Man Land

Today, I accompanied a friend of mine down to the Navy Yards where the piece he had produced for the headquarters of a corporation was crated and ready to be shipped. I will laugh if any one ever says art is effete to me again.

This is a work of nail art, by which I mean different sized nails produce the outlines and shadows of the design. The picture offers an example of the work done by Tim Kent. The piece being crated off today was a bit larger, and if the frame weighed 200lbs, 80lbs of nails were hammered painstakingly (literally, all involved were aching and sore from tapping/slamming that many nails into the wood), and the crate added another 75lbs, then the packaged piece was nearing 400lbs.

Several men were involved at every step. There was one woman, whom I did not get to meet, but I understand that her handshake was brutal. The piece got loaded by several strong men, nonetheless using dollies, and wearing the type of rugged clothing that resists tears.

I stood to the side and held jackets and papers, thus making myself useful too. But under no uncertain terms, this was man land and these men were proud of the brute force that created and crated another work of art.

The Artist Speaks

I had the unfortunate pleasure of hearing Wendy Mark and Andre Aciman speak at the James Gallery this evening. A pleasure because I like her work. A pleasure because he wanders well through diverse ideas. Unfortunate because, despite the MFA degree from Columbia in writing with which she introduced herself, words are clearly not her medium. She was painfully incomprehensible.

Aciman started the conversation explaining how they are working on a project together, loosely shaped around Lavender. They had decided, however, that this was not a good topic for the conversation they would have and so picked blue. After he had shared his thoughts on blue, she apparently decided not to speak about blue. She introduced her work, having brought pieces to show but incapable of figuring out how to show them until Aciman distributed them to the audience. She could not figure out what to say and floundered until he obliged by beginning to interview her. But even that did not help as she could not respond simple questions such as:

How did you find your form?
What about monotype was so appealing?
How do you pick your colors?
What is your process?
How do you work with the authors who produce essays for your limited edition books?

Simple questions. And yet each one required her to peruse the air above her head with the abstracted wandering gaze of a stoned Annie Hall, as she started sentences only to interrupt them and begin somewhere else. This was not a conversation but a strained interview where even the most eloquent and persistent interviewer has to eventually accept defeat.

This brings me to the surprising inelegance with which most artists speak about their work. I realize that words are not their medium but in a world of words, they do need to be able to express themselves at least a little bit. Without their own words, the artwork can become co-opted by curators, journalists and that is only if the work stands out enough to be noticed without some description to help move it there.

I like Wendy Marks' work. It is light. Despite the small size of her pieces, there is much space in looking at them. They become, as she intends, a little world of their own. They are produced in series but each one does stand alone. They are fun and if you get a chance to look at her work at the James Gallery then I encourage you to do so. Perhaps if you find yourself wandering through mid-town and need a respite from the wind, you might wander through the show.

She was quite clear that she does not like to illustrate writers' words. She prefers writers to produce from the inspiration of her work for the limited edition booklets she produces. This and her focus on works that are so completely self-contained may lead to the autonomy that makes her incapable of participating in a conversation. Though this attitude works well in her art, it is an embarrassing disaster in a gallery dialogue with another artist.

Aesthetic Surrealism?

I am struggling to understand how surrealism is an aesthetic movement. In looking at Breton's manifestos, I see him advocating awareness, a heightened awareness that flies above and beyond the immediate reality. He may not be writing theories, but he is suggesting a practice that is not so much aesthetic as, if not philosophical (though his encyclopedia definition in the manifesto of 1924 considers it such), psycho-developmental–I hesitate here to say psycho-analytical or psychological.

Automatic writing is not an aesthetic practice but rather a means of glimpsing a self that is truer than the social constructs permit one to see. By revealing the unconscious attitude, the 'real' person is made present, even if that 'reality' appears as a sur-reality. In addition, despite Breton's writings on art, and the general public memory now preferring surrealist art over the writings, Breton does not address the arts. That he addresses writing seems even, if I may, entirely selfish and only in response to his own interest in writing. He may mention writing but he does not mention painting, photography, film, collage, theatre, dance or any other conceivable art. Had he been interested in gardening, one can imagine he would have founded a method of spontaneous gardening. I am facetious here but only to make the point that I struggle to eliminate in my own mind: the writing manner he presents is not because he has an artistic revolution that he wishes to establish, but rather that it is the way he can discuss the personal revolution he is advocating.

In this, I can not help but see him politically active on behalf of the individual. That there can not be a political party is precisely because the cause is each one's. Later in 1934 when he writes Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme, he even says that surrealism is a response to the effects of war, the exhaustion of defeat coming out of war-whether the war is won or not. Liberty in the 1924 manifesto, a lack on interest in art or anti art, philosophy or anti-philosophy in the 1929 manifesto, both suggest that the quest is not aesthetic but personal, where the personal then becomes political.

