THE ANVIL OF ART

Young Norman Rockwell dreamed of the day he would paint as well as his idol, the great illustrator J.C. Leyendecker. Rockwell spied on Leyendecker, trying to discover the secret of his genius:

I'd followed him around town just to see how he acted....I'd ask the models what Mr. Leyendecker did when he was painting. Did he stand up or sit down? Did he talk to the models? What kind of brushes did he use? Did he use Winsor & Newton paints?

But Leyendecker's secret had nothing to do with his brand of brushes. A few years later, Rockwell visited Leyendecker in his studio and observed Leyendecker working on the painting above. He recalled:

New Rochelle published a brochure illustrated with reproductions of paintings by all the famous artists who lived in the town. Joe worked on his painting for months and months, starting it over five or six times. I thought he'd never finish it.

The painting was beautiful, with many fine touches.







It was nearly finished, and the client would have been happy to get it. Yet, Leyendecker remained unsatisfied. Rather than completing the painting, he set this version aside and started all over again, searching restlessly for the image he wanted. The final published version looked like this:



Nietzsche once wrote, "you admire the beauty of my spark, but you don't feel the cruelty of the hammer on the anvil that makes it happen."

Leyendecker paid a heavy price for that spark. Whatever it cost, the young Rockwell must have concluded that it was worth it. When Rockwell's turn came, he paid too. Rockwell may not have traded his soul to the devil, but he painted "100%" in gold at the top of his easel to make sure that he never gave anything less. That credo kept Rockwell at his easel seven days a week painting countless studies and refining his craft as his first wife filed for divorce and was hospitalized for depression. She was alleged to have committed suicide. His second wife was hospitalized for alcoholism and depression. Rockwell himself sought professional help for his own depression. And yet, the brilliant pictures kept on coming.

Today, we admire such artists from a safe distance. Few of today's heavily promoted artists are willing to spend the same time on the anvil. I can't say that I blame them, especially when most of their audience is incapable of distinguishing real sparks from glitter.

"Me, You and Everyone You Know": Filming art, Arting film

Seeing the film Me, You, and Everyone You Know, I kept getting the impression that it's a series of performances and installations, rather than an actual "life-like" story. They all had a punch, they were beautifuly written, conceived... and that was strange. Something unusually pure about it. Of course, it isn't about the film being "unrealistic". It is about it being a specific type of creation. And I'm afraid I'm having some difficulty describing just what that is.
But take some specific qualities of the film: the characters are sketched rather than painted. Sketched quite well, but nonetheless - they are hinted at and not "described". There is little or no small talk, nothing that can allow us to go deeper, beyond the surface of an action. I believe this is because at the heart of the work lies the need for composition, understood as the composition of a painting or performance rather than the composition of a character. The actions, events, situations, always seem to point to, or refer to, or use the language of, contemporary art.
Example: the two boys, both beautifuly discreet and calm characters, make ASCII drawings. And at a certain point, one of them shows the other a drawing he invented: a map of the neighborhood with "me and you and everyone we know" on it, in the form of dots. It might sound as a perfectly normal thing for boys to do. Well, it's not. And the level of asbtraction is quite high. Which doesn't mean it would be impossible for a twelve-year-old to come up with something of the sort. But it has the fresh scent of good contemporary art much more than of the spontaneous creation of a young adolescent.
It makes the entire experience of watching the film an unusual one. Of course one can enjoy it - it's a great picture - but once you feel what I'm trying to tell you, you simply can't stop thinking of someone writing it. Creating it. Composing it, like some installation.
Guess what. The director and star of the film - Miranda July - is actually a pretty renowned visual/performance/etc artist. This is her first feature film, and until now she has been doing installations and performances, many of which quite similar to the ones her character makes in the film. She is also the co-author of a brilliant web project that has been blogged about quite a lot, Learning To Love You More.
Doesn't this bring a lot of issues to the table?
If visual art can fit so well in a feature film, why not keep with the latter format? Isn't it more important, given the total lack of interest of the wider public towards contemporary art and the amazing success of the film (Golden Camera in Cannes, etc...)?
How close can a film, as in, regular saturday night film and not andy warhol film, be to a visual art work? Can't we judge it as such?
How does our judgement change once we accept something as a film or an installation /video art? Of course it does, and tremendously so. But isn't there something to be discovered by each of the disciplines - in the way we see the other work? For instance, for me a film is much easier to accept as such, to follow, to believe in, while video art creates great spaces for asking questions, for changing my approach, from a dynamic to a contemplative state. Oftentimes, though, the video art could use a little of the pragmatic follow me approach of a film, and vice versa, a film could use a little games with distance, so we can breathe.
Another issue: does the more accessible film equipment (Me, You... was shot on video, though it's still damn expensive video) mean that there is space for artists to go into/play with the more mainstream stream? Or is still going to be an offense to even think of mixing the two?
These questions are sometimes schematic, because I feel a need for schemes, for perspectives, points of view.
It's nice to know Matthew Barney is not the only visual artist making feature films. Although we shouldn't forget there are film directors who also make visual art (Lars von Trier, Peter Greenaway...).

