Boulez and Bowie

In the span of just one week at the start of this new year, we lost two musical heroes (whose names, coincidentally, both begin with “B”). Pierre Boulez and David Bowie may seem worlds apart musically and stylistically, but they both had strong influences on where my own music and performance has gone especially in the last few years.

By Joost Evers / Anefo (Nationaal Archief) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

By Joost Evers / Anefo (Nationaal Archief) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

I am most familiar with Boulez not as a composer but as the founding director and god father of IRCAM in Paris; and as a renowned conductor. One fun memory of the latter involves one of his recordings conducting Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. It was a favorite of mine, and when I got the chance to present it to Berio for an autograph, he declared his dislike of the recording, but signed my CD atop Boulez’ face. As a figure who loomed large in the world of avant-garde music, and then electronic music, he certainly evoked strong opinions from others. There is no doubting the influence of his leadership at IRCAM in both my electronic-music composition and research, even as I disagree with aspects of the institution’s culture, such as strict control and division of music and technology research. But it’s worth stepping back and looking at Boulez as a composer. His masterpiece Répons combines electronics with an acoustic chamber ensemble in ways that make the electronics disappear at times. It also has a very visual quality to it, evoking a complex film scene or theatre piece.

By k_tjaaa (Flickr: David Bowie Mural) [<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0">CC BY 2.0</a>], <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADavid_Bowie_Mural.jpg">via Wikimedia Commons</a>

By k_tjaaa (Flickr: David Bowie Mural) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The theatrical is one of many ways David Bowie’s influence comes into the picture, along with the use of gender experimentation and constant stylistic reinvention. His gender-fluid and sometimes overtly feminine presentations on stage were “transgressive” for the time, but have certainly impacted many of us and made space for our own expression in music and in person. It set an example for me to be able to first come out on stage and then eventually in person. In addition to gender, Bowie’s onstage persona gave freedom to be decadent and glamorous, something which many styles of music seem to lack. Now when I perform Boulez-influenced music, it is definitely with Bowie-influenced staging and theatrics. And of course the costuming.

But David Bowie was himself a talented musician and writer. In the same ferment of the 1970s in which he developed his personae, he also pushed the use of synthesizers and electronics in music that was still referred to as “Rock”. His song Subterraneans is a prime example of both technology (ARP synthesizers, backwards bass guitar) and theatrics in his music, as illustrated in this tribute video.

The album that includes this song, Low, was preceded by Station to Station, one of my favorites for its funk influence, including the song Stay. The funk and soul sound of this album, along with his more unambiguously masculine persona in the album art (at least to my sensibilities), exemplify his ability to change and reinvent quickly from one project to the next. It’s the album I have returned to primarily after the announcement of his death on Sunday night. But I do want to close with one if his most hauntingly beautiful songs: Drowned Girl is one again something different altogether.

Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015)

We lost another of our art heroes yesterday. Ellsworth Kelly, known for his iconic works composed of color fields, passed away.

Luna with Ellsworth Kelly book

The above photo features the catalog from his large-scale solo show at SFMOMA in 2002-2003. The exhibition was a bright spot, both aesthetically and emotionally, in an otherwise depressing period of time and made quite an impression. I kept intersecting with his work during my numerous art adventures in California. His paintings featured large color fields, sometimes combined together into a single whole, while other times separated, as in Blue Green Black Red (1996) on display as part of the Fisher Collection at SFMOMA. I had the opportunity to see a large retrospective of his prints and paintings at LACMA in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. This, too, was revelatory as it showed other aspects of his work, including black-and-white pieces and connections of his abstract style to nature.


[Installation view. Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and Paintings. January 22-April 22, 2012. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo (c) 2012 Museum Associates/LACMA]


[Installation view. Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and Paintings. January 22-April 22, 2012. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo (c) 2012 Museum Associates/LACMA]

 

It is still, however, the color fields that I most instantly recognized as his.


[Installation view. Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and Paintings. January 22-April 22, 2012. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo (c) 2012 Museum Associates/LACMA]

Kelly himself resisted being described as “abstract” or “minimal” or any other label that intersected with his career.  But I think this statement quoted in the New York Times obituary describes his art very well, and is a fitting conclusion.

“My paintings don’t represent objects,” he said in 1996. “They are objects themselves and fragmented perceptions of things.”

 

Bronx Museum of the Arts: Martin Wong, (DE) (RE) CONSTRUCT, Transitions

This winter the Bronx Museum of the Arts has three exhibitions to bring forth different aspects of life and art in New York City: a gritty and intimate solo exhibition, reflections on the urban landscape from the permanent landscape, and a view of a little understood country through the camera lens.

