Connect with us

Entertainment

Review: Spanish conquistadors and plastic vomit: That’s ‘Lifes’ at UCLA Hammer Museum

Published

on

Review: Spanish conquistadors and plastic vomit: That’s ‘Lifes’ at UCLA Hammer Museum

Halfway by means of my current go to to see “Lifes,” an eccentric exhibition in a single massive gallery on the UCLA Hammer Museum, a clattering sound accompanied by a visible blur rocketed by means of the room.

A protracted, fats, clear plastic tube, suspended on wires from the ceiling, emerged from a wall, dipped and disappeared into one other wall, burst out of one other wall, then disappeared again right into a wall once more. Every architectural encounter between tube and wall was framed by a big decal — a wall-papered digital picture of a white gallery torn open, its constructed innards of bricks and mortar uncovered, as if the wall had been smashed with a sledgehammer.

What was the passing blur? To search out out, finding the wall label was vital.

The plastic conduit is a pneumatic tube, a tool for transporting an object from right here to there utilizing compressed air. A small capsule will get pushed alongside contained in the cylinder. A kind of industrial service pigeon, common lengthy earlier than electronic mail and Amazon, pneumatic tubes was once frequent in workplace buildings, hospitals, department shops and such. You may ship a memo, a medical directive or an bill from one ground to a different very quickly flat.

Morag Keil, “The Vomit Vortex (element),” 2022, blended media

Advertisement

(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Instances)

Air Tube Switch Methods, the Orange-based firm that constructed the one within the Hammer present for Scottish-born, London-based artist Morag Kiel, has a lot of strategies on its web site for up to date purposes. “A 300-foot run travels in underneath 9 seconds,” it boasts. “A 500-foot run is lower than 14 seconds. Strive that on foot.”

Judging from the present, I consider them. The capsule rockets by. Artwork isn’t one of many proposed makes use of, however right here it’s.

The wall label reveals that what’s periodically whooshing over and round your head, unseen in capsules hurtling alongside inside this pneumatic tube, is synthetic vomit. I consider that too. Just like the digital decals of a smashed wall, internal fakery is prime.

Advertisement

And I suppose regurgitation may very well be a reputable theme, though it feels somewhat old school now. Starting within the Eighties, L.A. artist Mike Kelley started growing a sturdy, typically humorous physique of labor based mostly on metaphors of a human physique’s alimentary canal — the trail from the esophagus by means of the intestines the place meals goes in a single finish, vitamins get extracted and waste comes out the opposite finish. The exhibition’s pneumatic tube busting by means of digital partitions is its personal such raucous canal, though right here it backs up and barfs with a decidedly cynical edge.

The artificial heave is a wan sight gag, a self-reflexive expression of 1’s personal artificiality. It feels particularly flat within the neighborhood of the retrospective of artist Ulysses Jenkins, additionally presently on view on the Hammer, which units off sparks.

Jenkins — an early adopter of video as a instrument for artists, again when the know-how was model new round 5 many years in the past — pressed his do-it-yourself digital media in opposition to oppressive company requirements set by business tv. Video works like “Mass of Photographs” (1978) and “Inconsequential Doggereal” (1981) use the artist’s particular person Black physique as a conduit by means of which the social and cultural stereotypes relied upon by mass media circulate. In Jenkins’ fingers, they’re dissected and revealed as depraved absurdities.

“Lifes” encompasses a compelling pair of wierd park benches by Cooper Jacoby, visually wrapped in an illusionistic, lizard-like palette of peeling green-and-rust metallic lacquer. The floor of every bench is in truth a sensor of the physique warmth generated by anybody who sits down. It’s hooked as much as a kind of digital thermostat that transfers the temperature studying into scripted prose-poetry produced by an Synthetic Intelligence program.

A greenish park bench in a gallery, with painted-on cracks and a sensor

Cooper Jacoby, “How do I survive? (an actual value of what you please),” 2022, blended media

(Joshua White/Hammer Museum)

Advertisement

When one other particular person sits down beside you on the bench and the temperature adjustments, no matter literary marvels (or, remembering Jenkins, inconsequential doggerel) your individual physique would possibly difficulty forth together with superior know-how will get disrupted — and possibly enhanced, possibly ruined. Collaboration is at all times iffy.

