A roundup of events, exhibitions, concerts

AI WEI WEI

at the Kunsthal, Rotterdam

“He’s just an artist. What does he know?” a critic said of Ai Wei Wei. “He’s all politics,’ said the Tokyo critics. Both could be right but both are also wrong. Today he was in Rotterdam’s Kunsthal for the press day of Ai Wei Wei, in Search of Humanity. He praised the new show as one of the strongest ever mounted of his work – and he is absolutely right. The exhibition is spectacular, not only in its enormity, but also in the thoughtful way it has been curated. He admitted that once he has sent a work into the world his relationship with it is over. Or it sits in a crate in his studio, now in Portugal, so the only times he will see it again is in a show such as the Kunsthal’s.

Ai Wei Wei was his usual self on the podium – slightly self-deprecating, a little like one’s favourite Chinese uncle, but also forceful in his view of the world and humanity as a whole. At the beginning of the exhibition there are early works, unashamedly and heavily influenced by Dada and Marcel Duchamp to be precise. Everyday objects such as wooden stools leaning onto each other assume dynamic structures. A large sculpture made of the standard Chinese manufactured bicycle frames seemed at first to be a jolly rondo dance of bikes until one realises that the bikes themselves have neither saddle nor a handlebar – a bike will get you nowhere if you cannot steer it. The irony is obvious and refers to the state control in China. And Ai Wei Wei was the unfortunate recipient of state control more than once, at times brutally beaten and incarcerated.  There are videos of his altercations with Chinese police. A series of black boxes recreate the nightmarish conditions in which he was held for close to three months. Physically pressured in his cell by two guards at all times he had to eat with them standing threatingly close; not only that. They also stood within touching distance from him when he sat on the toilet. These scenarios are like something out of Orwell’s 1984, only worse.

In one vast space a giant python floats under the ceiling, further on the remnants of palaces in the form of truncated feet of what must once have been small statues. In a space to itself are the partially reimagined spectacular golden Zodiac animal heads that once graced the fountain of the Imperial Summer Palace. The animal heads are also shown as huge portraits made of Lego. Lego, for fear of Ai Wei Wei’s plan to use them for his political works, refused to deliver pieces to him as the company wanted permission to open a Lego Land in China. Ever the creative mind, he established Lego collection points and thousands were only too willing to contribute to his endeavour. Some of the most gripping works feature crushed bicycles, presumably by tanks during the Tiananmen uprising.

Ai Wei Wei engages both with the past and the present of China, openly protesting against the destruction of the country’s culture. He professes not to seek to make art for the sake of beauty, although everything he has created is in fact beautiful and executed to perfection. His is the visual language of activism, of protest against injustice, the pernicious state control over information, denial of free speech to the Chinese population in particular and human rights abuses. In his book 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrow, he movingly recounts, that as a result of the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution, his father was persecuted and banished, together with his young family, to ‘Little Siberia’ in North Eastern China, to live in an underground earth dug-out in inhumane conditions. This deprivation left an indelible mark on Ai Wei Wei as he grew up. Today his long-suffering father is recognised as the national poet.

 “I was a refugee in my own country”, Ai Wei Wei says. In recent years he has visited forty refugee camps. The pile of life jackets collected up on a beach reflects the plight of millions who flee their country in wartime.

There is much, much more to see and experience in this vast exhibition than one can possibly describe here – it simply must be seen. Absolutely not to be missed.

29th September 2023

 

TEXTIEL BIENNALE 2023

Rijswijk Museum, Den Haag, from 25/06 to 12/11

Once Again it is time for the TEXTIEL BIENNALE 2023 at the wonderful Rijswijk Museum, Den Haag. This year the theme of protest (propaganda?) seems to dominate. When as an art student my friend wept because she could not afford the usual white wedding dress I created one out of white plastic bags. I placed a fan under it so the bags billowed out and won 1^st prize at the end of year show. At the wedding it was her mother who wept because my friend had forgotten the fan. At the time it was just a creative adventure for both of us. Today it could be seen as protest again plastic and materialism.