Martin Wong: Human Instamatic is a large posthumous retrospective of Chinese-American painter Martin Wong. There have been several exhibitions highlighting his role as collector and muse for contemporary artists, but this one is the first to bring together his work as a painter since his death in 1999. It starts with his early works as a street artist in Eureka, CA but mostly focuses on his time in New York, especially his years on the Lower East Side in the early 1980s.

Martin Wong
[Martin Wong]

The Lower East Side of that era was a notoriously gritty neighborhood, as exemplified in the painting above. But there was a vibrant multi-ethnic community of artists and musicians living among the dilapidated buildings. Wong’s work documents the artistic and daily life of the area, but does so in a way the is deeply personal and internal at the same time.

Attorney Street (Handball Court With Autobiographical Poem by Piñero),” dated 1982-84
[“Attorney Street (Handball Court With Autobiographical Poem by Piñero),” dated 1982-84.]

Sign language abounds in his work along with urban scenes. The sign language in the piece shown above, Attorney Street, Handball Court with Autobiographical Poem by Piñero, features a short poem by Miguel Piñero, the playwright and actor who was co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café. The piece and its subject also show the immersion of Wong, a Chinese American, in the Latino culture of the neighborhood, and his expression of his identity as a homosexual man – Piñero was both his collaborator and lover. The latter theme repeats frequency is works – most prominently in images of firemen – along with the sign language.

In contrast to his depictions of the Lower East Side, his paintings of Chinese American people and culture have a more quaint and nostalgic quality, whether illustrating Manhattan’s Chinatown or San Francisco. In these works, we see women for the first time. One particularly prominent piece featured a cheongsam-clad woman reminiscent of the sexually charged images of Asian women from the early 20th century. He did, however, marry his heritage to the contemporary urban world. In the piece shown below (and a much larger companion), the Chinese symbolism and astrology are combined with the brick facade of the urban landscape and an ominous black hole, perhaps a nod to the rising AIDS epidemic that eventually took his life.

Martin Wong
[Martin Wong]


(DE) (RE) CONSTRUCT brings together pieces from the museum’s permanent collection around the topic of design. Design covers a lot of territory, and there are pieces that explore both its small and large aspects. Liliana Porter’s Bird, Drawing, Model, Painting, Rip, Hand, 1982 deals with small objects and figures. The start white background gives it a somewhat lonely but simultaneously tender quality.

Porter_Liliana_300dpi1
[Liliana Porter. Bird, Drawing, Model, Painting, Rip, Hand, 1982. Acrylic, pencil, silkscreen, collage. Gift of the artist]

Vito Acconci’s Building Blocks for a Doorway, goes in the other direction by focusing on architecture. The lettering is a fun detail, though, and I leave its interpretation as an exercise to the ready.

Vito_Acconci1
[Vito Acconci. Building Blocks for a Doorway, 1983-85. Five color etching. Each half 93 7/8″ x 47 1/4″. Edition of 8]

Acconci’s architectural spoke to me on a personal level, as did the far more minimalist Black Road by Glen Goldberg. Fun with highways…

20151122-IMG_7085
[Glen Goldberg. Black Road]

And the most minimal of all was Elizabeth Jobim’s Red.

Elizabeth Jobim
[Elizabeth Jobim. Red]


Transitions: New Photography from Bangladesh brings together works from nine Bangladeshi and Bangladeshi-American photographs to interpret a country that is rapidly changing country that defies many long-held stereotypes. The Bronx happens to be home to a large community of Bangladeshi Americans. Many of the photographs were just portraits and landscapes, as well as some striking similarities with India. On the subcontinent, pointing out the similarities between the two countries would be politically charged, but as South Asian Americans we can freely observe them. Most of the portraits were relatively prosaic, but one that I particularly liked was Arfun Ahmed’s Olympia Burka which featured the artists’ wife and a relative is Muslim does. It a very timely statement given the conversation we are having in this country around Muslim-American identity and prejudice. Plus, it features a cat!

Arfun_Ahmed1
[Arfun Ahmed. Olympia Burka, 2014]

Debashish Chakrabarty’s photographs featuring streaks of light are abstract and energetic. The figures, when visible at all, are very much obscured in the dark background.

 Debashish Chakrabarty


The Bronx Museum of Arts has become a regular stop on my visits to New York, and I’m proud to see this institution grow and thrive in the borough to which I am most deeply connected. I look forward to more exhibitions in the future. Dare I even hope to play a show there someday?