JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

On the Charlie Rose show the curators involved in a recent show of Matisse’s work focused on little known work. Curators work from the outside in — with rare exceptions, such as the late Kirk Varnedoe, who seemed to ingest the work he discussed. But most often you get lots of detailed information about the physical work and historical context, but don’t quite understand how the mainstream art bureaucracy values the work, or why. Contemporary art, like contemporary science, often needs a well-wrought bridge to the public.

Art is one area where “this means that” just doesn’t work — even though that simple symbolism is what is taught in universities by indirection; or the artist’s relations to the power structure. Curatorial discussion can often sound as shallowly partisan and mechanically tendentious as docent lectures. But these curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield, had some nuance; their discussion shed light on the context of the work both historically and on Matisse’s thinking, and thus expressed by indirection their love for the Matisse’s work.

From an artist’s perspective the work under review reveals its true nature without technocratic or historical intrusion: it is clearly transitional work, aware of itself as such, but choosing to present itself in the main tent. Rather than an artist working out the many issues involved in creating an image in his/her studio, away from the public, Matisse chose to let it all hang out. The subject of his work was the ambivalence of the expressive act, particularly evident in these very complex works shown on Rose’s show.

Matisse’s work, deceptively brilliant in its daring, not only in its historically significant transition to the graphical — a crude surface indicator — but in the way he used the graphical (a building of planes rather than of forms); graphical work had before been seen as purely decorative but Matisse used the flat areas of his paintings to express ambiguity. He incorporated decorative defaults as a subtle disjunction. Faces were sometimes depicted flat, without features, or with generic features, and this might seem not much, but they are a daring and dramatic assertion for an audience expecting realism.

A courageous decision and a trusting approach to the audience rather than the often seen, smug winking at shared assumptions between artist and viewer, often seen in contemporary work. In contemporary art there is much that seems clubby, obscure for its own sake, derivative of idea, referential if it is to have any meaning, or ingratiating in its pop cultural references (not trusting the viewer’s serious side). Matisse was principally an aesthetic artist, even though his gnomic written pronouncements often were impressively insightful. Matisse was a bright man. The paradigmatic quality of Matisse’s work is his intelligence; in Picasso’s work it is the very force of the creative — a seeming force of nature inhabiting Picasso’s work.

Here are some updated iBookstore links (currently available or soon to be):

iPad Sketchbook

Legends of Ghost Island, Book One

Drawing on Walls

Creative Quotations, Stillness in the Midst of Chaos

Five Stories About Things

25 Secrets of the Muse: A Book of Creative Strategies

A Curmudgeon’s Bestiary

Ancient World

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These links will have a permanent home in the sidebar.

This online dialog is one that needs to be listened to a second time. Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics, describes with amazing simplicity and clarity, the complex and counter intuitive perspective of an individual physicist about the nature of the world.

One reason science is so interesting to philosophers is that it overlaps so many first principles. Wilczek said so many things that require mulling over; here are some that particularly interested me:

He noted that the world seems to be built on a predisposition to symmetry. He says that reality suggests an ultimate simplicity. This is much more in harmony with Einstein’s search for a Theory of Everything than the endlessly cascading String theories.

He pointed out that one paradigm shift in physics is the perception that light rather than matter is the basic building material of reality. He says that physical reality seems to evolve from light as the foundationalist property.

He describes the Higgs boson not, as I had heard, as an entity that provides mass, but rather as a medium, as the ether. I had thought the ether was a phantasm of 19th century science, but it turns out that what they are looking for @CERN in the “search for the Higgs” is a medium that affects all that it touches. Which would be the universe. That is, they suspect the Higgs is the universe. It is like water affecting all that swims or floats — a primordial solution.

The latter point, and Wilczek’s emphasis on light as a primary medium, made me think of the great English painter J.M.W. Turner, who tore apart physical reality in a roiling formless sea of light and air.

Extending the idea of the Higgs boson as a medium in which all swim, Wilczek pointed out that “there is no void,” a primary intuitive assumption when looking out at the cosmos. Rather, again, you are looking out into a sea where matter, the objects perceived, are really corks, bouncing in and out of the multitudinous sea of reality.

