Time Regained

I've been working on this post for a while; I kept wrestling with it, because it seemed to me melodramatic, even lachrymose. Toward the end, it grew tediously presumptuous in generalizing my own condition to all of you as well. I wrestled with these flaws, but ultimately, I decided I couldn't rid the post of them, so I thought I'd front-porch the piece a little bit.

I try to propose ideas here, and follow through the logical implications of those ideas in an orderly way, and reach clear and consistent conclusions. Laugh into your sleeves, if you will, but this is my ordinary goal. I don't think I've met this goal here - I think my own feelings have run wild with the post.

Another thing to understand, approaching the post, is that I absolutely cannot give up on anyone I have ever called a friend. In practice, of course, I can give up; but I approach friendship with the assumption of eternity, and I cannot get past a certain twinge when it proves not to be so. I am in touch with an unusual number of people from my past.

What I am discussing in this post is not friendship, but the artist-model collaboration. It is a different thing; but as with so many artistic phenomena, it is structurally parallel with certain real life dynamics.

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More thoughts on Inanna #1. Whence so many thoughts? I have a rule for lo-mind activity: no radio, no music, no distraction. I find that this no-distraction practice leads me to a split in mental activity. On the one hand, I perform my lo-mind paint work, the meditative part. And on the other hand, my mind wanders over my current stockpile of analytic categories. I rarely hit a true zero-ego state, where the lo-mind eclipses me. Yes, I know I'm meditating wrong. At least I have lots of interesting thoughts. Interesting to me, anyway.

As I mentioned before, in Inanna #1, the power-object, or me, of life, is represented by a pregnant woman:

This is not just any pregnant woman. The composition was designed around a reference picture I took of Piera, in February of 2010, when she was pregnant with Lorenzo. This is the inkwash I did of the pose:

I loved this pose so much that after I finished the inkwash, I shot a bunch of pictures in case I ever came up with a painting for it (pregnancy being a fairly temporary condition). Lo and behold, I came up with a painting for it. And here I am working on that very painting, two years later (Lorenzo can already walk, and speak, and raise hell).

Piera, Emanuele, and Lorenzo are in Italy - they go back for a few months every summer. And here am I, in Brooklyn, making this painting. I was drawing the life-sized image of Piera onto the enormous goat-smelling linen, and a wave of nostalgia washed over me; it made me gasp, this nostalgia. It demonstrated the brilliance of the odd redefinition of nostalgia on "Mad Men." It was the pain of a broken part that has been broken a long time; a part that, for all that it is broken, I have learned to hobble, so that sometimes I forget the pain, and that I didn't always hobble; that I used to walk; and the part is not going to heal; and sometimes I suddenly remember it is broken and the break feels fresh again.

Here's what happened - Piera had Lorenzo, and her life got very busy. All of the parenting authorities, from Aristotle and Diderot, to Schopenhauer and Husserl, agree that having a baby will make your life very busy. And indeed, the authorities are correct on this. Piera's life got very busy, and she didn't have time to work with me on paintings anymore.

This doesn't mean we weren't still friends - Charlotte and I are very close with her and Emanuele, and huge fans of Lorenzo's, despite the hell-raising - and we all hang out together pretty frequently. It wasn't that part that having a baby interfered with. Rather, raising Lorenzo gobbled up Piera's leisure to spend endless hours in the studio collaborating with me on one painting after another.

I finished my first painting of Piera in February of 2008:

Daniel Maidman, Piera, 2008, oil on canvas, 28"x22"

At the time, this was an enormous technical leap forward for me. This portrait still hangs in my studio, so that I can see it.

Over the next two years, I worked with Piera every week, and completed 11 paintings. On this blog, we've discussed Piera a great deal, as some of you will remember. Then that period ended, and we couldn't work together anymore.

Daniel Maidman, Night (AKA Piera painting #7), 2009, oil on canvas, 60"x40"

There are three solutions to the problem of the end of a period. Let us turn to two or three exemplars to illustrate them.

First is Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli, like all the better Florentine artists of the period, was busy painting Simonetta Vespucci. Let's be clear about what kind of relationship Botticelli and Simonetta had: he wasn't banging her. She was married to somebody with lots more money (Mr. Vespucci) and rumored to be messing around with somebody with even more money than that (Giuliano Medici, the one that got stabbed by Pazzi, although the stabbing was about something else).

Simonetta is reported to have been quite lovely, even by the impressive standards of Renaissance Florence. The Florentines make us and our Victoria's Secret catalogues look like rank amateurs at lookism. How are they such pros, compared with us and our photoshopped fashion models? Because we don't believe in it, and they do. We've heard of Darwin. We get over our idea that beauty indexes virtue by the time we're, like, seventeen. Not the Florentines. One can argue with somebody who prefers a certain breast shape, but there is no arguing with somebody who thinks that breast shapes, like the Hebrew alphabet, are the chosen medium of God Almighty for making his awful meaning clear to puny Man.

Speaking of snazzy boobs, here's somebody who is apparently based on Simonetta Vespucci:

Detail, Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1483

And here's somebody else:

Detail, Botticelli, Primavera, 1477

I say "based on," and not "pictures of," because Simonetta died in 1476, at the age of 22. Take a look at this page from Botticelli's set of illustrations for The Divine Comedy, in my humble opinion some of the most profound drawings ever drawn:

It almost looks as if Botticelli depicts Dante's Beatrice as Simonetta, doesn't it? Botticelli illustrated The Divine Comedy from about 1480-1495. The real Beatrice died long before Dante wrote his poem; and the real Simonetta died before the masterworks Botticelli based on her.

