A Tool for the Living

 A Tool for the Living

by Tom Wachunas

   “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” – Robert F. Kennedy

   “Memory is the mother of all wisdom”  - Aeschylus

   “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  - George Santayana (1905)

   Program notes, ‘THE ACTION OF THE PLAY,’ provided by Players Guild Theatre: “By late summer, 1964, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was a deeply wounded man. Still in shock and consumed with grief and guilt over the assassination of his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, on November 22^nd, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, he was at a crossroads. The 1964 presidential election was approaching and President Lyndon Johnson, who had been dangling the possibility of a vice-presidential role to RFK, finally called Kennedy over to the White House to tell him his decision. The result of that meeting and the subsequent direction for the next, and last, four years of Robert Kennedy’s life are the focus of this play.” 

   It can’t be mere serendipity that the first two productions of Canton’s Players Guild Theatre’s 2016-2017 season are such timely, gripping looks at things presidential. ‘Tis the season of our discontent. So let’s just call it sagacious programming on the part of the Players Guild. In September, the Assassins was a chilling exposition of our culture’s spiritual poverty. And now, on the cusp of a viciously divisive presidential election, we have RFK, a one-man play written by Jack Holmes (from 2005). It’s an even more searing examination of the sociopolitical malaise that defined not only our past, but our tumultuous present as well.

   I still vividly remember Robert Kennedy - the man, and his turbulent times. I was just mature enough (a high school junior) to study and admire him, even to the point of painting an oil portrait of him (which I still own and treasure, pictured above) within weeks after his assassination on June 5, 1968. So yes, this play is unabashedly nostalgic in its sensibilities, and yet never saccharine or cloying.

   The action flips back and forth – not unlike flashbacks in a documentary film - between Kennedy’s memories of both public and private episodes, taking us up to his victory in the Democratic presidential primary in California. In many ways we get a micro-history of his thoughts and actions that transpired through such pivotal and cathartic developments as The Bay of Pigs, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of his brother in 1963 and Martin Luther King in 1968, and the war in Viet Nam, among others. 

   To his wholly riveting portrayal of Robert Kennedy, Aaron Brown brings  new meaning to “becoming the character.” The process must surely have been a daunting one. But in the end, Brown has masterfully crafted an intensely expressive picture of Kennedy’s physical and psychological demeanors, including the distinctive affect of his Boston accent, his often tired gait, his propensity for righteous rage peppered with impish witticisms - all delivered with arresting, at times even startling credibility.

    Particularly engaging is how the written narrative assigns a role to us in the audience and constantly re-positions our place in the action. In some passages we’re citizens of another country, or a local American crowd on the campaign trail. In others we’re the patient producers of a challenging promotional TV ad, or contentious colleagues on the Senate floor. In still others we might be guests at a social gathering, beloved family members, or reporters interviewing him in his living room. 

    Interwoven with these contextual shifts, though, is an overarching sense that we might well be the pages, as it were, of a journal, or perhaps even Kennedy’s conscience. As such we’re privy to his most fragile and tender reminiscences, as well as his deepest philosophizing. We hear Kennedy quote the ancient Greek poet and playwright, Aeschylus, several times throughout the evening. And interestingly enough, Aeschylus is often referenced by scholars as the “father of tragedy.” This in turn makes for a bittersweet connecting to Kennedy’s returning, more than once, to his haunting thought, “Tragedy is a tool for the living…” 

  This production is much more than sentimental entertainment. It is eminently compelling art - a still relevant (heartbreakingly so) and urgent call to identify, nurture, and emulate what Abraham Lincoln once called "...our nature's better angels." Angels who, perhaps, fled our midst long ago. 

