Dallas Arts

There’s nothing inherently wrong with an occasional visual interpretation of a piece of concert music. The twentieth-century concept of music as a purely abstract, intellectual exercise, to be experienced by sitting motionless while exercising only the aural facilities, deserves reexamination from time to time. Furthermore, the long term survival of symphonic music in a rapidly changing world also demands innovation on the part of the people who present orchestral concerts, and the addition of visual effect is at least worthy of consideration now and then. That said, the initially promising concept of a visual accompaniment to Holst’s visionary symphonic suite The Planets, presented by the Dallas Symphony Thursday night with guest conductor Thomas Wilkins on the podium, proved utterly disappointing. Simply putting images on a screen and having someone describe those images between sections of a musical work isn’t the answer, and it isn’t art.

Here are this weekend's openings. Photo: (From left) "Afghanistan, 1956," Painter on the Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1953," and "Three Baguettes, Paris, 1953," photos by Marc Riboud (Courtesy of Photographs Do Not Bend). The living legend, French photographer Marc Riboud, will be speaking at Photographs Do Not Bend on Saturday, October 2.

"How do we know what we know? I feel at home with this line of questioning because I don't know."" During a press preview walkthrough of the exhibition Vernon Fisher: K-Mart Conceptualism, Vernon Fisher repeatedly asserts his prerogative to inhabit the terrain of negative capability. Negative capability is a state of not knowing, essential for the intentional play that is making art. Keats wrote about it in a letter to his brother as: "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." Negative capability is the terrain of poetry or the zen koan, a space where images exist, overlap, relay, and might even suggest narrative but don't necessarily align in logical coalescence. Even when asked to speak as an authority on his own works, Fisher defers to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth curator Michael Auping, stating, "you can say it better."

Like its production of Cymbeline earlier this summer, Shakespeare Dallas has admirably tackled another rarely staged Shakespeare play with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which plays through October 2 at the Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre before it moves to Addison Circle Park for two weeks of performances. As one of the Bard's earliest comedies, the play is often overlooked as being a minor inconsequential work. But this most recent production is thoroughly enjoyable, allowing the darker aspects of the story to emerge.