Fine Art in Las Vegas: What are the odds?

If you live in Arizona, as I do, and drive north, you will find that eventually the road is blocked by the Grand Canyon. You have to go around. I went west, to Las Vegas, so I could continue from there, up north into Utah. Las Vegas was the last outpost of so-called civilization in that region so I stayed overnight and half a day, to rest up. Got a room in a major casino hotel for under $50. I don’t gamble, so I felt pretty smug that I had beat that pricing system.

But they did get me for $25 for admission to the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art. It’s a small space, showing perhaps three dozen paintings at the most. The show I saw was called “A Sense of Place: Landscapes from Monet to Hockney." It had numerous artists from widely varying times and places, but all the pictures addressed the show’s theme. Pieces were on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

How could that work? You might wonder what 19th century impressionism has in common with 20th century abstraction and precise representationalism. The answer is curation. This show is all heavily influenced by the skill and sensibility of the gallery’s curator who was not identified, but could have been Tarissa Tiberti, the gallery’s director.

Monet’s 1885 Haystacks at Giverney, for example are hung next to photographer Skeet McAuley’s 2001 image of golf course greens, and you notice that both scenes are quiet, sun-drenched, and both convey a strong sense of open space, and above all, a sense of place. The juxtaposition gives brilliant insight into both works.

My favorite juxtaposition was David Hockney’s intensely colorful "Garrowby Hill" (1998), hung next Torben Giehler’s 1999 "Boogie Woogie," a Mondrianesque abstract gridwork. And again, the juxtaposition makes you see both works in a new light, in this case, as aerial views of landscapes, and again you appreciate the sense of place conveyed by both.

Other artists in the show were Marc Chagall, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Robert Rauchenberg, Lichtenstein, Millet, Christo,Vik Muniz, and many others unknown to me before this show.

I spent over an hour in the small gallery going around and around the tight circuit, learning more each time. Each piece is a beautiful masterwork in its own right, but their creative and playful juxtapositions added a surprising new level of understanding.

This was not the sort of thing I expected to discover in Sin City. But I’m glad I paused there long enough to see it. See http://www.bellagio.com/files/exhibition-brochure.pdf. The show runs through January, 2012.
(Sisely on the right here)

Tucson Glass Festival

The Tucson Glass Festival was held from April 8-10, 2011 to celebrate art in glass. Originally the show was planned to be national but too many participants canceled after Arizona passed its racist anti-immigration law earlier in the year, so the organizers soldiered on with a local festival, and it was intimate and successful (from the point of view of a consumer of it, anyway).

There were tours of the Sonoran Glass Art Academy, which included demonstrations and instruction, with plenty of “product” for sale in the galleries, and likewise at the Philabaum glass studio and gallery, and other galleries around town.

A special highlight was a demonstration of technique by the brothers de la Torre, Einar and Jamex, originally of Guadalajara, now living and working in Esenada, Mexico and San Diego. They worked at Tom Philabaum’s studio in Tucson to produce a fantastic, life-sized glass head in their signature style of cartoonish, colorful, ironic, and witty construction that the three of them had designed the night before in the Ethiopian restaurant across the street from the studio.

The brothers were assisted by Tom Philabaum and a team of experienced glassworkers. The two-hour project was fascinating and almost medieval in its exercise of techniques that go back many centuries. I asked Tom Philabaum about the absence of safety equipment. All those bare arms and legs look awfully vulnerable moving around glass at fourteen hundred degrees, I said. But he replied, "I would rather work naked. You have to be able to feel the heat from the glass to know what it is doing." The man is clearly one with his material!

The glass bust that emerged was grotesquely beautiful, pinkish, as if its scalp had been removed, and decorated with something like a crown of laurels, except they were prickly pear pads, and topped with a sort of Mohawk haircut that made the whole thing reminiscent of a conquistador. It’s gaping mouth displayed the words “Baja Rizona.” Why not “Baja Arizona?” someone asked. Because, Jamex said, the two middle “A’s” are combined to one, and then it sounds like somebody is laughing, “Ha-ha, Rizona!” That is the kind of weird, eccentric humor the de la Torre brothers are known for.

