Montalvo Arts Center : Ariel Swartley for AGENCY

Ingram Marshall: Dissolving Boundaries

By Ariel Swartley on THU, NOV 19TH 2009, 9:23 A.M.

Ingram Marshall was a college student in the early 1960s when he heard his first piece of electronic music. It was Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique, created for the pavilion Le Corbusier designed at the Brussels World’s Fair. Marshall was so excited by the French composer’s use of taped sounds--echoing bells, mechanical plonks--as sculptural masses, he later told writer Edward Strickland, that he turned up the radio as loud as he could and stuck his head in.

Marshall’s own works, though nominally minimalist, prompt a similar, whole-body response. Whether composed entirely on tape with voices looping through layers of ambient sound–a fog horn, skis swishing through snow—or based on more traditional melodies and scored for string quartets, the sense they convey is visceral and immediate. The room has suddenly gotten bigger.

The spaciousness is evident even when his subject is confinement. Two pieces--Alcatraz, named for the federal penitentiary and Eberbach, for a 12th century German monastery later used as an asylum--will be part of the program at Montalvo November 21. Marshall describes both works as “musico-visual operas,” the libretto in each case being a set of slowly dissolving images-- landscapes, building details--by Jim Bengston, an American photographer now based in Norway. Friends since college, the two men share a penchant for discovering mystery in the ordinary—the ethereal cloud formed by a car’s exhaust, the familiar cadences of a weather report delivered in a foreign language.

Their Alcatraz evokes both the brutal reality of the building’s former purpose—it closed in 1963—and the haunted beauty in its decay. No one experiencing the piece feels entirely innocent. The thunderous clang of a cell door and the rippling arpeggios both invite regret. Eberbach offers another kind of dialogue between anxious spirit and enclosing walls, and Marshall underscores the connection between the two works by referring to Eberbach as a “Penitential Vision.

From the beginning, old and new have swirled together in Marshall’s music. The first of his compositions that he played in public presented a young woman’s voice technically manipulated in the ways tape makes possible—spliced, filtered, sped up and slowed down. The words she was speaking and singing were William Blake’s Jerusalem, written at the beginning of the 19th century.

In the 1970s, Marshall traveled to Java and Bali to study their gamelan orchestras. This ancient tradition with its non-western intervals, instruments that include gongs and bamboo flutes, and its compositional forms, stressing repetition and rhythmic variation, derived from the music’s association with ritual and drama, gave Marshall--as it had John Cage and Lou Harrison before him--a new palette of sonorities and sonic approaches.

Some of these are evident in Fog Tropes II, both in its initial instrumentation and in its fluid adaptability. As Fog, composed on tape as a sound score for a San Francisco performance artist, it layered the city’s foghorns and bird cries with a gamelan flute. Marshall scored a second version, Fog Tropes for a brass sextet, a few years later. Fog Tropes II, part of Saturday’s program, is the string version written for the Kronos Quartet. In each, the piece, like its namesake, offers the simultaneous sense of being surrounded and freed.

Like Bengston’s recent photographs of such highway staples as motels and scrubland, Marshall’s Evensongs represent a return to home ground. Based on two protestant hymns of his childhood, Now the Day Is Over and Abide with Me, the piece mixes taped elements—including a chorus of music boxes--with a live string quartet. Once part of a ubiquitous American soundtrack, the melodies in Marshall’s six variations shift in and out of focus like half-recalled memories. Both songs are Victorian era meditations on evening. Now the Day was written as a children’s hymn; Abide, whose author knew himself to be ill, is a frequent funeral piece. Between these two aspects—the rosy end of day and the gloomy end of life—Marshall’s music stakes out a tremulous middle ground. There, in the shimmering twilight, with echoes of his own child’s voice on the tape, innocence and experience blur.

Geoff "Double G" Gallegos: Pulling Together

By Ariel Swartley on MON, NOV 9TH 2009, 3:10 P.M.

Geoff Gallegos, more frequently known as Double G, clearly enjoys a challenge. Last December, dressed in white tails, his black braids bouncing out rhythms on his shoulders, Gallegos stood on a conductor’s podium before eighty or more disparate musicians—among them a professional string quartet, a well-known jazz pianist, a cadre of legendary Afro-Cuban drum masters, and a blistering funk-rock guitarist—hoping to meld them into a cohesive whole.

A saxophonist by training and a composer who cites both Charles Mingus and Dmitri Shostakovich as influences, Gallegos had an advantage: He was used to working with most of the people on stage. Arriving in Los Angeles thirteen years ago, Gallegos met a pool of other young musicians trained in both classical and popular disciplines who shared his interest in integrating sounds—turntable scratchings and cello melodies, say—usually kept far away from each other. The result was daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra, which Gallegos co-founded and leads. Hip Hop is, in a sense, a nation of conductors. A performer armed with a tone arm and a stack of records assembles a collage of phrases—a memorably funky bass line, James Brown’s trademark yelp—and ties them together with rhythm. Lyrics play similarly with whatever’s in the air: advertising jingles, campaign slogans, slang. daKAH’s expansive palette—orchestral strings, brass, and woodwinds, along with electric guitars, a dozen MCs and percussionists plus a turntable artist—allows Gallegos to sample live from a vast range of old and new sonorities. The intense physicality of the sound is ear-opening.

daKAH’s repertoire includes Gallegos’ “Unfinished Symphony,” whose movements pair jumpy urban lyrics with the shimmering brass-thick textures of Latin jazz to songs by hip-hop forebears like funk-rock-fusion prophet George Clinton, given new gravitas with orchestral fanfares. Gallegos has said the name means “one” in a Ghanaian language, but daKAHa’s sound is not some bland blend. Instead, the varied instruments and genres each have a turn at the mike, lifted and herded by the propulsive beat—and by Gallegos’s conducting. It’s different, he told an interviewer, from being a composer. “It’s more like being the captain of a ship...if it goes down, I’m going down with it.”

Late last fall, Gallegos conducted a preview of portions of his String Quartet No. 2, premiering at Montalvo this September. Watching him pound out the rhythm on his thigh, it was easy to imagine that the ship captain had picked up an oar. He began the composition while in residence as a Lucas Artist Fellow, inspired by the densely wooded trails and the sudden hilltop vistas of San Jose. If, as he noted, the sinuous lines and ecstatic harmonies of the first two movements invoke the acts of ascending the path and achieving the view, then the third seems to pause for a question. Constructed around one individual pitch which is defined and redefined by the intervals accompanying it, the movement is both a model of interdependence as Gallegos explained, and a portrait of the artist, shaping and shaped by his surroundings.