Botticelli is like an engine for seeing, and when the thing he sees dies, the engine rumbles to a halt. The seeing eye films over, the beating heart goes silent. It is dead. In the shadows of that cavernous broken heart a new engine is born eyeless. It is a windowless armored engine of memory. It makes lines and shapes and colors like the old engine, but it does not do the same thing at all.

There is something so heartbreakingly direct, so childish, about Botticelli, the artist and the man. There is no bullshit to his work. A little child says, "What is beautiful must be good." Or rather, it is like a little child to be incapable of considering otherwise. It is like a child to say, "I will look at beautiful things only." A child draws with simple lines, and flat colors.

A child also, confronting death and absence, might stamp his foot, and say, "La la la, I refuse to admit that it is so." And this is what Botticelli does, for decades. He retreats into seclusion with his imagined Simonetta, and fuses her to her absence; he makes of this pair, Simonetta and her opposite, an idea, a perfectability of human reason, adoration, ambition. This is perversion, but it is magnificent. Perhaps it is even redeeming. Perhaps on the last day, when the pillars have all fallen, and everything is on fire, and the fierce angel says, "Man, what did you do that was worthwhile?," some battered survivor will say, "Fuck you, angel - our Sandro Botticelli found meaning in the death of Simonetta Vespucci, who died of pulmonary tuberculosis when she was 22." And God, listening in, will have the common decency to die of shame at last.

Perhaps. But it is still a perversion; and it is not my perversion.

 

Let us consider another response to the end of a period. This one we have from André Téchiné's 1995 movie Thieves. In this relatively unremarked-upon film, a shocking event occurs offscreen. Here's what happens. The plot of the film revolves, more or less, around a young woman, Juliette, who proves irresistible to several older characters, including a philosophy professor named Marie, played by Catherine Deneuve:

Wait, you're thinking, is this a comedy or a drama?

It's not a comedy. For one reason or another, Juliette winds up dumping Marie. So what does Marie do? She fucking kills herself.  This is the shocking offscreen bit. Who kills themselves anymore over being dumped? Well, Marie, that's who, I guess.

Being a French philosophy professor, she leaves behind some very strong writing on what she was thinking. She says, "In this life, we do not renounce, we only replace. And I did not want to replace her."

Let's pause here to appreciate the remarkable genetic good fortune of Catherine Deneuve.

Catherine Deneuve in Thieves, age 52

OK, I just thought that was worth mentioning.

Back to the point. Marie presents a second model of how we can respond to the end of a period. We can, in however radical a manner is required, excise the component of consciousness which characterized the period. We can force ourselves to renounce.

I think it is very difficult for us to conceptualize killing ourselves over something, until it is time to do it. Soldiers, I think, must do it in a few situations. But in a movie, over love, it is liable to come off very silly. In Thieves, it kind of works, and kind of doesn't, depending on your tolerance level, going in.

I may be a romantic, but I am not, at the present time, a killing-myself-over-it romantic; not in real life, and doubly not in art. This makes me feel a little bad, like maybe I'm not intense enough to really count as a worthwhile person. But if I'm not a worthwhile person, I'm at least a tremendously productive person who is still living and breathing and participating in the lives of people I matter to, and that's not nothing.

To translate from love-talk to art-talk, the second option, vis-a-vis models and painting, would be to put down the brush once the model has left the studio, and go into geology, or dentistry, or something else; and never look at another painting. I actually did this once, with film; but it was film that left the studio, not any particular person.

Option 2 is not acceptable to me either. So what is option 3 for coping with the end of a particular period?

Here it is: you mourn (or the art equivalent) and then you go on living, and sometimes you remember. This is my preferred option. I am not saying it is the right option - I have a lot of sympathy for the other ones, as you have sympathy, indeed must have sympathy, for things people do in confrontation with a force greater than themselves. I'm just saying that for who I am right now, it makes most sense to gasp at the pain and go on living.

Since Piera left, I have, of course, produced a body of work with Leah which stretched beyond anything I had tried before, or was capable of before:

Daniel Maidman, Blue Leah #3, oil on canvas, 2011, 24"x36"

I owe this work not especially to my own progress as an artist. I owe much of it to what Leah brings specifically to our work together. Without Leah, these paintings could not have been; and without Piera's schedule change, I don't know if I would have worked so closely with Leah.

Daniel Maidman, Blue Leah #9, oil on canvas, 2011, 24"x36"

This third option combines the Jewish "pull yourself together" and the Heraclitan "not the same river" approaches. It is not a very dramatic option, nor a very narratively satisfying one. Matisse and Picasso both seem to have pursued it in their own ways: that you simply go on living, that you commit yourself entirely to making the work your models inspire, and someday you lose your models, and you keep putting one foot in front of another, and eventually it gets better for a while, and then likely worse again. You never stop making yourself available to lose, but you also never stop making new things.

We are here to make work first, and be happy second. Our work redeems us, not our pleasure. Not yet; we are not that good yet. Somewhere, there are people so pure that their pleasure justifies them. We used to be like that, and we will be like that again one day. But right now, it is our work that buys us the right to go on living. And this, really, is a beautiful part of the titanic struggle of becoming human.

Yes, I prefer this third option; I prefer to go on learning a new face, and relearning my marks to make the true image of a person who has time to sit with me and tell me who they are.

But before we go thinking of loss as a total thing, let's recall the insights of Proust, who considered the difference between art and life from a different angle from the one which has popped up here.