Hence his manifesto with Trotsky, Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant, on how to maintain the independence of artists and thinkers. Breton seems to have classed anyone interested in the self as an artist, with the assumption that the workers have neither the time nor the disposition. That Breton, and the surrealism he promotes, is in conflict with communism is clear, but I don't understand it as conflict between aesthetics and politics, so much as between the individual and the group. (To the degree that as the years go by, in his writing on art, Breton produces aesthetic doctrines, they seem mostly to be responding to abstract expressionism and why surrealism must have identifiable forms placed in chance encounters.)

I am working on this and suspect to say more....

Picture Love

In Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Swann famously loves Odette de Crecy by seeing her as Jethro's Daughter in the Botticelli painting The Trials of Moses. Later, in Volume II, Marcel, the narrator, will likewise love Albertine through "those Michelangelo figures which are being swept away in a stationary and vertiginous whirlwind". These examples of love refracted through art reminded me a year or so ago of some of Barthes' writing on the imaginaire, the manner in which we superimpose our own imagining onto our thus selected desire and I wrote about it a little. Perhaps these works of art are indeed merely tropes, no different from other literary stylings, on which Proust could express his characters' love. How nice these flourishes remain, and how true to the grandiose impressions we have of our new loves.

Valentine's Day, despite how lucky I have been in love, has nonetheless generally made me uncomfortable and I find art an honest yet still distracting way of expressing or enjoying it. Last year, I went to The Tempest with my new love, my aunt and her partner, which solved the need to speak for several hours and allowed the rest of the evening to be focused on the play rather than this still uncertain relationship. Other years, I have largely tried to avoid the heart-shaped, chocolate-covered celebration, always unsuccessfully, not because I do not feel love for one or many, but rather because I am not sure how to express it on demand. I do not proclaim well. I am more spontaneous in my desire and appreciation, believing, as I do, that Love is truly important, fundamental even.

In Greek mythology, specifically remembering my recent reading of Hesiod, after Chaos the first creation is Eros. How this occurs Hesiod does not explain, but only after Eros do Gaia and Okeanous, and the others, appear. Eros remains an independently created entity, though one who produces progeny with some of those first created. Similarly, when Zeus overthrows the Titans, Aphrodite, rising from the castrated penis of Kronos, becomes the first personification of the previous abstracted deities. The rest of the Olympians then appear. Love is always the first in the new world.

Perhaps because there is something static in Love, a kind of ever presence, Love is difficult to describe. Lust moves us and so words more easily build on each other in an attempt to convey the passion, the way we 'fall' for someone, 'tumble' into bed together, 'stoke' the fires of desire. Love is simply there, present. Though Love may share traits with the other passions such as being inopportune, undeniable, there is something undefinable about it that is different from the others. Having started speaking of Proust, I must here intervene to say that both Swann and Marcel discover their own jealousy in coveting the women they desire, a jealousy that overwhelms and undermines any other feelings, including any fascimile of love they might have created for themselves. They each believe they love, but maintain desire through jealousy. Swann finds a picture of Botticelli's painting to keep on his desk to remind him of Odette. Does he love? There is only the question.

I am sometimes asked if I would love the man I love any less if I did not like the works of art that he creates, or if he were not an artist. The question is dumbfounding because, as I know too well, he can not help but paint or draw and is compelled to return to it if he spends too much time away. I love his pictures–it is true–and perhaps had I not liked his paintings as much as I did when we first met, I might not have bothered getting to know him better. Who knows? He admits he let his feelings grow upon seeing my home and approving of my aesthetic sensibility. Did I picture him when I closed my eyes as a young girl? Not exactly. Did he me? I sincerely doubt it. And yet the pictures mutate to fit the one standing in front of us...if we are lucky, imaginative, both. The art of love is, for me at least, a picture I will see tomorrow, when he smiles at me sitting at a communal table in a crowded, loud dumpling house in Chinatown, where we meet because I still can't stand Valentine's Day and where there is no art on the walls to distract either of us from a ritualized acknowledgment of love. Love, then, is not always a pretty picture, picture perfect as it may be.

The Ariadne Myth

The issues in mythology seem even more prominent, however, when one looks at de Chirico’s early paintings which so influenced the Surrealists, even if de Chirico was not himself a member of the group and his later works vociferously denied. The Ariadne series, though so generally termed only in the beginning of the 20th Century with the show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the forty odd pieces de Chirico produced in 1913-1917, in particular points to a subterranean mythic base in surrealism.