The Sonus Quartet who will perform the piece are graduates of conservatories and orchestras in Cleveland, Houston, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles. They used to “have a residency,” as cellist Vanessa Freeborn-Smith put it, at one of L.A.’s Irish pubs where their set list roamed from madrigals to Led Zeppelin. “It’s not the music, but how it’s presented that turns kids off,” she said—the formal posture expected of classical players and audiences, the quietly polite applause. Quartet players, too, are their own conductors. For last fall’s preview of the “Montalvo” quartet—a piece they were still learning—they relied on Gallegos’s beat. By the time of the performance, they won’t need him. “We’ll know the proper rhythm,” violist Neel Hammond said. They will have internalized it.

For Gallegos, the premier is another departure. It means staying on shore—no longer ship captain but ship builder—while his composition leaves the harbor. The hope is that of any composer, any artist: that out of a multiplicity of styles and influences, sampled, appreciated, and finally owned, there will emerge a honed and buoyant craft. It’s a hope states and nations share as well.

Lee Mingwei: Hanging by a Thread

By Ariel Swartley on WED, NOV 4TH 2009, 2:23 P.M.

Lee Mingwei does not make objects so much as he makes possibilities. A slender platform slopes outward from a hillside. Follow its path from the forest and arrive at a single potted tree. These images, from Grandfather’s Incline designed by Mingwei and the architect Stephan Freid, invite us to consider how natural and man-made landscapes can intersect and even illuminate each other.

Proposed as a permanent public artwork to be sited on Montalvo’s well-used network of hiking trails, An Offering and Public Art Proposal: Grandfather’s Incline does not yet exist. The platform, intended to float somewhere above the Garden Theatre, is currently suspended between now and then. In that anticipatory state—where plans are sketched and instructions are penciled in—we must puzzle out for ourselves what the experience of descending the incline is likely to be. The elevations and topographical maps displayed in the Project Space offer a new, intimate view of the hillside—a kind of x-ray vision. At the same time, without an actual structure to tether us to the ground, we’re free to go off on our own tangents, to remember other precipitous slopes and their angles of repose.

To feel oneself vigorously launched, then left momentarily dangling, is a frequent experience in Mingwei’s work. In movies or novels suspense is accompanied by a rush of adrenaline. Mingwei’s objective is a different sort of emotional chemistry. It’s not surprising to learn that he studied Ch’an Buddhism in his native Taiwan. Like the paradoxes beloved by Buddhist monks, Mingwei’s not-fully-determined spaces induce, after the first startled moment, a feeling of buoyancy. In this sudden unfreighted state deeper perceptions and renewed intentions more easily arise.

His projects draw on a variety of skills and practices, some traditionally belonging to the arts, others frankly domestic. Sewing, writing, photography, gardening, cooking, sculpting, performance: For Mingwei, the common denominator is people. His constructions—of whatever material and whether concrete or metaphorical—are designed as arenas for engagement. Guernica in Sand, a recent installation, up-ends the idea of art as an object requiring protection and preservation. Each day as he recreated Picasso’s revered Guernica as a sand painting, Mingwei proposed that a spectator walk through it, disrupting the picture even as he was busy renewing it.

Mingwei studied biology and architecture—both full of lessons in interdependence--before completing a degree in textile arts. But that subject holds lessons, too: Delicate threads, when interwoven, can support many times their weight. His Fabric of Memory, a 2006 piece, first appears as an array of wooden boxes tied with ribbon. Like presents, they’re designed to be opened by exhibit visitors. Each contains a piece of hand-made clothing. Contributed by community members, the clothes are accompanied by written explanations of who made them and why they are cherished. The boxes, unlike the nubby sweaters, are uniformly smooth and their arrangement is enticing, but they are simply housing. Call them junction boxes for connections waiting to be made.

“Psychologically or physically,” Mingwei has said, “(I) build a platform for people to come in and put their story and their experience in my context.” Out of that warp and woof of single intention and communal engagement come works whose dimensions spread far beyond the habitual boundaries of viewing hours and exhibition space.

Submission number 858932 to the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition envisaged 12-foot glass walls built to the building’s thickness and erected on its original footprint. Designed by Stephan Freid and recreating a project originally staged by Mingwei in 1990s, the walls would be filled with letters written by visitors at stations scattered around the site. The project, though not chosen and not built, stands as a convincing demonstration. Over time, love and memory can make a fabric more enduring than steel.

Louis Hock: Seeing and Believing

By Ariel Swartley on THU, SEP 3RD 2009, 4:55 P.M.

We rarely see the officer’s face, but he’s very much in ours: badge looming, holster bulging. The image, shot at the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s checkpoint on Interstate 5 north of San Diego, dominates one wall of Feral, Louis Hock’s video installation in Montalvo’s Project Space gallery. What happens there? Dusk deepens. Every so often the black-gloved hands halt the flow of vehicles and waves one to the side for further inspection. On the opposite wall spheres arc over emerald grass and across puffy cloudscapes. Swatted or self-propelled? The soundtrack of mechanical thwacks gives no clue.

Hock, who grew up in Nogales, Arizona, just across from Nogales, Mexico, has long been interested in the way meanings get drawn—like a preternaturally straight boundary line—over the hills and gullies of experience. His desire to bring those discrepancies into focus has led to public art works like Art Rebate, which traced the route, via signed ten dollar bills, of money spent by visa-less residents in U.S. communities, and to installations like American Desert, which paired popular views of the Southwest from classic films and Road Runner cartoons with photographs of border crossing trails—some thousands of years old—still used by humans and animals.

Images, Hock knows, read differently when they are isolated and when they’re viewed over time. Initially, Feral’s leather-accessorized torso—aggressive, sexual, and overblown—is an icon of enforcement. It’s meant to evoke emotions of fear or security depending on where we stand. But even the most law-abiding viewer will feel this officer comes too close for comfort. Hock’s camera forces intimacy. We can’t help noticing the body beneath the uniform. The longer we look, the more the message unravels. Do we really expect this employee, glancing, suddenly human, at his watch, to divine the contents of every car trunk?

