Art review: Kirsten Stoltmann at Emma Gray

 

Kirsten Stoltmann’s painfully hilarious, super-short video at Emma Gray reads as an allegory of the artist’s fall from social grace. Or a spoof on suburbanites’ self-satisfaction and obliviousness. Or a satire of contemporary art’s deadly insularity. Possibly all three,  and likely more. “Post-Nothing” resonates beyond its cleverness to challenge — if only briefly and lightly — art’s status and the artist’s role in the wider world.

Stoltmann starts out earnest, Rocky-like, donning headphones for a morning jog. She ends up, only a minute later, embarassed, self-conscious, almost apologizing for her ambition. To tell the details of the tale would be to spoil its deftly produced surprise. Suffice it to say that Stoltmann’s micro-parable touches on artifice, as it applies to both art and life; pretense (ditto); and the suspension of disbelief necessary to appreciate certain art-like gestures.

Humor and audacity are regular tools for the L.A.-based Stoltmann, but they aren’t wielded as effectively in the rest of the show. A giant collage of sparkling colored artificial gems spells out I AM SO HAPPY, as if saying it’s so will make it so, especially if the declaration entails loads of effort and glitz. The piece reeks of irony but no real wit or insight. The same goes for a series of glossy magazine ads that Stoltmann has painted across with slogans, questions and implicit captions. Defacing typically sexist marketing campaigns might be empowering, but pitting their smooth insinuations against puerile rants (“I mean life is hard,” “To fart or not to fart”) is a losing — and silly — proposition.

-- Leah Ollman

Emma Gray HQ, 2600 La Cienega Blvd., (310) 497-6895, through March 16. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.emmagrayhq.com

Image: Kirsten Stoltmann, "Post-Nothing," video still, Courtesy Emma Gray HQ

Reimagining 'Carmen'

 

On this day in 1875, "Carmen" got its first performance in Paris. It was a disaster. Critics and the public panned it, and near the end of the run, the Opéra Comique had to paper the house to boost ticket sales. It wasn't until performances in Vienna later the same year that the opera took its first steps on the the road to ubiquity.

The opera has been filmed nearly 40 times already (not counting DVDs of productions), but on Saturday, "Carmen" is set to take a giant leap forward when a Royal Opera production opens as a 3D movie at theaters around the world.

In honor of "Carmen's" birthday, Colorado's Central City Opera asked, via Twitter, for readers' favorite adaptation of the opera's music.

Above is a keeper: Elmo & Denyce Graves performing in "Opera Lullaby," backed up by the Sheep Chorus.

Keep reading for a  few of the more clever reimaginings of the Habanera we found on YouTube. There are plenty more out there, so please do let us know what your nomination is.

Art review: William E. Jones at David Kordansky

Something of an archaeologist of the visual record, William E. Jones takes on central tenets of American political mythology in a trio of projected video works at David Kordansky.

“In Matthew Brady’s Studio” dissects portraits of powerful post-Civil War era Americans who posed in Brady’s photography studio with the accouterments of Classical antiquity. The video is split into three screens, two of which continually zoom in and out on a piece of fabric and a vase of vaguely Classical design. The central image zooms in on the eyes of the men themselves, bringing you up close and personal, but only for a brief moment. The tripartite projection somewhat resembles a dollar bill in format, with its central staring portrait and mélange of neo-Classical decoration. But the frenetic activity of the continual zooming gives the piece a manic, almost crazed energy that suggests a desperate effort to ground a severely divided nation in an altogether invented past.

By contrast, “Berlin Flash Frames” operates with the elusiveness of memory. Using stills from a propaganda film by the U.S. Information Agency about the Berlin Wall, it depicts crowds on the streets, smiling soldiers and close-ups of individuals, some of which are clearly staged. The images fade in and out of view like flashes of recollection, reappearing in varied sequences that create a sensation of déjà vu. Intermittently, they fade entirely to white, where we strain to see only the barest, smudgy outlines. The result is a partial, evanescent history, a quiet dismantling of grander narratives of American military benevolence.

The third video is derived from footage shot from a U.S. Air Force plane in 1969 as it performed practice maneuvers. It's not for the queasy. The horizon rotates vertiginously, then dissolves altogether in a blur of rainbow-hued lines that spread, coalesce and skim across the surface, punctuated with intense, stroboscopic flashes of neon color. Turning military might into a psychedelic light show, the work is appropriately, sickeningly beautiful.

-- Sharon Mizota

David Kordansky Gallery, 3143 S. La Cienega Blvd., Unit A, L.A., through March 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.davidkordanskygallery.com

Images: Installation views, "William E. Jones," 2011, David Kordansky Gallery. Credit: Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. 

