Star Trek makes good

I love the movies and I see a lot of them. I don't usually write about them, though, largely because it's time-consuming (and movies get plenty of press.) Furthermore, when I do write up a movie, it's usually one that is seriously moving, especially artistic, or under-appreciated.

Star Trek Into Darkness is none of these. But I enjoyed it immensely. The franchise had lapsed for a while, most likely because some of the movies were lame or worse. What I liked best about this one was that it felt a lot like watching an episode of the original sixties TV version, with Shatner and Nimoy, except, of course, that the special effects are now on steroids. (I even broke my Imax-3D virginity and was duly rewarded with visual spectacle and pzazz. It was fun!)

I give the writers a lot of credit for recreating the characters, moods, and campy atmosphere of the dialogue from the sixties, something to which most of the previous Trek movies didn't aspire. I had to wonder, as I heard sporadic chuckling from around me in the audience, whether anyone who has never seen the original series would appreciate the humor injected into scene after scene.

Kirk was the cowboy congenitally disposed to break rules and disobey orders, Spock was excruciatingly inscrutable, Scotty suitably apoplectic, and Uhura both sultry and self-assured. "Bones" had many of the best lines. Some seemed lifted straight from the TV series (e.g., "Damn it, Jim; I'm a doctor, not a torpedo technician!")

If you are a hard core Trekkie I think you'll especially like the attention to details such as the incidental presence of a Tribble. (Don't worry, it's not subtle.)

Of course it wasn't all fun and games. Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as the villainous Kahn, which he plays with thoroughly humorless intensity. And, like any action-adventure movie, you had to suspend disbelief in spades (just how many blows to the head can Kirk take without major, lasting trauma, anyway?)

But enough--if you want to read some real reviews, check them out on Rotten Tomatoes where the movie is rated at 86% / 89%. Hey, with ratings that high, they can't all be Trekkies!

Hard Ecology: A new book in more ways than one!

Hard Ecology: Rethinking Nature in an Abstract Landscape represents a new direction for me as far as book design goes. Up to now I've been happy with the books I've done before. These include two fairly traditional books, which include a significant amount of text, as well as several photographic monographs. All of these can be seen on my website. 

Hard Ecology differs because I conceived it as a Fine Art Book. While the themes follow directly from work I've been doing for many years, the book design is a deliberate departure from the earlier books. The new book is now available to preview in its entirety with no obligation to purchase at MagCloud.com.

The following is my introduction (which actually appears at the end of the book.) 

Ours is a time of reckoning. Depending upon your point of view, we have either reached the “end of nature” or we are on the cusp of a new nature, one that reflects our own agency—for good or ill. Once we inhabited nature. Paradoxically, it also inhabited us. But we were always a little uncomfortable wearing nature on the inside—as if it were a disease. Exterior nature we pummeled and paved. We built our palaces on top of it and excreted our effluents into its veins. Our interior natures we psychoanalyzed and medicated. We molded our physical natures with fitness regimens, dietary supplements, liposuction and Botox. We believed all along in our dominion over nature. Some still believe. Solutions to climate change, overpopulation, mass extinction, and other seemingly intractable problems—they claim—are at hand. Salvation will come in the form of genetic modification, nanotechnology, renewable energy…

Emerson (1836): Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man.

McKibben (1989): Since nothing on earth remains unchanged by man, we are at the “end of nature.”

It is a time of reckoning. Understanding our place in the world that we have wrought will be a hard lesson in ecology. We have tamed the wilderness, shaped nature, tried to design it into submission. Nature has been transformed, reduced, and abstracted. Nature is increasingly compromised or redeemed by our own actions. But nature is not—never has been—separate from us, from what is human. We have always been part of nature, inseparable except in our own minds.

Ecology is the study of relationships in the natural world. There can be no complete understanding of ecology without knowing where the human fits into the web of life.

Hard Ecology: Rethinking Nature in an Abstract Landscape is a photo essay that establishes a narrative with no real beginning or end. Instead it poses a closed loop, a sequence of interrelated images derived from an abstract landscape. The locations of the images are identified, but they are irrelevant. They range from the sublime to the banal, from distant places to my home neighborhood. Individually, these photographs are metaphors. They are visual examples of synecdoche, the literary form in which the part represents the whole. They symbolize both the fragmentation we experience in our everyday environment and cultural strategies for reassimilating with nature. Collectively, they create visual and conceptual relationships that are meant to stimulate new understandings about the meaning of nature and our place within it.