That play—between an image that fixes meaning and events that allow it to unfold—is also at work in The Mexican Tapes: A Chronicle of Life Outside the Law. Hock’s documentary, showing in the Villa’s Billiards Room, is centered in the rundown San Diego coast apartment court where he lived in the early 1980s. It follows his neighbors—gardeners, hotel maids, dishwashers, nearly all undocumented—through daily routines which include abusive employers, a supercilious landlord, and endless raids by the Border Patrol. Hock began shooting in the building as a casual experiment: he was practicing for a video course he was about to teach. When he found the long shots he favored as a filmmaker undercut by video’s lack of depth, he moved in closer. Soon other distances telescoped. He learned Spanish, became a close friend of several couples, eventually got their jokes.

In one scene, his neighbors, like an army of Kilroys, write their names on the underside of a dish, the back of a placemat. It’s a punchy cinematic moment: They are here despite laws and fences because we can’t live comfortably without them. More often, Hock works by accumulation. Childish cries of “La Migra!” are a recurrent sound in the tapes. It’s a favorite game in the building—a modern version of cowboys and Indians, in which older children pretending to be INS agents chase the younger ones to each group’s delight. Sometimes, though the cries are real: the kids have spotted the agents’ vans arriving. Then it’s the adults who run, while legal residents of a nearby condominium gather on their balconies to watch the show.

Eventually, some of Hock’s friends, tiring of the theatrics, decide to give Mexico another try. It feels like our loss. But in this story there’s a further twist. In 2004 several people whom Hock filmed as children decades earlier requested copies of The Mexican Tapes to show their own families. The conversation that ensued resulted in Sketches for the American Tapes: A Tale of Immigrations, Hock’s documentary-in-progress, that premieres in the Carriage House on September 27. He describes the work, a prequel to a full-length version he expects to complete in 2010 as “not unlike a book of short stories.” Given that the narrative encompasses thirty years, and the shifting political winds of several administrations, it might also be fair to call it an Odyssey.

Pandit Chitresh Das: Story Cycle

By Ariel Swartley on THU, AUG 27TH 2009, 4:23 P.M.

In the beginning there was the story—or perhaps the storyteller. Millennia ago, in Northern India, persons known as kathakas traveled between villages and temples performing religious and historic tales. They were their own accompanists, using an array of gestures and facial expressions plus all the vocal drama that tone and cadence can supply. Their job at its simplest was to summon an audience and lead it through each twist and nuance of the uplifting narrative. Yet the gestures—some in time codified as mutha, the Indian dance language of hand movements—and the vivid facial expressions, assumed and replaced almost like masks, were important as a barrier as well as an invitation. They signaled that the audience was entering a realm sometimes called sacred, where unexpected transformations occur. Men might speak as women; women might speak as gods. In this world, the teller is indistinguishable from the telling. Kathak—the single word—refers to both.

When choreographer-performer-teacher Pandit Chitresh Das brings his San Francisco -based company to Montalvo for an open rehearsal on August 30 and an evening of dance and discussion on September 29, they will be performing excerpts from a new work, Sita Haren, which draws on one of the oldest sources of Kathak storytelling: the Ramayana. One of the two great Sanskrit epics that have molded Indian culture, the Ramayana existed (much like Homer’s Odyssey) as a scattering of traditional tales before the Hindu poet Valmiki gave it cohesive shape in the 4th century BC. It is both a romance in which a popular prince, Rama, and his wife Sita, are forced into a lengthy exile by a scheming relative, and an allegory in which Rama and Sita, as incarnations of the gods Vishnu and Lakshmi, serve as models of right conduct despite a harrowing series of trials and deceptions.

Although the story is age-old, Das’s treatment will not be. His previous works have incorporated the tap dancing of American master, Jason Samuels Smith, and the devotional chanting of yoga. Like any other language, Kathak has survived its ability to adapt to change. The stories of Sita Haren are part of Hindu scripture, but the costumes the dancers wear and the spinning turns they execute derive from the Muslim influences entering India in the middle ages. Forbidden by the Koran from viewing images of gods and religious personages, Muslim rulers favored dances that were more technically oriented—a focus preserved today in the regional style centering around Jaipur. What’s meant by “technical” becomes vivid watching Das’s company dance with pounds of bells attached to cloths wrapped around each leg. The percussive jingle, accentuated by the slap of his fast-moving bare feet, create shifting—and mesmerizing—polyrhythms.

Another unexpected transformation came with the British. By the 19th century Kathak had become one of several classical disciplines performed by a geisha-like class of highly trained women. The line between artist and courtesan was not always clear, and the colonial governors—spurred by missionaries —loudly condemned both the dancers and the dance. It therefore fell to men, including Shambhu Maharaj, father of Das’s teacher and a famous exponent of Kathak’s most expressive, improvisational story-telling style, to preserve the tradition for subsequent generations.

Das has said that his aim in Kathak is “to bring together a diversity of generations,...styles, and genders, and to demonstrate that perhaps there is room for all.” That hesitant “perhaps” is more understandable after reading Maharaj’s fulminations against technical dance and choreography. But as the Ramayana makes clear, arguments between tradition and innovation, or male and female outlooks, have been with Kathak—and human society—from the beginning. Balance, as Das’s whirling dancers know, doesn’t just happen. One step leads to another.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: No Material is Unpromising

By Ariel Swartley on MON, AUG 10TH 2009, 4:24 P.M.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles was looking for water, not trouble, when she set out on a tour of the forest trails surrounding Montalvo last year. “I always ask where the water comes from,” the Colorado-born artist explains, “because then you understand things.”

Drainage systems—whether natural or the man-made variety—fall into the category of things most of us enjoy not thinking about. Unexceptional and closely allied with dirt, such practical matters would seem to be the antithesis of art. Ukeles, now based in New York, disagrees. Her current titles include Artist-in-Residence at the city’s Department of Sanitation. Her large scale works have included a garbage truck covered in mirrors and a ballet performed by snowplows. They’re vivid reminders that our glittering cultural monuments, our pinnacles of personal achievement, are supported, iceberg-style, by a mass of unseen and unsung activity.

