Pina and Juliet

    The Parrish Art Museum’s schedule of programs for next week starts on Sunday with a screening of “Pina,” a documentary by Wim Wenders about the choreographer Pina Bausch, and continues with a ballet performance of “Romeo and Juliet.”

    “Pina” was nominated for a 2011 Oscar for best documentary feature and was shown at the Hamptons International Film Festival last fall. Mr. Wenders is known for his films “Wings of Desire” and “Buena Vista Social Club.” He became friends with Bausch, who died in 2009, after seeing one of her productions in Venice. Their plans for a joint venture came to fruition just months before she died of cancer, two days before shooting was scheduled to begin. The film includes interviews and performances by her original company members. The screening starts at 2 p.m. Tickets cost $7, $5 for Parrish members.

    The Southampton museum’s Opera and Ballet in Cinema series will present “Romeo and Juliet” in a live HD simulcast from London’s Royal Ballet at 3:30 p.m. next Thursday. With music by Sergey Prokofiev, the three-hour production was choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan, the artistic director of the Royal Ballet from 1970 to 1977. Tickets cost $20, $17 for Parrish members. MacMillan’s first full-length ballet, it premiered in 1965 and continues to receive critical acclaim even after more than 400 performances.

‘Black Tie’ Auditions

    The Hampton Theatre Company will hold auditions for “Black Tie,” A.R. Gurney’s new comedy about a wedding verging on ruin, on March 25 from 6 to 8 p.m. and on March 26 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Quogue Community Hall on Jessup Avenue. The play has roles for three men and two women. Both union and nonunion actors have been invited to attend.

    The roles include Father, a gentleman in his late 60s, who does not let death interfere with his ability to influence his family; Curtis, in his late 40s or 50s, who is the father of the bridegroom; Mimi, his attractive wife in her mid-40s to early 50s, who is a bit more progressive in her thinking; Elsie, a daughter in her 20s, and Teddy, also in his 20s, the indecisive bridegroom on the eve of his wedding.

    Rehearsals will begin the second week of April, with performances at the Quogue Community Hall from May 24 through June 10, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Diana Marbury will direct.

    Readings will be from the script. No monologue or appointment is necessary. More information can be had by e-mailing [email protected]. Information about the theater company can be found on its Web site, hamptontheatre.org. Those unable to make the scheduled audition times will be accommodated with an alternate time, if possible. Housing will be available for out-of-town actors.

St. Luke’s Series Ends

    The Music at St. Luke’s series will conclude on Saturday with a solo recital by Daria Rabotkina, a pianist, at 4 p.m. in Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton.

    The program will be: Robert Schumann’s Humoreske, op. 290, Franz Schubert’s Grand Rondeau for four hands in A Major, D. 951 (featuring William McNally), and Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet — Op. 75.

    Tickets are $20 and free for students 18 and younger.

New Organist

    Dominick J. Abbate, a native of Southampton, has been named organist at the First Presbyterian Church, also known as the Old Whalers Church, in Sag Harbor.

    Mr. Abbate began his musical studies when he was 12 at the Southampton Methodist Church. During high school, he served as music director and organist at Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Bridgehampton and the Bridgehampton Methodist Church.

    In Sag Harbor, he will play a pipe organ built in New York City in 1845 by Henry Erben. It is the oldest organ in a church on Long Island. It is one of only 1,200 built by Erben during his career that remain in use in the United States today.

    Lois Ross of Southold, who has directed the choir at Old Whalers since 1998 and the bell choir in more recent years, will continue to direct both of them.

    Mr. Abbate graduated from South­ampton High School in 2007 and received a B.A. in economics, with a minor in anthropology, from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. He plans to join his father at the Brockett Funeral Home in Southampton after he completes studies to become a funeral director.

    He played at his first service in Sag Harbor on Sunday.

‘Li’l Abner’ Auditions

    The Studio Playhouse at LTV Studios will hold auditions for “Li’l Abner” on April 3 and April 4 from 6 to 8 p.m. at LTV, 85 Industrial Road in Wainscott.

    Those auditioning have been asked to take sheet music. An accompanist will be provided. The show will run from June 7 to June 9.

Lightning Strikes

    Next Thursday the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton will hold its second Lightning Round evening of rapid-fire presentations by people who may or may not be familiar from the East End. Presenters will have only about seven minutes and 20 slides to describe what it is they do or their creative process. Each slide advances every 20 seconds. A reception will follow, with wine, beer, and music. Admission is $10, $5 for members.

    The event was inspired by “pecha kucha,” a short presentation format devised by architects in Japan to present work and exchange ideas. The presenters this time will include farmers, poets, artists, musicians, restaurateurs, and even The Star’s own executive editor, David E. Rattray. Others are Scott Chaskey, Marilee Foster, Esperanza Leon, Kareem Massoud, Ada Potter, Sabina Streeter, Jason Weiner, and Almond Zigmund.