    RFK, at Canton Players Guild’s William G. Fry Theatre, 1001 Market Avenue N., Canton, Ohio / Shows THROUGH NOVEMBER 13 – Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m. / SINGLE TICKETS $17 / $13 for ages 17 and younger / Order at  www.playersguildtheatre.com   or call 330.453.7617

A Dazzling All-American Mélange from the Canton Symphony Orchestra

A Dazzling All-American Mélange from the Canton Symphony Orchestra

By Tom Wachunas

   www.cantonsymphony.org

    On the evening of October 29, while the Cleveland Indians were playing the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field in game four of the World Series, the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) wasted no time setting a festive mood right here in Umstattd Hall. From the rear of the house, all the CSO members - many wearing Indians caps or jerseys - strutted happily down the aisles and up on to the stage, all to boisterous cheers from the audience. Then Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann led orchestra and audience in a stirring   sing-along of Take Me Out to the Ball Game. 

   That Tin Pan Alley classic from 1908 – the national anthem of what was once affectionately called “America’s favorite pastime” - was a fitting lead-in to the first selection on a program of all-American music, Victor Herbert’s 1893 work, American Fantasy. The work was the Irish-born Herbert’s sparkling celebration of his adopted home of America, featuring an imaginatively varied medley of indigenous songs including Old Folks at Home, The Girl I Left Behind Me, Dixie, and Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. The finale was a delightfully unpretentious arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner. From energetic romps with a down-home feel, to passages of a more solemn nature, Zimmermann’s sensitive reading of the material was readily apparent in his ensemble’s crisp, bright playing. What could have been merely a trudging through blasé nostalgia acquired a spirit of palpable reverence.

   Next up: Violin Concerto in D Major, composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in 1946. The Austrian-born Korngold was already an eminently successful composer of film scores by the time he became a U.S. citizen in 1943. This three-movement work was based largely on themes taken from four of his scores. Surprisingly, the concerto was met with a somewhat tepid response when first performed by Jascha Heifetz with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1947. But it has since gained well-deserved attention from contemporary violinists. 

   Korngold’s writing for the soloist called for a particularly daunting degree of bravura and technical virtuosity. Here, guest artist Jinjoo Cho met the challenge with superb expressivity, playing with a fervor so sublime, so riveting, that at times she seemed to be channeling supernatural forces. Cho must be something of a shaman, or a conjurer, who has taught her instrument to sing in a voice at once bold and delicate. Her intonation was consistently warm throughout a dazzling journey into lyrical radiance that often included ravishing flights into unearthly notes in the high register, and a finale that was a pyrotechnical phenomenon in its own right. 

   In both George Gershwin’s An American in Paris, and Leonard Bernstein’s On The Waterfront: Symphonic Suite, the CSO delivered, once again, truly compelling performances. The Gershwin was a fascinating gem of sultry melancholy balanced with jazzy swag. And the Bernstein was a masterpiece of steely intensity, replete with lush orchestral textures that superbly articulated pulsing dramatic tensions, all building to an explosive and exuberant final note. Like the proverbial loud crack of the bat that signals a grand slam.

   Sigh. Oh, would that the Indians had done as much.

MassMu Déjà vu

MassMu Déjà vu 

By Tom Wachunas

   So let's leave it alone, 'cause we can't see eye to eye / There ain't no good guy /  there ain't no bad guy / There's only you and me / and we just disagree.  – song lyrics by Dave Mason

   EXHIBIT: Annual Stark County Artists Exhibition, at Massillon Museum, THROUGH DECEMBER 31, 2016 / 121 Lincoln Way East, downtown Massillon / Jurors: Mark Masuoka, Executive Director and CEO of the Akron Art Museum; Frank Oriti, visual artist from Cleveland, Ohio; Shari Wilkins, Founder and Director at the Cleveland Print Room  www.massillonmuseum.org

(Full disclosure - I do have a piece in this year’s exhibit. I wrote about it in April, at http://artwach.blogspot.com/2016/04/from-deep-inside.htm) 

  

