phillyarts

Once no bridges crossed the Delaware River; now 120 do. There’s a lesson here for composers like me, since we build bridges all the time. The bank of the river is dark— darker than it seems from a distance. I pick my way down to it, and it looks like sand, chocolate sand. Under my feet it slides softly down toward the water, arrested only by stubborn bushes and a type of ground-cover succulent I’ve never seen before. The leaves look like smooth chard, but longer, like corn husks. No, thicker, darker, softer. I don’t recognize this at all. Perhaps… yes, of course, it’s usually underwater. The bank, this far down, is actually riverbed, waiting for the next high-water. This sand is what silt is. Did silt greet the sturdy longboats, scrunching ashore on a cold Christmas, carrying the 2,400 men who followed George Washington into Trenton? I wonder. I drove across the just-wide-enough Washington’s Crossing Bridge, worrying about how far my side mirrors stuck out, then sniffed and supposed what the 2,400 might have worried about, faced with extreme cold, floating sheets of ice and Hessians with guns. There were no bridges across the Delaware then. The first one, now called the “Trenton Makes The World Takes” bridge, went up in 1806, 30 years too late for Washington. Still, if it had existed then, it would’ve been guarded. I wonder if the colonies were saved because there was no bridge. Just missing New Jersey There are 120 bridges over the Delaware now, both branches. One connects New Jersey and Delaware. The rest are spread among New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, with one, larkingly, almost touching all three. Interstate 84 pushed west in 1971 from New York toward the top corner of New Jersey. At the last moment it veered ever so slightly west-northwest and entered Pennsylvania on a bridge that just missed the Garden State by the length of a Pontiac LeMans. I wonder about bridges and history because I’m often asked to compose music for early instruments. My choral work, Vespers, uses Renaissance winds; The Waking Sun and The Nobility of Women use Baroque strings. Some people have asked how do I do it, and why. We composers rarely ask ourselves “why” questions, but fair enough. Most of us write for what comes along, and once Vespers launched without injuring anyone, other opportunities presented themselves to me. Instruments we can’t play That’s part of the why. As to how, many composers play an instrument with some degree of proficiency, but no one plays everything. So most of the time we’re working hard to unwrap the technique of an instrument we don’t play. If I have a proficiency, it’s in choral music— not because I have a trained voice (I don’t) but because I’ve sung in choirs all my life. I’ve learned what fits singers well and, well, what gives them fits. So whether I write for alto shawm, viola da gamba, or piano, it’s all the same to me. We lock those sounds into our ears, and that’s more of the why part. Tom Purdom rightly enthused in BSR over the playing of Tempesta di Mare violinists Emlyn Ngai and Karina Fox. (Click here.) I composed for Tempesta in The Waking Sun, my setting of texts of Seneca. In fact, as soon as I knew I’d be writing for Tempesta in this collaboration with The Crossing, my first thought was that I had to have, somewhere, a violin duet. I put that into “Weary, with empty throat, stands Tantalus.” Violins: old vs. new Is there nothing more special than a violin duet? Violins are ubiquitous; aren’t Baroque violins essentially, well, violins? Well, yes and no. The violin has many parts, all of which are changeable: angles and shapes and heights of fingerboard, tailpiece, bridge; the neck connection; the posts; the materials for these and other items— not the least of which, the strings themselves. But a Baroque “set-up” will completely alter the sound of a violin to a softer, yielding, more intimate voice. The Baroque bow— very unlike the modern bow, even to an untrained eye— demands a different playing technique, further sculpting attacks and phrasing. Violin makers knew what they were doing back then, just as now. Modern instruments, generally, are not “better.” The modern violin is a clarion, built to project into a bigger hall, over more instruments. The earlier violin, built for different music, plays that music more efficiently. Vivaldi up close A modern violin playing Baroque music sounds fine, but it must rein itself in, sometimes playing on the edges of notes, to coax the voicing, to approximate the conversation. The Baroque violin, however, can cut loose. And two of them playing counterpoint— oh my, the music naturally explodes into a succulent you’ve never tasted before. That’s the sound I wanted. It can be exciting to hear Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in a large hall, and it’s good to have large halls so more people can hear Vivaldi. That’s just fine. But it’s just fine. You don’t see the riverbed for the bank, as it were. You never feel, under your feet, the difference between sand and silt. Next time you’re in the northern Catskills, swing into Stamford, N.Y., and drive up River Street past the school until you see the creek on the right. Pull over, walk through the milkweed and place a foot on one side of the creek and one on the other. You’re now standing on both sides of the Delaware River’s west branch, about as far south as it’s possible to do that, at two miles below the source. The name of River Street, you see, is no poetic license. But unless you’re there, or unless you want to swim or take a boat, look for a bridge to cross the Delaware. Composers build them all the time. Sometimes we’ll take you from New York to Pennsylvania and bring you within a car’s length of New Jersey. Or we’ll show you where the longboats landed. Then you may wonder at chocolate sand and plants you’ve never seen.

