JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

A number of great thoughts pop up in Adam Kirsch’s review of a book by William Gass, Life Sentences.

Gass insists that “neither story (which can be told in many media and in many ways) nor meaning (which can be expressed with similar flexibility) are active elements in literary work.
…
“What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds,” …

… “not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s.…It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes. For that is what fine writing does: it creates a unique verbal consciousness.”

I’m quoting this because I agree with it. Not quite in the way Kirsch describes it in summary, but close enough; I spot on agree as far as the way Gass says it and would expand the idea to all the arts.

Art is about consciousness. Art is an expression of the cloud of identity which is what an individual really is, expressed at a moment in time. It is not a lecture, nor affirmation, nor negation of concept, nor political statement, nor craft decoration to impress, but an opening up of the spirit, mind and heart. Those elements of Being coalesce hopefully, and return the work, which the viewer can better sense than describe.

Art becomes something other than a single person, as the process affects the outcome, like a quantum experiment. That is what persists in art; art which succeeds. A unique voice, not of the ego, as the pop culture often portrays it, but of the sense of living; of a single life, speaking to others at the most fundamental, and trusting (because that is what civilization is) the audience to engage — sharing a brief portal of time.

Charlie Rose’s wonderful lunges at understanding Shakespeare and Hamlet was so provocative it had me noting things to myself:

I had often thought of Hamlet as a representation of a stepson’s possibly delusional, murderous rage – but the rage of a child, not an adult.

Hamlet is about being human because it confronts the dilemma of being human; our deep emotions and sense of right, our sense of unfairness and frustration at the conventions of society; Hamlet is about emotion choking action rather than generating it.

Hamlet can be thought an argument against revenge: about the futility of revenge, as the target seldom suffers as much as the enraged.

Although there was much tortured effort at understanding why Shakespeare persists with an almost biblical weight, his work, like the Bible itself, would only persist if the language and insight were of equal density.

The performances that were intercut revealed clearly that there is no barrier between the brilliance of the writing and the audience — the route of true art; this despite the compactness and arcane nature of the language; it still connects.

What was woefully left out – the English stain of anti-Semitism in Merchant of Venice, a clear marker that Shakespeare too was deeply flawed.

The best commentators were Greenblatt and Harold Bloom. Those who deal with the mechanics of the theater can never get it right, and don’t have the insight.

Of the performances:
Captain Picard and Richard Burton seemed Jon Lovitz Great Thespians – drawing attention to acting rather than character.

Olivier and Branagh clearly the best, most brilliant of actors. Astonishing in the revelatory power of their performances.

Rose’s brilliant question: Is Hamlet a sympathetic character?

Shakespeare evokes a truth academic scrutiny alone cannot parse; the meaningless question, asked of his plays, of life, and by Charlie Rose: What does it mean? It means, Shakespeare wisely answers, that there are no pat answers; that the human estate is ambiguous and can be noble.

The pop culture is really the commercial culture. It is business by other means. But because talented and clever people get involved you periodically get really good results — work that surpasses the defaults and becomes something special.

That is true of Gin Wigmore. Wigmore is from New Zealand but lives in Australia, which, from what I can tell, is California without the pretensions. You tend to form mental maps of places to which you’ve never been.

So how did we hear of Gin Wigmore? Searching for who sang the song in the Lowe’s commercial. The TV version of that commercial, with the dancers morphing into old age, is beautifully directed and choreographed and edited. And then they choose a great song, beautifully rendered.

Wigmore’s father died of cancer when she was sixteen and she wrote the song Hallelujah to tell her family she had finally accepted the loss of her beloved dad.

Here are Gin Wigmore’s heartfelt lyrics for Hallelujah:

Take your last step towards heaven and its glow
Take your last breath of sunlight, don’t let it go
Take your last look to remember, so that you know

I wont let you fade from no mind
I wont let you fade from no minds
I wont let you fade from no minds

Hallelujah for these eyes to see your painted life
Hallelujah for the touch of skin to skin with mine
Hallelujah for this mind that keeps our souls combined
Hallelujah for this life that let me be your child

Have your mind, have your strength to stay alive
Keep your eyes open with mine

You followed the road for the angels and you left me behind
A face without words can last a lifetime but it’s never the same
So, don’t say goodbyes that last forever just for a while
Because I’ll be by to see you some day soon

Hallelujah for these eyes to see your painted life
Hallelujah for the touch now of skin to skin with mine
Hallelujah for this mind that keeps our souls combined
Hallelujah for this life that let me be your child

Hallelujah, to be a part of your life
To see inside of all your smiles
You’re a traffic light of fire
You’re a man who I believe will never die

© Lyrics And Music Composed By Gin Wigmore

A new book on the iBookstore:

Old Peculiar Tales

This is a book of eleven speculative tales of fantasy. Image rich, created as a “picturebook”.

