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      ‘White Balls on Walls’ Review: Time With the Gatekeepers

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      The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam becomes a somewhat flimsy case study for fine-art diversity and inclusion conversations in this documentary.From its tub-like exterior to its gallery walls and vast conference room, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is awash in white. But the Dutch documentary “White Balls on Walls” concerns a different whiteness (and maleness) endemic in one of the Netherland’s cultural institutions. The movie’s cheeky title comes from a protest that the arts-activist collective the Guerrilla Girls (or an offshoot) staged outside the museum in 1995.The filmmaker Sarah Vos began following the museum’s director, Rein Wolfs, and his staff in 2019 as they set out to address diversity and inclusion. The museum’s slogan, “Meet the icons of modern art,” had been met with scrutiny of the who-decides-what-is-iconic variety. Vos tracks those efforts through the height of the pandemic and the social justice demands wrought by the killing of George Floyd. There will be some awkward social distancing and a doubling down on Wolfs’s sense that the museum must include a richer array of artists, welcome a more diverse demographic and, while it’s at it, hire more people of color.With access to behind-the-scenes processes, the documentary can be instructive about the work of changing legacy institutions, but also wincingly cautionary as Wolfs, his administrators and curators get tangled up in numbers and nomenclature. (“‘Gender balance,’ that sounds nicely diverse,” a woman says in an early meeting.) Their internal conversations — about colonialism, gender and Dutch identity — become more nuanced when people of color arrive. Charl Landvreugd, the museum’s head of research and curatorial practice, and the curators Vincent van Velsen and Yvette Mutumba, offer that nuance and give context to the museum’s quandaries. But even they don’t always pierce the hermetically sealed feel of the documentary.White Balls on WallsNot rated. In English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Rolf Harris, Disgraced British Entertainer, Dies at 93

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      His career as a musician and a painter over six decades ended abruptly when he was convicted of sexually abusing teenage girls.Rolf Harris, the Australian-born entertainer whose decades-long career on British television ended in disgrace after he was convicted of sexually abusing teenage girls, died on May 10 at his home in Berkshire, England. He was 93.His family announced the death in a statement released on Tuesday. The PA news agency reported that a death certificate gave the cause as neck cancer and “frailty of old age.”Mr. Harris’s career on British television spanned 60 years, but it collapsed in 2013 when he was arrested and charged with a total of 12 attacks on four young girls from 1968 to 1986. He was later sentenced to five years and nine months in prison. At the time of the offenses, the girls ranged in age from 8 to 19, although his conviction for the assault on the 8-year-old girl, an autograph hunter, was later overturned.One of Mr. Harris’s victims was a close friend of his own daughter, Bindi. He was convicted of abusing the girl over the course of six years, beginning when she was 13.“Your reputation lies in ruins, you have been stripped of your honors, but you have no one to blame but yourself,” Judge Nigel Sweeney told Mr. Harris at his sentencing in 2014.“You have shown no remorse for your crimes at all,” he added.Mr. Harris died without apologizing to his victims.The son of Welsh immigrants, Agnes Margaret and Cromwell Harris, Mr. Harris was born on March 30, 1930, in a suburb of Perth, Australia. He moved to Britain when he was 22 — with, he later said, “nothing but a load of self-confidence” — to study at the City and Guilds of London Art School. He made his first appearance on the BBC in 1953, drawing cartoons on a children’s television show.That kicked off a storied career that included everything from international hit songs to lighthearted television shows on which he would demonstrate his skills as a quick-fire painter (think Britain’s version of Bob Ross).“Can you tell what it is yet?” became his famous catchphrase as he brought the canvases to life. It also became the title of his autobiography, published in 2001.A 1964 album by Mr. Harris. He had several hit records in Britain and Australia, and his “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” reached No. 3 in the United States.JP Roth CollectionOne of Britain’s best-known artists, Mr. Harris was even commissioned in 2005 to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II for her 80th birthday — the whereabouts of which remains a great source of mystery. It was previously voted the British public’s second-favorite portrait of the queen, but it received a notably colder reception from critics.“I was as nervous as anything,” Mr. Harris told the British press in 2008, describing the two sittings he had with the monarch. “I was in a panic.”As a musician, he was known for his use of a colorful array of instruments, including the didgeridoo and the so-called wobble board — an instrument he invented. He featured it in his best-known song, “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” a novelty number about an Australian stockman’s dying wishes, which he wrote in 1957.His 1963 rerecording of the song, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, catapulted him to stardom in the United States. That same year, he recorded a version with the Beatles for a BBC radio show — the names of each band member playfully incorporated into the lyrics. (“Don’t ill-treat me pet dingo, Ringo.”)The song’s original fourth verse courted controversy because of its use of the word “Abo,” a derogatory slang term for Aboriginal Australians. The verse was included on Mr. Harris’s first recording of the song but omitted from later versions, and he later expressed regret about the lyrics.His career ultimately ended in disgrace a decade ago when he was one of several older media personalities arrested as part of Operation Yewtree, a British police investigation arising from the sexual abuse scandal involving the television presenter Jimmy Savile. Among the others convicted as part of the investigation were Britain’s best-known publicist, Max Clifford, and Stuart Hall, a former BBC broadcaster.After Mr. Harris was convicted in 2014, he was stripped of the honors he had been awarded throughout his career, and reruns of his television shows were taken off the air. He was released on parole in 2017 after serving three years in prison, after which he sank into a reclusive life at his family home in Bray, Berkshire, a quaint village west of London on the banks of the River Thames. Bray is said to have more millionaires than any small town in Britain.Mr. Harris’s survivors include his daughter, Bindi Harris, and his wife, Alwen Hughes. The two married in 1958 after meeting in art school, and she and his daughter stuck with him throughout his trial and prison term.After Mr. Harris’s sentencing in 2014, Judge Sweeney depicted him as an offender who had manipulated his fame.“You took advantage of the trust placed in you because of your celebrity status,” he said.Mr. Harris’s lawyer at the time, Sonia Woodley, pleaded with the judge to be lenient because of his age.“He is already on borrowed time,” she said. More

