The Play of Illusion

Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes, Marina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions: The Art of Deception (Lund Humphries)

In an article (The desert of the real, September 25) for The Guardian, Marina Warner previews an upcoming exhibit—Eyes, Lies and Illusions (October 7, 2004, to January 3, 2005) at the Hayward Gallery in London—for which she is curatorial adviser.

In the medieval Christian tradition, the devil is a mimic, an actor, a performance artist, and he imitates the wonders of nature and the divine work of creation. Unlike God, he can only conjure visions as illusions, as he did when, in the person of Mephistopheles, he summoned the pageant of the deadly sins for Doctor Faustus and then seduced him with the appearance of Helen of Troy. The Devil summons images in the mind's eye, playing on desires and weaknesses; the word "illusion" comes from ludere, "to play" in Latin. Conjurors mimic his tricks: an early Christian Father, denouncing magicians, gives a vivid account of the lamps and mirrors or basins of water they used, how they even conjured the stars by sticking fish scales or the skins of sea horses to the ceiling.

That is the same Marina Warner, Novelist and Mythographer, whom I came to know through her books on the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc. From her introduction, I would say that this exhibit is likely to be quite interesting.

Blogwatch

Welcome to everybody coming here for the Peter Schjeldahl thing, and thanks to Modern Art Notes, James Tata, Marja-Leena Rathje, Anna L. Conti, and Washington, DC Art News for linking to it. If you're new here, please stay a while and come back often.

So, Kyle Gann at PostClassic wrote this, which made A. C. Douglas at Sounds & Fury write this, which made Scott Spiegelberg at Musical Perceptions write this, and that got Alex Ross at The Rest Is Noise to join the fray. Then they all just kept writing more and more posts. What's the big deal? Writing about music, which ACD thinks is, well, let me just quote him directly so I don't incite him to write a response to my response:

Alone among the arts, music addresses and speaks directly to the center of feeling, bypassing altogether, and with no need of the interposition of, the intellectual faculty. For one to imagine that one could capture and transmit even the smallest part of the essential character of such a thing through the agency of a medium that requires the fullest interposition of the intellectual faculty to even begin to comprehend is, well, unimaginable.

Alex Ross justly calls this sort of thinking "an elegant paraphrase of Schopenhauer," but it also made me think of Proust's ideas about music uttered by the characters in À la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time). How can intelligent people, who are not untrained in music, really think of music as so ineffably mysterious? It is ironic that Scott Spiegelberg, who as a music theorist studies music in the most concretely musical terms, should come to the defense of historiographical analysis. I suspect that when ACD says that "technical language or comment [is] useless [...] in explaining how the music works to affect a receiver in the case of absolute music," it is the sacrosanctity of his own views on music he loves that he so zealously seeks to defend. Let us remember that ACD, without the slightest trace of irony, has labeled his beloved Wagner's Ring "an immortal work written by a music immortal." With the same certainty I have in the superiority of Scott's side of this argument, I equally believe that Scott's ideas, while interesting for the rest of us to read on the sidelines, will not make any impression on a mind that is so convinced that music is a locked mystery, to which it holds the only key.

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber links to an article (Inside the ivory tower, September 23) by Jim McClellan for The Guardian about blogging and the classroom and has some things to say about the phenomenon in this post. Very interesting to compare experiences, as I am in my third week of experimenting with a class blog for my course on Opera in the Twentieth Century.

For all my French newspaper reading, I learned from this notice at The Literary Saloon that author Françoise Sagan has died. The Francophone tributes are rolling in: Libération, Le Figaro, Le Nouvel Observateur, France 2, Le Monde, TF1, La Libre Belgique, La République des Lettres.

Finally, from the Department of Francophilia, in this article (Le budget de la culture augmente de 5,9 %, September 23) from Le Monde, Clarisse Fabre reports on the ways that the French Ministry of Culture plans to spend its 5.9% budget increase for the next fiscal year. As I've said before, we need a Department of Culture, folks: let's make art and music, not war.