    In this postmodern era, there’s no universal standard by which to measure and declare an artwork’s indisputable excellence (much to the dismay, I’m sure, of some academic traditionalists). And regardless of a juror’s credentials, the process of determining relative levels of aesthetic quality is in the end a complex and mostly subjective one, fraught with subtle biases, including multiple definitions of art. The practice has become needlessly imperious and even a bit silly. Why can’t we simply have “jurors” as guest curators who choose the entrants to be exhibited and leave it at that? This is after all an art show, not a horse race. The designations of win-place-show certainly mean something unarguable in the sport of kings, but they have little if any truly meaningful function in the context of group art exhibitions.  [excerpt from last year’s ARTWACH post - Dec. 19, 2015]

   I said it last year regarding this annual exhibition (and for that matter, any exhibit with a hierarchy of awards, beginning with ‘Best in Show’)  and I’m saying it again this year. So call me a whiner if you will. I still think that to designate a single work as ‘best’ (or second or third) - in an array as impressively diverse in media, style, content, and techniques as this one is – is to imply that all the other un-awarded works are relatively inferior achievements. It’s an ultimately meaningless competition paradigm suggesting, perhaps, that jurors are unassailable umpires of aesthetic excellence. They’re not. And I would certainly think they’re sensitive and intelligent enough to realize as much. 

   That said, I can’t tell you why, in any objective sense, Daniel McLaughlin’s oil on canvas piece - a somewhat flaccid grisaille study of a vacuum cleaner called Hoover Concept 2 (Best in Show) - merited a $300 award over, say, Brian Robinson’s magnificent pastel landscape, Resting Soil, or Diane Belfiglio’s equally beautiful oil pastel, Going Deeper II, neither work garnering an award. What exactly makes Michael Weiss’s surreal digital manipulations in his The Island more deserving of a money prize (in this case, $100 for Third Place) than Karen Bogdan’s spectacular fabric work, Summer Flower Garden,  or Pamela Glover Wadsworth’s arresting mixed media abstract painting, Being Rorschach? Does the fact that both of these women were awarded a (piddling?) Honorable Mention mean that their works are somehow less-than, not-quite-so, or lacking-in…what? 

    Nor can I tell you why Spencer Molnar’s acrylic and oil Two-Faced - at once goofy and ghoulish - received Second Place honors over such un-awarded accomplishments as William Bogdan’s haunting and poetic woodcut, The Chess Player, David Kuntzman’s dazzling grids in Newton, or the serene simplicity of Kelly Rae’s mixed media painting, Refuge.

   I guess all this grousing makes me a back-seat juror. Enough already. Besides, it’s not the jury I mean to skewer here, but rather the paradigm or system they’ve been asked to enter. With no indisputable rubric for discerning what’s good, better, or best, the system itself is an arbitrary one and, in the end, merely an unpredictable exercise of opinions, albeit presumably educated ones.

  I don’t think there are too many Stark County artists who are naïve  enough enter a local juried exhibit with the singular desire to win cash, even though it’s fun (and for a lucky few, useful) to embellish a resumé with accumulated accolades. The fact of the matter is that, given Stark County’s pitiable dearth of suitably large, established gallery spaces, most local artists regard opportunities such as this annual event at Massillon Museum simply as a motivation to keep their work in the public eye, however marginal in these parts that may be. The most valid, meaningful award any artist can reasonably hope for is any viewer’s genuinely willful attention to the work at hand. 

  

   So here’s my heartfelt thanks to all of you who bestow as much on this exhibit.

   PHOTOS, from top: Childhood, by Daniel McLaughlin; Being Rorschach, by Pamela Glover Wadsworth; Summer Flower Garden, by Karen Bogdan; Refuge, by Kelly Rae; The Chess Player, by William Bogdan; Going Deeper II, by Diane Belfiglio; Newton, by David Kuntzman    

Seeing The Sublime

Seeing The Sublime

By Tom Wachunas

 

   “Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.” ― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

   “…The eternal riddle encompasses points in time; it considers decay and rejuvenation. Its innermost secret is revealed in the "other", the spirit world - the ancestral footstep walking behind us.” - Marianne van Lent,  2014

   EXHIBIT: GLADE INVADED – Paintings by Marianne Van Lent / Main Hall Art Gallery, Kent State University at Stark / 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, Ohio / THROUGH OCTOBER 28, 2016 / Viewing hours Monday – Friday 11 A.M. – 5 P.M.