Although her medium is social systems, Ukeles works as a sculptor, trying to discover the underlying shape of operations we usually view piece-meal. Looking at the bigger picture first became a priority in 1969 when, as a new mother, she chafed at the different regard given to her work as an artist and her work as a diaper changer. Individual creativity, she argued in her Maintenance Art Manifesto, was not hierarchically superior to cleaning up. Rather maintenance was the renewable life-sustaining yin to innovation’s high-flying yang. In order to restore balance between them—and in her own life—she proposed doing her normal house-cleaning in an art gallery, with the products being exhibited as “dust works” and "soap sculpture.” Balance for Ukeles is not a static state. Rather it’s the point on which a phrase or a gesture teeters, offering sudden glimpses of multiple meanings and hidden assumptions: Dust works, indeed.

Ukeles, who has sited a recent project at an active landfill, is seldom daunted by unloveliness. But on her walk in Montalvo’s woods she found herself horrified by the oozing cankers she saw on the bark of otherwise stalwart oaks. Learning that this oozing signals the presence of SOD—the sudden oak death syndrome that has killed hundreds of thousands of trees in Central and Northern California since 1995—and learning also that infected trees might have only months to live, her first reaction, she says, was to run away. About to turn 70, she felt she had enough mortality to contemplate without dwelling on the potential death of a whole species.

As she describes her response to the doomed trees, Ukeles’s face elongates, her mouth forms an O, and she lets out a dove-like moan. That mournful sound and face eventually became her starting point for O OAKS OH!—the two part public event she is creating to address SOD. (Part one takes place at Montalvo on August 13; part two on December 2.) To counter her distress, Ukeles first went in search of knowledge. Those she talked with who are wrestling with SOD include biologists, foresters, Native Americans, spiritual leaders and activists—many of whom will share their findings at a LEARN IN which begins the August event. The day also includes participatory rituals Ukeles devised to confirm our connection with the oaks and channel that mournful O into an exclamatory one. Like a barn raising, O OAKS OH! assembles not only willing hands, but all available tools: science and history, art and faith, individual passion and public commitment. Engaging all parts of the community and both sides of the brain, Ukeles aims to turn the despairing, often tedious work of undoing an environmental disaster into a creative act—one that’s as inspiring as a new construction.

Connie Samaras: Framing the Conversation

By Ariel Swartley on FRI, JUL 10TH 2009, 5:10 P.M.

Connie Samaras’s photographs are so lucid, their perspective so matter of fact, that it seems silly to ask, ‘what am I looking at?’ Yet questions arise: Is that golden triangle above the crusty Antarctic snow merely plywood? Can the man in the rowboat at the foot of a Dubai hotel hope to catch fish in that chlorine-blue water? For Samaras both responses are important: asking exactly what it is that we see, and noticing what makes us hesitate to voice our queries.

Enjoy Your Time, Samaras’s exhibition at Montalvo, focuses on three places that have been variously cited as cities-of-the-future—Dubai , Las Vegas, and the polar station at Antarctica. Growing out of a challenging landscape (desert or ice), they are literally works in progress, showcasing the latest technological thinking. It’s no accident, then, that some photographs have the airy drawing board look of an architect’s rendering, or the seductively saturated colors of a tourist brochure. No tourists can be found, though, in her Dubai restaurant with its dramatic view of an indoor ski slope, just a family-like grouping of condiments on each empty table.

Samaras has said she aims to document “liminal spaces.” These, from the Latin, limen, for threshold, are the doorstep areas where one set of expectations comes up against another. A honeycombed expanse stares out from one wall of Enjoy Your Time. It’s a Las Vegas hotel, but in the photograph it resembles a sheet of construction material. Similarly the hotel, the Paris, is itself a dormitory for gamblers sold as a technologically enhanced edition of old world luxury. Appreciating illusion is part of the pleasure of Vegas, just as it’s part of the pleasure of art.

Unlike a boundary fence, a threshold is meant to be crossed. Yet, in the word’s root image, the moment of crossing is always set apart from what lies on either side. Wavering in the doorway between is and seems, we are free to imagine a world operating under a different set of rules. Perhaps the Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion dome, relic of 1970s idealism, that we see in Samaras’s Antarctic series, is not being subsumed by the polar ice but rising, phoenix-like, from it. In this sense her photographs resemble the portals encountered in science fiction—a subject she has written about and refers to frequently in her work.

For Samaras, all those physically altered realities aren’t the literature’s most interesting aspect. Rather, it’s the way science fiction uncouples natural processes from our assumptions about how they should be put to use. What if, say, commercial interests could be detached from aesthetic ones as easily as the color of water can be changed on a computer screen? Mirror-like, that question leads to another illusion. Samaras’s photographs may have eerie glow of a digitally manipulated images but what she’s using is the old-world physics of shadow and light.

To step across a threshold is to be conscious momentarily of existing within a frame. That’s what Samaras’s work provides:a kind of sensed equivalent to post and beam. Not quite inside, not quite out, the gray area they lead us to has an architecture but no name. It’s a lot like the place traditionally allocated to gays, women, and minorities. In it, the self coexists with an identity expressed in italics.

Elsewhere, Samaras, judo-like has turned such biases to her advantage, posing as a vacationing housewife to shoot the forbidden interiors of casinos, or adopting both the clothes—khaki pants, white shirt—and the entitled bluster of undercover police photographing heavily cordoned sites at L.A.’s Democratic Convention. This knowledge provides another kind of frame. As both an artist and an academic, Samaras is often ineligible to do what society pays her to do: document and observe. Adopting the chameleon demeanor of a spy, she has no trouble gaining access.

In its earliest incarnations a threshold marked the perimeter between shelter and exposure, with both states being necessary to survival. They still are. Halted in the no man’s land between them, we can look both ways. The question Samaras hopes we’ll ask: What exactly is in front of us?

Hirokazu Kosaka: One Way and Another

By Ariel Swartley on TUE, JUN 16TH 2009, 8:57 A.M.

At first glance the sheets of paper suspended in single file across Montalvo’s Project Space are identical. Each presents a dark rectangle on a white ground. Looked at more closely they reveal variations. On some the ink is visible on the unprinted side. Slight crumpling of the paper occurred in transit. The eye alternates between the calm of orderly repetition and the intrigue of unexpected departures. Kalpa, the title of Hirokazu Kosaka’s installation, means time, and we view that in the same fashion—an over and over again pattern of days crossed, meteor-like, by the singular present moment.

