Category Archives: Arts and Letters

Arts and Letters, Literature

MondayPoem: The Lie

[div class=attrib]By Robert Pinsky for Slate:[end-div]

Denunciation abounds, in its many forms: snark (was that word invented or fostered in a poem, Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark“?), ranking-out, calling-out, bringing-down, blowing-up, flaming, scorching, trashing, negative campaigning, skepticism, exposure, nailing, shafting, finishing, diminishing, down-blogging. Aggressive moral denunciation—performed with varying degrees of justice and skill in life, in print, on the Web, in politics, on television and radio, in book-reviewing, in sports, in courtrooms and committee meetings—generates dismay and glee in its audience. Sometimes, for many of us, dismay and glee simultaneously, in an uneasy combination.

A basic form of denunciation is indicated by the slightly archaic but useful expression giving the lie.

No one has ever given the lie more memorably, explicitly, and universally than Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) in “The Lie.” The poem, among other things, demonstrates the power of repetition and refrain. The power, too, of plain rather than fancy or arcane words—for example, blabbing.

I remember being enchanted—a bit excessively, I now think—when I first read “The Lie” by a single wonderful image early on: “Say to the court it glows/ And shines like rotten wood.” The mental picture of an opalescent, greenish glow on a moldy softwood plank—that phosphorescent decay—knocked me out (to use an expression from those student days). It was a period when images were highly prized, and my teachers encouraged me to prize images, the deeper the better. Well, though I may have been unreflectingly guided by fashion, at least I had the brains to appreciate this great image of Raleigh’s.

But now that superb rotten wood feels like an incidental or ancillary beauty to me, one moment in a larger force. What propels this poem is not its images but its masterful breaking down of an idea into social and moral components: the brilliant, considered division into hammer-blows of example and refrain while the pace and content vary around that central pulse. “Driving home the point” could not have a more apt demonstration.

Raleigh’s manic, extended thoroughness; his resourceful rhyming; his relentless, wide gaze that takes in love and zeal, wit and wisdom, and, ultimately, also includes his own soul’s “blabbing”—this is form as audible conviction: conviction of a degree and kind attainable only by a poem.

“The Lie”

Go, soul, the body’s guest,
….Upon a thankless arrant;
Fear not to touch the best;
….The truth shall be thy warrant:
….….Go, since I needs must die,
….….And give the world the lie.

Say to the court it glows
….And shines like rotten wood,
Say to the church it shows
….What’s good, and doth no good:
….….If church and court reply,
….….Then give them both the lie.

Tell potentates, they live
….Acting, by others’ action;
Not lov’d unless they give;
….Not strong, but by affection.
….….If potentates reply,
….….Give potentates the lie.

Tell men of high condition,
….That manage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition;
….Their practice only hate.
….….And if they once reply,
….….Then give them all the lie.

Tell them that brave it most,
….They beg for more by spending,
Who in their greatest cost
….Like nothing but commending.
….….And if they make reply,
….….Then give them all the lie.

Tell zeal it wants devotion;
….Tell love it is but lust;
Tell time it meets but motion;
….Tell flesh it is but dust:
….….And wish them not reply,
….….For thou must give the lie.

Tell age it daily wasteth;
….Tell honour how it alters;
Tell beauty how she blasteth;
….Tell favour how it falters:
….….And as they shall reply,
….….Give every one the lie.

Tell wit how much it wrangles
….In tickle points of niceness;
Tell wisdom she entangles
….Herself in over-wiseness:
….….And when they do reply,
….….Straight give them both the lie.

Tell physic of her boldness;
….Tell skill it is prevention;
Tell charity of coldness;
….Tell law it is contention:
….….And as they do reply,
….….So give them still the lie.

Tell fortune of her blindness;
….Tell nature of decay;
Tell friendship of unkindness;
….Tell justice of delay:
….….And if they will reply,
….….Then give them all the lie.

Tell arts they have no soundness,
….But vary by esteeming;
Tell schools they want profoundness,
….And stand too much on seeming.
….….If arts and schools reply,
….….Give arts and schools the lie.

Tell faith it’s fled the city;
….Tell how the country erreth;
Tell manhood, shakes off pity;
….Tell virtue, least preferreth.
….….And if they do reply,
….….Spare not to give the lie.

So when thou hast, as I
….Commanded thee, done blabbing;
Because to give the lie
….Deserves no less than stabbing:
….….Stab at thee, he that will,
….….No stab thy soul can kill!

—Sir Walter Raleigh

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Art, Arts and Letters, tD

Art. Does it have to be BOLD to be good?

The lengthy corridors of art history over the last five hundred years are decorated with numerous bold and monumental works. Just to name a handful of memorable favorites you’ll see a pattern emerge: Guernica (Pablo Picasso), The Persistence of Memory (Salvador Dali), The Dance (Henri Matisse), The Garden of Earthly Delights (Heironymous Bosch). Yes, these works are bold. They’re bold in the sense that they represented a fundamental shift from the artistic sensibilities and ideas of their times. These works stirred the salons and caused commotion among the “cognosenti” and the chattering classes. They implored (or decried) the establishment to take notice of new forms, new messages, new perspectives.

And, now here we are in the 21st century, floating in a bottomless bowl of a bold media soup; 24-hour opinion and hyperbole; oversized interactive billboards, explosive 3D movies, voyeuristic reality TV, garish commercials, sexually charged headlines and suggestive mainstream magazines. The provocative images, the loudness, the vividness, the anger – it’s all bold and it’s vying for your increasingly fragmented and desensitized attention. But, this contemporary boldness seems more aligned with surface brightness and bigness than it is with depth of meaning. The boldness of works by earlier artists such as Picasso, Dali, Bosch came from depth of meaning rather than use of neon paints or other bold visual noise.