This year’s show had a mix of woven, patchwork and some printed works.  Badru Temitayo’s vast colourful portraits of political leaders were stunning in their perfection. It made me wonder though in what sense a great woven portrait of Putin constitutes a protest. I especially loved Senzeni Marasela’s, simply handstitched cartoon-like dainty white handkerchiefs. They depict the tragic story of the ‘Hottentot-Venus’, a unnamed South African woman, enticed to Europe by her master to be exhibited circus-like because of her large rear, typical of her Khoikoi culture. Jacobo Alonso’s shows his created beatiful designs based on the life-saving, wafer-thin ponchos handed out to immigrants and bombed out Ukrainians. They hang majestically, reminiscent of ancient Egyptian or Japanese Emperors’ cloaks. There are more protest works, such as blood-red trilogy about the recent banning of abortions in USA states. The largest works show a typical smiling American family in their home, machine gun in hand. The other is an almost Bruegel-like tapestry by Mercedes Azpilicueta, recounting the story of a woman who fled to South America in the 16^th century to live as a man. Although the ideas, the message are there, as with large tapestries in other shows, and due to the technical ease of weaving these days, I miss the human hand, the mistakes, the irregularities, so I especially appreciated Boyce Magandela’s images of homeless people standing in line, painted simply on an old plaid. His other work, seen from a distance, was his almost photographic embroidered portrait of Nelson Mandela, his countryman and hero. But getting close to it, it was a mangle of threads – incredible. Not to be missed.

28/06/23

 

KunstKamer

Delft, 2022

This year the Delft KunstKamer is catching up on lost times due to Covid. Twice a year Ramon Dykgraaf and his partner Marc Cals their turn their sixteenth century house into a veritable curiosity cabinet to show the work of half a dozen artists. The shows are organised along with Joke Doedens and Simone Haak who run Terra, a ceramics gallery in the city. Entrance is free of charge.

This May, among others, the work of Ossip and that of Paul Nassenstein dominated.

Paul Nassenstein’s work has recently veered away from the colourful pieces in which large spaces are loosely scattered with tiny people, animals or objects, as if placed on a stage, all isolated, as if unaware of each other. Although the monochrome drawings include all these same elements, the eye is less distracted and these works on paper form a more homogenous entity. I loved the large subtle drawings in black and white.

But for me Ossip’s work stole the show. Photographic images of decades long gone by are used as cut-outs and turned into three-dimensional objects by means of wires, thus dancing away from their background. Some appear to be floating whilst juggling trembling objects, others have undergone animalistic transformations, sporting almost pre-historic wire bristles along the spine and long threatening tails.  Ossip seems to exhibit almost exclusively in the Netherlands which may be why I had not come across his fascinating, other-worldly work. If he exhibits near you, don’t miss it.

KunstKamer takes place in May and November and should definitely be noted in your arts calendar.

 

 

FEBRUARI FESTIVAL 2022

Nieuwe Kerk, Den Haag

At the end of a long day of copying a manuscript a 12^th century monk once wrote: -The hand moves, but the whole body hurts. After today’s performance of Schubert’s Quintet in C, I can only imagine that musicians, in this instance anyone playing a string instrument, must feel the same after giving a concert.

First up in today’s programme came the String trio in B-flat major, an excellent performance by Andrej Roszyk, Takehiro Konoe and Emanuele Silvestri. It was composed in 1816, the year Schubert took the huge risk of cutting himself loose from his teaching job, for what would today be described as sofa-surfing and the rather wild life of young men of the time. The string trio was followed by Ishay Shaer on piano with a rendition of the 1846 Franz Schubert/Franz Liszt Auf dem Wasser zu singen and Der Müller und der Bach. Schubert seemed to have a fondness of all that was water – rivers, mill streams or a wild river. Ishay Shaer sat down briskly, did away with the music sheet stand and proceeded in what seemed a delightful private conversation with the sounds he was conjuring up. Next came two rather dark and gripping Lieder, Auf dem Strom, sung by mezzo soprano Florieke Beelen, in turn accompanied by Mees Vos and Peter Nilsson.

There followed Erlkönig. Most German children will have heard this utterly terrifying poem from their parents. It is the dramatic tale of a father riding through the night with his delirious son in his arms only to find the child dead on arrival.

