The Eye of Hercule Poirot Sees All

This is Albert Finney as Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot in the 1974 Sidney Lumet movie of Murder on the Orient Express.

Finney gleefully plunges into the role, making his Poirot ever so nauseatingly fastidious and Belgian. If it was explained correctly to me, Christie copped to having made Poirot Belgian because nobody knows anything about Belgium, thus obviating the need for research. She could just make her detective eccentric and vaguely French.

Finney's marvelous Poirot occasionally stops bumbling, allowing his victim to suddenly comprehend his overpowering intelligence, much as a mouse comprehends a serpent. It is during one such instant of clarity that he hisses, "The eye of Hercule Poirot sees all."

That's how I remember it, anyhow, and I like it that way.

This phrase passed through my mind on May 13th, as I was working on this sheet of drawings at Spring Street:

Daniel Maidman, Kuan: Knee, Back, Spiral Torso, pencil on paper, 15"x11", 2013

The top two drawings are from 10-minute poses, and the bottom is from a 20. The model is Kuan, who is a fantastic model, and also a dancer, and also a kind and funny human being. Poirot's comment floated through my mind as I was drawing Kuan's back, on the top right. I realized that I was seeing in a way that was - well, it was not entirely new. I had seen much like this before. But I had taken another step, across a turning point, so that a progress was now completed.

The way I had seen before was as a kind of craving, a thirst. For most of us, our gazes at the beautiful things of this world are characterized by a similar thirst. In its purest form, this thirst is a thirst for knowledge. Artists - the observational kind anyway - refine this thirst and turn it into an awful instrument, a blade that dissects reality, peeling away appearances to reveal the underlying light and color and texture and mass of things. What civilians understand themselves as having seen, artists learn to see: to disrupt the easy flow of sight, even focused desirous sight, to yield explicit knowledge not only of what is seen, but of how the seer sees.

This furious form of sight is powerful, but it has limits. Lately, I have bumped up against those limits some. It is limited in its nature. It is a slave to desire. Desire makes many things visible. But it is a sieve; it sees intensely what is desired, and blocks everything else. Therefore as much as it enhances sight, it also blinds.

When I did the drawing at the top right, of Kuan's upper back, I was suddenly seeing without desire. I had been working toward this, but now, with a little jump, I was there. Near to it and there are a world apart. I was filled with a floating and detached love, an undiscriminating benevolence. I was not on a budget or a schedule. I had time for only a little bit, but I was seeing as if I had time for everything. It did not matter to me what I caught or what I lost. In letting go of what I thought I needed to catch, I realized I was going to catch more - unexpected things, but more - more, and better. In fact, I was in the depths of Proust's paradox: you will only get what you want when you stop wanting it.

It was then that Finney's delicious line reading floated through my mind: "The eye of Hercule Poirot sees all." I had discovered Poirot's secret method of seeing all, that he desires to see nothing in particular. This is how the detective detects. Of course! Of course it must be so - this is the method of science, the disinterested gaze which does not eliminate anything from the pool of suspects, the universe of clues. To attack the mystery with the preconceptions of desire is a fatally flawed attack; it presupposes a solution. The solution may even be correct, but to solve the mystery by means of such flailing correctness is, spiritually, not to solve it at all. It is to remain in a state of blindness.

Analytically, I had always understood this distinction between the scientific gaze and the gaze, if not strictly of the artist, then at least of most artists, and all art students. But I had not understood before that the detachment of the scientific gaze is suffused with love. It is the total love which remains once desire has been boiled away. Desire confuses us about our loves - do we love the beloved because of the way it can satisfy our appetites, or do we love it with regard to its nature in and of itself? Do we love the mere beingness of the beloved? So long as desire distorts our gaze, we cannot know. But once we have overpowered our desires, we can know. Our eye sees all.

Let me turn once again to my favorite fakey ancient-eastern-wisdom story:

"Master," he says, "what comes after enlightenment?"

The peasant bends down, picks his load back up, and keeps trudging up the mountain.

You can deduce the surrounding narrative. The application of the story here is this: did I retain this transcendent lucidity? Of course not. Consider the very next drawing I did, at the bottom of the page:

What the fuck is this bullshit? It is, of course, a demon of desire. Kuan made another of her endless variety of fascinatingly curled shapes, and I succumbed to the desire to capture the essential of that curl in the 20 minute pose. I was working toward that goal, instead of merely drawing. I had one phenomenon of beauty in mind - the beauty of transcribing this composition of the body - eliminating the surrounding phenomena of beauties available and, perhaps, more natural to the interval.

I was aware of what I was doing, and yet I could not resist. I wanted that image! The results were predictable enough. I rushed the drawing, and got bits wrong. You can see in the grey of her lower ribcage at picture-left. That's where I misplaced her bones and had to push them back and forth, trying to get them in their right places. But as Yoda teaches us, there is no try. This drawing is not a good drawing.

***

At this point in my own progress, I am allowed only flickers of the sublime detachment of Hercule Poirot. And yet these are redeeming flickers, and the contemplation of them reminds me of what exactly I am supposed to be working on. In this, as in so many things, I feel dazzlingly fortunate; and I hope that in seeking to describe my good fortune, I am able to pass it along to you as well.


---
Once again, I find that Fred Hatt and I are expressing related thoughts. I had meant to read his latest before posting, and now that I have, I'm glad I didn't. Our descriptions of seeing make use of some of the same metaphors, and I would have become tongue-tied if I'd known how much of his work I was copying. But as usual, he has a distinct and intelligent take on the matter, one that is well worth reading (and also includes a Kuan drawing): http://fredhatt.com/blog/2013/06/11/the-penetrating-glance/

Universal Threat

Last night I watched Silent Hill 2: Revelation. On the face of it, this is not a very good movie. And the face of it goes all the way to the bone. But that doesn't mean it's not interesting. I conceived a desire to explain to you at last why I find Silent Hill so utterly fascinating, and this led me to systematize some thoughts I had been sloppy about before.

I'd like to propose a three-tier division of horror movies:

1. Local Threat

The overwhelming majority of horror movies are local threat stories. In such a case, the character of the threat - be it a serial killer, a vampire, a witch, or distressingly aggressive wolves - is essentially limited in space. This means that whatever hellishness afflicts the main characters, anyone who isn't so unfortunate as to wander into the immediate area will probably make it through OK.

Psycho is a classic local threat horror movie:

If you don't check in, you can't get hurt.

This type of story has virtues and weaknesses. Its minor virtues flow from its major virtue, which is that it obeys the Aristotelian narrative unities of time, space, and action. The minor virtues that result are that if you do one well, it is propulsive and terrifying. It provides precisely the right size of canvas for reflection on the darkest verge of morality.

