Steve Shapiro

If one could determine the makeup of a theatrical production by its look, after both the extravagant and flamboyant sets of “Into the Woods” and “Around the World in 80 Days,” and the spare staging of “Palomino,” the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s set for its new drama, “Broke-ology” is, in the best sense, shabby.

This production, by an illuminating new playwright, Nathan Louis Jackson (born in Kansas City, Kansas, where his fiercely-felt domestic drama is set), reproduces a house residing in the Quindaro district: inside, an old air-conditioning unit is taped to one window, old board games fill a seen-better-days cabinet, and in the center is a sagging sofa; outside, dogs bark and the neighborhood is an unkempt collection of weeds and thugs.

The design by Meghan Raham includes a screen door, which gets a lot of action, always slamming—after a while, one waits for the noise. It turns out to be the sound of a family shutting out its possibilities.

By Steve Shapiro

In E.L. Doctorow’s recent novel, “Homer & Langley,” based on the homebound lives of the two Collyer brothers whose Fifth Avenue New York City brownstone became an overstuffed museum to their past—acquiring objects took on a fetishistic quality.

When they were finally found dead inside, twenty years of hoarding revealed all sorts of things, from old newspapers to a Model T automobile they had dismantled and rebuilt.

At one point, the fictional narrator admits as much, after enumerating a host of G.I. surplus equipment such as gas masks, binoculars, boxes of service ribbons and much more that found a place in their home: “artifacts of some enthusiasms of the past, almost as if we were a museum, though with our riches as yet un-catalogued, the curating still to come.”

Steve Shapiro

The news that J.D. Salinger had died, finally, at the age of ninety-one, on January 27, while not shocking in the abrupt manner of deaths such as Elvis’s or Michael Jackson’s or Heath Ledger’s, still had its J.F.K. moment. I learned of it driving home from work: on NPR I tuned into a segment about the enduring importance of “The Catcher in the Rye” and what Holden Caulfield had meant for fifty-nine years and counting to both readers and writers; I suspected the time had come—for years, I had wondered aloud what the response to Salinger’s death would be in an era where even celebrities’ fifteen minutes of fame is increasingly truncated—but not until the announcer ended with the statement did I feel that frisson of finality. At home, there were several phone messages from friends calling to mention the news; and when I Googled “Salinger” I found the Internet had, in just hours of the news, already filed several hundred items. In the age of tweets and blogs, no man, however reluctantly, is an island.

Steve Shapiro

Long before the new (old) vogue for 3-D at the movies, the theater was all about it. Trap doors onstage, apparatus dropping from the ceiling, lighting and sound cues, sets moving and changing as in Terry Gilliam’s film homage to old-fashioned theatrics “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”—indeed, the simple act of the actors on the stage, seemingly close enough to touch—all of it, when done right, registers as an experience that the audience feels it is a part of.

The new technically classy version of Jules Verne’s classic adventure “Around the World in 80 Days,” which débuted on January 29 at The Kansas City Repertory Theatre is Gilliamesque. The sets and the actors combine to create an illusion of travel, via locomotive or steamship or even elephant. The story recalls Verne’s popular 1873 novel (it was originally planned as a play, based on Verne’s own voyages); while there is a nod to the hokey 1956 Hollywood movie with David Niven as Phileas Fogg—Fogg’s servant, Passepartout asks if they will be going “by balloon”—this production, originally conceived by Laura Eason of Chicago’s innovative Lookingglass Theatre, relies on Verne’s modes of transportation.

By Steve Shapiro

The novelist John Dos Passos once complained of New Year’s celebrations, “Why won’t they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant; can’t they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping—rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas—but, goodness, why need they do it?”

Unlike other activities that run cyclically (dining out, say, or shopping or after too many dinners, out come the diet books), the arts are year-round. Creativity does not take a holiday. Yet, as the byproduct of all that inspiration and composition comes to a head with movie nominations, best-of lists and announcements of inductions into this or that arts academy, it makes sense to reflect on the arts in this tiny interregnum.

New Year’s resolutions for both the artist and the audience seem in order, perhaps now more than ever.

Each day heralds a new technological advance—right now, the seismic vibrations over Apple’s rumored “tablet” are as intense as any approaching earthquake—even if the result is not intended as a cure for cancer, but rather as a spur to eat up more of our free time.

