Sunsets

On the bus from Seattle to Vancouver, I had the good fortune to sit in the front row and watch the countryside, so different from the East Coast I am accustomed to seeing. On either side, there were huge pine trees, on the right hand side growing among the rocky terrain. Occasionally, we sped past a waterfall and I, the blase city girl, found myself gasping in delight.

The bus rounded a bend, and suddenly the large sky reappeared in so many shades of yellow, pink, orange, green, purple, with white and gray and navy clouds. I stopped reading for a while to enjoy the simple picture presented by the sun setting. Which is when, the conductor suddenly said: "If you painted it just like that, no one would believe it was real".

She is right in part because it was so pretty. But it also made me think that she should put it in those terms. I was struck, again and only because it was in such an unexpected context, that there is an expectation of truthfulness in art. Now of course, if it is too realistically painted, the questions can become, why bother? There is photography. But if it does not correlate to the viewer's personal vision of reality than the picture deceives. Interestingly, and as the bus conductor so rightly pointed out, if it is realistic it is least likely to accepted as such.

Turner Sunset c. 1830-5

Oscar Wilde once joked that Turner invented sunsets, meaning of course that we would never recover from the influence of his pictures of sunsets. Certainly, the vivid colors of his paintings seem the epitome of the sunset, and a sunset must somehow be as orange to be accepted as glorious. We can't escape the influence of others. They are there in the fragile neural connections of our mind. Traveling, however, can sometimes shift the comfortable state we have cultivated and a simple remark can lead to new thoughts.

I never notice sunsets at home because I am too busy, or so I thought. I am not sure that I see it that way now. Traveling today reminded me that I don't need to (not) see things the way I have, or others do. But if I want to keep seeing things for myself, then I will likely have to stay open to a surprise. A surprise that may scintillate but is as likely to disenchant, because a truly personal vision is not always a pretty one.

Artist Manifesto

A compilation of manifestos specific to artistic movements of the 20th century was recently released, edited by Alex Danchev entitled 100 Artists' Manifestos. Manifestos are a delight to read, so I often do. I often talk about them to my friends. Sometimes I even talk about them at conferences.

This compilation claims to go "from the Futurists to the Stuckists" and specifically only looks at manifestos relevant to art. The compilation edited by Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms, is still unsurpassed, but that remains due to its broader coverage. It does, however, end before including the Stuckists, whose rhetoric is well worth reading if you enjoy, as I do, the audacity that permits referring to Sartre as a 'toss-pot'. If you wish to focus on what artists had to say about their medium, the Danchev book might be the one for you–though you would miss out on lots of other deliciously juicy manifestos from fiends and friends of art.

Not that you would necessarily understand any of that from Terry Eagleton's review in the March 25th Times Literary Supplement. He assumes that the title of the compilation says it all, which granted largely it does, and promptly moves on to his own issues and problems with the fall out of the revolutionary avant-garde–as it is called, as if the avant-garde were ever not revolutionary...but that is for another discussion. I rather like it when reviewers decide to riff on the topic of the book, or use it to expound their own ideas, largely because such an attitude forces them to be more polemical than they might be inclined towards if their intention were to produce a straightforward report on the text.

At any rate, after much discussion of the ultra-leftism of most manifestos, their performative value, he reminds his readers that the avant-garde art between the two wars was not a simple group of clowns but a real threat to the state regimes run by two of the worst ideologues of that century: Stalin and Hitler. He concludes eloquently. These art movements have progresses and been incorporated into our daily lives to a point that was not at all what these original revolutionaries had in mind:

Post-modern culture is, among other things, a sick joke at the expense of the tradition recorded in this collection. Art has indeed been integrated with every day life; but this has happened in the form of advertising, public relations, the media, political speculators, the catwalk and the commodity, which is not quite what the Futurists and Surrealists had in mind.

MoMA's German Expressionism show

Despite the rain, the crummy week, the crowd, I enjoyed the show at MoMA, German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse. The show is on the 6th floor which required that I negotiate the swarms of members who were attending the members preview. Surely there were other people like myself there, but they were probably also wearing headphones to drown out the loud ties of vulgar fools under the ridiculous impression that there is anything exclusive about the setting, yelling to people who must pretend to be friends, "How did you get in?" or "Grab me a drink!" Or, avoiding the living impressions of Emil Nolde's Young Couple from 1913, of which the show presented 3 of the 68 color variations.

Anyway, among the delights of the show was the Oskar Kokoschka painting of two art historians mostly just because I always think it is funny to see how curators handle self-representation of this kind. Do they glorify their position? Do they hide it? Anyway, the placard explained that Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze were socially prominent, and also that the artist clearly gave them nervous hands.

The show also includes another set of Nolde's work. A series of a house. This one, however, they did not find it necessary to suggest that the color indicates the artist's examination of the various emotional resonances in the man or the woman. Seems to me if they were going to say something so obvious about the couple, they might have said something similar about the tree and house...how the artist was examining the colors of divergence between nature and construction... No? Okay.

Hands down the most touching part of the show was a small woodcut by Kollwitz, The Last Thing. It is very dark and shows an old man about to hang himself. Hyper-inflation after 1923 caused many retirees to lose the value of their pensions. This occurred in Eastern Europe only twenty years ago as well. Kollwitz chose to donate the proceeds of a society that helped the aged.

