The Rhetoric of Conversion

Earlier this week, I was discussing with a friend the confusion that I feel regarding art that is political. In general, I find overtly political art tiresome. If I wanted a statement after all, I would read a pamphlet. And it feels disrespectful to me of the other, possibly more important but certainly disregarded, arena that fine art enters–that is, the ability to produce a non-linguistic experience.

Of course, to say that I do not like political art is simply false because much art that has been produced over the years has undeniable political content. At the Renaissance portraiture show currently at the Met, the political can be witnessed in the Giuliani Medici portraits that were produced after his murder as a testimony to Medici loyalty, and also as a warning to other plotters. Picasso's Guernica might have come to mind for some. I don't object to it. But I do mind Sanja Ivekovic's hyper-feminist work currently on display at MoMA. This concern on my part has me generally avoid any art, performances, or readings that are described as political, or seem to have an underlying political message that is being presented. In conversation with the friend, she tried to convince me how important political messaging is in art, how it has helped change the world, but I am bored and bothered by its lack of nuance, its emphatic rhetoric, that like hers did not change my mind about situations the way information clearly discussed can make me suddenly start donating to an Animal Welfare group, or the local homeless shelter.

With these issues of rhetoric in mind, I was hesitant to see The Convert currently at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, NJ. That it was also running over three hours added to my consternation. But, someone I respect told me the work was excellent, so off I went to see the new play by Danai Gurira about the Shona rebellions in 1895-7, in the Rhodesia of Queen Victoria that we now call Zimbabwe. Gurira's introduction explains the conflict: "There is a grappling with home, place, space, and voice–on one side are the ardent keepers of culture and land and language and on the other there are those...glad to be free of the strictures of their forefathers...delighted to declare themselves the ambassadors of the new order, finally feeling significance and a purpose." Bafus, they are called by the Shona tribe members for having left the tribal ways: living in houses with cement floors like the Whites, spreading their Christian religion while neglecting the respect due to the ancestors, and making money incomparable to what can be made working in the mines. The Shona people are sons of the soil. The whites have destroyed that, and those blacks who have left are traitors, bafus, for forgetting or ignoring their past.

The cast of seven completely won me over. When the first intermission arrived, I could hardly believe that an hour had past. I was immersed in Jekesai's (Pascale Armand) extraordinary learning curve under the guidance of Chilford (LeRoy McClain), a young man who has left the savagery of the tribe to follow Christ's path, hoping that one day the Roman Catholic church will allow a Black to be a priest. Mai Tamba, the absolutely wonderful Cheryl Lynn Bruce, has her son Tamba, Warner Joseph Miller, bring Jekesai to work for Chilford instead of having her marry an old man. Jekesai agrees to be Chilford's Christian pupil under the name Ester (a good Christian name) and quickly memorizes long passages of the Bible, learns English, and embraces Christ's message of equal love with such sincerity that she  corrects the white priest for which Chilford has to remind her that is not permitted.

Ester is so content in her new life and role that Prudence, played with strength by Zainab Jah without any of the disdain or melancholy that her character could have lapsed into having, asks what is left of Ester. Prue has come to Chilford's in search of her philandering fiancée, Chancellor, whose sexual proclivities and social acuity are entirely likeable in Kevin Mambo until he permits his character the necessary smarmy turn. Prue was also educated, a rarity for women at the time which makes her a strange creature with no place. She has chosen however to continue to speak Shona to the tribal members, managing to engage with both cultures. Chilford's adamant stance that all elements of the savage life must be destroyed does not permit Ester that same option.

Of course, the civilizing colonialism is not successful and the tribes become angry for the change in their lifestyle, the menial labor in the mines, their polygamy disallowed, and the anger of the ancestors at the presence of the colonists. The uprisings include massacres on both sides, which conflicts create conflicts for the characters that are presented on an intensely personal level. I was never watching a story about the uprisings of Southern Rhodesia in 1897. Rather I saw Chilford angry that black men would cause the death of his beloved Father, the priest whom he writes every evening, and in that anger lose compassion for Mai Tamba whose work for him does not keep her from maintaining her ties to the tribe. Ester will undergo the greatest heartbreak as she sees the ethical lessons that she has gained in following the education and religion of the Whites disregarded by them in their treatment of the Blacks, regardless of justice. Pascale Armand's concluding monologue will break your heart as you see the chaos created not by religion, or race, or politics but by the complex web of a life lived among warring factions.

Danai Gurira's play The Convert has given me faith that art can be produced which is utterly engaging on all its aesthetic dimensions, even as it negotiates with the mind-numbing brutality of any sectarian belief. Emily Mann is known for being a director who creates an ensemble, working with the every aspect of the production to create a unit whole, one that this play in particular would need. The attention to detail was such that the show brought in a dialect coach to help the actors create their own nuanced sound of the English they were taught, allowing the very sound of the play to be embodied by the decisions the actors were making for their characters. Rhetoric did not convert me to the belief that the political can exist in art, but rather by the ability of the aesthetics to handle that additional weight. The art of theatre was present in every aspect of this show, perhaps out of respect for the heavy content, but certainly there in every piece of dialogue, lighting cue, background sound, acting moment, directing decision. I am profoundly moved by this play, not only because it made me think, but also on its own terms. And that, my friends, is a great play.

*******
The Convert at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, NJ. January 13-February 12, 2012.
(Take NJ Transit to Princeton stop, not Princeton Junction, and walk across the street.)

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.

The Popes

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

Braque, Man with a Guitar, 1911

Picasso, The Poet, 1911

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

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

Political Work

There is a story that an officer of the Nazi occupation forces visited Picasso in his studio, where Guernica was hanging. The officer asked, "Did you do that?" to which Picasso replied, "No, you did".

The painting may be one of the most famous examples of political art, and yet stands aloof from the debate on whether art is guilty of glorifying those atrocities that it chooses to depict. We have all seen work that through its intention to 'never forget for a single instant' somehow slides into uncertain ground through its stylization, commercial aspirations, and aesthetic sanctimony. From this discomfort stemmed the question whether art should exist after Auschwitz. We can all be grateful to Hans Enzensberger for the retort that art's continued existence is not a surrender to cynicism. Art must resist such arguments, accepting that its situation is one of paradox. Art can present suffering, but this suffering can not be ignored nor dismissed, Adorno explains in his essay "Commitment". Hegel's consciousness of adversity allows continued growth of the consciousness; in the lecture on Jacob Boehme, Hegel quotes him as saying: "without adversity life would have no sensibility nor will nor efficacy, neither understanding nor science".

The problem with work that only presents the suffering is that it makes no motion. Kant insisted that art could not have an end. A work of art that only presents the artist's particular notion of horror does not acknowledge the other quality of art, which is that its very expression points to life in all its available fullness. It is therefore an ineffective work of art, even if an effective work of political dismay, or at worst propaganda.

Picasso's work succeeds–as let us face it, does most of his work because the man was after all a bloody genius–by depicting the atrocities of fascism while also presenting the freedom that art permits. He was neither shy of his political outrage nor the possibility his work offered beyond that limited scope.