Maria Tatar's Blog, page 17

Paul McCarthy’s WS (White Snow) at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC

 

I went to Paul McCarthy’s White Snow installation prepared to like it. Disney’s Snow White is now over 75, and who can blame the art world for wanting to engage in a take-down of what has to be the iconic fairy-tale figure, the girl who represents everything wrong with once upon a time?  Cheerful, cute, and infatuated with good housekeeping, Snow White also becomes an exhibitionist, her beauty on display as she awaits the kiss from Prince Charming.

Here’s a summary of what you will find:

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19…

The twisted form of White Snow lies naked on the dirty carpet with what appears to be blood on her face, but a discarded brown Hershey’s squeeze bottle on a molested couch provides the real evidence. A bloody, naked Walt Paul slumps with a cartoon character protruding from his open mouth shows that all is not what it seems in this dark fantasy. Moving through the space will offer more clues, which are featured in the accompanying films — giant mirror images creating an alarming echo chamber of bawdy cartoonish desire, resulting in violent death.

I’m the first to admit that there is a Gothic dark side to fairy tales.  White Snow distorts and deforms the confections of mass culture to represent, in graphic terms, the violence and dysfunctionality lurking beneath the surface of the nuclear family and its domestic shrines.

I’m sure Paul McCarthy will be pleased with my sense of repulsion as I viewed the mess he had made.  But before long the cacophony blaring from the speakers makes you commiserate with the museum guards, the multiple screens projecting images of dancing dwarfs and writhing SnowWhites quickly turns boring, and the rectangular peepholes into the disorderly domestic spaces make you want to say: “Yes, I get it, I am a voyeur, and you are trying to assault me with these images and make me feel that art should be disturbing and painful.”  To add to the multiple ironies, McCarthy has added a gift shop capitalizing on Disney merchandise.

To sum up: I’d rather be a critical viewer of Disney’s Snow White than a complicit spectator of McCarthy’s White Snow.

Below some fascinating background from Randy Kennedy, who quotes Paul McCarthy as saying: “We take it somewhere.”  I wish he had.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazi…

This Snow White would not follow much of a fairy-tale narrative — no evil queen, no magic mirror, no resurrection through a prince’s love. At one point, two of the Snow Whites, most of the dwarves and McCarthy lay in a moaning, panting, undulating pile on the living-room floor that McCarthy intended as a visual echo of an image in Jack Smith’s 1963 underground transvestite romp, “Flaming Creatures.”

“It’s not about sex,” he told me of his own scene. “It’s about basic human contact. It’s about hanging onto someone else for dear life.”

When they finished, McCarthy hopped up and seemed barely out of breath. He was practically glowing. “O.K., we take five and then we’ll go again,” he announced. “Like yesterday, we’ll kind of start this as a see-where-it-goes. Then we amp it up. We take it somewhere.”

And from the program:

“McCarthy is known for challenging, visceral work in a variety of mediums–from performance, photography, video and installation, to sculpture, drawing, and painting–and scales ranging from tiny to monumental.  Playing on popular illusions, delusions, and cultural myths, his work is created to deliberately confuse codes, mix high and low culture, and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs.”

And here is another perplexed critic:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/arts/d…

What all this means, I don’t exactly know, although it obviously touches on regret for lost innocence and on a recoil from — and a satirist’s relish of — a homegrown plague of give-us-more-pleasure that has spread to much of the world. What I suspect is that in Mr. McCarthy we have a Swift for our time, or maybe a Hieronymus Bosch, and in “WS” — organized by the Armory’s artistic director, Alex Poots, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, in association with Tom Eccles — a scabrous American  “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

Paul McCarthy’s White Snow at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC

 

I went to Paul McCarthy’s White Snow installation prepared to like it. Disney’s Snow White is now over 75, and who can blame the art world for wanting to engage in a take-down of what has to be the iconic fairy-tale figure, the girl who represents everything wrong with once upon a time?  Cheerful, cute, and infatuated with good housekeeping, Snow White also becomes an exhibitionist, her beauty on display as she awaits the kiss from Prince Charming.