The brothers have a major show now at the Tucson Museum of Art, called Borderlandia. It is a show that has traveled through the west, perhaps elsewhere. It presents a wide range of colorful glass pieces, some free-standing, some wall mounted, some animated by electric motors and videos; all of them baroquely elaborate, immensely intricate, and stuffed full of “found” trinkets and souvenirs culled from dollar stores. Some of their iconography is serious, tragicomically cultural, religious, and bitingly political, and some of it is just plain goofy fun.

The work highlights, overall, ethnic commonalities and differences among people living along the southwest border. They use images from Mexico, American pop culture, the Mayas and the Aztecs, and even some pre-Columbian images. Juxtaposition is their preferred method for making narrative comments, such as by filling a traditional religious altar with pop-culture icons and images of politicians. The show is overflowing with political and cultural meaning, but it is also a huge dose of eye-candy and a magnificent display of the glass artist’s craft.

The bizarre bust that the brothers made for the Glass Festival demonstration ended up looking something like a Spanish Conquistador who plays in a punk rock band in a Day of the Dead celebration. It was hastily stuffed into the annealing oven before it could be thoroughly appreciated, but even so, the artists asked the small crowd of observers if there were any early bids for it. The bidding stalled out at $2,000, but at least it was an open.

I’m not sure when the formal bidding for it is, but they said they would not be surprised to see $7,000. Proceeds benefit the nonprofit Sonoran Glass Art Academy’s Youth Development Program.

Viva el vidrio!

T.S. Monk On Monk

T.S. Monk, drummer and bandleader, is the son of renowned pianist and composer, Thelonious Monk. I think T.S. also stands for Thelonious Sphere, same as his father but anyway, Monk the younger goes by T.S. He founded the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, dedicated to honoring (promoting) the music of his father and educating and nurturing new jazz talent.

T.S. tours the world performing his father’s ensemble music. In Tucson recently, he presented a show for which he is known, called “Monk on Monk” with a brass and piano sextet. It was quickly expanded to ten players with the addition of a tuba and bass sax, and some other horns, for a smoothly blended “Monk’s Mood.” The sound was good overall, and of course anyone who loves Monk’s music can’t get enough of it. Nevertheless, individual performances seemed lackluster. Nothing sparkled except the instruments.

T.S.’s drumming tends to the musical, which I like. He is 60 years old now, so one cannot expect fireworks. The different drums are tuned over a wide pitch range (I don’t know proper drum terminology) and he uses that variability to produce some melodious solos instead of the usual whap-bang theatrics. The playlist was not tremendously satisfying. It emphasized lesser-known works, such as Little Rootie-Tootie, Boo-Boo’s Birthday, and Crepuscule with Nellie, tunes that he explained were dedicated by his father to the family. I suspect there are still copyright issues with the “big” tunes, like ‘Round Midnight and Epistrophy, that prevent them from being featured. Still, it was good music, if lackluster.

T.S. put out a disc in 1997, also called T.S. Monk on Monk, which included just about the same playlist as this show, but had in the band such luminaries as Roy Hargrove, Dave Holland, Christian McBride, Wayne Shorter, and many others. Now, that music pops, so I conclude that the Tucson concert was not lukewarm because of the playlist but because of the players. Or maybe it’s something about Tucson itself that makes performers sleepy.

Joshua Redman

I saw a great performance on an improbable Sunday afternoon by Joshua Redman’s quartet at Portland, Oregon’s Performing Arts Center. It was near the end of the 2011 PDX Jazz Festival and I was only in town for the weekend, and there were only a few tickets left, so I was forced to spring for high-dollar seats, in the second row orchestra section, sitting right behind Joe Lovano, as it happened.

