In Incendies, the darkest secrets of a family and a country are uncovered. It’s a moving, nicely paced tale worthy of its Academy Award nomination as last year’s Best Foreign Language Film. I only wish director Denis Villeneuve had employed a bit more subtlety in his choices, so that the film’s final, shocking revelation felt less calculated.

The movie begins brilliantly, thanks largely to the soundtrack’s use of Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army.” As the mournful echoes and calibrated distortions of ..read more

There are so many ways one could approach a biography of fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent. The prodigy was hired by Christian Dior at 18 and took over the famed French haute couture house by 21. He was a cultural pioneer, an art collector, a lover, a shy, absorbed savant, a tortured man who forever longed for lost youth. L’amour fou, Pierre Thoretton’s documentary about the designer, focuses on Saint-Laurent’s long relationship to Pierre Bergés. Saint-Laurent met Bergés soon after the death of Dior, and he became for the designer a lover and a business manager, a confident, and a surrogate parent. The picture that emerges of Bergés in the movie is one of a cool-hearted, yet undeniably loyal companion. “I do not believe in the soul,” Bergés says at one point, and you wonder what kind of comfort this man could offer the troubled designer whose work reflected such a brilliant inner spark.

If the story line sounds familiar, it is because the relationship between Saint-Laurent and Bergés is remarkably similar to the relationship between another fashion designer, Valentino, and his long time lover, Giancarlo Giammetti, which Matt Tyrnauer brilliantly captures in his documentary, Valentino: The Last Emperor. As with the Italian designer, Bergés emerges as the man who kept Saint-Laurent’s life from unraveling, from running the business end of his fashion house to struggling through the designer’s drug and alcohol phases, not to mention a life-long bout of melancholy. L’amour fou tells us the story of Saint-Laurent’s life primarily through interviews with Bergés and lots of photo montages. And with the cagey Bergés as our guide, the view of Saint-Laurant and the relationship with Bergés is not quite sanitized, but it never feels particularly honest either.

To fill in the gaps in the story Bergés tells us, Thoretton tries to convey his impression of this love and life through the movie’s tone, and here he succeeds in creating an undeniably beautiful picture. There are long shots of street scenes, many panning shots through the couple’s luxurious apartments, and lingering views of their many works of art. The art collection is a major character here. After Saint-Laurent dies, Bergés decides to sell their art, which is a magnificent (an unthinkably valuable) collection that includes just about every major painter of the 20^th century. Bergés explains that if he had died, Saint-Laurent would never had sold the work. But then he never offers much of an explanation as to why he can so quickly and callously let go of their life. It just adds to the impenetrable aura that surrounds the calculating Bergés in this movie, which has zeroed in on a fascinating, complicated, and conflicted love story, but never quite finds a way to tell the whole tale.

Algernon Cadwallader/1994!/Snowing/Final Club (Lion’s Den): Two things that the very existence of this show disproves:

1. That there is no such thing as a Denton house show at this point in 2011.

2. That the endlessly touring underground act with complex emo tendencies is not only extinct, but incapable of still having a following.

Final Club is the only local band on the bill, and they sound like Crucifix compared to the three bands from Philadelphia. Though I’m not much for this style of melodic punk, these bands are usually good live and the crowd is usually better. The show invite did have one point of concern however:

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The sly punch line that is the title of Ann Glazer’s show at The Reading Room across from Fair Park seems sufficient enough a statement. “Summer Group Show” is a tongue-and-cheek jab at the slapdash exhibitions that take up gallery space during the slow hot months each year.  In an article printed out to accompany the show, Andrew Berardini , ArtSlant’s West Coast Editor, calls the artistic phenomenon “a ubiquitous and almost entirely useless animal that lumbers around every June through August to haphazardly stuffed galleries.”

The theme of the show, therefore, is themeless-ness, and Glazer’s disparate objects that hang about the Reading Room’s tiny space suggest it is a gallery theme that should perhaps be indulged more often. There’s a sumptuous, rust-colored velvet canvas, a framed t-shirt brandishing a cheeky slogan in Italian, and a gold leaf hung sculpture that plays off texture and shape – a bookish block embedded in a shimmering, rocky outcropping.

Above the art space’s reception desk there is a curious video piece depicting a woman in gypsy-like drapery, holding fabric flags, spinning in space and waiving her arms around like a tarmac aircraft director.   There is a cagey surrealism to the video, its fuzzy image is jumpy, clunky, and repetitious — the woman confined in both its frame and timelessness. It works as a metaphor the artist: the flamboyant orchestrator trapped by a fidelity to one’s own oeuvre. Only here the piece is one of the ways Glazer shakes off the restraints of career cohesiveness, setting aside her thread, shadowy collages, and evocative, feminine abstracts, for more eccentric doodles and dabbles. Think of it as a summer vacation: full of leisure and fresh air.

