A Crowded Spectacle of Incurable Diversity (Part 1)

A Crowded Spectacle of Incurable Diversity (Part 1)

By Tom Wachunas

    “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.”  - Claes Oldenburg –

    “…A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world… Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of aesthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable…”  - Robert Smithson –

     Absent from my native Stark County for 22 consecutive years (14 of them spent in New York City), I returned in 1992 eager to continue pursuing a life in the arts, both as practitioner and critic. My years in New York had forged an attitude infused with the kind of postmodern hubris lurking behind the statements quoted above. My first few years here in the greater Canton area were spent negotiating a profound sense of disappointment and disorientation. Gone were my emboldened Big Apple brothers and sisters at arms, my vociferous cohorts trudging the 1980s trenches of contemporary artfare (or so I thought). Instead, I felt as if in a time warp, surrounded by a throng of mediocre, traditional artsy-craftsy confectioners, a very small contingent of engaging modernists, and fewer still really daring visionaries. Culture shock? More like culture schlock.

    That’s arguably an overly- harsh assessment of our local scene, and one that has, to some extent, softened with time. The fact of the matter is I still cherish our local museums and galleries if only because I cherish the act of looking and discerning, and the time it takes to do a creditable job of it. And over the years I’ve found that a traditionally painted portrait, landscape, or still life can be every bit as exciting as the most arcane abstraction or problematic “conceptual” or installation work.  As to the ultimate relevance or efficacy of “old school” methodologies in presenting art to the world at large, I confess to being of two conflicted minds. Therein, the ideological juries, as it were, will remain forever hung.

    Speaking of juries, as in juried art shows, Marilyn Simmons (Gallery Manager at SPACES Gallery in Cleveland), and mixed media artist Paul G. Jira, provided the thrilling stuff of a truly memorable gallery experience in their selection of 65 works that comprise the 70^th Annual May Show at The Little Art Gallery in North Canton. While there are some excellent pieces here from familiar, accomplished local artists, this is also an impressive showing from numerous individuals unknown to me, and no less remarkable in their content and craft.  On the whole, the exhibit is wildly multi-faceted proof of the diversity in aesthetic depth and creative passions thriving in Stark County.

    On the subject of diversity, I do find it curious that ‘straight’ photography was excluded in the accepted media for the show unless, as the prospectus stated, it was “…altered as mixed media.” There are photographers in our midst who are acknowledged masters of their craft and I miss their presence here. The reasoning for the exclusion of such a long-established fine art form evades me at the moment. Is it really that far off from deciding to exclude floral-themed watercolors, which would no doubt raise a howl of protest from many in these parts?

    As it is, there’s no shortage of other visual/sculptural media here, and part two of this commentary will offer  more specific observations about some individual pieces. Understandably, the show is very crowded – so much art, so little space. The salon-style format doesn’t allow for much breathing room between works. But this is nonetheless a butt-kicking exhibit, so to speak, and warrants more than cursory looking. So consider it an invitation to get up, get out, and give it the time it so well deserves.

    After all, art – no matter where you find it - sits on its ass only to the extent that we viewers do the same.

    70^th Annual May Show, on view at The Little Art Gallery through June 2, 2012. Located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton.   gallery@northcantonlibrary.org  

    Photos, courtesy Little Art Gallery: (Top) “Pat Catans Man” charcoal by Jerry Zelinskas / “Virginia” oil on muslin by Erin Wozniak   

A Sassy, Brassy Season Finale

A Sassy, Brassy Season Finale

By Tom Wachunas

    For weeks after the March 31 MasterWorks concert by the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO), I couldn’t help feeling that the orchestra’s thunderous performance of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” would simply be too hard an act to follow in the same season. It had all the ingredients of a gloriously memorable season-ending event, leaving the audience summarily awestruck.

    On paper at least, the program for the actual season finale on April 28 - Janacek’s “Sinfonietta,” Jongen’s “Symphonie Concertante,” and Khachaturian’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony Poem) - seemed like it could be comparatively less successful in prompting similar praises. Then again this is the CSO – versatile, virtuosic, vigorous.  And daring. So on this occasion, the orchestra brought a particularly adventuresome, even sassy attitude to the program, imbuing it with surprising dimensionality and brio.

    Joined by 25 brass players of the Canton-based, internationally prominent Bluecoats Drum and Bugle Corps, the orchestra was indeed commanding as it delivered all the no-nonsense martial fanfares of the Janacek work, along with its gripping variations in moods and crisp, fast rhythms. The performance set a decidedly loud, infectiously stirring tone for the evening, aptly billed as “Sound the Trumpets!”

