The New Museum has put together a time capsule: a collection of dozens of works produced in New York in the year 1993. If you were a teenager in 1993, the exhibit “1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” will probably act on you like a heady, pop blast of nostalgia. After all, some of the show’s curators were themselves teenagers in 1993. The show is full of pop music and the kind of lurid imagery that goes straight to your memory banks. The result is a very warm, if perhaps incomplete, dive into the past.

The exhibit opens with a row of TV’s playing snippets of news and entertainment from the time: Rudy Giuliani in an early campaign ad; Whitney Houston belting out a ballad. This sets the tone. In the same room, to make it clear that the show’s focus is on the young, the curators have installed a video by Alex Brag (untitled). The piece is blurry, charming, and predictable: Barbie dolls and young women in little black dresses flail their arms to a background of Nirvana, Ace of Base, and other period music. We know where we are here.

Teenage dreamland is realized most beautifully in one large room on the museum’s fourth floor. The floor is covered in a deliciously soft orange rug (Carpet, by Rudolph Stingel). Dusk-blue billboards, each with the silhouette of one bird, take up two walls, and a string of lightbulbs hangs from a rafter in the middle of the room, (both those pieces, untitled, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres). A clip of Kristin Oppenheim singing the Beach Boys’ “Sail on Sailor” plays in an endless loop and completes the wistful mood.

But it’s not all solitary idylls. “1993″ goes heavy on death and the grotesque. The AIDS epidemic was at its peak, and the emphasis on loss is inevitable. “1993″ includes a well-known, heartbreaking series of Nan Goldin photographs showing a man slowly succumbing to AIDS as his partner stands by, helpless (Gilles and Gotscho). Gregg Bordowitz’s short video (Fast Trip, Long Drop) provides a vivid look at the state of the AIDS activism movement. The grotesque is harder to understand here: Why were so many artists in 1993 turning out coyly sexual life-sized dolls? Charles Ray’s “Family Romance” and Paul McCarthy’s “Cultural Gothic” both point to incest without, really, saying anything about it. Do we need both pieces in this show, especially after Zoe Leonard’s series of anatomical models?

Maybe it’s inevitable that a show of this scope will feel both incomplete and too big. After a while I, at least, found myself wandering through the rooms looking for what I already knew. The show began to repeat. Surely 1993 was about more than dysfunction in Manhattan? A few pieces in the show stand outside of time: Kiki Smith’s nude, powerful Virgin Mary; Lorna Simpson’s simple and somehow shattering Seven Mouths.

A few other pieces at least leave Manhattan. Pepon Osorio’s The Scene of the Crime is a life-size diorama of a South Bronx apartment complete with family pictures and a woman’s body under a bloody cloth. Spanish radio plays ads for detergent and the chairs are draped in Puerto Rican flags. (This Bronx murder is notably the sole mention of a borough of 1.4 million people.) And then there are, of course, Annie Liebowitz’s tragic shots of Sarajevo, including one of Susan Sontag posing amidst the ruins. But why isn’t there more? Did I miss something? Probably. Was the art scene too insular in 1993? Of course. Is there great work out there that still can’t make it on the New Museum’s Bowery? Almost definitely.

“1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” through May 26 at New Museum, 321 Bowery

Celebrated indie film ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ confuses pandering with empathy

Documentary ‘Fracknation’ debates ‘Gasland,’ ‘Promised Land’ and the greenshirts—and wins.

By Gregory Solman

The artistic advance of Eytan Fox’s ‘Yossi’

Oz Zehavi in Yossi.

In the new Yossi, Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox revisits the protagonist from his 2004 military love story Yossi & Jagger. A slight narrative shift shows the former army medic (played by Ohad Knoller) in his mid-30s, now an overweight cardiologist still mourning his lover’s death more than 10 years ago, sinking into loneliness: He’s introduced alseep. Fox’s project is almost a fairytale; a kiss brings Yossi back to life.

