Phallic Fullness Fractured

I happen to be taking a course on Ancient Greek mythology which provides me with endlessly fascinating peaks into this Classical culture. My vague familiarity with it comes from a childhood of loving myths, briefly living in Athens, and attending a college where we spent our Freshman year reading Ancient Greek texts and studying the language. This course, or rather than erudite professor, is a fountain of information into the culture.

Most of it does not concern art or artifacts so I have not had cause to mention it but today I learned about herms and simply had to find an image to confirm what I had been told. Basically, herms were simple block sculptures with a head of bearded Hermes, and a phallus towards the bottom. The one to the left is in the Istanbul Archeological Museum, and is supposed to be from the 5th century BCE. They were placed at crossroads and borders. They were also placed outside homes as good luck, to protect the inhabitants from any bad fate entering the domestic realm.

They are not dissimilar to the gargoyles placed on cathedrals to keep devilish spirits from profaning the house of god. Walter Burkert adds in his book, Greek Religion, that a tribe of chimpanzees do something similar. In order to guard the tribal area, male chimps take turns standing on the borders with erect penises. After several hours, one group is retired and another group of male chimps intimidates any potential enemies with their ugly faces and full erections.

These were mentioned in class because all the herms in Athens were vandalized the night before the greatest armada ever gathered by Athens was to depart on a mission to Sicily as a part of the brutal Peloponnesian War. This was considered an extremely bad omen, though the armada sailed. Around the same time, the Eleusinian mysteries were profaned.

General Alcibiades was accused of the herm destruction but the armada had already sailed and he did not stand trial (short version, believe me). The Athenian elders noticed that many of those who seemed to be involved in this rising disrespect of the rituals and customs had been students of Socrates. Ten years later Socrates would stand trial for corrupting the youth because some mocked the secrets and attacked phallic statuary.

A Bow

This picture stands out for me because of the blue ribbon. I was in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston last Spring when I saw this painting. I had already been there for hours, taken a break, and started again when this blue bow made me take note.

The painting of Mme de Jurjewicz is by Winterhalter, an unknown artist to me before. I am unfamiliar with his other work. I keep meaning to find out more and get distracted by other things.

I don't look at paintings the way a painter would, or an art critic would. I know that not only intuitively but from my various conversations with either. I see different things, meaning where perhaps there was none, something simple where others need more complications, difficulty, strategy to pull the painting into a new and different place. I see a bow that is the perfect velvet from a memory I can't recall, that folds along the side of my mind in layers of fabric wrapped with childhood joys, and am happy.

I like learning the way a better eye sees a painting; I learn how to see more strategically. The challenge is, of course, also maintaining an innocent eye that enjoys the work uncomplicated by knowledge of technique and style, one that appreciates technique and style radiant with seeming effortlessness, permitting a passer-by to stop and look with pleasure, to bow to a simple bow.

Initiations

This image is part of what made me go to back to school in order to study Proust. I learned as I proceeded that this image had absolutely nothing to do with the passage of Proust in which Botticelli is mentioned. But I got started because I thought it did.

Last week, I was reading the text again and laughed at the following passage. "And yet I should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of old papers," says Odette de Crecy in "Swann in Love" within Swann's Way by Proust. Of course, she has no desire to study because it is frightfully dull and the irony was too exquisite for me not to make a note of it. I started graduate school full of enthusiasm to study Proust and have found in the years since that I shall not study Proust (nor always be full of enthusiasm). But I started school because I thought I would.

Initiations point towards an end that they very often to do not succeed in attaining, not from failure but rather from an interest spawned by it. Today, I had a meeting with a woman I admire absolutely, completely, utterly, for her intelligence, her humor, her warmth...I do indeed find it impossible to understand that she is anything less than perfect, though knowing that she has children I can imagine that there must be some who conceive of her as less than I do. Responding to my questions and hopes, she suggested that I not try to focus or produce limitations yet. Perhaps for now, I might create a list of readings more loosely defined than I had been considering to date.