Online it said that Redman would have Aaron Parks as his piano player, and I have been following Parks since I “discovered” him, playing for tips in a Tully’s café in Seattle some fifteen years ago. Alas, it was not to be. On piano was Aaron Goldberg, who is fully competent but not as exciting as the other Aaron. Redman did play a Parks-written tune, and acknowledged him as a good friend. Matt Penman was on drums and Eric Harland on Bass.

I have enjoyed saxophonist Redman (and his father, Dewey Redman), since the early ‘90’s, when he still had hair. His 1993 album, “Wish,” recorded with Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, is still a favorite. He has come a long way since then and now is a major star. In his mid forties, I would guess, he is an interesting-looking fellow, tall and lean, with long, slender fingers, and a head that runs diagonally from the crown of his shiny pate to the tip of his huge jaw and protruding lips. But none of that affects his great music. He plays straight ahead jazz, hot and complicated but without the squeaks, blats and whinnying horse sounds that many players (including Lovano) often resort to. But he also does a fine, lyrical ballad with real feeling.

Redman seems a very gentle soul, with a soft voice, utterly authentic. It is somewhat surprising that when getting ready to play, he has a genuinely worried look on his face, as if he were wondering if he would be up to it, if it would be good. I have no doubt he is worried about that, for his playing is alive and spontaneous. Nothing about it is rehearsed. He does not know what's going to happen, so he really is venturing into the void every time he plays. When his piece is finished and he raises his head from the saxophone, he looks completely disoriented. He glances around in a panic, trying to remember where he is and what is going on, as if he were emerging from a dream. And that is probably exactly what is happening in his head. He is a modern day shaman who guides us into another world.

Blues with Grace

Abounding Grace Sanctuary, a Lutheran Church in Tucson, hosts local and regional music performances almost every week. Churches give me the creeps, and this one was no different, but I took a deep breath and went to see Joe Bourne, Arthur Migliazza, and Tom Walbank. The last two are local stars. Walbank is a guitar and harp (harmonica) wizard often found at Tucson’s 17th Street Market. Migliazza is a stride piano and boogie-woogie master, formerly of Tucson, but who now lives in New York. Tom and Arthur are old friends and often appear together in Tucson (not often enough). Joe Bourne is a jazz singer from Cambridge, MA.

Migliazza led off with his signature version of Yancy’s Blues, a genuine foot stomper. Bourne then sang several tunes with piano accompaniment. The accompaniment was great. I especially liked a rendition of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill,” because Arthur really slammed the downbeat note on the left hand in each bar. Plus I am just wild about any tune in 4/4 time over a 6/8 rhythm. I don’t know why. Arthur also did a version of Pinetop Blues that had people in the audience literally gasping in astonishment, interrupting often with applause.

Bourne sang many jazz standards competently, but he was not my favorite. He just did not swing, and that is death for blues. He hit every note dead center, exactly as written, but that’s not enough. To swing, you have to use rubato, play with the music, interpret it. Bobby Darin had swing. Bourne doesn’t. Also, his accent was uninteresting. In “Georgia On My Mind,” he actually said “Georger” at one point (Boston area accent). However, he did do “Motherless Child,” an old slave song from the late 1800’s and he did it a capella, as a Negro spiritual, not as a blues tune, and it was very heartfelt and moving, and really showed off his voice well. That’s obviously his forte, not jazz singing.

Tom Walbank came in at the second hour and knocked everybody’s socks off with his dazzling harmonica work, which is unbelievable. He has a composite piece of pre-World War I tunes that he has put together that is astonishing. He is hooting and barking and yelling and singing into the harmonica even as he plays it , creating his own rhythm section as he goes. It’s just amazing, seemingly impossible.

