MONDAY EVENING MODERNISM : ABSTRACT ART INSPIRES CELLO IMPROVISATIONS

Frances-Marie Uitti was nearing the end of her Monday-evening marathon in the new Anderson gallery at the County Museum of Art.

The young American who now lives in Holland had served for 1 3/4 stoic hours as an avant-gardish Pied Cellist masquerading as interpretive tour guide.

Her mission had been to offer sonic impressions of the modern masterpieces on display. In the process, she had musicalized, if not colorized, everything from Edvard Munch to Alfred Jensen.

She had moved casually about the museum, pausing to offer carefully premeditated improvisations in front of the works of art she deemed “most appropriate to musical translation.” Her steps were followed by a faithful mini-audience on portable stools and a technician manning a clunky tape-apparatus on wheels.

Blonde, mod and pretty in a clingy, black, spaghetti-strapped pantsuit, she had served as an abstract Alice in a painterly wonderland. Or at least tried.

The final resting place, near the exit, found Uitti producing big, bold, busy, blurry tone-scrambles on behalf of a Jensen canvas that invoked the spirit of a delirious Chinese checkerboard.

The devout were directed to gaze at the burning colors while the cellist fiddled. Some eyes were drawn, however, to another artwork, the one directly behind the feverishly bowing protagonist. It was a spiraling neon wall sign by Bruce Nauman that spelled out a potentially poignant message in long-hand:

“The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”

If any mystic truths were revealed on this occasion, they eluded at least one iconoclast.

Uitti is an interesting cellist. While her colleagues and potential rivals were polishing the bravura niceties of the Dvorak Concerto, she apparently was developing new means of expanding her instrument’s horizons. By using two bows in one hand, for instance, she has been able to explore uncharted timbral and dynamic possibilities.

With the aid of electronic equipment and her own pre-recorded tapes, she plays intriguing duets with herself. Sometimes the duets are confrontations: live cello versus mechanically magnified and/or distorted cello. Sometimes the duets suggest an old-fashioned division of labor: singing solo line accompanied by secondary, quasi-orchestral impulses.

One had to admire Uitti’s imagination, her sense of form and drama, her care for expressive poise. Still, one repeatedly had trouble finding the connecting link between the conventionally modern sounds she produced and the revolutionary visual compositions she claimed to be illustrating, or explaining, or subtitling or . . . .

She splashed around some well-calculated drones for Munch. She popped, slid and scratched earnestly for one explosive Kandinsky, then lay down her cello, knelt on the floor and plucked the strings to approximate the subtle circles and lines of another.

She created ripples and neat echo patterns presumably in the spirit of Mondrian, violent outbursts of dissonance to simulate an action painting of Jackson Pollock. Confronted with assorted wheels, machines and discs of Marcel Duchamp, she embarked on harshly vibrating tremolo adventures, introduced networks of fragments of unknown melodies, eventually succumbed to oddly plaintive lyricism.

For Mark Rothko, she invoked massively gnarled patterns that suggested a decayed romanticism. And so it went.

The musical impressions were, of course, wildly subjective, and only mildly prepossessing on their own terms. Sometimes the associations between sight and sound seemed superficial if not arbitrary. Often they seemed gimmicky.

Ultimately, the Uitti variations on art proved about as illuminating as Disney’s perspective of great music in “Fantasia.” For all her seriousness, the cellist-composer tended to trivialize the sources of her inspirations.

Matters were not helped by the seemingly haphazard method of presentation. Many of the itinerant viewers were unable to see the painting in question, unable to know which artist happened to be receiving musical attention, or why, or how.

One couldn’t tell the players on the wall, even with a program.

Communication was a sometime thing. Adding to the general aura of discomfort, space was cramped, and there were more bodies than stools.

This experimental concert was supposed to serve as a duo-media confirmation of “The Spiritual in Art.” In the end, it tended merely to celebrate the befuddled and, perhaps, the pretentious.