4 April/5 April 2020 ★ FT Weekend 11
When reality
runs wild A
ll forms of confinement
breed dreams of escape.
Freedom of movement,
release from physical
constraints, even escape
from anxiety. Like just about
everything else, that can now be
catered for online: up on my screen
this week popped an offer from the
American artist Annabel Daou, who
will do your fretting for you, to order,
as she paces her hallway from dusk to
dawn with her worry beads. Get in
touch [email protected].
Then, of course, there’s television,
our bringer of both hard news and soft
escape. In our household, online chats
with friends and family mostly centre
on what we’re watching.
And all of us, last week, had
discoveredTiger King. A Netflix
documentary in seven parts, it begins
with the jaw-dropping statistic that
there are more tigers in private
captivity in the US than in the wild,
worldwide. As the story rolls on, our
jaws get sore from dropping.
The tale centres on one Joe Exotic, a
zookeeper in Oklahoma in possession
of some 197 tigers. Or is that, as he later
tells us, 220 tigers? Or does he even
know — his creatures breed litters as
fast as he can make them do it, for the
value of the sweet cuddly cubs with
which queues of visitors “pay to play”.It’s a story of
cruelty, drugs,
abuse, craziness,guns and more guns
W
hen Jordan Casteel
moved to Harlem a few
years ago, she got to
know the neighbour-
hood by taking photos
of its people — restaurant workers,
bench-sitters, street vendors, kids —
and translating them into paint. James,
who hawked CDs outside the landmark
restaurant Sylvia’s, posed impassively
on his high stool, one foot resting on the
Fender amplifier he used to blast music
on to the crowded thoroughfare. The
man thought he was humouring a pas-
ser-by, and when Casteel invited him to
see the result at an exhibition, he ini-
tially demurred.
James showed up, though, and the
moment when he saw his epic portrait,
occupying most of a gallery wall, has
become part of Casteel’s mythology.
“It’s one of my favourite moments
ever,” she later recalled. “He looked at
me and he said, ‘Oh, my God. I have to go
get my wife.’ And he ran out, and then
20 or 30 minutes later Yvonne, his wife,
arrived and she said, ‘Thank you for see-
ing him as I’ve always seen him and
sharing that with the world.’ She was
sobbing and I started crying.”
James’s portrait anchorsWithinReach,
Casteel’s New Museum exhibition,
which I hope will still be there, pulsing
with a stealthy kind of joy, when cultural
life reawakens. His lids sag over pouchy
eyes, and a resting frown draws the
whole face down, in an expression that
could be sagacity or annoyance. His
patrician pose, fixed gaze and maroon
outfit trimmed with orange (matching
his hat and shoes) give him a monumen-
tal presence and a muted energy.
Until the art world reopens, you can
pick up something of the show’s crackle
on the museum’s website, which offers a
semi-satisfying video tour, and that of
the Casey Kaplan Gallery, which has an
ample selection of Casteel’s work. Her
portraits dilute the shutdown gloom,
not with spectacle or antics but with
luminous empathy. Just six years out of
Yale’s School of Art, she paints with
mature confidence and an anthropolo-
gist’s eye for detail.
Her first portrait series, painted while
she was still a student, depicts black
men relaxing naked in their homes.
Young, comfortable enough to pose in
the nude, her subjects have flauntable
bodies and theatrical presence. But Cas-
teel looks past their erotic appeal to
their tender awkwardness and haphaz-
ardly decorated rooms. “Jiréh” leans
forward on a tropical-print sofa, all
gawky, green-tinged limbs. His hands
are folded modestly on his knees, and
long feet float like small battleships on a
sea of mauve carpet. At the edge of the
frame, a scrawny houseplant struggles,
as if it has relinquished all its chloro-
phyll to the man’s skin and its vigour to
the vivid upholstery.
With the Yale portraits, Casteel began
a project she saw as redemptive. “I
wanted to contribute very humanised,
vulnerable representations of the black
male,” she says in an interview in the
show’s catalogue. “And not just as black
men who are being killed by police, or
black men in hip hop, but black men as
people who have various books by their
bed, or photographs of their mothers as
their most important possessions.”