Again, if you wish to preview the book - or to order it - go to MagCloud.com.

Art, Film, and Music in Milwaukee: it all rocks!

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It was a good weekend for the arts here in Milwaukee. Three quick hits:

Visual art at Villa Terrace

On Friday evening the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum opened a small mixed media group show called “Chasing Horizons.”  Guest curators Nirmal Raja and Christopher Willey, who both have ties to UWM, assembled a diverse set of Milwaukee artists whose work uses the idea of landscape as a point of departure. It’s not the kind of show one typically associates with Villa Terrace.

Most of the work is installed gallery fashion in the cleared upper rooms of the historic mansion. My favorite pieces, however, were the two site-specific installations. Kevin Giese has inserted two slender, undulating trunks of stripped buckthorn into the steeply sloping, carefully landscaped “backyard,” which sweeps dramatically down to the lakefront.

Emily Belknap, whose show at the Chazen I recently reviewed, has taken wonderful advantage of the ambiance of the building. Her installation, called “Flight Zones,” is made up of three life-size bronze sculptures of robins. A precise circle of finely sifted dirt surrounds each, indicating the distance at which a person’s approach will cause the bird to take flight. The circles of dirt echo the decorative period moldings on the ceiling and the intrusion of the “wildlife” creates a curious dialogue with the portrait paintings hung on the walls.

If you didn’t get to the opening you have plenty of time. The show will be up through August 25.

The Oriental Theater offers another great movie

Since we were in the neighborhood and it was still early my wife and I checked out the Oriental. From amongst the several interesting choices we were glad we picked “The Place Beyond the Pines.” It’s being promoted as a “crime thriller,” and there are aspects of that in it. However, it’s a much more nuanced and complicated story than that genre generally implies. It would be hard to describe much of the story without ruining the many truly surprising plot twists.

It begins with a stunt motorcycle driver played by Ryan Gosling who goes on a crime spree for an unusual motivation. Things don’t turn out as planned but that’s the only thing predictable about this provocative and sensitive narrative. Go see it before it goes away. 

Read more on the official movie website.

The Milwaukee Rep and Janis Joplin

Although we are season ticket holders for the MilwaukeeRepertory Theater, we might have missed this show because it isn’t part of the regular season. But we were very happy that we took advantage of a special Cinco de Mayo offer and went to see it last night.

It isn’t exactly a concert and it isn’t really a musical play. But I’ve never seen the Powerhouse Stage rock like it did last night. The performers were outstanding and the music was as energetic as any concert I’ve seen—and then some!

I’ve never been a particular fan of Joplin. I was just a couple years too young to have gone to see her perform live. Anyone my age has heard her most famous songs (especially “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Mercedes Benz”) repeated endlessly on the radio, of course, as well as seeing video of her performing. But those don’t hold a candle to the actual experience. The show was a visual and auditory extravaganza that seemed to represent her onstage persona pretty accurately. The only thing missing was a pall of pungent pot smoke wafting over the crowd--but I only know that from heresay!

I could quibble that the attempt to add a story line to the show was flawed by the lack of any real arc to the narrative. The implications of her famous dissolution and untimely death were quite subtle and understated. Still, it was nice to see and hear the people who influenced her, including Bessie Smith, Odetta, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin. Blues singer Sabrina Elayne Carten recreated all of those voices and presences and she deserves credit equal to Mary Bridget Davies, who played Joplin.

The audience was an intriguing mix and far more diverse than usual for the Milwaukee Rep. There were plenty of folks who looked old enough to have seen Joplin live—and even a few that came garbed in authentic-looking “period costumes” like dashikis, tie-dye, colorful stripped bell-bottoms, and leather vests. However, I was glad to see a wide variety of ages amongst the appreciative crowd. At first it took a bit of urging by the cast to break through the Milwaukee/Midwest reserve, but by the end of the first set the entire audience was on its feet, clapping, singing, and generally rocking the night away.

As she sings in Bobby McGee, “…feeling good was good enough for me!”

The show is called “One Night with Janis Joplin,” but you have many nights to choose from before the show closes June 2 to join in the fun.