This series of paintings are suggestive of the story in which Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus on Naxos after helping him kill the Minotaur and escape the Labyrinth, figures of the myth which would both return in surrealism as prominent journals. This myth is of particular interest because of the undetermined ending. In one account, she weeps for Theseus until she dies. In another account, she is married to Dionysus and made an eternal figure.

To consider some details of this myth: Ariadne is an epithet for Aphrodite, meaning the holy one, who is in the geneology of Greek mythology the first of the Olympians after Zeus castrates his father Kronos, a clear personification of Eros, the abstraction that is first to appear when Chaos is sundered. This places Love, not in its Romanticized sense, but in its wholistic sense of Union, at the foundation and returns us to Breton who would insist on the importance of Love. Staying with the Greek myth a moment longer to address Dionysus, we can see how passion and immediacy play into surrealism. Dionysus is generally known as the god of wine, but he governed all things liquid and living, such as wine, but also the sap of trees, semen and blood. This then is Breton’s Mad Love. In the de Chirico series, Ariadne is frozen in time, a marble statue in a yellow piazza with a column way on one side, a tower looming, a ship and a train in the distance. She seems to wait between her two fates, neither chosen yet.

Her two fates depict the strange mythic split within surrealism, as presented in the different statements on myth of Breton and Bataille. Breton advocated a new mythology, a new lifepath with a new lover. Bataille, on other hand, claimed an absence of myth, in which its very absence was necessary to the realization of a new and thus entirely different ritualization of life in which a mythology would eventually assert itself. In either of these choices, political speech in Barthes’ meaning is invoked to declare a new language, new myth. As Barthes recognizes, all political speech if it succeeds must become myth speech, something seemingly recognized and even permitted by both Breton and Bataille’s arguments. Either way, surrealism as it is here described seems inherently and actively political, definitely engagé.

Thrift shop on the 3rd floor of the Whitney

Bizarre. Wonderful. Delightful. Intriguing. But at the Whitney?

Charles LeDray has apparently spent the last twenty five years producing a collection of miniature clothes of the type that you would find in a warehouse thrift shop. Within the first room three areas are lit, each with its own linoleum floor, ceiling about three and a half feet up that covers the display, a circular clothes hanging display or a table with folded clothes presented. The ceiling really allows each room to have a miniature feel. In one of them there is a broom, fallen under the clothing rack but the friend who accompanied me and I both agreed it was the only disproportional item; its handle's length would have made it six or seven feet tall, which really is too long for a broom. But our noticing that goes to show to what degree a viewer can get involved in wanting to play and make a mess of all the items. There are hats, shirts, suits, jackets, most no larger than my hand, that is to say six inches...later there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of clay pots the size of my thumbnail, each of which have been individually thrown. There is one room where outfits that are displayed on miniature hangers are shredded at the bottom, or have a large hole in the middle of the chest. I could produce meaning here, but why bother it is so obvious and the show is better enjoyed with a sense of simple delight.

My favorite piece is a small (but nearly life-size) stuffed cat with a leg up licking its derrière, although I can't quite understand why it was titled "Pretty Teacher".

The work is described: Their intimate scale and materials poignantly evoke allusions to childhood memory, gender and class stereotypes, and wonder in the everyday.

Okay.

Now I do understand that miniatures convey all kinds of difficult concepts and can be the basis for art. I am sufficiently willing to believe this that I am about to read Susan Stewart's book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. This may allow me to discuss the show more pedantically. More importantly it may help me understand why the show was at the Whitney because though I liked it, neither I nor my art history friend who accompanied me could quite grasp why it merited Whitney stature.

Myth-some thoughts

Religion is ritual doing and myth serves to sanctify those actions in story. As religion is cast aside, ritual demeaned, the stories remain and become reinterpreted, developing plot and becoming fiction. As Barthes discusses in “Myth Today” of Mythologies, mythic speech serves to propagate the status quo where political speech, in contrast, questions and posits alternatives to the state of being. When Breton declares the need for new myth-making in his various surrealist writings, he is both undermining the current state of art, literature and politics but also suggesting that it become the foundation for a new state.

This in some sense also parallels his belief that automatic writing uncovered the true self which was then to be shared as a literary vision of something more true, more real than developed within the confines of effort. He urged everyone to participate in this method because it would re-animate their very being. In an age, now, where the personal is political, it is difficult to see how this call to self-awareness is not political.

Yet, Breton remained unclear about his political stance, despite having been too knowledgeable a Marxist to remain a member of the Socialist and then Communist Party in France, his support and partnership with Trotsky in the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, and ongoing political references in his general writing. As Sartre rose to eminence in post-World War II France, he chastised Breton and the surrealists for their lack of engagement. In both the instances mentioned, that is Breton’s postulation to develop a new mythology or seek the silent self, Breton is deeply engaged in undermining the current political position.