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      A Queer Punk Vaudevillian’s Surreal Take on ‘Titanic’

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      In some ways, turning the movie “Titanic” into a farce about climate change makes a lot of narrative sense. Instead of an iceberg — which has melted, of course — the ship goes down because it hits a mountain of underwater garbage.In other ways, “Titanic Depression,” a new multimedia performance, could only have come from the madcap brain of Dynasty Handbag, the queer vaudevillian with punk origins and questionable taste in unitards.The 1997 movie was a blockbuster, sure, but Dynasty Handbag’s vision may be even more epic than James Cameron’s. Clad mostly in frilly underwear, with a recalcitrant therapist on speed-text, she’s a bawdy version of Rose (Kate Winslet’s character in the movie). Jack, the Leonardo DiCaprio love interest, is played by an octopus, who sneaks aboard the vessel disguised as a fanciful hat. Billy Zane’s villainous snob is replaced by a dildo in a black loafer. A camel and a microscopic tardigrade make cameos. Mark Zuckerberg is there. The whole thing is a metaphor about the seeming futility of fighting industrial capitalism and impending environmental doom, but it is also: a hilarious romp! A sexcapade, with consent forms! A self-own, with a pause for meditation — about death! And Dynasty Handbag, the alter ego of the artist Jibz Cameron, inhabits all the parts.Cameron, 48, has been working various stages in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles as Dynasty Handbag for over 20 years, building a fan base both at august cultural institutions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at underground freak spectaculars.Jibz Cameron as Dynasty Handbag, in rehearsals. The project “just kept getting more money and more attention,” she said. “And then I kept feeling like it had to be bigger and bigger.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times“Jibz is able to address all kinds of issues — whether it’s body dysmorphia or childhood trauma or climate change — with the most hysterical absurdity and in ways that you would never expect,” said Ed Patuto, director of audience engagement at the Broad in Los Angeles, which programmed and commissioned her work. “She’s a great performer, in that you never see her rehearsals — it looks completely spontaneous.”“Weirdo Night,” her popular, long-running monthly variety show in Los Angeles, which she summed up as a “live ‘Muppet Show’ meets demented queer ‘Star Search,’” has become a Mecca for the surreal. “The ‘Weirdo Night’ community is freak church and Dynasty Handbag is the weirdo priest,” said Sarah Sherman, the breakout “Saturday Night Live” star, who has performed there. (The series was the subject of a well-received 2021 Sundance documentary.)“Titanic Depression,” which was commissioned by the Brooklyn cultural venue Pioneer Works in 2017 and will premiere there on Saturday and Sunday, is Cameron’s most ambitious and multidisciplinary project yet; it involves animation, video, soundscapes, singing, history and dance. It arrives on the heels of her Guggenheim Fellowship, a lot for an artist who refers to her crew as “dirtbag queers.”As her vision for “Titanic” grew, “it just kept getting more money and more attention,” Cameron said, with an avant-gardist’s note of surprise. “And then I kept feeling like it had to be bigger and bigger.”“What keeps it fresh for me is knowing that I can just make myself something to do, if I want to do it,” she added, on a break from rehearsals near her home in Los Angeles last week, in a studio where she also takes punk aerobics. “I definitely trust that it is what it wants to be.”Her instincts are being recognized all over: She will have visual art in “Made in L.A.,” the Hammer Museum’s biennial this fall; a comedy album, on the artist Seth Bogart’s Wacky Wacko label, is also forthcoming.But even among performance artists — not exactly a conformist bunch — Cameron’s alchemy of comedy, art, music, theater and fashion stands out for actually delivering on its lunacy.“Jibz is a force of nature,” said Jack Black, the actor and musician, adding that he and his wife, Tanya Haden, “were completely blown away” when they first saw Dynasty Handbag. “We were laughing uncontrollably,” he wrote in an email. “It felt like a hallucinogenic experience.” Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWith a sharp jawline, an askew wig and features that contort into a bouquet of disdain, Cameron plays Dynasty as an alternate-universe star, whose aesthetic is “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” crossed with a minor ’80s Aaron Spelling crime drama (lately she’s been partial to “Hart to Hart”), “but covered in goo, and a lesbian,” she said.One of those inspirations, Paul Reubens — Pee-wee Herman himself — was impressed by her character work. “To a certain degree, she seems kind of undefinable,” he said. “You have to see it; you can’t explain it very well. And that in itself seems like an incredible thing to have going for yourself.”The show, originally developed with the artist and technologist Sue-C, and presented as part of the New York Live Arts festival Planet Justice, is performed with a video backdrop; our heroine is live onstage, and everyone else is animated, mostly from Cameron’s own drawings, and sometimes with her face.At a recent rehearsal in Brooklyn, Cameron and a team of her collaborators — including her co-writer Amanda Verwey, and the visual director, Mariah Garnett, who is Cameron’s romantic partner — were working through a scene. À la Rose and Jack, Dynasty trails the octopus through gilded-age state rooms — generated partly by Dall-E, the image A.I., because, Cameron explained, that makes them visibly off-kilter, like Dynasty herself. In the bowels of the ship, they find a throbbing dance party. (Cue techno beats, not fiddle.) Cameron choreographed a wiggly duet with her cephalopod lover.“Jibz is a force of nature,” said Jack Black, the actor and musician, adding that when he and his wife first saw Dynasty Handbag, it “felt like a hallucinogenic experience.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesA lot of the hourlong show is this loopy, until it gets to what David Everitt Howe, the Pioneer Works curator who commissioned the project, called “the bonkers death sequence.” A literal meditation, it underscores how consumerist greed led to the tragedy then, and to the vast trouble we’re in now.