The Magic Garden

I just had a blast from the past! The New York Times has an article and video clip about one of my all-time favorite childhood television shows, The Magic Garden. When I was young, I absolutely loved this show. The show was on in the 1970s on a local channel here in the New York area. Looking back, I realize now how low-budget and campy it was, but I loved it. There's a sense of innocence and simplicity in it that I think children's shows have lost. There was always folk singing with Paula playing the guitar and Carole leading the (unseen) children in song. There was the Storybox, a magical trunk that would open and close on its own (you could see the wires!), and when they would open it, there were costumes inside and they would act out a story based on whatever they found. There was the Chuckle Patch, planted daisies that had jokes written on their leaves, and when the girls read the jokes aloud, the daisies would giggle. And there was the ever ridiculous, peanut-snorfing Sherlock the pink squirrel. (This is all starting to sound like a drug-induced trip.) The funniest part was that no sooner did I see the news article that I was suddenly able to sing the entire opening theme song, which begins like this: "Here in the garden of make believe / the magical garden of make believe / where flowers chuckle and birds play tricks / and the magic tree grows lollipop sticks..." Paula and Carol are now in their late 60s and still performing together. They've released DVDs with whatever has survived on tape from the original episodes from the show. I definitely will need to check them out to relive an aspect of my childhood.

Gibson's Queer Sculpture

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I received a travel award from CLAGS in support of a conference presentation I will be giving in a few days. The conference is the annual meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), and will be held at Yale University. There are going to be many great sessions, chances to hear some wonderful speakers, and opportunities for people to network. I thought I would share a bit about my paper. I'm speaking about John Gibson (1790-1866), a Welsh-born sculptor who spent nearly fifty years living in Rome producing works that Victorian Britain came to know and love. He was elected a full member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1836 and submitted this work you see here, Narcissus, as his diploma piece (the image comes from the Royal Academy Collections). Gibson was inspired to create this work after seeing an Italian boy gazing at his reflection in a fountain in Rome. Much of Gibson's work is classical in theme, and this is no exception. The subject comes from the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, a beautiful youth who, alas, had the ego to match, so he was cursed by the gods to fall in love with no one but himself. Gazing into a lake, he discovered his reflection and was so riveted by his beauty that he could not leave. And so he pined away gazing at his own reflection and suffering from unrequited love. The gods eventually had mercy on him and changed him into a flower, the narcissus, which bears his name. The myth was always seen as homosexually inclined (youth falls in love with another youth). Hence, it is but one example of the type of queer sculpture that I will be bringing up during my paper. Here is the abstract of my paper. Before reading, though, I think it's important to explain briefly about pederasty. The most important thing for you to know is that it has nothing to do with pedophilia. Pederasty was an all-male tradition in the ancient Athenian world, and it was directly associated with the raising of men to become strong, educated civic leaders. To associate it with the crime of pedophilia is to greatly misconstrue the foundation of democracy itself. And on that note, read away...

Channeling (Ant)Eros: John Gibson's Queer Sculpture
John Gibson (1790-1866) was born in Wales and raised in Liverpool, but he established a long career in Rome as one of that city’s—and Great Britain’s—most important sculptors. Gibson counted among his patrons Queen Victoria and the Duke of Devonshire, but he is best remembered today for reintroducing polychromy into sculpture in works such as his infamous Tinted Venus (c.1852). A follower of Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, and a teacher of Harriet Hosmer, Gibson flourished into the mid-Victorian period espousing the wisdom of J.J. Winckelmann and ancient Greek art, and producing his own interpretations of the gods in marble. At the encouragement of friends, he began writing his memoirs in the 1840s. These autobiographical notes stand today as a source for understanding both the classical references, and their queer implications, in his oeuvre.

