Old School

Ever wonder what happened to Ed Templeton?  That professional skateboarder turned internationally renowned artist, photographer, D.I.Y. innovator, entrepreneur, ‘Beautiful Loser,’ and book publisher?  Well if you haven’t, then Ed Templeton has.

His eclectic career as both a skater and an artist has always seemed to be about his own relationship to time and motion.  In his famous photography book, Teenage Smokers, for instance, each medium to close-up image of a young person with a cigarette has the feeling of personal impermanence, like a flash-memory of a kid you might have seen at the mall once when you were nine.

Templeton, especially in his most recent work, seems to be obsessed with these fragile, ephemeral moments, and what they might mean.  His 2008 book, Deformer, which took him 11 years to complete, examines his youth growing up in the ultra-conservative suburban “incubator” of Orange County, using childhood letters, notes, photographs, sketches, and paintings to tell his story with as much physical accuracy as possible—even if it’s all long gone.

His latest photography show, The Seconds Pass, at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City once again has Templeton on the move.  These thirty-some separate collages of pictures, mostly all taken from the vantage point of a moving vehicle, attempt to capture exactly where he’s been these last few years, so as not to miss a passing second.

Ed Templeton’s The Seconds Pass can be viewed at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City until April 3.  Roberts and Tilton is located at 5801 Washinton Blvd.  For more information, please call (323) 549-0223, or visit www.robertsandtilton.com.

When most people think of portraiture, images of aristocracy adorned in their finest medieval robes atop a crackling grand fireplace in some remote European castle probably come to mind.  When I mention that I focused on 18th-19th Century portraiture in college, people look as if they’re about to fall asleep before I can finish the sentence.  But this past Saturday, I attended a lecture at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum presented by John Klein, Associate Professor from Washington University in St. Louis, that reminded me of the magnetism and presence of portraits. In his lecture, “Matisse, Picasso and Beyond: How Portraiture Survived Modernism,” he examined the means by which the art of human representation prevailed through an era defined by its antipathy to historical convention.  Through the study of modernist masters like Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti, Klein arrives at a universal truth: human beings will always and forever be obsessed with themselves, others, and how others perceive them.

“Damn Portraits!” began Professor Klein, quoting Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres—an abrupt and honest exclamation that served as a perfect prelude to the difficult battle that portraiture was doomed to fight once the modern age descended on a timeless artistic tradition.  Ingres, like many artists of his time, despised portraiture.

He often complained that the overwhelming number of commissions from high society kept him from focusing on “more important” subject matter.  In the 19th Century, it seemed as if the only demographic that had an affinity for portraiture was the social elite.  When the 20th Century began, many creative figures decried the art form’s declining relevance.  Portraiture posed a series of difficult questions for the artist: How does one capture the complexity of human identity? How can an inner quality be expressed outwardly?  How can a still representation do justice to a personality trait that is defined by its movement? Modernism, says Klein, provided the platform that was so desperately needed: a movement that joined portraiture with the abstraction of the avant-garde.

Through an array of examples, Klein revealed how artists like Picasso and Matisse were uninterested with the centrality of the sitter, which historically would have been fundamental.  In works like Girl with Green Eyes (1908), Matisse blended his sitters into a decorative pattern where no single component of the painting could dominate.  Picasso’s Gertrude Stein (1906), on the other hand, showcases both the artist and the sitter, serving as a visual statement of the height and legitimacy of both Stein’s and Picasso’s careers. Klein taught the audience that through the execution of her face, as was common with many of Picasso’s portraits, the artist imposed a mask-like quality that hardly resembled Stein’s genuine appearance. The primitivization of her face is a symbolic and telling mark of the beginning of an important aesthetic shift.

After the First World War, artists became increasingly cynical of humanistic values, and rapid advances in photographic technology threatened representational portraiture.  Expressive abstraction began to take hold, providing the artist with infinite ways to communicate power, status and legitimacy—and the line between art and vulgarity became harder to define.  Marcus Harvey’s Myra (1995) is an example of how modern portraiture could become a PR dream come true. Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, a woman convicted of murdering multiple innocent child victims, is comprised of tiny flesh colored hands, hands meant to represent those of the children that she murdered.

Portraiture’s many levels of expression, as in Myra, have the potential for endless symbolism and emotion.  I could feel the tension in the lecture hall when Myra came on screen, and I could see that the man next to me was trying to conceal his goose bumps.

