Life in NYC

I was recently invited to post on a friend's private blog. The content is mostly about NYC, and thus is off topic for my own blog, but as it does address how some art was spared through Hurricane Irene, it is tangentially reasonable to share it with you here. Enjoy!

Guest Post from NYC

New York City is known for many things: art, food, musicals, night life, finance, even Law&Order or the occasional lack thereof. Those of us who live here try hard to enjoy as much of the city as we can and encourage friends to visit our favorite restaurants, hidden bars, shows and exhibits. We rarely discuss, however, the particular nature of family and friendship that this city breeds, as if in this city that never sleeps, we never sleep with loved ones or stay up all night worrying about them.

I would lie if I did not say that there are qualities of this city that make family life different from the one I experience when I visit my extended families in Nevada or Massachusetts. In New York City, school buses are only deployed for field trips as the city has a massive transit system which offers students a monthly card to ride public transportation to and from school for free. This means that sometime in middle school, most students start traveling to and from school without their parent. When I was growing up, I was given a beeper (remember those!) which allowed my mother to check on me whenever she wished and required that I respond within 20 minutes as any subway trips I took underground were rarely so long as to make that difficult to achieve, and if I were taking such a long trip she expected to know about it before hand. This liberty permitted me to visit friends, and the extended circle of my mother's close girlfriends who acted as aunts, on my own. I went to the Donnell library (now closed) across from MoMA on my own starting at eleven, the Met alone for the first time after school when I was twelve, tae kwan do in the village when I was twelve, guitar lessons in Brooklyn when I was fourteen, staying late at the theater where we had rehearsals when I was thirteen and coming home on the cross town bus in the wee hours of the night during tech week. My "aunties" met me for flea market shopping on the weekends, and once joined me for lunch when she walked into the restaurant where I had decided to get a bite. Both children and adults are accustomed to an unusual degree of freedom in their wandering.

On the other hand, we can be as close knit and present as can be found anywhere. When one of my aunties was dying two years ago, I was there to help her daughters sort through books, and other odds and ends. One of her daughters and I developed a closer relationship and this last week I visited her father who is now in the hospital himself. As the hurricane was headed towards us, I spent Friday night with her because her husband is out of town, she has two year old twin sons, a sweet but elderly dog, and Saturday morning needed to be at the hospital to help her father. We planned the morning so that she would return in time to let me get on the subway back to Brooklyn before noon when all public transportation was being shut down as a safety precaution. On the subway at 11:45, I watched in each station increasing levels of closure, and the other passengers and I chatted about our own preparations–one woman was looking forward to having nothing else to do but study for the patent law bar exam. In my neighborhood, the stores were full of people buying bottled water and tinned goods of course, but it was just as often seltzer and cans of tuna fish in olive oil, or dolmades, rice stuffed grape leaves. The prosciutto was gone before the ham, aged parmesan before cheddar, and the liquor stores were booming because New Yorkers are foodies even in a crisis. We laughed and chatted in line with each other, envying those who had gotten the last vine ripened tomato, lemon for their tuna, or 75% dark chocolate with orange.

I arrived home to tend to my own apartment and cat before heading to my partner's. The texts were a flurry as aunties ensured that I would not be alone, girlfriends checked to make sure we were stocking necessities, such as candles, and shared tips, like filling bath tubs with water in the case of a water shortage. My local taxi company made sure that I had a car ready to take me to Tim's where he was moving canvases to a higher level, caulking any cracks he could find, and sealing windows. We walked his dog during a break in the rain, and continued to respond to all the calls and texts of concerned loved ones in this incredible network. As the day wore on and we were secured with white wine, grilled chicken (it was in the freezer and might as well be made edible), dried figs, and pots of water seemingly everywhere we remarked at the fact that we spend our years building professional networks only to find that they too become a part of our closer circle. We asked people who are now friends about their galleries, their offices, their children, their pets, their water supplies, their gastronomic preferences and went to sleep curious about the storm but entirely secure in our sense of love.

As New Yorkers, we may be rude, disinterested, obnoxious, pushy, snobbish, elitist, superior, opinionated, suspicious, diffident and demanding. In this sometimes difficult city, we may be difficult in response. Nonetheless as anywhere, as family, we bicker and we bolster. As friends, we gossip, goad and champion. We love just as love loves the world over. You may not see our charms on your first weekend visit. You may not see them the next time either. But if you keep coming back, in due course, we'll show you not only our favorite hot spot, but our hearts as well.

