Arts

Loud and clear

EVAN J. GARZA — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:48:47 GMT

The 2008 Foster Prize at the ICA, Adel Abdessemed at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center
Although it's no stretch to say that contemporary artists are eager to say something, the art world has seen its fair share of awkwardly shitty gallery talks.

Adel Abdessemed, Practice Zero Tolerance Retournûe

“Artist Talk: James and Audry Foster Prize Finalists” at Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave, Boston | December 7 at 1 pm | 617.478.3100

“The 2008 James and Audry Foster Prize” at Institute of Contemporary Art | Through March 1 | 617.478.3100

“Gallery Talk With Mark Linga” at MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames St, Building E15, Cambridge | December 10 at 12:30 pm | 617.253.4680

“Algeria in France” at Bartos Theatre at the MIT List Visual Arts Center | December 11 at 7 pm | 617.253.4680

“Adel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice” at MIT List Visual Arts Center | Through January 4 | 617.253.4680

Although it's no stretch to say that contemporary artists are eager to say something, the art world has seen its fair share of awkwardly shitty gallery talks. Apart from a few bad apples, however, the opportunity to hear an artist speak about his/her work can be as rewarding as seeing it in the flesh (as long as the work is good to begin with). If the quality of the "2008 James and Audry Foster Prize" exhibition at the ICA is any indication, the discussion will be well worth your time. On Sunday December 7, the quartet of featured artists — Catherine D'Ignazio, Rania Matar, Andrew Witkin, and Joe Zane — will verbalize their points of view in "ARTIST TALK: JAMES AND AUDRY FOSTER PRIZE FINALISTS" (while implicitly making their case for the $25,000 award, which gets announced in January). The annual exhibit, which seeks to acknowledge locally based early-career artists "of exceptional promise," is divided among four galleries, one space for each artist, and the truly diverse assortment of media includes photography, video, neon, painting, sculpture, and installation.

If that doesn't slake your thirst for art chat, the following two talks at the MIT List Visual Arts Center are sure to quench. On Wednesday December 10, "GALLERY TALK WITH MARK LINGA" will find the LVAC educator addressing the work in "ADEL ABDESSEMED: SITUATION AND PRACTICE." Abdessemed has lived in Paris since 1999, but he was born in Algeria, and that leads right into the next evening's lecture. "ALGERIA IN FRANCE," with Paul A. Silverstein, Carnegie Scholar and associate professor of anthropology at Reed College, will address the Algerian relationship to France and its impact on Algerian immigrants in contemporary French culture. For those who haven't seen it: Abdessemed's show is a profound collection of photographs of the artist introducing wild North African animals (among them a pack of boars and a full-grown lion) to the streets of Paris, large-scaled looped video projections, the life-size terra cotta mold of an overturned and incinerated car, and a monumental 16x24 foot black-charcoal drawing created while the artist was suspended from a helicopter by his feet. Why on Earth does any of this require an explanation? Your guess is as good as mine.

Dance, Monkey: Billy Bob Neck

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:03:30 GMT

We put a comic on the hot seat. This week's victim . . .
I was pretty sure a paper like this would ask some kinda homosexual question, being in Massachusetts and named after a Henry Potter book.

Threshold of revelation

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:58:11 GMT

Einstein dreams in Central Square; Skylight is illumined in Lowell
Einstein dreams in Central Square; Skylight is illumined in Lowell

EINSTEIN’S DREAMS: These contemplations of time are framed in human rather than mathematical terms.

Time does cartwheels in Einstein's Dreams — and so does Einstein, in Wesley Savick's lyrical hurdy-gurdy built on MIT professor Alan Lightman's 1993 novel about a young Bern patent clerk sleeping on the job (from MIT Catalyst Collaborative/Underground Railway Theater at the Central Square Theater through December 14). Lightman's imagining of the 26-year-old Einstein's subliminal peregrinations as he labors to formulate his theories of time and space is a dreamier, more poetic affair than Savick's jaunty vaudeville, which Savick also directs. But both are rife with the bustle of the early-20th-century world through which the dreamer moves, however distractedly, while upright. And Savick's 80-minute theater piece — said to be Lightman's favorite of the several performance works into which his brief tome has been translated — captures not just the aura of the era but that of its music-hall entertainments. Enacted by a cast of three who share the stage with little more than three rotatable flats — one side black, the other luminescent — and an invaluable composer/accordionist to push time and time traveler along, the show is brain food that's more beer and pretzels than dense computative sausage.