Fox’s new story deals realistically with the emotions of Yossi’s second coming out. Desire is submerged in Yossi’s flaccid body and sadness. He limits his own options in two remarkable temptation scenes: a night of bisexual possibility with a beefy partying colleague (Lior Ashkenazi) and a hook-up with a high-living gym rat and dance promoter (Gil Desiano) met on the Internet. These emotional low points are early high points in the film’s casually modern view of the situations—erotic free choice—that are part of the acceptance of gay life. Fox, a humanist romantic who bridged Israeli-Palestinian gay brotherhood in the 2008 The Bubble, understands Yossi’s potential decadence and pulls him out of his tailspin.

After a quietly devastating visit to his lover’s past, Yossi takes off. On the road to Sinai, he meets a group of young Israeli soldiers who draw him back to the camaraderie of military life (rapport memorably expressed by Brando’s lonely officer in Reflections in a Golden Eye in a longingly alliterative mumbling about “men among men”). Fox exults in that rapport. His embrace of Yossi’s humanity conveys a post-Stonewall and post-AIDS artist’s guiltlessness—a quality displayed by few American gay filmmakers. As The Bubble demonstrated, Fox isn’t caught up in issues, statements or grandstanding. (That’s why his overtly political Walk on Water failed.) Yossi’s gentle romanticism disguises the fact that Fox is making a major artistic advance.

Take the transition to Yossi’s road trip: Dissolving from solitude to the open road, it recalls a Kiarostami image without the aesthetic remoteness. The Middle Eastern landscape suggests new emotional territory. The film’s realistic sensuality (photographed with an optimistic glow by Guy Raz) makes it comparable to Julian Hernandez’s Raging Sun, Raging Sky—a masterpiece still unreleased in this country, shown only at gay film festivals. Like that film, Yossi imagines the natural complexity of gay love. Fox doesn’t go into the abstract ruminations of Hernandez’s magnificent philosophical epic, but his confrontation with the grief process and the depth of yearning is comparably profound.

When Yossi observes the lithe, sun-kissed, hyperactive soldiers on leave—including tall, smooth-faced, bow-lipped Tom (Oz Zehavi) — he’s confronted with the life passing him by and notices the gay liberation they take for granted, the burdened past that’s outside their generation’s awareness. These soldier boys’ joking sexual ease goes beyond homophobia; it’s a bit idealized to include shared enjoyment of thumping dance music which dates Yossi, who listens to Mahler and grips a paperback of Death in Venice while lounging poolside. “You can read at home!” chides the teasingly handsome Nimrod (Meir Golan).

By evoking—and remaking—Death in Venice so gently and humorously, Fox modernizes Thomas Mann’s ruminations on beauty, desire and the divine in human form an essential achievement in gay and human consciousness. Fox connects Yossi’s grieving history and rebirth with gay love’s healthy future—and does it without the sentimental melancholy of the recent British film Weekend. The scene of Yossi letting down his defenses with Tom uncannily recalls the lyric in “Love, Part II” by Bright Light, Bright Light: “Do what you want with me/Let everybody see/I’m in love again.” With such exuberance, Yossi even surpasses gay movies as admirable as Oslo, August 31st and Ira Sachs’ Keep the Lights On.

In fact, this film peaks during a wonderful seductive pantomime where Yossi and Tom go through a light-switch tug-of-war. “I want to see you!” Tom insists. Somewhere Luchino Visconti is smiling.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair.

The Best in Order of Preference

1. “Late,” Florrie
2. “Super Ultra,” Charli XCX
3. “Cold Summer,” CJ Hilton
4. “Warrior,” Queen of Hearts
5. “Skitszo Pt. 1,” Colette Carr
6. “Iconic,” Icona Pop
7. “True,” Solange
8. “Cityswitch,” SRH
9. “Ghost,” Sky Ferreira
10. “Against the Wall,” Kat Graham

The release of an EP has become a rite of passage in pop music. It’s meant to mark an artist’s readiness for greater things, while defining how that artist wants to be seen by his or her public.

In the pre-download days, the music industry didn’t have much use for EPs. They were neither here nor there. It must not have seemed worth it—all the paper, plastic and aluminum it took to convert five castoff tracks into a marketable product.

