Tamra Davis’ new Basquiat documentary offers a surprising wealth of first-hand footage of the artist. Tracing his chaotic rise to wealth, fame and exploitation, the film is centered around a 1985 interview at the L’Hermitage Hotel in Los Angeles – a city to which Basquiat would retreat in order to escape the drugs and leaching coterie that hounded him in New York. The interviews are exceptional, not just for the precious evasions he offers, but for his face, so obviously entranced with the camera, struggling to strike the right attitude for posterity, and the tender, recurring smile that wins out against his vanity. Davis gives us the gift of intimacy with Basquiat’s charisma; we become personally familiar with it, and this gives weight to the interviews (the list is pretty long – Schnabel, Bischofberger, Deitch, Fab 5 Freddy), as they establish again and again that with Basquiat it was always love at first sight. You knew right away that he would be famous.

This cult of personality was something the artist both courted and loathed. He felt critics focused too much on him and too little on his art – a problem made worse by an ongoing current of borderline racism (he was always the “wild man”, his art was “primal” even “primitive”). But Basquiat needed attention badly, and fought oppression with lucre, Armani suits et al.

Ultimately this is a movie for fans. As in Schnabel’s biopic, part of the pleasure is scene-porn centered around the downtown of the late 1980’s. There’s a good amount of footage from the Canal Zone and similar parties, in which an ecstatically goofy Michael Holman puts Basquiat’s cool in relief (soon after you get to see Jean-Michel dancing – he’s good). The interviews are sometimes great, if not for critical insight, then for detail – like the ability of some of his friends to date his paintings by the imprint his sneakers left when he would leave them scattered on the floor.

Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in 1988, leaving behind a large body of work that continues to accrue a sense of relevancy and foresight. He was 27. This sort of loss is hard to do justice to, and thankfully the better interviews avoid schmaltz and panegyrizing. The best notes concerning his death are struck in a confessional tone. His friends all seemed to know what was going to happen, but were cowed by the artist’s imperious self-determination. Others were merely lost in the scene, or had other needs to attend to. Al Diaz, Basquiat’s graff partner, recalls a gift from Jean-Michel as he succumbed to alienation and the last drug binges that would kill him:

“He showed up to my apartment over on First Street, and he yelled [up to] the window, and he shows up with two paintings…with a dyptic. It said “To SAMO, from SAMO”, and like a creep, I turned around and I sold those paintings, yeah. (Interviewer: when he was still alive?). Yeah, when he was still alive.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is directed by Tamra Davis. It features interviews with Julian Schnabel, Larry Gagosian, Bruno Bischofberger, Tony Shafrazi, Fab 5 Freddy, Jeffrey Deitch, Glenn O’Brien, Maripol, Kai Eric, Nicholas Taylor, Fred Hoffmann, Michael Holman, Diego Cortez, Annina Nosei, Suzanne Mallouk, Rene Ricard and Kenny Scharf among many others. The film opens July 21, 2010 at Film Forum.

Tuesday night the Guggenheim opened it’s new restaurant, The Wright, for a press preview.  Andre Kikoski’s design takes its form from the mother structure, draping the 1,600-sq-foot room in clean layered curves.  Enlivening this is a sculpture of mod-colored aluminum bars by Liam Gillick, which gives a vivid, linear counterpoint to the swerving walls.  Gillick’s work is designed to expand and contract to fit new spaces, which is just as well since the Guggenheim intends to replace the installation regularly.  Overall the vibe is that of a super-hip airport lounge in a movie from the ‘60s.  It’s worth taking a peak at.

The food, created by David Bouley’s student Rodolfo Contreras (who was a friendly guy at the party) was delicious, but will probably be familiar to people who dine out expensively.  There was a tasty pork belly which came with a pomme dauphin disguised as a melon ball, a fine Tuna sashimi (with pickled shallot) and a rich pumpkin and chocolate cake sitting in mustard cream (and a superfluous green foam).  Contreras was clearly at pains to meet the visual expectations of serving food in such a setting, and each dish was brightly arranged, especially a tiered row of miniature cones containing salmon, creme and caviar.  The press release states that the sit-down area will serve this kind of fare, while the bar will have panini, salads, etc. From what I can tell, The Wright will at least be a fun place to get a drink after taking in some Kandinski. If Contreras can maintain the quality he established opening night, the place may become a destination even after the museum closes.