I find it difficult not to notice the number of shows about the period between the wars. I might be observing what I am inclined to see, so that I will not make much of it, but is there a parallel to be drawn? The Cold War is over. Are we preparing for another, simply making the transition to another long drawn out war? In the meantime, the MoMA show was well worth the crowd, and when I found a real friend in the crowd, it turned into a wonderful time.

Hope in Court

The Associated Press case against Shepard Fairey's use of the image of Obama would have gone to court today if they had not settled in January. The issue was whether Fairey had violated copyright in using the image. Though it seems obvious that he altered the image tremendously, and ought to have won the case, AP sued. The photojournalist who had taken the image did not mind that Fairey used it and did not think that AP should take action. He merely wanted recognition for the original photo, which is why he ever raised the issue.

I find the whole thing vaguely irritating in that Fairey is clearly an artist, while others continue to get away with their Warholian nonsense, like Mr. Brainwash. The Banksy film Exit Through the Giftshop is well worth seeing. Mr. Brainwash is a commercial success, and designed the cover to Madonna's album Celebration, but there is no one in the art world who can actually embrace the work Mr. Brainwash makes. As Banksy says in the film, "I used to think that everyone should make art. Now I am not so sure."

Well, I will say it because I am elitist. Not everyone should make art. Not everyone should be a doctor. Not everyone should go to college. Some people should embrace a simple life and we should all respect the enormous amount of trade work that goes to support this country. It is disrespecting that work, with the allusion that all should gain a white-collar, liberal arts education (a position that I think may come in reaction to soviet communism's idealism of blue collar work), which has reinforced cultural disparity. Mr. Brainwash should stop pretending he is an artist and go work at an ad agency. Not because ad agencies are not brilliant or creative, but because their work is....selling something beyond the art work itself and that is after all what Mr. Brainwash decided to do. He is his product, not the art work.

Tricks

"I went up to one of them," he began, "just to see how it was done. I stuck my nose into it. Well it's just not true! Impossible to say whether it was done with glue, with rubies, with soap, with sunshine, with leaven, with cack!"
...
"It looks as though it was done with nothing at all," resumed the painter. "No more chance of discovering the trick than there is in the 'Night Watch' or the 'Female Regents,' and technically it's even better than Rembrandt or Hals. It's all there–but really, I swear it."
I would not want to be too much like Proust's grotesque Mme Verdurin in adoring Night Watch, so I will leave her and that painting to look at Hals' 1664 Women Regents at the Men's Almshouse. This is precisely the sort of group portrait that I despised on museum visits as a little girl, not understanding why anyone would paint such a group of sour, dour, unpleasant and undoubtedly demanding old ladies. Now, however, despite what else there is to say about them I can look at their hands or their repressed smiles that slip through their efforts to submerge feeling.

Elstir was not at the time much respected in Mme Verdurin's group when he makes the comment about another artist's work which he has seen that day, who has died recently. Tricks, he says, he was looking for. He will in due course, learn those tricks, make up his own, leave this coterie for the dedication his studio requires and become a great and successful artist. Not everyone will understand what he has done.

“It seems that Emperor William is highly intelligent, but he doesn’t care for Elstir’s painting. Not that that’s anything against him,” said the Duchesse, “I quite share his point of view. Although Elstir has done a fine portrait of me. You don’t know it? It’s not in the least like me, but it’s an intriguing piece of work.... He has made me like a little old woman. It’s modeled on ‘The Women’s Regents of the Hospice,’ by Hals. I expect you know those sublimities, to borrow one of my nephew’s favorite expressions,” the Duchesse turned to me, gently flapping her black feather fan.

No matter. Elstir by then knows that his work is good and knows to paint what he must paint, not necessarily what is expected of him. The portrait is not a commission piece, but rather a portrait he chose to do. She was his model, her face merely a loose hold on this world as he produced work that was out of this world.

Tricks trick us into believing in ourselves.

The Studio of the Self

In 1855, Courbet produced an enormous painting of his studio, entitled, The Artist's Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life.

Good for him!

He had the audacity to show it in a tent next to the 1855 World's Fair, which had accepted other of his work, but not this one. The world came to his studio to be painted and he painted them. But this painting is his, in some wonderfully, selfish, ostentatiously selfish, way. They come to his studio; he is the center of the world. Here is the world, figured around him, rather than a painting of the world focusing on them.

Most self-oriented art is numbingly boring because there is not that much interesting about you to anyone other than yourself, your mother, and maybe sometimes your partner. If you have a dog, maybe your dog, but the dog is probably more interested in your roast beef sandwich than what you are saying. My students sometimes ask me why I do not permit them to write personal essays, and I always tell them that once they have proven to me that they can say something interesting about the world in which they live that is thoughtful and well-researched then I will be glad to hear what they have to say about themselves and their thoughts. I might say the same to many artists.

But Courbet had done the work and, like Velazquez' Las Meninas before him, could place himself in the world consciously as well as self-consciously. And, for doing so was able to inspire many other artists to work hard to find their own audacious impulse, and each of them worked hard to get there too.

But, the painting...the painter

"Now he was once again at work upon his essay on Vermeer, he needed to return for a few days at least, to The Hague, to Dresden, to Brunswick. He was convinced that a picture of Diana and her Companions which had been acquired by the Mauristhius at the Goldschmidt sale as a Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer. And he would have liked to be able to examine the picture on the spot, in order to buttress his conviction."
This painting by Vermeer was in fact attributed to Rembrandt's student Nicolaes Maes at an auction in 1876. Not until 1901 was it properly attributed and that through similarities to Mary and Martha and a re-examination of a revealed signature J v Meer, which had been supposed to refer to Johannes van der Meet. Proust, in this passage, is looking back at a time before his character Marcel's life has begun, when Swann still hoped to produce a study of Vermeer. He has Swann considering the possibility of that the painting has been mis-attributed, which had he pursued would have, in fact, made him a great scholar.

