By Steve Barnes I don’t think I’d ever been directly told to snap my fingers before, but I was willing to go for it. The person issuing the command was Lawrence Goldhuber, a dancer and choreographer who was standing on stage at the Prospect Park Bandshell. Mr. Goldhuber was dressed as Officer Krupke, the portly beat cop whose job it was to try and keep a bunch of gang kids under control in West Side Story, a film that hundreds of sweltering Brooklynites had shown up to see on one of the hottest nights of the summer. And snapping my fingers wasn’t all I was supposed to be doing. The finger-snapping was just a part of the “West Side Story Dance- & Sing-Along,” part of the Celebrate Brooklyn series of outdoor performances that runs for most of the summer in the park. In addition to snapping along with those cool kids as they sauntered down Manhattan streets on the big screen in front of us, we were meant to sing and dance along with them as well. There were a few problems with that, however. The promotional material for the evening told us that Mr. Goldhuber was going to teach us some of the show’s famous steps, but the lessons consisted of just a few humorously executed sidesteps and pirouettes followed by a request that we get up and dance along with the characters whenever the spirit moved us. To help us sing along with the characters, subtitles showing the song lyrics were supposed to be projected onto the screen during each number. But there were a few snafus with that as well. Sometimes the lyrics were out of sync with the music, sometimes there were no lyrics projected at all, and in a few cases lyrics to songs from other musicals managed to find their way onto the screen.
But none of that really got in the way of the genuine pleasures of the evening. Before the film, a discussion between Scott Foundas of the Film Society at Lincoln Center and Henry Krieger, who wrote the music for Dreamgirls, set things up. And after Mr. Goldhuber’s pep talk, the sky got just dark enough for the film to get going. And, thanks to several large groups of the show’s fans in the audience, the feeling of a group singalong did take place. One side of the audience was labeled as the seating area for the Jets (the multi-ethinc grab bag of “white” kids), the other side for the Sharks (the Puerto Rican kids). The Sharks side of the crowd had many more worthy villains to hiss and sneer at, as well as “America,” one of the show’s best numbers (see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPlcE3GcoFc) to get on their feet for. But the whole audience was completely swept up the songs, the dances and the story. Except for the singing, the crowd was amazingly quiet for an outdoor summer event, with almost no one getting up to head for the concessions. The centerpiece of the evening, the film itself, unsurprisingly proved itself a classic once again. For me at least, it’s one of those movies that really does seem to get better every time you see it. I’ve never really understood the people who think of it as dated (including the show’s lyricist and book writer, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents). It’s one of the archetypal New York movies, having much more in common with Scorsese’s and Sidney Lumet’s best work than with any other movie musical. It creates its own dream world without losing any of the grittiness of the slum streets that these kids exist on. The next time you see the film, after you’ve marveled over the Bernstein/Sondheim songs, the Jerome Robbins dances, and Rita Moreno, you might want to look behind the characters at something else that really distinguishes West Side Story. It’s one of the most amazing looking movies I can think of, designed by the great Boris Leven. Leven uses both actual city streets (many of which were bulldozed to make way for Lincoln Center soon after shooting finished) and sets that are real masterpieces of scale and color. Even Saul Bass’s closing credits, composed of a series of weathered doors and street signs, would make a memorable short film of their own. And the setting was a wonderful complement to the movie. Somehow it just seemed incredibly right to be seeing this film in a quintessentially New York spot, with a warm wind blowing, and the sound of the city audible in the distance. It made it very clear how much the city we live in now has in common with the one in which Tony and Maria act out their tragic story. Even if that had been the evening’s only strong point (which it wasn’t), it would have made the “West Side Story Dance- & Sing-Along” a worthwhile event.

