The Endless Procession

Well, you've got my being cooped up waiting all day in the wifi-enabled jury room 2.60 of King's County Criminal Court to thank for this post not being delayed even more than it already is.

I don't know about you, but I am always worried about receiving too narrow a stream of information. When I started painting, I looked at Sargent a lot:


Then I needed more, so I settled on the Big Three, and studied them for many years:

Titian

Velazquez

Rubens

Titian - for beauty. Velazquez - for psychology and brushwork. Rubens - for energy and joie-de-vivre. No doubt I'll have more to write about them as this blog unfolds.

But even the wonderful worlds of these three painters were not enough. I needed to turn to more artists; voraciously more. I was forced to be catholic in my tastes. I started with a few artists I had once flirted with, and then avoided.

Pablo, bien sûr

Matisse

And I started catching up on what's going on in the world today. Let me say it plainly: abstract expressionism, and every single movement since then, have done nothing for me. But that doesn't mean I don't look at them. I need shock treatment - I need my boundaries to be attacked and breached all the time. I need to see what possible things other people have thought of...

Lately, I've been watching PBS's Art:21 a fair bit. This documentary series on contemporary artists in many ways encapsulates everything I hate about PBS: its would-be hipness, its snobbery convinced it is populism, its self-righteousness, its tedium, and all with a dash of sucking thrown in for good measure. But they do stumble on some good stuff sometimes - heck, it's a good premise - and I learn even from the bad parts. So I keep watching it.

I saw an episode the other evening which included a section on artist Allan McCollum. This was a fascinating look at a body of work that resonated very strongly with me, even though it's in a mode I do not identify with at all.

Let's look at one of his pieces a bit, and hear what he has to say about it. Then I'll explain what I'm on about:

Individual Works...series begun in 1987.

To produce the Individual Works hundreds of small shapes are casually collected from peoples' homes, supermarkets, hardware stores, and sometimes from the sidewalks: bottle-caps, jar-lids, drawer-pulls, salt-shakers, flashlights, measuring spoons, cosmetics containers, yogurt cups, earrings, push-buttons, candy-molds, garden-hose connectors, paper-weights, shade-pulls, Chinese tea-cups, cat toys, pencil sharpeners, etc. From this collection of shapes many rubber molds are produced from which replicas of these shapes can be hand-cast in plaster in large quantities, thus creating a vocabulary of shapes which can be combined to produce new shapes, and so forth. A simple numerical system is used during the production process to insure that no two finished Individual Works will ever be alike. Each unique Individual Work is hand-cast in gypsum, and hand-painted with an enamel paint. The Individual Works are usually gathered into collections of over 10,000 per collection.

Now, why is this so interesting to me? Let me tell you about a couple of dreams I had when I was very little.

In one dream, I was in a flat landscape. There was nothing superflat about it: it was a village, with trees, small hills, widely spaced houses on farms. Some of the ground had been replaced with checked red-and-white tablecloth fabric. There was a road through the town - it was a sunny day. What was flat about this landscape was that there were no mountains or oceans nearby. In fact, I was aware that this particular region retained this character - houses, streams, trees, thoroughfares, grass, tablecloth - for hundreds of thousands of miles. The extension of this landscape in space was unfathomably vast. It never strongly changed, but it never repeated either. Every point in this land was unique.

A second dream. There was a closet, with a number of shelves. Each shelf was stuffed with a variety of dolls: dolls of animals and people. If you closed this closet, and opened the door again, you would find that the dolls had been replaced with different dolls, arranged differently. A second closing and opening would produce a new set of changes - but the changes would be slightly less significant. Repeating the closing and opening action gradually reduced the changes until they were incredibly slight; a single arm of a single doll would have shifted slightly, perhaps, or a doll would rest at a mildly shifted angle. But the changes, while diminishing in degree, never ceased. There was no logical end-point to the closing and opening of this horrible door. You could keep producing changes, trivial changes growing more trivial, forever.

I have a deep and queasy connection with the concept of an unbounded set of objects which are all unique and yet have no meaningful differences. Consider the trilobites:


Or Stephen Wolfram's cellular automatic plane:


Or the monstrous invasive dream-parade in the movie Paprika:


Or my own fascination, documented here previously, with the sequence of the prime numbers. My friend and model Vadim, considering fashion magazines, once referred to the images they contain as "the endless procession of beautiful but meaningless forms." Perhaps I am not describing something like fashion here, but I like Vadim's phrasing very much - don't you? It is a wonderful phrasing.

It is this very topic, this hideous thing that has no start and no end, which is the subject of much of McCollum's work. In the Art:21 interview, he described his interest in using an industrial process to make unique objects. The objects should have the feel of industrial mass-production, and yet no two should be alike. To that end, he has contrived extremely clever techniques, culminating in a very ingenious computerized graphical procedure (basically sophisticated copy-pasting) which underlies his Shapes project. Here's a bit of what he writes about the project:

And here's a photograph of some of its horrifying scale:

Allan McCollum. The SHAPES Project, 2005/06. 7,056 SHAPES Monoprints, each unique. Framed digital prints, 4.25 x 5.5 inches each. Installation: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, 2006.

McCollum adds a clarification of the difference between the physical implementation of the project, and its vastly larger conceptual space:

The Shapes Project is a system to create a large quantity of unique shapes, one for every person on the planet when the world population peaks in the middle of the twenty-first century. To make certain that the system will be able to accommodate everyone, it has been organized to produce over 31,000,000,000 different Shapes.

There is a stark inhumanity and terror to McCollum's work. This is work that not only has no meaning; by mimicking many of the structures of meaning - variation, distinctness of shape - it tricks the mind into partaking of it from the perspective of meaning, which it perplexes, confounds, and ultimately undoes. It makes meaning appear meaningless. It renders thought and hope and humanity futile. It makes Sol Lewitt's comparatively finite combinatorial systems look downright quaint:

McCollum has figured out how to particularize a functionally unlimited space, and in so doing, to destroy the mind that attempts to take it seriously.

I think I've been speaking a lot of hyperbole here, and I'd like to back up for a second before I get to the moral of the story. What do I mean "destroy the mind"? What kind of a claim is this?

Well, let's consider a common feature of the Ptolemaic and Copernican universes for a minute.


Sure, they're at each others' throats about the Earth and the Sun, but they both agree that the imperfect world we see around us progresses outward in space toward perfection. This model, to the extent that it permits the infinite, sees stability in the infinite. Its infinite is infinite in extent, not detail.

This is not the universe we now conceive: a universe of varying background radiation, of galactic superclusters, of twisty little garlic knots of spacetime. This universe, too, may prove infinite in extension, although we don't think so. But if it is infinite, it is not uniform. It is thick with detail.

This detail, we abhor. We have a different and more subtle form of the stabilization feature of the Ptolemaic-Copernican infinite: the second law of thermodynamics.

