this week in art

ELIZABETH CATLETT: “I AM THE BLACK WOMAN”

Installation view of “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” including Target Practice, Political Prisoner, and Black Unity (photo by Paula Abreu Pita)

ELIZABETH CATLETT: A BLACK REVOLUTIONARY AND ALL THAT IT IMPLIES
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, fourth floor
Through January 19, $14-$20 ($17-$25 including “Solid Gold”)
www.brooklynmuseum.org

“Unfortunately, for me, I was refused [a visa to enter the United States] on the grounds that, as a foreigner, there was a possibility I would interfere in social or political problems, and thus, I constituted a threat to the well-being of the United States of America,” Washington, DC-born artist Elizabeth Catlett said in 1970. “To the degree and in the proportion that the United States constitute a threat to Black People, to that degree and more, do I hope I have earned that honor. For I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist, and all that it implies!”

This is the last weekend to see “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” at the Brooklyn Museum, a revelatory show that traces Catlett’s extraordinary career as an artist, teacher, and activist. Divided into ten sections, including “I Am the Black Woman,” “Roots and Awakening,” “Motherhood and Family,” and “The Black Woman Speaks,” the exhibit features more than two hundred objects, from sculpture, painting, and drawing to linocuts, lithographs, political posters, and ephemera (documents, archival photographs, scrapbooks, postcards, pamphlets).

Elizabeth Catlett, three versions of Sharecropper (photo by Paula Abreu Pita)

Born in 1915, Catlett earned degrees from Howard and the University of Iowa, studying with Loïs Mailou Jones, James A. Porter, James Lesesne Wells, Grant Wood, H. W. Janson, and Henry Stinson. In 1946, her Rosenwald Fellowship, to work on a “series of lithographs, paintings, and sculptures on the role of the Negro woman in the fight for democratic rights in the history of America,” led her to Mexico, where she joined the revolutionary art collective Taller de Gráfica Popular, became a Mexican citizen, and married artist Francisco “Pancho” Mora, her partner for fifty-five years.

Catlett, known informally as Betty, amassed a remarkable output that is wonderfully organized by Dalila Scruggs of the Smithsonian, Catherine Morris of the Brooklyn Museum, and Mary Lee Corlett of the National Gallery, spread across numerous rooms. Among the works to watch out for are poignant oil on canvas and linocut renderings of Sharecropper, perhaps her most famous image; the “I Am the Black Woman” series, which unfolds in a poetic narrative; a trio of heads on a horizontal plinth; several heart-wrenching depictions of a mother and child; Target Practice, a bronze bust of a head with a circular target in front of it; Black Unity, a cedar sculpture with two faces on one side and a large, clenched fist on the other; a foil screenprint and life-size sculpture of Angela Davis, each bursting with shocking color; bronze maquettes for public art statues of Mahalia Jackson and Sojourner Truth; and the stunning Floating Family, created for the Chicago Public Library, in which a mother and daughter, carved from the trunk of a primavera tree, reach out and join hands, floating horizontally so people can walk under them. There are also three videos of her at work.

In her “Statement of Plan” for the Rosenwald Fellowship, Catlett wrote, “Negro women in America have long suffered under the double handicap of race and sex. Because of subtle American propaganda in the movies, radio and stage, they have come to be generally regarded as good cooks, housemaids and nurses and little else. At this time when we are fighting an all out war against tyranny and oppression, it is extremely important that the picture of Negro women as participants in this fight, throughout the history of America, be sharply drawn. . . . It is my earnest desire to portray this history of Negro womanhood in lithography, painting and sculpture and to send these portrayals to Negro and white colleges so that young men and women, especially in the south, can get some idea of the contributions of Negro American women.”

EInstallation view of “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” including Bather, Floating Family, Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans, and Sojourner (photo by Paula Abreu Pita)

Catlett — who died in 2012 in her home studio in Cuernavaca at the age of ninety-six and is survived by three sons, ten grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren — concluded her Rosenwald statement by explaining, “As to my future plans, I want to establish myself as an artist so that I can develop, as I feel that my greatest contribution to the forward progress of the Negro can be made in this field. The opportunity to devote one year to painting and sculpture would be of extreme importance in realizing this aim.”

