Teed Off

Yes John Updike played it, golf that is and the likes of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama play golf, though Hillary Clinton would not be able to gain membership  to the venerable Augusta National Golf Club, whose hosting of the Masters has come under attack for its male only policy. Though the Times recently reported on some rare changes in golf's protocols ("Change 267 Years in the Making: A Tweak in the Rules of Golf", NYT, 10/27/11), Golf is the direct opposite of Occupy Wall Street to the extent that it, perhaps more than any other sport, epitomizes the spirit of laissez faire capitalism and of the status quo.Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism could easily be re-titled, The 18^th Hole and the Spirit of Capitalism. Golf courses are where the robber barons of today network with other robber barons. From the caddies whose job it is to carry a golfer's bags to the steppinfetchit locker room attendants and rigid dress codes that are strictly enforced in opulent club houses, golf radiates a hive mentality. The scrappy immigrant who has worked his way up the ladder lands at a golf club where he is treated with a deference usually accorded to royalty. It’s no wonder that most golf clubs exude a pomp that is reminiscent of Buckingham palace. Sure there are public courses which cater to those who are not members of these exclusive clubs, but let’s face it, that’s not what we mean when we talk about golf. Golf courses have little if nothing in common with the asphalt oasis, the basket ball court, or even  tennis, whose effete precincts have more effectively been infected with the virus of democratization. Even the apparatus of golf reeks of privilege with the heads of the drivers, the so called woods, covered in soft velvet, velour or leather hoods that give them the cache of Faberge Eggs. If there ever is a revolution that topples the power elite, golf will likely be the first and only sport to go. OK there’s polo which is played  in Palm Beach, but it’s got too few adherents to make a dent.

The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer

Austrians trying to speak English are gris for the comic mill. There are Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famed malapropisms and Sasha Baron Cohen’s Bruno, the fashionista.  And then there is the surface old world charm. Who would have believed that under Schwarzenegger’s affability masked an adulterer or that Kurt Waldheim, the former UN Secretary General was a Nazi. Michael Sturminger’s The Infernal Comedy : Confessions of a Serial Killer tell the story of Jack Unterweger the Austrian serial killer and journalist turned celebrity  (whose was freed after international protests by well known figures like Elfriede Jellinek and others)  Sturminger has created an opera starring John Malkovich as the character of Unterweger on an author tour promoting his Confesssions and  bastardizing  English in the process. Magazines become maggotzines, Wikipedia is Vikipedia, “because,” one of Sturminger’s favorite words becomes “becawse.” Interestingly Malkovich isn’t really part of the opera unless you call his stand up routines a recitative. Rather he stalks the orchestra which renders bits and pieces of romantic Mozart, Vivaldi,  Beethoven works in which Sturminger’s sopranos play Unterweger’s jilted lovers. The operatic crescendos are in stark contrast to Malkovich’s deadpan in which he makes pronunciamentos like “I want to be someone and would rather be a killer than a no one.” Malkovich’s Unterweger has an Asberger’s like disorder but like a lot of disturbed people also has something to say. He’s a human triple entendre in a polyphonic setting. We experience this the moment we walk into the Opera House at BAM to find the orchestra on the stage and not in the pit. Is this a recital,  rehearsal or symphony that has been mistakenly billed as an opera or has the task bar on our computer been mistakenly moved to the side or top so that we are viewing the screen of reality upside down? One wonders if Alban Berg, the great Austrian composer of Wozzeck were alive, what he would have done with the story of Unteweger’s life?

Melancholia

Lars von Trier is a party pooper. Dunderheads don’t you get it? The whole performance at Cannes was a set up. It’s Melancholia played right before our eyes. Here he is in the limelight at Cannes, creator of Dogma, lionized with Kirsten Dunst, his star at his side, and he reprises the role she's just played in the film. He makes anti-Semitic remarks and finds himself banned from Cannes. Similarly Justine, the character Dunst plays, throws her whole life away, rejecting her marriage and the employer who has just given her a promotion to art director, at the agency at which she works— remaining loyal to the spirit of her depressive mother (Charlotte Rampling) who has instilled in her a deep and abiding hatred of life. All of this mind you while Wagner’s famed Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde plays again and again and again, underscoring the death in life which constitutes what amounts to a passion or calling for her. The lighting is spare and real and so is the message that that there is nothing, no transcendence, no life beyond the aberration known as existence—nothing except, art. The initial montage sequence is a homage to Bergman’s Persona. In Persona you are dealing with an actress who’s had a psychotic break. Freud defined melancholia as a response to loss which includes a lack of interest in the outside world. The close-ups of Dunst’s face in the early montage of Melancholia evince the shrinking from the will to live characteristic of the condition Freud describes. The  planet on a collision course with earth that constitutes the second movement of the film is called Melancholia, but it’s as if the catastrophe had already occurred to Justine before the collision ever takes place. She is suffering about something which has yet to be, a brilliant little touch on von Trier’s part  (there is another particularly brilliant directorial touch in the little piece of wedding cake on Justine’s face that precedes the breakup the marriage on the very night it’s begun). The parallels with Persona continue in part two of the film which, along with the collision, is devoted to Justine’s sister Claire. If Justine is afraid to live, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is afraid to die, but like with Bergman’s nurse and actress the roles switch and then with the big ball of destruction called Melancholia hovering overhead, Justine is exultant. She is finally in her element. As the world comes to an end, Justine becomes a latter day Grand Inquisitor, The Grand Facilitator, helping her frightened sister and nephew to die.

