The Sleepless Night

Hey, you all might like to know about this ultra cool yearly event in Toronto. www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca It's called the Nuit Blanche, which means sleepless night. It started in Paris in '02 and has passed on to other cities. Toronto is the only North American city to offer it. For 12 hours, from sundown to sunrise, the city becomes one big art exhibit. There are three zones, each with a different theme, where participants encounter strange, fantastical, and sometimes provocative surprises.

This year, 2009, there was a gigantic L.E.D. light sign suspended above city hall chambers that flashes four letter words (clean kind), codes, and DNA sequences determined by human operators, themselves controlled by computers.

Jeff Koons' giant Rabbit baloon hung menacingly in the atrium of the Toronto Eaton Centre.

Monopoly with Real Money was just what it says. Actors portayed bankers in a "real stakes" game of high finance.

Gone Indian was about a roving truck in pow wow trappings and a First Nation drummer doing his thing at uncertain moments.

Dance of the Cranes was a worked out by a choreographer and crane cab operator (There's a match made in Heaven). Two construction cranes were rigged with eerie blue lights. They circled around to music in the moonligt. Who would have known cranes could be so beautiful.

Cubemmunity was a large cube covered with four screens on which images footage from the neighborhood were projected. As the creator hit particular keys on the keyboard, they threw certain images on the cube. People could dance and interact with the cube.

And Ghost Stories was too bizarre for me to explain. You would have to be there.

Check out the website, and consider going next year. It puts a whole new face on Toronto.

Measure for Measure

Has anyone noticed that everything seems to have a measurability to it? Machines at bakeries and fast food shops will tell you exactly how many calories your almond croissant has. Rate Your Professor is a website that reduces the quality of teachers to numerical evaluations. There is room for commentary, granted, but the numbers are what sticks. Focus groups ask people to rate their experiences with products based on numerical rating scales. Pollsters gather opinions on candidates and issues using concise clear-cut yes or no questions. Economists look at purchasing patterns over time. Measurements are king.

The problem of reducing everything to measurements and scales is that you lose the grey areas in-between numerical assignments. You don't look at gradations.

Psychologists evaluate patients based on progress they have made, on changes of perception and action over time. Psychologists take in all factors of the patients' case histories and personalities. The total picture is what they view.

The pollsters and chart-masters think every experience is finite and reducable. They are charting the experience, but they leave out the human factor. Humans are complex, unpredictable creatures. Their likes and dislikes are personal, so they depend on all the quirks and aberrations of personality. Economists are now looking at the human factor when they make predictions. The economy and all social sciences are not extant independent of us. We created them. Human nature is the lynchpin that keeps a product or service connected to our habits.

Don't worry about using that calorie counting machine, though. Your waist line is measurable.

Doubtful Quote

"I thought I said to love one another."

In the spirit of Jesus

Review: Object Factory: The Art of Industrial Ceramics

All the conventions of ceramics you know get thrown and spun around in this exhibit. More craft than trade, Object Factory: The Art of Industrial Ceramics http://collections.madmuseum.org/code/emuseum.asp?emu_action=advsearch&rawsearch=exhibitionid/,/is/,/472/,/true/,/false&profile=exhibitions

at The Museum of Arts & Design in New York City ( until September 13) splices traditional forms with clever visual puns in some cases. In others, industrial designers find new applications for new and versatile ceramics. Come with a sense of humor.


The introduction describes how artists and designers are collaborating with the industry in ways that enhance and subvert the industrial process.


Perhaps the most patent example of this subversion is the the tea set, Spanish Lace, by Edyto Cietloch. The vessels are carved into filigree screens that imitate Spanish lace. Not, obviously, intended for pratical use of any kind, the functional objects turn into art objects. We might question everyday reality by extension.


For more on twists on expectations, look at 5.5 Designers Ensemble Cremiers Coulage no. 2 et no. 4. A sauceboat has some strange hitchhikers, the kind we usually try to keep out of the sauceboat. By having these little guests collect at the top, as if they were the sauce, the artists play with enticement and repulsion. What is food, and what is not get lumped together with the gravy.


