I did not become aware until after the fact that Canyonlands National Park, at a far remove from any of the parts that we managed to visit last week, includes
The Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon, where one can find the mysterious fellows pictured to the right. They and the entire Canyonlands region -- including the Goosenecks of the San Juan River, inadvertently omitted from yesterday's inventory -- feature prominently in Godfrey Reggio/Philip Glass' 1983 Koyaanisqatsi, which turned up as the subject of a post by AC Douglas while I was out.
The Alex Ross New Yorker piece on film music to which ACD links is terrific. In addition to the Koyaanisqatsi discussion, it includes an appreciation of Michael Giacchino's score for ABC Television's Lost, a score that demonstrates how much can be done with a very few notes when they are just the right ones. Giacchino's range as a composer of dramatic music is impressive: he also contributed the best James Bond score never used in a Bond movie to Brad Bird/Pixar's The Incredibles
, which should rank high on any list of that film's seemingly innumerable pleasures.
ACD offers Ross' essay -- I suspect he would offer much of Ross' work, including his weblog, The Rest Is Noise -- in refutation to "all those mutterings and auguries of doom I read recently in Big Media
about the death of the professional arts critic in our new
technology-created, democratic journalistic era in which anyone with
access to the Internet can be an arts critic . . . ." (I hopped atop that particular hobby-horse, as expressed rather sloppily by the Los Angeles Times, here.)
The problem is not that top-notch professional arts critics have disappeared -- Alex Ross is only one of a comfortingly long list of examples of professionals writing regularly and strongly, even for major publications, on arts-related subjects -- as it is that their influence on the larger populace appears to have diminished. The perception that "critics don't matter," whether right or wrong, drives publishing decisions and in many cases has led to cutbacks in the space allotted to those critics, no matter how talented they may be, or limitations on the type of writing they are asked to contribute. When is the last time anyone (other than perhaps Robert Hughes on the visual arts) published well-written, erudite criticism in Time magazine, for instance, a publication that formerly at least maintained the appearance that it was making an effort to provide something other than celebrity puffery in the "back of the book"? The New Yorker, despite being more interested in politics these days than in the arts, flouts the trend somewhat, but do any of the New Yorker critics of today "make a difference" in the way that, say, Pauline Kael and Penelope Gilliat did with their film writing in the 70s? Probably not, except to the already converted, e.g., those who already care a good deal about the sort of music that Ross writes about and who actively follow his writing because they know in advance that he will deliver the goods more often than not. So, as good as Alex Ross is and as prominent a platform as the New Yorker provides for him, I am not so convinced as ACD that this single example entirely debunks the general grumping over the Sorry Lot of Professional Critics.
And in any case, those Canyonlands sure are impressive. As is Koyaanisqatsi.
~~~
UPDATE [06/23/05]: No sooner did I invoke Robert Hughes above as an example of "well-written, erudite criticism" than up popped a case in point: a fine Hughes piece in the Guardian on the new Richard Serra installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Hughes takes as his premise the modest suggestion that Serra is "not only the best sculptor alive, but the only great one at work anywhere in the early 21st century", and proceeds to support that assertion along these lines:
Now 65, Serra has embarked on a magnificent, productive maturity. Put in the simplest terms - ones that Serra might find too simple, but never mind - his achievement has been to give fabricated steel the power and density, the emotional address to the human body, the sense of empathy and urgency and liberation, that once belonged only to bronze and stone, but now no longer does. He has achieved a very deep synthesis, and it may not matter whether others follow him. Once you are in the enormous Guggenheim gallery which these sculptures fill, once you are absorbed in their space and pacing out their convolutions, you feel suddenly free - far from the dead zone of mass-media quotation, released from all that vulgar, tedious postmodernist litter and twitter, from the creepy posturings, tired bad-boy claptrap and squalid sanctimony that characterise PoMo and BritArt. It is quite a good feeling - rather like the old days, one's inner fogey is tempted to say. The work is as new as new could be, but when you are experiencing it you may also think of an 18th-century definition of the spirit of classical sculpture: 'A noble inwardness,' wrote Johann Winckelmann, 'a calm grandeur.' Eine edle Einfalt, eine stille Grösse. Without the white gods, of course.
Elsewhere, Hughes cites Saint-Gaudens and Rodin, Bernini and Louis XIV, and an unnamed Greek philosopher. He even offers some high-art gossip concerning Serra and Bilbao's architect Frank Gehry (which I hope does not offend ACD, a known and serious Gehry partisan):
The gallery [Serra's installation] occupies is the biggest in the museum - a vast room, some 430 ft long by 80 ft wide. Paintings hung in it before, and they usually looked diminished by Gehry's architecture - sometimes to the point of silliness or near-invisibility. But Serra's work dominates Gehry's space like a rhinoceros in a parlour. (There's said to be considerable animosity between the two men; if that's so, one certainly knows, in this case, who the winner is.)
Above all, Hughes has the technical skills and the gift for tactile language (also apparent in Alex Ross) to make the reader "see" Serra's work, and to instill the desire to see Serra's work:
***The space inside, the gap between the walls, narrows, widens, breathes in and out (if you can speak of massive iron "breathing", which in Serra's work you can) and eventually rewards you with an inner chamber, from which you have to follow the same route out. At all points these constructions are open to the upper air, the gallery roof (and hence the architecture of the gallery) or the sky. But you can see out of them only by looking up, which doesn't really help you locate yourself. You would think it would be claustrophobic, terrifying, to be in the narrow curving slot between these giant planes, to be unable to see what lies ahead. Indeed, the fear of being crushed like a bug on an anvil has always been present in responses to Serra's work, a bass vibrato at the edge of consciousness. But you have to trust him, or lose the work in its entirety. There is just no way of experiencing these pieces by looking from the outside, or in photos, or on video: the initial view of them from the balcony above the Arcelor gallery is impressively dramatic, yet it's the merest pipe-opener to what unfolds close up and at floor level.
Lovely. Read the whole thing, whether you are interested in Serra, interested in fine critical writing or, better yet, interested in both. (Link via ArtsJournal.)
P.S., I had thought for a moment that I might draw a full-circle connection between Richard Serra and Philip Glass. Alas, my memory tricked me: the documentary film for which Glass composed his North Star pieces back in 1977 -- the first Glass music I ever heard -- was not about Serra, but instead about another sculptor, Mark di Suvero.
[Incidental and deeply pointless music trivia: the title piece from "North Star" was later appropriated and worked into the finale of "Platinum" by, of all people, Mike "Tubular Bells" Oldfield. Odd.]
