What a silly book! An aging museum Director has another murder near his museum grounds, but this time he is a suspect for the detectives on the case, while his prime suspect had an affair with the woman that he will sleep with, which his wife accepts because she slept with the murder victim! And there is a signing monkey whose life narrative is interespersed as the Director reads the memoir that the Chimpanzee signs to a typist.
A lovely send up of academic and museum bureaucracies, mid-life crises, old men with women barely half their age as wives and lovers, and our bizarre and entirely unexplainable self-satisfaction as a species. This is a series written by the former director of travel at Harvard's Museum of Natural History, so Alcorn's hilarious dialogue among academic bureaucrats about various theorretical fads, and the pretensions of those who take them seriously, his descriptions of the endless complexities of museum paperwork, and the characters who believe their cubicle defines the universe (or at least university). A perfect read when you need a reminder that it's only life after all.
The Great Trouble with Art in This Country
The great trouble with art in this country at present, and apparently in France also, is that there is no spirit of revolt–no new ideas appears among younger artists. They are following along the paths beaten out by their predecessors, trying to do better what their predecessors have already done.So spoke Marcel Duchamp in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney in 1946. I can imagine him rolling his eyes now to see so many mimicking what he did well, and definitively. There is plenty of art out there that takes "something from an earlier period [to] adapt it to your own work" and produces a creative approach. Most commonly now "following along the paths beaten out" by Duchamp.
Newness was only a rallying cry because of the academic rules surrounding art. How is it that the rule has now become new, new, new. What does that even mean?
The Museum of Modern Art currently has an exhibit on post-temporal art (The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World) based on the curator's idea that progression is meaningless when artists now have access to works and ideas from around the world instantaneously. Art was only about progress when art was understood as art history, bound by chronology and the Enlightenment's ideal of progress. Linking as we do across the internet no longer seeks to move forward but to produce connections, more like the rhizomatic web of Deleuze and Guattari than a ladder ever upward and outward.
Now is populated by what has been and what will be and new is no better than old, when there is so much more in it all. The 20th century wanted new, but that might not be as important for the 21st. New is often wasteful, ignorant, and blithe.
The MoMA show does a stupendous job of presenting art that is not worried about being new, creating progress, but content to use the materials and ideas that support the work, from wherever and whenever. I didn't like all the works, but the display was invigorating. If a museum, that receptacle for art history, can begin to reject the steel jaw of chronology then we might actually be looking at a new age for art, though not of art. And, wouldn't that satisfy all those who want something new?
No?
Oh well.
Book Review: The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
This brief book is a strange and uncomfortable tale of Christ's crucifixion from the point of view of his mother, who is not the peaceful, accepting figure of iconography. This Mary finds her son and his friends strange, self-important, and grand-standing. She is angry at herself and others for letting this happen to her son. She has run away to protect herself and is alternately ashamed and careful to keep her identity secret.
The novella is told in the first person by Mary, her internal monologue as she must patiently accept the visits of two men who want a story she refuses to describe as they desire (we are to assume they are apostles), as she retells the years of his preaching, wishing she could stop him, had stopped him, but could not, both out of weakness and because his followers had become adamant. A mother's anger at the influence her child's friends seem to have, encouraging him towards an end that all can tell will be a confrontation with law and order, is authentic and, if her voice were not so full of spite the reader might be able to feel sympathy, but instead we can only approach as close as to feel her horror and resentment at the world.
Her retelling of the raising of Lazarus is just one example of how Toibin retells the story to consider how on earth, the family might have dealt with the return of the dead, how the village might have reacted. In the Bible, the story is a miracle of Christ, but in life...what would it have been? Toibin reminds us that miracles are not simply glorious but also deeply upsetting re-orderings of the laws of nature, of reason, of what we believe we know to be real. For the family and friends of Lazarus, life is never the same. For those who just happened to be with Christ that day, and will never see Lazarus again, of course, it is a testament to the power of their leader. But, they do not consider the cost...
As many have turned to Mary, throughout history, for a sense of peace, for her grace, so did she need something similar, something ancient to embrace her. She leaves the Jewish faith of men and fathers to seek the feminine, a goddess from another culture. She will die not in the faith of her son, whose followers cleverly encompassed her tale in theirs, but seeking what many seek in her.
A quick read, the story is however unsettling. Its brevity was a clever tactic on Toibin's part to keep his reader from quitting before the end. This is not a beach read, as it were, but is a part of the tradition of myth and fairy-tale retellings. I am sure many will be horrified that Mary is depicted beyond the blue virgin, but many may find it comforting to recognize that she too might have felt the strong, complicated emotions of life.
The novella is told in the first person by Mary, her internal monologue as she must patiently accept the visits of two men who want a story she refuses to describe as they desire (we are to assume they are apostles), as she retells the years of his preaching, wishing she could stop him, had stopped him, but could not, both out of weakness and because his followers had become adamant. A mother's anger at the influence her child's friends seem to have, encouraging him towards an end that all can tell will be a confrontation with law and order, is authentic and, if her voice were not so full of spite the reader might be able to feel sympathy, but instead we can only approach as close as to feel her horror and resentment at the world.
