I don't like to have too many videos embedded to slow the download, but it's Terry Riley's birthday..



..also the news of Mills College's decision to deal with their administration's fiscal mismanagement by reportedly canceling the remaining two years on Roscoe Mitchell's tenure contract forces yet another upload in this space..



Mills Music Center Chair Chris Brown posted this month: "effective this July. I am requesting that letters of protest for this action, and support for Roscoe in his position at Mills be sent to the following administrators as soon as possible":
Beth Hillman, President of Mills College email: ebeth@mills.edu
Chinyere Oparah, Dean of Faculty email: jcoparah@mills.edu
Katie Sanborn, Chair of the Board of Trustees email: ksanborn@mills.edu

What's up for one more day..

Georgina Keenan at Issyra Gallery, 300 Observer Highway, Hoboken, is entering its last day (Sunday, gallery opens around 3pm; (917) 922-2690) but rumor has it there will be a similar show there in October. I saw it rather late in the run and have been busy, but wish I had posted earlier as she not only my sister, but quite a wonderful, emotionally supportive sister, so I am quite biased. There is a picture of me at the age of two and two thirds beaming in joy when she was brought back from the hospital and my position remains unchanged.

Her take on the Tantric mandala is to make mandalas and rose windows out of Playboy centerfolds that have succumbed to her hole puncher.  Also on display are at least two of her embroidered gloves, mixed in with the work of Senagalese painter/ gallerist Issa Sow.  I saw the show after zigzagging Chelsea and witnessed the opposite of a drop-off, most impressed by both artists. 

Her husband the bassist Dan Cuddy’s songwriting saw an uptick of notoriety two years ago when Yo La Tengo included “the gliding, roomy cover of the obscure “Automatic Doom” (by their psychedelic Hoboken friends the Special Pillow)" (Spin) on their Stuff Like That There cover album to go with compositions by Hank Williams, Sun Ra and The Lovin’ Spoonful.  There was a wonderful performance on the CBS site from a broadcast on This Morning, recorded and filmed by people who do that sort of thing for a living, but I can’t find it now and am left with someone who turned on their phone at Loew's Jersey Theater..



Also I found at least two DIY internet covers, of which this one is noteworthy..



Is there an automatic doom that's waiting for you?
Can there already be a bullet with your name emblazoned boldly?
As you lead your life with anxious and repetitive behavior
Automatic doom

Is there a magic floating chalice waiting for you?
And would you be depressed if you determined that your quest is over
And you lead your life with anxious and repetitive behavior
Automatic doom

Is there a crystal cosmic sparrow floating away?
Is there a neo-pterodactyl coming to prey?
Are you prepared to see the bad things that you say emblazoned boldly
In gold letters on your tomb?

Lorca's birthday was last week, and..

..I had found a live clip of Morente’s 'Campanas por el poeta' with the Bulgarian Voices, then it was taken down, since then someone uploaded it anew



along with 'Cantar del Alma' which occurs earlier in the Lorca album, so you may want to listen to it first if you have time for both.

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Xenakis' birthday was Monday

I have stopped taking an iPod around as I am trying to preserve my ear drums. One area of concern was my affection for La Légende d'Eer, which I especially enjoyed in public places.  

The five quotations included by Xenakis in the original program:

Each group would spend seven days in open country, and on the eighth, they had to break camp and head out for four days to finally reach a place where one discovers, stretching all across the sky and over the earth, a beam of light straight as a pillar, akin to a rainbow, but much more radiant and pure. – Plato, The Republic

note: The first quote is the source of the title Xenakis chose for the musical component of the Diatope.  It concerns a soldier named Er who returns from the dead and describes what he saw on the other side.  The vision culminates with Er’s sighting of the "Spindle of Necessity,” a great shaft encircled with eight rings representing the eight celestial spheres known to ancient astronomy.  On each ring is perched a siren singing a tone corresponding to the circumference of its orbit and together forming a cosmic harmony.  Seated on thrones amidst the sirens are the three Fates, or “daughters of necessity,” who accompany with their voices the harmony of the sirens: Lachesis, singing of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atropos of the future.

