CalArts to launch new art and technology degree program

Applying new technologies to visual art isn’t so new anymore.  So the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia is revving up a new program and a new degree – master of fine arts in art and technology – in which the new wrinkle seems to be stepping back and doing some old-fashioned deep, critical thinking about what it means to be an artist who exploits 21^st century technology.

When the school  launched its Center for Integrated Media about 15 years ago, as “a place to investigate art-making with computers…we were pretty far ahead of the curve,” says Tom Leeser, who has directed that center for eight years and will head the new master’s degree program that’s branching off from it.  “All the other institutions have caught up with us…. Now it’s evaluating these new technologies critically” that seems to be the next step forward.

Leeser said students in the two-year program will get plenty of the how-to’s of applying whatever the world’s tech genies come up with next to visual art, performance art, and art that intersects with the Internet’s social-networking possibilities. But the plan is to interweave the making of art very closely with the critical thinking that goes into art theory, so that graduates will not only know what they’re doing, but also how it fits into the world of ideas about art and society.

Review: Mexican pianist Ana Cervantes honors Juan Rulfo

Juan Rulfo was -- Susan Sontag notes in her introduction to his novel “Pedro Páramo” -- a man of many silences. The great Mexican writer and seminal influence on Latin American literature in the second half of the 20th century produced little (the slim novel in 1955 and, before that, short stories), and what Rulfo produced says little. Yet he wrote magnificently between the lines in a prose magical and musical even in translation.
 
In the spirit of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who said that a spectator finishes a work of art, Mexican pianist Ana Cervantes has commissioned a number of composers from five countries to “finish” Rulfo. She made two CDs of these pieces for the Mexican label Quindecim, and she played a dozen of those works Wednesday night in her impressive Los Angeles debut at REDCAT. All were California premieres.
  
Rulfo’s novel concerns a young man who follows his mother’s deathbed instructions to visit her hometown, Comala, and look up Pedro Páramo, his father. The son finds, instead, a ghost town and ghosts. Cervantes’ program was titled “Rumor de Páramo: Murmurs from the Wasteland,” and many composers evoked dry landscapes, wind and emptiness. They hesitated to say what couldn’t be said. They tried not to stir the air, awaken the dead or make trouble. Rulfo’s prose is unsettling enough.

Monster Mash: Michael Jackson's, Farrah Fawcett's legacies to the arts; LACMA goes Hollywood; Alice Tuan joins CalArts

--King of Pop's legacy: Michael Jackson dies, but his influence on art, artists, dance and dancers lives on.

--Making connections: Remembering Farrah Fawcett’s connections to art and the stage.

--Power players: More big Hollywood names join Los Angeles County Museum of Art's board of directors.

--New job: Playwright Alice Tuan named head of CalArts writing program.

--Firming up plans: Tracy Letts’ “Superior Donuts” finds a Broadway home as Broadway season takes shape.

--Big names sell: Three Warhol works sell at auction in London for $10.5 mllion.

--Saying no: Seville rejects Zaha Hadid's plans for a "spaceship" library.

--Taking control: Governments slow to track down, return Nazi-looted art to heirs, conference finds.

--Plans for new city hall: City of Malibu purchases Malibu Performing Arts Center for $15 million.

--Something in common: British architects whose work has been demolished form "Rubble Club" support group.

--Lisa Fung

Photo: Jeff Koons' "Michael Jackson and Bubbles," part of Eli Broad's collection on view at LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Playwright Alice Tuan to take a leading role at CalArts

More changes to report from the CalArts theater school. Alice Tuan, the award-winning L.A.-based playwright, has been appointed as the head of the Writing for Performance Program. She will begin some of her duties this summer before fully starting the job in the fall semester.

A playwright who has focused largely on the Asian American experience, Tuan has worked closely with L.A. theater companies such as East West Players and the Los Angeles Theatre Center since emerging on the scene in the late '90s. In 2000, she won the Mark Taper Forum's Richard E. Sherwood Award for emerging playwrights and has since been produced by companies around the country.