Second Law of Thermodynamics: In any cyclic process the entropy will either increase or remain the same.

Entropy is disorder. The second law informs us that the universe as a whole is tending toward disorder. Total disorder is heat, aimless vibration, crap. The universe is tending toward crap. This crappiness does for time what Ptolemy and Copernicus do for space: without setting an outer boundary, it assures uniformity. It is infinite, but without detail.

The Stephen Wolfram referenced above, a very interesting guy, has referred to the second law as "the so-called second law of thermodynamics." This is kind of a funny line. Wolfram thinks that entropy is not necessarily as straightforward as all that. If you scroll back up and look at that weird triangle pattern, you can see where Wolfram is coming from. This pattern, which never repeats itself and never settles into a quiet uniformity, emerges from the repeated application of some very simple mathematical rules. Wolfram has used this type of rule-set to simulate all sorts of interesting things, such as the patterns on seashells. This work has convinced him, and he's not a stupid individual, that the universe itself is the outcome of some similar repeated execution of simple rules of the type he is studying.

Now, this is not worth much as science, so far, because it doesn't predict anything and can't be tested.

However, one feature of Wolfram's systems is that, while broad areas tend toward entropic crappiness over time, new nuggets of order spontaneously arise and spread out as well. So if the universe is a Wolfram system, then it is not tending toward total entropic disorder. Wolfram's derision about the second law results from his belief that we are extrapolating the law from a small scale, where it works, to the ultimate scale, where it fails.

A Wolfram universe is a universe of infinite extent and infinite variation. It is thick with detail from here to eternity. And this induces the same terror that I am seeing in McCollum's projects. I think I can explain this terror better, having presented the situation at a universal scope.

We are accustomed to thinking of all the things we see as having some meaning. A tree - this means something. A cat, a dog, a man, a woman, a child - all these mean things. A cloud, a brook, a house, a road. All of them are part of a world, sometimes gentle and sometimes rough, but always meaningful. Those parts that are not meaningful in themselves, are meaningful to us, as we behold and consider them.

But how many things can we consider? Ten? Twenty? A hundred - a thousand?

What if there were no end to these things, all of them having distinct and serious human import? Can we stand to admire the beauty of a million clouds? A billion rivers? A trillion men and women? But a trillion is hardly even the foothill of the infinite.

So we have learned to cope with the infinite - with the grains of sand, the waves of the sea, the stars of the sky - by means of the concept of repetition. Repetition collapses the infinite. One grain of sand may be said to be functionally just like the rest of them. The waves of the sea - alike. The stars - alike. We have bounded the infinite prospect with Ptolemy's EMPIREUM or Copernicus's STELLARUM FIXARUM SPHAERA IMMOBILIS. Perhaps we can about choke down infinity if it doesn't really mean anything.

But an infinity consisting of an infinite and non-repeating number of elements just like the elements we know and care about blows us apart. Not only is it impossible for the finite mind to comprehend it, but its very existence forces the finite mind to consider that everything it knows, being alike in kind with so much more that it cannot know, is in fact a useless fraction, a meaningless fraction.

We cannot abide a finite universe, and we cannot abide an infinite but meaningful universe. We need a finite number of meaningful elements and a vast and empty cold surrounding them, a cold we can safely ignore apart from your occasional moment of wonder or dread.

Wolfram's universe, McCollum's universe, by contrast, is a mind-splitting, soul-mocking, terrifying universe.

So why on earth do I like this man and his project, which combines fecundity and sterility in the most unholy of ways? For this very terror I have been trying to convey. It is a specific kind of terror, a very particular formulation of terror, and it has haunted me in the most personal and visceral way my entire life. By some weird chance, it has manifested itself to McCollum as well. For him, it does not seem terrifying. For me, it was so terrifying that I stopped thinking about it, and then forgot about it. Looking at McCollum's work was part of my artistic shock treatment. When I saw his work, I remembered this thing, my own personal terror. McCollum restored to me a part of myself that I had lost.

In many regards, life is a process of forgetting and loss. Art, on precisely the same topics, is often a process of remembering and restoration. In art, we are all moving toward being as whole as we were when we began. I needed something I was missing, and McCollum gave it back to me.

Proxy Light --> Proxy Knowledge

Here's a really specific topic that's probably of limited interest to the non-painter.

Before I get going, may I just add this? Теплые приветствия нашим русским читателям!

So anyway, I'm working on this painting in which the face probably shouldn't be lit. The composition really doesn't want the face lit. But I am unable to subordinate my fidelity to the model to fidelity to the painting. Plainly speaking, I hate to have a painting with the face unseen. That's why I do so little work with backs and butts; you have to produce a really twisty pose to have a face in a painting like that, and I don't have any ideas that motivate such twisty poses.

Anyhow, on this painting, the face doesn't want to be lit, and yet I'm lighting it anyway. I figured out a way to just barely light it - to have hardly any light on the eye - and yet to have the eye read clearly. Here's the outcome of the first session:


If you look closely, you'll see that the iris and pupil are not really painted at all. The entire region - the inner portion of the eye - merges into a single patch of uniform dark. What is lit is the white of the eye. That's the only part you can actually technically see. You think you can see the iris and pupil, but you can't; you simply know where they are. And you don't directly know where they are; you only know 1) where they could be and 2) where they aren't. Your mind puts those two pieces of information together and provides a complete model of the eye, even though the light is directed such that the relevant part of the eye is actually completely invisible. Confused about what I mean? Compare that eye with the similar eye placement in my recent painting The Lightning which, incidentally, is covered extensively in my article in this month's International Artist and you should run out and buy it:


In this painting, the light in the darks is much brighter, and you can see every part of the eye. In the new painting, I am using proxy lighting to produce proxy knowledge. By means of the thing that is lit, you are able to fill in what isn't lit. The dark part is lit by proxy light provided by your mind. Your direct knowledge yields proxy knowledge. I get to have it both ways - I can leave the eye unlit, as the physics of the composition wants, without hiding the eye, which is what I want.

I agonized about the eye a lot before I started painting, and had this little trick in mind in advance. Thinking it over later, I realized I had pulled a similar stunt a few years ago, in this painting, The Saint:


As you can see, I really punched the light in the lit part of the eye. I planned for the unnatural brightness in the white of the eye and the nose, making them part of an aesthetic mimicking the jagged unreality of medieval iconography. Why would I do that? Because I knew that my technique at the time wasn't strong enough for me to portray natural light levels as I saw them in front of me. I always try to adapt my aesthetic to match my technical limits, while pushing my technical limits a bit farther each time. Not a bad idea, I think - the best example of this that I can think of Kevin Smith's first movie, Clerks, which was very adeptly designed to match his ignorance of filmmaking at the time.

