twi-ny recommended events

KUROSAWA & MIFUNE: THE BAD SLEEP WELL

Nishi (Toshirô Mifune) is desperate for revenge in Akira Kurosawa’s dark Shakespearean noir, THE BAD SLEEP WELL

WEEKEND CLASSICS: THE BAD SLEEP WELL (悪い奴ほどよく眠る) (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
December 23-27, 11:00 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

IFC Center’s eleven-film Weekend Classics series “Kurosawa & Mifune” comes to a close Christmas weekend with one of the pair’s underseen best, the Shakespearean noir, The Bad Sleep Well. The twelfth of sixteen films director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshirô Mifune made together between 1948 and 1965, The Bad Sleep Well is a tense, gripping thriller in which Kurosawa takes on post-WWII Japanese corporate culture, incorporating elements of Hamlet into the complex narrative. The 1960 film begins with a long wedding scene in which everything is set in motion, from identifying characters (and their flaws) to developing the central storylines. Kōichi Nishi (Mifune) is marrying Yoshiko (Kyōko Kagawa), a young woman with a physical disability whose father is Iwabuchi (Masayuki Mori), the vice president of Public Corporation, a construction company immersed in financial scandal as related by one of the many cynical reporters (Kōji Mitsui) covering the party and anticipating possible arrests. Also at the affair are Iwabuchi’s cohorts in crime, Miura (Gen Shimizu), Moriyama (Takashi Shimura), Shirai (Kō Nishimura), and Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara), as well as Iwabuchi’s rogue son, Tatsuo (Tatsuya Mihashi), who threatens to kill Nishi if he does anything to hurt his sister. It soon becomes clear that Nishi in fact does have more on his mind than just marrying into the company. “Even now they sleep soundly, grins on their faces,” Nishi declares. “I won’t stand for it! I can never hate them enough!”

Akira Kurosawa on set at the abandoned munitions factory in THE BAD SLEEP WELL

Photographed in an enveloping, almost 3-D black-and-white by Yuzuru Aizawa and with a propulsive, jazzy score by Masaru Sato, The Bad Sleep Well is a deeply psychological, eerie tale that finds inspiration in the story of Hamlet, Polonius, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Horatio. But whereas Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran were more direct interpretations of Macbeth and King Lear, respectively, Kurosawa, who edited the film and cowrote it with Hideo Oguni, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryûzô Kikushima, and Shinobu Hashimoto, uses the Shakespeare tragedy more subtly as he investigates greed, envy, revenge, betrayal, suicide, torture, ghosts, and murder; in fact, many critical plot points, including those involving violence, occur offscreen. The locations are spectacular, especially a volcano and an abandoned, decimated munitions factory that clearly references the destruction wrought by WWII. The actors wear their hearts on their sleeves, often emoting with silent-film tropes, especially Shimura, Fujiwara, and Nishimura as Iwabuchi’s nervous, perpetually worried underlings and Mihashi as the wild, unpredictable prodigal son. Mifune is stalwart throughout, wearing pristine suits and eyeglasses that mask what is bubbling inside him, threatening to explode, while Mori is a magnificently evil villain. At 150 minutes, it’s a long film, but it’s worth every minute; it could have actually been longer, but Kurosawa, in his first film made through his own independent production company, instead chose an abrupt yet fascinating ending with all kinds of future implications. Made between the period piece The Hidden Fortress and the samurai Western Yojimbo, The Bad Sleep Well was advertised as “a film that will violently jolt the paralyzed soul of modern man back to its senses,” and it still does just that, as corporate corruption seems to never end. Oh, and it also features one of the best wedding cakes ever put on celluloid.