Art review: Roman Signer at Young Projects

Swiss artist Roman Signer has described his art actions — many of which involve explosions and destruction — as “momentary sculptures.” However, most people experience them only as video documentation. In this sense, they are a species of filmmaking, and despite their undertones of violence, they are thoroughly delightful.

The current survey at Young Projects presents 15 works that effortlessly blend narrative, slapstick and existential poetry, all typically within the span of a few minutes. “Fass mit Kamera” (Barrel With Camera), begins with a shot of a man looking down at us, blocking out the sun. Then there is a rush of sky, then ground, sky and ground, blurring behind a water-splattered lens. The sequence is beguiling, exhilarating, puzzling and then suddenly humorous as the view switches to a medium shot of Signer placing a camera inside an oil drum and rolling it down a hill. One chuckles at the revelation that such a simple gesture could create such big, mysterious images.

Other works are almost pure slapstick: Signer sits down at an outdoor easel and poises his brush to start painting en plein air, only to be startled by an inexplicable explosion some yards behind him that makes him jump, leaving a single black mark on the canvas. Short, sharp and hilarious, the piece succinctly skewers the gentlemanly tradition of landscape painting with a literal “shock of the new.”

There are also works that allude to vaguely sociopolitical issues: a room full of toy helicopters lined up in neat martial rows take off all at once, buzzing around maniacally like so many trapped flies. In “Stuhl” (Chair), a mechanical winch twists a rope tied to a wooden chair, pulling it tighter and tighter, until it drags the chair across the floor and totally demolishes it. Darkly funny, it can be seen as an allegory of the implacable forces of unbridled industry in which the chair stands in, as it so often does in art, for the human body.

Some works strike a more existential, Sisyphean tone. There’s the small truck filled with barrels of water that Signer sends careening down a U-shaped ramp, only to topple over on itself, spilling its contents in a great crash of utter futility. There’s also footage of Signer sitting in a swivel chair, holding sputtering toy rockets in each hand that don’t quite provide the cartoon-like propulsion he might have hoped for.

What’s refreshing about these works is that unlike other artists who place themselves in harm’s way, Signer doesn’t seem to be interested in danger for its own sake. While clearly fascinated with machines and pyrotechnics, he seems more taken with their comic, aesthetic or metaphoric qualities than in presenting himself as a daredevil. In a sequence in which he triggers an explosion that catapults his hat up from the street so he can catch it from a second floor window, he is careful to tie himself to a pipe first to keep from falling. It’s a moment that easily could have been edited out of the final video, but it provides a sober counterpoint to the fabricated danger in works like Yves Klein’s 1960 photomontage, “Leap Into the Void,” in which the artist appears to swan dive directly onto the pavement.

In the end, while Signer may think of his works as momentary sculpture, they are, in their video form, more like a poetics of experience in which fleeting ideas take form not as objects but as lived phenomena of uncommon clarity.

-- Sharon Mizota

Young Projects, 8687 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 377-1102, through March 14. Closed Saturdays and Sundays. www.youngprojectsgallery.com

Images: Top: Installation view, "Pro Tempore: 15 Momentary Sculptures by Roman Signer." Credit: From Young Projects. Right: Still from "Bürostuhl," 2006. Credit: Roman Signer.

Laurel Nakadate flirts with danger in string bikini at the Standard Hotel

Laurel Nakadate's recent videos are suggestive enough to bring out some stern maternal instincts in just about any viewer. Couldn't you cover up with a sweater or something? Don't look at him that way. Don't you have some homework to do?

So it might be reassuring to know that Nakadate, a young-looking 35, is a video artist and photographer who has followed her exhibitionist impulses all the way to a major museum survey ("Only the Lonely," now at PS1 in New York). But watching her rub up against erotic content in her Standard Hotel video program, now on view in the lobbies of both the downtown and Sunset Strip locations in L.A., is still likely to trigger bouts of feminist empathy, male lust or both.

In her best-known series, Nakadate turned her camera on lonely men -- typically strangers who tried to pick her up on the street. She went home with them and asked them to do socially awkward, pseudo-intimate things like dance with her to Britney Spears or throw her a birthday party. In Artforum, critic Jeffrey Kastner recently called her work "dangerously smart, dangerously bold (and frequently just plain dangerous)."

Passing Balanchine on to the next ballet generation, in the studio and on tape

In a spacious, sunlit Lincoln Center studio on Sunday morning, two generations of New York City Ballet principal dancers met for a unique coaching session focused on a 1968 ballet by George Balanchine.