London's Hampstead Heath: Nature, Art, and Artifice

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This is an excerpt from a post on my other blog, Urban Wilderness. To start at the beginning, click here.

I've entered Kenwood Estate, a park within a park at Hampstead Heath. A map conveniently points me in the direction of Kenwood House, a neo-Classical country estate designed by Robert Adam in the 18^th Century. The guidebook tells me it now houses, along with period furniture, a remarkable collection of paintings, including—yes! Turner—and “Frans Hals, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and more.” I learn later that there is an important Rembrandt self-portrait here, too. Curious omission, Frommer!

I am thrilled by the prospect of thus discovering art amongst nature. But long before I get close to the house I can see that I am to be disappointed. From far off it is clear that the house is entirely enclosed, as if in a shroud. No part of the façade is exposed. Life inadvertently imitates art, for this shrouded monument echoes, at least for me, Christo’s wrapped Reichstag in Berlin. An exoskeleton of scaffolding doesn’t destroy the impression.

The interior is being renovated along with the exterior and so I am denied the pleasure of seeing the paintings as well as the architecture. I must satisfy myself with a solitary Henry Moore bronze. This “Two Piece Reclining Figure, No. 5” is solitary in more than one way. The only outdoor sculpture in the vicinity, “she” overlooks a vast open field identified as the “Pasture Ground.” Moore varied his treatment of the figure, of course. This figure is not recognizably female, though one can assume it based on other more representational versions. Indeed, “she” is scarcely recognizable as human, Moore accomplishing in bronze what the magician only suggests when slicing an assistant in two. The two bulky forms appear more similar to rocky outcroppings than human anatomy. The figure is objectified to the point where is to more akin to some “natural” feature of the landscape than to a human being, let alone an individual person. Kirk Varnedoe asserts, in his treatise Pictures of Nothing, “Abstract art absorbs projection and generates meaning ahead of naming.” An intriguing explanation of the power of abstraction. If true, however, then by naming it Moore forces an interpretation of his sculpture that may not match one’s first impression of it, especially when one encounters it out here in the landscape.

Similarly, where a construction contractor has erected utilitarian scaffolding, I see abstraction imposed onto the named structure of Kenwood House, which sits in uneasy alliance with its pastoral landscape.

Art and artifice derive from the same Latin root. Their meanings continue to overlap. Turning away from the shrouded, temporarily abstracted Kenwood House, I spy across the curiously named “Thousand Pound Pond” what appears to be a bridge. Two short spans flank a wider central one and the whole thing is topped with a balustrade. It is painted stark, Classical white that seems almost to glow on this gloomy day. Unaware that it is called “Sham Bridge” and for good reason, I make my way around a thicket behind it in order to take advantage of the view from the bridge. Except there is no bridge. It is a conceit, a visual folly, designed to be viewed from the terrace or lawn, creating the illusion that the pond extends farther into the wood. Artifice and abstraction.

Click here to read more.

Chazen Museum of Art: “Backyard Dilemmas”

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The first thing I see upon entering the small gallery is what looks like an old fashioned concrete laundry tub raised off the floor on steel legs. As I near it, however, it resolves into a meticulously recreated basement constructed to scale of tiny concrete blocks. A precarious set of wooden stairs, lacking a handrail is set into one corner. A window well protrudes from the opposite corner. The basement space is otherwise vacant except for the pool of water surrounding an off-center floor drain.

Water in the basement! Having recently endured a flooded basement myself, the sculpture struck a nerve. Actual water is bubbling gently from the minute floor drain, propelled by a small pump hidden underneath the sculpture. The silent seeping of water, a subtle but compelling gesture, is characteristic of the understated power of Emily Belknap’s art works.

The piece is part of an MFA thesis exhibit entitled Backyard Dilemmas: Constructed Landscapes by Emily Belknap. It is on display in the Oscar F. and Louise Greiner Mayer Gallery of the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

A quick survey of the gallery reveals a collection of equally meticulous sculptures (as well as two drawings) that combine the ultra-realism of scale model miniatures with an abstract sensibility. The fences that surround each “property” are all that represent an entire neighborhood. Gone are the houses, streets, sidewalks, lawns, and people that would animate the neighborhood and create of it a community.