CHRISTMAS DAY: GENE WILDER MARATHON

Gene Wilder is centerpiece of Christmas and Hanukkah celebration at the JCC on December 25

JCC in Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave. at 76th St.
Sunday, December 25, 12 noon – 6:00, $7 per film, $18 for all three
646-505-4444
www.jccmanhattan.org

Six years ago, comic legend Gene Wilder was at the JCC in Manhattan, being interviewed by his wife, Karen Boyer, about his latest book, What Is This Thing Called Love? The star of stage and screen passed away on August 29 of this year, at the age of eighty-three, and the JCC is paying tribute to the man born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee with a Christmas Day marathon featuring three of his best films. The celebration begins at 12 noon with Mel Stuart’s 1971 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the beloved classic based on Roald Dahl’s beloved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wilder plays candy baron Willy Wonka, who has decided to retire and give his company to a child who passes all the necessary tests during a fantastical visit to his factory. That will be followed at 2:00 by one of the funniest movies ever made, Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, in which Wilder portrays the washed-up Waco Kid, an alcoholic gunslinger who is brought back to life when a new sheriff (Cleavon Little) comes to the racist town of Rock Ridge; the all-star cast also includes Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn, Alex Karras, Slim Pickens, Dom DeLuise, John Hillerman, David Huddleston, and Rodney Allen Rippy. At 4:00, the festival continues with another comic Western, Robert Aldrich’s underseen, underrated 1979 charmer, The Frisco Kid, with Wilder starring as Avram Belinski, a Jewish immigrant from Poland who partners up with bank robber Tommy Lillard (Harrison Ford) on his way from Philly to San Francisco to serve as a rabbi. The afternoon concludes at 6:00 with a Hanukkah candle lighting and sufganiyot, special jelly donuts that are a Hanukkah treat.

RIDE THE CYCLONE

Six recently deceased characters battle over a possible return to life in RIDE THE CYCLONE (photo by Joan Marcus)

MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 29, $69-$125
212-352-3101
www.mcctheater.org

When I first heard that the new musical Ride the Cyclone was coming to New York City, I could not have been more excited. I’ve been riding the 1927 Coney Island landmark for decades and still make sure to go at least once every summer. But as I sat in the Lucille Lortel Theater one recent Saturday afternoon, it quickly became apparent that this show has nothing to do with the Brooklyn seaside wooden roller coaster that Charles Lindbergh claimed was more thrilling than flying across the Atlantic. However, I very shortly found myself fully immersed in this MCC production — only the third musical in the company’s thirty-year history — about five members of the Saint Cassian High School Chamber Choir from Uranium, Saskatchewan, who are killed in a tragic accident while riding a roller coaster known as the Cyclone at an unnamed Canadian amusement park. Caught up in a kind of purgatorial way station, Ocean (Tiffany Tatreau), Noel (Kholby Wardell), Constance (Lillian Castillo), Misha (Gus Halper), and Ricky (Spring Awakening’s Alex Wyse, the only cast member not part of the original Chicago Shakespeare Theater production) are not sure what happened to them, but they are assured by mechanical fortune-teller Karnak (Karl Hamilton) that they are indeed dead, and that because he did not warn them of the impending danger, he will offer one of them the chance to return to life. They are joined by Jane Doe (Emily Rohm), a creepy, ghostly girl who is more like her doll than a human; meanwhile, Karnak is counting down the hours of his own existence, as a rather large rat is gnawing through his electrical wiring. Each of the youngsters get their moment to shine, performing a solo that reveals their problems along with their hopes and dreams, dealing with such teen angst as homosexuality, overcoming physical disabilities, being a compulsive overachiever, shame, and finding one’s place in the world, each song delivered in a different genre, from glam rock to hip-hop to sentimental balladry. The cast might sing, “It’s just a ride,” but it’s so much more than that.

The Saint Cassian High School Chamber Choir look to the light in MCC production at the Lucille Lortel (photo by Joan Marcus)

The show has been around since 2008, when it was a cabaret song cycle inspired by mass shooting deaths, including the murder of show cocreator Jacob Richmond’s sister, Rachel, while she was trying to protect a teenager outside a Vancouver club; it is now a multimedia extravaganza, with Scott Davis’s haunted, abandoned amusement park set, Theresa Ham’s spot-on appropriate costumes, Mike Tutaj’s intimate, tongue-in-cheek projections, Greg Hofmann’s blazing lighting, and Garth Helm’s all-pervasive sound. Director and choreographer Rachel Rockwell never lets things slow down, as if the audience is riding a psychological roller coaster, while Brooke Maxwell and Richmond’s book, music, and lyrics cleverly play with genre clichés, avoiding turning the plot into The Breakfast Club while beautifully defining each character with such numbers as “This Song Is Awesome,” “What the World Needs Is People Like Me,” “Space Age Bachelor Man,” and “Take a Look Around.” The energetic cast is a delight, each actor glorying in their spotlight, but additional kudos go to Rohm, whose operatic voice soars throughout the theater. (The musical supervision is by Doug Peck, with musical direction by Remy Kurs.) MCC has extended Ride the Cyclone through December 29, but Richmond is considering keeping it going, perhaps transferring to another theater. As Ocean sings, “I know this dream of life is never-ending / It goes around and round and round again.” It might not be about the Coney Island Cyclone, but this ride is still one well worth taking.

