Redefining, Redesigning Fashion: Designs for Sustainability, installation view courtesy of the Goldstein Museum of Design.

Sustainability and fashion aren’t two words usually paired in the same sentence. The fashion industry is based on systemic obsolescence. And as the recent tragedy at a Bangladesh clothing-manufacturing facility cruelly demonstrated, fashion’s trickle-down effect—new season = new colors, styles, fits, fabrics, etc.—among mainstream retailers is to produce more for less, often at the cost of human life.

The rise of vintage and other resale clothing shops is a boon to the eco-friendly and price-conscious among us who still like to buy something “new” now and then. As for off-loading the unused, ill fitting or worn out items from our closets, numerous charities will take the stuff off your hands. So, other than purchasing used clothing and donating to Goodwill, what else comes to mind when sustainable becomes an adjective attached to fashion? Dresses made out of beverage-container labels, soda can pull-top tabs and other detritus? Gowns made of recycled or upcycled tablecloths? Tops and shorts from vintage fabric?

Anny Li-Fen Chang, Eco Pop Dress, collar detail. Photo courtesy of Goldstein Museum of Design.

Examples of each, unsurprisingly, are part of the Goldstein Museum of Design’s current exhibition, Redefining, Redesigning Fashion: Designs for Sustainability on view until May 26 and available online here. By the way, the delightful, high-collared A-line pop-can tab dress, designed by Anny Li-Fen Chang, a faculty member at the University of North Texas, was inspired by Vasily Kandinsky’s 1926 painting Several Circles, and is comprised of 2,500 spray-painted tabs—and would be truly fun to wear.

So would Rosetta LaFleur’s (a faculty member at the University of Delaware) floor-length gown constructed, in part, from salvaged upholstery-fabric yarn woven into a halter top. In artistic beauty and inspired construction, M. Jo Kallal’s (also from U of DE) zero-fabric-waste suit is breathtaking. Hand-constructed with needle felting, the suit was patterned on a “Hokusai-like ‘wave’ similar to those depicted in Japanese waterfalls cut from folded paper,” she says.

Rosetta LaFleur, Amalgamated Anemones, detail. Photo courtesy of Goldstein Museum of Design.

The exhibition, juried from 200 submissions, includes 46 pieces from 30 designers from the US, Australia, Europe and Asia. In the exhibition are works created through up-cycling, repurposing or the reclamation of clothing, materials or products. There are garments with multiple purposes or looks—dresses, for example, with skirts that can be raised (cocktail party) or lowered (evening gown). Other designers converted heirloom or memorable garments or household textiles into shorts, tops or accessories.

The late, great Alexander McQueen’s influence (dresses of shells, flowers) is clear in a knee-length dress by Sherry Sanden Will, a student at the University of Minnesota, festooned with ¼” thick slices of wood collected from dead branches. Martin Flores (a student at Michigan State University) may have been channeling a posher punk Mad Max in his zero-waste jacket. Another student from the U of M, Lauren Kacher, took medical scrubs in distinctly day-glow, sci-fi direction.

The exhibition also includes a lovely dress of traditional, biodegradable, organic Korean linen, and an up-cycled and over-dyed 1963 jacket from Bjorkman. The best quote, however, comes from Colleen Moretz (a faculty members at Immaculata University) about her multi-purpose wedding gown constructed from three damask tablecloths rummaged from friends’ closets: “The biggest challenge in using these repurposed table linens is working around the stains.” She found a way and the result is sumptuously old-world.

Redefining, Redesigning Fashion: Designs for Sustainability is up through May 26, 2013 at the Goldstein Museum of Design, University of Minnesota – St. Paul campus.

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Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities arts journalist and dance critic.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Sloshing in from an unseasonably wintry spring night, revelers gathered amidst the rich fabrics and assorted tableaux of gaudy and embellished items that Chicago-based artist Dzine has brought together for Public Functionary‘s first-ever exhibition. The opening of this non-profit gallery and social space has been much anticipated, and the opening was heralded through the night with pulsating music, bomba drums, and a steady stream of attendees.