In his memoirs, Gibson discussed his vision of idealized love by drawing on the figures of Anteros and Eros as aspects of spiritual passion. Overshadowed by his mythological brother, Anteros was created to be Eros’s playmate; literally and etymologically, he was “returned love” for the passion of Eros. Their duality was linked to the ancient Greek pederastic tradition, cited by Plato and others, with Eros as the passion offered by an elder erastes and Anteros the returned affection (sometimes sublimated) of the youthful eromenos. Though Gibson never explicitly discussed homosexual love or pederasty in his memoirs, he channeled Eros (and Anteros) into many of his sculptures, revealing to classically educated audiences intimations of same-sex passion.

In this paper, I will examine some of these classical subjects, such as the group Mars Restrained by Cupid (c.1820) and single figures such as Love Tormenting the Soul (1839). I will consider these works using Gibson’s own writings on ancient Greek love and art, but I also will draw on the present-day scholarship of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Whitney Davis, and others, contextualizing how Gibson used his Neoclassical origins to adumbrate the burgeoning homosexual identity seen in later Victorian art. By using coded visual language and imagery to channel (Ant)Eros in British art, Gibson helped pave the way for a conscious homosexual identity in the work of Simeon Solomon, Frederic Leighton, Hamo Thornycroft, Alfred Gilbert, and others.

Review: Gypsy

This weekend, my friends NV, MT, CB, & CM from Miami came to the Big Apple to celebrate NV's birthday. We had lots of fun, with dinners, shopping, and dancing, but the highlight for all of us was going to see Gypsy on Broadway at the St. James Theatre. The show was spectacular. Gypsy is taken from the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970), the burlesque stripper and actress. But the main protagonist of the show is Rose, her mother, who manages (and dominates) her two daughters' careers across the country during the waning days of Vaudeville. It has some easily recognizable tunes, like "Let Me Entertain You," "Everything's Coming Up Roses," and "Together Wherever We Go." This Broadway revival won the 2008 Tony Awards for Best Actress (Patti LuPone as Rose), Best Featured Actor (Boyd Gaines as Herbie), and Best Featured Actress (Laura Benanti as Louise/Gypsy Rose Lee). During our performance, Benanti apparently was replaced by her understudy Jessica Rush, so I can't assess what we missed there. However, I can say for certain that I would have been grossly disappointed if I had missed LuPone. If ever a role was written for a singer-actress, Rose was written for Patti LuPone. This woman is a musical knock-out. LuPone has such an incredible stage presence that she dominates every scene she is in, simply by sauntering on stage. Her voice brings down the house. The minute she showed up on stage, the audience gave her a round of applause, and she got a standing ovation at the end of the night. It's not easy to sing a Stephen Sondheim song. His lyrics can become tongue-twisters, and paired with Jule Styne's music, the person who plays Rose needs to make leaps of faith in harmony and tone. Rose has such a pushy stage presence that you expect her to be an exaggeration, but LuPone makes the hyperbolic believable and human. Even more impressive was her control of syncopation and the complexity of the lyrics, all while the orchestra masterfully played catch-up. What can I say but that it was simply astounding. Everything was definitely coming up roses last night.

Our 44th President

It's official: our 44th President will be Barack Obama! I have purposely avoided politics on this blog, but I have to say I am very pleased with this news. I can only hope that having our first African-American President will set the stage for a future where race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation will no longer be dividing setbacks in defining what an American is, for we are all human beings first and deserve equal treatment, regardless of our differences. Only then can we truly call ourselves Americans. Change is the one constant in life that cannot be stopped. Welcome to Change.

CLAGS Award

I've received some exciting news. I'm the recipient of the Fall 2008 Graduate Student Travel Award from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). The award is in recognition of the paper I will be giving later next week at a conference, and is to be used to assist with my travel expenses. My paper is entitled "Channeling (Ant)Eros: John Gibson's Queer Sculpture," but I'll talk more about the paper later. For now I thought I would blog about CLAGS, because they really are doing some fantastic work for 17 years now. As they say on their own website: "The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) was founded in 1991 as the first university-based research center in the United States dedicated to the study of historical, cultural, and political issues of vital concern to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals and communities." The founder and first director was Martin Duberman, a renown scholar of gay history. Back in the mid-'90s when I was first pursuing research in the field, I contacted Prof. Duberman to ask for his advice (by letter no less; this was before email was the norm). Imagine my excitement when I got home and there was a voicemail from him and a verbal invitation to phone him to talk more. We did speak, and I still to this day appreciate his encouragement of pursuing my interest in gay issues in the fields of art history and cultural studies. Sometimes people think we're in a "post-gay" world, but with the organized threat of new laws going into effect after Tuesday's election--laws that would outright take away the equal rights of gays and lesbians in places like California--groups like CLAGS are needed more now than ever. For more about CLAGS, check out their website at http://www.clags.org/.

