Cy Twombly's face

One of the more wonderful people in the world, a marvelous woman named Mary Ann Caws, once said that she thought she sometimes picked her research because she fell in love with a face. Cy Twombly has done that for me and I hope one day that I do write something about him.
This photo by Bruce Weber, from Vogue, is really charming, but honestly they all are.

bad news calls for Ugly Babies!

I laugh more than I ever have these days at what a mess we've made are making of things. It was in such a mood today that I had a conversation with an artist working on a painting of an 8 foot baby (it's hysterical) and a friend who was wondering why her genitalia made some assume she wanted to talk about babies (it's horribly true), and so that must have been in the back of my mind when searching for something to make me laugh this afternoon, I went to ...

UGLY RENAISSANCE BABIES

I first discovered this in grad school years ago but ah, how it makes me laugh. Of course, having been introduced to the concept, I have ever since wandered great cathedrals of art snickering and snapping pics of the ugly Renaissance (and yes, other periods...it's definitely not only Renaissance for you sticklers out there) babies that I find. It's so wonderful that great artists made such hideous mini-peeps and that random and unknown artists decided they had better things to do then get the baby right. Contrary to the bar's claim in Williamsburg, Baby's (not) All Right.

I could now wander along New Aesthetics and the impact of digital visualizations IRL... I've been there, it's fascinating, but not for today. Today, go look at ugly renaissance babies, or your "friend"'s recent posts of their spawn on social media (anyone else actually considered not following someone because you just acn't handle how unattractive their child(ren) is? No? Oh okay). Or, for something easier to share with those near and dear...Ugly Renaissance Cats.

I guess the lesson of the day is the world has been ugly for a few centuries.

The Penultimate Supper

Ah, Monty Python. Still good all these years.
Watched Life of Brian recently, which really everyone should go watch right now (or Black Books, my other favorite UK show) but this is a great if you want to imagine Renaissance commissioning arguments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Aj7W3g1qo
(No, Michelangelo did not paint The Last Supper. If he had, it might have lasted!)

Speaking of commissions, why do they have such a bad rap in the art world. If we are really over the whole notion of genius (clearly we are not) and (pick your least favorite artist to put here) has convinced us that artists can certainly be money-grubbing like the rest of society, then why are commissions so declassé? Does anyone believe that artists don't take the pulse of the times when they select works for a show? There's still plenty of aesthetic freedom to be had in commissions. (Unless it is a portrait of children, in which case bless the poor artist who has to suffer through that experience with the hovering mother anxiously awaiting to observe her child's newfound beauty.)

I guess to Michelangelo's point in the skit, the penultimate supper is more fun to think about. Too much already determined about the Last Supper. Unless constraints are your thing, it'd be much more fun to create the Penultimate Supper. In fact, someone out there...please do.

Is that all there is?

Hi. I'm back. Kind of. Maybe. Am I here, was I ever?
I get existential sometimes.

So, grad school is over, I have the tenure job, and though I write, profess, and conference about art theory a whole lot these days, somehow I still don't think of myself as a critic. I'm more inclined to talk with artists about their work, in studio visits, over dinners, or just randomly. I like to think about art in relation to ideas, connecting recent and ancient commentary to the visual artefact. Plenty of people are correct in arguing with me that good criticism does these things. They are right. But this blog divests itself of such status. Let's call these musings on art, visual culture, life, the absurd, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

Time takes its toll on life and death came to Wooster, who died a couple years ago. The avatar pick doesn't work as well anymore. Now I am the loving caretaker of Izzy Marmalade, the Sweetest Existentialist Cat, also known as Don von BonBon, or Steve, who is a very charmingly sized orange fur mush. Death. Life. Like writing. It comes and goes. It dominates and then doesn't.

I'm not promising much here. I'm hoping to keep posting thoughts here mostly because I get randomly enthusiastic about seemingly depressing topics (I am told) and my friends don't necessarily want to hear about it. I see the whole world smoldering and think...is that all there is?

