Author: Eileen Townsend

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Art Exhibit M

Johnathan Robert Payne’s “Meet Me Where I’m At”

I was really hyped to see Johnathan Robert Payne’s performance, ”Meet Me Where I’m At,” Friday night at Crosstown Arts. I’m glad I did. 

I’ve loved Payne’s art since I first ran across it at Beige, where the artist had a solo show last fall. That show was made up of obsessive, abstract ballpoint pen drawings — all modular lines, meditatively blended. I’m a sucker for his pensive and lonely works on paper, which seem more about the repetitive process than the final product. They recall Alighiero Boetti’s intricate ballpoint pen pieces, as well as the strangely sloping linear drawings of folk artist Marin Ramirez. They feel to me like a removed headspace, rhythmically applied.

Which is partially why I was so curious about this show. How would Payne’s pensive, quiet style of making translate into performance?

We were given 20 minutes between the show’s opening and the start of the performance to roam the gallery. Near the door, there were several curtains made of cut paper that Payne threaded together, fishnet style. A black, industrial tub full of water sat in the middle of the room. Several small drawings hung on the walls and, in one corner, a braided yarn rope dangled from the ceiling. Towards the back of the space, lit tea lights demarcated an 8ft x 5ft (est) rectangle on the ground. A projector lit up the far wall of the gallery, paused on a still frame from the opening sequence of Billy Blank’s Tae Bo Workout. The objects could have been the set-up for a joke: “A duck walks into a bar…”

Payne entered the space, kneeled facing the audience, and immediately shaved his beard and head. As he shaved his head, I became aware of what he was wearing: a grey hoodie, which suddenly took on a monastic glow. I also became aware of text on the paused screen behind him, a disclaimer that reminded us that Tae Bo is not a substitute for “counseling from your healthcare professional.” Payne then put on a pair of glasses and moved into the middle of the tealight-defined stage. The video started. For the next 50 minutes, he faced the back wall of Crosstown arts and did Tae Bo.

Payne was dwarfed by the screen, by Billy Blank’s huge projected visage. The scale of the projection reminded me of what it was like to watch Tae Bo commercials as a kid during endless, bored summers. Billy Blank instructs a crowd of fitness models on a red mat, backed up by graphic art of Billy Blank himself and a block lettered sign that reads “BE STRONG.”

Tae Bo, it turns out, is really difficult. Payne became visibly more exhausted as the video picked up speed. After 45 minutes had passed, the audience members who’d hung around that long started to cheer Payne on: “You got this!” or “Almost there!” Some of the Tae Bo moves were funny. Others were exposing. It was hypnotic. The bathtub loomed.

When the video finally ended, Payne sat down and turned towards the audience. He looked beat. He was a human again. I felt a wave of embarrassment, or guilt, or something. Payne then stripped down to his boxers and got in the bathtub. He submerged himself, then washed his whole body, carefully, with a bar of ivory soap. He didn’t acknowledge us.

He got out of the bathtub, still wet, and began to pick up small fortune cookie fortunes that, I realized, had been floating in the water. For the first time, Payne looked at us, and read: “Now is the time to investigate new possibilities with friends.” He then picked up another object — a pink funnel attached to a pink tube, beer bong style — and filled it with the fortune and soapy bathwater. For a moment, I thought he was going to offer it to us to drink.

Instead, he turned the action on himself. He attempted to swallow the water, choked and spit up. He repeated this action with three more fortunes (“a distant friendship could begin to look more promising,” “you will take a pleasant journey to a place far away,” “you will soon have the opportunity to improve your finances”), circling the tub each time. Then he exited the room. Someone said: “Are we going to clap? That was pretty good, wasn’t it?” and everyone clapped.

Payne’s work is punishing, but not exactly cruel. Tae Bo is a lonely mortification to be followed by ablutions in a rubbermaid tub, to be followed by a spiel of Chinese fortunes (the food of lonely American cliche.) These are familiar, unthinking moments. Who hasn’t worked out alone, showered, and eaten take out?

The weirdness of performance art vs. theater is that, rather than removing you from your body with a fear of lighting and narrative, performance art more often than not makes you super conscious of it. Which might be Payne’s point: rinse, repeat, repeat, rinse, pay attention. Stay aware. We’re all lonely. Meet us where we’re at. 