I used a new App called Book Creator for the iPad to construct this book. There have been no dedicated tools for creating fixed position books, and, out of the blue, a wonderful developer in England, Dan Amos, has done what billion dollar corporations could not. Picturebooks are books that look like formatted books; like a PDF, rather than flowing web pages. An excellent format for image heavy eBooks, but mind-numbing to create from scratch by code.

Dan uses a very simple, transparent interface — he had set out to make this App useful for kids — but it turns out to be fully capable for professional production as well. In the latter case a bit of knowledge about CSS would help for tweaks, but in most cases, you can get along with just the tools offered by Book Creator.

Book Creator is fun. You open the app and you immediately figure it out.

You create the book in the app. Instead of following a meandering path to get the eBook into iBooks, you simply tap a menu choice and BC constructs the ePub and places it in iBooks. You can edit without the usual hassle of creating on the desktop, transferring to iTunes and syncing — a tremendous time saver. Dan is currently working to enable audiobook capability and later videos.

I once taught in an after school center with the charge of introducing printmaking. You should have seen the pure delight expressed by children when they see a print of their drawing appear. It made you smile. Some kids would laugh out loud or even shriek. I can imagine whole classes filled with delighted children at seeing their creations appear in iBooks using Book Creator.

At first it was a surprise to see the solution BC offers; one expects a desktop application to create these picturebooks. It makes so much more sense to have the app on your iPad.

At the App store: Book Creator

Dan’s site, redjumper.net

We’ve been listening to singer songwriter ladies’ man Leonard Cohen. A mention somewhere and we started listening via Spotify. Spotify seems it could establish a new standard for online listening. The prices seem high, but it is a nifty idea.

Who By Fire is our favorite song by Cohen. This piece, after some background checking, is based on the Unetanneh Tokef, an ancient Hebrew piyyut or hymn. Who shall live, and who shall die, the subtext. The excellent lyrics, as always with Cohen, performed with deep melancholy, truly resonate. His voice is not his strong point; it is the intelligence and poetic yearning that wins you over finally.

Cohen needs accompaniment, a good group of musicians behind him, and even some more subtle orchestration — something to give the work shape. The purity argument seldom works. We’re not talking Las Vegas glitz-ification here, although just such SNL satirical treatment springs to mind. Listen to Who By Fire in solo and accompanied version; the latter much rounder and more effective.

I wasn’t surprised to read Cohen is depressive. I was surprised to find he is a cult figure. Like Dylan, who has so much more range, Cohen gives pop music an honorable hook into traditional strains in human culture — both in poetry and music.

Cohen about the writing process:

…like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.

In 1998 Cohen said:

I feel that we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior. At this point it’s more devastating on the interior level, but it’s leaking into the real world. I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad.”

Ahead of his time, was Cohen in that insight.

Since we are quoting: listening to that sensitive soul Anne Lamott, she quoted John Gardner about writing — about creative work as creating a dream,

Gardner said:

…the dream must be vivid and continuous.

All art shares that dream well spoken quality, because life has that quality.

Lamott also mentions Blake’s reminder, that we are here:

…to endure the beams of love.

The Philip Pearlstein of the Brits, the painter Lucian Freud, died July 21. His renown, usually judged — although never admitted as the metric — by price of work, was enormous. A true lone wolf — noble in his sense of dedicated mission and in his persistence of vision: realist, nudes (he called his subjects naked), small scale works. He was a serious artist who was viewed as a serious artist, a rarity in a contemporary world engorged with junk culture.

He was the grandson of Sigmund, and knew him. A man who told jokes, is the way Lucian remembered grandad.

I was happy Lucian Freud was celebrated if only because he had talent. I did not take to Freud’s images themselves. By the time you are eighteen you figure out that the process of gaining a reputation is filled with holes. At least Freud’s rep brought something to the table.