Resubmitted Post-A Museum of Ideas

I just realized that my recent post did not get posted accurately. Here it is corrected.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, based on lost orginial by Pieter Breughel, circa 1560s

Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

This is one of my favorite poems by Auden, written after his visit to the museum in 1938. Others have written about Icarus as well (Anne Sexton among them); William Carlos Williams even wrote about the same painting, which in the 90s was reinterpreted as a copy of a Breughel original for reasons including that he worked in tempera and this is an oil painting. But, all that detail aside, Auden manages to observe in his poem an apathy about life, as well as the painting itself and Breughel's particular talent at showing the ordinary setting in which extraordinary moments happen.

Conversion of St. Paul, Pieter Breughel, 1567

The Conversion of Saint Paul, above, also illustrates this rather well. A dominant feature of the painting is a horse's ass. Beyond that, the viewer must squint to see the man fallen from his horse. That clutz becomes the theologizing Saint Paul. But the soldiers and horsemen continue. Or, as Robert Frost said, "I can sum up in three words everything I've learned in life: it goes on."

The poem by Auden seems to me a particularly engaging angle on Breughel's picture. Words do not always speak well to their visual counterparts, in fact so very often they do not. That there is such a gap between the two is particularly noticeable now as we get increasingly blinded with images and yet can not, or are not permitted to, decipher them for ourselves, but need sociologists or museum curators to explain to us what we see. We have learned to focus on drama as the sole view worth having, when drama is itself surrounded by the mundane events that constitute a larger portion of reality at any given moment. As we succumb to the news flash, the idol, this moment in time, we easily lose sight of the significance our own quotidian actions can have in adjusting our life, our families, our world for the better. Even if we can not see the larger relevance at the time.

There is great value in acknowledging a war, the one in Afghanistan right now or the World War II that dismayed Auden, but artists need not only present the horrors in order to impact. Just as usefully can be a poem, painting or even installation that recognizes the rest of life, reminding us in so doing of what we hope to still have when the war is over, what it is we hope to enjoy when the dead are buried, and hopefully, through those pleasures to respect the losses entailed.

Summarily dismissed

Art is not as stupid as human conversation.
              -Alice Neel

The Popes

Picasso called Apollinaire The Pope, as a tease for his Tuesday gatherings. During one such Tuesday gathering in 1907, The Pope introduced Picasso and Braque to one another, and sparked art history to be forever changed. Their friendship became deeply tied; they would speak in near code to each other and had the other approve each painting in order to consider it finished. From 1907-1913, the two worked so closely that their paintings reveal similar objects, topics, interests, and of course style–what we now call cubism.

Braque, Man with a Guitar, 1911

Picasso, The Poet, 1911

One presumes that Apollinaire did not mind the nomiker, whereas André Breton was not overly fond of the jest of his detractors when they called him the Pope of Surrealism. Some saw Breton as being adamant and limiting of surrealism and imposing strictures that were unnecessarily confining, much the way that Catholicism was viewed (see L'Age D'Or for the degree to which their disdain could go to this religion).

Nicknames are quite personal, and not always well received, so what works for one may most certainly not work for another.

Close on Cubism

Picasso, The Accordianist 1911

In a documentary whose argument I found somewhat tediously described, Picasso and Braque go to the Movies, Chuck Close offers a startlingly succinct definition of cubism:

"...The extreme artificiality of cubism. It was not about space. It was not about atmosphere. It was not about the way we see things in nature. It's highly compressed, insistently flat. You are always aware that you are looking at a distribution of colored dirt on a flat surface and then emerging out of that, in a fractured and totally unrealistic way, pieces of imagery that begin to coalesce in your mind."

This quote made the rest of the documentary worth watching, as did the brief clips from the early films of Lumière, Edison and Pathe Frères. Otherwise, the tie between moving pictures and cubism was loosely bound and unconvincing, even if true. 

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog has produced a simple and eloquent account of the rock art and history of the Chauvet Caves. Discovered in 1994 by three independent cave seekers, the caves had been sealed by a rock fall which allowed the art to remain undamaged over the last 25,000 years. Much of the cave drawings were done in a previous period, between 30,000 and 32,000 years ago–the caves are truly a bewildering record of another time, indeed a time before history.