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Art Art Feature

“This Light of Ours” at the Brooks

“This Light of Ours” at the Brooks Museum is a timely and necessary exhibition. It is unique among documents of the civil rights movement because it showcases exclusively activist photography. The included images were all tactically made and smartly deployed by artists whose mission was not only to document what was happening, but to influence events in real time. “Our job,” writes exhibition curator and featured photographer Matt Herron “was to get the pictures and get them out into the wider world, not to collect glory or jail time as some civil rights hero.” In order to get their work out into the world, activist photographers developed guerrilla methods — improvising darkrooms, lying to officials, and hiding out when circumstances were dangerous.

The nine photographers whose work is featured hail from vastly different backgrounds. All uprooted their lives to travel through the South as the movement picked up speed in the early 1960s. Bob Fitch’s personal photography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s family is featured alongside Maria Varela’s densely atmospheric photographs of black Southern life. Tamio Wakayama, a Canadian photographer who spent his early years in an internment camp, photographed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the height of its influence. He later wrote, “There was a pervading sense that not only were we a part of history, but we were history itself.” Work by George Ballis, Herbert Randall, Bob Fletcher, David Prince, and Bob Adelman is also included, organized chronologically by event, rather than by photographer.

The exhibition is divided into four distinct sections: “Black Life,” “Organizing for Freedom,” “State and Local Terror,” and “Meredith March Against Fear and Black Power.” The featured works are both formally visually striking and saturated with important narrative, more than is possible to take in on one viewing. I found myself circling the exhibition, returning to certain photographs again and again with the feeling that there was still more to absorb. It is hard to overstate how moving these images are.

Subtle details within some of the photographs reveal parts of the civil rights story often looked over, such as the pervasive presence of weapons amongst both activists and Southern segregationists. A particularly striking photograph by Herron shows a young organizer and an older man sitting in a small library, facing a curtainless window, their backs turned to the camera. The older man holds a rifle. Herron writes in the exhibition materials, “The movement was nonviolent; the community was not.”

Some of the best photographs in the exhibit are also, on first glance, the quietest. Wakayama’s sparse shot of a memorial service held for slain activists James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner is devastating. Organizer Bob Moses stands amidst the ashes of Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Flowers are situated in rubble and charred wood.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from “This Light of Ours” is that the formal beauty of these photographs — their importance as works of art — is inseparable from their strategic importance as catalysts of social change. In one of Wakamaya’s photographs, a young man stands on the porch of an organizing center in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. A wooden cross bisects the foreground of the photo, visually separating the young man’s head from his body. The cross is emblazoned with a hand-painted logo that reads simply, “Freedom.”

In “This Light of Ours,” we have a potentially important curriculum for today’s protests, where, as Herron put it, “everyone is a photographer and everyone carries a camera.” We need thorough references like exhibitions like this to understand how we got where we are and where we are going next. Herron put it simply: “The job isn’t done. We made a lot of progress in the civil rights movement, but it is far from over.”

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Art Art Feature

“Between the Eyes” at Crosstown Arts

I once took an art history class for which we were required to buy a textbook called Living With Art. The teacher joked that it made art sound like a terminal disease, like the cultural equivalent of Living With Heart Failure. It was funny and unfortunately apt: Critical and curatorial discussion around art too often feels like people whispering at a funeral. It is a task to not get sucked into all the morbidity.

Which is why it is great that “Between the Eyes,” the current exhibition of abstract painting at Crosstown Arts, stakes no great critical claims. It asks us, instead, to embrace the openness of artistic questions. Make something weird and see where it takes you. Figure out the question after you have the answer.

The 14 featured works were brought together by curator Laurel Sucsy, a Memphis-based painter whose abstractions are featured alongside works by Marina Adams, Joe Fyfe, and Rubens Ghenov, among others. Sucsy says that compiling the show was an “extension of what I do in the studio anyway.” The works are intuitively paired and quietly presented. Move too quickly and you’ll miss all the best things about this show.