Thinking more about this very specific trick for a very specific lighting and facial-angle situation, I suddenly thought that I probably learned it from Sargent. Like many an aspiring contemporary figurative painter, I started out thinking I wanted to paint like Sargent. Since then, I've changed my mind, but I still admire Sargent a great deal, and I still study him. I have this painting of his on a corkboard above the desk in my office:


If you look, you'll see that he deploys this exact trick in his deeply underlit painting. He also gets to have his cake and eat it too. He preserves the profound chiaroscuro, he turns the face away from the light - and he doesn't lose the eye. His merest hint of the eye pushes it much farther than I have in either of the paintings I'm showing you here, but let's face it, he's still much better at painting than I am.

If you are a non-painter, and you've still made it this far, I think this can serve as a useful example of the mighty force of detail that the painter considers in producing an image. We're trained by photography to consider image-making effortless, but actually, every little thing you see on the canvas is the outcome of thought and decision. Perhaps these thoughts and decisions are not always analytic, the way I am describing them here - often, they are intuitive or unconscious - but they all result from grappling with the specifics of the situation and with the specific situation's relationship with recurring general issues. The question of how to convey information about an unlit object is a general issue, and this is a very detailed exposition of a particular solution to it in a particular set of circumstances. I think that climbing the mountain of these proliferating problems is a good part of the fun of painting.

Cadmium

There is a wonderful model named Stephanie who moved back to New Mexico over a year ago. Before she left, I prepared a painting of her for when she was gone: a reference drawing and a bunch of reference photographs. I do this for every painting, but usually I then paint from the actual model. This was not going to be possible with the last Stephanie painting.

I find it very difficult to paint without a model present - where's the fun in that? But I really liked this painting idea. Stephanie doesn't have an angry bone in her body, but I wanted the painting to be angry: almost impossible to look at. I had an idea for how to do that, too, and the idea was cadmium orange. Why cadmium orange? It's a hot color, and when used unwisely, an intense and ugly color. I had some idea of what it could do based on a portrait I painted when I was just starting out as a painter, in 2005:


I never painted the background, but I'm very fond of this painting, which was my second serious painting. The color in it is not unbearable - there is a cold light from the left which keeps it under control. But I used a lot of hot colors on the right, not really knowing what I was doing. I've thought about it since then, though, and what I wanted to do was a painting with only the hot colors on the right. A painting without relief from the hot colors. That was the idea for this Stephanie painting. Here's the palette I set up for it:


It's a simple palette, and I thought about it for a long time before I started the painting. It includes only naples yellow, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, cadmium red, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and ivory black. There's no white, because white is too tempting - you can make anything brighter with some white, but it also cools the image down. It's a respite from the hot colors. And I debated long and hard about using black in the painting. Black also functions as a relative cool in a situation like the one I was setting up, and I didn't want to leave myself anywhere to turn when I inevitably sought to balance the colors in the painting. But I figured I could keep it under control.

Amusingly, what I ultimately wound up using for a cool was naples yellow. A cool yellow, relative to those fearful cadmium colors.

The painting was about fury, and the fury was in the image, but it was also in the color. Having a model present is like having a physical bedrock for your work. When you are wandering adrift in the nebulous region between your mind and your paint brush, you can look to the model, and the presence of the model will remind you what you're doing. A photograph is no substitute.

In this instance, the physical bedrock was the cadmium orange. It's simply unworkable, it's a horrible color. It's best used for little passages, like if someone is wearing a garish orange sash - that's a nice place to put some cadmium orange. I suppose you could mix cadmium orange into a perfectly acceptable flesh mix, but my goal was to deal with from-the-tube cadmium orange, the pure goblin. So I wrestled with cadmium orange the whole time, and that was the physicality underlying the making of the painting: the paint itself. I would shy away from using any more cadmium orange, and then I would force myself to cover a whole area with cadmium orange and then deal with it. If I found myself leaning on the comparatively civilized burnt sienna, I would immediately shift back to cadmium orange. Perhaps I got carried away, but I liked this experimental procedure.

I worked on the painting for four days, from start to finish. Four very long days - it's close to life-sized:

You Will Not Be Forgiven, 60"x36", oil on canvas, 2010

I don't know about you, but for my part, I have noticed that I am only permitted to do anything once. What I mean is this - I had an unusual degree of knowing in advance what the colors I chose for this painting would do. Usually, I don't know exactly where I'm going with any particular thing. It's better, for me, not to know: my best work rides along the very edge of failure. I struggle and sweat for all these skills, but the skills are best in the minute before I master them. Once I know how to control them totally, their use loses its intensity, it becomes complacent. With this painting, I threw everything I know about color at it, almost certain that it would work. It did work - it might not work for you, but it works for me in the sense that I asked the colors to do something, and they did precisely that. If I were to do that again, without introducing some element I do not know how to control, I think I would make a boring painting.

Since I finished this painting, I've started four new ones, with models thankfully present. I'm trying a new color theory for the flesh in the Claudia painting I talked about below. I'm trying to depict extreme light over-exposure with stylized hot midtones in a second painting. In a third, the entire figure is cool-color stylized midtones: I will have to go much farther with grays than I ever have. And in the fourth, I am painting everything in a completely lunatic greenish indigo, and working on distressing the image enough to make some parts of it unreadable. We'll see how that goes.

I think the key is this - to continue finding a way to be at the very start of things. It is at the end of things that we stiffen and become inflexible. Our masterful technique reads as dead. It is at the start that there is excitement, a sense of opportunity and possibility. There is inevitable awkwardness, but I have always thought that awkwardness was a reasonable price to pay for life.

Look, I'm no romantic about crudity. The more masterful you become, the more this mastery serves as a foundation for your sense of being at the beginning. It is a background noise, but a background noise that makes the painting, overall, well executed. The awkwardnesses rise to higher levels. But the awkwardnesses continue to serve as a talisman of vitality and the beginning. Without the mastery, the expression falters, and without the excitement of beginning, there is rarely anything to express.

Claudia

Well! Let me tell you a little bit about Claudia and then send you packing to her blog.

I just started working on my first painting with Claudia - she's a model I've drawn many times at Spring Street and gotten to know over the course of one delightful chat after another at various art events around town.

Modeling, as with so many other practices, involves elements both of talent and skill. Skills can be developed - professionalism, strength, endurance, good body-position memory, a knowledge of the types of poses that work with one's body and are interesting to the life drawing student. Talent is one of those things you are either lucky enough to have, or not. With regard to modeling, these involve creativity, passion, and a face and body that are suited to expressing emotions.

Claudia is a wonderful model: fortunate enough to be talented, and dedicated enough to have become skilled.

Apart from these, though - and this is very important when considering whether to work with a model privately - she is great fun to chat with. You spend a lot of time with a model when you paint or sculpt them, and it's not a bad idea to have an eye, in choosing models, toward people you think you might want to be friends with anyway. Claudia is one of those kinds of people.

