17 August/18 August 2019 ★ FT Weekend 13Arts
T
he sweet scent of nostalgia
wafts through the rambling
corridors of the Massachu-
setts Museum of Contem-
porary Art (MASS MoCA),
perfuming staircases, drifting across
gargantuan galleries and penetrating
the darkest alcoves. The museum is per-
ennially crammed with disparate shows
(all nominally temporary but some
semi-permanent) that align, cross tra-
jectories and spin apart. Themes mate-
rialise by happenstance or through colli-
sions of sensibilities. Two of the artists
now on view have filled halls in this
castle-like compound with their private
toy collections. A third has constructed
a monumental ode to childhood, replete
with Barbie dolls, teddy bears and an
Edwardian rocking horse.
Jarvis Rockwell has spent a lifetime
collectingaction figures. Here he mar-
shals them into a parade spanning an
enormous stairwell. Aliens, superhe-
roes and beasts march, two by two,
acrossglass platforms suspended from
the ceiling towards some sort of apothe-
osis. Rockwell intends “Us” (2002) to
offer up avatars by the dozen, alter-egos
who embody our culture’s deepest
desires and beliefs. As Rockwell puts it,
possibly ironically, butmaybe not, the
toys “are going on to glory”.
Rockwell, 87, is the eldest son of the
artist Norman Rockwell, and his famous
father’s influence is inescapable. In a
2013 interview, he remarked: “It’s funny
that his art was called realism; peoplecalled it realism because that is what
they saw. But it was a constructed real-
ity, a fantasy... My work with toys
comes off of that. The toys have to do
with us, just as my father’s work had to
do with us. I think I’m just taking a dif-
ferent turn on who we are.”
Trenton Doyle Hancock might agree.
Another artist haunted by his past, Han-
cock believes that toys tell a truer story
than we realise. InMind of the Mound:
Critical Mass, he turnsa football field-
sized galleryspace into an epic game
board, a sort of Candy Land for grown-
ups — though the installation might also
make actual kids giddy with the sense of
having been understood. Follow the
rainbow squares into Hancock’s boy-
hood, his existential fears and dawning
political awareness, and you traverse a
landscape of wistfulness and whimsy.
At the age of 10 he invented a secret
identity, Torpedo Boy, and he’s been
constructing the character’s vivid uni-
verse ever since. Hancock starts bygiv-
ing ushis own back-story, starting with
a diorama recreation of his grand-
mother’s house. A squad of life-sized
trick-or-treaters in ghoulish masks
slink from the threshold of a suburban
house. They are no doubt scared off by a
disembodied arm that punches through
the closed door, clutching a big cross.
The message is clear: little devils not
welcome here.Toy stories
MASS MoCA| Three shows on childhood collections traverse
a landscape of wistfulness and whimsy.Ariella Budickreports
Clockwise from
main picture:
‘Mind of the
Mound: Critical
Mass’ by
Trenton Doyle
Hancock;
‘Us’ by Jarvis
Rockwell;
‘Now I Let You
Go...’by
Annie Lennox
Tony Luong; Kaelan BurkettCircle around to the back and you can
see the inside of a 1970s living room
decked out in floral wallpaper with
orange and brown linoleum tiles. Han-
cock’s grandmother evidently received
and passed on mixed messages from
pop culture. She read Jet, the magazine
marketed at African-American readers,
and also “Tortured for Christ”, a booklet
about Christians under communism.
She listened to LPs of black gospel sing-
ers (Mahalia Jackson) and white tele-
vangelists (Richard and Patti Roberts).
On a vintage TV set, two talk-show
preachers earnestly analyse the
demonic presence lurking in toys such
as He-Man andSkeletor. Near the door
sits a collection ofMasters of the Universe
action figures that havebeen sentenced
to the pyre. Someone (grandma, pre-
sumably) has written “BURN THESE”
on the side of the box.
The rest of the exhibition shows us
how Hancock’s imaginative universe has
expanded into an epic personal mytho-
graphy. At its heart lies the Mound, an
agglomeration of plant and human qual-
ities that cleans the environment and
encourages people to live more colourful
lives. Mounds enjoy the protection of
Torpedo Boy, who defends them against
the dread Vegans. Their battles, though,
arejust an excuse to display Hancock’s
collections of memorabilia, which he has
arranged on supermarket-style shelves
and inside tents, making even a venera-
ble adult feel like a kid in a toy empo-
rium. (I recognised manyboard games
from mygirlhood.) Hancock’sdesper-
ately adorable fantasy oozes charm,
which, like other people’s offspring, it
eventually loses. After a while, I yearned
for something less cute.
The pop star Annie Lennox also has a
hard time putting away childish things
— though she confronts them with mor-
bid melancholy.AndNowILetYouGo
...is another room-sized mound, this
one made up of a lifetime’spossessions
half-buried in soil. Lennox doesn’t trust
us to decode the objects: she supple-
ments the installation with a “field
guide”, listing 187 items that hum with
private resonance: a toy nurse’s kit, a
stuffed guinea pig, her mother’s sewing
machine and glasses, her father’s fob
watch and beer stein.