“It was such a tonal shift,” he said. “It’s dark. I remember I laughed uncomfortably, but I think it’s powerful, too. It makes the silliness stronger.”Jibra’ila Cameron, known as Jibz since childhood, grew up scrappy and poor in Northern California, with glimpses of creative freedom. A performing arts summer camp run by Wavy Gravy, the hippie clown and a friend of her parents, “totally saved my life as a kid,” she said.Her family life was volatile, though, and she left home at 15 or so, bumming around the Bay Area. Though she hadn’t graduated from high school, she was accepted at the San Francisco Art Institute on the strength of some Edward Gorey-style comics she drew. There, she was introduced to performance art and began making videos and joined bands. “I would just kind of freak out onstage, play the keyboard,” she said. (One of the groups was an all-female post-punk act called Dynasty; when it split up, she kept the name, tacking on Handbag — “I always thought the word handbag was really funny.”)“I feel like what I want to evoke with this is making something out of nothing — this tiny hope, survivability,” Cameron said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLater, hoping to become an actor, she studied at a theater conservatory. She had already embodied Dynasty Handbag, who debuted at Ladyfest in San Francisco in 2002, and her look remains remarkably the same: a misguided take on femininity, a studied failure of aesthetics. “She’s wearing tights, but they’re underneath a bathing suit,” Everitt Howe noted. “It’s all layered wrong.”Her quixotic clarity has influenced a younger generation of artists, like Sherman. “Jibz gave me the best piece of advice ever — after seeing me perform with all my props and costumes and gadgets and gizmos, she said, ‘You don’t need to WORK so hard, you’re funny! You’re ENOUGH!’” Sherman wrote. “I really took that to heart.”Cameron is not related to the “Titanic” director James Cameron, but he’s in the show, alongside industrialists like Benjamin Guggenheim, who “made his money in the mining and smelting businesses,” Dynasty Handbag says, punctuating her monologue about him with fart and bomb sounds. The disembodied voice of Guggenheim, who actually died aboard the Titanic, responds: “How dare you, I gave you a Guggenheim in 2022 and you wouldn’t be making this ridiculous show without me!”Cameron was still working out the ending for “Titanic Depression” last week, conjuring a moment out of a discarded plastic straw, a Lou Reed song and a gown made of garbage.“I feel like what I want to evoke with this is making something out of nothing — this tiny hope, survivability,” she told her crew. “People make music no matter where they are, what socioeconomic class. I get to come out in my showstopper outfit — that’s the showbiz part I really like. And then it gets weird.” More

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      Matthew Barney, Back in the Game

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      The hit, 45 years ago, shook up the world of football. Then, just as quickly, people moved on. But not Darryl Stingley, the receiver for the New England Patriots who bore the head-on charge by Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders. Stingley was rendered quadriplegic. Tatum, a defender known as “The Assassin,” notoriously never apologized.The artist Matthew Barney was an 11-year-old in Idaho at the time and remembers the incident from constant slow-motion replays on television. He was just getting into the sport seriously himself, and the Tatum-Stingley collision, though shocking, didn’t stop him. Violence was inculcated in football training, he recalled. It was also addictive.“That was my gateway, feeling that blow to the head and what that feels like in your body,” Barney said in an interview in March while editing “Secondary,” his new five-channel video installation that takes that 1978 event as its point of departure. He relished practice drills where he and other boys were ordered to slam into each other at top speed, he said. “You’d walk away, and you’re seeing stars.”Barney became an elite high-school quarterback, but he changed course during his years at Yale University, emerging from there in 1989 into the New York art world, where he found near-instant success. Physical duress was immediately salient in his work, from the “Drawing Restraint” projects in which, for instance, he would harness himself and move along a gallery’s walls and ceiling, attempting to draw on the wall.Football served as a prompt in the “Jim Otto Suite,” which Barney made in 1991-92, one of the early works that established his distinctive approach to combining performance, video and sculpture. Its inspiration was Otto, a Raiders player whose numerous injuries led his body to be loaded with prosthetic materials. Otto’s story collapsed resilience and destruction, and artistically opened performance and sculpture horizons.Ted Johnson, left, and Wally Cardona in “Secondary.”via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesBut the sport itself would recede in Barney’s work, engulfed by countless other themes — sexual differentiation, reincarnation, cars, sewers and excrement, among many others — and the epic scale and baroque staging of his “Cremaster Cycle” (1994-2002) and “River of Fundament” (2014) films. (Metrograph, a movie theater in Manhattan, is showing the “Cremaster” films this month and next.)With “Secondary,” which is open through June 25, Barney is tugging at a loose end that goes back to his childhood. From a place of physical and intellectual maturity, he’s scrutinizing a sport — and a country, because football is quintessentially American — that may or may not have changed. Now 56, he is taking stock of himself and an uneasy nation.“There’s a way that the violence in our culture has become so exposed everywhere you look,” he said. “I think my relationship to that legacy is by way of my experience on the football field. I wanted to make a piece that looks at that, in more ways than one.”The new work is concise for Barney. It runs one hour, the clock time of a football game. Six performers, out of a principal cast of 11, enact the roles of players in the 1978 game, including Barney as Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. It was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, near the East River. And it is showing to the public now in that very venue — his final use of the space before he moves to a nearby facility.Last fall and winter, the studio served as a simulated football field, a movement lab and a film set. When I visited, the principal performers — including David Thomson, who plays Stingley and is the project’s movement director, and Raphael Xavier, as Tatum — were running through some of the episodes that tell the story abstractly, in an indirect sequence.