Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Thursday, 24 July 2008
If on its first release you missed the Morgan Spurlock-
If you're converted, the film will preach to you already, but Spurlock
and VanAlkemade have also made a concerted effort to provide some
historical background on the rise of credit industry practices that still
pose a profound threat to the health of American economic life (as this front-
Purchase it at amazon.com today. Or, if that's a little too ironic for you, you can always add it to your Netflix queue, like I did, or borrow it from your local library. I wrote about Billy's performance at the Spiegeltent for the New York Times in 2006.
Posted at 8.33 am in /Videos
Permanent link to this story
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
It's a strange issue that makes bedfellows of Terry Teachout and myself
on the one side, and A.C. Douglas and David Byrne on the other. That unpleasant
word-
Nothing here really changes anything I said in my
own original post on the matter earlier this week. There seems to be
general agreement that Byrne's argument was poorly considered in his
choice of Die Soldaten as the specific target of his dismay, but
one or two things in Kyle's comments section should be addressed. Kyle
mentions there that "[My agreement with Byrne] hinges on one assertion
that I hope to god we can all agree with: Not every composer who writes
thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music is a genius." Sure; so long
as we can also say that not every composer who writes accessible and
easy-
Byrne does, however, question the motives of composers of this thorny, complex, etc. music:
There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmermann, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least? Why would anyone do that?
The only response to that is that composers (or playwrights or painters
for that matter) wouldn't do any of those things. This is an oddly
anti-
However valid Byrne's and Gann's charges of self-
All that said, in Queenan's and Byrne's original writings, something still irked me. Where had I heard this condemnation of artist, critic and audience before? Where in the recent past had I heard much of this same rhetoric? And then it struck me. The recent Bill Henson controversy also gave rise to much of the same kind of hostile vocabulary, political and cultural recidivism, and puritanical rhetoric; so much for the assumed cultural and inclusive progressivism of the Western left. Henson's motives in creating his work were questioned; artists themselves, as an elitist cabal, were charged with a deliberate attack on the nation's morals in defending Henson's work (as if two or more artists could be gathered as a collective to do anything in which they all agreed; the music and theatre blogospheres are evidence enough against that); the audiences for this work were characterised as potential paedophiles themselves. The situations are of course not at all identical, but there's some similarity; Australia's children needed to be defended from the depredations of photographers like Henson, and David Byrne's and Joe Queenan's ears (as well as the ears of others) needed to be defended from the subversive, "ugly" sounds that contemporary composers produce.
The Australian Prime Minister's office is a different, more chilling
bully pulpit than the pages of the Guardian or the entries on a
popular art-
On Monday, David Ian Rabey added to the comments section of my
original post a carefully-
The final solution to the problem of art
Art is a problem, after all
Is to call it incomprehensible
To burn it only lends it grace
I agree with Kyle again when he writes, "There are no easy lines to draw here, which I think is part of the value of art, that it plunges us into ambiguity; but there are some important principles, which perhaps it will take another blog entry to puzzle out." So let's not draw easy lines, and I hate to say this, but I think it might take more than one more blog entry to puzzle out. The question is far more important than that.
Posted at 9.24 am in /Music
Permanent link to this story
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Garrett Eisler mulled over the economic presumptions of the Lincoln
Center Festival's Samuel Beckett series at The Playgoer yesterday; it seems that, where
Samuel Beckett is concerned, the stars come out in New York. Lincoln
Center boasts Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. Last season, of course, there was
Mikhail Baryshnikov in a Beckett evening at the New York Theatre Workshop,
and next season, according to this Theatermania story, Bill Irwin will appear
in a Gerry Hynes-
In all this, the real news might be the addition of a new play to the Beckett stage canon – Eh Joe, originally written for television in 1965. In the past few years there have been no fewer than three productions of the work onstage: Joanne Akalaitis's production at the NYTW last season, the current New York staging, and Atom Egoyan's staging with Michael Gambon in the role of Joe at the Gate Theatre in 2006 (this production the basis for the Lincoln Center presentation, which Obscene Jester reviewed yesterday here).
