№ 14. 2007 - DIFFERENT GAME

CIVILIZED GARDEN

Blues excursions to places where art happens

James Manteith

It can probably be agreed that art exists to distill human impulses in their highest form and make them accessible to others with similar aspirations—with no distinction in this, ideally, for recipients separated by greater or lesser distance. Through his creations, the author engages in a dialogue that focuses on alignment with the art's truth. This truth need not be couched in abstractions or moralizing: it is simply the truth of an experienced world, both physical and spiritual, conveyed in visual, verbal and melodic lines, harmonies and tensions. Thinking of art in these theoretical terms, there might be additional interest in observing how art's impulses reach people in practice, in a selection of cultural events.

Political philosopher Michael Buckley at the A.Rapoport exhibit

1.

A striking test of art's capabilities is supplied by an exhibit of Alek Rapoport's work (see Apraksin Blues №11), held in connection with the tenth anniversary of his passing. The show's setting is the Belcher Studios Gallery in San Francisco. The fact of exhibit in itself may be found miraculous. Here we encounter originals, not reproductions, and the viewer's contact with them is also spatial. Many of Rapoport's works belong to the collections of various museums throughout the world, but most of what is displayed here, including drawings, is preserved by private hands. In their essence and the care given them, the most modest works, pen and ink copies of Italian wedding chests evidently found by the artist in the Hermitage before his move to the West, are as powerfully moving as later large-scale productions, where the author is already doing battle.

In a modern city such as San Francisco, space for the individual, unaffiliated artist is limited if not based on a solid economic foundation, and all the more limited when only to remember him. Yet despite these expectations, here we are surrounded by Rapoport's Images of San Francisco, canvasses of the 1980s and '90s, of dimensions and techniques often approximating those of theater sets, whose creation the artist once counted among his occupations. As with other posthumous showings of Alek's work, this exhibit was made possible by the artist's widow, Irina Rapoport, who is present at all times, attentive to every visitor and turning the viewing into a personal event for any person who enters. The Images provide entrance to a discourse with the artist's vision, less celebrating his adopted city, it seems, than demythologizing it, revealing an ethos of displacement, a map of numb and empty spaces with lives to match: coloration cannot compensate for this, no matter how vivid. Images of San Francisco form a bulwark against the city's refusal to shed its ephemerality, to end its double life as devouring Moloch. Their new exhibit invigorates, emboldens; even brief contact with them leaves a lasting mark. While the paintings' presence could have hindered light social discussion in the exhibit hall, these works may unfold for each viewer in their own time.

It is interesting that even paintings as polemical as these essentially maintain a tactful neutrality in their relationship with the viewer. One could look or not look at them, think about them or not think, and seemingly lose nothing. In any case, their bid for attention seemed far more modest than the persistent cry from the world beyond the gallery's walls, hung with advertisements and bound in high-tech knots of communications systems. The artist allows his viewer everything, but also offers weapons and armor for whomever needs them.

2.

A. Stenyaev. City Mood.

Several months later, Apraksin Blues visits a different exhibit, this time in San Jose. The gallery, Canvasations, is situated in a private home. Its owners, Svetlana and Alex Fedoseyev, coordinate the production of the magazine Terra Nova. A gallery of this kind might also be taken as a miracle: despite the pressures and priorities of everyday life, space in the home is found not only for the magazine's business but for an expansive showing of works of art, arranged not only in the central exhibition room, but throughout the whole territory of the first floor, from the entry to the kitchen and dining room and beyond, all the way to the garden, where paintings take the sun and stimulate public discussion by the high board fence they hang on. In the home stands a white grand piano, at which first a viewer, then the daughter of the home's master, seats herself and plays. Chopin, performed without notes, from memory, permeates the overall setting, and at once it is clear that such music, just as the paintings, may come to life most fully at just such moments—as a spontaneous embellishment, subordinate to the atmosphere suggesting it.

A sense arises that the gallery, primarily displaying the works of Russian and Eastern European artists, seeks in part to recreate or reclaim an older tradition of salons: not overly rarefied, not excluding the commonplace, but professing a type of elegance in which the commonplace has an inseparable part. From places at the table where the evening closes, paintings showing the streets of central Moscow can be seen. They strike a note of timelessness, spanning the residue of centuries and immediately recognizable to those present who have lived in or known that city. Suddenly the viewers find themseves both in California and on those old streets.