Dzine, Club Gallistico. From the website of Public Functionary.

Dzine’s show is aptly called Victory: seeing it, you feel as if you are walking through a personal awards-meets-dressing-room. Trophies abound! There are dozens of them along the far wall of the gallery that, upon close inspection, have clearly been reappropriated in the style of kustom kulture: they are decorative works swathed in a variety of bright velvets, fringe and brass knuckles. The artist, né Carlos Rolon, started as a teenaged graffiti artist and has gained popularity for bringing a celebratory Puerto Rican aesthetic into the art world via both installations and flamboyant nail art—a taste of his personal heritage at a large and small scale.

Detail from Dzine’s Victory. Photo by the author.

At the heart of the exhibition, a low-hanging chandelier, Untitled (Around the Way Girl I), drips with fake gold hoop earrings, mirrored surfaces and crystals. Like Andy Messerschmidt’s sheep chandelier in the Walker’s “oculus,” Dzine’s fixture functions as a sculpture but also draws the viewer into its warm and illuminated space. Dzine’s centerpiece is a beautiful distraction from the rest of the exhibition, an inviting place for people to congregate; small groups could be found throughout opening night staring into the work’s low lights like a fire in the hearth. The 2D works along the walls need to be experienced close-up, and every surface of Public Functionary is built up like a wall of a kitschy gingerbread house. Unlike their edible counterparts, these artworks are just eye candy, but still tantalizingly just-within-reach. The textures of the walls and paintings include: sequins, gilding, gold chains, and all sorts of other costume jewelry. I felt like a magpie ensnared by all the shiny things on view, drawn nearer and nearer to each sequined painting, wall and sculpture to investigate.

Detail from Dzine’s Victory. Photo by the author.

Situated in a relatively small exhibition space, Victory lives large. The installation celebrates the delights of surface and texture, but goes deeper too, confronting the viewer with signifiers of success. That said, literature for the show takes pains to invite all manner of viewers in, reassuring them that Dzine’s “work is not difficult to understand.” There are no individual wall labels, and there are many details to explore – it’s an invitation to stay a while and bask in the bright colors.  Victory by Dzine is on view through May 31^st at Public Functionary in Minneapolis.

For more: http://publicfunctionary.org/.

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Chloe Nelson is the program assistant for mnartists.org.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

The intriguing, dangling sculpture in the Hennepin Avenue lobby of the Walker is also a conversation piece. “Those are manger sheep,” one passerby told me. “Are those stickers?” asked another, pointing to the new window decals. Evocative and oddly familiar, Andy Messerschmidt’s  Friend Me/Follow Me: Graze Anatomy (2012), the new installation in the Walker’s “oculus,” looks like some eccentric holiday display: a shrine to psychedelia and the patterns of consumerism. The ingredients in this symmetrical and arresting mish-mash of sculpture, sound-piece and 2-D design are varied and decidedly low-brow: wrapping paper, 63 nativity sheep and several enormous shepherd’s crooks, gold paint and green Astroturf (among other surreal ready-made objects).

Andy Messerschmidt’s Friend Me/Follow Me: Graze Anatomy (2012) by night.

Messerschmidt told me that, in order to understand the origins of this work, it was essential to experience Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “disturbing Western” film, The Holy Mountain (1973). Apparently, there is a bearded transvestite in the film with cheetahs instead of breasts. Watch the trailer for said film, and he’s right – the connections do seem to all fall in place (note: the film trailer below contains some disturbing imagery).

From the trailer alone, you get a clear impression of the unique visual culture Jodorowsky establishes in his film;  the imagery recalls many things: Yves Klein’s Anthropométries, a nightmarish cult involving Surrealists, sacrificial animals,  war-torn society at its worst, and religious pastiche. Cindy Sherman’s grotesque humanoid forms and the aestheticized religion in Lady Gaga’s “Judas” music video. High-brow and popular art, both echo the filmmaker’s eccentric visual language.  Messerschmidt’s installation streamlines Jodorowsky’s lexicon down to clean design elements. The (sacrificial) lambs are still in evidence, but they are combined into an elegant, illuminated chandelier; the repetitive and overwhelming patterns inspired by Eastern religion he has flattened into wallpaper. The grotesque, curious, and bizarre of Jodorowsky’s cinematic vision, translated this way, becomes playful.