AI WEIWEI — 2016: ROOTS AND BRANCHES / LAUNDROMAT

A tree grows in Chelsea at the Lisson Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

2016: ROOTS AND BRANCHES
Lisson Gallery
504 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Mary Boone Gallery
541 West 24th St., 745 Fifth Ave. between 57th & 58th Sts.
AI WEIWEI: LAUNDROMAT
Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster St.
Through December 23, free
aiweiwei.com

This past October, Chinese dissident artist and activist Ai Weiwei swept into New York City, giving a talk at the Brooklyn Museum and opening four gallery exhibitions. He had been banned from international travel for four years since his March 2011 arrest and disappearance, and didn’t receive his passport back until July 2015. So it should not be surprising that the works deal with issues of home and planting roots, particularly in relation to the current refugee crisis around the world. At Lisson Gallery, one of three parts of “Ai Weiwei 2016: Roots and Branches” features giant, rusting cast-iron tree trunks and roots, creating a kind of dying forest, surrounded by black-and-white wallpaper depicting friezes of armed soldiers, explicitly referencing warriors on Ancient Greek black-figure vases; the same archaizing style is applied to modern military vehicles hovering around tent cities and rounding up men, women, and children; storms raging above dangerously overcrowded boats; people being carried away on stretchers; and signs on barbed-wire fences proclaiming, “No One Is Illegal,” “Open the Border,” and “#SafePassage.”

Ai Weiwei’s “Tree” rises up at Mary Boone in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At Mary Boone in Chelsea, Ai has planted “Tree,” a twenty-five-foot-high twisting tree composed of parts of dead trees bolted together to form something new, a totem that evokes how every person is made of DNA from different cultures and traditions (as well as, of course, much of the same DNA). It’s an imposing structure standing in front of gold-and-white wallpaper showing elegant, circular patterns of surveillance cameras. Also on view are a Warhol-like self-portrait and a triptych of Ai’s famous “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” both made using LEGO pieces like pixels, in addition to “Treasure Box,” a large, wooden box resembling a Chinese puzzle.

Ai Weiwei’s “Spouts Installation” gives the finger to China’s past (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At Mary Boone’s Midtown location, “Spouts Installation” consists of forty thousand ceramic spouts broken off from teapots dating from the Song to Qing dynasties, fracturing China’s past. Kaleidoscopic gray-and-white wallpaper features arms giving the finger, referencing Ai’s “Fuck Off” series, in which he takes photographs of himself flipping the bird in front of historical landmarks around the globe. The juxtaposition also makes the spouts, arranged in a circle around a central pole that is like a tree, look like a shadowy graveyard of broken middle fingers that have been silenced while also recalling Ai’s “Sunflower Seeds” installations at the Tate and Mary Boone in Chelsea. In the back room are the wooden box “Garbage Container,” the porcelain doormat “Blossom,” a glass-encased “Set of Spouts,” and the porcelain “Free Speech Puzzle.”

Ai Weiwei explores the refugee crisis in “Laundromat” at Deitch Projects (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Finally, at Deitch Projects in Soho, “Ai Weiwei: Laundromat” is a large room filled with racks of clothing, rows of shoes, stills from new films lining the walls, social media posts on the floor, a documentary video, and Allen Ginsberg’s poem “September on Jessore Road.” (“Millions of fathers in rain / Millions of mothers in pain / Millions of brothers in woe / Millions of sisters nowhere to go.” Inspired by the conditions at the Idomeni refugee camp on the Greek-FYROM border, the Shariya refugee camp in Iraq, and the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Ai has sought to give voice back to these refugees, who are suffering through war and extreme poverty; there is a deeply personal aspect to the work, as Ai’s family was sent to a labor camp when he was a child because his father was a poet and political dissident. The clothing and shoes are the real items worn by Syrian refugees at Idomeni — it’s particularly haunting seeing the racks of children’s clothing and rows of kids’ shoes — now properly cleaned instead of caked with mud and filth, each one individually tagged, as if offering each man, woman, and child a clean, new start, with renewed dignity.

