A Funny Valentine: Bonobo on Love

"Tu Amaras"
Bonobo
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
February 14, 2020
-- By Tom Phillips

"Tu Amaras" – Thou Shalt Love -- begins with an excruciating dialogue, set in 16^th Century Latin  America, between two Spanish missionaries and a lone Indian who has fallen in love with a cow -- a species brought to America by the Spanish. These inquisitors don’t like to call their friend an Indian, because they’re afraid it will make him uncomfortable – but what really makes him uncomfortable is their discomfort with calling him anything. They want to banish him for his carnal relationship with the cow. But they still want him to be comfortable.

This Chilean theater troupe calls itself Bonobo, after a human-like species of ape, and their ongoing concern is with human perceptions of the "other."  For the cast of "Tu Amaras," this comes to include animals, extraterrestrials, immigrants, homosexuals, criminals, and each other.  The last category is the most difficult.

Mexican Muralists Today

Vida Americana:  Mexican Muralists Re-make American Art, 1925-1945

Whitney Museum of American Art, February 17 - May 17, 2020

Madre Proletaria -- children at her feet, and around her shoulders -- looks out at us from a narrow cinder-block cell, in dungeon light. The walls have closed in on this family, they have nowhere to go.

David Alfaro Siquieros made this painting in 1929, but it is as current as today's headline -- TRUMP BUDGET: CUT SAFETY NET, ADD TO MILITARY.  If you care to see homeless families in real life, just go to a big-city railroad or bus station in the world's richest nation.

Mexico's revolutionary muralists -- Siquieros, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera -- are the stars of this show unveiled yesterday at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  Of course there's an essential problem in showing the work of muralists; their major pieces exist in situ and can't be removed to a museum. Murals attain their power largely through their scale and public place.

Doing its best, the Whitney has represented the monumental works of los tres grandes with photographs and videos. These are supplemented with some of their best paintings, along with works by artists who followed them on both sides of the Rio Grande. Rivera's astounding panorama of American industry, on the walls of the Detroit Art Institute, is reproduced as a video show, mimicking the way the eye might travel over the walls, but missing the freedom and scope of the actual experience. (I've been there, it's worth the trip.)

Still, the paintings speak for themselves, as do a pair of wooden sculptures by Mardonio Magana -- another cornered mother enfolding her children, and a peasant concealed except for his eyes, peering out between a sarape and sombrero. These are Mexico's revolutionary masses who rose up to demand land reform in the 1920s. When Siquieros paints the rebel leader Zapata, he encloses him in the same cinder-block walls that imprison the Madre Proletaria. 

The Whitney doesn't say so, but lionizing Mexican artists today can be taken as a response to the Un-welcome sign the US government has held up to Mexicans.  Whitney curators accompany the show with an art-history narrative stressing the influence these muralists had on US modern artists such as Jackson Pollock.  The show includes several early Pollock paintings from the Thirties that resemble the Mexicans' agonistic images. Pollock was part of Siquieros' Experimental Workshop in Union Square, where paint-splattering was one of the experimental techniques.

Other American artists from Thomas Hart Benton to Jacob Lawrence adopted the Mexicans' bold brushwork to  tell stories of oppression and resistance in US history.  The most artistic is a series of small canvases by Lawrence, with captions describing the Great Migration of blacks from south to north in the Twenties. Wise and understated, these scenes -- an attic in a rooming house, a bucket of molten steel -- evoke a struggle that's still going on, for equal status in the Land of Opportunity. .

There's a much bigger story left unsaid about the US and Mexico. A huge chunk of the continental United States, from Texas to Colorado to California, used to be Mexican territory.  When the US -- citing its "Manifest Destiny" -- seized all that in the 1840's, it incorporated a Mexican culture that has continued growing on both sides of the border ever since.

Sorry Mr. President, but Spanish is an American language. Tacos are more popular than apple pie. Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros don't need to be seen as Mexican artists who influenced Americans. They are American artists who worked on both sides of a political border. And their revolutionary message has never been more urgent in the US than today.

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips

Art on Ice

Newark, February 5, 2020
-- By Tom Phillips

Tomas Tatar at full tilt 

The Montreal Canadiens defeated the New Jersey Devils 5 to 4 last night in a thrilling overtime contest decided by a shootout after the Devils tied the game in the final minute. No one in the crowd of 15.000 was more thrilled than a gray-bearded New Yorker in the fourth row behind the goal, attending his first professional hockey game at the age of 78.

Thus did one item get crossed off my bucket list.  I had always had a passing interest in hockey, along with every other kind of game covered in the sports pages.  But it was a game I never played.  Not having grown up with frozen ponds at hand, I can barely skate, much less juggle a puck through a hostile crowd at 50 miles an hour. So I was a pure fan; and I was agog.