Review: Cranford

When most people think of Victorian novels, inevitably they think first of Charles Dickens, second the Bronte sisters and Oscar Wilde, third maybe Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope. But usually only Victorianists read novels by people such as Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), but people need to know more about her. About a decade ago I read Cranford, a collection of novella-like stories Gaskell published in the early 1850s. It's the story of a fictional town in Cheshire, England, around the early 1840s, just at the time when the Industrial Revolution was stretching the railroad throughout the English countryside and frightening people in small towns such as Cranford. It has a great opening line: "In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons." These Amazons are the women of Cranford, mostly spinsters or widows, but all seemingly in charge of this town where men seem to play no role at all, certainly not in the lives of the Amazons. Cranford is actually one of the funniest, most sentimental, and most endearing Victorian books I've ever read, and I always remembered it fondly as a favorite.

Needless to say, I was pleased to hear last year about the new BBC production of Cranford. It aired in the US earlier this year on PBS, and I finally managed to catch it on DVD and watch the five episodes over the course of a fortnight (sorry, couldn't resist). It was superb! Some of you may remember the production of Bleak House that was done a few years ago, and if you loved that, then you'll love Cranford. Judi Dench plays Miss Matty Jenkyns, a warm-hearted but occasionally befuddled spinster. Dench heads an all-star cast that also includes Eileen Atkins, Francesca Annis, Imelda Staunton, Julia Sawalha, and on and on. Among the men, Michael Gambon has a brief role, but it's well done, and Simon Woods (who I've had a crush on since he was in HBO's Rome) plays Cranford's young, new, doe-eyed Dr. Frank Harrison. It's important to keep in mind that the producers were all women as well, which I think adds a certain flair to the production (one of the sole males on set was the director). They did take some serious creative license with Gaskell's book, so don't expect a true-to-the-novel adaptation, but as has been noted, Cranford is such a melange of individual tales that it reads more like a series of interwoven short stories and not a solid novel in and of itself. But the miniseries succeeds in its representations of issues of the day, like the approaching railroad, the importance for a women to marry (or not, as the case may be), new treatments for medical ailments, and education for the impoverished and women. There are some hysterically funny moments, like when the cow falls in the limepit and the women sew him grey flannel pajamas to heal his wounds. But this is emotional drama too, and death is a recurring motif throughout the miniseries, as it was during the Victorian period, so be prepared to watch it with a handkerchief.

The Nightmare

In honor of Halloween, I thought I would post something Gothic. The image you see here (courtesy of ArtMagick) is The Nightmare (1781) by the British artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825). Fuseli was born in Switzerland, received his training like most artists in Rome, but was inspired by the Germanic Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement of the 1770s. After settling permanently in England, he had a successful career and eventually became Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy. He is considered to be an early Romantic, since so much of his art shows the darker, mysterious side of life, often depicting scenes of the occult and fantasy. However, his forms are quite classical in their design and are an example of "expressive classicism," according to art historian William Vaughan in his book German Romantic Painting. This painting shows a woman in the throes of a nightmare, with a demon sitting on her chest and a demon-like horse sticking his head through the curtains. It's been said that the horse represents the nightmare (get it? the horse is a mare of the night?), but in fact Fuseli denied that was his intent. There is obviously more going on in this picture than just a nightmare. The woman is lying on a bed, and the physical contortion of her body suggests post-coital exhaustion. The demon, an incubus, is not actually on her chest, but on her abdomen, and his rump (and netherparts) are conveniently located just near her own pudenda. The horse, with his flaring nose, forces his head through the parted folds of red curtains, another sexual symbol in case you didn't catch the incubus association. So depending on your take the painting can either be a nightmare because of the demons or symbolize the naughtiness of sexual intercourse. In either case, it's certainly a powerful image. And in that vein, Happy Halloween!

