Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch @ BAM

As a graduate student I used to venture out to BAM regularly to visit what was, in the 1990s, one of New York’s few locations for international experimental theater. And when I went over the bridge last night, I was relieved to find there is still one place in New York where people are not glued to their iPhones, one place that technology consumerism hasn’t yet colonized. Anja insisted that we get there 20 minutes early to watch the people arrive, and to be sure, the audience was as varied and as interesting as any cross-section of New York’s cultural and intellectual world. There were people of all ages, some dressed with abandon, others very meticulously put together, still others who arrived with their head still in a book. New York’s most vibrant intellectuals had crawled out of the woodwork to see Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch’s final work.

I last saw Tanztheater Wuppertal perform in New York, at Lincoln Center, in 2002. I remember it as being intellectual, avant-garde, somewhat experimental, I remember the dancers being of all different ages, being strong in personality, and saw them pushing at the boundaries of what it means to dance, to perform, to act.

But last night’s performance at BAM was softer, more fluid, more dreamy, less intellectually challenging. It was a delight. While it was enjoyable and engaging, there was nothing particularly radical about the dancing or the message being conveyed in the series of vignettes that made up "…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…" (Like moss on a stone). Unlike vintage Pina Bausch from the 1970s, the performance was not experimental and nor did it push boundaries. The overall narrative was resoundingly heterosexual: men and women struggled, fell in and out of each others arms, loved each other, writhed in agony and anger, but always, they came back to the fundamental belief in the resilience of the heterosexual relationship.

While the kind of relationship explored in the vignettes that made up "…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…"  was conventional, so much of the delight of the piece was in the strength and power of the women as they reveled in their femininity. Not only did the women outnumber the men, but they wore an exquisite array of colorful, sensual dresses – in familiar Pina Bausch style. The men, however, were often shorter, wore black, and were more generic, less distinctive in their appearance. The women teased the men, combatted them, resisted them, and then they fell into their arms, like honey as they melted into their feminine softness. And all the time, the women were playful and joyous, filled with an energy that spoke their endless enthusiasm for life.

The women dancers were beautiful, but not always in a conventional sense: striking in their defined facial features and the clarity of their movements.  They all had long, thick hair that became as integrated into their identities, their power, and the overall narrative as did their gorgeous dresses. They used their dresses not only as clothes, but as paniers for rocks, for grass, they transformed them into screens, fans, and curtains between them and the men. The women were always more beautiful and more exotic than the men with their colorful dresses, their long hair determining the shape of the dances as well as the stories, claiming their power as women. This feminine strength was uplifting, something to be celebrated.

The theatrical dance itself was about the intensity of what it means to love, to be intimate, the struggle to find emotional security and the difficulty of holding onto it. So the emotions conveyed in movement were at times profound. The pain, for example, of a woman at the end of a rope tied around her waist as she tugged, and writhed at speed, like a dog on the end of a lead was excruciating. It was painful because we may not all have been tied to the end of a rope, but we know the feeling of being unable to break loose from the chains that hold us back, hold us in one place. Then, in one of the most sensuous and erotic scenes, all of the dancers formed a line diagonally across the stage, sitting linked in the space between the legs of the one behind (above). As they sat, leaning back into the one behind, each brushed and massaged the hair of the one in front, to the beat of the playful music. It was, again, revealing of intimacy and tenderness.

Such moments of harmony were broken when a single dancer broke into an intense solo, at a pace that ensured we were transported into a realm of confrontation, into the isolation and untrained energy that puts distance between the need for love and the love itself. And so, the dancing was expansive and intense — as we came to expect from Pina Bausch — between comedy and intimacy, antagonism and isolation. And, to reiterate, I came away uplifted by the energy of the women as they indulged the depths of their femininity. Ultimately, however, I am not sure that this performance added to my understanding of what dance can do, or where it can go.