Teaching Visual Culture: Imperiaism/Globalization vs Technology

Planning revisions to my Visual Culture course, I find myself struggling around certain social issues because I want to include more about the rise of technology and artificial intelligence. Currently I have a week on race, on gender, on imperialism, on globalization, issues that continue to wreck havoc on our human interactions and respect for each other. In that sense they are important ideas to teach to future artists and designers. On the other hand, technology is changing us. Yes, it is racist and sexist. It is biased to those with power and access. It reiterates all kinds of socio-cultural divisions. The rise of technology for me, however, puts in question our valuing of these superficial constructs (race, gender, class, national identity) to bring forth a more fundamental question for all humans: do we matter? Or, is there any meaning to my existence?

I have always been rather fond of the notion that our existence is simply an extension of a massive war between single cell division and sexual reproduction. Both are fighting for domination. I am simply an artefact of the effort on behalf of sexual reproduction. The language around this idea talks about generation and reproduction in ways that I think limit our thinking about it. What if it is really simply, as I said before, about taking over: domination. 

This argument emphasizes that humans exist to reproduce. This is where I begin to think something else. For some time, humans have been interested in not only biological reproduction but an abstract one through ideas. As Harold Bloom suggested stressed poets, and as I simply feel standing in front of a classroom, the creation and recreation with modifications (hopefully improvements, whatever those might be) of ideas is a different kind of battle flag. Let us suppose therefore that humans are simply a fallible endpoint of sexual reproduction and the starting point of abstract extension. From mathematics to philosophy to art we are computers. Now, we've made better faster ones. 

How would those computers spread? Networks. Can we co-exist? Looking around, sexual reproduction as manifest in humans seems intent on destroying single cell production. With all the efforts of ecologists, we don't value plant life. Bacteria, viruses, etc terrify us and we are intent on producing an ever cleaner world. Why? Cleanliness is not ideal for us, but it would be for technology.

All this is a long way from my visual culture class, but I think about these things because I wonder to what degree I need them to think not about the wars of the past, but of the challenges to come as artificial intelligence is not only an extension of how we live (computers, internet, step trackers and the rest) but determines how we live for us. It doesn't seem that far anymore. Read Trevor Paglen's Invisible Images or watch Amber Case TED talk Everyone is a Cyborg now. From either of those, follow the suggested links on each site and see where you wound up. To what degree did you get yourself there? To what degree, did a computer decide what you would find interesting for you? 

As my students prepare for careers in the various art and design fields, I don't want them to be racists, sexists, or unaware of the mass privilege they experience from living the lives of plenty that they have even as they struggle with student loans, jobs, and supporting families. On the other hand, they should think about how technology informs the choices they make, what they desire, what they observe, how they think, and therefore what they will want to make, be asked to produce, and need to create. Those social factors influence computing, but I can't help wondering for how long. A future where being human is common ground doesn't seem that far away. As soon as the networks of data become more powerful than we are, more informed than we can be, that's the day that we are dominated, wherever we are, whatever we look like. Will teaching about 18th-20th century imperialism help then?

Seeing Things

Neil Harris in his book on J. Carter Brown’s directorship of the National Gallery (Culture Capital) explains how our nation’s capital came to be appreciated through graphic and literary presentations. Samuel F.B. Morse painted Congressional proceedings, but cartoonists provided caricatures of politicians that encouraged interest in the “farcical as well as tragic features of government” (Harris 40).

Films and plays, however, really helped rally interest in the workings of government with themes “reflecting attitudes toward partisanship, corruption, power, and pretension” (Harris 41). Before television, government was a largely mysterious affair, occurring at a great distance from most every day lives. Films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Born Yesterday, and State of the Union provided peeks into these places of power.

Television has changed some of that by providing us closer looks at Congress and the White House, but still we must remember how much we are influenced by what we see, or rather are given to see. There are parts of the world that I have never seen, but that I can describe because I have seen them in film and on television. We cringe at critical remarks in the 19th century about ‘exotic’ locales and people that are often derived from the Romantic imagery of the painters who visited, composed, and returned with canvases in hand. Art and stories do tell us something about a culture and a time, but sociological research also reveals those things that remained unacknowledged.