But EPs have now been embraced by the demoralized, declining music industry, precisely because the format is flyover country. There’s no recognized history of past success, no tradition associated with EPs. Failures go unnoticed amid that flat terrain.

Many of the artists who made notable EPs in 2012 probably won’t become pop superstars. But they were successful in this particular year, in this particular format, because unlike major-label moneymakers and TV talent show contestants, the recordings were made to justify their claim on an audience’s attention and did so, even if just for the length of a few tracks.

Stuck neither here nor there, they devised a destination for themselves and went there. And it turned out to be somewhere worth going. To me, that’s pop.

Florrie.

‘LATE,’ FLORRIE
“Late” is Florrie’s third and final EP before her major-label debut, expected to drop sometime this year. All three were produced by Xenomania, the British pop production outfit where Florrie was once house drummer.

She has also been a model, and there is something of a runway attitude about these four tracks. Even more than in “Introduction” and “Experiments,” the first two Florrie EPs, the songs here march out fiercely to meet you.

“Late” goes way beyond ambition, aesthetic and commercial. These songs are so focused and tightly wound they suggest that, for Florrie and her collaborators, the pursuit of pop perfection has become an idée fixe.

Indulging Xenomania’s famous penchant for toying with song structure, Florrie builds ecstatic melodies out of chants that initially seem lightweight (e.g., “I shot him down-down-down-down-down-down,” “You gotta earn every inch of my body, babe”).

But if the songs on “Late” have a common “theme,” it’s that Xenomania’s pop vision—which Florrie incarnates—is not to be trifled with. The polish and sharpness of this sophisticated EP render totally irrelevant the question of how seriously we’re meant to take it.

That’s because Florrie and Xenomania prize sincerity over seriousness. The final track, “To the End,” clarifies the sense of moral purpose behind their embrace of what’s commonly labeled disreputable. Florrie calms the culture’s Fear of Music as she intones, “Who knows what the future holds? Better do what you’re told … I will only bring you happiness.”

In 2012, politics became personal fantasy. Movies weren’t just entertainment but were used to justify escapist (possibly even anti-social) points of view. Critics misread films to suit their politics, but they could do so only because filmmakers were similarly biased. The year’s movies glorified power, just in time for our presidential election (as when Spielberg’s Abe Lincoln replaced honesty with political chicanery). That heartbreaking reconfiguration of history parallels our distorted contemporary art and politics, which indeed was the subject of the year’s most masterly film, Andre Techine’s Unforgivable. Thus the 2012 Better-Than List salutes the movies that preserved aesthetic complexity, humane values and honesty. The best films weren’t necessarily apolitical, but their artistry transcended transitory politics. If you don’t know these movies it’s only because our slanted media constabulary favors crap.

Carole Bouquet in Unforgivable.

Unforgivable > Zero Dark Thirty
Andre Techine tested political correctness against the difficulty of family/social life. It was the most sophisticated and morally challenging film of the year. Its essential politics exposed Kathryn Bigelow’s non-committal and unexceptional genre movie, a “mission accomplished” delusion. Techine showed how “family” and forgiveness are unfinished missions.

The Deep Blue Sea > The Loneliest Planet
Terence Davies’ gay sensitivity to sex roles (and memorable performances by Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale) bested Julia Loktev’s juvenile view of female infidelity and male weakness.

Sacrifice > The Master
Chen Kaige finds the roots of culture in patriarchal responsibility; P.T. Anderson loses culture’s meaning in anti-religious hysteria and high-art folly. Chen also featured superior acting by competing father figures You Ge and Xuegi Wang.

Holy Motors > Cosmopolis
Leos Carax’s dreamy limousine kineticism shamed Cronenberg’s oft-entrancing limousine stage drama. Carax parked and bloomed. Cronenberg parked then harangued.

Les Miserables > Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Tom Hopper and cast preserved the power of pop opera, while Nuri Bilge Ceylan cynically, tediously observed man’s inhumanity to audiences.

Dark Horse > The Turin Horse
Todd Solondz’s modern soap opera steadily, comically bored into our self-deceptions, while Bela Tarr’s highbrow jape steadily bored us.

