Dalai Lama in Nola

 

Two very emblematic photographs from His Holiness the Dalai Lama's spectacular visit to New Orleans this weekend. Top, presenting ceremonial kata to Mayor Mitch Landrieu after Landrieu presented him with the Key to the City, accompanied by an introductory speech emphasizing the commonalities between the teachings of Saint Francis and the the teachings of the Buddha. Below, at the Tulane commencement ceremonies receiving an honorary doctorate with iconic Nola music legends Dr. John and Allen Toussaint, who of course performed, to HHDL's apparent delight. Below, HHDL gets his groove on at Tulane grad ceremonies in the Superdome.

More photos of the Dalai Lama's amazing visit can be viewed at Charlie Varley's Varleypix site.

Pat Steir at the Newcomb Gallery



Big time celebrities, in big cities like New York, sometimes get big heads. It is a common human trait to try to find meaning in fame and fortune, but wisdom is a very different experience.  Longtime New York art star Pat Steir turns the fame game on its head in her Self Portrait expo. Self portraiture is nothing new, but Steir's Self Portrait is comprised of eyes, ears, noses and features that bear no resemblance to her actual appearance. Drawn directly on the gallery walls like precise renaissance sketches, they seem to be trying to tell us something, but what? Steir adheres to the old Buddhist view that what we think of as our "self," or ego, is a concept that is an illusory mind game. In this view, our sense of self is a product of our common DNA filtered through differing circumstances and degrees of awareness -- so identifying with our fellow humans is not only compassionate but can facilitate a happier and more meaningful life in a conflicted world where everything is impermanent except for the eternal present and, ultimately, the universe itself.  

Buddhist sages discovered the time-space continuum eons before Einstein, and in Steir's Endless Line, top, it appears as a continuous drippy tracery meandering around the room like a river. Painted white, it glows blue in the gallery's cobalt light and recalls her famous "waterfall" canvases of drips orchestrated into magical cascades with overtones of Zen and Jackson Pollock. Endless Line is painted directly on the walls and will be painted over when the show closes. This parallels the meticulous sand mandalas created by the Tibetan Buddhist monks who appeared with the Dalai Lama this past weekend. After days of work, the sand mandala was swept up and thrown into the river. Here the act of creation is an ongoing exercise in the art of life, and all that really matters is the--hopefully enlightened--awareness we bring to it. ~D. Eric Bookhardt 

Endless Line and Self Portrait: Site Specific Wall Installations by Pat Steir, through June 16, Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University, 865-5328.

Stephen Paul Day at the Arthur Roger Gallery

What do the rise and fall of empires have to do with Las Vegas? Probably not much except that both were into glamorous and grandiose symbolism. History is always a roll of the dice and somebody always loses. Empires were often fueled by visions of vast wealth, yet they all eventually crumbled. Stephen Paul Day's Blame It On Vegas exhibition actually focuses far more on European history than it does on Nevada's sin city, which is mostly represented here by his oversize paintings of tacky souvenir matchbooks. By contrast, his sculptures often feature mini-renditions of major European historical figures. In Virus, Adolph Hitler appears as a little manikin frozen in a Roman Salute in a foggy glass bubble. In a smallish bronze sculpture, Michael, a morose child appears surrounded by chess pieces comprised of scowling military men. Here in Louisiana we grew up with allusions to Napoleon in the form of avenues, cafes and even our legal code, but in Day's General Strategy Napoleon appears as a row of pastel candy colored busts on a shelf. This interplay of grandeur and tackiness is an ongoing theme.

His attempts to link Vegas with European historical figures can seem far fetched, yet he appears obsessed with finessing the contradictions of his romantic yet nihilistic outlook, and his work is often so finely wrought that it can be seductive. Lady Fingers is a glass female figure finished like white marble and it would be quite neoclassical if not for her unexpectedly exposed inner organs. In Pink Napoleon, the romantic egomaniac, reappears as two identical glass busts, kissing, in a mingling of flashy attitude and classical craft comparable to, say, snips of Beethoven's Eroica symphony sampled in a rap song. And then there's his wall sculpture, Mirror, six assault rifles rendered in reflective gold glass arranged in a row. Is it a comment on the 2013 version of the American Dream, or is it just Day up to his old tricks? Your call. ~D. Eric Bookhardt

Blame It On Vegas; Collecting Meta-Modern: Mixed Media works by Stephen Paul Day, through May 25, Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Julia St. 522-1999.

