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San Francisco Chronicle
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: If you're not OK right now, ‘Are You Okay?' is the show for you
A poet friend once told me that her art form was all about pacing. Break that line, and the reader has to slow down, reconsider. The everyday becomes strange and new. Dance does that with motion, plucking a moment out of time to probe, stretch or overturn our familiar ways of occupying space. Sure, dance says, you could get from A to B as you always would, but why, when the canvas is infinite? The two media have long found synergy in the work of choreographer Joe Goode, whose dancers don't maintain the genre norm of silent, vaguely quizzical expressions. They can talk. Throughout his oeuvre, you hear him picking out and finding the syncopated rhythm in the banal, often inadequate ways we try to connect through words. Linger on something deceptively simple like 'Are you OK?' for a moment, and it seems to bore to the soul and encompass the whole universe at once. That's the title of his latest piece, created and directed with Melecio Estrella of Bandaloop. 'Are You Okay?' is balm for anyone who doesn't always know how to answer that question except by gesturing vaguely at the state of the world — as well as for anyone who's asked it of someone else then felt guilty afterward. Is it not OK to be OK? When you ask it, are you forcing the ask-ee to discourse on climate change and politics, sociology and public health? Did an act of care just become an imposition? Joe Goode Performance Group's production, which opened Thursday, Aug. 14, at the Rincon Center, understands from its opening moments that at a time when a seemingly straightforward question is so fraught, we both need to laugh at ourselves and receive genuine comfort — and that those needs are not contradictory but complementary. There we are, in the post office lobby of the building, with its jade green Art Deco finishes, when barefoot performer Rotimi Agbabiaka stands atop a cube, mic in hand. Forget about polite intros, he bids us. Instead, pretend the show's already over. We were provoked and nourished, confused at times but cleansed. As audience members, 'You did OK,' he tells us, in the godlike tone of a parent tucking a child into bed, and in that moment, you remember: OK actually is enough. The bulk of the show takes place in a showroom where, at first, performers enact solo or duet tableaux, like living exhibits in a museum that you stroll through at your own pace. Voiceover weaves documentary-style excerpts from people in various states of OK-ness: 'I wanted to make sure my kids have at least one living parent.' Two dancers explore a doll-strewn sandbox, sand sifting between fingers in a long stream. Another pair, behind a wrecked car, have the building's window pane between them. As the inside dancer (Molly Katzman) wafts a hand past the torso of the outside dancer (B Dean), you might remember the lonesome childhood lark of lying in bed at night and hoping-slash-fearing that a friend, alien or princess could creep across your sill. In immersive theater, perennial problems include directing spectators' gaze and making sure everyone can see everything in a space not built with sightlines in mind. Here, Joe Goode Performance Group dispatches those obstacles with the economy and elegance of sound and light (including one handheld LED light that has the feel of putting on a show in an attic), as well as with rolling platforms. They're mini elevated stages, but they're also like boats adrift at sea, emphasizing characters' isolation and need to connect. If the dance moves themselves are more muddy than crisp, occasional sequences break through. A knot of bodies expels one upward, in a motion akin to giving birth. Kicks use dancers' feet to skywrite. Lighting designer Jack Carpenter, combining hues of blue orchid and red, suggests the cool center of a flame as performers intone, 'I don't know why I have water falling from my eyes.' Costume designer Sara Estrella outfits three performers in yellow rain jackets, helping them become climate change's floods that send a wide-eyed worrywart (Jessica Swanson) down current with her downward spiral. It's OK to not be OK for small, selfish reasons, the show implies. It's also OK to ask someone how they're doing when you're really just wondering if you yourself will be able to make it. Even in pits of despair, dreams and wonder are still possible. Glitter confetti could fall on you, a partner could metamorphose into a princess and a dress could stretch into a work of architecture. It's possible. Fantasy is the flip side of fret.
