Monday, February 25, 2013
Ambition Warned
An important thing: you may be great, and your art may be your life. But have something else in your life too. Do it on principle, do it even if you cannot make your gut believe in its necessity. Why? Here - here is one of my core fears, transcribed nearly perfectly in Greg Bear's City at the End of Time:
Friday, February 22, 2013
In Praise of the Bean: Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate," Millennium Park, Chicago
I haven't been back to Chicago since 1996.
Among the things I've missed was the creation of Millennium Park, and with it, of the Bean, a 100-ton stainless steal colossus completed years behind schedule in 2006. Who could be so hard of heart that they would go to Chicago and not want to see the Bean? Not I. So I'm back, and I went to see the Bean.
To think about the Bean, let's think about the architecture of Chicago. Chicago may or may not be a city of big shoulders, but it is definitely a city of big-shouldered skyscrapers. Its skyscrapers hulk, throwing weighty boxes above the city streets. There is a heaviness to Chicago School architecture which is specific to Chicago.
New York's 1916 Zoning Resolution imposed the pyramid on New York architecture, creating the tapering, balletic skyscrapers of Manhattan. When you think about it, the original World Trade Center towers were really Chicago towers; the new World Trade Center, a soaring glass needle, is much more New Yorkian.
Chicago's stolid towers create a sense of might: of labor, industry, and commerce. As a body of architecture, they are a glorious portrait and instance of the productive facet of the American character; one of our best facets.
For all that this concentrated strength is a heroic phenomenon, like most heroic phenomena, it carries a necessary flaw. José Ortega y Gasset described this flaw in his 1929 essay The Revolt of the Masses:
When in the early stages of the Empire some cultured provincial - Lucan or Seneca - arrived in Rome, and saw the magnificent imperial buildings, symbols of an enduring power, he felt his heart contract within him. Nothing new could now happen in the world. Rome was eternal.
The very success of the principle of Chicago has a tendency to stifle the future of Chicago. We are no longer a child nation, as perhaps we were when Chicago burned in 1871; nor are we a vigorous young nation, as Edward Hopper depicted us at mid-century. Instead, we are a mature nation, prone to intimidation by our own past successes, tending toward sclerosis.
What is sclerosis, but the gradual choking of vitality by obstacles strong enough to impede and numb, but brittle enough to shatter and kill? In our maturity, it behooves us to guard against sclerosis, against that contracting of the heart which Ortega y Gasset describes.
It is to an anti-sclerotic campaign that the Bean brilliantly contributes.
The Bean has the uncanny perfection of a metaphysical object, of a digital effect circa Terminator 2. Approaching the Bean from the south, one sees only a distortion of space, an incredible inconsistency:
It is so perfect that it seems to have arrived from another planet. One sympathizes with Kapoor's distress at its premature unveiling in 2004, before construction was complete. Just as the Bean is perfect in space, it should be perfect in time as well: its polished surface is designed to erase its own origin.
Coming nearer, one sees that it has panoptic properties: its elliptic geometry replicates on its surface the entire visible city. But the city is not absorbed by the Bean without transformation. Here I am in Millennium Park, the city behind me:
Or, rather, here is the image of me in the mind of the Bean, joined to the image of the park and the image of the city. This is very much the impression one has, staring into the surface of the Bean - that the immense reflective surface is like a mind, in the sense that the mind observes the universe, and models it. Does the Bean have a mind? Come now, we are not idol worshippers here. We approach art not for worship but for catharsis; not to see something else, but to see ourselves. We come to art to identify so intensely with it that when its heart breaks, when its brain breaks, we too are cracked open. So the pulsing, overwhelming mindfulness of the Bean is, in fact, our own mind, electrically shuddering as it consumes an entire city.
So what is this essential transformation which occurs as the Bean absorbs Chicago?
All of the straight lines curve. Witness the intrusion of another world into our own. In this world, mighty skyscrapers bend, steel and stone and glass shimmer and dance. The Bean allows us to see that Chicago-as-it-is is not eternal, that new things can happen in the world. The Bean returns to us the comprehension that things, be they never so great, can still be otherwise.