    Peter Richard Conte, the Grand Court Organist of the Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia, was the featured guest artist for the Jongen work. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit only a slight pre-concert familiarity with what is widely considered the composer’s most famous composition. So I’m not sure if the organ passages that were difficult to hear (and there were several) were the result of overpowering orchestral sonority, or simply a matter of the score calling for the organ to provide more understated tonal embellishments.

   That said, Conte’s playing was nonetheless extraordinary for its stamina and powerful, sensitive integration of the work’s kaleidoscopic textures. He was, to be sure, a seemingly inexhaustible orchestra unto himself. Particularly magical was the otherworldly quality of instrumental colorings which transpired during the second and third movements – shimmering, arpeggiated conversations among organ, harp, flute, and woodwinds. The whispered tranquility of the strings at the end of the third movement was a mesmerizing calm before the furiously dramatic calls and responses between organ and orchestra that unfold in the fourth, building to a startling and spectacular finale.

    In the Khachaturian symphony, Conte played with similarly thrilling muscularity throughout the sustained, colossal organ solos that drive much of the work. Add to that the return of the Bluecoats to bolster the brass section, and you have the makings of a ‘perfect storm’ concert-closer.

   But this is a curious and by many accounts problematic work, at least from a formalist point of view. That might be what prompted Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann to prep the packed house with one of the most hilarious and lengthy introductions to a work I’ve ever heard him impart. Acknowledging that he was an ex-trumpet player himself, he noted that the work’s lavish fanfare writing for many extra trumpets made him feel like he was “in heaven.”  He called the work eclectic, idiosyncratic, and certainly campy.  Sharing that it conjured for him images of Vincent Price at the organ, he further likened it to cult classics such as “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” noting that some phenomena are so uniquely bad that we somehow come to regard them as “really great.”

    Was this irony, or just a salty, tongue-in-cheek hint that the work might in fact be -  with its indulgently meandering structure and relentless, Russian bombast -  less than great?  Frankly, watching him wield his baton with unusually savory gusto, I think Zimmermann passionately respected the work, and genuinely wanted to sway the hearts of even the most strident purists long enough for them to simply have as much fun with it as he did. Did he succeed?

    Suffice to say that in the end, the organ soared, the brilliant brass rattled the rafters, and a very appreciative audience responded with their own great and generous noise of adulation.  

    Photos: (Top) Gerhardt Zimmermann, CSO Music Director / Peter Richard Conte, organist   

   

     

     

A Manic Montage

A Manic Montage

By Tom Wachunas

     “I have very little tolerance for the assumption that art should coddle, entertain, or intrigue us soley on the merits of familiar, conventional rules of composition, skill, or methodology. I should hope that by now we’re smarter than that.”  - June Godwit, from “There’s Something In My Cheek But It’s Not My Tongue”-

     After a somewhat protracted hiatus (a story I’ll save for another time, maybe), Gallery 6000 has snapped to attention with some crackling new, eye popping art. Hmmm. Snap…crackle…pop? Sounds  like it could be a title for an exhibit. And so it is.

    “Snap Crackle Pop” features 15 new, mixed media works by local artists Craig Uncle Dreg Booth and Rick Huggett. Both artists employ a photomontage technique, though with wildly differing aesthetic approaches.

     Compared to Craig Booth’s earlier, relatively more straightforward ventures into digital art photography, his works here are considerably more evolved and complex in visual textures and multiple perspectives. You could arguably call them snippets of reality from a pop-culture diarist.

     Booth’s incorporation of collaged images mounted in relief (many clearly appropriated from ‘found’ sources) gives his often surreal content a mock-3D appearance, and a sculptural heft. Their scope is dreamlike, to a certain extent even cinematic, and not unlike the strange narratives you might find in a modern graphic novel. A few have the aura of a William S. Burroughs-type fantasy, as in “Drunken Poets Dream.” Others exude an air of free-association with personal memories. With their surfaces uniformly encased in a generous coat of high-gloss clear resin, the pictures are densely composed moments and suspended as if under water. And with their saturated colors sometimes reminiscent of the psychedelic era, these snappy pictures do indeed pop.

     Rick Huggett’s pieces are digital photomontages that incorporate vinyl decals. Five of them feature cartoonish critters (a bat, a cow, a beaver, a mouse, and a newly-hatched chick) rendered in his somewhat trademark style of jittery, boldly colored contour lines. They float against ethereal (printed in extremely light gray) background images. His seemingly arbitrary juxtapositions of photographic realities with the oddly refined crudity of his logo-like drawings certainly have a childlike if not enigmatic goofiness about them.

