Long Day's Journeys

Walking Drifting Dragging at the New Museum

 

            A small but personable collection of conceptual artworks created on long, winding travels makes up the New Museum’s short-lived, interesting exhibition Walking Drifting Dragging, which closes February 3^rd.  One New York artist, Ellie Ga, tagged along on a research vessel trawling the depths of the Arctic, propelled only by the currents.  Though her artistic introspection at the loneliness of the frozen wastelands could only be imagined, her work was done when the boat stopped—for what reason, we aren’t sure, as the purpose of the mission is not revealed.  Her bird’s-eye-view charcoal sketches all include the same, near-ovoid body of the ship in white, surrounded by the ice in a chilling gray.  The steps the researchers took when dismounting the boat are traced in a dotted line.  The line always seems to follow a circle around the ship, finding nothing but the hard, never-ending floes that blocked their path in the first place.  Who can say what metaphorical relevance this has?  These of Ga’s works, like the Arctic, are cold and cartographic.

            But on her long walks around the craft, Ga was busy with an entirely different project.  Scattering bright, bluish lanterns in the fissures opening around the ship, she took wide-angle pictures of the rusting boat from far away, so that the now illuminated cracks seemed to point home, or at least the possibility of home.  Ga’s series is called The Fortunetellers, and while it’s true the fissures and dotted lines ingrain the ice like lines on a palm, the true fortune that needs to be told seems to be: Where will the ship drift next?  In such a vein does the exhibit display, nearly without comment, artists’ travels through their odd worlds, and the ways they attempt to chart them where it may seem impossible.

            Other highlights include artist Paulo Nazareth’s 4,618-mile walk from his hometown of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to New York City, mostly barefoot but occasionally in a pair of neon green flip-flops, which are on display.  Nazareth played off cultural stereotypes on his way across the border between Mexico and the United States, holding a cardboard sign that read “I Will Clean Your Bathroom for a Fair Price.”  Exploring the cultural welcomes that awaited him in Latin America and beyond is a different kind of map than Ga’s, but a map nonetheless.

            For these artists are all drawing maps of one kind or another, struggling to denote all sorts of new territory, some more successfully than others.  (Some were actually trying for the less successful approach--Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain charted a river in Guwahati, India by asking different local fisherman for their input.  The responses were so dissimilar that on their map, the river branches out in an impossible number of directions and even flows both ways.)  Perhaps that’s why the exhibit (curated by Lauren Cornell) is so stark and simplistic, with the works jutting out like landmasses.  It, too, is a map, but of entirely new lands—those wildly diverging attitudes and ideas of emerging artists.  Artists themselves can be hard to track, hard to define, and sometimes hard to enjoy, but no one could do more on their behalf than the New Museum.

            It would be hard to imagine that anything these artists might do in their respective futures could be more complex or more difficult to execute than the feats they have managed in Walking Drifting Dragging.  The name of the exhibition, with its images of groans of strain, is not far off from what these abstract artists had to go through to present us with their apparently simple final products.  I’m not certain, either, if I would be so interested as to what they might get up to in their strange, underground art world some time in the future.  But here they have presented us with something it took them a great deal of effort to achieve.  We may as well congratulate them.

The Day the South Was Won

Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Richard Rodgers Theatre

 

             In a true sign of the times, the producers, directors, creative types, and even (from beyond the grave) Tennessee Williams himself seem to have ceded the rights to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Scarlett Johansson.  Ms. Johansson plays what can be called the title role in name only, and billboards, advertisements, and marquees are splattered with her voluptuous visage draped in a barely-there slip that is far skimpier than the one she wears on stage—for those of you out there whose reasons for seeing this production don’t extend to the languorous fluidity of Williams’ prose.  The issue with this decision is that, regardless of academic raves on the historical value of this no doubt pivotal play, Maggie the Cat is not exactly the main character.  Therefore, the hype that this play revolves around Ms. Johansson is slightly misplaced.  That is, unless I give Broadway more credit than it deserves, and they are simply taking advantage of the rare Ashkenazi bombshell that is Scarlett Johansson and her rabid, or rather drooling, fans.  Most likely it is the latter.

            It isn’t that Ms. Johansson isn’t good as Maggie.  In fact, she’s great.  She takes to a Southern drawl better than one might expect, and she has a manic energy that follows her around the stage like a small tornado.  Conversely, the production, which has a magnificent set appropriately representing the gild of the Pollitt ranch, relaxes into a Southern drawl of its own, which is a characteristic more of the play than the actors.  Cat is not slow-moving, exactly, it just seems (in an altogether pleasant way) as if the actors are a few mint juleps into a warm evening.  Occasionally, however, they reveal some of the emotion that’s been left boiling underneath, and these moments are where it is revealed, however slowly, that Maggie the Cat is not actually the central cog in these proceedings.  Nor is it Big Daddy Pollitt (Ciarán Hinds), who is second only to Maggie in attention-grabbing antics, if for a less wholesome reason.  It’s actually her frustrated, angry husband, Brick.

            Brick is played by Benjamin Walker, whose most notable Broadway credit is the 2010 emo-rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. While I didn’t see it (for who did?) I can attest that Walker is brilliant in Brick’s role, embodying the simmering anger that the character must slowly bring to light over the course of the play’s three acts.  It is through him that the audience comes to realize that, while the drama and dynamics of the story play out around him, seeming to exclude him, he is actually the most important factor in the story.  There are no star turns here, not even for Ms. Johansson. 

This is the true brilliance of Tennessee Williams—that no matter who plays which part, the characters will stay what they were written to be.  Perhaps the Scarlett Johansson has inserted herself into his world, but even from his current, slightly inopportune position, he pulls the strings.  Is this the mark of a great genius, or just a controlling playwright?  Who’s to say?  But the fact remains that whenever or wherever one might see Cat, the characters will always slowly collapse into their mad power grabs and spiteful hatred.  Maggie will end up unfulfilled but hopeful.  Brick will do his best to keep his hatred for his wife under his belt.  The story is always the same, but it gets more and more relevant and more and more entertaining every day.