This is the tremendous, fundamental power of the Bean, its anti-sclerotic effect. The revival of youth, in men and nations alike, is not a matter of earrings punched in wrinkled ears, or thinning hair coaxed into ponytails. It is a matter of regaining that sense that things could be other than what they are. This deep sense underlies the creativity of children, the children who built our great cities. And Anish Kapoor has imported that sense back into Chicago, the most august of our cities.
This alone would be enough. But it is not all. The upper surface of the Bean, the one that reflects the city, has elliptic geometry - parallel lines converge. The backside, so to speak, of elliptic geometry is hyperbolic geometry, where parallel lines diverge:
Elliptic geometry is always very pretty; while hyperbolic geometry is a messy story.
The Bean does not have an elliptic upper surface alone. It also has a hyperbolic lower surface. And it is a messy story.
Kapoor has even ensured that the tiles beneath the Bean form a cartesian grid, so that its distortions in the hyperbolic underside of the Bean are very explicit.
From the straight-lined real Chicago, one arrives in Millennium Park, and is charmed by the curving virtual Chicago. And then one enters into - what? What is this?
What is this madness?
This is, to me, Kapoor's full statement on childlike creativity. The elliptic Bean returns to us the world as visualized by our childlike selves: mutable, sparking with potential, fluid in form. But the hyperbolic Bean illustrates the childlike mind itself: an infolding maze, untraceable - frightening - shocking and alien.
I see the hyperbolic Bean as saying - "Yes, you may have back the abnormal inventiveness and vigor of your infancy; you may have back your imagination and your industry. But nothing is free. You cannot have these things you need, without giving up the things which comfort you. You cannot go on traveling your familiar roads, and mumbling your stock phrases, and conducting your affairs in a warm and sleepy haze. You can still make great things, but you must embrace danger to do it. The danger is the certainty that you will not remain yourself. You yourself will become the perfect thing which has arrived from another planet."
No doubt Kapoor was not, in fact, thinking these very things when he was designing the Bean. But consider how much easier it would have been just to give the goddamned thing a flat bottom. 100 tons of steel, balanced on two nimble feet instead of one fat ass.
Kapoor called it "Cloud Gate," and indeed one passes under it as through a gate. The gate might not mean what I see in it, but it means something. And the object has such terrific strangeness and force that it forces thoughtfulness upon you. This is my sketch of my own thoughts in confrontation with the Bean. But if the Bean has anything to say, it is that things could be otherwise. My idea is not your idea. I encourage you, when next you are in Chicago, to experience your own unique strain of liberation in the company of the Bean.
Among the things I've missed was the creation of Millennium Park, and with it, of the Bean, a 100-ton stainless steal colossus completed years behind schedule in 2006. Who could be so hard of heart that they would go to Chicago and not want to see the Bean? Not I. So I'm back, and I went to see the Bean.
To think about the Bean, let's think about the architecture of Chicago. Chicago may or may not be a city of big shoulders, but it is definitely a city of big-shouldered skyscrapers. Its skyscrapers hulk, throwing weighty boxes above the city streets. There is a heaviness to Chicago School architecture which is specific to Chicago.
New York's 1916 Zoning Resolution imposed the pyramid on New York architecture, creating the tapering, balletic skyscrapers of Manhattan. When you think about it, the original World Trade Center towers were really Chicago towers; the new World Trade Center, a soaring glass needle, is much more New Yorkian.
Chicago's stolid towers create a sense of might: of labor, industry, and commerce. As a body of architecture, they are a glorious portrait and instance of the productive facet of the American character; one of our best facets.
For all that this concentrated strength is a heroic phenomenon, like most heroic phenomena, it carries a necessary flaw. José Ortega y Gasset described this flaw in his 1929 essay The Revolt of the Masses:
When in the early stages of the Empire some cultured provincial - Lucan or Seneca - arrived in Rome, and saw the magnificent imperial buildings, symbols of an enduring power, he felt his heart contract within him. Nothing new could now happen in the world. Rome was eternal.
p. 33
The very success of the principle of Chicago has a tendency to stifle the future of Chicago. We are no longer a child nation, as perhaps we were when Chicago burned in 1871; nor are we a vigorous young nation, as Edward Hopper depicted us at mid-century. Instead, we are a mature nation, prone to intimidation by our own past successes, tending toward sclerosis.
