The Best American Poetry

Steady My Laden Head [by Mary Gilliland]

The hours don’t count, I don’t count the hours. This is not a task but an activity. Unassigned. A practically involuntary part of the day, sowing itself in my unconscious during times I might not be physically involved. I’m winging it, without formal education. It looks like I have chosen to engage, but really the chooser was something larger that said Do.

What is done is admired by walkers on the South Hill Recreation Way, both people I have met before, and people I will never know. A couple with their dog stopped along the trail while I was weeding not far away, uphill: “When we see these flowers, every year, we know that spring’s really here!” This was during the era of my corralling Garlic Mustard by—every autumn—laying down Dame’s Rocket seedheads on areas among the trees where I’d weeded out G-M. Yes, “like a gleaner [I did] keep/steady my laden head across a brook”—the freshet, that is,
behind our shed, that by this time of year is a dry streambed. My strategy was to replace the invasive with a secondary invasive, one that blooms more prettily and at first glance looks like phlox. A place holder.

The scent of hesperis matronalis rises in the evening. The flowers bloom pink, mauve, white, purple and, sometimes, an eye-catching white streaked with one of the other hues, or vice versa. Those I would mentally note to let stand through the frost. The seeds matured, then I deliberately scattered them in new areas in order to multiply the striated enchantment. Which, last year, I discovered is caused not by genes but by a virus. Was it nature or culture that brought me the next-door neighbor whose PhD research focused on plant-virus interactions? Lizzie studied host and pathogen as they co-evolved; my brassica species, Dame’s Rocket, hosts turnip mosaic virus—resulting in variegated color in the flowers.

Turning the rocky hillside acre into a garden began with an earlier next-door neighbor’s retirement. He was of the tribe who trim every blade of grass to the same length, edge the sidewalk and allow no chipped paint on trim or siding.“Mary,” he asked after once more perfecting his holdings, “would you mind if I took some of those privet bushes out of your woods?” When purchased, our house had been closed in by invasive privet and Japanese honeysuckle, up to every door. By the time Walt posed his question, there was some green lawn, my husband’s joy. I imagined the clearance would lead to lovely walks in our very own wood after a day of teaching. But the cleared land was, next spring, thickly carpeted with a mystery plant. Helped by a few students, I pulled them all out. They returned. Pull. Return. And again. GarlicMustard had just begun its inexorable march across the Lower Forty-eight.

Hence the mass plantings: of deer-proof perennials that spread. Not so many rocket now, but cowslips, hellebore, brunnera, primrose varieties (including
Wanda!), pulmonaria, trachystemon, comfrey, andcetera, follow spring’s explosion of flowering bulbs, ephemeral pink corydalis, Virginia bluebells.

I garden at the end of a one-block cul de sac. This area bordering the woods is classified on the municipal maps as vacant land. Yes, it’s poetry.

                                                                                ——MG, 5 October 2022

Notes in a time of strike: the curatorial noos of “Futur, ancien, fugitif, une scène française” [by Tracy Danison]

Pierre Joseph: “Mur de mûres”, série “Photographie sans fin”, 2019: paper print. Photo: Aurélien Mole©Adagp 2019

Motivé, motivé / il faut se motiver / il faut rester motive / soyons motivé

                                                                                                       Le Chant des partisans – Zebda

If every demonstration by transport unions were a revolution I’d have bought myself, or, perhaps, been served, thousands of bowls of strawberries and cream by now. The duc d’Orléans’ machinations notwithstanding, common sense tells those with ears to hear that those who have never, ever, do Révolution.

No matter what the would be Révolutionaires shout, it’s more likely to be civil war than millennium.

O! Empty slogan! O! Hollow Révolution!

So, as I have indicated to Karine, who is lately shouting and revolutionating a lot, I do believe, as everywhere and in all times, most of what is supposed gold in all this is but cheap gilding, likely dangerously greenhouse-gas rich, too.

Forget the gilded promises, I tell the woman. Turn down the heat, snuggle up close, let’s take the bike, enjoy producing less CO2, playful-like.

In a time of strike, get a-pumping. Find some fun in it.

Révolution!

Evolve and inverse things ourselves, gather up the pearls rattling under the hooves of the swine, make that silk purse, fix up a lemonade… Etc., etc.

For instance, from our house, the Palais de Tokyo – the Musée de l’art moderne de la ville de Paris – is only 23 miles, there and back.

Lemonade!  

Tokyo’s time-stretched contemporary art exhibition Futur, ancien, fugitif, Une scène française is ongoing.

Futur, fugitif turns out to turn the usual on its head. Révolution! In a way.

Agreeable erotic willies flutter through the cramps as Karine and I stroll its acres.

Out of the passel of really fine work on show, the exhibition itself gets the big prize. I say this ‘though I think that every single esthetic worker in the Futur, ancien, fugitif show has bottom. So much so that I can even name particular favorites right off the top of my head as I sit here: Nina Childress, Jean-Luc Blanc, Anne Le Troter, Betrand Dezoteux…

… And I was deeply impressed with how Futur, fugitif’s artists have made their own the sense of the work of the “60s” made something fresh and unique from the soul of comic books, stuff and plastics… Futur, ancien, fugitif forces me to think, maybe for the first time in respect to contemporary art that there is a positive force of “tradition” that comes from experience rather than from special intention... This thought is only one of many possible thoughts Futur, ancien, fugitif gets you mulling over.

Anyhow, in the image of their soulful and sensitive choices, the curators of Futur, ancien, fugitif – a team including Franck Balland, Daria de Beauvais, Adélaïde Blanc Claire Moulène and Marilou Thiébault – put together a brilliant piece of conceptual, material and contextual contemporary art.

Caroline Mesquita: “Soft Evasion”, 2019: cardboard, paint. Photo: Aurélien Mole

Met Percent: Week Twelve [by Alec Bernstein]

“mow tall, mow often.” 

Met floor plan: Yellow highlighted galleries have been viewed, 11/22/19

I have visited 43 times and viewed all galleries up to 399 (~300 out of ~900) - one-third complete.

“The one-third rule means that when you mow, you want to cut off the top one-third of your grass blades . . . Mowing more than a third of the total height of your grass can stress the plant and make it more susceptible to common turf problems.” - https://lawnpride.com/one-third-rule/

The remaining two-thirds will find their own rules.

 

The Letter (an indivisible sound)

Top: Babylonian translation of “Met Percent” into the Cuneiform Alphabet
Bottom: Cuneiform tablet: Sumerian dedicatory inscription from Ekur, the temple of the god Enlil, Mesopotamia, ca.16th–15th c. B.C, not on view.

These writings are some of the earliest found. The “origin of writing” documents both the origins of the world and the first symbolic capture of emotions and thoughts “on paper”. Cuneiform is by far my favorite alphabet. 

The seven Sumerian debate poems (below) are world origin myths. When something was recognized as important, its origin became important, and it was given a myth. “The earth first appeared barren, without grain, sheep, or goats. People went naked” (Debate between Grain and Sheep).

Debate between bird and fish

Debate between sheep and grain 

Debate between the millstone and the gulgul-stone

Debate between the pickaxe and the plough

Debate between silver and mighty copper

Debate between Summer and Winter

Debate between tree and the reed

These myths are not universal and have significant variations throughout the regions and eras. No continuity, no Biblical standard, no problem.

“It becomes evident that he (Ring Lardner) was deeply concerned that the vast majority of mankind had no idea, earthly or otherwise, where it was going or for what reason”.  - Buford Donald Fisher, Ring Lardner as Dadaist, 1970.

“How can you write if you can't cry?”
- Ring Lardner

 

“An Archeologist of Morning”

Cuneiform tablet: a-she-er gi-ta, balag to Innin/Ishtar, ca. 2nd–1st c. B.C., Seleucid or Parthian, not on view.

“This tablet contains a lament by Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of fertility, over the destruction of her cities and shrines, and contrasts her present humiliation with her previous power.” - MetText

Left: A page from Melville’s “Marginalia”. His constant annotations were studied in depth by Charles Olson. Right: summary counts of the words marked by Melville in his Set of Shakespeare. Decoder rings come in many forms. 

Charles Olson described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning."

Assyrian Beards

Relief Panel from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. ca. 883-859 B.C), gallery 401.
Cover photograph of Melville on Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson, City Lights, 1966.

Detail, “The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life.” - Gustave Courbet, Musée d'Orsay, 1854-55. “Myself painting, showing the Assyrian profile of my head.” - Courbet.

Speaking of Olson: “Not since Gustave Courbet grew an Assyrian beard has any Western artist attempted such a sweeping rejection of the roots of Western civilization and identified with the Ancient Near East ‘beyond Homer’ and ‘beyond’ the Bible. For him the Sumerians were crucial to the attempt.” - John R. Maier, Charles Olson and the Poetic Uses of Mesopotamian Scholarship, Journal of the American Oriental Society.