I feel compelled to mention this here because I am such an advocate for the role of poems and stories in encouraging interest in art and artists. I really do think we can use them to tell us about responses to certain works and movements over the years, why and how they have continued to appeal. There is a place in the history of art for the stories of art. BUT, all that being said, we must also remember that these are fictional accounts. They have dramatic requirements that allow them to warp evidence to the contrary. After all, as I’ve said before, why ruin a good story for want of a few facts?

A good story is a good story and over wine or on a Sunday night before a busy week ahead, that is what I want. I want drama! Give me House of Cards! But, Monday morning, don’t expect me to believe it. A peek into a place of power is not a good solid look. That requires more than sitting on the couch. It requires the hard work of investigative journalism, whose tales are far longer and more warped than any novel or film, and which we often ignore until it becomes entertainment…

All the President’s Men, Lincoln, The Butler, Selma.

These are fictions. But if well done, they might just make us wonder about what we’ve seen, what we think we see, what we might see if we looked more carefully.

Book Review: Capital Culture, J.Carter Brown, The National Gallery, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience by Neil Harris

Capital Culture is a detailed account of J. Carter Brown’s influence as Director of the United States National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., but Neil Harris’ fifteen chapters also offer a view of the changes that occurred in museum culture during the 23 years of his tenure. The book centers on the changes that Brown was able to impose during his time at the National Gallery, by using specific shows and internal situations as case studies for the transformations that helped turn the gallery into a world class museum. The blockbuster exhibitions that Brown spearheaded were often met with disapproval despite their public success. Harris is even-handed in presenting critical declamations, both aesthetic and political, alongside his archival research into the driving reasons for the National Gallery’s efforts into these shows.

The emphasis on museums as sites of cultural education rather than excited engagement stems in part from the origins of survey museums arising out of princely collections. Brown’s move away from this pedagogical tradition incited much criticism, and though such departures have grown common place, they are still treated with hesitation, attitudes which may not serve to encourage contemporary audiences who increasingly arise out of a culture of choice rather than instruction. J. Carter Brown was an innovator and the book argues on behalf of his successes, despite any failures, for making the National Gallery an important cultural center. Harris convincingly claims that Brown’s vision transformed the museum stage and readers will likely find inspiration in Brown’s dynamic belief in art for all.

A full review will be available at the Journal of Curatorial Studies in the summer of 2015.

CAPITAL CULTURE: J. CARTER BROWN, THE NATIONAL GALLERY, AND THE REINVENTION OF THE MUSEUM EXPERIENCE, NEIL HARRIS
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (2013), 616 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-226-06770-4, US$35.00

Fashion in the Museum

I know that there are some who think that fashion doesn't belong in the museum and that there are others who mostly go to museums to see the fashions, whether on mannequins or in paintings.

The Boston MFA has placed costumes from Hollywood’s Golden Age on display with a wall showing clips from the films where the costumes were worn. The costumes appear remarkably different in person from the screen. In person, I noticed the dresses’ beadwork and color, but saw them for their structure and movement in the black and white films. If museums serve to help us become more visually aware, then this show reminds us that what we see on screens, film, television, or computer, may not be what we would experience in person.

No bad thing in that.

As I attend a talk at the National Arts Club (tonight, Friday 1/23 7pm) on the fashion designer Bill Halston, I will also confront the club’s own uncertainty about the committee. They often organize some of the more popular events, and yet they are derided as a “light” committee, unconcerned with real art. Almost all the clothes that we wear do not constitute art, but I would be hard pressed to reject all fashion across time as having no place in a discussion of art.

Fashion is intimate and it most obviously accepts our superimposed desires, but is that truly reason to dismiss it? Hasn't other art done the same?

What Do You See?

Charles Sheeler’s View of New York (1931) is obviously not a view of New York City. 

