The writing on the wall

Fri, 10 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The conceptual art Sol LeWitt helped
spawn three decades ago is a
particularly American kind, preoccupied
with plain things like lines on walls,
cubes in space. He countered the heroic
angst of Jackson Pollock in the lowest
key, with simple maxims such as "The idea
becomes a machine that makes the art"
and "One thing always leads to
another." But LeWitt is still making
people anxious.

During a question-and-answer period at
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
on the opening day of his second
traveling retrospective (the first was
in 1978 and started off at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York), audience
members worried about one thing in the
guise of many. Most of LeWitt's
two-dimensional works appear directly on
the walls, instead of on canvas or
paper. When he has to transfer a "wall
drawing" from one venue and size of wall
to another, how does he know, someone
asked, if he's preserved his original
idea? (There are no originals, he
explained, only variations.) Was the
artist who draws and writes recipes for
pieces that others execute ever taken
aback by the result? ("I think of it
conceptually and perceptually. So I'm
always surprised and never surprised.")
And when he's dead and can't do anything
about it, how will he feel then
about his abdication of control?

Dancing with ghosts

Wed, 28 Apr 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In the late '70s, when I first saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the dances ("Squaregame," "Sounddance," "Travelogue," "Roadrunners") were so unexpected and violently alive, and the dancers so startled by their own conviction, that when the curtain came down I started to cry. In recent years, Cunningham's pieces have been strikingly beautiful, surprisingly sexy and gorgeously intricate, but they don't play with time in quite the way they once did. They used to sweep everything into the moment. In the last few years, they've become elegiac, settling us gently on the outside to watch.

This diminished immediacy is due, in part, to the dancers. Twenty years ago, the troupe comprised eight or so eccentric modern dancers presided over by an idiosyncratic maestro who appeared every night in some corner of the stage. Now, at 80, Cunningham keeps to the wings, and the 15 or so ballet-trained dancers excel in flexibility and speed more than anything else. During the stark, slow 1959 classic "Rune," now in the repertory, they don't know what to do with their hyper-flexibility. When they extend their limbs in high, wide arcs and tilts, it doesn't look exciting, just easy.

Salon.com > Apollinaire Scherr

The writing on the wall

Dancing with ghosts