12 Steps to Enlightenment at the Asian Art Museum

Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment, is a new exhibit at the Asian Art Museum laid out amusingly as 12 steps to enlightenment rather than an art history survey.

The exhibit begins with an excerpt from the movie Koyaanisqtsi which means that Philip Glass's score is the soundtrack for the first room of objects. The 2016 Luxation I by Tsherin Sherpa, a Nepalese immigrant living in California, is the opening artwork, referencing dislocation and displacement after the 2015 Nepal earthquake.

The exhibit combines works from the two largest collections of Tibetan art in the United States, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. There are sculptures of the Buddha from different centuries and countries, including the 9th century Gautama Buddha above from Kashmir.

The signage is refreshingly void of art-speak and relates some fabulously outrageous stories. The 17th century cloth painting from Central Tibet picturing the Buddhist adept Virupa is accompanied by this description: "His extraordinary appearance in this work refers symbolically to his enlightened understanding of normal reality as nothing but a convention itself. Virupa's distinctive gesture, finger raised upward, refers to a time when, on an epic drinking spree, he agreed with the tavern's proprietor to settle the bill at sunset. Intent on continuing his binge, however, he used his great meditative powers to stop the golden orb in its course, ransoming it until the local ruler, fearful of scorched fields, paid his tab. As with his appearance, this incident represents symbolically Virupa's ability to transcend and influence ordinary experience."

History is also explored, as in this 18th century bronze sculpture of The lama Tsongkhapa (from the Phoenix Art Museum) which depicts the most influential scholar in Tibetan history from the 14th century.

The 18th century Tibetan Mandala of Vajrabhairava is a three-dimensional version of the mandala map the exhibit is using to lead museumgoers into possible enlightenment.

A 19th century painted door "once safeguarded the entrance to a monastery's gonkang, a shrine housing wrathful protector deities and a precinct accessible only to the most advanced practitioners. Its flaming skulls and weapons would have warded off evil spirits, intruders, and those not properly initiated to enter its sanctum."

Be warned there are quite a few human skulls in this exhibit, such as the 18th century Tibetan Flaming trident. The wall description tells us: "This striking ritual implement resembles both Varna Dharmaraja's skull-headed club and his consort Chaumundi's trident. Within its toothy, grinning skull is an object that rattles when the scepter is hand led. Its most intriguing aspect, though, is the form of the skull's reverse side. Unmistakably phallic, it is a reminder that sex and death are inextricably conjoined. Sex defeats death through reproduction, which in turn ensures death's triumph."

The most imposing object in the exhibit is a large wooden sculpture of The Buddhist deity Vajrabhairava, "the Lightning Terror, who personifies the victory of spiritual wisdom over death. Ferocious and commanding, he tramples a host of figures symbolizing our delusions and attachments."

The final room, entitled Being the Buddha, contains a pair of remarkable Chinese bronze statues of lovers representing the concept of nonduality. The deities Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi, above, is described thus: "This yab-yum deity's origin is traced to a time when the Hindu gods Shiva and Parvati threatened world order through immoral behavior, namely gratuitous violence and sex. To subjugate them, the Primordial Buddha manifested as Chakrasamvara: the mirror image of the unruly Hindu divinities...This yab-yum deity's origin is traced to a time when the Hindu gods Shiva and Parvati threatened world order through immoral behavior, namely gratuitous violence and sex. To subjugate them, the Primordial Buddha manifested as Chakrasamvara: the mirror image of the unruly Hindu divinities."

The deity Guhayasamaja and consort Sparshavajra, a 15th century bronze statue, depicts a "Secret Union, indicating the joining of apparent opposites: of male and female like these yab-yum figures, but also of the wisdom and techniques that lead to Vajrayana Buddhism's swift awakening."

"Accordingly, this sublimely sculpted pair constitutes a cosmic mandala embodied."

Modern and Ancient Sanctuary at Davies Hall

It was In Search of the Sacred at Davies Hall last weekend, with the composer Missy Mazzoli curating the SoundBox nightclub in a program called Modern Sanctuary and conductor Herbert Blomstedt offering Beethoven and Brahms in the main hall with a performance that felt infused by the deities.

