Orozco at MoMa, Dance Revolution, Jazz

Dec. 17, 2009

By JULIE BLOOM  
      

 

 

Orozco at MoMA

If you weren't in New York in 1993 to see Gabriel Orozco's solo debut at the Museum of Modern Art - a show that propelled him to hero status for many young artists and garnered the admiration of critics - now is the time to play catch up. The 47-year-old artist, the child of a leftist mural painter and teacher, studied in Mexico City and is the subject of a career retrospective at MoMA that runs through March 1. Part of Mr. Orozco's initial appeal was his approach to art. "Dodging commitments to mediums or styles, he took improvisation as his baseline method, and turned personal quirks into assets," writes Holland Cotter. Although the "shock and delight of puzzlement, of seeing nothing turn into something before your eyes," from the first show are gone, there are still treasures to be found in this exhibition, including dozens of small sculptures set out on shelves and tables in the last gallery. "Some are sketchy or merely busy, but others do what Mr. Orozco has always done best: find the cosmic in the commonplace, sweeten abjection with wisdom and wit."

Dance Dance Revolution

It may not quite warrant the attention of Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates or a special Senate panel hearing, but another intractable conflict has resurfaced: "The Nutcracker" wars are on again. Responding to a piece in The Washington Post criticizing the annual recurrence of the holiday classic, Alastair Macaulay writes: "Let's not castigate ‘The Nutcracker' just because it is the cash cow of American ballet. And let's not make the mistake of assuming the tweeness of bad "Nutcracker" productions means that the ballet is itself twee." He adds, "The Nutcracker" "is a musical masterpiece and, in some stagings, a theatrical masterpiece too. Ballet is larger, not smaller, because of it." Judge for yourself on Thursday night when New York City Ballet presents "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker" at the David H. Koch Theater and then pick your side.

Get Lucky

"Lucky Thompson might have generated a more complete understanding of jazz in the 20th century," Ben Ratliff writes of the often overlooked tenor and soprano saxophonist who died in 2005. "He could have helped us understand, for instance, that the 1940s wasn't entirely about bebop and that the soprano saxophone in the 1960s wasn't entirely about John Coltrane." Thanks to the pianist Eric Reed, Thompson is finally getting his due at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola this week. The sets focus on Thompson's compositions, mostly from the second half of his career and on Tuesday the music's "writing contained unusual turns: a chord change on every other beat in the étudelike ‘Monsoon'; a waltz with unusual harmonic wending in ‘Soul-Lullaby'; a masked blues form in the theme of ‘Prey-Loot.' It's rich ground." Mr. Reed's quartet, with the saxophonist Victor Goines, the bassist Reuben Rogers and the drummer Rodney Green, celebrates Thompson through Sunday at Dizzy's.