Messerschmidt’s work creates the experience of an isolated, enveloping moment for passersby that is decidedly separate from the rest of the museum. It’s also interesting to view the work from the restaurant, Gather, upstairs: the swirling projected images flash across the asymmetrical ceiling and are readily visible from the bar. As night falls on Hennepin Avenue, people going by make the occasional observation; I hear someone wonder aloud about the impact of the lit sculpture at different times of day.  The installation looks warm and bright as I give it one last look from the snowy sidewalk outside.

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Chloe Nelson is the program assistant for mnartists.org.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Institut du Monde Arabe. Photo: Pete Sieger, courtesy of the Walker Art Center

Three years ago, Architecture Minnesota magazine launched Videotect [architect + video], an annual video competition designed “to bring more voices and more creativity into public debates about key built-environment issues.” The first year’s topic, the Minneapolis skyway system, drew 25 entries, each 30 to 120 seconds long. A jury of architecture, advertising and arts notables selected, as the winning video, an animation inside a dead-end skybridge.

But viewers also loved a hilarious 3-D rap battle (which gave rise to the Videotect mantra “Don’t be a hamster, be be a man”) (which, despite the name, didn’t require special glasses to appreciate), and another great entry, a National Geographic-style archaeological excursion into the origins of the Minneapolis skyway system. Clearly, the creators of these videos had taken their work seriously. But they also were having a lot of fun—as did the standing-room-only audience in the Walker Art Center cinema.

The 2012 topic for Videotect was transportation, and the videos—more technically advanced than the year before—once again presented sometimes goofy, sometimes poignant, often hilarious points of view on various transportation choices, their environmental impacts, and how design should be more involved in creating sustainable transport. As juror David Frank said about the selection process, “Some of [the videos] were so funny that we were worried that would detract from the message. Some of them hit the message so hard we thought it was like clubbing you over the head with it. So we had to wrestle with the right balance of how the story was being told and what the story was.”

The Videotect 3 screening took place March 7 at the Walker: this year’s topic was “City of the Future.” The competition’s call for submissions asked, “Will the buildings of tomorrow be more healthful or responsive to you than the ones you occupy today? Will your city have more or less green space? And can your answers to these kinds of questions reveal the ways in which design enhances livability? Give viewers a glimpse of the future in a 30- to 120-second video. Entries will be judged on their ability to entertain viewers and get them thinking.”

The event included (as in other years) a screening of the eight submissions most viewed on the Videotect web page. From this pool of favorites, the audience selected a Viewers’ Choice Winner: a funny short by Four Humors Theater in which three men bravely donned spandex to convey the perils of the virtual office.

For  this year’s Honorable Mentions, however, the jury (R.T. Ryback, Renee Chang, Peter Remes and Zechariah Thormodsgaard) selected an audience favorite that Trekkies anywhere would appreciate, “Video Trek”; a beautiful documentary, “Working with Nature,” that included shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in the Sonoran desert and shots of city skyscrapers; and “Bobbie Jones,” a wonderful claymation adventure in which Bob returns to the sustainable lifestyle of Lower Canada from oil-saturated and gun-totting Texas, capital of Kingdom Come.

New this year: These videos, as well as the Grand Prize-winner, “Big Hair, Big Ideas,” will be screened at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival next month. For that reason alone, the jurors’ selection this year couldn’t be more perfect. A public-service announcement on climate change, with reference to a Bill Joy TED Talk, “Big Hair, Big Ideas” is threaded with whimsical humor and imagines a future filled with vertical farms and domesticated penguins, and food truck cuisine comprised of Asian carp sushi and millefoil seaweed salad.

