He wrote a musical piece in homage to Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” and actual Houston’s Rothko Chapel seems to anchor its meaning and context on a fairly solid foundation. But American composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey is a more resistant and speculative artist than that. His Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), which marked Chappell’s 50th anniversary earlier this year, has come to New York rewritten, reorganized and reinvigorated.
This latest and currently staged version of “Monochromatic Light” Premiered at Park Avenue Armory It retains the understated, ceremonial tenor of Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” with long pauses between inquisitive viola phrases and soft timpani notes. But here in New York, Slay’s music isn’t heard at Rothko’s, but at another American painter’s company. Where Rothko was brooding, contemporary artist Julie Meheretu swarms with detailed, digitally savvy abstractions. Work by avant-garde journeyman Peter Sellers has been powered up for his halls of the Armory’s cavernous drills and augmented with young dancers. His running time also ballooned from less than an hour to his 90 minutes.
In scaling up, Slay likely sacrificed the church focus that both he and Feldman had previously found in Houston. The night has long hours. But this reimagined, more hostile “monochromatic light” brings a new richness to New York, showing how abstraction shapes suffering and freely in ways that simpler representations often cannot. See if you can give.
In the Armory, “monochromatic light” is staged in rounds. Slay in the center conducts an ensemble of just her three musicians who play viola, keyboards and percussion. This is almost the same instrumentation as Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel”. A singer from the Trinity Wall Street Choir sits in the distance, and behind the audience is an octagonal aisle, on each side of which hangs one of Meheretu’s paintings. Three of his eight abstractions were seen in her 2020 exhibition at Marian Goodman’s gallery. In this year’s David Zwirner, Group exhibition of Toni Morrisonand four are new, incorporating dense layers of halftone dots, bright yellow or green sprayed clouds, and boiling black squiggles.
The staging mirrors Philip Johnson’s octagonal nave in the Houston Chapel, but from the opening moments of the quietly struck tubular bells, it’s hard to tell that Rothko’s dark reticence is left behind. Clearly, for Mehretu, the work here is not a painting, but an enlargement on a translucent screen, lit with colored spots from the front and back. (Lighting designer James F. Ingalls, a longtime Sellers collaborator, synchronized the color adjustments of all eight paintings so that, at certain moments in the score, the backgrounds all glowed purple or aquamarine and shimmering black. to appear and disappear. .)
Gangway features eight dancers (one per painting) who bend and writhe in a Brooklyn-born dance style called flex. The performers are athletic and the men in them perform shirtless, but they appear vulnerable, fragile and threatened, choreographed by Reggie Gray (also known as Leg Rock). increase. They contort their arms as if they were broken or dismembered, and pull their bellies together as if they were punched.
The score is wide and spatial, with a tempo from largo to larguissimo. (There is no beat per se; Slay timed it with the baton stroke lasting more than his one second.) Its opening minutes are particularly minimal. Against the viola’s long, dampened trills, Mehereth’s background becomes eerie green or mysterious blue, and the painting’s black lines begin to look more unnatural. The dancer moonwalks and rolls his neck. Their movements are smooth and spasmodic, and some of them display bulging eyes and painful expressions that recall the existential intensity of Butoh.
The choppy movements of the dancers, and the clashing layers and swaying lines of Meheretu, bring an unease to Sorey’s score that perhaps wasn’t conveyed in front of Rothko’s quiet paintings in Houston. There is anxiety and weakness in the scattered notes that Kim Kashkashian emanates from his viola while bowing between of the marimba for producing spooky theremin-like keying. The silky ah ah ah chorus line, a Feldman quote that I imagine worked well in Roscosmos, feels out of place against Meheretu’s unsettling paintings, but it’s a chorus of solo walking in the audience. There is a sharper accompaniment from Davon Tyne, a bass-baritone, who then circles the aisle. As he pries pieces from his mental “Sometimes I feel like a child without a mother,” the words are separated by long silences an octave apart, and the night takes on the tone of a funeral march.
Sorey’s insertion of spiritual elements into “monochromatic light,” the dancers’ channeling of Jamaican-specific movements, and Meheretu’s channeling of violent news images into the churning background all imbue this Surenodi with the particularity of black grief. I’m in. But it resists resolution throughout. This is a work of abstracted blackness (or blackness). On the one hand, it defies the supposed void of non-objective painting and art music, and on the other, the current market demand for social advocacy.Blackness in Abstraction as Curator Written by Adrian Edwards, is a model of artistic creation on a larger scale and more implied than many of our institutions can handle. Instead, it requires a dual engagement with form and identity that emphasizes blacks as material, method, and mode. Much like Du He’s Boa, Eastman and O’Grady, Houston’s murals can also draw a lot from Rothko’s black with purplish-blue undertones. It pushes past biography and storytelling into the psychic, global, and cosmic realms.
What struck me most about Mehretu’s half-baked retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year was that even our “diversified” cultural institutions still assign artists outside their dominant expression. It was how she used scale to defy reduction and simplification. Sorey’s “Monochrome Light” does the same for its understatement. Where Meheretu saturated space, Srey dismissed it, but both painters and composers were skeptical of how to create on a full scale when times prompted others to reduce their ambitions. We provide an important example. This is how you speak to several people at once. This is how you mourn and keep your freedom.
Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)
Until October 8th at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. Armoryonpark.org.