobber, as his father, was outstanding in pleading with Violetta to give up the affair, creating with Poplavskaya an affecting rapport of mutual understanding. But it is Poplavskaya’s vocal and physical exuberance that lingers in memory. (La Traviata resumes in April and May 2012 with Natalie Dessay in the title role.)

Donizetti’s Don Pasquale: a Worthy Addition

The newly introduced production of Don Pasquale, an opera buffa by Donizetti, is another success that brings together all these strands in a wonderful evening of theater. The commedia dell’arte characters comprise the aging corpulent Pasquale, the nephew he plans to disinherit, the plebeian widow Norina whom the nephew loves, and slick, dapper Doctor Malatesta who devises a scheme to bring the lovers together. It’s light fare, a kind of musical sit-com with a lively score, comic flourishes, and an opera rarity – a happy ending.

Rooftop terrace in Don Pasquale at the Met.

The production hews to tradition with splendid sets including Pascuale’s broken-down palace replete with a strut holding up a listing column, a rooftop terrace where Norina reads romances, and a nocturnal garden scene where Ernesto (Matthew Polenzani) delivers a serenade that transports us to Roman night. A duet by Pasquale (John Del Carlo) and Malatesta (Mariusz Kwiecien) intertwines rapid staccato lines as they fall over one another in mannered mutual regard. It was so delightful that when it ended the singers stepped in front of the curtain and repeated it, a throwback to times when such mid-opera encores were often demanded by appreciative audiences. I hope the Met does this more often.

Anna Netrebko as Norina in Don Pasquale t the Met.

Anna Netrebko as Norina couples her youthful exuberance and a talent for acting with a superb voice that combines great range, precision, and sweetness. During her Act One aria “Quel guardo il cavaliere,” in which she declares her free spirit, she prances around the terrace and even does a somersault onto her chaise longue. (Alas, Don Pasquale will not be performed again this coming season.)

Netrebko is an international star, and the Met says that she will be here more than anywhere else this coming season. Her parts include the title role of Jules Massenet’s Manon (throughout March and April), and Anna Bolena in the Met premier of Donizetti’s eponymous opera (September and October, then early February 2012). In a video interview she describes the Donizetti as “challenging, dramatic and beautiful,” and cites Maria Callas and Beverly Sills as the exemplars whose interpretations have most impressed her.

The Enchanted Island: a New Take on an Old Operatic Form

The Met is also introducing a novel operatic form: the pasticcio, which consists of setting a new libretto to a score comprising disparate parts of existing operas. The form was common in the 18^th century when Handel was among the practitioners. The Met commissioned a libretto from Jeremy Sams who developed a narrative merging aspects of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. Dubbed The Enchanted Island, The music is Baroque, a mix of Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau and others. My first reaction was, Oh, no. It sounds like when radio stations play only the popular movements of symphonies.

It’s another “We’ll see,” but as usual, the Met lined up an all-star cast including Joyce DiDonato, Danielle de Niese, David Daniels, and a cameo by Placido Domingo. At a press preview, the countertenor Daniels performed an excerpt with such intensity and rigorous beauty that it swept away any concerns for the pastiche form. (The Enchanted Island premiers Dec. 31, 2011.)

Mariusz Kwiecien will star in Don Giovanni at the Met.

There are more new productions, including Mozart’s Don Giovanni with Mariusz Kwiecien in the role looking, as one fellow critic noted, like Johnny Depp; and Charles Gounod’s Faust in a co-production with the English National Opera that features Jonas Kaufmann as Faust, Rene Pape as Mephistopheles, and Angela Gheorghiu as Marguerite.

And there is plenty to satisfy traditionalists. Throughout the season the Met mounts repertory productions of Verdi’s Aida, La Traviata, Macbeth, Ernani and Nabucco, Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Puccini’s La Boheme, Madama Butterfly and Tosca, Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore and La Fille du Regiment, Britten’s Billy Budd, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Mussorgsky’s Khovanshcina, Handel’s Rodelinda, Janacek’s The Makropulos Case, and Philip Glass’s Satyagraha.

Earlier Curtain Time, More Intermissions and Simulcasts in Movie Theaters

One innovation unlikely to encounter any opposition is the Met’s decision, responding to public demand, to change the curtain time from 8 pm to 7:30 pm in most cases. Apparently opera enthusiasts like to get to bed on time. Another adjustment will be tinkering with intermissions to insure that audience members’ attention is on the stage and not their bladders.

The Met announced also that it is expanding its “Live in HD” movie-theater simulcasts of select performances. It’s not only a marvelous way to expand the opera’s graying wealthy audience, but in many ways it offers a superior experience to sitting in the opera house. The camera is positioned to bring the viewer close to the action, able to see changing expressions of the singers that from afar are utterly unintelligible, and to follow the back and forth of action. I know it’s sacrilege to say so, but even in the orchestra the seating is not raked sufficiently to make for unobstructed sight lines (and to not worry about blocking the person behind you), the legroom is lacking for all but the petite, and the cavernous space subdues all but the most projective voices. The excitement and intimacy of feeling close to the performers is rarely achieved.

For that, one would do better to attend one of the eleven high-definition Saturday matinee simulcasts taking place this season: Anna Bolena (Oct. 15), Don Giovanni (Oct. 29), Siegfried (Nov. 5), Satyagraha (Nov. 19), Rodelinda (Dec. 3), Faust (Dec. 10), The Enchanted Island (Jan. 21), Götterdämmerung (Feb. 11), Ernani (Feb. 25), Manon (Apr. 7) and La Traviata (Apr. 14). Gelb says they have passed the seven million mark in tickets since it began six years ago. Opera for the masses: now that’s an innovation.

Jason Edward Kaufman

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The Metropolitan Opera’s season is in full tilt, with intriquing additions and changes to the standard repertory. More new productions — and renowned talent — are slated for 2011-2012.

La Traviata: a Thrilling Import

Donizetti’s Don Pasquale: a Worthy Addition

The Enchanted Island: a New Take on an Old Operatic Form

Earlier Curtain Time, More Intermissions and Simulcasts in Movie Theaters

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