News & Views
 Print This Post
January 21st, 2011
Terrible Knowledge
 -
Hasek (Alesandro Colla, right) confides in his Army buddy (Nathan Ramos, left) at the motorpool. Photo by Bobae Kim.
Reports and concerns about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) resurface whenever the United States hosts returning soldiers from a war zone. Veterans afflicted with this condition, first described as shell shock (and war neurosis) during World War I, struggle with suicidal and homicidal impulses, alcohol and drug problems, disrupted sleep, intrusive thoughts and images, and other symptoms that put stress on their relationships and render even ordinary activities difficult if not impossible to perform.
In the intimate setting of The Drilling Company, a small off-off Broadway venue that provides an arena for quality productions not yet commercially viable, theater once again afforded a vehicle for exploring the impact of war on its survivors. Joining a long tradition dating back at least to the ancient Greeks (over 2,000 years ago), Eric Henry Sanders shined the klieg lights on a contemporary American war in his drama, Reservoir, a compact play requiring little in the way of staging and props, and able to dramatize its story with just a handful of characters.
The development of PTSD follows “…exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity; or witnessing an event that involves death, injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of another person; or learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury experienced by a family member or other close associate…”1
Further, “…the person’s response to the event must involve intense fear, helplessness, or horror…”2
And, “[t]he disorder may be especially severe or long lasting when the stressor is of human design.”3
In Sanders’s play, Frank Hasek (convincingly portrayed by Alessandro Colla) has recently returned from a first and long deployment in an unspecified theater of operations and can’t stop twitching and checking around corners for hidden threats. Andre (masterfully interpreted by Nathan Ramos), his buddy on the job at the vehicle repair shop on the military base, keeps his symptoms at bay through the wonders of modern chemistry and music piped into his ears.
Marisa, the mother of Hasek’s infant son, pleads, cajoles and finally takes it upon herself to set up an appointment for her oddly behaving partner to see a doctor at the Veterans Administration. Afforded a mere 15 minutes by an overwhelmed system, Hasek lucks out, finding himself in session with a more than understanding psychiatrist (finely acted by Karla Hendrik). Eventually he gets to tell his story, though that alone cannot cure his malady.
Ordered to participate in activities that result in the taking of innocent life, the knowledge that Hasek acquires about the behavior of ordinary people in life-threatening situations continues to haunt him long after he has left the scene. In writing the play, did Sanders have information about real events on the ground in what sounded like Baghdad?
Answering that and other questions in an interview,4 the playwright described doing research for the script by speaking with veterans, including one from the current war in Iraq and another from the historical one in Vietnam. The knowledge he gained from those conversations broadened his understanding of soldiers. He learned about the gruesome reality of life in a combat zone and that most young men enlist for economic reasons.
Originally basing the character of the emotionally wounded soldier on Woyzeck in the eponymous 1837 play by Georg Büchner and additionally inspired by contemporary interpretations of Greek battle tragedies,5 Sanders created Hasek as an amalgam of impressions gathered from his various sources. While the details might reflect actual conditions, the playwright deliberately avoided linking the events in his play to any specific soldier’s experience.
A self-described news junky,6 Sanders had noticed the similarity between the plight of Woyzeck and that of returning soldiers from Afghanistan, including reports of several who had murdered their spouses.7 Drawn to know more and apparently needing to share his newly acquired awareness, the playwright developed Reservoir which, despite numerous revisions, remained essentially the same as originally conceived.
Later in the play, when Marisa keeps her own appointment with Hasek’s psychiatrist, the doctor assures her, “It’s possible he can be the same person again.” But unfolding events onstage put the lie to that assertion and place audience members in the uncomfortable position of helpless bystanders as the ghosts that inhabit Hasek’s mind and control his life prevail, leading to even more bloodshed. Viewers, slow to leave at the play’s conclusion, must then grapple with their own vicarious traumatization.
Reservoir
The Drilling Company
236 West 78th Street
New York, NY 10024
(212)873-9050
____________________________________________________
1 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. American Psychiatric Association, 1994, 424.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Interview with Eric Henry Sanders, January 14, 2011.
5 Jonathan Shay, Odysseus in America, 2002, and Bob Meagher, Herakles Gone Mad, 2006.
6 Op cit.
7 Massachusetts Cultural Council, Three Stages, interview with Eric Henry Sanders, June 4, 2010.
Posted in Theater Reviews |
Print This Post
January 13th, 2011
Color Comes to
Childhood’s Edge
An updated image of the painting Childhood’s Edge can be seen on the Work in Progress page. Work on the turquoise drapery in the background progresses.
