Art Smarts for May 2020

 {Click on images for larger size}
There are days in which I think that art, music, literature, theatre, and film are the only human endeavors that offer hope. Most museums are closed right now, but several recent shows offer things to consider, and the Internet allows us to experience part of what made them special.

Barley Hendricks
Even if you didn’t make it to the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) to see Black Refractions, you can explore the Studio Museum of Harlem (SMH), the lending institution for the SCMA show. The SMH isn’t a large museum. It was only founded in 1968, and it contains just 2,500 objects. To put that in perspective, the SCMA holds more than 10 times as much. But sometimes it’s not big you are, it’s the size of your vision that’s important.

In the early 20th century, Harlem was the single most vibrant cultural oasis in the nation. Brush up on the phenomenon called the Harlem Renaissance if you don’t know what I mean. Alas, the Great Depression, World War II hit, Harlem declined, and postwar racism made black culture an afterthought. The SMH came along at a time in which the civil rights movement rekindled a sense of Black Pride. Fifty years after the SMH opened its doors, we can appreciate the prescient vision of its founders.
Kehinde Wiley
Isaac Julien. Yes this is a sculpture!
Elizabeth Catlett
The SMH spotlights artistic mastery in media ranging from painting and sculpture to fabric arts and video production. All of its holdings come from artists associated with the black diaspora. So, no Van Gogh, but Jacob Lawrence; no Rembrandt, but portraits from Kehinde Wiley. No Judy Chicago, but quilts from Faith Ringgold; no Rodin, but Isaac Julien’s hyper-realistic forms; no Mary Cassatt sentimentality, but the sensuality of Elizabeth Catlett’s mother and child. 

Faith Ringgold
 When we refract art through a black lens, one of the most poignant lessons is that racism impoverishes both victims and their oppressors, the latter of whom deny themselves access to remarkably creative individuals. In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois published Souls of Black Folk. His book mattered because of his powerful insistence that people of color had souls at a time in which many whites denied it. Black art matters. It is incontrovertible proof that DuBois was right.

Last summer I visited the Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and saw a show devoted to Warner Brothers cartoons.  This winter I went to the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA to see The Art of Warner Bros. Cartoons. It wasn’t as extensive or polished as the Eastman House exhibit, but it too reminds us that cartoons are more than just kid stuff.

In an age before CAD, cartoons were the equivalent of Claymation in that even the smallest movement took a lot of work. It entailed drawing numerous cels that overlapped to make drawn figures “move” when the film stock flickered through the projector at 24 frames a second. Some of that was a clever trick. Watch some vintage cartoons and you might notice the art behind the illusion. Often, part of a figure is static; if the cels are done well, your eye follows the movement and you “see” only the movement, not the parts that don’t move. Snobs may turn up their noses, but the magic that went into Warner Brothers cartoons is indeed art.

Warner Brothers ‘toons were not just children’s fare in other ways. Cartoon crews trusted that kids were smart enough to know that dropping an anvil on Wile E. Coyote’s head, handing Elmer Fudd a bomb, or flattening Sylvester the Cat with a steam roller was make-believe. Maybe we have done children an injustice by getting rid of imaginative cartoons that engage the imagination, when we should have worried about the realism of America’s Funniest Home Videos where real danger is hidden behind a laugh track.

Warner Brothers didn’t infantilize. It dared show Bugs Bunny singing opera, made puns worthy of Groucho Marx, and did animated send-ups of contemporary and historical figures. When you didn’t “get” the joke, you learned to ask and the discovery process began. There were also sexual innuendos in the old cartoons. All of the adult stuff meant that many grown-ups were also tuned in and laughing. They decided which things to explain or not.

There’s a reason why Warner Brothers studio personnel are so highly regarded. If you can’t appreciate the artistry, come up with an idea for a 22-minute cartoon. Write a story, draw all the characters, and direct them. Add a soundtrack. You have one week, then you must start anew. Rinse and repeat for 33 years. You can cheat and use your computer.

You can’t go see The Art of Warner Bros. Cartoons right now, but you can see some original drawings and cels on Pinterest sites. Better yet, go to YouTube and watch available Warner Brothers ‘toons. If you grew up in the age of saccharine cartoons or none at all, you might find Bugs Bunny to be (if I might) a hare-raising experience!