Her willingness to work with me initiates me into a field of study suggested by the Botticelli painting and then Proust but different in some very important ways. Her encouragement to avoid the cages of categories is the most important guidance she could offer at the beginning. Like the painting that started this process for me, I am only just rising from the waters, only just being born into this new land and I should walk forward with all the innocence available to love.

A ReadyMade Thought

Tonight I attended an absolutely brilliant talk by Marjorie Perloff. She was informative, eloquent, excited, all of which made her great fun to hear. Her title was The Madness of the Unexpected: Marcel Duchamp and the Survival of "High" Art. She shared so much interesting information that my hand hurt trying to note it all and I will undoubtedly be transcribing my thoughts from those notes into the space here in the days and weeks to come.

Before I proceed to the paper that I must begin this evening, however, I had to mention an experience that I will never forget. The story follows.

In her talk, Ms. Perloff of course discussed the ready-mades. Though largely focusing on the fountain of the Independent Salon on 1917 in NYC, she also addressed the reproductions and miniatures that Duchamp created over the years of his career. Duchamp was not against making money and admitted at one point that though he enjoyed making the large pieces and selling them for large amounts, it was quite helpful to also make smaller pieces which could be more easily purchased by a wider audience.

The smaller pieces were not thoughtless recreations. They were dutifully made. In fact, he was adamant about finding the exact same type of paper, ink, cardboard, or what have you, that had been used in the first. It could not simply be something similar. It had to be the same brand, thickness, color paper. The question that Ms. Perloff posed was why he would go to such lengths to do so?

The talk ended and I knew I had work to do, but I approached her as she was untangling her computer cords and drinking water to recover. An answer had suggested itself to me when she asked the question, but I could not imagine why it was not a possible answer and given her in-depth study thought she might be able to clarify for me why she had dismissed it. I asked her why it was not possible to think of the paper, the ink as his construction of form. As the French alexandrine is a strict line form of twelve syllables, interrupted in the middle by a pause and with assorted other rules fashioned around it, perhaps he had used the paper, the ink as his formal structure.

She looked at me and said, absolutely. She had no idea why she had not thought of that. Duchamp had thought of paint as a ready-made and likewise each part of his reproductions were ready-mades to be respected as individual, unique elements. That was his form. So, yes, indeed the exact requirements of the paper, the ink could be seen as his building and maintaining his form. I thanked her, and excused myself to go write my paper.

The fact is that I doubt myself all the time and am afraid too often now to ask the question or offer an answer. I am surrounded by brilliant minds and I have much to learn from them. But I also have much to learn from myself, and perhaps should come to enjoy the unique form my own thought takes. I might then find the small ready-mades my mind signs, and offer them to others without so very much hesitation.

Seven A.M.

Last night, a little after 7pm, I walked past a re-shelving table in the library where a small book on Hopper had been left. With my bag on one shoulder, and seven books in my arms, I kept walking, only to get to the stairs, turn around and go back for the book. A couple weeks ago, I had gone to the Whitney precisely in order to see the Hopper show, but got distracted by other experiences there and this was a reminder of the surprise I experienced in seeing his works.

This morning, after a long night, I got up at 7am to the sun pouring into my room and was, surprised at the mental flash of seeing Hopper's Seven A.M.

I had remarked to my friend how much it reminded me of the many years when I used to go to Northwestern Connecticut, almost the Berkshires, where the small towns were quiet except for the train that passed through on schedule. The few shop windows offered things it seemed unlikely that anyone would buy; there was usually a coffee shop for passengers dropped off too early...or too late. I spent many summers walking around the state parks with the family dog. I swam in lakes. I picked strawberries, rasberries for jam, blueberries for pie, lettuces for salads and basil for pesto from the garden, only a few steps across the soft grass from the back door where a pile of papers waited for my friend's father to read, occasionally diminished not by his reading but rather a family member's pulling some from the bottom to recycle. The mornings were rounds of toast and tea at the kitchen table as the day got planned. Even the bustle of the waking family and the petty arguments between brothers are gentle murmurings in my memory. The kitchen door that led to the garage would slam as boys wandered in and out, but it is muffled now by years of experiences that lead me further from those days whose intimacy would inevitably end.

