Hilma af Klint: The Spiritual in Art

Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction

Edited by Iris Müller-Westermann Just before her death in 1944 at the age of 81, the Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint stipulated that her paintings were not to be publicly exhibited for 20 years. In fact, another 40-plus years were to pass before inklings of her vast oeuvre began to reach public consciousness, with the landmark 1987 exhibition and book The Spiritual in Art. Since then, critics, artists and historians have praised her with ever-increasing awe, and today af Klint's paintings, watercolors and sketches—numbering over 1,000 in total—have never looked so contemporary, presaging as they do the works of Beatriz Milhazes, Elizabeth Murray and Tal R., and Agnes Martin, Emma Kunz and Arthur Dove before them. For af Klint herself, as a medium for an art she was despairingly unable to comprehend, contemporaneity was irrelevant: her work—much of which was dictated by a spirit guide named Ananda—unfolded in complete ignorance of Kandinsky, Malevich or Mondrian, who likewise practised an abstraction informed by theosophy and occult philosophy. Af Klint's abstractions preceded those of Kandinsky, who is usually credited with inventing abstract painting: as early as 1906, she was devising large-scale canvases filled with grids, circles, spirals and petal-like forms—sometimes diagrammatic, sometimes biomorphic. She was painting watercolor monochromes in 1916, and making automatic drawings long before the Surrealists. This monumental 280-page monograph, with 200 color plates, is the first full Hilma af Klint overview. A landmark publication, it not only reveals the moving lucidity of her art, but challenges the narrative of abstract art in the twentieth century.

lifted from: http://www.newmuseumstore.org/browse.cfm/hilma-af-klint:-a-pioneer-of-abstraction/4,6176.html

Scoliosis debut starring Frances MacDormand

Reposted from Wall Street Journal article:

NY CULTURE

'Bodycast' Won't Confine This Actress

Oscar-winner Frances McDormand Relays Artist's Trauma      By 

LIZZIE SIMON - 

Nov. 26, 2013 10:16 p.m. ET

Frances McDormand runs through her lines. Alison Rosa

For four sold-out nights in December, Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand will deliver a monologue with little more on stage besides her, a PowerPoint presentation and off to the side, a woman feeding her lines via an earpiece.

The woman, Suzanne Bocanegra, is the creator of "Bodycast," a theater work that delves into her experience as a teenager in Texas with scoliosis, a condition that causes the spine to curve and was, in her words, "a social trauma."

"It sucked," she said. "I went to a large Catholic high school, and I had to wear a uniform over my body cast that didn't fit."

She and Ms. McDormand, who declined to comment on the performance, met at a 2011 experimental-performance festival where Ms. Bocanegra's first theater piece, "When a Priest Marries a Witch," was being shown. Ms. McDormand said over post-show drinks that she wanted to work on her next project, Ms. Bocanegra said.

"I told her that I had two stories left to tell," said Ms. Bocanegra, who, like Ms. McDormand, is 56 years old. "One about my grandparents' farm in La Grange [Texas], and one about the two years I spent in high school in a body cast. She said, 'I'll take the body cast.'"

The setting is spare, as it would be for a museum lecture, with the presentation behind Ms. McDormand, who is standing. The vocalist Theo Bleckmann and former dancer Emily Coates make appearances, adding further theatrical elements to the work.

Neither Ms. McDormand, who won her Academy Award for "Fargo" and has been nominated three other times, nor Ms. Bocanegra will be elaborately costumed. "We're not really sure what we're wearing," Ms. Bocanegra said. "But it will be something out of our closets."

Ms. Bocanegra, whose work as a visual artist has been shown at London's Serpentine Gallery and Los Angeles Hammer Museum, began her path to theater with an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art to present an artist's talk. "I wanted to push it somewhere outside of myself, and outside of a slide presentation," she said.