Steve Barnes is a freelance writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in such publications as ARTnews and the Wall Street Journal. ]]>

By Steve Barnes “I think everyone has a deep sexuality,” Alexander McQueen says in the astonishing catalog for “Savage Beauty,” the retrospective of his work that is in its last few weeks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (it’s up through August 7). “And sometimes it’s good to use a little of it—and sometimes a lot of it—like a masquerade.” Both sexuality and masquerade make their presence strongly felt in the photograph on the page facing that quote. A provocative skirt and jacket ensemble that mixes black leather, fox fur and a series of silver metal hoops and studs, it seems to be made for a woman who is equal parts dominatrix, socialite and heroine from an Edward Gorey book. Its combination of childish whimsy, in-your-face sadomasochism and classically flawless high style makes it a near-perfect introduction to the unique world that McQueen created. If you can’t make it to the Met, or don’t want to face the show’s daunting crowds, this sumptuously produced catalog is a good way to enter McQueen’s world. Its hundreds of photos show off many of the designer’s strengths—his amazingly precise hand at cutting garments, his unconventional yet always controlled sense of balance and his ability to bring together the most unexpected materials in ways that make the results seem as if we should have expected them all along. This is a man who makes a jacket on which crocodile heads serve as epaulets, creates a bodice from feathers, and constructs an aluminum facsimile of a spinal column to run along the backbone of a vest. And most importantly, none of these things ever feel like stunts. McQueen always saw himself as a storyteller, his shows relating back to themes taken from film, literature and history. The clothes exist simultaneously as fashion statements and part of a larger artistic discussion. They absolutely belong in an art museum—and they will definitely repay the amount of time spent going back over them in the pages of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. Sexuality and masquerade also figure prominently in another recent book that’s also well worth looking at. Christopher Reed’s Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas is an engaging, well-written history of how the development of homosexual identity and the major movements in art history have fed off of each other. Reed, an associate professor of English and Visual Culture at Penn State, discusses a broad range of ways that same-sex relationships have appeared throughout history, arguing that it was really not until the early 20th century that a homosexual identity as we currently understand it emerged in any public sort of way.
That is not at all to say that he finds no examples of homosexuality itself in earlier periods. From the patronage system of ancient Greece (in which relationships between an older man who served to “initiate” a younger man were common), through the many examples of same-sex relations in feudal Japan, the South Pacific islands, and the culture of the American Indians, Reed constructs a long history of alternatives to what we see as “normal” gender roles. But just as those social alternatives remained somewhat open-ended and unformed, so did their representation in sculptures and paintings. Open-ended and unformed certainly does not mean invisible, however. We see a 12th century illustration depicting the wedding of two men, representations of rather bawdy relations between 13th century knights and monks, and 16th century engravings showing groups of fleshy naked women pleasuring themselves with no men anywhere near. We also get to know many of the artists who drew outside the lines when it comes to sexual behavior: Gianantonio Bazzi, who referred to himself as “Il Sodoma,” or the Sodomite; the 19th century painter Rosa Bonheur, who needed to file an official permit with the Paris police to allow her to wear men’s clothes and keep her hair cut short; and the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, whose brute strength permitted her to do the kind of rough cutting on marble that even most male sculptors left to their workmen. Once modernity takes over, according to Reed, artistic temperament and homosexuality became intertwined in the public imagination. When homosexuality was turned into a medically and politically applied label, it became a much more direct target of attack for the powers that be, and many avant-garde artists strenuously tried to distance themselves from any suggestion of it. The macho posturings of the Abstract Expressionists are a major case in point, as are the directly anti-homosexual pontifications of such critics as Clement Greenberg. Reed points out the difficulty that such gay artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and especially, Andy Warhol, had in being accepted as serious artists by the boys in the Ab-Ex pack and their hangers-on. Vivian Gornick even went so far as to label Pop art “a malicious fairy’s joke” rather than an art movement. But as our vantage point in history shows, Johns, Rauschenberg and Warhol certainly succeeded in entering the highest reaches of the esthetic and financial art worlds. Despite the power of the many artists who fought the AIDS epidemic in their work and the extraordinary strides made by feminist and lesbian artists, however, Reed still finds a reticence on the part of museums and critics to open themselves up to the political messages that many gay (or queer, which seems to be his dominant term) artists are still trying to deliver. Thanks to this book, though, that message is getting a worthy platform. Steve Barnes is a freelance writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in such publications as ARTnews and the Wall Street Journal. ]]>