Swann though does not pursue his work. The passage goes on, "But to leave Paris while Odette was there, and even when she was not there–for in strange places where our sensations have not been numbed by habit, we revive, we resharpen an old pain–was for him so cruel a project that he felt capable of entertaining it incessantly in his mind only because he knew he was determined never to put it into effect." Swann allows an obsession to intervene, and how easy when he can call it love!

Little is known about Vermeer because what is there to know about him? We have his work. Is that not enough? Here we have Diana, a peculiar rendition where she is fully clothed only the moon in her hair symbolizing her stature. She is not yet undressed to bathe. Acteon has not yet appeared to spy. This is Diana and her companions. Innocent because there is no reason for the goddess to be angry yet. Vermeer chose to portray this early moment in the story, not included in the narrative telling because there is nothing to tell and it would only be 'plot development'. But in a painting it can stand alone.

Swann appreciated this painting but not enough to pursue his own interest. When there is work to be done, life does fall to the side, even love. Any artist, writer, film-maker, musician can be called fixated, monomaniacal, egotistical if they are dedicated to the work they do. That is because they have chosen to do something that is not of this every day experience, but comes from a willingness to work despite what life may have to offer. Many sacrifice friendships, love affairs, social engagements to produce what they have to produce. Swann does not and it is the tragedy of his character. Vermeer was modestly successful in his lifetime then forgotten after his death, but no matter. His art, his work was being produced by the standards, slow, painstaking and long to be recognized perhaps, that were from the concentration of his own effort.

The Politics of Autonomous Art

Given my recent posting on the nuclear situation in Japan, and Dali's response to nuclear testing in 1947, I thought it important to re-emphasize the importance of the independence of art. I am, threfore, going to revisit Adorno's essay "Commitment" published in 1965, though not published in English until 1974, in New Left Review.

In the last section of this essay, he observes how politics enter art. He does believe that art should address current events and concerns but neither should it be solely dedicated to issues, at the exclusion of itself as an artwork.

When a work is merely itself and no other thing, as in a pure pseudo-scientific construction, it becomes bad art–literally pre-artistic...the content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped into them: if anything is it the opposite.
Nevertheless, an emphasis on autonomous works is itself socio-political in nature.

The critical role of art is both critiquing society as it was and imagining something better. At the same time, he was outspokenly skeptical of political art, as such. In the words of Adorno scholar Simon Jarvis, "the danger for politically committed art is that it will end up as bad art without becoming good politics either."

There are plenty of issues in our modern world, and country: poverty of education, use of nuclear energy, disrespect of the humanities to the exclusive favor of the sciences, scare-mongering politicians, economic uncertainty perhaps depression, working with varying gender identities, just to name the first few that come to my mind. We may wish to address these but to do so as Dali or Socialist Realism did, would be a disservice to the actual complexities of each of these situations. That is where art has an advantage over regular, by which I mean verbal, discourse.

Art can commit to a discussion without losing its autonomy, by virtue of its artistic means. Art need not be reduced to a simple statement nor should it. That is the problem that I have mentioned before with much conceptual art. If you can explain to me the artwork than all you have produced is work, not art. A statement is so easy. I make them here all the time. Art, however, has the possibility of something else. A something else that I will attempt to exemplify by not defining it, but instead leave it to each artist to decipher alone.

I've Heard It Pronounced Both Ways

There is an old joke among art historians that I often use before launching into a section on linguistics in my work. The joke starts off walking into the Impressionist wing of a museum. Two little old ladies are chatting away in a corner, when one of them says to the other: “Monet, Manet. I've heard it pronounced both ways.”

The joke depends on your knowing that Monet and Manet are in fact different people. It is even funnier if you know they are different painters and how they were confused in their lifetimes as well. In 1865, Monet had several seascape paintings which were accepted for the Salon. Works were hung alphabetically in the Salon so Monet, who was still beginning his career, found his work near the scandalous work of Manet, who happened that year to be showing Olympia. Manet had caused a scene two years earlier at the Salon des Refusés with Le Bain, later to be retitled Dejeuner sur l'herbe, a pattern of infamy he embraced, one already established by Courbet who influenced both artists as well as so many others.

Monet was not interested in producing work whose notoriety was based in social outrage, though he did know that he wanted to paint a picture that was great enough to affect Paris, in size like Courbet's Burial at Ornans, and through a depiction of modernity as Manet's paintings had done. This, he knew, could not happen with pictures of the churning waters along the Normandy coast, like Le Pointe de la Have, though the critic Paul Mantz had written, in the important Gazette des Beaux Arts, of his desire to follow the career of this seascape painter. In the meantime, others were complimenting Manet on his seascapes. He is remembered saying, "Who is this Monet whose name sounds like mine and who is taking advantage of my celebrity?" A point, which, in passing, goes to show that many before today have used another's celebrity to get ahead.

The two painters are unlikely to be muddled any longer, though the joke for art historians points to the continuing confusion surrounding Impressionism. The art historians have a knowledge; the little old ladies do not. What I, however, particularly like about the joke is that it also shows how art audiences two centuries ago were no more attentive to details of the works on display than most audiences are today, a fact that is bemoaned but has an art history of its own.

