Seeing de Kooning

I finally made it to the de Kooning exhibit, the blockbuster MoMA show, on an afternoon when it was not too crowded, and alone so that I could float from piece to piece without needing to explain my preference for this one, or why I skipped that one. With such a large show, unless I know that I will return to see more at a future date, there is no choice for me but to let my eye wander until it lands on something, go see that picture or work, and then repeat. I can not absorb in one viewing as much work as was there displayed. And, though it is all there to be seen, I do not believe that the intention is to have each visitor absorb it all. Undoubtedly there are some well developed eyes and minds that are capable of slowly perusing each piece, as there are members of my gym who seem to be there when I arrive and leave no matter the time of day that I appear. The eyes are muscled as well, the brain is one big muscle and both need developing to be able to study art in such a studious method. For the rest of us, to show up at all is an important step.

So with that said, I can share that his early drawings were nicely presented to prove that he was in fact an incredibly skilled draftsman. The early work reveals the influence of Miró and Dali and Picasso in the exploratory manner that any artist who is looking for his or her style is likely to experience and so, show. The Seated Man and women sitting from the 40s are beautiful figures–the women are likely modeled from Elaine Fried who became his wife in 1947. The Montauk series in the 60s, however, delighted me (an example to the right). It is a wonderfully fun series. Light, pink, bodies, eyes, silly, sexy. I enjoyed it much more than his earlier series of women from the fifties when he was first exploring abstraction. Those are more earnest in their burlesque, ponderously intense (sometimes described as violent though I do not see it that) and bizarre as it moves into abstraction, which itself is studied, noticeably intentional. This is what is meant when we talk about development-the shift from intentionality to natural grace. It takes time.

Woman, 1948

If one expects an MBA to be making huge deals by 30 if s/he is to be a success, the same is simply not true of artists. Craft can be excellent while repeating what came before it. In fact, that may even be what differentiates craft from art. Art, on the other hand, requires that artists investigate their own response to the traditions from which they come or have embraced in order to be able to articulate their singular vision. And I do mean articulate as opposed to stutter or scream, if we are to use a vocal analogy. The young megastars of the art world rarely have something else to say besides their original "miraculous work" precisely because they stumbled upon it, got famous, and now what? De Kooning was 44 when he had his first major solo show at the Charles Egan gallery in Spring of 1948. He had been producing work, but it was then that the "breakthrough years", as described by MoMA, occurred, moving him into abstraction. I really like the black piece called Zurich though I would be hard pressed to explain why it is so called without a good biography nearby to explain the impetus of the titles he gave the works that made him famous.

Zurich, 1947

This brings me momentarily to the issue of titles in abstract works. I understand the first titles being concrete because he was actually still considering the impact and meaning of shifting into strongly abstract work. When he is settled into it, the pieces are called Untitled V, Untitled II, etc. He refuses titles. It is in the last years, however, that this gets pushed even further where the placards simply read [no title, 1983], for example. I realize that this might be explained by his personal disintegration, but it might also be understood as the most perfect acknowledgment of the sublimely peaceful visual works, like bright sunshine glaring down from a sold blue sky, where the spring air is crisp, clean and for a moment standing in the light everything is still.

[no title], 1983

Attic, 1961

After the dark paintings, of which Zurich is one, de Kooning was lauded for his white series, often posited as the "positive" side to his earlier "negatives" in black. The one below is called Attic, not because it looks like a cluttered one (though with more gray and brown it would resemble some attics I have entered) but rather because he put everything into it.
This is just to show that much can not be explained by a title, and though a plaque can give you information, it won't tell you how or why to appreciate it. That process is up to you, the viewer. There was so much work on display and I can hardly describe it all. Not only because hours have passed, but also because the expectations of writing are to produce coherent, causal language so that one thing, in some way, follows the next. This often means that things get cut because it does not "fit". We hope that our writers centered their writing on what they thought most important so that none of that gets cut, but in truth, from my own experience of writing, often good stuff does get cut for the sake of this one piece, with the hope that it will fit in another.

The experience of going to a show of this size is to embrace being overwhelmed. That is a good thing. There is not only great quantity, but also amazing quality. The artist is a phenomenon. That others participated in his process (studio assistants or Fried) is like objecting to Gertrude Stein's involvement in reading Hemingway or speaking to Picasso. If the artist stood alone, we would not be going to see the show. The best thing we can offer works of art is an earnest attempt to see it. This does not mean understanding what others have written about it (though that can be educational), nor what the author 'intended' (though that can be intriguing), but what happens to you, the viewer, when in front of this work. If you want to become a scholar, sure more is expected. But the grand majority of us can gain a great deal from simply walking up to any old piece that catches our eye, and seeing what happens next.

Les Chants de Maldoror

Isidore Ducasse, better known in the literary world under the pseudonym Comte de Lautreamont, published in 1869 a strange book in six parts entitled, Les Chants de Maldoror. He became known as the forefather of surrealism after Philippe Soupault and André Breton had his work republished, impassioned by the work.

The surrealists, in general, embraced him. Magritte and Dali both produced illustrated text. Besides his cover for the work, I have included one of Magritte's illustrations that is reminiscent of a scene in the second song in which the narrator explains he was deaf until one day looking up at the sky, and then looking even higher, he saw a throne made of human excrement and gold on which sat a proud body, covered in a dirty hospital shroud, called The Creator, who held in his hand the trunk of a body which he brought to his eyes, then nose, then mouth. At which point you can well imagine that he did devour the flesh. His feet dipped in a boiling sea of blood from which humans bobbed up for air before sinking immediately. One body digested, he would plunge his hand around the neck of another and eating the head first, then the legs and arms, occasionally cry out: "I created you; thus do I have the right to do with you what I want. You have done nothing to me, I do not suggest to the contrary. I make you suffer, and that for my pleasure". In response to this sight, the young deaf boy lets out a piercing scream, the first sound he ever hears.

The book is known for its depiction of cruelty and evil. There are some scenes that are truly horrendous, à la Sade but without the fixation on sex, with the ability to be cruel across the terrain of the mind and flesh. These moments are so well described, some characters seem so easy to envision, that it is not terribly surprising that artists would want to sketch out their own images for these bizarre 'songs'.

Dali's imagination easily transferred. In 1933, Albert Skira who had already published Ovid's Metamorphoses illustrated by Picasso and some poems of Mallarmé illustrated by Matisse, requested that Dali provide engravings for this text that was so important to the surrealists. Dali had been recommended by Picasso, who was then producing the cover for the first issue of the surrealist journal Minotaure, being published by Skira. Though Dali was involved in the journal from its first issue, he would only produce a cover for the eighth issue, which was financed by the Englishman Edward James whose patronage supported the Dalis in 1936. Magritte, also occasionally supported by James, would produce 77 illustrations for a 1948 edition of the text published in Belgium.

Though Les Chants are boringly dark (as anyone who has read Sade will understand), they have moments for anyone of interest. The surrealists were particularly taken with it because the author was such a mystery, little known of him and dying suddenly, buried quickly and then moved to another location. Though Ducasse published this text anonymously and at his own cost, he began writing a second book, of which we only have the first two sections Poems I and Poems II, which was to:

replace melancoly with courage, doubt with certainty, desperation with hope, complaints with responsibility, skepticism with faith, sophistry with cold calm, and pride with modesty. 

The Politics of Autonomous Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear Work

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

Just the facts, ma'am.

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

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

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

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

Changes in The Scandal of Susan Sontag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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