Miss Navajo

I saw a really great Independent Lens documentary last night about the Miss Navajo pageant in Arizona. This was a really inspiring story about the struggles and triumphs of the Navajos. One story note that was really disturbing: after WWII when the children in the reservations were taught by outsiders, the children were punished for speaking Navajo. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was trying to eradicate their culture (this is the common practice amongst conquering tribes/nations). Once a language dies, so does its culture... Of course, that unfortunately did happen for most Native American tribes.

Opening Night for the New SAM

My girlfriend and I decided to hit the town this past Saturday night for a special occasion: the 36-hour opening gala for the new expansion the Seattle Art Museum (a.k.a., SAM).

We left around midnight and got there 20 minutes later. We waited for our tickets (which were free) outside the museum at 1st Ave. & University St. for just a few minutes. There was even a person who informed us what time we would get our ticket for, which she said would be 1:20am, but by the time we got to the front of the line, they were sold out and our slot was for 1:40am. We considered going home, but instead went to the Alibi Room and hung out there for an hour before heading back to the museum.

The new expansion in terms of its architectural accomplishment is not much of an improvement over the existing building--the outside is quite ugly. It looks like The New-Age Ministry of Information. The only nice parts of the building are the white neon signs in my opinion.

Once we got inside, we were not any more optimistic about the new $100+ million expansion--while the first floor was very spacious, it's main attraction was four early 1990s Ford Tauruses. They were hanging from the ceiling and were also on display on the ground (one of the exhibits pictured here had a Taurus in the foreground with a widescreen showing a clip of Times Square in the background??). We really didn't get it, but perhaps we just weren't smart enough to figure out the artistic beauty of these particular retro-modern-art pieces... There was another strange quirk: also on the first floor there was a room where one could make custom buttons, paper

masks, and other memorabilia. The participants (pictured here) undoubtedly thought they were uber-cool and hip to be involved in such an ingenious act of modern artistry; we, however, found the task to be reminiscent of kindergarten.

Now, here comes the good part: once we got to the third and fourth level (the second floor looks onto the first), the various collections were amazing. From a porcelain collection to New Orleans old-fashioned dresses to Greek vases, every exhibit was designed with the utmost precision and presented beautifully.

So, overall we were very satisfied with our visit. The collections easily surpass the shortcomings of the 1st floor gallery and the sterile look of the outside of the building. Secondly, the event was very well organized and the employees and volunteers were very nice and welcoming.


Congratulations, SAM!

I saw a concert today at the Seattle Public Library:

"Susan Strick, soprano, with Johanna Mastenbrook, piano, will sing songs by Purcell, Schubert and Schumann, and Jensina Byington will play piano pieces by Rachmaninoff and Brahms, including his sublime Intermezzos."

It was pretty good and I enjoyed just sitting and listening, although I don't really like the layout of the Microsoft auditorium. The seats are somewhat uncomfortable (as they are throughout the library--the cause is "modern architecture" ) and the slabs of concrete on the sides of the stage really don't do anything to help the visual experience either.

Later in the evening, there was a heavy snow storm, which is unusual for Seattle, although we do get a lot of snow in the Cascades. I took a picture downtown with my cell phone and another one at home with my girlfriend and dog. We built a snowwoman!

Looks like the layout didn't come out so great ;-)

Underpants

Two nights ago I went to see Underpants--a comedic play adapted by Steve Martin from Carl Sternheim's 1910 original--with my girlfriend at the ACT Theatre here in Seattle. The set is a living room/kitchen of a middle-aged man and his wife in circa 1900 Germany.

One man, and then another, show up to rent a room at Theo and Louise Maske's house. We soon learn that the reason for their appearance is the wife--she accidentally shows her underpants during a parade by the king. The fiasco then starts in earnest as sexual desire, ambition, and cunning show themselves in full force.

The play is very funny (my girlfriend noticed that women laughed more than men; I think the shrewdness of the jokes was confusing for the men :-) and performed brilliantly by the cast--Julie Briskman, Richard Ziman, David Pichette, Matthew Floyd Miller, Marianne Owen and Wesley Rice. I was especially impressed with the performance of David Pichette (photograph from another play). My girlfriend liked Julie Briskman (photograph) and Marianne Owen.