Hopper depicts a nostalgia they say. I suppose, I agree. As one day, I will remember waking this morning not at 5am as the alarm had suggested to me I ought, but at 7am when my mind looked out onto the little life that I live now, one full of daily irritations but also wondrous moments of enlightenment, which too will pass to be layered into the shadows, onto the hours of mornings to come.

Reading, My Life

Last night I stayed up very late trying to finish a book that I eventually conceded could be concluded in the morning. As I venture into another night of reading, this picture by Carl Spitzweg, a successful Romantic era German painter and poet, came to mind.

I feel this way often, though I am not the Poor Poet of the title. I did actually have a leak last fall, though not from the roof but a crack in a pipe of the tenant above me. But a pile of books by my futon, also on my bedside trunk, by my chair on a little stool, and in a crate specifically for the current must-reads and library books illustrates my passion, as it does his here.

I do occasionally tidy. But often in the morning, when I get up just at dawn specifically in order to read for a few hours before another day begins, I look around my apartment to see that the organizing of the night before, done in order to settle into my work, has somehow shuffled into wandering papers, socks forgotten on the floor, tea cups half drunk, magazines discarded to be recycled, yellow post-its strewn with thoughts.

And I love it.

Book as Art

Edmond de Goncourt had the first edition of his friends' works bound in parchment and a portrait of the writer painted on the cover by the artist he deemed most appropriate for each writer. Jean-Francois Raffaeli did the one of Zola; the image here is simply called Bohème since I do not have access to a book cover.

Carrière did the one of Daudet, but I have included here a study of Daudet with his daughter.

Paul Valéry, in Aesthetics, disdains this project as it entirely forgets the purpose of the book. The book can no longer be read but is mummified "to sit eternally in a glass case".

For collectors this would undoubtedly seem an entirely natural response. This particular book is not to be perused but worshipped, fetishized. For Goncourt, the book became an object for posterity through the additional artistic endeavor of the portrait. The knowledge contained within the book is no longer material to the book's value. The book's value now occurs through being contained first, in vellum and then, by art. In fact, the question becomes whether the object is valued as a book, or as a portrait. In what sense does it remain a book except as the foundation for its current state, transformed into an objet d'art by the portrait, by its wrapping, by its untouchability? I can easily dismiss the question by saying it is all of the above. But that dismissal does not acknowledge the complication caused by each additional step of time (first edition), wrapping (vellum), additional artistic endeavor (portrait done by known artist), fragility (parchment and art made it impossible to touch), and lastly its possession by Goncourt, whose reputation adds to the history and thus value as an object.

To complicate the matter further, the book would now be valued as a collector's item by virtue of being a first edition, that is book-to -be-read into book-as-historical-entity. Its historicity then alters it from a book-to-be-read into book-as-value-object. First editions are rarely read or handled precisely for being rare. But in this instance, the book can not be confirmed as a first edition without destroying its surrounding artifactuality. The book is known to be a first edition through its historicity.

If the book is uninteresting, trite, or simplistic, it no longer matters. The content of the book, in some sense what it is the book refers to in being a book, has become irrelevant. Its materiality has literally disappeared.

As a collector do you want the book because you are a fan of Zola? Edmond de Goncourt? Raffaeli? Or, simply for the conquest of collection? Do you want it because it is a book or a work of art?

Portraits

Given that today is President's Day, we are likely to see portraits of our famous presidents, especially Washington. We are likely to see painted portraits and I was thinking of the famous portraits of Washington when I remembered this fascinating documentary on portraiture, in which an artist looks at the way portraits and the painter's self-portraits, placed side-by-side, reveal an intentional, or not, resemblance.

This is sort of how we see ourselves in actors, singers, and other celebrities that we admire. In the case of the artist, it is an opportunity to project themselves onto the world stage, or at least in the permanent visual memory of a historical figure. Seems funny to me...

Portraits are a wonderful way to appreciate your life, not the events but the actual existence. I used to work for a woman who decided that she would have a full length portrait of herself done for her 60th birthday. She looked daunting from the high place above her mantle. A much younger woman had hers done after surviving her battle with cancer. The portrait affirms something. What though?