The excruciating treatment of his subjects was meant to convey a close-up lens: all warts. And more warts. Freud’s gaze could be said to be related to Van Gogh’s intense scrutiny, but Freud lacked the passion and joy. Human beings are more than their warts; sensuality and spiritual longings are also there to be seen. Those qualities were heavily manifest in Freud’s life — still a chick magnet in his 80s, with a reported tribe of offspring — but never made it to his work. Although I respected his work, I felt his vision had little scope. The fading shadows and enveloping compassion of Rembrandt were outside his ken.

Making the audience suffer the grimness of life might seem serious, because life is such a battle, and it is easy if adolescent to get cynical and angry, but such an approach presents only a thin slice of our human existence and so is fundamentally false. A true depth of vision takes in more.

iPad Sketchbook 4

This is the fourth in a series of digital sketchbooks containing expressive images created on the iPad. This is an enhanced eBook, with thirty images, and includes sped-up movies which depict the creation of two of the images.

This lively NYT book review considers the “addiction” of contemporary art to violence.

I admire the passion of the commentators in rebuking art conventions, author and reviewer alike, and the many points well-made, but I differ in some respects, and in emphasis.

I’ve thought about this issue of violence depicted in art over the years. It sticks out like a sore thumb among the many conformist defaults of contemporary art. But I wanted to meander a bit; to also briefly discuss some other things…first some disagreements with ideas in the article itself…

Kipnis, the NYT book reviewer, says:

The art of cruelty aestheticizes violence, in not necessarily scrupulous ways. It can be reckless and scattershot, provoked by the desire to make others feel as bad as the sufferers of injustice and trauma whose experiences are vicariously borrowed by artists shopping for shocks. It bludgeons audiences into getting the point.

This is all wrong. The motives of contemporary art as it pertains to violence has a simple etiology: it is expressing a transparent need for attention and desire for relevance. The audience is viewed as shallow and jaded, so their work, such artists figure, has to be like the pop culture. Such violence focused work is an act of self-flattery: “we are not like that”. The formula of the pop culture and that of the work under discussion is the same: titillate and deplore.

Also, a calculation about criticism:

Such grandiose condemnations about the horrors of life, or the exfoliations of injustice, often seek to insulate the artist. A cynical tactic, designed to make it seem that criticizing the work reflects insensitivity to the subject of injustice.

The art being discussed by Kipnis has given up on the audience and lusts now for the attention derived from cheap thrills. Museums and galleries often enable: they show and thus validate such work, themselves trying to compete with popular culture, rather than providing a context of understanding. The art bureaucracy does not realize that people go to museums to get away from the junk. Part of the problem are the gatekeepers lack of insight, part the cynical artists looking for market share.

When Pauline Kael wrote about the “poetry of violence” in Peckinpah’s movies she was trying to connect to and understand the audience’s need for catharsis and the artist’s conundrum when surrounded by popular culture; but in her effort to reject the snobby decorousness some think of as art, she enabled something worse.

It is not the depiction of violence that is deplorable. It is when violence is divorced in presentation from suffering and pain that it is immoral. Still worse, many works of art ask you to identify with the criminals, as if that is an act of solidarity in retribution against an unjust society. Robin Hood is transformed into a liberal fascist. What this NYT article misses is that sense of how successfully (or not) the art accomplishes the transformative experience, yielding empathy as the central metric, where before there was only sensationalism.

The author under review wants to change this aesthetic of violence,

[she] imagines [it] “might deliver us . . . to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative and just way of inhabiting the earth.”

Oy. Here comes Al Gore. But, to be fair, the reviewer gives the author her due:

…[the author is] wonderfully fearless when it comes to belittling the well meaning, as critical of the “idiot compassion” of social justice seekers (too often patronizing and ineffectual) as she is of the misogynist gore in exploitation films. She suspects that the human condition is suffering.

I think Zen Buddhism might, in that last suspicion, have beaten her to the punch. So to speak.

Just finished listening to the audiobook of Lawrence Krauss’ biography of Richard Feyman, Quantum Man. The book is read by Krauss, who is a distinguished physicist himself — the insider knowledge helps,  as the quantum world is not intuitive. Krauss knew Feynman and admired him enormously. Feynman is such an interesting character, both in the scope and depth of his mind and richness of his personality.

Although the science is obscure in its details, the fundamental nature of the subject expands quickly — much of the subject matter spins off into philosophy. No surprise that after Newton determinism became a dominant influence in the mental framework of the West; Spinoza and Kant among many others. The idea of causation in the West spiked after Newton.