But don't take my word for it. Almost uniquely, Claudia also keeps a massive and popular blog chronicling her life in art. She's a brisk and funny writer with insight into her work and excitement about art: all sorts of art, all the phases of making art, the history and gossip of art. Scroll around the blog if you have the time and inclination, and get a sense of what makes Claudia such an excellent person to spend time with:

MUSEWORTHY
http://artmodel.wordpress.com/

When I paint, I think of my work with models as "doing justice to," the rather harsh Greek phrasing of the matter. I hope to become good enough to do justice to the marvelous people I paint. I hope that my Claudia painting will do justice to Claudia.

Here's a mediocre drawing of her I did at a workshop not long ago. It's not much of a drawing, but I think it catches a little bit of her electric presence:

The Nerdrum Affair

Perhaps you remember that, a while back, I wrote that I was not in the business of trashing successful living artists. Because maybe I'd have to work with them later. Well, I've exhibited with one, and I'm about to talk some smack about him, because this was what he had to say:

There is no doubt about it: In the previous century Hitler was the greatest Artist, greater even than Picasso.

Who said that? Well, you might not have heard of him. He's a Scandinavian painter named Odd Nerdrum. As these things go, very successful - his paintings sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. Mine, ahem, do not. Nerdrum saw fit to post this little observation on his Facebook page, where he is in the habit of posting delphic epigrams once in a while. I was among the first to notice the post, so I had the opportunity to be an early commenter. Let's see what I had to say:

I'm sorry, I find this unbelievably offensive, and I will be deleting you from my friend list now. This kind of pathetic wit is harmless enough until you start treading on the dead bodies of my relatives. You can go to fucking hell.

So I crossed that rubicon, and I may as well elaborate a little bit on how, exactly, Nerdrum can go to fucking hell. I've been thinking it over.

Nerdrum's post has a plain-language meaning, and its plain language meaning is a praise of Hitler.

Nerdrum's post also has an ironic art-world-critical meaning, in which he is attacking the moribund state of art by saying that, if Picasso is your paragon of good art, then Hitler, in your aesthetic cosmology, is even better.

Nerdrum's post is further modified by a labored and, by my lights, dubious distinction he has been working on for years between what he calls Art, of which he disapproves (think: modernism and post-modernism), versus Kitsch, which is supposed to be the good stuff (think: Rubens, Velazquez, Titian, etc.).

The Hitler quip triggered a flurry of comments, about 180-200, before the brave Mr. Nerdrum deleted the post. Hearteningly, many of the comments were to the effect of Nerdrum being a prick. The rest were defences, mostly on the basis of contending that those opposed suffered either a lack of relevant information, or a lack of proper interpretation, or a lack of sense of humor. Two actual Nazis crawled out of Nerdrum's list of 5,000 friends to defend, not so much Nerdrum, as Hitler.

I am going to tell you happy few right now that you have enough information to formulate a valid opinion of Nerdrum's post. It is obviously an ironic comment on some particular of the state of art, art criticism, and the art world.

What is just as obvious is that, by collapsing the moral distinction between anything to do with bad art, and the most profound monstrosity of which humanity is capable, Nerdrum has betrayed an astonishingly flattened moral topography. Let's consider the comment in light of a few options with regard to its interpretation:

1. Its plain-language meaning is its true meaning: he's praising Hitler.
2. It's an ironic critique: he has the moral topography problem.
3. It's meant to provoke: he has the moral topography problem.
4. It's meant to "inspire thought and discussion": he has the moral topography problem.

There is no way around concluding that he is either a Hitlerite, or has a disturbingly casual indifference to, and incomprehension of, evil.

Imagine spending time with a madman. In every particular, he is quite ordinary. He is friendly, considerate, perfectly reasonable in his conversation. Walking along the street with this madman, you pass a random stranger, and, out of the blue, he says something about how funny it would be to do this stranger a grievous harm of a particularly inventive and gruesome type. He chuckles a little bit, then continues with the previous discussion. He continues to be friendly, considerate, and reasonable. But the comment cannot be unsaid. Now, you have become aware that he is a madman, and nothing else he ever says will make it possible to consider him sane.

Nerdrum is not a madman. Rather, he is evil. His Facebook post is akin to the chance utterance of the madman: to Nerdrum, it was an acceptable comment. Perhaps meant to provoke, perhaps meant to outrage the squares - but overall, acceptable. And this makes us aware of something about him which any subsequent apologies (and they have not been forthcoming) cannot undo.

In kind, it is similar to, if less audacious and original than, unlistenable German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's public comment of September 16, 2001:

Well, what happened there is, of course—now all of you must adjust your brains—the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practise ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn't do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers. [...] It is a crime, you know of course, because the people did not agree to it. They did not come to the "concert". That is obvious. And nobody had told them: "You could be killed in the process."

Nerdrum's supporters can, and have, argued that whereas Stockhausen was serious, Nerdrum was ironic. This is a distinction without a difference. The same moral flattening occurs in both instances, regardless of intent. It is not a comment you could think of without the moral flattening.

The moral flattening is not idiopathic. It is not the outcome of some lone lunacy. It is a symptom of a so-called artistic demeanor, a demeanor which considers the question of good and evil to be terribly passe, to have no claim on the artist's attention. It is a symptom of the decadence of culture. And in this respect, Nerdrum's comment was marvelously clarifying for me. Why?

Because I have spent years worrying about Nerdrum. I could never reach a conclusion about him. He has fabulous technique, and sometimes I am inclined to think of him as a legitimate artist. Other times, I am inclined to think of him as a fetishist whose work is best suited to the cover of Omni magazine. I have never been able to put my finger on what bothered me about his work, until now. Let's take a look at a few of his paintings:



In the last instance, you might recall my previous thoughts on mouths and eyes. The partial or total effacement of the eyes is a common motif in Nerdrum's portraits. He has a mouth fixation similar to that of De Kooning, who cut photographs of mouths out of magazines and stuck them directly on the canvas as a starting point for his faces. When he is not painting portraits, Nerdrum often paints hieratic figures in barren, threatening landscapes. Frequently, violence is implied or explicit:




...and for years, I have been unable to solve what it was about Nerdrum that was troubling me. Lately, I have fallen in with a crowd of painters who are huge fans of his. Many have studied with him, and many emulate the qualities of his paintings: the thick impasto, the mimicry, not so much of Rembrandt's technique, as of a romantic half-memory of Rembrandt's technique, the gauzy depiction of idealized faces, the hieratic figures, the threatening landscapes, the peculiar clouds, the funny hats. In fact, Nerdrum seems to be encouraging his students to paint ersatz Nerdrums: you can often recognize who has studied with him, as you can recognize the work of people who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright, because they all built ersatz Wrights.

