On The Edge of Forward Bound

In The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, the main character is largely considered disreputable for her strange habit of going to the edge of the sea wall and staring into the distance, wondering, maybe hoping, that her past (love) might reappear on the horizon. Great change often makes me feel like I am walking the length of the seawall in my mind. That I just finished teaching Macbeth whose ghosts are notoriously haunting, or that I am preparing to teach a course on Romanticism may of course be exacerbating this feeling.

David Caspar Friedrich, Der Mönch an der Meer

I have moved in the last week, which meant that besides packing 45 wine boxes of books and rediscovering 4 I had hidden unpacked in my closet, I also sorted through the last few years of my life including postcards from museum trips I have attended, books, catalogs that I am still meaning to read, and the same things that I hide every time I move because I am still not sure whether to discard such family mementos.

The nice thing about the Romantics is that they truly understood the power of the emotional realm and both in literature and art presented the fullness of its passion. Perhaps now, it easily falls into kitsch, but after the rationality of the Enlightenment, in the context of all the revolutions at the end of the 18th century and continuing turmoil at the beginning of the 19th, the personal catastrophe of consciousness was a worthy topic.

Girodet, Ghosts of French Heroes (1801)

Without any of the same drama of that historical period, moving, change of any kind–even the best kind of change which offers the career one hoped to create, the love one hoped to find, the satisfaction of dreams and all that marvelous stuff–makes me feel like ghosts are running up and down the dusty, sepia corridors of my mind, opening and shutting doors, while I stand still at the edge of the seawall staring out into the distance.

The advantage of kitschy Romantic art is that it puts the personal melodrama into humorous perspective. I'm not really a fainting desolate mad woman, nor drifting from my body towards the heavens above. Despite the holidays, you are probably not going to lose your mind from holiday cheer, murder the masses who have forgotten your birthday/anniversary/triumph, or drown in end of year of business accounting, or dissolve under the weight of delivering packages across the world in one night, or even just your stuff to another country. If you feel like you might, perhaps a little Romantic art, even the best stuff, might make you smile:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Victoria and Albert Museum of Art, London, England
If you are in London, by all means do go to the Romanticism show at the Tate. I saw it last year and it is wonderful.

Without completely spoiling the ending of Fowles wonderful novel, she does of course create a wonderfully independent life for herself, despite the trauma she permitted herself. In fact and fiction, there is a place for acknowledging the acting out of certain kinds of melodrama, on the condition that it is in due course surpassed with far better theater, acting left behind for the directing and stage-managing of the present performance.

Time, Thought, Laughter

So an entire month and a bit more has passed since I last wrote. Though I watched the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, I can not claim to have been involved. As I watch the movement slowly die (200 arrested in LA today), I am sad because something is passing that I fear we will not have again. All is not well, but neither can we seem to change the course on which we find ourselves. In my shared office, on the blackboard, another teacher wrote "What is this basket and where am I headed?" Oddly, none of us have erased it. S/he wrote it last year, so the feeling remains but has become acceptable, subdued–I don't know.

Nor do I have any other exciting type news to share regarding why I have not written anything. It is merely the timeless: I have been working a lot. I can say that I have been working a great deal on art, or rather how art is written about. Long reading lists have been created that will occupy the next six months of my life, and which I look forward to sharing here.

I might have mentioned these past few weeks that I have taught Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, A.S. Byatt's "Art Work" from The Matisse Stories, and Ray Bradbury's "The Smile". My students struggle to think for themselves, not because they can't but because they are afraid of looking "retarded", direct quote from class. I spend much time trying to invigorate them, to convince them that all knowledge is risk. Very few start off knowing that everything they say is clever, or that every drawing is brilliant. The point isn't even knowing that. The point is simply to produce.

I will catch up in the weeks to come on the notes and thoughts of the past while, but in the meantime I have to share with you one of the funniest blogs that I have ever come across:
http://uglyrenaissancebabies.tumblr.com
If you need a laugh, enjoy!

Even More Modern than Today

Yves Bonnefoy's introduction to Gaeton Picon's book The Birth of Modern Painting suggests that among the significant accomplishments of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe was to remove the authoritarian voice of meaning from painting.