ps.: Miranda July also wrote a blog, openly admitting it was part of the indie film industry strategy to promote the film. Nice nonetheless.

Never judge a dog by its cover

Both sculptures are by Quinjing Jing.

See also this wonderful video.
(via)

Toy Piano - why is Margaret Leng Tan so fascinating?

The European Mezzo TV channel tells you everything about "culture" you need to know:
1. It is a ridiculously small milieu. Just look at their site. It is not much more developed than your average friendly grocer's home page.
2. It is snobbish. Ubearably snobbish. It does not intend to introduce art to new audiences, it does not intend to render the experience of art more... well, more anything than it already is. You need to get it, to get it. Just look at their site. The few introductions to future programs are ridiculously small, superficial and badly translated ("she inflames the audience"....).
3. It has no money. Just look at the site.
4. It seems not to care. It makes no effort to be user-friendly (the TV program on the site is in Excel, for the love of God!).
5. From time to time, it brings you the most delicious moments you could ever have hoped for.


Margaret Leng Tan's recital was such an enlightening moment. Leng Tan plays the piano. She comes out of the vein of John Cage. And moves forward. How can you move forward after Cage? Are we not stuck, as after any serious avant-garde artist? It might almost seem a permanent paradox: the true revolutionaries leave little space for their students. But if you look carefuly enough, there is plenty of room for others. And so, Leng Tan, after playing around with several of Cage's games (she is a Julliard graduate, so that meant mainly prepared pianos and such), tried the toy piano.
Today, she is considered the magician of the toy piano. Moving consequently into the exploration of the "toy sound", she established herself as a real master.
But Lang Tan is not my main interest here. What I found curious about what I saw was that the sound of the toy piano is so fascinating. Is it because it's a toy? Because it's so "simple", "naive"? Because it wanders around the frequencies, often destroying the "natural harmony" completely?And if so, what is it about this that attracts us? Maybe, and this is just a hypothesis, it's because this childlike simplicity is a relief. We can step down from the pedestal and actually enjoy it, without necessarily appreciating it as the scholarly art amateurs we are does. The playfulness is nearly destructive, it almost breaks the whole illusion of art, but then, not quite. It maintains the charm, the power, and yes, the beauty, while allowing us to move away. Only what sort of movement is it? Is it really the creation of distance? I would say it is rather assuming a distance, taking it as a starting point, which allows to be as close as we wish, making up our own rules, our private relation to the piece, uncontaminated by the judgement of style, technique, interpretation. That does not mean all of these elements do not play a role - they do. But we are happy to stop judging it, to put ourselves into the oblivion of spectatorship.
This became clear when Lang Tan played a very well known piece, Mozart's Turkish March, and I started listening to the interpretation, the technical aspects, the mistakes, and it wasn't as appealing. What I really needed was something simpler, easier maybe, but more immediate, more bare, less dressed up in the fancy clothes of "culture".
This brings me to another point, which could be developed: aren't the minimalist works - that have been appearing in the last couple of decades in various art fields - this type of search for a bare art? An art that, beyond the discussion of "hi" and "low", starts with an "a-b" that allows us to enter easier, to travel further, and to feel more at ease, just as if this were a simple toy, that by some chance (which, as Cage knew well, has little to do with chance, although it can spur from coincidence), by some chance becomes this: good.

Listen to Margaret Leng Tan here and here. I must admit, though, that these aren't the works that impressed me most.