The National Portrait Gallery houses the nation's collection of important portraits. I have not gone there in many years, but the last time I remember being surprised that it was so empty. I think portraits can sometimes feel excessively historical as if they were merely documents of someone's life and not visual revelations of some aspect of a person. I am inclined to revisit it when I am in DC next and see how I respond now.

Good portraits reveal something, although I am smiling to think of some of the artists I have known to paint portraits. Indeed, the portrait does quite easily reveal the artists own designs, launched from the figure painted. The portrait is a vision of the sitter they could not have seen without the artist.

A studio of her own

Last night, a girlfriend came over for dinner and walked in breathless because she had just rented herself a studio. She had decided to move out of her apartment in Manhattan a few weeks ago, and I already knew that she was going to share with a friend in BedStuy, but this was news.

She realized that she could probably cobble enough freelance jobs together to keep body and soul together. She had vastly reduced her costs with her move, even with additional studio rent. The studio is shared, but she will have her own space to work. Her own space, outside of her home, to develop work.

My small studio operates as an office but the couch becomes my twin bed when I need to sleep. Nevertheless, most of the time, the space feels like my little office. It is where I think, I write, I edit, I read, I procrastinate, I make tea, I type, I sketch, I outline, I re-read, I copy-edit, I print, and start all over again. My desk is in front of a window looking out on a tree and no matter what time of year, I see the moon rise at some point during the evening. The windowsill is currently loaded with the plants that continue to survive despite my care and not quite sufficient light. The space is mine and permits me the privacy to make all the mistakes necessary for the work that I do.

My friend was bursting with the projects she has in mind. They all sound good and now she can do them. She can do them because she chose to believe in herself sufficiently to shape her life so that the focus is her design projects, rather than a job that will pay the bills, get her into a graduate school program she is not certain she wants to attend, or any of the other excuses that can be made for resisting the pull to produce for herself. As she said, she can't imagine where she will be in six months because she feels like so much will start to bloom simply because she has the space to let it.

The fact is that Virginia Woolf was right about the importance of a room of one's own. Now if we could all just find that 500 pounds a year....

Man Land

Today, I accompanied a friend of mine down to the Navy Yards where the piece he had produced for the headquarters of a corporation was crated and ready to be shipped. I will laugh if any one ever says art is effete to me again.

This is a work of nail art, by which I mean different sized nails produce the outlines and shadows of the design. The picture offers an example of the work done by Tim Kent. The piece being crated off today was a bit larger, and if the frame weighed 200lbs, 80lbs of nails were hammered painstakingly (literally, all involved were aching and sore from tapping/slamming that many nails into the wood), and the crate added another 75lbs, then the packaged piece was nearing 400lbs.

Several men were involved at every step. There was one woman, whom I did not get to meet, but I understand that her handshake was brutal. The piece got loaded by several strong men, nonetheless using dollies, and wearing the type of rugged clothing that resists tears.

I stood to the side and held jackets and papers, thus making myself useful too. But under no uncertain terms, this was man land and these men were proud of the brute force that created and crated another work of art.

The Artist Speaks

I had the unfortunate pleasure of hearing Wendy Mark and Andre Aciman speak at the James Gallery this evening. A pleasure because I like her work. A pleasure because he wanders well through diverse ideas. Unfortunate because, despite the MFA degree from Columbia in writing with which she introduced herself, words are clearly not her medium. She was painfully incomprehensible.

Aciman started the conversation explaining how they are working on a project together, loosely shaped around Lavender. They had decided, however, that this was not a good topic for the conversation they would have and so picked blue. After he had shared his thoughts on blue, she apparently decided not to speak about blue. She introduced her work, having brought pieces to show but incapable of figuring out how to show them until Aciman distributed them to the audience. She could not figure out what to say and floundered until he obliged by beginning to interview her. But even that did not help as she could not respond simple questions such as:

How did you find your form?
What about monotype was so appealing?
How do you pick your colors?
What is your process?
How do you work with the authors who produce essays for your limited edition books?