You can feel the labour involved in
striking a balance between close obser-
vation and objectification, tribute andPicture of empathy
Jordan Casteel| Intimate,
domestic depictions of
Harlem life convey a touching
serenity. ByAriella Budick
headgear: wide-brimmed hat, leather
baseball cap and shaved pate. Somehow,
Casteel sneaks a sympathetic look
behind those aviator shades.
She composes faces out of discrete
elements — facets, highlights, sharply
delineated features — and the results are
at once stylised and highly specific. Her
subjects are never just costume manne-
quins, representatives of their social sta-
tus, or avatars of some state of mind.
They are collaborators, the sources of
human warmth that she reflects.
This is especially true in the recent,
resplendent portraits of Casteel’s gradu-
ating students at Rutgers University.
The pictures blaze with valedictory
intensity. She instructed each student to
select a location imbued with personal
associations. Cansuela chose her own
room, where we see her sitting on the
bed in unlaced red work boots, clutch-
ing a giant fuzzy panda. The fondness
flowing back and forth between artist
and model emanates from every inch.
Noelle, too, sits on her bed, cross-leg-
ged amid an array of brightly patterned
linens. You, the viewer, are being
watched: by the googly-eyed Wonder
Woman cushion, by the pair of puppies
framed on the windowsill, by the sitar-
wielding dragon-slayer gazing out of a
picture on the wall, and by Noelle her-
self, whose expression of serene open-
ness is surely directed at the painter.
That trust is the precious ore that runs
through Casteel’s work, presented sim-
ply and in abundance, as if to assert that
even in a time of suspicion and hostility,
it is a vital and renewable resource.newmuseum.orgJan Dalley
Television
Once they’ve grown up, though, into
400lb beasts capable of ripping your
arm off, their value as fun for the
public is rather lessened — and what
happens to them then? That’s one of
the many questions that runs through
this extremely bizarre tale.
Glimpses of the animals’ plight are
horrendous: dozens of adult tigers
packed together in a roiling mass like
sheep in a pen; a giant white tiger so
obese its belly almost laps on to the
ground. And a tiger cub zipped into a
very small suitcase and wheeled
through the lobby of a Las Vegas
casino, up to the bedrooms where — as
one of the gumboils in human form
that haunt this story puts it — “A little
pussy can get you a lot of pussy.”
Yet the filmmakers have obviously
decided to concentrate on the human
wildlife. And quite a menagerie that is.
Joe himself — bleached mullet, extreme
tattoos, piercing and chains, guns
always at the ready — has two or three
very young husbands on the go and
promises “Waco”-style revenge on
anyone who tries to take his cats away.
And the person doing that, animal
rescue campaigner Carole Baskin, may
turn out to have claws of her own: her
millionaire husband mysteriously
disappeared 20 years ago, and it is Joe’s
frequent public assertions that Carole
fed him to her own tigers that lead to alawsuit and nefarious plots which,
finally, see Joe himself caged, serving a
long stretch in jail.
Into the story comes villain after
villain, each dodgier and more cheating
than the last, almost always highly
suspect “millionaires” who, despite the
private jets and expensive weaponry
and big cats, turn out to be broke.
These human specimens have one
thing in common: an addiction to
exotic animals that stems from a lust
for power. “There’s nothing cooler or
sexier... than a tiger,” says Bhagavan
“Doc” Antle, his four (five?) wives
hanging on his arms. In fact, most of
the two-legged monsters here are just
out of jail, homeless, addicted or on the
run, misfits who find their only place in
with the far more dignified animals.
Yet the power-craze knows few
boundaries. When Joe Exotic runs for
governor of Oklahoma in 2018 (his
2016 presidential bid having been a bit
of a wet firework), he appoints as his
campaign manager the guy from the
firearms counter at the local Walmart
and makes vote-seeking videos
wielding a rifle, surrounded by his
tigers, and describing himself as “gay
as a three-dollar bill”. Yet the
astonishing thing — the documentary
actually makes nothing of this point —
is that Joe actually achieves many
hundreds of votes. One supporter sayssomething horribly akin to “he tells it
like it is”. That again.