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part four

Last year I described the life of Ivor Hele, the great Australian war illustrator. Hele painted front line combat in Africa, the Middle East, Korea and the South Pacific during World War II and the Korean War. In the jungles of New Guinea he was injured and lay unconscious for two days.



After a career filled with death and carnage, Hele withdrew from the world. He and his wife lived a life of isolation in a remote cottage by the ocean. Hele rarely spoke about what he had witnessed. He avoided the public and refused to have his picture taken. The local newspaper noted upon his death that "very few people have ever been inside their home." One young niece who visited the cottage recalled "Ivor really detested children."

But Hele never stopped drawing. Instead of drawing armies clashing on a battlefield, he began drawing intimate pictures of his wife around the house. He drew her putting on her stockings, he drew her sewing, he drew her wearing a funny hat made from a folded newspaper, he drew her reading a book. Mostly he seemed to like drawing her with her skirts raised and-- bless her-- she indulged him.

The local newspaper noted that "it was not until after his death... that it was realized he had kept so many sketches." The following drawings are from that collection. They have never been published, but deserve an audience:











Drawing his wife in the safety and seclusion of their little cottage seemed to be therapeutic for Hele's scorched soul.

These are marvelous figure studies but they are more. By lingering over the design of the human form, the symmetry and harmony of the limbs, the tenderness of human flesh, Hele may have been able to restore a little of nature's balance to his own life.

Bill T. Jones - The honest demagogue

I have just finished watching an interview with Bill T. Jones. I have seen him perform both live and on video. His story is touching and controversial. He is an authority.
But he is also a demagogue. There is a way of presenting oneself which has something incredibly irritating. Some sort of self-confidence and a way of declaring one's own experiences as universal truth.
You can only say this does not imply a similar attitude on stage if you've never seen Bill T. Jones on stage. The man constantly talks to the audience, his dancing is show-and-tell, it is lectures, sermons accompanied by dance, or joined by it, explained by it. And the tone of his voice has something distant, impersonal, that disturbed me. Now, I've also heard it during the interview. His powerful voice becomes too powerful, and sentences like "Dance is the first art." leave no space ofr anything else. No other areas, interests, points of view. And he is not saying this is what he thinks. Even when descirbing his most personal experiences, he says "The only way one can go through losing someone one has loved is by becoming what one has loved in that person". He doesn't say "I". He speaks for the rest of us. Demagogue? Prophet?
It is strange to discover that what I have been considering as an art of intimacy has the flavor of prophetic discourse. Can this be honest?

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HOW MANY LINES DOES IT TAKE TO DRAW A BLUE SKY?

How would you draw the sky if your only tool was a black line? Outline a few fluffy clouds perhaps? Add some cross hatching at the horizon? Well that's why you're not Rembrandt, buddy.

The vast majority of this picture is vacant air, but Rembrandt has filled it with lines so free and abstract that they put Jackson Pollock to shame.








It takes courage to etch even a single line in an open space like that. Look closely at Rembrandt's mad, gorgeous dithyramb across the sky and be proud of your humanity!







I'll return to more recent illustrators with my next posting, but I just couldn't resist squeezing in one more Rembrandt. This picture gives me goose bumps and I hope it has the same effect on you.

The poet's responsibility: the Peter Handke Affair

This is far from the first time Peter Handke is being controversial. And it's not the first time he describes the "Serb question" in a scandalizing way.
But after he spoke during Slobodan Milosevic's funeral, all hell broke lose. All cultural hell.
Shocking? Certainly. The question is: why?
Among the many fascinating opinions, one exchange I particularly appreciated.
Botho Strauss:

Those who fail to see guilt and error as the stigmata (or even as stimulants in some cases) of great minds, shouldn't busy themselves with true poets and thinkers.

And Guenter Grass, answering:

Heine – like Goethe too, by the way – remained a fan of Napoleon until his death. The horror and the terror that Napoleon spread, how he used up his armies on the way to Russia – all of that was of no consequence for his admirers. Heine runs equally afoul of today's criteria whereby Handke is condemned for his absurd, one-sided support for Serbia... Handke has always tended to adopt the most nonsensical arguments and counter-positions. But what I dislike about the current discussion is the double standard, as if you could grant writers the right to err as a special kind of favour. The writer Botho Strauß said something along these lines (text in German here)... I have a hard time with granting writers a kind of bonus for geniuses which excuses their partisanship for the worst and most dangerous nonsense.