What is sclerosis, but the gradual choking of vitality by obstacles strong enough to impede and numb, but brittle enough to shatter and kill? In our maturity, it behooves us to guard against sclerosis, against that contracting of the heart which Ortega y Gasset describes.
It is to an anti-sclerotic campaign that the Bean brilliantly contributes.
The Bean has the uncanny perfection of a metaphysical object, of a digital effect circa Terminator 2. Approaching the Bean from the south, one sees only a distortion of space, an incredible inconsistency:
It is so perfect that it seems to have arrived from another planet. One sympathizes with Kapoor's distress at its premature unveiling in 2004, before construction was complete. Just as the Bean is perfect in space, it should be perfect in time as well: its polished surface is designed to erase its own origin.
Coming nearer, one sees that it has panoptic properties: its elliptic geometry replicates on its surface the entire visible city. But the city is not absorbed by the Bean without transformation. Here I am in Millennium Park, the city behind me:
Or, rather, here is the image of me in the mind of the Bean, joined to the image of the park and the image of the city. This is very much the impression one has, staring into the surface of the Bean - that the immense reflective surface is like a mind, in the sense that the mind observes the universe, and models it. Does the Bean have a mind? Come now, we are not idol worshippers here. We approach art not for worship but for catharsis; not to see something else, but to see ourselves. We come to art to identify so intensely with it that when its heart breaks, when its brain breaks, we too are cracked open. So the pulsing, overwhelming mindfulness of the Bean is, in fact, our own mind, electrically shuddering as it consumes an entire city.
So what is this essential transformation which occurs as the Bean absorbs Chicago?
All of the straight lines curve. Witness the intrusion of another world into our own. In this world, mighty skyscrapers bend, steel and stone and glass shimmer and dance. The Bean allows us to see that Chicago-as-it-is is not eternal, that new things can happen in the world. The Bean returns to us the comprehension that things, be they never so great, can still be otherwise.
This is the tremendous, fundamental power of the Bean, its anti-sclerotic effect. The revival of youth, in men and nations alike, is not a matter of earrings punched in wrinkled ears, or thinning hair coaxed into ponytails. It is a matter of regaining that sense that things could be other than what they are. This deep sense underlies the creativity of children, the children who built our great cities. And Anish Kapoor has imported that sense back into Chicago, the most august of our cities.
This alone would be enough. But it is not all. The upper surface of the Bean, the one that reflects the city, has elliptic geometry - parallel lines converge. The backside, so to speak, of elliptic geometry is hyperbolic geometry, where parallel lines diverge:
Elliptic geometry is always very pretty; while hyperbolic geometry is a messy story.
L to R: very pretty, messy story
The Bean does not have an elliptic upper surface alone. It also has a hyperbolic lower surface. And it is a messy story.
Kapoor has even ensured that the tiles beneath the Bean form a cartesian grid, so that its distortions in the hyperbolic underside of the Bean are very explicit.
From the straight-lined real Chicago, one arrives in Millennium Park, and is charmed by the curving virtual Chicago. And then one enters into - what? What is this?
What is this madness?
This is, to me, Kapoor's full statement on childlike creativity. The elliptic Bean returns to us the world as visualized by our childlike selves: mutable, sparking with potential, fluid in form. But the hyperbolic Bean illustrates the childlike mind itself: an infolding maze, untraceable - frightening - shocking and alien.
I see the hyperbolic Bean as saying - "Yes, you may have back the abnormal inventiveness and vigor of your infancy; you may have back your imagination and your industry. But nothing is free. You cannot have these things you need, without giving up the things which comfort you. You cannot go on traveling your familiar roads, and mumbling your stock phrases, and conducting your affairs in a warm and sleepy haze. You can still make great things, but you must embrace danger to do it. The danger is the certainty that you will not remain yourself. You yourself will become the perfect thing which has arrived from another planet."
me in hyperbolic space
No doubt Kapoor was not, in fact, thinking these very things when he was designing the Bean. But consider how much easier it would have been just to give the goddamned thing a flat bottom. 100 tons of steel, balanced on two nimble feet instead of one fat ass.
Kapoor called it "Cloud Gate," and indeed one passes under it as through a gate. The gate might not mean what I see in it, but it means something. And the object has such terrific strangeness and force that it forces thoughtfulness upon you. This is my sketch of my own thoughts in confrontation with the Bean. But if the Bean has anything to say, it is that things could be otherwise. My idea is not your idea. I encourage you, when next you are in Chicago, to experience your own unique strain of liberation in the company of the Bean.