Paris Journal: Kusama

Self-obliteration is one of the themes of the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the Pompidou. But the expression should not be confused spiritual notions which have to do with the diminishing of the ego. Quite the contrary, the exhibitionism that pervades the psychosexual odyssey that the show describes is a response to the artist’s fear of the loss of self.  Kusama, a Japanese born, abstractionist was also known for her performance art pieces involving estheticized forms of streaking. The curious thing about seeing many of the videos of Kusama exposing herself and participating in body art happenings from the 60's, is that they, in fact, don’t seem dated at all. There is a whole psychedelic and hallucinogenic aspect to Kusama’s polka dot paintings and installations with their obsessive  and repetitive style that partakes of what neurologists call perseveration. And seen in historiographical context of her life or what the German sociologist Max Weber termed Beruf or calling, they are dramatic distillations of the central conflict of her existence which is reminiscent of Camus’ famous statement that the only meaningful philosophical question was suicide. Pathography is plainly not the intent of the current exhibit, but it’s hard not to see the artist’s repressive upbringing and her early awakening to Japan’s nuclear tragedy as driving forces in both her work and the mental illness that has plagued her all her life. Happily or unhappily Kusama eventually ended up committing herself and now in her 80’s still continues to produce work at the Tokyo institution in which she lives.

Paris Journal: Leurs tresors ont une ame

Leurs tresors ont une ame, “their treasures have a soul,” is the title of the show about the Maori at the musee du quai Branly. It’s reassuring to know that the culture wars are alive in this iconic Parisian location across from the Seine and footsteps away from the Eiffel Tower. For the show in question essentially documents the tortured relation between  the Maori and  the government of New Zealand which goes back to the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 where the Maori translation of governorship was turned to sovereignty by the Crown. Cultural imperialism and assimilation are two subtexts in an exhibit that ostensibly documents the survival of a culture based on whakapapa or  the interconnectedness of animate and inanimate objects in a world that was changing around them. The exact relation of western influences within the historical time frame presented is curiously absent in the displays, though the exhibit’s very title connoting as it does “the ability to choose one’s own destiny” implies that a way of life which has indeed earned a respected place in the culture of New Zealand society still finds itself in some way imperiled. It's interesting to the think about questions pertaining to a minority in the capital city of a country, where the majority finds their centuries old style of life imperiled by the influx of immigrants from former colonies that still bear the scars of centuries of imperialism.

Paris Journal: Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso...the Stein Family

The Steins, Leo, Gertrude, Sarah and Michael were patrons not investors and in that regard, like their counterparts the lesser known Cone sisters from Baltimore, played an enormous role in the lives of the artists whose careers they cultivated. Cezanne was not a household name when Leo Stein purchased his first Cezanne from Vollard, Cezanne’s famed dealer (whose portrait hangs in the Cezanne and Paris show at the Musee du Luxembourg). Everyone always points to the tremendous connection between Picasso and Gertrude Stein epitomized in Picasso’s iconic portrait of Stein from l906 now hanging in the Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso…the Steins Family at the Grand Palais, but from a cultural point of view it’s significant that an eccentric family of Americans, assimilated Jews of means, fostered the development of the early twentieth century modernism which became the calling card of French culture. The bust of Stein by Jacques Lipchitz from l920 and the portrait by Picabia from l937, which also appear in the show, exemplify Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence as it applies to the plastic arts. The little audio widget given at the Stein show also pointed out the debt the Picasso painting has to Ingres’ Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832) on exhibit in the Morgan Library in New York—which is another way of underlining the fact that this monumentally extensive show devoted to the Stein collection is really also a focal point for numerous historical and esthetic connections past and present. Gertrude had studied with William James at Radcliffe. Leo, who was himself the author of a book called The A-B-C of Aesthetics, had also been part of the circle that included Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry. Fry had offered the notion  of  “pure form,” as a way of understanding Cezanne’s revolutionary esthetic. Whether you go backwards in time towards Renoir who Leo would champion after Alice B. Toklas came to live with Gertrude at the Rue de Fleurus or forward to Gertrude turning her attention to Juan Gris and Picabia, two artists represented by another renowned dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, all roads seem to lead to the Stein family and the central role they played in the history of art, esthetics and thought.

Dead Birds

Dead Birds, the first of series of films by Robert Gardner the artist/ethnographer currently being shown at Film Forum, concerns the bellicose Dani tribes of New Guinea. The film, which itself was shot over 40 years ago, is a paradox to the extent that it presents a pre-Adamic world devoid of shame that is at the same time characterized by very modern seeming forms of ritualized aggression. Robert J. Flaherty’s classics Nanook of the North  and Man of Aran are early examples of  this kind of artistic ethnographic filmmaking. But one wonders if self awareness lurks in the even more primitive characters on which Gardner fixes his lens. To some extent the filmmaker preempts this matter by adopting the omniscient authorial voice and the question is one of attribution? Do the filmmaker's subjects experience emotion in the westernized way that the narration describes? Cultural anthropology and ethology, the study of animal behavior, and in particular aggression, both come to mind in watching this beautiful film, filled with lush and at the same time horrific landscapes and events (such as the death and cremation of a child).  Every society has it  peculiarity and supposedly advanced societies have their tribal qualities while a primitive society like the one Gardner records can seem to be performing a Beckett play in which violence has an absurdist edge. The battles that film documents call to mind religious rites (in which Gods are appeased by scores being settled) and also curiously our own culture’s obsession with competitive athletics. One difference between Dani culture and that of the West, is the marked lack of ambition, with no tribe attempting to do anything more than achieve equilibrium. There are no Napoleons, Ganghis Khans or Sun Tzus with theories on the Art of War. On the other hand what is uncanny is that the Dani rituals, in the end, are reminiscent of our modern concept of nuclear deterrence, in which the job of  each cold warrior is to make sure that the other doesn’t get ahead. People who suffer from OCD will also identify with the magical thinking by which the tribesmen attempt to ward off ghosts. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.