Of course, it's Lightman who dreamed a burgeoning Einstein whose contemplations of time are framed in human rather than mathematical terms. There is no mention of gravitational fields or relativity in Einstein's Dreams. And Savick just falls into step, adding some jêtûs and softshoe. We meet the newlywed patent clerk as he snoozes center stage, putting the finishing touches, we're told, on a paper he intends to mail off to Germany's leading physics journal that very day. Abetted by male and female figments of his imagination that double as Einstein friend Michele Besso and the officious typist who will turn his notes into a more neatly chiseled cornerstone of modern physics, our somnambulistic office worker then doubles back on the chimeræ in which he has imagined various possibilities for the properties of time in different if geographically corresponding worlds. In these flights, the time-space continuum flows backward, stands still, runs in circles, bounces as if between mirrors, or goes on forever, dividing the humans in its maelstrom into "Nows," who can't wait to get cracking on infinite possibilities, and "Nevers," for whom procrastination becomes a way of life.

Gongs with robot

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:30:10 GMT

Gamelan Galak Tika does crossover
The Balinese gamelan, a close-knit ensemble of percussion, flute, and voices, preserves some of the oldest music in the world as an essential part of ritual and secular occasions.

MASKED MAN I Made Bandem danced all the different roles in the traditional Topeng.

The performance space of MIT's Broad Institute Auditorium last Saturday afternoon looked like the scrap pile at the local recycling center. Strewn over the floor were keyboards, laptops, cables, microphones, and the tuned brass bowls and low metallophones with ornate carved bases that make up a gamelan orchestra. This hodge-podge set the stage for a program of new and traditional works by Gamelan Galak Tika introduced by artistic director Evan Ziporyn.

The Balinese gamelan, a close-knit ensemble of percussion, flute, and voices, preserves some of the oldest music in the world as an essential part of ritual and secular occasions. Although its sound and organizing structures aren't anything like Western music, the gamelan can embrace cross-cultural influences and modern interpretations. New sonic adventures like these electronic collaborations keep renewing the tradition and warding off cultural paralysis.

Saturday's concert began with four new musical encounters. Midori Matsuo's ssss began with bursts of melody from a few instruments, almost delicate trills and pulses that got cut off on the way to sustained rhythm. Gradually more instruments joined, and they all worked up to an accelerating clamor that broke off and left a long reverberation. Then the piece moved back to a sparse coda.

Po-Chun Wang's Rice Combo featured quiet gongs and electronic voices, and the assurance that if you listened carefully, you'd become a great cook.

For Mars Rover & Snow White, Matsuo played a Western drum kit, with Larisa Berger on keyboard, Megan Tsai on double bass, and the composer, Christine Southworth, sampling vocals. As the rest of the gamelan pitched in, you could detect a basic rock beat substituting for the typical Balinese syncopations and jittery changes of speed, and the loopy vocals drifting in and out sounded like scat singing.

Evan Ziporyn has designed a small "beta gamelan" that's tuned in just intonation so that it can work harmoniously with Western instruments. For Agak-Agak, composer Ramon Castillo added an electrified bass (played by Blake Newman), an accordion (Matt Ven Brink), and an EWI (electronic wind instrument) that looked like a squared-off clarinet and was played by Eric Nugent.

But the star of Agak-Agak was the Heliphon, a tall stack of cylinders spiraling down a pole in the shape of a double helix. This robot lit up charmingly with tiny blue and green lights in response to its fellow players while emitting an assortment of sounds that must have been generated by the live musicians — clear dinging patterns like a xylophone or a celesta, low drones and organ chords, and a faraway chatter, maybe the Helicon's memories of a crowd of its siblings on another planet.

Ghost story

RICHARD BECK — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:07:47 GMT

Toni Morrison's colonial America
Toni Morrison's colonial America

SLAVE SONG: Morrison’s characters — and history itself — sometimes disappear in the æther of her poetic prose.