One insight about Wilczek — about the sort of person who becomes a successful scientist — Wilczek pointed out the enormous significance of his discovery. He explained that his discovery of asymptotic freedom was tremendously important in physics. The interesting part was that he separated himself, his ego, in the description. It was as though he found a magnificent waterfall and didn’t see himself, the discoverer of nature’s magnificence, as the subject to be discussed. Egoless, and ego driven — the contradications of complex human beings.

Wilczek’s description of asymptotic freedom, his discovery, was a joy to hear in its layered simplicity — right from the horse’s mouth, as it were. He said that he essentially found that as quarks get closer together the powerful forces that bind them become weaker(?). Counterintuitive, but true. The closer they get, the more freedom of movement they acquire.

You have to give credit to someone who will make a movie about a font, but that is what the documentary Helvetica attempted. I’d heard positive things about the film and finally decided to sample it via a Netflix stream.

In some ways this is a documentary about taste and about consensus. The Helvetica font was settled upon by large institutions, as an acceptable, non-offensive, bridge from modernism into the contemporary. Helvetica expressed bland authority and unquestioned entitlement.

In some ways, the Helvetica font is the Trajan font of our age — the font you see on Roman buildings and governmental buildings in America — invisible by its ubiquity. A cold and anonymous typeface whose chief attribute is legibility — although Trajan has an authentic beauty of form Helvetica does not. That said, I am sympathetic with the designers who feel that typefaces deliver content but aren’t the content. So Helvetica does its utilitarian job.

The array of designers commenting on the font had its own interest. One overwrought designer likened Helvetica to a glass of fresh water on the desert of awful, terrible, horrible 19th century design. Personally, I like much about 19th century design, although Helvetica is okay as well. It would take an effort to get too worked up about this peripheral realm of design.

One other designer pointed out the push/pull in Helvetica — a Hans Hofmann, abstract expressionist idea — the tension between ground and figure. The sharp insight was that Helvetica had a perfect fit between ground and typeface. Helvetica is of the grid and the machine and it locks in place visually.

The problem with Helvetica is that it is dead, drained of human interest, and purely utilitarian. The strange conflation of ideas that images are always conjuring: Helvetica is both socialist in its aspirations and corporate in its manifestations. Helvetica is not personal, but astringently impersonal. On the other hand, minimalism works very well in graphic and industrial design: witness Apple.

I had always been disappointed that Helen Vendler, a wonderful writer about poetry, did not use a more conversational voice in her book about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which is linked in the navigation column on this page.

Her writing over the years for the NYRB was always accessible, without the lingo of academia, which often obscures more than reveals. Her deep understanding of the mechanics, and she would probably argue, further appreciation therefore of the value of what she discusses, wasn’t for me a great read.

But she is a subtle thinker, an insightful critic, and no small issue, has her own value system which won’t be subsumed to fashion. So even the Shakespeare book had great interest.

In this NYT review of a book by a poet filled with enthusiasm for his subject, Walt Whitman, Vendler once again offers sharp and helpful remarks (the poet C.K. Williams is Vendler’s reference),

Although Williams calls him “compulsively gregarious,” Whitman could hardly have composed his monumental poems without spending a good deal of his time not being gregarious, but rather sitting, thinking, reading, writing, revising.

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Williams knows that the real meat and drink in Whitman’s work lies in the poet’s unprecedented assembling of rhythm, sound, language and images.

But in the end, for Williams, the didactic trumps the aesthetic: we are brought back to the poetry’s moral demand that we be “greater than we are.”

This, however, cannot be the purpose of poetry, which necessarily subsumes even the ethical under whatever it has set up as the aesthetic law governing a particular construction. Ethics — like landscape, or anecdote, or history, or psychology — is part of the raw material of some (but not all) poetry. Like other ingredients it plays a necessarily subordinate part.

Wonderfully said, Helen Vendler. What Vendler calls, “the aesthetic law governing a particular construction,” is what I would call the poet’s sense of the world and ability to express that overriding sense; to weave it into meaning that is felt.

