Many fences

This article is from the Wall Street Journal. An accompanying photo in the print version is not online. I have my own photos of the Central Park installation, February 2005.

When artists working outside gallery and museum walls in the 1960s and 1970s put down their tools, they often had only a handful of black-and-white photographs or a grainy video as evidence of their labor. Like postcards sent from a place that no longer exists, these images were meant to underscore the "purity" of the art—an ephemeral event or a construction not designed for the ages—and might also serve to attract funding for the next project or as the paltry things their dealers were supposed to sell.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose signature style became the wrapping or marking of a structure or area with fabrics, had a more ingenious approach. They funded their dreamy, supersize, transient creations—realized most recently in 2005's "The Gates" in Central Park—with the sale of preliminary drawings and models, leaving the documenting of the results to the acclaimed filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, and to the German photographer Wolfgang Volz. The Maysleses co-produced and co-directed five sumptuous color films about large-scale projects by the Bulgarian-born sculptor and his Moroccan-born artistic partner and wife, beginning with "Valley Curtain" in 1974 and ending with "Umbrellas" in 1990, while Mr. Volz has been their official photographer since 1972.

Christo And Jeanne-Claude: Remembering The Running Fence
Smithsonian American Art Museum Through Sept. 26

A remarkable example of this long, fruitful relationship can be seen at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence" is devoted to one of the couple's most ambitious and evocative works of art: the 18-foot-high white nylon fence that ran for 24½ miles across two rolling northern California counties and into the Pacific Ocean. It stood for two weeks in September 1976.

Along with nearly 50 drawings, a 58-foot-long scale model, and 250 photographs by Mr. Volz that recall the planning of the work and the miraculous result, the show features continuous screenings of the 1978 film "Running Fence," directed by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin, as well as "The 'Running Fence' Revisited," a new film directed by Wolfram Hissen. Both documentaries convey, better than any set of objects could, the utopianism, nerve, luck, grass-roots organization, horse-trading and lawlessness that led to one of the few successful and popular works of American environment art.

Whether "Running Fence" would be impossible to accomplish in today's America is hard to gauge. Even in the mid-1970s, long before the age of terrorism, the odds were slim that a pair of New York artists with foreign accents could persuade 59 sheep ranchers and dairy farmers to allow an enormous fabric fence to snake across their property. As it was, convincing them and getting permits took four years. "You're a stranger here," one rancher tells Christo in the Maysles film. "You have to overcome that."

The intensity of the opposition is captured in an early scene in which a man shouts, "That's art? Some lousy curtain coming through here. Hell with it. I'm against it. I think it's stupid." And it wasn't only amateur art critics who initially hated the idea. Environmental groups also objected, especially to the component that called for the fence to spill down a cliff on the beach and disappear into the ocean. Some Sonoma and Marin county commissioners voted against its going up, too.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude never discuss on camera why they settled on this site. But the largely treeless contours of the golden hills are undeniably sensual. The mutations of the piece as it reacts to wind, fog, sun and ocean are captured beautifully in the Maysles film, which dwells more on the hour-by-hour construction—highlighted by the suspense of a last-minute injunction from the California Coastal Commission—than on the arduous process that eventually won over the doubters.

This is oddly modest of the Maysleses, who were instrumental in changing the minds of landowners. The artists had shown their honorable intentions by screening in local homes their previous collaborative film, "Valley Curtain," in which a 1,300-foot-long orange curtain was strung across a gap in the Colorado Rockies for 28 hours.

Mr. Hissen's film is better at revealing the uniquely American circumstances that allowed the project to succeed. As important as the $2,500 or $3,000 offered to each landowner was the promise by the artists to donate the construction materials when the piece was disassembled. Several recipients cut up the tall metal pipes that had supported the ad hoc fence, recycling them as permanent fence posts. "You give a farmer something free and they think they got the world by the tail," one local says.

County officials' disapproval also gave the project unexpected cachet. The government's telling the owners they couldn't do with their land as they wished angered a number of them, causing them to look more favorably on the outsiders. "Looking back, if the supervisors hadn't said no, Christo would have had a hard time getting this done," says another resident.

Most of all, the tenacity of the couple and their unshakable faith in their unusual ideas seem to have earned respect, trust and affection from people who had never heard of site-specific art. In a pivotal scene filmed by the Maysleses at one of 20 public meetings in which the project was argued about, Christo tells the crowd: "The art project is right now here. Everybody here is part of my work."