Professor Klein’s lecture was most certainly a personal highlight of my many years of studying and appreciating portraiture. Regardless of one’s knowledge of art, he was able to communicate his subject with admirable passion and vigor.  Professor Klein carried the double-barreled theme of portraiture and its modernist survival from the turn of the 20th Century through the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was quite frankly one of the most fun Saturdays I’ve had in a while, and I don’t think I was alone.  The jam-packed lecture hall’s enthusiastic applause was proof enough that nobody was falling asleep before Klein could finish his sentences.

-By Brittany Krasner

The Norton Simon’s calendar of educational lectures will certainly expand your art related intellectual repertoire.  For more information on upcoming lectures, please visit their website.

From George Washington on the Delaware, to Huck Finn on the Mississippi, to Katrina on the Gulf, rivers make up an integral part of the geographical, historical, cultural, political, and artistic landscape of the America we know.  And Los Angeles is no exception.  Yes it’s true that for the good part of the year, the L.A. River remains hopelessly barren, and provides a better bike path to Long Beach than it does a waterway.  But if you’ve ever actually step foot into that mighty concrete divider of our city, then you’d know it’s every bit as organic and symbolic as any other great river.  Whether it’s the plastic bag trees, the graffiti-worn banks, or the garbage disposal current, one would be hard-pressed to not find the same beauty that Mark Twain once described in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, as “…a wonderful book…which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice.”

On show until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the collective exhibition entitled The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River (UGLAR for short) also uses the metaphor of a book, only this one screams its secrets.  Consisting of a wide range of contemporary, LA-based artists, this unique assortment of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and illustrations all converge like tributaries into one central theme: the Los Angeles River.

One oil painting called “Confluence” by Tyson Dolan portrays the intersection of two concrete canals, meeting and opening into the space of the viewer.  The colors are muted, almost foggy, and with the installed background sounds of dripping water and distant train bells echoing throughout the room, one gets the distinct feeling of being alone and drifting through Dolan’s industrial river-basin.

Another piece, up-and-comer Rob Sato’s “Land Admiral Lefebvre’s Fleet Makes Sail”, takes a more surreal, maximalist route.  This multi-medium, ‘Where’s Waldo’ mash-up depicts an elaborate, farcical, eighteenth-century showdown between the Blue-Coats and the Reds on the battlefield of the Los Angeles River.  There’s of course no water for the huge wooden ships, so the implied Admiral Lefebvre sails upon his own ocean, with hundreds of tiny minions carrying the actual waves themselves.  Not to be ignored in this spectacle are Sato’s frequent dips into brash absurdity: slave-like giants, a monstrous fish-man-beast riding a whale like an Avatar pterodactyl, and if you look hard enough, a modern car wreck upon the bridge over the river.

The biggest work on show, however, is a mural completed by all the contributing artists.  It’s title is “The River Experiment,” and it speaks to the theme of the collection, which is one of evolution, or perhaps more accurately, mutation.  Because The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River – to complete Mark Twain’s quote – “[is] not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River runs until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.  For more information, please visit pmcaonline.org, or call (626) 568-3665.

Women’s Rights have come a long way since 1920, the year that the 19th Amendment granting women suffrage was finally passed. Since then, women have thrust their way through the second and third waves of feminism, achieving greater economic, as well as social, equality. We’ve now reached a strange post-feminine stage, where the trend seems to waver back and forth between second- and third-wave values. Women are encouraged to be strong and independent, to choose a career, to foot the bill—but also to marry, to raise children, and to retain youth and beauty. While women have more power than ever to determine their own destinies, there still exists an overwhelming societal pressure to conform to that feminine ideal. Look at Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw —independent and successful, but also desperate for the one man who will make it all worthwhile.  It’s a lot to grapple with—and no wonder feminism has entered this confused stage today where women have hit the streets placarding for Botox and boob jobs.

Joanna Murray-Smith’s play The Female of the Species, on now at the Geffen Playhouse, promises to articulate just that frustration women are feeling with the state of feminism in 2010.  The play stars a ferocious Annette Benning as Margot Marron, a successful theorist of feminism who is held hostage in her country home by a former student.  Marron’s character is loosely based on Australian feminist Germaine Greer, author of the feminist classic The Female Eunuch, who was held hostage by an outraged dropout in her home in 2000. David Arquette, Mireille Enos, Julian Sands, and Josh Stamberg join the ensemble in this farce that is sure to underline everything outrageous, infuriating, and hilarious about modern feminist theory.

- By Helen Kearns

The Female of the Species is playing now at the Geffen Playhouse through March 14th. Visit the Geffen’s website for ticket information.

One of Los Angeles’ most talented groups of classical musicians is also one of it’s most playful.  For people with very serious job descriptions that celebrate the world’s most revered classical composers, the members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra are borderline goofy.  They’re also incredibly knowledgeable and are interested in telling Los Angeles (and the world beyond) what makes chamber music so unique and exciting.