Collaboration is what Hammer curators Aram Moshayedi and Nicholas Barlow had in thoughts for “Lifes,” therefore the awkward multiplicity within the title. Their abstruse course of for organizing the present started with 4 written texts. Authors Fahim Amir, Asher Hartman, Rindon Johnson and Adania Shibli then engaged different artists to grow to be concerned, till there have been about 50.

Who did what isn’t at all times clear — which is presumably a part of the purpose — whereas a substantial portion of the exhibition consists of projected video in addition to audio and spoken-word items emanating from audio system that ring the wide-open gallery, simply the place the wall meets the ground. The echoing sound isn’t at all times understandable.

In essence, “Lifes” is a large present of brand-new commissions — a danger that, whereas definitely commendable for a often cautious institutional house like a museum, doesn’t pan out right here. Much less exhibition than tutorial train, with barely a dozen objects (together with video) within the room, the present feels skinny. The majority of it’s literary and musical, not visible, in time-based varieties confined to an hour-long program schedule — which implies you will need to hold round to have interaction with them, fingers crossed.

Advertisement

A number of preexisting works obtained folded into the combo because the collaborative curatorial course of developed. Along with Jacoby’s, amongst them are the present’s most rewarding works.

A structure with a clock and hanging a rock, left, and a tube going into a wall

Charles Gaines’ “Falling Rock” (rear), 2000, blended media

(Joshua White/Hammer Museum)

Charles Gaines’ “Falling Rock” (2000) is a hefty chunk of granite hauled up by a series on a motorized winch inside a glass sales space till, on the high, simply beneath a ticking clock, a launch mechanism sends it plummeting to the bottom. The stone smashes noisily by means of a fragile sheet of glass. An industrial-strength Sisyphus machine, the relentless contraption is grimly disturbing.

“Parade” (1993) is a marvelously unusual video by German artist Rosemarie Trockel, recognized for cross-pollinations between weaving and portray. Within the video, glowing white silkworms laid in opposition to a deep-blue background appear to carry out cautious choreography to music by Kurt Hoffman. Patterning related to textiles merges with kaleidoscopic dance routines of a larva-world Busby Berkeley.

Advertisement

Lastly, a small, startling, 2016 portray by L. Frank, a Tongva-Ajachmem artist (also called L. Frank Manriquez), imagines a world-shattering second in a easy acrylic palette dominated by crimson, white and blue. A Spanish galleon, fronted by a carved blond figurehead leaning out towards land, virtually like a battering ram, butts up in opposition to the shore of what would finally be known as California.

Everlasting stars shining overhead, a giant and little dipper, are quietly heartbreaking witnesses to Earthly affairs. A row of little white crosses separating water from land is sort of a permeable fence, its shapes doubling as funerary markers. The heartfelt modesty of the picture is infused with deeply private perception, resonating with the historic wallop of the occasion.

‘Lifes’

The place: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000
When: By Might 8. Closed Monday.
Contact: www.hammer.ucla.edu

Advertisement

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Entertainment

Review: Surrounded by beauty, the world mysteriously unravels in 'The Universal Theory'

Published

on

Review: Surrounded by beauty, the world mysteriously unravels in 'The Universal Theory'

As fun or scary as it is to ponder, we are likely not living inside the Matrix. But cinematically speaking, we are certainly living in a post-“The Matrix” world intoxicated by the possibility of a multiverse, as evidenced not just by noisy superhero fare and the Oscar-winning “Everything Everywhere All at Once” but also the more lush air of enchantment and doom pervading the German import “The Universal Theory.” Set against the ominous beauty of the Swiss Alps, the film is a post-WWII-set art thriller about a quantum physics wunderkind and a mysterious jazz pianist.

Call it blanc noir. Or hi-fi sci-fi. Or matinee fodder for the likes of Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger. For sure, it’s a dreamy pastiche of the era’s moody, existential movies. Co-writer and director Timm Kröger effortlessly evokes the chilly unease of Antonioni, Welles and Tarkovsky while channeling plenty of Hitchcock vibes, mostly with an impressively full-blown orchestral score (by Diego Ramos Rodriguez) that could be a long-lost symphony of Bernard Herrmann’s. (Roland Stuprich’s black-and-white cinematography doesn’t hurt either.)

Kröger’s first scene is a cheesy ’70s talk show on which rattled-looking author Johannes (Jan Bülow) says his bestselling novel about parallel worlds isn’t fiction at all, a claim met with glib mockery from the host. We’re then transported to the monochrome widescreen of the early ’60s, when brainy, awkward PhD hopeful Johannes (looking much less splotchy) is working on his dissertation, traveling by train with his grumpy mentor Dr. Julius Strathen (Hanns Zischler) to a conference at a ski lodge.