The painting is thus the response, without anxiety, or even reflection, of the painter's sensibility to a mere bit of color in the light....followed his taste for first glances–perceptions untainted by prior knowledge–after which he worked, in the diverse moment's of the work's genesis, solely with immediate, unreasoning, but obligatorily total adherence to the suggestions of a an obscure, inner necessity....The result was a sudden silencing of the voice that until then, whether clear or confused, never stopped asserting through the intermediary of things the authority of an order of the world, of an a priori truth, of an orthodoxy of thought. 

Manet  painted what he imagined, whether it made sense or not. He did not try to place his nude woman at the picnic in a context that could in any way be interpreted allegorically. It is clearly not a historical painting. The work is a pure painting, as Bonnefoy calls it, an act of the imagination.

Seeing, in other words, the interest in perception that is nothing but itself, seems to replace vision, as Mallarmé was later to believe.

He explains that this leaves the painter with the brave task of meeting and trespassing onto the unconscious. Finding their own inner source of intoxication, painters must live and produce without support or refuge, painting the visual impact of their hermetic dismissal. He goes on to make a statement that I think might have equally significant value today if recommended carefully.

This is not only an intoxicating discovery, a clear direction, the positivity of Being regained after centuries of interpretation and theory always falling short of the presence of the world; it is also an unceasing incitement to venture into the unknown, and therefore, something that can be admired and appreciated, but just as easily feared.

French painting had been ruled by the Academy, and Felibien had established a hierarchy of painting that placed historical painting, and allegorical painting, at the top. Though the imagination was called upon, it was done within the constraints of a general knowledge base and accepted interpretive skills determined and reinforced by the Academy. David's perfect portrait of Lavoisier and his wife, shows his chemistry tools to evoke his experiments oxygen, gunpowder and the chemical composition of water. Symbols are intentionally placed; poses are struck to suggest meaning. Manet suddenly rejects all this to permit a strong, enveloping but also anti-idea image. The challenge is to appreciate it without trying to explain it.

And here is where I come today. Without necessarily backtracking to require today's artists to mimic some past form or style, would it not be possible to reconsider this "intoxicating discovery" of stepping away from thought? Though much conceptual art has offered something, has it not also produced an expectation that suddenly appears quite traditional, that is the requirement to think about the art-experience? I can hardly claim to knowing what such art might be today, or how it might be identified, but perhaps we might discover it in the effort of trying to look at art rather than think, read plaques, learn biography. We might begin seeing more.

Nautical Notes: Mari, Navi e Naufragi

A week has passed but I am still thinking of the delightful show I saw at Centotto Gallery last Friday. Like many others, I am often wary of art shows in super-hip, most up-and-coming art communities, particularly when the invitation uses self-consciously heightened language, with additional remarks in a foreign tongue. This usually suggests that I am to arrive as a connoisseur with a depth of understanding,  a facility with a type of terminology that in truth I do not have, nor believe is necessary for every viewer. Such shows then tend to make me feel uncomfortable, when I do go to them, as if I were not good enough for the work on view.

This is not the case with Centotto Gallery's current show Nautical Notes: Mari, Navi e Naufragi. The show is a pleasure to see. The curator Paul D'Agostino invited artists with good work and placed them in the small space to draw the viewer into each work, so that each work can be admired, while also enjoyed together. The works vary in style but are placed in relationship to each other so as to complement and enhance themselves and each other. There are traditional seascapes, photographs, whimsical sculptures, a massive drawing, but it does not feel like a forced attempt to mix media but rather an honest representation of a response to a topic by modern artists. The show makes no theoretical claims but rather permits each artist to present a piece in loose affiliation with the nautical theme.

Though the art works well together, any of them could be owned and enjoyed in one's home on its own. Sometimes group shows require the rest in order for the works to make sense, provide the pleasure they suggest. Perhaps due to the simplicity of the theme, each work in Nautical Notes can rise to achieve its own presence, anchored through their foundation but allowed to float on their own merit. I found these works to be a true pleasure and hope to return and see them again.

Some shows are worth the voyage there. Whether the L train is running or not, find your way to Centotto Gallery at 250 Moore St #108 (off the Morgan Ave L stop) and let the works by Harry Gold, Adam Thompson, Josh Willis, Alice Lynn McMichael, Tim Kent, Zane Wilson, Rebecca Litt, Joel Dugan, Chris Wyrick, Rachel Day, Warren Holt and Paul Bergeron sail you on your own imaginative journey.