The paintings' authors are our contemporaries—people probably still living, each considering the demands of commercial interests, each actively engaged in a calibration of current tastes. Any echoes of the non-conformist aesthetic that might be noted here have a totally different source than in Alek Rapoport's work. The ideology of the paintings in this exhibit is the imperative of democratic variety, with certain stylistic attributes of non-conformism informing their creation as much as do the technical priorities of academic art. While each painting is ready to defend its individual credo, all remain tolerant of each other and the viewer, provoking a similar reaction of tolerance. Any of the works could lead to a different beginning.

3.

The event that follows, a musical one, presents a new group of people serving art. The initiative for Blues's involvement in these happenings comes from Alla Viksne, an artist who has recently discovered musical performance's appeal for painting. The California String Quartet, offering an afternoon concert of Russian music at the Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, considers the aims of its artistic activity to include the popularization of works by modern composer Iosif Andriasov (1933-2000). The concert's program includes two of his compositions, as well as a work by his son, Arshak Andriasov, whose study of composition had its beginnings with his father. The musicians open the concert with a nineteenth-century "collective" quartet. Each movement is by a different member of the "mighty handful," who successively pick up and brilliantly develop each others' themes. Only the eternal lyric Borodin chooses an individual direction with an astounding slow movement, Spanish-themed, and the unexpected appearance here of this extraneous dimension immediately amplifies the force of the whole.

Sound is suspended above the musicians' heads. They are playing in the church's isolated sanctuary, a place of worship that happens to lack an obvious altar. Instead, it has other attributes: an organ whose pipes make up the space's rear like an altar in themselves, and an elevated row of empty seats, like jury chairs, turned to face the audience or congregation.

Music requires effort from its listeners as well as its performers, and this effort is different now than that accompanying its creation. Music has no embodiment apart from musicians, and in this sense all images associated with it are static. Music comes from human forms with instruments, and to see beyond this, or to see more in this, demands effort. Or the effort may be to let go. It can be hard to let go of definite meaning.

Would the composers have chosen this same medium to communicate with posterity, if given access to videocameras? Armed with modern technology, would they have done anything with it worthy of posterity? No one among us has seen them alive. The evidence we possess of them is much less visual than musical, all the more so in light of the practical absence of photographs. Yet we receive a minimalist sound portrait that undeniably communicates volumes of information to the listener about the composers' thoughts and worlds, information of a complexity almost inconceivable for a contemporary ear. This portrait, too, comes to life through the labors of musicians, whose skill and mastery, if judged by common standards of production, may seem a tenuous and inefficient method. The path of musicians and composers is chosen by infinite givens, and time reveals that no condition lacks a source, that none can be taken for granted.

The works of the elder Andriasov bear traces of Shostakovich, discernably one of his forerunners. These traits appear alongside ethnic overtones from Andriasov's native Armenia. Ethnicity, the classical's direct opposite, in this case is pleasing. In an early, fiery string quartet, the composer flashes his command of demonstratively informed and yet fully individual musical idioms. A later, brief work shows his language turned focused and spare, moving away from dialectics in favor of an almost painful simplicity of melodic development, causing some discomfort for the listener. It seems a relief when the next composition, a short and energetic work by the younger Andriasov, apparently affirms the voice of youth.

The concert's second half consists of Tchaikowsky's Serenade for Strings. I am unable to stay for the second half, but hear the opening notes sound after leaving the hall, while standing in a corridor on the other side of the sanctuary's wall. Lining the corridor, a row of windows opens on a small garden, enclosed on all sides by church buildings, like the church's meditative eye. In the garden stands a weathered bronze modernist statue. Its rounded outlines ascribe roughly vertical proportions. Perhaps with too little evidence, I recall the Virgin Mary. The first autumn leaves lie damp on the ground. It is instantly clear how Tchaikowsky's music was created: not referentially, but by painful extraction from an individual heart. Much as every tree grows from its own roots. It is good to be found here by this music, with a view of this civilized garden. I don't know how much these sounds were already present in my blood—musical sounds, belonging to that special category where I may easily acknowledge my part in human nature as universal. I leave nature to finish the performance.

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