Marina Adams’ Four Worlds

A good starting place, if you’ve got an hour or two, is Adams’ muddled green-whites and deep indigos in her painting The Wild Feminine. This painting is deceptively simple on first glance, but pay it some attention and it gives a lot back. I have jotted in my notes “this painting makes me want to live inside color.” Likewise with another large-scale (74″ x 74″) work by Adams, Four Worlds, which features several large color fields connected by an undulating line. That one is all about the yellow.

Opposed to Adams’ work are two large canvases by Iva Gueorguieva. Gueorguieva’s paintings are harshly layered with an angular, futurist bent that recalls broken cityscapes. They remind me of drawings by the late visionary architect Lebbeus Woods, whose manifesto claims that “architecture is war.” Color and line frantically vie for attention in Vanishing (after Perugino), a yellow-and-black piece built out of shifting planes. This piece is more effective than Gueorguieva’s Scarlet Squall, where much of the action of the piece takes place in a weird, circular foreground.

Rubens Ghenov’s Slow Ektaal

Ghenov’s paintings are also architectural, but these buildings exist in the uncanny valley. Ghenov makes what I like to call “sky hole” paintings: bits and pieces of geometry that seem grafted onto the infinite. These void-collages couple well with Fyfe’s sparse assemblages. Fyfe’s so-called paintings strike me as too bare bones to stand alone, but they do interesting things for the rest of the exhibition.

Rob de Oude’s Fanning a Recurring Past

Rob de Oude’s square canvases are pseudo-mechanical productions of hundreds and hundreds of overlaid lines. The resultant visual effect is something along the lines of what it looks like to take a picture of a computer screen with your phone. As Sucsy put it, de Oude works with “familiar optics” in a way that dissociates them from their usual context.

Sucsy’s work is a highlight of the show and a touchstone for any experience of the other pieces. During a gallery talk this past week, someone remarked that Sucsy’s paintings are “finished with a lowercase f” — meaning that what resolution they have is tenuous at best. Her small abstractions composed of murky diamonds are careworn, worked-over. They have an evasive quality, like afternoon light.

The art writer and artist John Berger once posed the question, “Where are we when we draw?” This applies here: Where are we when we paint? A good painting (and there are plenty of good paintings in this show) creates a kind of commons — a place where an artist can share subtle perceptions, extended across space and time. You could easily walk away from any of the works in “Between the Eyes” none the wiser. Or you could live with them.

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Film Features Film/TV

Ex Machina

For the best reviews of the new cyborg flick Ex Machina, go read the comments on the movie’s YouTube trailer. There, you will find a variety of good observations, such as, “Why is the A.I. almost always female?”; “Maybe if people would stop treating their A.I.’s like shit then they wouldn’t go nuts and want to kill everyone”; and “I think this movie is made for the blow up doll fanciers. What Sick Bastards, that makes us humanize toaster ovens.”

I will confirm Ex Machina is a movie about “humanize[d] toaster ovens” that are created by a sick bastard. The film follows Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), a young programmer who has won a vaguely defined online contest. His prize is a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a genius billionaire who lives alone on a Norwegian estate that looks like a cross between Camp David and Rivendell.  

Ex Machina

Nathan is a supposedly chill dude (spoiler alert: he’s not really chill) who also happens to be developing cutting-edge robots. He needs Caleb, a freshman with a big heart, to interact with a robot named Ava in order to determine whether or not she has achieved sentience. Caleb is in over his head and knows it, but he is too curious to back out of the increasingly weird circumstances. Nathan, meanwhile, is revealed as an unstable alcoholic who abuses his sole employee, a beautiful, silent servant named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno).

We first meet the robot Ava (Alicia Vikander plus a team of motion-graphics artists) from Caleb’s perspective: She is silhouetted against a window in her locked chambers. She has a shy, sad-eyed, Natalie Portman vibe. Her artificial face is prosthetically masked with human features, but her body looks like a shapely version of the see-through computer my nerdy high school boyfriend once built. When Caleb is allowed to speak to her through a glass, Ava points out that she understands his “microexpressions.” She can tell he likes her, maybe too much. From there, Ex Machina is standard fare, as conjectural parallel realities go: Boy meets Robot. Boy loves Robot. But Robot is a robot. What will become of Boy?