“We cling unconsciously to ‘things’
that are endowed with emotional signif-
icance — keeping memories alive, while
the uncomfortable awareness of the
inevitable moment of departure is
held at bay,” she writes.And Now I LetYouGo...is a sort of funeral offering,
objects scattered on a hillock of earth.
Lennox bids goodbye to her belong-
ings,yet the installation is a paradox,
enshrining ephemera as if to preserve
them in perpetuity after all. Herstuff
has resurrected itself for another act,
demanding visitors’ attention —after
all, attention is the pop singer’s cur-
rency. In case anyone should forget that
Lennox has a claim on immortality (and
so her possessions do), she accompanies
hermound with a mirrored chamber,
crammed with gold and platinum
records. “Trophy Room” contradicts
the elegiac tone of the rest of the piece,
blazing with self-congratulation.
I don’t know if Mass MoCAcon-
sciously organised a suite of shows
around the theme of dirt piles, but there
certainly are a lot of them, breeding
memory and desire. The tumulus’s most
powerful appearance comes in Cauleen
Smith’s “Remote Viewing”, part of a
meaty one-woman show,We Already
Have What We Need. In the 14-minute
video, a black woman and her child look
on as an earthmover scoops out a build-
ing-sized grave and then pushes a stee-
pled one-room schoolhouse into it.
It’s both exciting and upsetting to
watch the building meet its fate, and
though the scene seems surreal, so is the
legacy of slavery. Smith says the film
was inspired by an account of a town so
determined to expunge its history that
whites actually buried a black kids’
school. She unearths old traumas, then
reinters them, going to Hollywood-style
trouble and expense of building a piece
of a village in order to destroy it. Various
artists at Mass MoCA treat nostalgia as a
fearsome force; Smith reminds us that
memory must do constant battle with
the equally potent craving to forget.massmoca.orgO
h, breaking up is so very
hard to do,” breathed
Scott Walker on The
Walker Brothers’ 1965
number one hit, “Make
It Easy on Yourself”, his voice a
strangulated throb. Over Burt
Bacharach’s lush strings, he paused,
collected himself, and delivered a
heroically selfless kiss-off to his
departing inamorata:
“If you really love him, and there’s
nothing I can do / Don’t try to spare
my feelings, just tell me that you’re
through / And make it easy on
yourself... ”
Before he reinvented himself as
an auteur of fractured, avant-garde
art-pop, Walker, who died in March,
was a visceral, honey-voiced
interpreter of cinematic love songs.
His rich baritone, stentorian yet
bruised, burrowed deep into the heft
and sinew of heartbreak.
And with “Make It Easy on Yourself”,
he had quite the song to work with.
Even in Bacharach and Hal David’s
peerless canon of eulogies to
heartache, this was something else:
an abandoned lover, in an act of
superhuman sympathy, reacting to his
loss not with anger or recrimination
but... forgiveness.
Walker’s visceral sadness was
raw. “My darling, if this is goodbye,”
he sighed, his voice a molten sob,
“I just know I’m gonna cry. So run
to him, before you start crying
too... ” Pitched beyond mere pop
sorrow, his self-sacrificing grief
sounded truly Shakespearean.
It was a masterclass in abject
yearning — and yet Walker’s definitive
take on the song was not the first.who sang it in a supper-club style as he
supported The Beatles on tour in 1963.
Covering it three years later, a strident
Cilla Black sounded less forgiving of
her exiting lover than inclined to give
him a good slap.
Sarah Vaughan fared better,
wrapping her formidable pipes around
the tune live at the 1971 Monterey Jazz
Festival. Long John Baldry sounded
duly heartbroken. Ironically,
Bacharach’s own version of the song
was a let-down: as a singer, he is no
great shakes.
“Make It Easy on Yourself” soon
became a staple for light entertainers
who raised their games to do it justice.
Tony Bennett dialled down the
schmaltz in 1970, as did The
Carpenters a year later. Johnny
Mathis’s soulful warble induced
goosebumps.
The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon
put his droll indie Noël Coward act
on hold in 1997 to throw himself
into the song’s exquisite ache. It
will surprise many to learn that
Rick Astley’s 2005 take was
genuinely fervent, like a great lost
Motown acetate.
But even the greatest songs are
unable to withstand acts of wanton
vandalism. In 2007, Michael Ball’s
tremulous mugging belonged in a
cruise-ship cabaret.
Bacharach’s own involvement on the
When Ronan Met Burtaaalbumlbum
couldn’t stop Ronan Keating chewing
it into cheesy karaoke. In 2015,
indie duo Slow Club turned it into a
tedious half-speed plod, as they do
to everything.
It’s Scott Walker’s radiant reading
that remains the gold standard for
this timeless classic. In later years,
as he turned to cerebral art-rock,
Walker hoped his music could “say
the unsayable”.
Yet it was “Make It Easy on
Yourself”, decades earlier, that was his
true inarticulate speech of the heart.