Friday, February 8, 2013
Art Is Not A Vector It Is A Field
Last time, we were discussing a particular piece, The Only Way Out is Up, by abstract sculptor Jesse Soodalter, and I had quite a lot to say about what I saw in the piece. This post will really only make sense if you head back and read it - it's the part of this post below the final graphic.
Soodalter, when she read it, liked it fairly well, but she had a couple of points of disagreement. Let's look at the piece again:
Here's Soodalter's first disagreement:
...the two interventions that you describe, while I agree that conceptually they're independent or at least distinct, in actual act are one gesture. The object is literally sewn to the paper with wire, not wrapped and then affixed. As I say, it doesn't invalidate the distinctness of those two axes, but it is quite important to (my own vision of) the nature of the piece that the object is bound to the paper, and embellished in the binding, not decorated and then mounted. Does that make sense?
Yes, of course it makes sense. Thinking it over, I realized that my list of interventions was incomplete: I talked about 1. the wrapping of the object in wire, and 2. the fixing of the object to the paper. But there was a prior intervention, intervention 0: surveying a field of garbage, of rubble, Soodalter saw this object. This object spoke to her, and she spoke back to it. She pulled it from the trash, and said, "There is something important to this one." In one sense, this is really the only important intervention; everything else just pretties up that initial recognition.
Now here is Soodalter's second disagreement:
The wire is as much there to constrain as to exalt, there's a sharpness and a punitive edge that is very much intrinsic to the piece – and to all the wire work, really; the diametric polysemy of wire is a huge part of my obsession with it.
Polysemy, by the way, is linguistic-theory talk for something like the concept I'm pursuing with this blog post overall. It's a term for a sign that has multiple related meanings; Soodalter, as I understand her, and I could be wrong, uses the phrase "diametric polysemy" to suggest that wire means some things, and other related things which are actually opposites of the first things - in this instance, the pinioning cruelty she describes is opposed to the benedictive gentleness I described.
What it amounts to is that you could say I got my entire interpretation wrong - I misunderstood how Soodalter made the work, I misunderstood the significance of how the work was made, and also I took the meaning of the work for the opposite of what Soodalter thought it was about.
You could say I got my interpretation wrong; but this is not the best way to put it. Soodalter, after all, liked my version. She liked her version too, and her version contradicts my version, but she herself didn't reject my version. What does this mean? Does it mean that The Only Way Out is Up doesn't mean anything at all? Of course not. But what we are talking about by meaning in art is not, I think, the same as our normal impression of the idea of meaning. That's what I've been considering and why I'm writing to you today.
As you know, I will never propose a simple idea when a complicated one will do, or use two words instead of ten. Plus also I like math. So let's consider the difference between a vector and a vector field.
A vector is a mathematical construct which includes magnitude and direction:
They're very handy for representing things like forces. A force applied to a cart, for instance, gives it a push, a push with both magnitude and direction. A vector is well adapted for representing this situation.
Let's say instead of little Bobby pushing his Radio Flyer, though, we're talking about an electromagnet.
Like Bobby, an electromagnet produces force. Unlike Bobby, its force isn't a single vector tied to a single location in space (the handlebar of the cart). The electromagnet's force influences everything around it. For every point in space surrounding the electromagnet, a vector exists, waiting to act on amenable matter. This phenomenon is called a field. In this case, it is a vector field.
The claim I am seeking to advance here is that the experience of art is more like a field than it is like a vector. Art itself is more like the electromagnet than it is like little Bobby. An adequate art object will mean the same thing to all viewers. A really impressive art object will mean many things to many viewers. Its purpose is not to create a single meaning, but to create a kind of aesthetic matrix which supports the discovery of meaning. Not just any meaning - but meaning of a sufficiently dense and profound variety to prove rewarding to the effort a viewer puts into looking at it.