So, what of contemporary art over the last couple of decades? Well, a pseudo-scientific tour of half-a-dozen art galleries featuring the in-the-moment works of art may well tell you the same story – it’s mostly bold as well. What’s been selling at the top art auction houses? Bold. What’s been making headlines in the art world? Bold.

The trend is and has been set for a while: it has to be brighter, louder, bigger. Indeed, a recent feature article in the New York Times on the 25th Paris Biennale seems to confirm this trend in Western art. (Background: The Biennale is home to around a hundred of the world’s most exclusive art galleries, those that purport to set the art world’s trends, make or break emerging artists and most importantly (for them) set “market” prices.) The article’s author, Souren Melikian, states:

Perception is changing. Interest in subtle nuances is receding as our attention span shortens. Awareness of this trend probably accounts for the recent art trade emphasis on clarity and monumentality and the striking progression of 20th-century modernity.

Well, I certainly take no issue with the observation that “commercial” art has become much more monumental and less subtle, especially over the last 40 years. By it’s very nature for most art to be successful in today’s market overflowing with noise, distraction and mediocrity it must draw someone’s fragmented and limited attention, and sadly, it does this by being bold, bright or big! However, I strongly disagree that “clarity” is a direct result of this new trend in boldness. I could recite a list as long as my arm of paintings and other art works that show remarkable clarity even though they are merely subtle.

Perhaps paradoxically, brokers and buyers of bold seem exclusively to associate boldness with a statement of modernity, compositional complexity, and layered meaning. The galleries at the Biennale seem to be confusing subtlety with dullness, simplicity and shallowness. Yet, the world is full of an equal number of works that exhibit just as much richness, depth and emotion as their bolder counterparts despite their surface subtlety. There is room for reflection and nuanced mood; there is room for complexity and depth in meaning from simple composition; there is room for pastels in this over-saturated, bold neon world.

As Bob Duggan eloquently states, at BigThink:

The meek, such as 2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright (reviewed recently by me here) may yet inherit the earth, but only in a characteristically quiet way. Hirst’s jewel-encrusted skulls will always grab headlines, but Wright’s simpler, pensive work can engage hearts and minds in a more fulfilling way. And why is it important that the right thing happens and the Wrights win out over the Hirsts? Because art remains one of the few havens for thought in our noise- and light-polluted world.

So, I’m encouraged to see that I am not yet a lost and lone voice in this noisy wilderness of bold brashness. Oh, and in case you’re wondering what a meaningfully complex yet subtle painting looks like, gaze at Half Light by Dana Blanchard above.

Arts and Letters, Literature

MondayPoem: The Chimney Sweeper

[div class=attrib]By Robert Pinsky for Slate:[end-div]

Here is a pair of poems more familiar than many I’ve presented here in the monthly “Classic Poem” feature—familiar, maybe, yet with an unsettling quality that seems inexhaustible. As in much of William Blake’s writing, what I may think I know, he manages to make me wonder if I really do know.

“Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry,” says T.S. Eliot (who has a way of parodying himself even while making wise observations). The truth in Eliot’s remark, for me, has to do not simply with Blake’s indictment of conventional churches, governments, artists but with his general, metaphysical defiance toward customary ways of understanding the universe.

The “unpleasantness of great poetry,” as exemplified by Blake, is rooted in a seductively beautiful process of unbalancing and disrupting. Great poetry gives us elaborately attractive constructions of architecture or music or landscape—while preventing us from settling comfortably into this new and engaging structure, cadence, or terrain. In his Songs of Innocence and Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, Blake achieves a binary, deceptively simple version of that splendid “unpleasantness.”

In particular, the two poems both titled “The Chimney Sweeper” offer eloquent examples of Blake’s unsettling art. (One “Chimney Sweeper” poem comes from the Songs of Innocence; the other, from the Songs of Experience.) I can think to myself that the poem in Songs of Innocence is more powerful than the one in Songs of Experience, because the Innocence characters—both the “I” who speaks and “little Tom Dacre”—provide, in their heartbreaking extremes of acceptance, the more devastating indictment of social and economic arrangements that sell and buy children, sending them to do crippling, fatal labor.

By that light, the Experience poem entitled “The Chimney Sweeper,” explicit and accusatory, can seem a lesser work of art. The Innocence poem is implicit and ironic. Its delusional or deceptive Angel with a bright key exposes religion as exploiting the credulous children, rather than protecting them or rescuing them. The profoundly, utterly “innocent” speaker provides a subversive drama.

But that judgment is unsettled by second thoughts: Does the irony of the Innocence poem affect me all the more—does it penetrate without seeming heavy?—precisely because I am aware of the Experience poem? Do the explicit lines “They clothed me in the clothes of death,/ And taught me to sing the notes of woe” re-enforce the Innocence poem’s meanings—while pointedly differing from, maybe even criticizing, that counterpart-poem’s ironic method? And doesn’t that, too, bring another, significant note of dramatic outrage?

Or, to put it the question more in terms of subject matter, both poems dramatize the way religion, government, and custom collaborate in social arrangements that impose cruel treatment on some people while enhancing the lives of others (for example, by cleaning their chimneys). Does the naked, declarative quality of the Experience poem sharpen my understanding of the Innocence poem? Does the pairing hold back or forbid my understanding’s tendency to become self-congratulatory or pleasantly resolved? It is in the nature of William Blake’s genius to make such questions not just literary but moral.

“The Chimney Sweeper,” from Songs of Innocence

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ” ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!’ ”
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved: so I said,
“Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”

And so he was quiet, & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind.
And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

—William Blake

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Arts and Letters, Literature

MondayPoem: Upon Nothing

[div class=attrib]By Robert Pinsky for Slate:[end-div]

The quality of wit, like the Hindu god Shiva, both creates and destroys—sometimes, both at once: The flash of understanding negates a trite or complacent way of thinking, and that stroke of obliteration at the same time creates a new form of insight and a laugh of recognition.