Posted in Currently on View |
Print This Post
January 3rd, 2011
The Art of John Kelly:
Embodying Egon Schiele
A man rolls out a record player with a green felt turntable and spins a disk that plays period music while two other men enter, carrying identical signs that note defining moments in the all-too-brief life of Austrian artist, Egon Schiele.
In the next scene, the same man dances with a blank canvas, casting purple shadows on its white expanse, striking poses that capture the angularity of Schiele’s images, and focusing on fingers and hands that move of their own volition.
Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, a combination of theater, dance, video and art, represents a culmination of 28 years of creation and reflection by John Kelly, the writer and performer who plays the young artist. Introduced to Schiele by an art teacher while attending Parson’s School of Design in the late 70s, Kelly fell in love with and then tried to emulate, often in self-portraits, the quality inherent in Schiele’s drawings, especially his line.1 The more he learned as he researched the artist, the greater affinity he felt for the man who drew and painted in Vienna during the second decade of the 1900s.
The artist Egon Schiele had the misfortune, in 1890, to be born into a family in the grip of a syphilitic father who refused treatment, infected his wife (11 years his junior) and gradually lost his mind to his disease, releasing the family when he died in 1904. Two years later, the 16-year-old Egon took his 12-year-old sister Gerti to Trieste on a trip that replicated their parents’ honeymoon.2 In 1912, charged with immorality and seduction for having under-aged girls model for him, Schiele spent 24 days in a local prison.3
Kelly captures that jail time in a video that cycles through the nights and days of his confinement. After an initial encounter with a guard who torches a drawing of a nude girl while a woman’s voice intones in German—perhaps the complainant in the case—the scene alternates between darkness and an overhead view of Schiele on his prison cot bathed in light. The positions he assumes as he tosses and turns echo his artwork, including one with outstretched arms like a crucifixion: the artist as martyr for his work.
In the onstage action that immediately follows, Kelly—wearing an undershirt—lies on the floor and becomes Schiele on the cot while his alter Egons dressed in suits walk around and mirror his movements. The tempo increases and when the Egons disappear, Schiele awakens as if from a dream to ponder the dance with his selves. The scene ends with a wall of stone projected on the screen replaced by his painting of four red-leaved trees. Out of pain comes art.
For Kelly, revisiting Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte provided an opportunity to rework the youthful version that grew out of his early days as an artist long before the success he enjoys now. Originally naming it with the more benign sausage knachwurst, he changed it to blutwurst (bloodwurst) because he found the latter more disgusting.4
To the originally physically challenging production that irreverently focused on telling the story—the truth—he added scenes and infused the entire performance with the gravitas that comes with maturity. The pleasure he experienced in the process surprised him; he didn’t know he would find the desire. The result exceeded his expectations.5
The scenes Kelly added to the original elaborate on Schiele’s relationships with women. First came Wally, a young woman he met in art school who became his model and lover. Then, after his release from jail and an eventual move to a new place, Schiele pursued a more reputable young woman, Edith, who later became his wife and the mother of his children.
Those familiar with Schiele’s paintings and life might have recognized Death and the Maiden, expressive of the artist’s desire to hold onto Wally despite his new marital status. In one scene, Schiele and his lover disappear behind a covered, tent-shaped form and re-emerge with the lifting of the drapery to reveal their faces in place of those in the painting. Life animates art.
Schiele’s wife Edith, the woman who had brought love and stability into his life, at six months pregnant succumbed to the 1918 flu, days before the artist did. In one of the most poignant scenes, the grieving Schiele confronts her body lying where she fell, draws a white chalk line around it, then retraces it, and tenderly, desperately, hugs various parts of her body.
Kelly’s additions and changes, including the ending scene of Schiele’s death, reflect a shift from youth’s blissful ignorance about relationships and their accompanying risks and losses to a more mature awareness of life’s vicissitudes. Browsing John Kelly’s website suggests a restless soul of many talents whose need to express himself requires a multiplicity of art forms.
Despite program notes that proclaim this as the definitive version of Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, Kelly might surprise himself again in another 25 years with an urge to revise the piece, adding to and tweaking it from the vantage point of another quarter century of experience, growth and acquired self-knowledge.
______________________________________________
1 Interview with John Kelly, December 22, 2010.
2 Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele, 1976, 10-11.