Following this questioning of reality theme is the dinner plate series by Robert Dawson entitled Willow Pattern with Uncertainty. The name says it all. Reminiscent of Bleed Pattern English China Trade ware of the 1700's, the floral scene becomes blurry for two thirds of the plate. The effect is a little cinematic and definitely not the way to show off your fine China. The seeming embodiment of China itself is depreciated by this parlor trick, and the art of porcelain becomes the art of the gallery.


Blurring boundaries between objects is what Gesine Hackenberg does with jewelry. In Spoon Set a jewelry ensemble takes the form of the eponymous title. In the artist statement, Hackenberg says, "Occasionally the realm of jewelry and commodities shift together very closely...By using materials, shapes, fragments, and typical patterns out of another daily context as a base for my jewelry, I transfer their meaning and emotional impact in my works." The craft of porcelain merges with the perhaps more rarefied art of jewelry. Industrial design and fine arts cross-fertilize eachother.


Then there are moments when fine arts lock horns with commercial design. In Jo Meesters Ornamental Inheritance, http://www.jomeesters.nl/home.php series the lower portions of vases carry traditional Dutch Delft floral patterns. About midway up flowers recede in favor of a contemporary industrial landscape, replete with McDonalds monopoles instead of marigolds, airplanes, turbine windmills instead of traditional ones, and what looks to be the CN Tower in Toronto. The play on old vs. new, and high culture vs. low is humorous and dignified at the same time.


Paul Scott http://www.cumbrianblues.com/exhibitions.html pushes Meester's idea to the limit. In Scott's Cumbrian Blue[s] series the English countryside of traditional table settings is given a new and candid interpretation. In After the By-Pass a bucolic village is interrupted by tourists on the motorway. Barsbacke 2 substitutes a factory for the English manor house. In Foot and Mouth No. 5 the expected grazing cattle are instead the victims of foot and mouth disease. A bulldozer is assembling them for disposal, as a funnel of smoke belches for its sacrifices. This is a far cry from dinner in polite society. This removes the gentile manners of the dining room and invites controversial discourse. The title may also suggest diner's putting their feet in their mouth as a result.

One gallery in the show omits the tongue-in-cheek (let alone the foot-in-mouth) puns. The mood is serious for serious applications of technology to industrial ceramics. Elisha Tal's, Eyal Cremar's, and Danny Lavie's Nomad series features toaster, kettle, and pitcher. Conductivity of heat with ceramics to this extent was not possible until this point. Ami Drach's Hot Plate extends its heating element over the surface of the plate depression. The artist refers to it as a conductive silkscreen. Here is the marriage of function and design at its height. The function is the design.

The Kyocera knives and cleavers series prove that ceramic cutting tools can now be as sharp as metal. It is cutting edge technology of today.

Of course, visual puns are what give this show its artistic edge. You may want to linger a bit at Khayasar Naimanan's Incognito (Hidden Wealth project) http://www.designmuseum.org/__entry/71239?style=design_image_popup What is going on here is really a challenge to the decorum of the dining ritual. The designer creates the usual floral design and flip-side hallmark, but it is reversed...flowers on dish bottoms and hallmark on dish surfaces. While keeping the decorum of centuries of fine dining, Naimanan disrupts diners' complacency just a tad. Maybe it is enough to make us reconsider the daily customs we take for granted. Or maybe it is just a clever way to inteject an artist's touch into useful objects.

MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN 2 COLUMBUS CIRCLE NEW YORK, NY 10019 212.299.7777

Museum Tue. - Sun. 11:00 am to 6:00 pm Thurs. 11:00 am to 9:00 pm Closed Mon. and Major Holidays
SUMMER HOURS: Due to popular demand, the Museum will be open on Tuesdays from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm throughout the summer.
The Store at MADMon. - Sat. 10:00 am to 7:00 pm Thurs. 10:00 am to 9:00 pmSun. 10:00 am to 6:00 pm

Stuart Kurtz

August 4, 2009

Stuart Kurtz is a free-lance arts, travel, issues writer at http://www.stuartkurtz.blogspot.com/ He is available for hire at decophile@hotmail.com

Quote Me

Being left high and dry isn't so bad if there's a flood.

I said that.

Review: Land of the Lost

Review of Land of the Lost

The tag line of Land of the Lost reads, "Right place. Wrong time." In the case of theater and showtime, they're actually both wrong. If you get your jollies out of groping primates, dino urine, and unusual bowel obstructions, then you will enjoy this latest Will Ferrell turn. If not, you might be wondering whether Dr. Rick Marshall's Tacheon Amplifier time machine can transport you to the credits.