In an effort to reach everyone, they perform at venues all across this sprawling metropolis and even perform in a series of half-concert-half-lectures to bring everyone in the audience up to speed on how instruments have changed since the days when Bach, for example, was composing.  These aren’t, to be clear, the kind of lectures you avoided in college – these redefine what you know about lectures and they come with live music.

Performing February 20 and 21 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale and Royce Hall, respectively, the LA Chamber Orchestra are exploring the world of Baroque music with a concert that includes compositions by Purcell, Vivaldi, Bach, and Mendelssohn.  We caught up with Assistant Concertmaster Tereza Stanislav and got to chat with her about Baroque music, playing violin, and her favorite place in Los Angeles. (See? Serious job description. Smiling, giggling interview. Go figure.)

Not only did we get a chance to talk to them and get some insider info, we also begged and pleaded for some tickets to give to our readers for the February 20 performance at the Alex Theatre.  Check out our video interview and enter this installment of our Extra! Extra! giveaway!

Some details you’ll want to remember: by entering into this giveaway, you’re automatically entered into the next three we’ve got going on.  All we need is your first name, last name, and email address and voila – you’re headed downtown for a first class look at LA’s most charismatic orchestra.  Just make sure you’re on your best behavior – no fooling around.

(Click here if you’d rather buy your own tickets – it’s not worth the risk!)

It’s pretty safe to say at this point in Beethoven’s posthumous career, that the man was not a one hit wonder.  Sure, we’re more familiar with some of his works than others, but generally speaking – he’s a heavy hitter.  His Piano Concerto No. 5 “Emperor” is considered one of the most magical and beautiful pieces amidst the enormous anthology of his compositions – it has a sort of romance and familiarity that is sweeter than Moonlight Sonata and less intense or dramatic than his famed Fifth Symphony.

Then there’s his Symphony No. 7.  It has an almost dancing rhythm, with plenty of drama, fantasy, and familiar melodies hidden within an abundance of brass and string instruments doing what they do best.  Perhaps the most recognizable movement of Symphony No. 7 is the Allegro con Brio.

While we’re on the subject of classical musicians who are worth their salt, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, performing on Wednesday, February 17 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, is the oldest civic concert orchestra in the world.  Founded in 1743, the Gewandhaus Orchestra is no stranger to performing Beethoven – they performed all of his symphonies during his lifetime.  For those who are skimming, that was during his lifetime.  We love our LA Philharmonic just as much as Gustavo Dudamel likely does, but even they can’t boast having played all of a composer’s works during his lifetime.  (Maybe we can accomplish this with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s compositions? Hint, hint!)

Because there is absolutely nothing like seeing the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” and his Symphony No. 7 with Riccardo Chailly at the conductor’s stand and guest pianist Louis Lortie gracing the stage, we’re actually giving away the pair of tickets hidden behind our backs for the performance on February 17 at 8:00pm.  It’s the kind of thing we’d normally just keep for ourselves.

Here are some Extra! Extra! details you’ll want to keep in mind: by entering into this giveaway, you’re also entered into the next three giveaways! All we need is your first name, last name, and email address and voila – you’re reminiscing about the days of yore when Beethoven was just a young man and a gewandhaus was just a meetinghouse for textile merchants.  Ah, the good old days.

(Click here if you’d rather not risk it and you’d like to buy your own tickets.)

No matter how many times I drag myself to the movie theater to see shows like Avatar in 3D or the latest Batman in I-Max, I always feel like I’m doing just that: dragging.  Throughout the last century, the entertainment industry has undeniably evolved, but whether it’s for better or for worse is strictly a matter of opinion.  Personally, there has never been a morsel of doubt that I extract the greatest amusement from plays, books, movies and performances that are inextricably linked to the past.  Call me old fashioned, old-soul, call me grandma, but there is something about the classics (they’re called classics for a reason) that resonates from the works of Tinseltown’s youth.  Something that I can’t quite put my finger on—something like star quality.

“I don’t know what is, but I’ve got it,” reads the inscription at the entrance to Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward, the current exhibition at the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts & Sciences.  Noel Coward embodied the term “Renaissance man” with the grace, style, and elegance of a true dandy, and the Academy pays homage to him with a compelling installation of photographs, antique personal items, letters, films, sheet music, posters, playbills, set and costume designs, and personal clothing.