“You're too much influenced by Greek and Latin already. Go beyond that, to the Sumerians, and before. Break the hold time has on you; get outside it . . since Western civilization has gone awry, we had better work with what we have from before the degradation.” - Olson quoted by Ralph Maud in his Charles Olson’s archaic postmodern. 

Trotsky, Custer, Zappa and Baraka

Rebellious generations often look forward but go back in time for hair styles. I know great beards when I see them.

 

Rock and Clay (Emergent Figures)

Relief Panel from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. ca. 883-859 B.C), gallery 401.

If I free associate, as Montaigne did, I must include my forbearers of influence. I cannot see these ancient bas reliefs without a ghost of the magnificent emergent prisoners by Michelangelo . . . or the Rock Men and the Clay People from Flash Gordon who appeared and disappeared into earth. I connect them, by their nature, their symbiotic relationships with the mineral world. 

 

 

Met Percent: Week Eleven [by Alec Bernstein]

Best Gauntlets, Hands Down

Maximilian I’s Gauntlets, from The Last Knight Exhibit, gallery 899.
Gladys Cooper as the formidable mother in Now Voyager, from the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty (Sylvia Plath’s patron).

From the very start of this project (see Week One), my MetPercent plan was: Move to NY, go through the entire Met, room by room in numerical order.When I described this, every colleague and friend asked, “Even the Armor?”

“Yes, even the Armor.” 

It is upon me. Blades, bludgeons, and blunderbusses abound in the Arms and Armor Collection. 

Weapons again.

 

Arms and the Man¹ (I Sing)²

Warhorses

Assorted Shaffrons (Horse's Head Defense), 15th-16th c., galleries 371, 373, and 379

In Old Arabic, the word for “Chivalry” (Furúsiyyah as horsemanship) (فروسه) was also the word for “Virtue” and “Honour” (Múruwwa as chivalric values) (مروه). Romantic chivalry in medieval Europe is widely considered the continuation of al-furusiyyah al-arabiya. Horsemanship and Poetry were two of the foundational requirements.

Muru’ah and the Code of Chivalry

— Muhammad ibn Idris ash-Shafi’i, the founder of the Shafi’ite rite in Islam.767–820 CE.

If you want to live free from harm’s way
And in good fortune and honor,
Your tongue, if it utters something indecent, stop it and say,
“Oh tongue other people have tongues.”
If your eyes see something immoral, close them and say,
“Oh eyes other people have eyes.”
Practice beneficence and be magnanimous to ones who attack
And depart with that which is better.

Montaigne was a dedicated horseman and wrote an entire essay “Of Warhorses, or Destriers”, covering the War- horsemanship of the ancients. His wish was to die either in his garden working the cabbages or on horseback.

 

Chivalry-Now (and then)

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Honoré Daumier, French, 19th century (not on view).

Warrior, religious, and courtly love chivalries. Created and debunked, and yet these chivalries are desired, and return and return, the code usurped and adorned.

From Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, abortion bombers (“Protectors of the Code”), the KKK, General MacArthur. . . to the International Fellowship of Chivalry-Now (http://www.chivalrynow.net/sitemap.htm).

 

Hats Off

A 1947 survey for the Hat Research Foundation (yes, a real entity) found that 19 percent of men who did not wear hats gave “because I had to in the army” as the main reason. The general belief is that when a formerly functional item of clothing becomes purely decorative, it usually doesn’t last more than a generation or two. 

Not Quite the Knight

Montaigne’s Cenotaph, Prieur and Guillerman, 1593, Museum of Aquitaine, Burgundy. 

Montaigne was late to Knighthood. “He probably never wore armor during his life, at least not on a battlefield. It must be seen as a final homage to his father, the only member of the Eyquem family who actually waged war. The transformation of Montaigne into a noble gentleman was completed only after his death.” (See Montaigne: A Life by Philippe Desan, 2019).

In his cenotaph, his representation is unusual in that his helmet and gauntlets are not worn but placed “nearby”. 

Weapons, Status, Luxury, and Guilt

Smith and Wesson New Model No. 3, .44 Caliber Double-Action Navy Revolver, ca. 1891–92, side and butt views, gallery 372. Winchester Model 1894, Takedown Lever Action Rifle, 1895-1900, gallery 372. Winchester House, Palo Alto, CA.

Tiffany & Co. adorned a series of revolvers for Smith and Wesson with gems, in this case turquoise and lapis lazuli. They are spectacular. The Met has several: https://www.metmuseum.org/search-results#!/search?q=Smith%20wesson&orderByCountDesc=true&page=1

As for Tiffany’s Winchester rifle: It was technically able to fire bullets . . . but the thick silver cladding made it impossible to disassemble and clean, and the ebony wood made it too heavy to use effectively. 

After her husband's death in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million (equivalent to $532 million in 2018) and nearly fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to $26,000 a day in 2018. 

A Boston medium told her (while supposedly channeling her late husband) that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles . . .10,000 windows, 2,000 doors (including the one to nowhere). Wow.

https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/sarahs-story/   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Witness a unique début with Ruth Childs’ “fantasia” [by Tracy Danison]

“fantasia”, Ruth Childs©Marie Magnin

When my boy was very little we would be walking along and he would suddenly stop dead, quivering like a pointer, point at this or that, cry “Behold”. Where he got “behold” from is a mystery. The this could be a dog with a torn ear, a pigeon with smeared rainbow in its wings, the that a gang of louts emptying a van, a woman pushing a stroller. Whatever it was, my boy was moved, really moved by it. So, we’d spend the next while looking silently and intently on, trying to penetrate the mystery of this dog’s ear, that pigeon wing or those louts, that woman.

He was apprehending, as the philosophers put it, the thing of itself. He was moved by the new feeling of – realization? wonder? enchantment? before the wide world. He was pointing that unique something that I look for when I say I am looking for beauty in art. In his “behold” he was a creator. Through him I could access the emotion of experiencing a thing new in the same way that I do when I confront of work of art.

The other day at the Atelier de Paris, Ruth Childs’ performance of her fantasia, a new creation, gave me a “Behold” moment, a chance to feel the emotion of witnessing something unique, made me a little boy apprehending the wide world.

This sounds exceptional, I know, but it’s what she somehow does. “Somehow” because Childs’ achievement is just not entirely explainable, though, whether it is set, light, sound, costume or gesture under scrutiny, everything in her performance is in place and (consequently?) in time. And I guess timing – in its kairos sense – developing then seizing the right moment, is what brings the spectator to the edge of witness. What makes her step over the edge to witness is in the “somehow”.

“fantasia”, Ruth Childs©Marie Magnin

Childs’ fantasia performance re-informs Beethoven’s dramatic symphony and relights the felt-images of Disney’s gorgeous animation by situating revealing jets and swirls of educated, emotive and elegant movement between them. She catches the spectator up in alternate forms of both: as music and image, memory and moment, as image and music, moment and memory.

Total command of stage/choreography support the performance.  She begins stretched out in the right-hand angle of a visual triangle induced by a stack of primary-colored costumes front stage and a white heap bottom stage. The effect is to force the eye from her long, exposed thighs to her human center: to be with her as she moves and possesses the stage, possesses the music, possesses the spectators with the art of her senses.

So, centering on her center, mastering the art of set, pointing here to a crash of sound, there to a wave of color, Childs somehow enables unique witness.

To behold.

fantasia – Dance, Performance • November 2019 • Ruth Childs • Atelier de Paris, 12-13 November 2019• Α Ruth Childs has studied in the US and Europe and has been based in Geneva, working with choreographers such as Marco Berrettini and Yasmine Hugonnet. Childs has been renewing the repertory of the well-known post-modern choreographer Lucinda Childs (e.g.,Calico Mingling, Katema, Reclining Rondo, Particular Reel), who is her aunt. With Stéphane Vécchione, Childs’ made her choreographical début in Paris in 2018 with The Goldfish & the Inner Tube as part of the Atelier’s annual June Events festival program. Ω Choreography: Ruth Childs / Performers: Ruth Childs / Lighting and technical management: Stéphane Vécchione / Outside choreographic consultant:  Nadia Lauro / Costuming: Cécile Delanoé / Production: SCARLETT’S, Tutu Production Ruth Childs calendar

 

 

 

 

Met Percent: Week Ten [by Alec Bernstein]

Sonrientes

Smiling Figure (Sonrientes), 7th-8th c. Remojadas, gallery 358. 

Not much is known about this happy figure. There are mixed cues: male and female, old and young, spirit and human, dwarf and child. It’s too small to stand alone and too large to admire in the hand. Emotional facial expressions, as in this figure, are very uncommon in Mesoamerica. I was captured by it from across the gallery and spent a good amount of time with that smile . . . 