Also like Shiva, wit dances. Leaping gracefully, balancing speed and poise, it can re-embody and refresh old material. Negation itself, for example—verbal play with words like nothing and nobody: In one of the oldest jokes in literature, when the menacing Polyphemus asks Odysseus for his name, Odysseus tricks the monster by giving his name as the Greek equivalent of Nobody.

Another, immensely moving version of that Homeric joke (it may have been old even when Homer used it) is central to the best-known song of the great American comic Bert Williams (1874-1922). You can hear Williams’ funny, heart-rending, subtle rendition of the song (music by Williams, lyrics by Alex Rogers) at the University of California’s Cylinder Preservation and Digitization site.

The lyricist Rogers, I suspect, was aided by Williams’ improvisations as well as his virtuoso delivery. The song’s language is sharp and plain. The plainness, an almost throw-away surface, allows Williams to weave the refrain-word “Nobody” into an intricate fabric of jaunty pathos, savage lament, sly endurance—all in three syllables, with the dialect bent and stretched and released:

When life seems full of clouds and rain,
And I am full of nothing and pain,
Who soothes my thumpin’, bumpin’ brain?
Nobody.

When winter comes with snow and sleet,
And me with hunger, and cold feet—
Who says, “Here’s twenty-five cents
Go ahead and get yourself somethin’ to eat”?
Nobody.

I ain’t never done nothin’ to Nobody.
I ain’t never got nothin’ from Nobody, no time.
And, until I get somethin’ from somebody sometime,
I’ll never do nothin’ for Nobody, no time.

In his poem “Upon Nothing,” John Wilmot (1647-80), also known as the earl of Rochester, deploys wit as a flashing blade of skepticism, slashing away not only at a variety of human behaviors and beliefs, not only at false authorities and hollow reverences, not only at language, but at knowledge—at thought itself:

“Upon Nothing”

………………………1
Nothing, thou elder brother ev’n to Shade
Thou hadst a being ere the world was made,
And, well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid.

………………………2
Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united What.

………………………3
Something, the general attribute of all,
Severed from thee, its sole original,
Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall.

………………………4
Yet Something did thy mighty power command,
And from thy fruitful emptiness’s hand
Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, water, air, and land.

………………………5
Matter, the wicked’st offspring of thy race,
By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace
And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face.

………………………6
With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join,
Body, thy foe, with these did leagues combine
To spoil thy peaceful realm and ruin all thy line.

………………………7
But turncoat Time assists the foe in vain,
And bribed by thee destroys their short-lived reign,
And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again.

………………………8
Though mysteries are barred from laic eyes,
And the divine alone with warrant pries
Into thy bosom, where thy truth in private lies;

………………………9
Yet this of thee the wise may truly say:
Thou from the virtuous nothing doest delay,
And to be part of thee the wicked wisely pray.

………………………10
Great Negative, how vainly would the wise
Enquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise,
Didst thou not stand to point their blind philosophies.

………………………11
Is or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate,
And true or false, the subject of debate,
That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state;

………………………12
When they have racked the politician’s breast,
Within thy bosom most securely rest,
And when reduced to thee are least unsafe, and best.

………………………13
But, Nothing, why does Something still permit
That sacred monarchs should at council sit
With persons highly thought, at best, for nothing fit;

………………………14
Whilst weighty something modestly abstains
From princes’ coffers, and from Statesmen’s brains,
And nothing there, like stately Nothing reigns?

………………………15
Nothing, who dwell’st with fools in grave disguise,
For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise,
Lawn-sleeves, and furs, and gowns, when they like thee look wise.

………………………16
French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy,
Hibernian learning, Scotch civility,
Spaniards’ dispatch, Danes’ wit, are mainly seen in thee.

………………………17
The great man’s gratitude to his best friend,
Kings’ promises, whores’ vows, towards thee they bend,
Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Art, Arts and Letters, tD

A beautiful and dangerous idea: art that sells itself

Artist Caleb Larsen seems to have the right idea. Rather than relying on the subjective wants and needs of galleries and the dubious nature of the secondary art market (and some equally dubious auctioneers) his art sells itself.

His work, entitled “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter”, is an 8-inch opaque, black acrylic cube. But while the exterior may be simplicity itself, the interior holds a fascinating premise. The cube is connected to the internet. In fact, it’s connected to eBay, where through some hidden hardware and custom programming it constantly auctions itself.

As Caleb Larsen describes,

Combining Robert Morris’ Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard’s writing on the art auction this sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay.

Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the ebay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.

If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.

The purchase agreement on eBay is quite rigorous, including stipulations such as: the buyer must keep the artwork connected to the interent at all times with disconnections allowed only for the transportation; upon purchase the artwork must be reauctioned; failure to follow all terms of the agreement forfeits the status of the artwork as a genuine work of art.

The artist was also smart enough to gain a slice of the secondary market, by requiring each buyer to return to the artist 15 percent of the appreciated value from each sale. Christie’s and Sotheby’s eat your hearts out.

Besides trying to put auctioneers out of work, the artist has broader intentions in mind, particularly when viewed alongside his larger body of work. The piece goes to the heart of the “how” and the “why” of the art market. By placing the artwork in a constant state of transactional fluidity – it’s never permanently in the hands of its new owner – it forces us to question the nature of art in relation to its market and the nature of collecting. The work can never without question be owned and collected since it is always possible that someone else will come along, enter the auction and win. Though, the first “owner” of the piece states that this was part of the appeal. Terence Spies, a California collector attests,

I had a really strong reaction right after I won the auction. I have this thing, and I really want to keep it, but the reason I want to keep it is that it might leave… The process of the piece really gets to some of the reasons why you might be collecting art in the first place.