Bill Gates has put online Feynman’s “Messenger” lectures at Cornell (You will need Silverlight). This is a legendary series of seven lectures that inspired many physicists. Feynman worked hard on these lectures; the agreement was that he would only give these lectures once.

In addition, there are a number of clips from various biographical documentaries on youtube — so this also filled out the charismatic (overused but accurate word in this case) man for me.

Some random notes / thoughts:

I had not realized the crucial part the young Freeman Dyson had played in Feynman’s recognition. Dyson is an unusually modest man; he seems immune to the sci-careerism in his field. When asked about his being passed over for honors due, Krauss reports that Dyson simply expressed gratitude to have had such an excellent life, in such wonderful surroundings, and to be able to do the work he cares about. Dyson is at the Institute for Advanced Studies, if I remember correctly.

(Changing gears for a moment, I ran across this fascinating paper by Dyson, “TIME WITHOUT END: PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY IN AN OPEN UNIVERSE,” a speculation about the heat death of the universe. The first part is philosophical and for the general public.)

Feynman’s intuitive way of working, not building up from formalisms, as did Dirac, had a particularly energetic, American character. Feynman’s impatience, unpretentious grounding, and exploratory nature are noteworthy — you can see how those traits combined with a focused mind might yield great results.

The second lecture was particularly exciting: Feynman, a brilliant mathematician, describes the relation of physics and mathematics. The mysterious connection between mathematics and the physical world has long been noted. No second hand knowledge in Feynman’s lecture, but rather he explains the process of thinking a scientific genius uses to understand Nature with the tools of math. Feynman elucidated three principal ways of explaining the actions of the real world in numbers: Newton’s mathematics, action at a distance, and a minimal model for a mathematical explanation of the world. Feynman explains how Newton’s math, useful in the quotidian domain, is not of much use in the quantum realm; also, he explained that he felt the other two models will someday have to be united as a tool to explain the world.

Feynman notes — and this is truly a lifting of the curtain — the mysteries he perceives. He notes such things as the oddity that there are so many ways to describe the same actions in nature. That every instance in Nature is always that, unique, and never a general case. That it is impossible to extrapolate action from the micro world of the quanta to the macro world of physical reality. Feynman explains that physics uses not axioms, but modes of thinking; for example, Riemannian geometry might be exactly the tool needed by Einstein, even though it was formulated 75 years before Einstein worked on his theories. Mathematics is the generality and physics the specific, and so axioms don’t work in physics. Feynman explained that Einstein and Dirac made guesses as to how the physical world worked, and then used tools available (these mathematical models) that seemed most likely to help in the explanation.

I should add that I checked out Feynman’s paintings and drawings. They are competent but never got to expressing a true voice. He was a talented amateur. It was interesting to note that early on he was dismissive of the arts, but clearly, as time went on, began to realize there was something there. In one lecture he was dismissive of CP Snow’s Two Cultures, but in his trying to learn to draw and paint reflected a counter tendency — deeper and wiser — that there was something in art that is parallel to the complexity and beauty of the physical world, but which exists in the individual human soul and in the imagination. He would recoil hearing that, but I feel eventually he would admit it, if he had had the time to evolve that side of himself.

Feynman’s love for and gratitude to his father were beautifully expressed in a youtube video. He explained the way his father helped him understand in a deeper sense. People may know the name of a bird, and there are many names in different cultures of course, but that tells you nothing about the bird, said Feynman’s father. The difference between a name and knowledge.

His father was distrustful of the honorifics and uniforms of status. His father pointed out that the costumes of life are just that, and underneath, we all share a common humanity. People bowing before others, because of their uniform, or societal status, repelled Feynman and his father. A useful skepticism implanted early on. Following on this, Feynman did not even trust established laws of science, but derived them himself. This is parallel to the development of many artists, who, with their own individual emphasis, recapitulate in their work the history of art.

Feynman spent a long time trying to return to the bestower an honor many in science would lust for: membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Feynman even considered refusing the Nobel Prize, but felt that people would think he felt too good for such an honor, when really, he simply saw it a decision amongst people and of no real importance. The important thing was the knowledge he had gained of Nature. He remembered seeing scientists in one field trying to keep honors from chemists because they  did not want to sully their grandiose clique with mere chemists. He mentioned Arista, an honorary society of his early schooling, where all they talked about was who they would let in. He laughed at the idea of IQ scores. A truly egalitarian American spirit was Richard Feynman — all from the seed of his father’s character and evolved in his son Richard.