Anyhow, Nedrum's comment finally clarified for me my problem with his work: flat moral affect. In depicting good and evil, he does not choose sides between them. He has a lurid fascination with brutality, but he does not define himself relative to it. Goya, whose work was more brutal, depicts horror, and is horrified. Nerdrum depicts horror, and is fascinated. In Nerdrum's universe, beauty is more important than virtue, and boredom is more repellent than evil.

My revulsion at this teaches me something about myself as an artist. It is often said that beauty and virtue are the same, or that the virtuous is beautiful. And this is often true. But when they diverge, I am obliged to choose virtue. I would rather be bored than wicked, and I would rather do right than be fascinating.

There is room in the world for wicked artists. Evil too must take an artistic form, from the perspective of evil, in order for us to complete our understanding of the dilemma of being human. Kundera has a wonderful quotation, which I am unable to find now, on the necessity of morally compromised writers, because otherwise history will be a tale told by choir-boys: a tale told from the perspective of moral innocence, which is to say, ignorance.

To be a successful evil artist, you must not only be good - you must be great. And you will still deserve the condemnation heaped upon you. But Odd Nerdrum is merely good.

Let's zoom back for a moment from the issue at hand, to the long-standing problem it exemplifies so well, to wit: what about this business of artists being assholes? What about that?

I have thought about that long and hard. After all, I'm an artist. Does this give me a right to treat people badly? Well, in my case, it would little serve my purposes as an artist, because the pictures I make come from love. So not being an asshole is very difficult for me as a practical career artist, but it is necessary in order to preserve the source of my inspiration. I am simply in love, in one way or another, with most of the people I know, and with my pictures, and with the people who sit for them. For me, a big part of love is a desire to know - not the good only, but the good and the bad, about that which is loved. And for people to be willing to show this to you, the good and the bad alike, again, the method of brutality is less effective than the method of adoration.

But leave aside the practical considerations. Many well-known artists and even great artists are notorious assholes. Caravaggio? Murderer - well, man-one, five to seven years, if this were Law and Order. Michelangelo? Grumpy as all hell, really stinky feet. Bernini? Had his girlfriend's face slashed. Picasso? Serial asshole to every woman he knew. The list goes on, and all the examples are more impressive than a shitty little Facebook post.

So what are we to make of the asshole problem, and of the link between artistry and assholery?

Here is my latest thinking on it. With regard to those who have already died, there is nothing we can do any longer. They lived; they died; they abused those around them and made what work they did. If the work is good - by all means, appreciate the work.

With regard to those who are living, absolutely - let them be assholes. But do not make a special exception for them because they are also artists. Treat them with the contempt you would treat any asshole. You don't get special dispensation to be an asshole because of what you can contribute to humanity. If it's really so important for you to be an asshole, for you to renounce your first citizenship, to the human race, then suffer the consequences. Nobody said it should be easy - it should be hard. There is no whining in art.

And if the work is good, then still appreciate the work, even the work by the living asshole. Just don't make it easy for the asshole to get away with being a jerk. Ostracize him. Humiliate him. Mock him. If he wants to make his own cost of producing art higher than it needs to be, make him pay every penny.

To go back from the general to the specific, I imagine some of my Nerdrum-following friends and acquaintances will, at some point, stumble on this post. Many of these friends are young; virtually all of them are extremely talented. This Nerdrumism of theirs appears to me to have the fanaticism of youth. It is in the nature of youth - I have suffered through this myself - to attach to heroes. Nerdrum has cultivated himself as a hero to many young artists. He has promulgated a system of virtues, many of which are legitimate virtues, and he has promulgated his own work as the ne plus ultra of quality and legitimacy. Part of becoming an adult is learning to recognize the faults of your heroes. It is learning to identify a set of principles which you can reliably advocate, and learning to separate those principles from men. It is a difficult and lonely process, setting your principles first and being skeptical even of them. Principles are fallible; our thinking is not perfect. But more fallible than principles are men, and sometimes even our heroes turn out to be cranky old Nazis.

UPDATE April 6, 2011

I notice this post is still getting a lot of traffic. I feel obliged to add that if anyone is thinking of using material from this post to prosecute Mr. Nerdrum under any ridiculous European hate speech laws, I will do everything I can to undermine the utility of my writing as evidence in the case.

Actus Purus

Or, the perfect actualization, called God.

This medieval Christian term seems to descend from Aristotle's conception of God. For Aristotle, that which exists has properties which can be divided into the actual, which is a realized and existing property of the thing, and the potential, a property of the thing which does not exist now but which may come to be. The potential is converted into the actual by means of an external cause. Aristotle, reasoning backward through the chain of effects and their causes, reaches to the first cause, the first mover, which he calls God. Because this mover is the first, it must be unchanged, unmoved, unaffected, by other causes. It has no potentiality - it is pure actuality.

There is an opposite quantity, called prima materia by the alchemists: the formless base of matter, all potential, no actualization.

Aristotle makes no claims, as far as I can tell, for the actual existence of prima materia, the way he does for actus purus. All things in the world, says Aristotle, are a little of both; and God is only one.

He has more to say about it, but let's not get into that. Instead, let's look at an image we've looked at a million times before, and see if we can't see something new in it:


First, let's think about it in terms of a literal application of this actus purus/prima materia dichotomy. Naturally, in a work of art you can't have a literal interpretation of very abstract philosophical ideas. But in this image, Michelangelo gives us a God in a state of very high motion - the cloth on his robes shows him moving, and he is surrounded by fluttering forms, a frenzy of motion. He stretches forward, he reaches toward Adam. His potential for motion is actualized, and his potential for action is actualized. He is an actus purus.

Adam, on the other hand, is barely risen above prima materia. His muscles do not tense in order to act - he takes no action. God's finger reaches actively, Adam's finger droops passively. Adam's forehead is smooth, God's is furrowed. God acts out of a block of complex forms, swooping cloth and angels; Adam sits on a vague landscape, formless colors suggesting the Earth.

This is one reading of this scene. Let's take another reading. God acts; Adam does not act. Who is the more powerful, in the psychological dynamics of this interaction? Adam lets God come to him; Adam, in his passivity, drives an active God into a maelstrom of passions. It is Adam who is the superior, and moreover, he is superior in the form we traditionally ascribe to the feminine: by merely showing himself, being himself, languidly, he inspires action in the masculine party.

But perhaps it is not fair to Michelangelo to describe him from a modern perspective like this. Let's rephrase the same thing in terms of the Aristotelian concepts. Who is the unmoved mover here? Again, it is Adam. In the narrative, God's touch will cause Adam to gain motion. But in the picture actually at hand, Adam does nothing for God, and God does everything for Adam. Adam causes God to move; God does not cause Adam to move. This is a scene of first things, and in any scene of first things, we find a first cause. Adam is the first cause; God's motions are that which is caused.