3 Galerie St. Etienne exhibit essay, “Egon Schiele as Printmaker,” 2009, 1.
4 Op cit.
5 Op cit.
Posted in Art Reviews, Theater Reviews |
Print This Post
January 2nd, 2011
Edward Hopper
Seeking Solitude in
Modern Times
 - Edward Hopper, Self Portrait (1925-1930, oil on canvas, 25-1/4″ x 20-5/8″), Whitney Museum of American Art, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest, ©Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper.
A museum goer could easily miss it, tucked away in an alcove, the glass-enclosed wall display of two rows of photographs spanning more than fifty years of Edward Hopper’s life: at 21 in the New York Studio School, drawing the nude male model in Robert Henri’s class–fertile ground for the Ashcan School; sketching in Paris around the same time; years later, working on a watercolor of a Maine lighthouse; the older Hopper with his wife Josephine, whom he married at 42; his now older hands, etching; and at 76, sitting near the coal stove in his studio of many years, looking serious if not downright glum.
These pictures of Hopper belong to a cache of over 3,000 items bequeathed, upon the death of his wife, to the Whitney Museum of American Art months after the artist died in 1967. Since its founding as the Whitney Studio (and then Club) by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1914, the museum has provided financial support and exhibition opportunities to a host of home-grown artists, including Hopper, and currently boasts a collection of American art the extent of which becomes apparent as one wanders around the exhibit, Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, and thumbs through the accompanying catalog.
 - Charles Demuth, My Egypt (1927, oil and graphite pencil on fiberboard, 35-3/4″ x 30″). Whitney Museum of American Art, purchase with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
The third venue for a show originally conceived as “a broad survey of American art from 1900-1950 that featured both realist and modernist artists…designed as an introduction for European audiences to American art of this period,”1 the Whitney decided to use its turn to focus “on the realist works that depicted modern life, both urban and rural, while also highlighting the artistic relationships that were most formative for Hopper…”2 On this side of the Atlantic, viewers enjoyed twenty more Hoppers (for a total of 32) as well as additional scholarship attempting to link Hopper’s art with that of his compatriots.
A quick walk-through of the exhibit, however, reveals that Edward Hopper operated in a universe all his own. Part of a group of urban-based artists who depicted city and factory views, folks at work and play, and other topics of life in the then new twentieth century, he labored from a deeply personal place.
The artist must have found validation in a Goethe quote he carried throughout his life:
The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me.3
Expanding on that, Hopper commented:
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.4
Perhaps because the creative experience required encounters with his unconscious, Hopper often found himself stymied in his efforts to produce.
I wish I could paint more. I get sick of reading and going to the movies. I’d rather be painting all the time, but I don’t have the impulse. Of course I do dozens of sketches for oils–just a few lines on yellow typewriter paper–and then I almost always burn them.5
Nevertheless, and much to posterity’s benefit, many sketches did survive to become paintings, more than enough to provide an ample selection for the Whitney’s Modern Times exhibit and to be included in collections throughout the world.
In the show, a few early paintings by Hopper lack the skill so apparent in work a decade later. In Tugboat with Black Smokestack (1908) and Queensborough Bridge (1913), the subject matter generates more interest than the draftsmanship, composition, palette or paint handling, highlights of the artist’s mature work.
Though Hopper might not have yet developed his facility with the brush, a psychologically insightful composition rendered in conté crayon and opaque watercolor, Untitled (the Railroad) (1906-7), demonstrated that he could certainly draw. Peopling a bustling train station with an assortment of types performing a variety of actions, the artist focused attention on an unhappy looking child tagging along behind a woman, perhaps the mother, while a well-dress man boards the train.
 - Edward Hopper, Soir Bleu (1914, oil on canvas, 36″ x 72″). Whitney Museum of American Art, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest, ©Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
With Soir Blue (1914), perhaps inspired by what he had seen on his three trips to Paris between 1906 and 1910, Hopper discovers the emotionally compelling world of color. At a terrace café, six individuals occupy tables while a woman with a painted face and low-cut dress stands erect in the background. Each distinctively pictured, as though a portrait of a personality the viewer should know–Manet (or Courbet) on the right? Van Gogh with the red beard?–none interacts with another, foreshadowing the isolation of the actors in Hopper’s later scenes.
In the primary-colored world of Railroad Crossing (1922-23), the wind, evident in the solitary tree in the foreground, sweeps over a diagonal road that leads the eye to the eponymous crossing. Barely noticeable in the shadow of a yellow house with blue roof and red chimney, a figure of a woman introduces an indeterminate narrative. The house, centrally located and flanked by two telegraph poles, has no visible neighbors.
