Gabriel Orozco at MOMA

Ducking out of the meshugas that was the Tim Burton exhibition, I found myself wandering around the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at MOMA.

I had never heard of this apparently very significant and influential sculptor. But I immediately fell in love.

Not with his shoe box or his yogurt container tops.

But with his spit and ink drawings on graph paper.

His pen and ink pieces.

And, most incredibly, his biomorphic and strange and beautiful ceramic pieces.

I loved his materials, his textures, his eye.

Unfortunately I had a lot of trouble finding images of the work that I saw. I love this bicycle piece, but there was so much more that really resonated with me.

I might go back, because when I looked online for Orozco images, I found things from this show that I don't recall seeing. In particular a giant mobile skeleton of a whale or something. Don't know how I missed it -- oh one thing that might have contributed to my confusion was that a big group of middle school children flooded the exhibition, and so I was kind of itching to vamoose, in spite of how much I was enjoying the work.

Tim Burton at MOMA

I had been dying to see the Tim Burton exhibition at MOMA and finally went this afternoon.

It was a huge show, with tons of drawings and sculptures. It really sucked you into his aesthetic and particular imagination.

The problem was, it was so fucking crowded. I skipped a lot of stuff because I felt cranky and couldn't deal with the crowds. I didn't feel like I missed that much, though, because, even though I find his work wonderful and the output of his imagination is breath-taking, I still also find it a bit redundant. There wasn't that much reason to see every single drawing he ever made. Also, I think this is a case where seeing the work live in person isn't that necessary. You really can get a sense of it from other media. I would be just as happy to look through a book of his work. Which is not to say that I don't think he deserves a retrospective at the MOMA. He is an important artist and I'm glad to see him recognized.

But the crowds! Jeesh!

Patti Smith Dream of Life

My mother recorded the PBS POV documentary Patti Smith Dream of Life for me (brilliantly filmed by Stephen Sebring), and we watched it together last night and this morning at her house.

It was incredibly beautiful, and gave this wonderful, disjointed, impressionistic composite of Patti Smith as a consummate artist. I really enjoyed it. I'm very tired right now, and don't feel like writing, so I'm just going to copy and paste what PBS says about the work:

"Shot over 11 years by acclaimed fashion photographer Steven Sebring, Patti Smith: Dream of Life is a remarkable plunge into the life, art, memories and philosophical reflections of the legendary rocker, poet and artist. Sometimes dubbed the "godmother of punk" — a designation justified by clips of her early rage-fueled performances — Smith was much more than that when she broke through with her 1975 debut album, Horses. A poet and visual artist as well as a rocker, she befriended and collaborated with some of the brightest lights of the American counterculture, an often testosterone-driven scene to which she brought a swagger and fierceness all her own.

Through performance footage, interviews, poems, paintings, photographs and Smith's voice-over reminiscences, Dream of Life reveals a complicated, charismatic personality wrestling with the paradoxes of being an artist in America and of being a woman in a male-dominated music scene.

Smith also wrestles with the tragedies — the deaths of her husband and brother — that brought her back to New York and to performing. Layering Smith's words over innovative camera techniques, the film explores how one woman discovered herself through music, how she survived tragedy, how she raised two children and how she endeavors in a quest for peace, for herself and for the world.

In telling Smith's story, Sebring plumbs the history of several important cultural movements. Smith's collaborations and close friendships with poets William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and musicians Bob Dylan and Michael Stipe reveal the links that make her a bridge between the Beats, the punk movement and musicians of today. The colorful moments in Dream of Life are plenty: Smith as an angelic street urchin, reciting "A Prayer for New York" in footage from 1975; a jam session with her 1970s collaborator, playwright Sam Shepard; Smith reading an Allen Ginsberg poem at Ginsberg's funeral; and Smith hanging out on the beach with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Mimic

Mimic is a piece of crap.

It's a movie about mutant strains of some bug that was invented to kill cockroaches which were carrying a disease. It was just such B-flick derivative unscary predictable crap.

Del Toro, who I love, directed it. Which is why I rented it. But jeez. It was bad.

Mira Sorvino played the brave entomologist heroine.

Meridith McNeal at Figureworks

My first art exhibit for 2010 was wonderful!

The other night I went to the opening of Meridith McNeal's solo show at Figureworks in Williamsburg. Her pen and ink and watercolor works are so beautiful. The gallery was pretty crowded, but it wasn't so much so that I didn't get a chance to each one, and each was more special and more perfectly implemented than the next. She manages to capture something very special in every image.

Der Rosenkavalier

OMG, yesterday I saw the live HD screening of Der Rosenkavalier at BAM and it was fucking awesome.

I was blown away.

I was pretty wary of it after watching the DVD with Te Kanawa a couple of weeks ago. There were parts of it I liked okay, but basically I thought it was "tough" and I was worried about sitting through four hours and forty five minutes of it again. Yes, I said FOUR HOURS AND FORTY FIVE MINUTES.

That's a lot.

But it didn't matter. This Met Opera production with Renee Fleming and Susan Graham pretty much flew by. I was completely engrossed the whole time and deeply, deeply moved by Renee Fleming's portrayal of the Marchaline. She had a lovely and subtle emotional range that just brought tears to my eyes practically every time she opened her mouth. She also had the best words of the opera, all the dramatic depth came from her character. After the opera I had my ladies poker group and I ended up quoting her a few times. She says at one point that you live oblivious to time and then suddenly it's everywhere and all you think about. She is hands down my favorite character in opera so far.

Kristinn Sigmundsson played Baron Ochs with a wonderful maniacal intensity.

I can't remember the soprano who played Sophie, but her performance was the least compelling.

The Devil's Backbone

I'm not sure how I felt about The Devil's Backbone, directed by Guillermo del Toro, who also directed Pan's Labyrinth (I mistakenly thought he did The Orphanage as well).

It's a very interesting story about an orphanage that is haunted by a dead child during the Spanish Civil War. But the ghost story isn't the main plot. It's related to the bigger story about the adults in the orphanage and their politics. The drama between these characters was actually rather unusual, but right now I'm tired and don't feel like writing about it.

There was some very intense violence that was one of the most awful scenes I'd ever seen.

Basically this felt like a combination of horror and melodrama, and I'm not sure how it worked. I was scared at some points, but not terribly scared; I was drawn into the story, but it also felt somehow like a cliche. I just don't know...