Andreasz Chéniertzky

This is a companion article to a previous review of Andrea Chénier at the Washington National Opera, from September 9.

For the season's opening under its newly amended name, the Washington National Opera presents Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier. Based on the life of the French poet of the same name, the opera was written in 1895 and is the reason why we still remember Giordano—and not a bad reason—though his other works, like the opera Siberia, aren't half-bad either.

With Eugene Kohn conducting, the opera opened to an unusually beautiful set accompanied by fine music. During the overture, the stage lay quietly in dark colors with several semitransparent white pointy mosquito-net-like covers looking like suspended, upside-down orchid blossoms or KKK hoods, only cute. A stilted, Nightmare before Christmas-like figure stilts about like a Rod Puppet. This gorgeous, impressive set, once lit, was host to dancing that bordered buffoonery, but silly music deserves silly dancing.

The most important character in the opera, the baritone role of Carlo Gérard, a servant at Château Coigny, sets up the story (about the French Revolution), lamenting the state of the servant's life. Chénier shows compassion for the cause of the revolution, but not revolutionary zeal either. Gérard, however, does and is dismissed. The first act is visually dominated by butterflies, dragonflies, moths, and other flying insects (the backdrop alone would be every lepidopterist's delight). During the festivities at the Château, little ballerina-moths carried firefly-shaped lamps. Other than that, the setting was sparse and pretty. Michael Chioldi as the extraordinarily flamboyant Pietro Fléville was a delightful addition, even if he hadn't sung well. Delicious decadence dripped from the setting, giving a perfectly apt description of the scene.

Mariusz Trelinski

It was by that point already that the imported production by Mariusz Trelinski (generously called a "co-production" with the Teatr Wielki in Poznań) had to be judged a success. Daring it already was. The second act shows why Chénier is not escaping to safety (the reason is a secret, letter-writing woman—Maddalena, the Countess Coigny's daughter), why Gérard, now an important figure in the revolutionary movement, does not denounce Chénier (Maddalena), and why the opera will end tragically (Maddalena). The central guillotine with light-chains stretched from it, beautiful blue, dark purple hues, the dark stage, live dogs, and later an imposing, very, very red background all made for a visually arresting set on which the action played out. The Soviet-flavored depiction of the fervor of the revolutionaries was chilling in its portrayal of good intentions turning into bloody zealotry (how timely) and the orchestra supported it by being best when it underscored.

The third act finally is nothing short of inspired. Mariusz Trelinski, film-maker-cum-opera-director, outdid himself, and the Washington National Opera is to be congratulated for bringing the most inspiring, pertinent, and beautiful direction of an opera to D.C. that I have seen this company do so far. How easily could they have opted for a pseudo-realistic set from, say, the 1950s Teatro alla Scala. The Tribunal showed the Hitlerite Mathieu (John Marcus Bindel) almost 10 feet above the stage, framed by the speaker's podium's glowing red borders—as though he were only a torso and extended hands, summoning and bewitching the crowd that hung over its gloomily red lit balconies, only to rise at his turning to them. The story has Gérard arrest Chénier to get to Maddalena, accuse him wrongly, but be softened by Maddalena's love for Chénier, whom he promises to help if...

In the almost equally well-crafted fourth act, Gérard retracts his accusation, but in revolutionary-style logic Chénier is condemned to death all the same. Maddalena gets to switch places with a condemned female prisoner and dies together with Chénier in a scene that may just have tickled opera season ticket-holder Herr Wolfowitz the wrong way. The unsubtle though hardly primitively obvious allusion to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did not elude the Washington audience.