Just what the world needs: another romance novel about a blushing virgin who’s ravished by a wealthy, attractive and powerful sadomasochist. As an older woman who has known genuine pain and loss, I have a better idea. Fifty Shades of Grey. By E.L. James. Vintage, 2012. 528 pages; $15.95. www.amazon.com. I finally succumbed to the hype surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey, E. L. James’s New York Times bestselling romance novel about a blushing virgin who’s ravished by a wealthy, attractive and powerful sadomasochist who owns a helicopter. I bought a copy and read it from cover to cover this past weekend while devouring honey-soaked pastries from a Greek festival I attended on Saturday afternoon. The baklava, at least, was satisfying. As a middle-aged woman with a daughter several years older than James’s main characters, I had trouble getting worked up about this “romance.” Many 20-somethings are surely attractive and fun, but when it comes to sexual fantasies, they’re amateurs. I prefer conjuring up someone who has been around a while: a man with a few laugh lines and wrinkles and some kind of history and perspective, not to mention sexual experience. So I was disappointed that James’s characters are so fresh-from-the-cradle, and doubly disappointed by the central character, the aforementioned blushing virgin Anastasia. Between TV, movies, the Internet and one’s well-informed friends, good luck guarding anyone’s innocence much past the age of six. Stone Age coupling In a romance novel, however, we are supposed to suspend our disbelief. So I willingly acquiesced to this setup until James introduced the possibility of actually being suspended from the ceiling for the purposes of sadistic “pleasuring.” Back in the Stone Age when I was a virgin or close to it, coupling to the roar of dinosaurs was excitement enough. Who can keep a straight face while reading about the whips, chains or other contraptions that James’s Mr. Grey keeps in his secret room? I will confess to being titillated by the idea of being dominated by a strong, powerful man, although I don’t know why. It’s not something I’d ever tolerate in real life. Maybe it’s the idea of not being responsible— of handing one’s power over to someone else. But what makes pain sexy? To her credit, E. L. James is adept at writing sex scenes— no small talent, and I admire her for it. Millions of people love her trilogy, and one obvious reason is James’s ability to describe sexual encounters so much better than the usual heaving bosoms and throbbing members that you generally find in romance novels. And I wish I had her marketing team. These people are geniuses. Real suffering But I do wish there were more characters in romance novels my age or older. And even if an author is capable of crafting an S & M relationship that’s enthralling to mainstream readers, I already know (by virtue of having lived more than half a century) that suffering— well beyond anything a riding crop can provide— comes to us all if we live long enough. All that said, no doubt that I’ll buy Books II and III of the James trilogy, and so will most people who read the first one. I may have been dragged kicking and screaming into this story, but now I’m hooked. I want to know what happens next to this improbable couple. But men and women whose hearts have been broken repeatedly through every sort of loss imaginable, with skin that’s age-spotted, creased and wrinkled, who are willing to lie down with each other one more time, naked in body and soul— now, that is vulnerability. That is romance. If you wrote a book about me, you could still call it Fifty Shades of Grey. But there wouldn’t be a whip or chain in sight.