By Steve Barnes Was New York ever really the edgiest city in the world? Two new shows make a case for it having deserved that title in the 1970s, ‘80s and early ‘90s. “Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs” (up at the Asia Society through August 14) and “The View from a Volcano: The Kitchen’s Soho Years 1971-85” (up at the Kitchen through August 27) show a city in political, artistic and sexual ferment—with a sense of energy and adventurousness that seems in rather short supply these days. The anything-goes attitude at the Kitchen in its early days allowed for an amazingly wide range of performers and artists to show their works there. In the current exhibit, the walls of the Kitchen’s galleries are covered with flyers, photographs and program notes from many of the shows that served to define the whole idea of performance art. Audiences were presented with such offerings as “The Last Video Tapes of Marcel Duchamp” and “Harrisburg Mon Amour, or Two Boys on a Bus—played by Taylor Mead,” as well as groundbreaking works by choreographers such as Karole Armitage, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. The Kitchen saw itself as a challenger to the established art world, a trait made humorously clear in the program notes for “Dubbed in Glamour,” which starred the John Waters regular Cookie Mueller. (A photograph of the wonderfully surly Mueller hangs above those program notes on the gallery wall.) The show touted itself as being “an expose of the energies of Para-Soho luminaries, that part of the art world which never had a loft, is younger than the art world and hangs out in the clubs.” Part of that youthful energy showed itself in the Kitchen’s adventurous music programming. The exhibit is dotted with video monitors that allow gallery goers to sample performances from Rhys Chatham, the Bush Tetras, and the very young Talking Heads. There’s also an “audio jukebox” at which works from many of the other musicians whose careers were nurtured at the Kitchen can be heard—Steve Reich, Sonic Youth, Pauline Oliveiros and Arthur Russell (who made a very interesting transition from art-music renegade to dance-club icon), just to name a few.
And last, but certainly not least, is the Kitchen’s central place in the birth of video art. Steina and Woody Vasulka, the Kitchen’s founders, were among the earliest video artists, and a monitor showing several of their works is at the exhibit’s entrance. (To get a rough idea of the kind of minimalist psychedelia they were up to, have at look at
http://www.vasulka.org/Videomasters/pages_stills/index_42.html. A room at the back features such central figures in video art’s history as Charles Atlas, Dara Birnbaum and Bill Viola. While the Kitchen was revolutionary in its way, its energies were contained on stages and gallery walls. “Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs” shows what happened when a group of Chinese expatriates met up with those energies as they were lived out on the street of New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s. Ai Weiwei has had a long career as a sculptor, installation artist and photographer, but his biggest claim to fame for many people stems from his recent political problems. A man always dedicated to thumbing his nose at authority (or giving it the finger, as he did in a series of photographs in which the “up yours” is delivered to such sites as the Eiffel Tower and the White House), he was detained by Chinese authorities on April 3. After a long and very public campaign for his release, he was let go on June 22. The Asia Society exhibit takes us to many of the iconic sites of New York sexual and social history. We go onstage with the drag queens at Wigstock, hit the streets with the participants in the Tompkins Square Park riots, and look into the eyes of some very nervous African-American cops patrolling a demonstration about the Tawana Brawley controversy. We also get intimate looks at such figures as Chen Kaige (director of the 1990s arthouse hit Farewell My Concubine), Allen Ginsburg, a very beautiful Bai Ling, and the communal life lived by a group of young Chinese artists as they tried to make ends meet. You also get a very strong sense of time passing in these pictures. Early on, we see a shot of Allen Ginsburg sitting in his apartment with filmmaker and musician Harry Smith. Close to the show’s end, Ginsburg shows up again, this time at Smith’s memorial service. The homeless people and stray dogs