Variations On An Ancestral Theme

Left: Purrukuparli, Enraeld Munkara, Tiwi people, 1955, gallery 354. The sobbing Purrukuparli is an ancestor from the Dreaming (primordial creation period). He chooses not to bring his dead son back, but instead announces the concept of mortality and creates the Tiwi burial rituals. “Humans too will someday die”. The very beginning of ancestors. 

Center: Ancestor Figure (Tsmas), 19th–early 20th c., Paiwan people, gallery 354. Of the Paiwan high nobles, minor nobles and commoners, only the high nobles were allowed to commission human ancestral images. These ancestors have powers, but their influence (help or harm) is controlled by the nobility. Class spirits. Very clear. 

Right: Male Diviner's Figure, 19th–mid-20th century, Baule people, gallery 352. High artistic achievement, the “more expensive the better”, presents not only the wealth and status of the diviner (and owner) of the image, but also “Dazzles the potential clients” of the artist, building his reputation and social position. The professional artist.

 

“   ”  Art

Upper left: Seated Figure, Djenne people, 13th c., gallery 350, Upper right: Constantin Brancusi, Mlle Pogany version I, 1913, MoMA, NYC, Bottom: Recumbent Figure, Henry Moore, 1938, Tate Galley, London.

“The term primitive is to be avoided or used in quotation marks”. - Tate, London. 

Originally, Nelson Rockefeller’s collection was called the Museum of Indigenous Art and later the Museum of Primitive Art. His museum and private collections became the Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Met in 1984. The Met had previously turned down the collection - considered by critics an American "Salon des Refusés".

 

Lime Paraphernalia

Lime Spoon with Seated Figure, Inca, 13th–16th c., not on view.  Lime Container, Usiai Island, late 19th–early 20th c., Lime spatula (Tap), Latmul people, late 19th–early 20th c., Gallery 354.

This container (center) was designed to hold powdered lime made from calcined seashells. The lime was removed through a hole in the top by a spoon (left) or a little spatula (right). Lime was a necessary part of the ritual of coca-leaf chewing; the coca leaves were put into the mouth to form a quid, and the lime was added to activate the drug. 

got montaigne? - 8oz Hip Drinking Alcohol Flask, Black (right) by Knick Knack Gifts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foot Jars ‘n Cowboy Boots

Pair of Ceramic Foot Jars, Peru, Inca Valley Paracas, 2nd-1st c. B.C. Gallery 354

      “Some boys went to look for his feet. His toes are made of crystal, so he can hide them, and the boys could not find them. Then the boys threw stones at the rainbow.

      When he enters the body of a man or a woman they become very sick and to cure them they are given a ball of seven-colored wool to unwind.”

From “The Rainbow”, Anonymous, Quechan, Peru, translated by W.S. Merwin.

Plastic cowboy boot cups, 1950s, U.S.A

As I pondered my interest in these charming foot jars, I recalled the three cowboy cups from childhood. My two siblings and I each had our own color cup. Mine was red. I loved that cup.

Rewarded by a performing Fall portfolio [by Tracy Danison]

“Midi sans paupière” by Carole Quettier, Bien Fait! 2019©Charlene Yves

Lady Felice Millefeuille-Bonté, the trillionaire who’s been trying these many years to reward my good looks with a hefty check and a friendly little squeeze of the hand, seems yet again to have missed me in September and October.

Then again, so absorbed was I in Jérôme Bel’s wonderful Isadora Duncan – featured by the Festival d’Automne, danced by Elizabeth Schwartz, at Centre Pompidou. Or maybe she called during the Ballet de Lorraine’s fine Histoire sans histoire(s) – a good deal more than a Merce Cunningham tribute, by the way, choreographed and arranged by Thomas Caley and Petter Jacobsson at the Palais de Chaillot … I actually shut my phone off for Machine de Cirque’s entirely different acrobat act at La Scala Paris. I may have missed her in the excitement.

Just my luck, my Lady might also have been telephoning me while I was tapping up my notes about the slew of dance performance pieces at Micadanse’s Bien Fait! 2019 festival. Had she been making her bountiful calls in mid-September, then dance performances such as Carole Quettier’s Midi sans paupière, Aurélie Berland’s short Études wigmaniennes or Gaël Sesboüé’s Maintenant, oui would have had me too focused to hear them: stock still, hands-on-knees, sage comme une image, as good as a picture, totally focused as we say now.

Money is everything, of course, even, maybe, especially, for these excellent performers.

But I regret nothing. I never have.

Quettier’s Midi sans paupière, (based on a reading of Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne), is a 30-minute demonstration of an exquisite mastery of dancing narrative. She deserved every one of her six ovations. Maintenant, oui, a true Dark Waltz, constructed around group synchrony, shone like a thousand suns, though a hair too recondite to get the strong audience recognition afforded Quettier’s Midi. Aurélie Berland’s Études wigmaniennes, part of a WIP she’s calling Les Statues meurent aussi (from filmmaker Chris Marker’s “Statues also die”), is lively and forceful. It leaves you convinced that human movement created music and that’s all ye need to know.

Of course, I could have missed Lady Millefeuille’s call also during a visit to the Mobilier National, where I got to test out touch-thread Jacquard weave technology. This innovation is the fruit of a partnership of Google and Mobilier, the successful, centuries-old, state-managed administration that runs the famous Gobelin weaving operations. Or, indeed, I may have been marveling at the truly panoramic vision of French contemporary art on show at the Palais de Tokyo (Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris)… Or doing some thought dancing on art history at the Musée Maillol … or, at Musée Marmottan Monet, reflecting on how classical notions of esthetics persist.

I may miss Lady Millefeuille again in November and December.

Unless of course she decides to join me.

Too cold for a swim, too warm for a cozy read? Do a little dance [by Tracy Danison]

Paris Dance Performance: November - December 2019

Entangled in “Samsara” by Jann Gallois©Agathe Poupeney

In November and December, Lady Felice Millefeuille-Bonté, the trillionaire débutante, will, I know, be trying to find me again to give me that check for a substantial sum. So, if one of her aides de camp reads the Paris Performance Calendar between serving her cream tea, Lady Millefeuille should know, right off the bat, that the Kalypso Festival 2019, France hip hop’s annual wave to the world, with 40 performances and 52 companies on show over 22 venues in Paris and the region, starts up in the first full week of November.  Tell her I have plans for that.

Also, she should know that I’ll be closely following Regard du Cygne’s Signes d’Automne program. Regard du Cygne, directed by Amy Swanson, a devotee of the divine Isadora Duncan, is a Paris where-to-go for new-creator dance performance.

Over the past seven years, the Kalypso festival, a brainchild of the popular choreographer and inclusive culture warhorse Mourad Merzouki, has been promoting hip hop to dance-lovers from every horizon. I am listing four pieces. Two, Et Maintenant and Blow are new creations touching on gender issues by millennial choreographers Léa Latour and Karim Khouader, and a third, Queen Blood, a masterful demonstration of feminine performance by the celebrated choreographer Ousmane Sy (a.k.a. Babson) and his cie Paradox Sal. The fourth is a piece by the well-known “fusion” choreographer Amala Dianor, The Falling Stardust. All four touch on our times from a cultured but “non-elite” perspective that I think gives a sense of the depth and seriousness of the work being done by performers who use hip-hop as their launch point. The venues are easy access for short-term stayers.

Attentive to entertainment in “Allegria” by Kader Attou©Justine Jugnet

Thoughtfulness is not the exclusive domain of hip-hop. There’s, too, Jann Gallois’ première of her new piece, Samsara, “cycle of being”, at the Palais de Chaillot running into mid-November.

Met Percent: Week Nine [by Alec Bernstein]

In Situ (Ex Situ)

(Left)  Asmat Tribe, New Guinea. 
(Right) Bis (funerary) Poles, Asmat peoples, 1960, gallery 354 (Nelson Rockefeller Collection).

The question that surfaced, after 3 trips to the Africa, Oceania, and the Americas galleries was one of context. Who were these made for? 

“Two polar types [of art] stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view.” - Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”

(Left) Prestige Stool: Female Caryatid, Buli Master, possibly Ngongo ya Chintu, 19th Century, gallery 352.
(Right) Prestige Stool: Female Caryatid, Songye Peoples, possibly, 19th-20th Century, gallery 352.

Many Important ritual items were not made to be seen. For the powerful leaders, prestige stools were wrapped in white cloth and hidden in a distant village. As exhibition value has increased (by capital according to the Marxists) cult value is harder to access. The artifacts are gorgeous, even when clearly not viewed as they were meant to be.

“I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.” - Frida Kahlo

 In Absentia

Michael C. Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller, adjusts his camera before taking pictures of Papuan men in New Guinea in 1961.
Revenge: Ber, head of one of the Asmat villages, was related to the men who killed Michael Rockefeller.