Delightfully shot and animated, the winning video exquisitely balanced meaningful storytelling and resonant humor. Similarly, Videotect offers cultural creatives the opportunity to enlighten and entertain audiences with their perspectives on design and 21st century life—giving us the chance to laugh, reflect and reconsider our relationship with the built environment anew.

You can watch all the 2013 Videotect submissions online, on the competition’s web page.

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Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities arts journalist and dance critic.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Joffrey Ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps. Photo: Herbert Migdoll.

On May 29, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-élysées in Paris, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premiered Le Sacre du printemps. Igor Stravinsky composed the music, Vaslav Nijinsky created the choreography, and Nicholas Roerich did the stage designs and costumes. Depending on your source, the ensuing riot was reportedly caused by: Stravinsky’s haunting atonal score; Nijinsky’s flat-footed, knock-kneed, floor-beating choreography depicting a pagan sacrificial rite; Roerich’s long, wide tunics and leggings clothing the dancers’ bodies; or some combination thereof. Undeniably, however, Le Sacre was a breakthrough ballet before its time.

On May 22, 1987, a new ballet commissioned by Rudolf Nureyev premiered at the Palais Garnier in Paris. Performed by the Paris Opera Ballet, the work depicted a rite of another sort: of seemingly insouciant dancers vying for supremacy (technical? sexual? cultural?) on a bare-walled stage. In their bright-green leotards and sheer-black tights, the women split, extended and skewed traditional ballet positions into a severe geometry of anatomical impossibility to a robustly clanging electronic score by Thom Willems. The work, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, by William Forsythe, initiated energetic discourse about “deconstructed” ballet and a new way of making choreography.

Joffrey Ballet, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. Photo: Herbert Migdoll.

Last Tuesday, February 26, Northrop Dance brought springtime in Paris to the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis when Joffrey Ballet performed these two groundbreaking works, as well as a new ballet, Son of Chamber Symphony, by Houston Ballet’s artistic director Stanton Welch. More history lesson than insightful glimpse into the past, the show’s surprising standout was Welch’s piece.

In the three-part work, Welch gave traditional ballet vocabulary fresh infusions of choreographic detailing. In the first movement, the dancers were mechanical toys moving with precision through flickers of gesture and lines of movement. Tutus that resembled mushroom caps and moss-green leotards reinforced the work’s fairy-land feel. The second part, a duet, was a work of intertwined fluidity that moved gorgeously within an expanding and contracting circle of light. Part three, with its undulating torsos, was infused with delicacy and a sense of pleasure.

Having seen In the Middle numerous times, including once performed by Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet on the Northrop stage, my expectations were high. This a work that demands technique imbued with fearlessness, a presence that claims space, and an attitude of almost ferocious disdain. Instead, in this iteration the dancers seemed to luxuriate in the choreography, and I got bored—until the final duet. In the role originally made for Sylvie Guillem, the Joffrey’s Victoria Jaiani brought the work home, piercing space with her extensions before snapping them back into place, adding percussive emphasis to Willem’s score.

Joffrey Ballet, Son of Chamber Symphony. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Le Sacre was meticulously reconstructed in the 1980s by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer for the Joffrey, after which the work toured. Stops included Northrop, where the work thrilled audiences eager to see what the fuss had been all about. In 2013, however, 100 years after its auspicious premiere, Le Sacre looked a bit tired, despite a vivacious performance of the score by the University of Minnesota Symphony Orchestra.

Similarly, judging from conversations afterward, Le Sacre continues to mystify audiences. No longer are viewers outraged; they’re just left scratching their heads. No matter Nijinsky’s revolutionary daring, even when given historical and cultural context. Balletomanes still prefer dancers en pointe and with limbs visible. Perhaps the dancers themselves do, too.

Noted performance details:

The Joffrey Ballet, presented by Northrop Dance, performed the following on February 26 at the Orpheum Theatre:

Son of Chamber Symphony  (2012) Choreography by Stanton Welch. Music by John Adams

In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated  (1987). Choreography by William Forsythe. Music by Thom Willems

Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913). Choreography after Vaslav Nijinsky. Music by Igor Stravinsky

The U of M Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mark Russell Smith, performed live for Son of Chamber Symphony and The Rite of Spring.