Primarily known as a playwright (Hay Fever, Private Lives, Cavalcade, Design for Living and Blithe Sprit to name a few, all later adapted for the cinema), and a celebrated composer (Mad About the Boy, I’ll See You Again), Coward’s immense talent and contribution to the arts encompassed nearly every form.  Star Quality is the first exhibition to shine light on the full breadth of his copious talents as a stage and screen director, actor, cabaret performer, painter, and wartime patriot, all while evoking the world of sawdust, tinsel, and naïve opulence that characterized early 20th Century Hollywood.

The tone of the exhibition is set immediately when you enter the 4th floor gallery of the Academy.  Large black and white photographs radiate Coward’s star quality, presence, and personality where he, in his signature dressing gown with a cigarette, preens as a dapper Hollywood darling.  Mannequins display his trademark loungewear, some flanked by caricatures that capture the flamboyant and distinctive personality that earned him a reputation his peers regarded as frivolous.

One cannot help but be impressed by the array of artifacts on display from Coward’s career.  A fascinating collection of cigarette holders (many gifts from Hollywood starlets), embroidered slippers, and letters provide a glimpse into Coward’s personal and private life. Photos taken on the set of The Untamed Lady show the close and affectionate relationship between Coward and Mary Pickford, one of his first and dearest friends in Los Angeles.  A sapphire blue dressing gown, worn by Moira Lister in the production of Present Laughter, comes to life against an array of photographs from the film.  It is a thrill to wander through this collection and see the evolution of the creative process, from a nascent thought into a polished end product.

Great genius in any form can be met with skepticism and rejection.  Coward’s star shined the brightest late in his life, and full recognition of his brilliance was awarded posthumously. One photograph in particular had a lasting effect—an image of Julie Andrews (playing Gertrude Lawrence) and Daniel Massey (playing Noel Coward) from the 1968 movie Star!. It served as a reminder of Coward’s increasing public popularity towards the end of his life (the film was released just 5 years before his death).

Drawing on public and private collections, and with unparalleled access to the Coward Archives, Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward showcases a remarkably robust, multifaceted and marvelous career, and recalls an era of Los Angeles history known for its lavishness, luxury, and innovation.  Coward’s is a legacy that even through the glamour of Hollywood remains deeply human.  Having what it takes in this town is not enough to achieve your dreams, but if you have star quality, you just might be able to do it all.

-By Brittany Krasner

Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward is on view through April 18th at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences on Wilshire Blvd.  Please visit their website for public viewing hours and more information. Admission is free!

American composer Robert Kurka’s only opera, Good Soldier Schweik, began life in 1956 as a six movement suite based on characters from the popular Czech antiwar novel of the same name, by Jaroslav Hask. New York City Opera became interested in turning the suite into an opera and Kurka expanded the orchestra from his original scoring for 7 woodwinds, to 16, plus brass and percussion, and began working with librettist Lewis Allan – a songwriter known for the celebrated anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit,” and the Frank Sinatra hit, “The House I Live In,” but chiefly, as the adoptive father of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s sons after the couple had been convicted of espionage and executed.

Kurka died in 1957 at the age of 35, four months before the opera’s successful NYCO premiere. Within the next 40 years, Good Soldier Schweik had seen over one hundred productions throughout the world, and been translated into 12 languages.

The work combines elements of American musical theatre, jazz, and Czech folk music, to underscore an explicitly anti-war story. The Long Beach Opera company’s cast of singing and dancing actors – led by tenor Matthew DiBattista in a powerhouse performance – delivered the goods in director Ken Roht’s dazzling multi-media production at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica. The orchestra – well, band, in this case – played with stylish pizzazz under Conductor/Artistic Director Andreas Mitisek.

Ably realized through Dan Weingarten’s inspired lighting and Justin Jorgensen’s novel set design, the production utilized scrims, projections, choreography, and outlandish props to whisk the plot from scene to scene at a breakneck pace, so that the audience was as disoriented as Schweik by the experience.

The house – mostly all long-time Long Beach Opera fans, and mostly very elderly – was packed, attesting to their pleasure at not having to endure a schlep to Long Beach. This brings me to my only gripe with this enterprise: somehow, LBO’s marketing missed the mark, hugely. Where was the large, 20-to-30-something demographic that would have been enraptured – and captured – by this stunning example of what opera has become in the 21st century?

- By Penny Orloff

To see Long Beach Opera’s full calendar, please click here.

I headed downtown, sniffling and sneezing the whole way, determined to revel in the magic of the Joffrey Ballet’s production of Cinderella at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  With a pounding sinus headache and hot soup calling my name, I knew that if there was one reason to leave the house on Thursday evening, this performance was it.  A ballet dancer through most of my life, I had never seen Cinderella performed and more importantly, this was the Joffrey!