My interpretation of Soodalter's sculpture was like one vector, and Soodalter's interpretation of her sculpture was like a second vector. They didn't match up at all because we were standing in different places relative to the work. The work was powerful enough to generate a vector field around itself, waiting for a viewer to wander into it. This vector field was of a quality sufficient to inspire thoughts which were important to me, and different thoughts which were important to Soodalter. It won't inspire thoughts in all people, just as not all matter can receive a push from the magnetic forces generated around an electromagnet. That's fine. We've talked before about different people having different tastes, and this is one way of phrasing that. It's using ten words to say "abstract art talks to some people and not to others." This distinction doesn't make anyone better, or worse, only different.
Soodalter, when she read it, liked it fairly well, but she had a couple of points of disagreement. Let's look at the piece again:
Jesse Soodalter, The Only Way Out is Up,
found object (asphalt), gold-colored aluminum wire, paper, October 2012
Here's Soodalter's first disagreement:
...the two interventions that you describe, while I agree that conceptually they're independent or at least distinct, in actual act are one gesture. The object is literally sewn to the paper with wire, not wrapped and then affixed. As I say, it doesn't invalidate the distinctness of those two axes, but it is quite important to (my own vision of) the nature of the piece that the object is bound to the paper, and embellished in the binding, not decorated and then mounted. Does that make sense?
Yes, of course it makes sense. Thinking it over, I realized that my list of interventions was incomplete: I talked about 1. the wrapping of the object in wire, and 2. the fixing of the object to the paper. But there was a prior intervention, intervention 0: surveying a field of garbage, of rubble, Soodalter saw this object. This object spoke to her, and she spoke back to it. She pulled it from the trash, and said, "There is something important to this one." In one sense, this is really the only important intervention; everything else just pretties up that initial recognition.
Now here is Soodalter's second disagreement:
The wire is as much there to constrain as to exalt, there's a sharpness and a punitive edge that is very much intrinsic to the piece – and to all the wire work, really; the diametric polysemy of wire is a huge part of my obsession with it.
Polysemy, by the way, is linguistic-theory talk for something like the concept I'm pursuing with this blog post overall. It's a term for a sign that has multiple related meanings; Soodalter, as I understand her, and I could be wrong, uses the phrase "diametric polysemy" to suggest that wire means some things, and other related things which are actually opposites of the first things - in this instance, the pinioning cruelty she describes is opposed to the benedictive gentleness I described.
What it amounts to is that you could say I got my entire interpretation wrong - I misunderstood how Soodalter made the work, I misunderstood the significance of how the work was made, and also I took the meaning of the work for the opposite of what Soodalter thought it was about.
You could say I got my interpretation wrong; but this is not the best way to put it. Soodalter, after all, liked my version. She liked her version too, and her version contradicts my version, but she herself didn't reject my version. What does this mean? Does it mean that The Only Way Out is Up doesn't mean anything at all? Of course not. But what we are talking about by meaning in art is not, I think, the same as our normal impression of the idea of meaning. That's what I've been considering and why I'm writing to you today.
As you know, I will never propose a simple idea when a complicated one will do, or use two words instead of ten. Plus also I like math. So let's consider the difference between a vector and a vector field.
A vector is a mathematical construct which includes magnitude and direction:
a vector
They're very handy for representing things like forces. A force applied to a cart, for instance, gives it a push, a push with both magnitude and direction. A vector is well adapted for representing this situation.
Let's say instead of little Bobby pushing his Radio Flyer, though, we're talking about an electromagnet.
Like Bobby, an electromagnet produces force. Unlike Bobby, its force isn't a single vector tied to a single location in space (the handlebar of the cart). The electromagnet's force influences everything around it. For every point in space surrounding the electromagnet, a vector exists, waiting to act on amenable matter. This phenomenon is called a field. In this case, it is a vector field.
a simplified diagram of a vector field
(simplified in the sense that not every point in the area has its vector illustrated)
The claim I am seeking to advance here is that the experience of art is more like a field than it is like a vector. Art itself is more like the electromagnet than it is like little Bobby. An adequate art object will mean the same thing to all viewers. A really impressive art object will mean many things to many viewers. Its purpose is not to create a single meaning, but to create a kind of aesthetic matrix which supports the discovery of meaning. Not just any meaning - but meaning of a sufficiently dense and profound variety to prove rewarding to the effort a viewer puts into looking at it.