Among her best-known dramas are "Ajax (por nobody)," "Last of the Suns" and "Coastline."

As head of the program, Tuan's duties include guiding playwriting MFA candidates through workshops. She'll also coordinate lab work among writers, actors and directors.

Speaking on the phone from Shanghai, where she is concluding a 10-month residency teaching English, Tuan said: "I don't really think you can teach writing. My job is to be a mentor. It's about telling trench stories and to help the students troubleshoot. A playwright's job is contradictory -- you spend half the time in solitude and the other half is collaboration."

Tuan said that during her time in China, in addition to teaching, she has worked on beefing up the "Asian" side of her interest in Asian American culture. She's in the process of completing a play that addresses the "U.S.' superpower dance with China" in the realm of international business.

"I think American theater contracted after 9/11," she said. "Audiences didn't want experimentation. With the recent election, you can feel like we've re-entered the world. The culture of the 21st century can become itself, rather than still living by 20th century rules. So I feel hugely optimistic about coming back to L.A."

Earlier this month, CalArts announced that Erik Ehn, the head of the theater school, would be leaving his post to join the faculty at Brown University. The school will be launching a search for his replacement in the fall.

-- David Ng

Photo: playwright Alice Tuan. Credit: CalArts

Erik Ehn leaving CalArts to head playwriting program at Brown

Erik Ehn, the dean of the School of Theater at California Institute of the Arts, is leaving his position to head the graduate playwriting program at Brown University.

"He did a good job, but the position went against his nature. He truly is a writer at heart," CalArts President Steven Lavine told Culture Monster today. "I asked him if we could do anything to make him stay. In the end, he just received the perfect job offer from Brown."

Ehn is currently traveling and could not be reached for comment. He will leave CalArts on July 1 and will begin his professorship at Brown at the start of the coming semester.

CalArts has asked two faculty members from the theater school -- Leslie Tamaribuchi and Ellen McCartney -- to serve as acting co-deans for the next academic year while the school launches a formal search for a replacement. The theater school currently has 55 faculty members plus additional instructors and technical staff.

Prior to serving as dean for three years, Ehn directed CalArts' playwriting program with Suzan-Lori Parks. An alumnus of the Yale School of Drama, he also has served as literary manager for Berkeley Repertory Theatre and has held teaching positions at the University of Iowa, UC San Diego, the University of San Francisco and Princeton.

An active playwright, Ehn is best known for "The Saint Plays," an ongoing cycle of short plays about the lives of the Catholic saints. His writing tends to be poetically abstract and is known to make quite a few demands on viewers. When his play "Chokecherry" was produced at the Ivy Substation in Culver City in 2000, the Times reviewer wrote: "In a world of timid wordfolk, playwright Erik Ehn keeps his radio tuned to the unruly language of the night sky."

In a Times interview in 2006, Ehn said: "I believe strongly that the world needs to change radically in the next few years, and that theater will be a part of that change. I can feel it like a person with a broken leg can feel the rain coming, that this need for coalescing is in the air. Whatever causes that coalescence is going to be what we call theater next."

-- David Ng

Photo: Erik Ehn. Courtesy: California Institute of the Arts

Jo Ann Callis' long lens on domestic life

Living artists are hardly a priority at the J. Paul Getty Museum, so photographer Jo Ann Callis is still a little stunned to be having a show there. And grateful.

“I feel so lucky,” she says. “I was prepared to be anonymous. I was enjoying life. I was thinking, ‘It’s OK. I had some moments in the past, and that is enough.’ ”

“Jo Ann Callis: Woman Twirling,” as the show opening Tuesday is titled, refers to her warm-hued photograph of a woman in a circle skirt spinning around in a blur. Her furious yet solitary movement contrasts with the stillness of a carved wood sculpture of an entwined couple that doubles as the base of a lamp. Questions arise about the activity and the setting.

This sort of oblique narrative percolates through of most of Callis’ carefully staged color photographs of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, which mine the psychological and emotional pressures of domestic life. They were selected to complement the historic work of the late Paul Outerbridge, whose commitment to color photography had impressed her at the outset of her career.