As “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” displays, Catlett made the most of that opportunity, leaving behind a legacy of extreme importance.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DUKE BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE IS “SO THRILLING!!!” AT JAPAN SOCIETY

Sujin Kim reimagines Shūji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle as macabre Harajuku burlesque at Japan Society (photo © Ayumi Sakamoto)

DUKE BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 15-18, $36-$48
www.japansociety.org
utrfest.org

Korean-Japanese director Sujin Kim’s macabre Harajuku burlesque adaptation of Shūji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is an exhilarating two hours of nonstop fun, a wildly imaginative celebration of all that angura, or Japanese underground, unconventional theater, has to offer. For the show, which runs January 15–18 at Japan Society as part of the Under the Radar festival, Kim has brought together an inspiring multidisciplinary cast of more than thirty, including the tantalizing cabaret duo Kokusyoku Sumire, consisting of soprano vocalist and accordionist Yuka and violinist Sachi, who wear adorable outfits with light-up rabbit ears; magician Syun Shibuya, who, in a sharp-fitting tux, does card tricks, pulls doves out of a hat, and dazzles with mind-boggling costume changes; the delightful aerialist Miho Wakabayashi, who has been detailing her New York City trip here; and the experimental Japanese company Project Nyx, which was founded in 2006 by Kim’s wife, Kanna Mizushima, and specializes in “entertainment Bijo-geki, all-female cross-dressing theater.”

We get a taste of what’s to come when, early on, the stage manager (Misa Homma) tells Judith (Rei Fujita), who is portraying Bluebeard’s prospective seventh wife and closely checking the script, “You know what? — Things don’t always follow the script, y’know? Let’s see your improv muscles!”

The narrative regularly pops in and out of the Bluebeard fairy tale, which was written in 1697 by French author Charles Perrault; the self-referential story of the staging of the show; and the acknowledgment that it is being held at Japan Society, maintaining an improvisatory feel throughout.

“Wait, you’re saying the stage manager is doubling as the costume designer’s assistant in this production?” Bluebeard’s first wife (Miki Yamazaki) says to the stage manager while Carrot the Prompter (Ran Moroji) rubs her feet. Carrot had just amateurishly spoken a stage direction out loud: “Whistles dramatically and pretends to be a bird flying away.”

The play unfolds at a furious pace, so fast that it’s sometimes difficult to read the English surtitles, which are projected on small, raised monitors at the left and right sides; it can get a little frustrating, as you don’t want to miss a second of what’s happening onstage.

Asuka Sasaki’s kawai costumes and the far-out, colorful wigs are spectacular, like the best cosplay comic-con contest ever, with circuslike lighting by Tsuguo Izumi + RISE and enveloping sound by Takashi Onuki. Choreographer Taeko Okawa takes advantage of every piece of Satoshi Otsuka’s set, highlighted by seven white doors that flip to seven mirrors held by the seven wives in slinky black. As they dance with the mirrors, reflections shimmer throughout the space.

Kokusyoku Sumire’s songs are charming and engaging, including “[Doppelgänger],” in which they explain, “Even if I hide perfectly / There are times when misfortune finds me. / If I were to suppress this tormenting pain, / Would I be allowed to wish for your happiness?,” and poetic, as when they sing, “Walking in shadows, careful not to stumble, counting to nine, who are you? / The moonlight is full, playing the song of joy. If I close my eyes, I should be able to see everything.”