Steve Shapiro

Abstract art has not always been strictly the bane of the middle-class. Under the regimes of the former Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union as ruthlessly as the present-day Chinese Communist Party, abstraction has equaled subversive tendencies; neither fish nor fowl, abstract art demands thinking things through, rather than automatically adding things up like a math quiz. Yet, to many people—from Ayn Rand to Thomas Hart Benton (who instructed that enfant terrible Jackson Pollock) to the elderly woman I stood beside years ago at a van Gogh exhibition who declared to her companion, “My grandchildren could do better”—abstraction is all in the mind. Where are the images, the themes, the symbols and the shapes that have always been art’s foundation? Of course, when Kazimir Malevich exhibited his seminal “Black Square,” in 1913, it was pure color and shape: the rest, he felt, was superfluous.

For more than a hundred years, viewers and critics have been sorting out what abstract art should be, while artists have continued one step ahead redefining what it can be. Due to the lavish outsize canvases of the Abstract Expressionists and other painters from the turn of the century onward, abstraction has emerged as the exception to the rule—to any rule, really. It is not only in painting (Klee’s spermatozoa-like squiggles; Kandinsky’s spiritually-inspired blobs), but in film (Resnais’s puzzling “Last Year at Marienbad”; the French director Jacques Tati’s virtually silent comedies with their circular narratives) and in literature (the noveau roman of the Fifties in which plots and characters were rearranged or written out completely, as in the Robbe-Grillet novel where the description is confined to objects like a pencil rolling off a desk). Over time, abstract art has been understood by the public as a mish-mash of images (or non-images) and ideas (or non- ).

By Steve Shapiro

Art in China, in the last half of the twentieth century, can be characterized in two stages: A.M. and P.M.—that is, After Mao and Post-Mao. The first phase began with Nixon’s groundbreaking trip, in 1972, as the outside world was permitted entrance and the Communist officials began, slowly, to entertain the thought of capitalism. Novelists and filmmakers, especially, took advantage of the thaw throughout the Eighties; directors such as Zhang Yimou (“Ju Dou”) developed international reputations for seeming to bring the real China to the rest of the world. Then, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre squelched artistic freedom for many who could be easily censored by publishers or film studios. Freedom, economic and otherwise, only went so far.

Visual artists, stultified for so long, sprang into action; contemporary Chinese painters and sculptors had worked under the radar for decades without the attendant celebrity extended to American artists who came of age after Warhol, when the Western art world became an island of egos and stratospheric prices unto itself. Ironically, for the generations of Chinese artists born in the early Sixties whose forebears had been criticized (and often beaten and even killed) during the Cultural Revolution for producing non-revolutionary work such as landscapes, the art works now being produced are revolutionary in an altogether opposite sense—for example, the Gao brothers have created a sculpture called “Mao’s Guilt” in which the head is separate from the body. If the Revolution was a joke, the joke is on Mao and his legacy.

By Steve Shapiro

Photographer Peter Feldstein and writer Stephen Bloom’s collaboration “The Oxford Project,” at the enterprising Belger Art Center in the Crossroads District through December 31, was twenty-one years in the making.

When Feldstein decided to photograph all 676 residents of Oxford, Iowa, in 1984, the grand idea seemed novel enough at the time. Oxford, a rural town eighteen miles west of Iowa City, looks like other such small towns: a blur in the rear-view mirror as the highway takes one past. Feldstein’s portraits—the 670 subjects who participated were given no instructions on how to dress or to pose, and everyone was democratically photographed once—were taken then put away with little fanfare. It was only in 2005, when Bloom inquired about the pictures and they decided Feldstein would re-photograph everyone he could while Bloom would interview them, that the first project developed into a second, wholly deeper vision.

At the Belger, twenty-two of the portrait-interviews are exhibited; after moving through the exhausting yet exhilarating show, the sampling selected from the larger, extensive, and beautifully produced catalogue more than manages to evoke the overall project. With text separating the 1984 and 2005 pictures, each triptych stands alone; assembled together, the town’s peoples’ stories parallel and balance out one another’s. Along the way, there is much humor and grief, a great deal of compassion, some bewilderment, religious (and secular) acceptance of the way life has turned out, mischief, even, and above all a quality of stoicism that small towns have always bestowed on their residents.