Wilson Bigaud
Are you up for an art challenge? Ever notice how often food is depicted in art? Yeah, me neither until I saw Embodied Taste at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. It’s billed as “a conversation on food, culture, art, and power,” which is a bit grandiose unless you were enrolled in the classes that supported those concepts. The basic idea, though, is to look at how social issues are embedded in depictions of food in art.

Marion Post Wolcott

 Who plants food? Who harvests it? Who prepares it? How is it distributed it and how is it parceled out? In a very basic sense, these are questions of who works and who eats. The Mead Show used graphics, photos, paintings, and objects to provoke thought. Of course, unless things change dramatically between now and July 26 when the show comes down, only those of us who have already seen it will be able to do so.

So, let me suggest a little treasure hunt in the spirit of the exhibit. Google some images from your favorite artists and look for those that have food in them. Don’t flip through them; pause and muse upon the images. What back stories relating to food, labor, consumption, and social class are inferred? In other words, does your favorite artist have hidden agendas?

Add caption
Let me show you what I mean though one of the offerings in the Mead Show: Frans Snyder’s 1640 painting Larder with a Servant. We see a table that’s almost literally a groaning board. A larder usually means a place to store food, but that’s not the case here. There is an obscene amount of food present: fowls, a stag, a boar, crustaceans, fruits…. If you’re wondering why there’s a dead peacock prominently displayed, peacock tongue was a delicacy, but only among the upper crust. Imagine how many birds had to be slain to sate the appetites of well-heeled guests. This painting comes from Belgium’s golden age of the 16th and 17th centuries, when money flowed into Antwerp banks, wine poured into Flemish ports, and merchants thrived in an unbalanced system that engorged their purses, but not those of workers who produced export goods or unloaded booty coming into the country.

Back to the table. For the most part you are looking at perishable goods. It is reasonable to infer that the servant girl’s role is to help ready a feast for a rich family and well-to-do guests. Her dress suggests she is a maid, not kitchen staff. She will probably take this food from the table to the kitchen and clean the room once the table is bare. Perhaps she’ll help serve it, a role in which she is expected to be efficient and anonymous. It’s unlikely she will taste more than the leavings of the feast. Depending upon her master, she might have to share even that with the hungry dog in the foreground.

Not all food in art is this politically charged. Some of it is a painted version of the cellphone “food porn” that we gleefully post on social media sites. Scores of other lessons emerge, so give it a whirl. Investigate the artist, the time period, and the place depicted. I’d love it if you shared what you find.

Rob Weir     



Wild Nights with Emily a Disservice to LGBTQ Rights

Wild Nights with Emily (2018; DVD 2020)
Directed by Madeline Olnek
Greenwood Entertainment, 84 minutes, PG-13 (implied sexuality)
½ star

I will not mince words. Wild Nights with Emily is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s not just that it’s boring, though it is, or idiotic (ditto), it trivializes what might be an overlooked aspect of poet Emily Dickinson’s life. Scholars discovered altered letters that contradict the traditional view that Dickinson was a sociophobic recluse who died unloved. Actually, she may have had a deep love: Susan Gilbert, later the wife of Dickinson’s brother Austin. Evidence remains open to interpretation, but it’s probable that Emily Dickinson was a lesbian. She might also have had a brief affair with Kate Scott Turner.

Alas, director Madeline Olnek was unsuccessful in bringing to the screen this important revelation about Dickinson. We do hear Dickinson’s voice in letters and poems clearly aimed at her dear “Sue,” but any sort of nuance escapes Ms. Olnek. I suppose that is to expected from a director who gave us such deathless classics as Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seek Same. (Yes, that’s a real movie title.)

In the film, Susan Gilbert (Sasha Forova/Susan Ziegler) marries Austin Dickinson (Kevin Seal) in part so she could be near Emily (Dana Melanie/Molly Shannon). Austin did his expected duty of producing a few family heirs, then leaves Susan to her devices and immersed himself in an affair with (the married) Mabel Loomis Todd (Amy Seimetz), who became the editor of Dickinson’s poems after her death. Sue, in turn, beds Emily and helps her try to get her poems published. Todd never actually met Dickinson, but scholars suspect that it was she who altered some of Dickinson’s original words to make them more acceptable for mass market consumption and, not coincidentally advance her own reputation as a Dickinson expert.