Leslie Close at Madoo

    Leslie Close will be the concluding speaker at Sunday’s Madoo Talks series, which has featured a number of garden historians. She will discuss “The History of Gardens and Photography.”

    Ms. Close wrote her master’s thesis for her degree at New York University on Mattie Edwards Hewitt, a landscape architectural photographer. She introduced a program in American landscape history at Wave Hill gardens in the Bronx and co-founded the Catalog of Landscape Records in the United States, a database now housed at the New York Botanical Garden. She lives in Bridgehampton, where she tends a large food garden.

    Admission is $30, $20 for members. Seating is limited and reservations are requested through [email protected].

New Amagansett Gallery

    Sara de Luca and Don Christensen will open a new gallery just off Montauk Highway in Amagansett on Saturday, with a reception that evening from 5 to 7. This season Ille Arts will show mostly artists who have a South Fork connection, and the opening show, “Friends and Family,” will include work by Sydney Albertini, Vivien Bittencourt-Katz, Mary Boochever, Amanda Brown, Jack Ceglic, Dan Christensen,   James Gilroy, Elaine Grove, John Haubrich, Pat Place, Kevin Teare, Tim Tibus, Stephen Westfall, and Mr. Christensen himself. It will be on view through the middle of May.

    Future shows will include solo exhibitions of Sydney Albertini, Liz Markus, and Ms. Bittencourt-Katz. A group show at the end of the summer will consist of work by Mary Heilmann, Mr. Westfall, and Don Christensen. A reading series organized by Max Blagg is in the works.

    The gallery space, envisioned as a gathering place, is on the site occupied by Wilsonville last summer. It has been cleared out, with bright, freshly painted white walls and floors, and there will be outdoor seating. The gallery’s Web site is illearts.com.

Guild Hall Wants Your Art

    Guild Hall is accepting submissions for its 74th Artist Members Exhibition through April 22. The show will open on May 5 and continue through June 9. The guest juror is Lilly Wei, an independent curator, essayist, and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and is also a contributing editor at ARTnews.

    The exhibition is open to every artist member of Guild Hall. The top honor of distinction, awarded by the guest juror, is a solo show in Guild Hall’s Spiga Gallery. More than 350 artists typically participate.

    Award categories include best representational painting, best abstract painting, best sculpture, best work on paper, best mixed media, best photograph, and numerous honorable mention citations, along with the $250 Catherine and Theo Hios landscape award and an award for best new member artist, presented to one artist who is new to the members exhibition or who has not entered in the past five years.

    Entry requirements are available on the Guild Hall Web site. A tour of the show with the winners will take place on May 19.

East End Arts Winners

    The East End Arts Council’s juried show “Music” will be on view through April 20 in Riverhead. The guest juror, Terrie Sultan, the director of the Parrish Art Museum, selected four winners from the entries on March 2. Best in show went to Christina Nalty for a sculpture. First and second prizes went to photographs by Stephen Bitel and Virginia Aschmoneit. Ruth Nasca of East Hampton won third prize for her movie poster painting “Impassioned Gospel Music.”

At Pritam & Eames

    Pritam & Eames in East Hampton will show the work of three East End artists in “Art at Home,” which opens tomorrow. The gallery of American studio furniture is focusing on its walls this time, hanging the work of Linda Capello, Aubrey Grainger, and Karen Klug­lein. Bebe Johnson, the owner and director of the gallery, said she was excited to introduce the work of artists “who are not afraid of beauty.”

    Ms. Capello, who graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology, is primarily concerned with the figure and the subtlety of line in her conté crayon drawings. A Sagaponack resident, Aubrey Grainger was influenced by the Hudson River School artists and the French and American Impressionists, and she also paints landscapes inspired by the East End. Ms. Kluglein’s life-size botanical watercolors on paper or vellum have won various awards, and she has shown her work nationally.

    A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m. The show will be on view through May 22.

Now, Hampton Hang

    The Hampton Hang Gallery will open this weekend with a group show, “Mind & Matter,” at its space in Water Mill behind Suki Zuki. The proprietors, Ashley R. Dye and Eric Kulukundis,  describe it as an open program art gallery specializing in the art of the Hamptons.

    Mr. Kulukundis has long ties to the area and its art community and is a former gallery owner in Los Angeles. Ms. Dye has lived on the South Fork for more than a decade and has worked with artists in galleries and as an independent art dealer during that time.