So - interesting, a little: a sphinx of an image, shimmering between one interpretation and another inside of a single set of concepts. Who is the first mover here? It depends on what you're looking for.

But one ought not to read too much into it. Michelangelo surely knew something of the Aristotelian concepts and their scholastic Christian interpretation. But he was an artist. He almost certaintly did not intellectually derive this image from a logical process; he probably had this image simply pop into his head, an intuitive outcome of everything he knew, and of his inspiration.

Why think about it in these terms at all then? Because it is very difficult to look at something familiar with new eyes. The Mona Lisa, the Sistine Ceiling - we are in danger of losing them, because of their familiarity. If we experiment with analyzing them from an alien perspective, legitimate or not, we can scrape the scales from our eyes and see them again in their dazzling originality. We can restore to them the shock of the new.

UPDATE

Hei Oulu! On kiva nähdä taas. Toivottavasti kaikki on hyvin sinulle!

Those Hideous Forms

Let's take a look at my hotel in Minneapolis last week:


Where was I staying, the Overlook? Not quite. But I would like to draw your attention to a certain shape on the hall carpets:


Here are similar shapes elsewhere in the pattern:


Can you bear another?


To you, these might appear to be innocent loops. To me, there is something utterly hideous about them. Something unnatural, gleaming with threat. A loop should be circular, or close to circular. These elongated loops - these are terrible shapes. I recognized them as soon as I looked at the carpet. I haven't thought much about the evil loop before, but it does appear elsewhere. Look at the blank heads of De Chirico's metaphysical mannequins in The Disquieting Muses:


It is the same elongated loop. And what is similar to a loop? A dome. Here is a natural dome, a good dome designed by Dr. William Thornton in accord with the good lord's own plan for domes:


Here is an elongated dome, a hideous dome:


Nice one, Michigan.

Since I saw that carpet in Minneapolis, I have been thinking about what I detest about this murderous shape. I phrased it like this - you take an ordinary human head. This head has a generally round shape. It is the throne of nature, of intelligence, of beauty. Stretch it out as De Chirico does, and empty it of features. It becomes an uncanny shadow of the natural, stripped of intelligence, outside the question of beauty. Is it empty? Perhaps it is empty of matter, or filled with a homogeneous stuff. But it retains a kind of muted awareness. A blinking, vague, malignant awareness. If you stumbled upon it in the day, it would seem inert, lifeless, pitiable. If you should meet it in the night, it might awaken and mutilate you. It is a horrible thing, this head, this long loop.

That's a description, but it's a description of how I feel about it. Outside of me, it makes little sense. Or rather, it makes sense, but it is not necessary; it does not inhere in the object. It inheres in my response to the object.

So what's the point of my describing my mania about this hideous form to you? Because it is a useful example of a fascinating topic. For each of us, the world is not evenly distributed. Some things provoke less response than pure reason implies they ought. Some things provoke as much response as they should - they provoke linear responses, in proportion with their nature. And some provoke utterly disproportionate responses, unique to the distortions of subjectivity and personality we bring to our perceptions.

This final category of thing, the thing that can provoke a disproportionate response, is terribly important to the artist. We cannot force our response to inhere in the object, not exactly. But we can seize hold of our response to the object, and consider it, and become acquainted with the intensity and texture of our response. And then we can seek to convey what we feel - either in a depiction of the object, or by willfully attaching the response to the depiction of another object convenient to the art piece in question.

This is a large part of the source of intensity in art. It is not linear alone; it depends on unreasonable intensity in ourselves. Art which draws on this intensity has that quality of the creative, the original, the strange, which we are searching for all the time. We must recognize our intensity where we find it, and make it a tool in our toolbox.

Today's Thought on Picasso

Extreme expressionistic stylization of visual phenomena is all well and good, but in order to depict the stylized figure, it is:

(a) necessary to develop an idiom of representation which is stylized in an artistically worthwhile way and
(b) necessary to develop an idiom of representation sufficiently unrealistic that its departures from reality do not read as mistakes.

Property (b) is absolutely vital. If you don't do it, it doesn't look stylized. It just looks like you can't draw. A critic once said of Gauguin that he simply didn't draw well enough.


I think this problem, insufficient and inconsistent stylization, is what made the idea occur to the critic.

Picasso is a master of this type of figural stylization, the "I meant to do that" effect.

On Undecidable Propositions

So... maybe I'm not as done talking about Professor Kuspit as, at first, I thought. I'm reading his book, The End of Art, which is very interesting. I'd like to discuss a point he raises, but given my absolutely crap track record for interpreting him correctly, let me say that any text not actually in quotation marks does not necessarily represent Kuspit's thinking. Even if I say it does. Just take it with a grain of salt, is all I'm saying.

Kuspit devotes a lot of time and energy to having it out with Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp, you may remember, is the fellow who gave us this:


That's the "readymade," the famous urinal converted - presto - into art on Duchamp's say-so. It's been all downhill for art since then, basically. Here's what caught my eye in Kuspit's discussion:

"Clearly the readymade has a double meaning. It is a conundrum, a Gordian knot that no intellectual sword can cut. Simultaneously an art and non-art object, the readymade has no fixed identity. Regarded as art, it spontaneously reverts to non-art. It collapses into banality the moment the spectator takes it seriously as art, and becomes serious art the moment the spectator dismisses it as a banal object. Just as the spectator critically reacts to it, thinking about and looking at it in a more creative way than he thinks about and looks at non-art objects, it becomes one of those non-art objects. The readymade always outsmarts the spectator, outwitting his interpretation of it ... it...remains indecipherable. It is absurd..."

(p. 23)

Now, there's nothing I like more than an ontologically ambiguous phenomenon! And who doesn't, really? Sometime, we'll talk about De Chirico. But not today.

Frankly, I had never given much thought to Duchamp's readymades before, because basically, it's a goddamn urinal, so who cares? I had never experienced this frisson of the irresolvable that Kuspit describes. But his description of this particular frisson was immediately familiar. He describes an object which, when contemplated, triggers an endless oscillation between two unstable states, the acceptance of either of which immediately causes a collapse of the state and a recoil to the opposed state. Why is that familiar? Because it is exactly the same frisson triggered by the following sentence:

This statement is a lie.

Think about it for a second, you'll see what I mean.

The urinal dates to 1917. The sentence comes to our attention in 1931. It is the plain-language example of Kurt Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. Imagine a theory, called T. A slightly less plain-language version of the statement is called "sentence G for the theory T," or the Gödel sentence:

G cannot be proved to be true within the theory T.

The incompleteness theorem is a devastating discovery which effectively ended a program, championed by Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert, and the adorable Gottlob Frege, to put mathematics on a really solid footing by finally demonstrating the completeness and consistency of certain absolutely necessary and fundamental mathematical propositions.