The Lady > Lincoln
Luc Besson’s bio-pic examined Aung San Suu Kyi’s marital and political commitment, while Spielberg’s unholy marriage to Tony Kushner pushed the cult of personality. Aphorisms vs. Propaganda.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Taken 2 > Zero Dark Thirty
Neveldine-Taylor and Olivier Megaton revealed the post-9/11 zeitgeist in genre tropes, while Bigelow reduced the zeitgeist to an enigmatic comic strip, a “mission accomplished” delusion.

A Thousand Words > Argo
Brian Robbins and Eddie Murphy dared the most personal Hollywood critique since Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife; Ben Affleck trivialized Hollywood accountability.

Damsels in Distress > Compliance
Whit Stillman showed affection for female independence, while a po-faced indie’s misogyny masqueraded as class critique in the year’s worst film.

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

Moonrise Kingdom > Beasts of the Southern Wild
Wes Anderson’s fable of childhood innocence lifted the curse of racist liberal condescension preferred by Benh Zeitlin’s obnoxious, way-late Hurricane Katrina fantasy.

The Skinny > Django Unchained
Patrik Ian-Polk’s gay comedy expanded and enhanced black American life, while Quentin Tarantino treated blacks, whites and the history of slavery to comic violence.

Americano > Amour
Mathieu Demy sourced his family heritage (our cinema heritage), while Michael Haneke celebrated the end of life (and cinema). Joy vs. pessimism.

Detention > The Life of Pi
Joseph Kahn dared trace modern moral confusion to its pop culture source, while Ang Lee offered banal 3D philosophizing.

Chronicle > 21 Jump Street
Josh Trank’s existential teen flick achieved beauty, deeper than the adolescent nonsense of a TV-franchise movie that was the year’s second-worst film.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

How SamJack stole Tarantino’s epithet orgy ‘Django Unchained’

Henri Matisse, “Young Sailor II,” 1906
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

At age 20, recuperating in a hospital bed, Henri Matisse was given a paintbox by his mother as a diversion. It was Matisse’s first stab at painting, and it changed the course of art. As the 20th century’s greatest colorist, he possessed an uncanny instinct for the energy of colors—for the way shifting hues illuminate a painting from within—but other qualities as well: drive, an anxious but methodical disposition, a willingness to fail and a reverence for great painting.

His early stylistic experiments have inspired the Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinary exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting. This chronological installation of nearly 50 paintings focuses on series of works—especially pairs of canvases—that show the artist consciously thinking through issues of composition, and ways to give his color full voice. The thrill of the show is that, as Matisse instructs himself, he instructs us too, in the language he knew best.

Matisse’s formidable powers are evident from the start. Hanging alongside a vivid still life from 1899—painted in heightened impressionist hues—a second version somehow preserves much of its weightiness of forms even though reduced to flat, planar colors. Nearby, a Cézannesque still life hangs next to a pointillist version of the same setup. A brushy image of a seated sailor, rendered in a subdued palette, hangs next to one with almost crystalline shapes in blazing Fauve hues. What all these paintings share is an eloquence of colors—or, more exactly, a poignant measuring of the intervals between them.

In 1907-8, Matisse painted two remarkable versions of “Le Luxe,” depicting a standing figure with two attendants. The first has deliberately modeled volumes, but the second’s unmodulated color planes are enough to capture the verticality of the standing figure—the sensation of looking up at her head, and down to her feet, her height measured out by color-charged bands in the background. The artist makes the pose momentous with minimal modeling—much as did Giotto and Duccio, two early Renaissance artists whose works Matisse had admired that summer in Italy.

Henri Matisse, “Le Luxe I,” 1907
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There was no turning back. In one of two stunning paintings from 1914, a window’s cool light gently suffuses a studio view, but the artist’s drawing expands the space almost violently, anchoring a chair and bowl at the bottom, while planting, at our eye level, a distant tower rhyming with the window’s vertical partition. In the second canvas, by contrast, sunlight splashes forcefully across the floor, tracing deep shadows. Elements are rendered more harshly, even irrationally, yet the means are the same: the re-creation of a scene by observing a particular light, and cajoling the forms within into life.