The show was $15 per person, ran about 90 minutes and was attended by about 150 people, mostly members of the church, I would guess, and mostly fifty years and older. I saw nobody under forty, which is a shame. The kids wouldn’t know who Count Basie is, true, but nobody can resist a hot boogie-woogie piano or a wailing blues harmonica -- nobody. I left early because of the growing lack of oxygen and the increasing smell of humanity in the windowless, airless room. But I was well pleased to enjoy Arthur and Tom again, individually and together.

The Ruins at Casa Grande

This is not really a performing arts event, or if it is, it is one that occurred at least six hundred years ago. The Hohokam Indians of southern Arizona had a prosperous civilization between Phoenix and Tucson between A.D. 1200 and 1450, at which time they disappeared. I took an archaeological tour of the remains of their civilization, sponsored by The Archaeological Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that acquires and preserves endangered archeological sites across America (www.americanarchaelology.org). The guide for our group of eight was Allen Dart, M.A., a professional archaeologist and Executive Director of the Old Pueblo Archaeology Center in Tucson (www.oldpueblo.org).

We began with the ruins of the “Great House” at Casa Grande, AZ. “Casa Grande” means “great house.” The town is named after the ruins. The great house was four-story public building, probably a meeting place and a center of government, built around 1300. It is made of adobe-like bricks, which essentially “melt” in the rains, so it is badly decayed. It has survived seven centuries mainly because the bricks are cut from the rock-hard caliche soil of southern Arizona. That is soil saturated with calcium compounds, the bane of gardeners today. There isn’t much rain in southern Arizona (only about 12 inches a year today – no telling what it was 700 years ago), so the building has stood up surprisingly well, considering the technology. The Park Service put a protective roof over the ruins in 1932, to slow down its rate of decay. Since the 1800’s, the Park Service has also added several structural supports to keep the remaining walls from collapsing.

The great house is interesting architecturally. Its exterior walls are not straight on the vertical dimension, but curved inward toward the top, giving the whole structure a graceful look, like a piece of pottery. This design supposedly added greater strength to the overall structure when the wooden roof beams tied the top of the walls together. At least that is what our archaeologist said, but that doesn’t fit with my intuition of how the forces would work. In any case, it would have been a beautiful building when new in 1300 or so.

The interior rooms are small. Even the large ones are only about 10 x 14, although ceilings are 20 feet high. Interior doorways are so low that you would have to be about five feet tall to use them, or bow to pass through. They are so narrow that you have to turn sideways to use most of them. I don’t know the average height of the Hohokams, but I suspect that the shape of the openings in the structure are due to a combination of temperature management and structural necessity (there are no arches or non-adobe lintels).

The rooms are now derelict, full of bird droppings and rodent holes, with the walls sporting carved graffiti from the 1800’s. The graffiti is itself interesting sometimes. Travelers apparently stopped here for shelter in the 19th century. “Carlos 1889,” carved his name about 12 feet up a wall, so there might have been a wooden floor part way up at one time, or else Carlos stood on some wooden structure, now lost, or else Carlos was a giant. Thanks, Carlos. You could have left us a little more detail.

There is some speculation that the great house was used for astronomical observations. There are a couple of interesting holes in the south façade that archaeologists say provide a line of sight with the sun at summer and winter solstices. That seems plausible, but I doubt that the entire compound would have been devoted to that single purpose.

Around the great house, on a flat site about four acres, there are low adobe walls, remnants of outbuildings, which are thought to have been used for storage of grains, or possibly as animal pens. There is no archeological evidence that anyone ever lived at the great house or its outbuildings (i.e., no fireplaces found), so it was probably strictly a government compound and a general meeting place. If the outbuildings were indeed used for food storage, that implies that they had a system of taxation, and if so, you wonder what public services the taxes supported. Probably religious ceremonies, but who knows. I guess we still have the same question today about how our taxes are used!