For instance, one of the most beautiful cinematic portraits of sadism I know is Alan Arkin's performance in the 1967 Wait Until Dark. This movie, which more or less takes place in a single apartment, pits Arkin's psychotic mobster against Audrey Hepburn's blind housewife. As the film progresses, her sightless eyes bulge, seeking a knowledge they cannot gain:

And he, who can see, is self-blinding - he hides his eyes behind sunglasses:

How like their morality this is - she, striving toward awareness and virtue, and he, sinking ever deeper into depravity. This simple visual parallel for their deepest qualities as characters is made possible by the narrow confines of the narrative. And again, if you happen to live only one apartment over, Alan Arkin really has no beef with you. A very local threat.

The major weaknesses of this type of story are twofold: the first is the stupid-main-character problem. The threat can be so curtailed that only a goddamned idiot could expose themselves to it. My friend Mac Rogers summed this up maybe twenty years ago in contemplating the obvious problem with the Friday the Thirteenth series, that Jason "pretty much only works Camp Crystal Lake." While we're talking about Mac, let me plug his new play, Frankenstein Upstairs. It's up in New York this month, and you oughta go, because on his worst day his writing is riveting. Info at the link.

The other major weakness of the local threat story is that the threat is more or less limited to evil versus good. Evil is a specifically human phenomenon. It is comprehensible because it is close at hand. It is the nearby threat, the familiar threat. We all represent this very threat. As Dostoyevsky demonstrates, it is a threat of horrific depth and inspires tremendous fear. But it is not the most frightening thing in the world. Not to me, anyway.

2. Global Threat

The local threat story deals with the extinction of the lead characters. The global threat horror story deals with the extinction of humanity. There are far fewer global threat horror movies than local threat horror movies, and most of them concern zombies.

I'm not much scared of serial killer movies, which shade off so easily into torture porn, which is not, properly speaking, horror at all. I'm not so distressed by vampires and witches and wolves. But zombies scare the holy fuck out of me.

George Romero, Dawn of the Dead, 1978, the best zombie movie ever made

I am unendingly upset by the prospect that, at some time in the future, everything we love and care about, so much of which resides in vessels of flesh, will be reduced to bloody meat. That some paralyzing disorder of the mind will erase everything that makes us distinct and individual, and fine and true, and turn us into a mumbling, self-consuming rabble. Zombie movies are terrifying because they are, ultimately, about the end of the world. What is the loss of my life, or yours, in the face of the loss of everything? I can bear the thought of getting eviscerated by some asshole with a knife, so long as the Mona Lisa survives. But I cannot bear the thought of the entire edifice going down in flames.

In fact, this was the only good thing about the deservedly overlooked 2009 Alex Proyas film Knowing. There's a good deal of running around and shouting before it becomes clear that nobody in this movie has any chance of influencing any of its major events, which are this: the world comes to a fiery end.

There is something obscene about its loving penultimate sequence of the destruction of Manhattan (a solar flare I think). If you're paying attention, you can see the water boil out of Central Park's reservoir. Which means that you've just seen the Met, and all the treasures in it - five or six thousand years of human hopes and achievement - turn to ash.

This, to me, is scarier than evil: coming face to face with the implacable indifference of nature. In the face of this indifference, all the things we value will not survive. They must be overwhelmed by the superior and inhuman forces of disease (as in zombie movies) or geology and cosmology (as in planetary destruction movies).

And yet even these awful nightmares adhere to a Law. It is the Law of necessity, and from our fragile human perspective, it is a cruel law, a law which overrides our affections and needs. But for all that, it is a Law, and therefore it is of a kind with ourselves, because we are characterized by reason, and reason is a law-seeking mechanism. We need not like the Law to take comfort in its government of the world.

3. Universal Threat

All horror movies concern offenses against order. Local threat horror movies deal with offenses against the moral order. Global threat horror movies deal with offenses against the civilizational or species-scale order. Universal threat horror movies, which are vanishingly rare, deal with offenses against the order of being itself. They are metaphysical horror movies.

You should know me well enough by now to know that I am a born metaphysician. This is why, of all the horror movies, I find the universal threat horror movies most fascinating and most unnerving.

I'd like to distinguish here between supernatural and metaphysical horror. Supernatural horror, for me, falls into the local threat category because, typically, it is treated as pertaining only to its immediate region of influence:

victim of the Blair Witch

The supernatural acts more like a magic trick than a rift across the diameter of reality. It's a scary, unnatural magic trick, but it does not rise to the level of a universal threat.

The 1997 movie Cube was a local threat horror movie. It concerned a large cube, built by fascist bureaucrats or something. This cube is subdivided into many cubical rooms, some of which tried to kill you in novel ways. A number of characters trapped in the cube spend the movie working on escaping from it. You could say it does not go well for them.

The 2002 sequel, Cube 2: Hypercube, was not a good movie. But like somebody you love without especially liking, it was a brilliant movie. It was a universal threat horror movie. Its new-and-improved cube is actually a tesseract. It doesn't have a large number of rooms; it has an infinite number of rooms.

one of many

As in the first movie, some of these rooms may well kill you, but they won't slice-and-dice you as the intended result of active human malevolence. They will do it indifferently, as an accidental outcome of their own unfathomable peregrinations. Inside this movie's hypercube, time and space become unreliable and fragmentary. Some characters are frozen in time, others age lifetimes in minutes. Several are endlessly duplicated. Some are murdered or killed or simply vanish, and some later un-die or forget their terminations.

This is mayhem as a result of the collapse of consistent reality. It is technically limited, I suppose, to the vast confines of the hypercube, but it carries implications for the entire universe: that those verities we think we can rely upon, the predictable identities of space, time, matter, and energy, are subject to disturbingly unstable forces. The hypercube strips the mind of its last refuge; beyond evil, beyond extinction, there remains the Law. The hypercube offends against the Law. It is an illustration of universal threat.

This genre also includes the 1997 Event Horizon, in which Sam Neill:

Becomes all kinds of fucked up:

As a result of a glitchy faster-than-light drive that opens one of those gates to hell you hear so much about:

The shockingly blithe, careless violence of this movie has to be seen to be grasped.

And finally, this microscopic genre includes the movie adaptations of the video game Silent Hill. The first Silent Hill movie, from 2006, had the following titles in its trailer:

A little grammatically questionable, but yes, yes exactly - the universal threat corresponds with De Chirico's formulation:

To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many colored toys which change their appearance, which, like little children we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty.

We seek an explanation because we are human, and we depend, when all else has failed, upon the Law. And the essence of the universal threat is lawlessness - that at bottom, there is no explanation. Silent Hill demonstrates this awful inexplicable lawlessness in its decay sequences. Preceded by air-raid sirens, darkness falls, and with the darkness, everything decays, clean new walls drying up and flaking off of a deeper layer of rust, blood, and cracked tile:

There are monsters and bloodshed and so forth, but it is the brutal inconsistency of the scenario which I find disturbing. There are at least three versions of the town Silent Hill in the movie: a real-world version that is a sunlit abandoned town in West Virginia (based loosely on Centralia, Pennsylvania), a fogged, more deeply empty version - and the darkness version of the fogged version.