One of the drawing groups shows a cave bear claw marking, then an outline of a bison is presumed to have been drawn by a human six feet in height but with a stick, additional drawings then appear lower down, and five thousand years later the last animal is included in the group. We live now in a period when art movements change by the decade, we record our transactions and even our most mundane thoughts, and so we find it easier to stay focused on the history of our nation, of our Western culture, as if the beginning was a defined marker that concluded with us, now, here. But 25,000 years ago was long before Herodotus, Vico, Hegel or Einstein could begin to define time and space. Herzog and the scientists who are working in the cave during his brief visit there permitted by the French Cultural Agency offer a warm reminder of stillness, and pure appreciation. Appreciation in which knowledge seeks but does not expect answers because as one of them says there can be none.

Along with the caves, Herzog interviews the assorted anthropologists, art historians, paleontologists and others who have been granted permission to be in the sealed and guarded caves for the two weeks at the end of March when the cave is opened for such researchers. They are all deeply considerate people with smiles when they discuss their research, and a respect that is full of kindness for the wonders that they see in the caves. One of them, who had worked in a circus in his previous career as a juggler and unicyclist, spoke of the dreams of lions both real and drawn that he had the first five days he was working in the cave. They were not frightening dreams but revealed the depth of response he was having, At the end of the fifth day, he decided not to reenter in order to give himself time to...he stopped to think of the word, which Herzog offered from the other side of the camera...absorb.

The leader of the group at one point calls for silence so that they can all hear the sound of the cave and, he adds, perhaps the sound of their own hearts?

With such advice as part of the guide to the caves, the movie provides an inspiring and wonderful look at caves that will never be open to the public. After the Lescaut caves started developing mold from the spores in visitors' breath, they were closed. Any caves found hereafter will be unlikely to permit visitors in order to keep the works pristine. And the ones at Chauvet are so clear that they are particularly protected.

There is a two foot wide walkway from which none are allowed to stray that goes most of the 1700 feet through the assorted cave chambers. The walkway is cut out in places to avoid injury to the stalagtites. Herzog's crew of four does an admirable job of setting up shots along this narrow path, and lighting with the bright lanterns that they have been permitted to bring.

The possibility exists that it was a ceremonial site as there is a peculiar block with a cave bear skull placed on it as if on an altar. There are a great many cave bear bones, as well as cave lions, bisons, hyenas, and other animals; some bones got covered in calcite and resemble porcelain sculptures of a vertebrae, or even an entire skull.

At least one human has been identified from a wall of palm prints with a broken right pinkie finger. That hand reappears all throughout the cave, which means that however many painted with charcoal, or just their fingers in the soft wall, one is personally identified.

With a bewildering array of 3D options in the cinemas currently, this is the only film that has been able to use 3D in order to better represent the subject matter of the film, in this case the experience inside the caves and the drawings found inside. In this photograph, we can see animals gathering on both sides of what appears to be a crevice, with a horse seen in the furthest reaches. The crevice is noticeably deep when seen in three dimensions, clearly reduced in this image. Of additional interest on this drawing, however, is the circle slightly right of vertical center, nearly at the top of the photograph. That is a hole from which water pours if there are continuous rains for at least a week. This natural feature seems to make sense of the cluster of animals drawn, as the real ones would have gathered at a pool caused by a natural stream.

Some art documentaries are boring, or focus on the artist rather than the work, or the historical period rather than the liveliness of the arts produced. Herzog has produced a deliberate and masterful film full of the natural beauty in the Chauvet caves. If you have the opportunity to see the film in theaters, you will enjoy these works in all the shapes and sizes which they take, and perhaps even take some time to yourself...to absorb.

Get by with a little help from my...

A good friend of mine from college happened to be in town for a marriage (typical travel reason these days) and managed to find time for us to spend the afternoon together. Last year, she had tossed aside the safety and boredom of her job to pursue the drama and dedication of film. This did not simply mean explaining to loved ones why she was leaving the security of a paycheck during an economic recession but also taking out loans to get a new undergraduate degree in film, as her BA in philosophy and history of science was no basis for admission into a film school.

Since I last saw her, she has been taking classes and controlling more of her time for her pursuit.

This time her husband joined us, after he had been to visit one of the premiere music schools in the city. He had decided to leave the even greater security of bookkeeping and accounting for a profession in  classical music performance. Now they count their pennies (which he does very well admittedly) and time all the more carefully.

As they dedicate their hours to practice and learning, they find less time for the casual conversation, the doldrums of daily drink dates, and the many ways other ways that time can slip away. They require a higher caliber of conversation, more challenging suggestions to engage them away from the passions they now pursue.

