Ok, so here's a giant flurry of cool art stuff I saw in Seattle.
I all ready wrote briefly about the installation
Moore Inside Out which was phenomenal(flickr stream of the event
here). Tuesday night I also saw a great show at the Moore:
Goran Bregovic and His Wedding and Funeral Orchestra.
Bregovic is an outstanding performer and composer from Serbia who has scored such brilliant Kusterica films as
In the Time of the Gypsies and
Black Cat White Cat. The concert audience was mostly Serbs so a good time was assured (Serbs know how to party, trust me I lived with one).
The concert started out slow with Bregovic's orchestra coming out piecemeal. First doleful strains from a string quartet and two female vocalists (in traditional gear) entering stage right. They were answered by the five piece brass section's burbling refrain as they made their way to the stage from the rear of the auditorium. Soon a six member male chorus joined the fray followed by the drummer/lead male vocalist, and lastly after the first song, by Goran himself. The slow stuff quickly gave way to riotous Gypsy rhythms and gloriously huge sounds. There's a reason Bregovic scored Kusterica's maximalist masterpieces, be they of the epic narrative scope variety or the gross-out comedy brand, like Kusterica Bregovic works on a large scale.
I've heard some complaints about Bregovic's performance;
this review of the show and even one of the managers of the Seattle gig whom I talked to felt Bregovic doesn't actually DO anything during his shows. There's SOME validity to this: Bregovic doesn't sing during most songs, he plays guitar for only a handful (more often he's playing with his Macbook) and he is seated the whole time. But these criticisms miss a very important point: Bregovic is always conducting his orchestra through his music (or at the least his orchestrations of traditionally Serbian music). The sound is big but it's also incredibly precise, the resulting effect wouldn't be nearly as powerful if Goran's hands weren't guiding the orchestra along. And it IS incredibly powerful music, halfway through the concert the entire audience was standing up and dancing in the aisles, clapping wildly and totally in sway with band. Even Iggy Pop didn't get a reaction like that when I saw him.
The day before I checked out the film Godless Girl which was part of a Trader Joe's sponsored screening of silent films with live organ accompaniment. The event was at the Paramount, which like the Moore, is a glorious old theater. There were a couple protesters outside claiming the regular organist had been unfairly fired. One of the picketers told me that she had heard one of the programmers wanted to hire a rock musician instead ("A ROCK MUSICIAN!!"). Then again, I'm getting the feeling that an event isn't really worth its salt on the West Coast if there's not a protest involved. The replacement (possible scab) organist was serviceable, at the end of the screening he announced he had just received a DVD copy of the film that morning so he had barely any time to prepare. But silent films weren't made to succeed or fail based on the extempore music playing over them, they were made to be purely visual in their storytelling and this film didn't disappoint.
Godless Girl, one of the last silent films directed by the great Cecil B Demille, tells the lurid tale of a high school atheist temptress and an overzealous religious classmate who fall in love at a Dickensian juvie detention center after a rumble they incite leads to the (spectacularly filmed) death of an innocent girl. It's wonderfully over the top --members of the Atheist Club have to renounce God with one hand on top of a Capuchin monkey-- with Demille's usual ingenuity for spectacle. During the aforementioned mele the camera tracks vertically over four flights of stairs filled with kids fighting tooth and nail, and the end of the film features fire scenes that give Gone With The Wind a run for its money.
Did I mention how gorgeous the theater was?
Outside
Lobby
Lower lobby (the foyer to the restrooms)
Recessed lighting in the theater
Screen (with sponsorship) and Wurlitzer
I also checked out the Seattle Art Museum which I loved.
When you walk in to buy tickets you're greeted overhead by Cai Guo-Qaing's
Inopportune: Stage One which is made up of nine identical white cars suspended from the ceiling with blinking lighting fixtures protruding from the vehicles. The overall effect suggests an explosion emanating from each car, a beautiful and elegant celebration of the combustion that both fuels these modern beasts and threatens our planet.
SAM had some great stuff in their permanent collection, this Warhol for example:
Don't mess with HIS blue suede shoes!
Two other pieces I loved were Mann Und Maus by Katharina Fritsch, in which a sleeping man covered in a white comforter on a white bed up to his serene face has a MASSIVE black mouse resting on his chest.
The impact of the piece lies in its sheer size. The man's head is life-size so imagine how massive the mouse is by comparison. The sculpture conjures up so many images: the incubus or succubus of Medieval lore crouching on the stomach of it's victim, disease (black plague or HIV), self-destructive nature. No matter how antiseptic, no matter how clean we want to make our lives, there's always some great creepy thing looming over us we can't escape. How many times have we seen mice in our apartments and immediately thought they could climb into our bed while we slumber away defenseless?
Another stunner was this piece Some/One by Do-Ho Suh
It appears to be a beautiful large metalic gown, until you get closer and see what it's made of:
I literally gasped when I saw the dogtags.
The piece is perhaps one of the best metaphors I've seen for our current American Empire, part luxury item, part armor, all sacrifice.
The big exhibit now at SAM is "Target Practice: Painting Under Fire 1949-78" a huge exhibit of pieces by artists who took aim at established conventions of paintings. Everything from Yoko Ono's A Painting To Be Stepped On i.e. a piece of cloth on the ground, to Jasper John's Target and beyond. The exhibit is highly engaging in a cerebral way and the free audio tour voiced by Laurie Anderson is informative and breezy. Though I have to say I went in for another much smaller exhibit, the Andrew Wyeth remembrance which is really a celebration of paint as a traditional medium.
Also I was totally impressed by the African Art collection at SAM which contains excellent examples of traditional cloth, masks, and statues as well as contemporary African Art. My only complaint is that their extensive collection of Dahomian religious statues and offerings were housed in a series of anti-septic glass cubes rather than all together in some semblance of a traditional shrine.
Anywho arts in Seattle, lots to love.