All three of these towns exist in the same space. In the sequel, the one I watched last night, the heroine goes to Silent Hill to find her abducted father, leading the inevitable Malcolm McDowell to remark, "There are many Silent Hills, are you sure you've got the right one?" This suggestion of the laminar nature of reality, of layer upon layer proceeding to potentially limitless depths, of every volume of space a continuous maze -

note the maze

- is a core facet of how the Silent Hill movies produce their proposed atmosphere of mysteries without answers, and secrets without explanation.

The filmmakers being human, of course they clutter up their movies with nothing but attempts at explanation. But at the end of the day, does it really matter which horde of benighted townsfolk burned who at the stake? All the narrative justifications in the world don't get us all the way down to the fundamental terror of the premise: that the world does not make any sense at all. You just thought it did, and you were wrong.

---

So that's my three-tiered system of horror movies, and my explanation for my immense affection for flicks of dubious quality like Cube 2: Hypercube and Silent Hill. A few additional notes:

1. I have read somewhere that in the perfect horror movie, no character would appear twice, so that we could not even rely upon the company of our guides through the universe of the film. This is obviously a universal threat mode of storytelling. And look - producers need to make their money back. Nobody, right now, is going to make a dada horror movie, a horror movie of total anarchy. But soon, perhaps, the cost of making movies will drop so low that it will be possible to think them directly into being. At that point, I will get around to writing and executing my long-dreamt-of take on universal threat, Irrational House. Until then, there's not much point.

2. This is the second time I've come upon the phrase "universal threat." Previously, I was thinking about all the things I'm interested in doing - the ones I'm actually doing, like painting, drawing, and writing, and the ones I'd like to do, like directing and sculpting. There is a film-world terminology whereby if you write and direct you are called a double threat; and if you write, act, and direct you are a triple threat. And I thought, abruptly, "I don't want to be a double threat, or a triple threat - I want to be a universal threat."

This struck me as such a badass phrase that I right away went and registered the URL. I haven't done anything with it yet, but if I get to the point where I need to, you know, leverage synergies, then surely this is what I will call my synergy-leveraging corporation and where I will park it on the Web.

Also, I made a mockup of a logo.

3. I recognize that I have been talking about things, these past couple of posts, which are not, technically, painting. I hope you'll bear with me while I flagrantly violate your trust as regards subject matter. I have many things to say about painting in the next few posts, but this was what I thought about this morning.

The Uncanniness of Solipsism

I have been collecting for a while now instances of a particularly distressing form of uncanniness. Or, rather, since recognizing this category of uncanniness, I have been going back through my memories and marking all those instances of it which were already present.

I recognized the category while watching Woody Allen's 2011 movie Midnight in Paris. Gil, Owen Wilson's present-day writer, finds a magical contrivance which, at midnight, takes him back in time to the Paris of the 1920's, a period of cultural fertility which he idolizes. The movie is supposed to be a comedy, but it is not only that. Here Gil walks with Adriana, a 1920's Parisian played by Marion Cotillard:

Do you see anything wrong with this picture?

I do. There's nothing in it. A city is full of life, movement, people. Here the streets of Paris are oddly deserted. The stage is set and the crew have switched on the lights, but the actors are nowhere to be found.

This eerie underpopulation persists in all the 1920's sequences. Here Salvador Dalí and Man Ray meet up with Gil in a restaurant:

A few extras are artfully placed - but not enough extras to convince us that this is a real, functioning restaurant. The present-day sequences are full of noise and urban vitality. The 1920's sequences look like the 1920's, but apart from people speaking directly to Gil, they are nearly unpeopled and silent.

The effect becomes even more overbearing during a brief jump-within-a-jump to the gaslit 1890's:

Ignore the large number of people in the frame, they fall away as the scene progresses. All that remains are the dim lights, and a stifling velvet darkness.

Gil does not notice this spooky etiolation, so besotted is he with talking to his heroes - to Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Picasso and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the style of the filmmaking tells us that these are not his heroes. They are almost convincing imitations of them, set in motion to advance some unstated purpose. For my part, the menacing staging was reminding me of something, and I quickly remembered what it was: the hideous pollen in Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In this bewitching book, the main character, Toru Okada, repeatedly enters a dreamlike alternate Tokyo centered on room 208, a hotel suite:

The room is dark. A vase holds a massive bouquet of flowers, and the air is heavy with their suggestive fragrance. ... In the bed at the back of the suite lies a woman. I hear her moving in the sheets. The ice makes a pleasant clinking in her glass. Minuscule grains of pollen suspended in the air shudder with the sound, like living organisms. Each tiny ripple of sound passing through the air brings more of them to sudden life. The pale darkness opens itself to the pollen, and the pollen, taken in, increases the density of the darkness. 

(pp. 393-394)

This upsetting pollen reappears in further dreams of the room:

...a familiar sharp smell of pollen struck my nostrils. I was in that strange hotel room. ... All of a sudden, the phone began to ring. My heart froze like a frightened cat. The air's sharp reverberations woke the floating grains of pollen, and the flower petals raised their faces in the darkness. 

(pp. 550-551)

I'm not sure if the awful threat of the pollen translates in these brief excerpts. They intimate not only sex, but violence, in the book; they bode bloodshed. But worse than that, they suggest that this entire world does not exist when Toru Okada is not present. His entrance awakens a latent reality, it brings the Tokyo of room 208 lurching into a kind of half-life, a grisly mimicry of independent being. The longer he stays, the closer this world draws to an explosion of violence. He must keep entering the world, and awakening the awful pollen, and trying to reach his goal before the pollen finishes waking up.

We are now approaching this fresh category of uncanniness. Consider another instance of it, Coraline, book and film. In Neil Gaiman's story, a little girl discovers a passage in her house to a second house, with a second set of her parents waiting for her. They seem like her real parents at first, but better - more loving and more exciting -  and with buttons for eyes. As Coraline spends more time in this other world, it becomes increasingly phantasmagorical. In the film, she observes an intricate dance of blank-eyed circus mice which, for my part, made me want to run screaming from the theater:

Again we are confronted with a world which springs into being only as a single real character enters it, and which falls silent again when he or she leaves.

Coraline provides the most explicit key of these three instances to the uncanniness involved: the other world is a construct designed to delight and distract Coraline. It is a trap. Over time, everything in it softens and blurs, and the other mother clarifies - she is an arachnid, some kind of predatory soul-eater:

She's been out to catch and consume Coraline the whole time.