Michael Pajon at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery

Winston Churchill once said that "History is written by the victors." How true. But it is also true that stories are for everyone, and in America stories appear almost everywhere, from song lyrics to comic strips or even old vintage scraps of paper, as we see in Michael Pajon's striking O Bury Me Not collage show at Ferrara. The title, from a Depression-era cowboy ballad, sets the tone for a wide range of folksy snippets of printed matter that, when shrewdly reworked into evocative collages, lead us straight into the wayward residue of the American dreams of the past, those alternative histories that  can never be written except by the poets, dreamers, musicians and inspired madmen among us, those rare creatures who can capture life as it is lived rather than simply chronicled.     

Art is what happens when such dreams are reworked into visions of the past, present and future, times that Einstein opined exist all at once. In Standard American XXIV, a vintage American vision of "progress" appears as a fraught nirvana of cowboys, flappers and Pullman cars surrounding a bulls eye target graced bye a bluebird of happiness and guarded by WWII aircraft among other whimsical omens of a happy hereafter. A Wisper, a Handshake, a Drop of Blood features a gathering of similarly dressed corporate stalwarts posing for posterity flanked by anatomy charts and tombstones. To the victors go the spoils and if the price is paid by others, so much the better, their expressions seem to say. Hunters, Hazards and Haints reads like a fever dream from the mind of Mark Twain, a fractured fairytale of Conestoga wagons, cowboys, railroads and Indian chiefs, and a lone home on the range where the deer and the antelope play--along with hucksters, hunters, snake oil salesmen and preachers, what Pajon calls "the 'lesser' folk of our collective American history," characters who, like the cowboy riding into the sunset, "should be allowed the luxury of myth." ~D. Eric Bookhardt

O Bury Me Not: Mixed-Media Drawing Collages by Michael Pajon, through May 28, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, 400A Julia St., 522-5471. Left: They Fractured His Arm But Not His Spirit

Baer at UNO St. Claude; Ho & Langlinais at the Front



Kevin Baer's Ritual Process show at the UNO St. Claude Gallery is a little like the jazz piano playing of Keith Jarrett: both seem coolly minimal yet are actually complex. In Baer's case, organic materials were deployed with surprising lyricism to evoke natural and man made processes. Horizons, pictured, was inspired by the Rothko Chapel where the legendary artist's abstract canvases appear as objects of meditation. But in Baer's Horizons, a blank canvas literally paints itself as its bottom is suspended in a trough of colored dyes that gradually saturate it like a wick. Likewise, some glassy illuminated obelisks in the parking lot slowly change form over time as what looks like cast glass turns out to be sugar glass that melts in the rain and heat. Even some of the drawings--created with materials like hair, charcoal and dust--look almost like they drew themselves. Ritual Process is cool and sleek yet organic in tone, and if that seems unlike Nola's baroque extravagance, think again, because this city is like a vast process art project that is always in flux. Even that self-painted Rothkoesque canvas might be read as an aesthetic re-visioning of the water lines found on so many structures after Katrina. Here Baer explores the unfathomable nexus of nature and culture.

More minimal process art appears in Colleen Ho's near monochromatic drawings at the Front. Stitched in thread on paper, they suggest spider webs in frost or footprints in snow observed from above. Labor intensive yet quietly evocative, they explore the subtle interplay of presence and absence.  Barrett Langlinais' abstract photographs return us to a realm of natural and man made processes as they appear etched into the skin of the city. Contained in those surfaces is a poetry of decay and regeneration like a resonant interplay of minor and major tones, the eternal counterpoint of darkness and light. ~Reviewed by D. Eric Bookhardt  Ritual Process: Mixed Media Process Art by Kevin Baer, Fridays-Sundays Through May 5; UNO St. Claude Gallery, 2429 St. Claude Ave., 280-6493; Strata: Photographs by Barrett Langlinais, On Impulse: Mixed Media Drawings by Colleen Ho, Saturdays-Sundays Through May 5, The Front, 4100 St. Claude Ave., 920-3980. Reviewed by D. Eric Bookhardt

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