She penned her story of becoming an artist, titled it "When a Priest Marries a Witch," and turned it over to Paul Lazar, an actor and director with a 20-year history of melding words, music and dance as co-artistic director of the New York-based Big Dance Theater.

He agreed to perform "When a Priest Marries a Witch," and after its MoMA premiere, the pair hit the road, presenting it in museums and festivals across the country.

"Suzanne is quietly animating the world on stage with her ideas," said Mr. Lazar. "Visual artists act from such an intuitive and mysterious place, and yet Suzanne can describe the way her art mind works in a disarmingly simple, direct and surprising way."

For a 2011 performance at City University of New York's Prelude Festival, he invited Ms. McDormand, who he had worked with in the 2010 Wooster Group production of "North Atlantic," a military satire. By the end of the evening, the three of them had decided to tackle "Bodycast."

In "Bodycast," Mr. Lazar switched to the director role. Ms. McDormand, as the lead performer, tells the stories as if they were hers, but Ms. Bocanegra has an onstage presence too, feeding the lines to Ms. McDormand.

The three of them rehearsed in an unusual venue. Beyond the living room and kitchen in Ms. Bocanegra's SoHo loft, there is a 40-seat theater with a 12-by-14-foot stage outfitted with a lighting and sound system by theater designers Jim Findlay and Jody Elff.

It is a throwback, said Ms. Bocanegra's husband, the composer David Lang, to a long-ago era when artists could afford to live and work in SoHo, collaborating and performing in each others' lofts. "There's a historical re-enactment thing going on," he said.

Within earshot of the theater is Mr. Lang's own studio, which allowed for eavesdropping through "Bodycast's" creative process. "It was very free-flowing," he said. "Because they're three people working in this tiny environment in this intense way, everyone was in everyone else's department."

It is Mr. Lazar's favorite theater in New York. "Its purpose is to be a place for artists to try ideas out and benefit from the response of other artists," he said. "It's a collective brain or heart, pulsing away and producing exquisite life and art experiences, outside of the ever-exasperating arena of critics and presenters."

"Bodycast" is even further outside the professional environment where Ms. McDormand typically dwells, but Mr. Lazar wasn't surprised that she attached herself to it.

"Fran is a free spirit," he said, "whose nature is to jump at what excites her."

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304011304579222020557961620

Adoption Rates of Consumer Technologies

if-famous-historical-events-took-place-in-the-age-of-instagram-20-pictures {histograms}

http://twentytwowords.com/2013/11/19/if-famous-historical-events-took-place-in-the-age-of-instagram-20-pictures/

Love by Leo Bascalia

http://instagram.com/p/hAJGygK9mX/

Notes from "Hitchcock"

Aesthetic comparison between "Psycho," "Silence of the Lambs" and "Hitchcock."  The cheesification of the performance of an artist performing on the edge, trying to evoke the aesthetics and yet reveal something more historical.  The role of the woman, the wife, the obsession, the fetishization of surveillance, the nefarious aspects of the late Eisenhower years - its prudish obsession with secrecy around sex and violence, the demonization of the queer.  The sexual repression of Hitchcock and the utter sexual frustration of the marriage of aesthetic minds battling and ultimately coming to celebrate on another, the dual of the sexes.  What "Psycho" says about Alma, feminism, misogyny.

How could Jonathan Demme be so devoted to Hitchcock, the master controller. What about the tragic, twisted, sociopathic queer.  Jodie Foster as contemporary Alma Hitchcock.

The brilliance of the casting - Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, the ultimate sexy older woman, brilliant inspiration actress.  Anthony Hopkins who made Hannibal Lector a household name, returns to play the master himself.  And Scarlett Johansson as the coquettish sex kitten California dumb actress with savy appeal and perky period appropriate physique.  Finally, the brilliant Toni Collette hiding behind the perfect proto-Mad Men all-knowing secretary who secretely writes the history.

Just wondering....