What I really like about ACT is that you have a great view no matter where you sit because the seats encircle the stage. Interestingly, my girlfriend and I were among the youngest in the crowd. I think the theater demographic is different in Seattle than in New York where I found the theater-going crowd to be much younger. Perhaps that's because not that many young people live downtown yet.

Theater in Seattle

I'm not an expert on it, but on Saturday I went to see A Number, a play about human cloning . It features two actors and four characters. The latter are a father and three sons, of which two are human clones. The sons are played by Peter Crook, who I thought did a good job given that he had to play three different characters. What really impressed me however, was the performance of the father (named Salter) played by Kevin Tighe. He has a very distinct face and I knew I've seen it before, so when I read his biography in the play program I wasn't surprised that he was in three episodes of Lost.

Not only is the story very interesting, but so is the format. It is at ACT Theatre downtown played on a fairly small circular stage that is situated in the middle of the stands/seats that are also cirularily shaped. The whole play consists of three one-on-one conversations between Salter and one of his sons. There are only 30-second or so pauses between each conversation and the dialogue continues for almost an hour straight. I highly recommend seeing it!

Undemocratic Art: The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe

Book Review
The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe
First Published in 1975 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
This Edition Published in 1999 by Bantam Books (Random House, Inc.)

"The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any individual artist is merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened. The public that buys books in hardcover and paperback by the millions, the public that buy records by the billions and fills stadiums for concerts, the public that spends $100 million on a single movie—this public affects taste, theory, and artistic outlook in literature, music, and drama, even though courtly elites hand on somewhat desperately in each field. The same has never been true in art."

Welcome to the art world according to Tom Wolfe, where the author reveals how modern art became famous and how its peculiar styles changed over time just as modern architecture did in his following book, From Bauhaus to Our House.

How was it that some artists, such as Jackson Pollock, made it, while others who in some eyes were more talented never did? Wolfe writes,

"So it was that the art mating ritual developed early in the century—in Paris, in Rome, in London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and not too long afterward, in New York. As we've just seen, the ritual has two phases:

1. The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn't care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.


2. The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards—and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity."

What tied the Boho Dance and Consummation together were the art critics, whose words in large part determined which styles were successful. And so first came Abstract Expressionism, then Pop Art, then Minimalist Art, and finally Conceptual Art, all within a span of less than 30 years. What is amazing about this phenomenon is how the style that was "in fashion" changed, and how quickly the superseded style was forgotten and viewed as contemptuous.

"...with Abstract Expressionism and what came after it, they had to have…the Word. There were no two ways about it. There was no use whatsoever in looking at a picture without knowing about Flatness and associated theorems."

"How manfully they tried! How they squinted and put their fingers under their eyelids in order to focus more sharply (as Greenberg was said to do)…how they tried to internalize the theories to the point where they could feel a tingle or two at the very moment they looked at an abstract painting…without first having to give the script a little run-through in their minds. And some succeeded. But all tried! I stress that in light of the terrible charges some of the Abstractionists and their theorists are making today against the collectors…calling them philistines and nouveaux-riches, status strivers who only pretended to like abstract art, even during the heyday of the 1950s. Which is today: You were nothing but fat middle-class fakes all along! You never had a true antibourgeois bone in your bodies!"
...
"The clincher was Steinberg’s own confession of how he had at first disliked Johns’s work. He had resisted it. He had fought to cling to his old values—and then realized he was wrong. This filtered down as a kind of Turbulence Theorem. If a work of art or a new style disturbed you, it was probably good work. If you hated it—it was probably great.
That was precisely the way Robert Scull discovered the artist Walter De Maria. Scull was walking down Madison Avenue on Saturday afternoon when he stopped in a gallery and saw some drawings that were mostly blank. They were pieces of drawing paper framed and hung, and down in one corner would be a few faint words, seemingly written by an ailing individual with a pencil so hard, a No. 8 or something, that the lead scarcely even made a line: ‘Water, water, water’ Scull hated these drawings so profoundly, he promptly called up the artist and became his patron. That brought De Maria his first recognition as a Minimal artist."