The Wright is located on the 88th street side of the Guggenheim NY.  It will open December 11th.

Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun envisions the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, a putative descendant of the Sun God who renounced his divinity in the wake of nuclear devastation, as an obscure man of captivatingly delicate temperament.   As bombs rain down on Tokyo, he dissects a hermit crab, composes mediocre haiku, and paces his lab-turned-bunker with the fumbling gait of a drowsy Chaplin.  These diversions obscure what intermittently emerges as a horrendous angst – the Emperor (Issey Ogata) must decide exactly how to submit to his enemy, a submission that was intolerable to many Japanese, and one that would permanently undermine the concept of the Emperor’s divinity.

The enemy is embodied in the person of General Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who having come a long way is baffled to find a “child” at the reins of the Japanese war machine.  Of all The Sun’s pleasures, both queer and profound, the dinnertime interactions between these two are best.   Sokurov has reconstructed the dining room of the famous photograph to a tee – and it is tempting to think that he drew his first fancies about Hirohito from it.  There is certainly a Chaplin-esque lilt to the real emperor’s posture there.  But only a fine imagination could create this: a moment in which MacArthur, having excused himself, watches from behind a slit door as the gleeful Emperor snuffs out candles for the sheer joy of temptation.  Marianne Moore once wrote that “To explain grace requires a curious hand”, so too for the velleities of absolute power.  

The film begins, both in coloring and in manner, as a sort of BBC country house drama.  The Emperor is fed and dressed by his aged and fawning butler, while a factotum busies himself with the task of projecting despair-defying honor.  Sokurov is unafraid of comedy, despite his subject matter – the butler must apologize for each chance contact as he buttons up his master, who, oblivious to this exertion, contemplates the beads of sweat on the old man’s scalp.  These unbearably close portraits of confusing intimacy (later the Emperor lights his cigar, forehead to forehead, from MacArthur’s) are a hallmark excellence of the film.  One of their effects, besides humor, is to reset the historical consciousness of the viewer.   After a few minutes we become mere observers of human strangeness, watching as they move from one oak-paneled room to the next, half-forgetting the chaos that rages outside, in this case, over the radio.

Other modes come quickly though.  As soon as the Emperor exits his quarters into the bomb shelter’s ratty hallways, Sokurov (who is also the photography director) floods us in stark, fearful shadows.  These tonal shifts are common and unapologetic, and evoke an emotional realism that stands in contrast with the close character study.  As the frail, almost demented emperor struggles to nap, we are flashed into a horrifying dreamscape of the bombing of Tokyo, in which winged carp play the part of American warplanes.  This segment, among many others, is an example of the film’s potent command of CGI.

Ogawa, who was faced with history’s first prolonged depiction of the Emperor [1], has created an unforgettable character.  An essential component is a facial tic; his mouth constantly opens and closes as if in anticipation of an utterance, or an incoming morsel.   It gives one a persistent sense of the Emperor’s absurd struggle to occupy a divine body.

Hirohito was a published marine biologist, and one of the film’s finest sequences shows him at study over a preserved Dorippe Granulata, a rare horseshoe crab found in Japanese shallows.   Initially loquacious about the specimen, whose shell resembles a samurai mask, the Emperor pauses at his description of the creature’s migratory habits.  Here he falls into a torpid contemplation of the causes of the war.   In this case, his grasping conscience fastens upon the United States’ Immigration Act of 1924, which incensed the Japanese people, and in his estimate, allowed the Japanese military to ride a jingoistic wave toward hostilities.   It is a testament to Sokurov’s prowess that at this point in the film we know his Emperor well enough to sense the true meaning beneath these half-felt equivocations.  He is ultimately baffled by war, and though he may well have contributed to its advent countless times, in repose he simply cannot imagine it as a reality.  The Emperor’s thoughts consistently return to an idyll of ancient, sea-locked Japan.  In an earlier scene he recites a poem by his grandfather, the Meiji Emperor [2]:

Sea to the North, and to the South
To the West and to the East
Waves whirl up

The film’s dramatic structure is built around the Emperor’s emergence from this idyll, and his eventual renunciation of divinity and submission to Allied forces.  Sokurov denies us the famous radio address, opting instead for a delirious nighttime scene in which the Emperor chants elements of his speech, negotiating in the moonlight for the release of the god within.  The scene is unmistakably drawn from Faust [3] , but here the bargain is struck in order to descend to the life of a private man.   It is a prospect the Emperor welcomes happily.  At no point in the movie does the historical reality loom so vividly above the individual’s mind: what should we really care for the consolations of such a bloodstained man?  Yet early the next morning, as he and his wife discuss the prospects of their mortal life, one cannot help but wish them luck.