Nuclear Work

The earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, which now must deal with the increasing radiation from its unprepared nuclear plant.

Just the facts, ma'am.

CNN reports that yesterday Gregory Jaczko, the head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Congress that spent fuel rods in the No. 4 reactor had been exposed because there "is no water in the spent fuel pool," resulting in the emission of "extremely high" levels of radiation. Workers are being exposed to extremely high radiation levels; current readings are nearly 3.8 millisieverts per hour where a typical person receives about 3 millisieverts per year. Tests in Fukushima, 50 miles away, found radiation measuring 12.5 microsieverts per hour -- well above the average reading of 0.04, but still well below that considered harmful to humans.

This is the unfortunate possibility of using nuclear energy, which truly does have many positive qualities so long as nothing like an earthquake shuts down the power of a plant so that the core is not being properly cooled. A meltdown occurs when nuclear fuel rods cannot be cooled and the nuclear core melts. In the worst-case scenario, the fuel can spill out of the damaged containment unit and spread radioactivity through the air and water. CNN does a good job of explaining the current crisis.

Andrew Cuomo wants a review of safety at the Indian Point nuclear plant, only 35 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. The California plant, San Onofre, which sits in a seismically active area is only equipped to manage an earthquake up to 7.0.

Dali painted The Three Sphinxes of Bikini in 1947 in response to nuclear testing on that Micronesian atoll of Bikini, but his blatant depiction of the value we place on nuclear power to the exclusion of anything else seems fitting to re-examine here. Dali was never one for subtlety and like so much of his work, I do think that this picture lacks that extra something beyond what I already stated. But when Japan is facing blatant fears, we might perhaps look at this painting to ask ourselves if we might not conceive, for the sake of the future, a more subtle approach to modern human needs, in art and in energy.

Monet's Cathedral

I remember as a little girl being very confused about Monet's cathedral. I have a vague memory of looking at a book with these pictures of the Cathedral, wondering why this book repeated the same picture in different colors. There must be some mistake, I thought; the idea of misprints already present due to my father's monologues on Saturday afternoon book browsing excursions. I decided against telling the hostess that she had a bad book as I knew she had chosen it to entertain me while she and my father spoke.

I would later become similarly confused about haystacks, though the haystacks I think resolved the distress because they were sufficiently dissimilar. The thought seems to have occurred to me that the artist chose to keep painting these haystacks, and from different angles, though why haystacks my mind could not explain. Haystacks were itchy and those paintings still make me slightly uncomfortable as if I am sitting on a stack in the hillside, observing the folk company my father has chosen to chat with as a part of his anti-communist diplomatic countryside tours of Eastern Europe, waiting until I am permitted to run around with the gypsy children, only later to eat the meat grilling, smoke curling into the cool evening air.

We would visit many small churches on these weekend tours and they looked much alike to me, my religious discomfort already growing, righteous when I was almost seven and realized that I would never again intone the words "I am not worthy to gather up the crumbs beneath thy table" in a country where there were so many hungry people of whom I was painfully aware, where this sentiment riled because it represented an authoritarian attitude that I resented, already believing myself fully capable of determining my own best interests. The churches are misty in my mind, their fogginess fading into forgetfulness. Only last year when I saw a 14th century church in England did I understand why my father and his friends might have had interest, besides religious, in visiting these ancient testimonies of belief. More than belief, these small, local, stone or wood structures engrave marriages, births, baptisms, many of the actual events of life that culminate but continue to be remembered in death, into the communal memory, representing a faith in the acts of this life, as much as the word of the next.

Monet's cathedral paintings were not misprinted. I doubt that it was frustration on his part that he could not paint it just so. As André Aciman's essay "Remanence" suggests about his own Saint-Urban in New York City, visiting becomes re-visiting in order to experience the same as different, but same as well. It is not necessarily about what you see, but how you see it that grows with you into overlapping memories of what you see, so that I smile when I see images of the Cathedral in Rouen because I still see the same picture in different colors, even as sections of the Flaubert story are included, or wonder how the Huysman book might change it, or what it might be like one day to stand in front of it myself, to see it in full sunlight and then come back again, and then again later.

Political Work

There is a story that an officer of the Nazi occupation forces visited Picasso in his studio, where Guernica was hanging. The officer asked, "Did you do that?" to which Picasso replied, "No, you did".

The painting may be one of the most famous examples of political art, and yet stands aloof from the debate on whether art is guilty of glorifying those atrocities that it chooses to depict. We have all seen work that through its intention to 'never forget for a single instant' somehow slides into uncertain ground through its stylization, commercial aspirations, and aesthetic sanctimony. From this discomfort stemmed the question whether art should exist after Auschwitz. We can all be grateful to Hans Enzensberger for the retort that art's continued existence is not a surrender to cynicism. Art must resist such arguments, accepting that its situation is one of paradox. Art can present suffering, but this suffering can not be ignored nor dismissed, Adorno explains in his essay "Commitment". Hegel's consciousness of adversity allows continued growth of the consciousness; in the lecture on Jacob Boehme, Hegel quotes him as saying: "without adversity life would have no sensibility nor will nor efficacy, neither understanding nor science".