I recently finished up this commissioned portrait. It took me a good amount of time but at last it’s complete. www.unclemildred.blogspot.com 12×16″ ink, gesso, acrylics on wood Beginning process Finished piece

Tempesta di Mare finished its celebration of its successful completion of ten full seasons— an achievement based on its founders’ application of a secret formula, known to a select few. Tempesta di Mare: Opus 10 Orchestra. Works by Scarlatti, Stanley, Leclair, Vivaldi, Handel, Telemann. Gwyn Roberts, recorders; Adam Pearl, harpsichord; Emlyn Ngai, violin. Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone, artistic directors. May 19, 2012 at Arch Street Friends Meeting, Fourth and Arch Sts. (215) 755-8776 or www.tempestadimare.org. Tempesta di Mare completed its three-concert celebration of its tenth full season with a program devoted to suites and concertos for a full-sized Baroque orchestra. Like the week before, the program once again featured works with a “ten” in their labels, e.g.  Scarlatti’s Sinfonia X in A Minor and Handel’s Concerto Grosso in D Minor, Opus 6, No. 10. Tempesta’s co-director, Gwyn Roberts, fulfilled her musical assignments with the relaxed air of a hostess presiding over an especially satisfying event. She and co-director Richard Stone have every reason to be pleased with their achievement. Tempesta di Mare has thrived in difficult times. Roberts and Stone posted their first mailing on September 10, 2001. They made it through the recession that followed 9/11, and now they’re surviving the current economic crunch as well. The secret of their success is a magic formula known to a select few: Schedule imaginative quality programming, recruit good musicians and apply plenty of attention to backstage necessities like fund-raising, promotion and the design of attractive brochures. Other music groups, like Dolce Suono and Lyric Fest, have benefited from the same arcane strategy over the past decade. Piffaro and Orchestra 2001 have applied it since the 1980s. When composers were legion As I noted in my review of the first two concerts, the fact that you can build a program around an arbitrary limitation like a “ten” in the title testifies to the sheer volume of music produced during the Baroque era. (To read that review, click here.) We are talking about a time when composers seem to have been as common as pastry chefs, each churning out compositions by the dozens. Before cheap printing and high-speed communications, every self-respecting duke and count employed a composer who was expected to produce new compositions for a full calendar of court concerts, as well as every wedding, birth or visit from a passing dignitary. An arbitrary selection system can force the planners to consider works that might otherwise sit in file cases, unplayed, merely because no one had given them a good look. The Tempesta program didn’t include any old friends, but the six selections were all winners. Ngai’s showstopper Concertmaster Emlyn Ngai once again starred in Saturday’s showstopper. The previous Sunday, Ngai ended the first half with a Vivaldi sonata that earned him an enthusiastic standing ovation. This time he ended the first half with a concerto by the founder of the French violin school, Jean-Marie Leclair, that evoked a similarly enthusiastic response. Leclair was a master violinist, and his Concerto in E Minor demands a masterly display of skill and style. In the first movement allegro, Ngai’s fingers traveled all over the fingerboard even when he was playing a high, ethereal passage. The third movement combined more high-speed work with an eminently hummable melody. Hummable melodies The program included an unusual number of movements that featured hummable melodies. Engaging melodies may not be the ultimate pleasure in music, but it’s always a treat when one shows up. The harpsichord presents special problems for composers who write concertos that mesh its quiet voice with a full orchestra. A successful harpsichord concerto requires a composer who fully understands the strengths and weaknesses of the solo instrument. Harpsichord challenge The English composer John Stanley (1712-1786) became a noted harpsichordist, organist and composer even though he was accidentally blinded as a child. When Stanley wrote his Opus 10, No. 2 harpsichord concerto, he knew better than to waste time writing passages in which the harpsichord plays with the orchestra, which would have drowned it out. Instead he alternated harpsichord solos with orchestral passages. The jump from the orchestra to the soft jangle of the harpsichord sometimes struck me as jarring, even with an orchestra that had been reduced by half. But in other passages Adam Pearl’s fingers created a bright stream that rippled between the mountains of sound created by the orchestra. The evening ended, fittingly, with Gwyn Roberts playing the soprano recorder in a Telemann suite. Roberts concluded her tenth season as Tempesta’s co-director with a performance marked by flowing melodies with every note in perfect balance— none too loud or too soft. As all amateur recorder players know, that can be more difficult than it looks.