You will notice that I have made qualified remarks about Emily, Sue, and Mabel. Olnek takes an Emily/Sue erotic relationship as a given. I have no issue with that; film directors often take liberties with biographical details. I do, however, take umbrage with Olnek’s attempt to make, in her words, a “dramatic comedy” that mixes humor and seriousness in seemingly random ways. The problem is simple: Wild Nights with Emily is neither funny nor convincing when it seeks to be informative. We see Sue and Emily steal a kiss in an upstairs bedroom, then grope each other, and tumble behind a bed like two teenagers in the backseat of a Fiat. Which was this, I wonder, the serious or the humorous part? I’d say the latter, but the comedy is so broad that it would take a TV laugh track to queue viewers.

Shannon portrays adult Emily as a cenerous worricrow. It’s as if she’s has stolen Rachel Dratch’s character of Debbie Downer, dressed her in crinoline, and given her a girlfriend. Ziegler is better as Susan Gilbert Dickinson, but she too falls prey to an insipid script that has her dispatching her children ‘round the clock to deliver mash notes to Emily. The only redeeming quality is that both Shannon and Ziegler are way better than Melanie and Frolova, who are so wooden as young Emily and Susan that one could get splinters from watching them. It might be not their fault; Olnek is fishing for laughs in scenes such as their rehearsal for a Shakespeare play, but comes away with an empty creel.

Empty pretty much describes most of the film. The scene involving a doddering Judge Lords mangling the title and details of Wuthering Heights is pretty funny, but I wish Austin’s wig had flown off–as it seemed on the verge of doing in numerous segments–as that would have been much funnier than flat insider jokes about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Lyman, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The real crunch comes in the last quarter of the film, when Olnek abruptly changes tone. Most successful dramatic comedies mix those elements throughout, but Olnek gives us two separate films that do not mesh. That is, after painting with (allegedly comic) broad strokes, she shifts to a didactic look at Dickinson’s altered letters and poems. She somehow got permission to film the actual documents and I can only conclude that no one from the Emily Dickinson House laid eyes on either Olnek’s theatre production that preceded the film or her screenplay.

Wild Nights with Emily is simply a bad movie. Though it’s a mere 84 minutes, it feels as long as Lawrence of Arabia. Even worse, it doesn’t even work as camp. If this one is on your Netflix queue, delete it.

Rob Weir


Ratings on Places You Can't Visit

Overrated or Not:
Travel Sites, Truth and Nonsense

It’s hard to imagine traveling these days, but that doesn’t stop travel sites from doling out advice. Lately they’ve been engaged in a slash-and-burn campaign of telling us of places and sites they think are overrated. Maybe that’s so we won’t lament that we can’t go there anyhow. So, I checked out Escape Here and Far and Wide to see what I’m supposed to miss.

I can’t comment on places I’ve never been, though I can’t for the life of me imagine that I would like Mount Rushmore, the Las Vegas Strip, or Copenhagen’s tiny statue of the Little Mermaid. I would like to go to Denmark someday, but I’m fine with giving South Dakota and Nevada a miss. But I can slap down my two pennies when it comes to places and things I have seen.

Let’s start with a few experiences that I agree are way overrated. Neither site cared for the Hollywood Walk of Fame, not should they. It’s like strolling through one of those cemeteries where all the markers are flush to the surface, except the little inscribed stars are set in granite. Some are smashed or covered with graffiti as the Walk is located in a rather seedy part of the city.

I really like London, but I concur that the London Eye is less than meets one’s ocular units. It’s just an expensive whirl around a Ferris Wheel whose biggest impact is to be photographed at night from a distant bridge. You don’t even get cotton candy.

I guess you can say you saw it
The Four Corners where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah intersect is just one of those kill-four-birds-with-one-screech-of-the-car wheels place for state collectors. It only exists because there’s so much barren land out those parts that surveyors just squared the boundaries. It’s also analogous to Greenwich, England, where you can stand with one foot on either side of the Prime Meridian. Having had a toe in both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres as well as the above four states I can tell you that you won’t detect any differences.

