The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

They do so across the expanse of the museum’s fourth floor, tracing their loops over a surface painted with a blueprint for the building. At one end, opposite the window onto Madison Avenue, hangs a giant neon-tube portrait of Ms. Michelson, glowing green.

Nicole Mannarino is the first to enter and the last to leave. Her blue jumpsuit, slit in a bare V, from neck to waist, has kimono sleeves that suggest wings as she holds her arms out to the side. She circles backward on half-toe, pauses periodically to reset, and continues circling.

Eleanor Hullihan arrives, her legs uncovered — the costumes, by Ms. Michelson and James Kidd, are remarkable for their individualized exposure of flesh — and the two women circle together with a precision that grows more incredible as their paths diverge and overlap. Each lowers an arm to avoid a collision.

One at a time, three other circlers join in; one at a time, all five circlers depart. (This is not counting the character in the horse’s head from Ms. Michelson’s 2009 work “Dover Beach,” who comes and goes inscrutably.)

That’s the gist of the dance, and the dancers’ entrances and exits constitute major events. But so, eventually, do small variations in the circling or quick digressions from it. Very late in the game, a mere torso tilt screams “beauty.” A few leaps forward by Ms. Hullihan seem as shocking as a reversal of gravity.

You might take all of this as a meditation on time, or on minimalism in art and dance. Or you might be bored out of your mind. (James Lo’s score meditates on minimalism in music.) There was significant audience attrition at the Thursday opening, particularly during the middle section, where the dancers stop circling to stand for what seems like eternity.

Meditating, however, is made difficult from the beginning by a conversation in voice-over, stalled and repeated, between Ms. Michelson and the playwright Richard Maxwell. They ask themselves the inane questions artists are often asked, and their inane answers — about how challenging art isn’t popular, etc. — are made more irritating by a purposefully insincere tone. Later, when Ms. Michelson recounts telling her dancers to “make it very beautiful,” it’s like a confession.

Meditation on the movement is thwarted again at the end, when Ms. Michelson’s voice, which has gone quiet, returns to opine about faith amid a ridiculous fable about God’s other child, Marjorie. Religion is also invoked in the program, where Ms. Michelson quotes George Balanchine’s praising comparison of American dancers to angels “who, when they relate a tragic situation, do not themselves suffer.”

But these dancers do suffer. The choreography is punishing, physically and mentally. Ms. Mannarino, her stylish jumpsuit sweat-darkened by the halfway point, endures heroically, but Moriah Evans is saddled with an oversize smock, and Ms. Michelson emphasizes her obvious struggle with the movement by excluding her from the parallel orbits of the others.

“You can get away with murder,” Ms. Michelson says, pretending that she doesn’t care if we agree. The choreographer whose image looks down upon the dancers and who keeps interfering and who demands acts of devotion is a cruel and anxious god.

“Devotion Study #1” continues through Sunday at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.

 

For many, the Florida Everglades’ spectacular vistas exist in black and white images from the lens of landscape photographer Clyde Butcher.

Butcher’s large-format prints hang in museums around the country, adorn Florida’s Capitol and even brighten Miami International Airport. Five decades after he moved to Florida, drawn by Ivan Tors’ mid-’60s TV series Flipper, Butcher is guided by the same belief: nature matters.

“Cities have to realize that the country is very important or we couldn’t live in the cities. Where else are they going to get their oxygen from? Where are they going to get their food from?” he said from his home near Sarasota.

Unbeknownst to many, Butcher turned his lenses on the Caribbean’s largest island a decade ago, producing images that will be on view in South Florida for the first time in Cuba: The Natural Beauty, opening Thursday at Miami’s Center for Visual Communication.

Fellow Florida coastal photographer Barry Fellman, the center’s director, didn’t know at the time that Butcher made visits to Cuba in 2002 in conjunction with the University of Miami and the United Nations.

“I was very surprised with his act of making pictures in Cuba. He hadn’t talked about it before at that point in his career,” Fellman said.

“I was very excited he was taking on this challenge. He has an incredible gift for sensing periods of space and can arrive in a spot and instinctively feel what it’s about.”

What Butcher saw in Cuba stirred his inner activist.

“Nature traverses politics. There are political problems between the two countries, but nature is not one of them,” the photographer says.

“The importance of nature is the same to us as it is to them — maybe even more important to them. They have a better relationship with nature than we do. It was exciting to see a country that is unspoiled, unlike America. We raped Florida, and Cuba is about the size of Florida and look how pristine it is compared to Florida. They haven’t messed up their country like we have.”

Granted, he says, he’s speaking about rural Cuba. He visited the Sierra del Rosario and Escambray waterfalls, the Sierra Maestra mountains and forest lands in Camaguey, Pinar del Rio and La Plata but not Havana or other major cities.

The Kansas City-born Butcher, 69, generally eschews travel, but he says the Cuban countryside felt like home. Printing his lavish black and whites of mountainsides, lush jungles, grassy swamps and sandy beaches proved more challenging than taking them.