Bob Jackson, 100 Faces of Bob at Off the Wall Gallery

100 Faces of Bob is over one hundred mixed media art objects mounted on the wall at Off the Wall Gallery created by outgoing President of The Plastic Club.  Last week DoN saw a movie at The Plastic Club’s monthly art salon, shot in 2006, of Bob Jackson’s collections and studio, a consummate pack rat collector and inspired artist.  Jackson collects objet trouve’ then transmogrifies the collected elements, found at flea markets, yard sales and antique shops into anthropomorphic portraits.

Bob Jackson, 100 Faces of Bob at Off the Wall Gallery

Off the Wall Gallery usually hosts group show but gave over the whole space to Bob Jackson’s thesis: attractive, fun, visionary art that’s affordable.  Bob Jackson has been leading The Plastic Club for many years, he’s seen it all, good and bad, and synthesized the information into an art style that is aspirational and accessible.  Like his ball point pen drawings on typing paper, the 100 Faces each express the artist’s hand, thought, effort and time.  Anthropomorphism is practically the original art, the Venus of Willendorf speaks to us over mellenia, Bob Jackson is able to tap into our deepest cultural memories and speak to us here in the future.

Bob Jackson, 100 Faces of Bob at Off the Wall Gallery

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Bob Jackson, 100 Faces of Bob at Off the Wall Gallery

Bob Jackson, 100 Faces of Bob at Off the Wall Gallery

The Off the Wall Gallery consistently installs thought provoking and relevant art shows. Usually the shows are juried group shows offering emerging artists to show their work with established artists.  Art is part of the business model at Dirty Franks Bar, space on their wall is coveted and their sales record is really good.  100 Faces of Bob will be remembered as one of the great moments in Philadelphia art history, the show looks like it will be sold out.  Each piece is only $50.00.  Bob Jackson’s legacy will be a strong, real, measurable impact on the Philadelphia art community, DoN has personally cried on Bob’s shoulder over art matters and know’s he has counseled and supported hundreds of other artists with assurances, solutions and advice.  Creating a wonderful experience design, the show offers so many lessons in art making, marketing, networking and socializing from a master Philadelphia artist, 100 Faces of Bob reveals the beautiful face of a friend.