The last galleries include the hieratic, flattened figures, still lifes and interiors from the late ’30s and ’40s, along with four series of photographs of paintings in progress, which afford a gratifying, over-the-shoulder view of the artist at work.

In Search of True Painting is the rare show that reveals and connects art on its own, intimate terms—in its purely visual manifestation. Looking on, we absorb the evidence of one of the greatest minds of modern art, a painter who, to a unique degree, combined intelligence, self-awareness, and knowledge of precedents. Oh yes, he also knew a thing or two about color.

“Matisse: In Search of True Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St., through March 17.

Those words are especially significant this winter. Not simply for the Hollywood award-seeking blockbusters but particularly for the cinematic landmarks soon to be available for film enthusiasts who are excited, to put a fine point on it, about exploring the history of human nature, human creativity. Here’s the annual Movies 101.

ACTORS

HARRISON FORD
Replicant or not? Ford’s third best-known role as Deckard in Blade Runner (Warner Home Video) proves how movie-star cool can sustain interest in a dated cult movie. This new multi-disc Blu-Ray set finally includes the original theatrical version (not the awful, confused “director’s cut”). Years later, it’s mostly an art-direction and F/X landmark. Ford (and Rutger Hauer) wear it well.

JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT
Keep Film Forum’s current retrospective on Trintignant going. The French actor who emblematized every decade since the 1950s is one of the most subtle and best in film history. One of his finest performances is in Patrice Chereau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Kino), in which Trintignant played a dual role as a patriarch who shared his family influence with a late twin brother (in flashback), a still-amazing modern epic.

DEAN MARTIN
The singer’s Hollywood career is balanced by an acting career full of famous classics and obscure ones like Mr. Ricco (Warner Archives), Martin’s swan-song entry in the Dirty Harry tradition. He plays tough and principled, an unbeatable, charismatic combination.

ALAIN DELON
One of the ultimate romantic icons contributes to Zorro (Sommerville House DVD), a little-known, delightful version of the perennial action-film franchise. This one directed by spaghetti Western adept Duccio Tessari adds to the legacy.

NINO CASTELNUOVO
European cinema’s slyest sex god has an alternate identity as a macho satirist. In 5-Man Army (Warner Archives), Nero joins a team of badasses including Peter Graves and James Daly. A slyly comical buddy movie.

AUTEURS

FRITZ LANG
Pity those Peter Jackson fans who don’t know the great epics of Fritz Lang. Still the most astonishing cinematic treatment of legends, Lang’s Die Nibelugen saga Siegfried and Kriemheld’s Revenge (Kino) pioneered the mystical grand narrative, producing the link between imagination and human memory. Even Lang’s now-antique special effects are wondrous in ways that have nothing to do with improved technology and everything to do with artistry.

Kino has also released a triple-pack, “Fritz Lang: The Early Works,” that preserves the master director’s first forays into original storytelling. Harakiri (1919), The Wandering Shadow (1920) and Four Around the Woman(1921) show the beginnings of Lang’s genius, which is also the commencement of cinema’s combined psychological and visual intensity.

ROBERT ALDRICH
Although known for hard-boiled action films, Aldrich also made eloquent studies of American milieu and American character. It began with his 1953 debut The Big Leaguer (Warner Archives), maybe the most serenely beautiful baseball movie ever made. Set at a New York Giants training camp, it stars Edward G. Robinson and the young Richard Jaeckel in scenes of open-air endeavor that apotheosize American competition and achievement.