Alicia Vikander as Ava


The script, while competent, is laden with grating cultural reference. Nathan and Caleb cite Prometheus while they drink wine and eat sushi. In one scene, Nathan explains his life philosophy through the extended metaphor of a Jackson Pollock painting. Caleb, for his part, regularly says things like “If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. That’s the history of gods!”

For a movie about the stunning reach of tech, the tech in Ex Machina is weirdly campy. In order to gain entrance to the most preciously guarded scientific research facility in the world, all Caleb has to do is pickpocket a key card, the kind you get at Days Inn. The sci-fi logic of the film, which could make it worthwhile, also falls flat. When Nathan gives Caleb a tour of the A.I. batcave, a room scattered with detached prosthetics and eerie light tables, he holds up a brain-shaped piece of glowy glass and tells Caleb it is the A.I.’s mind. Thought sequences, he explains, are downloaded in real time from billions of searches. Imagine what it would actually be like to talk to something that formed its reality based on web searches. I just typed “What is…” into Google and the second and third suggested searches — based on some seriously high-level algorithmic intelligence — were “What is Coachella?” and “What is a thot?” There may be some epistemological problems with crowd-sourcing.

A version of Ex Machina told from Ava’s perspective would have been infinitely more interesting. Near the end of the movie, Ava tries to make herself look human by donning a wig and applying layer after layer of prosthetic skin to her robot body. She stares in the mirror, investigating her weird, new self. Save yourself the trouble of seeing this movie and instead go read Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, where she describes cyborgs as “the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war.” It’s a start.

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Art Art Feature

Rock the Boat

CREDIT: Courtesy of LJM Studios

I’m a fan of Lester Merriweather’s art. His intricate collages, built out of carefully arrayed clippings from luxury magazines, are both bleak and sumptuous. They looked great in 2013 at TOPS Gallery, as a part of his exhibition “Black House | White Market” and again in 2014 in his Crosstown Arts solo exhibition “Colossus.” Merriweather is also an active curator who currently heads the University of Memphis’ Fogelman Galleries.

“Nothing Is For Ever Last,” Merriweather’s latest solo exhibition at the Dixon, is not his best. The work is similar, in both subject matter and approach, to that shown in previous exhibitions. Many of the works depict colonial-era ships on crested seas beneath mythologically bright blue skies. Others are gilded assemblages of luxury magazine ads, flowers, and jewels arranged ornamentally on matte canvases. The best work in the show, hydra, is a seascape composed of glossy female hair. A monster built from the nude arms of white models emerges from the hair-sea only to be flattened against a glitchy sky. In hydra, Merriweather recasts taken-for-granted images of (white) female beauty into something disorienting and unexpected.

Merriweather’s works are best when they awe with scale and shininess. The work in “Nothing Is For Ever Last” feels undercooked compared to past exhibitions. Collages are mixed in with a variety of model ships. Merriweather replaces the ships’ sails with red and blue bandanas (crip ship and blood vessel) or else he dips them in plaster to ghostly effect (dipped ship). These pieces succeed more in the description than the execution; Many look shabby where they should gleam.

Elsewhere, Merriweather replaces the hulls of ships with Louis Vuitton and Chanel Bags. untitled (commercial vessel) doesn’t need a title; it is all designer monograms, afloat in dark waters, its crew overboard and grasping from the depths. Hip-hop-influenced high fashion intersects Euro-colonialist imagery for an overarching comment on the violent legacy of global luxury trade.

One of Merriweather’s smaller, untitled collages is built from the spread of a historical magazine. Page left is a description of the British Navy’s defense strategies. Page right is a romantic painting of a ship — The Resolution — capsizing in a storm. Merriweather collages a model’s arm into the waves, sea-monster-style. This work is simple, but it stands out because it is so directly related to what’s across the hall in the Dixon; an exhibit called “Hail Britannia!” that features a lot of paintings of ships and the aristocrats who owned them.

I imagine the point of putting exhibitions like “Hail Britannia!” and “Nothing Is For Ever Last” next to each other is to create what curators like to call “a conversation” between two different kinds of work. Merriweather’s work says: British colonialism spawned centuries of waste and human casualty and wrought havoc on the globe. “Hail Britannia!” says: The British Empire employed lots of painters who were not half bad at painting seascapes.

