Hibiscus et sel

Dripping/Poriphera

This weekend I was deeply delighted to spend some time near Yves Klein’s Untitled Blue Sponge Relief and Untitled Fire Painting. Many of the things Klein does— the subtle, careful blending of sculpture and painting, for instance, which is barely even a blending, but more the sinuous suggestion of a third dimension in relation to the canvas’s two; or his gorgeous, so-right-it-seems-obvious use of specific, unexpected materials (soot, sponges)— are practices that resonate deeply with me. His works give me a sensation that’s at once deep and raw, as though I am made of violin strings and he is plumbing the plum line of my affective body. (Striking nerves, plucking chords, &c).

In the flesh, as it were, Untitled Blue Sponge Relief is composed with a delicacy and sensitivity that almost brought tears to my eyes, and which simultaneously belie and underline his playfully dead-serious praxis (it may be Untitled but it’s still International Klein Blue).

The breath was sucked out of me, though, by the dripping yearning of Untitled Fire Painting. Soot on canvas, its slopes and shadows at once bare and ripe, Klein creates something deeply erotic and intensely evocative by merely alluding, through the residue of fire, at the play of light on our skins and eyes, at the way desire almost physically curves perception…

Tanzt, tanzt sonst sind wir verloren

I confess that behind my fevered excitement about Pina, Wender’s tribute to his friend the late lamented choreographer Pina Bausch made with the members of her Wuppertal Tanztheater (which seems, in addition to a company, to be a family, an atelier, and a way of life), lingered some anxiety or wariness. One of the old clichés about dance relates to its ephemeral nature: it is so special and precious in part because of its impermanence. For centuries, in terms of ballet especially, it was notoriously difficult to document (despite the advent and relative successes of various notation systems) and even film was limited in its ability to convey the physical and emotional nuances.

The most successful film-dance marriages are the ones that require film as a medium to do something particular and otherwise impossible to both the film and the dance. We have in that category the modernist keystone, Loie Fuller’s Danse Serpentine (1896!), handpainted, still striking in its brilliant simplicity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIrnFrDXjlk

Wenders is canny enough to make the film (in addition, obviously, to a loving tribute) formally about being a dance film. This is what keeps it from becoming the maudlin gesture of documentation and memorialization it could easily have been. Its subtle, effective, vibrant cinematic practice— its formalism—  justifies making a film about dance as a medium unto itself, as in an angled shot, almost a Dutch tilt, of Pina’s Rite of Spring that enables us to see it in a way that would be impossible without film. Because Wenders is a crafty, delicate, and evocative storyteller and not simply a documentary or technician, these perspectives enrich our experience of the dances we knew; rather than simply providing some kind of alternate or inside view, they provide a new kind of syncretic experience. It’s a gorgeous ekhprastic synthesis that glows with the intimacy of two creators and their languages in dialogue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dflLt1G_Tc