C8 GALLERIES
‘reck room’: It’s got game
by Jessica Dawson Guy: How tough is it to turn an art
gallery into a rec room? Pal: [Feebly] Too hard, dude. Guy: [Impassively] Let’s get a beer. Pal: Cool. I offer this Beckettian dialectic (from the landmark sports-fan buddy play, “Waiting for Slow-Mo”) as a kind of shorthand to understanding Pat- rick McDonough’s latest exhibition at Flashpoint. Riffing on both the art and sports worlds, McDonough has attempted to convert the white box gallery into a den of beer pong and Coors Light: Our Nation’s Moldy Basement. His success is limited. Flashpoint’s
concrete floor, exposed ductwork and white walls weren’t going anywhere — and no amount of bar mirrors and cannabis-scented candles were going to make them. To further complicate the issue, the young McDonough, 28, had no Thomas Hirschhorn-at-Bar- bara Gladstone budget to fund this dream. Yet, like the best of Beckett’s dia- logues, McDonough’s theater of the absurd — the show’s title is the inten- tionally misspelled and lowercased “reck room” — has a few good ideas to share. How often does the rarefied world of high art interact with the mass- marketing extravaganza of profes- sional sports? (More often than ever, thanks to some key exhibitions mounted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Wexner Cen- ter, but never often enough.) In juxta- posing these opposites, McDonough gets us thinking about both. It would have been easy enough for
McDonough to stick to the sports fans who orbit professional athletics for this show, but McDonough chooses also to weave in the objects and he-
BRANDON WEBSTER/ FLASHPOINT GALLERY
room, we may luxuriously ignore real life.
“Patrick McDonough: reck room”
closes Saturday. Flashpoint, 916 G St. NW, Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 p.m., 202-315-1310.
www.flashpointdc.org.
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM
To browse the Post’s 2010 Museums Guide, go to
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McDonough also taps into our lust for entertainment. Witness this show’s centerpiece: a ping-pong table straddling a foosball console (a clear glass sheet replaces the table’s typical green surface so you can make out the foosball field below). This particular composition opens up some curious gaming possibilities (you can play both at the same time). But in terms of intellectual stimulation, it could be the beginning and end of many visi- tors’ experiences. (Rumors that law- yers from a nearby firm play daily on their lunch break are entirely true.) The fact that you can walk into a
gallery and play a game invites all manner of questions about what art can — or should — be about. It makes not thinking about things very easy. McDonough leaves the work of reflec- tion up to us and even tempts us not to do it.
And then there is McDonough’s
FOR THE BOYS? Patrick McDonough’s “reck room” transforms bachelor pad staples — a foosball table, an image of Dan Marino in his prime — into pieces of art that question concepts of masculinity.
COURTESY OF PATRICK MCDONOUGH
roes of his own industry. Armchair artists and weekend crafters are as much a part of “reck room” as big- finger-waving cheeseheads, thanks to McDonough’s liberal use of materials you can buy at Michael’s. At its core, McDonough’s show is about fandom. This rec room was built for us, bystanders of the famous. We can play foosball or table tennis (McDonough’s show offers both)
while our heroes battle it out at the World Cup or U.S. Open. We can make sculptures out of Legos (McDonough gives us these, too) and imagine we’re Whitney Biennial contenders. Wheth- er fans of sports or art, we live vicari- ously. So what if we can’t all be Le- Bron or LeWitt?
But fandom carries some uneasy
implications. One is passivity. As fans, we accept a life lived through others,
or through amateur sports and gam- ing culture (or through art history classes, exhibition visits and — I’m talking to you — exhibition reviews). This all hints at a larger cultural lazi- ness, the kind of meekness that allows bad things to happen on our watch. If our life goals are cheap gas, a home to call our own and a high-def TV, we’ll only bark when they’re taken away. Cocooned in the beer-stocked rec
portrait of the fan, implicit in this show. He offers some wince-worthy moments, some of which feel authen- tic, if also a little vamped. (Yes, I mean the mirror across which “Losers, Bud- dies, Hotties, Bitches” is written in 40- point frat-boy scrawl.) Misogyny in sports is hardly news, and the Guerril- la Girls have been complaining about the patriarchal art world for decades, but staring it in the face is rough. Don’t get me wrong: Not all is dark in “reck room.” There’s sly, self-depre- cating humor to be found among the miscellany tacked onto the gallery walls. I love the unfolded paper air- planes that look like Morris Louis stain paintings, with their washes of rich color soaked into sturdy stock. I also love the posters. One features Shaquille O’Neal, back when he played with the Magic, just after he’s released a jump shot. Concentric lines of variously colored beads emanate from his form like the visual embodi- ment of his impressive skills. Another poster stars 1980s-era Miami Dol- phins’ quarterback Dan Marino as he winds up for a pass. Marino looks like a late-20th-century version of classi- cal Greek sculpture — the National Football League’s own Discobolus. In “reck room” we dream of great- ness but accept mediocrity. We drink beer (check out the slide projector screening images of a Coors Light can; it must be seen to be believed) and get psyched for tonight’s game. We remember the Greeks and step right over the ’80s-era Pictures artists (there’s a Sherrie Levine rug). As for McDonough’s foray into fan- dom? He’s off to a running start.
