Thousands gather at the river to hear Water!

What a triumph! Yes, the music was magnificent, but there was much more to Saturday’s concert, aptly titled Water, at the Marcus Center. More even than the diverse outdoor performances and festive activities that literally surrounded the concert outside the hall. The real triumph was the Milwaukee River and the crowds who gathered there to experience the multimedia extravaganza orchestrated by Present Music.

When I moved to Milwaukee in 1976, the then Performing Arts Center (PAC) was still new. I didn’t realize at the time how bold a move it was for Milwaukee to build its premier performing arts showcase on the riverfront. Unlike today, there was no riverwalk then and even the businesses that lined it didn’t face towards the river.

Although a newcomer to the city, it didn’t take me long to discover that the sorry state of the river itself was the main reason. But it wasn’t just the polluted river. Downtown Milwaukee suffered the malaise of many rustbelt cities in the 1970’s. No one lived there and after five o’clock it emptied. The streets were deserted by six.

The riverside plaza behind the PAC that led down to the water likewise languished, underutilized.

 

Flash forward to today.

While no one will claim that Milwaukee has overcome all its problems, its downtown, and especially its namesake river, couldn’t be more different than it was 35 years ago. On Saturday evening thousands of people packed the riverfront plaza and lined the two flanking bridges. Boats of all sizes paraded past, idled to watch. The musicians floated up to the concert hall on the water.

This event made the Marcus Center, at its prescient location, the epicenter of a revitalization that has water as one of its defining features. The theme of the evening was no coincidence and its success was far more than symbolic. It represents a still nascent but real transformation in the hearts and minds of Milwaukeeans.

Moreover, the event brought together two constituencies that haven’t always found common purpose. It warmed my heart to see this event sponsored by both the United Performing Arts Fund and Milwaukee Riverkeeper, by the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Urban Ecology Center. For once I don’t have to choose between my two blogs to post this story, for it is appropriate to both.

The performances by Present Music and its partners, including Danceworks, several choirs, and video artists, were remarkable and moving. The music evoked the various rhythms and sounds of water in its many forms. In a piece commissioned especially for this concert, water itself was one of the “instruments.” The musician seated before a clear plastic tub with his sleeves rolled up looked incongruous, even humorous – until he began to “play” the water with reverent solemnity. The gentle, natural sounds he made harmonized beautifully, fittingly, with the voices and instruments of the ensemble.

Poet and naturalist Gary Snyder has said, “Art is not real unless some wild is let in.” Kudos to artistic director Kevin Stalheim and composer Kamran Ince for taking his metaphor to a new level.

The highlight of the evening, for me, was the concluding piece, a medley of songs “concocted” by Stalheim. Small groups of choristers stood around the periphery of Uihlein Hall, adding their voices to those on stage. Familiar tunes – How Dry I Am, The Water Is Wide, Down by the Riverside, Row, Row, Row Your Boat – joined with Handel’s Water Music (of course!) The melodies tumbled and washed over the audience like water.

A crescendo was followed by a hush. Then, out of the pregnant silence, a child’s voice sang out the single line: “Shall we gather at the river?” In a brilliant move, the thrilling climax erupted from the audience itself as the hall filled with two thousand voices proclaiming in song, “YES, WE’LL GATHER AT THE RIVER….”

 

And we did.

For more detailed reviews of the concert, read those by Tom Strini in Third Coast Digest and Jim Higgins at JSOnline.

The images that accompany this post are my own tribute to this important event. 

"Field of Vision: Artists Explore" Place at Racine Art Museum

This is essentially the same review that appeared in Art City last week. I offer it here with additional images and links to the artists' websites.

Rebecca Hutchinson, Connected Bloom

The Racine Art Museum has assembled a diverse collection of artists who explore the idea of “place” through feelings, thoughts, and impressions. In the first invitational show of its kind at the museum, nine artists were chosen whose work responds to place imaginatively rather than representationally.

This remarkable show surprised me and shook off a bias I didn’t know I had.  The exhibition subtitle, “Artists Explore Place,” brought to mind stereotypical scenes associated with “artist colonies” – lighthouses and lobster traps in Gloucester, MA; native dancers and animal skulls in Taos, NM; sailboats and farms in Door County. There is nothing like that in this show.

