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Inside 2 Design: The root of carpet cultures 3 Names & Faces: Cheney to have surgery 5 Couple to give $10 million to the NSO 5 Music: Ian Bostridge sings Schubert

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Saturday, September 24, 2005

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Art

The Down Side of Pop

BY JOHN MCDONNELL THE WASHINGTON POST

U.S. players Jim Furyk, left, and Tiger Woods wear their game faces during the Presidents Cup competition yesterday in Manassas.

Seriousness Is Par for This Course

At Presidents Cup, Fun Is A Concept Thats Played Out
By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer Silver Liz (1963) from Warhol Legacy: Selections From the Andy Warhol Museum.

Fun? Stare at the word long enough and it begins to look weird, like a nonsense word. Fun. Fun. Fun. Listen to the professional golfers talk about fun at the Presidents Cup and the same thing happens. Its a fun competition, Davis Love III tells reporters of the contest between 12 Americans and 12 internationals. Its going to be fun, Fred Couples echoes. Were going to have a lot of fun, says the U.S. captain, Jack Nicklaus. Its going to be a fun week, Australian Mark Hensby says. I think its going to be fun. Yeah. We get it already. The Presidents Cup, which ends tomorrow, is supposed to be enjoyable and relaxed. And, superficially, it does appear to be a more laid-back contest than the biannual Ryder Cup or the grueling week-in, week-out Professional Golf Association tournaments. With its smiley-face atmosphere, the Presidents

At the Corcoran Gallery, Andy Warhols Comment On a Sold-Out Society

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer

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THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH, FOUNDING COLLECTION

See GOLF, C8, Col. 1

Happynews.com, Where the Beat Is Always Up

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer

ome museum exhibitions put up disclaimers about sex. Others warn about violence in their art. The impressive Andy Warhol show that opens today at the Corcoran Gallery of Art ought to begin with a big sign that reads something like this: The following exhibition may cause depression or anxiety in visitors viewer discretion advised. For all the bubble gum colors and crisp commercial graphics in much of Warhols art, its larger vision is profoundly grim. Its that austere underpinning to the Warhol glitz that gives this exhibition so much weight and depth. People talk about Warhols art as ironic, or cynical or maybe as satirical all of which implies a certain good humor, or at least a distance from the things it talks about. I think his project goes much further

Dollar Sign (1981): Most of the 150 works in the exhibition point up a decayed consumer culture.

See ART, C2, Col. 1

The news menu was stuffed with the dreadful and appalling yesterday. A massive hurricane bearing down on Texas. A bus fire killing 24 elderly people near Dallas. Floods ravaging New Orleans again. And that was before you even considered whats happening to the economy, or in Iraq or Afghanistan, or anywhere else in this sad, wicked world. You see any happy news out there? As it happens, the people who produce Happynews.com did. There it was, right at the top of their Web site, bordered by a sunny yellow frame and adorned with smiley faces: Hurricane Rita still weakening. And: Majority to back Algerian peace plan. And: Indonesia takes steps to prevent bird flu. Happynews.com, started three months ago,

A Name You Always Never Knew

This John Madden Is About Brainy Flicks, Not Football
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer

BY JAHI CHIKWENDIU THE WASHINGTON POST

John Maddens latest work, Proof, stays faithful to the version he directed onstage in London.

First of all, hes not that John Madden. As a result of the elegant insights he offers about his line of work not to mention the locutions refined at Cambridge you are immediately aware that this is not the guy you turn to for an assessment of the Cincinnati Bengals new place kicker, or for an opinion on whether Ace (as in Hardware) really is the place. He seems quite content to be the other John Madden. The bloke who directs movies for the thinking person.

Know who he is now? No? If one were to refer to Mrs. Brown the warmly evocative period film with Judi Dench as a grieving Queen Victoria would that bring a specific person to mind? Or the austere Ethan Frome (1993) with Liam Neeson? Still no? Hope Davis, who appears in his new film, Proof the screen adaptation of the hit Broadway play about a young womans fear that shes inherited her fathers madness on top of his genius for math gets the same sort of blank stares when she mentions him.

