Hub of the Universe

-- By Tom Phillips

After sixty years of puzzlement, I finally get it. The cartwheel logo of the Boston Bruins, with a capital B at the center, refers to Boston’s traditional nickname, the Hub. I talked to five Bostonians and to my surprise, none of them knew this.  This gives me the courage to analyze Boston for them.

I’ve been trying to understand this place since my first visit in 1952, when I was ten. My father brought me up from the New York suburbs to see a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. I was excited to see Kenmore Square, which I envisioned as something like Times Square. Nothing prepared us for its sepulchral drabness. After two days in Boston my father concluded -- "This is a small town."

It still is, but not like any other small town. As the Hub, it is the biggest small town of ten thousand small towns that make up New England civilization. The wheel is not geographical but conceptual – showing the place Boston occupies not on the map of New England, but in its mind.  

White Noise: Overheard at the Biennial

-- By Tom Phillips

Nicholas Galanin: "White Noise: American Prayer Rug" 

Writers who cover Art are much more glamorous than we ordinary journalists; I noticed lots of leather and leopard-skin on women at the Whitney Biennial press preview.  (Faux, naturellement, but  expensive.) Two scribes were chatting in the row behind me as we awaited the news conference.  I didn't turn around, but took these notes: 

Says the one:  You know, I skipped the War-hole (Warhol) show.  I skipped it because I just don't like him. It seems to me he represents all that's worst about us -- the commercialism, the celebrity, sensationalism. Enough of War-hole, I say, let's move on!

Her friend agrees heartily, calling Andy Warhol the "father of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst." They move on. Says the one:   

-- Someone asked me to write an article about art collecting. I don't want to do it because I don't believe in collecting art.  

Says her friend:  But you're a collector yourself!

-- Oh no, I'm not a collector.  I inherited most of my art.  I mean, if I see something I like and there's room on my wall -- which there isn't! -- I'll buy it.  But that's not collecting.  

Her daughter is a senior at an ultra-prestigious Ivy League college, where she's working on the student newspaper. She told her mother she was thinking of going into journalism. Her mom's  reaction: 

-- I told her, I said:  Over my dead body are you going into journalism!

 Just sayin' ... 

--- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

Curran Hatleberg: "Dominoes" 

Biennial Buzz

2019 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
May 14, 2019 
-- By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

      "Stick," by Simone Leigh, "Incoming," by Keegan Monaghan  

Neck-deep in controversy before it even started, the 79th Whitney Biennial opened this weekend, promising a “snapshot of contemporary art-making in America.” The exhibit showcases emerging young artists, and lifts up the poor and marginalized, in the art world and American society. It also exhibits the museum's own contradictions.  

Exhibit A is a film about anti-personnel weapons that are  manufactured and sold by a director of the museum. Warren B. Kanders is CEO of Safariland, which sells tear gas canisters and other weapons to police departments and governments including the US. The film by Laura Poitras unveils a technology that can track the use of these weapons – and did when they were used by US troops against asylum-seekers at the Mexican border. Safariland’s new tear-gas product “Triple Chaser” works like a cluster-bomb, breaking into three pieces when it hits the ground. The film details the effects of the gas on its victims – as well as the bloody effects of bullets the company sells to the Israeli army, which fired them against Palestinians charging the border fence at Gaza.

Kanders says he is “not the problem” and has resisted calls for his resignation or ouster. To him, the problem is rioters and demonstrators endangering the police and soldiers who “keep us safe.”  But who exactly is “us?”  The exhibit as a whole identifies with the poor, people of color, the excluded and rejected -– and artists, struggling to survive in an art world so deeply implicated in the politics of privilege and oppression.

A few impressions from a fast preview:

A symmetrical bronze sculpture by Simone Leigh: a stylized black woman atop a ballooning skirt, bristling with black metal spikes. She’s black, beautiful, permanent, fortified.

"Dominoes" 

A series of back-country and inner-city photographs by Curran Hatleberg showing the resilience of the poor, comfort amid squalor. Politics be hanged, these people say, let’s play dominoes, crawl over a broke-down truck, fool with a snake, sit by the river and smoke.

An animated cartoon of NFL football scenes that shows pity for everyone -- players kneeling at the national anthem, others standing defiant or doubt-filled, soldiers venerating the flag, the band playing on, schlumpy photographers recording the historic muddle.

An old-fashioned ringing telephone, painted in old-fashioned oils by Keegan Monaghan, ambiguously titled: “Incoming.”

The biggest, loudest statement in the show is a zombie-like outdoor "Procession" by Nicole Eisenman.  Its ruined slaves and captives made me think of a Fourth of July parade in the Hell we're headed for.

But the signature piece, to me, was one with a quieter irony: a large woven rug by American Indian artist Nicholas Galanin simulating a TV screen without a signal – nothing but “snow.” He calls it “White Noise: American Prayer Rug."     

White noise, black lives, zombies on parade, and the Gordian knot of oppression paying for the art  that rails against it. It’s impossible to take a snapshot of America, the field of vision is too wide. But curators Ru Hockney and Jane Panetta combed the countryside to try to get the sweep of it. The result is broad, inclusive, gutsy, fresh, real.

It runs through September 22 at the Whitney.