From there emerged a crying out, indistinct, one I likened to a voice of fire,  just as there emerged from the light…a holy Word blanketing all of Nature, and the purest of fire was thrust out of the humid natural world toward the sublime area above. – Hermes Trismegistus, Pymander

For indeed, what is man within nature?  A void in the face of infinity, a whole before the void, a center between nothingness and wholeness…unable to perceive the void from whence he came, nor the infinity in which he is submerged. – Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Christ went on: “I traversed the worlds, I ascended into the suns, and soared with the Milky Ways through the wastes of heaven; but there is no God. I descended to the last reaches of the shadows of Being, and I looked into the chasm and cried: ‘Father, where art thou?’ But I heard only the eternal storm ruled by none, and the shimmering rainbow of essence stood without sun to create it, trickling above the abyss. – Jean-Paul Richter, Siebenkäs

In the first stages of the explosion, the general distribution of the star’s energy closely matches the distribution known for theoretical black holes at a temperature of 12,000 degrees Kelvin.  In the case of SN 1970g the radius was measured at 3x10¹⁴ centimeters, in other words, as large as the orbit of Uranus.  Once the supernova’s radius is known, it is possible to determine its absolute luminosity.  For SN 1970g, this was calculated at 10⁴² ergs per second, or one trillion times that of the sun…  During the 30 days following the explosion, the radius of the surface from which the light was emitted increases at a near-constant speed of 5,000 kilometers per second.  At the end of this period, the star’s photosphere, in other words, its visible surface, reaches a radius of 2x10¹⁸ centimeters, a much larger radius than that of our solar system. – Robert P. Kirshner, Supernova

Mickey Roker 1932-2017

I have fond memories of Mickey Roker and the house band, as the heyday of Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus suited some suburbanites for whether in the old city for an ‘art’ film unavailable on the Jersey side or not the location was more easily driven to from elsewhere in town, hard to get confused by ‘get on Third Street til you see it’ after which an employee guarded the cars in the parking lot before much gentrification in the area.  In those days I recall remarking to the proprietor of Serengeti in Pennsauken, NJ amid its demise ‘I’m not going to say South Jersey does not deserve a jazz club..’ at which time he interjected ‘I’ll say it!! South Jersey does not deserve a jazz club!!’  I was still drinking beer and there was hard bop coming from those who grew up in it.

What's up

In one of her most powerful works, Regina José Galindo responds to the May, 2013 acquittal of Efraín Ríos Montt of whom “in his first six months in power, 2,600 Indians and peasants were massacred, while during his 17-month reign, more than 400 villages were brutally wiped off the map” (Blum) and as Allan Nairn reports “made systematic the massacres that were taking place in the countryside..  where, at that time, the majority of the Mayan population was concentrated” and whose conviction for an 80 year sentence ten days earlier was “pushed” by “the Mayan population.” As Goya’s “Bury Them And Keep Quiet"from Disasters of War represents “cadavers.. unclothed.. their classical presentation with accentuated foreshortening contrasts ideal beauty with the tragedy of death” so Galindo characteristically lends hers in a rural field in the Pays-de-la-Loire region of France until an excavator removes a square of earth around her, symbolically opening the mass graves and externalizing the alienating effect of injustice on her. 540 West 28th Street til May 27.


Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Farmacopea, 2013. from suelta suelta on Vimeo.

Nancy Spero’s War Series at 528 w26th til June 17 was not shown together during the period she created them, the late 60s and early 70s, in NYC until a small gallery hung them in 1983. The works collected here involve war as a corporeal experience but emphasizes the mechanized attack on the body in Vietnam with drawings of bombs and helicopters, which she tried to depict from the perspective of the victims, likely influenced by Artaud’s premonition of drone warfare in To Have Done With the Judgment of God “..Huge armies of tanks, airplanes, battleships/ that served as their shield..” as the series preceded the Artaud paintings and Codex Artaud. Included is Female Bomb, allegorizing female encouragement of war, and a large scale installation of the Maypole which revisited the series during the Iraq War.  Also a month before Puerto Rico’s fifth plebiscite on its political status, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz presents two paintings by Elizam Escobar, jailed in the US for alleged bomb threats on behalf of independence with her videos (not the one above) including one of a woman’s Voudou dance casting a spell for the “total and absolute destruction of the machinery of war,” Taíno objects and an early Ana Mendieta film at the Museo del Barrio til May 15.

Kiefer, watercolor, 2013

21st St: If my post from three years ago “The the Île-de-France inspires a war with Van Gogh, whom Artaud called ‘bodily the battlefield of.. the problem of the predominance of flesh over spirit, or of body over flesh, or of spirit over both..’ with Monet near by. Provence gets you Van Gogh and Cezanne: Picasso holed himself up there to do battle with Manet and Velazquez; Kiefer ties the landscape in to controversial aspects of German history" assigned to Anselm Kiefer a relatively limited function, also in relation to the “painterly focus on nature (that) helped revitalize figurative painting" I noted earlier that year, he has traversed those limits in dramatic fashion with perhaps his best show ever, til July 14 at no. 522.  Eric Fischl’s evokes Trump-era “Late America” at 550 til June 24. At 521 til June 10 I presume Martin Boyce photographic series “Partial Eclipse” was an homage to the final sequence of L’Eclisse, as the Antonioni influence has been suggested before and both Boyce and Antonioni have cited the influence of de Chirico. Antonioni followed de Chirico in lending his own neurosis to the cityscape while Boyce’s images come off more strictly referential.