At the top of the bill came Schubert’s String Quintet, completed just two months before his tragic death in 1828. Ever energetic and seasoned German violinist Antje Weithaas, young Pieter van Loenen, Hannah Strijbos and Pieter de Koe and Laura van der Heijden, both on cello, all gave their very best performance. In this quintet gone are the sweet, light-fingered tones of the pieces Schubert wrote for the daughters of Count Esterhazy. This is a mature work which manipulates emotions to perfection. It illustrates Schubert’s states of mind due to cyclothymia, a form of bi-polar mental illness and syphilis. Aged just thirty one he died of mercury poisoning which was wrongly believed to be a syphilis cure. He composed over 1500 works, a quantity which may have been the result of his manic episodes. At the Februari Festival in The Hague this year, we were lucky to hear some of his best work.     

Friday, 25^th February

Today’s performance by the Geister Duo (multi-prizewinning David Salmon and Manuel Vieillard) was an unexpected emotional experience for me. On the programme were the Sonata in B sharp, Allegro moderato en Andante D968, both suitably flowing and playful as they were probably composed for his pupils, the daughters of Count Esterhazy. There followed variations on a theme from Herolds opera ‘Maria D908 and Deutscher & Ländler  D618. But it was the last piece, the Fantasia in F D940 that brought back memories of my early childhood in Vienna in an apartment filled with this very piece played by my aunt, as well as during a later work stint in Venice in a similar, rambling 18^th century apartment, where this Schubert composition alternated with his quintet in C major.

The Fantasia in F was dedicated to Caroline, one of the unattainable young Esterhazy sisters with whom he was said to be in love (a relationship between a commoner and the daughter of a Count was out of the question). To me the whole work is like an ever-recurring question, at times melancholy with its start in C and F (Caroline and Franz?), then vehement, Beethoven-like, furious even, and descending into doubt, returning with high, timid notes, asking soto-voce, then escalating to frenetic despair, but always asking the same question. I was surprised how this work gripped me by the throat, but then that is what music can do – it reaches parts that one didn’t know where there and today the Geister Duo certainly achieved that and I for one was not the only one in the audience to be moved.

 

Kissi, Kissi, OPERA BOUFFE? LE ROI CAROTTE

Opera de Lyon production/Volksopera (BE)

Jacques Offenbach, darling of the Belle Epoche, composer of near one hundred operettas and today perhaps best known for the Galop Infernal, the music used for the Can Can, was the inspiration for tonight’s event. I wasn’t really a fan of Offenbach until I saw the extraordinary staging by the Opéra de Lyon of his opera bouffe, Le Roi Carotte (check it out). Liberally dipping into the spirit of Offenbach’s Opera Bouffe, Thomas Kokkelmans has created a little gem with Kissi! Kissi! A Shakespearean comedy plot of mistaken identities, (in today’s parlance ‘gender-fluid’), Kokkelman’s piece plays on Offenbach’s fictional island of Tulipan. The text is delivered in quasi Molièresque French and the music as unapologetically frilly as the words, are a skillful mix, at times Viennese with a sprinkle of Tirolian – all these Thomas Kokkelmans has welded together with brio. The pompous Prime minister’s son, brought up as a girl, the despotic Duke’s daughter brought up as a boy – and yes, you’ve guessed it – the two off-springs fall in love and their respective parents are forced to ……..confess their deception. Both Helene Bracke in the role of Théodorine, a kind of Cindy Lauper in her heyday and Annelies van Gramberen, playing the tom-boyish ‘girl’ with an obsession for crashing around on drums deserve special mention for their excellent performances. The Belle Epoche music was joyously played by the Ensemble du Beurre et des Oeufs. A very upbeat enjoyable evening after the many dark-theatre days.

 

DELFT CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL 2022

Die Sieben letzten Worte (The Seven Last Words)

at the Schuilkerk Bagijnhof in Delft, Sat. 6^th August

Unusually, Joseph Haydn composed Die Sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze in three versions: the original version for orchestra, in oratorio form and tonight’s arrangement for string quartet, performed wonderfully by the Meccore Quartet.