Dr. Rick Marshall (Ferrell) is a scientist who is looking for his big break. After a dry spell spent initiating sassy grade school kids into the wonders of science, he invents the Tacheon Amplifier, a device which can open up dimensions in time in a sideways fashion. After appearing as a laughing stock on the Today show with Matt Lauer, Rick gets a visit from wide-eyed scientist, Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel). She shows Marshall a modern fossil - excuse the oxymoron - with a connection to Marshall. This seems to prove Marshall's theory of portals into other dimensions.

The two head off for the desert, where, Holly says, Tacheon readings are strong. The hitch is that the area where this is happening is in a tunnel of horrors, a sideshow attraction that two Rednecks, Ernie and Will (Danny McBride of Tropic Thunder). Marshall and Holly have to suffer the indignity of paying admission and getting a pitch on fireworks in order to win the Nobel Prize - maybe. Will acts as guide on their raft trip into the cave. The Tacheon device starts an earthquake that opens up a portal into an alternate Earth.

Prepare yourself for this Earth. It's weirder than the one they started in. The place is populated with dinos, strange primates called Pakuni, lizard men called Sleestaks, and higher- functioning (which is not saying much here) time travellers called Altrusians. The team has to find its way back to the Earth they know to claim their Nobels (or junior high school science prize, whichever comes first). The set up happens way too fast, so that the weird Earth the team comes into doesn't get the initial laughs it might have gotten.

Much of the humor depends on gay jokes. There is a tension between the men's macho heroics and their effeminate sides. There is also a good tension between Rick's and Holly's professional respect and the hots they feel for eachother. The humor is all typical of guy flicks. The team's companion is a primate of the Pakuni tribe named Cha-Ka, who has a penchant for groping his female and male friends. A strange narcotic causes the men to have a strange trip in a stranger "yard sale" version of Earth. Rick has to cover himself in dino urine to get a T-Rex they call "Grumpy" off the scent. And then there is the manner in which Rick gets himself out of the innards of Grumpy...trust me, you don't want to know.

What does work here is that nothing is lost by sacrificing the mystery and danger of the original Sid and Marty Krofft TV series of 1974-76 in place of the comic take in this endeavor. That series suffered horrendous acting and writing that got in the way of the frights and mystery. No loss. There is a loss in the lack of sly in-jokes on the original series. Why can't Rick strum out the full theme song, which was good, on his banjo?

It is not surprising the writers, Chris Henchy and Dennis McNichols dug up a corny Saturday morning series out of the dinosaur graveyard as a repository for all their male sophmoric gags. You can't say they spoiled a classic.



Land of the Lost is rated PG-13 for scads of sexual and bathroom humor.Check out the cameo of The Zarn, vocalized by Leonard Nimoy, but sounding like Jason Robards.

Stuart Kurtz

Review of the Class

Here is an insightful review of the movie The Class, which is yet playing in second run houses here and there. It will probably be out on DVD in late summer. My good friend, Geraldine Torf is the author. She is a student of psychoanalysis and former therapist. The political opinions are not all in line with my own, but the overall writing is original. I contributed the idea about the reason why Francois is reluctant to teach The Enlightenment.

The extraordinary docudrama that is the film The Class is an excellent vantage point to examine the particular perspectives that are brought to bear on social structure; namely cultural, organizational, group and individual psychoanalysis. Francois Begaudeau, a teacher in a Paris Public High School in the Twentieth Arrondisement reshaped his novel chronicling his interactions with his students over the course of a year. The demographics consist of a group of fourteen year old students mostly of Caribbean or African descent with one noteable Asian adolescent whose mother is deported to China during the course of the film's progression. The work is entertaining and unlike most documentaries which can be too raw or painfully accurate to be easily assimilated presents viewers with an excellent educational tool.