Johannes’ overseer is no fan of “metaphysical rubbish,” which is where the young man’s energies are directed, particularly toward the universal wave function that suggests the existence of multiple realities. At the hotel, Johannes finds a like-minded thinker in Strathen’s old rival, the bombastic Blumberg (Gottfried Brietfuss). But he is also drawn to a coolly beautiful, enigmatic musician, Karin (Olivia Ross), who improbably knows his deepest childhood secrets and likes to say things to Johannes like “Leave me alone” seconds before cooing, “Be careful” and kissing him.

Something is genuinely off about the goings-on at the conference, from strange deaths and elevators that suddenly aren’t elevators, to a rash of scabby infections afflicting guests and the discovery of a subterranean tunnel. Not to mention, of course, the distinct possibility that no one is who they say they are. Or were. Or will be? (And you thought you had too many distractions when you were in school.)

Advertisement

You don’t need a master’s in wave-particle duality to enjoy the cosmic playground of coincidence and fate that Kröger has in mind. That being said, the director, a cinematographer making his feature debut, isn’t anywhere near David Lynch’s kind of subconscious-melting brilliance. “The Universal Theory” is overlong and ultimately a work more of the head than the heart, no matter how much that wall-to-wall throwback score swells with intention. The performances, too, are more likenesses than full characterizations, which, admittedly, is wholly in keeping with the perplexities being dramatized.

Kröger is nevertheless a gifted stylist with the language and pacing of classical movies. He knows how to play with that familiarity of composition and narrative just enough to have us riding his plot all the way to the end, when he leaves snowy Switzerland for the rest of the story (which includes a “film” of Johannes’ book that makes this life-is-simulation-is-cinema cycle mischievously complete). All in all, it’s a timeline — or two — of incident, regret, memory and ghosts (and movie love) that wouldn’t feel out of place on a double bill with one of Lars von Trier’s early-career sandboxes such as 1991’s “Zentropa.” Nothing in “The Universal Theory” is going to blow your mind, but as it plays its fastidiously crafted notes of conspiracy and chaos, you’ll know the idiosyncrasies of the art house are alive and well.

‘The Universal Theory’

In German, French and Swiss German, with subtitles

Not rated

Advertisement

Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

Playing: Opens Friday, Oct. 11, at Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Movie Reviews

‘Black’ movie review: Delectable flourishes eclipse the minor flaws in Jiiva and Priya Bhavani Shankar’s mind-bending thriller 

Published

on

‘Black’ movie review: Delectable flourishes eclipse the minor flaws in Jiiva and Priya Bhavani Shankar’s mind-bending thriller 

A still from ‘Black’
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Tamil cinema’s tryst with high-concept thrillers is as rare as the occurrence of the Supermoon in Black — the new Jiiva and Priya Bhavani Shankar-starrer. The mind-bending thriller takes an intriguing concept and with able performers at the core, does a neat job of emulating the thrilling moments of Coherence, the 2013 Hollywood film on which it’s based.

In Black, Jiiva and Priya play Vasanth and Aranya, a couple who decide to chill at their newly constructed row-house villa within a gated community. But before the duo reaches the location where most of the film unfolds, we are told how back in 1964, a time-based strange occurrence happened during a supermoon. Unsurprisingly, the incomprehensible event occurs again and with no one to help, Vasanth and Aranya have to fight through what seems to defy the very law of time and physics as we know it.

With just two actors populating the majority of runtime, and almost the whole story evolving within the confines of a house in a gated community, the trump card of Black is how intriguing it is from start to finish. With scenes looping multiple times and considering the repeated sequences will have more scenes than what was shown the first time around, Black needed a strong technical team and debutant director KG Balasubramani pulls it off quite neatly along with cinematographer Gokul Benoy and editor Philomin Raj. The well-written screenplay neatly unfurls the questions in our minds even as the unravelling could have benefitted from better spacing.

Black (Tamil)

Director: KG Balasubramani

Cast: Jiiva, Priya Bhavani Shankar, Vivek Prasanna, Yog Japee

Advertisement

Runtime: 117 minutes

Storyline: A couple moves into a vacant gated community only to experience strange occurrences 

After a series of shots establishing the personalities of Vasanth and Aranya, the relationship the couple shares and two annoying, unmerited songs, Black shifts to top gear the moment the couple occupy their new house. The film slowly amps up the thrills as the story progresses and despite having only two primary characters (unlike its source material), Black manages to keep us at the edge of our seats for the most part.