    “Mind & Matter” features paintings by Steve Miller, sculpture by Mike Chiarello, and a specimen mineral collection by Angela Firestone, who was formerly with the Cranbrook Science Museum. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m., and the show will remain on view through April 20.

Napoleon, the Poster

    Paul Davis, a Sag Harbor artist, was commissioned to design a poster for “Napoleon,” a 1927 movie presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The festival, which starts on Saturday and runs through April 1, is showing the restored film with newly discovered footage for the first time in this country.

    Mr. Davis worked from film stills for his portrait of Albert Dieudonné, the star of “Napoleon,” using the colors of the French flag. A copy of the poster is available on the festival’s Web site, silentfilm.org/napoleon-poster.php.

De Niro Sr. at DC Moore

    Robert De Niro Sr., who visited East Hampton regularly in the 1950s, will have a show of his paintings and drawings at the DC Moore Gallery in New York City beginning today. The artist “blended abstraction and representation, bridging the gap between European modernism and Abstract Expressionism,” according to the gallery. The show will be on view through April 28.

With the buzz factor on the new Cindy Sherman retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art already at full decibels, aptly descriptive words such as malleable, prescient, and chameleon-like are already sounding like clichés.

    Yet, it is not just her seemingly shape-shifting originality that is so impressive in this epic collection of photographs from three decades of art making, but the evolving mastery of her medium in coaxing out the effects that allow these transformations to occur.

CLICK TO SEE MORE IMAGES

     At the press preview for the show last month, Eva Respini, the exhibition curator, said the artist’s generosity was a key factor in the enduring nature of her art. In all of her 512 works to date, there are no titles. The numbers are merely inventory records that her long-term gallery, Metro Pictures, devised to keep track of them. With such open-ended offerings, she permits her viewers always and repeatedly to bring their own perceptions and narratives to the photographs. This allows her images, even the iconic ones that have defined her career, to be endlessly fresh and invigorating.

    What is so fascinating in a retrospective such as this, with 171 photographs in all, is that each one commands attention in the same way it did when it was originally shown, sometimes even more given the context of the additional images around it. Such is the case with the “Untitled Film Stills” series from 1977 to 1980, where familiar and less-known works are double-hung in close proximity, allowing all of their contradictions to give each narrative a richer backstory.

    Ms. Sherman seems to have grasped early what simple defining details pack the most allusions in our collective sense and memory. In these images — all invented with no literal inspiration — she uses both 1950s and 1960s female cinematic stereotypes — gangster moll, pinup, naif, sophisticate — and setting, typically urban, to imbue the sense of melodrama or ennui each grainy print evokes.

    The artist, who was born in New Jersey and raised in Huntington Beach on Long Island, has been a seasonal resident of the South Fork for many years, but lives quietly here, maintaining her anonymity much as she does in New York City, where she keeps her studio. She first studied painting at the State University at Buffalo in the early 1970s, but soon found conceptual photography far more relevant to her practice of making art.

    Her relationship with Robert Longo, another art student at Buffalo, would be responsible for opening her eyes to the contemporary art scene, which shaped her ideas about how she would express herself. She began looking at feminist artists who treated their bodies as subjects for art and photographs, as well as the male artists who were taking things even further, such as Chris Burden shooting himself and Vito Acconci’s dramatic physical acts of self-denial and self-gratification.

    The product of one of the first generations that were glued to the television as children, she also had a penchant for masquerade and disguise, and was known for dressing in complicated getups for art openings in Buffalo and New York City. These proclivities would suit her burgeoning artistic style well, giving her a wealth of material to draw from in her efforts at transformation and transgression.

    She was not known for her technical proficiency at first, but the quality of the early film stills series is wholly intentional. She learned how to print them to give them a cheap, Hollywood publicity still-style finish. That the poses are staged and melodramatic doesn’t cheapen the fun. It only draws us in deeper to what she is up to by assuming these identities and raising questions about who is ultimately in control of them, whether it is she as object, subject, or artist, the viewer, or society at large.

    There are two big wow moments at the beginning of the show. The first is the huge photomural she devised for the installation with surreal photo images of her, several feet tall, wrapped on the exterior walls of the show. Just inside, the first gallery gives a boffo glimpse of highlights from her career, some familiar and some surprising. They run from early headshots of her simply made up to look like different, almost cartoonish characters to one of her fashion shots, a dystopian sex picture, and a mock death scene featuring her lifeless face and neck as dirt-caked insect fodder.

    The room is so succinct and perfectly edited that in one sense you almost don’t need to see the rest of the show. In another, it is the perfect segue into each additional room. The more overpowering urge is to proceed to see what is in store next.

