Author: greg

Working Title: Le Corbusier via Pierre Huyghe at Harvard

The debut live performance of Pierre Huyghe’s puppet opera was last week at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier’s only building in the US.
While it’s not quite a review, Ann Wilson Lloyd’s report in the Times gives more details of the production/exhibition, which runs through April 2005.
The synopsis: it’s Team America: World Police meets Adaptation meets My Architect.
Says Huyghe,

“I found myself in the same position as Le Corbusier,” he said recently, “of someone invited to do a project and formalize it in a specific context. I felt overwhelmed by the conditions of this predefined context. Then I found this book by Sekler and Curtis, and I realized it was a parallel situation. The difficulty in coming up with an idea became the idea.”

A Puppet Opera at Harvard Channels Le Corbusier [NYT]
Previously: Team France Harvard Opera Police

The NYT A&L Hegemony Continues

Sorry, your entire Sunday morning isn’t enough. Now the NYT Arts & Leisure section wants your whole weekend. Jan 7-9, 2005, to be precise, far enough in advance that you can’t pretend you have something else planned.
Some program highlights:
Sat (1/8), 6:00-7:15 p.m.
“Bigger Roles, Smaller Films” Patricia Clarkson and Hilary Swank tell rockstar editor Jodi Kantor what it’s like to work with Katie Holmes, [“that Oscar-nom-less little scene-stealer.”]
Sunday (1/9), 4:00-5:15 p.m.
“The Prophet of a New Modern Architecture”
Nicolai “Herbie Who?” Ouroussoff interviews Rem Koolhaas. Doesn’t say who they’re talking about. Huh.

little things from reading the paper:

a couple of the things I would’ve missed had I not actually read the printed version of the Sunday Times:

  • In her interview at Cannes, a thoroughly justified Manohla Dargis somehow manages to not point out to Jean-Luc Godard that, if it weren’t for America, he’d be busting on Abbas Kiarostami in German right now. [Plus, how do you interpret the karmic justice that, someday Michael Moore will look like Godard looks now?]
  • A.O. Scott cannily unpacks the audience for Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge [“But in New York!”] Chanel No. 5 commercial, without pointing out that the allegedly cutting edge Karl Lagerfeld ordered up a remake of a 3-year old movie (which itself was seven years in the making). Methinks those 40 iPods are somehow full of one soundtrack.
  • Is the “O Holy Night” mp3 discussed in the “Best of the Very Worst” music story really “said to be Adam Sandler” by many? Or just by the people who don’t know the Eric Cartman version?
  • The artist/filmmaker Alfred Leslie (who inspired Jonas Mekas, who founded Anthology) collaborated on a 14-min. film in 1964 called, The Last Clean Shirt. It was a one-shot of a couple in a car, played three times. Three Leslie friends, O’Hara, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith, all died in car accidents. [Two of them after 1964, btw.]
  • Choire’s weekly full page [!] is Times Out.
  • It’s about time someone reviews the Eisner-Ovitz courtroom drama as drama. Bruce Weber wonders if it isn’t Shakespearean.
  • Pepe Fanjul keeps the family tradition of exploiting sugarfield workers alive, even after fleeing Cuba for Palm Beach. But this story is about tracking down a painting his family was forced to leave behind, which turned up for sale in Switzerland. Making a cameo: Fanjul’s “old friend, Ms. [Katherine] Harris.” Before breaking bread at Casa Fanjul, go watch H-2 Worker.

    • 2004-11-29, This Week In The New Yorker

    In the magazine header, image: newyorker.com
    Issue of 2004-11-29
    Posted 2004-11-22
    THE TALK OF THE TOWN
    COMMENT/ MORE WAR/ Philip Gourevitch on seeking true victory in Falluja.
    DEPT. OF SCHOOL SPIRIT/ FARM TEAM/ Ben McGrath on the eager Democrats of the New York City Council.
    EXCAVATION DEPT./ FOUND/ Peter Hessler traces rare bronze artifacts back to China.
    CONTRABAND/ PSST! GOT MILK?/ Frederick Kaufman meets a coven of black-market dairy consumers.
    THE FINANCIAL PAGE/ WHY GOLD?/ James Surowiecki on the shared fantasy of a precious metal.
    PERSONAL HISTORY/ Jonathan Franzen/ The Comfort Zone/ At home with Charlie Brown.
    REFLECTIONS/ David Sedaris/ Old Faithful/ Tests for a lover.
    FICTION/ Roddy Doyle/ “The Joke”
    THE CRITICS
    A CRITIC AT LARGE/ Robert Gottleib/ The Hitmaker/ Or, The Man Who Came to Broadway.
    BOOKS/ Elizabeth Kolbert/ Why Work?/ A hundred years of “The Protestant Ethic.”
    THE THEATRE/ John Lahr/ Shadowboxing/ Rage takes the stage.
    MUSICAL EVENTS/ Alex Ross/ Maestro North/ A new era at the Boston Symphony.
    ON TELEVISION/ Nancy Franklin/ Playing Doctor/ “Huff” and “House.”
    THE CURRENT CINEMA/ David Denby/ Sex Appeal/ Alfred C. Kinsey reconsidered.
    FROM THE ARCHIVE
    CARTOONS/ The First Decade: 1925-1934/ A selection from the recently published The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker.