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Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities arts journalist and dance critic.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Hidden away in the little-known Walker boudoir, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s Fantasy Play is lovingly separated from the rest of Midnight Party. And rightfully so, for this work gives passersby a slightly uncomfortable glance into Von Bruenchenhein’s elaborate private world. Marie, the artist’s wife and subject of the photograph that we will explore today, is standing up. She sports stockings and little heels, a long dress with a painterly check design that evokes the South Pacific (and pulled a little low to be appropriate for any but those beaches), flowers in her hair in the style of Frida Kahlo. Her exposed breasts point out at the viewer, oddly squished by her ill-fitting garments. She’s wearing a peach cardigan and her hands are somewhere behind her back; untitled (Marie) features the lady looking out at the viewer, nearly smiling (photograph pictured below, at the far right of the shot).

Installation view of Midnight Party. Courtesy Walker Art Center, photo by Gene Pittman.

Marie seems to be comfortable in her spot on the wall: surrounded by other portraits of herself, she is matted and placed within a simple, wooden frame. This room is devoted to Marie as much as it is to her husband’s photographs of her. The Walker’s intimate parlor welcomes the viewer with blue green walls, shell-pink kissing chairs and slightly spotted brown, wall-to-wall carpet.

Working with flowers during the day as a florist and baker, photographer Von Bruenchenhein staged floral scenes by night centered around his wife Marie. Through this series of photographs, the artist unwittingly gives us insight into his marriage: the playful relationship of a couple living  in relative obscurity in mid-century Wisconsin. Now considered an “outsider artist,” Von Bruenchenheim documented his wife, his junior by ten years; his lens lingers on her slim physique, curled hair, and gentle gaze over and over again. Rather than archive his wife’s daily life, Von Bruenchenhein pins Marie like a little butterfly in these sensual boudoir scenes, replete with textiles, wallpapers and pattern. Like Max Reinhardt’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Von Bruenchenhein’s photographs are intoxicating, ethereal but also collaged, cut-and-pasted — clearly a façade. His figures lack the exoticism of Matisse’s odalisques or the fierce empowerment of modern-day Mickalene Thomas’s ladies.

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Untitled, circa 1950, gelatin silver print, 9-15/16 x 7-3/4. Collection: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Gift of Richard Flood, 2006

Untitled (Marie) is no girl next door, and she’s also no trophy wife or consciously exotic other. This is the girl in the bedroom: she is complicit, unlike a hired model, and her sensuality seems to lack motive. She lives in a dream world, cacophonous with  flowers and delightful homemade props. She is not subversive;  she is comfortable. She exposes her breasts as unapologetically as she wears her little heels and cardigan. Plucked from obscurity and chosen by the institution, these photographs are bizarre in this context but not altogether dissonant with the crowned, queer dancing scene reflected across the gallery . The little-known Walker boudoir stages a tiny, flattened arrangement of Maries, like a Wisconsin-born bougainvillea, among the flowers.

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Chloe Nelson is the program assistant for mnartists.org.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Ben Frost. Photo: Bjarni Grimsson, courtesy of Walker Art Center.

Early into Ben Frost’s 60-some minute performance at Amsterdam Bar and Hall last Saturday night, as the room darkened, a digital sonic wave began to roil and crest.  Paul Corley held his drumsticks in a preparatory gesture, as if in prayer, and an insistent thrumming began. Then, a sound tsunami rammed into my chest. I literally couldn’t breathe. You do yoga, I told myself. Inhale. Exhale. Again.

If Frost’s music is an extreme listening experience, which it is (woe to those who didn’t bring earplugs), it’s also a thrilling physical, kinetic adventure for an audience in two ways: as comprised of listening, responsive bodies, and as watchers of the rhythmic, sonorous conjuring occurring on stage.

Frost performs barefoot, moving between laptop, speakers, guitar and sundry digital wizardry with choreographic precision. Sometimes he stands on one leg, flexes a foot, raises his arms, nods. His charisma is as quiet and understated as his music is a ferocious rush, immersing every sensibility in sound.