According to the Gospels, while dying on the cross, Jesus uttered seven short sentences. In the late medieval period they were compiled to form a “septenary of words on the cross”. Around the end of the 17th century, Jesuits in Lima, Peru, created a specific 3-day Passiontide devotion based on Jesus’ words. It ended at the hour of Jesus’ death around 3 p.m. Soon the idea reached Europe, in particular catholic Spain and Italy. Around 1785/86 Cádiz in Spain commissioned Hayden to compose this work for the city’s Easter festival.

Today the Schuilkerk Bagijnhof is hidden in a lovely secret square of Delft. It is a catholic church in the Dutch Baroque style. As most churches I have visited, it seems simple, if not plain. On one side, plain windows, on the other leading to the altar, there are vast snow white moulded frames which must have displayed grand religious paintings. From the multitude of ornamental mouldings one must suppose that once they were all gilded in true Baroque style. Plainly, the Baroque was driven out with some zeal. But, its high vaulted ceiling has impressive acoustics, perfect for this evening’s concert.

The excellent Meccore quartet, sitting appropriately under the over-life-size statue of Mary and child with Jesus on the cross above the altar, energetically yet subtly played their way through the drama of Hayden’s composition. The lighter parts spoke of pathos and resignation, the darker ones, dominated by the deep sounds of the cello, of raging despair.    

I’m perhaps glad this was not the orchestral version. The finale, the “Terremoto” (“earthquake”), which can only be described as the ultimate musical turbulence, would surely have caused the shaking, if not the collapse of this small but perfectly formed church.

During this festival I have become a fan of the Meccore Quartet. Not only because of the superb quality of their performances. The  frequent eye contact between them, the occasional smile exchanged, for me in any case, make a huge difference – they truly love playing together. Catch them wherever you can.

Dagboeken,

4^th August 2022, 16.00  Prinsenhof Mandelzaal

I must admit it –as a notebook fanatic, Krzysztof Penderecki’s 2008 Strijkquartet nr. 3, ‘Leaves of an unwritten diary’ proved irresistible.  The Meccore String Quartet with Wojciech Koprowski and Judyta Kluza, both on violin and Michal Bryla and Marcin Maczynski respectively gave a dynamic and performance laden with emotion. By choice, Polish born Penderecki (1933-2020) admitted that having witnessed Auschwitz and Stalin’s destructive rule, he had lived in hard times. In his compositions he walked the tightrope between mainstream and avant-garde music. He was influenced by his mother’s Orthodox religion and his father’s love for gipsy music, phrases of which appeared in this work. He wrote the opera “The Devils of Loudon” (for 100 voices!) which bishops and even the pope tried to banish from the stage. His ability to switch in seconds from one mood to another is stunning. Not surprisingly, this fitted perfectly when used in the block buster films The Exorcist and The Shining. The Meccore Quartet put their heart and soul, as well as their backs, into this gripping performance. Bravo.

The second half of this concert was of the piano quartet nr.1 by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), played by Nino Gvetadze on piano, Alissa Margulis, violin, Meghan Cassidy, viola and Julian Arp on cello. It provided a stark contrast to what was possible, or not, a century before Penderecki. Fauré, deeply influenced by classical and religious music, did not hesitate to turn into a serial womaniser with a good handful of mistresses. Sporting a walrus moustache, he was an influential figure who searched for renewal. At firstly playful and rolling at the start, plunging to deep melancholy and despair to rise anew in the last part with a tumultuous finish. Once again, a brilliant performance.

Wonderland

4^th August 2022, at the Mandelzaal, 22.00

This evening’s concert with the title of Wonderland lived up to its title. Nino Gvetadze on piano, intermittently accompanied by Daniel Rowland’s hypnotic strains on the violin and Maja Bogdanivic on cello created a dreamland. Against gigantic projected images we were transported to lands of mystery and magic by means of illustrations by adventurous botanists travelling to far-away lands such as the East Indies, bringing back illustrations of magical beasts and plants. I also especially loved the typography, floating down into the images as if from heaven, announcing each piece of music, then floating off to dissolve as dying sounds do.

On the musical menu were nature related pieces of composer, poet and occultist Cyrill Scott, some of which reminded me strongly of Eric Satie’s compositions. Nodar Gabunia’s Toccata deceptively began in a pensive mood only to come to a thumping crash as it ended.