The problem with work that only presents the suffering is that it makes no motion. Kant insisted that art could not have an end. A work of art that only presents the artist's particular notion of horror does not acknowledge the other quality of art, which is that its very expression points to life in all its available fullness. It is therefore an ineffective work of art, even if an effective work of political dismay, or at worst propaganda.

Picasso's work succeeds–as let us face it, does most of his work because the man was after all a bloody genius–by depicting the atrocities of fascism while also presenting the freedom that art permits. He was neither shy of his political outrage nor the possibility his work offered beyond that limited scope.

Arts and Education

Recently in a discussion on the education system in this country, I claimed that I was not proud to be a citizen of the United States if we continue to disrespect the value teachers provide. This article in the New York Times points out some disturbing trends; I am a firm believer that higher pay would encourage better qualified people to pursue teaching as a career path. My friend replied that despite the embarrassment of our unwillingness to fund our teachers and education system, she was proud to be able to speak her mind, march in protest, and engage with our elected officials, thus proud to be of this country. I entirely agree that these are venerable traits of this nation but it is no longer enough.

The United States became a great nation by exceeding standards. Our use of democracy and technology have encouraged the people of other nations to seek independence and advancement as well. To stake our pride on these issues is to take pride in the past, at the sake of the future. We should be paving the way for education in the 21st century if we want to maintain the status that made this country great. It is not just Apple, Google, and the Constitution but also our ability to reflect and respond to these products, services and notions that will continue to make us flourish.

One of the more interesting qualities of following an artist's work, or reading about a historical artistic figure, is watching their work develop. This occurs because they continue to educate themselves in technique, style, as well as personal and political issues of interest. Their work reflects this constant growth. Some periods that are seen as awkward nevertheless reveal the transition in the artist's imagination; the MoMA Matisse show Radical Invention 1913-1917, focused on just this aspect of his work. We value the artist's striving for something new. Even commission artists, who are expected to be able to consistently produce similar quality portraits, look to improve their manner...or, if that is simply the way they make money, they use it as a space in which to practice what they will push to the edge in their personal work.

No one is interested in an artist who does the same thing year after year, or flaunts the same picture season after season. In a strange analogy, I will argue here that we can no longer accept that the United States prides itself on its democratic freedoms or its capitalist technologies. In education, in the sciences, in the arts, we must all continue to look forward and ask what we can do next. Not because what is next will be more risqué or outré, but because if we continue to proceed without recognizing the need for change we will become passé, both as citizens and artists.

Free Play

There are days when I am at a loss, confused, disoriented, uncertain. If I have any clarity of mind, I try to go to a museum. Not to see a favorite work as that would require too much effort of appreciation in a time of duress, but rather to wander until standing in front of one piece, the stern edges of my discomfort are stilled.

Breton, in his own text Position Politique de la surréalisme, affirms Hegel’s definition of art saying, “l’objet d’art tient le milieu entre le sensible et le rationnel. C’est quelque chose de spirituel qui apparait comme matériel” [the art object holds the middle between the sensible and the rational. It is something of the spiritual which appears as material]. Art is the bridge between the senses and the mind, by moving from one to the other. It permits a moment of communication between the artist and the other, and from the artist to the many, and the one to the many. Art manages the miracle of bridging the self and other, the trappings of the mind and the freedom of thought, without rejecting either.

The surrealists imagined that the strength of the image appeared from the artist’s willingness to paint two seemingly irreconcilable ideas together. The image was thus a creation of the artist’s willingness to reveal the conflict of being. This seems so reasonable that I am occasionally at a loss as to why it required theoretical consideration, discussion, proof, but try to remember that such mental efforts can be fun too. Pierre Reverdy said that "L’image est une création pure de l’esprit. Elle ne peut naître d’une comparaison mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus ou moins éloignées. Plus les rapports des deux réalités rapprochées seront lointains et justes, plus l’image sera forte–plus elle aura de puissance émotive et de réalité poétique..." [The image is a pure creation of the spirit. It (the image) can not be born of a comparison but rather of a coming-together of two realities more or less apart. The greater distance and just relation between the two things brought together, the greater the force of the image–the more emotional power and poetic reality there will be]. Rather than comparing one state of being to another, the artist brings these states into dynamic engagement, permitting the peculiar parts of a particular moment to participate in a dialogue with the known and accepted. The more removed the two forces at work in the artist are from each other, the more emotional power the image will offer. Though this was stated in relation to surreal art, I do not see how it does not apply to art in general and even see Kant's idea of free play at work.

Unfortunately I do not often remember how easily I can get out of the stagnancy of my mental muck, believing I guess that sitting in it will somehow show me something other than mud. Occasionally, I guess I could sit in it long enough that something starts to grow, but even with Spring beginning to bloom that seems like a long wait. Art jars me, even as it seems familiar, and so moves me on to the next thing, reminding me to play a little, freeing my efforts from frustration.

Killer Painting

Though reading Ancient texts can sometimes drag with their catalogues of ships, warriors, geneologies, there are occasionally moments that even the worst translator can't ruin.

The Argonautica by Appolonius of Rhodes does not start off with a bang, by which I mean reading Book 1 (of 4) can feel endless as the women weep to have the men following Jason to steal the golden fleece, the men build a ship with the assistance of Athena, they sail around and backwards, find women to satisfy them on another island, leave them with yet more accounts of wailing, and on to the next island with slight variation. But Book 2, begins with a fantastic boxing scene so vivid that I can't believe it has not been painted.