JOHN FORD
Winning his record-setting fourth best-director Oscar for The Quiet Man (Olive Films), Ford challenged his own renown as the auteur of Westerns with this great, fond British romance. It complements his classics The Informer and How Green Was My Valley with more innate humor than any of his other films. The John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara love story is also a heritage story; a film of inspiring pictorial and emotional beauty. There’ll be more to say when the DVD is released in early 2013.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
In “Trilogy of Life” (Criterion) Pasolini’s exploration of medieval literature links his modern political vision to the classics, finding parallels in medieval literature: Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights. This early-1970s trilogy contains intellectual curiosity and erotic daring; Pasolini focuses on ribaldry to concentrate on the idiosyncrasy of human nature. (It’s especially striking in Blu-Ray.) Removing the veil from various cultures, Pasolini explored timeless qualities of life. Our contemporary cinema would do well to catch up to this artist’s unusual and major achievement.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

A singer, a violinist and a pianist

Joyce DiDonato

There is so much to crab about, it’s nice to rave, once in a while. I know at least three musicians, who have recently performed in New York, who make raving possible. They are a singer, a violinist and a pianist.

Singers aren’t ranked like tennis players, but if they were, you’d be hard-pressed to keep Joyce DiDonato out of the No. 1 spot. The mezzo-soprano from Kansas sang at Carnegie Hall, accompanied by a “period” band, Il Complesso Barocco. She sang opera arias from the Italian baroque. A few of the arias were by well-known composers such as Monteverdi. Most were by virtual unknowns: Cesti? Orlandini? Porta? DiDonato has done some welcome excavation.

When she took the stage, the audience roared for her, as though expecting something good. They got it. She put on a clinic of singing, the way Marilyn Horne used to do, in her prime. Technically, DiDonato can do practically anything. She is almost always in the center of the note. She is utterly secure, meaning that you can be secure as you sit in your seat. Her high notes are free. Her low notes are juicy. She can dig into her lower register, the way a violinist does his strings.

Of her musicality, there seems no end. She added a speck of American jazz to a couple of those baroque arias, I swear. Her Italian diction is a model—as when she spat out the first words of a Monteverdi aria, “Disprezzata regina” (“Despised queen”). She has a healthy streak of humor too, which we saw when the band behind her was tuning up. She imitated, almost under her breath, the sound of a string instrument tuning. Memorably funny.

Usually, when the band introduced an aria, she looked eager to sing, champing at the bit to sing. We would be too, if we could sing like that.

With the New York Philharmonic, Frank Peter Zimmermann played Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1. In the first movement, I thought he was playing too warmly, too beautifully. But I soon realized that the music was still frightening: Shostakovich built the fear into it. In the second movement, the Scherzo, Zimmermann was rude, brash and jabbing. Or rather, the music is that way, and Zimmermann expressed it right.

So it was with the Passacaglia, which Zimmermann played nobly. I thought that maybe he and the conductor, Andrey Boreyko, were a touch fast. But they made their tempo work. Incidentally, Zimmermann missed a note or two, which was almost comforting: This was not a studio recording. There’s nothing like live.

The cadenza, which bridges the Passacaglia and the Burlesque, was superbly calibrated. This was a feat of thinking, as well as playing. And the Burlesque was hot and virtuosic—from the orchestra as well, actually.

Pianists aren’t ranked like tennis players, but if they were  . . .  This brings us to Yefim Bronfman, who performed Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto in Carnegie Hall, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted by Fabio Luisi. There is a well-known video of Bronfman. He is 17, rehearsing a Bach concerto. Sitting next to him is Gina Bachauer, the famed midcentury pianist. After the concerto is over, Isaac Stern asks Bachauer whether she has anything to say to Bronfman—any advice to give. “Nothing,” she says. “Bless him. Nothing else. What can you say?”

I have nothing to say about the “Emperor,” except maybe this: The opening pages were just a little overpedaled, in my view. Otherwise, Bronfman had Beethoven to a T. The solidity, the limpidity, the rhythm, the chords (deep and precise), the octaves (ditto), the fortissimos, the pianissimos, the trills. The utter evenness of his playing—the sense of weight—is almost spooky.

Now and then, someone will ask me, “Whom do you like in the Beethoven piano sonatas? What recordings should I get?” The truth is, I don’t have anyone to recommend—although Backhaus and others deserve high praise, certainly for individual sonatas. I know that the recording industry is down the tubes. (Down the YouTubes?) But Bronfman should record the 32 sonatas, even if in his living room, for no money. He owes it to posterity.