fragment from "anatomy of la mentira: red nose"

victor cartagena

"please love me"

In a corner, a woman dances. She is all lush curves with hard edges that slice through at unexpected moments. Meanwhile, another woman stares at you. "Fuck you," she says. She says it again, and again. She repeats it in permutations that drive themselves, quite skillfully, from a statement to a scream. Two women wrestle, and it is difficult to tell whether they are fighting or holding each other up. A man tells stories, just a fragment of each. A man undresses himself and dances with a woman, and it is such a magnified portrait of intimacy that it reduces everything else in the room to an almost suffocating hush.

On Wednesday, I went to the world premiere of "Please Love Me." The artists responsible for the evening are all people who I know and like and whose work I admire to the utmost. They are: Alex Ketley (choreographer), Les Stuck (musician/video artist), Christian Burns, Andrea Basile, Joy Prendergast, Kara Davis, and Malinda Lavelle (dancers, all). The project is partly an attempt to detach dance performance from its usual setting in a theater and wholly an examination of honesty and emotion. It provokes. It's not the kind of thing that you can settle back and just look at. It doesn't hand you a tidy list of rebus-like meanings. It demands that you converse with it, that you respond, that you see things through a lens of your own making -- everything filtered by your own emotions and your own history.

There were things that didn't work for me. For a piece that is meant to be mobile and seen out in the world as opposed to in the confines of a theater, I thought it was oddly sealed off from its surroundings. The particular space (a gorgeous room with black ceilings, pale walls, and narrow pillars) seemed to have no effect. Much of the movement was oriented toward a single "front," so certain things -- gestures, facial expressions -- made me feel like I was being left out.
But, mostly, it addressed things that I am mad about and crazy for. It moved dance, an art form that can be so refined and abstracted, toward a refreshing level of the human and mundane. "The meaning of life," says Kafka, "is that it ends." Isn't that cheerful? But if that's the case, shouldn't art rip you open? Shouldn't it ask you to feel something other than placid admiration? It should give you depth, since there's nothing it can do about length.

(if you want to go see this, and you really should, future performances are listed at the website)

pictures at an exhibition

Yesterday I spent nearly four hours at the SFMOMA, devouring the art with the lovely Damien who is visiting from England.

The big exhibit, the one with all the lavish posters hanging from lampposts across the city, is the William Kentridge: Five Themes. I've never seen Kentridge's work before, and there was such an enormous amount of it, that I almost couldn't decide what I thought about it. The drawings (many strange self-portraits, parades of walking gramaphones, nudes with heft and ballast) are both crude and clever. They balance heavy black lines with delicate, fantastical shapes that remind me of old-fashioned etchings. Along with the drawings, there were films (enormous rooms with screens on every side, fracturing the space into different stop motion narratives running simultaneously). There was also a room with two miniature theaters, like the kind that make you expect puppets or a Punch and Judy show, on either end. One played music from The Magic Flute and showed animation from his production of the opera (yes, he directs operas). I always forget how much I love the Queen of the Night aria. The other was called The Black Box and it was an entire miniature production with grotesque automatons and industrial sounding music and disturbingly precise animation projected over everything.

Mostly, his stuff made me think about what a strange experience art that isn't performance based really is. All of those automated things--the puppets that run on tracks, the recorded music, the procession of flashing lights--run through the same sequence with no deviation, no guidance from a human being, and yet they're designed to make us feel and think.

The Paul Klee etchings made me want to write disturbing stories for every one of them. I've never appreciated Klee before, but these small pieces were so fine and so strange in intricately shaded black and white, that I sort of fell in love with them.

(this one is called The Hero With The Wing)

Ranjani Shettar's new work made me think about Icarus and space. It was incredibly still, especially compared to the Kentridge, which seems almost frenetic.
My favorite though (and I think it will always be my favorite piece there, no matter what travels through) is the the Rothko they have. No. 14, 1960 makes me feel like the front of the world has been peeled away and I am looking, for the first time, at whatever it is that exists underneath.

We finished up our visit with a trip to the rooftop garden, which is newish. Damien got tea, brewed to a timer in a tiny glass teapot, and I stretched out on a bench and admired how blue the sky gets when there aren't any clouds to get in the way of the sun.

It was a good afternoon.

looking at things

So, "Brought To Light" was fascinating and I have much to think about now regarding lightning, William H. Mumler, x-rays, and dagguerotypes. There was also (on a placard... I have a small obsession with museum placards) a magnificent story about a farmer who was obsessed with snow. Also, intriguing references to Tesla and an image from "the most anticipated celestial event of the 19th C."

There was also an exhibit of Martin Puryear's sculptures. Some of them are the kind of things that absolutely unfold inside your head, spinning into thoughts that are further and further away from the actual physical object. I LOVED "Brunhilde," which is a very large, airy, blimpy shape made from woven strips of wood. The photograph doesn't do it justice. In person, it is warm, fascinating, and somehow both enveloping and gentle.

And then there is this Rothko, which is magic.

(There are also some pieces which I just don't get. Or which are on the edge between disturbing and very scary. Like the herd of black poodle sculptures arranged in concentric circles around a white baby statue.)

trompe l'oeil, butoh, and the similarities between oysters and stories

I'm reading, in bits and pieces, a collection of Rudyard Kipling's short stories as chosen and arranged by W. Somerset Maugham. The story that I'm reading right now is called "The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat," which is an irresistible title, but so far seems to be a strange story about a wild bunch of newspaper men who are out to discredit an irritating M.P.

Maugham says something very likeable in his introductory essay though. "No one," he says,
is obliged to read stories, and if you don't like them unless there is something in them more than a story, there is nothing to do about it. You may not like oysters, no one can blame you for that, but it is unreasonable to condemn them because they don't possess the emotional quality of a beefsteak and kidney pudding. It is equally unreasonable to find fault with a story because it is only a story."

Tomorrow, well, later today actually, I'm doing a second workshop with Shinichi Iova-Koga. He is teaching us about butoh. Last time, my understanding was that butoh is a dance that is motivated from the interior, ideas bleeding out gradually to the outer layer of your skin, where they become visible to anyone who is watching... but I think that the definition of butoh is a bit liquid, and I'm sure it'll mean something else today.

I may not know what butoh is, but my neck muscles are very sore from it. Mainly from trying to not use my muscles, which my body apparently interpreted as hauling itself upright by the neck.

And I have discovered a new favorite artist. I have a postcard that my friend sent from Belgium many months ago up next to my desk because it has a pair of boots with water fountaining up from them, and it only occurred to me tonight to look up the artist responsible for the mind prickling image. His name is Roman Signer and he does many extraordinary things, often involving explosions. There is a video of his work, "Action With Sheets of Paper," here, but I like the still photograph because it looks like a grove of white trees with people wandering between them, and it's only when you look closely that you realise it's a shower of white paper falling on a crowd.