|
Down Periscope (1996)
IMDB rating: 5.30
Plot: Lt. Cmdr Tom Dodge (Kelsey Grammer) is one of the Navy’s best, even if he is a bit unconventional. But to take command of his own ship, he must first prove himself in simulated combat. Dodge is shocked when he’s put in command of the rusty and outdated USS Stingray. His crew consists of the Navy’s worst misfits and troublemakers. And to add salt to an open wound, Dodge’s old rival, Adml. Graham (Bruce Dern), will be supervising the opposing team, the crew of the more-up-to-code USS Orlando. Dodge must now prove that he and his crew are up to the challenge…
|
Online Movies World
Directors: Ward David S.
Actors: Grammer Kelsey,Schneider Rob,Stanton Harry Dean,Dern Bruce,Macy William H.,Campbell Ken Hudson,Huss Toby,Martin Duane,Penner Jonathan,Tatum Bradford,Williams Harland,Torn Rip,Martin Jr. James,Marder Jordan,Comedy,
Menil gets a modern overhaul
11.10.09
I ndividual artworks — a painting here, a sculpture there — get rotated in and out of the Menil Collection’s modern and contemporary galleries. But the basic configuration has only changed twice since founding director Walter Hopps created the first installation in 1987 — once in 2002, when former chief curator Matthew Drutt moved it from the east wing to the opposite end of the building, and now.
Franklin Sirmans, the Menil’s modern and contemporary art curator, is responsible for the current overhaul. He began planning it a year ago, but the recent news he’ll be leaving in January to head the contemporary art department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art makes his reinstallation all the more noteworthy since it will leave the most tangible mark of his three-year stay in Houston.
Sirmans has returned the permanent-collection works to the east-wing rooms. But that’s not the only — or even the most noticeable — shake-up.
Early modernism — except for Surrealism, a key Menil concentration that has its own galleries — has gone into storage. The new installation abandons what has until recently been a more-or-less chronological approach — albeit a spotty one, given both space constraints and the Menil’s eclectic holdings — in favor of arrangements that use the galleries’ natural light to full advantage and are driven by the location needs of key artworks.
“Why not have this space be somewhat dedicated to working in sync with the building?” Sirmans asks. “That became a driving force, and then you start to think, ‘Well, what are some of the things we are most proud of? What are some of the things that people really should see here?’”
Case in point: Brice Marden’s massive four-panel masterpiece The Seasons (1974-1975). The sensuous waxy surface of each 8-by-5-foot canvas quietly hums with a single color that’s highly suggestive of light and memory.
“That became a focal point, and that can only really go on one wall,” Sirmans says. “That defines for you a certain time frame. OK, so you’re going to cheat a little bit (chronologically) because of the necessity of the work. Well, why not? If it looks good, it looks good.”
Sirmans hopes the path to the reconfigured galleries will prime visitors for unlikely juxtapositions. Passing first the antiquities galleries and then spaces devoted to indigenous art, they’ll arrive at an entryway devoted to contrasts in materials — a huge 1968 Robert Morris sculpture made of two pieces of cut felt in dialogue with Martin Puryear’s Deadeye (2002), a vessel-shaped, smooth pine sculpture that’s one of several major loans on view.
Then they’ll enter a room hung in consultation with contemporary artist Robert Gober — a far cry from the Picassos and Matisses that kicked off the last installation. The Gober room acts as a kind of mini-sequel to his 2005 Menil exhibition, The Meat Wagon , in which he mixed his works with objects from the collection, from a wax bust of Abraham Lincoln to a dress designed by Charles James to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s 1965 mirror painting Vietnam . Those pieces are all here, along with a painting by Surrealist René Magritte — a touchstone for Gober — as well as trompel’oeil tattered-book re-creations by San Francisco artist Steve Wolfe, the subject of a Menil show planned for April.
Gober’s own illusionistic works include a barred prison window, set into a gallery wall, offering a tantalizing but fake view of a sky; and a block of Swiss cheese — beeswax, actually — sprouting human hair.
