So, Who’s the Artist?

In the art-as-gimmick department, this item is perhaps more interesting for the questions it elicits than how the so-called artwork is actually generated.

Tarinan von Anhalt practices what is called “jet art,” flinging paint into the vortex of hurricane-force winds generated by the engines of airplanes, splattering onto blank canvasses that are eventually worth thousands a pop. An idea invented by her late husband, Jurgen, on a tarmac in Dallas in the 1980s, his wife later expanded the medium to include fashion accessories. Earlier this month, she showed off the technique as part of an event in Florida, above, marking the 50th anniversary of the Learjet. (Later this year, she’ll be interacting with the famous Boeing 707 that belongs to actor John Travolta.)

An article in the Palm Beach Post posed the conundrum of just who the creator really is here: “If art is the expression of the artist,” wrote Carlos Frias,” then whose emotion is landing in [the] purple and blue and yellow and red splashes and speckles?”

Good question. Who gets the credit for these colorful (and not especially terrible) examples of faux expressionism? Is it the facilitator (von Anhalt)? The machine (i.e., the jet)? Or even the pilot (who sets things into motion in the first place)?

All of the above, combined in the combustion of a moment. Art or not? That’s debatable.

(Photo: Thomas Cordy / The Palm Beach Post)

Into the Sky

I came across this photograph, taken of the Eibsee Lake in Bavaria, Germany on September 24, 2012, and found it so richly dimensional in its composition and evocative on several levels that I felt compelled to post it. What look like clouds (and they are, in a reverse trompe l’oeil kind of fashion) are actually reflections of clouds in the water, where a platform looks ready for someone to dive (or descend) into the “sky.” The image seems to create some subliminal sort of expectation without meaning to; it’s a juxtaposition that’s moodily dreamlike and lingers in the memory. An incidental piece of art that just happened to cross the wires on a run-of-the-mill news day…

(Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / AFP / Getty Images)

At Hitchcock’s Place

Whenever I think of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, I think of… apartments. Not out-of-control birds or psychos in showers, but apartments — in all their Hollywood-constructed artifice. I was reminded of this as I saw Vertigo again, recently voted the greatest movie of all time by the British Film Institute, supplanting Citizen Kane, which had held that slot for the last 50 years.

In Vertigo, it’s Barbara Bel Geddes’ faux bohemian pad, right, with San Francisco’s Coit Tower as a backdrop, where the easel she employs as an aspiring artist is center stage when Jimmy Stewart drops by to chat. Likewise, Stewart’s own bachelor abode, where his character likes to toss throw pillows in front of the fireplace, especially when Kim Novak comes for an unexpected visit.

Rear Window, of course, would provide a justifiable explanation for my Hitchcock apartment fixation; after all, the film revolves entirely around Stewart’s voyeuristic snooping on the strange occurrences transpiring at a building across the way. And how about Grace Kelly, right, lounging languorously on that incongruous bed in the living room as Stewart nurses a broken leg in the wheelchair?

There’s also Dial M for Murder, with its overpowering desk where the pivotal telephone resides, as well as the always-drawn drapes that signal the claustrophobia of bad things waiting to happen.

But the real reason is Rope, right, my all-time favorite Hitchcock film. It’s hard to match a setting that features a buffet arrangement atop a chest that’s really a repository for a just-committed homicide. As a panoramic Manhattan looms in the background, the ‘40s-chic dinner guests (a little blood with that champagne, please) are oblivious to the surreality of their situation as unknowing visitors at a murder scene. For the viewer, the tension in the air is almost as strangling as the actual crime. (Recalling one of the director’s mordant quotes: “Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table.”) Rope is, for me, Hitchcock at his most sardonic.

I couldn’t come up with a consistent name responsible for the subtle genius behind the creation of these memorable set designs (no Bernard Herrmann-like collaborator, who scored several of the great Hitchcock films), as the director worked with so many. Which makes it obvious that most of the myriad architectural motifs were probably a result of the master’s own singular imagination. Imagination, one is reminded, that was as wonderfully creative as it applied to the mysterious as well as the mundane. Like apartments.