Famous lines about “good fences make good neighbors” from Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” briefly come to mind. But these carefully crafted fences are oriented so that they project out from the vertical wall. Although the realism is indisputable, on another level they suggest abstract constructivism—to me at least. This duality is just one way that Belknap creates tension. In a statement on the wall text panel, Belknap says, “The decision to fence a backyard is more than an aesthetic choice; it implies anxiety, a need to contain and regulate.”

On the opposite wall of the gallery is an enormous field of miniature cornstalks; its vertical axis shifted perpendicular to the wall surface, as with the fences. Each of what looks like thousands of individual cornstalks has been created by hand from twisted strips of paper. The resulting “field” simultaneously evokes an actual corn crop ready to harvest and, because it is contained within a rigorous rectangle, mirrors the grid of fences across the way.

This dialectic between straightforward realism and conceptual abstraction is constant in Belknap’s work. Emotionally, I find myself teetering between a wondrous admiration of the breathtaking technical proficiency required to create these sculptures and darker moods conjured by the artist’s vision of our own “constructed landscapes.”

For those who read my Urban Wilderness blog as well as Arts Without Borders it will come as no surprise that I am a fan of paradox. Belknap serves it up with nearly every piece. At the center of the gallery, symbolically as well as literally, is a sculpture entitled “Parking Lot.” A lone and leafless tree stands at the center of the piece. The ambiguous metaphor could be interpreted as a hopeful interjection of life into the sterile space or as the destructive constraints we’ve placed on nature by constructing such places.

courtesy Emily Belknap

In an unlighted corner of the gallery is another tabletop sculpture entitled, “Vacant Lot.” The titles are mostly descriptive. You get the picture. A vacant lot with cracked pavement is surrounded by rusting chain link fence. A few desultory brown weeds along the fence are the only suggestion of life. There is a (tiny) padlock on the only gate, but the fence has been torn open in one corner. A miniature streetlight glows faintly in another corner. The small-scale rendition of cyclone fencing alone is worth visiting this exhibit. Belknap twists each strand of wire individually and assembles each length of fence on a “loom” that she has devised for the purpose.

My favorite piece is the only one that is built to human scale. It was initially less attractive, perhaps for that very reason. At first I don’t even notice the end of a picnic table sticking out of the end wall of the gallery. It seems ordinary in the context of the extraordinary miniatures. Oddly enough, it is when I have my back to it that it becomes noticeable. I am reading the artist statement when I hear a brief, sharp thumping sound. After a few moments it repeats: thump, thump. I turn and observe a brown cardboard box, like a shoebox, on top of the “picnic table.” I walk over to it and see that a series of crude holes have been punched in the top of the box, as if someone were trying to contain a living thing inside it. Thump, thump. The top of the box rattles visibly with the noise. It is easy to imagine a bird inside raising its wings, trying to escape. This sculpture is more suggestively, and again paradoxically, titled: “Rescue.”

Belknap received a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. She is the winner of the 2013 Chazen Prize, which is awarded to an Outstanding MFA Student. Her exhibit, Backyard Dilemmas: Constructed Landscapes by Emily Belknap, was curated by Bartholomew Ryan, assistant curator in the visual arts department at the Walker Art Center. The exhibit is on view at the Chazen Museum of Art through May 12, 2013.

If you live in the Milwaukee area and want a taste of Belknap's work, she is included in a group show called "Chasing Horizons" that opens at Villa Terrace this Friday, May 3. Opening is 6-8 pm.

Except as noted, the images are mine, taken in the dimly lit gallery with my point and shoot camera. To see more (and better) images of Emily’s work, go to her website.

Happy Slow Art Day!

Happy Slow Art Day from Arts Without Borders! Here is a sculpture from the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London entitled - get ready for it... "Rock on Top of Another Rock." I kid you not. As you can see, it is in the park, near the gallery (which, sadly, was closed when I was in London.) The artists are Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

How valuable is photography?

"Museums Are Still Wringing Their Hands Over Photography's Importance" is the heading for an interesting blog post. The subheading reveals the theme of the article: "Even in 2013, photography's place among the "fine arts" continues to be a topic of discussion—but why?"

It's worth reading. Do do so, click here.  

That article is a response to another, published in the New York Times, called "The Lens Rises in Stature." Also worth a look: click here.

© Flickr user eSeL.at