IN TRANSIT

A cappella musical IN TRANSIT has pulled into Circle in the Square for its Broadway bow (photo by Joan Marcus)

Circle in the Square Theatre
1633 Broadway at 50th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 25, $89-$159
www.intransitbroadway.com

In the fall of 2010, Primary Stages premiered the a cappella In Transit at 59E59, nabbing a special Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble and earning a nomination for Outstanding Musical, losing out to a little show called The Book of Mormon. A new production of In Transit has now pulled into the Circle in the Square, where it has its ups and downs, stops and starts, just like the New York City subway system. The show is set in an imaginary train station watched over by Boxman (Chesney Snow and Steven “HeaveN” Cantor alternate in the role), a subway beatboxer with a speaker and a microphone who serves as a kind of Greek chorus / narrator, dishing out advice as well as beats. “Really, how you gonna get where you’re going if you don’t know how to be where you are?” he asks. Over the course of ninety-five minutes and sixteen a cappella songs — there are no instruments used; every sound is made by the human voice — various straphangers take stock of their lives while in transit or at their destinations, their stories rooted in genre clichés that seem tailored more for tourists than New Yorkers yet delivered with energetic charm by a very likable cast. Jane (Margo Seibert) is working as a temp while going on auditions, looking for her big acting break. At a bar, she hits it off with Nate (James Snyder), who recently lost his job because of a major “reply all” faux pas. Nate’s sister, Ali (Erin Mackey), has just taken up running to deal with her breakup with Dave (David Abeles), the doctor she moved cross-country to join in New York. Trent (Justin Guarini) and Steven (usually played by Telly Leung, but we saw understudy Arbender Robinson), are planning their wedding, but Steven insists that Trent must stop hiding his sexual orientation from his Bible-thumping mother (Moya Angela) in Texas. The excellent cast also includes Gerianne Pérez, Mariand Torres, and Nicholas Ward; all of the actors except for Snow play multiple roles.

Characters share their hopes and dreams, trials and tribulations on the subway in IN TRANSIT (photo by Joan Marcus)

Directed and choreographed by three-time Tony winner Kathleen Marshall (The Pajama Game, Anything Goes), In Transit works best when it is taking place in the subway, on Donyale Werle’s set, which features familiar train seats and platform and a clever conveyer belt that suggests subway car movement while the characters share classic subway thoughts: “I should’ve hailed a cab.” “This aroma’s unique.” “Is that lady pregnant or fat?” “Crap, why is the seat all wet where I just sat?” “Did I just miss my stop?” When the location moves to Texas, to a bar, and to Jane’s office, it’s like someone pulled the emergency cord on the train and we did indeed get off on the wrong stop. The cast displays an endearing chemistry not only in the major storylines but in the playful subplot involving Trent and angry token clerk Althea (Angela). Overseeing it all like a mythological god is Snow, the only actor from the original 2010 production; the sounds that come out of his mouth are hard to believe, like a full band accompanying the rest of the cast’s lovely, soaring voices. The problem, however, is in the writing, which does not feel adult enough, unwilling to take any real risks, so it is not surprising that the book, music, and lyrics were written by a quartet — Kristen Anderson-Lopez, James-Allen Ford, Russ Kaplan, and Sara Wordsworth — whose resumes include Frozen, Finding Nemo: The Musical, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie & Other Story Books, and the NYC Children’s Theatre’s Dear Albert Einstein. It could have been a much-loved express train, but instead it’s merely a likable local.