See MADDEN, C5, Col. 1

See HAPPYNEWS, C10, Col. 1

THE NEW SEASON TV Previews

Martha Behind Bars: The Jailbird Who Famously Feathered Her Nest
By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer

Oprahs Imprint on One Mans Memoir

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer

artha Behind Bars does anyone really wonder which Martha thats bound to be? is not only a disappointment but something of a cheat. By rough calculation, Marthas only behind bars for 30 minutes of the picture, which is but a third of it with commercial time subtracted. Compared with that depressing statistic, its only a minor discrepancy that there are, in fact, no bars. Not sos youd notice. Inmates, all women, at the Alderson Federal Prison Camp to which Martha Stewart is sentenced for five months, occupy less formal sorts of cells. Theyre cinderblock cubicles, really, without big

clanging doors. Stewarts even has a window with a pleasant view of the world outside. The film, CBSs Sunday night movie at 9 on Channel 9, is a virtual but not official sequel. Martha, Inc.: The Story of Martha Stewart, which covered Stewarts rise to prominence as Americas scrappiest happy homemaker and also benefited greatly from having Cybill Shepherd in the lead role aired on NBC in May 2003. Since then, of course, Stewarts immaculately configured and tastefully appointed world came tumbling down, Stewart having been found guilty of obstruction and other charges related to an insider trading scandal.

See TV PREVIEWS, C4, Col. 1

BY BEN MARK HOLZBERG CBS

The Oprah Lottery of Fame and Fortune is back in business. The first thing I said was, Oh my God, said James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, when Oprah Winfrey came on the speakerphone last month to give him a heads-up that his addiction-and-rehab memoir would be her book clubs next selection. The second, third, fourth and fifth things were, Thank you, thank you, thank you and thank you. Small wonder the man was grateful. A blessing from the Wizard of O means hundreds of thousands, at least, in additional sales. Winfreys announcement promptly drove A Million Little Pieces to No. 1 at Amazon.com. So long, William Faulkner, its been nice knowing you. In 2003, Winfrey began featuring the works of authors such as Faulkner, Leo Tolstoy, Alan Paton and

K ALSO PREVIEWED: Extras provides funny background about moviemaking. | C4

Cybill Shepherd puts some elbow grease into her portrayal of the imprisoned Martha Stewart.

See OPRAH, C4, Col. 3

DAILY 09-24-05 MD RE C2

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C2 Saturday, September 24, 2005

Design

The Washington Post

Red Roots and Carpet Mysteries

By Linda Hales
Washington Post Staff Writer

omewhere past Tehran, beyond the void known as the Great Salt Desert, Brian Murphy arrived at a field of wild madder. He had been tracking the history of Persian carpets since 1999, between assignments in Iran and Afghanistan for the Associated Press. His vivid memoir, The Root of Wild Madder (Simon & Schuster), tells of visits to bazaars, readings of the mystical poet Hafez and arduous treks, all of which failed to explain the swirling patterns and complex colors that village women weave and elite museums collect. He hoped the madder plant, a dye source known to botanists as Rubia tinctorum, would unlock the ancient mysteries of rugs, and by extension, illuminate cultures known the world over for their brilliant craft. Carpets offer a continuity between now and the past, Murphy said recently by phone from his home in Greece. His book is a travelogue in the best 19th-century tradition. With madder as grail, Murphy set out to get to the bottom of a Turkmen folk saying: Carpets are our soul. He made 25 trips in five years, to Mashad, Herat, Badghis province, Mazar-e Sharif and other locales in Afghanistan and Iran, where

rugs are still hand-made. Readers are treated to a precarious ride through the mountains in blinding sleet. Murphy sips tea with a warlord and trades cigars for a meal of pilau. He also flies to New York, so a Fifth Avenue dealer can unroll a stunning Heriz silk carpet, for which a Wall Street trader is said to have paid $80,000 in 2004. Madder was seductive. It grows from roots the color of blood, which were pounded for centuries into a dye potent enough to color wool and bones. Synthetic dyes long ago proved more efficient, so Murphy was delighted to find a field of madder in a remote region, and a massive stone grinding wheel that crushed the roots into paprika-colored dust. Madder dye can produce a range of hues from orange to purple, all of which mellow over the years into a pointillist palette that modern collectors covet. Synthetics always seemed garish by comparison. The struggling dyemaker had modernized his equipment, trading camel power for a tire linked to a motor. The author acquired a few brownish-red roots as souvenirs, and blood-red creases in the palm of his hand, but no epiphany. Only much later would Murphy encounter a young singer and weaver named Zeynep, from the nomadic Qashqai tribe. She came as close as

