Tag: Surrealism

Andrew Dawson with Gorey's Doubt, and the play's backdrop of Gorey's notes and ideas in Travis Russ's GOREY The Secret Lives of EdwardGorey

Review | Gorey | The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey | Written and Directed by Travis Russ | HERE Theatre

On May 13, 2016

… a fantasy memoir …

noted on 11/17/16: The Secret Lives of Edward Gory is returning for a run at the Sheen Arts Center. For more information and tickets for this current run, click here.

The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey – and Gorey was highly reclusive – moves us as if in free-form through Gorey’s life. That’s just right – a perfect analogy for the sense of free association of Gorey’s drawings and writings. What a wild thought! one thinks encountering Gorey. What crazy, touching juxtapositions! And of course, underlying the unlooked-for leaps in Gorey’s art is hard work and discipline – the same goes for this fine play.

L-R Phil Gillen, Andrew Dason and Aidan Sank representing Edward Gorey at three periods of life in Travis Russ's GOREY.

L-R Phil Gillen, Andrew Dason and Aidan Sank … representing Gorey at three periods of life. Photo Jenny Anderson.

Three actors, perfectly cast and intensely individualized, play Gorey at three different ages: Phil Gillen (Gorey 3) is the optimistic, skittish Harvard guy in his mid-twenties and in terms of cultural epochs, during the 1950’s, Aidan Sank (Gorey 2) is a more sardonic Gorey ten years later in the ‘60’s, and Andrew Dawson (Gorey 1) in perhaps the most magnificent of the three fine interpretations of the artist is Gorey, “fragile and powerful,” during the 90’s when the artist was in his mid-seventies (he died in 2000 at age 75). I’ve seen plays before with actors together on stage representing different ages of a character’s life but I’ve never see a better interweaving of different times of a person’s life than here.

Interweaving is the essence of The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey, a dense fabric of Gorey’s life composed of threads time, friends, passions, compulsions, creativity, and incidents large and small.

Fact and fiction are also woven in this play – Russ calls it “a fantasy memoir” – that draws upon interviews, personal notes, and letters found in Gorey’s Cape Cod house along with over 1,000 objects (he was a hoarder) inventoried at his death.

We see Gorey’s life – not in sequence but we catch on. Gorey 2 recounts an incident when he was eight when he “begged mother to dress me up as Emily Bronte for Halloween.” “And she did!” Gorey 1 puts in though he was “mistaken for Emily Dickinson.” We hear of his time in and after Harvard and friendships with several writers including his roommate Frank O’Hara. Later comes a scattered, poetic evocation of O’Hara’s charismatic personality, next to whom “I – I felt like a piece of, of, of driftwood – “ of O’Hara’s ambiguous accidental death on Fire Island and of Gorey’s missing him to the end of his days.

Andrew Dawson with Gorey’s Doubt, and the play’s backdrop of Gorey’s notes and ideas. Photo Jenny Anderson.

Through witty projections, we’re on hand for Gorey’s invention of the penguin in sneakers, his alter ego, named Doubt. We hear of Gorey’s early, discouraging peddling of his portfolio around New York City and his many rejections – including a rejection letter from The New Yorker (“The people in your pictures are too strange and the ideas, we think, are not funny”), subsequent recognition, and his meeting and passion for George Balanchine that led him to ballet: Gorey 2 says he attended “Eighty-four Swan Lakes. Sixty-three Firebirds. Fifty-seven Western Symphonies. I even sat through 176 consecutive performances of The Nutcracker. (Pained.) I mean, The Nutcracker.”

The talented congruence between Travis Russ’s play and Gorey’s creative expression is fascinating – Russ catches Gorey’s voice. I feel, though, that the play needs more dramatic tension. There’s wry wit, charm, insight, gossip, illumination and mystery – but no suspense. One’s never concerned for the character, only interested in him, so after a time the cleverness gets a little tedious.

The production is visually effective with the set by Russ and Carl Vorwerk incorporating as a backdrop an appealing miscellany of Gorey’s notes and written ideas: it’s nothing short of beautiful that the audience is invited to have a close look at these before and after the performance. One thing is missing: Gorey’s drawings. We see none of them, except the figure of Doubt. This is a real loss. If you did not know Gorey before you attended a performance, you’d have a sense of his writing style by the end of it, but not a clue about the drawings.

Still, the play creates a mind expanding full world – Gorey’s world – and I feel glad and lucky to have spent time in that imaginative place.

GOREY The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey is produced by LIFE JACKET Theatre Company and plays at HERE Theatre in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village through May 22, 2016. For more information and tickets, click here. (note 11/2016: for information and tickets for the current production of The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey, click here.