While the first half unravels at a break-neck speed, it’s in the second half where the shortcomings come in full view. There’s a scene where Vasanth, out of frustration, leaves his house dishevelled only for cops to think it has something to do with his missing wife. Though it might have felt like an organic scene while writing, it’s anything but that visually. The film’s most interesting aspect is the effect of the supermoon and how it casts a pitch-black force field within which our protagonists get trapped. Akin to a black hole, this field is so powerful that even light can’t reflect and acts as a portal to different timelines.

A still from ‘Black’

A still from ‘Black’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

But the explanation to this comes at the fag end of the film and while it can be brushed aside as a writing choice, this results in a buttload of exposition with terms like super-positioning and parallel reality to urban legends like the Bermuda triangle and thought experiments like Schrödinger’s cat thrown at us. While it might not hinder the experience of those accustomed to films on time-travel paradoxes, the references certainly overstay their welcome without much explanation to those alien to these concepts.

What makes it easy to look past these minor flaws, apart from the strong technical team, is the performance of the lead cast. While Jiiva makes a splendid comeback after a string of misses with a role that feels tailor-made for him, Priya scores in an equally important role as someone who asks the right questions to decipher the happenings to the audience without succumbing to the generic thriller trope of being the damsel in distress.

Despite reminding us of a slew of films and series on similar lines, Black does justice to the genre without taking its viewers for granted and spoon-feeding information. While the lack of a simplified explanation might be a common criticism, that’s what makes Black — along with titles like the Kannada film Blink which came out this year — stand apart from other films that lose their essence by challenging the audience’s intellect. A gripping screenplay, able performers and a strong technical crew, accentuate this well-written thriller; and Black manages to surpass its shortcomings and leaves us wishing we don’t have to wait for another supermoon for such flicks.

Advertisement

Black is currently running in theatres

Continue Reading

Entertainment

Review: Good news! The Mark Taper Forum is back. Bad news? ‘American Idiot’ misfires

Published

on

Review: Good news! The Mark Taper Forum is back. Bad news? ‘American Idiot’ misfires

In these trying days of super-storms and political peril, we have to celebrate wherever we can. And the reopening of the Mark Taper Forum is reason to break out in civic cheer.

Snehal Desai, Center Theatre Group’s galvanizing new artistic leader, is making his directorial debut with the company in a new production of “American Idiot,” the rock opera based on Green Day’s multiplatinum concept album. A co-production with Deaf West Theatre, the revival features a cast of deaf and hearing actors singing and signing their way through this pop-punk musical explosion of suburban angst and cultural alienation.

When I reviewed the 2009 world premiere at Berkeley Rep, I declared that the show “does what rock bands have set out to do from the beginning — lay down a style that defines a new zeitgeist.” “American Idiot” took a risk in borrowing a music video format to critique a sensationalizing, oversaturated media culture that made it difficult to feel, never mind think.

The book by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and Michael Mayer, the musical’s original director, stitched together story fragments taken from the 2004 “American Idiot” album and supplemented them with material from the band’s 2009 recording, “21st Century Breakdown.” The setting was the tumultuous early aughts, after 9/11 set the country reeling and President George W. Bush drummed us into war with Iraq.

Daniel Durant and Mars Storm Rucker, center, and the cast of Green Day’s “American Idiot” at the Mark Taper Forum.

Advertisement

(Jeff Lorch)

Strange to say, but this awful period seems almost quaint by comparison with our current discord. “American Idiot” railed against the background noise of cable news. Today, we have TikTok rewiring our brains. Bush promoted what he euphemistically called “compassionate conservatism.” After losing his bid to retain the presidency, Donald Trump called for angry mobs to “fight like hell” or you won’t “have a country anymore.”

When I heard that the Taper was going to reopen with a new take on “American Idiot” right before the fraught 2024 presidential election, it sounded like perfect timing. We could all use an excuse to vent our anger and anxiety, and Green Day’s stylishly brash songwriting provides just the right outlet.

What I didn’t expect was to find the musical so dated. The story of three young suburban wastrels looking for a way out of the American capitalist wasteland struck me as a luxury we can’t really afford at this hinge moment in history.

Advertisement

My unexpected reaction stems from Desai’s misguided production. The music’s urgency is generalized into a blur. Instead of definition, the staging gives us a muddle of free-floating feeling.