A Mercy | By Toni Morrison | Alfred A. Knopf | 176 pages | $23.95

In Toni Morrison's America, slavery and its racist legacies are malevolent ghosts: dead, at least legally, but not at rest. In her 1987 novel Beloved — a now-canonical vision of a nation haunted by its wrongs — the angry spirit of a murdered baby takes up residence in the house of her family of freed slaves, smashing mirrors and scattering food. So it's not surprising that spirits would also be wreaking havoc in Morrison's new novel, A Mercy, a baggy, half-allegorical account of the nation's poisoned origins. The bigger question is whether these new ghosts can speak to us.

Morrison's focal point is Florens, who in the late 17th century, at age eight, is given by her mother to a Dutch trader named Jacob Vaark. (This is the mercy of the book's title.) Florens's mother believes that Vaark will treat her daughter well — "There was no animal in his heart," she thinks — and she turns out to be right, in some respects. Florens grows up on Vaark's estate in upstate New York with Lina, a Native American sold to Vaark by Presbyterians, and Sorrow, a vague young white woman who is probably the daughter of a drowned sea captain.

The novel speaks in a chorus of voices. Florens, illegally literate, writes her story in a kind of improvised patois: "I know you cannot steal me nor wedding me"; "With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging." These chapters alternate with Morrison's lyricism-on-steroids third-person narration, and the narrative back-and-forth helps you to feel the eerie, shifting mysteries of the unorganized colonies. "I am happy the world is breaking open for us," writes Florens, "yet its newness trembles me."

Vaark, a benevolent eccentric, is planning the construction of a mansion — "a profane monument to himself." But he chops down the trees "without asking their permission," and in Morrison this is a big mistake. (One feels that if Vaark had read Beloved, he'd have known better.) He falls ill and dies (he'll come back to haunt the unfinished house), leaving his English wife, Rebekka, alone with the estate.

Rebekka also gets sick. She sends Florens into the Virginia wilderness in search of a free black man — a blacksmith — who she believes can heal her. Florens falls in love. The blacksmith refuses her, and Florens goes mad with desire and anguish.

Help wanted

EVAN J. GARZA — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:54:19 GMT

‘Anything But Paper Prayers (The Annual Aids Benefit)’ at Barbara Krakow Gallery, ‘Icons + Altars’ at the New Art Center, ‘Annual Holiday Sale’ at Massart
I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d take a painting over a snowflake sweater any day of the week.

Heidi Dauphin, Making a Point (2008)

“Anything But Paper Prayers (The Annual Aids Benefit)” at Barbara Krakow Gallery, 10 Newbury St, Boston | November 29–December 18 | 617.262.4490

“Icons + Altars” at New Art Center, 61 Washington Park, Newton | Through December 14 | 617.964.3424

"The Annual Holiday Sale” at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston | December 1-6 | 617.879.7710

Next week is Thanksgiving, which means that the holiday shopping season will soon be as unavoidable as thermal underwear and black snow. If you harbor a shred of contempt for the retail industry, you’d be doing yourself (and a sweater-folding employee) a favor by avoiding the annual mind fuck that is Black Friday. The following fall fundraisers not only offer a much less chaotic shopping experience, they also encourage the purchase of far cooler gifts: works of art. (I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d take a painting over a snowflake sweater any day of the week.)

First on the list is Barbara Krakow Gallery, which will open its annual AIDS benefit exhibition, “ANYTHING BUT PAPER PRAYERS,” November 29 in celebration of World AIDS Day (December 1). Works by more than 70 artists will be on view, each one available for a donation of $350 to either the African AIDS Initiative based out of Harvard University or the Boston Pediatric/Family AIDS Project at the Dimock Center in Roxbury. Artists from the gallery’s roster — Michael Beatty, Peter Downsbrough, Sally B. Moore, Flora Natapoff, and more — will share the walls with a slew of other local artists.

Not to be outdone, the New Art Center in Newton has mounted its 15th annual benefit event, “ICONS + ALTARS,” a collection of works by more than 100 local and regional artists invited to create art inspired by personal, cultural, social, or spiritual iconography. Each exhibited work is available for sale through the purchase of a ticket, which is placed in a drawing that takes place at the closing reception, on December 14. The last night of the show will also be marked by a Special Auction of work by long-time “Icons + Altars” artists Stephanie Chubbuck, Heid Dauphin, Bonnie Mineo, and Jessica Straus to celebrate the benefit’s 15-year history. Each ticket will set you back $250; proceeds benefit the NAC’s arts education and exhibition programming.