"Completeness" and "consistency" have special meanings here. A "complete" system is capable only of generating statements that can be proved or disproved inside the system. A "consistent" system is incapable of generating statements that can be both proved and disproved in the system. Got that?

1. Completeness: capable of generating only statements that can be either proved or disproved within the system

2. Consistent: incapable of generating statements that can be both proved and disproved within the system

For the system of fundamental mathematics to live up to the hopes of Russell, Hilbert, and Frege, it must be both complete and consistent. What Gödel does is to prove that *no* system capable of generating a theory of fundamental mathematics can be both complete and consistent. If it is complete, it is inconsistent. If it is consistent, it is incomplete.

Incidentally, you haven't missed how Gödel proves this, because I haven't described it here. It's fiendishly complicated and involves a lot of notation that you'd probably be happier not knowing. It's a short book, if you're really interested. A short book, but if you're anything like me, a long fricking read.

What's interesting for our purposes here is that Kuspit's description of his experience of looking at Duchamp's urinal is categorically identical with the experience of looking at the deadly Gödel sentence. Given that, let us entertain for a moment the possibility that the Duchamp urinal is a Gödel sentence. Wow! What would that mean?

It would mean that art, when looked at from a certain perspective, can be functionally considered to be a formal system of logic. It would mean that the urinal is a statement, consistent with the language of this system, which makes an assertion that is undecidable within the system.

Well, what is the character of this system? And what assertion is the urinal making?

A system is a set: it is a set of axioms and theorems. One really important property of sets is that they should define what they include and don't include. How is the set defined? This property, the formation of the boundary of the set, allows the analyst to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant phenomena when conducting an analysis of the set. For instance, "1 + 1 = 2" is an important member of the set of fundamental mathematics. "Meow" is not.

In the art context, defining the boundaries of the set amounts to answering the question: What is art?

Whoa! Holy shit! The big question!

What Duchamp has done, in proposing the urinal as a work of art by signing it, is to point out a contradiction implicit in the set of axioms which underlie the definition of art. Axioms are statements taken to be true (though not proven) at the base of a logical system. Good axiom selection involves picking axioms that generate a minimum number of inconsistent results (theorems).

Well, art has a little axiom problem with its boundary definition. Duchamp has figured out that we have at least two axioms determining the boundary of the set we call art:

Axiom 1: "Art" consists of that set of human-produced objects which use aesthetic means to produce some kind of enlightening transformation in the viewer.

Axiom 2: "Art" consists of that set of objects produced by people called "artists" who come up to you and tell you that the thing they just made is "art."

Feel free to re-interpret axiom 1 as you like, depending on your personal tastes. Axiom 2 you'd have a hard time arguing with in any consistent way.

Duchamp, noticing the not-necessarily-identical outputs of axiom 1 and axiom 2, has gone ahead and generated an object which, under axiom 1, is "not-art," and under axiom 2, is "art." Because both axioms are deeply and viscerally active to the modern art viewer, Duchamp's object produces a sense of rapid and unstable oscillation between art and non-art states, as described by Kuspit: it is a contradictory object, a basilisk, a Gödel sentence.

Any artist could have done this at any time, because this problem has always existed in art and is intuitively obvious to any working artist. But before Duchamp, there had kind of been a tacit agreement among artists not to be a total dick about it. Functionally speaking, the artists would exploit axiom 2, while ensuring that they did their best not to violate axiom 1.

Duchamp's innovation lies not in his insight, but in the audacity of his barbarity. Just because you're the first rapist doesn't mean nobody thought of committing rape before. They just had the sense not to do it. Duchamp's program is not constructive, in the sense of seeking to highlight logical problems in order to point a way toward resolving them, as best as possible. His program is destructive; he highlights problems in order to wreck trust in the relevant system. In so doing, he discredits everything previously generated by the system, and shuts down subsequent use of the system.

In a sense, it is a salutary effect, because it forces us from the age of naive art-making to the age of willful art-making, with regard to that aspect of art which corresponds with a logical system. You might call the urinal one of my prime numbers, even though it is not, in itself, productive. And you would do well not to forget this: art is not a logical system.

However, the logical system aspect of art is obviously an important part of it, and since the urinal, a good deal of speculation on the axiomatic problem - What is art? - has gone on. I myself am not particularly a philosophical purist, so I like Roger Kimball's rough-and-ready solution to the problem:

"...the real issue is not whether a given object or behavior qualifies as art but rather whether it should be regarded as good art. In other words, what we need is not definitional ostracism but informed and robust criticism."

(p. 53, Art's Prospect)

You see what he does here? He demotes Axiom 1 - the "aesthetics and transformation" axiom - from its status as a definer of boundaries. He leaves only axiom 2 to define the set of objects called "art." But having done so, he immediately re-applies axiom 1 as an axiom, not of definition, but of criticism.

That works for me, but I tell you what. I described this idea to my wife, Charlotte, who is nothing if not skeptical, and she said, "That's really begging the question, isn't it? I mean, if you want to focus on what good art is, you're presupposing an answer to the question of what art is, aren't you?"

More on Charlotte's opinions soon. In the meantime, here's a huge-ass painting I just finished that I am very happy with, because any time you get to use a lot of cobalt blue, you can't help walking away happy:

Rachel's Room
2010, oil on canvas, 72"x48"

Four

Now, among the many things I owe you, is an explanation of what I was doing at a talk given by Donald Kuspit. So at the risk of boring you with the details of my real-world life a little more, let me clear up what happened. I thought of a bit of a fun way to lead you through the story.

This is a good place to start:


What's that? That's the art magazine section at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on May 14, 2010. The numbered circles are art magazines in which I was currently featured: 1. International Artist, 2. American Art Collector, 3. Art+Auction, and 4. Modern Painters. I took the picture because "four" is a personal record.

Of most interest to us at the moment is #2, American Art Collector. What am I doing in there? Well, they like to print pictures of paintings that have sold because collectors spotted the artist in their pages. I happen to have just recently sold this painting:


I told you about this back in March. The collector, Howard Tullman, first saw me in American Art Collector. Who is Howard Tullman?

This guy:


We're standing in front of my painting The Shock. I'm the one of the left. Yeah, that's me. There are a lot of scorching hot artists out there. Sadly, I'm not one of them. What are you going to do? I'm pretty happy anyway.

Maidman, you ask, in what room are you standing with a collector from Chicago, and a framed painting of yours on the wall?

Funny you should ask. That's a large meeting room at the Roger Smith Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. The reason the three of us - me, Tullman, and the painting - are all together there is that that place was hosting The Great Nude Invitational Figurative Arts Fair (first annual):

Plus also, I smoke.