The Sun will be at Film Forum until through December 1st.

[1] Portrayal of the Emperor, who’s voice wasn’t heard by the Japanese people until his radio announcement of surrender, has remained taboo.  Sokurov kept his lead’s identity secret during filming for fear of assassination.  Interestingly, the film was well received by many in Japan.

[2] The historical record gives a different poem, no less in line with his thinking:

Across the four seas, all are brothers.
In such a world why do the waves rage, the winds roar?

[3] The Sun is the third part in a tetralogy of films concerning figures who embody absolute power.  It was preceded by one about Hitler, (Moloch) and Lenin (Taurus).  The final film will be on Faust.

Photography sage/sleuth Luc Sante has published a new book, Folk Photography, collecting 122 postcards which purport to document the United States “in all its messiness, sprawl, disaster, homely comfort, hard labor, pageantry, violence, optimism, piety, ignorance, hubris, imaginative flight, orderliness, grandeur, chaos, and pastoral quiet.” The pictures come with an essay, and Sante’s essays are some of the finest on the market. If you can find the book, which is not yet widely available, scoop it up. Otherwise check out the author giving a talk and slide show on November 17th at Aperture Gallery, 7PM. Maybe there will be some copies there. For the curious, Sante keeps a pseudonymous blog.

Folk Photography is published by Verse Chorus / Yeti Press.

This is not an assemblage, it is an albatross that died after eating debris its parents mistook for food. The phenomenon is common in the garbage-choked Midway Atoll where thousands of such corpses appear yearly. The photographer, Chris Jordan, captured these transfixing images just as he found them. See more on the NYRblog, or read Tim Flannery’s piece on the evolving Gaia concept. Click “Read More” for a slideshow of Jordan’s images.

David Ellis’ exhibition at (Le) Poisson Rouge is a misnomer. It consists of a handful of sculptures wrought from records (and their sleeves) that are neat bits of ornamental design but that don’t invite any kind of reflection. The same is true of his “movement sculpture”, which comes off like a sneaker commercial. Perhaps noticing this, someone tacked on a looped playback of Ellis’ collaboration with Italian street artist Blu.

The opening was followed by a show with performances by Prefuse 73, Jon Hopkins and  MIXHELL. Not much happened. The high point turned out to be a set of horror-inspired stuff from Jon Hopkins, in which he used the venue’s cavernous interior and well-spread speaker system to creepy and then chest-rattling effect. Prefuse 73 played a rambling, messy set that was disappointing coming from such royalty. One sequence, a sustained sampling of guitar solos (including some Hendrix), was smart if totally undanceable. He was probably just drunk, or bored, as were we.

La Danse, Frederick Wiseman’s 38th film, is a masterpiece. In it the 79-year-old director has set aside the epic, ongoing film of America’s institutional fabric that has been his life’s work in order to take up a subject that seems nearer to his personal affections – the Paris Opera Ballet. If, like me, you know little about ballet, the film will be an artistic epiphany. And then there is the exquisite pleasure of Wiseman’s own genius for capturing queer, irretrievable experiences. You have only two weeks in which to see it.

The POB traces it’s lineage to the 17th century and the Académie Royale de Danse created by Louis XIV. It is an institution of Byzantine traditions (in a culture that adores them), with an archaic hierarchy that at once baffles and charms. The Ballet’s stars are officially titled as such. Below them a hive of virtuoso dancers toil, each one more lithe and beautiful than the last, reigned over by visiting maîtres. Some of these hold forth in dazzlingly arrogant fashion, with a levity that informs both their wit and cruelty. There is much here for the Francophile, and not only cliché. As Wiseman explores the Ballet, we are given access to the less-than-glamorous aspects too; the spacklers, the electricians and laundresses; an unsightly cafeteria meal of fish drowning in gooey sauce; a labor rep who tries to encourage the dancers as he admits their country’s diminishing ability to sustain pensions. One gets the sense that nearly every employee of the POB understands that theirs is a vocation of love, borne with Sisyphean patience, from the dancers’ endless rehearsals to the seamstress who pins bead after single bead upon a wardrobe of gowns.