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2010
Trocks: Full of agile humor dance reviewfrom C1
Kennedy Center debut of the Trocks, as they are fondly known, the audience was primed for their time-tested (they have been at it since 1974!) brand of all-male, drag-show ballet parody. There’s the chest hair spilling out of their decolletag- es. The debutante gloves pulled up to hir- sute armpits. The swans who don’t con- form, who throw punches; the uber- lipsticked prince who blankly gestures “huh?” when Swan Queen Odette un- spools a sequence of nose-in-the-air fin- gerplay and arm-waving that approxi- mates a 19th-century mime sequence carried out with 21st-century flimsiness. The New York-based Trocks have not
changed much in 36 years. This program, which concluded Wednesday night, could have been culled from their early appearances: bits of “Swan Lake,” Act 2 (a big kick in the waltz knocks over one of the swans on the sidelines; after the bows, everyone fights over the bouquet); the pas de deux from “Le Corsaire”; “Go for Barocco,” founding choreographer Peter Anastos’s sendup of Balanchine tropes, and variations from “Paquita,” in addition to “Dying Swan.” For this rea- son, I didn’t find the performance quite as amusing as my neighbors, many of whom were left gasping for breath. But what I appreciated most — and heartily
applaud the whole blue-eye-shadowed troupe for — was the picture that the Trocks present of what ballet would look like if ballerinas were allowed to be indi- viduals. If character, and differences, were invited in.
Bust the mold! cry the Trocks’ pan-
caked grins. Technique ain’t everything! (Though theirs is not at all shabby.) In the Trocks’ hands, old-school ballet is live theater, not an antique shop. You have to admire the joy of one of the four men soaring through the familiar “little swans” variation from “Swan Lake,” his smile beaming to the balconies, wide- mouthed in exhilaration and — in con- trast to his colleagues, who were shoot- ing him well-timed disapproving looks — luxuriating like a little boy in the sheer thrill of flying through space. The tights be damned. His feet were trapped in sat- in, he was all trussed up in tulle — still, we felt his joy. What a glorious dance it was!
Likewise in “Paquita,” beyond the slap- stick and the catfights, there were lus- cious moments of freedom: when one of the gents does a walkover in perfect time with the music and two of the dancers celebrate the finale with a sweaty chest- bump, their velvet bodices clapping to- gether with gridiron gusto, a toast to sheer pleasure. That never gets old.
kaufmans@washpost.com
MUSIC REVIEW
‘Defiant Requiem’: A powerful past comes to life
by Stephen Brookes JUANA ARIAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
LIGHT AND FREE: The New York troupe, including Brock Hayhoe and Joshua Grant, turned old-school ballet into live and lively theater.
It’s almost impossible to imagine, but in the dark, bleak years of 1943 and 1944, in the remote Nazi internment camp of Tere- zín, some of the most extraordinary musi- cal performances of all time took place. Surviving brutal conditions and facing im- minent death, a group of Jewish prisoners nevertheless formed a chorus and memo- rized (from a single score) Giuseppe Ver- di’s earthshaking “Messa da Requiem,” performing it some 16 times in the camp. The Nazis considered it a wonderfully cruel joke — the prisoners were “singing their own requiem,” as one put it, and a Roman Catholic one at that. But the joke was on the Nazis, for the prisoners found in the work an epic gesture of defiance and hope that gave them a spiritual victory over their captors. As Rafael Schaechter, the group’s director, put it: “We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them.” That story is at the heart of “Defiant Re- quiem: Verdi at Terezín,” a multimedia concert-drama created by Murry Sidlin and given a spectacular, bare-knuckle per- formance Wednesday night at the Ken- nedy Center. The requiem itself is almost unbearably powerful on its own — a sear- ing tone poem about the end of the world, operatic in scope and run through with ce- lestial melodies and cascades of fire and brimstone. But Sidlin’s setting of the mu- sic, incorporating film of the camp, inter- views with survivors, and actors describ- ing the dramatic background, was handled with both dignity and power, and pushed the requiem to even more harrowing depths and exalting heights. Major players were involved in the pro-
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duction, and Sidlin drew strong, commit- ted performances from the Washington National Opera Orchestra, the City Choir of Washington, the Catholic University of America Chorus and four soloists, includ- ing the angel-voiced mezzo-soprano Janet Hopkins. Sidlin may have sacrificed pre- cision for passion here and there (that eight-part fugue in the Sanctus is no pic- nic), but that hardly seems a fault. And when the singers filed out at the end, qui- etly intoning the “Oseh shalom” from the Jewish liturgy as a single violinist contin- ued to play on the darkening stage, the ef- fect was nothing less than electrifying.
style@washpost.com
Brookes is a freelance writer.
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