A Doll's House Revisited - Natasha Nicholson: The Artist in Her Museum at MMoCA

When you enter the first gallery, the "Thinking Room" as it's called, of the Natasha Nicholson:  The Artist in Her Museum exhibit, you see an inviting cream-colored divan.  It sits amidst lovingly arranged pieces of artwork by Nicholson's friends.  On expansive display at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) until November 8th, this is an exhibit that keeps drawing me back.

This astounding show lures you to take meditative rest.  It acts as a kind of comfortable chair in a quiet space after a tiring day.  My most fruitful visit took place on September 22nd, when I attended a tour led by the petite yet formidable Ms. Nicholson herself.  She shared her thoughts & feelings about this major exhibit of her art, more or less as she displays it at home.

Silent Buddha (2014), Nicholson's somber assemblage, is situated at an appropriate entry point.  It harkens you mysteriously to her work:  a 6-inch black wooden statuette stands inside a frame against a white wall, its right hand severed, its head bound with red thread.  It's an attractive, enigmatic, vaguely ominous presence.

Nicholson admitted to our group of twenty visitors that she finds it hard to leave these things after spending hours at MMoCA, as she is wont to do.  Born in wartime (1945), Nicholson says that she arranged her personal "treasures" with secretive devotion as a girl growing up in St. Louis.  This self-described autodidact seems to have had a precocious artist's eye as well as a keen collector's enthusiasm at a tender age.

Surprisingly for someone so clearly cultivated, so fond of foreign objects, Nicholson said that she didn't visit Europe until she was 30 years old.  "How you live with objects is important," Nicholson told us.  She said that she prefers to gather "precise and consistent" things.  She gets them everywhere:  from the sidewalks around her Schenk's Corners studios, at estate sales & thrift stores, even via the Internet.

The objects that Nicholson has curated & arranged in the four MMoCA gallery spaces struck this appreciative viewer as charming, eccentric, even eerie.  Surrounded by a rusty iron rocking-horse frame, an age-faded Chinese lamp, a"spirit painting" of a dead child (circa 1840), glass-tipped titanium electrical thread & a thousand other odd items, the wondering mind is encouraged to delight in the rich, diversity of human products. 

In the "Studiolo" (Italian term for cabinet of curiosities), for example, a tall shelf of books, mostly about art & culture, rises high beside an armchair upholstered with West African beadwork.  The walls of Nicholson's replica parlor ("always in flux," she explained) are painted dark green.  She displays items ranging from Bavarian hunting amulets to a "dumb piano," a one-third-scale piano keyboard that folds into a black wooden box, used for practice while traveling.

The "Bead Room" gently guides you to the exit, which doubles as the entrance to MMoCA's fine museum store.  As you pass the silent parade of objects - beaded jewelry, embroidery, photos & drawings - you get a sense of what Nicholson means when she says that she was influenced more by painting than sculpture.

In the final ramped wall-space, you can enjoy images of models & masterpiece paintings from fashion magazines which, Nicholson explains, are a "source of ideas and connections" for her.  The artist embodies the spirit of sharing that art & culture strives to achieve.  She is generous with her creative output, allowing us to observe her personal possessions in this large, yet intimate MMoCA exhibit.

Nicholson offers a kind of post-modern silent Doll's House for adult art-lovers.  Henrik Ibsen would've appreciated it:  "Hedda Gabler & A Doll's House center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive & destructive for those around them.  While Hedda has few similarities with Nora in A Doll's House, many of today's audiences & theatre critics find Hedda's intensity & drive to be more complex, less comfortably explained than Nora's rather routine feminism." [- Wikipedia, Henrik Ibsen, edited]

Please see this inspiring MMoCA show before it's dismantled next month.  You'll feel right at home, meaning occasionally discomfited with the world & its artifacts.

Links:
http://www.mmoca.org/exhibitions-collection/exhibits/natasha-nicholson-artist-her-museum
http://natashanicholson.blogspot.com/p/cabinet-of-curiosities.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen

Metaphysical California: Jenny Lewis, The Voyager

Jenny Lewis in 2006

A friend who knows more about rock music, including the unglamorous business of music, than I do admitted that she didn't know The Voyager album.  Released in 2014, this laid-back yet challenging indie-pop album by Jenny Lewis suggests a 21st-century film noir.  It's a satisfying meta-movie set to a groovy soundtrack by a self-deprecating hipster.  Lewis is an artist who's unafraid to get personal, even confessional, in her candor.  The Voyager is her long-awaited masterpiece.