Here’s a summary of what you will find:

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19…

The twisted form of White Snow lies naked on the dirty carpet with what appears to be blood on her face, but a discarded brown Hershey’s squeeze bottle on a molested couch provides the real evidence. A bloody, naked Walt Paul slumps with a cartoon character protruding from his open mouth shows that all is not what it seems in this dark fantasy. Moving through the space will offer more clues, which are featured in the accompanying films — giant mirror images creating an alarming echo chamber of bawdy cartoonish desire, resulting in violent death.

I’m the first to admit that there is a Gothic dark side to fairy tales.  White Snow distorts and deforms the confections of mass culture to represent, in graphic terms, the violence and dysfunctionality lurking beneath the surface of the nuclear family and its domestic shrines.

I’m sure Paul McCarthy will be pleased with my sense of repulsion as I viewed the mess he had made.  But before long the cacophony blaring from the speakers makes you commiserate with the museum guards, the six screens projecting images of dancing dwarfs and writhing SnowWhites quickly turns boring, and the rectangular peepholes into the disorderly domestic spaces make you want to say: “Yes, I get it, I am a voyeur, and you are trying to assault me with these images and make me feel that art should be disturbing and painful.”  To add to the multiple ironies, McCarthy has added a gift shop capitalizing on Disney merchandise.

To sum up: I’d rather be a critical viewer of Disney’s Snow White than a complicit spectator of McCarthy’s White Snow.

Below some fascinating background from Randy Kennedy, who quotes Paul McCarthy as saying: “We take it somewhere.”  I wish he had.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazi…

This Snow White would not follow much of a fairy-tale narrative — no evil queen, no magic mirror, no resurrection through a prince’s love. At one point, two of the Snow Whites, most of the dwarves and McCarthy lay in a moaning, panting, undulating pile on the living-room floor that McCarthy intended as a visual echo of an image in Jack Smith’s 1963 underground transvestite romp, “Flaming Creatures.”

“It’s not about sex,” he told me of his own scene. “It’s about basic human contact. It’s about hanging onto someone else for dear life.”

When they finished, McCarthy hopped up and seemed barely out of breath. He was practically glowing. “O.K., we take five and then we’ll go again,” he announced. “Like yesterday, we’ll kind of start this as a see-where-it-goes. Then we amp it up. We take it somewhere.”

Happy Birthday, Maurice!

Keep Moving

http://keepmoving.blackberry.com/desk...

I’ve never been much for Tweets until I read Neil Gaiman’s words about Maurice Sendak: “He was unique, grumpy, brilliant, gay, wise, magical and made the world better by creating art in it.”  That’s poetry, and it captured Maurice Sendak, bringing a smile to our faces on the day that we felt we had lost the author of Where the Wild Things Are.

Neil Gaiman’s latest project is to use Twitter and social media to create A Calendar of Tales (by Neil Gaiman and you), with twelve stories inspired by tweets and illustrated by artist-collaborators who submitted their work electronically.  You can see the results at the link above and listen to Neil read these stories and make them come alive.

I love the name Keep Moving, because it captures exactly what Neil Gaiman does.  Like no other writer, he keeps reinventing himself and changing, reaching out to collaborate and to connect with his many fans.  How many writers are fans of their fans and are willing to demystify the creative process in ways that invite others to join in and become part of a team of rivals.

Disney Princesses Ranked

Here’s a quick summary of the virtues and flaws of Disney Princesses.  It shows real progress in moving from sweet docility to adventurous feistiness.  Is it time to make a new version of Snow White, now that we are approaching her 100th anniversary?  Well, still a few years to go, but she is already in her 70s.

 http://news.moviefone.com/2013/05/28/dis…

 

Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/books/…

M-Alice in Wonderland?

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland: The buzzed-about Once Upon a Time spinoff centers on Alice, played by newcomer Sophie Lowe, the Knave of Hearts (Michael Socha) and Alice’s love interest Cyrus (Peter Gadiot). Oh, and John Lithgow voices the White Rabbit! The anthology series hails from OUAT creators Eddy Kitsis, Adam Horowitz and Jane Espenson. The series will air Thursdays at 8 p.m.