Missy Mazzoli is a 39-year-old East Coast composer who is writing some of the most interesting theatrical music in the world right now, capped by her three operas from the last decade, Songs from the Uproar, Breaking The Waves, and Proving Up. Four years ago I saw another show she curated at Le Poisson Rouge, the hipster basement speakeasy in Greenwich Village, where I thought, "I wish she had curated more of her own music and left the arias from Faust and Peter Grimes sung by overmatched young singers out of the program."

At her disposal in SoundBox were some of the best musicians in the world, such as principal SF Symphony Violist Jonathan Vinocour playing Mario Balter's mesmeric, extended technique Ut.

There was also soprano Marnie Breckenridge, looking and sounding exquisite, vocalising with composer Mario Diaz de Leon on his Sanctuary.

This was followed by Missy Mazzoli, Lorna Dune, and Marnie Breckenridge performing a piece from Mazzoli's Vespers for a New Dark Age, followed by Meredith Monk's Passage and What Does It Mean?.

The evening continued with the longer, minimalist Sacrament by Mario Diaz de Leon with Robin McKee, flute, Jacob Nissly, percussion, and Jerome Simas, clarinet. Another highlight was a Vespers piece for solo violin and electronics by Mazzoli, prefacing a somnolent, atmospheric piece by John Luther Adams, The Light Within, and finally Arvo Part's Silentium from Tabula Rasa.

It's fun to join interesting younger people who are stepping out to a nightclub atmosphere rather than going to a stuffy classical music concert, but this may be my last SoundBox. The experimental excitement and genuine hipness of the first few years have mostly fled with higher ticket prices and a few too many audience members attending only because they have heard it's the hot, happening ticket in town. By the end of the evening, I felt more sleepy than spiritually refreshed.

Two days later, at what I refer to as the old ladies' Sunday matinee, proved to be a holier experience.

Herbert Blomstedt, the SF Symphony's Music Director from 1985-1995, had returned for his annual two-week stint heading the orchestra, conducting the most boring of classical music staples, Beethoven and Brahms, with the assistance of the new young assistant concertmaster Wyatt Underhill.

It was wonderful seeing Underhill getting a chance to be concertmaster in such bread-and-butter fare as the Beethoven Second Symphony and the Brahms Fourth Symphony because he radiates the same kind of joy in musicmaking as cellist Peter Wyrick at his side. The Beethoven was alive and continuously interesting (and this is not a composer I love at all), while the Brahms Fourth was the best live performance of that work I have ever heard. Blomstedt managed to draw out such a clean sound that it didn't feel like an interpretation so much as a conjuring of how exciting and moving the music sounded at its composition, as if all kinds of time and barnacles had been scraped off.

Blomstedt is 92 years old and becoming more masterful each year. A Wikipedia article notes, "A devout Seventh-day Adventist, Blomstedt does not rehearse on Friday nights or Saturdays, the Sabbath in Seventh-day Adventism. He does, however, conduct concerts, since he considers actual performances to be an expression of his religious devotion rather than work." Listening to this Brahms Fourth, I could see heaven.

Snapshot 2020

West Edge Opera presented their fifth annual Snapshot program of four operatic works-in-progress last Saturday at the Taube Atrium Theater, and it was a fascinating evening. The highlight this year for me was the extraordinary musical accompaniment by Earplay, a San Francisco chamber orchestra dedicated to contemporary music.

Led by conductor Mary Chun, the players were Tod Brody, flute; Peter Josheff, clarinet; Loren Mach, percussion; Keisuke Nakagoshi, piano; Roy Malan, violin; Ellen Ruth Rose, viola; Leighton Fong, cello; and Richard Worn, bass.

It helped that the musical scores for all four operatic excerpts were consistently interesting in different ways, even when the vocal lines or the librettos didn't measure up. First up was a harrowing scene from El Canguro by composer Mike von der Nahmer and librettist Cynthia Lewis Ferrell dealing with a miscarriage by a Guatemalan peasant who has been surviving by selling her newborn babies to a gringo adoption mill. The orchestra was extraordinary, evoking a Central American jungle with impressionistic means.