In Time Regained, the final part of Remembrance of Things Past (spoilers! sort of! this book has no plot!), Proust's alter-ego Marcel reflects on his life, and the people whose company he assumed he would always share, and whom he eventually lost. Suddenly, time itself becomes visible to him, and he sees these people as being like enormous towers in time. Freed of the first-person perspective on time, outside of time, he realizes he has never lost anyone he has ever known; they all remain in an incorruptible present.

Marcel asks himself how he can manufacture this state of enlightenment, or what its origin is - he asks how he can return to his grandmother, to the church and the trees, the paving stones, to Gilberte and to Albertine - and he sees art as the path from the here-and-gone torment of first-person time to the transcendent calm of absolute time. He sees life as a nearly meaningless raw material which must be digested and made over, and art as the meaningful product of human insight applied to the processing of this inchoate substrate. Suddenly we, reading, realize that his book, his tremendous book, has superseded and subsumed his life; that the man, shriveling away to nothing in his cork-lined room, writing and revising thousands of pages, actually carried out this transmogrification, this miracle, which he describes, which recasts the years we spent reading his book and makes us understand that Proust was the fiction, and Marcel the truth; that the book is real, and the life imaginary.

Marcel and Proust

And this, my dear, dear friends, is a fundamental part of the third option. Botticelli and Marie are both, in their ways, suicides. Proust, who withdrew from society to write his book, was a suicide in his way too - but Marcel is not, and we base our lives on Marcel, not Proust. Going on living, and loving those we work with, and above all making our work, is our task for the time being. Marcel shows us how to make it bearable; how we have not lost, and cannot lose, anything we once knew.

Sometimes - not all the time, but sometimes - we make another image of those we used to work with, which is what I am doing with Inanna #1. But by and large, we keep going. Our work is incomplete. We are not dead yet.

 detail of Piera as me of life, Inanna #1, work in progress, pencil and oil on canvas, 108"x84"

Oceanic Feeling

This post, as you would no doubt deduce from the authorial voice, appeared at Huffington Post first. I'm running it here as well, while I finish up a piece written specifically for this blog. Unfortunately, today is the last day of the show I'm describing, so if you like the work - keep an eye out for future shows of Victoria Selbach's paintings, alright?

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I'd like to talk with you today about the show "Grace in the Light," at Dacia Gallery in Manhattan. It's a solo show of paintings by Victoria Selbach. I've been a fan of her paintings for a few years now, and in the interests of disclosure, I should tell you that I also show at Dacia Gallery. In fact, I recommended Selbach to the dealers there, and they liked her work and gave her a show.

 Victoria Selbach, Mary 4, acrylic on canvas, 58"x28", 2011

I'm a painter first and an art writer second. This puts me in an awkward spot. I do have to write about painters apart from myself, but I also know a lot of the painters whose work I like. The way I've resolved this issue is that I simply won't write a negative review. That doesn't mean I'm lying in my positive reviews. It means I only write about work if a) I like it and b) I have something interesting to say about it. And I hope you'll put up with my being friends with some of the painters.

So let's talk about Selbach. Much of her work involves paintings of women in dark interior spaces, patchily lit by bright sunlight. The human eye can handle a maximum light-dark contrast ratio of something like 15,000 to 1. Paint at its best goes to maybe 100 to one. Selbach has spent years finessing tricks out of paint to suggest dazzlingly intense light emerging out of lush shadow. Consider Nude 4, from 2009:

 Victoria Selbach, Nude 4, acrylic on canvas, 24"x30", 2009

She has figured out composition, overexposure, and bounce-light glow in this image. But revisiting these techniques three years later, she coordinates them much more subtly and gracefully:

 Victoria Selbach, Mary At Mille Fleurs, acrylic on linen, 48"x30", 2012

There are a lot of people painting a lot of female nudes right now, and many of them are doing a good job. Yet I have always had a feeling that there was something more essential, more necessary to Selbach's work than to most of the nudes I was seeing. What makes them special? I think I've finally put my finger on it. Consider Mary 3:

 Victoria Selbach, Mary 3, acrylic on canvas, 58"x40", 2011

Typically for Selbach's work, a complex pattern of light and shade is draped over the figure. This pattern disrupts the ordinary figure-ground relation. Instead of one figure (the figure itself) and one ground (everything behind the figure), we have two paired figures-and-grounds. One pair is the literal figure and the floor she's lying on. The other is the light, and the shadow surrounding it. These two systems conflict.

That's interesting, but what does it buy us? On the most superficial level, it's cognitively appealing; the brain is forced to fill in the outline of the figure, just as it does in those images of a dalmatian against a field of random black-and-white blotches. We get a huge preconscious kick out of this edge-completion procedure.

On a deeper level, I think this disruption holds the key to the significance of the work. The sight we see has clarity and definition, and yet the figure is not entirely separable from the space in which it is immersed. This phenomenon - a combination of clarity and irresolvability - reminds me of Freud's elaboration on Romain Rolland's proposal of the concept of oceanic feeling. Freud writes:

It is a feeling which he [Rolland] would like to call a sensation of 'eternity,' a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded - as it were, 'oceanic.' ... it is the source of the religious energy... One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone... it is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.

[Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 1-2]

Yes, yes - this is what I think of when I look at Selbach's women, who are so thoroughly integrated into their spaces that they cannot be separated from them, or even seen distinctly, despite the light. There is no cognitive impairment here, but rather a shift in perspective, a collapse of distinction between self and world. Where does this oceanic feeling originate? Freud continues:

An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world... He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time - among them what he desires most of all, his mother's breast - and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help. In this way there is for the first time set over against the ego an 'object,' in the form of something which exists 'outside' and which is only forced to appear by a special action.

[Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 3-4]

I would not like to overcommit to Freud as a thinker, but I do think he's onto something here. Let us return to Selbach's work, so much of which is named in relation to Mary mother of Jesus. Here is Mary 5:

 Victoria Selbach, Mary 5, acrylic on canvas, 58"x28", 2011

Armed with the concept of the oceanic feeling, we can make more sense of our response to the work. This Mary emerges partly out of darkness, as do the Magdalenes of de La Tour. The immeasurably bright sunlight, reflecting off the floor, warmly illuminates the undersides of her belly and her breasts. Confronting this female nude - yet another female nude, sigh - we are suddenly overcome with a feeling of the essential, of the unfetishized feminine. Why? Because the entire basis for the oceanic feeling lies in the primal encounter of the infant and its mother's body, and its inability to distinguish itself from it. Selbach's Mary figures juxtapose the religious impulse, and the infantile bond to the mother, evoking both in the glowing bodies of her models, dappled by sunlight and lost in shadows just inside the doorway of her studio. They must evoke both, because their true subject is the profound force which underlies both, the oceanic feeling. And if Selbach's true subject is the oceanic feeling, then we have an explanation for why her female nudes read not as a neo-academic reflex, but as a thematic necessity: because without the original encounter of the inchoate consciousness with the body of a woman, dimly understood as a kind of cosmic mother, there is no fully-formed oceanic feeling.

This is what sets Selbach's work apart. She selects a seemingly simple toolkit: light, shadow, wooden floors, trellised windows, a female model. But she recognizes that her tools are not ends in themselves. They serve a basic need, a fundamental impulse, to go back - if you are a Freudian - or forward - if you are a Catholic - to that Mary who is all-surrounding, all-present, loved without bound because she herself is without bound. Selbach's impulse is an ache for the ocean, and her work is the ocean itself.

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ENDNOTES

1. Grace in the Light
Victoria Selbach, Solo Exhibition
August 1-30, 2012
Dacia Gallery, 53 Stanton St., 10002, Manhattan

2. Victoria Selbach online: http://www.victoriaselbach.com

hi-mind/lo-mind

Take a painting like this:

Daniel Maidman, The Black and White War, 2011, oil on canvas, 60"x72"

Virtually the entire surface area of this painting required high-level mentation: constant analytic choices about how to represent both real things (the two versions of Alley) and imaginary things (the background). It was a wickedly large amount of work, and it took me months and months to do it.

You may remember that when I was working on that Damien Hirst painting, I endured (and duly bitched about to you) a kind of mind-numbing boredom, getting the edges of all those circles nearly inhumanly perfect.

The Alley painting was hi-mind. The Hirst procedure was lo-mind.

It is all very well to come up with some cool terms to describe things, but that doesn't take us so far as the meanings of these terms, or their significance, if any.

I have been reflecting on the lo-mind procedure a great deal lately, in the context of the one project I'm not telling you about yet, and in the context of the other one, the Inanna series.

I have undergone a large transformation in preparing Inanna #1. You will recall that the first inspiration for the series was this painting I wandered into a couple of years ago:

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

And you may further recall that, once I aimed for it,  I could not replicate the spontaneous integrity and energy of that scrubbed-on paint. Try as I might, all further efforts felt forced:

Daniel Maidman, Nursing, 2010, oil on canvas, 30"x24"

What happened was that I fell prey to a classic error with which actors particularly will be familiar: I was trying to reproduce the outward effect - rather than trying to reproduce the inward state which led, on its own, to that effect (this error is a massive bugaboo for Stanislavski).

Konstantin Stanislavski: I am large, I contain multitudes.

Once I recognized that problem, it dissolved. But I was left with a more difficult problem: how to reproduce, at will and on an ongoing basis, that initial state of mind. In this context, Stanislavsky prescribes the same thing the Buddhists are said to:

1. You begin by chopping wood and carrying water, instinctively; but you become alienated from this natural state.
2. You spend many years reasoning on the nature of things, and studying their forms, and devising and practicing various ways of chopping wood and carrying water.
3. One day, you simply resume chopping wood and carrying water. It appears as natural as it did in the beginning, but now it is a function, not of instinct, but of enlightenment.

Have I got that about right? I've never been entirely clear on it. If it's not right, let's just say it's the version I use, just as my version of Orpheus does not include any of the freaky sex stuff. It may not be the true myth, but it's the one I learned and I can reason on its meaning even so.

Orpheus: no freaky sex stuff

In this model of enlightenment, I would be aiming to reach step 3 by the time I put paint to Inanna, and to that end I need to get through step 2 before then. So what did I do, with my reasoning and studying and devising and practicing?

I reasoned the existence of lo-mind: of painting from a place of lack of intention, avowed indifference to goal, of pure physical connection between arm and - what? Not reasoning, not observation, not analysis.

This series of denials brought me to the edge of the precipice.

The next steps would be studying and devising. But you know me by now - I don't believe in studying, and my attitude toward devising is basically "measure once, cut twice" or, if possible, "measure never, cut three times." So I skipped the studying and devising and went straight to the practicing. I leapt over the precipice. Here's what I did:

I had ordered this huge fuck-off piece of gessoed Belgian linen canvas from Utrecht - a 7'x9' monstrosity. It showed up in this tube here:

After much negotiation with industrial staples, I pried the lid off, took out the canvas, and nailed it to the wall of my studio. Interesting observation: this linen smells like a goat.

note my ace stretching skills at work

Once I got it up there, I felt like the gesso they used was too dark, and too yellow. So, not thinking it over very clearly, I got out a big, half-used tube of Titanium White oil paint and just started painting it over the entire surface of the canvas. I ran out of the paint pretty fast, but I also realized that I was making the canvas too bright and bluish for my tastes anyway.

