Generally speaking, there are two kinds of people: those who cruise, and those who see the floating TGI Fridays of Carnival and Royal Caribbean as absurd microcosms of all that is wrong with Western consumerism. (I know a few who can claim membership in both factions due to family obligation, and they tend to medicate their cognitive dissonance with hard liquor while on board.)
If you belong to the second group, you’ll sink with grim satisfaction into the watery abyss of Sea of Tranquillity (2010), Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s 29-minute computer-animated and live-action art movie about an imaginary cruise ship and its ennui-stricken inhabitants. Through Jan. 19, the film plays on repeat in a darkened gallery at the Tampa Museum of Art, sending the lilting notes of its titular jazz anthem — written and composed by Op de Beeck, performed by Belgian chanteuse Sandrine on the soundtrack and on screen — floating into adjacent galleries every 15 minutes or so.
The overall effect of languor and luxury is enough to make a viewer crave a Scotch and a cigarette.
Op de Beeck’s portrayal of Western wealth and whiteness feels like a familiar critique. At the outset of Sea of Tranquillity, we’re introduced to a laconic hero of sorts — the late-middle-aged ship’s captain whose weariness with his assignment is plain from his facial expression. (In fact, no one in the film speaks; the only language uttered comes through Sandrine’s song.) Then a series of character-driven vignettes appears on screen to illustrate, in elliptical flashes rather than as an explicit story, the variations of class and race hierarchy that play out aboard the ship, as in life: a statuesque blond hostess who doodles while babysitting an empty casino; a geisha-like Asian chambermaid who shuffles down an interminable corridor; a Caucasian man who dines alone on a disc of blue gelatin (a droll example of molecular gastronomy); and the smiling Brazilian dancers who shimmy for an audience of stoic European passengers.
Everyone on board plays a role in a dissatisfying circuit of consumption and genteelly-rendered exploitation. Only Sandrine — a real-life alum of the Belgian version of American Idol — exudes vibrancy as she belts out the sad lyrics of “Sea of Tranquillity,” while an older white male passenger eyes her under the watch of his disapproving wife. (Sandrine is black and looks like she’s about 26.) Thanks to Op de Beeck’s directing and deft performances by his actors, these wry vignettes are a treat to watch and deliciously amuse-depressing. On the other hand, a viewer walks away with the sense that significant social ills including racism, sexism, oppressive labor conditions (on cruise ships, which are well-documented), prostitution and elective plastic surgery (depicted in other scenes) have been alluded to for a moment, but mostly in the service of conjuring the sexy ambience of despair that makes the film itself a tantalizing consumable.
The real star is the film’s aesthetics — especially Op de Beeck’s 3D-animated ship and its semi-computer-generated interiors, where actors are staged and costumed with expensive-looking slickness. Its gray exterior fuses the body of a cruise liner with an angular, futuristic dome that hints at some other ominous, militaristic function: Think Death Star meets The Love Boat. This impressive sensory package, song included, is the memorable takeaway from Sea of Tranquillity.
An adjoining exhibition offers a different kind of immersion. Fragile Waters showcases 119 black-and-white photographs by the renowned Ansel Adams as well as two living photographers, Dorothy Kerper Monnelly and Ernest H. Brooks II. Water doesn’t get much more beautiful than in their pictures of kelp-strewn coastal California and Maine (Monnelly), majestic winding rivers of the American West (Adams), and Antarctic icebergs and underwater ecologies around the world (Brooks). I don’t love that the exhibition was organized by photokunst, a marketing firm that promotes Brooks’s and Monnelly’s careers, but the show’s spine-tingling passion for the environment and conservation is a great cause
.
Among the most fascinating are images that extract some visual abstraction from nature, such as Adams’ “Frozen Lake and Cliffs” (1932), an austere composition of a rock cliff face, black ice and snow that looks like a forerunner of Clyfford Still’s craggy Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950s. (Per an exhibit wall label, Adams preferred the term “extract” to “abstract” when talking about such pictures because he saw himself as photographing what was there, rather than creating an abstraction in the way a painter might.)
Swirling, bubbly ice pattern studies by Monnelly, shot on the coldest days of Massachusetts winters (1997-2003), and Brooks’s beautiful “Constellations” (1969), a simple photograph of sunlight dancing on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, likewise render the natural world spellbinding and strange.
And there’s not much stranger than historical Surrealism — the province of a third traveling exhibition, Arp, Calder, Miró: Modern Masters from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. A selection of 52 works by Jean Arp, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder offers a look at the visual innovation that characterized the movement, of which Arp and Miró are regarded as seminal members. (The label didn’t stick for Calder, who had mixed feelings about Surrealist theories.) Prints and bronze sculptures by Arp showcase his elegant biomorphic abstraction, a style based on organic shapes and chance arrangements of form that continues to influence art and design today. Miró’s energetic painting and prints delve into dream-like imagery, including a figure of a man who has swallowed the sun. The real crowd-pleaser, though, is a trio of Calder’s sculptures — one hanging mobile and two floor-based pieces whose delicate offshoots of metal rods and circles whirl gently as air circulates through the gallery.
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2013.