Dance with seven door-mirrors is a highight of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (photo © Ayumi Sakamoto)

The scene titles in the script are not projected on the monitors but give a good idea of what audiences are in store for, including “The Bride in the Bathtub,” “A Goblin Peeks from Behind the Curtain,” “Don’t ruin my script with your life,” and “The Maestro of the Puppet Killers.” In “A Pig and a Rose,” which features some of the most hilarious dialogue in the play, Copula the Attendant (Chisato Someya) complains to the second wife (Yoshika Kotani) that the seventh wife has been miscast: “Her expressions are our hand-me-down, her heart is like a plastic trash can, and oh, her face — is the stuff that splashes out from an overflowing pit latrine. . . . She is Madam’s used tampon! Madam’s vomit — her face is fit for a manhole cover in a sewer!” The second wife is overjoyed, proclaiming, “So thrilling!!! Insults are divine, don’t you agree, Judith?”

Fujita and Homma stand out in the fantastic cast, which also features Ruri Nanzoin as Coppélius the puppeteer, You Yamagami as the costume designer, Haruka Yoshida as the debt collector, Nozomi Yamada as the actor, Yume Tsukioka as Aris, Hinako Tezuka as Teles, Kaho Asai as the magician’s assistant, Wakabayashi as the fourth wife, Mizushima as the fifth wife, Sayaka Ito as the third wife, and Mayu Kasai as wife number six. Don’t worry if you can’t keep it all straight; just let the extravaganza dazzle you time and time again.

Kim has a dream of presenting Terayama’s work in a tent along the New York City waterfront. Here’s hoping that’s next for this immensely talented creator.

[There will be a preshow lecture on Terayama by UCLA professor emerita Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei at 6:30 on January 17. Ticket holders on January 17 and 18 are invited to see the current exhibit, “Bunraku Backstage,” in the Japan Society Gallery; there is also a display of rare Terayama artifacts on view, including scripts, letters, photos, and more from the La MaMa Archive.]

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SAILING UNDER THE RADAR: BLUEBEARD AT JAPAN SOCIETY

Sujin Kim reimagines Shūji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle at Japan Society (photo by Yoji Ishizawa)

DUKE BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 15-18, $36-$48
www.japansociety.org
utrfest.org

In his 1697 book Histoires ou contes du temps passé, French author Charles Perrault adapted such famous folktales as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Though not quite as well known, particularly when it comes to children, Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” about a duke who has a penchant for moving on from wife to wife in not the most legal of ways, has been turned into plays, short stories, novels, ballets, operas, and movies.

Multidisciplinary Japanese artist Shūji Terayama, who died in 1983 at the age of forty-seven, was obsessed with the story of Bluebeard. “The Japanese countercultural icon Terayama Shūji produced three projects in the years 1961–1979 that rework the legend of Bluebeard, often intermixing the folkloric narrative with contemporary lived reality,” Steven C. Ridgely wrote in Marvels & Tales in 2013. “This was a countervailing tendency to the tide of texts emerging at the time that demythologize Bluebeard by means of historical figures such as Gilles de Rais. Terayama’s work on Bluebeard might best be understood as an effort to frustrate the mapping of folklore and legend to practices of the past and to insist on the liberational potential of taking possession of narratives in the folkloric mode.”

Adding a macabre Harajuku burlesque touch to the proceedings, which take place backstage at a Japanese theater, Korean-Japanese director Sujin Kim has reimagined Terayama’s version in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, running January 15–18 at Japan Society as part of the Under the Radar festival. The North American premiere of this new production is performed by Project Nyx, an all-female avant-garde ensemble led by Kanna Mizushima; avant-garde cabaret duo Kokusyoku Sumire; and magician Syun Shibuya.

There will be a reception following the January 15 show, an artist Q&A after the January 16 performance, and a preshow lecture on Terayama by UCLA professor emerita Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei at 6:30 on January 17. Ticket holders on January 16, 17, and 18 are invited to see the current exhibit, “Bunraku Backstage,” in the Japan Society Gallery; there is also a display of rare Terayama artifacts on view, including scripts, letters, photos, and more from the La MaMa Archive.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MANDALAS: SYMBOLISM AND INTERDEPENDENCY AT THE MET

Tenzing Rigdol at work on Biography of a Thought (photo courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

MANDALAS: MAPPING THE BUDDHIST ART OF TIBET
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through January 12, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org
biography of a thought online slideshow

This is the last weekend to see the Met’s “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet,” a stunning collection of mandalas, symbolic geometric diagrams of the universe that relate spiritual stories of unity, balance, and inner harmony, so it is appropriate that the exhibit is in the downstairs octagonal galleries of the Robert Lehman Wing. The works go back as far as a thousand years, ranging from portraits of masters to manuscripts and manuscript covers, from fragmentary leaves of sutras to small statues of bodhisattvas, from glittering crown ornaments to dance robes and stage masks.