There is much more. I won’t spoil it
for you. But why, you might well be
asking by now, are reasonably
intelligent people so fascinated by a
story of cruelty, drugs, abuse,
prejudice, amputation, craziness and
squalor, guns and more guns, all set off
by twanging country music?
Well, there’s something compelling
here about documentary and “truth”.
A rather blitzed-looking director,
interviewed for the film we’re
watching, agreed to produce Joe
Exotic’s absurd videocasts (daily at
6pm, for 10 years) in exchange for
being allowed to document everything
that went on at the park for a “reality”
series. A series within a series, framed
by a documentary: Chinese boxes of
factual television making, all based on
a fantasist.
And perhaps because our own
everyday reality is now almost surreal,
more unimaginable with each news
bulletin, we are drawn to something
more outlandish still. There’s
something addictive about watching a
real story that no one would have
believed if it were fiction — because
that’s what we’re actually living
through. Especially, at the moment
when we all long for escape, a story
that contains so many cages.Main image:
Jordan Casteel’s
‘Jiréh’ (2013)Left: Casteel’s
‘Her Turn’
(2018)
Collection Jody Robbins.
Courtesy the artist and Casey
Kaplan, New York; Emanuel
Family CollectionT
he sky was overcast in Salz-
burg on August 22 1920, as
the audience gathered in
front of the cathedral. Some
w e re s i t t i n g o n h a r d
wooden benches, some were standing as
the performance of Hugo von Hof-
mannsthal’s Jedermann, a parable
derived from medieval mystery plays,
began. Then, around the halfway point,
the sun broke through. Some of those
present recalled that this ray of light felt
like a benediction from above, granting
fair weather to the event’s founders. The
Salzburg Festival was born.
That was 100 years ago this summer.
Now the Salzburg Festival counts as one
of the most high-profile draws for the
world’s cultural tourists. It was not the
first — Wagner’s opera festival at Bay-
reuth, founded to perform his four-part
cycleDerRingdesNibelungen, started life
in 1876 — but it is the festival that
has set the template for everybody else
to follow.
As the musical world reels from the
effects of the coronavirus shutdown, it is
worth reflecting on how far we have
come. Over the past 100 years, and
especially since the end of the second
world war, music and opera festivals
have spread across Europe and the US in
their hundreds.
The Salzburg checklist, which has
made this possible, is simple: first, find a
venue with beautiful surroundings,
especially a historic city or a spa resort;
then, provide all the necessary require-
ments of the well-to-do, such as fine
hotels and restaurants.
Salzburg’s founding trio understood
all this, but their ideals aspired higher.
In 1920, poet and playwright Hof-
mannsthal, director Max Reinhardt and
composer Richard Strauss envisaged a
festival that would restore the pride of
Austrian culture after the first world
war. They also had the laudable inten-
tion to play to local people, though the
high cost of tickets soon drew in an elite
crowd and shopkeepers responded by
putting up their prices— a sign of what
was to come.
The founders might not approve of
everything that has happened since, but
the scale of achievement would surely
impress them. Today, Salzburg is
becoming a year-round festival city,
with smaller festivals created for Easter
and Whitsun (the latter headed by
mezzo Cecilia Bartoli) and an annual
Mozart week in late January.
At the same time the Salzburg exam-
ple has spawned hundreds of offspring
worldwide. In the UK, Glyndebourne
was founded in 1934, followed by Alde-
burgh, Bath, Brighton, Buxton, Chelten-
ham and Edinburgh. Germany has
Baden-Baden, Bonn, Göttingen, Halle
and Munich; Italy offers the artistic
heights of Florence, Pesaro, Ravenna
and Verona; the US lures visitors to
Glimmerglass, St Louis and Santa Fe.
And these are only the tip of the iceberg.