Mary Giles, Copper Crevice

Try this: close your eyes and think of a place to which you feel deeply connected. Let your mind drift away from what that place looks like and concentrate on how it feels to be there. What kind of art would that sensation generate?

The artists in this show seem to have been chosen because their work avoids representational specificity and embodies sensation in a nuanced way. The conceptual integrity of the work in the exhibit is matched too by a meticulous level of craft across diverse mediums. The mediums range from the ephemeral – paper, natural fibers and wax – to the enduring – copper, bronze and gold. The processes are all labor-intensive.

Jolynn Krysostek, Untitled

Jolynn Krystosek carves large but delicate medallions out of fragile wax. The forms suggest cameo pendants while the content references Victorian botanical illustrations. I found the sumptuous physicality of the wax and the technical facility with the unusual medium mesmerizing in all of them. However, I preferred the few in which curls of wax roll askew and out of the frame, which deflates the tromp l’oeil effect and calls attention to the fluidity of the wax itself. 

Sarah Hood, Birch Tree Ring

Sarah Hood fashions jewelry on which she recreates tiny fragments of the natural world. The meaning is ambiguous: is it a plea to respect the jewel-like preciousness of nature, a lament at how little there is left, or commentary about its commodification? While I enjoyed these pieces conceptually, I found the use of model railroad-scale artificial trees unconvincing and distracting. In earlier works, which I found on Hood's website, she incorporated real plants, leaves and seedpods. This seems more compelling.

Nicole Chesney, Betoken

The only painter among these artists is Nicole Chesney. Consistent with the rest, neither her approach to place nor her painting technique conform to tradition. Chesney layers oil paint, glass, and reflective aluminum to create luminous abstractions that stray so far from a specificity of place that they could be any place or no place. A horizontal line may be the horizon; her colors may be atmospheric; her work may be an updated version of color-field painting on a high-tech substrate. In any case the combination of deft painterly brushwork on glass over aluminum results in a mystical sense of space that would fit in just as well with an exhibition of Rothko and Olitski as it does here.

Beverly Penn, Topo I, detail

From a distance, Beverly Penn’s two large oval wall pieces have a decorative simplicity. The curvilinear effects reminded me of Louis Sullivan’s architectural ornamentation. Up close the detailed rendering of simple weeds seems almost miraculous. I wanted to reach over the velvet rope and touch it; that it was made of cast bronze was hard to believe. High relief and the museum’s lighting create shadows, which animate a sculpture that might have remained inert and ornamental.

Lauren Fensterstock, Third Nature 3

My favorite works were by Lauren Fensterstock. She manufactures shadow boxes that from a distance appear to be filled solid with some black earthy substances. Reflections on the glass fronts make the interiors visually impenetrable. But they are not minimalist forms a la Donald Judd, whose work they superficially resemble. Upon close inspection one discovers a very dark approximation of a kitchen-window terrarium or a science fair ant farm. Nothing actually grows in these faux terrariums. The deception is created from thin strips of cut and quilled black paper “planted” atop charcoal that’s been crushed to look like soil. The artist says that they represent “the earth becoming an expression of man’s view of nature rather than man’s true experience of nature.” If so, I found it especially symbolic that the dominant image as we view each box straight on is literally a reflection of ourselves. It takes an oblique viewpoint to make out the interior detail, as if nature has become such an alien experience that we can see it only with peripheral vision. Or perhaps they are apocalyptic reliquaries that contain the charred remains of a scorched earth, still held in hopeful reverence.

Olga de Amaral, Umbra 31, detail

In the end, for the artists in Field of Vision, place may be interpreted many ways, but is not somewhere that can be located via GPS.  Place is a state of mind, an emotion, or a relationship. The catalogue copy states, “These works are substantial without being directly representational.” They are substantial indeed.

There is still plenty of time to see Field of Vision: Artists Explore Place. It is on view through October 2.

Photography illuminates an Urban Eden in Milwaukee

Pete appeared suddenly, seeming to materialize from nowhere. Perhaps from the street itself, which is where he calls home. He approached the wall cautiously, hesitant. His own face gazed back at him, enormous, calm, composed. Softly, he said, “I can’t believe this is happening.” In the deep shade under the brim of his cap his tired eyes glistened, first with pride, then tears. He repeated, his voice barely audible, “I can’t believe…, this is me.” After a long pause he added, “I’ve been on the streets for….” His thought trailed off, leaving me to wonder how long. He sat on a board that edged one of the planting beds in the community garden. He sat for a long while in silence, watching as the crew of volunteers pasted up face after face alongside his.

