Another essay by art and theater critic, world traveler and ARTES contributing editor, Edward Rubin…
It wasn’t until I visited the Doge’s Palace in Venice (below, left and right [detail]) and came face to face with “Paradise,” Tintoretto’s large painting that hangs majestically in the Ducal Hall that I discovered that Tintoretto was still alive. Here he was, some 400 years later, looking down at me looking up at him. I didn’t have to read the painting’s label which no doubt listed the artist’s name, the title of the painting, and the date it was executed. I didn’t have time. I was pulled right past the words into the heart of the matter. Communication was instantaneous. I knew immediately that this seething mass of humanity, posing as saints and angels on canvas, all 23 by 72 feet of it, was transmogrified flesh…Tintoretto’s. More
‘Frank Stella Prints’ offers an unusually illuminating perspective on the career of virtuoso artist, Frank Stella, who helped define the perimeters of American art over the past five decades. The show focuses on his printmaking, and its over 100 works on paper suggest the ways his highly experimental approach transformed our understanding of the traditional print.
This elegant and comprehensive exhibition, the artist’s first major print retrospective since 1982, also offers up a clear view of Stella’s stylistic evolution — a series of reinventions that morphed from the minimalist geometric abstraction of his early years to an effervescent complexity of his later gestural work.More
On a recent sunny September afternoon, I stood on one of the hills of Rome with a group of Italians, looking across the brown Tiber (below) to the old orange buildings of Trastevere. A bright green bird, maybe some sort of parrot, swooped over the river toward a row of darker green umbrella pines. Modern Rome has few birds, except for sparrows and pigeons, and precious little quiet, so we stood for a while and drank it in.More
“To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.”
~E. B. White
Right: Bartelomeo Veneto, Lady Playing a Lute (c. 1520). Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan, Italy)
Rebirth and Resilience
Dear Reader- In May of this year, the ebb and flow of ARTES articles and opinion—so much a part of my life and that of our writers and online visitors since launching in 2009—came crashing down. The diagnosis: the accumulated content of 27 Gb of words and images, supported by WordPress code that in some cases dated to our inception, caused it to collapse under its own virtual weight. As explained, it was an aging sand castle foundation, eroded by a relentless tide of new material being heaped on top. Our repeated and best efforts to keep the site ‘live’ were to no avail. In the weeks that followed, shock, sadness and a genuine sense of loss permeated my emotions.
Right: Casper David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818).
My dismay was only reinforced by conversations with tech experts who offered little hope for an easy fix; or a complex rehabilitation effort at great expense, with no guarantees at the other end. Weeks turned to months as I contemplated life without ARTES as a daily project. I taught more classes, began writing a long-planned book, and roamed the many book stores and libraries in my area looking for solace. It was an emotional summer for me as various strategies for restoring ARTES churned in the back of my mind. Events were further complicated by added responsibilities related to my aging mother at one end of life’s spectrum, and the imminent arrival of a grandchild at the other.More
Matthias Bitzer, Installation view. Foreground: phosphor notes (a different sort of gravity), mixed media (2016)
The works in Matthias Bitzer’s show, “a different sort of gravity” couldn’t be more confounding or diverse; this is the show’s aim. On my first view, I found the installation to be incoherent, even confusing.It took my breath away. On the second view I realized that the exhibit resonates with a sense of its true meaning, but this baffling heterogeneous display takes time to grasp.More
Yes, it’s true that in Shakespeare’s time men and boys played women’s roles on stage (because, by law, they had to) and, yes, as the Yale Rep’s playbill notes, women have had occasion to dress as men and, yes, there have been stagings of Shakespeare’s plays that have used cross-gender casting. All of this is noted in the playbill, and as one reads it one gets the feeling that the authors perhaps protest too much as justification for the current casting of Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s later plays that has defied pigeonholing (tragedy? comedy? Perhaps a “romance”?). The play is, at best, problematic, and scenes and plot devices echo many of those used by the Bard in earlier plays, so much so that one gets the feeling that Will might have been running out of gas. In any event, Yale Rep’s current production, under the direction of Evan Yionoulis, reflects, if unintentionally, the problems in the play itself, compounding confusion as to how the audience is supposed to respond to what it is seeing. xxxxxMore
There’s no doubt about it – sex sells. Yes, indeed. Stand outside TheaterWorks up in Hartford and stare up at the marquee. It’s surprising steam isn’t rising off Emma Mead’s sensual photo of a woman embracing a man. And then there’s the play itself: Sex With Strangers. With a title like that, you just know you’re not going to see a re-staging of I Remember Mama.