Dia on Facebook

New Yorker resident feminist responds to Oscar horror

She's a bit more strident than I would have been, but her catalog of the night's lowest and deepest curves is full.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/02/seth-macfarlane-and-the-oscars-hostile-ugly-sexist-night.html

Source: newyorker.com via topiary on Pinterest

Embarrassment is the Key to Enlightenment: Tiny Furniture and the Composition of Meta-Mumblecore

Paul Schrader, in the DVD extra which is his interview essay about Tiny Furniture, compares Lena Dunham to James Franco.  His hilarious suggestion is that many of Franco's contemporaries don't like him because he is too talented in too many areas.  Like a 'frumpy, NY Jewish girl of privilege' version of Franco, Schrader suggests that our natural reaction to Lena Dunham is "why the fuck her?"  Paul Schrader says, "she spurs envy."

Totally.  We are annoyed by Lena because she's so successful.  We are annoyed by her because she was born into that privileged, New York City cultural elite, a child of successful New York artists who has become even more famous than her parents and at a way younger age.  And then there's that creepy, apocryphal line in the film when Dunham's actual mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, playing the main character's successful artist mother, says to Aura: "oh, you will be more successful than I am, really, believe me."

As Schrader so brilliantly suggests in his interview on the DVD extra,  Tiny Furniture  is appropriating the mumblecore genre.  Our contemporary obsession with the minutia of self, write DIY as videos in which "me and my friends are gonna make a movie about me and my friends talking about me and my friends."   Schrader suggests that Tiny Furniture is too representative of its genre and that this "too representative-ness" is what creates the hostility.   He suggests that this movie about a young woman who only worries about herself and takes her clothes off, makes us want to slap her.  Schrader assures us that he believes the film to be tightly scripted and well-written, which uses good storytelling.  But then he claims that it's good filmmaking pretending to be "amateur" and that's where we differ.   I don't think Tiny Furniture is pretending to be amateur at all. I think it's aspiring to be photographic and cinematic and metaphoric in the most foreign filmy type of way.  The only false or ironic note I detect is when Aura claims she hates foreign films.

Which brings to me to the question: what is Tiny Furniture about?  Is it the failure of composition to protect us from embarrassment?  Is it the beauty of, the preciousness of the minute, the intimate, the horror/the necessity of the 'real,' the elusiveness of it. It is anamorphic, expressively photographic, landscapes of embarrassment, striving, jealousy.  The fear of loss, of losing what you maybe don't yet even have.  Dunham frames the innate ugliness, the selfish entitlement of the world in which she is a happy yet reluctant member.  She questions what passes for success in the New York City these days, she questions the values of her world even as she expresses them in a glossy, shallow depth of field lushness.  Schrader says that Dunham's emphasis on composition is a kind of artistic proof of her work, evidence of her structuring and originality.

Finally, Schrader asks if the film is a representative of Future Film or of a dying genre.  "In many ways, (it is) an old fashioned film wearing these new raggedy clothes."  I dunno, Paul, those clothes don't look so raggedy.  5D digital filmmaking is looking mighty fine in that indie NY Tribeca loft.  If the film is representative of anything, I would say, it's the enduring power of French film, of European cinema, as much as Woody Allen, to inspire a young American woman of today to be her powerful, self-deprecating self.

Ultimately, I think Tiny Furniture is about getting all the mistakes out of the way.  It is about being a loser, and what is lost is the kind of virginity that New York demands its citizens lose, even today, after all these gentrifying years later, all these years of wealth and power and slickness later, you still have to get fucked in order to live here.  And, Dunham's character endures through all humiliation in order to finally get her tickling time in bed with her mother.


Lena on Nora Ephron:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/06/lena-dunham-remembers-nora-ephron.html

I love that Lena loves Nora.  Nora Ephron, married to Carl Bernstein, wrote the novel and then directed her own film version of their bitter breakup and divorce.  Nora and Lena talk about Woody Allen and the ways he influenced both of them in the DVD extras of the Criterion Collection's "Tiny Furniture."