(Illustration / top: Stanley Chow)

Serena’s Zen

Is she the greatest female tennis player of all time? Or of her time? Analysts can debate, but what I saw in Serena Williams as she won her fourth U.S. Open singles title (and 15th Grand Slam championship) over the weekend were qualities that transcend any time. One may tire of the phrase “heart of a champion,” but, boy, was it appropriate here.

The match was remarkable on many levels: the longest women’s final at Flushing Meadow since 1981; the first women’s three-setter final since 1995; Williams the first female since Martina Navratilova to win as a 30-year-old, which the latter did in 1987.

Seeded fourth in the tournament, Williams was coming off a spectacular summer that saw her winning a fifth Wimbledon and grabbing the gold at the London Olympics. Facing the number-one player in the world, Victoria Azarenka (who, like fellow Eastern European Maria Sharapova, produces cringe-inducing squeals that make you jump for the mute on the remote), Williams came out of the gate like a Mack truck, with 120 mph serves and whammos off both forehand and backhand sides that made her opponent, 23, look like a junior and not the top women’s player on the planet.

And then, collapse. After winning the first set easily, the tables turned; spraying shots left and right, her colossal serve failing her, and the young Belarusian demonstrating exactly why she is ranked first in the game, it was Williams who looked like the amateur. I stopped taking notes, reminded of her dismal loss in the first round of the French Open earlier this year.

Notes on a Classic

Henrik Ibsen has always been one of my favorite playwrights and, for whatever reason, I recently remembered and decided to re-read one of his pieces that always kept a place in my literary thoughts: the impeccably concise and supremely structured Ghosts – first staged 130 years ago in of all places, the United States (specifically Chicago, Illinois, in May 1882). Its themes reverberate as strongly now as they did when I read it in younger years.

Henrik Ibsen

It is Ghosts that’s based upon that famous line we’re all familiar with, “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.” And Ibsen, already having given us an early prefeminist icon with his character of Nora in A Doll’s House, followed that up with Helene Alving here – a woman whose realizations about the verisimilitudes to be found in freedom (“the joy of life”) may appear quaint now, but were quite revolutionary at the time. (As were many of the topics addressed in the play, from premarital sex to venereal disease and assisted suicide. In England, the work was greeted as “An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged.” And that was one of the kinder reviews.)

So many truths, so little time: it’s still a wonder how Ibsen manages to navigate 30 years in the mere 12 hours that are the basis of the play; the decades are melded together by incredibly crafted expositionary dialogue that seamlessly moves the story forward while at the same time taking it back. The scene settings, with their dreary backdrop of rain-washed Norwegian fjords, create the perfect atmosphere for the dark drama taking place on the stage.

I guess what resonates the most philosophically (again, not a novel concept, but consider the context) is the theme of repression as the perpetrator of all that chokes the human spirit, as true then as it is now, as is the idea that it’s more or less impossible to escape those legacies that we are at a loss to change (as the character of Osvald says to his mother Helene, “I didn’t ask you for life…I don’t want it – take it back again!”)

And it is Osvald who utters that beautiful line at the end of the play, the devastating entreaty, “Mother – give me the sun.”

Magnificent literature – and perfect for a rainy day.

Eyes of a Master

I was riveted by this rarely seen Rembrandt painting, Portrait of the Artist (c.1663-1665), which was on special loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Kenwood House in London through the end of last week. It harbors an expression as enigmatic and difficult to characterize as that of the Mona Lisa smile: weary yet intense, elusive and omniscient. And what of the circles that seem to frame the image in a cryptic geometric pattern? More mystery from the grand master of the Dutch Golden Age…or as The New Yorker put it: “We see what he sees and, by the sorcery of paint, as he sees — with a consciousness both outward and inward, alive in a moment forever.”