Francois utilizes his rational legal authority with a generous overlay of charismatic style. This is by virtue of his lean good looks, strong voice and aggressive teaching technique. He stimulates his students through challenging, correcting, teasing and criticizing. Because he is a paid employee in a beurocratic instructional institution, it invokes a managerial capitalist orientation toward the worker students. The class members thereby respond to their teacher's attempts to communicate with a Marxist jargon. This is one of the outcomes of the herd instinct and the group mind, which puts the teacher in a precarious position. Communication with adolescents is an extremely challenging operation because a fine line has to be walked between exciting presentation and the danger of over-stimulation. It is tempting to utilize "administrative system conditions" with its resultant overt condescension. Some "communicative action" is attempted to illicit compassion and understanding but it is done clumsily. Begadeau tries to be a pseudo-buddy and attempts to be open to intimate questioning. He becomes defensive when Sulyman, his Malinese student asks him if he is a homosexual.

Freud's erotic transference and counter-transference saturate the classroom environment. Khouma, the Zoftig Caribbean fourteen year old is newly aware in her unconscious of the sexual dynamic of giving and receiving. Therefore she chooses not to cooperate and resists reading aloud from The Diary of Anne Frank. It is somehow suggestive of the possible sexual exploitation of colonial subjects or female workers in the labor force. Francois is unaware that his unconscious response to her cleavage made him single her out. His ambivalence towards the student body manifests again in his further exchanges with Sulyman. He feels a masculine competitiveness with this poised good looking regal youth who seems to have a strong sense of the true. He is aware that Francois' false attempts at relatedness sometimes stirs up more chaos. He chooses not to do his work in this hotbed of seething oppositional energies. In the workplace or in school anyone who is unusually perceptive of unconscious psychodynamics is rife for expulsion. His photographic talent denies the teacher's meeting verdict that he is 'limited.'

The secondary school teacher's autobiography idea must be analyzed for its reception in a multi-cultural classroom. While the students from the Caribbean might welcome the opportunity for ego assertion some cultures put more emphasis on humility. When Isabel and the other pretty girl representative inform Sulyman of the proceedings of the expulsion hearing, Bergadeau calls them "skanks" or whores. When girls are in early adolescense they need an ego ideal informed by the super-ego to keep them from acting out sexually. Sulyman is righteously indignant because it is likely in Malinese culture that women are venerated for their future respected positions as wives and mothers. His mother is an excellent example of the dignity and bearing of an esteemed woman in the culture. There are probably tribal rites in this culture, which would better enable Sulyman to endure the stresses of adolescence. It could have been helpful to have Margaret Mead reincarnate as a cultural consultant to the staff. The small number of faculty members on staff could have been beneficial if they were not to busy denying their id instincts and projecting them entirely on the 'animal' students. It would be helpful if all faculties in secondary schools could have regular staff meetings led by a communicator psychoanalyst enriched by a background in cultural studies. It would be extremely efficacious if federal funds could be released for such projects. In our own country such interventions would do a lot more to inhibit violence and thus be more life preservative than Obama's politically expeditious move to give full thrust to stem cell research funding.

In Afghanistan the U.S. wants to introduce modernity in this traditional culture too soon. We object to the idea of boys' schools there when it was only five decades ago in American and English educational systems when single sex student bodies were a sign of eliteness and exclusivity. This style still persists in Jewish Yeshivas and some other faith based schools. Certainly girls should have equal educational opportunities but one can't rush acceptances. Our own tribal memories must guide us in the pace we set for change.

Now to return from my digression about culture in foreign relations to go back to my discussion of the film. In the exchange between Bergadeau and his male colleague at the beginning of the film they talk about collaborative efforts to teach literature and history around joined themes. Francois says they were able to absorb 'Ancienne Regimes' but were not receptive to 'The Age of Enlightenment'. This is totally a diminishing derogative judgment against their students. In the sixties my cousin Ralph as a Peace Corps member taught Shakespeare very successfully to his Nigerian students. Literature often transmits universal truths, which are available to all if properly communicated with understanding and compassion. On the other hand my son Hugh who was brought up with a strong immersion in Western Civilization and its literary inheritance was stymied by Shakespeare's ornate language because he was adjusting to the intrusion of four stepsiblings into his household. Bergadeau didn't mean to fail so miserably with Solyman but his cultural and psychological background left him ill equipped to deal with this pedagogical problem.