It is easy to see that Wiseman shares this love, and the patience that comes with it. Nowhere is this more present than in his documentation of the Ballet’s final performances. Wiseman succeeds in the seemingly impossible task of replicating the kinetic environment of the theater, capturing the mute thud of every footfall, each wince behind fixed and smiling eyes. The mastery he shows here is difficult to convey, but he clearly has an intuitive handle on ballet’s many forms, whether the leaping grace of Noureev’s Nutcracker or the avian rigidity of Wayne McGreggor’s Genus.

These performances come at the end of the film. Before that, we see them in bits and pieces, as the dancers practice privately, and more often, as they work tirelessly before the choreographers. Here Wiseman’s brilliance is working at full steam as he captures the strange existential experience of being in these sun-washed rooms. We are made to inhale a dense atmosphere of ego, fear, pettiness and ambition, above all of absurdity. Freshly agape from a young dancer’s practice performance, one can’t help but be indignant as the choreographer tortures her over some subtlety (an arabesque?) that she has apparently flubbed. Moments later he is satisfied, and the layman is hopeless to determine just what improvement has been made. At one point the choreographer Angelin Prelijocaj rambles on to his young Medea about the significance of her final gesture, a hopelessly romantic blowing of dust from the hand which will symbolize “destiny”. It seems almost comic. Yet when the moment comes in the final performance it is unquestionably profound. All of this Wiseman captures with equanimity. He is never didactic, and seems at pains to preserve the absurdity alongside the artistic triumph, with neither washing the other out.

Were it only a document of these performances, La Danse would be a film well worth seeing. But Wiseman’s own artistry is more than a match for that of his subject matter. From it’s opening shot of the drippy, catacomb-like basement of the PLO, the film, which includes no voiceovers or text, no frame of any kind, conveys rich notions about place that feel as if they were a lifetime in the making. Yes, we are meant to go breathless at the superlative performances, to twinge as arches quiver and hamstrings braid, but it is an intimate love for the building itself that truly captures our imagination. We share with Wiseman the eye of some long-attendant ghost, marveling silently at the agonies of the dancers, at their triumphs and their vanity, only to retreat to the back spiral stair cases and dusty garrets, emerging upon the rooftop apiary that all of dreary Paris surrounds.

Throughout the film I kept remembering a strange evening as a child when I found myself alone in my elementary school auditorium. It was after orchestra practice, and everyone else had gone home. I felt overwhelmed with excitement that I should be standing alone in that busy place, the whole school seemed to swell around me, more alive in its nocturnal form than it had ever been before. What I was apprehending was the idea of institution, the spirit a place acquires over time. It is this sublime apprehension that forms the core of Wiseman’s film. It is above all else a tribute to the uncanny difference between edifice and institution, and a living tradition that depends on such enchantments.

La Danse runs Nov 4-17 at Film Forum.

Simen Johan has returned to Yossi Milo Gallery with an update of his ongoing series Until the Kingdom Comes. The new pictures are just as disquieting as those in the 2006 exhibition – if not more so – and they demonstrate a clear refinement of both technique and concept.

Johan has earned his name as a master of Photoshop technique by placing images of children, animals (both living and stuffed) and detritus into landscapes that are themselves hybrid images. The effect is never obvious, but the eye remains uneasy, subconsciously aware that the light coming out of the mist is a bit too vivid, that the mountain’s shadow is too thin. His work always features a startling, sometimes macabre, central image, but it is the slight unreality of place that truly unsettles.

In the current work, he seems to have embraced the mystical and religious weight that his title implies. Imagery that was only vaguely iconic in the first installation has now become explicit. We have the Lamb of God, the Tree of Knowledge, a roiling bush of serpents. From Johan these receive a welcome touch of depth and wit: the lamb cocks its head with a wry, slight grin, having been sacrificed a thousand times before; the tree is enshrouded almost totally in a low-lying cloud, its interior dark, dank, and probably fruitless. It is a pleasure to see such measured thought and technique take the place of plastic Jesus irony.  