When Pete finally got up to leave he reiterated his disbelief. Then he said he was going to go invite all his friends to come see it.

Urban Eden is a photographic mural project named after the community garden that it faces. It was created by Sally Kuzma and John Ruebartsch. Kuzma is an artist and ESL teacher at the International Learning Center (ILC), a program of Neighborhood House of Milwaukee. She acted as project director, seeking out participants and recording their stories. Ruebartsch, a professional photographer, made the portraits. 

The subjects of the portraits all have some relationship to the garden and its neighborhood, which is in one of the city's poorest zip codes. At Urban Eden refugees who attend the ILC grow and harvest food alongside people from two multicultural neighborhood parishes, St. Paul’s Lutheran and Central United Methodist. A group of environmentally active students from Marquette University were instrumental in establishing Urban Eden. Some of them are included in the mural.

That the mural is more than an art installation is almost too obvious to mention. Kuzma shared with me the following stories:

“During the mural installation yesterday, some profound things were happening:

An artist who came to see the mural approached me about renting rooms to ILC refugees; she owns a rooming house in the neighborhood and feels called spiritually to do this.

A Marquette student who had helped initiate the garden came to paste up posters but ended up spending most of her time playing with neighborhood children in the ILC playground.

People from the neighborhood are asking how they can be part of the garden, and learning that the colorful Somali Bantu women they see at the bus stop on 25th St. are coming to school here.

It's almost as if the mural is an incidental thing that is making visible the very real good will that is being generated in this place by a lot of different people. Marking the spot where human beings are being human.”

The project is also much more than a single installation. Urban Eden is part of an international effort “to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world.” That effort, called INSIDE OUT, was inspired by the work of JR, an internationally acclaimed artist and winner of the 2011 TED prize. (If you haven’t heard of TED, which awards $100,000 annually to people with ideas that can change the world, check it out: TED prize.)

The portraits that make up the Urban Eden mural, along with the stories, will be archived online with similar projects from around the world at INSIDE OUT: A Global Art Project. The mural is located on 26th St. between Wisconsin Ave. and Michigan St., behind the US Bank building, facing south.

This is not the first collaborative project for Kuzma and Ruebartsch. Here, There and Elsewhere: Refugee Families inMilwaukee, a photo-documentary that debuted at Walker's Point Center for the Arts last summer, is currently touring to several locations around the country.

Here Kuzma and Ruebartsch stand in front of a section of the completed mural. To see more images from the installation, go to my flickr page.

Congress should take up poetry!

It isn't my idea. Last Sunday, Bill Keller, editor of the NY Times, suggested just that in a wonderful editorial. Read "I Yield My Time to the Gentleman From Stratford-Upon-Avon."

Keller says, "Poetry is no substitute for courage or competence, but properly applied, it is a challenge to self-certainty, which we currently have in excess. Poetry serves as a spur to creative thinking, a rebuke to dogma and habit, an antidote to the current fashion for pledge signing."

I have known a few poets in my time, met quite a few more, and heard many read their work. I've never known a poet who wasn't both thoughtful and attentive. Unlike some other kinds of writers, poets tend to be good listeners. I'm sure there are among them some narcissists, but I'm guessing the percentage is far lower than among other kinds of artists; certainly lower than among that class of people who choose to enter politics. 

There is angry poetry, but humility is a far more common quality.

Keller quotes these familiar lines from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” by William Carlos Williams:

 It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                     yet men die miserably every day
                                           for lack
of what is found there.

Keller also asked David Orr, the poetry columnist for the Times Book Review, to provide a reading list for Congress. Here is that link: "Bedside Table Suggestions for Congress."

If you go to the Times website to read any of this and do a search of the topic you will find that lots of people have added their own suggestions for a Congressional reading list. Why not send a few suggestions to your representatives, hey? (Can you see Jim Sensenbrenner picking up a volume of poetry when he goes to bed tonight?) 