This completes the concept of the uncanny false world. Not only does it spring into being in response to the presence of a single real consciousness - a very close model of philosophical solipsism - but it proves persistently impossible to shake the feeling that a second consciousness created it to trick the target consciousness. It is as if one were stuck in the mirrored interior of a disco ball, and had a sense of something moving in the darkness outside. The uncanny menace of this type of world is as follows:

1. Because it exists for a single individual, it reeks of falsehood.
2. The texture of its falsehood is of a kind with intentional manipulation.

Here we have a good example of hopefulness in horror. What I mean is this - as children, some of us worry that the entire universe may be an illusion, that we alone can be said to exist. This is an instinctive formulation of the solipsistic argument. The urgency of the anxiety tends to diminish over time, but it is one of those peculiar arguments which cannot be dismissed; its claims are larger than all sets of contrary evidence can encompass.

For all that, the fact that all actual instances of the solipsistic universe are attended by this uncanny sense of falsehood and the unseen second consciousness provide some of the most powerful evidence available for the existence of an actual universe independent of ourselves. It is a kind of counterfactual proof: to suppose the truth of solipsism seems inherently to invoke this mood of the uncanny. The mood of the uncanny is a visceral, pre-rational evaluation of the solipsistic universe as utterly impossible. It folds obscenely.

This is no kind of analytic proof, but analytic proofs are posterior things. They come after fundamental things. The question of the independent existence of the universe is a fundamental question; we are scraping along the very bottom of the world when we ask about this. In this murky realm, intuition is elevated above its ordinary place. It is nearly all we have left. We are so constructed as to be unable to buy into a true solipsistic universe. This is some of the most powerful evidence we are going to get that our ordinary working assumption is correct: there is a universe. There are people in it. We are not alone.

---

Let me add here an excerpt from a conversation between Paul Éluard and André Breton.

left to right: Paul Éluard, André Breton (photograph by Man Ray)

ÉLUARD: How do you reconcile your love of women and your taste for sodomy?
BRETON: The question of reconciliation does not arise. I prefer sodomy for moral reasons and above all through considerations of non-conformity. No chance of a child with a woman one does not love, and that a woman one does love can so abandon herself seems to me infinitely arousing.
ÉLUARD: Why?
BRETON: From the materialist point of view, in the case of a woman I love, it is infinitely more pessimistic (shit's law) and therefore more poetic.
ÉLUARD: But why, for example, does not the idea of conception through coitus appear more pessimistic to you than shit?
BRETON: Because it is in conformity with growth which is mingled in my mind with the idea of well-being.

Oh, P.S., Éluard and Breton co-founded surrealism. This excerpt is from the Research into Sexuality, as quoted on page 91 of A Book of Surrealist Games. It took place in a part of Paris in the 1920's which Woody Allen somehow failed to include in his movie.

I am well aware that in a metaphysical sense, I consistently advocate for the principle of well-being sketched out, and rejected, by Breton. Philosophically speaking, I am Mr. Vanilla.

I am afflicted with a sense that this makes me very bland. There are all kinds of dark pleasures - whatever Breton would be into if he were around today - which, like two north magnetic poles pushed toward one another, I bend away from. While Breton and his friends have the whiff of brimstone about them, I myself am not sexy. I am not adventurous; I am neither wild nor mysterious; I am in favor of rendering good to the good, and bad to the bad; death has got no part of me.

I have spent a good deal of time considering evil, and I think in some ways I have the hang of it. I believe Socrates has it wrong about evil. It is possible not only to do evil, but to choose evil - to do evil in the context not of confusion, but of clarity. And though I can see my way to this, and to its awful strength, I cannot choose it. I believe that lacking even a tincture of the choice of evil makes me some way duller than I need to be, less daring and less great. But I cannot bear the stain.

This series of thoughts came up when I reached my set of conclusions about the uncanniness of solipsism. Why? Because I find it almost unbearably tedious that I can reason my way clear around the circumference of the universe and what I come up with is, "The universe exists. You are not alone." I am utterly unsurprised that this is the chipper conclusion I reach. It is in character for me, it is mundane, it is an obvious conclusion which did not require so much effort. I feel that the Breton crowd would snub me once they got to know me. I would not be cool.

While this is disappointing, there are compensations to the uncool position. Although I cannot get as much of hate and pessimism as I would like, I have so much love and well-being that I can give them away to other people. I can even write them down and make pictures of them. So, fine: we are all constituted in such a way as to have some nature which is our own nature. This is mine.

Thus do I assert myself.

I will never cease in praising the virtues, and though they are obvious, boring virtues, that does not diminish our happiness when we make a life in them.

---

Instances of the uncanniness of solipsism not discussed here:

A Maze of Death (novel), by Philip K. Dick (and most of the rest of his books)
They (short story), by Robert A. Heinlein
The Muse (short story), by Anthony Burgess
The Third Expedition (chapter), The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
The Shining, as filmed by Stanley Kubrick
The Polar Express, as filmed by Robert Zemeckis

Therefore Laugh and Regret Nothing

The Living and the Dead, Begging

Weather permitting, my wife and I like to walk long distances inside of New York City. On one of New York's many bridges, there is a man. I used to think I ran into him a lot; only lately do I realize he hangs out on that bridge. He has a boom box of odd design, always playing, and it seems he is always there. "Why do you suppose he does that?" Charlotte asked. It seemed to her counter-intuitive, a waste of resources, to hang out on the bridge: exposed to wind and sun, unable to sit or lie down, not asking for change among people not disposed to pass it along. But it seemed obvious to me. By establishing this habit, this man saves himself, in some small way, from being nobody. He is not just another homeless crazy, interchangeable, disposable, and forgettable. By virtue of his habit, he is somebody: he is the guy with the boom box who hangs out on that bridge. Many people would spend many resources to be this much of a somebody. It makes no sense to Charlotte, but it makes sense to me.

Consider another instance of people who have found a successful scheme to distinguish themselves from their fellow men:

This is inside of the Strand, at 12th St. and Broadway, a used bookstore beloved of New York residents and tourists alike. While we're on the topic, let me share a trick to Strand shopping which is not obvious at first: if you go in looking for something specific, they will not have it and you will be disappointed. But if you go in looking for nothing in particular, you will find the most wonderful books you didn't know you had to have.

I took this picture because, looking at these books, I realized that if everything goes absolutely right for me, and I wind up as a book in the Strand, this is where I'll go. Not bad company, right? Matisse, Michelangelo, Morandi, Mantegna, and Metsu are certainly not nobody. Consider two possible truths about the man on the bridge: either he stands on the bridge in order not to be nobody - or he uses his somebody-ness to teach us a lesson about something worthwhile. I hope to learn from things, and so I hope I've learned a lesson from his efforts. But in himself, it is more likely the man on the bridge is like most men: a slave to the cravings of his vanity. That is, he probably does not think of himself as some kind of sage teaching a lesson. He probably just wants to be somebody. This does not make him a low person - I am like that more often than I would prefer, and I do not think I am a low person - but in such a case the maximum virtue of his somebody-ness is lower than that of artists Ma- through Mo- at the Strand.