Her retelling of the raising of Lazarus is just one example of how Toibin retells the story to consider how on earth, the family might have dealt with the return of the dead, how the village might have reacted. In the Bible, the story is a miracle of Christ, but in life...what would it have been? Toibin reminds us that miracles are not simply glorious but also deeply upsetting re-orderings of the laws of nature, of reason, of what we believe we know to be real. For the family and friends of Lazarus, life is never the same. For those who just happened to be with Christ that day, and will never see Lazarus again, of course, it is a testament to the power of their leader. But, they do not consider the cost...
As many have turned to Mary, throughout history, for a sense of peace, for her grace, so did she need something similar, something ancient to embrace her. She leaves the Jewish faith of men and fathers to seek the feminine, a goddess from another culture. She will die not in the faith of her son, whose followers cleverly encompassed her tale in theirs, but seeking what many seek in her.
A quick read, the story is however unsettling. Its brevity was a clever tactic on Toibin's part to keep his reader from quitting before the end. This is not a beach read, as it were, but is a part of the tradition of myth and fairy-tale retellings. I am sure many will be horrified that Mary is depicted beyond the blue virgin, but many may find it comforting to recognize that she too might have felt the strong, complicated emotions of life.
The Art of Reading
"There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered."
Thoreau, Walden "Reading" (102)
I've written before about how much I learned from books. How to recognize love. How to reflect on my own prejudices. I certainly date my life by books.
Black Beauty
Peter Pan
Gone With the Wind
Go Ask Alice
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald and then the collection The Crack-Up
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Symposium, Plato
Purgatorio, Dante
Leviathan, Hobbes
Unless, Carol Shields (bringing me back also to Cynthia Voigt's A Solitary Blue, which broke my heart when I read it at 12)
Remembrance of Things Past, Proust
The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous
Americannah
Dime Store Alchemy, Charles Simic
The Sight of Death, T.J. Clark
Each of these books transformed the way I see the world, my friends and family, art and literature, machines and animals. They transformed the way I think, freed me from believing that I am dependent on being one way, encouraged me to take great risks. Each deserves to be written about, and shall be soon. Of course, in the meantime, I keep looking for the next.
And, what about art? Are there pictures/sculptures/images of any kind that have changed me?
Certainly.
That's for next time.
Thoreau, Walden "Reading" (102)
I've written before about how much I learned from books. How to recognize love. How to reflect on my own prejudices. I certainly date my life by books.
Black Beauty
Peter Pan
Gone With the Wind
Go Ask Alice
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald and then the collection The Crack-Up
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Symposium, Plato
Purgatorio, Dante
Leviathan, Hobbes
Unless, Carol Shields (bringing me back also to Cynthia Voigt's A Solitary Blue, which broke my heart when I read it at 12)
Remembrance of Things Past, Proust
The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous
Americannah
Dime Store Alchemy, Charles Simic
The Sight of Death, T.J. Clark
Each of these books transformed the way I see the world, my friends and family, art and literature, machines and animals. They transformed the way I think, freed me from believing that I am dependent on being one way, encouraged me to take great risks. Each deserves to be written about, and shall be soon. Of course, in the meantime, I keep looking for the next.
And, what about art? Are there pictures/sculptures/images of any kind that have changed me?
Certainly.
That's for next time.
Lady Emma Hamilton
Lady Emma Hamilton was not so much née, but eventually took the name Hart. She was a young beauty, and became the love of Lord Admiral Nelson’s life. In a codicil to his will, he wrote: “I leave Emma Lady Hamilton, therefore, a legacy to my King and Country, that they will give her ample provision to maintain her rank in life.”Susan Sontag fictionalized their love affair in her novel The Volcano Lover, a book that I enjoy but certainly not for its great worth as a literary text. Partly it means so much to me because of the lover who gave it to me four years ago for my birthday.
The first image is credited to Joshua Reynolds, but she is largely known as the muse of George Romney, whose paintings are below. Life was not kind to Lady Emma. Besides eventually becoming quite large, and disdained, she died in France in 1815 in poverty. Her beauty gone she was largely forgotten–the beauty myth was less myth than fact of life.
Art and Meaning
Is art a language? Answering in the affirmative requires that we take it as a communicative tool with meaning posited in each work. Answering in the negative leaves us with the question of what to do with it.
By positing art as a language, whose visual images express meaning just as verbal language does, André Breton establishes a manner in which he thinks of visual works. That art should express meaning, whatever that meaning might be, is to interject an ethics into art that not all are willing to accept. With its previously stated intention to alter the cultural norms of reason, Surrealism has an agenda, and the works that come of it are attempting a shift in consciousness. This assumes that to engage with art is to be in a certain kind of quest. That may be the case for the artist, but not all would agree that art should offer a journey for the spirit.
Art may refuse what language offers. Communication, understood as being meaningful, may be a limit to the way we experience art. If communication is not understood as having to express a specific idea that can be comprehended in words that follow an ordered logic, then sure paintings communicate. Perhaps that is what people mean when they say that art must express something. Too often, however, that phrase "express something," is used not for what it states but as a way of saying provides meaning. I don't think art needs to be narrative, but nor do I think narrative art is irrelevant or dead. Art may be a way to be in the world beyond the confines of language.