    Thematically arranged, the galleries are composed sometimes completely from one period or series. In other cases they might bridge decades, allowing works that may not often be seen together a chance to benefit from cross-referencing. These include a room devoted to her reactions to fashion from several decades alternating with a gallery showing only her centerfolds series from 1981. Another cross-decade survey looking at her backgrounds and narrative space is followed by a room with several series that take her almost entirely out of the pictures, but are late 1980s and early 1990s reactions to things such as AIDS and censorship in the arts. These issues were at the forefront of artistic concerns in those years.

    The history portraits occupy one cohesive space, painted in a rich burgundy to offset their opulence. The headshot series and her society portraits also have their own galleries, leaving other spaces for explorations of the fantastical and macabre and her early cutouts and animation.

    There is so much to see and all so well edited. In the words of the curator, who worked with Ms. Sherman to devise the mix, their goal was to “select the best examples of the best works.” Each room is its own celebration, but certain ones do stand out such as the galleries containing the film stills, the sex and disaster series, the history series, and the society portraits.

    Perhaps it is their cohesion that helps sell the works’ strengths in these galleries, but each of those rooms packs a wallop. Whether it is the abject horror of the rotting food and pieces of humanity in the disaster series or the odd personification in the photos of prosthetic and doll parts uncannily posing as human procreation machines in the sex series, those images never lose their power to shock and awe. But at the same time, her ability to make or impose herself into classic icons of art history in parody or homage elicits a similar response.

    The 2008 society portraits show the desperate measures to which women will go to continue commanding attention at an age when most are relegated to invisibility. These pictures evoke empathy even as they make us cringe. In this series, her manipulation of makeup, lighting, and perhaps some Photoshop magic to mimic bad cosmetic procedures forces us to remind ourselves that we are still looking at that same woman from the film still series and how much manipulation it took her to look this way. It is one thing to transform yourself into a clown. It is quite another to make yourself look physically altered from surgery. Those pictures sting, not because they are made to look like anyone in particular, but because they could instead be any one of us in the not so distant future, new visual clichés for our current age.

    “Cindy Sherman” is on view through June 11.

   Carol Muske-Dukes will be among those receiving Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Awards from the Poets & Writers organization at a benefit dinner on March 29 in Manhattan. The award recognizes “authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community,” it says on Poets & Writers’ Web site.

    The site emphasizes that Ms. Muske-Dukes started a long-running writing program for inmates in New York State prisons in the 1970s. Also a novelist and essayist, Ms. Muske-Dukes is the current poet laureate of California. Her latest collection of poems is “Twin Cities,” from last year, and she recently co-edited “Crossing State Lines: An American Renga.”

    The other recipients are the novelist David Baldacci, Kwame Dawes, a poet born in Ghana, and Kathryn Court, the president and publisher of Penguin Books.

    The dinner will take place at Capitale at 130 the Bowery. Tickets start at $500, and at each table with the silverware and sauvignon blanc will be author-hosts, including two from the South Fork, Jay McInerney and Robert Caro.

 “An Available Man”

Hilma Wolitzer

Ballantine, $25  

   “The universe is offering you a gift. Claim it.” This is the urgent imperative put forward by a friendly psychic advising the skeptical and reluctant Edward, a widower and the protagonist of Hilma Wolitzer’s engaging new book, “An Available Man.” Edward, whose beloved wife, Bee, has recently died and left him lonely and bereft, ultimately struggles to find a way to claim the gift: a second chance in life, in love.

    Those of us who have lost a spouse (and those who have not) will identify with the great stalled tide of grief that engulfs and isolates Edward at the novel’s beginning. Edward’s situation is extreme, but Ms. Wolitzer’s style is restrained, economical, spare, yet canny. She sets her narrative in the conventional flow of life, then skillfully plumbs the sudden, slanting depths. The first time we encounter Edward, he is ironing his dead wife’s blouses, as if pressing memories of her living flesh from the fibers of her clothing.

    This portrait of an ordinary person who has suffered an extraordinary loss reveals Ms. Wolitzer’s fine skill in drawing a character who is not exceptional, or even intriguing, yet sympathetic. This is a kind of old-fashioned chivalric tale — Edward is a bit restrained in the fast-moving digital world. He is not “old old,” he is 62, a high school biology teacher, thoughtful and trusting, but a scientist, a naturalist. Edward isn’t conversant with the world of social media, of Facebook or Twitter. When he talks on the phone, he’s usually on a landline (answering machines and even a Rolodex are mentioned), though caller ID, of course, cellphones, and e-mail are in evidence.

    Thus when a personal ad is placed on Edward’s behalf, it is published in The New York Review of Books, in old-fashioned newsprint. Responses from potential dates arrive in old-fashioned letter form — via the U.S. Mail.