Highlights include the “Thousand-Armed Chenresi, a Cosmic Form of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara,” a gilt copper alloy statue with multiple arms and heads; the dizzying “Vajradhatu (Diamond Realm) Mandala,” in which the Buddha Vairochana is surrounded by celestial realms; a Bhutanese skeleton mask placed atop a Tibetan dance costume; and “Chest with Scenes of Tantric Offerings,” populated by gory depictions of animals and skeletons amid hellish violence.

In the center of the exhibit, in the atrium, is Tenzing Rigdol’s Biography of a Thought, an installation with no beginning or end that invites visitors to place themselves in the center, like a buddha in the middle of a thangka. Commissioned specifically for the exhibition, the immersive, colorful work features four walls of murals in addition to a box exploring interdependency and handwoven carpeting with symbolic imagery.

Rigdol, who was born in Kathmandu in 1982, calls it “the journey of a single thought that gathers momentum and produces many thoughts that cluster and form ideas.” Among those ideas are climate change (roiling seas, a lone polar bear), environmental pollution (smokestacks), social injustice (George Floyd), government whistleblowers (a Mount Rushmore–style depiction of Frances Haugen, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange that resembles a country rock band), terrorism (the Twin Towers), and Western art (Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon reimagined as five taras representing the five sensory faculties). Rigdol also puts himself in the work, in a series of figures with a wrapped head, carrying burdens and expressing his ignorance.

In addition, Rigdol incorporates ASL mudras and poetry in Braille that are not translated, part of the artist’s mission to communicate “without belonging to any nation, race, class, group, tribe, club, or creed.”

The Braille poem sums up Rigdol’s vision: “I see the sun / I see cloud / I see river / I see soil / I see the universe / within interdependency.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MORGAN LIBRARY GOES KAFKAESQUE FOR FRANZ CENTENNIAL

Andy Warhol, Portrait of Franz Kafka, silkscreen print, 1980 (courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York © the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York)

FRANZ KAFKA: PROGRAMS
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 13, $13-$25
www.themorgan.org

There are not a lot of authors whose name has been acknowledged as a legitimate adjective in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, and even fewer of those adjectives have been used as the name of a musical. In fact, the only one might be Kafkaesque, which is used for anything that relates to Czech-born German-language writer Franz Kafka and has “a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.”

Last fall, James Harvey’s musical comedy Kafkaesque! opened off-off-Broadway at Theatre 154 in the West Village, about one American family experiencing predicaments inspired by Kafka’s writings. The first song gets right to the point when Kafka sings, “By age forty I was dead / never had kids and I never wed / the words I wrote were hardly read / but now I’m an adjective.”

Kafka and his work have grown in stature since his passing in June 1924 at the age of forty from tuberculosis, leaving behind a literary legacy that includes the novels The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika and such influential stories as “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “The Metamorphosis.”

The Morgan Library is celebrating that legacy with the simply titled exhibition “Franz Kafka,” continuing through April 13. The show features original notebooks and manuscripts, letters about vegetarianism and his first hemorrhage, postcards, illustrated pages, family photos, handwritten aphorisms, first editions, architectural models, a diary, and other ephemera, primarily from the Bodleian Library, organized into such sections as “Life and Times: Health and Illness,” “Life and Times: Jewishness,” “Journeys: Around Europe,” and “Journeys: Of the Imagination.”