After this whole affair, Handke gave several interviews. Some of them (copy here) witty and slightly aggressive, others invoking Yugoslavian history to explain, to justify. But how well does he know history? I certainly am no specialist in this matter, but whenever someone explains history too well, even it is to correct what someone else said, I have my doubts, and look for a second opinion.
Probably the most fascinating thing about this affair, is that a poet still has that much power. Yes, you will say, but acting as a politician. No. Acting as someone for whom the polis matters. Zoon politicon - the social animal.

The Brown Dress Performance

365 days. one brown dress. a one-woman show against fashion.

Have an idea. Make it simpler. Make it one idea. Then work on it. Mould it, so it lives, not like a number, but like a word. Study it until it makes sense. (I love the expression to make sense). Try it. And again. Live it. Assume this is it, and it isn't any better, but it isn't any worse. And since you assume it, it can only get better. Which, if you check the site I found it at, as well as the author's, Alex Martin's, journal, did happen.

I JUST COULDN'T HELP IT

I usually try to limit myself to updating this blog once a week. However, I could not let the 400th birthday of Rembrandt-- one of my favorite illustrators of all time-- go by without a gesture of respect.

Rembrandt illustrated stories from the Bible, Faust and other sources. Just like today's illustrators, he designed pictures for reproduction and popular consumption (using etchings, the most advanced technology of the day). Like today's illustrators, he was often frustrated by his tasteless and unreasonable clients. (At the height of the "tulip craze" in Amsterdam, a single tulip bulb sold for three times as much as Rembrandt's masterpiece, The Nightwatch.) And just like today's illustrators, he died broke.

But 400 years later, all the money squabbles and heartbreak and exasperation have faded into background noise, along with the names of all the investment bankers and merchants who were once such big shots in Amsterdam. All that's left is the sublime poetry of Rembrandt's pictures.

David Gallaugher's grass-lined wheel

FOR
Excellent. Funny. Smart.
It's a brilliantly simple idea. It makes us think - and smile. It is all about ecology. And nature in the city. And taking a real break from all of this. And let's all live together like one happy family.
And above all - don't take it all too seriously. Because it's conceptual - i.e., it is about the concept more than it is about what comes out of its realization. Because it's unpretensious - i.e., it doesn't intend to change the world (at least not the whole world at once). Because it's pretty - i.e., it is a relief from all this...hmmm... down to earth thinking. Oh, and because they got to hear a lot of hamster jokes, apparently.

AGAINST
How do you know where you're going? How long is the grass going to last? So this is the version of nature that architecture students have for us? Don't ask what nature can do for you, but what you can do for nature.

BOTTOM LINE
I like it.
"Even in the Public Gardens [in Halifax, NS], you're not allowed to walk on the grass."
(which is a much better statement than another reported one: that they want to "draw attention to what he considers a North American obsession with manicured lawns.")

ALTERNATIVE
Teresa Murak, Procession (1974)

thank you Jan for the link!
UPDATE: The photo of the Grass Wheel is by Andre Forget, a Halifax-based photographer. I'm terribly sorry for not putting the credit before. It is often difficult to execute on the internet (to get to the original source), but it's mainly laziness, and not incapacity or bad will, that is to blame.

ALBERT DORNE

Albert Dorne had a wretched childhood. He was born in the slums of New York and grew up in poverty, suffering from tuberculosis, malnutrition and heart disease. Fatherless, he quit school after 7th grade to support his mother, two sisters and younger brother. He tried everything to feed his family, from selling newspapers on a street corner to prize fighting to working on a shipping dock.



One of the things I like about Dorne is that he had all the credentials for life as a thug, yet the siren song of art was stronger and pulled him through.



At age 10 Dorne began cutting school 3 or 4 days a week to sneak off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he taught himself to draw by copying almost every work of art in the place. The determined little boy soon became well known around the museum. Dorne lived in constant fear that his school would catch him, and he went to great lengths to cover his tracks. He later discovered that his teachers already knew what he was up to and had agreed not to turn him in. They admired his talent and ambition, and thought his chances were better at the museum than at school.