Ian Gittins
More in the series at ft.com/life-of-a-songcouldn’t stop Ronan Keating chewing
it into cheesy karaoke. In 2015,
indie duo Slow Club turned it into a
tedious half-speed plod, as they do
to everything.From left: Scott, Gary and John of
The Walker Brothers— RedfernsAnd with “Make It Easy on Yourself”,Tony Bennett dialled down the
schmaltz in 1970, as did The
Carpenters a year later. Johnny
Mathis’s soulful warble induced
goosebumps.
The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon
put his droll indie Noël Coward act
on hold in 1997 to throw himself
into the song’s exquisite ache. It
will surprise many to learn that
Rick Astley’s 2005 take was
genuinely fervent, like a great lost
Motown acetate.
But even the greatest songs are
unable to withstand acts of wanton
vandalism. In 2007, Michael Ball’s
tremulous mugging belonged in a
cruise-ship cabaret.
Bacharach’s own involvement on the
20112011 When Ronan Met BurtWriting it in 1962, Bacharach and
David hired a tyro Dionne Warwick to
sing vocals on the demo. Her cloth-
eared label boss rejected it, so instead it
became a US top 20 hit for Jerry Butler,
Curtis Mayfield’s original co-singer in
The Impressions.
When Bacharach broke the bad news
to Warwick that she could not release it
as a single, she famously snapped at
him: “Don’t make me over, man!” —
thus inspiring the title of her own
debut hit. Her live take on “Make It
Easy on Yourself” remains glorious.
Walker and Warwick’s readings were
way more resonant than that of
comedian and crooner Kenny Lynch,DANCEL-E-V with Young Turks
Bold Tendencies, London
AAAAEA woman stands poised on the very
edge of the dance floor: chalk-white
face; white hair; white clothes; black
lipstick. Opposite her is a man in a
zebra-striped shortie playsuit teamed
with stockings and suspenders. He
smiles at the lady in the purple nylon
wig. And that was just the audience.
Sharon Eyal’s four-week residency
at South London’s hip and happening
Bold Tendencies space has been catnip
for the venue’s very art-school
clientele, and the eighth floor of the
decommissioned multi-storey car park
that houses Bold Tendencies was
packed to capacity for last Sunday’s
show by Sharon Eyal’s L-E-V.
The troupe’s all-inclusive summerbreak in Peckham has been a mix
of classes, workshops and
performances in collaboration with
British creatives. The second week
featured 41 members of the National
Youth Dance Company in a revival of
Eyal’sUsed to Be Blondeand last Sunday
served up the fruits of a collaboration
with the London indy record label
Young Turks, featuring material from
Koreless and Jamie xx, whose rhythmic
electronica provided a glucose drip-
feed for the 60-minute set.
Eyal and her eight dancers wore a
random bag-wash of shorts and vests
and their faces seemed to have been
made up by a naughty seven-year-old
while they slept. The material drew
heavily onLove Chapter 2, which had its
UK premier at Sadler’s Wells last year
and whose signature move is a catwalk
strut sustained for unfeasibly long
periods of time.
The dancers begin the performance
huddled together like an anxious seaTHE LIFE
OF A SONGMAKE IT EASY
Reviews
anemone, but although the group
function organically as a unit Eyal’s
lines and clusters never render
individual personalities completely
anonymous. While she displays
surprisingly little interest in coupling —
the chief preoccupation of so many
mainstream dancemakers — she
clearly relishes idiosyncrasy and the
evening is peppered with solo displays
of skill.
Gon Biron shows off his uncanny
backbends, Mariko Kakizaki, who
trained as a rhythmic gymnast,
indulges in some sky-high extensions
and jetés en tournant and Swedish
Royal Ballet principal Daniel Norgren-
Jensen ditches grand allegro in favour
of a whole body judder in time to the
bubble wrap popping of the score.
Eyal’s own dancing career began in
Tel Aviv in 1990 with the Batsheva
Dance Company, where she was house
choreographer from 2005-2012 under
the direction of Ohad Naharin and his
“Gaga” movement system (a kind of
whole-body mindfulness). Like
Naharin, Eyal is never afraid to revisit,
remix and repurpose pre-existing
material to create new (or new-ish)
work, tailored to new performers or a
specific site. Although Sunday night’s
session was composed almost entirely
of familiar moves it was given a fresh,
almost improvisatory vibe by the
rave-like atmosphere and by Eyal’s
contributions as “caller” on the
sidelines. So much contemporary
dance operates like a closed system
where the audience is merely a
replacement for the studio mirror
but “Gaga” doesn’t work with mirrors
and this edgy, intimate setting allowed
L-E-V’s dancers to engage more
directly with the encircling crowd.
“Alice, go closer to the people,”
urged Eyal. “Be a bit more extreme.
Look into their eyes.”
Louise Levene
L-E-V with Young Turks perform— Susan Bingham boldtendencies.comAliens, superheroes
and beasts march, two
by two, towards somesort of apotheosis
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