“I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment,” said David Thomson, left, who plays the former Patriots receiver in “Secondary,” while Barney, right, plays Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThere were weird things going on, too. Additional performers around the sideline wore the all-black costumes of devoted Raiders fans, walking around like camp horror figures; some were actors, but others were members of the Raiders’ New York City fan club. Some were being filmed inside a trench that was dug into the studio floor, exposing pipes, dirt and water.An artist’s studio, Barney said, has traits of the stadium. “It’s kind of the organizing body for this story,” he said, adding: “I wanted my working space to be a character.”Digging the trench, he said, revealed decaying pipes and how the tide floods and recedes under the buildings. “I wanted that infrastructure to be exposed, both as a manifestation of the broken spine of Stingley, but also as crumbling infrastructure within my studio, within the city of New York,” he said.For all its allusions, “Secondary” — the title refers to the back line of defenders on the football field, cornerbacks and safeties whose job is to shadow the wide receivers and break up any passing play — holds to the Tatum-Stingley incident as its narrative and moral core.Stingley, right, was left paralyzed after Tatum hit him in a 1978 game.Ron Riesterer/Sporting News, via Getty ImagesIt is rich and also tragic material. Stingley died in 2007 at 55; Tatum, 61, died three years later. All his life after the hit, Stingley wanted an apology that never came. Tatum argued that the hit was just part of the job, even if he also boasted that his style of play pushed the line. Since then a flood of research has confirmed the sport’s toll. Stabler, whom Barney plays in “Secondary,” contributed to this knowledge posthumously when his brain was found to show advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.I asked if Barney, the former quarterback, had come to worry about his own health. “Honestly, yeah,” he said. He was glad, he added, that he stopped playing when he did.“Secondary” has a staccato format, amplified by its staging: A jumbotron-like overhead device shows one video channel on three screens, while four other channels run on monitors around the studio. The hit is evoked early, but much of the subsequent action returns to buildup — players warming up, fans getting hyped. The play sequences make up roughly the final third.“Secondary” was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, and it is now on view to the public there.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThe point was never a literal treatment, said Thomson, the movement director and Barney’s close collaborator on the project. “This isn’t a docudrama,” he said. “I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment.”Still, Thomson said, from studying the real-life athletes, he distilled traits that informed how he worked with the actors who portray them. Stingley, he said, was earnest. Tatum, angry. Grogan, technical. Each trait, he said, became “a touchstone one goes back to without too many flourishes, and see what resonates from that place.”In their research, Barney and Thomson read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football highlights and practice reels. Video of the hit — which came in a preseason game, with no competitive stakes — is grainy and sparse. The camera follows the ball past Stingley’s outstretched arms, so that the hit takes place at the edge of the frame. There were not dozens of camera angles available like today.David Thomson holds Ted Johnson aloft in a scene from “Secondary.” Play sequences make up roughly the final third of the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesIn their research, Barney and David Thomson, the project’s movement director, read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football footage.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesThis opened space for improvisation, and for Barney to introduce sculptural props that the players negotiate. (Barney has always stated he is a sculptor first and plans for these works to be shown in future exhibitions.)Xavier, the dancer who plays Tatum, had to contend with a pile of wet clay dumbbells that distended and broke as he carried them. “I’ve worked with props before, but they were solid,” he said. “But the clay was alive.” It forced him, he said, to locate vulnerability, even tenderness, inside a character that he remembered from his own childhood as an aggressive, even mean, football player.Indeed, the core players in “Secondary” are middle-aged men negotiating the memory of the culture they grew up in — and of their own bodies. Even stylized, the football movements involved in the piece are not instinctive or easy ones for men in their 50s and 60s.Barney “particularly wanted older bodies, which I appreciated,” Thomson said. “What are the limitations that those bodies hold that may have a different resonance, a different visual narrative?”But “Secondary” enfolds other perspectives as it gestures toward a broader, contemporary American social landscape. The referees are a mixed-gender crew. Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a composer, experimental vocalist and member of the San Carlos Apache Nation, delivers an extremely deconstructed version of the national anthem.Jacquelyn Deshchidn, center, is featured in “Secondary,” flanked by, from left, Jeffrey Gavett, Kyoko Kitamura and Isabel Crespo Pardo, who play referees in the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta Cervantes“As an Indigenous person, it was something that I was excited to take on,” Deshchidn said. They became drawn, too, to the work’s environmental aspect, spending breaks on set staring into the damp trench. “It brought up imagery of bones and burial, and repatriation work — the way there are institutions truly built on top of our bones.”Barney is an art-world celebrity (whose fame only grew during his more than decade-long relationship with the Icelandic pop artist Björk), but he prefers a low profile. On set, he cut a workaday presence with his close-shaven look under a cap. Performers in “Secondary” said his work ethic was intense but his manner open. While some people on the project are his longtime collaborators, like the composer Jonathan Bepler, many are new to his world.There is a sense with “Secondary” that Barney is turning a page — certainly with the studio move, after some 15 years at that site, but in some private way, too. When I asked if he was feeling his age — our age, as we are contemporaries — he said yes.“Letting go of being a young person is a big relief,” Barney said.Camila Falquez for The New York Times“In a good way,” he added. “Letting go of being a young person is a big relief.”Compared with his earlier work, “Secondary” strikes a more concise and collaborative note. “It’s more connected to the world,” he said. “It’s a piece that’s thinking through the environment within which it was made. In my 20s, I was trying to figure out ways of assigning a material language for what was inside me. This piece is different that way.”“Secondary” may take its cue from 1978 and invite its players into a kind of memory work through their bodies — but the work’s structure, with its emphasis on the buildup to the bad thing everyone knows is coming, energizes it with premonition.It ends in an elegiac vein, the final shots widening to the city. “It felt crucial to pan away from the specific to the general,” Barney said. “As much as the studio is a kind of micro frame, there’s a larger one that is the city and country that we live in. I want there to be some kind of legibility to read those different scales — for them all to be in there.” More