Dogs and the Left Gaze Bias

Thanks to the Towleroad blog, I found out about a new study that says "Dogs can read emotions in human faces." According to the study, humans and dogs share an instinctive behavior: "left gaze bias." Apparently when we first look at another person, our eyes automatically move left so that we look at the person's right side, which is probably because the right side of our body expresses emotions better. As it turns out, dogs are the only other creature to do this, and they only do it when they look at humans. The study suggests that because dogs have been partnered with humans for so long, they've become accustomed to "reading" our emotions the same we "read" the emotions of other people. Of course, anyone who's a dog person already knows that they can read our emotions--that's just one of the reasons why they're such amazing creatures! So in the spirit of "left gaze bias," I found this adorable, tilted-head picture of Newton, a Westie puppy, courtesy of his owner sinosplice's Flickr album.

Doctor David Tennant

Oy! Such a tragedy to befall us fans of Doctor Who! My friend CC in England just sent me word that David Tennant has announced he will be leaving the show at the end of next year's episodes. On the BBC website announcement about his departure, Tennant was quoted from an acceptance speech last night as saying, "Now don’t make me cry. The 2009 shows will be my last playing the Doctor. I love this show and if I don’t take a deep breath and move on now I never will and you will be wheeling me out of the Tardis in my bath chair." (For those uncertain what he's talking about, the Tardis is his time-traveling spacecraft in the form of a 1950s British police phone box.) So life must go on, but without Doctor David Tennant, although the show will continue with a new, 11th Doctor (the Doctor and other Timelords have the ability to regenerate themselves whenever their lives are threatened). Fortunately, Tennant isn't a flash-in-the-pan. The Scottish-born actor is a Shakespearean-trained performer who recently did a stint in Stratford-upon-Avon playing Hamlet alongside Patrick Stewart as Claudius, for which both got rave reviews, so I have no doubt we'll see more of Tennant. In the meantime, executive producer Russell T. Davies is promising to make sure they send off Tennant's Doctor with "the most enormous and spectacular ending, so keep watching." I thought it would be interesting to pair the announcement of his departure with this report on the BBC website from when he first started as the Doctor in 2005. The picture here is from that episode, and just to make things clear, Tennant is the human, not the Sycorax alien in the background trying to take over Planet Earth.

Library Bytes: Google Books

More than once, I have felt the pull in two directions in the debate between those interested in protecting works of art and literature through copyright (e.g., authors) versus allowing free access to all information (e.g., libraries). There is a lot at stake in this debate both for creators and the public, and I can see both sides of the argument. Those who create should be able to protect their works for a limited period of time, but we also should be able to bring freely as much information as possible to the masses. For the past couple of years Google has been involved in a book-scanning project as part of their global ideal of digitizing everything in the world and making it freely available over the Internet. They have been working with major libraries to scan books in their collections and allow people to search them on their Google Books website. The idea isn't new. Companies like netLibrary started something comparable to this nearly ten years ago, but they were charging libraries subscription costs for their patrons to read the electronic books. While Google's book-scanning project works beautifully for those who are researchers and do not necessarily need to read every book cover-to-cover for specific projects (but can if they wish), the fact remains that Google has not restricted itself to scanning books in the public domain. They have been scanning books still protected by copyright and in some cases still in print. As a result, two class-action lawsuits were filed against the company by authors and publishers to protect their interests in Google's project. Google claims that what is it doing is an extension of fair use. The authors and publishers argue otherwise, that Google has not asked for their permission and that this free distribution impinges on their attempts to earn a profit. As it turns out, this week Google has settled, agreeing to pay out $125 million in compensation, although they are denying any wrong-doing in the suit. There are other stipulations, all of which you can read about in an article from Wednesday's New York Times, "Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning," but take a look also at Google's own webpage about the settlement and how it will alter their service: Google Book Search Settlement Agreement. Personally, I think Google Books is a fantastic tool. I've used it on more than one occasion in my research, because the scanned books are fully searchable by keyword, which means you can look for references in books to people, places, and events you might not ever think to look in. For my own research in nineteenth-century art and culture, this has been extremely useful, because many of the books published during that century are difficult to find or are too fragile to hold. Contrary to what the lawsuit argued, it has inspired me at times to seek out the purchasing of these books if possible. (After all, the actual reading of electronic books is an unpleasant task. For me, reading a book entails the experience of actually holding a book, and I never want to give that up.) On the other hand, I'm also pleased that there is going to be a curtailing of the free electronic delivery of works protected by copyright. Authors do have the right to protect their own work, at least for a time-limited period. It seems then that the middle road is the most viable for all those involved in this debate.