in abandoned buildings give way to people playing pool in a suburban basement and Bill Clinton stumping on the Lower East Side during the 1992 presidential campaign. And perhaps the most striking thing is what a good photographer Weiwei is. His eye for movement and composition is strong and very instinctual, giving even the most casual-seeming shots a lovely sense of balance. He even has the ability to turn sets of shots blown up from contact sheets into unified individual compositions. All in all, these two shows give a nice picture of a New York City in which there was really a community of outsiders—gays, straights, punkers, artist, writers. To look at them gives you a renewed sense that if this isn’t the edgiest city in the world any more, it certainly used to be. Steve Barnes is a freelance writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in such publications as ARTnews and the Wall Street Journal. ]]>

By Steve Barnes Part of an artistic circle that included Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes and Lincoln Kirstein, George Tooker, who died in March at 90, would endure as a figure of interest for sociological reasons alone. But as “Reality Returns as a Dream,” a show of his work that is up through August 5 at the DC Moore Gallery (535 West 25th Street) proves, the reasons why we should still pay attention to Tooker and his work go far beyond who his mentors, friends and lovers were. Tooker was born in Brooklyn in 1920, studying in the early 1940s at the Art Students League in New York. It was there that he first met Paul Cadmus, an artist who brought a sure draftsman’s hand and colorist’s eye to works that often exhibited a bawdy and forthright homoeroticism. The power that Cadmus’s sexuality had to ruffle the feathers of American society was perhaps most famously exhibited in The Fleet’s In, a painting showing sailors on shore leave. Pulled from a 1934 exhibition of WPA art at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, the work was not seen in public again until 1982. While Tooker can in many ways be seen as one of Cadmus’s followers, a look at two paintings both called Coney Island, one painted by Cadmus in 1934, the other painted by Tooker in 1948, shows how Tooker followed in Cadmus’s footsteps while marking out his own distinctive path. Both of the pictures showcase a Rubenseqsue physicality—voluptuous bodies (both male and female) aggressively on display in public. But while Cadmus throws those bodies into a dynamic, every-man-for-himself free-for-all, Tooker shows a much greater sense of decorum. Despite all the bare flesh on display, Tooker’s beachgoers seem almost prim, obediently posing for the artist. In the background, a group of young men appear to be playing football on the beach, but there’s very little sense of motion. In the foreground, a woman tends to an unconscious man, the positions of their bodies strongly bringing a pieta to mind. We are presented with a world that holds its people in, even when they’re at their most exposed.
That sense of people being trapped by their environments, almost as if they were insects under glass, is a thread that runs through the 26 paintings and sketches that are up DC Moore. In the show’s first image, Tree (1965), a woman gazes at us from behind a tree, not acknowledging the man staring at her. Landscape with Figures (1965–66) is something of an office worker’s nightmare, a sea of anxious faces peering up from a forbidding series of cubicles with no exit. And in Tooker’s most well-known image, 1950’s Subway, an apprehensive woman walks down an antiseptic subway corridor in which a series of vaguely threatening characters lurk. Tooker’s pristine compositions take on an even greater sense of formality due to his use of egg tempera, a medium that gives off a glowing, soft tone. At first glance, some of these works, with their classical compositions and muted colors, could be mistaken for ones from hundreds of years ago. But a far more modern sensibility is at work as well. In 1959’s Laundress, a series of clotheslines turn the sky into a patchwork of abstracted shapes while the women’s faces are split into two fractured halves. For me, however, the most striking feature that shows up constantly in this show are the tortured eyes of the people that Tooker depicts. The same anguished eyes of the woman in Subway can be seen in a nearby self-portrait (in which a skeleton lurks behind the artist’s image) painted in 1996. That anguish shows up in the affectless shoppers who wander through a store of faceless items in 1972’s Supermarket, as well as in Corporate Decision (1983), with its poor family in the foreground cowering before a series of suited men in black-and-white passing judgement in the far background. It’s a testament to the helplessness that many of us feel at the hands of a world that does not quite understand us, and it’s the central achievement of Tooker’s art. Also up in a side gallery at DC Moore is “An Intimate Circle,” with paintings and photographs by Tooker, Cadmus, Lynes, and Jared and Margaret French. A kind of scrapbook of the world in which Tooker lived, it provides a nice background to the main show.]]>