With a staging, costumes, and direction that cannot garner anything but praise, it was either to follow necessarily or coincidence that the acting was first rate. John Marcus Bindel and especially Jorge Lagunes, who both offered distinguished singing gave us even better acting, making the story thus far more compelling than the text alone would merit. Salvatore Licitra, the star of the performance and the reason many, if not most, people will attend, too did a good job, though his singing was more impressive. He, the alleged successor of Luciano Pavarotti (a reputation gotten not the least due to a last-minute replacement at the Met for the latter), had visible and audible fun singing the role and did not, or hardly, mark down. In fact, the only singer to mark down was Keri Alkema, the mezzo (La Contessa), from whom one would have least expected it. Paoletta Marrocu, the Maddalena of the night had a non-distinct but gorgeous, very clean voice that sounded unforced and bright all through the night. Licitra, at any rate, won't be the pull in subsequent performances as he is indisposed - and while his substitute Carlo Ventre can't hold a candle to Licitra, it's not the tenor you will want to see this magnificent production for.

Eugene Kohn, who had to interrupt the performance for a third-act adjustment, did all he needed to do in order to supply direction and story with sufficient music... but then this night was not about the music, it was about opera as a whole, a visual feast that merged with the music as only the most absorbing directions can. Andrea Chénier will never become my favorite opera, but in such cloth I shall want to see it as many times as possible.

Bibracte

France 2 has a set of Web pages called La renaissance de Bibracte, by Laurent Ribadeau Dumas. Bibracte was a Gallic citadel on Mount Beuvray, in the heart of the Morvan region, about a half-hour from Autun. A city that reached 5,000 to 20,000 in population was founded near the end of the 2nd century BC on this mountain, at an altitude of 820 meters (a little over a half-mile). According to Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars, Bibracte was the "largest and wealthiest oppidum (fortified town)" in the region.

After allying themselves temporarily with the Romans, under Caesar, the Galls made an alliance of tribes at Bibracte, under the famous warlord Vercingetorix. That history of the site, as a possible birthplace for the idea of France, led President Mitterand to place Bibracte on the list of important national treasures. Mitterand even left instructions to have himself buried at Bibracte, a plan that was never carried out, because of local opposition. Archeological excavations continue throughout the large area of protected land, and a number of interesting finds can be seen in the Museum of Celtic Civilization on the mountaintop. The museum is hosting an exhibit right now called L'or blanc de Hallstatt, on the lives of salt miners in Austria 2,500 years ago.

"My Name Is Peter, and I'm an Aesthete"

Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The New Yorker, writes so well that I usually turn first to his article when the magazine arrives in my mailbox. Last night, he delivered the first of this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art, sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium. Although the lecture was scheduled to begin at 7 pm, Schjeldahl actually began speaking at about 7:25, which is good since I was able to find a parking place only about 5 minutes before that.

The good news is that Peter Schjeldahl is funny. He began with a few minutes of jokes, after explaining why there was no slide projector. Slides, he proclaimed, are an "absolute blight on visual culture." In response to a question about that remark later, he elaborated this theory: "slides are lies that you believe," he said, "junk food that you are fed," which has nothing to do with the medium of painting. Each time a slide is shown, the possibility of that actual work's impression in someone's eye is wasted. Speaking to a group with most likely a number of art historians in it, he said that art historians are educated in slides, not in paintings, and repeated a story that if one day a cosmic ray somehow reduced every actual work of art instantaneously to dust, art history would pretty much continue as if nothing had happened.

One of Schjeldahl's major points on the topic he chose ("What Art Is For Now") was that the snob appeal of art is one of the "underestimated engines of culture," that for now he has "no desire to swell the size of the tent" of those who love art. In his view, there is no reason to bring art to the masses. Those who want it will find it, and "if somebody doesn't want art, bully for them." However, as Schjeldahl also noted, the audience for art worldwide may be larger now than it ever has been, and the art market is a booming business. This may help explain the gulf that can be observed between major art critics and the art-going public, in the case of the J. Seward Johnson sculptures at the Corcoran, for example (see my post from September 14, 2003). I planned to ask Schjeldahl a question about that, but we ran out of time.