Maybe this implied “conversation” would have more going for it if there weren’t about 10 times more paintings in “Hail Britannia!” than are in “Nothing Is For Ever Last” or if Merriweather’s work pulled off the grandiosity it has in past exhibitions. Or maybe if the exhibition literature, which alludes to “statements” that Merriweather’s work makes about “urban” life in America (must we tiptoe so lightly?), had been braver.

“Nothing Is For Ever Last” suggests a void in the conversation on race and wealth in America that it doesn’t attempt to fill. It left me wanting more.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Slothrust at the Lamplighter

CREDIT: Shervin Lainez

Some advice from frontwoman Leah Wellbaum of Brooklyn-based band Slothrust delivered in the song “Crockpot”: “Don’t shake hands with the lonely kids, ’cause I hear that shit’s contagious.”

The lonely kids, contagious or not, will be in high form this coming Monday at the Lamplighter Lounge. Julien Baker, known around town for heading the band formerly known as the Star Killers (recently renamed Forrister), will play a set from her recent solo project — heartbreaking send-offs about lost love and stalled feelings; music for driving alone without knowing your destination. Also on hand will be Small Fires, an indie-emo-inspired acoustic project led by Ryan Azada (also of DADS) that sometimes includes Baker.

Shervin Lainez

Slothrust

Slothrust’s set (that is Sloth-rust) will emotionally graduate from longing into careworn apathy. Impose Magazine, in a review of the band’s most recent album, wrote: “Combining Leah Wellbaum’s slurring malaise with her punchy, post-grunge guitar, everything about Slothrust’s sound feels both earnest and cathartic, like a heart that pumps raw after a winter run.” Slothrust — a three-piece that also includes bassist Kyle Bann and drummer Will Gorin — is technically tight as hell, with lyrics to match.

Local Goner act Toxie will round out the evening in their underwhelmed, post-riotgrrrl style. Toxie, fronted by Alexandra Burden, smokes a cigarette, asks you to dance, and refuses to break eye contact.

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Art Art Feature

A Q&A with the Brooks’ new director Emily Ballew Neff.

Last week, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art announced that it’s hired a new executive director to fill the spot that has been empty since Cameron Kitchin left for the Cincinnati Art Museum. Emily Ballew Neff, who hails from Texas and has spent most of her career as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will join the Brooks in mid-April. Dr. Neff is an Americanist with a resume that also includes research in African and European arts, as well as degrees from Yale, Rice University, and the University of Texas Austin.

Neff took time to speak with the Flyer from Oklahoma last week, where she recently left a job as director and chief curator of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma.

Flyer: It seems as if Western American art has had a big influence in your career. While in Houston, you curated exhibits such as “The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950.” How do you think your past curatorial focus will relate to your work at the Brooks?

Neff: As an Americanist, I have done projects on painting and photography of the American West. I’ve also done projects on 18th-century Transatlantic British and American art. As an undergraduate, my senior thesis was on African art, and then my master’s thesis was on 19th-century French art. I have a broad background, but in terms of what I want to do — I don’t want to impose too much on Brooks and on the community until I get there, get to know the community, and try to figure out what would be a good fit. I’m a very firm believer that the wrong thing to do would be to come to a cultural climate that is as sophisticated and developed and historically important as Memphis’ is and impose my will. It needs to be a reciprocal — a conversation.

If I do come in with any agenda, it is to make sure that the art collection itself, which is terrific, is absolutely central in everything that the museum does. The museum has a great reputation for its education, its community outreach, and engagement. I would like to be able to enrich that already-great tradition. But the collection is really very fine, and I am all about the art. The Brooks has a major collection of encyclopedic art. That is an amazing legacy. I like to see the art of various cultures kind of bump up against one another in interesting ways … that kind of depth and breadth.

What is first on your agenda when you arrive? I know the Brooks has its 100-year anniversary coming up in 2016, and there are renovations planned to make the museum more accessible to visitors.