The materials used in Kalpa are common but here each has a particular lineage. The paper with its pearly sheen is handmade from plant fibers according to Japanese tradition. Black ink (sumi) made from soot was used in Japan’s earliest printed pictures, and Wakayama prefecture, Kosaka’s birthplace, was an important medieval center of its production. Both materials are essential to calligraphy, which Kosaka, an ordained Buddhist priest, practices in its meditative form (Hitsuzendo). The poppy seeds adhering to the paper’s surface refer to a Sanskrit parable comparing the progress of time to the filling of a miles-high cube with the tiny seeds, added at the rate of one per century. Kosaka, who has been living and working in Los Angeles since the mid 1970s, also holds a BFA in painting from its Chouinard Art Institute, so it’s possible that the seeds’ changeable blue gray color inspired him as well.

Holding on to the tension between the particular instance and the general pattern and keeping them both in balance is a theme that frequently emerges in Buddhist writings. In the West, we might describe it in perceptual terms as observing the relation of figure and ground. It’s work we allocate to artists rather than priests. In Eastern thought those two disciplines blend together. One feature of Kosaka’s installations and collaborations is that they habitually direct our attention away from art as a discrete object and toward the processes involved in its making.

Of course some of those processes are within the artist himself. Members of Kosaka’s family have been residing in the United States for four generations. The idea of the places we keep in mind while we live in others is behind his on-going project, Ruin Map, in which older Asian immigrants on both the East and West coasts draw maps of their childhood home. Carved into woodblocks—the process suggests the action of memory on the brain, Kosaka says—the maps are then hand printed. These are the sheets that hang from the ceiling. When they were first hung, the poppy seeds created an evenly textured, fabric-like surface. It looked something like tweed. Over time, as the seeds drop, the fabric wears.

Kosaka’s June performance at the Carriage House draws on another traditional discipline, Japanese archery. Although a martial art, it has—like calligraphy—a meditative form. Just as the brush becomes an extension of the artist’s body and emptied mind, in Kyudo, or the way of the bow, the end result—hitting the straw target—is considered inseparable from the means of attaining it. Arrow, bow, target, the shooter’s breath, mind, and heartbeat, all that’s aimed and aimed at, work together or the shot misses its ultimate mark. The practice, Kosaka has said, “is about trying to achieve oneness with self.”

In his performance, titled “On the Retina,” the themes explored in Kalpa take dramatic form. Out of the archer’s slow ceremonial movements comes the meteor-like arrow streaking across the audiences’ vision. But this is only a starting point. Kosaka’s collaborators accompany the flight from its centuries-old formal beginnings to its present location. Oguri is a Japanese born Butoh dancer now based in Los Angeles. Emerging from Japan’s avant-garde movement at the end of the 1950s, Butoh—originated by Tatsumi Hijikata, Oguri’s teacher—encourages dancers to explore personal and socially challenging ideas and position themselves to be transformed by them. On the Retina’s other partner, Tetsuya Nakamura, was drawn by the American music he heard on Armed Forces radio while he was growing up in Tokyo to study blues harmonica. Since moving to this country he has toured and recorded with rock, rap and acoustic musicians. The onstage collaborations—body and mind, music and dance, old and new—include us, too. Like the archer’s target, our receptive awareness is an inseparable part of whole performance.

Jan Henle: Art-Work/Work-Art

By Ariel Swartley on WED, MAY 13TH 2009, 12:15 P.M.

You may not notice the man at first. For a long time at the beginning of Jan Henle’s film, Con el Mismo Amor, he isn’t there. Then suddenly he is, walking at a steady clip up a trail that cuts diagonally across the slope that’s gradually been coming into view out of the darkness. The slope, located in the mountains near Maricao in southwest Puerto Rico, is part of a three-acre sculpture Henle created over an eight year period beginning in 1999. The figure—it’s the artist himself—helps us appreciate the size of the piece. Those pebbles are boulders. Or perhaps not. We needn’t be certain to marvel at the pattern of their scattering or the way their pale intrusions punctuate the hillside’s curve. In Henle’s film the fractal quality of landscape is brilliantly evident. Plot or plantation, the natural forces that carve them are the same. The variable that intrudes is us.

Where does art-making end and the artwork start? In Con el Mismo Amor answers proliferate like the tropical greenery. Maricao’s mountains are themselves a work-in-progress, created by the collision of tectonic plates and subject to continuing atmospheric manipulations. More recently they’ve been shaped by economic and political forces. The area’s particular constellation of latitude, altitude, and mineral-laced soil attracted coffee planters in the 19th century, and they, with the help of tenant farmers, made Maricao beans a prized European commodity. After Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory, trade agreements and job opportunities changed; landowners pursued more easily harvested crops or moved to countries with cheaper labor. When Henle acquired the property it was abandoned, and local vegetation—its growth made rampant by the moist climate—blanketed the hill.

Sculpting can be a deductive process, a matter of chipping away excess substance that blocks the view of an imagined form. To clear the greenery and uncover the hillside beneath, Henle worked alongside jibaros. The term, often translated as “mountain men,” refers to inhabitants of Puerto Rico’s back country, many of them descendents of the tenant farmers employed by the Spanish planters. Henle grew up in St. Croix before moving to Puerto Rico and worked in his stepfather’s landscaping business, so the terrain of his piece in both its physical and social aspects is home ground. Work on the hill was accomplished with traditional hand tools—machetes, pickaxes—and techniques handed down from grandfather to grandson, but Con el Mismo Amor is not a reclamation project. The historical context is both there and not there.

That doubleness is central to Henle’s work. What is insistently present in this piece seems to be the hill-in-itself: its mounding but delicate contours, the incised line of the footpath, the vivid red earth that clumps and can be raked apart. Yet we experience it in two dimensions and at one remove, through images: this is hill as the artist wants us to see it. What Con el Mismo Amor also shows is the hard, repetitive, collaborative labor of clearing the ground and carefully planting new hardwoods. For Henle, sculpting and sculpture are not easily divisible. To form a respectful fellowship with nature and to practice working, as he says in the film, “without reason, without thinking, that you know what you are doing because you live in a certain manner,” are as important as the landscape that results. What is being cleared and cultivated in Con el Mismo Amor is not just the physical ground but a kind of consciousness. Where does man begin and nature end? To approach a boundary from both sides is to begin to see it as permeable. And as arbitrary.

Zaccho Dance Theatre: Suspending Disbelief

By Ariel Swartley on MON, APR 20TH 2009, 12:45 P.M.