Simple questions. And yet each one required her to peruse the air above her head with the abstracted wandering gaze of a stoned Annie Hall, as she started sentences only to interrupt them and begin somewhere else. This was not a conversation but a strained interview where even the most eloquent and persistent interviewer has to eventually accept defeat.

This brings me to the surprising inelegance with which most artists speak about their work. I realize that words are not their medium but in a world of words, they do need to be able to express themselves at least a little bit. Without their own words, the artwork can become co-opted by curators, journalists and that is only if the work stands out enough to be noticed without some description to help move it there.

I like Wendy Marks' work. It is light. Despite the small size of her pieces, there is much space in looking at them. They become, as she intends, a little world of their own. They are produced in series but each one does stand alone. They are fun and if you get a chance to look at her work at the James Gallery then I encourage you to do so. Perhaps if you find yourself wandering through mid-town and need a respite from the wind, you might wander through the show.

She was quite clear that she does not like to illustrate writers' words. She prefers writers to produce from the inspiration of her work for the limited edition booklets she produces. This and her focus on works that are so completely self-contained may lead to the autonomy that makes her incapable of participating in a conversation. Though this attitude works well in her art, it is an embarrassing disaster in a gallery dialogue with another artist.

Aesthetic Surrealism?

I am struggling to understand how surrealism is an aesthetic movement. In looking at Breton's manifestos, I see him advocating awareness, a heightened awareness that flies above and beyond the immediate reality. He may not be writing theories, but he is suggesting a practice that is not so much aesthetic as, if not philosophical (though his encyclopedia definition in the manifesto of 1924 considers it such), psycho-developmental–I hesitate here to say psycho-analytical or psychological.

Automatic writing is not an aesthetic practice but rather a means of glimpsing a self that is truer than the social constructs permit one to see. By revealing the unconscious attitude, the 'real' person is made present, even if that 'reality' appears as a sur-reality. In addition, despite Breton's writings on art, and the general public memory now preferring surrealist art over the writings, Breton does not address the arts. That he addresses writing seems even, if I may, entirely selfish and only in response to his own interest in writing. He may mention writing but he does not mention painting, photography, film, collage, theatre, dance or any other conceivable art. Had he been interested in gardening, one can imagine he would have founded a method of spontaneous gardening. I am facetious here but only to make the point that I struggle to eliminate in my own mind: the writing manner he presents is not because he has an artistic revolution that he wishes to establish, but rather that it is the way he can discuss the personal revolution he is advocating.

In this, I can not help but see him politically active on behalf of the individual. That there can not be a political party is precisely because the cause is each one's. Later in 1934 when he writes Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme, he even says that surrealism is a response to the effects of war, the exhaustion of defeat coming out of war-whether the war is won or not. Liberty in the 1924 manifesto, a lack on interest in art or anti art, philosophy or anti-philosophy in the 1929 manifesto, both suggest that the quest is not aesthetic but personal, where the personal then becomes political.

Hence his manifesto with Trotsky, Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant, on how to maintain the independence of artists and thinkers. Breton seems to have classed anyone interested in the self as an artist, with the assumption that the workers have neither the time nor the disposition. That Breton, and the surrealism he promotes, is in conflict with communism is clear, but I don't understand it as conflict between aesthetics and politics, so much as between the individual and the group. (To the degree that as the years go by, in his writing on art, Breton produces aesthetic doctrines, they seem mostly to be responding to abstract expressionism and why surrealism must have identifiable forms placed in chance encounters.)

I am working on this and suspect to say more....

Picture Love

In Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Swann famously loves Odette de Crecy by seeing her as Jethro's Daughter in the Botticelli painting The Trials of Moses. Later, in Volume II, Marcel, the narrator, will likewise love Albertine through "those Michelangelo figures which are being swept away in a stationary and vertiginous whirlwind". These examples of love refracted through art reminded me a year or so ago of some of Barthes' writing on the imaginaire, the manner in which we superimpose our own imagining onto our thus selected desire and I wrote about it a little. Perhaps these works of art are indeed merely tropes, no different from other literary stylings, on which Proust could express his characters' love. How nice these flourishes remain, and how true to the grandiose impressions we have of our new loves.