    Forget The Trailer; I Want A Japanese Retail Cult

    humans_mike_mills.jpgIs it a Hollywood perk trend, or just a by-product of working at The Directors Bureau? Whichever, director/artist Mike Mills is the latest auteur to attain that most incongruous of filmmaking achievements: his own blindingly trendy store in Tokyo.
    Humans by Mike Mills, located in Harajuku, right by the massive Roppongi Hills comples, is actually a “store cum gallery” [eww. there goes my Net Nanny rating…] and “more a conceptual experience than a shopping trip,” according to Casa BRUTUS, one of a million Paper-like magazines in Japan.
    From the limited Japanese writeups I’m finding, that means t-shirts, cd’s, and window installations by the likes of Susan Cianciolo and her Japanese doppelgangers.
    From Mills’s Humans Manifesto: “I don’t trust people who are very articulate. The only way to be sane is to embrace your insanity. When you feel guilty about being sad, remember Walt Disney was a manic depressive. Everything I said could be totally wrong.”
    Yep, sounds great, now get back to work.
    Humans by Mike Mills near-empty official site, Casa BRUTUS mention, and 06/2004 launch week info (in Japanese)
    The Directors Bureau
    Coincidence? Fellow TDB’er Sofia Coppola’s Japanese fashion line, Milk Fed
    Related Mike Mills posts on greg.org

    So, What Else You Working On, Yoshio?

    taniguchi_hiroshima.jpgHere we are, the week before Thanksgiving, stuffed and groggy from consuming so much MoMA-related press, which we probably have to regurgitate on Thursday for our out-of-town relatives.
    Then comes this new angle for the MoMA-weary: Turns out Yoshio Taniguchi’s other silvery, $400 million-plus, urban planning tour de force, tourist mega-destination has recently opened in Hiroshima. It’s the Naka Incineration Plant, a 490,000 sf waterfront waste processing center that’s open for public tours, in order to encourage Hiroshimans to consume wisely. [and while they’re there; Taniguchi threw in a bar.]
    Like its sister building in Manhattan, the NIP [hmm. let me confirm that acronym, -g.] features Taniguchi’s clean lines and meticulous attention to detail. No word on the ticket price.
    Hilton Kramer, you cranky old deluded bastard, consider this an early Christmas gift. And for the rest of you MoMA critics, don’t say I never gave you anything (besides a drubbing over some of your flimsy and/or hysterical arguments, that is). As for me, I think it kind of looks like the Tate.
    Beauty in Garbage: Naka Incineration Plant by Yoshio Taniguchi [Fred Bernstein in ArchNewsNow, via life without buildings]

    Given Wi-Fi Enough And Time, What I’d Like To Watch From Tate Modern’s Archive

  • Pamela Lee: After Obsolescence
    The art historian talks about time and the work of On Kawara, Wolfgang Staehle, and Bill Morrison (Decasia)

  • Todd Haynes in conversation with Richard Dyer
  • Olafur Eliasson, around the time of his The Weather Project
  • Painting Present: Francis Alys [what’s up with that guy?]
  • Agnes Varda
  • Martin Creed
  • some parts of Moving Image as Art: Time-based media in the art gallery
    [thanks, archinect]

    • Felix On Richter At DIA

    When we went to DIA Beacon last fall, we gave the Gerhard Richter gallery a cursory glance on the way in, and then were transfixed by it on the way out. It’s the kind of thing you have to be in the mood for, attuned to, and that seems to take some time.
    Felix Salmon feels similarly, but he writes about the experience much more clarity.
    Richter at Dia [felixsalmon.com]

    On Art At MoMA

    I heard there was art at MoMA. Here are some highlights:

  • City Square, Alberto Giacometti’s tabletop sculpture of personages on non-intersecting trajectories used to be embedded in the wall at the entrance of the post-war galleries. Now it’s installed in the center of the room, so you can walk all the way around it.
    Giacometti described his attenuated figures as existing on the edge of perception, as if they just came into view on a hazy horizon. I’ve always wanted to make a movie recreating this sculptural scene on Utah’s Salt Flats, the existentialist remake of Eve Sussman’s 89 Seconds at Alcazar. See City Square on the Flash site for MoMA’s 2001 Giacometti retrospective.