Polydeukos "took off his closely woven fine-textured mantle" while King Amykos "threw down his thick dark cloak, pins and all, and the herdsman's rough-cut staff of wild mountain olive that he carried". They prepare themselves, selecting knuckle straps cut from rawhide, tanned dry, toughened, to be wound around their fists by their servants. One shadowboxes to test his skill, while the other stands by in silence.

They fight, "blow after blow continually resounds so the cheeks and jaws of both of these combatants sounded when struck and an endless noise of grinding teeth was heard". They pull away and rest. They return, but as Amykos rises to his full height, "rising on toe like an ox butcher, and bringing his heavy hand slamming down on him, Polydeukos sidestepped the blow, withdrawing his head, so that he caught the forearm glancingly on one shoulder; then whipping in, knee past knee, he drove home over the ear a blow that shattered the inner bones".

Sweat flying, blood pours as the head leads a limp body to the ground. Eyes stunned, still open.

The men of Amykos rise with clubs to come after Polydeukos, whose men circle him with scabbards, "first Kastor struck a man on the head as he bore down on him, and the skull, split lengthways, dropped in halves on either shoulder".

It goes on. Polydeukos' men defeat Amykos' men, who eventually flee, leaving their orchards and villages to be plundered. We desire as they did. We work. We destroy, day to day, companies and countries, economies and more common things. Heroes were the Everyman writ large.

I want Titian color, Michelangelo scale, the stress of Van Gogh, I want globs of paint like gore. Medea may be psychological and so interesting in that way, but this language from Book 2 of a boxing match turned gang violence rivals a Mike Tyson match. I want the audacity that slices through a holistic vision and halves our mental tenacity. I want to feel the work–be overtaken by the picture's power, pride and superiority–not nod in ironic correspondence with some over-conceptualized, hyper-textual, isolationist musing produced by a beardo who loses Life for the perfection of pretense. I crave the wild possibilities of killer painting!

Engineers of Human Souls

Oh, the horrors of decadent bourgeois art! For a while after the October 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks encouraged a certain amount of experimentation in what a literature and art of the proletariat would be. By 1932, Stalin was firm that all art needed to serve the Party with the decree On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations. The focus on the "little man" shifted to a focus on the "hero of labor" and the glory of production. Socialist realism became the official term used to describe the art movement.

An artistic and literary front was necessary to produce edifying works, to show positive heroes fighting the Communist cause against gross capitalists, the (surprise, surprise) negative characters. The idealization of production was necessary to explain the fierce building of an industrialist infrastructure required for socialism to succeed. The agrarian country was not prepared for the new socialist society that depended on the industrial age of the 19th century for its success. Tyrannical labor requirements were instituted so that communism could eventually be put into effect. Art and literature needed not to question or undermine these efforts but support them. And artists were expected to support it...or disappear.

Trotsky had warned that Lenin's measures–including Article 1 of the Party's statutes (1907) which permitted iron discipline by the Party, dictatorial power for the Central Committee, and permitted a small Bureau to take over the Party's powers–would end in a dictatorship by the Chairman of the Central Committee. Lenin claimed these reforms were necessary to prepare for the revolution. He did take power. Stalin did after him. And art was required to present the historically concrete character of Socialist reality in order to contribute to "the ideological transformation and the education of workers in the spirit of Socialism", in the words of Andrei Zhadanov in 1934, who had been made the Party Secretary.

The avant-garde curiosity of the first years of the Revolution was suppressed in favor of disciplined support of the Party. Some of the works of Socialist Realism are done by talented artists whose scope is curtailed by the requirements of idealogues. Stalin's death in 1953 began to loosen the binds, but that time when art was required to help engineer human souls is a good reminder of how superficial art becomes when it serves a declared purpose.

Multiple references used but largely Fernand Braudel's A History of Civilizations.

Changes in The Scandal of Susan Sontag

The conference on "The Scandal of Susan Sontag" offered an impressive array of feminist scholars. I hesitated for a moment before attributing that socio-political label, but I do not think any of them would be offended. The speakers had been Sontag's peers and significant advocates of a free path for women, even if they might have occasionally disagreed with her particular point of view. The first panel discussed her recently published, and seriously edited, journals from the years leading up to 1963 when she was thirty, had completed her education, and was just beginning to experience the success and fame she would embrace in the years to come.

One of the last questions posed by a member of the audience asked if there were any concerns that the journals revealed a side of Sontag far more uncertain than the fierce and imperious image she had presented in life. That absolute certainty had been a part of her success; she never worried about angering people with her opinions, even sometimes seemed to revel in the discomfort she caused. Were they not worried that we would begin to think of Susan Sontag differently with this new information? I was surprised by the question.

Why would we think of her now as any had thought of her then? Why should that be important?

I don't look at Manet's Olympia with the horror it caused the French when displayed in the 1865 Salon.

A quote from the Picturesque Lottery for the Salon of 1783, is quite clear in fact that we change the way we look at things: "Up to now we only expected amusement and neatness from their brushes; [women artists] show today vigor and nobility. They are finally the worthy rivals of our sex; and men, who had previously assumed their own talents to be superior in all respects, can from now on worry about real competition."

