Scatter’s got the genius fellowship blues, or not
Art Scatter doesn’t have much to say about this year’s MacArthur genius grants, half-a-million bucks, no strings, no waiting. We usually get a bit queasy when they are announced, not because we ourselves are expecting the phone call (even Art Scatter isn’t THAT delusional) but because we fear that someone we know will be on the list, someone we can’t abide. So we are happy this year. We don’t know a soul. (We just saw The Big Lebowski again and have determined that we don’t use “abide” nearly enough, as in “The Dude abides.”)
Truth be told, I always LIKE the list, mostly people I’ve never heard of doing things that sound amazing if not impossible, a sort of scatter in its own right. This year seems heavy on the neuroscience. I have great respect for neuroscientists. I have no idea how one spends her day, of course. Peering into people’s ears with one of those ear-examiner things with a little light, except it’s a laser and they are picking up electrical activity in one lobe or another? That’s a bit like what I imagine. Or on darker days, slicing fresh brain into ultra thin slices. I started to add, “the size my mother wants her cake sliced at birthday parties.” Sorry. I’ll spare you my astro-physicist fantasies.
I did recognize a few of the fellows (that’s what we’ll be called when we are chosen: MacArthur Fellows), especially the ones in the arts. Jennifer Tipton is an amazing lighting designer — techies rule! I saw saxophonist Miguel Zenon at a two Portland Jazz Festivals (don’t get me started: bring it back!). Is he “creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st Century” as the MacArthur people suggest? Probably not, but he can really play and his combo of Latin, African and Caribbean influences IS really interesting and listenable. We’ve already written so much about Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic who wrote “The Rest Is Noise,” that he probably thinks we are stalking him. No complaint there. I haven’t read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun about life in Nigeria after the civil war with Biafra, but the award makes me want to. And I don’t know Tara Donovan, who takes ordinary objects such as paper clips and straws and makes various sensuous shapes out of them. The photographs I’ve seen are pretty cool.
I think my favorite winner is John Ochsendorf, a structural engineer at MIT who uses the “wisdom” of ancient builders to solve contemporary engineering problems. He’s studied rope suspension bridges designed by the Incans, Romanesque church vaults and buttresses and he and his students designed England’s Pines Calyx dome, pictured above, “a robust, energy-efficient structure built from local resources using a tile vaulting system patented in the 19th century by Spanish architect Rafael Guastavino,” according to the MacArthur notes. My google-snooping suggests that this is exactly right. I think it’s important to our sense of history that we understand just how smart, just how adaptive those who came before us have been. So, well done MacArthur peeps, well done. (This is NOT sucking up!)
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Me, I’m thrilled Jennifer Tipton has gotten a “genius” grant and look forward to seeing the results of her freedom from commissions she might not want to do. She comes from a long tradition actually of extremely gifted lighting designers for theater and dance, starting with Loie Fuller at the turn of the century who made maximum use of the recent invention of incandescent light bulbs, at one point traveling with some incredible number of electricians, like 34,and dancing on a glass platform lit from underneath with a gazillion light bulbs. She was followed by Jean Rosenthal, the inventor of that blue cyclorama we see behind such Balanchine ballets as Agon and Concerto Barocco, or at least we used to, and a shaft of light going at an angle from the flies in a straight line onto a soloist in a Martha Graham work Rosenthal used to refer to as Martha’s Finger of God. Tipton has lighted many modern dancers as well, but what I’ll not soon forget are her lights for a Royal Ballet production of Giselle, in which the Wilis (brides jilted at the altar in case you’ve forgotten who dance feckless men to death) looked like wax, a sort of tallow color that was spookier than hell.
Comment by Martha Ullman West — September 23, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
Thanks for the heads up on the Genius Grants. I’ll stop waiting around by the phone for another year.
I was delighted to discover Fellow Walter Kintudu (http://www.kitundu.com/), described by the MacArthur Foundation as “a young sound artist and inventor of original musical instruments that navigate the boundary between live and recorded performance. Inspired by hip-hop, other modern musical forms, and traditional Asian and African instruments, Kitundu’s phonoharps are hybrids of turntables and stringed instruments.”
Kintudu has been an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s interactive science museum that puts OMSI to shame (sorry). The melding of science and art seems appropriate to Bob’s recent posting about Portland’s “Right Brain Initiative.”
Comment by MightyToyCannon — September 23, 2008 @ 9:29 pm
See! We like those MacArthur guys! And talk about combining science and art…
Comment by barry — September 24, 2008 @ 5:27 am
Department of Amplification: I meant to say Tipton comes from a line of women lighting designers. And yes, they combined science and art–Fuller came to an untimely end possibly because she used to join her friend Marie Curie in playing with radium.
Comment by Martha Ullman West — September 24, 2008 @ 2:21 pm
The trouble with Art Scatter is its tendency to send me wandering through the internet tubes in search of more information. MUW’s cogent comments prompted me to read more about Loie Fuller. Thanks to Wikipedia, I learned that she was influential in persuading Sam Hill to turn his mansion into what has become the Maryhill Museum of Art. Small world. I had a vague recollection of a dance artist being involved, but that information had blurred with Rodin, the Queen of Romania, Stonehenge and peacocks. It’s been awhile since I’ve ventured to that side of the Columbia.
Comment by MightyToyCannon — September 24, 2008 @ 4:36 pm
I’m thrilled that Mighty Toy Cannon looked up Loie Fuller. Not only did she persuade Sam Hill to turn his mansion into a museum, she donated a bunch of stuff including her correspondence with Queen Marie of Romania, with whom she had a very close friendship indeed. Her memoirs (Loie’s) are worth reading.
Comment by Martha Ullman West — September 24, 2008 @ 9:34 pm
At the end of the day, it’s possible that Sam Fuller was the single most colorful character to set foot in the state. I’m thinking we might want to have an Art Scatter gathering at Maryhill next spring to celebrate him!
Comment by Barry Johnson — September 25, 2008 @ 7:14 am
Meps! Overlooked again.
Glad about Ms Tipton, though — it’s about time she got this award.
Comment by MrMead — September 25, 2008 @ 12:53 pm