Not surprising then that Hopper admired the art of, and became good friends with, Charles Burchfield,6 another realist whose work evolved into idiosyncratic depictions of town and country views devoid of human presence, like the two desolate winter street scenes included in the show. Each artist wrote about the other over the course of their lives.
 - Edward Hopper, Seven A. M. (1948, oil on canvas, 30-3/16″ x 40-1/8″). Whitney Museum of American Art, purchase and exchange, ©Whitney Museum of American Art.
Absent inhabitants, classics like Railroad Sunset (1929), Early Sunday Morning (1930). and Seven A.M. (1948) imply an observer wandering alone while others gather elsewhere.
 Edward Hopper, New York Interior (ca. 1921, oil on canvas, 24-1/4 x 29-1/4). Whitney Museum of American Art, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest, ©Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art.  Edward Hopper, South Carolina Morning (1955, oil on canvas, 30-9/16" x 40-1/4"). Whitney Museum of American Art, given in memory of Otto L. Spaeth by his Family, ©Whitney Museum of American Art. Paintings by Hopper that do include figures, like New York Interior (1921), Night Windows (1928), Gas (1940), South Carolina Morning (1955), and A Woman in the Sun (1961)–all in the show–come upon subjects engaged in solitary activities, oblivious to the onlooker who keenly watches them.
In searching for the perfect image to depict the ephemeral intersection of psyche and experience–reality filtered through the soul–Hopper found himself peering into the private moments of others and wandering around unpopulated locations. In the cacophony of modern times, he sought and perhaps finally found the freedom of existence inherent in solitude.
___________________________________________
1 Sasha Nicholas, co-curator, in a communication from the Whitney’s press office.
2 Ibid.
3 Quoted by Peter Findlay in Edward Hopper: The Capezzera Drawings, 2005, 2.
4 Ibid, 22.
5 Ibid, 14.
6 Barbara Haskell in Modern Life. Edward Hopper and His Time, 2010, 49.
Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue (at 75th Street)
New York, NY 10021
(212) 570-3600
Catalog available.
Posted in Art Reviews |
Print This Post
December 25th, 2010
Work in Progress:
Childhood’s Edge
An updated image of the painting Childhood’s Edge can be seen on the Work in Progress page. The underpainting has been completed and work on the turquoise drapery in the background has been started. Stay tuned for more color, coming soon.
Posted in Currently on View |
Print This Post
December 19th, 2010
Drive to Draw
Trumps Handicap
In all three of his books featuring old master drawings as instructional aides for depicting figures and learning artistic anatomy, Robert Beverly Hale (during his lifetime, a sought-after teacher at the Art Students League) included several examples from the hand of Edgar-Hilaire-Germaine Degas (1834-1917). Hale singled out Degas’s “marvelous knowledge of anatomy”1 and explained that “[m]uch of Degas’ [sic] drawing is achieved by variety in the handling of his line and values.”2
From classically trained beginnings, Degas’s evolution as a draftsman took an unforeseen turn around 1870 when, while doing voluntary military service during the Franco-Prussian war, he began to experience visual problems. Finding “bright lights intolerable,” he “was forced to work indoors in a controlled environment.”3
A few years later, during an extended visit with family in New Orleans, the artist resigned himself to permanent loss of visual acuity in his right eye. Describing his affliction in a letter written during his travels to his friend and fellow artist James Tissot, Degas focused on what he still had rather than on what he had lost:
What lovely things I could have done, and done rapidly if the bright daylight were less unbearable for me. To go to Louisiana to open one’s eyes, I cannot do that. And yet I kept them sufficiently half open to see my fill.4
Added to his problems with glare, Degas soon began to suffer from a centrally located scotoma, a discreet area of impaired vision. In an 1874 letter to Tissot he expressed his fear of going blind:
My eyes are fairly well but all the same I shall remain in the ranks of the infirm until I pass into the ranks of the blind. It is really bitter, is it not? Sometimes I feel a shiver of horror.5
From his forties onward, Degas persisted in creating art despite his partial blindness. By age 57, he could no longer see well enough to read. That year, in a letter to another friend, Degas complained:
I see even worse this winter, I do not even read the newspapers a little…Ah! Sight! Sight! Sight!…the difficulty of seeing makes me feel numb.6
In Degas: Drawings and Sketchbooks at The Morgan Library & Museum, in a one-room exhibition displaying works on paper in oil and dry mediums mostly from Degas’s early years, only one suggested the radical stylistic changes necessitated by the encroaching blindness of his later years. The 19 works on paper accompanied by two sketchbooks and some memorabilia, all from the museum’s own collection, demonstrate the skill with which this artist refined his observations to produce arresting images, some of which found their way into fully realized paintings.