Now of course, owning anything is transient. The Egyptian pharaohs tried taking their possessions into the “afterlife” but even to this day are being constantly thwarted by tomb-raiders and archeologists. Perhaps to some the chase, the process of collecting, is the goal, rather than owning the art itself. As I believe Caleb Larsen intended, he’s really given me something to ponder. How different, really, is it to own this self-selling art versus wandering through the world’s museums and galleries to “own” a Picasso or Warhol or Monet for 5 minutes? Ironically, our works live on, and it is we who are transient. So I think Caleb Larsen’s title for the work should be taken tongue in cheek, for it is we who are deceiving ourselves.

Art, Arts and Letters

Art world swoons over Romania’s homeless genius

[div class=attrib]From The Guardian:[end-div]

The guests were chic, the bordeaux was sipped with elegant restraint and the hostess was suitably glamorous in a ­canary yellow cocktail dress. To an outside observer who made it past the soirée privée sign on the door of the Anne de Villepoix gallery on Thursday night, it would have seemed the quintessential Parisian art viewing.

Yet that would been leaving one ­crucial factor out of the equation: the man whose creations the crowd had come to see. In his black cowboy hat and pressed white collar, Ion Barladeanu looked every inch the established artist as he showed guests around the exhibition. But until 2007 no one had ever seen his work, and until mid-2008 he was living in the rubbish tip of a Bucharest tower block.

Today, in the culmination of a dream for a Romanian who grew up adoring Gallic film stars and treasures a miniature Eiffel Tower he once found in a bin, ­Barladeanu will see his first French exhibition open to the general public.

Dozens of collages he created from scraps of discarded magazines during and after the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu are on sale for more than €1,000 (£895) each. They are being hailed as politically brave and culturally irreverent.

For the 63-year-old artist, the journey from the streets of Bucharest to the galleries of Europe has finally granted him recognition. “I feel as if I have been born again,” he said, as some of France’s leading collectors and curators jostled for position to see his collages. “Now I feel like a prince. A pauper can become a prince. But he can go back to being a pauper too.”

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Arts and Letters, Literature

The Chess Master and the Computer

[div class=attrib]By Gary Kasparov, From the New York Review of Books:[end-div]

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.

It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn’t come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the “Kasparov” brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess.

Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts—and doubled Deep Blue’s processing power—and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer. (“The Brain’s Last Stand” read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world.

It was the specialists—the chess players and the programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts—who had a more nuanced appreciation of the result. Grandmasters had already begun to see the implications of the existence of machines that could play—if only, at this point, in a select few types of board configurations—with godlike perfection. The computer chess people were delighted with the conquest of one of the earliest and holiest grails of computer science, in many cases matching the mainstream media’s hyperbole. The 2003 book Deep Blue by Monty Newborn was blurbed as follows: “a rare, pivotal watershed beyond all other triumphs: Orville Wright’s first flight, NASA’s landing on the moon….”

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Arts and Letters, Literature

MondayPoem: Michelangelo’s Labor Pains

[div class=attrib]By Robert Pinsky for Slate:[end-div]

After a certain point, reverence can become automatic. Our admiration for great works of art can get a bit reflexive, then synthetic, then can harden into a pious coating that repels real attention. Michelangelo’s painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican might be an example of such automatic reverence. Sometimes, a fresh look or a hosing-down is helpful—if only by restoring the meaning of “work” to the phrase “work of art.”

Michelangelo (1475-1564) himself provides a refreshing dose of reality. A gifted poet as well as a sculptor and painter, he wrote energetically about despair, detailing with relish the unpleasant side of his work on the famous ceiling. The poem, in Italian, is an extended (or “tailed”) sonnet, with a coda of six lines appended to the standard 14. The translation I like best is by the American poet Gail Mazur. Her lines are musical but informal, with a brio conveying that the Italian artist knew well enough that he and his work were great—but that he enjoyed vigorously lamenting his discomfort, pain, and inadequacy to the task. No wonder his artistic ideas are bizarre and no good, says Michelangelo: They must come through the medium of his body, that “crooked blowpipe” (Mazur’s version of “cerbottana torta“). Great artist, great depression, great imaginative expression of it. This is a vibrant, comic, but heartfelt account of the artist’s work:

Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia
“When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel” —1509

I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water’s poison).
My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine’s
all knotted from folding over itself.
I’m bent taut as a Syrian bow.

Because I’m stuck like this, my thoughts
are crazy, perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.

My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Art, Arts and Letters

For Expatriates in China, Creative Lives of Plenty

[div class=attrib]From The New York Times:[end-div]

THERE was a chill in the morning air in 2005 when dozens of artists from China, Europe and North America emerged from their red-brick studios here to find the police blocking the gates to Suojiacun, their compound on the city’s outskirts. They were told that the village of about 100 illegally built structures was to be demolished, and were given two hours to pack.

By noon bulldozers were smashing the walls of several studios, revealing ripped-apart canvases and half-glazed clay vases lying in the rubble. But then the machines ceased their pulverizing, and the police dispersed, leaving most of the buildings unscathed. It was not the first time the authorities had threatened to evict these artists, nor would it be the last. But it was still frightening.

“I had invested everything in my studio,” said Alessandro Rolandi, a sculptor and performance artist originally from Italy who had removed his belongings before the destruction commenced. “I was really worried about my work being destroyed.”