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      ‘The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons’ Review

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      A new documentary explores the artist’s sly conceptual works, and what it means when white people try to own something Black.The title of this new documentary about the artist David Hammons is a mouthful: “The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons.” It’s playing at Film Forum, and I don’t envy whoever has to make it fit the marquee. But they should figure that out because the title feels crucial to the aim of this movie, a sly, toasty, piquant consideration of Hammons’s conceptual art, the way it mocks and eludes easy ownership. Which is to say: the way his art is aware of — the way it’s often about — the stakes for Black people navigating the straits of the market.The movie has all the trappings of a serious nonfiction assessment: scholars, critics, curators and luminous comrades speaking to the humor, funk, atmosphere and texture of the Hammons experience, the acid and ingenuity, the bang of it. The way only he, seemingly, could tile whole telephone poles with bottle caps and affix a backboard and a basketball hoop atop each one, and then plant them, as he did in 1986 with “Higher Goals,” outside a courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, where they took on a tribal, sky-scraping, palm-tree majesty that winked at the long odds of reaching the N.B.A.’s summit. That piece is like a lot of Hammons’s work: tragicomic. A small forward would need to pole-vault up to those baskets.Maybe it would’ve been enough for this film, which Harold Crooks directed with the critic and journalist Judd Tully, to get into Hammons’s gift for withering, radiant transfiguration of everyday materials (Black hair, chicken bones, liquor bottles, those caps, fur coats, jelly beans, a hoodie’s hood), of the public’s opinion of art, of status. (In 2017, at the Museum of Modern Art, he hung a drawing by one of his mentors, the crucial, visionary Charles White, across from one Leonardo da Vinci made, which the British royal family owns.) It would have been enough to behold the assortment of thrilling footage of Hammons at work, in conversation and, in one contentious encounter, under interrogation by a group of students. And, for a long, satisfying stretch, that happens here. This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets.But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish. Most of the critics, scholars and fellow artists go bye-bye, which means so long to the bulk of its Black participants. In come the gallerists, collectors and dealers. The money. This is where “The Melt Goes On Forever” seems like it wants to play Hammons’s game. It’s up to something that has to do with whether a Hammons can ever be owned and what it means for work whose foremost concerns are a kind of in-the-wild presentation to be for sale. Suddenly, it feels like Crooks and Tully have stopped making a straight-ahead documentary and started making … a piece.This was probably the case from the film’s outset. In 1983, Hammons created several dozen snowballs (out of real snow, big as a softball, small as a melon ball). He put them on a rug and sold them in the cold, near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place. Bliz-aard balls, he called them. The movie opens with a moony story from a woman who remembers, as a girl, buying one of the snowballs for about a dollar. (Hammons — in a roomy overcoat, kempt beard, ascot and winter fedora — seemed homeless to her.) She turns out to be a gallerist, and her story is a prelude of the movie’s big market-bound dismount, at the end of which is a separate childhood memory, from the dealer Adam Sheffer, of encountering Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale and the impact it had on him. (He remembers being afraid at the sight of Hammons out there that day.)Sheffer tells the filmmakers that, as an adult, he wound up working with and befriending Hammons’s daughter Carmen. To her bewilderment, Sheffer wanted to purchase a snowball for $1 million (a commission, presumably; the movie doesn’t ask him to clarify) and tried, tried, tried to line up an insurer first — but alas. Thwarted, he whips up an email to Carmen (“if you come across any other interesting Hammons …”) that her mischievous father prints, frames and displays alongside a permanent snowball for a rare retrospective at the Mnuchin Gallery on the Upper East Side, seven years ago. Sheffer says he tried to buy that, too.Someone else — someone who collects Hammons’s work, we’re told — makes a substantial offer on the same piece. And Hammons decides to — well, this movie really is worth seeing; and if you’re unfamiliar with his witty solution, you deserve to hear it from the film itself.But tales like these are where the movie gets that title. It comes from the artist Halsey Rodman, who, in an interview, is clever about the inherent conundrum of Hammons’s snowy ephemera. The work is incomplete, he surmises, because, in memory as much as in one’s hands, the melt goes on forever. A proverb that does the work of parody.An animated scene from the documentary shows Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale from 1983, when he offered snowballs for purchase near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place.Tynesha Foreman/Greenwich EntertainmentThis feels especially true once the movie ends in that blitz of auctions, acquisitions and shows: the sale of Hammons’s “African American Flag”; the Mnuchin event; the eviction of the late writer and assembler of interesting people Steve Cannon from his gathering spot and home. It’s a home one otherwise supportive gallerist calls “pretty cruddy,” a home where, on one of its walls, Hammons painted what he called “Flight Fantasy.”The film’s emphasis on possession and dispossession (Cannon’s story needs its own proper telling) becomes so strong that it kind of topples over the movie’s sense of scholarship. And without the intellectual rigor of a Bridget R. Cooks or Kellie Jones or Betye Saar or Suzanne Jackson or Robert Farris Thompson or Henry Taylor to continue guiding us (and the filmmakers, honestly), things get murky.With each alacritous tale of somebody trying to tame or take a Hammons, a kind of pungency set in. And all I wanted was to be in a clearer, cleaner, happier movie about white people trying to own something Black. I wanted to be in the movie about the time Nike wooed Michael Jordan. I wanted to be in “Air.” Both that and “The Melt Goes On Forever” are honest, in their ways, about the stakes of ownership and the racial eternity of this dilemma. I just think the people who made the Jordan movie are better storytellers. I left that movie high. It knows capitalism is an emotion. It knows the thorny racial transaction that makes this country run. And I know Nike doesn’t own Jordan or even his skill, just a symbol of them, his silhouette. Indeed, he’s never depicted in “Air” as more than a back of the head. And Hammons, here, never sits for an interview. (He’ll