Parker's Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) reflected in the glass of Temple of Dendur gallery while museum Director Thomas Campbell speaks at the press opening

Art Review | Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) | Metropolitan Museum Roof | Summer 2016

By Yvonne Korshak

On April 24, 2016

In Art Exhibitions

… they never promised us a “real” garden …

Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), site specific installation on roof of Metropolitan Museum, summer 2016

When is a house not a house? When it’s a Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) by Cornelia Parker, site specific installation for summer 2016, Roof Garden of the Metropolitan Museum

When I first saw photos of Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object in a newspaper, I thought oh no, why do they have to stick an eyesore on the museum’s lovely roof garden. When I went to see it actually I found that it’s an intriguing eyesore, not what I’d like best to see on the roof but it does get you thinking.

Cornelia Parker's Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), view of the back showing scaffolding and water tanks used for ballast.

Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), showing scaffolding and water tanks used for ballast.

As you step from the elevator outside to the roof, you see in the far corner something like a house — but no, that can’t really be a house. First off, it’s not being glimpsed along the road on a drive in the country – it’s on the roof of an art museum (alert there), surrounded by the Central Park and the skyscrapers of Manhattan. And, if you had any thoughts this was some quaint touch for the summer roof garden, you fast find out from moving around it that the façade is a cover for a web of scaffolding, pipes and water tanks. The water tanks are practical as well as expressive: they are ballast to keep the structure in place in high winds. Adding to Transitional Object’s disquieting effect, the shiny mansard roof looks inconsistent with the heavily weathered siding which, we learn, came from an old red barn in up-state New York.

Artist Cornelia Parker sitting on the steps and chatting with a visitor.

Many associations and philosophical ideas are embedded in Transitional Object, as the artist, in person and in abundant accompanying written materials is quick to tell you. As a house facade with an insubstantial and old fashioned look, it recalls a movie set and it was in fact designed after the house in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho, which like many movie sets is a façade with struts holding it up and no real back to it. Hitchcock designed the house in Psycho after one in a well known work of art, Edward Hopper’s painting, House by the Railroad in the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. “Psycho House” looms so large in the popular imagination that a version of it is a tourist attraction at Universal Studios but, for the sake of visitors, Universal built it not just a façade but a complete structure (click here for a terrific series of photos about “the house”). So we have a kind of conversation across culture, in which four of the “same” house, all differently constructed, all have something to say. There’s the Hopper painting, the movie set in Psycho, the intact Psycho House at Universal Studios, and now Transitional Object — to which we can add a fifth, the archetypal old house, haunted or otherwise, of the rural and small town American landscape, that rests in many of our memories and imaginations.

And then there are reflections …

Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) reflected in the glass of Temple of Dendur gallery while museum Director Thomas Campbell speaks at the press opening

Which is the “real” house? In tossing into our thoughts the house with a history, Transitional Object shakes us up to think about what is really “real.” That philosophical questions underlies Transitional Object, moving it beyond amusing associations to a work with depth of meaning.

The artist is also interested in the view of the psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott, and it’s from his theories that she drew her title. For Winnicott, a “transitional object” refers to objects children seize upon, such security blankets and teddy bears, to provide comfort and enabling their developing independence from their mothers.

British artist Cornelia Parker, the artist, sits on the steps of Transitional Object (Psychobarn)

Artist Cornelia Parker taking the sun on the steps of Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)

As Parker commented, Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho failed to make that transition and so, taking on the persona of his own dead mother, he became a murderer of women. In this connection, the artist feels that Transitional Object, as houses in general, take on a symbolism referring to the womb. Visually, the array of pipes and water tanks in the back do suggest an external view of the inner parts of the human body, the things that we don’t ordinarily see, that we shouldn’t see, but are always with us. As a rich work of conceptual art, Transitional Object is loaded with ideas, more than I’ve said, perhaps even more than the artist has thought, some you may discover yourself.

And speaking of the living-dead — the stately decrepit structure with its guts exposed brings to mind Salvador Dali’s surrealist painting, Burning Giraffe. Have a look also at Dali’s Spectre of Sex Appeal. But Dali’s work is small, Burning Giraffe is 13.8 in x 10.6 in, and hangs on a wall, and through that alone is less in your face. Although not literally a public space, the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art functions much like a public space.

My preference for this outdoor summertime space is for a work of art that matches and enriches the loveliness of the setting, one that offers some of those emotions and sensations associated with “real” gardens (I know, I know, What is Real anyhow?). My all-time favorite — so far — is Tomas Saraceno’s Cloud City, on the roof summer of 2012. I like the installations that, like Cloud City, engage visitors physically while, with Transitional Object, we mainly look. To me, it kind of spoils the view … but, thinking about something rich and challenging is a worthy activity. This is a good place to go with a date – lots to talk about! And refreshments are available on the roof too.

Cornelia Parker’s site specific installation Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) will be on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum through October 31, 2016. For more information about the work, and about visiting the museum, click here.