Siena near Sheffield?

Do you ever dream about what it would be like to "discover" some masterpiece of art? You know, like you happen to rummage through your grandmother's attic and discover not only that she was Picasso's secret mistress, but that he painted a Cubist portrait of her that she's kept hidden all these years because it made her look indecent? The likelihood is that it will never happen, but one can always dream. Still, surprises similar to that do happen occasionally in the art world. Take for instance the news about these "Sienese panels found in English parish church" in the latest edition of The Art Newspaper. Apparently a small church in a mining village in Yorkshire, England turned out to have two heretofore unknown panel paintings by the early Renaissance painter Sano di Pietro (1406-1481). No one is still certain how they got there, but the local aristocracy may have had something to do with it about a century ago. And if all that wasn't interesting enough, turns out there's a New York connection as well. The expert called in to examine the works was Everett Fahy from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Memory Walk

This morning was the Alzheimer's Association Memory Walk 2008 in New York City. It was so great to have my brother, nephew, nieces, and some of my good friends along participating in the Memory Walk with me. It was a two-mile walk through Riverside Park. We had spectacular weather, and the view overlooking the Hudson River surrounded by fall leaves was beautiful. Team "Ferrari & Friends" raised almost $1200 in donation for the organization. There easily had to have been about 1000 people (and dogs!) participating in the Walk. The Memory Walk was something that I've wanted to do for the past few years, but I always seemed like I was so busy. This year, however, I was determined to do it, and I'm so glad I did. My mother died from early onset Alzheimer's disease in 2006, and it was one of the most excruciating experiences that our family went through to watch her suffer from this horrific disease. With the support of my family, co-workers, and friends, I can say for a fact that we definitely made a difference today. A hearty thanks goes out to all those who helped sponsor our team, and a big hug goes out to my family and friends in the above picture who participated in the Walk. The photograph of us was taken this morning by my friend Ted Fisher of New York Portraits. Thanks, Ted! Hopefully he'll soon post more photos of the Walk on his blog.

Virginia Woolf Speaks

Over the summer, I finally got around to reading the novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and I absolutely loved it. The stream-of-consciousness that flows from Clarissa Dalloway to different people she encounters along the way makes it a masterpiece of early 20th-century fiction. There are some wonderful quotes as well ("What a lark! What a plunge!" and "I prefer men to cauliflowers" are now two of my favorite sayings--and those are just on page 1). If your only exposure to Woolf is from the movie The Hours, you should know that Woolf was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. She has become an icon for feminists and lesbians for her writing and lifestyle. A part of the talented and polyamorous Bloomsbury Group, she was friends with other great writers like E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey and artists like Duncan Grant. Her sister Vanessa Bell was a Bloomsbury artist as well. But the reason for this post is that the BBC has an article ("Great writers find their voice") about the release of a multi-CD set from The British Library with recordings by various writers. On the article site, you can listen to the audio file that is the only known recording of Virginia Woolf's voice. As always, her quips are fantastic: "Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind." It's fascinating not only to hear what she has to say, but to actually listen to the intonation of her voice. People don't realize how much the way people speak English (American and British) has changed over the past century. Regional accents have diminished more and more as the global media shrinks our planet. Woolf's voice and words reveal not only her talent as a writer, but as a modern woman as well.