Never Say Smile

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:45:22 GMT

Annie Leibovitz highlights her career
Could there be anyone cooler to have for a photography teacher than Annie Leibovitz?

Who Says Jim Gaffigan Isn't Sexy?

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:55:04 GMT

Oops. We did.
Jim Gaffigan dubbed his latest traveling venture "The Sexy Tour," and he's bringing it to Boston this weekend.

Dance, Monkey: Rich Ceisler

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:52:19 GMT

We put a comic on the hot seat. This week's victim...
Rather than hunting animals, she should be hunting all of the young men that are after her underage daughters.

Game show

GREG COOK — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:03:41 GMT

Who will win the ICA's Foster Prize?
On November 12, the Institute of Contemporary Art opened its biennial Foster Prize exhibit of “Boston-area artists of exceptional promise.”

DEFIANT: Rania Matar's photos show women and children living amid the rubble of war in her
native Lebanon.

On November 12, the Institute of Contemporary Art opened its biennial Foster Prize exhibit of "Boston-area artists of exceptional promise." The game show works like this: four finalists present their work in the museum and we wait till early 2009 for the institution to announce the $25,000 winner. (The three others get $1500 consolation prizes.) So for those of you playing along at home, let's meet the contestants.

Catherine (Kanarinka) D'Ignazio of Waltham, best known locally as a founding member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things and other local art gangs, goes solo here with recent work addressing the climate of fear drummed up by our leaders since 9/11. Last year she jogged most of Boston's disaster evacuation routes (you've probably seen the signs) while recording her breathing. Those recordings are broadcast here along with a new video installation, Exit Strategy. In a loop of quick cuts, D'Ignazio exits through doors (slam, slam, slam) all over the ICA building but never escapes. The slamming and the insidious breathing induce extreme, punishing claustrophobia. It's very effective, and terribly unpleasant.

Rania Matar of Brookline presents black-and-white photos of women and children living amid the rubble of war in her native Lebanon. A hole that a rocket blasted through a bullet-pocked wall frames an ornate building behind. A stout Orthodox Christian nun's veil ripples in the wind. A girl hugs the concrete-block corner of a bare room in a Palestinian refugee camp. A family hang out in the debris where their apartment used to be. Running through the images is a meditation on Muslim and Christian women adopting the veil.

This is the fifth exhibit I've seen of this work. In the past I've felt that Matar would make a good newspaper photojournalist but that her work needed more urgency or vision. This grouping is more vivid, more dramatically composed — even though it includes familiar shots. I think that's because the images have been more sharply selected.

Joe Zane of Cambridge makes dry, cerebral, art-referential, self-depreciating joke paintings and sculptures about the nature of art and museums and what it means to be a great artist. He's explored these themes in past work; he addresses them in the context of the Foster competition with pieces like a silver-plated trophy whose shape is based on his profile.

Sympathy for the Devil

CAROLYN CLAY — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:29:01 GMT

Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington; McPherson's The Seafarer at SpeakEasy
Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington; McPherson's The Seafarer at SpeakEasy

ROCK ’N’ ROLL: So much for those who say Tom Stoppard is all head and no heart.

"It's not just the music, it's the oxygen," sputters Czech rock fanatic Jan, trying to explain what Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones mean when you're wrapped in a straitjacket of repression and looking toward a revolution that will prove more velvet than violent. That feeling of being hemmed in and gazing through a shaft toward the freedom that's in the music is ingeniously captured in the American Conservatory Theater/Huntington Theatre Company production of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, currently at the Boston University Theatre (through December 7). Inspired by an Eastern Bloc photograph, Douglas W. Schmidt's monumental set is like a drab tenement laid on its side, so that the audience is looking past gray concrete toward a patch of blank white sky. The production, too, makes it through Stoppard's sumptuously limned tunnel of political argument, Sapphic poetry, human passion, Cold War espionage, and 22 years of Czech history filtered through a lens of disappointed English Marxism to achieve the exhilaration encapsulated in the loud electric-guitar licks that introduce the Rolling Stones at Prague's Strahov Stadium in 1990. But there are some drab patches, as well as brilliant ones, along the way.