I’ve recently placed my books in eBook form at the iBookstore:

25 Secrets of the Muse: A Book of Creative Strategies

A Curmudgeon’s Bestiary

Ancient World

Creative Quotations: Stillness in the Midst of Chaos

Ghost Island, Legend 1: Battle Eternal

Ghost Island, Legend 2: Counselors

Ghost Island, Legend 3: Battle Eternal

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It was a sometimes frustrating process as there is no direct route to creating an epub — the format used by many eBook vendors — in a form that can be validated and formatted satisfactorily. The epub format is really HTML1 — the most basic web, going back years; it is then wrapped in a compressed zip format. I started by using Adobe CS5 Indesign, part of a recently released suite. Although this application was 19 months in development it could not produce an epub that could be validated. Extraordinary.

Well, it was worth it as the final results look beautiful. The books have also been edited, so they are at present, the most current revision. I should note that the books currently on display at the iBookstore were the first version. Apple has yet to display the current revision, which I assume will be available to all who purchase the currently displayed eBooks when parsed in the next few weeks by Apple.

The other issue, which the iBookstore wrote me that they will be improving: some of the ebooks are not sampled so you can get a full idea of the contents. This, as I say, will soon be remedied as well.

[ via Lifehacker.com ]

The above video discusses in an entertaining way the ideas currently in fashion about economics. The premise, that we are irrational beings deluding ourselves of our reasonableness, is confirmed everyday in the news. But this clear presentation is still interesting.

I would change the wording, but in summary, the presentation notes that money and achievement are not related.

What motivates people if not the carrot of money and the stick of unemployment?

• Play. What the presentation calls Autonomy. If you are allowed to play you collect the best of yourself. One company allows its engineers one day a week to do whatever they want, with the sole stipulation that they show the results to the company.
• Learning. What the vid calls Mastery. People want to grow. It is a blessing of human nature. If we grow we are happy. Surprise. It isn’t looks, status, money — they all help of course given our biological predispositions — but it is the desire to be better and fulfill our capabilities that satisfies in the long run. Life is short and learning is long.
• Purpose. I’ll agree with this word. It is really the social impulse, the religious impulse, the tribal impulse. Something larger than ourselves to which we can contribute.

Human beings really aren’t so bad — despite what you see on the evening news. It is the structures we erect, often with good intent, that force us into a self-made Procrustean bed, where we lose control and become the servant of some system, destroying our natural impulses to grow, learn and contribute.

It is a modern assumption that there is a key to every poem and the author has it. The trouble is that I don’t believe this. I happen to think that the author may be the last one to know what his work is about. I’ve often noticed that the more I like a poem I’ve written, the less sure I am that I can explicate it…in general, [an author] is too involved in what he wanted the poem to be, to be able to see what it actually is.
—Galway Kinnell

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An ineluctable conclusion:
Kinnell is noting the true authority of the artist: to create a whole, a world that can be entered and interpreted in many ways. That can’t be done if you start out to illustrate a theory — universities teach illustration.

Universities can’t teach creativity, so theory becomes paramount in schools of the arts. The theoretical becomes predominant in the studio arts as well. The artist is taught explication, exegesis.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
—Raymond Chandler

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The motive in creating art may not be redemption, but if the artist fully inhabits the work, the resulting feeling, for audience and creator, can be that secondary definition of redemption: clearing a debt. That is, catharsis.

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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The overflowing energy in art is love. This is true no matter how dark the work. The need for creative expression, as primary as any human need, if successful, instantiates love.

“Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them all at once. What a delight this is! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.”

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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The dream of creative expression is an experience of the whole — the blooming, buzzing chaos yielding its inner harmony, and thus its meaning, miraculously. It is non-verbal, felt, and mysteriously embracing. It is being fully human.

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Mozart’s birthday was yesterday. His work came, as he describes, fully formed, leaping from him as a unity. The other paradigm of creation, that of Beethoven, has it that the work aggregates from smaller insights; Beethoven’s work habits are as cogent a model as that of Mozart. There are no rules in creating.