He eventually left Suojiacun, but he has remained in China. Like the artists’ colony, the country offers challenges, but expatriates here say that the rewards outweigh the hardships. Mr. Rolandi is one of many artists (five are profiled here) who have left the United States and Europe for China, seeking respite from tiny apartments, an insular art world and nagging doubts about whether it’s best to forgo art for a reliable office job. They have discovered a land of vast creative possibility, where scale is virtually limitless and costs are comically low. They can rent airy studios, hire assistants, experiment in costly mediums like bronze and fiberglass.

“Today China has become one of the most important places to create and invent,” said Jérôme Sans, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. “A lot of Western artists are coming here to live the dynamism and make especially crazy work they could never do anywhere else in the world.”

Rania Ho

A major challenge for foreigners, no matter how fluent or familiar with life here, is that even if they look like locals, it is virtually impossible to feel truly of this culture. For seven years Rania Ho, the daughter of Chinese immigrants born and raised in San Francisco, has lived in Beijing, where she runs a small gallery in a hutong, or alley, near one of the city’s main temples. “Being Chinese-American makes it easier to be an observer of what’s really happening because I’m camouflaged,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean I understand any more what people are thinking.”

Still, Ms. Ho, 40, revels in her role as outsider in a society that she says is blindly enthusiastic about remaking itself. She creates and exhibits work by both foreign and Chinese artists that often plays with China’s fetishization of mechanized modernity.

Because she lives so close to military parades and futuristic architecture, she said that her own pieces — like a water fountain gushing on the roof of her gallery and a cardboard table that levitates a Ping-Pong ball — chuckle at the “hypnotic properties of unceasing labor.” She said they are futile responses to the absurd experiences she shares with her neighbors, who are constantly seeing their world transform before their eyes. “Being in China forces one to reassess everything,” she said, “which is at times difficult and exhausting, but for a majority of the time it’s all very amusing and enlightening.”

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Arts and Letters, Literature

MondayPoem: Adam’s Curse

[div class=attrib]By Robert Pinsky for Slate:[end-div]

Poetry can resemble incantation, but sometimes it also resembles conversation. Certain poems combine the two—the cadences of speech intertwined with the forms of song in a varying way that heightens the feeling. As in a screenplay or in fiction, the things that people in a poem say can seem natural, even spontaneous, yet also work to propel the emotional action along its arc.

The casual surface of speech and the inward energy of art have a clear relation in “Adam’s Curse” by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). A couple and their friend are together at the end of a summer day. In the poem, two of them speak, first about poetry and then about love. All of the poem’s distinct narrative parts—the setting, the dialogue, the stunning and unspoken conclusion—are conveyed in the strict form of rhymed couplets throughout. I have read the poem many times, for many years, and every time, something in me is hypnotized by the dance of sentence and rhyme. Always, in a certain way, the conclusion startles me. How can the familiar be somehow surprising? It seems to be a principle of art; and in this case, the masterful, unshowy rhyming seems to be a part of it. The couplet rhyme profoundly drives and tempers the gradually gathering emotional force of the poem in ways beyond analysis.

Yeats’ dialogue creates many nuances of tone. It is even a little funny at times: The poet’s self-conscious self-pity about how hard he works (he does most of the talking) is exaggerated with a smile, and his categories for the nonpoet or nonmartyr “world” have a similar, mildly absurd sweeping quality: bankers, schoolmasters, clergymen … This is not wit, exactly, but the slightly comical tone friends might use sitting together on a summer evening. I hear the same lightness of touch when the woman says, “Although they do not talk of it at school.” The smile comes closest to laughter when the poet in effect mocks himself gently, speaking of those lovers who “sigh and quote with learned looks/ Precedents out of beautiful old books.” The plain monosyllables of “old books” are droll in the context of these lovers. (Yeats may feel that he has been such a lover in his day.)

The plainest, most straightforward language in the poem, in some ways, comes at the very end—final words, not uttered in the conversation, are more private and more urgent than what has come before. After the almost florid, almost conventionally poetic description of the sunset, the courtly hint of a love triangle falls away. The descriptive language of the summer twilight falls away. The dialogue itself falls away—all yielding to the idea that this concluding thought is “only for your ears.” That closing passage of interior thoughts, what in fiction might be called “omniscient narration,” makes the poem feel, to me, as though not simply heard but overheard.

“Adam’s Curse”

We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, “A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.”

And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, “To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.”
I said, “It’s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.”

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

[div class=atrrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Art, Arts and Letters, tD

L’Aquila: The other casualty

18th-century Church of Santa Maria del Suffragio. Image courtesy of The New York Times.The earthquake in central Italy last week zeroed in on the beautiful medieval hill town of L’Aquila. It claimed the lives of 294 young and old, injured several thousand more, and made tens of thousands homeless. This is a heart-wrenching human tragedy. It’s also a cultural one. The quake razed centuries of L’Aquila’s historical buildings, broke the foundations of many of the town’s churches and public spaces, destroyed countless cultural artifacts, and forever buried much of the town’s irreplaceable art under tons of twisted iron and fractured stone.

Like many small and lesser known towns in Italy, L?Aquila did not boast a roster of works by ?a-list? artists on its walls, ceilings and piazzas; no Michelangelos or Da Vincis here, no works by Giotto or Raphael. And yet, the cultural loss is no less significant, for the quake destroyed much of the common art that the citizens of L?Aquila shared as a social bond. It?s the everyday art that they passed on their way to home or school or work; the fountains in the piazzas, the ornate porticos, the painted building facades, the hand-carved doors, the marble statues on street corners, the frescoes and paintings by local artists hanging on the ordinary walls. It?s this everyday art – the art that surrounded and nourished the citizens of L?Aquila – that is gone.

New York Times columnist, Michael Kimmelman put it this way in his April 11, 2009 article:

Italy is not like America. Art isn?t reduced here to a litany of obscene auction prices or lamentations over the bursting bubble of shameless excess. It?s a matter of daily life, linking home and history. Italians don?t visit museums much, truth be told, because they already live in them and can?t live without them. The art world might retrieve a useful lesson from the rubble.