The other drummer performing with Frost for this gig, Greg Fox, (formerly of the Brooklyn-based “white metal” group Liturgy, and named Best Drummer by the Village Voice in 2011), is hypnotic in an altogether different way. His hands and wrists move as quickly as hummingbird wings, marvels of speed and blur that deliver a panoply of sounds—hard ticking, bright flashing, beats blasting.

The Australian-born Frost lives in Iceland, studies with Brian Eno and has worked with artists from Björk to British choreographer Wayne McGregor and his company, Random Dance (presented by Northrop Dance in 2009). He says he’s moving in a new direction with his music. This show, with the two drummers, was a preview; a 2013 album will reveal all.

Ben Frost with St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, drummers and sound guy on Feb. 9. Photo courtesy of the artist’s Twitter feed.

Frost’s first appearance in the Twin Cities in 2010, made possible by Kate Nordstrum, then-curator of the music program at the Southern Theater, was an 80-minute arc of aural intrigue (threaded with digitized wolf howls, crackling static and a few minutes of collaboration with Tim Hecker) that concluded with a repeating thud that became a single point in space, not unlike a heartbeat.

The Amsterdam performance on February 9, again made possible by Nordstrum who’s now curator of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series (co-sponsored by Walker Art Center), was a series of works punctuated by pauses (filled with boisterous applause) in between. The new pieces were more “melodic” than before in the sense that, quite often, the head-nodding, body-swaying rhythms and an occasional plaintive series of notes, were melodically one in the same.

Transportive, tantric, meditative, exhilarating– these are the some of the descriptors that come to mind. But Frost’s music can’t really be explained; it must be experienced in the body. For those of us raised on electronic-music pioneers, such as Eno and Jean-Michel Jarre, the viscerality of Frost’s music points to the genre’s continual evolution. For the Billie Joe Armstrong look-alikes in the audience, with their punk hair and eyeliner, Frost’s music is a substantive, cerebral alternative. Feel it. And breathe.

Related links:

Find more information about the Liquid Music series and upcoming concert dates: http://www.thespco.org/concerts-tickets/liquid-music

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Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities arts journalist and dance critic.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Anna Sundberg (Vanda) and Peter Christian Hansen (Thomas) in ‘Venus in Fur’ at the Jungle through March 10. Photo: Michal Daniel

If Venus (or her Greek equivalent, “Hail, Aphrodite!”) were to visit you in your studio, office or garret one dark and stormy afternoon, what would she be like? Would she appear ditzy, or pushy, or charming? Or all three? What if she slowly revealed herself as an an astute researcher of your work and—more surprising—its precedents, but also sweetly and vociferously challenged every choice you’ve made? What if she were a seductress adept at both sticking to the expected script of social interaction and unexpectedly improvising? A detective who has investigated every aspect of your life—most notably, the particulars of your fiancé—and reveals her knowledge, bit by disconcerting and startling bit? A goddess—and a woman, an everywoman—wreaking vengeance on behalf of her gender?

For the character of Vanda in his play, Venus in Fur, New York playwright David Ives has conjured all this, as well as a creature even more quixotic and dangerous: a sly and deranged Aphrodite of sorts, as much Maenad as goddess, whose mission is to incite intoxication, chaos and destruction beyond that created by love, to that created by lust. First performed off-Broadway in 2010, Ives’s two-person exploration of power, pain, pleasure and gender is being performed at the Jungle Theater, under the expert direction of Joel Sass.

Here the captivating Anna Sundberg is in the formidable role of Vanda. All lace, leather, chains and punishing heels, she appears to rout her foil and victim, the playwright Thomas—gamely played by Peter Christian Hansen—from his assumptions about sex, seduction, art, language, sado-masochism, power, gender and role-playing. Sundberg’s a wonder to behold. She deftly, seamlessly moves through Vanda’s machinations, switching accents, costumes and body language like the shape-shifter her character is. Upon meeting her, Thomas doesn’t know who exactly has shown up — only that he’s frightened and loving every minute of it. S&M, whether safely consigned to a script or dangerously improvised in the studio, is his creative dream, and its apotheosis is Vanda–or rather Aphrodite.