    This plot advances on the title’s seemingly cliched assumption — if a man is widowed or single, he is immediately fair game, “available” to the hordes of desperate single women eager to entrap him.

    In fact, this story of a suddenly single, deeply mourning male set adrift in an alien milieu of busybody matchmakers, watchful female family and friends and the assertive widows and other female hopefuls who follow him, breaks free again and again from stereotype, from an old-time movie plot, and illuminates the virtues of its guileless, passive hero — and the saving graces of a few of the ensemble of women.

    Ms. Wolitzer does not riff on or refer to the solid statistics that show that, in fact, it is men who are the ones eager to marry immediately after the loss of a partner, and that many women “go rogue” after a spouse’s death — loving the freedom from caretaking and convention, they do not marry again or “come in from the cold.”

    The women in “An Available Man” remain mostly cheerfully hetero-conventional in this regard, except for three misfits, women who do not slide easily into the too-familiar patterns. One is Edward’s stepdaughter, who fears abandonment (because of “bad father” issues) and keeps choosing Mr. Wrong. Then there is a silvery sylph who long ago left Edward standing at the altar, a jilted bridegroom. She is hardly conventional, a woman who breaks vows and breaks hearts, a fugitive from love who also endlessly seeks love. She is portrayed as nearly pathological, certifiably crazy — the opposite of Edward’s great lost earth mother love, Bee. (Bee’s name calls up both the essence of steadfast “to be,” existence, and also nature’s busy winged pollinator.)

    The elusive female is named Laurel, as in mythology, a hotly pursued beauty who is turned into a tree, inaccessible to all human lovers. She’s also a Lilith figure, the one who refuses to “lie under” Adam and leaves the Garden to Eve, to the “male gaze.” Laurel is the unknown, who keeps the story of Edward from becoming too easy and superficial: a last chance romance.

    In contemplating Laurel, the reader begins to realize that despite all of the narrative attention paid to Edward, this is not so much the story of a lonely widower as it is a compelling subtext or sub-story of women’s complex alternative lives and careers — post-grief, post-sexual revolution, post-knee-jerk male dominance.

    There is a third female character who is also a kind of misfit, but less darkly drawn than the other two, and finally transcendent. This is Olga Nemerov, a restorer of museum tapestries, a scientist of the artistic past, of history, of the narrative itself. Olga is also the “restorer” of Edward. She is positioned somewhere between the Eve of Bee and the renegade rebel of Laurel; she is an independent woman, a worker, a clearsighted no-nonsense soul, a lab rat like Edward and rescuer of his unicorn-like soul.

    Her independence compels her to reject Edward (as he rejects her) at a blatantly obvious matchmaker’s dinner party early on in the novel. She insults him, acts like a “bitch” (as she later admits) to his “clueless prick” (his description). But after a few chapters, they land firmly, ultimately, on solid real ground — not so obviously in Eden as in daily life in the great spectacular egalitarian green of Central Park (Ollie’s Garden, as Edward calls it).

    If things are summed up a little too neatly at the end of the book, there is still plenty of thinking to be done beyond the last page. Why do we value men over women, why do women fear age, why do they judge each other so mercilessly, why can only a very few connect to their honest power? And why are men still the unicorns of the family romance?

    If none of these questions interest the reader, they can indeed be ignored and the entertaining and wise story of hapless Edward heartily cheered on: a man perhaps too good to be true, but truly “available” all the same.

    Hilma Wolitzer’s previous novels include “Summer Reading” and “The Doctor’s Daughter.” She lives in Manhattan and Springs.

    Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she founded the Ph.D. program in creative writing and literature. She has a house in Springs.

   Making claims about the importance of recently deceased poets is a tricky business, especially if the poet was a friend. Robert Long, who died in 2006, was a friend, a poet friend — and friendships among poets is a subject worthy of its own treatise — and therefore it’s probably impossible for me to attempt to be objective about his work without sounding self-serving or distorted by that perverse calculus of grief and identification. But I can say that it continues to surprise and delight me and that I therefore feel entitled to claim, by my own personal standards, that it’s both original and serendipitously blunt. I like bluntness, especially the indirect, somewhat back-stepping kind. In other words, Frank O’Hara and E.E. Cummings’s kind.

    Robert Long wrote one full book and what amounts to three chapbooks that were filtered into the collection “Blue” (Canio’s Editions, 1999), and “De Kooning’s Bicycle” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), a brilliant novelistic prose celebration of the artists and writers who moved to the South Fork in the ’50s and ’60s. As John Ashbery said of the book, it’s essentially “the history of mid-twentieth-century American art.” Long, who was an art critic for The Star for many years, lived most of his life in Springs, and this book is certainly special, but it’s his poetry that will and should be remembered.