Library Bytes: Biblioburro

I am starting a new feature with this post called Library Bytes, where I will write about anything related to the magical world of libraries. Our first Library Byte has to do with an article in The New York Times last week by Simon Romero called "Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs." Code word: Biblioburro. This is one of those heart-warming stories that makes you admire the resolve of people and recognize the goodness that does exist in the world. For the past decade Luis Soriano of La Gloria, Colombia, a school teacher who makes $350 a month, has taken it upon himself to help promote reading by loading up books onto his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto (you can't make this stuff up!), and bringing the books to children and adults in the mountain villages of Colombia. And to think there are communities in the US that can't even support bookmobiles. Soriano reads to them and loans them the books. When he first started he had only 70 books, but now he's up to 4,800, and he's trying to have a public library built next to his home. Why is he doing it? Because he believes "that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia." He deserves a medal from every literacy organization and library organization, not only for encouraging reading, but making this unbelievable effort to bring reading to people who don't have the resources to buy their own books.

Review: Holzer & Opie

My friend JM and I went to the Guggenheim on Friday night to see the Jenny Holzer installation and the Catherine Opie exhibition. JM is a big fan of Holzer's work, and we were both looking forward to these shows. The installation is a projection of phrases by Holzer onto the facade of the newly refurbished spiral building by Frank Lloyd Wright. You should definitely take a look at their website for the installation, as it has a video that beautifully demonstrates what the projection is like. The museum is only showing the installation on Friday nights for their "pay what you wish" entry. The image here was taken by me using my mobile phone (which surprisingly took a good picture). If you can't make out the words, the message says: "RESPECT THEIR RIGHT TO WHISPER, LAUGH, AND LAPSE INTO HAPPY SILENCE." Holzer (b. 1950) is an American Conceptual artist. Her work since the 1970s has been based on truisms, phrases or ideas so self-evident that they almost don't bear repeating. But she does repeat them, over and over, and has them appear on everything from cement benches to building walls. What is interesting about truisms is that the more they are repeated, the more they call into question what they declare to be true, so her phrases make you pause and contemplate the truth behind the message. The medium in which she works is important as well, because it changes how one perceives the message. A large-scale digital projection such as this one conjures up a cinematic experience, a Star Wars-like effect, whereby enormous words hovering over you force you into accepting their message. In contrast, the same words on a cement bench make the message more meditative. The installation was fun to gaze at for a while as her phrases rotated the whole time. Here's another one of the projected messages: "I DON'T REQUIRE CHANGES FROM THE SURF, NOW DILIGENT, NOW SLUGGISH, OBEYING NOT ME." The installation runs until December 31st. To visit links to other works by Holzer, go to Artcyclopedia's Jenny Holzer page.

Catherine Opie (b. 1961) is an American photographer who made a name for herself in the mid-1990s with her transgressive series Portraits (1993-1997). These works, on display here as part of this mid-career retrospective, are a series of head-and-shoulder or full-length-body portraits of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and straight people, all of whom are part of the Goth scene, the leather & bondage scene, the S&M scene, and so on: they are the über-alternative in alternative lifestyles. According to curator Jennifer Blessing on the wall text for the show, these studio portraits were shot "with the dignity historically accorded to members of a royal court." I can see where she's going with this. All of the works are arranged like a gallery of traditional paintings, and all of the works are shot vividly with intense background colors that showcase their subjects. But I think that type of assessment is a politically correct way of making the subject matter palatable to mainstream audiences. For me, the figures are arranged like a freak show, images you would see from some early circus, such as the bearded lady and the fire-eating man. Instead, here you have a drag king named Bo with a fake mustache and butch flannel shirt, and Vaginal Davis wearing green curly-haired clown wigs strategically placed on her nude body. But it's important to recognize that this freak show is what makes the portraits so beautiful. Their transgression is their beauty. They are a type of royal court, but one very different from what mainstream America usually knows or sees. Their individuality is their beauty.