Here's mine, by Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton:

Like You

Like you I

Love love, life, the sweet smell

of things, the sky-blue

landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up

and I laugh through eyes

that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful

and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me

but in the unanimous blood

of those who struggle for life,

love

little things,

landscape and bread,

the poetry of everyone.

Who has a big idea?

Is there an Einstein living today, someone who thinks so big that everyone takes notice? So big that it changes the way everyone thinks?

If there were such a person, would we be paying attention?

We've all heard the old conundrum, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear, does it make any sound?" What if a tree falls in the city? All around the tree there is a cacophony of noisy activities, traffic, construction, conversation, etc. Will anyone notice?

In the New York Times, Neal Gabler has written a provocative and engaging essay about the death of the big idea. He cites many examples of famous thinkers from time gone by, like Einstein, Reinhold Niebuhr, Betty Friedan, Marshall McLuhan, William F. Buckley, Jr. Marie Curie, and George Washington Carver. But he opines that the voices and ideas of any such thinkers alive and speaking out today are drowned out by the deluge of information to which everyone is constantly subjected. He further suggests that social media, with its emphasis on short bursts of mostly trivial information, is particularly culpable.

It's a good essay, worth reading: The Elusive Big Idea.

Gabler makes only one reference to big ideas in art. He doesn't mention a single artist, though. He says, "An artist friend of mine recently lamented that he felt the art world was adrift because there were no longer great critics like Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg to provide theories of art that could fructify the art and energize it." I find it sad but telling that the people who wrote theories about art get credit for having had big ideas instead of the artists themselves. But then, so much of Modernism was about the words/ideas as much as the art itself. I think it may be even more true of contemporary art.

Which artists had the big artistic ideas, on a par with the great thinkers who affected the culture? Giotto? Velazquez? Manet? Cezanne? Warhol? Was Pollock's success really so dependent upon the intercession of Rosenberg and Greenberg?

How about photography? The medium itself probably changed the way we see the world more than any single practitioner. In fact, until I retired from teaching last May, I kept a poster version of this famous image on my classroom wall because I consider it (or whichever was the first one taken from space) to be the most influential photograph ever taken. Further, the image of the earth from space, that tiny blue sphere in a universe of black, may be the most important image ever made precisely because of the big idea it represents: the earth is fragile and its resources finite. It is no accident that the image graced the original cover of the Whole Earth Catalog or that the first Earth Day was organized shortly after its first publication.

Does art still have the power to affect how we see the world? Or is everyone too busy uploading images to facebook and you-tube of their pet or their latest meal from their cell phone cameras to see anything else?

Hey, I have an idea: anyone want to see pictures of my adorable new granddaughter? Just go to my album on Facebook.

The artistic life

I read The Writing Life by Annie Dillard a while ago. I dog-eared a particularly poignant passage thinking it applies equally well to other art forms as it does to writing. When I googled the passage I found that the beginning is often quoted, but that the quoters usually trail off before the end of the first paragraph. Which is a shame because the second provides a counterpoint that contrasts profoundly with the first. Without it her observations are unbalanced.

I guess the reluctance to include the second paragraph is understandable. The beginning has a sunny attitude, while the end becomes a bit nihilistic. Art, like life, isn’t always sunny. I can relate to both moods. In the first version below I’ve taken liberties with her text to generalize it. Her original version follows that in case you want to see how little I had to alter.

"Creating a work of art is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as an artist is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild abandon; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even express anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if it is demonstrably false.

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality. A shoe salesman – who is doing others' tasks, who must answer to two or three bosses, who must do his job their way, and must put himself in their hands, at their place, during their hours – is nevertheless working usefully. Further, if the shoe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. Your work of art, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your work; everyone needs shoes more. There are many paintings, sculptures, and prints already – worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent work of art on which to gag the world?"

I believe the answer to the dramatic rhetorical question that concludes the passage is found in the first paragraph. Of course, some artists are not unlike shoe salesmen, but for those to whom Dillard refers, for whom art is exhilarating rather than commercial, not to pursue one’s calling would be the metaphysical equivalent of shooting oneself.

The original text from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard:

"Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false.

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality. A shoe salesman--who is doing others' tasks, who must answer to two or three bosses, who must do his job their way, and must put himself in their hands, at their place, during their hours--is nevertheless working usefully. Further, if the shoe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already -- worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it? Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?"