And so the "human comedy" continued... On a more serious note—if one is to analyze the phenomenon from a broader social and biological perspective—it is another example of how gullible humans are to peer pressure and how most of us want to be part of the new and cool trend. In the case of the cosmopolitan art world, the goal is to be part of le monde:

"the social sphere described so well by Balzac, the milieu of those who find it important to be in fashion, the orbit of those aristocrats, wealthy bourgeois, publishers, writers, journalists, impresarios, performers, who wish to be 'where thing happen,' the glamorous but small world of that creation of the nineteenth-century metropolis, tout le monde, Everybody, as in 'everybody says'…the smart set in a phrase…'smart,' with its overtones of cultivation as well as cynicism."

Old School

When I was at the Seattle Public Library (a.k.a Central Library) and reading Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't help but think of the architectural style of the building. I like the SPL: it's 10 stories tall, has a big collection, and is of course architecturally... intriguing. I think that was my initial reaction when I first saw it. It's very modern, colorful and gray, and definitely industrial. It was designed by Rem Koolhaas.

Now, here's the interesting part. After spending some time in the reading room of the library, I realized the following: it's not as pleasing to spend time there as in the reading rooms of some of the other libraries I've been to that were build in the late 1800s or early 1900s. The New York Public Library comes to mind and is the best example of what I call "old school" architecture: masonry or brick buildings, tall ceilings, and lots of wood on the inside. They don't necessarily have to be in the Beaux Arts style to be to my liking - - brownstones are probably my favorite buildings.

What's in common with these older buildings is that they're physiologically more pleasant to spend time in -- when I look around, I get a feeling of grandiosity, master craftsmanship, sturdiness, and knowledge, especially when surrounded by wooden furniture and books. As to why I prefer these older architectural styles, I think it's a matter of preference, but as Tom Wolfe pointed out, many people hated buildings built on the Bauhaus legacy, yet their construction continued. I believe that steel is just one of those materials that the human brain doesn't like very much perhaps especially when combined with very geometric shapes. Wood, on the other hand is part of nature and I think that we have a genetic predisposition to "liking" wood. As for the Beaux Arts style, there's more artistry and less rigidness, which again provoke a positive response in the brain.

Now, I don't think that the Seattle Public Library is ugly. It actually looks cool from the outside and the inside. It feels cool to surf the Web on a laptop via Wi-Fi. I don't think I'd get that feeling in the New York Public Library (I haven't tried it). As for sitting and reading, you can't beat the old school.

The Professor of groupthink: From Bauhaus To Our House by Tom Wolfe

Book Review
From Bauhaus To Our House by Tom Wolfe
First Published in 1981 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
This Edition Published in 1999 by Bantam

Tom Wolfe, (author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full) the master of identifying and describing what he calls 'the human comedy' (i.e., a witty look into social trends), takes a look at post-World War II architecture in America and doesn't like what he sees. Written in 1980, he is struck by the monotony and ugliness of the buildings, and their clients' willingness to pay for them.

'"O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on eartrh where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?"'

As Tom Wolfe explains, modern architecture in America can be traced back to post-World War I Germany and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus School. Influenced by the socialist movement and the ruins of Europe, Gropius and his colleagues start an architectural movement based on the notion of "starting from zero".

"Gropius' interest in the 'proletriat' or 'socialism' turned out to be no more than aesthetic and fashionable, somewhat like the interest of President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic or Chairman Mao of the Republic of China in republicanism. Nevertheless, as Dostoevsky said, ideas have consequences; the Bauhaus style proceeded from certain firm assumptions. First, the new architecture was being created for the workers. The holiest of all goals: perfect worker housing. Second, the new architecture was to reject all things bourgeois. Since just about everybody involved, the architects as well as the Social Democratic bureaucrats, was himself bourgeois in the literal, social sense of the word, 'bourgeois' became an epithet that mean whatever you wanted it to mean. It referred to whatever you didn't like in the lives of people above the level of hod carrier. The main thing was not to be caught designing something someone could point to and say of, with a devestating sneer: 'How very bourgeois.'"

The change in the design and style of buildings was revolutionary:

"It had been decided, in the battle of the theories, that pitched roofs and cornices represented the 'crowns' of the old nobility, which the bourgeoisie spent most of its time imitating. Therefore, henceforth, there would be only flat roofs; flat roofs making clean right angles with the building facades. No cornices. No overhanging eaves. These young architects were working and building in cities like Berline, Weimar, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, atabout the Fity-second Parallel, which also runs through Canada, the Aleutian Islands, Moscow, and Siberia. At this swath of the globe, with enough snow and rain to stop an army, as history had shown more than once, there was no such thing as a functional flat roof and a fucntional facade with no overhand. In fact, it was difficult to imagine where such a building might be considered functional, outside of the Pained Desert. [....]

