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July 19, 2004
OGIC: Chicagocentric
- In The New Republic, Jed Perl calls the Art Institute of Chicago's new Seurat show a golden opportunity, but one that the AIC fumbled:"Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte" is the latest salute to the museum's crown jewel, and while the show's strengths do honor to the painting and to the city, the exhibition is very, very far from being an unadulterated success. Its failures speak volumes about what the people who run today's museums think the public wants--and how, perhaps, in the eighty years since La Grande Jatte came into the museum's collection, the people in charge at the Art Institute have shrunk their assumptions about what the public can absorb. A transcendent medium-sized exhibition has been nearly ruined by the museum's insistence on producing a multimedia extravaganza....
A great chance to educate the public has been botched in Chicago. For Seurat's studies for La Grande Jatte, seen in such dazzling profusion, tell a story of the workings of the imagination that anybody can understand without audio-visual assistance. The one thing that the Art Institute has been wise to include is an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper, a handout that is available as you enter the crucial phase of the show, which contains a reproduction of La Grande Jatte and a brief explanation of the way that the studies for the painting have been grouped in order to reflect, as best we can understand, the stages of Seurat's thinking. Walking around with this information sheet, people can begin to grasp Seurat's strenuous process of trial and error, and his arrival at the riveting vision of the final painting. One morning, I saw a woman and what I expect was her second- or third-grade daughter making their way around the room. The girl was picking out the changes, the shifts that Seurat made as he developed and honed his ideas. All it took were her eyes and her native intelligence. She didn't need a movie to help her compare a study of a figure to the figure in the painting, and she didn't need a simulated zoom-in to enable her to look at the texture of Seurat's paint strokes. By looking directly, by seeing things for herself, this girl was taking possession of the painting. The magic of creation is there for all to see, for all to embrace, if only the museum would let people get on with it.
Perl's review has much to say about Seurat's virtues as well as this particular show's failings. I'll try to go see the exhibit anyway; the painting is so iconic and ubiquitous here in Chicago that I think I stopped really seeing it years ago. It will be good to go and take a fresh look.
- Word Wars, the Scrabble documentary whose directors I interviewed last January, is finally hitting Chicago. It opens at Facets Cinémathèque this Friday for a week, plus in a matinee screening each of the following two Saturdays (July 31 and August 7). Go, go, go! I finally caught the movie myself last weekend at Cambridge's Brattle, incidentally the former stomping grounds of the lovely Cinetrix, who apparently still haunts the place--after the screening I spilled out of the theater into Harvard Square and ran directly into her while still squinting dazedly in the sunlight. I'm fairly sure she wasn't just a figment of my sun-drunk imagination, as she, the 'Fesser, and I later successfully met up to get, um, drink-drunk. (There should be more room in life for matinees, and post-matinee squinting; already intoxicated by the movie, if it was any good at all, you swoon and swerve in the surprising light. It's a minor, but excellent, brand of euphoria.)
I loved the movie and, yes, I would say that even if it hadn't been made by one of my oldest friends. It's a slice of a life you've probably never imagined. The obvious comparison is with Spellbound, and what the Word Wars characters lack in youthful charm, they more than make up for in eccentricity and passion. They're there by active choice, and the film makes clear that professional Scrabble is not a life you choose for any dispassionate reason. There's no percentage in it, yet the competition is cutthroat. What the main characters go through may fit many viewers' definition of suffering. And yet they're happy, in their way, and the most unguarded of them are especially fascinating. Marlon Hill in particular, from the mean streets of Baltimore, steals the show. Here is a man who will put to rest forever any illusions you may have that this is a game solely for introverts or nerds. There are many kinds of intelligence; part of what's fascinating about Word Wars is how it shows you that even within a group of people with one particular, ridiculously specialized talent, there is an enormously wide range of ways of being good. Marlon, having the most unorthodox ways, establishes the range. And, well, the guy's a star. Did I say it already? Go, go, go!
- This greenest of cities has a brand-new park, which I haven't yet seen up close. From the pictures, it seems to me that the giant mirrored jelly bean is the pièce de résistance. I look forward to seeing myself in it in the very near future, and will certainly report back on the experience.
Posted July 19, 2004 6:16 AM