So I got out some of my rags:

oil painters - am I using the wrong kind of rags? put me some knowledge here

And I started wiping. This spread the uneven patches of dazzling, bluish-white Titanium White, and removed a lot of it. I just kept on wiping. It was a total wax-on, wax-off affair. I made circles. I worked that titanium white into the existing gesso over every square inch of the canvas. I produced a revised white of intermediate brightness and intermediate coldness. It took hours.

I let it take longer than it needed to take, because partway through, I noticed that I was practicing. I felt my mind draining out; I felt I was on the verge of finding out what the arm connects to, when it does not connect to reasoning, observation, or analysis. I made those nearly invisible white circles on a white surface, following an approximate most-efficient distribution of wipes, and my arm connected to these things:

- the shifting configuration of its own strength and fatigue
- my mood

That was all I could see about it. The point isn't even really to find out what the arm is connected to. The point is merely to do. And one does by practicing. I practiced, and I think I will be ready, when the time comes to paint, to paint.

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Now, I am describing here a physical phenomenon, and it is very difficult to establish a direct correspondence between a verbal description, and a physical phenomenon. But it is not so hard to establish a correspondence between a verbal description and a logical sequence. And I had the good fortune, a couple nights ago, to watch the PBS show art:21, season 6, episode 2 ("Boundaries"), which featured David Altmejd, a fascinating youngish sculptor (I have a vested interest in calling him youngish, because he's a year older than me, and I'd prefer not to be oldish).

Apart from the work itself, Altmejd has a very engaging mode of wandering reasoning. He had this to say about his procedure for making his work:

95% of the relationship i have to my work

is through process

it's not as a distant object

it's a made object

i like the idea of trusting the work

trusting the material

and trusting that every little step is

gonna dictate the next one

This is very interesting, especially the last two lines. Because it is quite a clear description of what, in mathematics, you would call an iterative function. An iterative function is a function which is repeated, and which uses its own most recent output as the input for each successive step.

Iterative functions are used to describe many different types of systems (here is where I start to tread deeply in the bog of ignorance - math people, feel free to scornfully correct me). Among the systems described by iterative functions are linear dynamical systems and non-linear dynamical systems.

Linear and non-linear dynamical systems are distinguished in a way that is very important to us as artists.

The state of a linear system may be predicted by knowing:
a. what time it is in the system, and
b. performing a single computation.
The location of a planet in its orbit displays more or less linear dynamical properties. I give you the date, you tell me where to aim my spaceship.

Non-linear dynamical systems lack this property. Their iterative nature comes to the fore. They are deterministic, like linear dynamical systems, but you can't predict their state at any given time except by performing the iterative function that defines them, for each moment from the start to the specific time of the prediction. The weather, and most likely any other chaotic bullshit you can think of, is a non-linear dynamical system.

Altmejd makes very interesting sculptures. They have a kind of wistful majesty to them:

David Altmejd, The Swarm, 2011, plexiglass and whatnot

His description of his method stops at iteration, but I think what he's getting at is the concept of non-linear dynamics: he cannot predict the outcome of step 64 of his system without executing steps 1-63. His work takes on an orderliness which, in hindsight, looks like predictability. But in the process of making it, he cannot leap forward; he must walk each step.

David Altmejd, The Vessel, 2011, plexiglass and what-have-you

This struck me as a tremendously important revelation in respect to this elusive question of lo-mind.

Hi-mind is Newtonian; it is designed to integrate the manifold and various into the simple and true. It is adept at grasping the predictable qualities of linear dynamical systems, at planning an artwork from a bird's-eye view. A huge amount of analysis went into The Black and White War, but it was path-independent: I could think about, and solve, any part of it at any time, independent of other parts.

Lo-mind is down in the mud with the media themselves. It crawls along, seeing only the blades of grass and columns of ants in front of it, trusting that it will reach to its goal if only each step is faithfully executed. It is not aiming at a goal, it is aiming at each step. The goal executes itself in the context of each step being taken - or not. To truly embrace lo-mind is to give up on certainty of the nature of the goal, or of reaching it, or of its existence. It also requires a heightened immediate sensitivity of the arm: the arm must respond to what has already been made - it must respond truthfully - in order to take the next step; every single time, it must do this.

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All of this is a very fancy way of describing the difference between product-oriented and process-oriented people. I have tended more toward product orientation. And I am not abandoning that. But I also find it insufficient for the nature of some of what I want to do. So I'm teaching myself to be process-oriented as well.

Rilke, a poet I know likes to remind me, wrote, at the end of Archaic Torso of Apollo, "You must change your life." Yes, yes, yes - we will not go on being what we were before.

It was so strange I could scarcely credit the truth of it.

So - it turns out my drawing is different without nicotine in my system. In hindsight, I suppose it should have been obvious. Drugs change how you think; the continuous presence of a drug encysts your personality and cognitive machinery, preventing some or all changes from taking root in the dormant, non-drugged core.

For instance, when did I start smoking? January, 1997. When my nicotine concentration dropped, my personality immediately reverted to its state in early 1997: freshly post-Texas. It could be reasonably argued that if you met me after 1997, you've never met me at all. This argument isn't actually correct, but it's reasonable.

Thank fucking christ my drawing skills didn't revert to what they were like in 1997 as well. They could have - I started life-drawing seriously in 1998. I could have found my entire drawing apparatus detaching from me. I could have had to start from the beginning.