ABOVE AND LEFT BY HASAM SARBAKHSHIAN

Brian Murphy, author of The Root of Wild Madder, traveled Iran and Afghanistan, tracing the origins of carpet weaving by nomads such as those at left and the mystical and spiritual dimensions of the rugs. Inset: the madder plant, source of red dye.

anyone to explaining the riffs of knots. In her hands, shapes and colors were not random twists of wool, but memories being recorded a bird she saw as a child or the color of a mountain she knew. Its an inner song, she told Murphy. There is mystical clarity in her explanation that the rug he sees will never be the one she made. The Root of Wild Madder gives minor roles to Genghis Khan, the disastrous British retreat over the

Khyber Pass, the Iranian revolution, the Taliban and Pentagon-sponsored flyovers. But carpets rolled, stacked, dusty, sand-caked, sun-bleached or silken are the stars in this drama. Journalistically, investigating carpets proved helpful. Tracing the origins of a dwindling craft opened avenues into the economics, culture and social dynamics of the region. The journey also introduced Murphy to a world of people beyond the talking heads and dissidents we all have to cover, he admits.

Three stories stand out. In Afghanistans Turkmen belt, he met a family of Saryk rugmakers. In 2003, a 19th-century Saryk carpet sold at Sothebys for $24,000, a staggering sum in the bleak province of Badghis, where two sisters and a cousin worked at a loom that covered an entire room. They were making a dowry for the eldest girl, whose weaving skills enhanced her prospects for marriage. Rugs are now made for income. But Murphy, who had been seeking understanding of their mystical and spiritual dimension, asked whether the girls believed carpets had a sacred aspect. There are times when I finish a difficult border or gul and must stop just to look at it, Asli, the eldest, replied from the floor. It is like a small world all alone and separate: perfect and peaceful. God must be guiding our hands, I think. This is how he gets us to look beyond this world. During a sandstorm, a man named Rahmin sheltered Murphy under a carpet his grandmother had made. Rahmin told of whispering into the carpet after her death, believing his grandmother could hear. To him, carpets contained lives. And yet, when the opportunity arose, minutes later, to barter the rug for food, he tried. You cannot eat memories or stories, he told Murphy, no matter how sweet. On a trip to Iran, Murphy received the gift of a small, unremarkable carpet from a grieving mother. Her son had been killed in a minefield while trying to reach the European Union. He got as far as the border between Turkey and Greece. She was weaving the rug when he left and thinking of him constantly, she said. Murphy took it home with him to complete the sons journey. Maybe something of my son is still alive in his carpet, she said. If it makes the journey, maybe he will rest peacefully. Murphy is now the APs international religion writer. His collection of 40 carpets, kilim and other textiles reminds him daily of the anonymous artistry of hopeful girls and worried mothers in heart-rending villages. They have this amazing compendium of life, spirituality, Murphy says. I hope people will see them as more than an object. I hope they will see them as an extension of a culture, and try to recognize the humanity that goes into making them.

The Corcorans Warhol Legacy: Despair in a Camouflage of Glitz

ART, From C1
than that. I think theres profound, considered despair in it. Taken as a whole, Warhols art seems to portray a world so thoroughly sold out that theres no hope for it. Warhol Legacy was chosen from works in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, filled out with a few loans. Most of his signature series are represented. The early Campbell soup cans are there, along with a stack of his giant Brillo boxes. There are his trademark silk-screen paintings of Marilyn, Liz, Jackie and Warhol himself. A gallery titled Death and Disaster shows Warhol riffing on news photos of suicides, car crashes, the electric chair and botulism-laden cans of tuna. Other galleries concentrate on fascinating works some of Warhols best that may not be well known to the general public: his grim little Polaroids of guns and knives; his abstract images derived from shadows, Rorschach blots and camouflage; his gripping Screen Tests, in which one subject after another stares into a movie cameras lens for four long, uneventful minutes. And almost all of the more than 150 works in the exhibition seem to point to a culture of consumption that, in one way or another, has broken down. As art historian Thomas Crow pointed out in a famous article, the Pop side of Warhols art, which can feel like a celebration of American consumerism, is more than counterbalanced by a tragic side. There are the crashes and suicides and executions, even that lethal tuna, that suggest not everything is right in big-box America. Even Warhols most famous celebrity images arent so much celebrations of Hollywood values as records of their failure. Warhols first Marilyns were painted right after her breakdown and suicide. His Liz Taylors were made after her very public illness and many scandalous affairs, and they dont exactly show her at her best. Every one of the Warhol Jackie pictures that render the first lady in her stylish heyday, when she was a symbol of American optimism and energy, was painted after her husband had been gunned down.

THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH, FOUNDING COLLECTION

Above, a Warhol self-portrait from 1986 done in silk-screen, his trademark method of capturing icons such as Marilyn, Liz, Jackie and, of course, himself. At right, more silk-screen on canvas, abstract camouflage.

But the truly tragic side of Warhols imagery, even at its grimmest, is that for all its touching subject matter, it has so little power to touch us. Repeated in relentless series, in every color and size, Warhols pictures can feel like almost random dips into the stream of stuff and images that float by us every day. Even when his pictures have shock value, its the kind of shock you get from the pictures in a tabloid, the kind of shock that leaves you once youve left the checkout aisle. Warhols appropriated imagery feels so heavily pre-processed by the pop culture industry that it is left with all the bite and tooth of a Kraft single. Popular culture doesnt just consume big news and celebrity; it swallows its icons whole. Warhols art documents how their meaning gets dissolved and digested with his pictures as the end result. Even when Warhol himself has taken the photograph that a silkscreen portrait is based on, as in the relentless flow of commissions he received from figures such as

Cheryl Tiegs and Debbie Harry, theres a strong sense that the sitter has become just one more interchangeable product turned out by the Warholizers at the Factory. The value of these portraits, and maybe of their sitters, too, depends on the branding that Warhols trademark technique and color gives to them. The saddest thing is to imagine each of these sitters paying something like $35,000 to be turned into part of someone elses product line. You might as well pay to become a Pez dispenser head. Its not clear that Warhols almost interchangeable sitters are meant to have any more significance to him, to us, maybe even to themselves than all the different shoes he drew in his earlier career as a commercial artist. In Warhols art, that is, consumer culture doesnt come up short only when its seen failing in its suicides and accidents and assassinations. It also fails when it succeeds. As plenty of studies have suggested, the fundamental premise of consumerism that happi-

ness grows in tandem with wealth and ownership is a failure from the start. The eerily empty commodities depicted in Warhols art, and produced by it, can feel like illustrations of that failure. There are only rare moments in this show when we arent face-toface with the all-consuming maw of commodity culture. In the single gallery of (almost) abstract pictures, we see Warhol hunting for imagery that is so inconsequential, so beside the point in what it says, that it can resist the pull of outside forces. Warhols almost indecipherable images of random shadows cast onto a wall feel so trivial and incidental that they manage to float free of any use the larger world could put them to. Ditto for a series of abstractions that Warhol based on standard camouflage patterns. After all, indeterminacy is what camouflage is all about: Its explicit goal is to remain unseen and unseeable, to avoid coming together into any kind of meaningful, even recognizable image. Warhols

camouflage paintings are icons of meaninglessness. Warhols paintings that mimic Rorschach blots have some of the same force. Theyre built around patterns that are meant to be absolutely empty of meaning until someone reads some into them. This makes them just the opposite of Warhols celebrity images, which had been overstuffed with meaning if only of the most superficial kind long before the artist got to them. But its those four-minute Screen Tests, which come at the close of the Corcoran exhibition, that feel most like theyve escaped the prepackaging and pre-processing of consumer culture. Their sitters, whether famous or not, seem to have some kind of power and authenticity that dont depend on roles theyve taken on within the world outside. These film clips are so foursquare in their point-and-shoot technique, their content so willfully ungussied up with style and a fancy look, that they seem to let their sitters withdraw, for a few min-

utes at least, from a culture of consumption, spectacle and self-presentation. The Screen Tests are kind of boring, and their sitters seem bored in them. But theres a sense that withdrawal into boredom can provide a refuge from involvement in a buzzing social world that will only swallow up your individuality. Its a bleak take on life, and Im not sure I buy it. If theres pleasure to be found in things and those of us who love art had better think there is then its hard to do without consumption of some kind, and the culture that it brings with it. A view of Warhol as a radical ascetic does make more sense of how it feels to see this exhibition, however, than one that casts him as the happy, holy fool of mass culture. Just take your Prozac before heading to the show.
Warhol Legacy: Selections From the Andy Warhol Museum runs through Feb. 20 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW. Call 202-6391700 or visit www.corcoran.org.