“These were not easy negatives to print,” he said.

Getting the right shot often proved a matter of luck.

“We didn’t have the opportunity to spend time waiting for the right light. We had to work in a darkroom, sunrise to sunset.”

Fellman hopes political changes on the island spur interest in protecting the environment — here and there.

“They tell us the Castro era is coming to an end. Now is a pivotal moment to pay attention to the intensely rich resources the country offers,” Fellman said. “Now is the time to preserve and maintain.”

Butcher’s goal with Cuba: The Natural Beauty, which is also a 72-page book from the University of Florida Press, is to alter perceptions Cubans have of their own land.

“I think people are going to have a good experience seeing their country in a different world than the cars and hotels and poverty and all the things people like to photograph over there.

“Basically, something that relates to everyone is nature, and that’s the reason I did it.”

Follow @HowardCohen on Twitter.

 

 

When people think of famed surrealist Salvador Dalí, more often than not it’s one of his 1,500 paintings that comes to mind. Maybe even Destino, the Disney-animated short the Spanish artist produced in 1945.
Often overlooked, but as significant in understanding Dalí, are the hundreds of sculptures he created before he died in 1989 at age 84 in his birthplace, Figueres, Spain.
“Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality,” Dalí once said. Still, with raised Dalíesque eyebrows, people exclaim, “I did not know Dalí did sculpture.”
With the Wednesday opening of Dalí Miami at the Design District’s Moore Building, perhaps they will.
Along with his glass masterpiece Montre Molle (Melting Clock, 1971) the gouache Spring Rain (1949) and the rare intaglio The Grasshopper Child (1934), the 200 works on view will include 70 sculptures, among them Dalí’s 1964 bronze Venus de Milo with Drawers and the 1972 bronze, Winged Triton.

On Friday, High Line Art, the public art program of the New York park built on a historic elevated rail line, announced its plans for its spring 2012 season. Work on view will include, in April, a new contribution by the Scottish artist David Shrigley to the High Line Billboard series, presented on a 25-by-75-foot billboard next to the park on Tenth Avenue at West 18th Street, and films and videos in the High Line Channel series, an outdoor program featuring projections on a building to the east of the High Line at West 22nd Street after dark.

Also in the spring, High Line Art will present performance art pieces by Alison Knowles (April 22, Earth Day), Channa Horwitz (May 17) and Simone Forti (May 24), on and around the High Line. And the park’s first group exhibition,“Lilliput,” inspired by Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” will assemble sculptures of diminutive scale by various artists, scattered along the High Line.

On Friday, High Line Art, the public art program of the New York park built on a historic elevated rail line, announced its plans for its spring 2012 season. Work on view will include, in April, a new contribution by the Scottish artist David Shrigley to the High Line Billboard series, presented on a 25-by-75-foot billboard next to the park on Tenth Avenue at West 18th Street, and films and videos in the High Line Channel series, an outdoor program featuring projections on a building to the east of the High Line at West 22nd Street after dark.

Also in the spring, High Line Art will present performance art pieces by Alison Knowles (April 22, Earth Day), Channa Horwitz (May 17) and Simone Forti (May 24), on and around the High Line. And the park’s first group exhibition,“Lilliput,” inspired by Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” will assemble sculptures of diminutive scale by various artists, scattered along the High Line.

In its 10th year of showcasing work from Latin American artists, the arteaméricas fair in Miami Beach that opens Saturday is highlighting something new: work from artists of any origin.

The new FotoAméricas section, which was open to all nationalities, is a reflection of Miami’s increasingly global reputation as an art destination.

Miami’s profile has been raised largely thanks to Art Basel Miami Beach, which marked its 10th year in December, and multiple satellite fairs that draw an international audience each year.

“You have now a much more international crowd of not only Latin Americans but Spaniards, Europeans,” fair president Leslie Pantín said. “You have [an area] that has changed dramatically in the last 10 years with all these international people that live most of the year down here in Miami.”

His own fair represents that shift, Pantín said: In its first year, “only Hispanics came.”

This year, the 52-gallery fair is expected to draw an estimated 15,000 art lovers from all over the Southern part of the state, New York — and, of course, Latin America.

Observers say that while Miami remains a city in artistic flux, its roots in Hispanic culture are deep.

“Miami is a city in search of its cultural artistic identity,” said Reed V. Horth, president and curator of Robin Rile Fine Art and curator of a Salvador Dalí exhibit that opens next week in Miami. “There are many names, shows and styles all vying to become what is quintessential about Miami. While the future remains uncertain, we are slowly becoming to Latin American art what Paris was to impressionism in the 1880s.”

Arteaméricas, which runs through Monday, is the first of three major events that focus on Latin America and its mother country of Spain to open in Miami the space of a week. On Wednesday, the five-day Dalí Miami exhibit, featuring 200 works by the Spanish artist, opens at the Moore Building in the Design District. Thursday brings the opening reception for Cuba: The Natural Beauty by photographer Clyde Butcher at the Center for Visual Communication in Miami.