be 80 this year.)This movie’s homestretch should make me just as happy. Hammons seems like the victor in his attempt to satirize not so much the transaction of art for dollars but the covetous, oblivious, entitled nature of certain transactors. In “Air,” Jordan knows his worth — well, his mother does. When the white folks at Nike meet her demands, corporate justice is served. But that’s a fantasy that “The Melt Goes On Forever” scrubs raw.Maybe Crooks and Tully are actually better than I think at doing what Hammons’s art does and letting the gallerists’ and dealers’ values speak for themselves. Their movie’s not telling me what to feel at all. I’m just feeling it, feeling baffled, dismayed, leveled with, winked at. But I’d also like to know if these gallery folks know how anti-Hammons their aims are, how they’re losing at his game while excelling at their own. (What does Carmen Hammons think?!) The movie’s right. It’s a grand folly. The melt really does go on forever. But do these people get it? That’s not how the game works, of course. Obviously, Hammons knows that. And so, I suppose, do the people who keep trying to beat him at it.The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David HammonsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      Laurie Simmons and Lena Dunham Argue About Earrings, Not Art

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      Laurie Simmons: My father was a first-generation American small-town dentist on Long Island with an office off our kitchen and a darkroom in the basement; I’d sit at his feet as he developed his dental X-rays. I see his work ethic in you — you’re relentless in your desire to keep making things — but I’d like to think that came from me, too.Lena Dunham: Well, it did. I’ve seen you go into your studio and come out 12 hours later in the same outfit looking confused, like you don’t know when you went in. Growing up, I spent a lot of time in that space. My favorite thing to do was to look through the loupe at slides on the light box. And then you’d take the red pen and X out the ones that weren’t good.L.S.: I can’t believe you remember that.culture banner More

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      Michael Blackwood, Who Captured 20th-Century Artists on Film, Dies at 88

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      He made cinéma vérité movies — more than 160 — about musicians (Thelonious Monk), architects (Frank Gehry), composers (Philip Glass) and sculptors (Isamu Noguchi).Michael Blackwood, a prolific documentarian who explored the work of 20th-century artists, architects, musicians, dancers and choreographers in more than 160 films and yet never became widely known, died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.His wife, Nancy Rosen, confirmed the death, in his sleep, but said she did not know the cause.Mr. Blackwood filmed his subjects in the unobtrusive, no-frills cinéma vérité style, seeking to capture the creative process behind their art, often in studio visits. Sometimes they were their own narrators; sometimes there were no narrators at all. Mr. Blackwood was invisible to viewers.He followed the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk on tour in Europe. He tagged along as the minimalist composer Philip Glass prepared for the 1984 premieres of his opera, “Akhnaten,” in Houston and Stuttgart, Germany.He observed the creative process of the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Christo during his creation of epic environmental projects like “Running Fence” and “Wrapped Walkways.” And he let Isamu Noguchi explain his approach to his art as they walked among his sculptures.A scene from “Monk,” one of Mr. Blackwood’s two documentaries about the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk.Michael Blackwood Productions“I go from one piece to the next,” Mr. Noguchi said in the 30-minute film, “Isamu Noguchi” (1972). “It’s a continuous development. It’s not something that I have intellectually arrived at as a way of doing things. I change with the work.”Mr. Blackwood took a similar approach to his own work, which he often undertook with his brother, Christian, a cameraman, director and producer. He moved from project to project on subjects that reflected his eclectic personal tastes, remaining largely under the film world radar and giving few interviews. Most of his films were carried on European television networks, but some were shown on public television stations in the United States and at art house theaters in Manhattan. They were also sold to libraries and museums.“He made the films he wanted to make and hoped people would want them,” Ms. Rosen said in a phone interview. “Any money he made from distributing his films was plowed into the next film.”Mr. Blackwood felt a particular urgency to make films about artists like Philip Guston, Larry Rivers, George Segal and Robert Motherwell.“There are no film portraits in existence of the artists of the early century, but barely a few haphazard meters of footage on such great figures as Rodin, Renoir and Kandinsky,” he told the Canadian magazine Vie Des Arts in 1981 in one of his rare interviews. “What a pity!”His fascination with architecture led him to make films about some of its stars, including Louis Kahn, Richard Meier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry.In his review of “Frank Gehry: The Formative Years” (1988) in The New York Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Mr. Blackwood “has built up an admirable oeuvre of films about architects and architecture,” and that Mr. Blackwood has Mr. Gehry “ramble though his work in a way that is both inviting and informative.”A scene from “Isamu Noguchi” (1972), a 30-minute film about Noguchi’s approach to sculpture.Michael Blackwood ProductionsMichael Adolf Schwarzwald was born on July 15, 1934, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) and moved to Berlin when he was 2 years old. During World War II, his parents sent him for his safety to Lubeck, on Germany’s Baltic Coast, to one of a network of children’s homes run by the Lutheran Church.His father, Gerhard, who was Jewish, did forced labor jobs in Berlin during the war; his mother, Elinor (Feist) Schwarzwald, converted from Lutheranism to Judaism but subsequently rejoined the Lutheran Church to survive in Nazi Germany and protect her family. She worked at the Finnish consulate. After the war, his parents started a business that made sets and curtains for the German film industry and local theaters.The family, including his brother, emigrated to New York in 1949. Michael changed his surname to Blackwood and dropped his middle name after becoming a United States citizen in 1955.After his graduation from George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan, he found work with a special film unit of NBC. He swept the floors at first, but eventually learned to edit and direct there, which led him to make his first film, “Broadway Express” (1959), a 19-minute portrait of people riding the New York City subway, set to a jazz score.In 1961, after leaving NBC, Mr. Blackwood moved to Munich, West Germany, where he directed documentaries for public television. He returned to New York in 1965 and soon began making his own independent documentaries. In 1968, he and his brother directed two films about Monk for West German television: “Monk,” which focused on recording sessions and performances in New York and Atlanta, and “Monk in Europe,” about a European tour.Much of their footage was used in another documentary, Charlotte Zwerin’s “Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser” (1989). Jon Pareles wrote in a review in The Times that “Monk’s feet were as busy as his hands, and Mr. Blackwood’s alert camera crew zeroed in on them.”