Now with the multiple homicides in the secondary school in Germany it seems that the misunderstandings and cultural omissions in the docu-drama pale in the wake of this tragedy. The student's addiction to violent videogames and his access to his father's gun collection are grim reminders of the relevance of Trevor Norris' article. Arendt talks about the oikos and agora being diminished with the ascendance of the public realm. Baudrillard in the contemporary vehicle of semiotics illustrates that the consumption of chosen objects signifies the status of participating societal inhabitants.
"Speech has been drained of its power and meaning." If greed and the urgency to make a buck at any ethical cost are not exposed by the proliferation of such products as guns and inciting videogames, nothing can be. Consumerism and lack of proper outlets for the erotic and aggressive proclivities of teens and young adults led to 9/11 and the multiple school shootings extant all over the world. Certainly when Ahrendt cited Sputnik in the beginning of The Human Condition as a sign of the alienation of mankind, she could never predict the rise of Fertility Clinics in the Medical community of our present era. There the private consummation of human reproduction and generativity has been assigned to the public so that it can be considered that anything can be purchased and is up for grabs in our consumer society. In the past if there was ambivalence or reasonable doubt about the wisdom of having children the soma itself could express safeguards or limits to those who had not resolved their resistance. The stem cell hysteria is another way our consumer society feels that with enough expenditure we can abolish all the ills that debauch our health. The unconscious motives and repressed emotions as basis for disease and accident are suppressed. In the rise of the knowledge of splitting the atom propaganda arose that this detonated bomb would give rise to all kinds of scientific discoveries, which would save mankind. Human destructiveness has now escalated to the level where humanity could be annihilated. Too much emphasis has been put on Science and Technology as a panacea for societal ills. It demands conformity, which does not give rise to a philosopher such as Descartes who was allowed to sleep late, and thus out of the loop was able to observe and think without the arbitrary discipline of time control. Too much emphasis has been put on adjustment and assimilation.


On my way home from the film on the subway I talked with a fashionable muscovite woman in her sixties who cast negative judgments on the Hispanic U.S. immigrants. Because our cultural values have been compromised from consumerism and the shrinkage of Family influence, we must question and analyze why total immersion into the existing cultural milieu should be forced onto new immigrants. Students need real relationships from mature leader educators who can encourage individual character development. At a case presentation on March 28, a BGSP student talked about his eighth grade mostly Dominican group. He seemed like the perfect compassionate and low stimulation leader who could build trust over time. His bi-lingual approach to group process shows his respect for the family culture. Too much forced adaptation to a new language is a cruel assault on the mother tongue.

Assimilation marked the cultural history of the German-Jewish society that influenced Hannah Ahrendt. The ensuing betrayal of this population by the Nazis did much in the maturation of this intelligent political philosopher. With increasing anti-Semitism in Hitler's repressive regime, she was chosen by a Zionist organization to reveal this horrifying truth to the rest of the world. Journalistic seeds planted at this time gave birth to her new career when she moved to New York City. She shifted from her temporary strong identification with the Jewish people to claim her 'interspace. How much we have attachment to our cultural heritage should be a matter of personal choice. She was severely criticized for her series of articles on Eichmann in Jerusalem because she was too objective and emotionally distant. Certainly in her disappointment over her relationship with Heidegger she had to focus her attention in The Human Condition on the diminishment of the oikos and the resultant distortion of the Polis.

In Entre Des Murs the teaching philosophy is to impose adjustment in kind of a Fascist way. They forbid the wearing of head scarfs by Muslim women in France because they fear the rising violent protest of the Arab underclass created by National pressure to suspect anything non-French. Retreat into a more classic cultural and religious practice is what many citizens in every country are doing ;sometimes reverting to Fundamentalism in their attempt to decrease the inroads of consumerism and Technology. My middle son, David, immerses himself and his family into a Chasidic lifestyle. They don't have a TV in their household so the children aren't confronted by product bombardment They try to imbue the atmosphere with the spiritual mysticism which influenced Walter Benjamin in his article citing the aura of objects in original representational Art. His older teen-Age and Young Adult children have abandoned the strict structure and have experimented with the dangerous world outside their culture. It is worrisome that the attempt to insulate them from the larger culture left them so vulnerable to its devastations. David himself chose to go to The University of Hawaii to seek diversity in the student body. In the 60's and 70's in his childhood New Hampshire the population was predominately white and conservative. Now he has become the conservative Computer programmer who tries to contain his own family in a homogeneous environment.

The Class as a docu-drama should be used as a discussion tool for teachers and students in multi-cultural schools. It might help disperse the resulting trauma on both sides.

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