 - Self-Portrait in a Brown Vest (1856, oil on paper, mounted on canvas).
Beginning with the typical student fare of self-portraits and a nude male study produced in his early 20s, the selection included the expected ballerina and racehorse pictures associated with Degas, and surprised with Ingres-inspired portraits of some friends.
 - Study of a Seated Woman (1868-69, oil paint thinned with turpentine, over graphite, on tan paper, mounted on canvas).
Two oil sketches, Study of a Seated Woman (1868-69) and Standing Man in a Bowler Hat (ca.1870), both done on tan paper, relate to a painting of a still undecipherable narrative dated around the same time. Interior (Philadelphia Museum) depicts a woman seated in much the same way as that in the sketch and, on the other side of the room leaning with his back to the door, a man similar in attitude to that of the Standing Man.
In light of the approximate dating of Standing Man and its similarity of execution to the Seated Woman, it might represent one idea among many entertained by Degas before he settled on the final version. In the study, the man looks down his nose. In the painting, he glares at the woman turned away from him on the other side of the dimly-lit room.
 - Seated Dancer (ca. 1871, oil paint thinned with turpentine over pencil, on pink paper).
Still working with turpentine-thinned oil on toned paper, Degas turned his attention to the ballet, where the gas-lit interior of the Opéra provided intriguing effects and mitigated his problems with glare. One of many preparatory studies for Dance Class at the Opéra on the Rue le Peletier (Musée d’Orsay), Seated Dancer (ca. 1871) exemplifies the artist’s drawing skill, knowledge of anatomy, and confident handling of paint. With brilliant economy, he reserved the pink of the paper for the light on the dancer’s back, the shine on her satin shoes and the highlights on her skirt. Her dangling neck ribbon defines the curve of her back.
 - Three Studies of a Dancer (ca. 1880, black chalk, Conte crayon [?], and pink chalk, heightened with white chalk, on blue paper faded to light brown).
In his late forties when he drew Three Studies of a Dancer (ca. 1880), Degas might have found working three-dimensionally a more manageable way to continue his investigations into the form and movement of bodies–dancing or at rest. In this study, the artist depicted his model from three different views as a prelude to sculpting the well-known Little Dancer, Fourteen Years Old.
In rendering the dancer’s pose–hands clasped palms down behind the back–Degas carefully observed the rotation of the arms and movement of the shoulder blades, depicting the strain inherent in the awkward position. Pentimenti around the far left foot reveals Degas’s design decision to make the foot visible from behind.
 -
Landscape with Path Leading to a Copse of Trees (ca. 1890-92, pastel over monotype in thinned oil paint).
Over a decade later, when Degas executed Landscape with Path Leading to a Copse of Trees (ca. 1890-92), reading had become impossible for him. This monotype, one of 50 he painted based on the countryside he observed during a trip to visit his friend, painter and printmaker Georges Jeanniot, eerily echoes how the world must look to someone with a scotoma in his central field of vision.7
With the medium of monotype, Degas could return to oil paints, which his failing vision had forced him to replace with the easier-to-handle pastels. The process entailed “roughly indicat[ing] elements of the landscape with a brush” on a metal plate, then running “the plate through a press,” which produced a print that he could then “enhance with pastels.”8
In much the same way he did in his pastels of dancers and bathers of the 1890s, in Landscape with Path, Degas deftly deployed color accents and arranged the subject in an arresting composition. Flowers dot the field, a path runs diagonally up to the right, creating a zigzag pattern where it meets the horizon line and takes the eye past the contrast of dark trees to the pink and blue sky beyond.
Despite his visual handicap, Degas gave the world enough paintings, pastels, prints and drawings to populate collections around the world and influence generations of artists. Quite possibly, had he not suffered from a visual handicap, he might never have found his way to the daring work of his later years.
But then again, had his eyesight never faltered, with the added benefit of normal vision, combined with his expert draftsmanship, love of color, and always inquisitive mind, he might have evolved even more intriguing modes of expression.