Why? Because these artists have used their somebody-ness the way it is meant to be used: as a vehicle for the preservation and transmission of something greater than themselves. Their work, obviously, is the point. What do we care that Michelangelo was a grump, Morandi a hermit, Matisse a bit of a letch, but certainly not more of one than I? These are charming details written on the box, but the prize inside the box is the work. The value of the name is that it saves the work from oblivion. And the work can save each soul it touches. This is the proper use of somebody-ness.

But consider another fearful reversal. We come to the shelves of the Strand as if making a pilgrimage to a holy place, to spend some minutes or hours in the august company of the mighty of the arts. But how does it look to them, living as they do a half-life as discounted books? To the extent they have any self-knowledge left, they must conceive of themselves as hollowed-out, dulled, beggars. They are groaning for our attention, we are the only vehicles that remain for them to continue living. They are absolutely helpless, and if we will not spend some time with them, they must hurry along at last to that house of shadows their cleverness allowed them to escape for some decades or centuries. Nobody who lives and dies escapes it forever; one day the name of Michelangelo must also be forgotten, and he, loudest of mouths, will at long last be silenced.

What a strange situation this is! We approach these artists in awe and supplication, and they in turn approach us in desperation, the breath of oblivion hot on the back of their necks. We the living can afford to approach them in all innocence. They, so much closer to death, cannot afford innocence. Things have clarified for them, that this is a struggle for survival. Have they repudiated the magnificence of their own work? I hate to think so.

Everything Will Be Made and Forgotten Again

There is one answer to this awful dilemma. I grasped the answer once, and wrote it into a script for a long-abandoned film. This part of the script is set in an edenic society on the shores of the oceans of Europa. One of the people there makes the leap from the continuous forgetful present into awareness of self and time. This leap gives her two understandings which elude her fellows: hope for the future, and fear of death. Distraught, she goes apart from human company. At the bottom of the sea, she discovers the native Europans, which are telepathic sea fans (you can see why this film didn't get made). She presents her woes to these sea fans. The sea fans have already endured what she is only now suffering: they remember eden, and they remember the turbulence of mortal life and hope. They have long since made their way back to the eden consciousness wins for itself. They say to her, "Everything will be made and forgotten again. Therefore laugh and regret nothing."

This is extraordinarily difficult to accept. Not for everyone, but for me at least. And I recognize that when I do finally accept it, it will be very easy to accept. But until then, it will remain difficult. Matisse, who kept drawing on the wall with a stick when he was a sick old man lying in bed, grasped the principle and made a picture of it, a picture which is a door wide open to enlightenment, to celebrating what we can have and letting go the burden of wanting things we cannot have:

Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1910, oil on canvas, 102"x154"

This picture, in fact, was in my folder for the visual design of the Europa sequence. And the idea I assign to it, of "laugh and regret nothing," is an idea I turn to nearly so much as I turn to my furious ambition and my thirst for immortality. Perhaps I will argue every idea and its opposite, so long as they are interesting ideas. In the meantime, though, I am in a "laugh and regret nothing" mood - it is a sunny day in the unusually cold spring of 2013, and there is good cheer enough for the man on the bridge, and for Gabriel Metsu on the shelf at the Strand, and for me and you. I am painting like crazy lately, and I hope you too have a wonderfully productive summer.

The Platypus

Let me share with you a doubt. My doubt is that visual art has all that much of an impact on history.

I have written many of the essays you've been reading as if art had something to say, and as if it were important. And I believe, more or less - on good days - that something like this is true.

If you've read Citizens, Simon Schama's magnificent history of the French revolution, you will have come across chapter four, "The Cultural Construction of a Citizen." This is the first chapter in which Schama advances in detail the jarring thesis that pre-revolutionary and revolutionary visual arts, from high painting to low propaganda, helped to inspire and guide the revolution. I have thought about this thesis for a very long time now. On the one hand, he draws convincing links. But on the other hand - come on. We're talking about prints, pamphlets, and 18th century French painters.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Girl Making a Dog Dance on Her Bed, 1760, Oil on canvas, 35" x 27.6"

a masterpiece from the pre-revolutionary French genre of fannies-and-puppy-dogs

Usually, my thinking on this odd chapter is that Schama himself is devoted to the visual arts, and overestimates their active role in history to match their active role in his own life. Confusions proliferate from this contrary conclusion as well: if the visual arts are, by and large, of little interest - are they at least of interest to interesting people? Do they shape the lives of the people who shape history? Do these people actually shape history? Should we care what they think?

Consider a modern example of the phenomenon Schama describes.

Shepard Fairey, the "Hope" poster, 2008

Everyone would recognize this iconic poster, but I think almost no one would say that its impact shifted the course of the election. It shows correlation, not causation - or at most, it was one of a thousand factors. And yet, in fifty years, when the confusing tangle of antecedent circumstances has faded from memory, and the poster remains as powerful as ever - what role will people imagine it had in the election of 2008?

What do most people know of Barry Goldwater today, apart from Lyndon Johnson's commercial, which bluntly implied that the election of Goldwater would lead to nuclear war?

the "Daisy" commercial, 1964

I have read it argued that this television commercial tipped the balance. Could this be true? I doubt it, just as I doubt that Fairey's poster tipped the balance 44 years later.

I am inclined to believe that the visual arts in the west were most influential in the Middle Ages, when the images hosted by churches helped to describe and explain religion, theology, and philosophy to a largely illiterate populace. This is what I am inclined to believe, but who can accurately reconstruct the hearts of the dead from the documentation they left behind? The documents are the visual arts themselves, and the writings of people to whom the visual arts were important. The reconstruction is impossible, and the documents are skewed. So I have beliefs, but I do not know.

Here's what I do know: whether or not the visual arts make a bit of practical difference to anyone, they do encode intellectual history in complex and sophisticated ways. This makes them a part of our intellectual heritage. Apart from the beauty of art objects, this is one of their key values. They are statements in the great conversation which has gone on since first we spoke until today. History consists in events, but it also consists in ideas. In this second sense, the visual arts do not sway history, nor do they record history. They are the very materials of history.

All this by way of background considerations for a remarkable painting I stumbled across the other day at the Brooklyn Museum. It's among the European paintings in the Beaux-Arts Court, if you want to go see it for yourself.

Carlo Crivelli, Saint James Major, 1472, tempera and gold on panel, 38.3"x12.6"

I had never heard of Carlo Crivelli or Saint James Major. But I'm pretty good at guessing about things. So what do we have here?

The painting has many Medieval trappings: the narrow, centered, vertical saint image - the patterned gold leaf - the stylized angularity of the figure, in whom curves are built up by arpeggios of broken straight lines - and the use of tempera, a pre-oil paint medium.