“Although Monk’s recorded piano sound is percussive,” Mr. Pareles went on, “the film shows him using the sustain pedal within single notes, using extraordinary finesse.”In a 1993 film, “The Sensual Nature of Sound,” Mr. Blackwood examined four distinctive performers and composers — Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros — devoting significant time to their discussions of their own work.“The thread that ties together so much of Blackwood’s work,” Sasha Frere-Jones wrote last year on the website for Pioneer Works, a Brooklyn culture center that was streaming some of Mr. Blackwood’s films, “is a sense of patience and respect, so that even when the documentary form includes narration, it usually comes from the painters and musicians themselves.”Mr. Blackwood also made films about subjects who were not artists, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe and the diplomat George F. Kennan, and several about Germany and German Americans.In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Benjamin; his daughter, Katherine Blackwood and a son, Daniel, from his marriage to Ela Hockaday Kyle, which ended in divorce; and six grandchildren. His brother died in 1992.Mr. Blackwood’s last three films were all completed in 2014: one about the expansion of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.; another about the painter Carroll Dunham; and the third a portrait of Greg Lynn, a leader in computer-aided architectural design.One film remains — one that Benjamin Blackwood said he may complete — about the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s “Greene Street Mural,” an installation created in 1983 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan. It measured 18 feet tall and 96½ feet wide and was destroyed, at Mr. Lichtenstein’s direction, after six weeks.“His priority wasn’t making an art piece,” Benjamin Blackwood said by phone, referring to his father’s cinematic ambitions, “but to make a film about the art his camera was capturing.” More

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      A Sibling Rivalry Divides Harry Bertoia’s Legacy

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      Celia Bertoia’s father — the famous sculptor and not-so-famous musician Harry Bertoia — had been dead 30 years when she asked a psychic how to handle his legacy.The youngest of three children, she had long seemed to be her father’s favorite: a confidante who, as a child, would cut his hair outdoors on their forest-fronting property among the idyllic valleys of Eastern Pennsylvania. But after his death in 1978, she dodged the family business of welding together mountains of metal into behemoth public-art installations and “sounding sculptures” that made music. She became a real-estate agent in Colorado, then the owner of a Montana service that provided timing for road races.When she entered her 50s, Celia decided it was time to help manage the thousands of pieces her father had left. Her mother, Brigitta Valentiner Bertoia, had died in 2007. The next year, Celia consulted the psychic, who, knowing none of the back story, described “beautiful papers with abstract designs” — which Celia took as a reference to her father’s monotypes — and his lung cancer.Harry Bertoia is buried near the barn that houses his sounding sculptures, and under his biggest gong.Aaron Richter for The New York Times“She said: ‘The world is ready for these now. You should get these out,’” Celia, now 68, recalled in a phone conversation from the Utah office park that houses the Harry Bertoia Foundation, the nonprofit she started in 2013. “She gave me the direction.”Following the psychic’s guidance reignited the childhood rivalry between Celia and her older brother, Val, who had spent much of the previous three decades restoring, appraising and emulating his father’s sculptures in the workshop Harry established in 1952. Accusations of theft, forgery, avarice and betrayal erupted, prompting a bitter three-year lawsuit that led, in 2016, to the division of Bertoia’s most fabled work: a centuries-old stone barn stuffed with nearly 100 of his so-called Sonambients, intricate but austere sculptures he welded from rods of beryllium copper and played like a virtuoso.Many families struggle with issues of inheritance. But during the last decade, the Bertoias have learned how complicated those issues can be when that inheritance is unique.“When I first heard the sculptures, I went, ‘Wow, what is that?’ Their suppleness is so inviting,” said the composer Mark Grey, who captured their sounds with a mobile studio in 2002 to build simulacrums for the Kronos Quartet. “His sculptures leapfrog electronic music technology to create a different window into what we think sound is.”In late 2021, Sotheby’s auctioned 20 of Bertoia’s Sonambients (a rough portmanteau of sound and ambient) for nearly $6 million, prices that were in some cases ten times their estimates. Then Jack White’s Third Man Records reissued the 11 rare LPs Bertoia had recorded in the barn — recursive chimes that linger like church bells, powerful drones that roar like doom metal, tapped gongs that sing like seraphic choirs. The first pressing sold out in days. Last year, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas hosted the first domestic Bertoia retrospective in nearly half a century. There, musicians including Nels Cline and Craig Taborn played the Sonambients in a series of concerts.Those events were all partnerships with the foundation, part of Celia’s efforts to send her father’s work out into the world. Val, though, hopes to bring the world to the work. As children, they fought, and as adults, they have competing visions of their father’s legacy.“Celia and Val have the utmost respect for Harry,” Lesta Bertoia, the oldest sibling, who excused herself from the lawsuit, said in an interview. “But they have never had good communication. Now they can make up one another’s motives.”Val Bertoia with Melissa Strawser, his partner, at the Bertoia barn. Aaron Richter for The New York TimesTHE MORNING AFTER the Sotheby’s auction, 100 miles southwest of Manhattan at the family home in rural Pennsylvania, Val Bertoia bounded around what he called the “Sonambient Barn” with a devilish grin. He swatted and swiped row after row of musical sculptures ­— half of them made by his father, half by his own hand. The place shook with tectonic power, long southerly windows buzzing like beehives. His longtime partner, the artist Melissa Strawser, beamed.The Bertoia family arrived in tiny Bally, Pa., at the dawn of the 1950s. Harry was an accomplished jewelry and furniture designer who had worked with Charles and Ray Eames. He’d taken a job at the modern design bastion Knoll, where he developed the celebrated Diamond chair. Then the sound of a bending wire captured his attention and fired his imagination.An archival photograph of Harry Bertoia with his sculptures, and at left, a mallet used to activate them.