LoVe

DoN

When Literature becomes Life, watch out! What is life, after all, but a series of interlocking narratives? No one understood why, nearly two decades ago, ”Sheba” (not her real name, subsequently here known as “She”) gladly tossed aside her barely scuffed 27 pairs of second-hand cowgirl boots and tottered away from her vaguely glamorous if sodden dream job as a professional, um, mainstream journalist to move to New Jersey or Mexico (or was it Montana or Vermont or Venice Beach or maybe even back to Philadelphia?). Only now, nearly but not quite completely recovered from her ensuing dissolute downward spiral of booze, drugs, pretty boys, whips, chains, Ben-Wah Balls, capsicum nipple paint, intermittent hooking, petty theft of rare ’50s flea market finds, compulsive fellatio, pizza binges, Margarita orgies, filthy public poetry performances, sordid swing and swap scenes, bulimia, rampant hypochondria, fetishizing rejection and abuse as sexual foreplay, stalking, lascivious solo shows at the Fringe Festival, exorbitantly witty phone sex banter, garden-variety exhibitionism, and general self-indulgence and excess in the name of art, can She reclaim the multiple personas She abused during that troubled, dissolute decade and offer them to the world for possible, um, explication. Hunger for attention Hard to believe, but all her life, or at least up until then, She actually believed She was well balanced. Silly girl! How could She be the last to discover She probably suffered from a maladaptive emotional syndrome known as ”Hysteroid Dysphoria”— meaning, someone pathetically obsessed with being the center of attention through any means possible: lurid language, loud clothing, intrusive laughter, exotic jewelry, excessive cleverness, peculiar-looking male companions, bitchy whining, aberrant sexuality, weirdly human pets, spellbound hangers-on, you name it? No wonder She’s never been able to finish reading her favorite book, Marie-Louise von Franz’s elusive Jungian masterwork, Puer Aeternus. Wikipedia says von Franz even wrote about “active imagination,” a kind of conscious dreaming: “Active imagination is a certain way of meditating imaginatively, by which one may deliberately enter into contact with the unconscious and make a conscious connection with psychic phenomena.” What a goddess! Hey! When Literature becomes Life, watch out! For instance: She fixated on a fascinating 2004 documentary film, Pola Rapaport’s The Writer of O, highlighting the unusual story behind the creation of The Story of O, which overwhelmed her with parallels between “Pauline Reage’s” classic 1954 novel and, yes, her own, Swanson’s Swansong, which, She confesses was, to her deluded mind, the 21st Century’s Story of O. Scandalous Story of O Naturally, her logic was illogical. The Story of O was a scandalous, elegantly written, controversial sadomasochistic novel, shocking for its time. But as it turns out, it wasn’t the autobiographical account of sordid ecstasy it might have seemed, but actually Reage’s pure fantasy, a luridly imaginative work by a meek and mild and rather plain middle-aged woman, intended as a literary ”gift” for her married lady-killer lover, a work created out of an obsessive need to hold his interest, to please him and recapture his flagging sensual attention, since the author was, at the time, in her 40s. And so She believed her book, like Reage’s, was also a scandalous sadomasochistic novel, similarly created out of literary obsession, inspired by a year’s enthrallment with a powerful and anonymous imaginary “lover”— the quixotic, and yes, very married Colorado cad and bounder Sal DiBreviary, who became transmogrified, in her book, into a witty, literate “conceptual artist” and girls’ high school home-ec coach, who never reveals his real identity and never converses with her on the telephone but nevertheless exerts an amazing power, via language, over our heroine through the bondage of the written word. Embracing her inner Venus She’s certain that her book, like Pauline Reage’s, also explores “the thorny relationship between sexuality and power, submission and freedom, liberation and non-being,” as well as the spiritual component of such self-abnegation. She saw her book not only as the definitive work on this issue but also, of course, as Cerebral Chick Lit, Reality Fiction, Seinfeld in Cyberspace, picaresque post-modern metafiction, dancing on paper, and more. Sigh. She’s better now. Aren’t you glad? This is her truth. What is life, after all, but a series of interlocking narratives? Finally, via intensive psychotherapy with a pitiless Brit domme-shrink until her health insurance ran out, She has unlearned her addictions, curbed her rampant promiscuity, embraced her inner Venus of Willendorf, stopped dyeing her hair that silly shade of Putrescent Eggplant, and erased the oh-so-fine line between fiction and dishonesty. There’s more, some of it tragic, but this will have to suffice for now. Yes, She is deeply shallow. So what? Deal with it. Meanwhile, She lies in wait, a languorous odalisque on a red-velvet Empire settee, seeking yet another comeback some day soon, hoping She’ll be snagged by the right book publisher/literary agent/ movie director/TV producer/cab driver. Stranger things have happened. If an erstwhile Onion editor’s screenplay for The Wrestler can enrapture Hollywood, why can’t She?