 

This is 2001, the earliest scan I have handy. I'd been working hard for three years by this point.

I didn't regress that far, but I did regress. My fine motor control appears to be shot. I can't make precise little lines right now. I can make crude, strong lines:

Daniel Maidman, Leah, Standing Torso, 7-24-2012, 15"x11"

And I can make soft indistinct lines:

Daniel Maidman, Leah, Soft Portrait, 7-24-2012, 15"x11"

This is a bit of a shock, but it's not entirely unwelcome. Consider the case of Lovis Corinth. Here's a painting of his from 1895:

Portrait of the Painter Karl Strathmann

And here's one from 1912:

Samson Blinded (Stephen Wright first showed this to me)

What happened to him in between?

KAPOW! BLAMMO!

Stroke, 1911. The stroke seems not to have hindered his productivity, but rather, to have thrown him off one track - a highly accomplished but ultimately uncommitted aestheticism - and onto another - certainly cruder, but more vigorous, and to my eye, more essential. That second painting, coming as it does hard on the heels of the stroke and the physical therapy, seems to me to be a kind of emotional self-portrait: who, in Corinth's opinion, was mightier than Corinth? And who was blinded but Corinth? This is a picture of real torment, and real power.

What I'm saying is, when you lose the things that made you comfortable, you gain the opportunity to start fresh. And what I would add, as always, is that I would rather be a better artist than a happier one. I quail at the thought of having my visual apparatus totally fried the way Corinth did. But I do not mind particularly the challenge I am facing - a challenge which I suspect is actually fairly temporary - as certain skills peel off my brain along with their chemical undergirding.

This thing I am going through - it is allowing me to see things a little differently. For instance, at Spring Street on Monday, while suffering from an almost absurd amount of pain and, of course, a homicidal rage, I drew this:

Daniel Maidman, Burr: Cranium, 7-23-2012, 15"x11"

This is the part of the head nobody gives a shit about. But I was sitting there, reckoning with the diminution in my ability to draw complex forms. And I thought, "Why don't I pay attention to the thingness of the head, the subtle variation of the parts people ignore?" And, looking at it differently, and drawing differently, I think I came up with a drawing that was worth making.

Why do I suspect this phase is temporary? Well, it feels like I am undergoing a shock to the system, not a failure of the system. Consider this, from the same drawing session with Leah yesterday as the drawings above:

Daniel Maidman, Leah: Knee, Arm, Neck, 7-24-2012, 15"x11"

This reflects nearly as much dexterity as anything else I've ever drawn. I can switch off this impulse to crudity, to indecisiveness, if I want to revert to my ordinary habits of high precision and high rendering. I'm just choosing not to switch off these impulses. Rather, I'm going through them. We all need to be renewed. Brain chemistry issues are as good a route as any other route. And, jesus, I am in love with this drawing:

It's not very graceful, or very accurate. But it is very soft, and very simple. Any drawing of a face involves both the physical features, and a feeling. It can be your feeling, or the model's feeling, or some feeling floating in the air in the room; whatever. Your drawing answers to the physical and the emotional criteria which combine to produce it. A distinctive weakness of the high precision, high rendering paradigm is that it neglects the emotional criteria. And my current exile from my comfort zone seems to be deeding over to me a heightened ability to experience and express the emotional criteria. That's a huge big benefit, y'all.

Two benefits, actually. First, I can say, "I am not what I was before; I am new; I am not done growing." And second, "This new thing that I am, cannot do what I did before, but it can do other things which I wanted to do before, and could not."

This is so bizarre, so abnormal, so disconcerting an experience, that I could scarcely credit the truth of it, even as I sat there at Spring Street undergoing it. I felt like I had slipped into one of those tales where a djinn magically transports the caliph, in his sleep, from Baghdad to the distant shores of the Wu-Tang Archipelago; and the caliph seems to himself to spend several seasons there, his grueling training overseen by Ghostface Killah, his evenings lost in scholarly conversation with RZA; and one morning, he awakens not on a hard tatami mat, but in his sumptuous bed back home in the Golden Gate Palace, and but a single night has passed; yet he retains his new knowledge, of shaolin kung-fu, and the secret language of bees, and how to find the cosine, and so forth.

 

I felt like that, except the knowledge I mysteriously acquired on that far shore had to do with drawing.

How To Make Anger Into Art

YESTERDAY

A couple years ago, we listened to a model who has a certain amount of background in psychoanalysis. She remarked that while I seemed like an easy-going guy, there was barbed wire underneath.

She was right. I am a very angry person, and the fact that you missed it doesn't make it not so. I have a geological model of the self - all spherical layers. If you stripped off the layers above my anger, you'd be left with a planet of fire. The anger layer is fire.

Right now, I am quitting nicotine. I haven't had a cigarette in over a year, but now I'm quitting nicotine itself, which I was getting through e-cigarettes. This process, relative to the visibility of my anger, is like kicking a paving stone, and it breaks in half, and an absolutely huge fucking cockroach that was behind the stone freezes for a second, then scuttles out of sight. You can never unknow that it was there.

I have a tremendous amount of pain in my head as the nicotine drains out of the nicotinic receptors in my neurons.

graphic of dubious scientific validity via BBC

I have found that my outbursts of anger, during this withdrawal, temporarily submerge the pain in a sea of glittering pinpoint pleasure. The anger itself is acting as a kind of narcotic. I am not chemically addicted to sadism. But I have the machinery for it. It would be very easy.

