JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

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.

After a battle with WordPress and obstinate plugins — which resulted in Jolly Days loading as a blank page; and a battle with a cell phone company about its online payment implementation, and not being able to run today —  I’m feeling pecked to death by ducks. Until you realize the context — the greater tribulations of the world — the Arab world in turmoil with uncertain outcome; the devastation in Japan; our president who seems one step behind too often and the Republicans in disarray, the ominous future for the economy if something is not done — it doesn’t make you feel perky.

I’ve been working hard to publish more books at the iBookstore; not satisfying creative work, but rather meticulous, mind numbing work. I’m very proud of the result though:

iPad Sketchbook 3
Ira Altschiller: Works on Paper
Ira Altschiller: A Retrospective

and two more to come: picturebooks is what Apple calls them, which are fixed layout books for a better presentation of books which have an emphasis on images.

I did want to mention a funny link provided at Jason Kottke’s site

Someone at Yahoo Answers uploaded a page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as his own and asked for comments.

Rated as the best answer / criticism:

You know your story needs more work, so you don’t need anyone to tell you what you already know.

Comment sections are always pretty funny. Some people don’t like the snarkiness, and I’m not a big fan of that aspect, but often there are interesting ideas and commentary as well. It is the mosh pit after all. A financial journalist at bloggingheads said that she always felt that people weren’t asking questions or engaging ideas  in comments sections of weblogs, they were trying to appear smart.

The idea of sending great literature as if written by sender to an established publisher has been done over the years. Rejection letters for masterpieces like War and Peace leaves one agape — like the audience watching The Frankie singing Puttin’ on the Ritz in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Saul Bellow stopped sending his stories to the New Yorker after a full of himself young editor told him how he should correct his piece. Bellow had recently won the Nobel Prize.

Joyce’s novella The Dead was made into a movie in 1987 by John Huston, then in his 80s. This was a project of love, with his daughter Anjelica in the lead role. We just saw it in a Netflix rental. The movie begins with a depiction of the long associations of human society and quirks of personality as manifested at a party. You feel the weight of time on these people living in Ireland in 1904. Their characters are all delimited and defined in a way that is a marvel. Like My Dinner With Andre, Huston has taken a minimalist setting and made it something so much more complex. Anjelica Huston is a great actress. Her silent presence in so many scenes gave the movie a tremendous emotional richness.

Underlying it all is the genius of Joyce. His language en-flowers as the story evolves into a meditation on living and dying. At first this human society is mundane, slightly boring, quietly funny. Then on the carriage ride home The Dead opens up into a dark space that makes you shudder, like traveling into a boundless forest. You feel the emotional separation of husband and wife.

When Anjelica Huston tells her husband — a “sensible man” she sneers — of the long lost love of her youth; of her guilt at this young boy’s death, she overflows with grief and finally loses herself hugging, clutching at her husband. But she immediately pushes her husband away — she will not accept even his consolation. Her husband muses over the evening party and falls into a reverie about his life, his beloved wife, and the lives of his friends and family, and then into a reverie about all our lives. It is like a melting into something larger and larger, as Frost defined poetry.

Clearly no one could re-write Joyce in the concluding scene. It has to be repeated and heard in Joyce’s words and so the filmmaker resorts to the slightly awkward technique of voice-over to give full throat to Joyce. Joyce mingles prose and poetry in a great yielding resonance of language and feeling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Captain Beefheart died on Friday. He did not want to be known as Captain Beefheart, but as an artist using his real name, Don Van Vliet. He wanted to distance himself from his musical beginnings. Why I do not know. Tom Waits, and many others, owed a debt which they acknowledged. Part performance art, part Dada goof, part interesting music —he was an original. He and Zappa mapped a unique region in the popular culture.

His obit says,

By shunning commercial success and a more accessible sound, Van Vliet became a role model for subsequent generations of musicians. His music is cited as an influence on the rise of punk, post-punk and new wave. Beefheart is also claimed as a kindred spirit by free jazz musicians and avant-garde classical composers.

Maybe he was concerned his paintings would not be taken seriously if his other life as Beefheart were attached. He must not have realized that what is taken seriously in the pop world and art bureaucracy as well is making lots of money.

He considered himself a painter. He got his break when Julian Schnabel had a show at the SFMoMA and was asked by the director if Schnabel knew of any interesting artists in the area. This is an odd question for the director of a San Francisco museum to ask of a NY artist, but such is the art world. Schnabel was hot at the time; the museum had raised something like a million bucks for one of his paintings. Schnabel’s art dealer put together the art collection of Hollywood Guy Michael Ovitz. Now Schnabel makes movies, as does his art dealer. Such is Hollywood.

So Schnabel by recommendation anointed Don Van Vliet and subsequently Don Van Vliet had a survey show at the museum. He was so shy that he stayed in the hall leading to the main exhibition area for much of the event. He stood there in the hall with his wife. He was married for 40 years.

He was a good and true artist, an authentic creative spirit, was Don Van Vliet.

A new eBook at the iBookstore: iPad Sketchbook 2

This new sketchbook has over 100 images and animations depicting the evolution of several drawings. A permanent link is in the iBookstore links area on the navigation column to the right.

Galway Kinnell about Rilke:

Rilke writes only what is for him a matter of life and death. There’s nothing trivial, no bright chatter, no clever commentary. He writes at the limit of his powers. There are moments when he seems to write beyond the limit. His poetry gropes out into the inexpressible, like the late music of Beethoven.

That striving for more is a mark of all art. Rilke’s approach, as described by Kinnell, might sound a ponderous load to contemporary tastes, where distanced irony and referential cleverness hold sway. Earnestness doesn’t earn points but rather scorn. But who cares? Contemporary tastes change. Kinnell is speaking with the long horizons of art before him.

The nuance in Kinnell’s brief description, the subtle, complex mapping of a sensibility which he suggests, says much good about Kinnell as well.

Creative work often strays so far from its source material that it sometimes is interesting to revisit the original inspiration.

This site notes the White Horse Tavern was the source of “Those Were the Days,” a beautiful, wistful song. The tavern was a meeting place for Allen Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, James Baldwin, both great “Dylans,” Bob and Dylan Thomas; Dylan Thomas’ given name was taken as honorific by Bob Zimmerman .

Creative work mixes “reality,” whatever that is, with the temperament (“Art is life filtered through a temperament.” —Zola) with the evanescent grasp of memory.

Wikipedia quotes Dylan Thomas,

I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance. [...] I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.

It’s funny how profound those early encounters with the medium are for artists. I remember how I loved cartoons in the newspaper when I was young. I also remember, like Dylan Thomas, my reaction was purely aesthetic. I would study the lines and forms in cartoons with an infatuation that had nothing to do with content. I knew something was different in my reaction from that of my friends, for whom it was just a good laugh — although I had no idea why I felt that way. The pure sensual beauty of the lines and the magic of the suggestive images enthralled.

Wiki also notes that a monument to Dylan Thomas has an inscription from his work:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

“Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” Fantastic.

On The Naked Scientists a panelist noted that a recent study indicated that we are happiest when we are focused on what is at hand. Zen Buddhism is right. However, in a contemporary culture, which is built to distract, this is not so happy a finding.

The scientist noted that our wandering minds yield tremendous benefits as well — our very human instantiation, our culture, our inventions, our imagination; but it comes at a cost — that of our happiness.