I don’t fully agree with Mr.Kimmelman. There’s plenty of excess and pretentiousness in the salons of Paris, London and even Beijing and Mumbai, not just the serious art houses of New York. And yet, he has accurately observed the plight of L’Aquila. How often have you seen people confronted with the aftermath of a natural (or manmade) tragedy sifting through the remains, looking for a precious artifact – a sentimental photo, a memorable painting, a meaningful gift. These tragic situations often make people realize what is truly precious (aside from life and family and friends), and it’s not the plasma TV.
Arts and Letters, Literature

Why I Blog

[div class=attrib]By Andrew Sullivan for the Altantic[end-div]

The word blog is a conflation of two words: Web and log. It contains in its four letters a concise and accurate self-description: it is a log of thoughts and writing posted publicly on the World Wide Web. In the monosyllabic vernacular of the Internet, Web log soon became the word blog.

This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.

A ship’s log owes its name to a small wooden board, often weighted with lead, that was for centuries attached to a line and thrown over the stern. The weight of the log would keep it in the same place in the water, like a provisional anchor, while the ship moved away. By measuring the length of line used up in a set period of time, mariners could calculate the speed of their journey (the rope itself was marked by equidistant “knots” for easy measurement). As a ship’s voyage progressed, the course came to be marked down in a book that was called a log.

In journeys at sea that took place before radio or radar or satellites or sonar, these logs were an indispensable source for recording what actually happened. They helped navigators surmise where they were and how far they had traveled and how much longer they had to stay at sea. They provided accountability to a ship’s owners and traders. They were designed to be as immune to faking as possible. Away from land, there was usually no reliable corroboration of events apart from the crew’s own account in the middle of an expanse of blue and gray and green; and in long journeys, memories always blur and facts disperse. A log provided as accurate an account as could be gleaned in real time.

As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Art, Arts and Letters, tD

What is art? The answer, from a little bird?

I’ve been pondering a concrete answer to this question, and others like it for some time. I do wonder “what is art?” and “what is great art?” and “what distinguishes fine art from its non-fine cousins?” and “what makes some art better than other art?”

In formulating my answers to these questions I’ve been looking inward and searching outward. I’ve been digesting the musings of our great philosophers and eminent scholars and authors. I’m close to penning some blog-worthy articles that crystallize my current thinking on the subject, but I’m not quite ready. Not yet. So, in the meantime you and I will have to make do with deep thoughts on the subject of art from some of my friends…

[youtube]pDo_vs3Aip4[/youtube]

Art, Arts and Letters, tD

The Vogels. Or, how to become a world class art collector on a postal clerk’s salary

I’m missing Art Basel | Miami this year. Last year’s event and surrounding shows displayed so much contemporary (and some modern) art, from so many artists and galleries that my head was buzzing for days afterward. This year I have our art251 gallery to co-run, so I’ve been visiting Art Basel virtually – reading the press releases, following the exhibitors and tuning in to the podcasts and vids, using the great tubes of the internet.

The best story by far to emerge this year from Art Basel | Miami is the continuing odyssey of Herb and Dorothy Vogel, their passion for contemporary art and their outstanding collection. On December 5, the documentary “Herb and Dorothy” was screened at Art Basel’s Art Loves Film night. And so their real-life art fairytale goes something like this…

[youtube]fMuYV_qvyEk[/youtube]

Over the last 40-plus years they have amassed a cutting-edge, world-class collection of contemporary art. In all they have collected around 4,000 works. Over time they have crammed art into every spare inch of space inside their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. In 1992 they gave around 2,000 important pieces – paintings, drawings and sculptures – to the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. Then, in April of this year the National Gallery announced that an additional 2,500 of Vogels’ artworks would go to museums across the country: fifty works for fifty States. The National Gallery simply didn’t have enough space to house the Vogel’s immense collection.

So, why is this story so compelling?

Well, it’s compelling because they are just like you and me. They are not super-rich, they have no condo in Aspen, nor do they moor a yacht in Monte Carlo. They’re not hedge fund managers. They didn’t make a fortune before the dot.com bubble burst.

Herb Vogel, 86, is a retired postal clerk and Dorothy Vogel, 76, a retired librarian. They started collecting art in the 1960s and continue to this day. Their plan was simple and guided by two rules: the art had to be affordable, and small enough to fit in their apartment. Early on they decided to use Herb’s income for buying art, and Dorothy’s to paying living expenses. Though now retired they still follow the plan. They collect art because they love art and finding new art. In Dorothy’s words,

“We didn’t buy this art to make money… We did it to enjoy the art. And you know, it gives you a nice feeling to actually own it, and have it about you. … We started buying art for ourselves, in the 1960s, and from the beginning we chose carefully.”

More telling is Dorothy’s view of the art world, and the New York art scene:

“We never really got close to other people who collect… Most collectors have a lot of money, and they don’t go about their collecting in quite the same way. My husband had wanted to be an artist, and I learned from him. We were living vicariously through the work of every artist we bought. At some point, we realized that collecting this art was a sort of creative act. It became our art, in more ways than one. … I enjoyed the search, I guess. The looking and the finding. When you go to a store, and you’re searching for your size, don’t you get satisfaction when you find it?”

And Herb adds the final words:

“The art itself.”

So, within their modest means and limitations they have proved to be visionaries; many of the artists they supported early on have since become world-renowned. And, they have taken their rightful place among the great art collectors of the world, such as Getty and Rockefeller, and Broad and Saatchi. The Vogels used their limitations to their advantage – helping them focus, rather than being a hinderance. Above all, they used their eyes to find and collect great art, not their ears.

Arts and Letters, Literature

Why has manga become a global cultural product?