This points to a development in stage technology that permits a
crossover from video to theatre. The original Eh Joe was an
intimate chamber drama, the camera focusing on Joe's face, the
communication one-
I wonder, though, whether the progress of technology may have the
effect of rendering some of Beckett's other plays anachronistic. When
Beckett wrote Krapp's Last Tape in 1958, the personal, portable
reel-
Even now, it's unlikely that audiences will come across a portable
reel-
The status of Beckett's work in a technology-
That Beckett himself was not averse to moving his work from one medium into another is demonstrated by his own oversight of the film of his 1972 play Not I as well as his permission to Mabou Mines to produce a stage adaptation of the short novel Company during his lifetime. As Eh Joe demonstrates, the canon of Beckett's work continues to challenge theatrical innovators and audiences – a mark of the unique nature of his work, and an indication that Beckett's modernist stage practice will continue to infest the postmodern era. As Garrett notes, his work also challenges the imaginations of the Lincoln Center marketing and development office; but this is the lesser part of the story.
More on Samuel Beckett here.
Posted at 8.52 am in /Drama
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 21 July 2008
UPDATE: There's more on this at Terry Teachout's blog today, along with a link to Ethan Iverson's response. Ever the loyal opposition, A.C. Douglas takes exception to my own conclusion.
Because it seems to have everything to do with modern music and little
to do with modern theatre, Joe Queenan's 9 July essay in the
Guardian, "Admit it, you're as bored as I am", has gone by the
boards in the theatre blogosphere, but it shouldn't have, really.
Queenan's screed is a weak and unpersuasive broadside against contemporary
music, its composers and its audience; in placing himself on the side of
those who have tried it and quite disliked it (while at the same time
parading his as-
A defense of new music comes from Terry Teachout in this past
Saturday's Wall Street Journal (Terry's tastes and mine
differ by a measurement of light-
"The last couple of times [Stockhausen] came to London, the repellent
trend-jumpers – technoheads, avant rockers, goateed Shoreditch types
– were all over the place," one commenter on Service's entry says,
and this tone and vocabulary are not far different from Queenan's own.
Harrison Birtwistle's new opera, The Minotaur, is "harsh and ugly
and monotonous and generically apocalyptic. Birtwistleites might dismiss
me as a Luddite who despises new music, but the truth is, I find nothing
new in The Minotaur's dreary, brutish score; it's the same funereal
caterwauling that bourgeoisie-
Queenan drags out a few more warhorses from the anti-
Once all these poor rhetorical flourishes are chipped away, one is left
with a sense that what drives all this is the emergence of an inferiority
complex – that Queenan feels that he just doesn't "get it"; his
current response is to imply that there's nothing to "get" in the first
place. Setting aside for the moment the assumption that art is something
that one has to "get," whatever that means, one doesn't need to get past
more than an introductory course in Freud to recognise that Queenan's
attack on this music is an act of aggression towards that which makes him
feel inferior. It comes as no surprise, then, that Queenan descends to
impugning and condemning the motives of the composers themselves –
though to know those motives would be an act of mindreading generally
beyond the parapsychic abilities of middling American humorists. Who to
blame? The composers, made up of "dozens of academics who give each other
awards for music nobody likes"? No? Then maybe it's that other awful
influence on society, those damn kids who make up the audience for the
music: "A certain market for demanding new music can always be found among
brash young urbanites, but this audience is not large, nor well-heeled.
Moreover, it is by no means certain that the affection for new work
survives one's youth, when sonically grating music is mostly a way of
antagonising older people. The central problem in writing music targeting
hipsters is that even hipsters one day stop being hip ..."
Touché, I guess, says this brash young 46-
At least Queenan stops one step short of calling this work "fraudulent" in trying to sell a corrupt bill of goods to a gullible audience. Accusations of fraudulence might work well in determining the behavior of a car salesman or a mortgage banker, but in art the definition of "fraudulent" is, like most definitions in art, in the eye of the beholder. Many have found the work of a director like Jan Fabre "fraudulent"; I and many others do not. On the other hand, I found Romeo Castellucci's production of Hey Girl! last season particularly susceptible to such charges, and I was in the minority there. To each his own, but the use of the word attempts to pin a moral or ethical motive on a work of art which, by some lights, is beyond simple dichotomies as true or false, sincere or fraudulent. In this conception, such labels are irrelevant in discussing a piece of music or a play.