It is an interior painting of his studio, with a window through which we see a blue sky outside. Inside, an empty chair, an unlit lamp, and a covered camera are not only signs of the artist not working, but are made dismal by the gray walls and tone that cover the main body of the painting. The covered camera was indicative of Sheeler’s work as a photographer, though he was switching to painting. I am amused by the window centerpiece with the blue sky outside because of the fact that artists so often sense that their worlds trapped inside a studio are gray and lifeless, where outside, where they cannot be, is full of color and vibrancy. Those of us on the outside might not always agree, but Sheeler’s painting highlights that narrative to an amusing degree.

Sowing Victory

The Boston MFA has an impressive collection of World War I posters currently on display, given by John T. Spaulding in the summer of 1937. He and his brother, William S., were great supporters of the MFA, providing the museum with major gifts from their collections. These posters were first displayed in the fall of 1938, when war was imminent. They served therefore a double purpose by establishing the aesthetic value of posters (extending if you will from the earlier appreciation for prints) and providing viewers with needed patriotism to support the United States' eventual engagement in the coming war.

Mostly from the United States, the posters also include some from France, England, Russia and Germany. They urge citizens to buy bonds in support of the war cause, but some also encourage men to enlist, often using guilt to pressure. A picture of a father with children on his lap and a caption that reads “Daddy, what did you do in the war?” or a picture of several hats (fedora, straw, ad so forth) with a navy cap in the center and the question “Which hat will you wear?”

Most intriguing to me, however, were the posters about rationing, and self-subsistence by planting “Victory” gardens. Somehow, support of the country has shifted away from the notion that we be careful about our consumption. Since Ford decided to recall troops from Vietnam in TK to suggest the end of the war there, even though United States presence continued for a while, as a nation we have been adverse to military engagement unless quick and easy. This is understandable, but it means we delude ourselves that we are not at war, as say our continued military engagement in Iraq for over a decade should be considered. Since we are not at war, we do not think of ourselves as having to minimize or economize as if we were at war. Our economy depends on excess spending, I understand that, but unfortunately, it makes us wasteful and inconsiderate of the real costs of sustained success. You an’t win a war you aren’t fighting. You can’t avoid waste if a surplus is assumed.

We are at war, and I’m struck by the ease with which we live our lives. I’m not sure that planting gardens, or rationing meat and flour and sugar, would do anything for our troops or the military, but these posters did make me note how the two were once linked.

The Change You Want To See In The World

In the Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott exhibit currently at the MFA, through September 13, 2015, I heard a woman my age explaining to a little girl, maybe around six years old, that these pictures depict a time when kids of different color had to go to separate schools.

"Separate schools?" Incredulity mingled with confusion as the adult sighed, "Yes."

But the little girl looked perplexed rather than upset, and I was glad that she found it odd and attached no personal significance to this fact.

She was the change that many in the exhibit had hoped for. Elderly couples walked hand in hand looking at the photographs that Gordon Parks took in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1950. They show the way racism and segregation still quietly defined the life of those he knew. That would change soon, but not soon enough. The photographs were supposed to be published in Life magazine in 1951, but were suspended. The 42 photographs on display have never been seen before. The exhibit includes examples of his typewritten pages from his novel, The Learning Tree (1963). Parks confronted racism at every stage of his career, working in Chicago, but then also during his fellowship for the Farm Security Administration in segregated Washington DC, no better at the war office, and certainly not once he left those bureaucracies and tried fashion photography, though he was able to get freelance work from Vogue.

His work is an implied indictment of racism by showing the humanity of those so rudely dismissed. Given the racism the United States that still confuses the United States, the show could not come at a better time.

Goya: Order and Disorder, Boston MFA

The Boston MFA show Goya: Order and Disorder had long lines on its closing weekend, but was worth the wait, or in my case the treacherous roads to Boston the previous day. The Black Ice and accidents on the highway reminded me of the dangers in life, a small preparation for Goya’s own visions.

