GLASS

Just watched the Philip Glass documentary on a bit of an impulse. I've never been the biggest fan, but have always been intrigued. It sucked me in right away, and I definitely gained an appreciation for his music and incredible output and longevity as an artist.

Here are a few of my favorite videos that I've found online.

See the movie. You can stream it on Netflix.

"When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk."

It's not often you see a movie that instantly compels you to tell everybody you know, once knew, or might not know yet to see as soon as possible. I'm taking a few days off to get some R&R and recharge after a two week tour and figured I would take in a few matinees in the city. I read about "Man on Wire" in TONY when it first came out and was instantly intrigued. I didn't know about Philippe Petit's famous highwire crossing of the Twin Towers before reading the review, and like any New Yorker was quite affected by any story involving the two spires that are no longer with us.

How often is one's entire life driven my one moment? For Petit, a Parisian street performer, this moment came while sitting in the waiting room of a dentist's office, waiting for some respite from a toothache. While thumbing through a magazine, he saw an article about the building of the WTC, which included drawings of the towers. Instantly, the yet-to-be-completed towers would give him the challenge of a lifetime. Petit, who had been a tightrope artist for years would also cross the Notre-Dame and the world's largest steel arch bridge in Sydney in the intervening years, defying both death and the law in order to do so. However, the sheer height between the towers offered him something far beyond anything else the world had to offer a man of the tightrope.

The movie follows the six-year planning that Petit and his rogue cast went through to fulfill the dream. Every step of the process had to be accounted for in order for the team to rig the highwire and for Petit to cross it. The trials and travails of the group are totally exhilarating, and the characters, a mix of hippies, renegades, and an insurance adjuster on the inside, are totally fascinating. When Petit finally gets up on the wire (after a night of countless mishaps), 450 meters in the sky, it is totally breathtaking. Not only did he cross the span. He danced up there, walking, running, dancing, hopping and even lying down on the wire, spending 45 minutes up there before walking into the arms of police. For the thousands of people who were there to see it, most of them probably on their way to work, it was a sight never to be forgotten. Most of us will never be able to understand how somebody could flirt with death to such an extreme, but seeing Petit interviewed throughout the film, you feel that this was his journey in life, the only way he saw of living. He has no answer to why he did this. Somehow, in all its absurdity, it just has to be.

One can't help but think what could possibly keep Petit going after accomplishing this feat. Certainly, there is little chance any structures side-by-side and quite so high will ever again exist, and modern security mechanisms, especially in this new age of terror, will never allow an amateur team the access to buildings necessary to pull of something of this magnitude. The movie delves very little into Petit's life since, and one certainly wonders how things must pale in comparison with that miraculous journey that culminated so beautifully that summer day in 1974.

In the words of Port Authority Police Department Sgt. Charles Daniels, who was dispatched to the roof to bring Petit down, later reported his experience:

I observed the tightrope 'dancer'—because you couldn't call him a 'walker'—approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire....And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle....He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again....Unbelievable really....[E]verybody was spellbound in the watching of it.

See this movie. Click here to go to the official site.

There is an excellent Gothamist interview with Petit here and one from Psychology Today here.

My Kid Could Paint That

One of the most lingering, poignant, and thought-provoking documentaries I've seen in the past year was a small film called My Kid Could Paint That. The subject centers around a then four-year-old named Marla Olmstead, an adorable little girl from upstate New York who became a superstar in the art world in 2005 when her abstract paintings began to sell for tens of thousands of dollars. When Sixty Minutes came to do a piece about her, suspicion arose that perhaps she was not wholly responsible for production of her work, that her father, himself an amateur painter was either guiding her or doctoring the paintings himself. However, in the same piece, a curator for MOMA, without being told who the artist is, says that the paintings are worthy of the work that appears in any top museum. Much of the movie centers around the resulting controversy, and Marla's parents go on to defend her work against this suspicion by producing several videos which chronicle one of Marla's paintings from start to finish. Personally, I had a gut feeling watching the movie that there is some unhealthy and unacknowledged parental involvement going on in Marla's painting (something about the father's defensiveness and shifty eyes that lead me to feel this way), however, on a much deeper level the movie raises some of the most profound questions about art, and ends up being much more about the world of adults and the definition of art than a gifted child.

First of all, the movie shows just how important the story behind any work of art is. People are so drawn to the fact that these paintings were done by a child, and once this is known the paintings take on qualities that they might not have otherwise. It is impossible to experience these paintings purely for what they are intrinsically once you know they were painted by a four-year-old. This goes for so much of art... how often are we moved by something because of the story that surrounds it? Does Nick Drake's music take on an other-worldly beauty because I know about his tragic end? Is the last movement of Mahler 9 so haunting because I know it was one of the last things he completed before dying? Am I more drawn to Billie Holliday because I know what she was living through? How about that experience we've all had of being in a modern art museum and giving special attention to a work simply because it is by an iconic figure in the art world? Can we ever experience art purely for what it is and judge it solely on its own merits? In the end, except for the purpose of honesty and authenticity (nobody should be lied to in order so that art sells), why should it matter whether Marla's work was done by her father or not? If the paintings are as haunting, dramatic, and beautiful as people say they are, shouldn't they be just as valuable and worthy of our attentions, regardless of their origin?

The idea of a four-year-old producing a profound piece of contemporary art that is then compared to work by Pollack or Kandinsky also challenges the notion of contemporary art being something worth taking seriously. Mia Fineman, in an article for Slate (go here to read it), writes:

Ten years ago, I traveled around Thailand with Russian conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, teaching domesticated elephants to hold brushes in their trunks and apply paint to canvas. The project was cheerfully satirical, but the elephants really did learn to paint, and their bold, gestural abstractions were strikingly similar to Marla's—and raised many of the same questions. Like Marla, elephants approach a blank canvas with a blithe lack of inhibition and no preconceived idea of what a painting is supposed to look like. What matters to them is the process: the friction of the brush against the surface of the canvas, the creamy viscosity of the paint, and the fine-motor activity involved in making different kinds of marks, from long sweeping strokes to quick rhythmic dabs and slithery caresses.

Where does the notion of skill come into play when a four-year-old (or an elephant) can produce something that is compared to the masterworks? Is skill still important in art, or is it the intention or the idea behind the work that transforms it into great art? If is is the intention or idea that makes a work into art, again, isn't it troubling that a precocious but otherwise normal four-year-old can produce abstract art that is taken so seriously? Skeptics of modern art could easily conclude that the entire Marla Olmstead affair is proof that abstract expressionism is a giant hoax. Fineman ends her article refuting this notion and writes:

Yes, anyone can pick up a brush and slather paint on canvas in a drippy style that evokes Jackson Pollock. But it took an artist like Pollock to step back from his own work, which at the time looked unlike anything that had come before, and say, with bold conviction: "This is it. This is what modern painting looks like." In other words, Pollock taught us how to see art in a new way.