Raphaël, les dernières années au Louvre

As an undergraduate art history student I wrote an essay on Raphaël’s School of Athens because I was so captivated by the movement and energy of Plato and Aristotle as they bring the spatial recession towards us while simultaneously filling the picture plane with their verticality. It’s an extraordinary painting for its dimensions, but also its philosophical and aesthetic reach. Indeed, it’s the painting that I have, ever since, associated with Raphaël, one of the three high Renaissance masters of Papal Italy (Michelangelo and Leonardo being the other two). This autumn’s exhibition at the Louvre, Raphaël, Les dernières années, opens up to a quieter, more reflective Raphaël. This is probably because the exhibition features the works that can be moved: the smaller, more intimate, though nevertheless breathtaking paintings and drawings that he made in the final ten years of his short life.

Raphaël, The School of Athens, 1510-

That said, in the second room of the exhibition is the dynamic, complex narrative of Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary, c. 1514-16. The agitation, or the “spasm” of the painting’s Italian title, creates anger, surprise and a depth of other complex emotions that emerges as Mary reaches out to help Christ having stumbled from bearing the weight of the cross. Simultaneously, we see here, the precision of Raphaël’s technique in the perfectly crafted, if disproportionate muscles of Simon of Cyrene, the man compelled by the Romans to carry the cross.  His arms are as exquisite as the cloth of Mary’s red robe in the bottom right corner. The rich, vibrant reds and blues, the sculpting of the human body, and the realism of the highly charged scene brings alive the rarely painted narrative, making it hard to believe that it was painted 500 years ago. This is a painting that does so much more than tell the biblical story.  

Raphaël, Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary, c. 1514-1516 

The portraits, however, were for me, the most sublime of the images on display at the Louvre. They are sublime because of the luminescence of the skin, the perfection of the face, the grace and serenity of the look as it the sitter greets the eye of the spectator in quiet reflection. Because Raphael is best known for his frescos in the Vatican living quarters, the portraits are surprising, though frank. In the examples in the Louvre exhibition, the background is often a single color, placing all emphasis and our complete attention on the exquisitely perfect faces of the sitter. Everything that needs to be said about the sitter is in the face, the hands softly resting, and in contemplative eyes.

Raphael, Portrait of Bindo Altiviti, 1515

 The Portrait of Bindo Altiviti (1515), the rich banker who was also a highly cultured man, is once again, striking for its realism. And also, as the first of the portraits to be exhibited, the viewer is struck by the contemporaneity of his soft, graceful face caught in the shadows. And I am surely not the only one to be seduced by the eroticism of his full red lips, his golden hair falling on his bare skin.

Raphaël, Portrait of Cardinal Bernardo Douizi da Bibbiena, 1516-1517

It’s difficult not to be wooed by the sumptuous red ecclesiastical dress against a luminescent green background in the portrait of the Cardinal of Santa Maria in Portico, Rome: Portrait of Cardinal Bernardo Douizi da Bibbiena, c. 1516-1517. Even if he is not someone we would want to spend time with, his dress, his delicate hands holding what is presumably a message for the Pope, and his intense eyes that follow us as we walk around the room, make him irresistible.

Raphaël, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1519

My favorite was the Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1519) because it is grey. His hat and his beard frame his face which, other than his folded hands at the bottom of the painting, are the focus of an otherwise “fully lit” monochromatic palette. Apparently, it is not just for compositional purposes that the hat, as if an extension of the coat, covers his head: it also covered his baldness. But the most sumptuous and most sensuous aspect of the painting is Baldassare’s grey fur: it is so finely painted, so soft and subtle that it made me want to reach out and stroke it. I am no Cinquecento scholar, but I can’t think of another painting from this time that ventured into an entirely grey palette to create such a compelling, richly textured, yet entirely somber canvas.