One leaps, another catches, both share responsibility for maintaining balance: Interdependence is a dance basic that takes on new meaning in the companies performing Remy Charlip’s choreography at Montalvo April 4. In these troops wires and wheels are honored collaborators, offering access to new dimensions.

A three-part doorframe suspended more than head-high over the Garden Theatre was the first thing arriving audiences saw. It was a dangling invitation to leave customary eye- level perceptions behind. Zaccho Dance Theatre’s use of cables, hoops, and other aerial devices regularly persuades viewers –along with the boys and girls in its neighborhood studio classes—that dance can be vigorous and exciting. For director Joanna Haigood, though, the circus hardware is one means among many of liberating movement from the confines and expectations of a traditional stage.

Haigood’s site-specific compositions—set on street corners, along forest paths, on the walls, or from the rafters of public buildings—mix history and social commentary and blur the distinction between performer and passer-by. What fills the space around us, Haigood suggests, is not only our bodies, but our minds, not only the unpredictable present, but our collective past and dreamed-of futures.

Charlip, too, is longtime believer in siting art in the midst of life, and Haigood began her opening solo at Montalvo—Charlip’s Dance in a Doorway—by strolling along the front row to embrace the choreographer where he sat. As she turned to the stage her movements transformed gradually from intimate and casual to public and performed, so that when she reached the doorframe, the crowd’s attention was fully gathered for her electric leap to what was in effect a tri-level trapeze.

Charlip’s original drawings for each of the dances were reproduced on large cards beside the stage, offering audiences a kind of treasure hunt: try to match the sketch of a pose with its translation by a particular dancer. Being able to trace the artistic process did not entirely demystify it. José Navarrette and Debby Kajiyama, who joined Zaccho in this performance, told Charlip that they had used every one of his sketched positions for Alone Some and Twosome, but their interpretation, a send-up of a romantic tango, was so witty that it was hard for a viewer to remember to look over at the pad.

In the final piece, Garden Lilacs, the score—Welsh composer Ivor Novello’s achingly adult World War Two ballad of desire and loss—gained even more poignancy from Zaccho Youth Company’s performance. Dressed in filmy blues and purples, the pairs of dancers suspended in hoops or mirroring each other’s movements on the stage, recalled a world of idealized childhood, full of enchantment and perfect bliss—a world by definition ephemeral. But near the end, when two of the girls danced off the stage presented their prop flowers to Charlip, and nestled at his feet, everything came full circle. All that had been lost was, for a perfect moment, magically restored.

AXIS Dance: A Still Point and a Turning Wheel

By Ariel Swartley on MON, APR 20TH 2009, 12:41 P.M.

One pushes, the other pulls; weight is distributed between them. Interdependence is a dance basic that takes on new meaning in the companies performing Remy Charlip’s choreography at Montalvo’s April 4 celebration, A Perfect Day. The partnering of humans and machinery allows both to cover new ground—physical, artistic, and emotional.

To the vocabulary of movement, AXIS Dance Company adds a Sixth Position: torso upright, arms held loosely at the side, legs and feet immobilized in a wheelchair. The sequences that flow from this starting point can be as classically simple—and as emotionally laden—as a reach toward an outstretched hand. Others, daring and formally elegant, expand our notion of the shapes a dance can take. A chair and its occupant, moving as one, flips to a sideways position on the floor, where the dancer—his arms his propulsion and his torso a fulcrum—becomes another wheel.

From its beginning in 1987, AXIS has used a combination of disabled and able-bodied members to explore both the possibilities of and our assumptions about restricted motion. Charlip, whose performances in his later years included ones in which he simply stood on the stage and imagined dancing, is a natural choreographer for the company. In Faces, their opening work at Montalvo, Rodney Bell used only his head, neck, and hands to map a terrain as dramatic as his native New Zealand’s.

Airmail Dances, Charlip’s choreographic invention, provide a series of sketches representing the positions of one or more dancers, which companies then interpret and link in their own way. The process of embodying an idea offers its own revelations. Looking over the sketches for Dance with Three Steps reproduced in Montalvo’s program, the two able bodied dancers in the piece, Shansharee Giles and Janet Das, said with surprise that these looked more like their actual dance than the drawings they’d been following in rehearsals. Using two sets of stairs, Axis’s version of Charlip’s dance placed the women’s meditative almost floating gymnastic explorations of one set next to Bell’s dogged yet sometimes breath-taking chairbound attempts to mount the other. What resulted was a complex dialog between earth and air, desire and actuality, stasis and flight.

The latitude that the Airmail Dances allow individuals came into special focus at the second performance of Dance in a Wing Chair. At Montalvo Alice Sheppard left her wheelchair for a vintage sofa in order to gracefully and humorously embody Charlip’s drawings of a reader taken on a journey, pushed to the edge of her seat—even sent head over heels—by a book. In the audience was Megan Schirle who performed the dance in AXIS’s 2003 production. Physically unable to do the movements as sketched, Schirle’s version had her literally carried away—her limbs moved gently into various positions, her pages turned, by a second dancer acting as her chair.

It was startling, too, to realize that Axis’s final dance Alone Some and Twosome, was the same one Navarrette and Kajiyama had performed earlier. The aggressive push and pull movements, formalized in tango, took on a more disturbing quality when they occurred between Judy Smith in a wheelchair and the free-moving Giles. Gradually the same movements performed both separately and in tandem seemed less about the tug between their visible differences—standing versus sitting, older versus younger—and more about the shifting dynamics, shared weight, and negotiated balance necessary to change any two “I”s into a “We.” At the end, with Giles folded peacefully above Smith, the chair was able to hold them both.

Remy Charlip: The Domain of What If

By Ariel Swartley on THU, MAR 26TH 2009, 1:40 P.M.

Imagine this: a figure in black appears on a darkened stage. His hands are what we see. They flutter and clench in the exaggerated gestures of a crooner. The illuminated face above moves, too, wildly. This is a dance of the flesh sundered from the body, of emotions unmoored. It’s hard to believe that the man the lights reveal when they come up—balding, ordinarily dressed, not young-- could have stepped so completely outside himself.