This out-of-control anger is completely selfish. I haven't got a thought for anyone else, except inasmuch as I want to hurt them. I want to hurt everyone. I want everyone to hurt, and then to apologize to me, for the pain I am undergoing.

---

Well, as you know, I believe in the alleged Indian injunction against wasting any part of the animal; the animal being, of course, ourselves. So what are we to do with anger?

The last time I was this angry was in 1996, in Texas. I was so angry I was dangerous. People shied away from me. I couldn't sleep, or talk normally, or calm down, or eat. My weight dropped to 163 (I'm 6'1" - that's a very low weight). I was drifting toward becoming a stalker. I fled Texas, to flee myself. It took another year to disentangle myself from what I was in Texas.

During the Texas period, I used anger, quite consciously, as an energy resource for exercise. I ran a lot - about six miles at a go, 4-6 days a week. I ran at night, on the rubber track at UT-Austin, among the snails and bats and herons, when it was cool enough to go outside. I ran for hours. And I reflected on my anger as I ran.

What is anger? Anger is a form of energy. There are some things to be learned from anger, and that's why I'm writing about it. But whatever there is to be learned from anger, and about anger, this is dwarfed by the amount of energy represented by anger, if you are at all an angry person.

What I'm saying is that you will learn everything there is to learn about anger in the first 32 minutes, and anger lasts 24 hours. The other 23 hours and 28 minutes of anger are nothing but energy. Featureless energy is usable only as a fuel.

Unfortunately, anger is not quite featureless. It wants to fuel destruction more than it wants to fuel creation. So look, o ye of anger - there is a little bit of self-modification you have to engage in if you have positive goals, and anger to burn.

What you have to do is build a kind of scrubber. You must pass the anger through this scrubber before you fuel your work with the anger. What is the scrubber? It is hate. Feed your anger into the scrubber, and use the scrubber to hate your anger, to scourge your anger, to punish your anger; use it to discipline your hand, and your mind, and your eye. Your anger will be turned against itself, and when it burns, it will burn clean.

I am currently using my anger to fuel the underdrawing of Inanna #1, a tedious process which has been going on for days. I have a whole blog post to write about what my Inanna #1 method is teaching me, but this isn't that post.

what it's like to draw on a 7-foot-tall canvas

Inanna #1 is about air, light, color, beauty, and life. It is safe to say that I am feeling none of those things right now. Not only am I not feeling them, I don't believe in them. I think they're all pretty much stupid.

design sketch: junior goddess Inanna discovers the me, or power-object, of life, depicted as a pregnant woman

But I did feel them at one point, when I was coming up with this painting; or at least, the Sumerians felt them when they wrote the myth the painting is based on. Or if they didn't feel them, they wrote some myths down in such a way as that it was possible to misinterpret the myths as implying that the Sumerians felt them. At any rate, sometime along the way, an idea was generated, that somebody, somewhere, believed in air, light, color, beauty, and life. And those seem like pretty nice things.

Inanna, incomplete underdrawing

I don't have anything insightful to say about anger, in my painting; at least nothing I can say while in the depths of it. But I do have some insights about air, light, color, beauty, and life, which I was already in the middle of working on, when anger, like a thief, found my house. I am enslaving my anger, and using its energy to continue what I was working on anyway. It takes a lot of hours and a lot of concentration and patience to draw the drawing for this painting, and I'm charging it to anger's Visa.

This seems like a more appropriate option than just killing everybody. I have zero faith in air, light, color, beauty, and life right now, but I do have faith in my hatred. My hatred is pure and powerful; it is forged from anger, it is at the first logical remove from anger. I can aim it at anything I like, and I aim it at its source. This is how you make something good out of something bad.

TODAY

That was what I was like in early 1996.

My headache brutally reminded me that we will always be everything we have ever been, if only we can locate the correct address in our vast internal directory structure. I reappeared at my grisliest to myself, shimmering horror. And then my headache moved on.

Now I simply feel as if somebody were rolling a dull probe around the frontal bone of my left eye socket:

This hurts, bad, but it can be supported. Perhaps you have never been an addict; perhaps you haven't had the counter-intuitive experience, in breaking an addiction, of regret, that you cannot reasonably return to your addiction now that you've put in the suffering to detach from it.

So much for nicotine.

I do not quite believe in air, light, color, beauty, and life today. But I am not consumed by fury either. I am merely sick, and hopefully getting better.

Performing Design: The Puppetry of Kate Brehm

Judah Low is one of the heroes of China Miéville's novel Iron Council. Low makes golems. Traditionally, a golem is a clay man animated by magic.

Mikoláš Aleš, Rabbi Loew and Golem, 1899
In the fantastical world of Iron Council, golem-making is well established, complete with university courses and theory:

What we do is an intervention, Pennyhaugh lectures Judah from his notes, -- a reorganization. The living cannot be made a golem -- because with the vitality of orgone, flesh and vegetable is matter interacting with its own mechanisms. The unalive, though, is inert because it happens to lie just so. We make it meaningful. We do not order it but point out the order that inheres unseen, always already there. This act of pointing is at least as much assertion and persuasion as observation. We see structure, and in pointing it out we see mechanisms and grasp them, and we twist. Because patterns are asserted not in stasis but in change. Golemetry is an interruption. It is a subordinating of the static IS to the active AM. -- p. 205

Judah Low ultimately outdoes all other golem-makers. They know the theory, but they intuitively think in terms of the clay-man model. Low is radical: He deeply understands "unalive" as the only limit on his medium. He makes golems out of heaps of corpses, shattered railroad tracks, air, light, sound...