There's nothing wrong with being indifferent to, or even actively
disliking, this kind of music. I don't like some of it myself (though I
must say I find far more in Stockhausen, Penderecki and Berio than Queenan
does). But 1,000-
Most often the rhetoric is aimed at Modernist or Romantic conceptions of the artist – indeed, Modernists and Romantics, rather than Modernism or Romanticism themselves. Even if this were germane to the reception of this music, without Modernism or Modernists we'd have no Baudelaire, Eliot or Beckett (or Wagner, Ibsen or Chekhov, come to that); without Romanticism or Romantics, no Keats, Shelley or Byron. And it is true that these writers (and composers like those mentioned above) find that undermining traditional conceptions of form and content is the only means by which they can express their own innovative, liberating perspectives. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and art does not continue to live and breathe from generation to generation without forms, expectations and assumptions being shattered. That the bourgeoisie is epatered should come as no surprise. The aggression directed at these artists and this art, like Queenan's against these contemporary composers and their music, is indicative not of indifference or dislike, but a need to suppress, to condemn – a puritanical and reactionary project to dump us back in the 18th century, before the work of Darwin, Marx, and Freud indicated the paucity of rationalistic, meliorist Enlightenment thought and social philosophy.
An admission of dislike or indifference towards this art, as I said, is understandable. Taste is personal; it takes all kinds to make up an audience. But hostility towards its audiences and artists is the expression of reactionary hatred towards persons – and, as Freud would point out, hatred emerges from fear. What is it that Queenan and his advocates at Tom Service's blog are so afraid of?
Posted at 9.35 am in /Music
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 14 July 2008
Scenes from an Execution by Howard Barker. Directed by
Richard Romagnoli. Original music by Peter Nilsson. Sound design by Ben
Schiffer. Lighting design by Laura J. Eckelman. Scenic design by Mark
Evancho. Costume design by Julie Emerson. With Jan Maxwell (Galactia),
David Barlow (Carpeta), Alex Draper (Urgentino), Patricia Buckley (Gina
Rivera), Timothy Deenihan (Ostensible), Peter Schmitz
(Prodo/
Making art in Renaissance Venice and the 21st century Western world in Howard Barker's contemporary classic, in a brilliant production with Jan Maxwell by the Potomac Theatre Project
Peter Schmitz and Jan Maxwell
in Scenes from
an Execution
(Photo: Stan Barouh)
Anna Galactia (not unlike the historical Artemisia Gentileschi) is a middle-
Scenes from an Execution, originally written in 1985 as a radio
play and adapted for the stage a few years later, is Howard Barker's most
popular and most frequently-
As Galactia's personal faults become more and more evident, she is more and more at the mercy of the Doge (Alex Draper), an immeasurably better politician who nonetheless is a genuine connoisseur of the painter and her work. At the end of the play, explaining the decision to exhibit the work, he says:
To have lost such a canvas would have been an offence against the artistic primacy of Venice. To have said this work could not be absorbed by the spirit of the Republic would be to belittle the Republic, and our barbarian neighbors would have jeered at us. So we absorb all, and in absorbing it we show our greater majesty. It offends today, but we look harder and we know, it will not offend tomorrow. We force the canvas and the stretcher down the gagging throat, and coughing a little, and spluttering a little, we find, on digestion, it nourishes us! There will be no art outside. Only art inside.
It is this idea of absorption into the community that renders the art powerless to offend, as well as powerless to change the community or the world. (And Galactia's status as a woman in Venice helps this along. "If it had been painted by a man it would have been an indictment of the war, but as it is, painted by the most promiscuous female within a hundred miles of the Lagoon, I think we are entitled to a different speculation," another painter says.) Though it might be easy to leave the Doge with the last word of the play, it belongs as it should to Galactia, whose "Yes" leads her to an honored seat at the table of the powers that first sought to suppress the painting and punish the artist.
Barker denies closure to the issues he raises: these are questions, this is the situation of the artist who accepts patronage and the democratic community which seeks to recognise her in promoting its own self-validation and self-congratulation, and there we have it. Romagnoli's spare production sharpens the focus of the conflict; we never see Galactia's work (indeed, we don't even get to see her sketch; Maxwell's hand as it travels over her sketchpad holds no pencil). We see only the artist and her condition.
Maxwell is a powerful, energetic and sensuous Galactia, who leads her
younger lover, Carpeta (a comically effective David Barlow, who may as
well physically wrap himself around Maxwell's little finger), like a puppy
on a leash; a good lover, not even he can contain her arrogance and
stubbornness. With loose hair flying in all directions, loose clothing
draping over her body's curves and little make-
The day-
Posted at 9.33 am in /Notices
Permanent link to this story