My interpretation of Soodalter's sculpture was like one vector, and Soodalter's interpretation of her sculpture was like a second vector. They didn't match up at all because we were standing in different places relative to the work. The work was powerful enough to generate a vector field around itself, waiting for a viewer to wander into it. This vector field was of a quality sufficient to inspire thoughts which were important to me, and different thoughts which were important to Soodalter. It won't inspire thoughts in all people, just as not all matter can receive a push from the magnetic forces generated around an electromagnet. That's fine. We've talked before about different people having different tastes, and this is one way of phrasing that. It's using ten words to say "abstract art talks to some people and not to others." This distinction doesn't make anyone better, or worse, only different.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Legitimacy
Here, this is something very interesting which came up in correspondence with abstract sculptor Jesse Soodalter. She wrote:
...although I've admired many different kinds of art, figurative and otherwise, for a million years, it wasn't until I had a kind of damascene realization of the power and, in some sense, legitimacy of abstraction that I began to conceive of myself as any kind of creator of visual art.
It took me a short while, and then I realized I recognized this sentiment; I recognized it very precisely and completely, so much that I could narrow my damascene moment to sometime between September 27 and November 8, 2003.
At that time, I was in Los Angeles, going to life drawing in Santa Monica on Tuesdays and in Los Feliz on Thursdays, and generally screwing around with drawing and painting and calling myself a student of art. I didn't quite feel that I was ready to call myself an artist. But I was definitely a student of art.
When I was a kid, my mom had a book of Francesco Clemente around the house, which I never opened, but I do remember the cover, because you're not gonna forget that face or that font.
So I was vaguely aware of the existence of Clemente from a young age. In 1998, I saw this movie, "Great Expectations," which when you think about it isn't that good a movie, except for the spellbinding artwork attributed to the artist main character, Finn...
...and the amazing integration of the actual artist into the cinematography, so that Ethan Hawke as Finn, and the hands of the artist actually making the artwork, cut together beautifully.
After I saw it, I looked up who this amazing artist was, and lo and behold, it was Francesco Clemente. Best decision Cuarón made in that film, I thought. From then on, Clemente had a specific, if relatively unexamined, place in my mind - the guy who does the very recognizable big-eye portraits and totemic images.
On this basis, I went to see his show at Gagosian/LA in the fall of 2003, sometime between September 27 and November 8. This show did not, ahem, exhibit him at his best. Mostly because the set-piece artworks were enormous paintings done on denim.
This is one of those things that's really only obvious in hindsight, but it turns out denim is a shitty medium for Francesco Clemente to work on. It looked blotchy, contrasty, unsubtle, and stupid.
Also, there were some small watercolors in the back room.
I did, however, have a revelation in that show which was a turning point in my life as an artist, and it would not have happened if the work had been good. It had to be bad for the point to be clear. The point was this: no matter what he was doing, Clemente's work radiated self-confidence. It said, "I made this, it is my art, I will not explain myself, and if you don't like it, fuck you."
When the work is good, you can mix up its self-confidence and the quality of the work itself. They only manifest separately when there's really no excuse for the work apart from the reckless assertion of the artist that you're going to damn well look at it. It swaggered. Clemente's work swaggers, it is downright Captain Kirkish. It can be insufferable, but there is no mistaking it for something apart from what it is.
I realized that without this forceful assertion, this possibly swaggering awareness of your classification as an artist, it did not matter how good you got; you weren't going to be making art. I had been holding off calling myself an artist because I lacked confidence in my skill and my vision. I thought, "Well, I need to learn to draw and paint better; I need to figure out what I want to say." And here Clemente was telling me:
"Screw that - you already know everything you need to know, you're avoiding the issue by claiming you don't know what you want to say. Take responsibility for yourself and start making the work. In fact, Maidman, let me quote to you the immortal words of Xenophon, Anabasis, book III:
"'Why am I lying here? The night advances; with the day, it is like enough, the enemy will be upon us. If we are to fall into the hands of the king, what is left us but to face the most horrible of sights, and to suffer the most fearful pains, and then to die, insulted, an ignominious death? To defend ourselves—to ward off that fate—not a hand stirs: no one is preparing, none cares; but here we lie, as though it were time to rest and take our ease. I too! What am I waiting for? A general to undertake the work? And from what city? Am I waiting till I am older myself and of riper age? Older I shall never be, if today I betray myself to my enemies.'
