What the Butler Saw

“Facing East: Photographs From Cairo, Luxor & Aswan”, Utopia Restaurant, Long Beach, CA

Except for an anachronistic car, bus, or bike, “Facing East: Photographs From Cairo, Luxor & Aswan” a show of 19 photographs by Kay Erickson at Utopia Restaurant presents us with a Rip Van Winkle proposition in reverse: what if we woke up 200 years prior to when we fell asleep?

No joy of sects here. Erickson suggests we overlook the sound byte association we have of the Middle East – tribal violence, civil strife, terrorism – to acknowledge the poetry of the world of day-in and day-out happenstance. With these images the world is a little smaller, a little more intimate, and a lot less intimidating.

Timeless and timely, gentle and animated, she points out the simple things that slip under the radar of history.

As a group the work affords us a rectangular porthole glimpse into a world far removed from our traffic-jammed, construction-pocked streets.

Erickson shows us images whose implied time does not follow a clock. People go about their business. They have all the time in the world. Two young girls smile. A street vendor peddles his wares. A motorcycle leans against seven oil drums. People walk to work. Someone prays.

What you see is not what you get. Sepia-toned, her photographs belie their texture of wall and road. The pictorial space glows like a sunrise after a sandstorm: the sky is brown and yellow, not plum and pink. This world is mature and wise, not hung over and spent. The ruts of the road echo the routines and rituals of life that goes on below the surface of headlines and has done so for thousands of years.
Each piece tempts like a wedge of baklava. Each implies a journey whose destination is not important because the road is the thing. Irrespective of the means of locomotion, timeless or else rooted in the Here and Now, these people are on the move. Like figures on a Greek vase, they continue their daily rounds.

As a whole the show reminds me of stills taken from an aged black and white silent movie with some of the frames removed. We walk near these men, children, and burqa-ed women, then a bus or a truck passes before out eyes, and the cinematic thread of our vision is interrupted and then resumed as we look at something else.

Erickson provides a cost-benefit analysis to foreign travel: we may have the financial and physical means to travel but at what cost if we don’t seek to understand other people, other cultures, other climes? Think Visigoth British soccer hooligans marauding across Europe.

Erickson’s theme? Cultural subjectivity. It’s an ironic take. A global village in which it’s neighbors don’t know each other? Better instead call them global hermitages. Or global retreats. How about global bunkers?

Her starting point? A little learning makes the whole world kin. Nice.

The show runs until March 23, 2006. The restaurant is located at 445 East First Street, Long Beach, CA 90802. For more information call (562) 432-6888 or visit www.utopiarestaurant.net.

"The Quality of Light," The Long Beach Playhouse Studio Theatre, Long Beach, CA

Like quixotic clouds on a Cote d’Azur afternoon, Richard Martin Hirsch’s sweet The Quality of Light, directed by Jo Black-Jacob for the Long Beach Playhouse’s Studio Theatre, flickers happy and sad, funny and tragic. Like an Impressionist painting it abounds with joy and warmth, non?

Jack (Patrick Rafferty) meets Claire (D.J. Harner) at an inn in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France. He’s perky, charismatic like Ferris Buehler, with the joie de vivre of a Junior Year Abroad student.

He zeroes in on Claire, petulant, pretty but sulking, rich but with no noblesse oblige.

Sparks fly.

What brought them both there, to that inn in that city at that moment, describes the arc of the play.

A nice touch: the white walls of Claire’s new home in California echo the blank drawing paper of her French holiday: both signify a fresh start, a blank canvas, and the freedom to create.

It’s France, they couple – duh - but both have secrets. To reveal what Jack had just transacted and what Claire had just endured would erode the foundation, the denouement, and the climax of this carefully crafted story.

Rendered with daubs of local color, this lovely production made me forget about Freedom Fries, Euro conversions, and fractious riots.

Connoisseurs of morsels thespian, we feasted on the work of superb actors who embodied memorable characters with wonderful accents playing out a story with perfect pacing upon a set that made me want to eat Coq au Vin, drink Pernod, and sniff lavender.

One of those digital scene changers – incongruous in such an analog-based setting - moved well enough from landscape to sculpture garden to architecture to geography but for a moment the dreaded Windows desktop appeared. Hey, it happens to Guillaume Gates as well. Nonetheless the pixellated scene fades did remind me of the dots in a Paul Signac Neo-Impressionist painting. Inadvertent but nice.

Black fields an all-star team. Rafferty made Jack boyish, irrepressible, and funny. He delivered a soliloquy on the search for the meaning of life that quickly changed my opinion of him from Man on Prowl to Cary Grant existentialist. That set up his awkward compassion for Claire’s backstory and his agony when he revealed his own predicament.

Harner made Claire mercurial and vulnerable, sexy and coltish. Peeling back her story was like peeling an artichoke – thorny, rough, soft, succulent. I especially liked how she responded to Jack’s non-advances (prickly, standoffish) and then opened up with vernal giddiness.