When he turned 17, Dorne decided to make his move into the art business:

"I went to a man who ran a one-man art studio and offered to work for nothing as an office boy while I learned the business. The 'nothing' as a salary sounded fine to him. But I still had to take care of my mother-- and by this time I was also married so I had two families to support. I worked in the studio six days a week from nine to six-thirty. Then I'd get home, have supper and a nap, and go back to work all night seven nights a week from midnight to eight in the morning as a shipping clerk... I did this for a whole year. Finally... I was made a full fledged artist with a salary. I was able to give up my night job. After almost a year of this, I decided I could make more money and perhaps find better work as a free lance artist."

Dorne went on to become one of the most popular illustrators in America, rich beyond his wildest dreams.



Dorne's traumatic childhood left him scarred. He drank heavily. Yet, the bee fertilizes the flower it robs. His experience endowed him with two great gifts. First, he developed a powerful survival instinct. Like a weed pushing its way up through the sidewalk, Dorne always hustled and found assignments when other illustrators lacked work. Second, growing up in a world of desperate, scruffy people Dorne developed a sharp eye for the human carnival. Note how Dorne's insightful line captures a riot of folds, lumps, wrinkles and patches in these marvelous drawings.



However damaged he may have been by his experiences in life, these drawings demonstrate that he never lost the unabashed joy of drawing. Look at the pleasure he took in drawing fanciful hands.







 

Installation for the soccer maniacs

Police in Berlin said on Wednesday they had arrested two men on suspicion of placing cement-filled soccer balls around the city and inviting people to kick them. At least two people injured themselves by kicking the balls, which were chained to lampposts and trees alongside the spray-painted message: "Can you kick it?"

I agree with ann that the message seems unnecessary, but the work does have a pleasant, sadistic thing about it. Especially if you're living in a country like Portugal.

(via, originally from)

How to concentrate on blogging?

Number 4 on the list of things to do in order to concentrate on writing is "Stop with the blog already". That puts the blog in a rather bad position, doesn't it?

Romeo Castellucci and subjective criticism

It is not rare for me to come out of a show/performance/stage production and not know whether I liked it or not.
This was certainly the case with Romeo Castellucci's 4th episode of the Tragedia Endogonidia series - BR.#04 Bruxelles/Brussel, during the Alkantara Festival. And if I waited so long before writing anything, it was precisely because of that.
The state of I don't know is something to cherish. Whereas in everyday life it may be quite problematic, there is no reason for it not to persist in aesthetic judgement.
There is more. Contrary to many aesthetic theories, I firmly believe aesthetic judgement can change - and usually does! - after the aesthetic experience. We reevaluate what we saw, heard, felt, after thinking about it, but also, after receiving new information. That is why the conversations people have after shows are not, in my mind, just the need to share one's impressions. They are rather attempts at establishing some sort of relation between me, my view of things, and the way others see and feel them. And, since we are no monads, communication makes a difference. I've had shows which I didn't really appreciate but started to have liked after having discussions about them. This is probably quite natural in non-temporal arts, where we can come back to a piece and renegociate our relationship with it. But in time-based art it seems awkward, to say the least: how am I to have liked something I already didn't like when it took place? The "taking place" is what's misleading here. Things take place, but our judgement of them needn't stop when they do. Does this mean we are easily influenced? We can't make up our mind by ourselves? Yes. Isn't that great?
The problem is when we see something controversial, like Castellucci's production.