"Hear the moral of it, Maidman, for it is this: make a decision. Your decision may be wrong! Look at these christawful denim paintings - that was a bad decision. But it is better to make a bad decision than to make no decision at all. From a bad decision, we lurch on to a better decision. From no decision, we waver along an endless road of indecision. Your studies are finished; you are an artist. Make art."
All these things Francesco Clemente said to me, and I listened to what Clemente said. I changed what I was thinking about, or rather, how I was thinking about what I was thinking about. The revelation was a revelation of legitimacy, just as Soodalter described in her own damascene realization. It was in reaction to it that I finally made that leap, and became an artist.
I did not make art right away. Early the next year, I began; a friend commissioned a painting, of whatever I liked. I decided, for painting #1, to do a female nude. This has perhaps set a pattern that has persisted. At the time, I had been working with burnt sienna and white for a while, but I had no real idea how to paint, or how to color, or anything. So I bought John Howard Sanden's Portraits from Life in 29 Steps. I was worried I would wind up painting like Sanden, but more worried about my total ignorance. It turned out that Sanden is a tremendous teacher, and, because I was swaggering like an artist, learning from him didn't compromise how I painted at all. Here's a Sanden:
And here's a detail of my first serious painting, done in response to his instructions for how to paint like him:
Looking at it now, I see a couple of genes of Clemente thrown into the mix. But this is the first time I've thought of that.
Anyway, that's the story of how I became an artist. Let me return to Soodalter's story for a minute. She writes about it beautifully, more beautifully than I have here:
For me it was a specific Rothko. Having never really thought about him--or indeed Abstract Expressionism at all--much before, I wandered into a room at the Art Institute of Chicago and found myself faced with this painting,
and out of nowhere it just reached into my chest and yanked, hard enough to make me choke up. It really was a single transformative moment, and it unroofed some profound sink of emotional and aesthetic responsiveness to abstraction that has been the absolute and literal making of me as an artist. It took time to root, and lots of tentative and sheepish but infatuated gestures, before I found my voice, so to speak, with the object and wire pieces. That came very much with getting into Arte Povera too, that sense of a kind of profane sanctification of objects/spaces/events by the means of the artist's attention.
This is a piece by Soodalter:
Now, I don't know what I'm talking about when I talk about abstract art. I don't have a good sense of the terms of debate and discussion. But there is something that is so perfectly correct to my eye to this.
There is the found object, pure matter, close to the alchemical prima materia - raw, cruel, base, meaningless.
Then there is the first level of intervention by the artist, the wrapping of the object in a gold-colored wire. This wrapping is the sanctification of which Soodalter speaks. The eye of the artist perceives the object, the palm holds it, the soul blesses it - and the fingers express the blessing with wire. The artist interacts with the object at the most visceral, physical level.
Then there is a second intervention, the fixing of the object to the paper. This to me is the equivalent, by means of reason, of the first emotional-spiritual intervention. First the heart and hand absorbed the object, now the mind does too. The paper is flat space, the cartesian plane, the page of text. The sanctified object becomes part of the map of the universe in the mind of the artist. It is set in its right place, here and not there.
This minuscule thing records the confrontation between the human presence and the universe: a confrontation characterized on the human side, for Soodalter, by fascination, love, and ultimately, integration.
That's what I see in these humble materials. But part of the reason I see that at all in a jumble of stuff which I might otherwise overlook is that Soodalter has passed through the revelation of legitimacy. You are walking along, and you pass by her, and she holds up her hand and says, "Stop. Thou shalt look. This is art."
It is essential for the artist to have the revelation of legitimacy, to learn to make the assertion. You can make the assertion and still be wrong. But if you don't make the assertion, you can't be right.
...although I've admired many different kinds of art, figurative and otherwise, for a million years, it wasn't until I had a kind of damascene realization of the power and, in some sense, legitimacy of abstraction that I began to conceive of myself as any kind of creator of visual art.
It took me a short while, and then I realized I recognized this sentiment; I recognized it very precisely and completely, so much that I could narrow my damascene moment to sometime between September 27 and November 8, 2003.
At that time, I was in Los Angeles, going to life drawing in Santa Monica on Tuesdays and in Los Feliz on Thursdays, and generally screwing around with drawing and painting and calling myself a student of art. I didn't quite feel that I was ready to call myself an artist. But I was definitely a student of art.
