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2009 Alpert Award Winners Unveiled as Fellowship Program Reaches 15-Year Mark
Valencia, Calif., May 6—
The Herb Alpert Foundation and California
Institute of the Arts (CalArts) yesterday announced the
recipients of the 2009 Alpert Award in the Arts. The five
winners of the prestigious fellowships are:
Artist Paul Chan, of Brooklyn, N.Y., in
the film/video category; Writer, composer, performer and
director Rinde Eckert, of Nyack, N.Y.,
in theatre; Composer, guitarist, violist and CalArts alumnus
John King (Music BFA 76), of New York,
N.Y., in music; Artist Paul Pfeiffer, of
New York, N.Y., in the visual art category; and Choreographer
and performer Reggie Wilson, of Brooklyn,
N.Y., in dance.
Now in its 15th year, the annual Alpert Award in the Arts
provides five unrestricted $75,000 grants to five independent
artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music,
theater and visual art.
Adjudicated by three-member panels of noted artists and
arts professionals in each of the five categories, the Alpert
Awards were conceived to reward creative experimenters who
are challenging and transforming art, their respective disciplines,
and society. The awards also provide vital financial support
to each artist at a key juncture in his or her creative
development.
Initiated and funded by The Herb Alpert Foundation, the
awards have been administered by CalArts, which was selected
by the foundation based on a shared vision of the transformative
power of the arts.
"All of this year's recipients represent the essence of
the Alpert Award in the Arts," said Herb Alpert. "They take
aesthetic, intellectual and political risks. They challenge
worn-out conventions, and they're unafraid of the unknown.
Particularly at this time of so much turbulence, and possibility,
we need them to keep on opening up the doors."
"The Herb Alpert Foundation is delighted to be able to celebrate
these five unique artists whose contributions enrich us
all and add to an important legacy," said Foundation President
Rona Sebastian. "We are reminded that with creative energy,
courage, freedom of thought, and hard work, artists really
can have a powerful impact."
CalArts President Steven D. Lavine added: "The CalArts community
congratulates Paul Chan, Rinde Eckert, Paul Pfeiffer, Reggie
Wilson and our own Music alumnus John King. Under these
difficult economic conditions, we at CalArts are more pleased
than previous years to be part of the process of getting
funding, time and opportunity in the hands of these gifted
artists. We look forward to welcoming all five to our campus
for the residency portion of their fellowships."
"Artist and filmmaker Paul Chan is being honored for his
groundbreaking, risk-taking art and engagement in the world,"
explained Alpert Award Director Irene Borger. "Theatre artist
Rinde Eckert is being recognized for his expansive aesthetic,
transfixing musicality, and the vitality and urgency of
his texts," she continued. "The music panel selected composer,
guitarist and violist John King for his originality, conviction
and control of his medium and materials while artist Paul
Pfeiffer is being given the prize for his compelling, complex
investigations of mass media, and extraordinary use of film.
Finally, choreographer Reggie Wilson was selected for his
pioneering combination of aesthetic and political values,
and forward work in bringing together multiple cultures."
Since the inception of the Alpert Award in the Arts, the
70 past recipients have gone on to further recognition,
producing significant and acclaimed works and receiving
major cultural prizes and awards, proving that the Alpert
Awards identify important mid-career artists who are effecting
change not just in their métiers but across the larger cultural
landscape.
The 2009 Alpert Award in the Arts Recipients
Paul Chan
While Paul Chan sees the language of art as distinct from
the language of politics, that Chan chose to mount a production
of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot out of doors,
at night, in the devastated landscape of New Orleans' Lower
Ninth Ward, tells you something about his activism, his
engagement with desolation, and his trust and distrust of
language. "Art, if you do it right," he has said, "clears
the mind so that something new can happen." Keeping words
to a minimum in his video essay Baghdad in No Particular
Order, shot in that city before the invasion, with
no voice-over telling you what you are seeing on the screen,
creates the space for not-knowing. The attempt? To create
"a leap that disengages what we know and engages us in what
we don't." The forms? Charcoal drawings, video installation,
computer animation, web projects. Some investigations? Simulated
light and shadow cascading through a window. Biggie Smalls.
Pasolini. Henry Darger. Faith. Dissolution. Uncertainty.
The instruments? Philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and cunning.
In short, a menagerie of strategies unleashed so that we
might imagine things outside of ourselves. Chan's term:
"empathetic estrangement."
Rinde Eckert
Rinde Eckert concerns
himself with big ideas: ethics, god, idealism, national
identity, the elusiveness of faith. And how we shape our
mythos and our romantic notions. With a virtuosic command
of gesture, language and song, writer, composer, librettist,
musician, performer, and director—total theater artist—Rinde
Eckert moves beyond the boundaries of what a "play," a "dance
piece," an "opera" or "musical" might be, in the service
of grappling with complex issues. Eckert makes solo work,
chamber pieces, and through-composed operas with larger
casts, and has long collaborated with other artmakers, including
choreographer Margaret Jenkins, composers Steven Mackey
and Paul Dresher, directors Robert Woodruff and David Schweizer,
and the new music ensemble Eighth Blackbird. Building a
link between ideas and people, as between theater and science,
he's even bringing together a university drama department
and medical school. Thinkers and writers, including W.B.