The Tony-nominated Rock 'n' Roll is a heady mix, even for one that's seen the churn of Stoppard's brainy blender. The play, its scenes bridged by era-anchoring bursts of the title commodity, straddles not just two decades but two worlds: the leafy academic cloister of England's Cambridge University, where intellectual systems may butt heads but at least dare speak their names, and Prague, in the years between the Soviet quashing of the 1968 Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is on one level about the supremacy of words as well as music. But, critics of Stoppard as a playwright who's all cerebrum, take note: it also sets up a debate between head and heart, sophistry and soul, that pure emotion, riding the music, carries in the end. As one character, a Czech expatriate looking back from the cusp of the '90s to the anarchic '60s, remarks, " 'Make love, not war' was more important than 'Workers of the world unite.' "

Dynamos

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:42:16 GMT

Philadanco at the ICA
The four pieces on the program that Philadanco brought for its Boston debut last weekend at the Institute for Contemporary Art were all-dance numbers showcasing a troupe of highly polished, supercharged dancers.

ENEMY BEHIND THE GATES: Bad timing?

The four pieces on the program that Philadanco brought for its Boston debut last weekend at the Institute for Contemporary Art were all-dance numbers showcasing a troupe of highly polished, supercharged dancers. Except for one sextet of women, each work marshaled 10 or more members of the company's 16-person roster. Despite the jam-packed choreography and the unremittingly high-performance intensities, by the end of the evening they looked even more revved up than they'd been at the start.

Founded in 1970, Philadanco is Philadelphia's answer to Alvin Ailey, a company of mostly African-American dancers who've mastered the gamut of contemporary styles. Their choreography comes with messages of uplift and reflection, but the dances themselves — at least the ones we saw here — don't detour us away from the pure pleasures of physicality. They differed in big issues of style and mood, but all the choreographers were working with small chunks of group arrangements, people streaming in and out with little to distinguish them from their companions.

The program started with a revival of the late Gene Hill Sagan's 1983 Ritornello, which is choreographed to a familiar score with a daunting predecessor. Bach's Double Violin Concerto is also the music for George Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, a classic in the ballet repertory. Sagan's alternative was enjoyable if not profound.

Four men and six women used a hybrid vocabulary of ballet and modern-dance steps — fast chaînû turns, running, skipping, stag jumps borrowed from Martha Graham. The arms were always in motion, curling and spreading in an effect that modern dancers like Paul Taylor have used to extend and glamorize the non-balletic body. To the slow second movement, two couples danced almost entirely in tandem. When the men weren't tipping the women up in odd, angular lifts, they made pliant plastique shapes to set off the women's pointe-free bourrûes, arabesques, and developpûs.

Rennie Harris proposed a social history in Philadelphia Experiment, but the theme of slavery and its legacy of urban despair was assigned to photographs projected on the backdrop and a singer insistently exhorting us to remember past abuses. The dance itself was a fast, punchy montage of hip-hop, boogie, and sassy street attitude. It looked like a chorus for a music video or a rap show to me.

At the end, as the audience screamed its head off, the stage lights came on again. A leader (unidentified as such in the program notes), who'd strutted around and solo'd during the piece, pumped up the audience even more as the cast returned for a long, choreographed encore with more boogieing and little specialty bits.

Steps . . . and more steps

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:47:36 GMT

Boston Conservatory and BoSoma make dance work hard
Martha Graham’s Steps in the Street doesn’t look anything like a dance of the 21st century, but at the end of Boston Conservatory’s fall program last weekend it fit right in.

AFFIRMATION: Adrienne Hawkins’s Whoa-Man 360 recalled Alvin Ailey’s character studies.
Photo by Liza Voll.

Martha Graham’s Steps in the Street doesn’t look anything like a dance of the 21st century, but at the end of Boston Conservatory’s fall program last weekend it fit right in. The audience cheered wildly for the seven-minute dance that begins in silence, then explodes in a tremendous feat of jumping for 10 women who exit with their energy still unspent, as one outsider strides in the opposite direction. The redoubtable Yuriko, a Martha Graham dancer in the 1940s and now a principal reconstructor of the early Graham works, came to Boston with her daughter Susan Kikuchi to stage the dance.