In 1969, the journalist Milt Machlin investigated Rockefeller's disappearance. Several leaders of Otsjanep village, where Rockefeller likely would have arrived had he made it to shore, had been killed by a Dutch patrol in 1958. This provided some rationale for the tribe’s revenge against someone from the "white tribe". Neither cannibalism nor headhunting in Asmat were indiscriminate, but rather were part of a tit-for-tat revenge cycle. So it is possible that Rockefeller found himself the inadvertent victim of such a cycle started by the Dutch patrol.

“After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance, out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to the friend he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner; which being done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch him with their swords. After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send some chops to their absent friends. They do not do this, as some think, for nourishment, as the Scythians anciently did, but as a representation of an extreme revenge.” - Montaigne, Of Cannibals

“I am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead . . . ” - Montaigne, Of Cannibals

 

“Warming the Dance Space”

(Left) Helmut Mask, 19-20th c., Mende or Sherbro peoples, Gallery 350.

(Center) Headdress  Janus Mask, 19-20th century, Ejagham, Bale peoples, gallery 352. 

(Right) Moon Face Mask, 1880, Baule peoples, gallery 352, worn to “warm the dance space” at the beginning of a sequence known as “gbagba” or “mblo”.

Worn during funerals and initiations. Some are startlingly naturalistic and may be portraits of known individuals; others are highly stylized. There are three overall types: helmet masks that cover the wearer's head entirely, headdresses that are attached to basketry caps worn on top of the head, and masks that cover only the face.

Pre-Colombian Gold

Significant precious metalwork from the early Americas surpasses local 5th Avenue Retailers . . .

“The practice (from 2000 BC) only ceased when indigenous American societies lost access to gold during the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century.” - Met Text

Nice way to put the economic workings of colonialism. After 3,000 years of brilliant design, all gold ore went directly to Europe; do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Read Before Traveling

“These stick charts are memory aids used to navigate island positions and wave patterns. The exact significance was known only to its maker, and they were never carried to sea. That would question the navigator’s skill. They represent a system of mapping ocean swells, which was never before accomplished. 

Marshallese navigators used their senses and memory to guide them on voyages by crouching down or lying prone in the canoe to feel how the canoe was being pitched and rolled by underlying swells. there are four main ocean swells: the rilib, kaelib, bungdockerik and bundockeing.” - Met Text

Imagine figuring out that by lying in a canoe, you could feel the cross currents and tell where the islands are . . . .

This is impressive. 

Or . . . You can use your Hos for weather magic. With its legs of Sting Rays and a chant. As the climate crisis grows, if you can’t navigate it, pray.

Weather Charm (Hos), Caroline Islands, Micronesia, 19th-20th c., gallery 353

Machine de cirque: something improbably different at La Scala [by Tracy Danison]

Machine de Cirque, quantum acrobacy with gemütlichkeit ©Loup-William Théberge

Imagine the Marx Brothers endowed with Buster Keaton’s naïve humor, tutored under Zen discipline by Cirque du Soleil’s best acrobats. You have pretty much imagined Machine de Cirque – acrobatic performers Raphaël Dubé, Yohann Trépanier, Ugo Dario, Maxim Laurin and Frédéric Lebrasseur – a circus company from Québec, currently at La Scala Paris.

Machine is funny, sweet, strong, skilled, focused.  Especially, it’s subtly exciting: perfomer leaps, twists, bounds, tricks and turns consistently touch the limits of possibility, play out where luck and ability meet in fluctuating proportions. Machine de cirque is, as Monty Python once put it, “something entirely different”. Maybe they’ve invented quantum acrobatics. Anyhow, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Witty and complicit like the Marx Brothers: like cows in the presence of a particularly well-endowed bull, we adults nervously pawed and snorted from the beginning to the end of the show. Like Buster Keaton, boyishly joyous and plain sympathique: the gurgly, delighted laughter of the children in the audience filled the air as these five big boys mimed silly suavity with girls, played with the nakedness taboo and good-naturedly whacked each other for the hell of it. Skilled like Cirque du Soleil under Zen discipline: there is, I think, some talent and mental discipline involved in holding sideways by the soles of one’s feet. I mean, what kind of force is required to stand, literally, horizontal, like a flag stretched in the wind?

Frédéric Lebrasseur, the troupe’s drummer-musician-clown, opens the show by slapping up a beat. He uses the beat as a lion tamer might use a whip butt and hoop: to keep his charges grouped and circulating in rhythm, marking territory. Acrobats Dubé, Trépanier, Dario and Laurin prowl around a tall center-stage scaffold-like construction that is drawn forward enough that it narrows stage front to the 50- or 60-foot square rectangle that they mark as performance. Hanging above them are North America’s mantraps: slack wires, insulators, pipes, poles and rails and wheels and planks.

Machine de Cirque, something entirely different with skits for the kids in us ©Loup-William Théberge

Because performers are elbow to elbow, because a spectator sees everyone moving together in the same straitened space, because of the performers’ energy and concentration, the crowding transforms such fairly standard acrobatic feats as bat juggling or mounting a high-seated unicycle into rather tense drama.

Machine de cirque’s derring-do, boyish joyousness, charm, Zen-strength skill and mastery of drama are not however what makes it entirely different. It’s the troupers’ interpersonal trust and solidarity that does that.

Other acts strive to perfect execution of the just-possible – to get to the “ooohhh-aaahhh point”. Most circus acrobats, I expect, let go of the trapeze wondering, “Have I got the trick right?”. Machine de Cirque’s acrobats, on the other hand, strive for the – “Holy-Cats! point”. As one of them launches roof-ward, I expect he wonders, “Is it the right moment for this?” That’s because, at the point where the mesh of probability begins to overtake possibility, it’s the drama of process that counts. Neither the acrobat or the spectator knows if the trick will work until it does. It’s no longer a question of getting it right or failing. Failing – missing, slipping, falling – is as much success as succeeding. And where failing means breaking your own neck or somebody else’s back, trust and solidarity are not merely necessary, but a necessary condition for daring the trick at all. So, something entirely different.

Machine de Cirque left butterflies in my stomach and it’s been a while since a show did that.

Machine de Cirque plays at La Scala Paris until 3 November but continues touring in Europe and elsewhere. Watch for it wherever on the planet you may be.

Ballet de Lorraine’s “For Four Walls” puts a mirror to Merce Cunningham’s palimpsest [by Tracy Danison]

Petter Jacobsson/Thomas Caley, “For Four Walls”, Ballet de Lorraine 2019©Laurent Philippe

Histoires sans histoire(s) is an intercalation of Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley’s For Four Walls and Merce Cunnigham’s Fabrications and Sounddance, staged at the Théâtre National de la Danse (Palais de Chaillot) as part of the Festival d’Automne’s celebration of the centenary of the celebrated choreographer’s birth. Jacobsson and Calley are co-directors of the Ballet de Lorraine. 

Whatever Fabrications and Sounddance may say about Cunningham’s genius, Histoires certainly is (yet another) proof of the Ballet de Lorraine’s excellence as re-creator of old stories and creator of new ones.

For Four Walls opens the old story: Fabrications and Sounddance follow. With 24 performers dancing within mirrors that double and triple or quadruple movement, with pianist Vanessa Wagner perched over a single grand set two-thirds off-center stage flawlessly executing John Cage’s pure chord within a single sound, the company re-creates the “lost” content of Cunningham’s Four Walls, creating Histoires sans histoire(s). They put up a mirror where by looking straight ahead onlookers also see what is behind.

 

Merce Cunningham, “Fabrications,  Ballet de Lorraine 2019©Bernard Prudhomme

The arrangement makes Histoires work visually and psychically as a palimpsest does, showing everything all at once but also as single units, as if each thing were written on distinct, separated surface. Just as with a palimpsest, despite a saturation of apparently random positions of words and ideas, the eye and brain always know where they are as the spirit explores the potentials.

In the mirror Histoires holds up, I saw that the recursive palimpsest of Fabrications and the chaotic sensuality of Sounddance are not meant only as a questioning of dance forms. They are also as a statement of physical or psychic truth. And looking in the mirror provided by Jacobsson and Caley, I could see and feel the newness that is Cunningham play out. I could see how he empowered me as onlooker to create or “find” for myself the infinite filigrees of sense in the art of human movement: to create my personal palimpsest of Cunningham's famous 64 underlying figures (by coincidence the same number of underlying figures as the I Ching).

 

Merce Cunningham, “Sounddance”, Ballet de Lorraine 2019©Laurent Philippe

And, as the remarkably talented dance performers of the Ballet de Lorraine in the mirror before me sprang for themselves, sprang for and with each other, moved apart from and towards, through, to, one another, sprang inside themselves, as I gave these doubling men and women a pattern, as they gave each other and themselves a pattern, I felt absolutely certain that “random”, “recursion”, “synchronicity”, “dissociation”, “association”, “coincidence” are all the same damned thing, all as solidly linked and as eternally true as any reality that I can kick. I swear that I texted that to a friend while still sitting gazing at the empty stage where Histoires sans histoires had been. 