All masonry, all that gross and 'luxurious' granite, marble, limestone, and red brick was suspect, unless used in obviously non-load-bearing ways. Henceforth walls would be thin skins of glass or stucco. (Small glazed beige ceramic brick were okay in a pinch.) Since walls were no longer used to support a building--steel and conrecte or wooden skeletons now did that--it was dishonest to make walls look as chunky as a castle's."

In 1937 Walter Gropius, escaping the Nazi onslought, came to America:

"The reception of Gropius and his confereres was like a certain stock scene from the jungle movies of that period. Burce Cabot and Myrna Loy make a crach landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercombie & Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones thorughout their noses--who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange monaing chant.
The White Gods!
Come from the skies at last! [...]

Such prostrations! Such acts of homage! The Museum of Modern Art honored Gropius with a show called 'Bauhaus: 1919-1928,' those being the years when Gropius headed it. Philip Johnson, now thirty-four years old, could resist the physical precence of the gods no longer. He decamped to Harvard to study to become an architect at Gropius' feet. Starting from zero! [...]

It was emberassing, perhaps... but it was the king of thing one could learn to live with... Within three years the course of American architecture had changed, utterly. It was not so much the buildings the Germans designed in the United States, although Mies' were to become highly influential a decade later. it was more the system of instruction they introduced. Still more, it was their very presence. The most famous creatures in all the mythology of twentieth-century American art--namely, those European artists poised so exquisitely against the rubble-they were...here!...now!...in the land of the colonial complex...to govern, in person, their big little Nigeria of the Arts.

This curious phase of late colonial history was by no means confined to architecture, for the colonial complex was all-pervasive. Stars of the two great movements of European painting, the Cubists and Surrealists, began arriving as refugees in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Leger, Mondrian, Modigliani, Chagall, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Yves Tanguy--O white gods! The American Scene and Social Realist painting of the 1930s vaniched, never to reappear."

And so the European ideal was taken up by the American architectual elite much as Manhattinites today are in fervor of the New York (Bronx) Yankees. For those who tried to counter the establishment, the punishment was swift and severe, especially within the "elite" architectual world of the university:

"Within the university compounds there was no way for an architect to gain prestige through an architecture that was wholly unique or specifically American in spirit. Not even Wright could do it--not even Wright, with the most prodigious outpouring of work in the history of American architecture. From 1928 to 1935, only two Wright buildings were contructed. But in 1935 he did Fallingwater, a home for Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., father of one of his apprentices. This structure of conrete slabs, anchored in rock and cantilevered out over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania highlands, was the start of the final phase of Wright's career. He was sixty-eight years old at the time. In the next twenty-three years, until his death at the age of ninety-one in 1959, he idd more than half of his life-s work, more than 180 buildings, including the Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, Herbert F. Johnson's mansion, Widngspread, Taliesin West, the Florida Southern campus, the Usonian homes, the Price Company Tower, and the Guggenheim Museum. Within the university compounds this earned Wright a reputation like Andrew Wyeth's in the world of paining: okay for a back number.

In a way, the very productivity of a man like Wright, Portman, or Stone counted again him, given the new mental atmosphere in the universities. Oh, it was easy enough, one supposed, to go out into the marketplace and wheedle and vamp and dance for clients and get buildings to do. But the brave soul was he who remained within the compound, stayed years of his career in intellectual competition, doing the occasional small building, where a convenient opportunity presented itself, in the Corbu manner: a summer house for a friend, and addition to some faculty member's house, and--if all else failed--that old standby, the retirement home for Mother, which she paid for. It was no longer enough to build extraordinary buildings to show the world. The world could wait. It was now necessary to win in the competition that took place solely within and between the world of academic architecture."

And so the "human comedy" continued... The fear of "anathema", in the words of the author, was so great, that architecture changed very little from the 1940s to 1980. That resistance to change, however, created even more comedy for those perceptive enough to notice it (solely Tom Wolfe?), as other architects tried to break the mold without being excommunicated from the establishment.

A great story... applicable to any groupthink situation... a Tom Wolfe classic.