In fact, Susan Sontag was an advocate of change, which she discusses in some detail in her 1964 essay "One culture and the new sensibility". She recognized that art was "becoming increasingly the terrain of the specialist" and saw that as a part of the transformation of the function of art. Art's reference to the production of art, as well as its conscious use of other materials, produced an inter-textuality that was often only meaningful to students of art. She grants the discomfort caused by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Albers. Their collaborations, improvisations were "changing the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art". For her, "art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility". This new sensibility was of great importance to her, and a topic to which she returned in her continuing considerations of what would eventually be termed cultural studies. She participated in the new sensibility with her own works, but largely for her support of the new works being produced, glorying that the "seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense". A new sense was encouraged because that is what great art has always done.

The culture changes and works of art change too. Those who have come before become a part of the canon, or not. Some get forgotten for a while, relegated to obscurity until there is a reconsideration, for example Vermeer. Others' riotousness is incorporated into the education system so that Whistler, and Susan Sontag, can be found on most college programs, in one department or another, despite their once shocking life choices. Nothing remains scandalous if kept in the spotlight long enough.

I do not consider Susan Sontag particularly shocking, though I disagree with some of her views. I don't like Dali (with the exception of Hallucinogenic Toreador) but am not disturbed by him as the conservative communists were with his The Great Masturbator. I can't stand Jeff Koons' work enough that I don't even try to understand his 'art'. Yes, I did just put that word in quotes in reference to what he does. In time, the culture views the life and work of the artist in a new light.

The next generation comes along. The world finds new wars. People change. Art changes.

Description, not Painting

In the foreword "À Arsène Houssaye" of Baudelaire's Petits Poème en Prose: Le Spleen de Paris, he says that the idea came to him to "apply to the description of modern life, or rather to a life that is modern and more abstract, the procedure that [Bertrand] had applied to the painting of an ancient life, so strangely pictorial". Aloysius Bertrand's posthumously published book of prose poems, Gaspard de la Nuit, Fantaisies dans la manière de Rembrandt et Callot, is considered by many poets to be the father of the genre–disputes about whether it is a genre to be here ignored.

Why is modern life to be described in words, whereas the life that once was permitted painting with words? Baudelaire wanted illustrations to his work, which makes this statement even more intriguing because he is clearly distinguishing himself from Bertrand, his short descriptions to Bertrand's small pictures, his life to a past lifestyle. Something about this ancient life allowed picture making that is no longer there. Perhaps it is the abstractions?

Baudelaire claims this modern life is more abstract but he does not make clear what the comparison is based upon. The abstraction of modern life seems particularly odd given his emphasis on the modern. Modern is the current and only if we are at a remove can we abstract, that is generalize by presenting an overview. On the other hand, to abstract is also to condense to the essence of the thing. But an abstract is a condensation of something that has happened, simply because we can not reduce the immediate. So if we believe that Baudelaire is going to present a life that is more abstract than we have to believe that it is a life that is always a second behind the current. That indeed would be the very issue of the modern, that is always reviewing what is happening from a self-conscious distance that uses the present to think about the moment happening rather than engaging in it, a self-conscious review of the steps and techniques that permitted the moment or work to occur.

So how do descriptions permit this place where abstractions describe without representing in any figurative space? If it is answered in the poems, it is not done clearly–of course how could it be clear composed in a genre, poème en prose, without distinct boundaries or definition. That is another issue of the modern: a multiplicity of viewpoints, explanations, relations that alter the perception of some objective thing.

The objective thing is not there anymore, so there is nothing to paint in words. At best, we can provide a list, a vertical axis of description, and climbing ever higher build a tower of Babel but one that has no hope of reaching an end. Perhaps only because of painting's just beginning to venture into impressionism did Baudelaire not conceive that painting could be equally abstract, as proven sometimes painfully over the course of the 20th century...or how painting would incorporate words and flip the comparison...but that conversation waits for another day.

When I Buy Pictures by Marianne Moore

In any discussion of the prose poem, visual art becomes a topic. Though art is inevitably addressed in prose poem studies, art inspires other writers as well. This is simply ignored due to its general prevalence. There are many to look at, but one I recently read is Marianne Moore's poem "When I Buy Pictures". I appreciate this poem because she discusses the incredibly prosaic reasons that a normal person does purchase this or that picture.

When I Buy Pictures

or what is closer to the truth,
when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor,
I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:
the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible than the intensity of the mood;
or quite the opposite—the old thing, the medieval decorated hat-box,
in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hour-glass,
and deer and birds and seated people;
it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal biography perhaps,
in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;
an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hieroglyphic in three parts;
the silver fence protecting Adam's grave, or Michael taking Adam by the wrist.
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from one's enjoyment.
It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily be honored—
that which is great because something else is small.
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be "lit with piercing glances into the life of things";
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.


Leaving Kandinsky and Hegel to the side, because I don't want here to begin thinking about Spirit, I smile at her opening. "When I buy pictures" is the way I would begin a sentence too, though only ever having bought one I would wonder if picking among pieces the artist has offered could count in the approach to this topic, and probably decide that there was something different about it too complicated to incorporate, thus switching indeed to what it feels like to imagine a piece coming home with me, an experience with which I am far more familiar.

I look at a piece, considering what it would be like to live with it day in and day out, through lovers, cats, interests, homes, and whether it is likely to move with me through those other experiences I can not yet conceive. There is no way to tell though I have the piece that I bought, and the pieces I have been given hanging still which suggests that the act of choosing the piece gives it a permanent relationship to my life that I can never understand when I am selecting.