But the date is early Renaissance. Many of the leaps toward naturalism had already been made by 1472, and Crivelli, working in the cities of Italy, would have encountered them. In fact, though James Major's face is of a Medieval type, it is depicted using many of the tools of Renaissance realism. It is no longer a caricature, as Medieval faces are, but a realistic portrayal of a funny-looking man, like those computer-generated photographs you sometimes see of Charlie Brown or Bart Simpson as if they were real people. The pretense of Medievalism gives way entirely in the extremities, which are state-of-the-art. Consider these hands:

These are lovely hands, naturalistically rendered with regard to structure and light, and subtly observed down to the level of tendons and vascularity. Renaissance hands. Or consider the feet:

The texture of the sole of the foot is glimpsed on the left foot. Bones and tendons are represented with the exaggerated anatomical detail of the early Renaissance, when artists were still reveling in their ability to pull this kind of stunt at all. The foreshortening of the right foot is plausible and smartly observed. The delicate upward hitch of the big toes is utterly characteristic of the sense of nobility of the period. I am partial to painting feet myself, and I've given their depiction a lot of thought:

Daniel Maidman, Blue Leah #10, 2012, oil on canvas, 24"x24"

Based on James's feet, I'm going to claim that Crivelli, like Mantegna, could and did draw the body in an entirely Renaissance manner. All of his Medieval gestures are choices.

So what's the deal with this painting?

I see this Saint James Major as existing at the crossroads of the intellectual history of the west. Like Botticelli, Crivelli is a man torn between two worlds.

On the one hand, there are the last echoes of the Middle Ages. For all the anthropocentric humanism of Medieval scholastic thought, the heart of the Medieval thinker beat to the Gothic rhythm of puny, cipher-like Man, cringing before the overwhelming force of God's drama as it played itself out across the uncertain face of the fallen world. This intuition of insignificance defined the art of the Middle Ages, its stiff, stereotyped figures tightly integrated into symbolic scenery. This outlook, at its very best - tender, humble, forbearing - Crivelli cannot leave behind. He refuses to leave it behind; he refuses to give up a nearly-obsolete faith.

And yet he is a modern man. All artists are, be they never so reactionary. Crivelli could not help surrendering to the irresistible attractions of the Renaissance. The Medieval figure is an idea playing a role. The Renaissance figure is at most a step removed from direct observation. It is rooted in the perfection of the real. It is so much more convincing, it offers so much more scope for the talents of the artist. Having once seen it, Crivelli is incapable of going back. He must apply it himself. His lighting is realistic, his anatomy is accurate, his flesh is convincing.

The Renaissance glorifies two things: the flesh, and the meaning of the flesh. Crivelli has taken the first carnal step - the glorification of the flesh. But he has not seen all the way to the endpoint of the intuitive ideology of the Renaissance, that meaning arises from the flesh and inheres in it. Instead, he awkwardly sutures his glorious flesh, like a guilty pleasure, into his Medieval pictorial paradigm, in which meaning is imposed from above, as the God of the Middle Ages imposes his will on the world, from above. He pastes a modern man like a decal into a ginned-up old timey composition.

Do you see how exciting this is? This is a platypus of a painting. It is a painting in which clashing elements of different worlds live uneasily side by side. It is only when the boundary of an outlook occurs inside a work, butting up against the boundary of an adjacent outlook, that the contrast makes us intensely aware of the qualities of each. This painting, more than the works that precede or follow it, gives us insights into the deep natures of the Medieval and Renaissance outlooks. It is a little painting, and no doubt many other paintings are better, or illustrate the same principle. But it was in confrontation with this one that I was offered this series of understandings. The painting offered it to me; in an instant, it revived the past and made its concerns clear and present. These are not dead ideas, because we do not yet know the answers to the questions they address. And even if we did, the ideas would not be dead because they are answers generated by our human brothers and sisters, able to speak to us down through the centuries by means of the miracle of their work, which robs time of forgetfulness. That's what art offers: thoughts, beauty, memory, companionship. It does not divert the course of armies, but it compensates us for our sufferings. Importance does not reside in changing history alone. Art rarely changes history, but it is important.

---

Worth Reading: Citizens, by Simon Schama
Worth Visiting: The Brooklyn Museum

Speak, Memory: Fedele Spadafora at Slag and Mighty Tanaka

This one ran a little while back at Huffington. I'm just now getting around to posting it here, and the shows I'm describing have, ahem, closed by the time you read this. I apologize. I thought I was busy before, but it turns out I had scarcely plumbed the depths of my ability to overschedule myself. I need clones, people. Bring me clones.

***

Fedele Spadafora is a New York artist who is in the home stretch of that anxious journey which characterizes the development of the technically-trained painter: he is just about done making pictures in homage to his skills, and has nearly made his skills the servants of a vision.

Spadafora's work has never been brightly colored, and he has never been a partisan of the pleasing shape. His palette is getting gloomier, and his images, as often as not, more indistinct. They give a jostling shoulder to our sensual appetites. That's fine, there is more to us than our sensual appetites. Spadafora provides rewards in a currency in scarce supply.

Consider his 2011 painting Stage Diner:

Fedele Spadafora, Stage Diner, 24"x36", oil on canvas, 2011

At the time that he painted it, he explained that he was interested in the scenario that "plays out in the melancholy diners and hole-in-the-wall restaurants that are quickly being replaced by Starbucks, T-Mobile, and Chase." This body of work is elegiac; it is set in a present that is rapidly fading into the past. And yet, for all that, it is the present. You can still visit those diners and order toast and eggs. Spadafora picks out the utterly characteristic details of these vanishing environments: the qualities of daylight filtered through front windows, the white uniforms, the half-empty bottles of ketchup, the yellow plastic pitchers. Look at Stage Diner again. It looks casual, haphazard. But it is an essay in careful construction, in arrangement of things we notice and things we miss.

Later, Spadafora felt that his technique constrained him, and he cast around for subject matter in which he could indulge his growing interest in looser paint handling. At the same time, he was seeking a deeper emotional connection to his work. So he began to make paintings of old family photographs:

Fedele Spadafora, Second Place, 50"x38", acrylic on paper, 2012

This composition is done almost entirely in bluish-grays and browns. There is very little in it to satisfy the eye. And yet it is dense with recognizable history and emotion. A father and son stand together. The father is an immigrant. The son, either transplanted here as an infant or born here, is already American. The son is perhaps not the most talented of his generation, but he is talented enough to have won second place at something - a high school art contest? Does this explain the odd little statue bottom left? He has won second place, in a contest of questionable meaning: perhaps the contest matters, and perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps the son's ambitions will come to something, or perhaps they will be futile. The son cannot know, and neither can the father. The son is blinded by adolescent excitements, by youth's flawed measurement of opportunity. The father is blinded by pride - he glows with pride in the talent of his son. His life is not an easy or exciting life; he vests his hopes in his son.