And that is as it should be. When impassioned, only the best will do. There is nothing wrong with a life lived casually but it makes no sense to someone who is full of vigor for their new endeavor. Full of excitement, life has it all and that energy must be protected from those who are willing to slip a bit here and bit there, check out this, look at that, and go on to the next without a spark. True friends stand out during this time, not only because they are patient with the outbursts of enthusiasm for the new found passion but also because their own passions are revealed in response to their friend's outburst.

Passion for the arts is required because it pays little and the reward is largely personal. Without passion it can not survive–this has been said and will be said again for that simple reason. Passion can not be sustained by intercourse with apathy, and one's social life will change in the face of that shift. Friends are necessary to refuel the curiosity that cares to spend hours alone in trenchant trials of perfecting a very personal vision.

I wish any of us who care passionately about what we do to have friends who care equally, who sustain our excitement with their own, who learn and share their learning in exuberant monologues of inquiry, who enjoy and applaud the incredible risks taken to satisfy the life worth living.

Dark Times

I am feeling low, somewhat restless, a little fearful as I watch the economy sink again, And ponder the futility of my own aspirations. Well, that is what it feels like, true or not, and only the most confident (perhaps stupidly so) look at the future without some element of doubt present.

With these feelings in tow, I was startled when I came across the following passage from D.H. Lawrence's essay on Taos, New Mexico:

To me it is so important to remember that when Rome collapsed, when the great Roman Empire fell into smoking ruins, and bears roamed in the streets of Lyon and wolves howled in the deserted streets of Rome, and Europe really was in a dark ruin, then it was not in castles or manors or cottages that life remained vivid. Then those whose souls were still alive withdrew together and gradually built monasteries, and these monasteries and convents, little communities of quiet labour and courage, isolated, helpless, and yet never overcome in a world flooded with devastation, these alone kept the human spirit from disintegration, from going quite dark, in the Dark Ages.

The world may be on the brink of disaster, or it may not, but I can take comfort in knowing that in the face of Nothing Known, these small groups of men and women produced and reproduced the remaining manuscripts of the previous great age, and made small efforts at their own creative endeavors. I may be irreligious-I can not support the idea that we might turn to a hierarchical belief system that dictates your life here and in the presumed hereafter-but I can hope that as value is reevaluated yet again, we might find small groups in which to redefine what does have value. It may take time, and we may none of us be here to see the outcome, but there is beauty in those Dark Ages, simple, and simply left as a reminder to create no matter how vast the devastation seems.

The Book of Hours, Valencia c.1460, a page from St. Augustine's City of God

Omne Bonum by James le Palmer, c.1360-1375; A dentist with silver forceps and a necklace of large teeth, extracting the tooth of a seated man                                                   

Siege of the Castle of Love, unknown artist. c 1350-1370

The Unicorn in Captivity tapestry, The Cloisters, c. 1495-1505 (really should not be included given its late date)

All my examples appear to come from the late Medieval period but there are some good things produced earlier; The Green Knight is one of my favorite romances (in the traditional sense of the word). I shall seek out some other art and post it in the future.

Prints

I really enjoy learning new words, even ones that can not serve my Scrabble game. Today I learned the term for early prints: Incunabula. The word means cradle in Latin but was used to designate simple prints usually of a single easy image produced during the earliest stages of printing from movable type (apparently before 1500)–perhaps a saint card that could be carried on one's person.

Though the Chinese invented paper and printed books and pictures from woodblocks, the 15th century radicalized printing technology. With the advent of movable text, suddenly a whole host of complications could be introduced into a picture as well. Individually designed artist prints started being created, in which the artist was on site to confirm the quality of the piece.

Woodcuts precede metal engraving but both techniques require a great deal of skill, which is one reason why so many woodblock prints are not pleasing to me. The technique is often rough, something you never find with Dürer.

Albrecht Dürer was born in Nüremburg, the son of a goldsmith who had the advantage of being able to travel after completing his apprenticeship under Michael Wolgemut, a successful artist with a large studio. It is possible that he planned to go see Schongauer, the great engraver, but when he arrived in Colmar, Schongauer had died the month previous.

This marvelous engraving of The Temptation of Saint Anthony is an example of Schongauer's work. In engraving, v-shaped grooves are carved, with a tool called a burin, into metal (usually copper but silver, gold and other metals can work too). Ink is spread across so that it seeps into the grooves, the sheet of metal is then wiped clean so that the only ink is in the indentations before a piece of paper is placed on it and pressed with the image. The engraving appears on the paper as a mirror image of the engraving. Vasari says that Michelangelo copied this engraving for his own Trial of Saint Anthony.