In his catalogue essay “Kafka’s Life and World,” British editor Ritchie Robertson writes, “Even during his final illness he kept writing. In March 1924 he wrote his last story, ‘Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse-People,’ and on his death-bed he corrected the proofs of the volume, A Hunger Artist: Four Stories, in which the story was included. ‘Josefine’ is a masterpiece of Kafka’s gentle, self-deprecating humour, and ends with the unexplained disappearance of the heroine and the narrator’s reflection that she will not be much missed. She ‘will lose herself happily in the numberless host of our people’s heroes, and, since we don’t go in for history, she will soon, redeemed and transfigured, be forgotten, like all her brethren.’”

Kafka often wrote about the unexplained, but he never disappeared from the public consciousness and will not soon be forgotten. The Morgan exhibition, held in conjunction with the centennial of Kafka’s death, is supplemented by a series of programs that delve further into Kafka’s life and world, ranging from panel discussions to special tours, workshops, lectures, and live music; below is the complete schedule.

Postcard to Ottla Kafka, Schelesen (Želízy), December 1918. MS. Kafka 49, fol. 79r (jointly owned by the Bodleian Library and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach © the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

Thursday, January 9
Kafkaesque: Creative Responses to Kafka, with Joshua Cohen, Maira Kalman, and Josh Luxenberg, Gilder Lehrman Hall, $25, 7:00

Friday, January 10
Virtual Spotlight Tour | Franz Kafka: The Making of an Icon, Zoom, sold out, 12:30

Wednesday, February 5
Virtual Lecture | Benjamin Balint: Kafka’s Last Trial, with author Benjamin Balint, Zoom, free with advance RSVP, noon

Gallery Tour | Franz Kafka with Benjamin Balint, Engelhard Gallery, free with museum admission, 2:00

Wednesday February 19
Winter Break Family Program | Franz Kafka Storytime and Artmaking, with readings of author Larissa Theule and illustrator Rebecca Green’s Kafka and the Doll, free with museum admission, 2:00

Thursday, March 6
Concert | Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis,” with pianist Jenny Lin, actor Saroi Tsukada, and bassist Lindsay Rosenberg, followed by a discussion with music publisher Richard Guerin, Gilder Lehrman Hall, $40, 7:00

Friday, March 14
Lecture | “Daylight at the Exit”: Women Translating Kafka, with Michelle Woods, Gilder Lehrman Hall, free (advance RSVP recommended), 6:00

Wednesday, April 9
Lecture | Nahma Sandrow: Kafka and the Vagabonds, with playwright and Yiddish theater scholar Dr. Nahma Sandrow, J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library, $20, 6:00

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE VIVID UNKNOWN: REIMAGINING KOYAANISQATSI THROUGH INTERACTIVE AI TECHNOLOGY

The Vivid Unknown uses generative AI and immersive sound to reimagine Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

TECHNE: THE VIVID UNKNOWN
Under the Radar Festival / BAM Next Wave
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-7, $10
Series continues through January 19
utrfest.org
www.bam.org

“I like people to break things. I’m always interested in how kids interact with things because they’re going to do things that someone else might not do,” artist John Fitzgerald told me at the inaugural presentation of TECHNE: The Vivid Unknown at BAM’s Fishman Space, a multimedia reimagining of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi, which means “life out of balance,” “life disintegrating,” and “a state of life that calls for another way of living” in the Hopi language.

Fitzgerald was not referring to the hardware but “the rules of engagement” that he’s designed with an expert team. “Anyone can bring their own story to it. That’s something I learned from Godfrey, who calls it the autodidactic experience of watching Koyaanisqatsi,” he said. “He’s not telling you, ‘technology bad, humans good — the natural world is safe.’ He’s giving you the opportunity to have thoughts about things, to experience things. Everyone will always watch it differently. I’ve seen that movie dozens and dozens of times; there are a lot of different ways that you can interpret it. So I’m excited to see how this evolves and unfolds. People might want to come in here and sit down on the floor, they might want to go out and get some fresh air and come back in; it’s an open experience.”