Giulio Romano, Portrait of a Woman at a Mirror, 1523-1524

There are so many delights in the exhibition, but the execution and articulation of fabrics must have been among the most exciting. In an unsettling image by Giulio Romano, one of Raphaël’s assistant, Portrait of a Woman at a Mirror, 1523-1524, the woman covers herself with a piece of entirely transparent fabric. Or in Portrait of a Woman, 1512-1518, the trimmings of the woman’s dress are so opulent and finely rendered that they appear to be three dimensional, protruding into the spectator’s space. Next to the theatricality and energy of the better known frescos, the economy of line and form to create an equally dense, yet thoroughly individual story in the portraits cannot help but mesmerize any viewer. 

Cindy Sherman @ Gagosian Gallery, Paris

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#547), 2010-12

When I was first introduced to Cindy Sherman’s photographs as an art history major at Melbourne University, I was really excited by the Untitled Film Stills, particularly in the originality of their invention of what I would call a historical postmodernism. Ever since, however, I have found her photographs to range from mildly disappointing to outright offensive. I remember seeing an exhibition of recent work in a New York gallery about ten years ago, and being offended by the reek of a colonization of the image of socially less-privileged women. Similarly, I am not fully convinced by the repetition ad infinitum of her self-portrait, a strategy that has become her signature process and aesthetic. It is all that she does.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#548), 2010-12

Indeed, the recent photographs on display at Gagosian’s Paris gallery are a long way from the film stills. In this current series of untitled images, Sherman the actress and star of her own photographs is seen posing in Romantic landscapes. She wears outfits courtesy of the Chanel archives, garments that are rich and luxurious in their fabric, ornamentation and form. The discontinuity between the exaggerations of the figure and the depthless landscapes is contrived for maximum collision and incompatibility. The landscapes gesture towards being dreamy, towards an invitation to fall into them. However, they are cold — in color, temperature, and thanks to a digital manipulation process that makes for a harshness. And so, I at least was never tempted into contemplation of the landscapes. On the contrary, Sherman’s figure is so arresting — through its composition, performance, detail — that it is easy to walk around the exhibition taking no notice of the brown, grey and other tonally depressing landscapes. Thus, Sherman reverses the diminished figure in an overwhelming and animated landscape that is the preoccupation of Romantic painting. Similarly, the separation and collision of foreground and background, figure and landscape cracks open the seduction to contemplation that is so typical of Romanticism.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#540), 2010-12

Sherman’s critics and commentators are always quick to point out the political importance of her work, an importance that still makes sense within wider discursive contexts on identity. The manipulation and undoing of Romantic yearning is surely the site of these photographic statements about the self, identity, and particularly, women’s social and cultural identity in these images. The foregrounding of the artist as performing self in a landscape to which she has no relevance, a landscape from which she is completely alienated, could logically be interpreted as the photographs’ raison d’être. Because the outfits are inappropriate, to the point of irony, the regard and hand articulations are exaggerated and cold, the foreground-background relations are disproportionate, and so on, the image arrests us, it prevents us from falling into the photograph. We are thus commanded to confront the emptiness of this reality, its drain of emotion, its absurdity even. 

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#551), 2010-12

While I understand the importance of these claims in Sherman’s photography, I still can’t help thinking that through the engagement with Romanticism, the urgent politics that were so provocative in the Untitled Film Stills are now lost. The early work, and particularly, the Untitled Film Stills were instrumental in the ignition of a discourse on the representation of woman, and the imperative to arrest the ogling of a viewer that had been identified as the most oppressive strategy of Hollywood film. However, I am not convinced that this later work is intervening in public discourse to the same extent. It is true that, rather than having a male wanderer in a powerful overwhelming landscape, Sherman places a lone woman in a landscape that is on the precipice of disappearance, thereby screaming the imperative to stand up and take notice.  However, because the reference of the recent photographs is a Romantic aesthetic, it doesn’t have the currency or the urgency of intervention that was so ground breaking in the earlier works critique of the popular cultural landscape of Hollywood film. 

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#552), 2012

All Images Courtesy of Gagosian, 2012