Need it be said? Venus in Fur is not Fifty Shades of Grey. In fact, the power dynamics in Ives’s tour-de-force are never more exciting, or inciting, than when Vanda and Thomas switch genders. Detached from their expected “sexual” roles, their interactions become a sublime sort of hellfire that sears through any preconceived notions about who really wears the dog collar in the relationship—be it between lover and role-player, playwright and actress, goddess and supplicant.

There’s no real porn here – despite a smokin’ scene in which Thomas shoves a pair of thigh-high boots onto Vanda’s feet and up her legs – but rather a lot of provocation: intellectual, social, cultural. Throughout the play, Vanda and Thomas invoke this quote from The Bible’s Book of Judith: “And the Lord hath smitten him and delivered him into a woman’s hands.”

Vanda asks, “It’s pretty sexist, isn’t it?” Thomas: “I’m only quoting Sacher-Masoch’s book” [also titled “Venus in Fur” Venus im Pelz]. Vanda: “Yeah, but you included it here [in the script] on page zero like it’s the whole point.”

That’s right. In this erotic power play, nothing and no one is quite what they seem. “Hail, Aphrodite!”

Performance details:
Venus in Fur, written by David Ives and directed by Joel Sass, is on stage at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis February 1 through March 10. Find more information: http://jungletheater.com/venus.html

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Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities arts journalist and dance critic.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

John Skelley (Edmund Tyrone) and Helen Carey (Mary Cavan Tyrone) in the Guthrie Theater’s production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill. Directed Joe Dowling, set design by John Lee Beatty, costume design by Ann Hould-Ward and lighting design by Christopher Akerlind. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

“I’m sorry I remembered out loud,” exclaims an exasperated, exhausted and somewhat contrite Mary Cavan Tyrone, after one of her increasingly dissolute attempts to have her painful memories and excruciating present understood—or perhaps merely acknowledged. As if that would help.

Pitch-perfectly portrayed by Helen Carey, in the Guthrie Theater’s first production of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night, Mary is the long-suffering—and morphine-addicted—matriarch in a family of alcoholic men. Bird-like beneath her meticulously coiffed grey hair, Mary quickly slips from recovery into the fog of addiction in the course of the three-hour production. Her hands are cramped into rheumatic claws with which she beats through the thickets of age and memory, recrimination and remorse…stopping occasionally to pat her head, check her hair and seek assurances from her family that she still has her looks.

Mary’s family includes her belligerent yet caring husband, James Tyrone (Peter Michael Goetz, restrained and sympathetic) — an actor with whom she fell in love shortly after graduating from convent school. Her older son, Jamie (John Catron, a tornadic force), is a wastrel attempting, somewhat, to follow in his father’s thespian footsteps. Edmund is the youngest (John Skelley, lithe, winsome and perhaps the production’s most tragic figure), conceived after the death of Eugene (for which Mary blames everyone, including herself), and recently diagnosed with consumption.

John Skelley (Edmund Tyrone) and Peter Michael Goetz (James Tyrone). Photo by Michael Brosilow, courtesy of the Guthrie Theater.

The play occurs on one fog-dense August day in 1912 at the Tyrones’ summer home, during which alcohol and morphine, anger and fear fuel each family member’s disappointments and regrets. The family closely mirrors O’Neill’s own. So much so that, after finishing Long Day’s Journey in 1941, O’Neill stipulated the play couldn’t be performed until 25 years after his death (which occurred in 1953).

In our 21st-century culture of reality programming, social media self-disclosure and gotcha press, where baring one’s body, soul and secrets has become commonplace, one might ask: What’s the big deal? Well, believe it or not, secrets were just that in O’Neill’s day: Private occurrences, behaviors and information that weren’t talked about within the family, much less aired in public. Repression ruled.