I need to hit the ground running. I know that the staff and the board have already been working hard on the 100-year anniversary. I think that it is an extraordinary opportunity for a new director. One of the questions I got yesterday from someone was, “Doesn’t this seem a little daunting, to come in right before this is all happening?” and I said, “It is the challenge that any museum director would want.” It gives you that opportunity to really focus on the institution and its history. It is a process that is going to involve the Memphis community in a very deep way, and I hope that what comes out of it is something that is a kind of strategy for the next chapter of the Brooks history … I like that sense of urgency. People care so much about this institution, and so we better do it right.

There has been an ongoing effort within the Brooks to incorporate more contemporary work and to have exhibitions that are not only about contemporary work at a national level but at a local level. Can you speak to your goals in terms of that effort?

I am really interested in contemporary art. I don’t know yet if this would be right for Memphis or not, but I am very interested in site-specific contemporary work. I think that is a fantastic way for the community to become kind of invested in [art]. I think that Overton Park is such a beautiful, exceptional treasure in Memphis, and I can see artists coming in and doing something that is temporary and site-specific — a kind of intervention. You don’t need to go inside the museum walls to experience art — you can also experience it while you are having a picnic at the park. I can’t wait to learn about the Memphis art scene; I know it is a very creative city, and it is going to take me awhile to get around and get to know people and to see it. This is a challenge, a challenge that I welcome, to balance the local with the global.

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Film/TV TV Features

Empire

At a glance, the new Fox series Empire looks like a serialized version of Craig Brewer’s 2005 movie, Hustle and Flow. It stars a top-of-her-game Taraji P. Henson opposite Terrence Howard as matriarch and patriarch of a hip-hop dynasty. The show openswith Cookie Lyon (Henson) leaving jail after a 17-year drug sentence and returning to claim what is rightfully hers: the successful music label run by ex-husband Lucious Lyon (Howard). Cookie is a catchphrase generator who dresses exclusively in bodycon dresses, and Lucious knows how to stare coldly across a room whilst looking deeply conflicted. Their chemistry, established in Hustle and Flow, is as potent as ever.

Apart from its excellent cast, Empire has more in common with English historical dramas than it does with Brewer’s film. Lucious, we learn, suffers from Lou Gehrig’s Disease and must leave Empire Records to one of his three talented sons: Andre (Trai Byers), the eldest, is all business; Jamal (Jussie Smollett) the middle child, is a soft-hearted composer in the mold of Frank Ocean; and Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) is a young rapper who is all about the booze and bitches.

Empire

King Lear is an obvious influence, though the series is actually more analogous to James Goldman’s 1966 play about the legacy of King Henry II, The Lion in Winter. When the play went silver screen in 1968, Katharine Hepburn starred as the fierce Queen Eleanor — long imprisoned by her husband, protective of her brood, scheming for power and revenge. Empire is a vehicle for Henson, who can easily drive the show with a twitch of one of her perfectly manicured eyebrows. Cookie is proudly maternal and truly hot — a victim of love but not its fool. She can also drop hilarious lines like, “You want Cookie’s nookie, ditch the bitch.”

Empire is a formulaic musical drama, and the formula works. Episodes are peppered with topical hits (courtesy of Timbaland) and usually conclude in a satisfying party/performance. The show supposedly takes place in New York City, but you wouldn’t know it because there are about three exterior shots of buildings in the whole series. This empire is built with bedrooms, board rooms, and recording studios.

There is a pleasant unreality to Empire, founded in its weird locationless-ness and spontaneous song, and reinforced by the total unsubtlety of the writing. We learn early on that Jamal is gay and closeted. Then we learn it again and again. Characters speak to each other as if they had recently lost their memory and are trying to establish a basic grip on the facts. When Andre, who is bipolar, starts to drink in the eighth episode, his wife tells him, “Andre, your meds won’t work if you drink.” Lucious, in an otherwise uneventful moment, tells everyone for the nth time, “You don’t get it! I’m about to be dead soon!” A note to any Empire producers concerned about clarity: We do get it.

The character development on Empire is also so obvious as to be totally inscrutable. Henson, Howard, and everyone else seem to act from behind their roles, rather than inside them, communicating with pure charisma. It is a shame, and it unfortunately begs the question — if this were a family drama about white people, would the script be more subtle, the characters less-frequently reduced to one-line summaries?