I participated in this fair, with two paintings, The Shock and the larger Red:


That's Red in the middle there, by the bartender, who was an incredibly nice guy. And while I'm at it, here's me outside the hotel with the model, Lillian (on the right), and another model, Claudia, whom I am looking forward to working with, and who writes a just wonderful blog on art and modeling, which I have recommended to you before:


Back to the point. One of the organizers of this fair is - well, let's call him Professor Kuspit. He is a professor, and I think Mr. doesn't really indicate the amount of substantial critical and analytic work he has generated over time. Which is a lot. My mom was reading him when she was getting her MFA.

Not to imply I have an MFA. I don't.

So this panel discussion of which I speak, which touched on matters of Mondrian and woman-hating, was part of the art fair. The panel included Professor Kuspit and Vincent Desiderio, who is quite an accomplished figurative painter and a friend of Kuspit's. Clearly very fond of one another, they have developed a smooth patter consisting of dropping nuts on each other. This is delightful to watch, because they fall into a classic comedic counterpoint: Kuspit plays the slow-speaking, thoughtful, kind of crotchety elder. Desiderio plays the hot-headed, impassioned youth. Both have a good sense of comic timing, in terms of pauses and in terms of when to let the personae drop. This dynamic led to the single funniest moment in the panel, when both deployed our old friend, wit, to reply instantly to a question:


So that's how I wound up attending a panel where Donald Kuspit was speaking. Next we'll get back to talking about art, and I promise "next" doesn't mean "when hell freezes over."

Mondrian

I just finished a painting which, by an amusing coincidence, is directly related to a talk I heard over the weekend by Donald Kuspit, an art historian, professor, and critic for ArtForum. Kuspit was advancing the thesis that abstraction in art is anti-feminine to its core. Proceeding from the predominance of representations of women in the earliest known art, and the continuous quest for integration of the parts (with women ever as the subjects) thereafter, he contends that the modern art movement, first with its fragmentation, and then with its complete abstraction, is in large part an anti-female movement.

Well, that's a lot to swallow, and I'm not entirely convinced, although the macho swagger we associate with Jackson Pollock and the "men's men" artists, certainly give it the intuitive ring of at least a half-truth.

Anyhow, Kuspit cited Piet Mondrian as evidence for his argument. The contention is that Mondrian's straight-line abstractions are not only implicitly misogynistic (women being associated with curves), but explicitly misogynistic in the stated aesthetics of Mondrian himself. A little googling has gotten me only this for textual support:

The New Plastic in Painting, a text published in the first issues of the journal De Stijl in 1917, defines "representation of any kind" as "predominantly female art." The historical dominance of representation is the expression in art of "oppression by the female, a legacy of the old mentality," which "in our time... stil weighs so heavily on life and on art that there is little room for male-female equilibrium." The way to the establishment of this equilibrium can be sown by "abstract-real" art (Mondrian's earlier term for his "neoplastic" art), where it is given form in particular by the relation between feminine horizontality and masculine verticality. The victory of the masculine principle of abstraction is evidenced by the disappearance of curves, with all lines "tensed," as Mondrian put it, by the dynamism of rational control.

Well, at least as much of that statement is interpretation by the authors of the passage (from Critical Terms for Art History, Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff) as it is old Piet himself. But assuming it to be correct for a moment, it seems to suggest that Kuspit, by focusing on the "masculinity" of the straight line, is elliding Mondrian's own proposition on the male-female duality of straight lines, depending on their vertical/horizontal orientation. In a sense, Mondrian has made two statements about whether or not straight lines are entirely masculine, and Kuspit is taking the less dualistic statement for the entirety of the argument.

But let's take Kuspit at his word, that the Mondrian pictorial system is anti-female. Well, that brings us to this painting I happen to have been working on, which I am calling Integrity, because, again, I suck at names. Here's the painting:

That would be a female model (Jordan), integrated into a single relaxed form so much as I and the wonderful Jordan were able, and painted in a manner I borrowed as much as possible from the great integrator, Da Vinci (I used the color scheme of the early Renaissance for the flesh, and the pictorial convention of the fresco for the emphatic outline). From its conception, I wanted this figure, with its organic irregularity and unity, to sit in front of a Mondrian. So I hunted around until I found this 1921 Mondrian here. I think it's called Untitled:

By means of simple photoshop tricks, I eliminated the colors and thinned the lines:

Then I rotated it until it I felt like it serendipitously matched the divisions of the figure:

Then I placed it into the painting:

So I happened to have foregrounded, in a way, the very point that Kuspit was making, by bringing the warm, integrated, organic, and feminine image into juxtaposed conflict with the cold linear Mondrian grid. What the effect of this conflict is in terms of the final painting, I cannot say - that's up to the viewer.

Maidman, you may be wondering, are you some kind of an intellectual?

No. I'm not anti-intellectual as regards my work, but I would say that I'm non-intellectual. What this means is that I am open to an intellectual interpretation of work, but my work does not arise from an intellectual mechanism. I didn't sit down and say, "Well, I'd like to explore the conflict between the masculinized modernist paradigm and the classical concept of the feminine." I drew Jordan at a life drawing workshop, and the painting just popped into my head. It seemed like it would be a good painting, so I painted it. That's more or less how all of my paintings happen.

But you could ask me the question, "Are you some kind of an intellectual?" from another angle. You could say, "Do you believe that paintings have intellectual content?"

I would say to you, sure they do. I will even go so far as to say that they are capable of having profound, complex, and even revelatory intellectual content. But I will not hold with the critics in contending that this content is particularly historically important. I think you're looking at a certain excitable revolutionary quality to the French with or without Liberty Leading the People:

And I think you're looking at The Terror with or without the Death of Marat:

I think paintings can illustrate the thought of the times, and prophesy the thought of the ages following. But I do not think that one woman more or fewer gotten beaten up, snubbed, or leered at based on Mondrian's frankly idiotic musings. People are people, and history has more important things to shape it than pictures. Pictures are one doorway to the transcendental, but the transcendental is hardly, to date, the prime motivating force of mankind.

No doubt I will find reason to argue against this position regarding the role of art at some later date.

A final note: Mondrian came to mind for this painting because I happen to like Mondrian. I've got a soft spot for Mondrian, Sol LeWitt, and all artistic geometers, because had I been one whit less interested in girls and more interested in number theory, I might have been a mathematician myself.

Next time I will explain what on earth I was doing at a talk by Donald Kuspit.

UPDATE: WHOOPS

If you've been following this blog, you know that I've navigated some pretty tricky reasoning based on involved neurological research. I try hard not to misunderstand or misrepresent the work of the scientists and scholars I cite.

Well, I sure did it here. Donald Kuspit clarifies that he did not say abstraction per se was anti-feminine. His point was in regard to Mondrian only, and based on the solid documentary evidence that Mondrian called the curved line female, and the straight line male, and then went right on ahead and did away with curved lines in his work.

With typical categorical abandon, I extended Kuspit's argument to cover the entire rest of abstract art. So, uh... just ignore this post. And many apologies to Mr. Kuspit.