The events are a testament to the built-in audience that South Florida provides for art with a Latin American or Spanish bent. With high-profile galleries and artists in the community, “it would be hard to argue any other city has had as much of an impact on Latin American art as Miami has,” Horth said.

Gary Nader, an art dealer and gallery owner, began auctioning Latin American art in the early 90s and just recently opened a show featuring masters and contemporary Latin American artists.

“When I opened my first gallery here 25 years ago, I registered ‘Miami, Latin American art capital of the world’ [as a trademark] because it’s where you find the most important things in Latin American art — in Miami,” he said.

Still, Nader said, only about 50 percent of what his gallery shows is Latin American art. And when he resurrected his auction house earlier this year, the pieces he sold were Latin American, modern and contemporary.

The presence of Art Basel Miami Beach has introduced collectors of modern Latin American art to more cutting-edge contemporary artists from the area, said art advisor Lisa Austin. And the growing population of affluent young Latin Americans are proving a solid target for those contemporary artists.

 

BY STEVE ROTHAUS, srothaus@MiamiHerald.com

Kirk Fordham, CEO of the Everglades Foundation in South Florida since 2008, has resigned to become executive director of Gill Action, a Colorado-based organization that provides funding for pro-gay political campaigns across the nation.

“Perhaps having a family has made it more imperative to get involved on a full-time basis to make sure American families have the same rights as everyone else regardless of sexual orientation,” said Fordham, 44, a one-time aide to several Republican politicians, including former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley of West Palm Beach.

Fordham, partner Mike Cevarr, a senior research analyst for Fannie Mae, and their two sons, 13-month-old Lukas and Levi, 7 months, will move this spring from Coral Gables to Denver.

“I’m giving up the sun and the surf for the sun and the snow,” said Fordham, originally from Rochester, N.Y. “It's an unexpected opportunity and I hate, hate, hate to leave my Everglades work. It's near and dear to my heart.”

His last day at the Everglades Foundation will be Friday, April 13. He starts the following Monday at Gill Action.

The Everglades Foundation, based in Palmetto Bay, will soon look to replace Fordham. “Paul Tudor Jones, our board chair, will lead the search committee,” Fordham said.

After graduating from University of Maryland with a degree in government and politics, Fordham got a congressional internship; worked for Jim Inhofe (then a U.S. Congressman, now a senator); and became Foley’s chief of staff in 1994. He stayed with Foley until 2004, then worked a year as finance director for Sen. Mel Martinez.

For three years, Fordham worked in public affairs/governmental public relations. In January 2008, he became CEO of the Everglades Foundation.

Although Fordham has been closely tied to Republican politicians, he also has cultivated relationships with Democrats. South Florida’s two congresswomen both praised him in news statements.

"Although we will miss Kirk's determined efforts to protect and restore America's Everglades, I am thrilled that I will now have the opportunity to partner with him in his new role at Gill Action,” said U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman from Weston. “Kirk practices a bi-partisan approach to problem-solving that has earned him the respect of many friends on both sides of the aisle. As we continue our march forward to protect the right of every LGBT person to enjoy every opportunity this nation has to offer, I look forward to working with Kirk to build on the progress that has been made by groups like Gill Action."

Said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami, one of the Republican Party’s most outspoken gay-rights advocates: “The Everglades will lose one of its most tireless and effective advocates, but the nation will benefit as Kirk shifts his focus to advancing equal opportunity for each and every American. Kirk is well regarded in Tallahassee and on Capitol Hill as a staunch supporter who has used his knowledge and experience in government affairs to further important causes. I look forward to working with him to ensure that our nation — and our laws — treat everyone fairly and equally.”

Gill Action fund, begun by Quark software inventor and philanthropist Tim Gill, has given $14.45 million to pro-gay campaigns since 2005. In Florida, Gill Action helped fund the unsuccessful 2008 campaign to prevent a statewide amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions, said Fordham, who made national news in 2006 when Mark Foley’s political career imploded during a sexting scandal involving teenage male congressional pages.

Fordham, who helped orchestrate Foley’s resignation from Congress after ABC News obtained copies of the text messages, later told a House Ethics Committee that he reported Foley’s antics to House Speaker Dennis Hastert three years before that scandal broke, but that Hastert did little with the information.

Some gay activists believe Fordham didn’t do enough to stop Foley when he suspected inappropriate behavior between the congressman and underage pages.

“While I appreciate Kirk’s many talents at bringing various political players to the table to move the LGBT agenda forward, I am perplexed as to why these guys just can’t say they’re sorry for what they did,” said Mike Rogers, a Washington-based activist blogger who appeared in the 2009 film documentary Outrage, about closeted gay politicians including Foley. “He said, ‘Oh, I gave the information and no one did anything with it.’ ”

Fordham says he doesn’t know what more he could have done about Foley’s “flirtatious” behavior: “I went behind my boss’ back to the House speaker to report it.”