Pucker up for a sloppery rock
The Blarney Stone gets no love and doesn’t deserve any. The castle is perfectly fine, but it’s a tip-off when there are competing legends of why it’s lucky to be tipped onto your back, have your head pushed under the walls, and kiss a wet rock. Can you say, “gullible tourists?” I will say, though, that it’s way more interesting than Plymouth Rock, which also gets thumbs down. It’s there because, you know, it has to be authentic, right? I don’t think there are any other big fricking granite boulders anywhere in New England. Funny the Pilgrims failed to mention such a stone.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa deserves to fall out of favor, unless you think the world needs more photos of grinning tourists pretending to hold it up. Spend an hour in Venice and you’ll see lots of sinking towers.

The White House deservedly makes the lists as well. It might feel very patriotic as you wait to get in, but there’s not much to see in the public areas. Besides, who wants to see where sports stars eat McDonald’s burgers with a fat man and his comb over?

Mildly Disagree

There are some places that probably are a bit naff, but I nonetheless liked them. The entire tale you are told about the Alamo in San Antonio is a load of horse exhaust and there’s not much left of the old fort, but it’s nice to visit and bite your tongue because you know the whole damn thing was about the right of illegal immigrants from the South to bring their illegal slaves into a foreign country.

So maybe it does look like 2 am outside a bar
The Mannekin Pis fountain in Brussels is what it sounds like: a statue of a small boy with a jet of water shooting out from his bronze tallywacker. It’s stupid, but in a good way.

Yes, Temple Bar in Dublin is crammed with tourists bellying up to try to convince themselves that Guinness is actually worthy of being called beer. If you’re lucky, though, you might actually find an Irish person with whom you can get a recommendation for a real beer.

Sites routinely list the Sydney Opera House as not worth the effort. Well, it’s hard to beat its exterior visual impact, especially when strolling across Harbor Bridge. The interior is a letdown, though. It opened in 1973 and there just isn’t much to be said for no-frills functionality. It feels like being in a shopworn megachurch.

Are Your Nuts!?

Dreams of Nessie
Now for stuff where I want to cry out, “Getta life, you idiot!” I’ll start with one dear to my heart. Sites tell you to avoid Loch Ness in Scotland. Nessie might or might not be a real lake monster, but the lake is deep and lovely and the ruins of Castle Urquhart add to a dazzling tableau. If you can’t dream here, take up an unimaginative profession such as becoming a member of Congress.

Neither site liked Stonehenge, which suggests their writers have rocks in their heads. You cannot gaze upon Stonehenge or any of a number of comparable megalithic locations without realizing that what we call “ingenuity” is an ever-evolving concept. Besides, the Druids told me this place is cool.

Along the same lines, how can one not be impressed by the Great Wall of China? Smug writers who pooh-pooh it need to be sent to re-education camps.

Or maybe fed to the lions. That fate should be for those who tell you to avoid the Coliseum in Rome. Yes, the stadium floor is missing. It’s coming up on its 2000th birthday. Send me a postcard of what you will look like in another 1,970 years.

Please tell Leonardo to make it bigger
One site said that viewing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre is a disappointment. Okay, so the room is crowded but this painting is considered one of Western art’s greatest masterpieces. The same site complained that is was so small. That individual should retire to his dorm room and gaze lovingly on his life-sized poster of Def Leppard.

I’m not Catholic, but if anyone tells you that the Vatican isn’t worth seeing, convert, and strangle that fool with your rosary beads. The Sistine Chapel is a marvel, and it’s much bigger than the Mona Lisa. You also need to see all the (literal) loot carried by to Rome over the centuries. If you want to draw some lessons about blind faith, who am I to dissuade you?

Anyone who tries to tell you that Venice isn’t worth seeing needs to be lobotomized. The main sites can be overrun by day trippers, but if you venture away in any direction you will find solitude and architectural wonders that restore your faith in humankind. The food also gets better in those quiet plazas. I advocate a stroll across the Bridge of Sighs for those who don’t like Venice.