  • One, (Number 31, 1950), 1950, Jackson Pollock: One of the iconic works in MoMA’s collection, it now feels more closely situated with the of the artist’s work; you easily take in several paintings at a time. [One page]
    bnewman_vir.jpg
  • The old classical–and aesthetically magical–enfilade installation of One (Number 31, 1950) and Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimins (also 1950) has been replaced by a less privileged lateral, room-to-room hanging. Now, from a diagonal vantage point, you can take both of these paintings in at once instead of turning your back on one, then the other. I’m sure there are plenty of interpretive and ideologically significant ways to read this.
  • The giant Twombly in the contemporary gallery is the new One, a painting to fill and overwhelm your field of vision. This wall and approach is much worthier of it than the oblique, cramped partitioned space in Philip Johnson’s old ‘basketball court’ gallery, where it hung during the Twombly retrospective.
    Still, the most rewarding Twombly experience is upstairs, where two later, graffitoed paintings face Rauschenberg’s contemporaneous drawing/collages. It’s the kind of dialogue that the Rauschenberg in the Fifties show at the Menil and Guggenheim could’ve captured, but didn’t. [Cy and Bob traveled to Rome together as kids.]

  • The entire drawings show is a masterpiece; you could spend all day there, if it weren’t for the pull of the rest of the museum.

    • Guys and Twenty Dollars

    In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Damon Runyon was the most widely read journalist in the country, and his movies like Double Indemnity and Broadway plays like Guys and Dolls were hits. Runyon held court nightly in Lindy’s Restaurant on Broadway and 51st Street, which, even in May 1949, three years after his death, was the fabled realworld haunt of many of his thinly fictionalized characters: Dave the Dude, Harry the Horse, Izzy Cheesecake.
    In his Times’ May 22, 1949 profile, Leo “Lindy” Lindemann told of a “timid, well-dressed” older woman who came to the restaurant asking after “some of those quaint persons Mr. Runyon writes about.” Lindy pointed her to a regular, who he identified as Morris the Schnook. “She was delighted. She pressed his hand when she left. When she reached the siewalk, the Lindy habitues roared with laughter. Morris the Schnook was their invention. Their butt was really Abe Lyman, the orchestra leader.” And thus, the Times saw fit for the first time to print the term “schnook.”
    Now, 55 years later, and just months after self-hating Jew Jerome Robbins was quoted calling himself “a schnook from Weehawken,” I’m as surprised as an orchestra leader to offer up the 86th appearance of “schnook” in the paper of record. Frankly, I’m a little verklempt.

    What Is the Value of Priceless Art? Debate Continues on $20 Admission     [NYT]

    Hilton Kramer Wakes Up, Finds Out It’s 2004

    Needless to say, he’s in a bad mood.
    Related, I’m guessing, from Christopher Knight in the LAT: “It will also drive some people nuts, which is another reason to applaud. At a preview, one notoriously fusty critic was heard to shriek, in reference to what he imagined was being done to Barr’s legacy, ‘This is patricide! Patricide!'”
    Oedipus on 53rd St [Observer]

    Fox Presents: Bocaccio’s Decalogue

    Now! From television’s acknowledged experts in adultery, profanity, lying, and covetousness!
    According to Variety, FX SVP Gerard Bocaccio dreamed up the concept for ‘The Ten Commandments,’ a series of 10 one-hour TV movies which will “explore the spiritual and moral issues faced by modern America.”
    Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s Section Eight will exec produce, and the two will be joined by eight other “A-list directors [sic, Clooney’s A-list? how about ‘up-and-coming’? Seriously, people],” and each will tackle a commandment.
    I wonder who gets “Thou shalt not steal?”
    Related:
    FX gets serious about Bible study [Variety, via Yahoo, thanks to GreenCine]
    Read like a million posts about Kieslowski’s Decalogue, a ten-hour made-for-TV exploration of the spiritual and moral issues faced by modern America Poland.