_____________________
1 Robert Beverly Hale, Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters, 1989, 244.
2 Robert Beverly Hale, Master Class in Figure Drawing, 1991, 59.
3 Eliana Coldham, et al., Art, Vision and the Disordered Eye, Vision and Aging Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Calgary (www.psych.ucalgary.ca), 2002.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 See Retinopathy at http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/pace/va-lab/avde-website/retinopathy.html.
8 Explanatory text, The Morgan Library & Museum.
Degas: Drawings and Sketchbooks
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016-3405
(212)685-0008
www.themorgan.org
Posted in Art Reviews |
Print This Post
December 17th, 2010
Rx for Happiness:
Be Here Now
Minds stray more than 30 percent of the time during all activities (except perhaps sex). Regardless of whether one’s thoughts turn to worrisome or pleasant topics, letting them wander correlates with a downward shift in mood.
To gather the data, researchers employed a specially created iPhone app that randomly prompted experimental subjects to report on current activities, feelings and thoughts, rating the last two as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Positive thoughts failed to uplift mood, and negative and neutral ones made people feel worse.
Reported in Science News, the results speak only to the short-term effect of reveries. The scientists did acknowledge that letting one’s mind range beyond the task at hand might be beneficial in the long run, offering opportunities to reflect on the past and plan for the future.
The study seems to reinforce the notion that living in the moment enhances well-being. Though not part of the comments quoted in the article, the findings raise questions about whether the concentration problems of those suffering from various anxiety disorders (including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) contribute to their general inability to feel good (anhedonia), a defining symptom of depression.
Posted in Therapist Musings |
Print This Post
December 8th, 2010
Demand Grows for
Art About Addiction
What began with annual exhibits and coalesced into a volume of images and statements by artists affected by alcoholism and other addictions has found a home on the Web. Margaret Dowell, who along with Patricia B. Santora and Jack E. Henningfield (all PhDs) shepherded that process over the course of several years, has taken it upon herself, with the help of webmaster Don Dunsmore to launch the Addiction and Art website.
Originally supported by the now defunct Innovators Combating Substance Abuse Program, a national program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the Art and Addiction annual competitions invited artists to submit work related to their experiences with alcohol and other substances, provided an exhibition opportunity and gave cash awards to the best of them.
In 2008, that year’s selected pieces traveled to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for display at the annual scientific meeting of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence. Two years later, the Johns Hopkins University Press published the story of the Art and Addiction exhibitions in a professional volume now called Addiction and Art. A review on these pages highlighted the power of these images to convey the suffering of those caught up in substance abuse and dependence, either their own or that of someone close to them.
With the goal of fostering the use of visual art to enhance awareness and sensitivity to the devastating effects of addiction and to assist others interested in sponsoring similar art competitions and shows, Innovators had developed a replicable protocol, included in the book. Dr. Dowell began the new website as a way to encourage and document these shows. In an email, she had this to say:
I had been involved in organizing several, including the model at Carroll Community College (where I am an adjunct professor), and helped with writing the Innovators guidelines for Addiction and Art Exhibitions. I witnessed the masses that turned out for these shows – the galleries were PACKED…..there is so much interest in this topic.
She soon noticed another need. Visitors to the site wanted images they could use immediately in their prevention and treatment efforts. Currently exploring how to make that happen, Dr. Dowell continues to build a community of artists and professionals interested in harnessing the power of images to confront addiction. Stay tuned.
Posted in Therapist Musings |
Print This Post
December 1st, 2010
Apollo & Dionysus:
Rooming Together
 Kjell Bjarne startles awake in a dorm-like room, jumps out of bed and looks around for a suspected presence, eventually finding Elling in the wardrobe. Exiting the closet, this new arrival attempts to conceal a notebook and explains that he moved in while the other man slept. After they share names, Kjell asks Elling, “What are you here for?”
The conversation that follows reveals their location–a state psychiatric hospital in Oslo–and their very different natures. They find commonality in not having any need to be there and display profound differences in their descriptions of how they came to be committed.
Elling: The government generously supplies places – – for people who are in a – – hectic phase in their lives. After some coercion I accepted.
Kjell: I was jumped on by six policemen, tied up in a strait-jacket, thrown in the back of a paddy wagon and beaten unconscious.
Elling, constrained in body, thought and deed, can barely abide Kjell Bjarne, impulsive, careless and slovenly dressed. Flash forward two years: they find themselves on the way to a new life in a government-financed apartment, supervised by Frank, a cigarette-smoking social worker assigned to help them navigate re-entry into the real world.