Empire is only on its eighth episode, but each contains enough high drama for a whole season of another show. It will be interesting to see how long it can last, with the ticking time bomb of Lucious’ illness and the steady introduction of new (and uniquely scheming!) characters. So far, we’ve seen the family double-cross each other in the interest of power, but, on the whole, their hearts are still intact. When Cookie tells Lucious she can make him immortal if he’ll just split up with “Fake-ass Halle Berry,” it somehow seems reasonable. But if the show doubles down on itself and starts assigning unreasonable motivations to unreasonable characters, it will lose its mojo. And we’ll move on to the next sumptuous musical drama. Which won’t have Cookie, and that will be a shame.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

“Fifty Shades Of Grey”

As a woman, a feminist, a person with eyes, and a human being who has had sex more than once, I can say with complete transparency that I hated Fifty Shades of Grey. It is an important movie, not because it is good, but because in Fifty Shades we have a great American cultural salon — a place where we can discuss what the heck is going on with us in 2015.

Based on an unaccountably popular softcore paperback by fanfiction writer E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey is the tale of a 22-year-old, virginal English lit major, Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), who falls in love with 27-year-old billionaire businessman Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). Grey is also hot for Ana, but he “doesn’t do” romance. He is a BDSM dominant who would prefer to keep Ana in his shiny bachelor pad and perform unmentionable things upon her naked body. Only problem with that plan is that Ana is a born romantic, and Grey just might be in love. After some happenstance and hijinks, Grey lures Ana to his sleek pad, where he asks her to be his submissive. When Grey lays down the terms of the BDSM contract, Ana asks: What might she receive in exchange for her freedom? Grey answers: “You get me.”

No reasonable human woman could think this is a good exchange. The problem is not that Ana might waste several good years trapped with a weird guy in a track-lit kitchen somewhere above Seattle, it’s that Christian Grey is not sexy. Somewhere between Justin Timberlake, our most neurotic pop icon, and Mark Zuckerberg, our most visible example of a successful, white, American male in 2015, we find Christian Grey.

Dornan’s success as a romantic lead rests on the premise that he is a troubled, hot dude with a couple of jets and a slick apartment. Archetypically, he should impress with a panty-twisting mix of vulnerability and control. He should do coke. He should carry a gun. But he doesn’t do anything bad, or even interesting. This is partially E.L. James’ fault and partially Dornan’s. When Grey assures us that he is “50 shades of fucked up,” it’s with all the deep darkness of a 20-year-old who’s seen Trainspotting.

The only evidence that Grey is anything but the tilapia option at the bad billionaires steak club is that he likes BDSM. He likes to tie women up; he’s bad. Never mind that most internet-possessing tweenagers could imagine more lurid scenes than what we see in Grey’s playroom. (Floggers and rope, lots of boobs and butt, a little pubic hair and thrusting, no full nudity.) What really irks is that Fifty Shades of Grey pathologizes BDSM so much as to make it Grey’s exciting flaw.

I don’t buy it. This movie is not about sex or even romance. It is about privacy. Grey is not merely interested in Ana. He admits early in one scene that he is “incapable of leaving her alone.” This, after we see him track her location from her cell phone and essentially kidnap her from a bar where she is drinking with her friends. That’s only the first in a line of actions that, to the impartial observer, are just plain stalking, but Ana seems only mildly miffed that her former independence has been replaced by his totalizing attention.

What in all holiness is my demographic (hi, ladies!) supposed to find alluring about this? It’s not sexy, so all we have left to ferry our deadened souls from one scene to the next are the displays of money and power.

How does Grey fund his elegant lifestyle? He’s 27 and lives in the Pacific Northwest. He’s bad at dating, and he’s into alt sex. He’s too sleek for hardware, but he could be a software guy or an app developer, though he seems too chilly for social media. Surely, Grey is a Google man.

This is a flick about power, which in 2015 means tech. Grey is a walking embodiment of it — an exciting, little-understood, but all-powerful force that promises us safety in exchange for the small matter of our privacy. We are all virginal English majors in the face of the Goog.