Histoires sans histoire(s), was created as part of the Festival d’Automne 2019 Merce Cunningham Centenary celebration and produced jointly by the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine, Théâtre National de la Danse-Chaillot, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Festival d’Automne à Paris. It was staged for the first time from 12-16 October 2019 with the usual technical-esthetic verve of the Théâtre National de la Danse at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris.

Met Percent: Week Eight [by Alec Bernstein]

Medallion with Christ from an Icon Frame, Byzantine, 1100, gallery 303

At the Met, lingering in the darkened galleries of the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, I select a few favorites:

Eikonomachía - literally, "image struggle" or "war on icons" - is a controversy over the proper use of religious images, and it results in the destruction of icons in all media. 

Iconoclasts - "breaker of icons" - is the deliberate destruction within a culture of its own symbols . . . for religious or political motives.

Iconolater, Iconodules, and Iconophiles are derisive terms for those who revere or venerate religious images.

Electric Chair, 1971, Andy Warhol [Met, not on view]. Gold necklace with Cross, Byzantium, 6th century, gallery 301.

“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” - Lenny Bruce

 

“Guillotine of History”

Head of Christ, Netherlands, 1480-1520, gallery 306; Head of a Cleric from a Tomb Effigy, France, 1450-60, [not on view]; Head of Emperor Constans, Byzantine, ca. 337–40, gallery 301.

Throughout the image wars, the destruction of the head, face (and nose) was rampant, because the head was the most potent symbol of the body. 

“During the High Middle Ages, portraiture did not rely on likeness . . . thus individual selfhood was subsumed in broader forms of corporate identities.” - The Face in Medieval Sculpture - Met Heilbrun Timeline of History. 

In my  twenty years of business air travel, I would study Tiepolo or Raphael and draw heads - of no one in particular - a flight attendant, a sleeping passenger, the occasional celebrity . . . by abstract construction or memory. Apparently my “corporate identities” philosophy is in accord with the Medieval masters. Nice to know.

Montaigne concludes Of Physiognomy with a pair of anecdotes in which his life was threatened, but his kindly demeanor and honest words saved him. “If my face did not answer for me, if people did not read in my eyes and my voice the innocence of my intentions, I would not have lasted so long without quarrel and without harm.” But he also writes, “The face is a weak guarantee.”

 

Bread Branding

A ceramic Bread Stamp, Byzantine, 500-900, gallery 300. Inscribed in Greek in reverse,“IC, XC, NIKA”: Jesus Christ Victorious. Used for The Eucharist breads. Interesting the “victory” (NIKA) stems from Nike in the Greek.

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Nike, the personification of victory, late 5th century B.C., gallery 156

 

 

 

 

 

Your Skull Here

Abbey Head-Shaped Coffin, France, gallery 306

This carved wooden coffin was for an important skull. And in the next display case, a “valuables” coffin. Important to preserve both. But not together. I note how different the terms “coffin” and “sarcophagus” feel.

Valuables Coffin, France, gallery 306

 

Paul Klee Anyone?

Footed Cup with Falconer, Byzantine, 15th century, gallery 300. Angelus Novus, Paul Klee, 1921, Israel Museum.

Walter Benjamin bought Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, an oil transfer drawing with watercolor, for 1,000 marks in Munich. Benjamin passed it to Theodor Adorno, and Adorno to Gershom Scholem.

Benjamin’s friend Charlotte Wolf then recalled how this “gauche and inhibited man” had “behaved as if something marvelous had been given to him." By simply looking at the drawing.

This is the first time I have seen the word “humor” in the MetTexts. The  cup has a “sense of humor”, according to the museum documenters. But to Benjamin, “This is how one pictures the angel of history.”

Katinka Bock’s sculptures point the nature of material and movement [by Tracy Danison]

Katinka Bock, not titled©Pierre Antoine / Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Katinka Bock’s Tumulte à Higienopolis currently at Lafayette Anticipations is a more than successful marriage of exhibition space and esthetic intelligence. The lines and light of the Anticipations’ space are a perfect medium for the unmoving movement that animates Bock’s sculptures.

 

Katinka Bock, Rauschen©Pierre Antoine / Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

“Rauschen”, a gaping, colorful and vertically anchored monumental bulge suspended through the center of the building, could be a conch shell, a blanket enfolding a child or a vortex.

This remarkable piece visually emphasizes the up-down or side-to-side positioning of the other works on display.

 

Katinka Bock, Gisant©Pierre Antoine / Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

These include, among other strongly-crafted pieces sown over three floors, a field of naturalistic brass cactus, thick "rugs" (not titled) on a "clothesline", a covered reclining effigy ("Gisant") in pointy shoes and an overstuffed pincushion: the cacti strain up, the rugs flap, the effigy lays, the pincushion is pinned.

 

Katinka Bock, brass cactus©Pierre Antoine / Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Karine, my companion, remarks that Bock’s works remind her that movement (mouvement) is not necessarily displacement (bouger). She’s right.

At Tumulte, where Bock’s hand touches, it points the “quantum” view, where fixed and solid, flux and flow are part of the same moment, if not of the same perceptual choice.

See Katinka Bock's work live if you can.

Katinka Bock’s Tumulte à Higienopolis continues at Lafayette Anticipations until 5 January 2020

Met Percent: Week Seven [by Alec Bernstein]

Byzantine Leads to Gothic

Sarcophagus, Byzantine, early 300s, gallery 300    Capital with Four Heads, Gothic, 1225–50, gallery 304

Just never saw it that way

1,000 years from the end of Rome to the Renaissance: the gigantic new Christian colloid of Rome, Greece, Persia, Scandinavia, England, Syria: no wonder I never saw the connections . . . and the imagery was a continuum of  controversy. 

 

“The human spirit cannot keep on floating in this infinity of formless ideas; they must be compiled for it into a definite picture after its own pattern.” - Montaigne

 

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget

 - “Byzantium”, William Butler Yeats

 

“As a living man does not have to give reasons for his breathing, he does not need to explain his beliefs.” - Montaigne

 

“It’s Byzantine”

 

Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling, Germany, 1220-30, gallery 300

It’s too too complex is the consensus.

• “Pension savers caught out by ‘byzantine’ tax-relief rules,” reads a headline in The Times of London.
• “Experience in byzantine water policy key in elections at Coachella Valley agencies,” says an editorial in the Desert Sun.
• “It’s Complicated: Bosnia’s Byzantine System Of Government,” puns Radio Free Europe.

 

The Formats of Old Friends . . . The Storyboard

Ivory Altarpiece, ca. 1390–1400, Italy, gallery 306

Stories in units in framed cells. Time divided into sequence in space. Grids of progression. The DNA for films, graphic novels, cartoons, comics . . . 

Stories in Light

Stained Glass Panels, 15th C., German, gallery 306

Q: How do you tell those biblical stories - Mary as Virgin, Queen, Bride, Mother, Intercessor - to a largely illiterate congregation? 

A: Stained glass.

I have heard that the origin of the term kike comes from Jewish immigrants at Ellis Island who would not sign their names with crosses (X), and signed instead with small circles: kikel or kikeleh in Yiddish shortened to kike, i.e. the people who make little circles.

 

The Articles We “Know”

The Last Supper, ca. 1500–1530, German or South Netherlandish, gallery 305

Yes, of course. The Last Supper, The Apostles, The Annunciation, The Madonna, The Child, The Pieta . . . familiar, the stuff of Western Civ. Not “chapter and verse” to me, but by osmosis in school, by television, and my childhood neighbors on their way home from Catechism.

In Los Angeles I discovered all the freeways have articles; a Spanish influence. New Yorkers take 95 to 395. Angelenos take The 405 to The 101.

Un-naming modern primitivism and Beauty in Mondrian’s abstraction [by Tracy Danison]

Rene Rimbert, "Nature morte au jeu de cartes"©Musée Maillol, Paris

Two lovely and intriguing painting exhibitions ongoing at Musée Maillol and Musée Marmottan Monet offer more than their titles suggest. Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du douanier rousseau à Séraphine at Musée Maillol debunks the notion of “naïf (primitive)” and does a great job of showing color, shape, form in daily life in France 1920-1940 by outsider painters. Mondrian Figuratif at Marmottan Monet uses some lovely figurative painting to anchor a well-made walk-through of Piet Mondrian’s painterly quest for Beauty.

Piet Mondrian, "Crépuscule", 1906 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

 

The thing one learns from Les Grands maîtres naïfs is that modern primitive painting applies not to style but to painters who didn’t attend official art schools. Whether the subject is the outside or “natural” world, food or male desire, the Grands maîtres in question paint “what they see and what it feels like”.