Marianne Moore had in fact only a few years prior to this poem made the decision to buy several Copley reproductions of Blake prints of Milton's Paradise Lost. She had been thinking about this decision for nine years. Buying a picture isn't necessarily an impromptu decision. And some years later, the picture hanging on the wall can find itself not only a part of your life, but a part of your mind, so that scribbling at her words, Marianne Moore brought the pictures into her art.

"Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from one's enjoyment."
Agreed Ms. Moore, but how interesting then to consider the redrafting of this poem: changes to the words, a shift from its original syllabic design, a clearer mention of the pictures. And perhaps that is the danger in thinking about it too long, you never get to enjoy it. Because if you think about it for long enough, you can reason yourself past the piercing glance that the picture gave you, that stopped you long enough to linger, look, and if luck took a liking to you, let you love it enough to lug it home where it looks back at you, lit by the life of your things.

The Way She Looks Now

This past weekend, I was reading an article by Mary Ann Caws, "The Sense of a Life: Re-assessing Simone de Beauvoir" in Women:a cultural review. Caws is observing the way Simone de Beauvoir has been remembered and interpreted in certain recent releases, but her review left me with particularly strong images of Simone de Beauvoir.

"In 1940, arriving at the café Flore first thing to take her position at one of the tables closest to the stove, in chilly wartime...standing at the bar for her breakfast...She with her cigarette...her wooden-soled shoes that she wore until the end of 1945, and her turban...all white and pink in her turban and vest...her turban–the red one–or with her hair piled high, and the bright textiles and necklace AND earrings..." These taken from several pages of the article made me start realizing that I never think about Simone de Beauvoir as having physical form. My 1962 Gallimard copy of Le deuxième sexe has the slightly stiff cream paper used for covers, with the title in red. No picture. All these years, she has remained for me an energetic but deeply disciplined woman whose works obviate the need for image.

But when Caws remarks, "I love contemplating the various portraits and pictures in such books" as some of the ones she reviews, I realized that I too like a face. Simone de Beauvoir was a stern blur to me that did not in any way meet the description of a turbaned woman posing for a picture in 1951 with Yvette Roudy and Kate Millett "all pink and white in her turban and vest"–what turban?

So I went looking for a picture.

The first image I found presented a beautiful older woman, smiling at a speaker, and indeed turbaned. I found others, including the Irving Penn photograph that must be why I imagine her stern, but knowing this smiling woman now I only see her as elegant, reserved, not stern.

I was thinking about her when I found myself overhearing a conversation between a young single woman and an only slightly older married woman, mocking some friend who had spent thirty minutes deciding what underwear to put on for a date. Their feminist credentials were exhibited as they made reference to this one and that one as to why it was ridiculous for this woman to spend so much time on garments that would only be taken off, without notice of their lace, hue, style.

Simone de Beauvoir is also criticized. Caws mentions how often in France she is condemned as 'a phallic woman, complicit with the dominant forms of masculine power'. Others criticize her dismissal of any maternal feeling in herself or other women. She was not particularly nice to some of Sartre's young women. Her comments about them in letters can be vicious. She was loyal to Sartre despite the pain caused by their sexual freedom. She wasn't this. She wasn't enough of that. As if an existentialist would betray herself for someone else's vision of what she should be.

Her life was complicated, certainly. And I can not argue that the young woman who was so worried about her panties was necessarily being true to herself. I do, however, wonder that any one continues to have expectations of the manner in which a woman chooses to be a woman. This is why, as a young woman, I refuse the term feminist.

I am enormously grateful to the group of women who raised me alongside my mother. They showed me different lives, lifestyles, regrets, choices that seemed to me deeply personal and not intrinsic to their female gender. I remember being told around the age of fourteen that "you never need a man", this around the same time that I was working for Feminists for Free Expression in the office space donated by Penthouse, and then when I was nineteen, telling my mother that I was not "as French as I thought I was" when my own relationship disintegrated because as philosophy students we believed we should freely engage with whomever we desired. Their feminism permit me to shed it, to make choices without concern whether I am an adequate representative of the 'free woman'.

Some of my mother's friends are in their fifties now, and pride themselves on the self-care that allows them to look in the mirror and admire what they see, to email their resumes confident of the knowledge, credentials, and bank accounts they have earned. In my teenage years, I knew a woman in her fifties who had five lovers, living around the world. They would fly in to see her, and I would suddenly be told that she would not need my help that week as 'he' or 'him' was due to arrive. These women are successful and stunning. Maybe they worry about which lipstick to put on but it hardly seems like it is negatively affecting their lives.

I wear a fancy dress and heels–once a year. Occasionally, I do more than sweep my hair up to be hidden behind me by bobby pins. I like arguing and am as aggressive as any one else, which has occasionally gotten me into trouble as I raise the ante when they do. If some woman wants to wear fancy panties, who are we to think about it once, let alone discuss it in horror? If there is anything I learn from the life of Simone de Beauvoir, it is not to concern myself with labels applied by others or myself. If I learn more about who I am then I can count on the fact that I will change what I think, how I dress, when I speak. I only hope that I can do it with the grace and resiliency of this woman whose politics, philosophy and lifestyle are not necessarily what I would choose for myself. I close with a piece of the quote from A Dangerous Liaison by Carole Seymour-Jones that Caws chose to conclude her own review: "she never believed that one size fits all, only that men should not make woman the 'Other' in a relationship or in society." Thanks to Simone de Beauvoir, my mother, her friends, and many feminists I do not know and have never heard of, I am not the Other. I don't need to be a feminist. I can look how, and for what, I want. I'm just living my life.