By Steve Shapiro

SAN FRANCISCO--Often, when the name “Disney” is invoked, it is in one-word terms like the conglomerate Apple or like a nation (say, Dubai), rather than in purely personal terms. 

Before “Walt Disney,” after all, there came Walt Disney; before the dazzling enchantments of the animated feature-length films “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Fantasia” there lie the hard groundwork of a young commercial artist and animator whose business card read “Walt. Disney Cartoonist”—that period announcing his artistic independence from his farming-turned-newspaper-route-salesman father, Elias. As with other one-word wonderments—Elvis, Marilyn, Picasso—it is a mystery as to how much and how possible it is to separate the one from the other.

Many biographies, favoring either the sunny Uncle Walt or the union-busting corporate Colossus, have summoned up the energy and the resources to thus characterize him as the American ideal or (in a negative sense) the American ideal. The latest effort comes in the more direct form of the multi-million-dollar family-funded Walt Disney Family Museum, in San Francisco’s former military-complex-turned-public-park The Presidio.

The museum, newly opened on October 1, is not sanctioned by the Disney Corporation. It ceases with Walt’s death, at a surprisingly young sixty-five, from lung cancer, in 1966. If the familial influence in the form of photographs and personal artifacts (like a bracelet made for Walt’s wife Lilly imitating the one standard size Oscar and seven miniature Oscars specially awarded for “Snow White” in 1937), as well as in the shaping of the personal-public narrative, hews toward the genial genius, it is impossible to deny at least the genius.

“The Helmet Project” at Sherry Leedy Gallery

Steve Shapiro

Art, like war, comes in any number of forms: there is the personal conflict, like Otto Dix’s nightmarish World War I etchings; the public anti-war photocollages of the Dadaist Hannah Höch; the officially sanctioned “war artist,” such as Lincoln’s star cartoonist, Thomas Nast; as well as the artist whose work, like Ronald Searle’s when he was a British POW in Singapore, evoked scenes at the hands of the Japanese, yet did not sear his consciousness ever after the way such horrors did to other artists. Then again, art, like war, is a statement: in the artistic sense, however, the greater the vision and the fuller the creation, the more powerful the impact. One need only think of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the single most moving testament to death and to honor in the past century, when the September 11 memorial wrangling periodically returns to the news, to appreciate the ideas at work.

Cindy Kane’s wartime artwork, “The Helmet Project,” at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art (running through February 27), is personal, though in a roundabout style. She invited fifty foreign war correspondents to contribute whatever they wished from their travels, and then she covered fifty used helmets with the personal artifacts. At the Leedy gallery, the decorated helmets hang in two rows of twenty-five, a little lower than eye level; the point is not to touch them so much as to read them. A visitor can weave in and out (with an accompanying guide), reading the journalists’ effects—notes, press passes, e-mails—and then noting how Kane has molded the words into images.

Lesley Dill at Byron Cohen Gallery

Reviewed by Steve Shapiro

Of the many words used by critics, curators and art-goers to describe contemporary art—such as angry, baffling, cryptic, daring, extravagant and exasperating—the word haunting gets little play. Perhaps it is because so much of today’s work has a mass-produced feel, or no feel at all.

Modernism was predicated in part on an industrial, almost clinical, quality; the warmth of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings were overtaken by the cold porcelain of Duchamp’s urinal and the mechanical engineering of Cubism. Art since the twentieth century has come to mean anything, yet often unconnected to the idea (and the ideal) of the artist’s hand.

The sense of art that proves most haunting is art with a human touch. A Vermeer portrait, suffused with the artist’s personal intent (combined with technical prowess), can thus be linked to, say, Giacometti’s sculptures with their evidence of puttied fingerprints, and to Hannah Höch’s collages, onward to Joseph Cornell’s boxes, Richard Serra’s torqued steel arcs, and Lesley Dill’s hands-on works of copper, wire, steel, horsehair, rice paper, and thread.

(Images available online at www.sherryleedy.com)

Reviewed by Steve Shapiro

What do you see in a photograph? What do you notice first in a painting? The easy answer—an image, or if the work is abstract, an efflorescence of colors—is not wholly accurate.