Pinned

I do not often like museum captions because I find them either senseless or unnecessarily full of sense. Either I am told information that is obscure and uninteresting that does not help me engage with the picture, or I am told something completely obvious. Occasionally, however, the combination is reached to perfection. The following caption is reproduced from the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Richard Hamilton, Pin-Up 1961

One of the founders of Pop art in Britain, Hamilton took his theme for this work directly from popular culture, using pictures from Playboy and other men’s magazines as his sources. While the work references these ubiquitous photographs of sex symbols, it is also a modern treatment of a conventional subject of painting—the odalisque, or reclining nude. Hamilton approaches this tradition through a variety of pictorial modes: the hair is a stylized cartoon, the breasts appear both in drawing and in three-dimensional relief, and the bra is a photograph applied as a collage. "Mixing idioms," Hamilton has said, "is virtually a doctrine in Pin-up."




In my mind it perfectly balances an explanation of the artist, his period, interest and approach. I learn a little about how the picture is constructed (cartoon, photograph), I am also left with enough curiosity to wish to seek out more information; what does he mean by mixing idioms is a virtual doctrine in Pin-Up? Does he mean for pin-ups as a form in general or just this picture? Why would one picture have a doctrine? Is it only particular to this picture or to his others as well? These are questions with answers that I can only learn by continuing to find out about him...either through looking at more examples of his work, or reading about him and his work, or, ideally, both! How wonderful to have a museum provide a picture and text that would engage me. Well done MoMA, and since Hamilton died last month kudos for managing to bring another person into relationship (for whatever length, since sometimes more information dispels the initial allure, like a second or third date) with his work!

Morisot, Manet and Mallarme, Part 3

There are women who seem able to do it all. Whether with the benefits of financial support, psychopharmaceutical aids, or some inherent grace beneath it all, these women can do what the rest of us can not. We may seek to ridicule them, present their hidden anxieties, reveal their personal crises, but in truth, we all know, that some women–in the words of possibly the greatest advertising campaign of all time–just do it.

In Mallarmé's piece on Morisot what becomes most apparent to me is his admiration for her ability to manage so many roles, of which the two most important are clearly her studio time and her social requirements. He sees her as the well-respected painter, the considered and considerate hostess of a Salon, a mother, the sister-in-law to the sometimes difficult Edouard Manet whose paintings also adorned her home, a sister to whom she remained intimate even when her sibling abandoned painting upon marrying, a considerate friend, an avid letter writer (as they all seem to have been! Though I guess we write emails), and, dare I say it, a beautiful home-maker.

Perhaps because we live in such a competitive age, or perhaps because we fear difference after the Social Revolution of the 60s and 70s, whatever the reason we seem disinclined these days to recognize, respect, or revere greatness. Whether in our civic leaders, our friends, or larger peer group, I see a disposition interested in finding the flaw. Is it not obvious that undoubtedly it is there? Is it necessary to highlight it?

I have said nothing here about the quality of Mallarmé's writing most commonly termed obscure because it has been discussed at such length in so many other places. He is notoriously difficult, known to have written his prose then gone back and deleted words so that what remained was a spare, almost terse, presentation of his object of focus. No matter how obscure he might be, however, that he admired her is clear. And he does not hesitate to state all the ways in which she was great. We could perhaps be encouraged to do the same, not necessarily of our immediate circle–who may in truth not be "great" with that in no way diminishing their wonderful and important place in each of our lives, though we likely each know at least one truly great person–but perhaps of those celebrities, politicians, and other luminaries whose lives we permit to have plastered across our screens and papers to feed some longing that we need not indulge.

Some people are great. Let's let them be.

Stepping back

Willa Cather once said though I know not where:

"Beauty is not so plentiful that we can afford to object to stepping back a dozen paces to catch it."

Today, again at the library, working again to know sufficient Italian to pass an upcoming exam, I could not stop myself from taking the time to walk through the Century of Art exhibit at the New York Public Library Schwartzman building on the top floor, the corridor leading to the Rose Reading Room. I felt vaguely guilty, dawdling among the pictures on my way to or from the Women's Room–I really ought to spend each moment translating, vocabulary building–but I could not resist looking at this, then that, liking it more or less with additional viewing time.

So I stepped back a dozen places from my academic activity to notice a work of art, and my life was made more beautiful for that pause. Why should I feel guilty and object to such time spent?

I hope you don't.