Together with the choreographer, Yuriko brought Steps in the Street back from oblivion in 1989, just two years before Graham’s death. It must not be accidental that the Conservatory’s program left out the date of the original choreography (1936). Three-quarters of a century renders a dance practically an antique, and I guess the producers wanted to stress this dance’s modernity — its minimalistic repetition and relentless physicality. From its first performances by the Graham company in New York, the revival has wowed audiences, but its connection to history is a bit cloudy.

A contemporary film by Julien Bryan served as the basis for the 1989 revival, but the film was silent and couldn’t encompass the full-stage choreography, which had to be re-imagined by Graham and Yuriko. No one could find the original music, by the American composer Wallingford Riegger, so another Riegger score was applied. This was Riegger’s 1940 orchestration of the two-piano score he’d written in 1935 for the Variations and Conclusion to New Dance, by Martha Graham’s pioneering contemporary Doris Humphrey. To Riegger’s polyrhthyms, Humphrey created a stirring and original dance for a group with soloists in counterpoint. Now orchestrated for flamboyant brasses, percussion, and strings, the infectious rhythms have subsided, and the dancers pound away on an underlying regular beat.

The Boston Conservatory dancers Thursday night performed Steps in the Street with clenched determination, loud exhalations of breath, and a thudding heaviness. I don’t know why they aren’t able to relate in their own terms to the themes of the dance, “Devastation — Homelessness — Exile,” or why they don’t simply do the work of the dance, without having to telegraph that they’re working at it. Their long black dresses and black head-wraps, and Linda O’Brien’s moody lighting, gave the whole thing an air of grim desolation. Steps in the Street was one of many modern dances to come out of the depths of the Depression, and all the vestiges of the period that I’ve seen speak of survival, resoluteness, even hope — not at all the downbeat qualities the Conservatory dancers drew from Graham’s jumping dance.

Excerpt: The School on Heart's Content Road

CAROLYN CHUTE — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:59:35 GMT

One week only: an exclusive excerpt from the acclaimed author's new novel
In the cold parlor of the St. Onge farmhouse, deep in the old collapsing couch, sort of wrapped in the couch, in its waves of whimpering springs and hills of upholstery of frazzled blue nap, are 15-year-old Brianna and Gordon.

At first glance, the surface of Carolyn Chute's prose ripples with a loopy, hippy-like playfulness. Think Richard Brautigan. Readers who delve deeper into any part of her quartet of novels soon realize, however, they have entered a world of Faulkneresque drama. Chute's latest book, The School on Heart's Content Road (excerpted here), once again pits the free-spirited residents of an off-the-grid New England commune in the fictional town of Egypt in the very real state of Maine against the rapacious forces of 21st-century commercial, mass culture.

The School on Heart’s Content Road | By Carolyn Cute | Atlantic Monthly Press | 352 pages | $24

Time chugs on. Late afternoon of a mid-September day.
In the cold parlor of the St. Onge farmhouse, deep in the old collapsing couch, sort of wrapped in the couch, in its waves of whimpering springs and hills of upholstery of frazzled blue nap, are 15-year-old Brianna and Gordon. His thick legs are stretched out, feet on the rug. She has her legs curled under her as she leans toward him and he is looking at her, face-to-face. His face normal, hers stretched by birth defect.

He smells of the hot fields and hot work, perhaps even some chaff in the seams of his faded blue T-shirt. She places her hands on his shoulders; her hands and her body and work shirt and jeans smell of the woods and of hot work too — of a logging operation, specifically, woods-spiced with skidder grease and a smoodge of pink bar-and-chain oil — and she looks steadily into his face and she does not giggle. She is his wife now. She takes herself for granted. She sees his eyes on her face and on her bright ripply hair, which falls over her back and over her shirtfront. These eyes of his are filled with her sweaty, woodsy, cigarette sweet opulence . . . his eyes and his being are drawn to her, pulled to her, stuck. As in a web, yes.

She says huskily, "We are mind into mind. We are getting mixed up." He smiles, in a twinkly, restrained way.

She sees his 40-year-old eyes crinkle at the sides, eyes the palest she's ever known, like some great big cat. She almost giggles. They are on the edge of so many sort ofs and almosts as she leans closer, now forehead to forehead. This is painful to him as he is becoming farsighted, but he doesn't draw back. He accommodates.