[div class=attrib]From Eurozine:[end-div]

In the West, manga has become a key part of the cultural accompaniment to economic globalization. No mere side-effect of Japan’s economic power, writes Jean-Marie Bouissou, manga is ideally suited to the cultural obsessions of the early twenty-first century.

Multiple paradoxes

Paradox surrounds the growth of manga in western countries such as France, Italy and the USA since the 1970s, and of genres descended from it: anime (cartoons), television serials and video games. The first parodox is that, whereas western countries have always imagined their culture and values as universal and sought to spread them (if only as cover for their imperial ambitions), Japan has historically been sceptical about sharing its culture with the world. The Shinto religion, for example, is perhaps unique in being strictly “national”: the very idea of a “Shintoist” foreigner would strike the Japanese as absurd.

The second paradox is that manga, in the form it has taken since 1945, is shot through with a uniquely Japanese historical experience. It depicts the trauma of a nation opened at gunpoint in 1853 by the “black ships” of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, frog-marched into modernity, and dragged into a contest with the West which ended in the holocaust of Hiroshima. It was this nation’s children – call them “Generation Tezuka” – who became the first generation of mangaka [manga creators]. They had seen their towns flattened by US bombers, their fathers defeated, their emperor stripped of his divinity, and their schoolbooks and the value-system they contained cast into the dustbin of history.

This defeated nation rebuilt itself through self-sacrificing effort and scarcely twenty years later had become the second economic power of the free world. Yet it received neither recognition (the 1980s were the years of “Japan-bashing” in the West), nor the security to which it aspired, before its newly-regained pride was crushed once more by the long crisis of the 1990s. Such a trajectory – unique, convulsive, dramatic, overshadowed by racial discrimination – differs radically from that of the old European powers, or that of young, triumphant America. Hence, it is all the more stunning that its collective imagination has spawned a popular culture capable of attaining “universality”.

At the start of the twenty-first century, Japan has become the world’s second largest exporter of cultural products. Manga has conquered 45 per cent of the French comic market, and Shonen Jump – the most important manga weekly for Japanese teenagers, whose circulation reached 6 million during the mid-1990s – has begun appearing in an American version. Manga, long considered fit only for children or poorly-educated youths, is starting to seduce a sophisticated generation of French thirty-somethings. This deserves an explanation.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of readbestmanga.[end-div]

Art, Arts and Letters, tD

Artists beware! You may be outsourced next to…

China perhaps, or even a dog!

15jul08-tilamook.jpg

As you know, a vast amount of global manufacturing is outsourced to China. In fact, a fair deal of so-called “original” art now comes from China as well, where art factories of “copyworkers” are busy reproducing works by old masters or, for a few extra Yuan, originals in this or that particular style. For instance, the city of Dafen, China manufactures more “Van Goghs” in a couple of weeks than the real Van Gogh created in his entire lifetime. Dafen produces some great bargains — $2 for an unframed old master, $3 for a custom version (prices before enormous markup) — if you like to buy your art by the square foot.

You’ve probably also seen miscellaneous watercolors emanating from talented elephants in Thailand, the late Congo’s tempera paintings auctioned at Bonhams, or the German artist chimpanzee who, with her handlers, recently fooled an expert into believing her work was that of Ernst Wilhelm Nay.

Well, now comes a second biography of Tilamook Cheddar, or Tillie, the most successful animal painter in the history of, well, animal painters. Tillie, a Jack Russell terrier from Brooklyn, NY, has been painting for around 7 years, and has headlined 17 solo shows across the country and in Europe.

Despite these somewhat disturbing developments, I think artists will be around for some time. But, what about gallerists and art dealers? Could you see the Toshiba robot or a couple of (smart) lab rats or an Art-o-mat replacing your friendly gallery owners? Please don’t answer this one!

Portrait of The Dog. Image courtesy of T.Cheddar.

Art, Arts and Letters

Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82

[div class=attrib]From The New York Times:[end-div]

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan gallery that represents Mr. Rauschenberg.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged, during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture.

Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated.

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a St. Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.

A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky, small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations.

Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, off southwest Florida, these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on one that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he felt, and risk sometimes meant failure.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”

He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Mr. Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.”

A Wry, Respectful Departure

That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.

But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 1950s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.

At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.

Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.

There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” (1955) was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric akin to bandages, from which paint dripped like blood. “Interview” (1955), which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photos of bullfighters, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.

There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected sites; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” (1955-59) and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

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Art, Arts and Letters

Art Review | ‘Color as Field’: Weightless Color, Floating Free

[div class=attrib]From The New York Times:[end-div]

Starting in the late 1950s the great American art critic Clement Greenberg only had eyes for Color Field painting. This was the lighter-than-air abstract style, with its emphasis on stain painting and visual gorgeousness introduced by Helen Frankenthaler followed by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.

With the insistent support of Greenberg and his acolytes, Color Field soared as the next big, historically inevitable thing after Jackson Pollock. Then over the course of the 1970s it crashed and burned and dropped from sight. Pop and Minimal Art, which Greenberg disparaged, had more diverse critical support and greater influence on younger artists. Then Post-Minimalism came along, exploding any notion of art’s neatly linear progression.

Now Color Field painting — or as Greenberg preferred to call it, Post-Painterly Abstraction — is being reconsidered in a big way in “Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975,” a timely, provocative — if far from perfect — exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum here. It has been organized by the American Federation of Arts and selected by the independent curator and critic Karen Wilkin. She and Carl Belz, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, have written essays for the catalog.