Callis developed her style “not in imitation of Outerbridge,” says Getty photography curator Judith Keller, “but she used his love of experimenting with color, his preference for creating work in the studio and constructing whole scenes to be photographed and his interest in images that appear to be beautiful and mildly seductive, before you realize something is not quite right.”

Charlemagne Palestine still pushes his keyboard to the limit

“I’m not a Minimalist,” the keyboard performance artist Charlemagne Palestine said last week. “I’m a maximalist. That’s the word I like, because it gives me possibilities.”

Palestine, known in music circles for his marathon all-night concerts in the 1970s (they were often so intense that he bled on the keys) is returning to the Los Angeles stage tonight after an 11-year absence. As part of the Monday Evening Concerts series, he will perform one of his seminal works, “Schlingen-Blängen,” on one of the world’s largest church pipe organs at the First Congregational Church.

“I can’t say, at 61 years old, that I can be maximal every day,” he added. “But when I play this big organ, it’s going to resound like Armageddon come home.”

Palestine said “Schlingen-Blängen” will get a two- to three-hour airing, enough time for him to work his magic, creating and sustaining overtones that slowly build, vibrate and combine in the ether.

The piece’s title, he said, is a sendup of avant-garde musical titles, “all those unpronounceable nonsense-profound Stockhausen and Xenakis things. But I didn’t go to Greek or Latin. I went to Jerry Lewis Yiddish. I said, the schling and the schlong and a bing and a bong. I even put an umlaut over the A in Blängen.”

And like that title, Palestine’s music, which can seem improvised, is carefully planned.

“I need to know the fundamental components -- how the smaller sounds become more complicated,” he said. “I put them into almost a color swatch. There are about 250 different stops on this organ. It’s like a chemistry lesson.”

Monster Mash: Breaking news and headlines

--More 'Ring' woes: Aside from audience disdain (see comments), Los Angeles Opera's multimillion-dollar "Das Rheingold" faces technical problems.

--Bailout for the Bard: Facing a $2.6-million deficit, Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival appeals to the government for help.

--Helping schoolchildren: Michael Eisner's family foundation donates $1.25 million to CalArts.

--Music history: Heirs donate Leonard Bernstein's Connecticut studio to Indiana University.

--Showing regret: Chinese art dealer weeps after refusing to pay for Yves Saint Laurent bronzes.

--It's a small world afterall: Lincoln Center Festival features international theater and dance companies.

--Genius grantor: Georgetown's Robert Galucci tapped to lead the MacArthur Foundation.

--'Let them eat fake': Paris exhibition shows how Italian Surrealist faked his own work.

--Lisa Fung

Caption: A scene from Los Angeles Opera's production of "Das Rheingold." Credit: Branimir Kvartuc / Associated Press

Michael Eisner's family foundation gives $1.25 million to CalArts

Former Walt Disney Co. chief executive Michael Eisner and his family's Eisner Foundation are giving $1.25 million to a program at California Institute of the Arts that brings arts instruction to Los Angeles schoolchildren.

The grant, to be paid in $250,000 installments over the coming five years, is the largest ever received by CalArts' Community Arts Partnership, university officials said, and is the first grant the Eisner Foundation has made to an arts institution.

The community arts program, launched 19 years ago, sends CalArts faculty, students and alumni into neighborhood schools and community centers to teach a wide range of courses in music, dance, theater and visual arts. Its current annual budget is $1.7 million. The Eisner Foundation grant is focused on "new media," which include film and video, animation and digital forms. Over the five years, $375,000 will fund new-media courses for youngsters in the Community Arts Partnership, and the rest will go for scholarships for CalArts students, including a $750,000 ongoing endowment.

The aim, Eisner said in a statement, is "advancing not only the youth of Los Angeles, but the long-term viability of new media itself."

The Eisner Foundation had assets of $143.5 million at the end of 2007, according to the last annual statement on Guidestar.org, and made $6.4 million in donations that year.

-- Mike Boehm

Photo: Michael Eisner. Credit: Stephen Brashear /Associated Press.