    His poems cut back and forth from image to insight to insinuation like brushstrokes off a highly colorful palette making a provocative collage/parade of the casual and profane:

It’s like walking into a room

And suddenly realizing you’ve had sex with everyone there

At least once, watching your friends’ lives

Tangling as you all grow somewhat older,

Somehow more resolute. Bookshelves grow, too,

And you notice your handwriting becoming more matter-of-fact.

It’s as if all that comic smartness we glided through in youth

Were somehow desperate. And now we come to terms

With the sidewalk’s coruscating glamour,

The rows of dull but neat garbage cans,

Each with its own painted number,

The poodles and patrol cars, the moon rising high,

Like aspirin, over Eighth Avenue.

(From “Chelsea”)

    Few poets are able to cram so much keen lyrical feeling and diverse imagery into such a small space with such an entertaining sense of urgency. His was a visual virtuosity born of an intense appreciation of his own odd-minded obsessions with, say, the art of de Kooning, Pollock, and Tiepolo, Formula One racing cars, and the visual splendors of the East End, not to forget Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and Ninth Avenue, among others.

    The language in his poems whirls, zigzags, and flows erratically, as if uncontrollable, though all by design. His prepossessing emotional dexterity was fashioned over a lifetime of looking at art. There’s something profoundly subliminal, spontaneous, and private in his work at the same time.

    Although his being gay is present in the poems, it’s no more a subject than his politics, or his profound respect for his environment; it was what art turned, agitated, and reconstituted things into that mattered most to him, not ideas in and of themselves. His poetry is, essentially, as private and formally causal as he was, proffering an attitude of prepositional forlornness. Even the love poems are addressed to an unnamed anonymous “You,” coloring the intimacy with a second-person sense of privileged familiarity.

An ordinary car gliding past my house

And your regular breathing all those miles away,

In your room, on the other end of the phone,

Lying on your bed, speechless, receiver

To your ear, both of us not wanting

To hang up. And when we finally did,

You said “Seeya,”

Though you won’t, ever again.

(From “Little Black Dino”)

    His is a world of drugs, booze, fast living, with a coating of nostalgia for Nowhereville, where angels write postcards and talk on the telephone. The lines whiz by on Librium, the images speak to one another in their own whispered jazzy two-tone language, a disjointed language of self-avowal and diligent watching, and endless surprise.

I’m comfortable here, on 50 mg. of Librium,

Two hundred bucks in my pocket

And a new job just a week away.

I can walk the streets in a calm haze,

My blood pressure down to where I’m almost human,

Make countless pay-phone calls from street corners:

Buzzing, they go by in near-neon trails,

People, people like me, headed for black bean soup,

For screams in alleyways, for the homey click

Of the front door’s closing, heading home

Past all those faces you know you’ve seen before . . .

(From “Chelsea”)

I’m playing the dilettante,

But it’s all out of my hands. One time,

I bought a velvet jacket from a speedfreak

on your corner. It was December. It was cold.

We had this great chat about the necessity

Of transacting business politely. We walked to the

Grocery so I could get change of a five, after

I’d tried on the jacket, out on the street.

People walked by. I had my gloves between my teeth.

“Whaddaya think,” I said. “Looks good,” he said.

(From “East Ninth Street”)

    The wonderful lack of judgment, explanation, or apology throws the reader headlong into the excitement and desperation of the scene. Frank O’Hara, an early influence, did his own version of excited conversational truth-telling celebration, but Robert Long has taken that a step further. In the world of his poems the everyday lives side by side with off-kilter, hallowed feeling, a place where “St. Lucy is the patron saint of eyes” and we all get a “package from the Dessert-of-the-Month Club” whether we subscribe or not.

    His finely honed, keen ability to see beyond where he’s looking probably accounts for his brooding sympathetic music and the high-mindedness of his anxious intelligence. He knew how to mix the high and the low, raw emotion with restraint, in order to register the deeper mysteries in the silence between words. De Kooning rode a bike but Robert preferred Enzo Ferrari’s Dino, a six-cylinder understated miracle that was “more beautiful than most painting, most poetry.” He deserves another look, as he speeds by. Who knows — maybe we’re all a little more ready for him now.

    Philip Schultz’s books of poems include “Failure,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008, and, most recently, “The God of Loneliness.” The founder of the Writers Studio in New York, he lives in East Hampton. A slightly different version of this essay appeared on the Library of America’s Reader’s Almanac blog.

   We all should write a thank you note to Robert Wilson for locating his grand experiment in arts sponsorship on the South Fork.

