Phallic Fullness Fractured

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

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

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

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

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

A Bow

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

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

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

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

Initiations

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

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

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

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

A ReadyMade Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven A.M.

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

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

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

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

Reading, My Life

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

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

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

And I love it.

Book as Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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