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesBertoia’s grave in Pennsylvania.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesDuring his final 20 years, Bertoia developed an army of minimalist sculptures with long rods that waved like fields of grain, producing tidal washes of luminous overtones or pointillist symphonies. He added a second floor to the hay barn, where his desk remains; the rest of the barn functioned as a giant resonant chamber, filled with a rotating cast of 100 sculptures.“Being in the presence of those sounds brought me into a different world,” Celia said. “He would move around the room like a cat. He knew those sculptures better than he knew his family.”Val began working for his father at his sprawling, cluttered shop in the center of Bally in 1971. Their relationship was sometimes strained, but Val said he internalized his father’s methods. “Harry was my idol, my hero, my superman,” he said.After his father’s death, Val tended to the business. He continued making sounding sculptures, incorporating whimsy, a quality he felt his father had shunned, and numbering every piece sequentially. (After 45 years, he is nearing 2,700.) Harry Bertoia acolytes accused Val of being a charlatan who plagiarized, charged for tours and inflated appraisals.“I realized I could not replace Harry Bertoia,” Val, now 73, said. “I had my own personality and discoveries.”Harry Bertoia’s sounding sculptures are also housed at the foundation that bears his name in St. George, Utah.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesThis loose arrangement seemed to work until Celia launched her foundation. She’d been away from the sculptures for so long that she asked to shadow Val for two weeks, to get reacquainted with their dynamics and his own work. He agreed, then demanded $10,000; he admitted this was to scare her off. When Celia mentioned a few sculptures she’d requested years earlier, Val said they were gone. He’d split the proceeds only with Lesta, the sister who lived nearby. Celia hired a lawyer, battling Val over what belonged where until they settled in 2016.Celia and Lesta received 73 of the remaining 92 Sonambients. Val kept the barn, their childhood home, the workshop, and the other 19 sounding sculptures. Val described the day he spent crating his father’s sculptures as “emotionally swirling, like a hurricane.” For Celia, it was “a knife in the belly.” Lesta watched from the sidelines, telling them they were again behaving like children.A DECADE AGO, Bertoia’s musical legacy found an unexpected champion. John Brien is the owner of Important Records, a Massachusetts-based label that had documented the experimental recesses of international musical scenes for a dozen years, like harsh noise from Japan and New Zealand and graceful drones from England and Australia. He knew of Bertoia’s chairs and even kept a photo of the designer above his desk. He was embarrassed when he stumbled on a link to Bertoia’s music in 2012; how had he missed it?“There was nothing I could compare it to,” Brien said. “I wanted to know as much as I could.”Brien pitched the idea of a box set to the Bertoias, who consented despite the lawsuit. He began visiting the barn, where Harry’s Sony microphones still hung, to collect photos, slides and sketches. Released in 2016, the 11-disc “Sonambient” was the first compilation of Harry’s albums.Brien has since emerged as one of Bertoia’s most steadfast advocates, restoring and converting nearly 200 hours of unheard tape of music made on the sculptures. He has unearthed novel techniques within those recordings, including a primitive form of overdubbing. Brien said he can now identify several sculptures by sound alone.Amid the turmoil, Brien strove to be inclusive. He solicited essays from all three children. The art historian Beverly Twitchell, who organized Bertoia’s first two exhibitions while he was alive and wrote a definitive biography, contributed archival photos and guided Brien beyond the drama. And when the much-larger Third Man suggested partnering on a vinyl edition, defraying the massive cost of pressing such a large set, he agreed.“I wanted to reach a new audience unfamiliar with this music,” said Brien. “This was the way.”Celia Bertoia, the artist’s younger daughter, at the foundation.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesBrien’s work suggests an ideal path forward for the Bertoia family — partnerships, not divisions. But Celia and Val still seem hesitant to share resources, even while mounting exhaustive projects to document their father’s work.“Celia’s goal is to gain money, where I have the goal of gaining people,” Val said. (According to financial records, Celia has not drawn a salary as the foundation’s executive director for several years.) “We have two different directions — the foundation and the ‘Soundation.’ The Soundation is about how people can feel healed.”For five years, and with the help of Sotheby’s, the foundation worked to sell 60 of Celia and Lesta’s 73 Sonambients to a museum willing to build a new barn. Practicalities quashed the plan. Celia is now focused on a catalogue raisonné, a complete accounting of Harry’s work. That’s difficult to accomplish for an artist who never signed his creations, and harder still when a feud makes some of the pieces untouchable.“The catalog will survive far beyond any of the siblings,” she said. “It will ensure Harry’s work will live on.”Bertoia’s works at the foundation in Utah, which operates separately from Val Bertoia’s collection in Pennsylvania.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesVal has filled the half-empty barn with sounding sculptures of his own, opposite his father’s remaining Sonambients. Moving among them, he raved about the possibilities of what he called “the metaverse” — an augmented-reality program that will allow anyone to visit the barn virtually and play. Brien had once floated the idea, but Val and Strawser pursued it when the pandemic shuttered in-person tours.Grey, the composer, has started developing the program. It is not a question of technology, he insisted, but funding. “To see the barn in all its glory — the microphones hanging off rafters, cobwebs all over them — was remarkable, but time moves on,” Grey said. “We have the opportunity to keep this art alive.”When Twitchell, the Bertoia biographer, learned the barn’s contents would be scattered, she was sad. But practical considerations offset her disappointment. The aging barn has no security system or fire sprinklers, little parking or insurance. Even if the instruments are no longer in the same place, she said, they will at least survive.“Harry would like the idea of multiple approaches to his work,” Twitchell said. “No one would say ‘this is the only way to think about this stuff.’” More