From there, visitors will head into more familiar territory — a Pop gallery anchored by Andy Warhol’s Lavender Disaster (1963) and Ten-Foot Flowers (1967-1968), along with several of his smaller paintings. They’re joined by two works that haven’t been out in a good while: George Segal’s plaster sculpture Seated Woman (1967), who sits in a real wood chair, and Jim Dine’s 1962 assemblage 3 Panel Study for Child’s Room . Surprisingly, another Magritte — The Curvature of the Universe (1950), a blue sky with clouds painted directly onto a wine bottle — is part of the mix, perhaps a nod to his influence on Pop and later generations.
Rauschenberg, who had his own room in the previous installation, now shares a gallery with his one-time lover Jasper Johns, whose works bunked with Warhol’s in the old setup. All three artists benefit from the new arrangement.
The Johns/Rauschenberg room thrives on the insertion of two major loans — Johns’ seminal 1963 Periscope (Hart Crane) , which the artist has lent, along with one of his plaster light-bulb sculptures; and Rauschenberg’s Third Time Painting (1961). The Rauschenberg work crucially fills a gap in the Menil’s holdings, which have lacked one of his “combines” — assemblages of paint and everyday objects. It did wonders for the Rauschenberg room in its final months, and it looks even better in the east wing of the building.
This midpoint completes what I think of as the left-brained half of Sirmans’ installation, with its emphasis on the conceptual, figurative and real-world-based side of art. Next up is the right-brained half, which is spiritual and ethereal all the way.
“We’ve got to have some comfortable benches in here,” Sirmans says about the next room, which is filled with Mark Rothko paintings.
Indeed. You may have seen most of these Rothkos individually, from Astral Image (1946), a high point of his biomorphic Surrealist-influenced phase, to the 1949 “multiform” No. 21 (Untitled) , in which shapes and bands of yellows, reds and oranges hover and gently jockey for position, and four superb examples of his mature style featuring floating, pulsing rectangles of color. But your life will be a little more complete once you’ve seen them all together in this room, and you’ll want to sit down for a while to take it all in. This is Rothko before he began turning to the blacks, plums and maroons of the paintings in the nearby Rothko Chapel because he felt people were too distracted by the color to see the “tragedy, ecstasy, doom” in his work.
Next, Barnett Newman’s paintings and sculpture are sited in a middle gallery, which suits them better than the pivotal corner space they occupied in the previous installation. With the exception of a small, sketchy canvas painted in 1946, the year before Newman’s breakthrough to color-field abstraction, the Menil’s Newmans are all vertical and use mostly somber colors. In contrast to his better-known vast horizontal expanses of blazing color, these Newmans call for a comparatively intimate space that you happen into, not one that announces itself with sight lines seen from the vantage point of other galleries as the Rothko room does.
Sight lines matter. What is perhaps the Menil’s quintessential pre-Chapel Rothko — an untitled 1957 canvas featuring a brushy band of violet over simmering fields of reds — looks across the Newman gallery to Marden’s The Seasons , which makes a perfect counterpoint even if you aren’t steeped enough in Menil lore to know that Rice University’s Institute of the Arts mounted an important 1975 exhibit of Rothko, Marden, and David Novros’ work under the directorship of Dominique de Menil.
Novros is also represented here with 6:30 , a recently restored configuration of six L-shaped panels painted white and sprayed with an iridescent coating that reveals a color shift from green to pink in the gallery’s natural light. It’s joined by beautiful examples of Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold’s work, completing the room’s reductive harmony.
Initially, Sirmans and Menil exhibition designer Brooke Stroud planned to model the reinstallation after the original 1987 configuration, in which a single room was broken into four rooms to accommodate intimate hangings of smaller — particularly early modernist — works.
“But then, in the end, you can get more (pieces) out, but are you really using the building in some sort of unique way instead of creating a series of spaces that are, I think, more akin to another space (like the Surrealism galleries)?” Sirmans asks. “We figured out that you can … have that intimacy in Surrealism, and if you’re going to use one of these large spaces, then use it.”
douglas.britt@chron.com
(