Debussy lyrical pieces formed the backbone of the concert, but for me Ravel’s Habanera was the highlight as Daniel Rowland, seemingly led by his violin, moved around like a sleep walker. All three performers were dressed in white which reinforced the tenebrous mystery of the night. I can only wish for more concerts like this under the excellent direction by Nino Gvetadze in the future.

LA FIN DU TEMPS CONCERT

by Olivier Messian at Prinsenhof Mandelzaal 19-20H

Tonight’s concert La Fin du Temps by Olivier Messian held a particular attraction for me for rather grim family reasons. As I grew up in France and at a lycée in my mid-teens, my friends and I were as aware of Messian as of Jean Cocteau, Boris Vian and Juliette Greco. What was so exciting was that it was not ‘just classical music’ like all the rest.

Prodigy child Olivier Eugène Prosper Messian became the teacher to Pierre Boulez and Stockhausen. As a military medical auxiliary in WW2, he was captured, imprisoned and transported East by the Nazis. La Fin du Temps has an apocalyptic feeling, parts full of  despairing, other raging – no doubt Messian expected to die of cold and hunger in the grim camps in Poland like many others before him. Equally surreal is the thought that his ‘quartet’ first performed the piece in sub-zero conditions not only to fellow prisoners, but also to prison guards. There is a photograph of Messian standing in front of his band of improvised musicians. Gone is his soft, sensitive face. A hard and emaciated man, sporting a fierce frown, stares the camera down.

When I was young, Messian’s playfulness attracted me before I recognised it as subversive and often angry music. What could the German camp guards possibly have made of it?

Tonight’s quartet was international – Hungarian Barnabás Kelemen on violin, cellist Serbia-born Maja Bogdanovic, who was a sensation at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Georgian Levan Tskhadadze on clarinet who gave a spectacular performance.

The programme went from quieter pieces to the thunderous Danse de la Fureur, pour les sept Trompettes, sounding like an infernal organ about to explode.  Excellent.

 

THE POTATO EATERS – Mistake of Masterpiece?

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum has mounted a surprising exhibition – a surprising and moving show of Van Gogh’s early, ambitious but unsuccessful to communicate with the world. The show consists of 24 paintings, many drawing and a tiny, wonderful sketchbook, the closest one can ever come to the artist thinking.

While many painters of his time portrayed simple people, peasants, weavers, tile painters etc., Van Gogh’s mind became inflamed with the plight of the poor farmers around Nuenen close to his parents’ home in the Netherlands. What I always saw in these paintings was Van Gogh’s great, even excessive empathy with those who suffered the life of hard labour. He even painted the nearby church surrounded by the graves of the peasants in the same soil which they had worked all their lives until they died, exhausted. Did he, by depicting these subjects, also unintentionally show his own struggle and suffering? Millet, Charles Degroux, Israëls, Breitner and later even Cézanne painted working people, none of them come near the impact Van Gogh created on the canvas, even with all the imperfections of composition and his much criticised style of applying the paint. He came too early – while he was rejected, even ridiculed, the German expressionists only a few years later revolutionised art.

To create The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh laboured, sketching all the elements for the work in advance, much as before him even Da Vinci had done, passionately reporting to his brother Theo almost on a daily basis. This picture would be his great work, his breakthrough. Hélas, it was not to be and eventually the colour-swirling images of his Arles period overtook everything.

The Potato Eaters were his attempt, as he explained, to show the world what he saw and felt. In the face of the cruel, accusatory criticism by his friend Anthon van Rappard, he valiantly insisted that he forgave himself for his mistakes and imperfections – he wanted to paint life, the truth, not “pretty”. Despite the assiduous preparation, where Van Gogh had intended to portray good and honest people, The Potato Eaters, critics saw no further than what they called the rather brutal application of paint strokes.

There are problems with the work – the woman in the centre looks at the young man to her right, but he stares straight ahead, apathetic. The woman on the right also looks too tired to notice the man asking for coffee. The five figures thus huddling in the soot-tinted gloom have a rather depression effect on the viewer. Given the obvious problems Van Gogh had with the composition of painting a group, he never again attempted it.