Left: Courtney Rackley (Olivia) and Patric Ball (Ethan) in Hartford TheaterWorks production of ‘Sex with Strangers.’
As you walk down the stairs to the theater proper you may feel yourself starting to pant, and not because the stairs are steep. You sense you’re in for one of those evenings that require you be accompanied by an adult. Yes? Well, yes and no. The play’s title and marketing are pitching sex, and there are some steamy scenes in Laura Eason’s play, but Oh! Calcutta! it ain’t. The sex is the wrapping paper Eason has used to deliver an updated version of A Star is Born with just a touch of Educating Rita in this engaging two-person, two-act dramedy that, once we get through the sex, is about the state of the publishing business, the incursion of electronic media into same, writers’ insecurity and the awkwardness inherent in a May-September romance.
Briskly directed by Rob Ruggiero, with some deft set designs by Brian Prather, Sex With Strangers opens with Olivia (Courtney Rackley) nested in an isolated bed and breakfast in Michigan during a blizzard. A teacher and unfulfilled writer, she has come to this sanctuary (she is the only guest) to work on her novel. The sound of an automobile interrupts her editing. Who could it be? Well, it’s Ethan (Patrick Ball), who bursts on the scene with an energy and brusqueness that immediately destroys Olivia’s insular tranquility.
What follows is a set-up that is a bit strained, for Ethan is a blogger turned author with two best-sellers under his belt, both detailing his sexual exploits that, in the process, demean women. Olivia bristles, but at the end of the first scene they are in each other’s arms for the first of several fade-outs that allow the audience to imagine explicit sexual activity. Here’s where you have to suspend your disbelief, for it’s difficult to accept that Olivia, an erudite and self-possessed woman, would succumb so easily to Ethan’s sexual magnetism, which basically consists of “Do you wanna do it?” lines and moves. Buy the foreplay—such as it is—buy the rest of the play.
Yes, most of the scenes in the first act end with the couple coupling on various pieces of furniture, but the sexual interaction quickly becomes secondary to the issues Eason really wants to deal with. The basic conflict is not between male and female, although there is certainly a lot of dialogue dealing with the two genders’ ids and egos, but rather between an insecure author who revels in the smell and feel of a book (Olivia) and a successful author (Ethan) who is comfortable in the world of E-books and apps.
Over the course of the first act, Ethan seduces Olivia in several ways – yes, she willingly succumbs to his sexual overtures but she is more hesitant about his suggestions that she enter and embrace the 21st-century’s somewhat fractionated publishing world. She finally agrees to have her first book, which received mixed reviews and enjoyed limited sales when first published, be rejuvenated in electronic form.
Oddly enough, much of the heat generated by Sex With Strangers (also the title of Ethan’s first book) has little to do with the two characters’ sexual passions but rather with their confrontations over ethics and the nature of a writer’s relationship to his or her work. In either case, Rackley and Ball handle the multiple mating dances with a great deal of style and flair. Both actors, under Ruggiero’s tutelage, know how to deliver a laugh line, and when their characters are in full-tilt confrontation they bite into each other’s lines like two predators vying to see who will dominate and devour the prey.
Sex With Strangers could easily have been titled Naked, a word that could be interpreted in several ways. Yes, sexual relations are primarily carried out when the participants involved are naked, but Eason is also dealing with the loss of privacy that comes as a concomitant to immersion in the world of texts, twitters and blogs, which often leads to a redefining of the word “rape.” Eason asks the audience to consider what someone must give up when he or she enters the somewhat anarchic world of the Internet. What is real? What is manufactured? As we cede more of who we are to whom we appear to be when we are “Googled,” does the person become the electronic persona? In essence, is fame and fortune, as determined and dictated by the Internet, a Mephistophelean bargain?