ANDREAS GURSKY: NOT ABSTRACT II / EDWARD BURTYNSKY: ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS

Andreas Gursky Amazon, 2016 C-print 81 1/2 × 160 1/4 × 2 7/16 inches, framed (207 × 407 × 6.2 cm) © Andreas Gursky/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Andreas Gursky, “Amazon,” C-print, 2016 (© Andreas Gursky/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through Friday, December 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-741-1717
www.gagosian.com

A pair of stirring, unrelated photography exhibits in Chelsea close this week, both featuring awe-inspiring large-scale prints that turn manufactured landscapes into gargantuan, thought-provoking spectacle. “My photographs are ‘not abstract.’ Ultimately they are always identifiable. Photography in general simply cannot disengage from the object,” German artist Andreas Gursky says about his latest show, “Not Abstract II,” an extension of his recent survey exhibition “nicht abstract” at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Continuing at Gagosian’s vast Twenty-First St. space through December 23, the exhibit consists of twenty-one C-prints and inkjet prints accompanied by a specially commissioned subtle soundscape designed by Canadian electronica DJ Richie Hawtin. The majority of the photographs, some stretching more than eleven feet high and more than sixteen feet wide, were taken between 2008 and 2016, highlighted by a trio of recent untitled vertical works that look like Agnes Martin melded with Mark Rothko, C-prints with horizontal lines of bold colors that are impossible to identify as aerial views of tulip fields without additional information. In “Review,” the backs of the heads of current and former German chancellors Gerhard Schröder, Helmut Schmidt, Angela Merkel, and Helmut Kohl are in the foreground, Barnett Newman’s “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” in front of them. “Amazon” takes visitors inside a vast warehouse of endless packages, the scope of the company’s reach instantly evident and overwhelming, while another exploration of consumerism, “Mediamarkt,” gets its own room. “Les Meés” depicts a rolling landscape covered in rows of solar panels. Meanwhile, the shining gold room in “Qatar” practically glows throughout the gallery. Two examples from Gursky’s superhero series, one depicting Batman against a coming ship, the other Spider-Man dwarfed by a building, are too gimmicky alongside these other breathtaking works that, essentially, take humans but not humanity out of the picture.

Rice Terraces #5 Western Yunnan Province, CH, 2008 Chromogenic Color Print

Edward Burtynsky, “Rice Terraces #5, Western Yunnan Province, CH,” chromogenic color print, 2008 (photo courtesy Bryce_Wolkowitz_Gallery_)

Bryce_Wolkowitz_Gallery_
505 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through Friday, December 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-243-8830
brycewolkowitz.com

The abstract, or “not abstract,” nature of reality and humankind’s intervention is also on view a few blocks west at Bryce_Wolkowitz_, where Canadian native Edward Burtynsky’s mini-retrospective, “Essential Elements,” also runs through December 23. The show comprises nineteen chromogenic color prints ranging from 1981’s “Grasses, Bruce Peninsula, Ontario” to a pair of Salt Pan photos taken earlier this year in Gujarat, India. Like Gursky, Burtynsky takes large-scale photographs of vast interiors and exteriors, with Burtynsky concentrating more on the impact technology and resource extraction has had on the environment, as evidenced in such series as “Water,” “Oil,” “Pivot Irrigation,” and “Dryland Farming.” In “Essential Elements,” the branching “Colorado River Delta #12” resembles the L.A. traffic patterns in “Highway #2, Intersection 105 & 110.” “Rice Terraces #5” looks like shimmering mirrored waves. “Oil Refineries #8” is brethren to Gursky’s later “Storage.” It’s a real treat seeing “Third Floor Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta,” a shadowy, deep photo that has never been shown before in the United States. A photograph of Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” is too obvious, and the kaleidoscopic 1999 “Borromini #21, Vault, San Ivo della Sapienze, Rome,” feels too gimmicky in an otherwise small but solid round-up.

MANIFESTO

Cate Blanchett plays multiple characters in Julian Rosefeldt’s MANIFESTO

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Daily through January 8, $20
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

As visitors go from screen to screen in Julian Rosefeldt’s thirteen-channel installation, Manifesto, at the Park Ave. Armory, they’re bombarded with declarations from cultural missives by artists and philosophers dating back more than 150 years. Various words and phrases stick out, hanging in the air like bees buzzing around flowers: “originality,” “conflict,” “infinite and shapeless variation,” “decay,” “revolution,” “recklessness,” “absolute reality,” “glorious isolation,” “obsession,” freedom,” “everlasting change,” “the unconsciousness of humanity.”

I am against action; I am for continuous contradiction: for affirmation, too. I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense. I am writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say.

