Sunday April 5 is your last chance to catch Martha Clarke’s The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Minetta Lane Theatre. From its hypnotic opening promenade, as actors enact the evolution of beasts into humans, to its climatic high-flying ascent into a Dantéan hell, this artful interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting (a recreation of a production first seen in 1984) makes magic from the simplest means. It’s not for the imagination-challenged or those repelled by complex sexuality. At the performance I saw, an elderly gent in the front row got up and left. His loss.
From the prehistoric to the modern: Jenny Holzer’s Protect Protect finds the art world’s Cassandra in peak form. Her works are a loaded melding of technology and wordplay that range from sweeping, strobe-like LED panels to blown up reproductions of government documents that bring us an Orwellian vision of bureaucracy and paranoia come home to roost; never before has truth and beauty been harnessed to reveal the duplicities at work in our country’s government and the individual psyche. Go, and behold the power of text to move your soul as it bends your mind. On view through May 31.
Above and below, photos courtesy of Jonathan Nye