The Pauline Prophecy: Jewish-Christian Relations in Bernard Malamud’s A NEW LIFE

-- By Tom Phillips

Originally published in
ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES, AND REVIEWS 1/18/2020

A New Life, Bernard Malamud’s 1961 epic of a down-and-out New Yorker in the Pacific Northwest, is unique among his novels. The story takes place far from the urban Jewish milieu that was the author’s usual setting, and not coincidentally, it is the only work in which he fully develops a critique of American culture. Malamud studiously avoids mentioning religion until very late in the book, and then only obliquely. However a close reading, beginning with the significance of the main characters’ names, suggests an inter-religious dynamic.

Relations between Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians, and Jewish and gentile cultures are front and center in much of Malamud’s fiction – notably in The Assistant, the 1957 novel that immediately precedes A New Life. In A New Life these themes are concealed, or implied – probably because it was written while the author was sojourning in gentile territory, where his values came into sharp conflict with those of the dominant culture. A New Life can be read as a satire on American Philistia from a Jewish point of view, but in the end it goes beyond satire. The coupling of Seymour Levin with Pauline Josephson, the wife of his boss and enemy, and their absconding with her children, suggests a prophecy of a new age in which Jew and gentile combine in a generational assault on American values.

In short, the Sixties.

The Unknown Dancer

"The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood"
Written and Directed by Suguru Yamamoto
Japan Society, New York
January 10, 2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Wataru Kitao as the Unknown Dancer.

                                    
Mayday! Mayday! Is a cry that comes up repeatedly in Suguru Yamamoto’s dance/drama “The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood.” It means “help me” in French, but it seems to fall on deaf ears in Tokyo, the setting for this theater piece by and for a new generation of Japanese artists.

Despairing dramas about alienated people were a staple of the last century.  What makes this fresh is that it suggests alienation is actually the flip side of community. We feel disconnected only because we're connected.



“The Unknown Dancer” is a whole cast of characters, played by one brilliant young dancer-actor, Wataru Kitao, equally at home with hip-hop and ballet, in male and female roles, as a child or an old person, as a human being or an animal. The ability to cross so many lines is a feat of acting empathy – the very opposite of disconnecting.

Between the Ice Sheets: June in January

Laura Peterson rehearses "Interglacial" 

-- By Tom Phillips

"Interglacial" refers to the period between geological Ice Ages -- the current period, about eleven thousand years old, the age when humankind established its dominance over the earth. That age may well be extended by the effects of humankind and its technology, pumping an ever-increasing volume of carbon dioxide into the air, trapping heat and raising temperatures, melting ice.  

It was 69 degrees on  January 11 in New York --  a record high -- when huge icebergs cracked on Canal Street in New York before an small audience in a storefront.  The ice was simulated but the sights and sounds were familiar.  It was just like the videos from Greenland and Antarctica of ice sheets "calving"-- sending  mammoth chunks of melting ice roaring and plunging into the sea.  

Laura Peterson's choreography is always an interaction with space and materials -- wood, grass, plastic, etc. -- the stuff that makes up our world.  About two years ago she started experimenting with paper, and at some point it became clear that its properties have much in common with ice.  It's smooth and slippery, it lies flat, it crackles, under pressure it stands up and forms shapes, and under enough pressure it breaks up in unpredictable ways.  

"Interglacial" was conceived to bring home the global meltdown of ice. Peterson and her dancers performed the work-in-progress today, each hour from noon to eight, free for anyone curious enough to drop in to the storefront at 323 Canal.  

Inside, huge sheets and balls of white paper played the part of the world's natural ice, and three dancers played the role of global warming.  They smoothed out the paper and used it as a dancing surface -- displaying the cool mechanics of ballet steps, civilization at its most elegant and highly-developed. Then these lovely humans proceeded to sabotage the scenery, crawling under the paper floor, standing it up into crazy conical shapes, then sending it rolling and tumbling down in broken heaps. The sound track roared and crackled, with the keening of whales in the deep background.  

The humans -- advanced as they are -- seemed utterly unconcerned with the destruction they had wreaked.  Meanwhile on the street, the June-in-January revelers paraded in shorts and tank tops, snacked on hamburgers and ice cream, drank water from innumerable plastic bottles, and filled the trash cans to overflowing.

"Interglacial" isn't done. Watch for it near you.

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips

War Babies: Prophets of Peace

 This article was originally published in the Toronto Star, Sunday 12/29/2019

-- By Tom Phillips

Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, c.1963

The 1960's turn sixty in 2020, with their meaning and value still in hot dispute. It might help to divide the decade in two; the first half peace and love, the last fear and loathing. Still, in both phases, the Sixties were an age of prophecy.

Bob Dylan sang “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”  Simon and Garfunkel saw “the words of the prophets written on the subway walls.”  New voices came out of nowhere, and found rapt listeners in the massive generation born after World War Two, the baby boomers. 

The prophets were not boomers themselves.  They were the big brothers and sisters of the boomers, the relatively small generation born during the war.  As elders, they knew from an early age that their voices would be heard. And they knew the world they were born into was not fit for future generations. Children of war, they became prophets of peace.