Over the course of three hours, Violette Verdy, for whom the choreographer created the lead role in "La Source," and Helgi Tomasson, who danced for Balanchine for 15 years before becoming artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet, helped Sterling Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia understand and absorb specific details and nuances.

Having worked closely with Balanchine, they were able to explain and illuminate –- and, increasingly, demonstrate -– the choreographer's original intentions to dancers who recently learned and performed "La Source" as it has been handed down through several decades.

Sunday’s session, with its illuminating demonstrations of the finer points of choreographic shading and emphasis, will soon have an impact beyond the two dancers who were its beneficiaries and the handful of observers who were present. It was digitally taped by the George Balanchine Foundation for the Interpreters Archive, an ongoing series. The edited tapes for each ballet, which include an extended interview with the veteran dancers who participate, are available to dancers and scholars in 70 libraries worldwide. (In California, the collection is available at UC Irvine, Moorpark Community College, UC Berkeley. Sacramento Ballet and the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum.) In addition to New York, taping sessions have taken place in San Francisco, Washington and Los Angeles, where in 2008 Yvonne Mounsey coached Melissa Barak in the formidable role of the Siren in Balanchine’s "Prodigal Son."

In "La Source," set to a score by Léo Delibes, Balanchine drew on Verdy's sophisticated, subtle musical awareness and effervescent wit to create a contemporary tutu ballet that alludes to 19th century French romantic ballet tradition. It is a notably demanding work -– there are two extended pas de deux as well as two solos for each principal. For today's young dancers, often called on to perform the hyper-extended extremes of new choreography, the delicacy and refinement of "La Source" may not be second nature. Verdy and Tomasson (who performed the lead male role with her frequently) observed and conferred, and often demonstrated.

Video of Gustavo Dudamel's L.A. Phil inaugural gala concert coming to iTunes

Music Director Gustavo Dudamel's 2009 inaugural gala with the Los Angeles Philharmonic will be featured in the first full-length classical concert video on iTunes.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn. says that the Deutsche Grammophon live recording, part of the DG Concerts series, will be available for download starting Sept. 14. The video shows the Oct. 8, 2009, performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall in which the  young Venezuelan conductor led the orchestra in the world premiere of John Adams' "City Noir," which was commissioned for the event, and Mahler's Symphony No. 1.

Other Phil tech ventures include the "Bravo Gustavo" online and iPhone conducting game and a Hollywood Bowl phone app.

Dudamel and the Philharmonic will open the 2010-11 season with an Oct. 7 gala concert with Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez.

-- Karen Wada

Photo: Gustavo Dudamel conducting the 2009 inaugural gala concert. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times.

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The Year of the Dude

Dance movie montage: Everybody cut 'Footloose'

 

 

Still have "Born to Run" in your head even though Jimmy Fallon and company sang that at the Emmys all the way back on Sunday? Getting antsy for the new season of "Glee"? Maybe you just need a Tuesday afternoon pick-me-up? Then check out the above video montage of dance movies set to "Footloose." brought to our attention by New York Magazine's Vulture blog.

What do you think? Were there any films missing? We would have liked to have seen something from "A Chorus Line," "All That Jazz" and maybe even "The Wizard of Oz." Share your thoughts in the comments.

-- Whitney Friedlander

Driven by the desire to create the next viral video

What would L.A. look like without any cars?

That question fascinated Ross Ching because (a) he hates getting stuck in traffic and (b) he likes creating Internet videos whose images are intriguing enough to go viral.

The 24-year-old Santa Monica filmmaker began to contemplate a carless city in December after he discovered Matt Logue's photography book "Empty L.A.", in which Logue used digital sleight of hand to produce deserted street scenes.

"I thought, How can I take this concept and make it my own thing?" Ching tells Culture Monster. "It made sense to combine Matt's cool idea with my specialty, which is time-lapse, and do a video. Photographs are two-dimensional, but video adds the dimension of time, and that third dimension helps tell the story" --  in this case, what he calls "the weird obsession people in L.A. have with driving."

For a week, Ching, was up at sunrise, taking pictures when the light was right and traffic was light. He spent 15 to 20 hours filming with his Canon 7D and about the same amount of time rendering and editing his footage, including erasing any signs of automotive life. (To find out more about how he did all this visit his website, www.rossching.com.)

David Mamet discovers 'Lost Masterpieces of Pornography'

Playwright David Mamet pushes peoples' buttons for a living. So when it came to making an Internet video, it seems only natural that he would gravitate toward the world of sex and illicit behavior -- but tinged with that distinctive Mamet irony.

Here's a short humorous clip he directed, starring his frequent collaborators Ricky Jay, Ed O'Neill and Kristen Bell. And despite its title, the video is safe for work.

-- David Ng