He wasn't kidding. Overcoming hostility and working within bureaucracies has been as integral to Christo's art as the structures he sketched and built. Early on, he and Jeanne-Claude (his invaluable and highly intelligible mediator) realized that the post office in Valley Ford was a hub for the sparsely populated area, and so they went about courting the support of the postmaster.

The lasting impact of "Running Fence" on this still-rural community is the focus of Mr. Hissen's documentary. He filmed a reunion last year between Christo and Jeanne-Claude (two months before she died) and the surviving participants and observers of the project. "There's no Rembrandts hanging in people's houses out here," says one man. And yet "Running Fence," then and now, ignited serious conversations about "what is art" among citizens who had never thought it was a question.

It is fitting that the Smithsonian American Art Museum bought the project archive for "Running Fence" in 2008. But to gain a deeper sense of its emotional scope, watch the Maysles-Zwerin film. The putting together of the artwork seems not unlike a barn-raising, demanding the same cooperation and, when the fence is secure and rippling in the breeze, evoking the same giddiness and pride. I can't be alone in feeling patriotic about a country that allowed such an unlikely and lovely thing to exist.

Mr. Woodward is an arts writer living in New York.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D9


* ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
* APRIL 6, 2010

A California Dream Come True. By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Analog Soul

Brooklyn, N.Y.

The reasons for the satisfying success of the old-school soul unit Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings come together at this small, hand-built recording studio in a rickety brick row house in the Bushwick section. Nearby, chained guard dogs laze in the early spring sun. Next door to Daptone Records' headquarters, an auto-body shop quakes with industry. It's a likely location for a studio that's the opposite of state-of-the-art.

With its out-of-fashion tape-recording equipment, the House of Soul studio, as it's known, gives the Dap-Kings' music a resonance that recalls the delightfully greasy soul tracks cut some four decades ago at Stax or Royal Recording in Memphis, Tenn., the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Ala., or Malaco's studio in Jackson, Miss. Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings built this studio by hand; she's proud to tell you she wired the electrical sockets. Under the floorboards in the isolation booth, where singers and soloists record their parts, are old tires stuffed with clothes to give the space vibrancy and warmth. Mark Ronson brought Amy Winehouse here to record tracks for her monster hit "Back to Black," with the Dap-Kings providing instrumental support. The framed platinum album the Dap-Kings received for their contributions is on the musty basement's floor, not far from what looks like a paint-by-numbers portrait of Stevie Wonder.

The studio reflects the spirit of the Dap-Kings, a self-contained unit dedicated to straight-to-the-gut soul, as their new album attests. Out next week, "I Learned the Hard Way" (Daptone) features the Dap-Kings laying down a solid foundation under Ms. Jones, who as a vocalist is somehow defiant yet vulnerable. To be sure, Gabriel Roth's arrangements and production celebrate classic soul recordings, but to call "I Learned the Hard Way" retro is to miss the point: This is the kind of American music whose commercial fortunes may ebb and flow, but as an art form it is everlasting. "There ain't nothing retro about me," Ms. Jones told me. "We're not hopping on anybody's band wagon."

The Dap-Kings comprise a three-piece horn section with a bone-rattling baritone sax, two guitars, Mr. Roth's bass, drums and Ms. Jones—a tiny dynamo with a big voice and bigger stage presence. In concert, they come out and hit hard from the opening note of a soul revue hosted by their guitarist Binky Griptite. On disc, the Dap-Kings are wall-to-wall soul, with abundant nods to their predecessors. But they're well aware it's no longer the '60s music scene. If it were, and radio played soul and R&B with the joy and frequency it once did, two songs on the new album—"She Ain't a Child No More" and "Better Things"—would be hit singles.

Ms. Jones joined the Dap-Kings a decade ago. Media make much of her brief stint as a corrections officer at New York's Rikers Island prison, but more relevant is her rollercoaster experiences as a singer. Thwarted early in her career by a thoughtless young producer who told her she lacked the look to be a star, Ms. Jones sang in a successful wedding band for almost 20 years before walking away to join the Dap-Kings, who had an unwavering commitment to soul music.

"I was turning down a $500 gig for a $75 gig," Ms. Jones said. "But I felt it's what I had to do." The Dap-Kings had secured a residency at a club in Barcelona, providing the singer with her first trip overseas, but those close to her thought she'd made a mistake. "My own family said, 'What is she doing running around Europe with these guys?'"