 

André Bauchant, "L'Hibou" © Ewald Graber © Adagio, Paris 2019

What they see becomes visual lyric: intimate, even indiscrete, warm, colorful. Visitors will enjoy the little irony of tourist-targeted views of Montmartre by these often commercially struggling artists as well bigger and more recondite ironies such as Dominique Peyronnet’s slipping of the iconic La Femme à la Perle into the sharp symmetry of a modern urban landscape.

Camille Bombois, "Nu de face"  Courtesy Fondation Dina Vierny © Adagio, Paris

And there’s plenty more work by these marginal maîtres that just enables the eye to enjoy while the mind wanders: feathery flower bouquets by Séraphine Louis (which put me in mind of Shaker prints, even Jung drawings), Le Douanier Rousseau’s powerfully-imagined “exotic natural” scenes (which put me in mind of William Blake prints), René Rimbert’s bistro-inspired still lifes (which brought Cezanne’s to mind), the graded colors and perspectives of sea- and landscapes by André Bauchant and Ferdinand Desnos, or Camille Bombois’ good-tempered almost-porn.

"Le Douanier" Henri Rousseau, "Deux lions à l'affût dans la jungle" © Archives de l'Hôtel des Ventes de Monte-Carlo

And if Grands maîtres naïfs puts pay to the notion that modern “primitive” painting is anything more than a nasty little kick against painters of “marginal” social origins, Mondrian Figuratif  puts in doubt the “Father of abstraction”’s parental role in that particular style.

Piet Mondrian, "Composition avec large plan rouge, jaune, noir, gris et bleu ", 1921 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Marmottan Monet’s exhibition in fact highlights Mondrian’s personal spiritual quest for beauty. I mean “Beauty”in a Neo-Platonic, 19th-century sense, with a capital B, the one that was supposed to exist with Love and Truth at the core of the universe and Christian society. “Mondrian figuratif”’s walk-through arrangement makes the visual case that painter Mondrian knows in his heart, like poet Keats, that Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth. This puts a lot of water between him and a painter like a Picasso, or Jasper John’s who knows who else in the modern era whose search is mostly for new and satisfactory expressive style(s).

Piet Mondrian, "Moulin dans le crépuscule",1908 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

In the entry way of the Mondrian Figuratif  walk-through sits a ‘still life” of a “naturalist” dead hare in the Dutch Renaissance style, made by a 19-year old Mondrian. Next to it is the painter’s very first “abstract” painting. The hare’s ‘naturalism’ is on its head, subjected to the effect of light on a graded color and texture (the hare’s fur) while this first “abstract” work is clearly a study of the subtle line and color of tar and worn tiles in somebody’s floor.

Piet Mondrian, "Ferme près de Duivendrecht", 1916 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Turning into the exhibition from there, some wonderful examples of Mondrian’s figurative work greets visitor eyes. But raise them, look right. There at the bottom of the exhibition is Mondrian’s 1921 Composition avec large plan rouge, jaune, noir, gris et bleu, which definitely isn’t somebody’s tile floor! But then, those colors, those lines! Why, of course, it’s the Beauty of all tile floors! Of all windmills! Then, catching their breath and looking back and forth, there certainly seems a relation between the capture of the exact chromatic quality of early moonlight in the 1906 Crépuscule and Large plan, between the swathes of horizontal color and “natural” geometry of the 1908 Moulin dans le crépuscule and Large plan… The walk-through between these paintings is a visual discussion of Mondrian becoming toward Beauty and, maybe, Truth: all we need to know.

Mondrian Figuratif runs at the Musée Marmottan Monet until 26 January 2020.

Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du Douanier Rousseau à Séraphine runs at Musée Maillol until 19 January 2020.

Expansive preferences: Extra! an annual festival of living words at Centre Pompidou [by Tracy Danison]

Translingual poet Cia Rinne has won the 2019 Prix Bernard Heidsieck for work on the living word awarded during the annual Extra! literary festival©Hervé Veronese/Centre Pompidou

Maybe poets and literati should take a leaf from the libertine meet-up sites and start organizing everything according to preference group. Under a preference topic, say, sadomasochism, a libertine can access a wide range of apparently unrelated interests, say, voyeurism, spanking and humiliation. Libertines thus stay both focused and expansive, free to experiment. Access and experimentation are very important for poets and literati, too.

The preference group idea came to me when I visited the third annual Extra! “living literature” festival at Centre Pompidou. Created in 2017, Extra! features the visual and sound aspects of literary endeavor. It suddenly became clear, to me, anyway, that the genre called “literature” is about viable and useful a guiding descriptive as gender is for human beings and that a move to a preference group system is imperative.

The people participating in Extra! all seemed to have a marked preference for words, a preference shared by a wide range of people, including Poetical and just plain people who like to read a lot. So, under a preference group approach, word would take the place of literary. Extra! becomes a “living word” festival, with literature, performance and installations as specific festival offers.

Extra! outre-tombe installation: participants learn to manage author-provocateur Michel Houellebecq’s future legacy©Hervé Veronese/Centre Pompidou

With activities over several days in different locations around central Paris, the opening night of this new an intriguing annual living word festival at Centre Pompidou featured, among other installations and events, English-using poet Alain Arias Mission’s 60s era happenings around “concrete poetry”. The poet uses physical typography, (meta)political urban topography and partly spontaneous performance for effect. Mission’s show reminded me that “happenings” and “situation” are playing a strong part in dance performance creation these days.

Last June, for instance, choreographer Joanne Leighton situated a valedictory dance performance at the Musée de l’immigration to point the issue of rising anti-enlightenment political views; Nina Santes, who took up the residence at the Atelier de Paris that Leighton was capping with her in situ performance, creates or is searching to create (interactive) performance from the happening formats that opened out in the 60s, the time when Mission, among others, was bringing out situational, public, spontaneous poetry.

Mission’s concrete poetry exhibit was in echo with a hilariously cynical interactive game involving managing author-provocateur Michel Houellebecq’s future literary legacy, along with a projected compilation of iconic film images and talk-show-format discussions.

Extra! organizers capped the evening with the award of the Prix Bernard Heidsieck to polyglot sound and translingual poet Cia Rinne. Rinne has linguistic feet in Sweden, Finland and Germany, as well as in her translingual poetry, which, she told me, was suggested by ordinary conversation in the multilingual household where she grew up. Just as Nina Santes’ work reverberates with energies inherited from happenings, Rinne’s work winds around and binds together concepts exemplified by sound-tech poet pioneers such as Laurie Anderson and traditional, page-visual-Ogden-Nash-book-of -practical-cats-style poetry formats.

Prix Bernard Heidsieck, which rewards non-book word creation, memorializes poet Bernard Heidsieck (1928-2014), a French-language champion of multi-media literary endeavor.

Lafayette Anticipations: deploying original intentions and creative potential [by Tracy Danison]

The building-artist points intersections and possibilities: Hella Jongerius “Interlace” exposition 2019 ©Roel van Tour / Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

And I've been running away from the wise man in my head
And he says, go, go, go, go get lost in the wind

And I've been hearing some whispers on the wind
And they say, run, run, run, run away for your sins

Don't leave that fiery mind behind/ Take it along for the ride
Don't leave that fiery mind behind/ Take it along for the ride

 “Fiery Heart, Fiery Mind”, Alice Phoebe Lou

Physical space and cultural project make Lafayette Anticipations distinct as an institution. Lodged in a building designed by the architect Rem Koolhaas, Anticipations enjoys a pretty-much entirely modular interior space. As a project, the institution explicitly links art, industry and technology in culture production.

Anticipations’ unique interior space practically calls up new visions of live performance; its exhibitions of themselves provoke –  without provocation – conversation on where, how, by whom, with and for what culture is produced.

Opened to the public only in 2018 and blessed with its distinct potentialities in space and concept, Anticipations development as an institution is also an opportunity to look at how original intentions and potential can be deployed though time.

The opportunity to observe is why the appointment of Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel as managing director, seconding its founder president Guillaume Houzé, caught my eye. Lamarche-Vadel is 32, Houzé, 38. Lamarche-Vadel is said to have a strong interest in presentation and arrangement of culture production.

The Anticipations’ building is a work of art in a way that no building I can think of is, so the first thing to think about is: How interior space potential is understood in respect to fixed physical plant? In other words: What is the tail, what is the dog, the space potential or plant configuration?  Then the question is: How is this understanding to be kneaded into Anticipations’ live performances and exhibitions?

A Penelope Contemporary: at a 3D loom, from Hella Jongerius' “Interlace” exposition 2019 ©Roel van Tour/Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Anticipation’s season-opening dance performance program Echelle Humaine makes me think that, as a work of art, the architecture immediately makes a single unit of “performer-performance-space”. This is because, in much the same way as certain contemporary movement artists seem to be pushing performers to localize within themselves not just performance but also place, Anticipations’ art-architecture strains to make itself performance and performer as well as place/space potential.

