Tag Archives: Public Theatre

Above the Line

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I did my day backwards. Starting from a reflective, quiet experience, I ended with a quarreling barrel of noise and anger that fueled the Trump victory.

Story of my life at the moment. Escaping into art before being forced into reality.

Agnes Martin made over 600 paintings exploring emptiness, energy, seeing, and surprisingly, joy.

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The show at the Guggenheim opens with this oddly shaped room hung with the entire ethereal series Islands I – XII from 1979. Here in Martin’s signature style, the paintings explore light and form and formlessness. She challenges us to slow down and look in order to really see. This is the work of art. To make us slow down and think, feel, remember, dream, and aspire.Martin wants you to experience innocence, freedom, perfection attained and resisted.

Here shapes emerge. Stripes of pale blue and gray. Pencil lines. All revealed up close and melt away at a distance. The pieces unite and converse, push against each other for space. They look stunning with the architecture.

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Martin explained that she works in a meditative way, emptying her mind and waiting for inspiration. For her, inspiration is emotional, and the intellect does not produce artwork. So despite what you see, her works are not minimalist, mathematical explorations of line, color, shape. You can see the artist’s hand.

Loving Love, 1999

Untitled, 2004

painterly detail

painterly detail

Instead emotion fills her intention, and she argues the work, like the Abstract Expressionists. And not just any emotion.

Loving Love, 1999

Loving Love, 1999

Martin says she draws a line and chooses to live above the line, with happiness, beauty, and love. By this approach, I’ve been living below the line since the election. After 9/11, art pulled me above the line. I don’t know what will this time.

Going to the Jewish Museum certainly wasn’t the answer. Although ostensibly I went for the John Singer Sargent portrait on loan, aching for his bravura splashes of color after the austere monochromes of Martin.

But I was literally swept into the bright noise of Take Me (I’m Yours). This democratic space lets artists express in the moment, and the below-the-line anger oozed through the rooms.

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With objects to take ranging from pills to lemon water and t-shirts and ribbons to words on paper and words on the wall, I filled the bag provided. My bright yellow ribbon states “It is not enough to be compassionate” in hot pink serif letters. This was the cleanest saying hung for the taking.

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The t-shirt: “freedom cannot be simulated.”

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What tore my heart open was the poster created by Jonathan Horowitz before Election Day. I couldn’t bear to take one, although it was probably the most popular object in the exhibit. Now who’s face will join the portraits?

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Martin’s Taoism that had so calmed and uplifted me vanished immediately.

I don’t know why I decided to follow through on my ticket purchase for Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat.” But I went and found the violent yelling and seething racism of working class plant workers  just more than I could take.

Yes, the play was written and even opened before the election. I bought my ticket when I could assume my pedestal height to empathize with their struggles for work, which in my privileged way I share, so a connection. I couldn’t make it past intermission.

I get it: working class white America is angry. Now liberal America is angry. What do we do with all this anger? How can we get back above the line?

Untitled, 1960, looks like a textile

Untitled, 1960, looks like a textile

Or do we need to blur the lines or weave the lines? Try something new?

detail; see each one of us showing up

detail; see each one of us showing up

 

 

Shakespearean Take on the Civil War

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The way the American Civil War forced choices about identity fascinates me.  Suzan-Lori Parks takes this on through her particular lens with her three-act “Father Comes  Home From the Wars.”

The play follows the choices made by Hero, a slave who serves his ‘boss-master’ fighting in the war.  The first part shows him wrestling against his conscience, amidst his slave comrades, lover/wife, and ‘father’.  With a Hamlet-like indecision, it takes other’s actions to get him to move forward.

Parks is referencing the hero’s journey, too, particularly Homer’s “Odyssey.”  Hero even takes the name Ulysses later in the play, the Roman name for Odysseus, as well as the Union general, and another slave is named Homer.

But it’s the Shakespearean ties that intrigue me.  The second act features a Shakespearean soliloquy by the boss-master that is as touching as it is surprising, as well as unveiling the surprise identity of their Union soldier captive.

Hero continues a motif of trying on clothes to try on new identities.  Still, he can’t  imagine a future in which his value isn’t expressed monetarily.  His choice at the end of the second part is disappointing, but completely in character.

By the third act, the tone changes dramatically, with a Greek chorus of runaway slaves, or maybe they’re more like the three witches of the Scottish play.  And Hero’s dog makes an appearance as a truth-telling Fool.  While the other characters change and let go, adjusting to shifting circumstances, Hero plays out the same drama of loyalty versus his true identity.  He admits to trading his “soul” for values he seems to have no choice in enacting.

Parks has made a Shakespearean play about the greatest tragedy in the American experience, perhaps even greater than the annihilation of Indian cultures, although with much the same results.  Some of the allusions are heavy-handed, such as the use of contemporary slang and dress, notably in the third part.  I think her audience gets the relevance and crippling legacy of slavery today, without crippling not only one, but two of her characters.  Still I can’t imagine the plot without the repercussions of the physical wounds of these characters.

In part two, the characters debate which wounds are worse.  Hero says he would choose his legs, while the Yankee wounded in the leg says he now has to choose his arms.  The specious choice of which body parts are best to preserve closes the play as Hero says his hands are now his own.

But are they?  His self-deception makes him a tragic victim, much like his Shakespearean namesake.  She as a passive victim is rescued.  This Hero is neither heroic nor saved.  It’s a sad business that Parks elevates and elucidates for the ages.