There are other works in the show worth mentioning, namely Opie's Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), which has her sitting before a luxurious black-and-gold tapestry and wearing a leather mask, pins in her arms, bare-breasted, the word Pervert bleeding, carved in cursive penmanship, onto her chest. This contrasts with Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), which has her bare-breasted, now staring down at the innocent face of the baby that suckles at her breast, the word Pervert now a scar on her chest, the red-and-gold tapestry behind her echoing Madonna and Child imagery from Renaissance paintings. I love figurative art, so I find these works to be some of her most riveting. However, she has done other types of work that are also on exhibit here, such as a series of images of freeways and storefronts. Her series Icehouses and Surfers border on abstraction and made me think of the atmospheric photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto and an inverted version of zip-style painting akin to Barnett Newman or Jo Baer. Definitely take a look at the Guggenheim's website for the exhibition, which has a short video with Opie talking about some of her work. The exhibition runs until January 7th. More links to images of her work are available on Artcyclopedia's Catherine Opie page.

My friend KB told me afterwards that much of Opie's work, in whatever representation, is about communities, which does make a lot of sense. But as my friend JM said to me, what strikes him about so many photographers since the late 1980s is how they got caught up in the battle over censorship and funding by government bodies. Classic examples are Andres Serrano, Sally Mann, and of course Robert Mapplethorpe. These shocking works became their token oeuvre, and everything afterwards tends to lack the same heightened level of aesthetic experience. I can see what he means by this. Opie's figurative work is powerful and speaks to the mid-1990s alternative lifestyle experience in Clinton America. The rest of it, alas, doesn't seem to speak to me in the same way. Ultimately, I believe it is the portraiture for which Opie will be best remembered in art history, but only time will tell.

Review: Primeval

Have you ever watched a program that you aren't really enjoying, but yet keep watching in the hopes that it might get better? Or worse, you realize you've committed yourself to watching it and now you just want to see how it ends? If so, then you understand how I feel about the television show Primeval on BBC America, which has only two episodes left this season. It seemed like it was going to be exciting. Crystallized anomalies begin appearing that are dimensional gateways linking our time with periods in history when dinosaurs and other primitive creatures roamed the world. So now dinosaurs are stepping through and wreaking havoc on present-day England. Of course all the dinosaurs are violent creatures, and of course our merry band of palaeontological and zoological heroes always save the day. (OK, in all fairness, the episode with the pterodactyl turned out not to be violent, and that was a positive episode with its "let's save the animals" theme, but then again pterodactyls are my favorite dinosaurs.) The whole show is based on computer animated dinosaurs. In other words, it's a special effects show. Fine, no problem. But the acting is stilted, and the editing is often choppy in linking plotlines (you feel like you're missing something at times). Even worse, the writing is drab and uninspiring, and whenever it makes an attempt at emotions, it teeters on melodrama. And why do I have so many questions that I know they're never going to answer? For instance, why are the anomalies only reaching back to millions of years ago or potential futures? Why isn't Robin Hood coming through the anomaly? (Oh, wait, that's because he's on another BBC show.) And why only England? There are no other anomalies opening anywhere else in the world? There was only one major plot twist in the show that worked well: the "oops, we just changed our future" episode when a major character disappeared and no one but lead Nick Cutter remembers she ever existed. But of course how disappointing and predictable was it that they resolved this "mystery" with the return of said character as a newer, fresher, sexier, snob with a new name, just to confuse Cutter. And while I'm at it, why has no one commented on the fact that immediately when that plot twist took place, everyone on the program suddenly had a new hairstyle, including Cutter, who shouldn't look different since he was on the other side of the anomaly? Am I really the only one who noticed everyone looked different from before? Considering how successful the BBC has been in the US lately, airing its programs on BBC America and Sci-Fi and licensing new versions of shows in the US (e.g. the new ABC show Life on Mars was originally a BBC show), it's a shame to see how Primeval has faltered. Doctor Who it is not. It just goes to show that you can't depend on dinosaurs alone. They make terrible actors.