Valentine's Day, despite how lucky I have been in love, has nonetheless generally made me uncomfortable and I find art an honest yet still distracting way of expressing or enjoying it. Last year, I went to The Tempest with my new love, my aunt and her partner, which solved the need to speak for several hours and allowed the rest of the evening to be focused on the play rather than this still uncertain relationship. Other years, I have largely tried to avoid the heart-shaped, chocolate-covered celebration, always unsuccessfully, not because I do not feel love for one or many, but rather because I am not sure how to express it on demand. I do not proclaim well. I am more spontaneous in my desire and appreciation, believing, as I do, that Love is truly important, fundamental even.

In Greek mythology, specifically remembering my recent reading of Hesiod, after Chaos the first creation is Eros. How this occurs Hesiod does not explain, but only after Eros do Gaia and Okeanous, and the others, appear. Eros remains an independently created entity, though one who produces progeny with some of those first created. Similarly, when Zeus overthrows the Titans, Aphrodite, rising from the castrated penis of Kronos, becomes the first personification of the previous abstracted deities. The rest of the Olympians then appear. Love is always the first in the new world.

Perhaps because there is something static in Love, a kind of ever presence, Love is difficult to describe. Lust moves us and so words more easily build on each other in an attempt to convey the passion, the way we 'fall' for someone, 'tumble' into bed together, 'stoke' the fires of desire. Love is simply there, present. Though Love may share traits with the other passions such as being inopportune, undeniable, there is something undefinable about it that is different from the others. Having started speaking of Proust, I must here intervene to say that both Swann and Marcel discover their own jealousy in coveting the women they desire, a jealousy that overwhelms and undermines any other feelings, including any fascimile of love they might have created for themselves. They each believe they love, but maintain desire through jealousy. Swann finds a picture of Botticelli's painting to keep on his desk to remind him of Odette. Does he love? There is only the question.

I am sometimes asked if I would love the man I love any less if I did not like the works of art that he creates, or if he were not an artist. The question is dumbfounding because, as I know too well, he can not help but paint or draw and is compelled to return to it if he spends too much time away. I love his pictures–it is true–and perhaps had I not liked his paintings as much as I did when we first met, I might not have bothered getting to know him better. Who knows? He admits he let his feelings grow upon seeing my home and approving of my aesthetic sensibility. Did I picture him when I closed my eyes as a young girl? Not exactly. Did he me? I sincerely doubt it. And yet the pictures mutate to fit the one standing in front of us...if we are lucky, imaginative, both. The art of love is, for me at least, a picture I will see tomorrow, when he smiles at me sitting at a communal table in a crowded, loud dumpling house in Chinatown, where we meet because I still can't stand Valentine's Day and where there is no art on the walls to distract either of us from a ritualized acknowledgment of love. Love, then, is not always a pretty picture, picture perfect as it may be.

The Ariadne Myth

The issues in mythology seem even more prominent, however, when one looks at de Chirico’s early paintings which so influenced the Surrealists, even if de Chirico was not himself a member of the group and his later works vociferously denied. The Ariadne series, though so generally termed only in the beginning of the 20th Century with the show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the forty odd pieces de Chirico produced in 1913-1917, in particular points to a subterranean mythic base in surrealism.

This series of paintings are suggestive of the story in which Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus on Naxos after helping him kill the Minotaur and escape the Labyrinth, figures of the myth which would both return in surrealism as prominent journals. This myth is of particular interest because of the undetermined ending. In one account, she weeps for Theseus until she dies. In another account, she is married to Dionysus and made an eternal figure.

To consider some details of this myth: Ariadne is an epithet for Aphrodite, meaning the holy one, who is in the geneology of Greek mythology the first of the Olympians after Zeus castrates his father Kronos, a clear personification of Eros, the abstraction that is first to appear when Chaos is sundered. This places Love, not in its Romanticized sense, but in its wholistic sense of Union, at the foundation and returns us to Breton who would insist on the importance of Love. Staying with the Greek myth a moment longer to address Dionysus, we can see how passion and immediacy play into surrealism. Dionysus is generally known as the god of wine, but he governed all things liquid and living, such as wine, but also the sap of trees, semen and blood. This then is Breton’s Mad Love. In the de Chirico series, Ariadne is frozen in time, a marble statue in a yellow piazza with a column way on one side, a tower looming, a ship and a train in the distance. She seems to wait between her two fates, neither chosen yet.