There are numerous ways to experience The Vivid Unknown, and it’s left up to each individual to decide, mimicking how we approach life. AI-generated images speed across three large screens as immersive AI sound envelops the room. You can sit on the floor right in front, move around, or take a regular seat in the back. If you decide to participate — and I highly recommend you do — you will discover that when you are in an oval of light, the shape of your body will be picked up by sensors behind you and your onscreen silhouette will eventually be filled by an image different from what is already being projected.

For example, amid slow-motion and time-lapse shots of beachgoers, mountains, metropolitan cities, airplanes, waterfalls, clouds, traffic, the demolition of a housing project, and other scenes, a rocket taking off fit into my outline and followed me onscreen as I walked across the room. Meanwhile, a woman stood near the middle, moving like a dancer. Couples posed together. A few kids jumped up and down. Humanity fused together with technology and the environment as some of us participated and others merely watched from the back.

Almost all the young boys and girls chose to become involved with the art, which brought out the child in the adults who got up from their seats and interacted with it as well. Noticing that, Fitzgerald, who has a five-year-old and a four-month-old, said that the older one is “the best product tester out there. He’s the first to be, like, ‘That’s too long,’ or ‘I want to see more of that.’ He speaks without a filter.”

Curated by Onassis ONX, TECHNE consists of four digital installations that are part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival and Under the Radar; it begins January 4-7 with The Vivid Unknown and continues January 8-11 with Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser’s The Golden Key, January 12-15 with Margarita Athanasiou’s Voices, and January 16-19 with Stephanie Dinkins’s Secret Garden. (Tickets for each is $10; a series pass is $35.) BAM Rose Cinemas will be showing Koyaanisqatsi on January 7 at 7:30, with Fitzgerald and Vivid Unknown codirector Reggio on hand for the conversation “Terra techno firma” afterward.

Onassis ONX NY program director Jazia Hammoudi shared information with me about how it all works, but I opted to discover much of The Vivid Unknown on my own, which was extremely satisfying. In the program, she writes, “The refined interactivity of the work’s music and visuals subverts the source material’s linear minimalism and subtly engages the body in epic vistas from mountainscapes to oil fields. Within The Vivid Unknown’s zone of immersion, the connection between individual and collective action reflects the complex relationships between human agency and planetary outcomes.” In addition to TECHNE, Onassis ONX is presenting Christiana Kosiar’s RUNWAY and Viola He’s A {room} of one’s own January 10-14 at the Olympic Tower on Fifth Ave. as part of Under the Radar’s Under Construction series.

Fitzgerald met Reggio about two years ago, when he went out to Santa Fe to visit the now-eighty-four-year-old filmmaker, who also made the sequels Powaqqatsi in 1988 and Naqoyqatsi in 2002; all three films in the series feature original soundtracks by Philip Glass.

Audience participation enhances experience of multimedia The Vivid Unknown by John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Since this was the first public presentation of the work at BAM, I asked Fitzgerald what he thought about the audience’s response.

“It’s exceeding expectations on all levels,” he said. “We’ve never had this many people in it. One of the things about making creative technology art is that it’s always half broken until it’s not, until you have to press play and make sure everything comes together. The idea was that Koyaanisqatsi is a depiction of the state of the world in the latter half of the twentieth century as chaos unfolded. So I was just playing around with this idea of how you don’t really control anything but you do have an impact on this.”

That concept is also represented by a video sculpture off to one side, a refurbished slot machine that was transformed into an interactive artwork by the fabrication studio Chateau Brooklyn. When you pull down the S2000 lever, images speed by a trio of small monitors; it offers an additional moment of connection, but it has no effect on the film. It exists on its own, but it offers a sense of power and involvement even though the results are random. One boy was having a blast with it, pulling the lever a few dozen times, too young to consider the metaphor of how we gamble in life, taking or avoiding risk.

At several points, the barrage of images dropped out and the screens went dark; only the shapes of the audience members standing in the oval of light could be seen. “I want people to feel like they’re making an impact on the images,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s why the last state is left this way; the film disappears, and it’s fuel to give a reflection of your presence.”