It is wonderful to see some of this work float free of the Greenbergian claims for greatness and inevitability (loyally retraced by Ms. Wilkin in her essay), and float it does, at least the best of it. The exhibition begins with the vista of Mr. Olitski’s buoyant, goofily sexy “Cleopatra Flesh” of 1962, looming at the end of a long hallway. The work sums up the fantastic soft power that these artists could elicit from brilliant color, scale and judicious amounts of pristine raw canvas. A huge blue motherly curve nearly encircles a large black planet while luring a smaller red planet into the fold, calling to mind an abstracted stuffed toy.

It is a perfect, exhilarating example of what Mr. Belz calls “one-shot painting” and likens to jazz improvisation. Basic to the thrill is our understanding that the stain painting technique involved a few rapid skilled but unrehearsed gestures, and that raw canvas offered no chance for revision. “Cleopatra’s Flesh” is an act of joyful derring-do.

The “one-shot painting” stain technique of color field was the innovation of Helen Frankenthaler, first accomplished in “Mountains and Sea,” made in 1952, when she was 24 and unknown. (It is not in this exhibition, but the method is conveyed by her 1957 “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” with its great gray splashes punctuated by peninsulas of red, yellow and blue.) The technique negotiated a common ground between Pollock’s heroic no-brush drip style and the expanses of saturated color favored especially by Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

In Greenberg’s eyes the torch of Abstract Expressionism (the cornerstone of his power as a critic) was being carried forward by Ms. Frankenthaler’s spirited reformulation, followed by Mr. Louis’s languid pours; Mr. Noland’s radiant targets; Mr. Olitski’s carefully controlled stains and (later) diaphanous sprayed surfaces. And this continuity confirmed the central premise of Greenbergian formalism: that all modern art mediums would be meekly reduced to their essences; for painting that meant abstractness, flatness and weightless color. As you can imagine, that didn’t leave anyone, not even the anointed few, with much to do.

Revisionist this show is not. Its 38 canvases represent 17 painters, including a selection of works by Abstract Expressionist precursors titled “Origins of Color Field.” The elders tend to look as light and jazzy as their juniors; Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hoffman and Robert Motherwell, all present, were ultimately as much a part of Color Field as Abstract Expressionism. But even Newman’s “Horizontal Light” of 1949 seems undeniably flashy; its field of dark red is split by a narrow aqua band, called a zip, that seems to speed across the canvas. Rothko’s 1951 “Number 18,” with its shifting borders and cloud-squares of white, red and pink, has a cheerful, scintillating forthrightness.

This forthrightness expands into dazzling instantaneousness in the works of Ms. Frankenthaler and Mr. Louis, where it sometimes seems that the paint is still wet and seeping into the canvas. Ms. Frankenthaler’s high-wire act is especially evident in the jagged pools and terraces of color in the aptly titled “Flood” and in “Interior Landscape,” which centers on a single, exuberant splash. Mr. Louis manages a similar tension while seeming completely relaxed. In “Floral V,” where an inky black washes like a wave over a bouquet of brilliantly colored plumes, he achieves a silent grandeur, like a Frankenthaler with the sound off.

After the Frankenthaler and Louis works, this show dwindles into a subdued free-for-all, as most artists settle into more predetermined ways of working. Often big scale and simple composition add up to emptiness, especially when the signs of derring-do recede. Both Mr. Olitski and especially Mr. Noland are poorly represented. In Mr. Noland’s square “Space Jog,” Newman’s zips run perpendicular to one another, forming a pastel plaid on a sprayed ground of sky blue, like a Mondrian bed sheet.

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Art, Arts and Letters

Suprealist art, suprealist life

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Suprealism is a “movement” pioneered by Leonard Lapin that combines suprematism and realism; it mirrors the “suprealist world”, where art is packaged for consumer culture.

In 1993, when I started the suprealist phase of my work, which was followed by the “Suprealist manifesto” and the exhibition at Vaal gallery in Tallinn, a prominent art critic proclaimed that it represented the “hara-kiri of the old avant-garde”. A decade has passed, and the “old avant-gardist” and his suprealism are still alive and kicking, while, as if following my prophecy, life and its cultural representations have become more and more suprealist.

The term “suprealism” emerged quite naturally: its first half originates from the “suprematism” of the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde, which claimed to represent the highest form of being, abandoning Earth and conquering space. The other half relates to the familiar, dogmatically imposed “realism”, which was the only officially tolerated style under communist rule. Initially, I attempted to bring to the concept the structures of high art and images from mass culture. The most popular domain which attracted most attention was of course pornography. During my 1996 exhibition at the Latvian Museum of Foreign Art, in Riga, the exhibition room containing 30 of my “pornographical works” was closed. There were similar incidents in Bristol, where some of my pieces were censored, not to speak about angry reactions in Estonia. It is remarkable that it is art that highlights what is otherwise hypocritically hidden behind cellophane in news kiosks. But nobody is dismantling the kiosks – the rage is directed at an artist’s exhibition.

An important event in the history of suprealism happened in 2001, when the Estonian Art Museum held an exhibition on the anniversary of the nineteenth-century Estonian academic painter Johan Köler. The exhibition was advertised with posters representing Köler’s sugary painting “A maid at a well”, sometimes ten times the size of the original. Since during the Soviet rule, Köler was officially turned into a predecessor of socialist realism, our generation has a complex and ambiguous relationship with this master. When the 2001 exhibition repeated the old stereotypical clichés about the artist, I expressed my disappointment by relating the exhibition posters to modern commercial packaging, advertisements, and catalogues. It was the starting point of the series “Suprealist artists”, which I am still continuing, using cheap reproductions of classical and modern art and packages, puzzles, flyers, ads, and so on, belonging to the contemporary consumer world. I use them to make new visual structures for the new century.

The “rape of art” as an advertising method is becoming more and more visible: many famous twentieth-century modernists are used in some way in advertising, which brings the images of Dali, Magritte, or Picasso to the consuming masses.

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