-- \Photographs by Tom Phillips

"White Noise: American Prayer Rug" 

Beatledom without the Beat

"Pepperland"
Mark Morris Dance Group 
Brooklyn Academy of Music
May 11, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips

"Pepperland" 

Great artists know where they shouldn't go.
George Balanchine, for example, never choreographed to Beethoven, because he said Beethoven's works were complete in themselves, nothing to add.  Mark Morris could have used that kind of discernment when he accepted a commission for a 50^th-anniversary tribute to the Beatles’ masterpiece “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The resulting “Pepperland” is an uncharacteristically shallow work that does worse than add nothing. It subtracts much of the album's best content -- no Lucy, no Rita! -- for original segments by composer Ethan Iverson that have only fleeting connections to the Beatles. Beyond that, the whole project completely misses the spirit and style of "Sgt. Pepper."

---

The Morris troupe has perfected a casual, communal style of ensemble dancing that celebrates relationships, particularly those among its dancers, who typically spend many years collaborating until their movements and mannerisms meld into each others'. This is almost a Platonic ideal of society transformed by dance. Unfortunately, it is completely at odds with the content of “Sgt. Pepper,” which brings to life a gallery of misfits and loners pursuing fantastical dreams. Morris might have reached his Platonic ideal in response to Sgt. Pepper's loneliness. But to get there he would have to walk his company through descending levels of Hell, like Virgil leading Dante. And this he would not do.

“Pepperland” begins with a promising gesture: a tight circle of dancers opens out from the center of the stage, unspooling like the grooves of an LP record. But the imaginary world the Beatles created on that disk, the psychedelic trance of “Lucy in the Sky,” the stuck-in-a-groove frustration of “Getting Better,” the narcissistic self-pity in “She’s Leaving Home,” the loopy frustration of “Lovely Rita,” and most of all the thunderous moral critique of “A Day in the Life” are all absent or caramelized into playful, sentimental pas de deux.

“When I’m 64” is a three-ring clown circus, full of gawky leaps and flopping around in groups, but the comic pathos of "will you still feed me?" is unfelt. The only song this work seems to take seriously is George Harrison’s eastern meditation “Within You Without You,” lamenting the “the space between our souls.” Harrison echoes the theme of "Sgt. Pepper" but his lyrics lack the bite of Lennon and McCartney’s –- a problem the Beatles solved by isolating this cut at the beginning of Side Two, and following it with a laugh track. Morris makes it central to “Pepperland,” with a crossed-legged dancer meditating center stage.

As for the sound: One of the Beatles' great innovations in popular music was the import of classical elements, most strikingly the harpsichord and string passages composed by producer George Martin. Still the Fab Four were fundamentally a rock band, inspired by American Rhythm-and-Blues and its solid, gritty core. Composer Iverson ignores the roots and embraces the refinements. His arrangements play around with Beatle tunes but excise their soul, banishing the thumping beat of rock for a light, airy, often atonal classical-jazz. The dancing follows the music -- predominantly classic-jazzy, with character shoes and a lot of ballet steps.  Morris makes it flow with his weaving, looping moves for shifting groups of dancers. Very charming as always, but it looks more like a tribute to Balanchine than the Beatles.

“Pepperland” is a place Mark Morris should never have gone. And if you love "Sgt. Pepper" as complete in itself, neither should you.


-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

Parable of the Plant Kingdom

"Estado Vegetal" 
Manuela Infante 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York 
May 3, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips 

In medical Spanish, "Estado Vegetal" means a vegetative state, where basic life functions go on but consciousness and thought are lost. Politically, a "Vegetative State" could mean rule by the plant kingdom. This intense theatrical piece, starring a young Chilean woman and an array of potted plants, suggests such a state is exactly where humanity is headed.

Dirty Dancing

"One. One & One"
Vertigo Dance Company 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
March 6, 2019
-- By Tom Phillips 

Except for a neat row of dirt at the front of the stage, the opening section of “One. One & One” by Israel’s Vertigo Dance Company looks much like the closing elegy of George Balanchine’s “Serenade.” It’s a solemn communal idyll, to sonorous cellos in a minor key, with a motif of dancers leaning on each other for balance and support. They seem to be a close-knit group, working out complex tasks together –- as when three men braid the hair of a woman while she uses her long tresses to pull them across the stage.

The communal spirit stays as more dirt is spread in the rectangular, closed space. But the mood changes suddenly with the sound of a cannonade -- big guns, firing in the distance. After that, the dirt and the dancers start to fly, and the communal idyll is transformed into what looks like an army boot camp, whipping troops into combat readiness. The motif here is “bring it on,” with dancers lining up on each side of the stage and charging at their opposite numbers, trying to breach their defenses. Every charge is repelled!

So much for “Serenade.”  This looks more like socialist realism, the kind of state-sponsored art that Balanchine came to America  to get away from. And if it reminds you of the modern history of Israel, as seen by the State of Israel, that’s just what it looked like to me.

Passing for White in The Great Gatsby: A Spectroscopic Analysis of Jordan Baker

-- By Tom Phillips and Lucie Hopkins 

This is an edited version of our article published in The Explicator, Vol. 76 No. 3, November 2018. 

The character of Jordan Baker in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has puzzled readers for nearly a century.  She is glamorous and opaque, her “pleasant contemptuous expression” (23) so polished it deflects interpretation and critical analysis.  However, a close reading focused on Fitzgerald’s descriptions of Baker puts her at the center of the novel's concern with identity. Amid the racial and sexual upheavals of the 20s, she may be Gatsby’s most successful imposter -- a light-skinned African American “passing for white.”

Such suspicions were directed at Gatsby himself by Carlyle V. Thompson in a 2000 essay, “Was Gatsby Black?”-- an argument quickly dismissed for insufficient textual evidence (Manus). In Jordan’s case evidence runs throughout the text, obscured by her proximity to Daisy and Gatsby, and Fitzgerald’s deceptive style, in which significant detail can “pass” as merely decorative.