    There is a kind of morose nostalgia sometimes about what is considered the heyday of art making here in the mid-20th century. I am often guilty of promulgating the nostalgia for glory times past. But we ignore the bold and innovative experiments taking place here and now at our own expense. This laboratory Mr. Wilson has created, a wonderfully repurposed old Western Union plant on Water Mill-Towd Road, reminds us that the South Fork can still be a setting for bold creativity on an international scale with appropriate relevance to our present.

    This weekend the art fairs set around the Art Dealers Association of America and Armory shows in New York City drew many East Enders west to see them. Meanwhile, many visitors in for those fairs opted to board a bus provided by the Watermill Center on Saturday to attend a concert there by John Bock, titled “Lecker Puste” or “Delicious Breath.”

    The echo of French and German voices filled the gallery and concert space, giving the event a feeling of worldly consequence. Mr. Bock, a German artist, was selected as one of eight finalists in a competition held by the Métamatic Research Initiative. The Amsterdam-based group is devoted to promoting research into the legacy of Jean Tinguely, a 20th-century Swiss painter and sculptor who died in 1991. His work was concerned with movement and time-based ideas and mechanisms.

    Tinguely was also one of the first artists in the 1950s to produce happenings, art with an element of performance or spectacle mixed with the ephemeral, although documentation of such events was common. Even in his less active works there is an implication of static energy, and his sculptures communicate with the viewer, engaging them in a kind of interaction with the nonhuman forms he devised. According to Museum Tinguely in Basel, “they also reveal a feeling for tragicomedy, for the enigmatic and inscrutable.”

    The Métamatic group aimed to capture these elements when it issued a call for proposals. “Lecker Puste” was one of 297 submissions. The interactive element of Mr. Bock’s work is similar to that of Tinguely. Whether he is actually physically there or not, his presence is often implied or replicated through video. His sculptures may contain or focus on mechanical movements, but he often incorporates a softer, more human element if only to contrast the differences and dehumanizing effects of objects in a post-industrial world.

    In his performance on Saturday night, the stage was set with his factory of primitive and vaguely functioned devices constructed from the detritus of contemporary living, a seat for a cellist surrounded by soft sculptures, a Foley artist for sound effects, and enough space for a dancer giving life to the themes of Marcel Duchamp’s “Large Glass” or “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” promised in the production notes for the piece. The themes mingle with Tinguely’s, since Duchamp’s erotic (in his words) themes are communicated solely with mechanical and dehumanized imagery.

    The dancer mimed one or a combination of the “bachelor” forms in Duchamp’s piece — empty suits or carved objects — and he stripped and redressed himself in familiar articles, inside out and backwards. He might stand this way for a while or tie a shoelace to his toe and dangle the shoe from it in an awkward, duck-like dance, revolving around the stage much as the spinning clothesline in Duchamp’s piece implies the same movement.

    The dancer is ancillary, however. It is Mr. Bock’s universe and he, like a god, is at the center of its myths and power. His contraptions each have a predetermined visual and aural impact that he embellishes with additional materials.

    From the white plaster he forms and plays with on a white hinged base that presses the mixture into an oozing flatness to the liquid he pours into the open bottoms of three inverted plastic water bottles connecting to squiggles of metal and plastic tubing and into a long, penis-shaped receptacle covered with a man’s black sock that extrudes a stream of the intermingled liquids onto the floor, he creates nothing but visual interest. The visual purity of the white on white of the first contrasts with the later intermingling of the colors of carrot, cranberry, and green vegetable juices and a shot of hot pink opaque Pepto-Bismol thrown in toward the end. There is even a “small glass,” a rearview mirror-sized piece of Plexiglas hand-sewn to a wire frame that he paints and erases, leaving an empty void in the center surrounded by a white border.

    Each of these tasks is accompanied by the amplified sound effects produced at stage right by a man at a table. Sloshing water, squeezing clay, clopping coconut shells, and other endeavors provide an enhanced sound coordinated to the artist’s movements and activities. Their mutual choreography and its success appears to delight them both, as if they too are surprised and amused by it. The cellist uses her instrument to extract squeaks, moans, and wails when she is not making the same versions of the sounds with her voice. As much as the sound effects performer plays up the mechanical elements, the cellist introduces the human response, and it is not a joyful one.

    Another human element in the piece is a rubberized head of a man propped up on a pedestal. Mr. Bock has some lurid fun with this stand-in, attacking it with hangers, fists, sticks, and other objects. He forces a bloodlike substance from its mouth and jabs the eyes, filled with small eggs, to coax their yellow runny fillings to flow out. It is the violence promised in the production notes, a “showdown of exuberant beauty and disturbia.”