What may be the most popular piece in the show features a nest of pythons that intertwine to form a sort of reptilian arch. The arch is completed by two particular snakes that pass a moribund dove between their mouths. The scene is set at the bottom of a particularly vibrant (and unreal) quarry, wherein the snakes relish a seemingly endless feast of rats, doves and flamingos that descend from the world above. Interpret it as you will – the picture is happily too strange for any easy closure.

The show is wonderful, not only for the visceral pleasure of the pictures, but also for its air of seriousness. These are dark, moody images that call to mind large-scale painting rather than photographs. Like Caravaggio or Bellini, he uses a calculated distortion of light and physics to stir in the viewer an uncanny sense of disorientation, as if they were entering a new world that is unintelligible by accustomed means. If the magic works, the viewer becomes meek, childlike. Traditionally this is to induce humility before the glory of God. But Johan seems to think such a state – to be giddy with a child’s fears and genius – a gift in itself. He provides it generously.

A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows, Francesco Clemente’s new work at Deitch Projects, is more of a chapel than an exhibition. This effect is partially due to the watercolor medium, which on such a grand scale implies the cloudy translucence of stained glass. The piece consists of three sets of five enormous panels – all of which the artist has cut from three 60-foot-long paintings of rainbows that the press release boasts were likely the largest watercolor ever created. Each of the series constructs a rainbow out of their respective five panels, the first two vertically, the third horizontally. We are told that their effusive, bright coloring represents a spiritual epiphany for the artist, who had painted in darker tones before.

This is a great exhibition. Its subject is nothing less than the epistemological triumph of love. Clemente’s passion for existence, and for the transcendent bond that can be achieved between lovers (his wife’s image dominates much of his art) touches deeply. I liked it to the point that evaluation seems loathsome. It’s better to just sit in the middle of it. Go when nobody else is there.

Conceptual minimalist Ceal Floyer is back stateside at 303 Gallery, proving once again just how little you can put into a big room. Taking up just two of the walls, Scale and Ink on Paper are an agoraphobe’s nightmare. For the rest of us, the show provides the airy calm for which so many spaces aim and miss.

Floyer likes to deal in plain dialectic. Fans will remember a slowly boiling pot alongside a glass of mineral water as it effervesces its last bubbles (H20 Diptych, 2002), or an inverted waveform of a country song contending with an edit of the original audio (I Do/I Would 2006). In the current show we have Scale, 24 black speakers forming a diagonal staircase along a wall. The duality here is aural, the speakers emulate the sounds of a person mounting, then descending a stair. There is always a pause on the fourth step, providing a human poignancy (does she really want to go up there?) in what is at first a somewhat cold-looking piece.

Floyer has a talent for the clarifying potential of dualism. As the audio cycles, she means to strip away the viewer’s aesthetic expectations until their mind is settled on the staircase itself, an object which synthesizes “up” and “down.” To go up is trepidatious, exhausting; to go down is perhaps to flee. The associative power of a staircase is surprisingly potent.

We are asked to reboot our conceptual expectations for Ink on Paper, where method is brought to the fore. The piece consists of a series of colored circles on white paper, which were created by a pen being held vertically as its ink bled out. On close inspection the circles are irregular – almost cell-like – with errant shades of ink escaping the outer membrane. Whether these are the same drawings from the Ink and Paper of 1999 I was unable to ascertain, but in either case it is clear that the concept is one Floyer thinks highly of. It isn’t hard to see why – here she has successfully integrated the chance maxim held to by elder minimalists like Rauschenberg and Cage. The beautiful shading seen in the circles is the product of the density of the paper, the flux of the ink as it spread, the temperature of the room and so on. The artist herself was stationary in the act of creation.

If the concept works for you, Ink on Paper builds an organic momentum, unveiling circles as shifting forms; cell, eye, sun, bruise. If not, Floyer’s work at least succeeds as an aesthetic cleansing, which is a nice thing to have done before crossing the street to take in Picasso’s Mosqueteros, or any other matter of the heart.