Yes, Sex with Strangers is being promoted with SEX all in caps. That might be a wise or foolhardy decision. Those hoping simply to ogle naked bodies will be disappointed, but those who wish to be engaged by ideas that demand we assess what we have lost and what we have gained as the electronic media has become ascendant will be more than satisfied. In essence, the play is really not about SEX, it’s about SOUL.
By Geary Danihy, Contributing Writer
Sex With Strangers runs through April 17. For tickets or more information call 860-527-7838 or go to www.theaterworkshartford.org
Editor’s Note: Artist, China Blue, lives and produces art in the New England region. She is founder and executive director of The Engine Institute, an organization fostering collaborative explorations between artists and scientists through research, development and presentations, with the goal of facilitating the spread of scientific and artistic literacy. A light and sound artist, China explores human sensory and perceptual abilities through her investigations and explorations into bioacoustics, ultra and infrasonic sampling devices, brain wave monitoring, and robotic sensory avatars. Here, she sets her sights on a complex human condition–Alzheimer’s disease–applying her creative abilities to discover new ways of understanding the way we think and feel.
Richard Friswell:I see your work on display in galleries and installation settings in the greater New York area. It is a pleasure to finally explore it with you, in depth. First, tell me about the overarching message of your recent series of paintings?
China Blue:This work explores how we connect and hold on to our life experiences. Memory is transient. Our recollections occur in fragments that arrive as flashes detached from time. “Memory Networks” is a project that investigates linking and preserving them in beautiful abstract figurative forms to hold them together. Made with aluminum based paint the shiny globules and lines make for stunning examples of how we can hold on to our thoughts and experiences. xxxxxMore
One survives through an obsession with vengeance, the other through an obsession with atonement. Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
~Seneca
You don’t ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It’s all about survival; it’s all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in…
~Nick Hornby, “How to Be Good”
Leonardo DiCaprio as one-time frontiersman,Hugh Glass, in ‘Revenant’
Two of the most highly acclaimed films of this awards season have been Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant” and László Nemes’s “Son of Saul.” Oscars went to Iñárritu for Directing, Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor and Emmanuel Lubezki for Cinematography. Nemes’s “Son of Saul” won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Both films center on a protagonist in unimaginable torment. One survives through an obsession with vengeance, the other through an obsession with atonement. xxxxxMore
Jonathan Yeo, Kevin Spacey as ‘President’ Frank Underwood (2016). National Portrait Gallery
The 2016 presidential campaign has evaporated the blurry distinction between “real” and “virtual” that Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin railed against in his classic 1962 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. At the time, Boorstin was furious about how Madison Avenue advertisers—the Mad Men who were engulfing the media with consumerism–and a television system then-dominated by a three-network monopoly, had created a culture based on “illusions that we mistake…for reality.” (Boorstin, 5-6). xxxxxMore
“We must first look, before we can see.” ~Henry David Thoreau
painting’s label which no doubt listed the artist’s name, the title of the painting, and the date it was executed. I didn’t have time. I was pulled right past the words into the heart of the matter. Communication was instantaneous. I knew immediately that this seething mass of humanity, posing as saints and angels on canvas, all 23 by 72 feet of it, was transmogrified flesh…Tintoretto’s. More
weeks that followed, shock, sadness and a genuine sense of loss permeated my emotions.
There’s no doubt about it – sex sells. Yes, indeed. Stand outside TheaterWorks up in Hartford and stare up at the marquee. It’s surprising steam isn’t rising off Emma Mead’s sensual photo of a woman embracing a man. And then there’s the play itself: Sex With Strangers. With a title like that, you just know you’re not going to see a re-staging of I Remember Mama.
same, writers’ insecurity and the awkwardness inherent in a May-September romance.
which basically consists of “Do you wanna do it?” lines and moves. Buy the foreplay—such as it is—buy the rest of the play.
received mixed reviews and enjoyed limited sales when first published, be rejuvenated in electronic form.
“Googled,” does the person become the electronic persona? In essence, is fame and fortune, as determined and dictated by the Internet, a Mephistophelean bargain?