Yeats, Dante, Homer, and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, frequently
inspire Eckert's musical and literary motifs. Studying Melville's
Moby Dick led to his best-known work, And God Created Great
Whales. And who peoples his work? A composer trying to write
an opera while losing his memory. A man who commits suicide
sailing solo around the world. A Mafia accountant with a
change of heart. Eckert describes many of his characters
as "little men with big ideas whose consequences of their
hubris are often disastrous." Sometimes tragic and austere,
sometimes broadly comedic, entirely grounded by presence,
Eckert's work is alchemical: moving from rumination and
distillation to hard-won illumination, or its lack.
John King
Rooted in 20th-century experimental music, John King has
written media operas for full orchestras and voice, instrumental
solos, string quartets, and mixed chamber works with live
electronics. Neither "sampling" nor "quoting," King draws
from both classical and vernacular music traditions, synthesizing
the conceptual with the avant-garde. He has received commissions
from Kronos and Ethel, as well as from choreographers, ranging
from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to the Stuttgart
Ballet. King has also composed an hourlong suite of pieces
for what he calls his Extreme Guitar Orchestra, which has
been performed throughout Europe and across America. Underneath
his plasticity lays a singular ethos: King celebrates the
ineluctable mutability of the audible. His music, often
structurally open, braids the written with the improvisational,
spontaneity with indeterminacy, coalescing live and processed
sound and, at times, allows performers unusual individual
freedom in performance. Using the score as a temporal guidepost,
a singer's voice accompanied by full orchestra in one performance
could, with the structure randomly altered, be accompanied
by a solo flute at another; players' heartbeats could determine
multiple tempii. Whether in imaginative concert with Alain
Robbe-Grillet, Stéphane Mallarmé or Bertolt Brecht, you
might think of King's work as intense, visceral dialogue.
Paul Pfeiffer
Borrowing footage from television, movies, and sports events
that serve as raw material and building blocks for his work,
Paul Pfeiffer creates video, sculpture and installations.
Using iconic images of spectacles and celebrities, he plays
with the canonization of memory and history, as in a digitally
erased Marilyn Monroe or ghostly image of Muhammad Ali fighting
in the ring and asks viewers to question their own spectatorship
and desire. Informed by, among others, Francis Bacon, Warhol,
and DaVinci's Vitruvian Man, his large-scale pieces wrestle
with notions of power while the miniature works evoke intimacy.
In a recent colossal production, he recorded a hired crowd
of 1,000 men to recreate the sounds of 100,000 fans cheering
during a World Cup match. In all of his work, from a lush
sunrise and sunset shot, and shown, in real time, to a 24-hour
a day, 75-day piece, where New York commuters could watch
a video of a nest full of eggs hatching and then growing
into chickens, Pfeiffer is saying: pay attention. One critic
summed up his body of work, "One can feel the deepening
of love—and the holes left open by need."
Reggie Wilson
Choreographer Reggie Wilson's ongoing, in-depth
field research and extensive travels is a model of a 21st-century
artist working in a global context. Wilson's travels from
Zimbabwe, Senegal and Congo-Brazzaville to Trinidad and
Tobago and the Mississippi Delta have led him to question
accepted concepts of time, space and dynamics, and to continued
collaborations with dancers throughout the world. This global
context helps him distill and transform ritual and social
dance and vocal forms (such as Chicago-style Stepping, Pantsula,
the Big Apple, field hollers, shouts…), combining them with
post-modern task-based structures, contemporary movement
techniques, and the movement languages and gestures of Africans
in the Diaspora to create what he calls "Post-African/Neo
HooDoo Modern Dance." By experimenting with the existing
tension and energies between tradition and innovation, he
comes face-to-face with new methods of mining connections
and disconnections in the spread of dance beyond the western
avant-garde. Wilson sees performance as a site of transcendence;
building and manipulating energy in a space is a core aesthetic
practice. Following a multiyear exchange and collaboration
with the Senegal-based Congolese choreographer Andréya Ouamba,
Wilson will premiere The Good Dance-dakar/brooklyn in the
fall.
The Herb Alpert Foundation envisions a world in which
all young people are blessed with opportunities that allow
them to reach their potential and lead productive and fulfilling
lives. Over the past few years, the Foundation has focused
on core areas: "The Arts," a broad category that includes
arts education, a focus on jazz, and support to professionals.
This also includes programs that seek to use the arts to
help meet the needs of underserved youth and to help build
competencies that will enable them to become successful
adults. The other core area is "Compassion and Well-Being,"
which celebrates the positive aspects of human psychology
and seeks to bring more compassion and compassionate behavior
to our society.
CalArts is recognized internationally as
a leading laboratory for the visual, performing, media and
literary arts. Housing six schools—Art, Critical Studies,
Dance, Film/Video, Music, and Theater—CalArts educates professional
artists in an intensive learning environment founded on
artmaking excellence, creative experimentation, cross-pollination
among diverse artistic disciplines, and a broad context
of social and cultural understanding. CalArts also operates
the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in the
Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles.
More information is available at www.calarts.edu
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