The Hohokams had no written language so we don’t know much about them, or even why they disappeared. One prominent theory, endorsed by archaeologist Dart, is that a long period of drought dropped the water level of the nearby Gila River so low that it could not fill the irrigation canals any more. So the crops died and the civilization collapsed. Another theory is that there was some sort of a political revolution when the rulers became tyrannical (as rulers are wont to do), leading to destruction of the social order. The revolution theory and the drought theory are not incompatible. My favorite speculation is that the Hohokam people did not disappear, but just dispersed. Their descendants are, by Native American oral tradition, the Tohono O’odham Indians around Tucson today.

One more interesting feature of the ruins site is the ancient ball court near the great house. The court is much smaller than I had imagined, only an oval depression in the soil about fifty yards long. There is some archaeological evidence that such structures were used for a kind of team ballgame, and there is some documentary evidence associated with similar sites in Central America. The speculation is that the Hohokam would have used a stone ball wrapped in leather, or possibly a ball made of a hard, plastic-like substance composed of hardened tree resin and an unidentified waxy material. What the game was like or how it was played, or why, is unknown. Was it just for fun? Was there betting? Or were they not really “games” at all, but deadly serious theater symbolically representing cosmic forces, or even contests among competing tribes? Archaeologist Dart suggested that the ballgames were discontinued in the 1300’s, so the culture must have evolved. The so-called ball courts could have been used also for theater or for speeches, as the acoustics are very good around the rim, for someone speaking in the center, as Mr. Dart demonstrated. Normally, the public is not allowed into the environmentally and archaeologically sensitive area where the ball court is found, but we were special because we had a card-carrying archaeologist with us. (The whole group was closely shadowed by a Park Service ranger the whole time anyway).

After a picnic lunch, the group drove off to visit several other archaeological sites in the area, including the “Grewe” site to the north, where the Hohokam first settled. For reasons unknown, the center of their civilization gradually migrated south to the Casa Grande site. The Grewe site is largely unexcavated, so there is nothing to see but some large, fenced-off, open fields of brush and cactus, and a large Wal-Mart. Dart told us that ancient artifacts were discovered when they dug up the area for the construction of the Wal-Mart, and to their credit, the Wal-Mart people stopped, and changed the whole plan of the store and its parking, to leave the ancient underground artifacts as little disturbed as possible.

We visited a few other sites in the area that only an archaeologist would be able to recognize as ancient ruins, and saw some building foundations and some depressions in the ground that were clearly ball courts, if you knew what you were looking at. It was interesting to realize that all around these small towns like Florence and Coolidge were ancient Indian ruins. You would have to have a trained eye to see it though.

Finally we visited a site called the Poston Butte Ruin, which I think was actually private property for which Dart had been granted access. There we walked over a featureless desert of rolling hills. Except Dart told us they were not “natural” rolling hills but ancient Indian garbage mounds. Once we knew what to look for, it was easy to see five and six-hundred year old pottery shards everywhere, some of them quite beautiful. As the rains fall, the dirt of the trash piles gradually erodes, exposing the piles of broken pots and other artifacts. I found a six-hundred year-old stone scraper tool. It was a thrill to hold it in my hand and wonder about the person who had made it so many centuries ago. Mr. Dart, with his special “archaeologist’s eyes” found a tiny bone carving of a coyote, only an inch long. I could have looked right at that fragment a dozen times and never seen it, but after it was identified, we could see it was a beautiful and detailed work of art. I don’t see how such a carving could have been made with stone-age technology, but there it was.

Naturally, we put all artifacts back on the ground exactly where we had found them. It is pointless to collect such artifacts, and illegal at most sites (i.e, in National Parks), and an anti-scientific vandalism, and a cultural desecration. As we were told. Repeatedly. See http://www.oldpueblo.org/collecting.html for the full speech/sermon.

After a long day of hiking, I got accustomed to walking with my eyes on the ground, alert to the many artifacts that are in this area. I started to develop “archaeologist’s eyes,” maybe a little, and at least, got a good feel for what archaeologists do and what ancient Indian archaeology is like in this part of Arizona.