All these things we read at the narrative level of the painting. But what's really interesting about this painting formally is the more radical elisions of detail Spadafora introduces into an at-first-glance realist idiom. The father's suit is little more than an outline. The son's legs are nearly indistinguishable. Their faces are half-missing. The son hardly has any eyes; the father's eyes are absent altogether. And yet, the father's suit buttons glow hard and distinct, and the lettering "2 PLACE" is clear on the otherwise murky award.

Looking at the painting, we are not immediately disturbed by these odd presences and absences. They work. And they work because Spadafora, it turns out, is very good at tackling his deep subject. His deep subject isn't what the painting is a picture of. It's memory. Spadafora, in leaping from lonely diners to family photos, is leaping from perception of the present, to the uneven realm of memory. Here he finds his real métier.

Consider this dinner scene:

Fedele Spadafora, Around the Table, 44"x60", acrylic on paper, 2011, courtesy of Brian Jacobson

Once again, how recognizable this is! The clothing of the mid-century Italian family - either here or back there - the decanter of wine, the stiff stare of the older generation into the camera. Years later, you pull out the cracked photograph and point to faces and ask some senior relative about the people in the picture, and your relative says, "That's your second cousin, this is your great-uncle, you don't remember him, he died when you were three or four..."

Look at those faces! Some of them are legible, others have entirely vanished. The woman on the left - you can remember her hair and her high collars, but you cannot summon her face any longer. The man on the right is so much younger in this picture than you remember him, look, his hair is still dark, and that glowering brow was always the same.

These people stare at us out of the past, their grip is strong but it is slipping. That's how memory works. The food on the table has vanished, the room has vanished, the sitters are slowly erasing. Only textures are persisting, so specific, and yet detaching from the objects, people, places, and events in which they inhered. Spadafora has made memory and forgetting visible.

This brings us right up to two present bodies of work. Spadafora is showing at Mighty Tanaka, a gallery in Dumbo (for those of you not in New York, D.U.M.B.O. is an idiotic cooked-up acronym for a neighborhood in lower Brooklyn - Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) - where was I? Oh yes, the Tanaka show. This is a two-person show, where Spadafora's somber reflections are startlingly paired with Jeff Faerber's catchy, horny nudes.

Spadafora's work in this show reflects another iteration of his exploration of memory. He has narrowed his focus from the ethnic, the historical, and the familial, to the personal. In short, he has painted a bunch of screen-grabs from The Lawrence Welk Show. Of course, why not? Fedele's generation was raised by television (he is a few years older than I am); the Big Three network monoculture forms some of their most personal primary memories.

Fedele Spadafora, Green Lady, 12"x16", oil on panel, 2012

What a distinct formulation this is -- "There was a woman on the show - I don't remember who she was - but she had a kind face, and very pretty, and glamorous -- I will remember her face for the rest of my life."

This was how boys Fedele's age were first introduced to women who were not family, or friends, or neighbors. It was how they learned to conceive of romance.

Here he makes three paintings of nearly the same frame:

Fedele Spadafora, Little Girl Singing I, II, and III, each 12"x16", oil on panel, 2013

He reinterprets her in each image, replicating the stutter of a failing memory: "Was it like this? Was this it? Or...?"

Each time, elements leap out with total clarity, but the clarity does not signify the present. It signifies the irregular working of memory, which retains everything about some things, and little about others, and moreover, which things are so faithfully retained changes over time. Details come to the fore and later fade back into the indistinctness. We grasp at what we once knew, and we will recognize it if we see it again. But on our own, we have lost the complete picture, and do not even recall that there was a complete picture to lose. Spadafora finds in The Lawrence Welk Show a rich substrate for his exploration of the intermittencies of memory.

Now we come to Spadafora's solo show at Slag Gallery, in Bushwick (also Brooklyn). We began with Spadafora's earlier work, which consisted in observation of the present. It was tinged with nostalgia, but had not yet made that break which propelled it into the realm of the remembered.

The Slag show returns us to the present and the near present. But it is a present transformed by Spadafora's investigation of our own mechanisms of remembering. It is present-as-memory. This kind of claim would inevitably contain a whiff of bullshit without the most apropos of subject matter. Spadafora has lucked into precisely such matter. He was in Prague just after the fall of Communism and Tunisia just after the Arab Spring. If there's anything that people can't get straight in their heads even while it's happening, it's revolutions.

Consider his painting of the Žižkov Television Tower in Prague:

Fedele Spadafora, TV Tower, 32"x10", oil on canvas, 2013

This example of late Communist architecture looms in the painting, as it does over Prague. The painting is detached from narrative, and yet menace floats around it. There is something threatening and awful to it. In its mute stillness, it encodes days of chaos and uncertainty, the terror of the tyrants, heightened in the hour of their fall, before the fall is guaranteed, when the repercussions for having stood up will be most terrible if they should not, in the end, fall. Spadafora's TV Tower is an electric icon of fear. But it is not an observation of revolution. It is the kind of detail that sticks in the mind from the days of the revolution - days when impressions were jumbled and confusing, and could not settle properly. "What do I remember of those days? For some reason I think of the blue sky and the TV tower, it used to jam signals from the West, you could see it from everywhere and it was a symbol of the old regime, a blight on the city..."

Then Spadafora finds himself in Tunisia in 2010. Here is what he chose to paint:

Fedele Spadafora, Djerba I, 12"x20", oil on canvas, 2012

You know what that looks like to me? It looks like he painted a snapshot he took from the window of a moving car. Having been among the people while society was upheaving, he asked himself, "What was most characteristic about it? What do I retain?" And the answer was: the buildings and the landscape, passing by alongside the road. It makes sense. A revolution cannot consume everything, there are never enough people to fill an entire nation with riots and fires. Most of the time, most of the places must be as they always were, quiet, sparsely populated. The weather will go on unimpeded. These zones of calm stuck with Spadafora, and he painted them. But there is an intensity to it, that same revolutionary vibrancy and menace, which he saw in the television tower in Prague.

In two paintings in the show, he summons an unreal image to express the impression the scene made on him. Twice he paints it, a falling star over Djerba, what they used to call a prodigy. It is as stylized as a meteor in a medieval manuscript:

Fedele Spadafora, Horizon, 36"x72", oil on canvas, 2012

I think he catches here the sentiment Auden expresses in his 1938 poem Musée des Beaux Arts about Brueghel's painting of the fall of Icarus:

...everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure...
the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

What Spadafora seems to have seen in Tunisia is a terrific change in the context of a much larger stability. The foundations of the city and the land are unmoved by the excitement of the day, and yet the excitement of the day is significant, meaningful, and difficult to comprehend. He envisions what he sees before him as a shooting star, but he contextualizes the shooting star in an Auden-like landscape of indifference, of other priorities.