The plot of Elling focuses on their challenges. Elling must overcome his agoraphobia to leave the house and Kjell Bjarne must act appropriately despite his obsession with bedding a woman. Their case manager, a thorn in their collective side, threatens rehospitalization when they falter at the beginning. Later Elling comes to rely on him for help when a crisis in Kjell’s new relationship sends his friend to bed for four days. Ultimately, Frank declares the roommates normal for doing what Elling fears qualifies them for recommitment.
But the real action lies in the way that both Denis O’Hare as Elling and Brendan Fraser as Kjell Bjarne inhabit the bodies of their characters, bringing these unlikely roommates to life. In the course of the play, the audience learns that Elling’s hospitalization followed the death of his possessive mother, with whom he was Oedipally close, and that Kjell Bjarne frequently carried his drunk mother to bed.
Their psychological ticks align perfectly with their histories, lending credibility to all the action and conflict that provide the play’s drama. Exceptionally entertaining, at times bordering on the vaudevillian, Elling delights as well with poignant moments and brilliant dialog:
Kjell: The government sent me to a special school, where they only taught idiots.
Alfons (the poet): My parents sent me to a special school, where only idiots taught.
Unfortunately, New York’s theater-going public didn’t seem to get the joke or appreciate the broader references. Soon after the previews, the producers announced the play’s closing due to lackluster ticket sales, undoubtedly compromised further by the negative review of an all-too-influential drama critic who seems to have an aversion to psychologically challenging material.
The juxtaposition of the divergent personality types represented by Apollonian Elling and Dionysian Kjell Bjarne personifies the ancient mind-body split. Apollo, sun god, associated with truth, rational thought and poetry, exists in contrast to that other son of Zeus, Dionysus (aka Bacchus), god of wine, who spreads ecstasy through intoxication and pursuit of primal pleasures.
Elling’s path to himself, barricaded by his mother’s restrictions and admonitions, leads through discovery of his inner poet, assisted by the lapsed writer Alfons (perfectly played by Richard Easton). But Elling would never have ventured outside without Kjell’s insistent drive to engage with a woman. When that opportunity lands outside their apartment door and Kjell automatically assumes a caretaking role with her, Elling goes into a jealous rage that speaks volumes about his mother’s reactions to him and impels him on a quest of his own that leads to a poetry reading.
Kjell Bjarne, the epitome of pure id, raised by a woman enslaved to Bacchus, fights the excessively rational constraints imposed by Elling but also learns from them. Each man functions better by virtue of his contact with the other.
Flesh and blood examples of the dangers of extremism in any direction, the characters of Elling and Kjell Bjarne have much to teach viewers courageous enough to find bits of themselves in both the uptight poet and his guileless sidekick. Normality, however defined, must surely depend on living at peace with all aspects of oneself.
Posted in Theater Reviews |
Print This Post
November 28th, 2010
European Art Between the Wars:
Pay No Attention to that
Rubble Behind the Column
In her thoughtful classic, Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman addressed the fickle nature of society’s attention to the wounds of war (as well as to other human-inflicted assaults on individuals, like the sexual abuse of children).
Citing the medical community’s involvement in the treatment of “shell shock,” the diagnosis that emerged from the Great War, which conflated explosions’ concussive effects on the brain with the emotional damage inflicted by the horrors of trench warfare, Herman described how “[w]ithin a few years after the end of the war, medical interest in the subject of psychological trauma faded once again.”1
 - Otto Dix, Skin Graft (Transplantation) from The War (Der Krieg) (1924, etching, aquatint, and drypoint, 7-7/8″ x 5-3/4″), The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS).
It returned during World War II, disappeared soon after, then reemerged again with the United States’s military involvement in Vietnam, officially becoming Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in 1980. Now, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ struggles–both on battlefields and stateside–to manage their traumatic stress, once again challenges psychiatry to attend to the psychological wounds of war.
In keeping with humanity’s innate drive toward attaining pleasure and avoiding pain, and reeling from the devastation of a war that killed over 16 million and injured millions more, leveled cities and obliterated landscapes, what was left of the population of Europe retrenched, desperate to embrace any semblance of order.
In a masterful curatorial feat, Kenneth E. Silver dove into a sea of European art from the 20s and 30s and emerged with works to support his thesis about the resurgence of the classical ideal during those in-between years. In Chaos & Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936, an exhibit at the New York Guggenheim Museum, he has chosen mostly paintings and sculptures, with occasional photographs and film, to highlight this unsurprising recoil from the intolerable reality of the ruins of the first world war. Silver interprets this turn to columns, monumental edifices and figures, and machine-inspired precision, as evidence of Europe’s compelling need to retrieve the grandeur of a much earlier period in Western civilization and forget about its capacity for mass murder and destruction.