The band's furious stage show helped it build its reputation and lock in its sound. In 2004-05, it played more than 250 shows in 14 countries. The Dap-Kings' breakthrough album, "100 Days, 100 Nights," followed. Critics caught on, and countless TV and festival appearances followed. College-age members of the audiences who hadn't lived through soul's great era heard the band and introduced it to their parents. Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings were no longer seen as a nostalgia act out on the fringe.
[dapkings] Associated Press

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

"We knew we were on to a good thing," Mr. Jones said. "We weren't making any money before, but now we were on a roll." Without a regular income, Ms. Jones had moved in with her mother in Far Rockaway, Queens. Now she was able to get out on her own again.

On the heels of "100 Days," new opportunities beckoned. Ms. Jones worked with Lou Reed and had a role in Denzel Washington's "The Great Debaters." "Finally, my look paid off," Ms. Jones told me with a wry smile. The Dap-Kings backed Al Green. The full unit appeared on the all-star charity album "Dark Was the Night." Back in Bushwick, sessions began for "I Learned the Hard Way," a title that reflected Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' rise to success.

As for the studio, with its analog recording equipment and reel-to-reel tapes, Mr. Roth, who produces under the name Bosco Mann, said: "It's all just a tool. Analog sounds good, but it's more important to have a good drummer." Owning the House of Soul means the Dap-Kings don't have to rent costly studio space by the hour, he added. The trick is to avoid the trappings of success and make better records. And to let Ms. Jones continue to blossom.

"Sharon has an unmatched ability to connect with an audience," he said. "She can't mail it in. As she says, what comes from the heart reaches the heart."

By JIM FUSILLI

Nimble Gimble hums along

Getty Images Johnny Gimble performs in Austin, Texas in May 2009

Country music does not usually catch my attention, but this piece did.


"When I was 15," he recalled in a recent phone interview, "I was working for a radio band in Shreveport. Cliff Bruner, the hottest Texas fiddler of them all, was on the same package shows, playing for Jimmie Davis. I asked him, 'Cliff, how do you play that hocum?,' which is what we still called swing there. And he said: 'Can you hum what you're thinking? Practice till you can play what you can hum.'


"Later, when I was in the Army, in Austria, they didn't play any country music on the Armed Forces radio, just big band, and I'd hear Slam Stewart [of Slim & Slam] humming along with his bass, so I started practicing that—humming some hot licks and then trying to find them on the fiddle. When I got with the Wills band in 1949, Bob would let me hum along on the bandstand. My son Dick sometimes does that playing bass, too, and my granddaughter Emily Gimble can scat, humming along with her jazz piano solos."

Sonny Stitt

A beautiful sax. Touted as Bird's heir, a burden too great for any one, he grew into his own sound. Found this on YouTube; whilst only music, it is a magnificent example of his gorgeous tone.



This second one is a video: JJ Johnson (trombone), Howard McGhee (trumpet), Tommy Potter (bass), Kenny Clarke (drums), Walter Bishop Jr. (piano), and Sonny Stitt (sax) performing Bird's My Little Suede Shoes. Berlin, September 26, 1964.


A gem follows: Bird and Coleman Hawkins in an excerpt of "Ballade" followed by Bird, Buddy Rich, Hank Jones and Ray Brown jamming. It ends with Norman Granz describing the following two pieces (which are not played), which bring in Lester Young, Flip Phillips, Harry "Sweets" Edison and Ella Fitzgerald.


That last one mentioned above is here:

Orozco exposición

ABRE MUESTRA DE OROZCO - (Foto: EFE)

Más de 340 piezas componen la magna exposición del muralista mexicano José Clemente Orozco, que fue inaugurada en el Instituto Cultural Cabañas en Guadalajara | Ver nota
 

Muestra de José Clemente Orozco llega a Jalisco La exposición está compuesta de 345 dibujos, acuarelas, gráficos, pinturas, tintas, recortes de periódicos y reproducciones fotográficas de su obra dentro y fuera de México

Más de 340 piezas componen la magna exposición del muralista mexicano José Clemente Orozco, que fue inaugurada en el Instituto Cultural Cabañas en Guadalajara, capital del occidental estado de Jalisco.

Esta es "la más grande retrospectiva" de la obra del artista jalisciense que se presenta en México en las últimas tres décadas, dijo la directora del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), Teresa Vicencio.

La exposición "José Clemente Orozco pintura y verdad" está compuesta de 345 dibujos, acuarelas, gráficos, pinturas, tintas, recortes de periódicos y reproducciones fotográficas de su obra dentro y fuera de México.

