Lohengrin

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Brooks Adams

Wilson's use of such effects can verge on the self-parodistic, he's used them so often. But then Wagner's music in Act III has this feeling too, and one sensed that Wilson was self-consciously playing it up. The overture always brings to my mind the Beatles movie Help!, in which it was used, and the "Wedding March" is beyond familiar, although I read with some amazement in the Lohengrin press clippings that during the 1950s in Chicago, the "Wedding March" was briefly outlawed from church weddings, as being secular music and therefore unfit for sacred settings. Wagner's opera is anything but sacred or saintly; in fact, it's really kind of a witches' sabbath in disguise, and Wilson is just the man to bring out this perverse streak.

When a gleaming cube rose up from the floor in Act III to evoke Elsa and Lohengrin's High Minimalist honeymoon suite, it seemed only natural that the bride and bridegroom made no effort to fit inside. This was not, after all, a marriage that was meant to be consummated, and besides, such gleaming cubes have become modernist tropes, ideas that needn't be inhabited. Of course, Wilson's cube also recalls more stringent examples by Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin and James Turrell that have for 20 years inhabited such avant-garde institutions as P.S. 1 or Dia Center for the Arts. But to see Wilson's applied Light and Space Art at the Met was nevertheless a thrill. The last image of the opera, with Elsa fallen dead, her little brother Gottfried having miraculously reappeared (what a strange, incestuous birthing ritual this is!), and Ortrud vanquished but still twirling in an expressionist frenzy, was totally magnetic.

Wagner's music gives you plenty of time to think about contemporary art affinities. Every time the light bars went black in the sky of Wilson's production, I thought of Ed Ruscha's recent paintings with those blacked-out captions, and wondered whether Wilson was appropriating Ruscha as well as everyone else for his oddly American-looking Lohengrin. Burgoyne Diller and Peter Halley also came to mind as additional sources for that aura of hard-edge abstraction, with horizontals and verticals not quite meeting, that Wilson so assiduously cultivates.

As for the more flyaway aspects of Lohengrin's legacy, I am reminded, whenever perusing Elizabeth Peyton's new book, with its assorted illustrations of Ludwig II and other schwach types, of the Swan King's tremendous allure as a chaste Decadent, a delusional archetype that has entranced many a youthquaker, as well as such modern geniuses as Luchino Visconti, who cast Helmut Berger as Ludwig and Romy Schneider as the Empress Sissi in Ludwig. This 1972 film, when seen in its four-hour, uncut entirety, like Einstein, or Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's film version of Parsifal, proved to be one of those unwieldy, alternately soporific and revelatory art events of which the Met's Lohengrin is only the latest example.

More recently, Neueschwanstein, or at least Disney's Sleeping Beauty version of it, pervades the work of James Angus, a barely minted Yale graduate who has made a miniature wood reconstruction of Ludwig's castle, seemingly cloning itself in staggered relief, as if the artist had just pushed the "duplicate" button on his computer. A sense of the post-Disneyesque sublime also extends to Keith Mayerson, whose painterly abstractions, self-consciously worked in the California "abject art" tradition, seem to pay homage to Kandinsky's painterly Wagnerisms. (Coincidentally, Robert Wilson did a 1997 installation at the Villa Stuck in Munich, the home of Kandinsky's teacher who himself made a temple of art and painted many mythological themes, such as centaurs and centauresses, in the spirit of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk.) Even Michele Zalopany's large grisaille pastel Leda, featuring a girl on a swan boat in an amusement park ride, struck a Wagnerian note last spring.