“Deco Japan” is a first and fascinating look at the extraordinary artistic experimentation of interwar Japan, with its unique synthesis of Western subject matter and native forms. It’s also a remarkable look at Japan’s troubled identity at the moment it emerged as a world power. “Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945.” Through June 10, 2012 at the Japan Society, 333 East 47th St., New York. (212) 832-1155 or www.japansociety.org. Modern Japan is unique: a complex, hierarchical and profoundly isolated culture that remade itself virtually on a dime in response to the challenge of Western imperialism and emerged as a power determined to beat the West at its own game in the early 20th Century. I know of no other society that was able to remake itself so thoroughly in so short a time, and to adapt alien customs, institutions and values to its own. Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) was as thoroughly cut off from the outside world as it is possible for a society in proximity to other cultures to be. Foreigners had been expelled in the 17th Century, and trade contact was limited (at least nominally) to a single day a year when outside shipping was permitted to berth in Nagasaki harbor.  Of course, the fascination of the forbidden meant that both Western and Eastern influences made their way by osmosis into Japanese culture, despite official prohibition. But until Commodore Perry trained his guns on Tokyo in 1853, Japan’s ruling elite was able to preserve not only the façade but in large part the reality of a feudal culture that answered to no code but its own. From Samurai to Pearl Harbor Such a society, where even firearms had been banned to protect the monopoly of the sword-wielding Samurai warrior class, would have seemed an easy target for Western predation. But the native leaders, recognizing their peril and rapidly calculating that their power could be preserved only by adopting Western political and economic forms and military tactics and technology, transformed Japan within 40 years into a ranking world power, and within 60 into the dominant presence in the Far East.  The culmination of this process— an inevitable one, in the eyes of Japanese leaders— was a confrontation with the greatest world power of all, the U.S. The amount of cultural contradiction and what sociologists like to call cognitive dissonance that Japan was called upon to absorb in these decades, from the so-called Meiji Restoration of 1868 (in reality a modernizing coup d’état carried out in the name of the emperor) and the outbreak of war with China and the U.S. in 1931-1941, is staggering. Yet it was an aspect of Japan’s drastic reinvention of itself to have persistently interpreted radically new social forms in terms of traditional values and conventions. Only in this way was the country able to assimilate a change that affected virtually every aspect of life without losing its abiding cultural identity. Without that remarkable dynamic, the great experiment in forced-draft modernization would certainly have come a cropper, and Japan would have faced the revolutionary crises that swamped Russia and China. Bertolucci’s Emperor Still, the tensions and confusions inherent in such a process were painful and occasionally absurd. Japanese cultural modernism is a very curious thing. After 1945, with the imposition of the MacArthur regime on the defeated Japanese empire, change was, at least for a while, dictated by the American occupation. But the adoption of Western influences before World War II, especially after the formal recognition of Japan’s Great Power status at the Washington Naval Conference of 1922, was a matter of choice by the Japanese themselves.  Virtually none of this fascinating period has been noticed in the West, except of course by scholars. The only portrayal I can think of in Western popular culture is in the brief section of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film, The Last Emperor, that deals with Japan’s creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. That film’s chief interest is China, but suddenly highly Westernized Japanese types appear to direct the court of the “restored” Chinese emperor, much to the fascination of the young emperor, who had himself grown up in the total seclusion of Beijing’s Forbidden City. Ahead of the curve The Japan Society’s present show of Japanese art and artifacts between 1920 and 1945 thus breaks new ground, and must be accounted one of the most important exhibitions of the current season— in larger terms, a significant cultural event, and a milestone in Japanese-American cultural relations. It has been made possible by two extraordinary collectors, Robert and Mary Levenson, who have amassed the works on display over more than two decades. Even in Japan, the influence of Western art deco on the art of interwar Japan has been belated: Only in the past ten years has serious attention begun to be paid to it. The Levensons were ahead of the curve, and we are in their debt. The objects on display range from the most casual items of popular consumption— matchboxes, postcards, sheet music, advertising posters— to works of high fashion and fine art. Two things about them strike one immediately: their natural stylishness and level of craftsmanship; and their fascination with any and all things Western. One might think the former might reflect the Levensons’ own good taste, and no doubt it does. But design excellence in the humblest commercial artifacts suggests a broadly diffused level of aesthetic invention and sophistication. Cigarettes and cocktails Art deco, of course, was a movement designed precisely to extend such values to articles of commerce, but it dovetailed with traditional Japanese expression. The resulting dialogue between Western motifs and Japanese forms is the core of the exhibit. Such cultural encounters are not always happy, but Japanese deco, at its best, achieves an extraordinary stylistic synthesis, and it’s certainly a distinctive branch of the worldwide deco movement. Japanese art had already exerted its own influence on Western fine art in the late 19th Century work of Van Gogh and others, but it had never penetrated to a popular level. To see vampish Japanese girls in low-cut Western dress with cigarettes and cocktails, or bent into Isadora Duncan dance poses, is certainly striking; but even women of the elite classes in traditional costume reflect the Western aura. Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s Staircase (Kaidan) is a good example: Its young lady wears a kimono with a fox fur wrap, and almost certainly reflects— directly or indirectly, consciously or not— Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Nudity appears, too, as in the sheet music for Song of Miss Nippon, whose Western-bobbed and black-slippered figure reclines— none too comfortably, it would appear— in a figure-length, corkscrew-shaped hoop. Imperial stallion Male figures, in contrast, are almost entirely absent from this art, a reflection perhaps on patriarchal dignity or the greater plasticity of perceived female identity. The male does appear prominently, however, in animal figures.  Hiramatsu Koshun’s highly stylized bronze Bull is a superior example, with its striking (but not derivative) evocation of Picasso. On a rather different level is Hayashi Bunshu’s Stationery Box with Pegasus Going to the Sky. The winged stallion surmounts the globe, clearly an appropriation of the classic Western image for the imperial purposes of the Land of the Rising Sun. More and more overtly political themes emerge as Japan’s Asian wars begin in the 1930s, and persist— still in Western dress— into the 1940s. Japan had taken the Prussian constitution for its own model, and industrial cartels characterized both Germany and Japan prior to the advent of fascism. Eroticism, militarism and expansionism are all increasingly interwoven as the period proceeds; objects are more sharp-edged; animal totems are more beaked and predatory. Elegance is rarely lost, however. European fascism, military tailoring aside, was more or less a stylistic disaster; the Japanese variant held up a good deal better. Hiroshima’s legacy Japan’s imperial era came to an end with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with it the deco style. Few artistic movements have ever tried to reconcile such complex and conflicting imperatives, and few in consequence have been as distinctive. At its best and most sophisticated, Japanese deco was a genuine fusion of old and new, East and West. But few of its products lack interest as cultural expression. “Deco Japan” is finely curated, beautifully displayed and revelatory on many levels. Connoisseurs of fine art and popular culture alike will be well rewarded. The show’s real subject, though, is the enigma of modern Japan itself.