Her two fates depict the strange mythic split within surrealism, as presented in the different statements on myth of Breton and Bataille. Breton advocated a new mythology, a new lifepath with a new lover. Bataille, on other hand, claimed an absence of myth, in which its very absence was necessary to the realization of a new and thus entirely different ritualization of life in which a mythology would eventually assert itself. In either of these choices, political speech in Barthes’ meaning is invoked to declare a new language, new myth. As Barthes recognizes, all political speech if it succeeds must become myth speech, something seemingly recognized and even permitted by both Breton and Bataille’s arguments. Either way, surrealism as it is here described seems inherently and actively political, definitely engagé.

Thrift shop on the 3rd floor of the Whitney

Bizarre. Wonderful. Delightful. Intriguing. But at the Whitney?

Charles LeDray has apparently spent the last twenty five years producing a collection of miniature clothes of the type that you would find in a warehouse thrift shop. Within the first room three areas are lit, each with its own linoleum floor, ceiling about three and a half feet up that covers the display, a circular clothes hanging display or a table with folded clothes presented. The ceiling really allows each room to have a miniature feel. In one of them there is a broom, fallen under the clothing rack but the friend who accompanied me and I both agreed it was the only disproportional item; its handle's length would have made it six or seven feet tall, which really is too long for a broom. But our noticing that goes to show to what degree a viewer can get involved in wanting to play and make a mess of all the items. There are hats, shirts, suits, jackets, most no larger than my hand, that is to say six inches...later there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of clay pots the size of my thumbnail, each of which have been individually thrown. There is one room where outfits that are displayed on miniature hangers are shredded at the bottom, or have a large hole in the middle of the chest. I could produce meaning here, but why bother it is so obvious and the show is better enjoyed with a sense of simple delight.

My favorite piece is a small (but nearly life-size) stuffed cat with a leg up licking its derrière, although I can't quite understand why it was titled "Pretty Teacher".

The work is described: Their intimate scale and materials poignantly evoke allusions to childhood memory, gender and class stereotypes, and wonder in the everyday.

Okay.

Now I do understand that miniatures convey all kinds of difficult concepts and can be the basis for art. I am sufficiently willing to believe this that I am about to read Susan Stewart's book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. This may allow me to discuss the show more pedantically. More importantly it may help me understand why the show was at the Whitney because though I liked it, neither I nor my art history friend who accompanied me could quite grasp why it merited Whitney stature.

Myth-some thoughts

Religion is ritual doing and myth serves to sanctify those actions in story. As religion is cast aside, ritual demeaned, the stories remain and become reinterpreted, developing plot and becoming fiction. As Barthes discusses in “Myth Today” of Mythologies, mythic speech serves to propagate the status quo where political speech, in contrast, questions and posits alternatives to the state of being. When Breton declares the need for new myth-making in his various surrealist writings, he is both undermining the current state of art, literature and politics but also suggesting that it become the foundation for a new state.

This in some sense also parallels his belief that automatic writing uncovered the true self which was then to be shared as a literary vision of something more true, more real than developed within the confines of effort. He urged everyone to participate in this method because it would re-animate their very being. In an age, now, where the personal is political, it is difficult to see how this call to self-awareness is not political.

Yet, Breton remained unclear about his political stance, despite having been too knowledgeable a Marxist to remain a member of the Socialist and then Communist Party in France, his support and partnership with Trotsky in the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, and ongoing political references in his general writing. As Sartre rose to eminence in post-World War II France, he chastised Breton and the surrealists for their lack of engagement. In both the instances mentioned, that is Breton’s postulation to develop a new mythology or seek the silent self, Breton is deeply engaged in undermining the current political position.