PERFORMANCE

A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE

an appreciation of Keith Hennessey's Turbulence, A Dance Against the Economy

By John Wilkins

It all could fall

I saw Keith Hennessey’s Turbulence, A Dance Against the Economy over three months ago and still can’t stop thinking about it. It’s not just the performance, which is stunning enough in and of itself, but the way in which it demands a rethinking of aesthetic priorities, aims and what’s possible in the theater and for that matter art in general. For me, there really has been a before and after Turbulence. I can’t quite get around what it proposes and accomplishes. It certainly isn’t about aesthetic quality or breaking barriers or subverting or embracing taboos, all superficial aspects of the performance and post-modern aesthetics, but instead Turbulence takes on a richness of feeling, a belief that art can disrupt what is ordered and dead and create, for fleeting moments, a world of truth and reality that you just know, that if you wanted to, you could grasp. In this way, Turbulence is defiantly and unabashedly utopian in its aspirations: it implores us to dream and to join the dreams of others, both politically and emotionally. It proposes that there is a more vibrant and loving world than the one we live in, that our desires are worthy, that the imagination is not a dream, but a reality, with repercussions as powerful as the economy.

PHOTOGRAPHY

WHAT WE DO WITH GREATNESS

(or an artist is not a baby)

an introduction to the following four essays on Cindy Sherman

By John Wilkins

©Cindy Sherman/Untitled #92

There’s something shocking about great artists and that is you can criticize them and oftentimes with much greater force than all the featherweights, quarter-artists and unimaginative children who keep on churning out novels, sculptures, paintings, dances, films and glass dolphins. It’s much easier to smash a genius than shoot a gnat. So that would seem to be a problem, or at least unfair, or at least that’s the question we had to ask ourselves in taking on Cindy Sherman. She is a great artist, which is to say that critics, artists, smokers, monkeys and drug addicts, that is to say everyone, will want to draw their knives and slash away. When you get the mid-career retrospective, you might as well paint a lipstick target on your forehead and pass out the guns. Of course, some will praise, but that’s not fun and might even make you seem stupid.

YOUTUBE

ELIS REGINA SINGS JUAN CARLOS JOBIM'S "THE WATERS OF MARCH"

a YouTube appreciation

By John Wilkins

Elis Regina singing in 1973

In Jean–Luc Godard’s Breathless, the director Jean-Pierre Melville, playing a famous director very much like Jean-Pierre Melville, disembarks from an airplane and is surrounded by reporters shouting a barrage of questions at him. In the distance he catches sight of Jean Seberg—who wouldn’t? We first see her selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Elysees, but here she appears to work for some culturally minded international news network. The range of her journalistic activities is quite impressive, absurdly so, but none of that matters. Whatever her actual duties, she is finally whatever Godard needs her to be, which is a beautiful way of approaching character. Continuity is an ugly virtue and Godard knows that and so he chooses feeling, flux and life every time, or at least in most of his films up to 1967, when he was both fun and important.