But in O’Neill’s play, talk they do. Intercutting their shame and blame with equal parts love, compassion and a sense of helplessness. Which is, in part, why the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm gained access to the play and first produced it in 1958—and O’Neill was posthumously awarded his fourth Pulitzer Prize. Which is why Mary’s half-convincing apology, “I’m sorry I remembered out loud,” so cuts to the quick.

As directed by Joe Dowling, this production of O’Neill’s family tragedy doesn’t shy away from emotional levity. There is wit, laughter and the occasional cutting remark (at once painful and humorous); the maid Cathleen (Laoisa Sexton, over-Irishing her Irish) offers a wry perspective on the proceedings. But these lighter bits sit alongside pain that constantly drips, IV-like, into the family dynamic. There’s no escape for the Tyrone family, but it’s an unforgettable night of theater for the rest of us.

Performance details:
Long Day’s Journey into Night, written by Eugene O’Neill and directed Joe Dowling, is on the Wurtele Thrust Stage at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis from  January 12 through February 23.
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Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities arts journalist and dance critic.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Katelyn Farstad, Mouth’s Self Portrait. 2012 . Cat litter, caulk, photographs, ink, acrylic . Courtesy of the artist’s website.

Some art is about product, the final work, and some art is about the work coming into being, about process.  Katelyn Farstad’s current show, Mouthbreather at Midway Contemporary Art, is a hybrid, a collection of works that show the scars of their creation and express a pathology of process.  The works are all busy with detail and assorted parts–collected odds and ends, ostentatious junk, painted over and glued together; this is making as compulsive behavior, worrying over the details for the sake of worrying over details in the creation of a meticulous chaos.  You can recognize the constituent bits of some of the pieces from across the room.  And You Will…, for instance, features a broken (deconstructed?) chair and a nail strip used in a nail gun.  Some of her works hide their bones at first, but as you get closer and study them, you suddenly spot the plastic netting or painted sponge, some odd and out of place bit, and realize all of the pieces come from the same impulse. Mouthbreather is, in a sense, a collection of modes, a family of creations — the talented older sister, the careless little brother, the uncle no one sees anymore.

Of course, there is only one artist here, but what is on display strikes me as evidence of a struggle: of the self striving to present itself, of a knotty, complicated process of working out confusion and frustration — breaking the chair into pieces, throwing clay, shoving sticks through family photos on the wall.  Some things emerge lovely despite the apparent tumult of their making, such as Caught by the Ripe Fruit Cop.  But many of Farstad’s works come out intricately insane, honest, and visceral; Wake Up Those Sleeping Dogs is a good example.  Carpet is roughly stapled to one side of the piece, a wicker vase crudely glued to the top; there’s a plastic tray of some kind, that has been abused by slashes of paint and clay; and a hole on one side of the work’s base, with a chunk of wall or ceiling inside.  It is a dog house as chew toy for our most anxious pets, those with the nervous habit of chewing through walls.

Many, if not all, of the pieces on view feature a tenuous, even unnatural physicality: the works are impossibly balanced, sticking out horizontally from the wall, fabric ready to slip.  They offer a record of kinetic energy like debris after a storm, with things where they should not (could not) be — upside down, sideways, splattered over, unstable.  This further evinces that feeling of process throughout the show — of control and the abandonment of restraint, of frustration and release — what the act of creating is all about.

Installation view of Mouthbreather at Midway Contemporary Art. Courtesy of the gallery.

Each piece in the informs the others; I found I learned more about the success of one work from the perceived failings of another. And taken together, they evidence nothing so much as manic creation in action, the process at work — like someone breathing with their mouth open, perhaps.

Noted exhibition details:

Mouthbreather by Katelyn Farstad is on view through February 2 at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis.

Image credits: Middle left, Wake Up Those Sleeping Dogs, 2012, mixed media, 66″ x 26″ x 36″. Middle right, The Secret V.2, 2012 acrylic, bleach, fabric, plastic.

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Jay Orff is a writer, musician and filmmaker living in Minneapolis. His fiction has appeared in Reed, Spout, Chain and Harper’s Magazine.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)