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Antonia Contro’s rare collaboration of art and philosophy reflects on the passage, perception and human measurement of time. But visitors must reach their own conclusions. Antonia Contro’s “Tempus Fugit”: Through December 30, 2012 at American Philosophical Society, 104 S. Fifth St. (215) 440-3442 or apsmuseum.org. In most contemporary art galleries or exhibits, the only thing on the walls as large as the artwork is a florid written statement from the artist or curator, to say nothing of the individual signs that accompany each piece. Chicago-based artist Antonia Contro, in “Tempus Fugit,” takes the opposite route, and it’s an especially surprising choice for a show that pairs museum pieces with works of contemporary art: She resists the urge to post any text or titles alongside the pieces, leaving visitors free to browse the exhibition in the silent grip of their own imagined narratives. At first glance, the white walls of the display, designed and built in a V-shape to evoke a giant open book in the American Philosophical Society’s small gallery, seem to cry out for some written explanation of Contro’s curious assemblages, which inhabit small, ingeniously-lit rectangular cubbies in the wall. (To be sure, visitors can pick up a catalogue or an unobtrusive laminated sheet of brief but poetic explanations.) Contra was commissioned by the Philosophical Society to select artifacts from the Society’s collection and pair them with her own artwork. Consequently, the contents of nine boxes set into the walls walk a fine line between historical exhibit and artistic meditation. As the exhibit’s title implies, the result reflects on the passage, perception and human measurement of time. Sunrise over the Arctic While visitors can easily come and go without perceiving the given titles of any of the pieces on exhibit, each piece does have a name, as well as a theme inspired by musical terms for timing. “Adagio” deals with geologic time, the slowest measure of all. Here, Contro’s Nord/Sud (Tribute to Amundsen) combines cutout and collage to turn a weathered, rust-colored book cover into a sun rising over a map of the Arctic Circle. It’s grouped with a 19th-Century gold nugget, a piece of petrified wood donated to the Philosophical Society in the 1920s, and Contro’s Le Alpi, a clay model of the Swiss Alps molded atop the wooden figure of a woman’s shoe. “Sognando” refers to astronomical and scientific measurement. This theme pairs Heaven’s Dome, Contro’s backlit aluminum cut-out, with a cucumber-like green glass tube used in Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with static electricity in the 1750s. In “Crescendo,” Contro pairs her August (gouache on panels, one of which shows a lushly detailed pine bough whose needles are beginning to slide into watery oblivion) with an 1807 “Chronological, Historical and Biographical Chart.” This chart branches like mutant aortas from Adam and Noah to the Republic of Carthage, from Alexander the Great to Charlemagne and the Republic of Holland, ending with the U.S. Founding Fathers and the Louisiana Purchase. Darwin and a moth A few other human-designed trees of time and development include an early 1960s computer model. In the associated materials, Contro muses that we forget time’s eternally cyclical nature: “Our paradigms of linear time ignore the essential return.” Alongside the artifacts and art of the “Crescendo” box is a real treat: an opened 1860 First American Edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, displaying the book’s only original graphic and Darwin’s cryptic explanation for it:  “The accompanying diagram will aid us in understanding this rather perplexing subject.” The next box, titled “Coda,” includes an 1882 invitation to the “Funeral of Mr. Darwin” at Westminster Abbey, Wednesday April 26t, “at 12 o’clock precisely.” Contro pairs it with a minute video installation (in collaboration with Joseph E. Merideth and Julie Naggs) that shows a single fluttering moth wing. As the grainy black image on a white field pulses into the distance and back again, it evokes a quivering protozoan or gamete before becoming a solitary wing. The viewer may be reminded of chaos theory’s “butterfly effect” and consider that Darwin’s theory continues to rock the world long after his death. No didactic panels The last box, titled “Aeon,” pairs another tiny video installation of endlessly turning pages with a gorgeous illuminated “Book of Hours,” probably from the 15th Century. Contro urges the viewer to consider that our modern demarcations of time– like digital clocks or LED displays– fail to offer the sense of comfort and order of the illustrated breviaries of the Middle Ages. In another use of pages to signify the passage of time, the exhibit provides an audio component: While visitors browse the displays, an intermittent recording of rapidly turning book pages ripples through the room like a gentle rain. “We force time into carefully calibrated vessels of our naming,” Contro says of the exhibit’s opening piece, which features the first known written time line. At the opening reception earlier this month, Contro remarked that she “begged” the Philosophical Society’s to leave out “didactic” panels that would have transformed an aesthetic experience into a historical or educational one. In this case, the choice to leave viewers free to name their own impressions of these pairings of artifact and art was a good one.