On one hand he is known for his portraits of aristocrats, such as the full length Duchess de Alba in a lace mantilla and wearing traditional Spanish clothes as she points down to the sand at her feet where “Sole Goya” is written. Shockingly similar to that painting is the seated portrait of an actress, Antonia Zarate y Aguirre, also wearing black, also covered in a lace mantilla (though not quite as delicate or ornate), and placed against a brown and gold background. Eavesdropping on two conversations in front of the piece, I heard different objections to it. One was dismayed that the silver ribbon at her rib cage clashed with the gold background, as did the black and brown. This on the principle that you do not wear silver and gold or black and brown together. The other objection found that a curl of hair on her forehead appeared to extend her already bushy eyebrow, made worse by the fact that some skin had been painted visible through the curl and looked like an unfortunate beauty mark. “I wouldn’t like it if it were me,” exclaimed the woman to her friend.

There are many ways to criticize art, and this personal approach is one. A friend who had seen the show objected to the lack of biographical material, as he was left wondering more about Goya. To my mind, this is the show’s success, building interest in an artist such that visitors would seek out information on their own. Biographies are both accessible and easy to find for the common museum audience, where the type of information the show relayed about technique required visual examples to explain. Goya’s work also required some historical contextualization since Goya’s presence as Court Painter made him a witness to the rise and fall of courtiers, while the Napoleonic invasion during the Peninsula War are significant to his posthumously published Disasters of War print series.

The etching They Do Not Want to (No quieren, Plate 9 from Disasters of War) depicts a soldier attempting to rape a young woman with an older woman coming from behind to stab him. The rape and pillaging of towns devastated Spain and Goya knew much about it from his own countryside visits, including to his home village. The lines marking the left side of the crone’s skirt emerge out of the wall behind the figures, while the right front side of her skirt sweep down to connect with the ground lines beneath the two struggling figures. Her strength comes not only from the presence of the knife but also the way Goya has her circling the environment of the two central figures. The contour lines around the soldier make him stand out, and provide a dark background against which the young woman has all the innocence of mostly untouched blank paper (with only the required lines to depict her form). The crone is all shading that, I will go so far as to suggest, gives her the ambiguity of wisdom, the gray tonality that accepts both black and white, murder as protection.

This woman made me realize the deep respect that Goya shows for aged women, whether as witches or protectresses. The show explained in a wall text that old age was associated with vanity, avarice, and lust, but that is far better seen in his depiction of old men. They are swinging, a metaphor for sexual license, gorging themselves on food in the dark, and generally foolish. I did not spot a work that presented old men as wise in the Goya show, and remain intrigued by the lack of imagery and tales in general presenting men as aging gracefully.

The show was divided thematically, with walls dedicated to youth, old age, power, allowing the curators to combine paintings and prints. One large room was dedicated to his portraits, including one with questionable attribution thereby allowing viewers to witness the challenge of certainty. The show culminates with a freestanding wall of prints from Disasters of War, though the room behind it includes several more works. Goya’s prints of war, madness, and nightmares contrast to his polite portraits. As Enlightenment philosophy gained strength, ridiculing the superstitions of religion, it must have been all the more horrifying to see the savagery of the revolutions, the dismantling of governments, the massacres that followed. How could this mankind espouse reason on one hand, and yield such violence with the other? The question remains for us as we declare ourselves a global community and witness human violations on mass scales around the world.

Goya was brilliant not simply for his technique, but for his ability to draw what we still refuse to see.

Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allen Poe at New World Stages

A musical about Edgar Allen Poe? That makes no sense. Musicals are light and frothy; Poe is dark and dreadful. But, this show, now open at New World Stages in New York City after a successful production in London, reminds us that both musicals and Poe might yet stretch our imagination more.

Poe notoriously inspired Baudelaire, but the costume designs of Nevermore might make you think of Tim Burton but they are also a reminder that he too was inspired by Poe. Things come full circle. The songs and choreography do not obscure the hardships of Poe's life, but tell the story with high Gothic drama that allows for the needed chortle every now and then. Poe's own rhyhtmic rhyme schemes are often duplicated in the songs, which reminds us of the remarkable simplicity underlying Poe's nightmarish imagination.