Retreating from the free-wheeling creations of the pre-war avant-garde, culture in the years leading up to the next conflagration veered right in its insistence on constraint and conformity, and on adherence to newly established standards. A shell-shocked populace, artists included, hitched their hopes to rising stars who promised security but instead delivered up Fascism and Nazism, logical but disastrous consequences of suppressing difference and dissent.
The exhibit begins at the bottom of the building’s ramp, opens with Pablo Picasso’s Bust of a Woman and some words of his that set the tone for what ensues. “The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it’s more alive today than it ever was. Art does not evolve by itself, the idea [sic] of people change, and with them the mode of expression.”
Following that, one can stroll into the nearby gallery and view a selection of 15 prints from Otto Dix’s Der Krieg (War), graphic depictions derived from personal experience of exploded buildings, mangled bodies, and other trench detritus. Reminders for those too eager to forget, these images refuse to participate in the collective denial epitomized by the balance of the work on display.
To strengthen the point of the exhibit, the curator omitted works by artists who, like Dix, insisted on portraying reality. In Germany, the prints of Käthe Kollwitz (Never Again War! [1924]) and Max Beckman (Hell [1919]), and almost everything by George Grosz, stand out as exceptions to the general trend presented here. Even Salvador Dalí, known for his self-serving, right-leaning politics, painted forebodings about Hitler (The Enigma of Hitler [1938]) and the Spanish Civil War (Soft Construction with Boiled Beans [1936]).
 - Pablo Picasso, The Source (La source) (1921, oil on canvas, 25-3/8″ x 35-3/8″), Moderna Museet, Stockholm © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Although well represented with a number of paintings from his classical period, Picasso continued to march to no one’s drummer but his own. Appalled by the 1937 bombing of Guernica, that same year he lavished considerable creative energy on producing one of Europe’s greatest anti-war paintings, Guernica, in a distinctly nonclassical manner.
The art included in the exhibit after Dix, perhaps because of its regression toward the norm, mostly lacks depth and in many cases, craft. Interfering with the viewing experience, the architecture of the Guggenheim building forces the interested to stand some five feet from the paintings and ricochet between the elusive wall text and its distant referent.
 - Mario Sironi, Leader on Horseback (Condottiero a cavallo) (1934–35, mixed media on canvas, 114-3/8″ x 108-1/4″), MART Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Arranged in seven categories, roughly chronological, the exhibit takes the viewer upwards toward the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. The best of the work reaches back to Greco-Roman and Renaissance art for the sake of meaningful expression rather than for the glorification of Nazi and Fascist leaders, although in the final gallery illustrating The Dark Side of Classicism, Mario Sironi’s almost ten-foot-high Leader on Horseback (Condottiero a cavallo) (1934-35) excels in its ability to exploit the power of paint on canvas to aggrandize a military personage.
Self-portraits, like those of Carl Hofer (1932), Fridel Dethleffs-Edelman (1932) and Dix (1931), along with portraits by Alfred Courmes (Peggy Guggenheim [1932]) and, especially, Picasso’s Olga (1923) use a variety of approaches to excellent psychological effect.
Paintings by Marcel Gromaire (War [La Guerre] [1925]) and Barthel Gilles (Ruhr Battle [Barricade] [1929-30]) demonstrate that art could still convey the reality of war within the confines of existing styles.
An unusual sheet-iron figure, Antinous (1932) by Pablo Gargallo, while Greek in subject matter uses flat planes and lines to define a figure in space, deviating significantly from the other, far more representational, figurative sculptures.
The excellent catalog accompanying the exhibit convincingly links many European artists and their oeuvre with the rise of right-wing ideologues, some because of their own political beliefs, others out of expediency. Apparently little had changed since Greek and then Roman sculptors and painters served power hungry aristocrats and clergy, benefiting from the lucrative patronage.
One wonders what curator Silver might uncover after rummaging around in the art produced in Europe since World War II. Would he find European artists still turning to the rich and powerful for support and if so, what form does that patronage take now? While waiting for the sequel, viewers can enjoy the gems in this show at the Guggenheim and work off that frappuccino hiking up the ramp.
_________________________________
1 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992, 23.
Chaos & Classicism:
Art in France, Italy and Germany
1918-1936
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Muesum
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York, NY 10128-0173
(212)423 3500
Catalog available.
Posted in Art Reviews |
|