Wizards, poor things, need wands. Not Remy Charlip. Dancer, illustrator, children’s book author, theatre director, choreographer, and bodywork practitioner, he inhabits a universe in which magic is a matter of course. Trees grow feet and leave the forest, bones, properly aligned, teach the muscles to relax, a series of squiggly pencil marks becomes—look again—instructions mailed from San Francisco for a New York pas-de-deux. Or a pas-de-quatre. Charlip’s innovative “Air Mail Dances”—like Garden Lilacs, to be performed at Montalvo on April 4--allow companies to select both the number of dancers and the movements they use to pass from one sketched position to the next.

Transformation—the process by which a frog becomes a prince—may be magic’s central mystery, but for Charlip it is also a basic impulse. “I enjoy the hydrotherapy of washing dishes,” he once wrote, “because it’s the clearest model for me of the before and after process.” With a shift of perspective, drudgery mutates into gold.

For Charlip that kind of mental alchemy is art by another name. “Where do dances come from?” an interviewer asked. “Squiggles,” he replied. “The calligraphic impulse.” Seen on the page the sketches for an Airmail Dance have the fluid economy of brush painting. Charlip credits Santa Monica’s coral trees—graceful South African natives whose fleshy red flowers bloom on leafless branches—with inspiring the doubled, entwining steps of “Garden Lilacs.” Seers, in the word’s most elemental meaning, see beyond things-in-themselves to the underlying patterns. Charlip’s varied disciplines are, in his experience, naturally occurring branches on a single exuberant tree

One of our earliest, visceral encounters with transformation comes, Charlip says, in picture books, where each turn of the page “changes all that has gone before.” No wonder children feel empowered when they do the turning. His books like A Perfect Day play repetitive rhythms against visual surprise. (Parents at the picnic all look like their children!) His 1964 classic, Fortunately, was inspired by an old vaudeville routine—fortunately a boy is invited to a party, unfortunately the party’s in a far off city, fortunately he knows someone with an airplane, etc. With the illustrations mirroring the reversals, flipping from cheerful color to black and white, the book is as exhilarating to read as a swing is to ride.

Some of Charlip’s early work—dancing and designing productions for Merce Cunningham when the company’s budget was half a shoestring, co-founding New York’s still-lively Paper Bag Players, whose name indicates their early-adopters approach to the creative recycling—encouraged Charlip’s feeling for the more that can be done with less. He applies that scavenger’s facility to experience as well. Describing his solo dance, Meditation, Charlip wrote, “It was originally called ‘Some of my favorite steps done slowly and carefully because I hurt my back.’” Another, Glow Worm, turns humiliating childhood memories of abuse into an act of liberation.

Peeling a drawing, a dance, a text, down to its essential lines he sometimes seems to be taking things apart, the better to understand what makes them work. To find this rigorous taste for deconstruction in a man who draws smiley-faced hearts and likes rainbow striped sweaters could be disconcerting, until we remember that magic has always been half art, half science. Look clearly at what’s in front of you, Charlip urges; then look again, using your imagination. Adult or child, stiff or pliant, mechanic or dreamer—we all possess that power.

Julia Meltzer and David Thorne: Saying Makes it So

By Ariel Swartley on FRI, FEB 27TH 2009, 5:03 P.M.

This February, The New York Times reported, a camera toting college student was arrested on a Bronx subway platform. Like the photographers of U.S. buildings and infrastructure represented in Julia Meltzer and David Thorne's installation, “In Possession of a Picture,” he was informed that the subject of his just-snapped photo was off-limits. The case made news because the officers were in error: no law bans photography in the New York subways.

We never learn the circumstances surrounding Meltzer and Thorne's photographers, nor what their intentions were. We only sometimes know their names. Their disputed pictures are represented by an empty rectangle in each frame. What we do know is that in every one of these fifty cases, the artists were able to find photographs of the forbidden object on the Internet. It's these we see mounted beside the blank shots. Some are as innocuous-seeming as a Denver hotel. Others are tourist magnets represented here by multiple images-the Empire State building in a dozen different weathers, giddy teens in Disneyland's teacups. There are those, too, like a shot of the twin towers, that produce a stab of unease.

What lies at the center of each of these frames is a visible boundary between information and its absence. The uses of media and the construction of history are themes that concern both Meltzer and Thorne. What are the strategies we use--publicly and privately--to navigate from what we know to what we don't? What is the role of dogma? Storytelling? Faith? These questions are investigated further in We Will Live To See These Things, filmed in Syria in 2005-6. Using both documentary footage and imagined texts, the artists trace currents-political, material, religious-shaping that country's public life. And, by extension, ours.

In the first of what the film's subtitle calls “five pictures of what may come to pass,” an architect relates the story of a public building he designed in the 1960s that remains unfinished. What, he wonders, might replace it: “A new headquarters for the U.N.?...A Starbucks?” In a segment shot in a brightly carpeted mosque, we watch young girls in barrettes and jeans study verses from the Koran. We recognize the architect's sardonic humor, the effort of concentration in the childish faces. Other scenes leave us reaching for a guidebook.

In “a perfect leader, or the appearance of one,” the unexpected constellation of images--an equestrian meet and a recitation, written by Thorne, envisioning a messianic leader--refer to recent history. The late Basel al-Assad, elder brother of Syria's current president, noted horseman, and patron of riding clubs, was slated to succeed his father in office until he died in a car crash. Even with explication the mystery remains of why certain personalities-a Basel or a JFK-grip a nation's imagination long after their deaths.

Perhaps as illuminating as the issues raised are the varieties of speech explored. Following the chant of “a perfect leader,” a dissident discusses his work with the Syrian democratic movement. “I feel like I am extracting with difficulty and hardship,” he tells the camera, which pans away to spare apartment blocks and empty streets, “like somebody who is digging in stone, a larger space for public life.” The film's final segment accompanies private acts like shopping and going to the barber with a poetic tract that fuses the diction of prophecy (”I hear singing in my ears”) with the rhetoric of recent foreign policy (“I see decisive victory”). What-we're left to wonder-will fill the blank page of the future. Pronouncements or dialogue?

Peter Sellars: The Rule of Engagement

By Ariel Swartley on FRI, FEB 27TH 2009, 4:20 P.M.

Two minutes listening to Peter Sellars address an audience is enough to know: If art had an army, this tousle-haired opera, theatre and festival director would be its best general. Sellars's conviction that art matters is galvanizing. On the syllabus of “Art as Moral Action,” a course he teaches at UCLA, the first requirement is “Total Engagement.” Whether we employ thumb, camera, palate, or simple attention, he insists, artist and audience together have the power to accomplish world-changing acts of compassionate imagination.