Art requires truth, not sincerity.

Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong.

The words are all spoken by Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal, Blue Jasmine), who plays thirteen characters in twelve of the films, which each runs ten and a half minutes and are looped concurrently. She does not appear in the shorter prologue but does provide the narration. Among the characters she portrays are a homeless man, a grade school teacher, a factory worker, a punk rocker, a scientist, a news anchor, a choreographer, and a puppeteer.

Our art is the art of a revolutionary period, simultaneously the reaction of a world going under and the herald of a new era.

Originality is nonexistent.

Purge the world of intellectual, professional, and commercialized culture!

Rosefeldt (Trilogy of Failure, Deep Gold, The Ship of Fools), a photographer and filmmaker who was born in Munich and lives and works in Berlin, has an MA in architecture, so location plays a key role in the films, many of which take place in spectacular surroundings, interiors and exteriors, that would make Andreas Gursky drool, including an abandoned Olympic village, the Klingenberg CHP Plant, the Palasseum housing project, a former fertilizer factory, the ZDF Hauptstadtstudio, and the Humboldt Universität Department of Engineering Acoustics (in which a 2001-like monolith floats in the air). Each film begins and ends with Christoph Krauss’s camera lingering on the often jaw-dropping visuals.

We must create. That’s the sign of our times.

Fluxus is a pain in art’s ass.

Existence is elsewhere.

Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto, 2015 © Julian Rosefeldt and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

The statements are delivered in unique and inventive ways, with Blanchett, looking vastly different in each scene courtesy of Bina Daigeler’s costumes, Morag Ross’s makeup, and Massimo Gattabrusi’s hairstyling, playing a mourner giving a eulogy, a mother saying grace, a teacher presenting a lesson, a choreographer yelling at her troupe, a financial analyst spouting data, a crane operator incinerating garbage, and a CEO offering a new concept at a private board meeting in a seaside villa.

I am for art that is put on and taken off, like pants; which develops holes, like socks; which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit.

No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic.

Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden.

Each section is dedicated to a separate artistic theory, discussing Pop Art, Conceptual Art / Minimalism, Fluxus, Surrealism / Spatialism, Dadaism, Suprematism / Constructivism, Stridentism / Creationism, Abstract Expressionism, Architecture, Futurism, Situationism, and Film. Heard today in this context, the statements range from the very funny to the extremely dry and boring, from the downright elitist to the realistic and relevant, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Farewell to absurd choices.

Nothing is original.

In this period of change, the role of the artist can only be that of the revolutionary: it is his duty to destroy the last remnants of an empty, irksome aesthetic, arousing the creative instincts still slumbering unconscious in the human mind.

Close-ups of Cate Blanchett appear simultaneously in thirteen-screen installation at Park Ave. Armory (photo by James Ewing)

The quotations come from a wide variety of sources, from little-known essays to major influential texts. They include Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Manifesto, Dziga Vertov’s WE: Variant of a Manifesto, André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, Lucio Fontana’s White Manifesto, Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision, Elaine Sturtevant’s Man Is Double Man Is Copy Man Is Clone, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma 95, and Claes Oldenburg’s I am for an art . . . , in addition to writings by Francis Picabia, Barnett Newman, Yvonne Rainer, Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara, Sol LeWitt, Paul Eluard, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Werner Herzog.

The past we are leaving behind us as carrion. The future we leave to the fortune-tellers. We take the present day.

All of man is fake. All of man is false.

I believe in the pure joy of the man who sets off from whatever point he chooses, along any other path save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.

About two-thirds of the way through each film, all of the characters portrayed by Blanchett, seen in extreme close-up, suddenly speak their lines in monotone unison, a kind of choral cacophony of chanting and singing that echoes throughout the massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, an exhilarating moment that makes up for some of the pompous diatribe and intellectual masturbation that preceded it. It also is a grand statement for the critical importance of art, especially during tough times when countries face cultural and sociopolitical battles that threaten personal freedoms and liberties. But the best reason to experience Manifesto, which continues through January 8, is to watch a remarkable actress in a marvelous and memorable tour de force; Blanchett fans will also want to catch her in Anton Chekhov’s The Present, which is running on Broadway through March 19.