He was also quick to share credit. “This is a project made by a dozen artists; it’s truly a collaborative effort,” Fitzgerald explained. “Everyone is unified behind Godfrey and his vision to show humans where we are right now. It’s like a mirror into ourselves.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SOUL SEARCHING: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI AND BABE

The Light and the Dark looks at the life and times of Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (photo by James Leynse)

THE LIGHT AND THE DARK (THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI)
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St, between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 15, $66-$131
www.59e59.org

After seeing Kate Hamill’s The Light and the Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi) and Jessica Goldberg’s Babe on the same day, I was hard-pressed to figure out why every woman doesn’t just go all Judith on their own Holofernes. While both plays explore misogyny, sexism, control of a woman’s body, and the dominant patriarchy in the arts, one does so much better than the other, although neither is ultimately successful.

At 59E59, Primary Stages is presenting The Light and the Dark, about Artemisia Gentileschi, the early Italian Baroque painter whose career was temporarily derailed by sexual assault and gender discrimination. Hamill’s previous feminist-driven works include stirring adaptations of Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Vanity Fair, and Dracula. She has portrayed such characters as Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennet, Meg March, Renfield, and Marianne Dashwood; in The Light and the Dark she inhabits the title role with a tender ferociousness as Artemisia matures from a precocious seven-year-old girl to one of the most talented and important artists of her era, even as she’s held back by men and social mores every step of the way.

Artemisia knows what she wants from a young age. Her Tuscan-born father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon), is a naturalistic, technically skillful painter who delivers precisely what his patrons desire. Admitting he doesn’t know how to raise a girl on his own, he decides to send her to a nunnery for her education, telling his daughter, “Think, if I build a big enough fortune and you mark the sisters well enough, you may be a fine lady — the wife or the mother of the great artist of tomorrow!” Misia, as he calls her, responds, “I don’t want to be a lady! I am I, your Artemisia. And I want to be a painter!”

When she is nine, Orazio lets Misia begin working in his studio, and six years later she is allowed to start painting alongside Agostino Tassi (Matthew Saldívar) and Cosimo Quorli (Jason O’Connell), which could be considered scandalous, especially when Orazio brings in a nude model, a sex worker named Maria (Joey Parsons). Soon the arrogant Agostino takes a personal interest in Artemisia, who is proving to be an exceptional artist with a unique perspective on traditional biblical scenes, and scandal does indeed ensue, against Artemisia’s will.

Artemisia Gentileschi has been undergoing a renaissance of her own this century, a heroic figure for the current time, spurred on by the 2002 Met exhibit “Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy,” such books as Mary D. Garrard’s Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe and Gina Siciliano’s I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi, and such plays as Sara Fellini’s NEC SPE / NEC METU and Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution. Artemisia often repeats “I, I, I” when talking about herself, trying to establish an identity that her father and his friends will not allow her to have because she is a woman, and she is prone to cursing like a sailor, dropping F-bombs again and again.

“Before Caravaggio, painters / Started with the light. / Blank canvas, blank fresco, / And painted layers upon that blankness — / But Caravaggio starts in the darkness / And carves his way out from the shadows,” she says in a way that refers to her own situation. She also declares, as if for all women, “Why should I suffer for nothing? / If I cannot undo it — and I cannot undo it. . . . / I can make it right. / I can control it.”

The show is visually beautiful, from Brittany Vasta’s alluring studio set to Jen Caprio’s lovely period costumes, Seth Reiser’s lighting, and Kylee Loera’s projections of such masterworks by Artemisia as Judith and Holofernes, Susanna and the Elders, The Allegory of Inclination, and Madonna and Child. The cast is effective, but Hamill and director Jade King Carroll too often get caught up in overly earnest monologues and preachy explications; Artemesia speaks at the audience instead of to them. Several didactic art lectures could have been cut or shortened — the play is too long at two and a half hours with intermission — in favor of the narrative itself, which can be compelling.