That conviction is on view in the seven films from seven nations commissioned by New Crowned Hope, the festival honoring Mozart which Sellars directed in Vienna at the close of 2006. The films feature languages seldom heard in movie theatres--Sotho, Guarani. Yet watching a lone rider approach a frontier settlement in Meokgo and the Stickfighter, we don't feel that far from home. With his black cowboy hat the rider's a familiar cinematic figure and we flinch as he reaches under his blanket and pulls out-a concertina! In this short which mixes tribal legends with the spaghetti westerns that director Teboho Mahlatsi watched in his South African boarding school, music turns out to be as powerful as a forcefully wielded stick.

Of course the films also reveal distant worlds. In Opera Jawa, a dazzling fusion of modern Indonesian politics and Sanskrit legend, a woman rides a bicycle to an illicit rendezvous along a silky red carpet unrolled through acres of emerald rice fields. The tone of the image is haunting not least because it's wholly non-western--like the gamelan orchestra that accompanies it. In Half Moon a man in a Biblical-looking village is called away from a cockfight to take a cell phone call. The effect is unsettling like a composer's sudden key change. Where exactly are we? The story, too, of a bus full of Kurdish musicians traveling to give a concert in Iraq, is a chimerical blend of comedy and tragedy.

Not surprisingly, given the filmmakers' countries of origin, war intrudes both on screen and off. Dry Season-a story of revenge pursued and reconsidered in the sunwashed courtyards of Chad-found its shooting schedule interrupted by an outbreak of fighting. Working on location, oftenwith non-professional actors, the filmmakers had little access to special effects. One result: the violence they refer to is more disturbing for being implied. An underground fire burns near Kuala Lumpur in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. The radio recommends wearing facemasks, but the film's immigrant workers make do with white plastic shopping bags, their droopy shape a parody of military gear. From Thailand, Syndrome and a Century sets its dream-like exploration of memory in the halls and gardens of a hospital. Cheerful pop music plays, orchids hang in the trees, but the artificial legs piled on a conference table are an uncomfortable reminder of loss.

Opera Jawa, which concludes with spectacularly staged funerals, directly invokes Mozart's final unfinished work, the Requiem. On a more intimate scale, so does Paraguayan Hammock. Director Paz Encina creates a potent counterpart to the traditional funeral mass out of the conversation of a long-married couple. Through their ritual arguments, muttered asides, and fiery denials, we watch hope for their son who is fighting at the front shading to terror, grief, and back to hope, while night slowly falls in their jungle clearing.

This visionary power--the ability to uncover the glory in ordinary lives--is something all seven films share. A baker, a restaurant cashier, a singer, a potter, a dentist: despite the foreign settings the characters are people we recognize. Watching them, our world both shrinks and expands. Perhaps this is what Sellars means by total engagement. Attending as completely as we can to what's going on around us, we begin to mistake our neighbor for ourselves.

Boolean Valley: The Geometry of Clay

By Ariel Swartley on WED, NOV 26TH 2008, 1:14 P.M.

Watching the slide show that Adam Silverman, a potter, and Nader Tehrani, a professor of architecture, presented at the opening of Boolean Valley was a little like watching a bullet train and a handcar speed toward each other on the same track. Images of Tehrani’s airy room-size projects—empyrean geometries worked out in thin-pressed wood or pleated plastic—alternated with close-ups of Silverman’s earthy, hand–thrown pots. Yes, they both trained as architects, but what sort of collaborative construction would meld their skills?

The answer came in a sketch from one of their planning sessions. (Several of these drawings accompany the installation.) Silverman pointed to a line of circular shapes, graduated in height. These, he explained, represented the basic output of a potter’s wheel: platters, bowls, columns. Grouped in a row, their stair-step ascent suggested a curve. Or, as Tehrani put it, there was now a horizon line. Ah. Mud meets mathematics. The windows may not have rattled, but the drawing, like a seismographic record, marks the moment when their allusive Valley took shape.

Their joint effort also introduces AGENCY: The Work of Artists, Montalvo’s yearlong series of pieces and performances exploring the theme of interdependence. Composed of nearly 200 identical clay pots--each sliced into two parts and nowhere more than knee high—Boolean Valley presently occupies a pair of adjoining galleries at the San Jose Museum of Art. From the beginning, then, we too can choose how to approach it. Arriving from the museum’s central hall we promptly encounter the terrain’s darkest and steepest aspect: a glittering headland of black, bullet-nosed spires. Entering from the opposite direction, we see instead its varying contours, the luxuriant interplay of blues and grays. Neither, of course, is the definitive view.

The installation consists of two basic shapes. One thrusts upward, the other spreads outward--the artists call them domes and hoops. Other names could be applied: missiles and craters, males and females, ones and zeros. Like all valleys, this one is formed by a specific arrangement of opposing forces. Slicing the pots at several carefully determined midpoints added another variable: height. Yet despite their derivation from a single prototype—call it a geometric ancestor—the objects before us are a mass of quirky individuation. Swollen, pitted, bubbled, and swirled, the surfaces vary in luster and hue; they show the marks of their manufacture and traces of the weather on the day they were glazed.

From the beginning Tehrani, Iranian by birth, knew he wanted one of the glazes to be cobalt. He responded to it, says Silverman, “because it’s a homeland color.” The mineral has been coloring Persian enamel for 5000 years. Silicon carbide, visible as a dull gray on some of the pots, is another story. As the source material for semi-conductors, its connection with the real Silicon Valley is evident. Recent history might lead us to see the two chemicals as emblems of warring interests, but in Boolean Valley they’re allies. Silverman has long used silicon carbide as an aesthetic wild card. Fired with cobalt or black, it produces his glazes’ distinctive craters and lumps. “When you collaborate,” Tehrani told a questioner, “you don’t want someone like you.” It’s from collisions of minds and methodologies, from unpredictable reactions, from accidents, he was suggesting, that new worlds arise.

About Ariel Swartley

Ariel Swartley lives in Los Angeles and writes about contemporary and uncontemporary culture. Her essays on music, fiction, garden design, comics, art, culinary history, radio, film and ethnobotany have appeared in Los Angeles magazine, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Boston Phoenix and Rolling Stone.