Id vicious

EVAN J. GARZA — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:22:27 GMT

The Museum School Art Sale at SMFA, ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock + Roll’ at Steven Zevitas Gallery
Money is a dominant topic of conversation in the art world even when there isn’t a global financial crisis.

The great Boston art shakeout

GREG COOK — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:01:33 GMT

Ten local galleries closed this year. Where are we going?
By September, the Harrison Avenue gallery district seemed to have become a zombie, stiffly stumbling forward, as the citywide exhibit-space upheaval that began this past spring caught up with the neighborhood.

FIRST FRIDAY CROWD I: Visitors browse Howard Yezerski Gallery’s new digs at 460 Harrison.

By September, the Harrison Avenue gallery district seemed to have become a zombie, stiffly stumbling forward, as the citywide exhibit-space upheaval that began this past spring caught up with the neighborhood. Ten galleries were shuttered across Boston in 2008, seven of them in the South End, driven mostly by expiring leases and gloomy economic forecasts. The number of local venues deeply engaged in the future of contemporary art — particularly locally-made contemporary art — shrank. This fall, with each day auguring further economic catastrophe, the future looked even worse.

But this past week, Harrison Avenue came back to life, abuzz with hundreds of people out for the First Friday gallery receptions. All told, eight galleries have opened or changed addresses in the district since February. On Friday four of those galleries participated in the monthly showcase for the first time since settling in. Two more spaces are slated to open there next month.

Over the past decade, the South End has increasingly challenged Newbury Street as the heart of the city's art scene. This year's changes shifted the center of gravity to Harrison Avenue. "Before we were a destination because of the uniqueness of First Fridays," says Arlette Kayafas of GALLERY KAYAFAS. "Now I think we will be a destination because of that, but also the quality of the work."

Friday's visitors and dealers were energized, hopeful, and happily surprised. The rearrangements landed substantial players in more prominent storefronts, making the neighborhood feel as if — maybe — it was in better shape than it was a year ago.

The upheaval has made the South End feel excitingly new, but has diminished Newbury Street. Economic nervousness abounds. And some worry that this new world order may mean more shows of less adventurous work.

A wash
This year's gallery shakeup has been nothing short of seismic. Over the course of 2008, the gallery building at 450 Harrison Avenue — where multi-year leases were up and rents were increasing — lost ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY, BERNARD TOALE GALLERY (whose namesake, Bernard Toale, switched his focus from exhibiting to consulting), Michael Price's MPG CONTEMPORARY, GALLERY XIV (which last fall had taken over the 450 space previously occupied by Locco Ritoro), and JULIE CHAE GALLERY (which opened in 2007 in space vacated by Genovese/Sullivan when it moved to Andover; Chae now plans to move to New York).

Here comes the sun

JIM SULLIVAN — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:54:17 GMT

It's All Right
It's All Right

Call of the cash

CAROLYN CLAY — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:46:36 GMT

The Merchant of Venice ; Voyeurs de Venus ; The Oil Thief
Naming The Merchant of Venice after Antonio is like naming Medea after Jason.

MONEY: That’s what they want.

Naming The Merchant of Venice after Antonio is like naming Medea after Jason. The victim isn’t half as compelling as the avenging victim, and such is Shylock, the diamond-hearted center of Shakespeare’s unsettling comedy set on the Rialto — in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s current rendering (at Midway Studios through December 7) a street as lucre-centric as Rodeo Drive. Coins are jingled and bills peeled away from thick wads of cash from the get-go in a bold, fleet production in which Shylock is not the only man made — or unmade — of money.

Director Melia Bensussen is not the first to suggest that the Christians of Venice are as obsessed with cash as Shylock is. But what Bensussen, an intelligent director who is also a practicing Jew, brings to the table is an unwillingness to take a Sound of Music approach to solving the problem that is Shylock. In her judiciously trimmed modern-dress production, Jeremiah Kissel, also an observant Jew, is a tough if also heartrending Shylock — in the beginning a guy you might meet at a bar mitzvah, later one you might meet in a nightmare. Approached by Antonio and his empty-pocketed chum, Bassanio, for money to finance the latter’s wife-winning mission to Belmont, Kissel’s Shylock is a half-menacing, half-mischievous kibitzer, a fast-talking gum chewer who, every time he mentions the rich sum of 3000 ducats, either takes his head in his hands and shakes it or slaps himself silly. Here the frisky Borscht Belt businessman may hide malevolent intent beneath some pointed clowning, but he’s more likable than Robert Wash’s black-clad, suavely depressive, arrogantly derisive Antonio.