The show had a Poe historian to consult but this is fiction not documentary, and Jonathan Christenson, the writer and composer, makes allowances for the story. Poe's adoptive mother in the production leaps to her death from the asylum where her husband places her when she starts to lose her mind. This is actually a merger of two important figures from Poe's adolescence but provides the loss that helped create the distance to his adoptive family.

Those who are familiar with Poe's stories may enjoy identifying allusions to the stories within the dialogue and songs. The script does an impressive job of moving between the facts of his life and the realities of his fiction to create a show that will satisfy any Poe enthusiast–so long as they don't require strict biographical authenticity...and really, who wants to ruin a good story for want of a few facts? For that you can read a book.

The book on Susan Jaffe Tane's significant collection of Poe manuscripts is available in the lobby (beside very soft t-shirts) if you want some information. But how many people who love Poe, do not love the man, but the author? It's not easy to love a depressive alcoholic afterall.

All this to say, I really enjoyed the show. Apparently some members of the audience thought it was depressing. I entirely disagree. The show is about a depressed man, but not itself depressing. Perhaps his dark tales populated by strange and evil characters destroyed him, as the ensemble sings in one of the final numbers, but they were also his company in times of duress and gave him life long after his had died of desperation.

If you think you like Tim Burton, gothic tales, forboding tales of creative genius, let alone the master himself, Edgar Allen Poe, Nevermore will also make you rethink musical theater, and jump at the shadows creeping along the side of your brain all the way home.

The show opened last night and more information for tickets can be found at:
http://nevermoreshow.com/

Film Review: Blackhat OPENS FRIDAY 1/16/2015

I am writing this review on a word processor that is connected to a computer that sets the type for the Sun-Times. If I make an error, the computer will tell me. Observe. I instruct it to set this review at a width of 90 characters. It flashes back: Margin too wide. Now things get interesting. I ask it to set the width at 100 characters. It flashes back: Margin too narrow. That's because it's reading only the first two digits of my three-digit number.

So wrote Roger Ebert in 1983 to start his review of Wargames, a film about a computer whiz kid who mistakenly breaks into a computer in the Department of Defense. Hacker films are thrilling because most of us don’t understand the machines that run our lives. We depend on the connectedness of the machines, but the code is mysterious, and when it doesn’t do what we want, frustrating. As Ebert pointed out, word processors, or computers now, are constantly trying to fix what they deem to be errors, even when we want it our “wrong” way. Only a few seem to have the ability to move through those networks with the speed and ease of a New Yorker racing through rush hour streets. If only we knew what to do, we too could destroy our enemies and balloon our bank accounts. Hacking, despite the fact that its reality is long boring hours typing and fixing code into a computer, is therefore a perfect topic for an action packed adventure. Thus, the hacker adventure flick subgenre.

Blackhat picks up our most recent fears from the opening sequence when we become aware that our beautiful blue Earth is wired by electric networks, with everything from nuclear power plants to the stock market, our national security and our bank accounts, dependent on computers and the code running those circuit boards. When a hacker sets a virus into a Chinese power plant with a consequent meltdown, then follows that catastrophe with a stock market run on soy, the Chinese government requests to partner with the FBI, suggesting Nicholas Hathaway, a convicted hacker played by People’s Sexiest Man of the Year Chris Hemsworth, be released from prison to help them track this blackhat.

The term blackhat refers to hackers who break into a computer network with malevolent intent, destroying data or stealing information for their own purpose. Blackhats will take advantage of a known entry point to exploit the company, nation or service dependent on the network. Is the film an accurate depiction of hacking? Well, yes and no. Michael Mann did spend time with Mike Rogers, who was head of the House Intelligence Committee, and hired Kevin Poulsen, a senior editor at Wired who was sent to jail for being a blackhat with a three year ban on any computer use after his release, and Christopher McKinlay, the mathematician who hoped to find love by hacking OKCupid last year, to serve as consultants on the film. They ensured that the code on screen looked authentic, but the fact is that code writing or deciphering is long, boring work that does not make for good film, and so the film requires a willingness to suspend disbelief at the speed with which our actors identify and break through the various information roadblocks.