To be continued…

Sailing by the muted TV last night I was snagged by the head of the interviewee. Familiar, but could not recall who it was. It was this guy’s head, not his face, that was striking. A sculptural head rather than substantive presence — perfect for TV. It did not hurt that his stillness gave him a Zen priest’s calm. True charisma of the modern kind.

It was the sculptor Richard Serra on Charlie Rose; Serra is being given a show of his drawings at the Met. In the photos flashed before the interview, to establish status markers, there is a shot of the Met with a big banner saying Richard Serra Drawings. The banners the Met hangs to advertise shows is a surrender to Nascar culture rather than a useful addition. It is jarring seeing those banners plastered on a putative house of culture. It doesn’t fit with the architecture and is not suggestive of the reflective nature of art.

The dignity of High Culture (often an affectation itself) has been trumped by the affectations of the Football Hall of Fame and Academy Awards. They can do grandiosity and not be called snobby because they are clearly not high culture — an unwitting irony there.

Serra’s astringent work was a necessary antidote to the excesses of the art of the 60s. An over estimate would have it that Serra was one of those who tried to swing the pendulum from the Dionysian to the Apollonian. The problem is that Serra’s work does not have the poetry of purity which is what minimalist geometric iconography is all about. Ellsworth Kelly is a better candidate if that is your taste.

Serra’s work is outlier work taken into the main tent. It depends on the negation of what came before. It does however well instantiate an aspect of the art world. That could be expressed, as one critic did at the time, by saying, “Art is not important until I talk about it.” The shameless egomania of post modernism made manifest in critic and artist.

Serra’s art is designed to make you talk about it, to provide obscure grist for the mill — a subservient role for art. It won’t contradict anything you say, because it is content free. Although Serra describes his work as experiential — the viewer weaving his way through plates of steel — the work is seeking meaning ascribed by not offering it. It flatters the audience and at the same time challenges: say you don’t respond, don’t accept the invitation to display-speculate, and you say you are not cool.

Serra’s work does have an elegant assertiveness that fits in well with corporate America however — more noteworthy in its sociological way than the images themselves. No surprise corporate America has embraced such work. Nothing to be concerned about: with subject or personal feelings, a world view or an emotional state, which might trouble a corporate boardroom. They are simply objects of ego and sensibility, now, in the 21st Century, seeming more artifacts of interior decoration than of art.

The recent show given the director Tim Burton at MoMA is more institutionally honest in its subservience to celebrity culture. Burton is actually a very talented fellow. But the large crowds drawn to MoMA by Burton’s show, and the show itself, are products of media culture, not of any desire by a cultural institution to provide its audience with a deeper, meditative experience.

We’ve just seen a great documentary with the unfortunate title, “Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould”.

Documentaries are dependent on subject. The Civil War documentary by Ken Burns was his best because of the wonderful letters and photographs. Burns has never matched that fine piece.

Gould, some kind of genius, was a riveting subject. Photogenic — you would cast him as the eccentric, poetic soul, too fine grained for this world — an articulate, wonderfully talented individual; the man was a Seeker. Gould lived music, inhaled it, inhabited it when he played. He is renowned for clarity and extraordinary technique. His deep psychic connection to the great architect of music, the genius Bach, makes complete sense — they are so opposite in their tendencies.

Watching Gould perform is like watching a sentient spider delicately crafting a web. He sat on a low chair, an artifact his childhood — and partly because he had a back injury as a child. This enhances the sensation of watching a magician at work as he chants along with the music. He invests the music and loses all sense of self. The noted “oddness,” he wore gloves to protect his hands and an overcoat even in warm weather, weren’t affectations, although later he saw the utility of such eccentricity for an audience more drawn to surface than substance. It would draw them to him. In England he would simply be called an eccentric without disparagement but in consensus America he stood out.

Gould’s inner struggle seemed to me a battle between the performer and the artist within. Performers need an audience; they need the feedback and the applause. It is at root a shallow relationship. But the artist works alone and digs deep, trying to reach that deeper self that he might touch the audience at some primal human level. Gould finally surrendered to the artist in himself, worked in the studio, not publicly performing, but instead leading the way to electronic renditions. The problem is that he was a performer. He was riveting to watch, in his confidence and ecstatic trance; there was no way he could improve the improvisational fascination of his performances with a perfection of sound.

It was such a wonderfully done documentary. Beautifully integrating photos and video and incredible music. There is a real sense of the human being, Glenn Gould, communicated in this film by these empathetic filmmakers.