However, Carroll and Hamill do make The Light and the Dark feel relevant to what is happening today, particularly in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Both female actors, Hamill as Artemisia and Parsons as Maria, ultimately take ownership of their bodies away from the men while subverting the male gaze; each gets fully nude, standing boldly onstage, not mere naked subjects to be depicted on canvas but real women shouting out their independence. They might not be holding daggers, preparing to cut off a perpetrator’s head, but you can see and feel their weapons nonetheless.

Gus (Arliss Howard) and Abby (Marisa Tomei) wonder about a new employee in Babe (photo by Monique Carboni)

BABE
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 22, $99-$119
thenewgroup.org

Jessica Goldberg’s Babe has much in common with Kate Hamill’s The Light and the Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi); instead of taking place in the world of Baroque painting, it is set in the contemporary music industry, where an old-school record producer, Gus (Arliss Howard), spews sexism and misogyny in his search for artists with a soul. He gives short shrift to his longtime right-hand person, Abby (Marisa Tomei), who discovered 1990s sensation Kat Wonder (Gracie McGraw) but has never received the recognition she deserves.

When a young Gen Z woman, Katherine Becker (McGraw), comes in for a job interview and ultimately gets hired, each character’s flaws become exposed, as well as their strengths, but it is hard to care in this lackluster story searching for its own purpose, never filling in the blank canvas it started with.

Comparisons abound between the two shows. “I don’t want to make people feel great, I want to destroy shit! I want the girls in the front, moshing the fuck out of each other!” Kat declares in a way Gentileschi never would have. Abby, who is gay, explains, “People think if you’re a certain age without a partner, you’re alone. But it’s not true,” evoking Artemisia saying, “I have no interest — in marrying,” but with less conviction. While Hamill empowers Artemisia, having her stand onstage naked, using her body as a model for the self-portrait Allegory of Inclination, Goldberg makes Abby sexless, having had a double mastectomy as a result of cancer. “So it doesn’t really make me feel —” she tells Katherine, implying she lacks physical and emotional desire and confidence. While The Light and the Dark references Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Donatelli, and Botticelli, Babe brings up Liz Phair, Bob Dylan, Joan Jett, and Kathleen Hannah.

At one point in The Light and the Dark, men assume that Artemisia did not actually paint anything, that a woman is incapable of creating high-quality art and that someone else must be behind it all, which is one of the reasons Artemisia signs her name on her canvases “in bold type . . . And wait for my accolades to roll in!” In Babe, a New Group production at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Abby eventually asserts, “I want my NAME. On the record.” As women in fields run by men, neither receives those accolades, but Abby has settled for compromising where Artemisia keeps up the fight.

Marisa Tomei, Arliss Howard, and Gracie McGraw star in the New Group’s Babe
(photo by Monique Carboni)

During the job interview, amid outdated questions that would drive a human resources department to drink, Gus asks Katherine, “Do you have a soul?” Unfortunately, it’s Babe itself that lacks heart and soul. Even at only eighty-five minutes it drags on, like side two of an old record that doesn’t live to up to the flip side.

Derek McLane’s office set is attractive and BETTY’s original music is fine, but the narrative and time shifts are bumpy; director Scott Elliott never gets a handle on the rhythm. Interestingly, although Gus has a disdain for groups, preferring solo artists performing songs written by others, he wears a Killers T-shirt, the Las Vegas band led by lead singer and chief songwriter Brandon Flowers. The costumes, which never change, are by Jeff Mahshie.

Whereas it is obvious why Hamill made The Light and the Dark, celebrating a woman who faced tremendous obstacles in order to express herself through her remarkable art, it is decidedly unclear what points Goldberg (Refuge, Good Thing) is trying to make in Babe; it’s like a concept album without a concept. It purports to be about “the American spirit of individualism,” as Abby says, as well as the resistance to the DEI movement, but it’s as flat as an LP that is not going to go gold or platinum anytime soon, instead gathering dust on a shelf.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]