To say that the Joffrey’s performance is a delight would be a gross understatement.  The inexplicable energy that comes from an impenetrable technique and preparation was abound on opening night; you focused not on the choreography itself, instead you were invited to focus on the story the choreography was telling.

As Cinderella, Victoria Jaiani was convincingly transformed from poor maiden to princess – her first scene having been dressed by her fairy godmother was performed with a shopoholic level of excitement.  The new, white, sparkling tutu redefined her as a veritable, although expiring, princess in every sense of the word.  It seemed her posture even improved.  In a refreshingly aggressive move during the famous “glass slipper” scene when the prince approaches Cinderella’s stepsisters first, Victoria practically throws her partnering shoe at the Prince to prove herself – quite unlike the demure, embarrassed display of politesse in the book.

One of the more joyous characters of the ballet, and simultaneously one of the most scarily talented on the stage, was undoubtedly the Jester, played by an enormously flexible Derrick Agnoletti.  Prior to the roar of applause given to him by the audience, he moved us through each scene at the Prince’s ball with huge leaps and great comic timing.  Likewise, the two gentlemen (yes, men) playing Cinderella’s stepsisters are so entertaining and flailing, it convinces you that while their roles are significant, these dancers aren’t being used to their full potential as stepsisters.

To put it plainly, the style of ballet performed in Cinderella is a kind of anomaly, at least when it comes to ballet performed in Los Angeles of, say, the last 5 to 10 years.  It does not fall into either of the most widely performed styles of ballet: Russian and Balanchine.  (Yes, balletomanes, I am generalizing.)  Choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton, who was born in Ecuador and whose Cinderella premiered with Sadler’s Wells Ballet at the Royal Opera House in London in 1948, the style and movement has much more fluidity than Russian choreography, but isn’t nearly as esoteric as a George Balanchine choreographed work.  It’s accessible, comedic, and yet no less impressive.

On for two more performances (well, three if you hurry), Cinderella is a gorgeous display of how well technique, set and costume design, and wit come together on stage for such a grabbing, beautiful, and entertaining performance.  Even the little girls sitting with their parents were on the edge of their seats at the end to see the prince and his princess walk off into the gold and glittering future.  As was I, actually, which was impressive considering my sickly condition pre-performance.  My evening had ended happily, after all.

Cinderella is on for three remaining performances: Today (Saturday) at 2pm and 7:30pm and tomorrow (Sunday) at 2pm at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  For more information, please call (213) 972-0711 or click here.

Click here to watch a Joffrey Ballet produced video introducing their Cinderella.

The job of a film archivist is a relatively new one.  It sounds silly.  (If my friend Pete has a massive DVD collection, is he suddenly considered an archivist?)  But what a lot of people don’t know is that film is a kind of living organism.  It decays quite rapidly over time.  And as depicted so graphically in the latest Tarantino venture, Inglorious Basterds, most of the movies made in the silent-era were shot on an ultra-flammable cellulose nitrate film base.  Due to this highly unstable stock, as well as the recklessness of early studio storage, a great many of the films made in America before 1920 are either lost, or have turned to dust.  In fact, no type of truly durable film base was even introduced into the movie-making landscape until the early 1990’s with the popularization of polyester.

Enter the heroic film archivist, whose job it is to preserve the ever-growing, ever-decaying amount of film stock from the grips of its natural demise.  Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive is one of these heroes, who most recently co-curated the REDCAT screening of Now You Can Do Anything: The Films of Chris Langdon.  This series of fourteen short, experimental films were all made within the period of two years, from 1973 to 1975, and would have easily been lost were it not for the efforts of people like Mark Toscano and fellow filmmaker/Angeleno, Thom Andersen.

Yet Langdon’s shorts, interestingly enough, seemed to work in spite of preservation.  The magic was in her apparent disregard for such preciousness.  Her film “Bondage Boy,” for instance, featured 16mm shots of a guy in a basement dressed in a woman’s slip and bound with ropes in various positions, all to the soundtrack of an uppity 1950’s swing tune.  “Picasso,” another one of Langdon’s works, was, in her words, “the first post-mortem documentary” of the famous painter, fully completed in four hours for a little under $5.

Langdon, who was present at the screening, addressed the audience afterwards.  And it was clear that her main motivation behind the 83 minutes of film we had all just sat through was simply to film something.  One piece was a joke, another was a bet, and one was just to get over the plain fear of wasting money through a camera.  In a sense, she was fueling the need for future experimental film archivists like Mark Toscano.  Because without artists with the courage to waste film, why would you need someone to preserve what’s special about it?

The Redcat is located Downtown at the Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.  For information about upcoming screenings and performances, please visit www.redcat.org, or call (213) 237-2800.