The romantic fantasy at the heart of Fifty Shades of Grey is that we are capable of negotiating with tech power. “You can leave at any time,” says Grey to Ana, before they enter the red room of expensive handcuffs. We see Ana parsing over details in her submission contract and telling him no-way-José can he suspend her from the ceiling using genital clamps. He pushes, she pulls. He eventually tells her that she is the one changing him. They are each other’s totally healthy and normal project, wink wink.

I’ll join everyone on the internet in saying this is not a picture of a healthy BDSM relationship between two self-selecting adults. Anastasia and Christian’s affair is a coercive situation that masquerades as an even-handed exchange. This year’s defining fairy tale is that the Anastasias of our world are capable of convincing the tech-moneyed powerful not just to control us, but also to care about our needs. Yeah, right.

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Art Art Feature

“I Thought I Might Find You Here” at Clough Hanson

CREDIT: Chip Pankey

Brian Pera’s sculptures about the suicide of his friend, Papatya Curtis, are not sentimental. They are colorful and brave and wildly sad, but they use none of the available sentiment — words and shapes and colors all comfortably ordered around grief — to explain loss.  

The pieces that make up Pera’s “I Thought I Might Find You Here,“ at Rhodes Clough-Hanson Gallery, are yarn, fabric, and wood assemblages in matte orange-red, black-currant purple, patagonia yellow, or not-my-first-rodeo teal. They look vital.

Pera first met Curtis in his neighborhood, at her yarn store, where he attended a weekly knit night. After her death in 2012, the yarn from the store was given away, and much of it now forms the raw materials of Pera’s sculptures.

The five sculptures that comprise the visual center of the show are organized around a film and a slideshow. The film, screened in a small side-gallery but ambiently available throughout the main gallery, shows visuals of knitting alongside audio interviews of Curtis’ friends, members of her knitting circle. The women talk about their late friend’s warmth, her bad luck in love, the day of her death, and how they each, individually and as a group, encountered what happened. In the slideshow, typed sentences broadcast in sheets of color against a back wall, Pera tells his version of the story. He describes Curtis and he describes his grief, but he disclaims both descriptions, saying it isn’t enough. “I won’t hold your attention,” he writes.

But he does hold our attention. The sculptures, the core of the show, have a progression. It is not clear if the emotional progression of the work matches the chronological order in which Pera built the pieces, but there is a definite spiritual chronology to the pieces — an invisible mountain, and Pera there climbing it. These are not memorials in the usual sense; they are the shapes grief makes in the body of someone grieving.

The first sculpture, your entry point, is freestanding but tethered to the low ceiling with a couple of bright chains. The body of the work is squarish, made of raw wood, some of the wood flecked with blue paint, some covered in orange muslin. There are spare knobs attached to odd sides of the work; a red belt; a line of hanging embroidery circles; a small wheel … elements strapped together in slightly organized chaos; details sans the thing they are detailing. In the belly of the sculpture there is a child-sized bundle of chicken wire wrapped in plastic and bright cloth, left exposed.

Behind the first sculpture, backed up against a wall, two posts from a deconstructed bed frame stand at an angle. Between the posts is a waterfall-like sheet of yellow thread. Bound in the thread are about 50 doll-sized, porcelain arms. The arms were made by Pera’s friend and collaborator, Nikkila Carrol, whose creations are anti-anatomical, shoulderless and strange, each frozen in a different gesture of failed defense. Next, there is a simple wooden chest attached to a hitch and mounted on wheels. The chest is draped with a colorful shawl, and the shawl is in turn draped with orange plastic construction fencing. This piece is compact but it has an implied motion. It asks to be taken somewhere. That call is answered by the fourth sculpture, a tower-like structure made of scrap wood and adorned with teal chimes and a heavy pink yarn hanging. If the chest asks to be dragged up a mountain, this tower is located at the summit of that climb. All the elements of the piece seem meant to blow in the wind.  

Finally, there is a compact, animal-like form made with blue and purple shag layered over a tight wrap of teal fabric. This last piece feels more born than made. If the rest of the sculptures can be read as a kind of frantic organization undertaken during the journey of grieving, this final work feels like what is allowed to stay on in the world after that process — something entirely new, created under circumstances of dangerous necessity.