A recent (still selective) listing cited
77 classical music and opera festivals
just in the UK, and there are armfuls
more across the world — Finland alone
quotes 34.
Their success has not just been artis-
tic. These festivals have become major
contributors to their local economies
and sources of employment, at least for
the seasonal periods in which they oper-
ate, which is why the widespread dis-
ruption this summer is so serious.Opera festivals are especially vulnera-
ble, as rehearsals tend to start six weeks
or more ahead of the opening night.
That means any cancellation has to be
made a couple of months in advance of
when performances are due to begin.
The outlook is changing by the day,
but the coronavirus pandemic has
already cut a swath through those festi-
vals that open earlier in the summer. In
the UK, the country-house opera season
has been almost wiped out, with the
exception of Glyndebourne, which is
still planning for a delayed opening on
July 14. Across Europe, the two big
Easter festivals at Salzburg and Baden-
Baden have gone. Even the Bayreuth
Festival, which is not scheduled to open
until late July, is suspending online
ticket sales until further notice.
Let us not be pessimistic. It says much
for their ingenuity that almost all festi-
vals across Europe and the US managed
to ride out the financial crisis of 2008.
With that experience in mind, many are
asking patrons who have bought tickets
for this summer to donate the money to
the productions already in preparation,
which are being rescheduled for futureyears to save on costs. Being open to
change will be crucial for survival.
Salzburg knows this as well as any-
where. The history of the festival has
been one of repeated renewal. No period
was darker than the years following the
Nazis’ annexation of Austria in 1938,
when Hitler attended the festival to give
it his personal stamp of approval. In a
double symbol of how far the festival
had fallen from its founders’ ideals, the
Jewish Reinhardt was told he was no
longer welcome, and Hofmannsthal’s
Jedermannwas dropped from its annual
performances.
Salzburg picked itself up after the war
and entered a new period of expansion.
Under the aegis of the Salzburg-born
maestro Herbert von Karajan, it tapped
into postwar economic growth and
became synonymous with sky-high
prices and de luxe consumerism.
Since Karajan’s death in 1989, a desire
to break with that era and stay relevant
has seen a succession of artistic direc-
tors boldly taking the festival this way
and that. Today, Salzburg looks to be at
another crossroads. The festival’s artis-
tic leadership is pushing ahead with cut-
ting-edge opera productions and some
esoteric programming, while the busi-
ness plan looks more in tune with its
conservative past (top ticket prices are
above €400, and a new sponsorship deal
with Russian oil company Gazprom has
infuriated environmental campaign-
ers). Seeing where that leads, though,
can wait for another day.
It is too early to say for certain that the
2020 festival will go ahead, but a cen-
tury ago that ray of sunlight breaking
through the clouds was hailed as a
beneficent omen. Everybody at Salz-
burg will be crossing their fingers that it
is back on cue this year.TheSalzburgFestivalisduetorunJuly18-
August30;salzburgerfestspiele.atWhat will happen
to all the music?
Salzburg Festival |This year’s centenary event is in doubt
—but it has survived darker times. ByRichard FairmanArts
It was not the first — but
Salzburg is the one that
has set the template forfestivals across the world
distortion. Her portrait of “Jerome”
veers closest to the way male painters
traditionally treated female models: he
reclines like Manet’s Olympia — sin-
ewed, matter-of-fact and armoured in
bright blue skin.
Casteel acknowledges her debt to Bob
Thompson’s jubilant use of colour, but
she has a deeper affinity with Alice Neel,
the astringent portraitist who built faces
out of varicoloured splotches applied
with furious grace. With her bleak view
of humanity, Neel could be cruel to her
subjects. Casteel’s portraits, on the other
hand, radiate compassion and love.
She took that generosity with her to
Harlem, where she evidently realised
what she’d been missing by getting rid of
clothes. Her 2017 group portrait of
“Cowboy E, Sean Cross, and Og Jabar”
juices their solemn expressions with
their impeccably casual outfits andAPRIL 4 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 2/4/2020 - 17: 03 User: andrew.higton Page Name: WKD11, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 11 , 1