“The fundamental lesson, I believe, is that Design is a contact sport. It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task and applying the very best of our thinking, feeling and doing to the challenge. Sometimes a little prototype of this experience is all we need to take us from oh-oh to [...]

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Rochelle Dinkin, Rachel Issac, and Joshua Gabriel presentPortraits: Narrative, Intimate and AnonymousJune 1-29, 2012

reception: First Friday, June 1, 5-9pmhours: Fri, Sat, Sun 12-4pm2040 Frankford Ave, Phila, PA 19125

Three artists explore the boundaries of identity through biographical and symbolic vocabulary. What constitutes the notion of self is evoked, twisted, and turned upside down. Rochelle Dinkin and Rachel Issac, a.k.a. the Grimm Sisters, utilize organic tapestries of intricate pattern and design to plumb archetypal identity, while Josh Gabriel’s bold and graphic visual language operates more directly within the collective unconscious.

Rochelle Dinkin is a graduate of PAFA, a recipient of the Fleischer Art Challenge, and has put together 36 solo exhibits. (www.grimmsistersart.com)

Rachel Issac is a printmaker combining etching processes with mixed media embellishment. Her psychological narratives evoke irreverent humor and mystery.

Joshua Gabriel, an artist and musician, is a graduate of Tyler school of Art. He recently relocated from San Fransisco to Brooklyn, and is currently working on a mural commission from the International Stone Company of Brooklyn. (info@joshuagabriel.com)

image sixty three, 2007-2010, oil, clay, grout on panel, image eighty-six, 2010-11, oil, cardboard, paper, plaster, sponge, wax, aluminum mesh on panel, 9.5x7.5x2.75, image sixty six, 2007-2010, oil, clay, cardboard on panel, 11x10.5x2 just scrumptious....see more here.

1601 Vine 1601 Vine Street

Not happening.

                        Now this one's a real pisser... a perfectly good project that was approved up the ying yang and had finances in place before getting offed by the shitbird economy. All that's left here is a crappy surface parking lot. Though there are some current plans for this site, nothing that ends up getting built here will be as cool as this.                       Read more later today at the Philadelphia Citypaper's Naked City Blog!

grincitycollective:

CALL FOR ENTRIES: DUE: JULY 1, 2012 APPLY > FALL RESIDENCY 

By Victoria Galan, MDPS

Every Monday, Brittany Thomas rounds up the week's sure-bet live shows. This week: DJ EBG III, The Spinto Band, and Black Dice.

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