The power and energy of the drawings in this exhibition were the absolute highlight for me. The first two drawings/prints brought a lump to my throat.

This exhibition is a wonderful and bold counterpoint to much used, and misused, images, now appearing across the world on anything and everything, from aprons to oven gloves, key rings and bike bells.

The museum has produced a beautiful catalogue/book in Van Gogh’s early work paired with photographs of real and very poor Dutch peasants of the period who indeed looked and suffered exactly as Van Gogh depicted them but at the time the world preferred to look away.

 

 

Plus ça change…

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking,

was looked on as something shocking. But now, God knows, Anything goes.

NUDE PHOTOGRAPHY in Bath, Woods and Surf

at Rotterdam’s Kunsthal

Journalist and photography collector Wim de Jong has amassed what amounts to a secret social document – photographs apparently taken by men of their wives, girlfriends and mistresses – all of them in the nude of semi-nude. None of them can be classed as pornographic but might have been so at the time they were taken.

Most of the photos are small, the size of pictures stuck in family albums, but these photos would not have been stuck among pictures of babies and grannies. They would have been kept in a box, hidden in the attic or under the floorboards. They are of a time when owning camera was not as wide spread as now. Films had to be processed in a lab. If your pictures of nude women were too revealing, not even pornographic by today’s standards, a UK lab would not hesitate to call the police, if only to cover themselves.

De Jong’s collection seems to come essentially from Germany with its early ‘Freikörperkultur’ (the cult of doing everything in the nude) and from France and there is a distinct difference between the photographs.

The German ‘Hausfrau’ was often persuaded by her photographer to disrobe in unlikely places – perhaps they were not quite so Frei – a stark naked woman is climbing dry, leafless pine trees or is squatting in brushwood or sitting astride a large, sharp looking rock. It looks painful. Many featured wives nude or in transparent negligés next to Christmas trees. Some subjects are shown in what looks like the homes of very poor people, in kitchens with no more than rudimentary plumbing. Some rather sad women seem to not so much stand as hover or squat in outhouses or garages, shocking, dirty places where one would expect to discover a nude murder victim.

Once I had got over the novelty of this collection I no longer looked at the bodies, but at the faces and therein lay the shock as a woman for me. Most averted the face, shielded it with one hand, eyes cast to the ground. Only a few looked into the camera. Many looked drawn, worn out – only the man holding the camera was having a rather seedy, fun time here.

Some later photos from the mid-1960s were lighter in mood – a triptych of a pretty girl in a shabby kitchen making tea, waving a pot, a well-built young woman framed by a large houseplant, doing her best to look like a Roman marble statue. Another nude, possibly the only smiling one, posed on a child’s bicycle between an ailing pot plant and a decorated Christmas tree – fun after the kids had finally finished playing with their Christmas presents and been coaxed into bed with their new teddy bear.

The French photos are altogether different. Unlike their German practical, sporty counterparts, making the women about as unsexy as nude explorers in the forest undergrowth, here some of the French subjects were enjoying themselves, posing seductively. They wore lipstick, their hair was curled; they seemed altogether more complicit, some very beautiful, just having a little naughty fun, some even in their bosses’ offices or leaning out of a French window, bare bottom pointing at the camera which implied a ‘romantic love in the afternoon’ session in hotel rooms. A sequence of large photos features an elegant Gina Lollobrigida look-alike. She is taking her clothes off, one item per shot, suspender belts and all – in the early fifties there was a lot of stuff for women to take off.

In the exhibition hall there was subdued tittering in the air, visitors pointing at particularly weird pictures. Soon I felt that I was looking at portraits of women who had mostly been coerced into taking their clothes off, one or two brutally so.

Today many a teenage girl can, and sometimes does, innocently post her naked or near naked body to the world on Instagram or Facebook in the hope of getting ‘likes’.

I felt rather sad about these women. It is hard to judge now – were they reluctant participants in their husbands or boyfriend’s fantasies, were they exposed against their will as many of their faces amply demonstrated?

Now spectators are laughing at them which seems unfair.

To allay fears that someone might recognise their grandmother, Will de Jong reassures the public in the Netherlands that none of the women are Dutch.

20/09/2020