Word: avante
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...exceptional interest. Organized by Mark Rosenthal, an art historian from Berkeley, Calif, it will give most museumgoers in America their first proper look at one of the fundamental modernist painters. There have not been many unalloyed classicists in 20th century art, and although Gris' work has its avant-garde credentials, it can now be seen as he probably wanted it to be: as the extension, into a modern idiom (for cubism was, to him, a kind of ultimate language) of the tradition of calm, cerebrative painting that flowed from Chardin through Seurat, and whose essential subject was still life...
...both Artistic Director and Patron for the Boston Shakespeare Company. Sellars' commitment to Pericles and his perspective on it must result from much work, yet his points get lost in an amateur hodge-podge of avant-garde theatricality. He sacrifices crucial substance for a vapid style, believing his messages can still come across. The last scene seemed comical to much of the audience, but watching Sellars stare intently and emotionally at the stage, one quickly realized this was no farce to laugh at but serious stuff. Only...
Such are the arresting components of Available Light, a 55-minute collaboration of three prominent minimalists that premiered last week in Los Angeles. Created by Choreographer Lucinda Childs, Composer John Adams and Architect Frank O. Gehry, Available Light is less a milestone than a signpost. Today's avant-garde has had to circle back on its forebears: the same impulse that gave rise earlier in this century to atonal music and flamboyant attitudes in dance now deals in the certainties of plotless movement and assertive major triads...
Just how far the pendulum has swung is evident in Available Light, which travels to the Brooklyn Academy of Music later this month. Childs, who collaborated earlier with fellow avant-gardists such as Composer Philip Glass and Theater Artist Robert Wilson, is a cool rationalist who favors organizational clarity over overt emotionalism. The repeating patterns that ripple through her dances are imitated and finally dispersed like waves spreading across a pond. There are no kicks, leaps or pronounced extension. Childs' dynamic level rarely rises above a whispered pianissimo...
...says her dance is closely allied with Adams' music, too often the two clash: the sounds urgent, the movements passive. Further, visual minimalism palls more quickly than its aural counterpart, and beside Adams' expanded vocabulary, Childs' monochromaticism looks dated. By definition, being a member of the avant-garde means always being in motion, like running up a down escalator: if you are not actively moving forward, you are surely moving backward. -By Michael Walsh