Los Angeles Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Appreciation: Joe Goode (1937-2025)
Is a painting an image or an object? Or reverse the order for a sculpture — is it an object or an image? It's both, Joe Goode's art answered as the 1960s began — something surely material but purely visual. And something else besides, something curious and engaging that you haven't ever seen before. In his strongest work, the Los Angeles-based artist — who died of natural causes in his sleep on March 22, a day before his 88th birthday — held the image and the object in eccentric equipoise. The result is an uncanny sense of vivid presence. In 1961, not long after the Oklahoma transplant left Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), where he studied with influential Light & Space artist Robert Irwin, Goode began an enigmatic series of 13 paintings of milk bottles. Most are roughly square, five-to-six foot canvases of seemingly monochrome color. A glass milk bottle from Alta Dena Dairy slathered with paint, either in matching or contrasting color, stands on the floor in front of the painting, which is hung about three inches off the floor — certainly an unusual height. Installed that low, the painting's scale is geared to the body of an average adult looking at it. The flat painting becomes a 'wall,' the slathered milk bottle becomes 'a painting.' Sometimes, Goode included a contour drawing of the bottle behind it on the canvas, suggesting that one is the projection of the other. (Whether the bottle or the painting is the projection remains a question.) Look closely, and often the monochrome canvas is gently brushed with multiple layers of color. The result is ethereal, further enhancing the image/object conundrum. Goode's knockout series arose from two primary sources. One was the contemplative, nearly monochrome still lifes of ceramic vessels by heralded Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, which caused a stir in 1961 at the painter's rare American gallery exhibition at Ferus on La Cienega Blvd. The other was the vigorous argument between abstraction and figuration as front runner of the avant-garde, then being hard-fought in the American art world. Which was more adventurous? Goode's painterly retort — still lifes that held the abstract and the figurative in taut equilibrium — brilliantly neutralized that argument, while adding depth to the object/image dichotomy. A third, less observable source was more private and personal: When Goode's first child was born, the milkman arrived at the doorstep almost daily bearing a fresh Alta Dena bottle. The artist launched the series. Art's spur came not only from the specialized art world, but from ordinary human experience. Goode's job was to bring them all into harmonious play. One work, a deep purple monochrome rising behind a vivid orange bottle, graced the sixth cover of the new Artforum magazine. In the 1960s, Goode's work was uncomfortably tagged as Pop art. It shared some attributes of paintings by Ed Ruscha, his childhood friend from Oklahoma City, as well as Southern California artists as diverse as John Baldessari, Billy Al Bengston, Wallace Berman and Vija Celmins, with whom he established the vigorous 1960s L.A. art scene. But those artists approached representational imagery in a wide variety of ways. As his career developed over the next five decades, and as art movements began to unravel as a way to characterize art, the term fell away. Goode almost always worked in a series — for instance, making multiple sculptures of staircases whose orderly repetition of rectilinear treads and risers put a domestic tongue firmly in the industrial cheek of Minimalist art's crisp geometry. (Carpeting softened the cold edges.) He hung painted paper and canvas on a line and blasted them with shotgun pellets, the random shredding establishing layers of color when the sheets were placed atop one another, or exposing the gallery wall as yet another painted layer. He painted clouds drifting through azure skies, then tore them up and reassembled the heavens to his liking. He splashed and poured liquid thinners over paint, causing chemical reactions to burn holes in the surface — 'Ozone Paintings,' he called them. Creative destruction was a regular theme. (Even in high school art class, Goode had delighted in making sculptures to be set on fire.) An element of violence was appropriate for an era torn apart by war, civil rights unrest and epic environmental degradation, but Goode redeemed the tumult through art. One result was an extensive exhibition record — more than 120 solo shows at museums and galleries internationally – as well as representation in nearly 30 museum collections, including extensive holdings at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Goode is survived by his wife, Hiromi, and niece Yuki Katayama. No funeral for the artist is planned, but according to a spokesman at Michael Kohn Gallery, which represents the artist, a memorial celebration is being discussed for a later date.