Las piezas que la componen, distribuidas en 19 salas de manera cronológica, estarán expuestas hasta el próximo 31 de julio.

Por primera vez en la historia serán exhibidos los 150 dibujos preparatorios que el artista hizo para cada uno de sus murales en México y Estados Unidos.

En ellos se muestra la evolución de Orozco como artista plástico desde sus inicios como caricaturista en diarios del país, su etapa como pintor de caballete hasta su trabajo como muralista, afirmó el curador de la exposición, Miguel Cervantes.

"Quisimos reunir la obra de Orozco de una manera lo más panorámica posible y mostrar que tanto los dibujos de sus inicios como sus pinturas están a la altura de Picasso, Rembrandt, Matisse o Goya", señaló el experto.

Durante la investigación que duró dos años, los curadores registraron más de mil 600 obras de Orozco diseminadas en suelo mexicano y estadounidense.

La obra exhibida pertenece a coleccionistas mexicanos y extranjeros, a la colección de la familia del pintor, a museos mexicanos, así como de la Biblioteca Baker en New Hampshire y el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York, en Estados Unidos.

Para esta exposición, la Secretaría de Cultura del Gobierno de Jalisco y el Fondo de Cultura Económica publicaron un catálogo de 600 páginas de las obras expuestas.

Además se editó la antología crítica "La zarza revivida. José Clemente Orozco a contraluz" con 60 textos recopilados desde 1913 de plumas como José Juan Tablada y Octavio Paz que constituye "la primera edición con tal cantidad de ensayos", dijo Cervantes.

Luego de su paso por el Hospicio Cabañas, la exposición será trasladada al Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, en Ciudad de México.

Exhibición   Por primera vez en la historia serán exhibidos los 150 dibujos preparatorios que el artista hizo para cada uno de sus murales en México y Estados Unidos (Foto: EFE )

A magnum opus for Ransom

Austin, Texas


Even without a Texas nexus, it's an excellent fit: Magnum's huge archive of press prints—some predating the founding of the venerated photographers' cooperative in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others—has arrived at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center here. (The archive was recently bought by the private investment firm of computer magnate Michael Dell; the Ransom Center will catalog and exhibit it for at least five years.) To reposition itself in today's digital marketplace, Magnum will use the funds realized from the two tractor trailers full of what it produced so well using old-school technology. The Ransom Center, having recently celebrated its own 50th anniversary, will continue doing what it only seems to get better at: collecting and preserving the paper trails of many media, including the materials just deaccessioned by Magnum.
deaccessioned: the process of legally removing objects from a repository/museum's collections.

 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos - 

Cartier-Bresson's 'Place de l'Europe. Gare Saint Lazare' (1932).

At last count, Ransom's large building on the UT campus houses 36 million manuscript pages, one million rare or significant books, five million photographs, and 10,000 objects, from Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish typewriter to the sunglasses Gloria Swanson wore in "Sunset Boulevard." While many of Ransom's 70,000 annual visitors come to gawk at its Gutenberg Bible (one of only 48 complete copies) or the first photograph taken in nature by Joseph Niepce in 1826, what places Ransom in the rarefied company of research libraries like Harvard's Houghton, Yale's Beinecke or the Library of Congress is the breadth and depth of its 20th-century British and American collections.

Most of the contents are accessible to anyone with an I.D. and a wish-list. Simply walk in and you can soon be rifling (carefully) through acid-free boxes of Tennessee Williams's papers, as Vanessa Redgrave did when she went searching for a certain previously unpublished, unproduced Williams play. Or you can have a look at Ezra Pound's copy of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," in which the poet scribbled "For E.P., miglior fabbro, from T.S.E."—the mold that grew on the inside cover is left as provenance; Pound buried it in Italy to protect it during the war.

The Ransom Center was named for its founder, Harry Huntt Ransom, an English professor and then university chancellor, who decided in the 1950s that Texas needed its own Bibliothèque Nationale. Rather than compete, so late in the game, for rare books with long-established libraries, Ransom took the unconventional tack of pursuing the prepublication manuscripts and archives of late-19th- and 20th-century British and American writers, for which little market then existed. (Not so now.) Flush with funds from university oil revenues, the "Great Acquisitor," as Ransom was called, snapped up the collections of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw, to name a few, as well as many nonliterary archives, such as that of theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, and 5,000 boxes of producer David O. Selznick's papers.

The Harry Ransom Center - The Magnum archives arrive at the Ransom Center.

