Word: hartleys
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...cutups of the '20s, Leopold and Loeb, are back, artier and hornier than ever. Stacy Cochran's My New Gun: doctor gives his restless wife a handgun; audience waits for it to go off. Add two other, more seasoned directors of outlaw movies -- Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant) and Hal Hartley (Simple Men) -- and you have a tough new movie generation. If they'd all gone to film school, their yearbook portraits would be mug shots...
...though certainly he was a good one. The show, and in particular Powell's detailed catalog -- a benchmark in the study of black American art -- do open a door for Johnson's entry into that history, even though Powell's claim that Johnson was a kind of black Marsden ; Hartley, discovering full identification with his people through folk culture, passing from a "narrow and skewed" Eurocentric primitivism to a fully integrated "black, populist aesthetic," seems overblown. What matters, however, is that he once was lost, and now is found...
...Armory Show, which he had helped organize: roadkill, as it were, on art history's Route 66. He didn't quite have the empirical genius of the older Winslow Homer, to whom his early work strongly relates; nor did he quite possess the visionary force of Marsden Hartley, with whom he shared a love of romantic, elemental images -- sea, rock, the buffeting air of Maine...
...other paintings in his career show the same fine play between aesthetic intent and illusionism. Usually it's the eye-fooling that wins. The comment of a great American Modernist, Marsden Hartley, is cited by one essayist: "In Harnett there is nothing to bother about, nothing to confuse, nothing to $ interpret . . . there is the myopic persistence to render every single thing singly." The catalog protests this, pointing to the stories that underlie the conglomerations of things in his still lifes, which do indeed provide something to interpret. But was this what Hartley meant? In fact, no. He saw what...
TRUST. Typical Hal Hartley dialogue: "Will you trust me?" "If you trust me first." In this deadpan romance, the writer-director limns the palship of a pregnant high schooler (Adrienne Shelly) and a sociopath genius (Martin Donovan). Another fond sketch of losers from the down-scale version of Woody Allen...