At times this ten-track record suggests the disciplined soul of Beach Boys wunderkind Brian Wilson.  It follows in the footsteps of Fleetwood Mac in its 1977 heyday.  Jenny Lewis is the aesthetic heir of the Laurel Canyon '70s scene.   Singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell & Neil Young thrived in that environment.  The Voyager is a shimmering collection of introspective songs, a brilliant collaboration with producers Ryan Adams & Mike Viola.

As the similarly gifted Neko Case, Cat Power & Aimee Mann do on their best records, Lewis takes the listener on a trip to aural Nirvana, traveling through a landscape populated by lonely people.  There's "a john gettin' a hand-job on the balcony below."  She rests at a cosmic motel where "you'd better hide the weed 'cause the maid is at the door."  Lewis moves gracefully from acid-tongued resentment ("Just One of the Guys") to a restless dream-reverie ("The Voyager").

Indeed, on the title track Lewis offers a world-weary, yet stoical, deadpan mantra for aspiring fellow escape-artists in search of Paradise Lost:

Jenny Lewis, The Voyager (2014) - cover artwork

The voyager's in every boy and girl

if you wanna get to heaven get out of this world . . .

You're the voyager! I'm the voyager!

Whether it's performed live, broadcast or commercially recorded, good music is angelic & generous.  As novelist Rick Moody puts it in his masterful book of essays, Celestial Music & Other Adventures in Listening (2012):  "Music has soul."  Moody goes on to expand his thesis with an intriguing argument, albeit rather awkwardly phrased:

"Why music, then?  Because when we sing it and play it, we are not only imitating the things that are, but we are [also] praising the things that are, and praising is good, and you find it, too, in almost any account of heaven.  The angels sing their praises, and when we sing, according to, among other, the Levites, we are imitating the angels." [- p. 280, italics mine]

Moody laments the loss of vulnerability in contemporary popular music, as exemplified in Otis Redding's riveting live performance of the Memphis soul hit "Try a Little Tenderness" at the Monterey Pop Festival (June 1967).  "Longing, and compassion, and tenderness are heavenly, and they make you better than you otherwise were."

Jenny Lewis's songs are rife with melancholy longing & melodic tenderness.  Her recordings have always felt intimate.  She's a clever, compassionate & bemused artist.  Other musicians respect her skills, as evidenced by the notable guest artists who appear on her albums.  Benjamin Gibbard (Death cab for Cutie) performs on Rabbit Fur Coat.  Benmont Tench (of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers) & the Watson Twins play on The Voyager.  Beck & Ryan Adams also perform on The Voyager.

Lewis is keen to project an attractive media image in her CD artwork.  The Voyager, for example, features a booklet of photos of Lewis posing in sunny weather wearing a pastel rainbow jumpsuit.  Even when issuing work with other musicians, she's a self-confident artist who wears her heart on her sleeve.

Jenny Lewis, in fact, reveals a genius for collaboration.  Her first major group, alt-county indie-rockers Rilo Kiley (1998-2011) issued several good records & toured regularly.  Signed as a solo artist by Conor Oberst to the Team Love label in 2004, Lewis put out the poignant Rabbit Fur Coat album (2006), featuring the gorgeously harmonizing Watson Twins, Chandra & Leigh.  More recently, she made the intriguing Jenny & Johnny album I'm Having Fun Now (2010), a project shared with her romantic & artistic partner Johnathan Rice.

Ironically, this California-based angel arrived via Sin City.  Born Jennifer Diane Lewis in Las Vegas to show-biz parents in January 1976, Lewis was a child actress.  Her film work ranges from a comic pre-teen role in Troop Beverly Hills (1989) to a dramatic role at age 21 in Pleasantville (1998).   Lewis has a family legacy to build on:  her singing mother Linda & a Harmonica Gang member father Eddie Gordon instilled ambition in Jenny.  Fortunately for Lewis's fans, her Ma & Pa apparently encouraged their precocious redheaded girl's considerable talents early on.

Jenny Lewis continues to take advantage of visual platforms.  In 2014, for example, she contributed an exclusive track, "Completely Not Me" (a collaboration with Rostam Batmanglji of Vampire Weekend), to that semi-feminist HBO show Girls.  Indeed, Jenny Lewis plays well with others.  She covered the Traveling Wilburys' "Handle with Care" in collaboration with M. Ward, circa 2006.  She appeared as a guest artist on Brandon Flowers's album Flamingo (2010).  And she sang a lovely duet with Elvis Costello on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman in 2011, when her Acid Tongue CD came out.

Throughout her nearly 20-year music career, she has demonstrated how to make sound-art that's catchy & yet gets deep.  Put simply, The Voyager rings true.  It's a fascinating document, one artist's take on loss & yearning.  A memorable portrait of our era, a time after "the Twin Towers fell / and it all went to hell."