Schjeldahl spent a lot of time picking apart the meaning of art, why it is important, why it should be preserved and supported, even if "there is a lot wrong with art." The function of art in a democratic society is spiritual, a way to manage the alternating impulses of humans between the wild and the tame. Like the cathedral in the Middle Ages, the modern museum "creates social stability by pointing to something that is beyond the everyday." One of art's problems is that even the priests of this artistic cult—art historians and museum curators—have become afraid of the concept of beauty. Schjeldahl described an interesting sociological research project, to create standards for what mystical religious experiences are. When everyday people in our time filled out a questionnaire related to those scientific standards, many of them had had such mystical experiences. Few had shared those experiences with anyone, and no one had ever discussed them with their own clergy. Of all the topics that might come up in a discussion between a museum curator and a museum-goer, the beauty of art is perhaps the most unlikely. The word itself, beauty, "is the A-bomb of art criticism," he concluded.

The question "Whither art?" seemed to generate the most disagreement from the audience during the question period. No, Schjeldahl insisted in a response to one question, art is really not about artists' expression of personal concerns. Art about an artist's concerns can only be effective if it is "enterable," that is, if it is simultaneously a concern of many. In other words, Guernica is not a great painting because Picasso opposed a bombing in Spain, but because we share the same horror of war. "Art is rhetorical," Schjeldahl insisted, "it argues," but most of the great historical art in museums is still very much alive, long after the arguments themselves are dead.

One of art's "problems" may be the shift in our very understanding of the word, from its Greek root in our word technique (teknh) to a special zone of the individual. We understand the phrase "fog of war," Schjeldahl said, and "well, the fog of art never ends." Artists in the 20th century, he suggested, were dedicated largely to "an exploration of the decorative side of art," with the thought that we should think of the work of Pollock or Mondrian in the same way we would discuss fabrics. Perhaps we are now past that, and artists will be ready to return to exploring the illustrational, narrative side of art, to recover the great classical-Renaissance tradition of the nude, for example, an exceptional tradition that has been all but lost.

That led him into a discussion of two paintings by one of his favorite painters, Rembrandt, which in spite of the absence of slides were vividly depicted. (In defense of slides, I should say that this worked well because I could picture the paintings he was describing in my mind. I cannot imagine trying to teach art history without slides, to students who did not come prepared with images already in their minds.) He spoke at some length about Rembrandt's Lucretia (1664) in the National Gallery of Art here in Washington as a shocking portrait of a noble woman at the point of committing suicide (to save her husband's honor, after she has been raped). The work is unique, Schjeldahl said, an image "never seen even in our world of television and video." He thinks that the version of Lucretia (1666) in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is even better and more dramatic. (Schjeldahl is originally from Minnesota.) His description of the work of Rembrandt (as he put it, nothing more than "dirt on cloth," which is one way to think of how you make a painting) does make you hunger for figurative art.

The most moving moment of the night was Schjeldahl's description of the encounter that changed his life in relation to art, what made him a member of the "self-selected elite," in a democratic society, of those who love art. (A group that might be organized, as Schjeldahl imagined it, like Alcoholics Anonymous, which inspired the statement in the title of this post.) It was his visit to a small town in Italy, Monterchi (near Arezzo), to see a country chapel called the Cappella del Cimitero, no larger than a toolshed, where on the wall is Piero della Francesca's fresco of the pregnant Virgin Mary, the Madonna del Parto (1467, image shown above). It was quite an epiphany for someone who wanted to be a poet and who had never really had any education in art.

See also An Interview with Peter Schjeldahl (Blackbird, Spring 2004). There will be two more Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art, also at Lisner Auditorium in Washington: painter/printmaker Pat Steir ("What Is Called Beauty," October 13, 7 pm) and Yale art history professor Alexander Nemerov ("Childhood Imagination: The Case of N. C. Wyeth and Robert Louis Stevenson," November 10, 7 pm).

Nuit Blanche 2004

An article (Paris/"Nuit blanche": 300 artistes, September 19) from France 2 Cultural News previews the next major cultural event in Paris (see my post on last weekend's National Patrimony Days): the Nuit Blanche. Inaugurated only in 2002 by the new mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, three hundred artists will provide all-night diversion in 130 locations throughout the Paris region on October 2. The celebration has a budget of, wait for it, 1.15 million € [$1.42 million], with 500,000€ from private sponsors. It has also spread to Rome (the Romans just held theirs, on September 18), Brussels, and Montréal.

Music has a place, with a concert of foghorns on the Seine, voice-instrument dialogues in the Buttes-Chaumont, DJs adding sound to film at the Bourse, and a children's chorus in front of the Opéra. Some other surprises that are planned include "Danseurs de surface," a choreographed ballet of street-cleaning machines, designed by Anatoli Vlassov et Julie Salgues at the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad; "Vertiges," six dancers suspended in the air all night on ropes and trapezes, at the old Hôpital Saint-Lazare; "24 heures Foucault," a program of events at the Palais de Tokyo for the 20th anniversary of Foucault's death; and "Crème de singe," an installation/happening by the art collective Donuts, in which virtual apes try to escape from zoo cages all night long, in the shope windows at Printemps.

It sounds like fun, which is the whole idea.

Patrimony Days in France

An article (Près de 12 millions de Français ont profité des Journées du patrimoine, September 19) in Le Monde says that the number of visitors taking part in the 21st annual Journées du patrimoine this weekend increased by a half-million over last year. The idea is to open up all sorts of historical buildings to all visitors, for free, for a weekend, to give everyday French citizens the chance to connect with their cultural history. Although the focus this year was on science and technology, some of the big sites were the same as every year: Mont Saint-Michel (13,058 visitors), Cluny (5,400 visitors), the menhir fields at Carnac (2,250 visitors), Chambord (9,249 visitors). One site that was new to me was the Château d'Antoine d'Abbadie in the Aquitanian town of Hendaye, where this is a collection of historic astronomical instruments.

There is lots more coverage, which will disappear into the archives soon, from Le Figaro. To find out more about what the National Patrimony Days are, here are my posts on the event last year, on September 19 and September 25, 2003.

Music as Medicine

This story was just too perfect for blogging, so here it is. In an article (Housebound to be treated to concerts in their own living rooms, September 22) for The Independent, Arifa Akbar describes a program called Musicians on Call, which has gotten more than 1,500 players from 30 orchestras to volunteer to make house calls to people confined to home because of illness or disabilities:

Christopher Smith has always wanted to take his daughter to a classical music concert, but her severe disabilities mean she rarely leaves the house. But today, Georgia, five, will have her own private concert of favourite Beethoven pieces in her family's North London sitting room by members of the London Symphony Orchestra. [...]

Mr Smith, 60, who is Georgia's full-time carer, said the scheme made possible an experience for his daughter, who has a type of cerebral palsy in which she cannot talk or walk, would never otherwise have. "When she was about two, we discovered that she absolutely adored classical music and we think one of her favourites is Beethoven's 9th symphony. My wife, Caroline, and I have talked about whether we could risk taking her to a concert but we have worried that she could start making a noise, which is her way of talking."

How beautiful is that? Although the story is about the organization's work in Great Britain, here is how the group got started, according to their Web site:

Musicians On Call was originally founded by Michael Solomon and Vivek Tiwary in the course of their volunteer work with The Kristen Ann Carr Fund at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. After a concert sponsored by the Kristen Ann Carr Fund, a hospital staff member raised the issue that some of the patients had been unable to attend the performance either because they were in treatment or too sick to leave their rooms. In response, Michael, Vivek and the musician went from room to room to play for those patients who had been unable to attend the concert. The one-on-one interaction of patient and musician created a crucial intimacy; the expressions on the faces of friends and family members at the patients' bedsides revealed a deep sense of connection and release. Musicians On Call was born!

I think I know where my next charitable donation will be going. This is the best idea I have heard in a long time.