Image: Video still, New Becoming, 2010

Twenty-two images line the wall of Marty Walker Gallery, foggy, silvery alien landscapes: an iceberg adrift in the sea, craggy mountain ranges, the glowing surface of the moon. Ted Kincaid’s new work breaks from the wistful austerity of artist’s pristine cloudscapes with images that are grittier, dreamier. That the work in Every Doubt that Holds You Here looks like the mid-19^th century photographs of Gustave Le Gray or early films like Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) is every bit the point. This is an homage, of sorts, to photography and photographic process, made, we are told, without the use of any “photographic material.”

That revelation contains Kincaid’s conceptual kick, placing this works somewhere in the same theoretical realm as the work of another Marty Walker artist, Jeff Zilm, who emulsifies photographic medium to create monochromatic, suggestive canvases. Think of Kincaid as the inverse of that conceptual project, using non-photographic material to create immersive, decidedly unreal scenes which punch with the power of illusion and conjure up a palpable sense of removed-ness.

Image: Iceberg 616 2010,Digital Photograph printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Pearl 320 gsm

12×16”

Of the 70 amateur pianists competing for Van Cliburn glory, only 25 remain, reports Olin Chism in the Star-Telegram. There were a few surprises, with a few contestants that impressed not making the cut. Among those who did advance, race car designer Dominic Piers Smith.

Last summer a U.S. District Court ruled that Russia must return a collection of religious books and manuscripts to Chabad, a Jewish ministry based in New York City. Russia refused, and the ruling has prompted the country to cease all loans of art work in Russia to U.S. museums over fears that the United States will seize Russian loans as collateral for the Chabad works. That action has placed a number of planned exhibitions in limbo, including a planned show on Islamic art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It also left a Metropolitan Museum of Art show four Cezanne’s short.

Image via wikicommons.

Towards the back of the project room at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, light projects through the bullet-perforated skin of Hugo Garcia Urrutia’s monolithic gold cube, spattering a constellation of illuminated patterns across nearby walls. Garcia Urrutia’s work, “Making a Killing,” we are told by the artist and curator Charissa Terranova in a statement, is a reaction to Mexico’s drug related violence. A metaphor for the country, its punctured skin referencing the death of innocents caught in a spray of brutality, light erupting from it’s confines. Seen in this way, the gold cube presents a portrait of a culture once closed and complicit in secrecy, no longer able to contain the atrocities committed.

Formally, Garcia Urrutia’s large aluminum piece references Judd’s architectural cubes, but subverts the minimalist notion through the incorporation of light and gold, materials which we can take as symbolic references to spirituality and money. Cordoning off the interior light-emitting space with golden barriers, the work isolates the audience, denying entry and assigning the role of outside observer. We may only view the aftermath of the violence, a staccato pattern recorded into the skin of the cube, which simultaneously creates a series of voyeuristic peepholes from which to view the internal workings.

Conceptually, the piece investigates complex issues related to segregation of the commons, architecture as site for violence, and the contradiction inherent in forcing secrecy. However, the piece is too pretty to develop a gritty activism or prolonged indignant anger. More importantly the use of light (reminiscent of several World Trade Center proposals) references those lost victims, obliging “Making a Killing” to function as a memorial, trading outrage for remembrance.

“Did anyone bring a gun?” asked Heyd Fontenot, moderator of the “Shoot Your Mouth Off” panel discussion last Saturday evening. That’s probably a smart question to ask when one is in a state that has legalized the right to carry concealed handguns onto school grounds. No one was packing. No one even talked about muzzle velocity or modified ejection ports. Instead, the discussion moved immediately into more complex topics as panelist Noah Simblist discussed how architecture frames violence and the assertion of power through the positioning of weaponry. Discussion followed about the beautification of weapons (such as “Hello Kitty” designer guns), the artist/writer William S. Burroughs’s gun fetish, and the practice of collecting of “tough art” as the audience and panelists jointly navigated topics of power, violence, and cultural norms that aren’t so normal.

The panel was the verbal companion piece to the “Gun & Knife Show” co-curated by Fontenot and Web and held at CentralTrak. The art in the exhibit takes into account the fascination with guns and the ability of artists to re-contextualize the weaponry. Both the panel discussion and art show were an invitation to disrupt classic right/wrong notions about weapons, seeing them as both artwork and cultural icon in a region with a predominance of gun ownership.

Many audience members offered up stories, mentioning that they grew up with guns and art in the house. Which begs the question of how learned cultural behaviors replicate themselves, simultaneously furthering the appreciation of both weaponry and fine art in our society.

Here are this weekend’s gallery openings.

Images: Elliott McDowell, (left) Memories Over Rolls Royce, and (right) Angle Oak. Work at Afterimage.

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