Anticipations’ art-architecture is like a choreographer: it’s not enough to hold a show there – there has to be the “show” and “show” has to be there. I’m thinking here of how such artists as Joanne Leighton shape perceived space by the potentials of movement or of how performers such as Bruno Canteteau shape-themselves-into-things-in-space-into-movement-into-poetry.

So, for me, until they tear the building down, Anticipations’ creative challenge will be to align, synthesize, the building-as-choreographer (or artist) with what goes on within it – a challenge that, it seems to me, requires management to take on an artist’s stance, as well as play the demanding stage manager, when it comes to performance.

An artist’s stance, involving an unusually close creative collaboration with (the other) creators must necessarily be the order of the day for Anticipations’ culture-project exhibitions, too.

Conceptually the exhibitions immediately provoke conversation about the intersections and possibilities in innovation, technology and esthetics. But the art-architecture immediately mounts the same challenge as for performance: Is the concept (seen as performer) kneaded into, synthesized with, the building (seen as a work of art) and exhibition (seen as performance)?

The recently wrapped-up exposition by textile designer Hella Jongerius is a concrete example of the challenge. Visitors could get their heads around a “3D” loom (on the model of a “3D” printer), see how computer-assisted weaving works and examine the texture and visual effect of a wide variety of fabric – touching upon technology, innovation, art.

But, as Jongerius intimated when she opened the project by calling for making fabric “helicopters and airplanes”, the exhibits were not separate parts of an endeavor. Rather, they pointed a whole – an overall, integrated, synthetic – vision of the possibilities of re-imagining textile as technology, as innovation, as art. For her exhibition it was Anticipations building as artist (choreographer) – again, a much more assertive, collaborative artist than is ever likely in other institutions – that pulled everything together, that actively called attention to the intersections of the different endeavors, pointed toward conceptual possibility.  

In the end, then, Anticipation’s unique architecture demands that management take a strong creator stance as a collaborator among the others and reach, and be seen to be reaching, for synthesis of space potential with performers and performance and concept and exhibition.

If you go by the esthetic success of Yukio Hashimoto doing de Keersmaeker’s classic modern dance (2018) or of multimedia artist Simon Fujiwara playing up the mediatization of human personality (2018), neither performance nor exhibition seems a tough challenge… Until you consider that both conceptually lent themselves to the building’s default symmetries and perspectives. There is not that much work that does.

Most other institutions are their default setting. Anticipations is not. It is a work of art itself, with an independent potentiality. This means that getting the most out of performance and exhibition means, in a way that simply is not true for other institutions, both an assertive artist’s stance and intimate creative collaboration. Neither the one nor the other is simple or straightforward.

On the other hand, the need to take the challenge in hand means Aticipations will always be engaged in trying to unify performer-performance-place. That creative endeavor, “successful” and “unsuccessful” is really worth following.

Met Percent: Week Six [by Alec Bernstein]

Have We Met?

Suddenly the ancient gods are part elephant (Cambodia) gallery 245,  or have “groups” of arms (Myanmar) gallery 250, or are standing on a buffalo (Java) gallery 247. With so many cultures in close proximity, the differences are as surprising as the similarities.

The elephant Ganesh in Cambodia is the god for the removal of obstacles - an unusual power - guarding daily existence. Ganesh is a pan-Hindu “crossover” whose role changes in Buddhism and Hinduism throughout Asia. Today, Ganesh Tattoos are very popular.

“God sends the cold according to the coat.” - Montaigne

 

“What has become of the discs?”

In China, “Bi” - the notion of a covering sky (gaitian) that revolves around a central axis - is like an early form of the carpenter’s square. Often jade is the measure of the owner’s moral integrity.

The uses are many, and many uses, unknown.

Buddah Records first album was Safe as Milk by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. 

CLEMO UTI – "THE WATER LILIES"
By Ring Lardner

CHARACTERS
PADRE, a priest.
SETHSO}
GETHSO} both twins.
WAYSHATTEN, a shepherd’s boy.
TWO CAPITALISTS 1
WAMA TAMMISCH, her daughter.
KLEMA, a janitor’s third daughter.
KEVELA, their mother, afterwards their aunt.

{TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This show was written as if people were there to see it.}
1. NOTE: The two Capitalists don’t appear in this show.

ACT I

The Outskirts of a Parchesi Board. People are wondering what has become of the discs. They quit wondering and sing the following song.
CHORUS: What has become of the discs?
What has become of the discs?
We took them at our own risks,
But what has become of the discs?

(WAMA enters from an exclusive waffle parlor. She exits as if she had had waffles.)

ACTS II & III

(These two acts were thrown out because nothing seemed to happen.)

 

The Recumbent Pig

Pigs in Recumbent Position, China, 1st-2nd Century, Gallery 207 (top, bottom pigs not on view).

These recumbent pigs were often placed in the hands of the deceased to express the wish for wealth in the afterlife. If you got pigs (dead or alive), it’s good news . . .  wealth, abundance, plenty.

True News from Paris: eight well-loved performances [by Tracy Danison]

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker talks through "Violin Fase", Lafayette Anticipations 2018 © Tracy Danison

Over the next couple of  months I would like to report True News on creators and performances worth looking out for. A concept for a True News Mechanism came to me during the most recent unprecedented heat wave.

An individual whispers his or her sensory experience into the True News Mechanism’s reception trumpet. True News processors use the same COBOL X12-49A algorithm that enabled Jesus a smooth resurrection. Forty acres of glistening brass tubes offer honest whisperers designer glimpses of those dark gears that grind toward the True. Mechanism engineers heave suspect fabulators into the relentless mesh. There they go from being parts of the problem to being parts of the solution.

Metaphorically speaking, Hang Huang, who runs the English-language dance and travel blog DanceVisa, Catherine Zavodska, a culture influencer who heads up DanseAujourdhui, a dance-appreciation community that offers culture-oriented events and tourism, along with myself are the first persons to whisper into the Mechanism.

Catherine and Hang have a deep and abiding love for dance performance. Hang seems always to see where a performance is coming from, has the knack of seeing where the depths and weights of a performance lie. Catherine has more useful knowledge about dance than I could ever hope for; she always knows how to measure creative effort and execution.

With the aid of Catherine and Hang, the Mechanism and myself can report its first eight bits of True News from dance performance: eight well-loved pieces from the Paris Season 2018-2019. These include Ohad Naharin’s Decadance, performed at the Opéra Garnier, Ousmane Sy’s Queen Blood, performed at La Villette last Winter; Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Faun, performed at the at the Opéra Garnier last Fall; Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Violin Fase, her initiation piece revolving around Steve Reich’s music of the same name, danced by Yuika Hashimoto,  renewed last Fall at Lafayette Anticipations; Oona Doherty’s Hard to be Soft – A Belfast Prayer at Atelier de Paris in Spring 2019; and Damien Jalet’s Vessel, also last Spring; Noé Soulier’s exceptionally moving, almost-baroque Les Vagues, produced at the Palais de Chaillot last Fall; and Crystal Pite’s Season’s Canon, equally last Fall at Opéra Garnier.

Catherine Zavodska and I both well-loved Cherkaoui’s [Après-midi d’un] Faun[e]. The piece got me thinking about how Maurice Béjart and Rammallzee (‘The rhythm [dance] that breaks’) find shared culture space, but Catherine saw an orgasm in it. She is surely closer to Nijinksky’s intention. Her idea is that Cherkaoui has a talent for working performance “movement” from the ground up (as in break-dancing) then pushing it beyond “choreography” to discover (experience the unknown of), or uncover (experience beyond), a “real thing”, in which the performance is a visual, physical and emotional meeting point of spectator and creator intention.

Oona Doherty dis-covers a new continent of emotion in Northern Ireland © OonaDoherty

The Mechanism has identified four, including Faun, of the eight well-beloved pieces as visual, physical and emotional real things. Catherine delighted in Decadance, performed by the junior rank of the Opéra de Paris ballet, calling it “true” thing with “neither beginning nor end”, outside of time, as “a letting go”,  “a jubilation”. Touched by the deep realness of the performance, the Mechanism observes, last year I wrote of Crystal Pite’s Season’s Canon “… Way down there where once was Hell, I saw a man picking up a woman and knew that picking Karine up just like that [would make] her mine forever.” And. Ahh, God. There’s Noé Soulier’s Les Vagues. The choreographer’s sense of poetic schwerpunkt is penetrated and perfumed by the consistent kairos of movement. My performance note reads: “… and suddenly she says, gesture like an Egyptian – gestures that emphasize, underline, give meaning to her words rather than be words:

I begin to long for/A language lovers use/ Broken words

Inarticulate words / Like the shuffling of feet/ On the pavement

I have to tell you, it still makes me cry.