Untitled (Ritual)

Raymond Pettibon used the 19th St. Zwirner gallery as a studio to supply new works for the fourth floor of the New Museum show, and ‘got an extension’ from the original opening date for this show, which turned out to be one of his best as well, til June 24.  24th: Robert Longo at 519 til June 17, Gerhard Demetz at 524 til June 3, Ray Johnson at 523 til June 17.  Lygia Clark at 531 is all Concretist.  Also on 26th, two floors of Henry Moore with views from two decks on the 10th floor, 521 26th til June 30. At 526 W 26th, Suite 718 Walther takes up Chinese performance photos including Ai Weiwei dropping a Han Dynasty urn "praised as an ironic commentary on the nationwide destruction of China's cultural heritage during the country's economic boom" but as with Yves Klein throwing gold in the Seine and people selling their feces, I see this as braggadocio about one’s own prices, much as I respect the courage of his activism in China. The Ethiopain Elias Sime's recent works from electronic waste exported to Africa (til June 17 at 533 26th).  Magnan Metz at 521 has four Mendives in the back. Leonora Carrington steals both current Surrealism group shows: The Artist Traveling Incognito (1949) at 568 25th til June 17 and The Garden of Paracelsus (1957) and 1964's Untitled (Ritual) at 744 Madison Avenue, 3rd fl. til June 2.

Loos' plan for his grave

A reenactment of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s 1992 installation Heidi, Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Zone, originally made for a group show in Vienna when McCarthy was 46 and Kelly 36, is up til June 30 at 76 Grand St., including the chalet, a large Austrian landscape by each artist, kitsch Austrian postcards, two installation tables, and the hour-long film featuring at one point a voice over of the architect Adolph Loos' writings “The modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty per cent of the prisoners are tattooed. Tattooed men who are not behind bars are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder. The urge to decorate one's face and everything in reach is the origin of the graphic arts. It is the babbling of painting. All art is erotic... But the man of our own times who covers the walls with erotic images from an inner compulsion is a criminal or a degenerate... I thought I was giving the world a new source of pleasure with this; it did not thank me for it. People were sad and despondent. What oppressed them was the realization that no new ornament could be created” with the visuals of Loos’ design for his own cube-shaped grave being drawn onto the right buttock of a Heidi mannequin.

Satyajit Ray wrote "it was probably the partition that brought (Henri Cartier-Bresson) to India, but he soon found himself confronted by a second political event - the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.." a floor of the Rubin is devoted to selections from Henri Cartier-Bresson's India pix til Sept 4 including the three famous shots of the Kurukshetra refugee camp are here (I, II, III) and the Punjabi refugees in transit.  Absent is the group shot at the table of  “Kashmir. Srinagar. July 1948. Sheik ABDULLAH, Prime minister of Kashmir since the Maharajah ceded the territory to India, puts improvement of the lot of the poor Kashmir natives above religious differences. Although he is a Moslem, he stands for friendship with Nehru's India. Here (in sheepskin hat) he talks to members of the UN Commission sent to investigate the position in Kashmir,” who officiated the marriage of Alys and Faiz Ahmed Faiz in 1941. They feel the need to qualify the deifying exuberance of Henri's note “While Sri Ramana Maharshi is dying in his last incarnation, and thus becoming a god, his favorite peacock (the gift of a rajah) strolls the ground of his last earthly home" and separate the shot from another of his mourners, (three related pix elsewhere) but you can't make everyone happy, and there are plenty of original prints of viewers' favorites here like the dawn prayer in Srinigar, the Jaipuri carpet maker "telling the children in a chant what colors to use,"  "Great care of all sarts of diseases," and the various 1966 classics from Ahmedabad (above right).  Y. G. Srimati sang bhajans by Gandhi's side as a teenager and her contemporary takes on Hindu tantric iconography are at the Met til June 18.  Jyoti Bhatt is also well known for photographs of rural Indian life, but it's his paintings and prints that highlight DAG Modern's selections from the Group 1890 (41 e57th 7th fl. til May 31), which didn't stay together long, including a late 1970s print that seems to be both a parody and encouragement of cultural pilgrimage to India:

Jyoti Bhatt, Beginning of the Journey, Etching, 1978

Last but not least, Acquavella has reunited all but one of the twenty-three Constellations of Miró (18 e 79th, til May 26, one owner backed out at the last minute) and seeing the originals in a group is essential by all meanings of the word, including that this is one of art history’s supreme attempts to represent essence, “the floodgates from which spurt, all one bound, love and liberty.” (Breton) Speculation on why Miró went to Fascist-controlled Mallorca in 1940 with ten gouaches for reference that he could have left with his dealer and a stack of paper mirrors the writer: the family man says he went for the family (so say the curators); the cynic (like Paul Hammond, in an exceptional essay introducing his translations), the Romantic, the nature lover, the mystic, the Catalan nationalist, the accusatory Marxist/ anarchist, etc. all recite their respective explanations.  As is often the case, I find Tàpies most persuasive: “Against a universe created and controlled by God, Miró offered us the continuous, changing, and infinite flux of nature. Against immutable laws, he offered us the spontaneous rhythm and ebb-and-flow of the waves of the living world. Against all that was closed and filled with taboos, he offered us clear open spaces. Against the monstrous pride of the powerful, he showed that we are all equal because we are all made of the same flames of stars.  To the dispossessed he showed that the whole richness of the universe was in them. For things to grow and get better he told us that love ought to impregnate all. What we had been sold as sin, perversions, and weakness of the flesh, he told us was often something beautiful, as great and powerful as the forces that rule the pull of constellations. He told us that we had to return to the search for purity and innocence of the first day; that we had to find again the unpolluted source if we were not to lose ourselves within a pretentious, spurious, and mendacious society; that life was struggle and above all renewal; that, under the axis of the Mediterranean sun, self-assured good sense had to be balanced with a healthy and irrational pagan exaltation...

“Joan Brossa.. said back then.. ‘Let’s step out of the corners! If this curtain falls again, nothing in art will receive any light and everything will darken at the high level of art, amid boulders.. NOW we sense Miró’s triumph. He has fully awoken to the highest reality..’”

Sunrise

Hammond notes the books he had in Mallorca were ‘Saint John of the Cross, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Saint-Pol-Roux,’ and that he wrote in his notebooks he wanted ‘Apuleius, Shelley, Carroll, Engels, Jarry, Peret,’ and that “it appears that Miró arrived late at Constellations as his generic title for the series. It is something of a misnomer; or rather, another overarching image might have been used, something invoking water or effervescence perhaps.” This suggests Rimbaud‘s “Elle est retrouvée. Quoi ? - L'Eternité. C'est la mer allée/ Avec le soleil// Ame sentinelle,/ Murmurons l'aveu/ De la nuit si nulle/ Et du jour en feu.//Des humains suffrages,/ Des communs élans/ Là tu te dégages/  Et voles selon.” may have influenced the spirit of the content.  Hammond says there is no indication that Miró sketched the works first.

This would have been a much better show if André Breton’s poems were included, to replicate the historic presentation of both at Galerie Berggruen, Paris in 1959.  I tried to pretend that there was something to be said for the works to stand alone, but the second time I saw the show I was torturing myself trying to remember lines from the poems. Guston managed to get Clark Coolidge’s poems into the Morgan by putting them in the drawings (pdf), but in this case Breton’s poems were written 17 years after the paintings were finished.  I will limit myself to two of Hammond's translations:

Morning Star

It says to the shepherd: "Come closer. It is I who used to draw you as a child to those deep caves where the receding sea docks the eggs of storms that the wreck, with its myriad lowered eyelids, polishes. In the unique oblique light, as the hand is laid on the superb fossils lying by the road that seeks itself in the dynamited mountain, you burned to see spurt up the rib of a coffer of ancient handiwork that might contain (it's no problem to force it) all that is blinding in the world and that streams forth. I give it to you because it's you just as each day is so that your furrows warble and that, more flattered than all the rest, your companion might smile when finding you once more."

The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers

The benches of the outer boulevards cave in with time under the embrace of lianas softly lit up with lovely eyes and lips. While to us they appear free and easy those ardent flowers continue to flutter around and melt into each other. They traduce in concrete terms the adage of the mythographers that gravitational attraction is a characteristic of space and carnal attraction the daughter of this characteristic but which altogether omits to mention that it is up to the daughter to dress the mother for the ball. One breath is all it takes to liberate those myriad egrets bearing achenes. Between their flying up and coming back down along the endless curve of desire all the signs encompassed by the celestial score are written down.