Fighting pirates and swimming with mermaids?  Shades of Peter Pan, and maybe the genie is the boy who would not grow up, thereby uniting Peter and Alice  at long last.

watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Y-ir6JhV2Zs

J.M. Barrie–Revived

Giving a nice twist to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel This Side of Paradise, the Pearl Theater in NYC brings two short plays by J.M.  Barrie–Rosalind and The Twelve-Pound Look–under the umbrella title This Side of Neverland.  Unlike Peter Pan, most of Barrie’s other plays have not fared well, in part because they feel like period pieces, with their depiction of Edwardian manners and mores, courtship rituals and marital discord.  But now we have what appears to be a successful revival of two of the works.

Here’s Catherine Rampell’s review from the New York Times

These two droll delicacies involve resourceful women with surprise identities. And both tuck proto-feminist messages into gently barbed social commentary — about aristocratic fat cats, class anxiety and the entertainment industry — that still holds uncomfortably true today.

Pristinely directed by J. R. Sullivan, both plays seem so good-natured that you hardly notice you yourself might be the object of dissection. Preshow and entr’acte piano-playing of period tunes like “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” whose misty-eyed lyrics are found inside the program, allow audience members to sing along. Don’t let the musical nostalgia and starchy dressing gowns fool you, though; as Mr. Sullivan makes clear, Barrie’s words are disturbingly current.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/05/14...

Bedtime Reading

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/boo...

At the end, you will find a great list of picture book favorites, canonical and heretical.  I’m a big fan of The Wolves in the Walls.

Don’t miss the charming meditation on the bedtime book club by Dwight Garner.  And my advice: Give those books away to new readers, unless they have been read to pieces.

HANS DE BEER “Little Polar Bear”

TOMIE DE PAOLA “The Knight and the Dragon”

JULES FEIFFER “Bark, George”

JULES FEIFFER “I Lost My Bear”

NEIL GAIMAN AND DAVE MCKEAN “The Wolves in the Walls”

ARTHUR GEISERT “The Giant Ball of String”

STEVE GOODMAN AND MICHAEL MCCURDY “The Train They Call the City of New Orleans”

RUSSELL HOBAN AND LILLIAN HOBAN “Bread and Jam for Frances”

MUNRO LEAF AND ROBERT LAWSON “The Story of Ferdinand”

ASTRID LINDGREN AND HARALD WIBERG “The Tomten and the Fox”

PEGGY RATHMANN “The Day the Babies Crawled Away”

COLEEN SALLEY AND JANET STEVENS “Epossumondas”

MAURICE SENDAK “In the Night Kitchen”

MARK ALAN STAMATY “Who Needs Donuts?”

SANDRA STEEN, SUSAN STEEN AND G. BRIAN KARAS “Car Wash”

 

And Now for Something Completely Different

Soman Chainani’s School for Good and Evil comes out next month.  

Here’s what I wrote after reading the manuscript last January:

“It is not often that someone comes along who can reinvent fairy tales and reclaim their magic in ways that are truly for children. Soman Chainani takes the racing energy of Roald Dahl’s language and combines it with the existential intensity of J.K. Rowling’s plots to create his own universe, inhabited by characters we grow to love. THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL uses the sorcery of words and the poetry of friendship to startle, enchant, and keep us turning its pages.”

And for more on the volume and the author’s career:

 http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/05/princ…

The first of a trilogy for middle-grade readers (ages nine and up), The School for Good and Evil tracks two archetypal heroines: the lovely Sophie, with her waist-long blond hair and her dreams of becoming a princess, and her friend Agatha, an unattractive, unpopular contrarian who chooses to wear black. A giant bird snatches the pair and carries them off to the School for Good and Evil, a two-pronged magical academy that trains children to become fairy-tale heroes and villains. When, to her horror, Sophie arrives at the Evil branch to learn “uglification,” death curses, and other dark arts, while Agatha finds herself at the School for Good amid handsome princes and fair maidens, the line between good and evil blurs, the meaning of beauty twists, and the girls reveal their true natures.