• Last Life

    Last Life

    It is particularly true of Shakespeare that his individual works both feed off and nourish an entire body-of-work. Hamlet is the richer for Macbeth, Twelfth Night for King Lear, the comedies for the tragedies, Falstaff for Toby Belch, Viola for Sonnet 121 and even for Iago. In LAST LIFE: A Shakespeare Play  by Sara Fay…

  • D.I.S.P.L.A.Y.E.D.

    D.I.S.P.L.A.Y.E.D.

    Heidi Latsky’s D.I.S.P.L.A.Y.E.D. is reached through several stories of descending stairway (or elevator), balcony, and lobby. On each level are encountered living sculptures, sometimes still as stone and other times in stylized motion. They evoke both classical sculpture and avant-garde fashion, draped in white but wearing 3-D geometric adornments, wires and corners contrasting the flow…

  • Manifesto

    Manifesto

    MANIFESTO is an installation by Julian Rosefeldt of 13 short films in simultaneous play in the darkened space of the Park Avenue Armory. More than one, but never all, of the screens are visible from a given point. Cate Blanchett, playing different roles in each film, delivers lines taken from some 55 manifestos (most artistic,…

  • Simon Starling: At Twilight

    Simon Starling: At Twilight

    SIMON STARLING: AT TWILIGHT documents a revival, by Starling, a visual artist, and the theater maker Graham Eatough, of W.B. Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well, the 1916 Irish folk play that drew on Noh drama to break with Naturalism and realist art in general. Ultimate reality was, to a Symbolist like Yeats, immaterial but accessible…

  • Annemarie Heinrich

    Annemarie Heinrich

    They might, in an English novel, have been called “womanly,” the left perched elegantly on the grip of the cane, the right draped, like a napkin, across the opposite wrist. From there, the eye follows the arm to the crook of the elbow and up to the face. It is, the portrait, perfectly proportioned to…

  • Reconstructing the Universe

    Reconstructing the Universe

    In the lexicon of critical clichés, “bracing” is the one I would choose to describe the Guggenheim’s ITALIAN FUTURISM, 1909–1944: RECONSTRUCTING THE UNIVERSE. I was startled, as if awakened, by its spiraling coherence and aesthetic range, and loved the byways down which it made me wander, including into the actorless kingdom of Futurist theater. I…

  • The Mystery of the Ordinary

    The Mystery of the Ordinary

    The René Magritte exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art has stayed with me since I saw it last month, on the day after Thanksgiving. I suppose that, among the Surrealists, I have always thought first of Dalí due to the iconic status of his melting clocks and cinematic collaborations with Buñuel; and then of…

  • Baden-Baden

    Baden-Baden

    The first of four pieces in BADEN-BADEN 1927, Gotham Chamber Opera‘s update and reassessment of the German spa-town festival held in that year, is Milhaud’s “Abduction (or Rape) of Europa.” It happens in front of a picture by the contemporary artist Georg Baselitz, who is known for exploring identical images in multiple works and from…

  • Hopper Drawing

    Hopper Drawing

    There is much greatness in the visual art of the United States, but in the end I always settle on Hopper. I went away from Modern Life, the Whitney Museum of American Art‘s 2013 retrospective, thinking his paintings, which teeter on the line between the beauty of solitude and the pangs of loneliness, to be…

  • Harmony in Process

    Harmony in Process

    Among the visual artists producing work to the music of the Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet at HARMONY IN PROCESS Saturday night at ShapeShifter Lab was Patti Maciesz, who sat center stage and made little illustrated tags for the audience in response to what she was hearing and seeing. This is the one she handed to…