Dürer is known for his engravings and they are beautiful, though his oil and watercolor paintings also deserve to be appreciated. In the Fall of Man, from 1504, we can see all of his skill evident. Not only does he produce subtle shadows on the skin of Adam and Eve, but the animals and woods reveal his ready hand at nature too. A placard hangs from the stick that Adam is holding in his right hand which dates and signs the piece.

Adam, I am told, recalls the Apollo Belvedere, which was excavated in Italy during Dürer's lifetime. Most seem to believe that he would have seen a drawing of it, which he then used as a model for Adam's posture. Remembering that engraving produces a mirror reflection allows the model to become even more evident.

Prints are still used by artists to allow their work to be disseminated, appreciated by those many of us who can not afford the larger, more expensive canvas works. The history of prints and printmaking deserves more of my attention but suffice to say that it is an excellent way to collect and support those artists whose work you admire but can not afford. Limited edition series become valuable in their own right, if that is an issue of concern for you...and if you really need proof: Warhol. But that is another print conversation altogether.

Good Morning!

Bellini's Agony in the Garden may seem an odd way to rise and shine but for whatever reason I thought of this gorgeous sky and thought to share it with you. You have likely been up early and seen dawn. Isn't it wonderful that Bellini managed to capture it just so!

It seems so easy that he would have produced such a sky given the great skies of Turner, Winslow Homer and others. But this painting was produced in the 1460s when such naturalism was still uncommon. Perhaps Christ found comfort not only in the vision of an angel with a chalice but also the possibilities of a new day.

At any rate, here is wishing you a day unencumbered with phantom visitors but filled with all the beauties of glorious summer!

Scraps of paper everywhere!

I have been rather lazy this summer, enjoying the experience of shutting off my mind and computer. Recently, however, I have been feeling the tingling of excitement to get thinking again so have been taking on little tasks, short lectures at museum and so forth. Nevertheless, I am still neglecting the regular tidying that I tend to do in my tiny studio, so find myself awash in papers, magazines, and other paper detritus that require sorting.

On this note, I introduce the word cartello. A cartello refers to a scrap of paper painted into a painting. The example in drawing is by Raphael and is a silly little sketch.

The next, more formal, example is by Giovanni Bellini whose mastery of oil painting (introduced to Venice in the second half of the 15th century) influenced the work of his great students, Giorgione and Titian both of whom worked in his workshop. When his brother Gentile Bellini died, Giovanni Bellini became the most successful artist in Venice and had trouble keeping up with his many commissions–although I find this is generally true of artists no matter the quantity of work. This portrait shows Leonardo Loredan appointed as Doge, a position he held for nearly 20 years as the position was a lifetime post though generally given to an elder in the expectation that they would not remain in the post for too long as the other world would call. Many of his portraits were destroyed in a fire but this one, from 1502, remains and it is truly masterful.

Art Therapy

There was a point when I was asked, among the various treatments that were being recommended, to try art therapy. The very ideal galled me. I was certainly not going to draw pictures for therapists to analyze, dissect and discuss as meaningful. When I was nine, I had been assigned to see a court appointed psychologist during my parent's divorce and she asked me to draw my ideal family. I was thoroughly annoyed at such an obvious ploy. I remain so.

Thus it was much to my surprise when a friend explained recently that he has not seen a therapist because he can always make pictures-it's a kind of therapy, he said. Later that week, another friend who is going through a bad time bought herself a new watercolor pad so that she could paint during her visit. Pastels, she reminded me, are toxic and not really the thing to bring to someone else's home. And given her current difficulties, she continued, she was not going to be without her ability to express herself.

Certainly The Artist's Way, among those books on freeing your creative spirit, and many psychology books encourage attempts at the visual arts. Painting, pottery, quilting all seem to be on any in-patient mental health program, and can be found at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as a way for the patients to create even as their life is destroyed. I appreciate that this is useful to some and would hardly stand in the way of its implementation, but it is too easy a step from there to biographically analyzing all art–a step that I find is not always appropriate or, more significantly, interesting.

I wouldn't want to suggest that art therapy does not reveal some truths the patients might not otherwise express, but that does not mean to me that art must always reveal some therapeutic element. Or, I guess I might qualify that by saying, even if it does reveal such is it truly necessary to discuss it? Wouldn't we learn more about ourselves and the work if we sought beyond the personal and thought about the worldly qualities that it imparts instead? At any rate it seems a worthwhile challenge to look at art without trying to instigate a biography of the artist, even if many of life's actions (painting, sculpting and quilting included) are another therapeutic attempt to overcome the past.