The way they bickered you would never know that the two inn workers – the adorable Dora (Margret McWilliams) and the stoic Henri (Jean-Pierre Gillain) - were married until you realized their banter was but foreplay enacted out of doors.

But Steve Longmuir held the production together. Robust, jovial, and, above all, wise, he played Esme, the painter-narrator who commented on the events at hand and infused the story with lambent Gallic irony. Touché

Shows are Fri & Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 2 pm. The play runs until Apr 22, 2006. Tickets are $18-20. The Playhouse is located at 5021 East Anaheim Street, Long Beach, CA. For more information call (562) 494-1014 or visit www.lbph.com.

“Mr. Winkle Hotel-Motel Nudes: Photographic Works by Lara Jo Regan”, Icon Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“Mr. Winkle Hotel-Motel Nudes: Photographic Works by Lara Jo Regan” at Icon Gallery shows what happens when you separate glitz from celebrity, aesthetic readings from literal readings (“It’s not journalism, stupid, it’s art!”), bacon from the sizzle.

The result surprises. You’re left with the work itself, with form and content, elements intrinsic to the work. Unholistic – pagan? – viewers see style as transparent and separate form and content. One species sees Mapplethorpe, Serrano as pornographic, as iconoclastic. Another thinks art illustrates premises and idée fixes. In both cases, the art object becomes irrelevant, prey to extrinsic impositions.

Regan doesn’t privilege form or content. She takes an icon, not one she cannibalized from popular culture but an icon of her own creation, and situates it in un-glamorous settings that brim with low-brow patinas.

Mr. Winkle’s iconic status cannot be denied. He has achieved worldwide popularity through a series of calendars and note cards that bear his likeness. He’s become a global cultural phenomenon because so many people have identified with his plight – abandoned on the side of a highway, rescued, nursed back to health by Regan.

Time and again people attribute their desire to continue to live, to stop abusing themselves and others, to make something of lives, all to the example of this dog. His Q-Tip body, his infectious, Cheshire Cat smile, his poses staged a la Cindy Sherman all confer upon him the status of secular icon. An icon by definition implies transcendence (read celebrity), induces veneration (read adoration), and confers hope and salvation.

Before she began what mushroomed into “Winklemania” – a phenomenon that includes packed book signings, appearances on national televisions shows, a biblical deluge of e-mail - Regan was an award-winning documentary photographer; she won Pictures of the Year awards and The World Press Photos of the Year 2000 Awards for the social acumen of her work.

And it’s that sociological incision that Regan imparts to these current photos. Regan the journalist/icon shepherd/artist doesn’t prey upon Winkle’s iconic status. She demotes it. She places him, not in luxury suites as would befit canine royalty and expense accounts but in budget hotels and motels, the kind of place in which you would stay were you to plan to get your kicks on Route 66. Hotels like Howard Johnson and Best Chalet Inn serve a function of utility; their artistic representations either wax ironic or else document a specific genus of middle-class culture.

You would think the juxtaposition of Mr. Winkle and these white bread roadside rest spots would clash. They don’t. Mr. Winkle doesn’t look out of place here. Nor does he look like he’s slumming. Nor does it appear as if he’s placed there for purposes of irony.
Why don’t these images jar us? It’s not because the banality of these places can dim the luster of even the brightest star.

No, it’s because the formal qualities of these images, their composition, hold the intellectual clashes at bay in an unlikely grid of beauty.

At some point you have to account for the chromatic richness of these pieces, their lush texture, and, most of all, their exquisite compositions. It’s too easy to zero in on the meta-esthetic qualities of the image – their cultural and economic implications – without considering the effect their composition has on their reading.

Each piece abounds with a formal vigor that complements their iconography. In Corner Curve the semi-circle of Mr. Winkle’s body completes the circle begun by the balcony railing. In DC Donut, the rectangular lampshade above the circular lamp whose center frames the dog glows around the edges like something out of a Rothko painting. Stay ‘N Play Motel is filled with the whimsy of a Miro painting. Ho Jo Hedge presents Winkle as an appendage to a series of rectangular hedges whose verticality resembles Easter Island monuments. In Sliding Door the pattern of the carpet echoes the design of his two front paws.

Forget the art historical associations of Raft of the Medusa and focus on a gradation of color that runs the spectrum from red to blue, punctuated with a strident yellow raft upon which rests a white cipher of a dog. The vertical bars of a gate as well as the vertical white lines against the green rim of the pool sequester the composition – and the dog - in terms formal and associations literal.

Then consider the scene itself. Forlorn dog in a spiraling cultural vortex. Vivid like the colors in the remake of The Stepford Wives. Though its circumstances belie it, this image, all these images, offer a drama built up, first, from formal elements. When you consider the art of these images, distinct from and then reintegrated back into the content, you realize everything is not as it seems, that first impressions are not always the best, that beauty – or a reasonable facsimile - is here, there, and everywhere.

The show runs until March 18, 2006. The Gallery is located at 1617 Cosmo Street, #312, Los Angeles, CA 90028.