    It would be easy to write off these reductivist configurations as inane or simplistic. But I think there’s something more engaging and sophisticated going on here. Maybe they’re a collective commentary on homogenized depersonalization and random acts of meaninglessness. Or perhaps a coolly distilled response to the boggling sensory overload so easily encountered on the Internet. Visually, and ironically enough, for all of the open space in Huggett’s compositions – occupied yet eerily barren – I’m reminded of the ridiculously cluttered look and content of web pages such as those on Facebook. More ironic, we’ve immersed ourselves in a technology that on the one hand promises connectivity with flesh-and-blood reality, and on the other pares life down to the www language of codes, hyperlinks, icons, and trends. And we seem to ‘like’ it.

    One of Huggett’s pieces, showing a funky spotted cow wearing a bell and floating next to a carton of cultured lowfat buttermilk, is called “Ring Bell, Win Prize!” Got life? Click mouse, press Enter.  LOL.   

   “Snap Crackle Pop” on view through July 31 at Gallery 6000. OPENING RECEPTION is on TUESDAY, MAY 1, 5:30 – 7:30 pm. – please RSVP to Becky DeHart at (330) 244 – 3518 or  rdehart@kent.edu.  Gallery 6000 is located in the University Center Dining Room, on the Kent State University Stark campus.

    Photos: (Top) “Ties” by Rick Huggett /  “Drunken Poets Dream” by Craig Uncle Dreg Booth

Driven to Real Affection

Driven to Real Affection

By Tom Wachunas

    Sentimentality is a many splintered thing. We tend to dismiss those stories that have too much of it as hoakey and inconsequential. I suspect that when negative criticisms are leveled against a play or a movie because of its fluff content, the problem is often at least as much to be found in the performance as it is in the writing. When actors wallow too much in teary mush, it’s no doubt a reflection of the director’s vision.

     But like cholesterol, there’s the good  kind and the bad kind of sentimentality.  Alfred Uhry’s play, “Driving Miss Daisy,” which won the 1988 Pulitzer for drama, and became an Oscar-winning movie (best picture) in 1989, is dripping with the good stuff – authentically heartwarming, not heart clogging. In directing the current Canton Players Guild Theatre production of the play, Dennis O’Connell has effectively seen to it that his actors keep their characters credible while not drowning in their own syrup.

    So who are the characters? The play opens just as Miss Daisy Werthen, a septuagenarian Jewish widow in Atlanta, has crashed her spanking new 1948 Packard into the neighbor’s garage. This is a last- straw incident, prompting her prosperous businessman son, Boolie, to hire for her a black chauffeur, Hoke Coleburn, to take over all driving duties. Daisy vigorously resists at first, but after she reluctantly gives in, her tolerance of Hoke progressively blossoms into full-fledged trust and friendship over the next 25 years.

   In keeping with the aim of the Players Guild ‘Stripped Away’ series of productions on its intimate arena stage, everything about this production is well designed for maximum dramatic affect with a minimum of special effect: a few pieces of furniture; a backdrop of painted panels (designed by Joshua Erichsen) that alternately suggest fancy wallpaper and an elegant garden; and a car comprised of two chairs facing forward.

    The character of Boolie is not just a superficial adjunct to the story. To that role, Scotland Gallo brings impressive substance – a warm mix of Southern gallantry, generosity, and compassion. He’s convincingly authentic, too, when conflicted between his Southern liberal Jewish world-view and an invitation to attend a dinner for Martin Luther King.

    Marci Paolucci (Miss Daisy) and Marvin L. Mallory (Hoke) are, separately and together, astonishing beyond words (but that never stopped me before). Paolucci’s heartrending transformation from the imperious and dictatorial Daisy at the beginning, the gradual dissipation of her fierce pride and independence, through to the completely thawed, docile, and loving woman in the nursing home at the end, is a riveting theatrical marvel to behold. Likewise, Mr. Mallory is a powerhouse of subtlety as he paints a compelling portrait of deference, dignity, feisty patience and affection, all tempered with an insistence that he be regarded as more than an anonymous servant, more than some “….back of the neck you look at while you goin’ wherever you want to go.”

    For as much as what these people say is certainly important, it’s how they say it that fuels their 25 year-long drive together with such palpable grace – with powerful facial expressivity and body language, right down to their progressively hunched backs and weary gaits.

    Here, then, is a truly stellar display of masterful stagecraft. The cast clearly respects this script, which  transcends artificial symbols, or gratuitous preaching on the era of racial divide wherein the story unfolds. Instead, they generously present real, breathing people, taking us on a memorable ride through the tender and coarse vicissitudes of their own mortality. And, except for the hopelessly cynical and stone-hearted among you, I guarantee good sentiment will out, and tears will be shed.

   Driving Miss Daisy, THROUGH MAY 6,  at the Players Guild William G. Fry Theatre, 1001 Market Ave. North, in Canton. Shows are Friday and Saturday 8 pm, and Sunday at 2:30 pm. All tickets $11, available at  www.playersguildtheatre.com or (330) 453 – 7617

 

  PHOTO by James Dreussi