Hathoway (Hemsworth) was a hacker but as he insists he never robbed people, only banks, making it easier for all of to rest assured that we are rooting for Robin Hood. When he hacks into the NSA, we agree it is the right move. Hathoway helped write the code that is causing all this damage while he was at MIT, before he went to prison for hacking into a bank, and so he’s not only a computer genius, but also in perfect shape to fight singlehandedly his way out of a Korean restaurant, have a shoot out on the docks on Hong Kong, followed by another one on its streets, chase and hunt down the man who would hack his way through civilization. All this and have a love affair too. Don’t be fooled by Hathoway’s reading material, which includes Derrida and Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. This film won’t deconstruct anything, but it will blow up a few buildings and people. Blackhat sets out to be a cyber thriller and it succeeds, as long as you don’t take it too seriously.

This may not be one of Michael Mann’s great films but it has all the elements that he does so well. The tensions between two opposing governments, as well as police and criminal forces is classic for the director of Heat, Collateral, and Miami Vice. Since the term blackhat is rooted in Western movies, where the bad guys often wore black hats, this might be seen as Mann’s ode to the genre. Roaming from Chicago, to Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Kuala Lampur, and Jakarta, the film is mostly shot on location with electric cityscapes, and panoramic exteriors of the mines in Kuala Lampur. The music supports the three narrative changes from international cyber-crime scare, to renegade team who can only win by ignoring direct orders, to the personal vengeance that fuels the final portion of the film.

Michael Mann’s visual aesthetic remains gripping whether for the fight scenes or the initially awkward love story. The bad guys are really bad. The good guys are really sensitive and caring. There are two women: the smart FBI lead played by Viola Davis, who does much with the little she is given; the impressive financial software designer (Wei Tang) whose intelligence is secondary to her passion for our hero. The contemporary hacking scares, or the concerns about encouraging women to go into technology might have elevated this film but honestly, this is a good old-fashioned, cyber-crime, race-against-time, action-adventure, hero-with-love-interest story. For 135 minutes, you will forget about your comparatively unimportant problems, and if you don’t think about it too much, you’ll enjoy it all the way home and forget about it by the time you finish changing all your passwords.

Blackhat, directed by Michael Mann opens Friday, January 16, 2015

Join us! Aperture at the National Arts Club tonight, 8pm!

Book Review: Broken Colors by Michele Zackheim

The book opens with the early life of Sophie Marks, whose parents died during the First World War, living with her artist grand parents in the English Midlands. She moves to Paris to go to art school, falls in love, and upon returning to her grandparents gives birth to a child she does not want, but eventually grows to love until air raids bomb her home and everyone she knows. Shell-shocked, she is hospitalized for several years. Any hesitation that I felt about the opening tragedy was allayed by the beauty of the language. Though sympathetic to the plight of the characters, the story never descends into melodrama.

The book has just laid its underpainting at this point, as Sophie must yet become an artist, and build a life as such. Across love and success, the story maintains a gorgeous calm. The chapters are brief and evocative of each step she takes, loving, losing, moving here, then there, in search of some indescribable sense of self, and all the other trite material of life that is never so trite for those living it, or for good fictional characters. The happy is satisfying not because it is a trite, happily-ever-after farce, but because the reader has come to believe that Sophie, nearing eighty, might yet be able to learn something, accept what she had refused, and find contentment.

The focus on Sophie makes some characters, like Nico, a little too simple, but since the reader is strongly positioned within Sophie's point of view, I was willing to ignore the occasional shallow quality in that character as an aspect of how Sophie saw them. She had not the knowledge, self or otherwise, to see them completely, and so neither do we.

I read this book within 24 hours, on the subway, while walking, ignoring family or friends after the holidays, because the book carries the magnificence of a Tolstoy life without the volume as a burden, and I wanted the satisfaction of knowing, in the end, the life of Sophie Marks completely.

Book Review: Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man by Alfred Alcorn

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 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.