These most recent paintings record a consciousness seeing the present itself through the window, not of observation, but of memory. Each thing is an image of itself, already distorted and hazed by the unreliable mind and heart. Having started with the present, Spadafora has circled back around to the present. Along the way, he dredged up precious things which were nearly lost. I have no idea what he will do next - there is no means of logically deriving it. But don't you think it's exciting? An artist turns to paint and canvas and says, "What am I? What have I been and what remains of me?" He approaches the canvas with austerity and discipline, and what do you know - the canvas answers. That's very exciting. The answer is exciting, and the means of acquiring it is exciting. More power to you, Fedele Spadafora.

---

Fedele Spadafora online: http://fedelespadafora.net/

at Mighty Tanaka: "The Subliminal & Sublime," until April 5th, 111 Front Street, Suite 224, Brooklyn, NY 11201, online: http://www.mightytanaka.com/

at Slag Gallery: "Fedele Spadafora," until April 18th, 56 Bogart Street, Ground Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11206, online: http://www.slaggallery.com/

The Sign

It is since July of last year that I've been worrying about how to paint the 7-foot-by-9-foot Inanna #1 properly. You remember - I talked about it a lot. I finished the figures in the underdrawing, and it hung there on the wall, alternately baleful and forlorn. I could not summon the will to paint on it; I did not trust myself to do what I needed to do. Dust settled on it.

What I needed to do was make the gesture I had hypothesized and agonized about: the purified, absolutely physical gesture, emptied out of intention, reason, and observation, distilled to itself and nothing more. This I could not do, I did not feel ready to do it properly. But without the gesture, the painting was nothing, it could not become itself.

This is the painting on July 28, 2012. Let's review what it's about - on the left is the Sumerian goddess Inanna. On the right is the me of life, represented here by a pregnant woman (a me is a kind of Sumerian mythological power-object, or divine decree). Inanna observes the me of life in this first painting. In the next painting, she will observe the me of death. Being a young and ambitious goddess, Inanna will then travel into the underworld to gain control of these two powerful mes. This is the subject of the series of which this painting is the first.

The string is a trick I learned from Gaudí - to make a curve, hang a string. The curve was for the curved horizon the painting was eventually to have. I traced the curve with a pencil:

And that was the last thing I did. From July 28 until March 13, the painting underwent no change.

I'd like to say that in early March I had a very elegant realization that I was ready to go ahead. But I didn't, I just needed the wall space for a different enormous painting I want to work on. So it was time to commit. My plan was that the overall painting should be blue in the end, and the figures yellow. But to get this to work, I needed to do a first layer of yellow for the figures and green for the ground. You can see the frightening quality of it, at least for a high-rendering figurative painter. It's just some paint put on with a palette knife...

...and then spread with a cloth and turpentine.

I did this in yellow for the figures, and then in green for the ground:

I first recognized this technique as possibly leading to a viable aesthetic idiom in 2010:

Daniel Maidman, La Mémoire, 2010, oil on canvas, 18"x14"

It has taken me this long to do it again, on purpose, and make it work.

There are a few ways to know that something is working. There's an ordinary way, which is that you look at it, and evaluate things like formal elements, and the image relative to the intention, and so on, and you make a rational decision about whether the painting is working or not.

Another ordinary way is the gut hunch, which is a powerful tool in the hands of an experienced artist. The gut hunch is a kind of shorthand summary of a huge act of aesthetic integration in the preconscious mind. The artist scans the picture, and his gut tell him if it works. This is how Richter evaluates his squeegee paintings.

A third way is to wait for a sign - to demand revelation. That was what I needed, to understand my work on this painting. I was not making it from my intentionality and my reason, and my intentionality and reason were not the relevant tools for comprehending my progress. Neither was my gut particularly well-trained in the aesthetic region I was tackling. I needed a sign.

I got one, too. Here's what happened. I'm working on another series of paintings right now, which we aren't going to talk about yet. But doubling is fundamental to this other series: the doubleness of gender, of sex organs, of eyes, of halves of the sphere, of electromagnetic fields. There is a shape that helps to define this series. It is the shape of the electromagnetic field which surrounds a solenoid:

This field resembles a donut in three-dimensional space. Its cross-section has two lobes and looks like a bivalve:

I knew that I wanted the marks I made on Inanna #1 to be visible, but I did not know how they should be distributed. The issue was going to come to a head with the blue layer - the blue layer is dark and specific and covers most of the canvas. I was satisfied with my gestures on the yellow-and-green layer, but I was going to have to go further and nudge those gestures into an overall composition in the blue layer. What the composition was, I had no idea. I was trusting the painting to tell me.

So here's me taking the leap of faith - the first dabs of blue, straight from the tube, onto the dry yellow-and-green layer:

And here's me with my handy cloth and turpentine, spreading the paint. As you can see, the marks are completely visible.

At first, I was simply making visible marks, pleased enough with that. But I soon realized that the painting did in fact have a composition to tell me about. It wanted to take on that bilobate solenoid shape. Current should flow down the center, between the two figures, and curve leftward on the left side of Inanna and rightward on the right side of the me of life. I worked on this procedure across the immense surface of the canvas:

When I got to the right hand side, I palette-knifed a bunch of blue paint onto the canvas at about my chest level, and got going. But it felt wrong - I felt that I shouldn't be starting this part of the curve separated from the existing part I had done across the middle and top. I should build outward - the current should not break. So I went back up and started working down from the top, not up from the middle:

This is how the painting looked at the point where I had just started working down from the top, abandoning for a minute the paint I had placed on the canvas on the right.

Now an interesting problem came up: I wanted the paint to trace the outline of the figure's back fairly closely. And I was applying the paint with a bunched-up cloth. I am left-handed; if you paint, you will understand that you can best control edges when you approach them from the same side as the hand you paint with. So when I was pushing paint rightward against an edge, as in Inanna's back, I had good control, or as good as you can get when you are painting with a squished rag. But I was going to have a problem pushing paint up near the edge of the me of life's back with my left hand.

So I switched hands.

This was my sign. I'm not ambidextrous at all. I can't do anything (no, not even that) with my right hand. But I became ambidextrous - doubled - while I needed to be, on this painting. I confidently traced a fluid line down the back of the me of life, holding the cloth in my right hand.

That was how I, personally, knew that whatever I did, it fucking worked. In the world of real magic, signs are not the same as miracles. They are mostly rightnesses accomplished where they could not be accomplished before: something in you is transformed, and you are across the chasm without having crossed it.

That's how I finished Inanna #1.

Daniel Maidman, Inanna #1, 2012-13, oil on linen, 84"x108"

When I planned the series, I found that I could not simultaneously believe in rendering and narrative. So I traded one for the other. By great good fortune, I was permitted to make the trade, and in doing it, to make a painting different from what I had been making. I found my own combination of color fields and tight representational line. I am so excited about this. There is still room in the world to grow and change.