    Throughout it all, Mr. Bock seems adorably childlike in his playing as if he too is caught up in the wonder of his creation. He is a god, but immature in his authority. Playing with a colored light and Jello, he appears to burn himself, jumping back and saying “Ow,” but it is not clear whether it was an actual accident or for effect. He moves from station to station until all have been played out, returning to some a few times before he is through with the performance. He revels in the absurdity of the universe he has created. He then sets out to destroy what human element is left after the other performers have left the stage, namely the cello, using a wood chipper.

    At this point, seated in the front row, there is a palpable element of danger as pieces of the bow flip back out and the shards of the cello itself go flying. It is very American to expect that an audience attending such a function would be protected from those splinters, but the destructive danger, used as well in Tinguely’s work when he blew up two of his sculptures in America, in New York and Las Vegas, seems an apt and final element of the homage.

    The one-night only event was recorded for the Métamatic Research Initiative and will be included in its collection along with the objects used for the concert.

Body on View at Ashawagh

    “Body of Work VII” will revisit the figurative work of several members of this group of artists, including Rosalind Brenner, Linda Capello, Michael Cardacino, Cynthia Loewen, Anthony Lombardo, Bob Markell, Frank Sofo, and Margaret Weissbach. In addition, four other artists have been invited to exhibit with the group for the first time — Janet Culbertson, Tina Folks, Douglas Reina, and Frederick Paxton Werner.

    The show, which features painting, sculpture, photography, and multimedia work, opens at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday morning and will be on view through Sunday afternoon. A reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. on Saturday.

Brenner at Sarah Lawrence

    Rosalind Brenner’s poetry and paintings will be on view at Sarah Lawrence College’s Esther Raushenbush Library gallery through May 20. A reception for the artist will be held on March 24 from 3 to 5 p.m.

    The title of the show is “Possibilities/Energy Paintings.” Ms. Brenner is known for her art glass studio in East Hampton, which produces new work and restores glass windows in churches, houses, and commercial settings, among them the Chrysler Building, the New School for Social Research, and the department stores Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus.

    She also paints on glass, as well as working in watercolor, oils and acrylics, and collage. She earned an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence and has been making books with her images and poems.

Crazy Monkey Winners

    The winners of the seventh annual art competition at Amagansett’s Crazy Monkey Gallery in February were announced earlier this month. Barbara Bilotta took best in show, with Mark Zimmerman in second place and Jim Hayden in third. Other winners included Sheila Rotner for most original work, and Andrea McCafferty and Mr. Zimmerman for most thought-provoking work. Ellyn Tucker also received mention.

Gold’s Eyes at Romany

    Rick Gold will sign copies of his new book, “My Eyes Have Seen,” at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor on Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m. The book contains images from almost a half-century of photography. A former teacher at Pierson High School, he retired in 2005 for health reasons.

   The Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center’s lineup for the spring includes a new Breakout Artist series that showcases young singer-songwriters and musicians, with tickets in the $20 range. This is in addition to the world-renowned artists of the Main Stage shows.

    Diego Garcia is up first, with a performance tomorrow at 8 p.m. that includes his new song “You Were Never There,” which is getting play on WEHM, a partner in the series. Mr. Garcia will display his Latin roots with a jazz and blues flavor.

    On Saturday at 8 p.m. in a Main Stage show, the Canadian band Cowboy Junkies will demonstrate their unique mix of blues, country, folk, rock, and jazz that has earned them a cult following.

    Rory Block, twice named “best traditional blues female artist” by the Blues Foundation, will showcase her acoustic guitar playing and vocal stylings on March 30. The next day, Shelby Lynne, a Grammy Award-winner, will perform songs from her two highly acclaimed self-released albums as well as her latest country-folk effort, “Revelation Road.”

    On May 4, Kathleen Edwards will perform songs from her new folk-pop, alternative-country album, “Voyageur,” which was well received by The New York Times.

    Mike Doughty, a Brooklyn singer and songwriter formerly of Soul Coughing, will take the stage on May 19 for a solo acoustic performance from his newly released “Yes and Also Yes,” an album that ranges from political to personal, including excerpts from his recent memoir, “The Book of Drugs.” The Wood Brothers, a guitar-and-bass duo with a countrified blues sound, will join the lineup the following day.

    Dianne Reeves, a winner of a number of Grammy Awards, and her trio bring old and new jazz and rhythm and blues on June 8. Other performers in June are Gary Clark Jr., Ziggy Marley, Jonny Lang, and Robert Cray, who on June 23 will show how his Southern style, soulful voice, storytelling, and guitar have earned him five Grammy Awards. Rounding out the month, Wayne Shorter, a multi-Grammy-winning jazz saxophonist and composer, will showcase his new quartet on June 30.

    The nonprofit performing arts center also offers Finest in World Cinema, a year-round series of art-house, foreign, independent, and documentary films, many of which are family-friendly. A complete schedule with prices can be found at whbpac.org.