A painting may gleam with oil on canvas; but as you look at the scene, whether figurative or abstract, you simultaneously take in the effect of the materials—whether the paint has been smoothed on or galumphed on heavily, built up like van Gogh did—as well as the artist’s touch: John Singer Sargent’s refined hand allowed for the daubs of paint to become part of the scene. A photograph may seem more straightforward; yet from its inception in eighteenth century French photography has been all about exposing technique and framing the artist’s imagination.

The recent combined painting / photography exhibition, “Jeff Aeling: Looking West” and “Carl Corey: Habitat,” at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art settles one question as it brings up another. The two artists are quite different in approach and aesthetic.

Steve Shapiro

It is often said that the Christmas season brings out both the best and the worst in people; the same can be said of creative artists. Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” first published in London, in 1843 (he composed it in six weeks), was, even for one so popular and influential as him, a success of another order. Bob Dylan’s recently released album of Christmas songs, “Christmas in the Heart,” is a similar surprise, coming from a songwriter so identified with his own visions. Yet there are many artistic coals in stockings, from the multifarious “Carol” film adaptations to the treacly holiday albums by singers who evince little Christmas spirit in their work the rest of the year and the annual parade of so-called inspirational books by celebrities. Christmas, after all, is a time of celebration, even if it goes no further than the checkout line.

The idea of the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s production of “A Christmas Story, the Musical!” (which opened November 28 and runs through January 3 at Spencer Theatre on the UMKC campus) is to offer a corollary production to its annual “A Christmas Carol.” The Dickens play has been a tradition at the Rep for twenty-nine years; Eric Rosen, the new artistic director, has been active in rethinking the Rep’s schedule, and like a painter re-hanging his canvas he was wise to look for another holiday play that might connect the theatergoer expectations of old for a holiday story with a new twist on the theme of family and giving.

By Steve Shapiro

The continuing renovation and transformation of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, from a staid institution clad in nineteenth-century architecture and led by early twentieth-century aesthetics, to a state-of-the-art twenty-first-century media-tropolis of computer screens, sleek-looking galleries, and shopping kiosks, reinforces the notion, at once classical and modernist, that how art is exhibited is as important as the art itself. From the conceptually futuristic space that is Steven Holl’s Bloch addition and the bounteous Hallmark endowment of its photography collection, to the recently opened American Art Wing and the yet-to-be-unveiled Egyptian Wing (due for Spring, 2010), the Nelson is providing thoughtful, theoretical, and thematic contexts for its contents.

The newly-opened American Indian Galleries, on the second floor, replace the modern and contemporary works that never quite fit in within the plain white walls—the raucous paintings and Dan Flavin fluorescent light tubes seemed jumbled together, like all the artifacts squeezed together floor-to-ceiling in Charles Foster Kane’s estate Xanadu at the end of “Citizen Kane.”

.By Steve Shapiro

We know so much about Charles Darwin; yet we know so little. His visage, that balding, bearded face with a serious mien, is as iconic as the one (supposed) portrait of Shakespeare.

It would be nice to think we can guess what he is contemplating, and why he is always frowning in photographs: perhaps because he knows what the world will be like after the publication of his book “On the Origin of Species.”

Like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Leaves of Grass,” published respectively in 1851 and 1855, when “Origin” was finally released in England by the prestigious publisher John Murray, in 1859, after a gestation period of more than twenty years, it proved to be the bombshell that both the Civil War novel and strange American poem were perceived to be, initially.

Steve Shapiro

The finale of “Palomino,” David Cale’s one-man show now running at The Kansas City Repertory Theatre, is really the beginning.

In ninety minutes, on a virtually empty stage, the playwright-actor-director takes the audience back and forth in time, from Central Park to a London publishing house to the shores of Malta. Like a model pacing up and down a runway in one outfit after another, Cale—using only his voice and his body and, most importantly, both his and our imaginations—puts himself into several characters, both male and female, without ever forgetting his performing self. Theater critics write about “breaking the fourth wall,” stepping off the stage, so to speak, that traditionally separates the artifice from the audience. Here, Cale welcomes the disappearance.

Essentially a monologue, “Palomino” deepens through the use not only of a multi-character “cast” but through Cale’s fully inhabiting each of them. Monologists such as Eric Bogosian and playwrights such as Alan Bennett, in his “Talking Heads” character monologues, usually do all the heavy lifting first: the play’s the thing, as Shakespeare put it; but the writing is the play.