One real-world equivalent of the golem is the puppet: matter persuaded into meaningful motion by human interruption. And the puppet, like the golem, is prone to the clay-man restriction on its nature:

Big Bird and Pat Nixon (!)
When we think about puppets today, we mostly think about Muppets. Muppets, like all other anthropomorphic puppets, are capable of the most startling and delightful resemblances to living things. They can move like them, express emotions like them, display little tics which we overlook in everyday life, but which become precious and beautiful when meticulously repeated by a puppet. People love this quality of puppets. Just ask the producers of War Horse.

As great as all that is, it is not the only mode in which puppetry can take place. New York puppeteer Kate Brehm is a lot like Judah Low. Ask Brehm, "What should be puppetized?" and she will tell you, "Everything."

Brehm has coined the term "performing design" to describe the work she does. A few years ago, she created the Poofs, human-sized tunicate-like puppets capable of a surprising amount of humor and poignancy:

The Poofs
I've seen the Poofs in action, and though they are awesome, they represent an intermediate step between the classical clay-man puppet, and the premise that everything is a puppet. It turns out that it's easy to say everything is a puppet, but very, very hard to do.

Think about it. You and I are sitting in a cafe, having a cup of coffee, and I say to you, "All things are puppets." You consider it, and you say, "Okaaaay -- this coffee cup is a puppet. These little packs of sugar are puppets. This spoon is a puppet."

That's an intermediate step. It's broad, but it's not broader than, for instance, Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

 intermediate concept of total puppetry

The further step is to say: The size of this cafe is a puppet. The triangle between my eye, yours, and the coffee cup is a puppet. The mass of the table is a puppet. The division of space is a puppet. The rate at which time flows is a puppet.

This is how Kate Brehm thinks when she thinks about puppets.

I recently had the good fortune to see her work-in-progress The Eye Which We Do Not Have. It is Brehm's most complete effort at total puppetization yet. With lingering traces of Hitchcock and du Maurier, it is ostensibly the story of a woman losing her mind over an unhappy affair. But the story is nearly submerged in a universe come shuddering to life.

The "stage" is composed of two doors. In each door, there are three windows, through which we see into the space of the play. The windows have flat shades. The shades are on rails. And the first several minutes of the play are a dance of the shades:

This serves as a kind of introduction to the range of animation we can expect. It is not meaningless kinetic activity. Accompanied by the theme music from Vertigo, it is a menacing bit of performance: unexplained, mysterious, and somehow threatening, as if our eyes were blinking by external command.

From there, it's off to the races. Brehm frequently references cinema, which has implicitly recognized point-of-view, edits, and the frame as puppets since Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles and Gregg Toland swaggered onto the scene. Brehm appropriates this grammar by occasionally converting her six windows into a kind of moving storyboard, as in a sequence of the heroine running up a flight of stairs:

This is puppetry-as-montage. She also performs puppetry-as-mise-en-scene by, for instance, rotating a set mid-scene, from a level perspective to a bird's-eye-view:

"Look," you might be inclined to say, "rotating the set is a long-standing trope of theatrical machinery. What makes this special?" I think that what makes it special is the purpose for which the set is rotated. Ordinarily, it's a purely functional act. It changes the imaginary location visible to the audience. In Brehm's world, it is, like every single other thing, a means of expression. It corresponds with a sudden sense of terror in the narrative. That is very special indeed.

This sense of the expressiveness of all things covers not only point of view, but scale. In a hallucination scene, the heroine struggles with a group of amusingly be-penised paper cutout men:

Examine this group of frames. The heroine is represented by multiple puppets, of different sizes. And the cutouts change size as well. The many figures in the scene maintain continuous identities, but their sizes relative to one another keep changing. Size has become Brehm's puppet.

Perspective and size are both qualities of things, and not things themselves. It is difficult to advance the claim that a quality is a puppet. In all plays, things move closer and farther away, changing our perspective and their apparent sizes. True. I would propose that such qualities become puppets when their progressions throughout the play assume independent, thematically coherent narratives of their own. In this regard, Brehm's affinity for Vertigo makes sense. In many ways, the vertical distance between objects is a puppet in the movie Vertigo: It steadily declines from the start of the movie to its middle, and expands from the middle of the movie to its tragic close. Hitchcock tells the story of the movie purely on the formal level of organization of space. Brehm does the same.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea: Everything that crosses the boundary from ordinary life to the universe of Brehm's stage is examined and animated. Animate things on her stage are not characters alone, or objects alone, but the qualities of things as well: space, perspective, light, size, rate.

I have seen and heard tell of people making puppets out of unusual items. But I have neither seen nor heard tell of anyone recognizing quite as Brehm does that the totality of the stage phenomenon is a puppet, that every instant and dram of the stage's innards is a puppet. This approach takes a staggering amount of work, of filling multiple information transmission channels. And inevitably, Brehm's enormous creativity runs far ahead of her technical capabilities. The images in her mind are fully formed; matter lags behind. The production is rough around the edges, even for a work in progress. All great things are.

Why am I so fired up about this puppet show, The Eye Which We Do Not Have? I've considered that a bit. I think it's because I'm excited about how Brehm thinks, about how she allows me to think when I'm in the company of her work. Her universal animation represents a kind of awakening: a sudden sense, after much struggle, of the entire world as active, of all things and qualities as fluid, as engaged in a process of meaningful becoming. We are capable of many transformative insights in life. Some equal this one, but none exceeds it.


Poofs and Stills from The Eye Which We Do Not Have: courtesy of Kate Brehm
Kate Brehm online: http://katebrehm.com/
Iron Council at Amazon