The libretto verged on borderline cultural appropriation, but its heart seemed to be in the right place, and Maya Kherani, Tania Mandzy Inala, and Kevin Gino all sang well as poor Guatemalans stuck in a terrible situation.

Jonathan Khuner, West Edge Opera's musical director, took over the conducting duties for Moon, Bride, Dogs, by composer Ryan Suleiman and librettist Christina Fries, which was a surreal take on the French fairy tale Donkey Skin entwined with a nightmarish vision of being gnawed on by feral dogs in an Argentinian landscape.

J. Raymond Meyers played the Moon, Aléxa Anderson was the Idiot Girl (Bride), and Jason Sarten wearing a fur jacket played the Dogs, and they were all wonderful. So were the music and vocal lines, while the libretto was genuinely creepy.

Aléxa Anderson as Idiot Girl in particular did an amazing job, singing a procession of anguished melismas that were stunning.

This was followed by Eighteen Melodies for Hu-Jia, with a libretto and score by Joan Huang above. It's a monodrama that tells the story of a Chinese woman kidnapped by a warlord who is eventually rescued/ransomed but who has to abandon the son she conceived with her abductor. This unfolds in short snippets of poetry of haiku length that basically translated to "He is in the East and I am in the West."

The music was both spare and complex, and Vivian Yau gave a vocally superb performance except when she had to declaim some of the poetry in speech, which didn't work at all.

The final operatic excerpt was Gilberto with music by Nicolas Leif Benavides and a libretto by Marella Martin Koch based on stories Benavides told her about his grandfather teaching Latin dance in Oakland in the 1950s, only to be drafted into the Korean War. In Joshua Kosman's review at SFGate, he mentions that the musical score "kept making head fakes toward vivid Latin dance rhythms but then stopping as soon as anyone had something to say," which was my impression too. I have loved every piece of music I've heard from Benavides over the years, but this felt way too talky rather than lyrical.

It didn't help that everyone seemed to be slightly miscast in their roles (pictured above: Nicolas A. Garcia, Aléxa Anderson, Linda Baird, Chad Somers, and Jason Sarten) except for Chad Somers as a virginal recruit taking dance lessons on his last night before shipping out. With his lovely young tenor voice, he was sweetly convincing and poignant as a lamb being led to slaughter.

Soul of a Nation

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983 is a surprisingly brilliant and powerful exhibition of American art curated by Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley from the Tate Modern in London.

It has been traveling around the United States for the last two years, and until March 15th, it is residing at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. Pictured above is Faith Ringgold's 1967 American People Series #18, The Flag Is Bleeding.

Much of the art is political in nature, like the 1968 Boy with Flag from David Hammons...

...and John T. Riddle Jr.'s 1970 Gradual Troop Withdrawal, referencing the noxious, lying phrase that the U.S. government used during the Vietnam War.

Figurative painting is also featured, including Raymond Saunders's 1971 Jack Johnson, featuring the famous black boxer without arms...

...Barkley Hendricks' 1974 What's Going On...

...Emma Amos's paean to the woman who helped to allow her to work as an artist, Eva the Babysitter...

...and Wadsworth Jarrell's psychedelic 1971 Revolutionary (Angela Davis).

There are also a couple of rooms dedicated to abstraction such as Sam Gilliam's 1970 Carousel Change with its colored canvases hung up like sheets on a clothesline.

Looking at the artists' bios online, it's remarkable how many are still alive and creating in their 80s and 90s, including sculptor Fred Eversley, represented by the 1975 Untitled (parabolic lens, unique asymetrically center), 1975

The large exhibit is loosely organized by themes and cities where black power art scenes flourished outside of institutional settings, including Oakland. In an amusing turn of history, you can now buy Black Panther coffee mugs and tote bags in the deYoung Museum gift shop.

As usual, the deYoung is charging too much ($25) for entrance to the special exhibit, but they are offering $10 discounted tickets every Saturday through the March 15th closing, and next Saturday, February 8th, admission is free. Click here to check out the details and order your free tickets online.