The theater, reportedly says Castellucci, is a space to show amazing events.
But what is "amazing"? Castelucci's amazing might actually come from a maze rather than from amazement. It is a dry, calculated construction, a sort of a post-Wilsonian theater of imagery. But where Robert Wilson opts for a sort of a postmodern surrealism, the Castellucci I've seen prefers semantic games with the "timeless themes": birth, death, violence, etc., directly going for the heavy-duty stuff. At the same time, his aesthetics is quite close to what we've seen in the Cremaster Cycle. The strong white light that's gloomy, the fantasy/mythological characters, the extreme slowness (they aren't only taking their time, but ours as well...), and what's most striking, the extreme ritualization of everyday activities. Actually, this passing onto the stage seems to be quite natural, as Cremaster had the performative and theatrical qualities that only maybe needed to be nourished with some sort of theater dynamics to make it a stage piece. Here, tragedy is what provides this dynamics. It raises the energy level, while keeping the aesthetics of unbearable purity unbearably pure. Castellucci's discovery here seems of some importance: you don't need the story to have the tragedy. Or do you? Although fighting away any clear narratives, BR#04 somehow goes back into them all the time: when a guard takes off his uniform, and lies nearly naked on the floor, to be beaten up by other guards, we get a very succint, but also very straight-forward story. More - it is actually a story with a moral! This is a crucial point that distinguishes Castelucci from Wilson or Barney. The latter two stay as far from moral, social or political issues as they can, while the Italian director goes directly into them. How does he survive? How does one survive combining a visual arts/ abstract world with dwelving into social matter? Cláudia Dias had one solution I particularly liked: being delicate and extremely personal while maintaining a rigid formal structure. Castelucci's structure is even more rigid and dry (almost lifeless!), but he chooses the exact opposite strategy to Dias: he becomes completely impersonal. The characters have absolutely nothing personal about them. The stories aren't stories, but flashes, hints of stories, sketches of narratives with a few grasping details. Thus, the "narratives" we see are at once complete - a guard undresses to become an anonymous person, who is thenupon abused by other guards - and inexistant - there is no reason for the abuse, no outcome, no difference between the people who beat and the one who is beaten, there is no beginning and no end, as the act of violence remains fairly similar throughout the scene. It is suspended, and we are allowed to link it to our entire imagination, memory... or not.
And this is where the roads diverge. Do we accept this game of suspended scenes and create the stories ourselves, or do we demand something more than just live paintings? Do we see the crawling old man dressed in a bikini as a beautiful, engimatic and sad image, or do we see it as a naive metaphor? Is gratuitous violence meaningful because it shows the lack of sense, or is it simply gratuitous and therefore senseless? Are the strange characters that appear somewhere in the middle fascinating, or just cheap decoration? Is the baby that is left crying alone on the stage a great act of provocation, using the tradition of live art, or is it an irritating act of going back to something that has already been done but with stupid cruelty and a pathetic atmosphere?
I really cannot answer these questions. When leaving the theater, I asked a few friends about their opinions. An young actress said it was disturbing and moving. A performer said it was the worst thing he had ever seen. A choreographer said it was absolutely beautiful. An older actor who used to work with Grotowski said it was simply a stupid show pour épater les bourgeois.

I continue to cherish my I don't know. Castellucci's is a great theater to have watched. Then again, I believe it was Mark Twain who defined a classic as a book people praise and don't read. At times, I wonder how important is the very experience of being there, live, when a work is so disciplined it sometimes seems to move from the ritual to the image of the ritual. Isn't the image enough, then? Is this why Castellucci's web page has no images?
more on Castelucci

Tags: art, contemporary art, new art, vvoi, vvoitek, modern art, cool

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part three

Eugene von Bruenchenhein (1910-1983) was a small, quiet man who worked the night shift at a bakery outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He and his wife Marie lived a humble life in a tiny shack where Eugene spent all his spare time painting and writing poetry.



Eugene and Marie kept to themselves. The neighbors never guessed that inside their meager little home, Eugene and Marie lived as a god and goddess.



The couple adored each other and during their forty year marriage built a rich fantasy life together. He made crowns and elaborate jewelry for her out of clay he dug himself. He used the bakery oven as a kiln to fire his creations late at night when no one was watching. He also made tiny thrones out of chicken bones painted gold.



Eugene's paintings and sculptures were quite mediocre. His real artistic accomplishment was that he made several thousand pictures of Marie as his queen, muse, glamour girl, goddess, siren. He would scavenge floral print wallpaper or scraps of fabric to create exotic backdrops. He would adorn her in sarongs and togas and bikinis. Many of these photos he later colored by hand.





Eugene created montages with Marie's face in the sky, in the sun, and in the trees.



I don't imagine that many housewives in Milwaukee during the 1940s and 1950s spent their days posing for their husbands in nothing but a tiara. But then, I don't think that Eugene and Marie ever felt bound by the time and place where they lived. Their love was transcendent.





Eugene's images of Marie remind me of the line by that great poet of love, Walt Whitman,

I will leave all,
and come and make the hymns of you.

Whatever you may think about the song of Eugene von Bruenchenhein, there are definitely worse ways to live.