    Though it could seem unremarkable to some viewers, among the many aspects that make this exhibit so completely engaging is in how NYC-based painter Marianne Van Lent specifies her medium: fresco secco and dispersed pigment (on canvas or panel). Fresco secco. It’s the very old Italian term for the practice of painting on dried plaster.

    While other painters working in some related manner might be understandably content to list their materials simply as “mixed media on canvas,” Van Lent gives us an important insight to her aesthetic. Beyond its literal connotation, fresco secco indicates a subtle alignment with the momentum of painting history. Think of her iconography – even in its clearly abstract appearance - as a continuation of a long tradition, though certainly not limited to fresco secco per se. I mean ‘tradition’ here in the larger sense, namely the one which declared, centuries ago, the raison d’etre for painting to be the transformation of a two-dimensional plane into a compelling illusion or meaningful symbol of “naturalistic” reality.

    Modernist painters challenged and otherwise usurped that operative philosophy and, by mid-20^th century, declared and liberated the picture plane to be a discrete reality unto itself. In so doing, they offered visions - both representational and non-objective - that we could rightly call metaphysical in character. Abstract painting was a formal departure, in ever varying degrees, from necessarily literal identification with the visible world. Yet at its most potent, such art can nonetheless actually enlighten how we define and perceive “reality” on multiple planes.

   So it is that Marianne Van Lent begins by priming her surfaces with a thin layer of plaster. This tactile skin could itself be a metaphor for consciousness – a constant awareness of all the painterly events that have transpired upon it. In that sense, her paintings are self-contained histories of their own making. The gently visceral ripples and creases in the undercoat are still perceptible under multiple layers of luscious translucent washes (the facile glazing of “dispersed pigment” invests her acrylic colors with the distinctive luminosity of oil paint) that seem to float forever in palpable tension with more opaque concentrations of codified, often stenciled shapes, all amid sweeping, gestural brush marks, and all rendered in an exhilarating color dynamic.

    While initially inspired by natural environs (glades, woods, or aquatic settings, for example), Van Lent’s imagery is encrypted to simultaneously suggest and transcend familiar physical incidentals. The apparently biological and botanical references to earthly places can just as well evoke processes and mystical phenomena on much larger, and more spiritual, planes. The cellular becomes cosmic, the minute, massive. 

   Many of the paintings embrace an additional sort of dichotomy: Our (i.e., humanity’s) tentative if not intrusive relationship with nature, which is to say our tendency to undermine the supremacy of spirit. Landscape can conjure, with equal force, an idyllic haven of rest or a scarred battlefield. In “Glade Invaded,” for example, the conical red shape and amorphous black splotch hover menacingly on a misty white field, as if to wound, or kill, serenity.  

   In considering Van Lent’s “subtle alignment” with the history of painting that I mentioned earlier, I think it’s possible to see her all at once as a Romantic, an Impressionist, a Symbolist, an Expressionist. Her compelling articulations can prompt us to contemplate and savor both the accessible and the enigmatic nature of nature – our own and that of the visible world.

    We can regard painters like her as our modern-day shamans – those who purge and intercede, who illuminate old and familiar things with new, magical light. They navigate the sublime – that ineffable state where agony coexists with ecstasy, where the pain of destruction and the rejuvenation of spirit are necessary adjuncts to being alive. To that extent, Marianne Van Lent is also a Realist in the truest sense.

   PHOTOS, from top: Radiolaria Red; Psychic Nucleus; Heart; Light Vision; Spinning in the Glade;  Glade Invaded