Will much bad art be accepted on the basis of such an argument? Sure. But much academic painting is accepted because it says something, albeit boring and pallid. I think the greater challenge is on the viewer to attempt to engage with art not simply for its historical moment, the artist's established greatness, for the tale told on the canvas, tapestry, bowl, or wall, nor for the personal psychological reaction to what you see, but for a way of being alive in the world without the trappings of language as the means to thought, dream, aspiration, desire.
I don't know what that looks like, but I've had moments with art that did that. Briefly. I'm still figuring out whether it can be described, or whether even the experience is beyond language.
By positing art as a language, whose visual images express meaning just as verbal language does, André Breton establishes a manner in which he thinks of visual works. That art should express meaning, whatever that meaning might be, is to interject an ethics into art that not all are willing to accept. With its previously stated intention to alter the cultural norms of reason, Surrealism has an agenda, and the works that come of it are attempting a shift in consciousness. This assumes that to engage with art is to be in a certain kind of quest. That may be the case for the artist, but not all would agree that art should offer a journey for the spirit.
Art may refuse what language offers. Communication, understood as being meaningful, may be a limit to the way we experience art. If communication is not understood as having to express a specific idea that can be comprehended in words that follow an ordered logic, then sure paintings communicate. Perhaps that is what people mean when they say that art must express something. Too often, however, that phrase "express something," is used not for what it states but as a way of saying provides meaning. I don't think art needs to be narrative, but nor do I think narrative art is irrelevant or dead. Art may be a way to be in the world beyond the confines of language.
Will much bad art be accepted on the basis of such an argument? Sure. But much academic painting is accepted because it says something, albeit boring and pallid. I think the greater challenge is on the viewer to attempt to engage with art not simply for its historical moment, the artist's established greatness, for the tale told on the canvas, tapestry, bowl, or wall, nor for the personal psychological reaction to what you see, but for a way of being alive in the world without the trappings of language as the means to thought, dream, aspiration, desire.
I don't know what that looks like, but I've had moments with art that did that. Briefly. I'm still figuring out whether it can be described, or whether even the experience is beyond language.
Lily's Painting
Though Lily, the artist and a significant character in To The Lighthouse, has had her vision, it is over, unrecognized by anyone but herself, resolving none of the pain those around her experience.
Among the various qualities given modernism (at least to literary works attributed to the period) is their dismay that the world is not, never was, and may never be whole. The fragmentation of narrative viewpoint and chronology presents this: that hubris, that single-minded confidence which led to the cataclysmic destruction of a world vision. The tragedy of modernism is the loss of satisfaction, of innocence, where there is life beyond Eden. Mrs. Ramsey is diminished to a purple triangle, and yet...and yet the text, if not the fictional painting, provides the comfort of companionship. The tragedy of the Ramseys can be extrapolated to serve the tragedy of the reader. Lily's painting permits her to know that she continues the work she started years ago.
There is a wisftul wandering tone in many modernist works. Tragedy reigned until other tones became necessary. And in due course other tones did become necessary, such as anger, mockery, naiveté, crass excess, and others. In due course, we might even imagine that heroism, grace, dignity will return. No matter how much we become convinced that each epoch must define itself, the fact is that it is all a matter of redefining.
The idea that there is nothing new need not be a point of hopelessness, but rather offer a lineage. Though the creative ego might desire spontaneous existence, the past provides for the future. The tragedy of Modernism was not that the satisfaction of empires had become ashes in the mouth, nor that innocence was lost, but rather that we continue to believe we must respond to that tragedy rather than observing the tragedies of our own age.
Among the various qualities given modernism (at least to literary works attributed to the period) is their dismay that the world is not, never was, and may never be whole. The fragmentation of narrative viewpoint and chronology presents this: that hubris, that single-minded confidence which led to the cataclysmic destruction of a world vision. The tragedy of modernism is the loss of satisfaction, of innocence, where there is life beyond Eden. Mrs. Ramsey is diminished to a purple triangle, and yet...and yet the text, if not the fictional painting, provides the comfort of companionship. The tragedy of the Ramseys can be extrapolated to serve the tragedy of the reader. Lily's painting permits her to know that she continues the work she started years ago.
There is a wisftul wandering tone in many modernist works. Tragedy reigned until other tones became necessary. And in due course other tones did become necessary, such as anger, mockery, naiveté, crass excess, and others. In due course, we might even imagine that heroism, grace, dignity will return. No matter how much we become convinced that each epoch must define itself, the fact is that it is all a matter of redefining.
The idea that there is nothing new need not be a point of hopelessness, but rather offer a lineage. Though the creative ego might desire spontaneous existence, the past provides for the future. The tragedy of Modernism was not that the satisfaction of empires had become ashes in the mouth, nor that innocence was lost, but rather that we continue to believe we must respond to that tragedy rather than observing the tragedies of our own age.
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