A burgeoning real thing also lies behind a focus on the particularness of a performance.

Catherine, for instance, sees “choreography” as the mesh of music and movement, not just movement with or to or around music as I often do. So, Cherkaoui’s achievement in Faun would be more about completing Débussy’s erotic impulsion than, as I feel it, about fleshing out the sense of Mallarmé’s poem. When Hang speaks of the performance of Violin Fase that he attended as “exceptional”, he is also using a particularity to speak of achieving a real thing performance. He points to de Keersmaeker’s “danced commentary” as key. Injured and unable to dance herself, as originally scheduled, de Keersmaeker came on to the performance floor to talk with spectators in the wake of the Hashimoto’s 15-Minute performance. As she talked, her movement physically, visually, emotionally doubled Hashimoto’s dance; she effectively (re-)created it as a “real thing”.

Critical focus, the Mechanism suggests, can even switch from the performance itself to the experience of uncovering or discovering the real thing. Hang characterizes Oona Doherty’s Hard to Be Soft - A Belfast Prayer as a “discovery” by display of impressive ability and energy. That’s entirely on target. Doherty, whom I discovered myself at her exceptional pictogram-performance Lazarus and the Birds of Paradise for Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales 2016 is a stochastic calculus of Hollywood musical, avant-garde contemporary dance and cinéma noir altered for performance theater. It puts across an extremely powerful performance-pictogram of the emotional state of Northern Ireland’s humans.

Ousmane Sy’s Queen Blood and Damien Jalet’s Vessel can also be looked at as real things uncovered or discovered. Vessel, according to Hang, uncovers “a new genre” of dance performance. Hang feels that Jalet, known for innovative scenography (Skid, which featured at Palais de Chaillot in the Fall, very nearly literally had performers dancing (vertical) on a wall) creates a new body language that pushes the performance into a thing identifiably new.  Queen Blood, according to Catherine, discovers a “conductor” within a choreographer. The all-women cast of Sy’s piece is made up of distinct individuals (so much so that I, for one, “forgot” their status as female and “remembered” their status as individual during the performance.). Sy’s choreography and directorial approach conduct rather than direct or manage the performers of his cast, solo and together. That is to say that under Sy’s “baton” each performer is a separate instrument of distinct sound and role, uncovering dance movement as corporal music.

For each of us, these eight pieces were True News, real things that you can share through our eyes. Mark the Creators on your bucket list as talent worth seeking out and the performances as new eyes to see through they made just for you.

Met Percent: Week Five [by Alec Bernstein]

Streams and Mountains Without End

I did some Met mezzanine stuff, but now the second floor . . . 

China: The landscape in length: “The Mountains in Fog” is a scroll (1’ high and over 20’ long) and is “time over size”, “like time over strength” in “ruin lust” (see Week Two). The involvement of the viewer - walking the path - is a “different” form of  contemplation. 

The landscape in sheer size: “The Palace of Nine Perfections” [Yuan Jiang, Qing dynasty, 1691] is over 6’ high and 18’ long. It dominates the room; the impact is immediate. 

 

On the Importance of Being: Flowers and Birds

Exaltations of Nature. 

Vase with flowering plants and birds, China, late 17th-early 18th century, gallery 200.

Mankind . . . we regard as only one of Nature’s varied manifestations, and less worthy of appearing in the annals of Art than any other element: the fragile beauty of a flower or the graceful motions of a bird in flight rouses in our hearts, an emotion as poignant as any human loveliness or pain. - The Chinese Eye, Chiang Yee, 1935.

 

Moon Vase

Moon-shaped bottle, China, 18th century, “slippery stone”, gallery 200.

“Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do”. - Montaigne

 

The Celebration of Error

Kenzan-style Dish with Bamboo Leaves, Japan, 17th–18th century (not on view) kintsugi (kintsukuroi) gold lacquer repair.

Artist Uses Kintsugi to Mend Cracked Streets with Gold. https://mymodernmet.com/sidewalk-kintsukuroi-kintsugi-art/

 

Window onto Bamboo on a Rainy Day

“There are four principal ways of painting bamboo. In fair-weather, the leaves are spread out joyously; in rainy-weather, the leaves hang down despondently, in windy-weather, the leaves cross each other confusedly, and in the dew of early morning the leaves all point up vigorously.” - Henry P. Bowie, On the Laws of Japanese Painting, 1911.

Family apocrypha claims that at 2 I was bilingual in English and Japanese. Our gardener Mr. Yamamoto spoke no English, but our talks gave me an appreciation of bamboo, gardens, and the Japanese grid.

 

Paris performance rentrée: new creation, classic music and creative retrospectives [by Tracy Danison]

Jan Martens, Sweet Baby Sweet © Klaartje Lambechts

If you’re a trillionaire trying to reward my good looks with a hefty check, in September and October you’re likely to find me at one and the other of the dance and performance pieces in the Paris Performance Calendar, hands on knees, attentive to doings on the stage. The federative performance arts Festival d’Automne and big, or dance performance-dedicated, institutions such as the Théâtre National (Palais) de Chaillot or Micadanses always offer a good range of dance performance as a new season opens. Most, if not all of my September and October picks are taken from such 2019-2020 Season calendars. 

Through to December, there’s Festival d’Automne’s celebration of Merce Cunningham’s contribution to modern dance. This makes for a prime opportunity to see France’s excellent provincial ballets strut their excellent stuff. There is an instructive bent in the offer and with it an opportunity to brush up on the principles of modern and contemporary dance as you enjoy the dancing.

My head has highlighted intriguing retrospective work by the well-known choreographers Jérôme Bel and Philippe Decouflé. Without ignoring such emotion-masters as Saburo Teshigawara performing things like Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (recommended by DanseAujourdhui’s Catherine Zavodska, at the Philharmonie de Paris) or the erotic tension of Jan Martens’ Sweat Baby Sweat, my heart has chosen creation by artists whose esthetic power I admire, including Yasmine Hugonnet, Myriam Gourfink and Latifa Laâbissi or such artists as Florence Casenave, Carole Quettier or Nina Vallon, whose work I have not yet seen but whose performance ideas tease my esthetics. Vallon, along with Aurelie Berland, among others, are movement artists whose work makes up a really intriguing offer of new creation riding classical music and choreographies for Micadanse’s Bien Fait! 2019 program.

Jan Martens’ Sweat Baby Sweat and the playful exploration of Yasmine Hugonnet’s Se Sentir Vivant both feature in Lafayette Anticipations’ Echelle Humaine 2019 program. This contrast of approach reminds me that Echelle Humaine is both quality live performance and a visual treatise on how movement creates or shapes physical space – and vice-versa.

Yasmine Hugonnet, Se sentir vivant, 2017© Anne-Laure Lechat

Again in the spatio-human vein, the very talented saxophone-clarinet-piano guy Antonin Tri Hoang and 12 musical companions will be turning the vast volumes of Saint Eustache’s Ship-to-Heaven architecture into a jazz soundbox. The performance will also provide a good moment to explore the old Halles parish church, far more of a conscious work of art than Notre Dame and which harbors Raymond Mason’s 1971 Le départ des fruits et légumes du coeur de Paris, le 28 février 1969 (“The Departure of Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris”) sculpture in a side chapel.

Looking past the September-October listing, Paris’ performance offer for November and December is easily as solid but also perhaps more esthetically intriguing than that of September-October. I’m thinking here not just of the ongoing Festival d’Automne program (lots of performance from La Ribot as well as dance from Merce Cunningham), but also Loïc Touzé, Liz Santoro and Daniel Linehan as dance performers at Théatre de la Bastille and new creations by Jann Gallois, Kader Attou and Système Castafiore at Palais de Chaillot. But really, especially I’m impatiently waiting on the program for the Kalypso hip-hop dance festival from 6 November to 17 December. In 2019, Kalypso, brainchild of performer, choreographer and tireless promoter of urban dance culture Mourad Merzouki, will feature work by 52 well-selected troupes in Paris and in cities throughout France. I’ll be paying particular attention to Kalypso and French hip hop/urban dance in 2019-2020.

Beyond hip hop and into Spring 2020, staying with just a few center city institutions, there’s reason to look forward to the contemporary dance performance offer, just for instance, at Théâtre de la Bastille or La Scala Paris or Atelier de Paris in Spring 2020. Bastille for example will be featuring such proven young talent as Sofia Dias, Vítor Roriz, Olivia Grandville or Madeleine Fournier, talen developed at the Atelier de Paris. La Scala will offer, notably, new circus performance with La Chute des anges (Raphaëlle Boitel, cie L'Oublié(e)) and Humans (Yaron Lifschitz, cie Circa) along with a reprise of the Michèle Anne de Mey & Jaco Van Dormael’s absolutely brilliant Cold Blood (Collectif Kiss & Cry).

Click here to access the September-October Performance Agenda.