Enter Thomas F. Staley, a James Joyce scholar, who took the helm of the Ransom Center in 1988, 12 years after Ransom's death. Among the 100 archives he's scored for the Ransom during his tenure are those of British playwrights Tom Stoppard, John Osborne, David Hare and Arnold Wesker, as well as those of writers David Mamet, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Penelope Lively and the Ransom's largest single-author collection, the 10-ton archive of Norman Mailer. Today most of the funding for Mr. Staley's acquisitions—including the $5 million tab in 2003 for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate papers and $2.5 million in 2005 for Mailer's—comes from the endowments of private sources he so adroitly cultivates. (As for the Magnum acquisition, MSD Capital, L.P. would not divulge the pricetag, but a source familiar with the transaction said the Ransom has insured it for more than $100 million.)

Affable, kinetic and with an impish sense of humor, the 74-year-old Mr. Staley conducts operations from an office whose decor and contents feel slightly at odds with the contemporary setting: rare books mingle in antique bookcases with Joyce journals and review copies of new books; the walls are covered with autographed memorabilia from the past century. An Eve Arnold photo of Marilyn Monroe, sitting in a playground reading "Ulysses," fairly leaps off the wall.


Mr. Staley typically looks at up to five collections a month, adding that while he "certainly could not imagine a Virginia Woolf doing this, more authors today are aware of the possibilities and try to negotiate their archives during their lifetimes because they need the money." Mr. Staley's ability to tap deep pockets—quickly—for an acquisition is legendary. As a result, he says, "we get a shot at many of them, the first-refusals."

Steve McCurry / Magnum
Steve McCurry's famous photo 'Pakistan. Peshawar. 1984. Afghan Girl at Nasir Bagh refugee camp' is part of the collection.

In a shrewd game of what he stresses is "chess, not checkers," Mr. Staley keeps three different tiers of authors on his radar screen, looking for those likely to be future subjects of literary scholarship. (A group of curatorial-minded younger readers scouts collectable younger talent.) He stays in personal touch and also monitors the writers' personal (read: financial) circumstances. He knows the dealers, is friends with many of the writers, and has terrific stories of hard-ball negotiations—successful or not—with an Osborne (who held out during his lifetime; his widow subsequently made the deal with Mr. Staley) or a Wesker (who made lunch for Mr. Staley at his home in Wales and showed him his archive, stored in a damp barn covered with plastic, in hopes of getting Mr. Staley to up his offer—he didn't). Mr. Staley also tells of the fun he had, in the early '90s, marshaling a "minyan" of Texans for the funds to "get I.B. Singer's archive out of New York."

More on Photography

Robert Adams's Heart of Darkness

He makes frequent forays to London and delights in the serendipity of stumbling upon a folder of moldy, mouse-nibbled Beckett and Harold Pinter letters while poking around Stoppard's barn, helping the playwright pack up his papers for Austin. But it would be hard to top his discovery, years ago, while inventorying a newly acquired collection of Joyce papers, of some onionskin leaves that Mr. Staley "realized were the famous lost link, the missing draft with Joyce's corrections in his own hand to the opening of 'Finnegans Wake'—an item more valuable than the price we had paid for the entire collection." This is empirical proof of Mr. Staley's axiom that "10% of an archive represents 90% of its value, and 90% of an archive is worth 10% of the price."

That great sucking sound made by the exodus of the papers of so many British writers from "over there" to here has understandably generated some push-back from across the pond, some going so far as to denounce it as "cultural vandalism." Others blame their own for simply lacking the cultural chutzpah of a Tom Staley.


Ms. Lewis writes about the arts for the Journal from Austin, Texas.
* ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
* MARCH 25, 2010


A Magnum Opus for Ransom
By Anne S. Lewis

Exodus to Jazz

Listening to Last.fm, Ben Webster & Oscar Peterson radio, Exodus by Eddie Harris came on. I have never heard the song, probably, other than in the movie. Curious, I took a look at his biography.

Eddie Harris (October 20, 1934 - November 5, 1996), was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Although he was one of the most popular jazz musicians of his day (and the first to receive a gold record), his inclusion in his repertoire of types of music other than jazz and his incorporation of comedy into his act led many jazz critics to consider him insufficiently committed to jazz. His experimentation with other types of music sometimes had questionable results, but many still regard him as one of the great jazz musicians.

 Insufficiently committed? What the hell do critics know? And how could they criticize a musician in such a way?