The turning point, of course, is Shylock’s betrayal by his daughter, Jessica, the browbeating of whom Kissel does not stint. But the young lady flees with her Christian lover with not just a casket but also a fat briefcase of booty. Encountering some Christians who have met this tragedy with hilarity, Kissel cuts short his opening riposte at the words, “You knew — ,” thus implicating all Christian Venice in his heartbreak. From this point on, he is agitated but stony, except for a few courtroom flashes mimicking his demonization.

The production separates with uncommon smoothness the play’s courtroom melodrama and its Belmont-set romantic comedy, which is ebullient, particularly when Marianna Bassham’s lively, conspiratorial Nerissa has anything to do with it. The teasing, boudoir-bound comedy of the rings that brings the play to a close, leaving Antonio alone like the cheese, is particularly charming and lusty. Then again, Antonio’s not quite alone. The production’s last image is of Shylock in his counting house, letting hollow coins slip through his fingers.

Exposures

GREG COOK — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:51:06 GMT

Photos from Yousuf Karsh, William Christenberry, and the PRC
In "Karsh 100: A Biography in Images," which is now up at the Museum of Fine Arts, his iconic shots of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Ernest Hemingway are defining portraits of the men in all their crusty manliness.

OLD HOUSE, NEAR AKRON, ALABAMA (1964): The soul of Christenberry's photography is in his
Southern Gothic subjects, not his compositions.

Photos: Yousuf Karsh, William Christenberry, and the PRC

"Karsh 100: A Biography In Images" | Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave | Through January 19

"William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961-2005" | Massart, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston | Through December 6

"Keeping Time: Cycle And Duration In Contemporary Photography" | Photographic Resource Center, Boston University, 832 Comm Ave, Boston | Through January 25

You might say Yousuf Karsh was a one-man golden era of portrait photography. In "Karsh 100: A Biography in Images," which is now up at the Museum of Fine Arts, his iconic shots of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Ernest Hemingway are defining portraits of the men in all their crusty manliness. And check out his willowy profile of Audrey Hepburn, the craggy face of Boris (Frankenstein's monster) Karloff, and a smoldering Anita Ekberg, eyes closed, smiling, hair blowing across her face, bosom thrust forward.

MFA photo curator Anne Havinga brings together more than 100 of Karsh's photos. The time line runs from his apprenticeship in Boston (1928-'31) to setting up his own business in Ottawa (1932) to his great success photographing for Life magazine and other major publications to his return to Boston (1997 until his death in 2002). It's a seductive star-studded show.

The development of photography in the 19th century made realist painting really, really uncool for a long time, and it cleared the way for photography to be the primary medium of portraiture in the 20th century. Karsh had the good luck to arrive on the scene just as advances in printing were fostering the birth of Life (founded in 1936) and other glossy photography-centered publications — and thus whole new markets for photos. He angled to become the court portraitist of the rich, famous, and powerful of this era.

His breakthrough was his 1941 photo of Winston Churchill as a great, grand, stately ruler. Churchill's head is spotlit while the rest falls into shadow; the result highlights a defiant expression that was read as his steadfastness during wartime. But what stands out in Karsh's oft-told account is his fawning before Churchill, who was grumpy about posing because his staff had not informed him of the sitting. Karsh wrote, "I timorously stepped forward and said, 'Sir, I hope I will be fortunate enough to make a portrait worthy of this historic occasion.' " Churchill granted him just two exposures. The British leader's expression seems to have been provoked by Karsh's politely plucking his cigar from his mouth.

Dance, Monkey: Baron Vaughn

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:39:37 GMT

We put a comic on the hot seat. This week's victim...
We're not far off from a time when discontented McCain supporters will say things like, "Argh! I stubbed my toe! Damn you, Obama, and your move-around-my-furniture-while-I'm-sleeping ways!"