I have previously been bowled over by Deaf West’s ability to find new expressive life in familiar musicals. “Big River” established the company’s musical bona fides. I was ultimately bewitched by the 2009 Deaf West-CTG revival of “Pippin” and was completely seduced by Michael Arden’s 2015 revival of “Spring Awakening” at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, before the company took it to Broadway.

But this new “American Idiot” seems at cross-purposes with itself. The staging lacks both synergy and focus. The casting of deaf and hearing actors — one to embody and emotionalize a character, the other to sing, speak and jam — fails to harmonize into a resonant or even intelligible interpretation. Our attention is splintered. The result is busy, breathless and barren.

A person gestures enthusiastically as two people watch from a couch next to him

Otis Jones IV, left, Ali Fumiko Whitney and James Olivas in Green Day’s “American Idiot” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jeff Lorch)

Advertisement

There’s a serious casting problem at the heart of this revival. Daniel Durant, who was in the Deaf West production of “Spring Awakening,” takes on the lead role of Johnny, one of three friends desperate to escape the small, aimless, conformist world choking the life out of them. The role anchors a show that is more a collection of scenarios than a clearly delineated story. It’s essential, for this reason, that the actor playing the part can fill in what’s missing and become the musical’s compelling center.

Tony Award-winner John Gallagher Jr. from “Spring Awakening,” who played Johnny at Berkeley Rep and subsequently on Broadway, brought star power to this modern-day druggy rebel struggling to name his cause. Durant turns Johnny into a disheveled drifter. His performance made me imagine what the very fine actor Michael Cera might be like as David Berkowitz in a TV movie about the Son of Sam serial killer. I suspect that’s not quite what Armstrong and Mayer were going for in their book.

What makes this casting choice more puzzling is that Milo Manheim sings and plays guitar with a rock god’s swagger as the Voice of Johnny. The contrast with Durant’s lumpish Johnny makes no sense. Why cast a hearing actor with tremendous charisma next to a deaf actor who is made out (in costuming, grooming and general deportment) to be a schlub? There are other ways to get at inner conflicts without sacrificing theatrical magnetism.

The scenes with Johnny and his buddies are handled in a perfunctory manner that made it hard for me to invest in their plights or paths. Otis Jones IV’s Will, the character whose plans to run off with Johnny are upended by his girlfriend’s pregnancy, and Landen Gonzales’ Tunny, who chooses the military route as his answer only to be seriously wounded in combat, are treated almost as spectral presences, insubstantial and more or less tangential.

Daniel Durant, center, and the cast of Green Day's "American Idiot" at the Mark Taper Forum.

Daniel Durant, center, and the cast of Green Day’s “American Idiot” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jeff Lorch)

Advertisement

I kept trying to locate where Manheim, James Olivas (as the Voice of Will) and Brady Fritz (as the Voice of Tunny) were singing. This has not been my experience with Deaf West musicals in the past. This sense of dispersion, directly attributable to the casting and the direction, is only compounded by Takeshi Kata’s two-tiered, standard-issue industrial musical set

Jennifer Weber’s jumpy choreography doesn’t enhance the storytelling picture. I did appreciate David Murakami’s projection design. One video image of a highway at night was more eloquent than anything in the lead-up to Johnny’s Greyhound getaway.

The music, thankfully, fills the theatrical breach. The orchestra, discreetly visible on the set’s upper level, brings out the vibrancy of Tom Kitt’s arrangements and orchestrations. And the singing is glorious. Mars Storm Rucker as Whatsername, the girl Johnny shoots heroin with for the first time, seismically delivers the character’s emotionally vehement numbers. Mason Alexander Park brings a David Bowie-ish quality to St. Jimmy, Johnny’s fiendish drug dealer.

“American Idiot,” the show’s opening number, still rouses an audience with a mad-as-hell anthem that is as valid today as it was 20 years ago when the album came out. The head-bobbing in the audience made me wonder what a dance-party version of the musical might be like, something akin to the immersive staging of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love.”

Advertisement

But that’s probably asking too much from a theater just getting back on its feet. The good news is that the Taper is open again. Being there again, even with all these criticisms, felt deeply satisfying.

‘American Idiot’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When:  8 p.m.Tuesday-Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Runs through Nov 16. (Call for exceptions.)

Tickets:  Starts at $35

Advertisement

Info:  (213) 628-2772 or centertheatregroup.org

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending