The Arts Equation
By Colin Dabkowski and Jeff Miers
The arts speak to all of us in unique and unpredictable ways.
Whether it’s the improvised piano lines of Oscar Peterson that hijack your brain waves, the comedy films of the Coen brothers that transport you or the wild drips of Jackson Pollock that bring your consciousness to a higher plane, all of it — no matter how different it might seem — is linked together in the grand narrative of art and culture.
The connective tissue that links the arts together can be almost as interesting as the disciplines of art, music, film and poetry themselves. That’s why on these two pages, we explore just a few of the millions of surprisingly close connections among art forms that seem, on the surface, to be disconnected.
This article itself, for instance, takes its cue from Lawrence Weschler’s book of visual connections titled "Convergences." News Arts Writer Colin Dabkowski and News Pop Music Critic Jeff Miers have researched different works of art in all forms and added their expertise toward drawing a line of similarity, the linking of all things expressive.
They explored visual art exhibits, books, poems, music, even television commercials — to find their commonality — the melody of a work of art, the rhythm of a poem, the vision of a song. What would a music expert see as the soundtrack to a work by Jennifer Steinkamp, currently installed at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery? What would a theater critic see as a perfect illustration of a piece of work by Susan Sontag or the play that comes to mind from sculpture or a poem?
In the end, hopefully, the few examples we’ve compiled might draw out the poetry fan in the film lover, the Canadian rock guru in the dedicated video art viewer or even the Joni Mitchell zealot hidden within the "Sex and the City" devotee.
The Works:
Singer Rufus Wainwright’s "Want One"
Writer Susan Sontag’s "Notes On Camp"
Buffalo United Artists’ play "My Deah"
The Conclusions:
According to Susan Sontag’s infamous piece "Notes on Camp,""The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric — something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques." Rufus Wainwright’s virtuosic hybrid of show-tune foppery, the grandiosity of Verdi, and insistence on stacking vocal harmonies and chord tones like a cross between Queen and the Beach Boys fits Sontag’s description of camp quite snugly, particularly throughout his gloriously over-the-top "Want One" album.
It’s pretty tough to trace a direct line from the comparatively subtle tones (really) of "Want One" to the sheer camp extravaganza that is John Epperson’s "My Deah," a play that shifts Euripides’ famous story of love gone violently wrong from ancient Greece to the Deep South.
But just as the elegant bass-string plucks of Verdi are transposed to the modern cell-phone-era absurdity of Wainwright’s "Vibrate" (My phone’s on vibrate for you/Electroclash is karaoke too/ I try to dance Britney Spears/I guess I’m getting on in years), Eurpides is probably rotating in his grave at full-speed to know that his "Medea" has been replaced with the former Miss Louisiana State University.
Such is camp, for better or worse. The show, produced by Buffalo United Artists, runs through June 14.
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The Works:
Apple computer’s iPod ads.
Robert Longo’s "Untitled (Men in Cities)"
London vs. New York
The Conclusions:
They are a new and prominent part of America’s cultural landscape: the contorted figures of slickly dressed young professionals, iPods firmly in hand, all writhing themselves into evangelical contortions to the strains of Coldplay, Jet or the Fratellis.
They are as much a part of Apple’s advertising machine as an artistic outgrowth of the early-’80s punk and new wave scene and the art it produced. And looking at the stark and contorted young punk- dandies of former Buffalonian Robert Longo’s "Men in Cities," a series of intense graphite drawings from 1980, is like peering directly into the genesis of modern hipsterdom.
"When you look at some of the drawings, I believe that there’s a real physical and personal relationship to the viewer," Longo said in an interview in the book "Art Talk: The ’80s" about his 1980 series. "You experience the gesture. Did you ever see James Chance of the Contortions, or David Byrne of the Talking Heads? Wouldn’t you like to be able to move like them? But that’s what these drawings end up [doing]."
And if Buffalo has any band whose sensibility is firmly rooted in Longo’s somewhat macabre vision of dance in the heyday of punk and new wave, it’s London vs. New York, an outfit which happily categorizes itself in the dance-punk category. The band played at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center’s "Artists and Models" affair Saturday, a place where all sorts of punk-pop-art connections are destined to swirl about.
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The Works:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
The Tragically Hip’s "Nautical Disaster"
Jennifer Steinkamp’s "Wreck of the Dumaru"
The Conclusions:
Jennifer Steinkamp’s installation at the Albright-Knox employs computer animation, abstract painting, architectural space, film, motion and the viewer him/herself, in service of a highly unique, experiential form of fine art.
Steinkamp’s art is esoteric, but far from complete abstraction — you’re a participant in the piece whether or not you want to be. That makes it very real, even if it seems, at first, surreal. This twilight world between active cognition and passive dream state is the very space wherein music — both its creation and its enjoyment – - dwells.
"Wreck of the Dumaru" is a tribute of sorts to Steinkamp’s great uncle, who died in a nautical accident during World War I. The piece places the viewer directly in the ocean, disappearing into the waves. Coleridge’s epic hallucination-in-verse "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" prefigures such forceful humbling of the human in the face of indifferent nature. ("Water, water everywhere/And all the boards did shrink/Water, water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink").
Gordon Downie’s lyrics for the Tragically Hip’s "Nautical Disaster" loops through the brain. These work as both accompanying music and ancillary poem. "One afternoon, four thousand men died in the water here/and five hundred more were thrashing madly, as parasites might in your blood/Now, I was in a lifeboat designed for ten, and ten only/anything that systematic would get you hated/It’s not a deal, not a test, nor a love of something fated/(Death) The selection was quick, the crew was picked/and those left in the water were kicked off our pant leg/and we headed for home."
One could almost smell the saltwater.
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The Works:
Andrei Codrescu’s essay collection, "New Orleans Mon Amour"
Folk art by Dr. Bob
Dr. John’s "City That Care Forgot" CD
The Conclusions:
Dr. John’s "City That Care Forgot" CD (out Tuesday) offers the delicious New Orleans funk the good Doctor has been honing for decades. Like the city that birthed it, Dr. John’s latest wraps around the listener like steam off an early summer morning sidewalk in the French Quarter.
Buffalo’s own Ani DiFranco, now a denizen of New Orleans, makes a cameo. Dr. John’s funk is swampy, always, and as thick and spicy as the gumbo you get at Galatoire’s on Bourbon Street. Defiant, too, as one would expect from a people abandoned in their hour of need by the government of a country whose culture they’ve given so much to.
New Orleans is a city where people go to reinvent themselves. In the same way that strange stew that is the City of New Orleans turned the young Mac Rebennack into the flamboyant Dr. John we know today, it also created the bizarre folk art character Dr. Bob. His strange sculptures and gimmicky slogans painted onto wooden boards are hardly the stuff of high art, but his popularity in the Crescent City and beyond is indisputable. To see some of his work in Western New York, take a trip to Amy’s Place restaurant at 3234 Main St., where one of his famed "Be Nice or Leave" signs hangs above the fryers.
And possibly the foremost chronicler of all that is strange, enticing and transformative about New Orleans is the commentator and professor Andrei Codrescu, whose essay collection "New Orleans, Mon Amour" chronicles his 20-year love affair with the city in gorgeous hues. Born in Transylvania, of all places, Codrescu came to New Orleans looking for what most everyone else does: a change for the weirder.
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The Works:
Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay "Eyes Wide Shut"
Poet T.S. Eliot’s "Canticle V (The Death of Saint Narcissus)"
Big Orbit Gallery’s "Double Narcissus" exhibit
The Conclusions:
Kubrick’s swan song, the brilliant (and vastly underrated) "Eyes Wide Shut" — based on the novel "Traumnovelle," by Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler — is commonly referred to as a psycho-sexual drama. It is that, but "Eyes Wide Shut" also calls into play a Freudian slant on narcissism, sexuality, the significance of dreams and the role of the unconscious in first summoning, and then subverting, fear, doubt and moral ambivalence. No wonder so few people liked it. Psychoanalysis and popcorn don’t mix, apparently.
Narcissism is possibly the oldest of all subjects for art, poetry, theater and, well, life. And that has probably something to do with the fact that plenty of artists themselves are just the slightest bit narcissistic. Take, for instance, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, a Buffalo artist whose exhibition "Double Narcissism" on view at the Big Orbit Gallery, 30D Essex St., features four video screens showing the artist gazing at himself in the mirror and performing various self-involved and obsessive activities of alternately curious and unprintable activity.
This sense, in the brilliant poetry of T.S. Eliot, shows up in one of his religiously inspired canticles, which conflates the stories of the mythological Narcissus (the boy who fell in love with himself), the Christian Sts. Sebastian and Narcissus. It manages to blend together themes of sexual violence, masochism, narcissism and martyrdom, all of which factor heavily into both Kubrick’s masterpiece and Rhodes’ exhibition. Eliot writes: "Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows/He danced on the hot sand until the arrows came/As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him/Now he is green, dry and stained with the shadow in his mouth."
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The Works:
Federico Garcia Lorca’s "Dawn," from "A Poet in New York"
Joni Mitchell’s "Sex Kills"
"Sex and the City," the movie
The Conclusions:
While the women in "Sex and the City’s" mythological New York City stroke their seemingly limitless supply of vanity over cocktails in a midtown hot-spot, crying in their cosmopolitans over the latest wrinkle in their sex lives, Mitchell reminds us of the overarching culture that has allowed such narcissism to flourish unchecked.
Speaking truth-to-stupidity is necessary, and Mitchell does it incredibly well in the process, making connections between the rampant commodification of sexuality, interspecies alienation, and "the gas leaks/and the oil spills."
Even if "Sex and the City" satisfies your affinity for both definitions of the "cosmopolitan," it helps to see New York from the diametrically opposite point of view of Candace Bushnell. When the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca visited New York in the late ’20s to write his scathing, surrealistic book of poetry "A Poet In New York," he spared almost nothing from his anti-capitalist hatchet job — not the skyscrapers, not the melting pot of culture (save the neighborhood of Harlem) and certainly not the churning economic backbone of the American economy.
From Lorca’s poem "Dawn": "Those that go out early know in their bones/there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:/they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,/in mindless games, in fruitless labors."
Pretty grim stuff. The "Sex and the City" movie is in theaters now.
e-mail: cdabkowski@buffnews.com
e-mail: jmiers@buffnews.com
Originally published by NEWS ARTS WRITERS.
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