Sunday, November 15, 2009
Arts & Extras: Writing on the walls is inaugural installation
Arts & Extras column
Mike Allen, arts columnist
Recent columns
- 'Ophelia' marks Black History Month
- Art Council's updated website reflects mission to be 'inclusive'
- Metal sculptor who died too young gets retrospective
Arts&Extras blog
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Take a glance at the overpass wall across from Norah's Cafe at the Taubman Museum of Art, and you might assume an ambitious vandal got his freak on.
Take a closer look, and you might notice the black graffiti scrawls are executed with surprising clarity and precision, depicting subjects just a tad highbrow for the stereotypical tagger.
A man in a business suit tells a beggar with a cup, "Less is more!" Under the heading "Global Warming," an ice cream stand has the word "Ice" crossed out, selling only "Cream."
Two arms are raised side by side. One, with a shaved armpit, is captioned "Fashion." One with an unshaved armpit is captioned "Freedom."
In an arresting, wordless image, a woman in a burqa regards a white wedding dress and veil through a shop window.
The drawings on the overpass wall are in fact a museum exhibit, drawn in late September by Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi, expected to stay on the wall through March.
The museum has intended from the outset to use that wall for rotating outdoor murals. Perjovschi's inaugurates the space.
His temporary installation is similar to a larger set of drawings he created in 2007 on a 10-meter-high wall in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Perjovschi was the first artist to draw on that surface.
"I had to draw in front of the public (no way to isolate the space) and it become more like a drawing performance," he wrote in an e-mail.
He's done similar installations on walls, chalkboards and glass, at other galleries in New York and throughout Europe.
His drawings often contain political commentary. He tries to condense his messages into a single frame, he said.
The individual drawings on the wall across from the Taubman each hold some sort of message, but as a whole they're meant to convey how complex, contradictory and dynamic the contemporary world is, he wrote.
Perjovschi, 48, was born in 1961, when the Berlin Wall was erected. "I am still standing," he writes.
Growing up in a society under the control of the Soviet Union, art was "conservative, traditional and almost entirely a propaganda tool," he wrote. He began studying art at age 10, but eventually became tired of art after 12 years of painting nothing but still lifes. His interest was renewed when he broke into drawing, he said.
In 1989 the Iron Curtain collapsed. Perjovschi wrote that after a year spent demonstrating in the streets, he began working with several newly founded newspapers, including 22, named after the Dec. 22 date of the end of the communist regime. Now free to use his art for political activism, Perjovschi also benefited from direct public feedback, and his work became "more direct more simple more to the point."
In 1997 he took his cartoons from the newspapers to the exhibition halls, and in 1999 he filled the floor of the Romanian pavilion at an international art exhibit in Venice with his drawings.
"Since then I never stopped drawing," he writes. "I never painted again."
'Othello' shoots hoops
Planting Shakespeare in a modern setting is nothing new.
Ian McKellen memorably played "Richard III" as a fascist dictator in Nazi-esque military uniform in the 1995 film of the same name. A year later, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes played Romeo and Juliet as the scions of two corporate dynasties feuding with guns.
The Department of the Theatre & Cinema at Virginia Tech is offering its own update of one of the Bard's greatest tragedies, "Othello," re-imagining the brooding Moor as the captain of a basketball team. Acting instructor Michael Anthony Williams plays the title role, and assistant professor Bob McGrath directs.
The jazzed-up production also features innovative lighting, projected images and a musical score composed by Haitian-American classical musician Daniel Bernard Roumai, interwoven through the play by a live disc jockey.
Performances are at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. today, and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday in Squires Haymarket Theatre at Virginia Tech. Tickets are $9, $7 for seniors and students. For more information, call 231-5615 or visit www.theatre.vt.edu.
Link in New York
The O. Winston Link Museum will unveil "The New York Prints," rarely seen photographs that Link took in New York City in the 1940s. The exhibit opens Thursday at 6 p.m. with a cocktail party fundraiser featuring music by the Cyrus Pace Trio. Tickets $25.
The photos will remain on display until Dec. 18. For more information, call 982-5465 or visit www.linkmuseum.org.
'9/11 Revisited'
Virginia Western Community College is exhibiting photographs by Roanoke native Wes Wilmer taken at Ground Zero as Wilmer did volunteer work there in the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The exhibit will be on display in the Humanities Building Art Gallery until Dec. 11.
For more information, call 857-6070 or visit www.virginiawestern.edu/humanities/artgallery/
In the Arts & Extras blog
The Taubman celebrates its first anniversary this coming week. In my blog, I'll take a closer look at the new art exhibits the museum opens Friday. Come check it out at: blogs.roanoke.com/arts