When I was a kid, my mom had a book of Francesco Clemente around the house, which I never opened, but I do remember the cover, because you're not gonna forget that face or that font.
So I was vaguely aware of the existence of Clemente from a young age. In 1998, I saw this movie, "Great Expectations," which when you think about it isn't that good a movie, except for the spellbinding artwork attributed to the artist main character, Finn...
ripped off from here
...and the amazing integration of the actual artist into the cinematography, so that Ethan Hawke as Finn, and the hands of the artist actually making the artwork, cut together beautifully.
Ethan Hawke, artist
we all totally look like that
After I saw it, I looked up who this amazing artist was, and lo and behold, it was Francesco Clemente. Best decision Cuarón made in that film, I thought. From then on, Clemente had a specific, if relatively unexamined, place in my mind - the guy who does the very recognizable big-eye portraits and totemic images.
totemic image
On this basis, I went to see his show at Gagosian/LA in the fall of 2003, sometime between September 27 and November 8. This show did not, ahem, exhibit him at his best. Mostly because the set-piece artworks were enormous paintings done on denim.
Francesco Clemente, Liberation Self Portrait, 2000, mixed media on denim
14 goddamned feet tall by 14 OMG and a half feet wide
This is one of those things that's really only obvious in hindsight, but it turns out denim is a shitty medium for Francesco Clemente to work on. It looked blotchy, contrasty, unsubtle, and stupid.
Also, there were some small watercolors in the back room.
I did, however, have a revelation in that show which was a turning point in my life as an artist, and it would not have happened if the work had been good. It had to be bad for the point to be clear. The point was this: no matter what he was doing, Clemente's work radiated self-confidence. It said, "I made this, it is my art, I will not explain myself, and if you don't like it, fuck you."
When the work is good, you can mix up its self-confidence and the quality of the work itself. They only manifest separately when there's really no excuse for the work apart from the reckless assertion of the artist that you're going to damn well look at it. It swaggered. Clemente's work swaggers, it is downright Captain Kirkish. It can be insufferable, but there is no mistaking it for something apart from what it is.
I realized that without this forceful assertion, this possibly swaggering awareness of your classification as an artist, it did not matter how good you got; you weren't going to be making art. I had been holding off calling myself an artist because I lacked confidence in my skill and my vision. I thought, "Well, I need to learn to draw and paint better; I need to figure out what I want to say." And here Clemente was telling me:
"Screw that - you already know everything you need to know, you're avoiding the issue by claiming you don't know what you want to say. Take responsibility for yourself and start making the work. In fact, Maidman, let me quote to you the immortal words of Xenophon, Anabasis, book III:
"'Why am I lying here? The night advances; with the day, it is like enough, the enemy will be upon us. If we are to fall into the hands of the king, what is left us but to face the most horrible of sights, and to suffer the most fearful pains, and then to die, insulted, an ignominious death? To defend ourselves—to ward off that fate—not a hand stirs: no one is preparing, none cares; but here we lie, as though it were time to rest and take our ease. I too! What am I waiting for? A general to undertake the work? And from what city? Am I waiting till I am older myself and of riper age? Older I shall never be, if today I betray myself to my enemies.'
"Hear the moral of it, Maidman, for it is this: make a decision. Your decision may be wrong! Look at these christawful denim paintings - that was a bad decision. But it is better to make a bad decision than to make no decision at all. From a bad decision, we lurch on to a better decision. From no decision, we waver along an endless road of indecision. Your studies are finished; you are an artist. Make art."
All these things Francesco Clemente said to me, and I listened to what Clemente said. I changed what I was thinking about, or rather, how I was thinking about what I was thinking about. The revelation was a revelation of legitimacy, just as Soodalter described in her own damascene realization. It was in reaction to it that I finally made that leap, and became an artist.
I did not make art right away. Early the next year, I began; a friend commissioned a painting, of whatever I liked. I decided, for painting #1, to do a female nude. This has perhaps set a pattern that has persisted. At the time, I had been working with burnt sienna and white for a while, but I had no real idea how to paint, or how to color, or anything. So I bought John Howard Sanden's Portraits from Life in 29 Steps. I was worried I would wind up painting like Sanden, but more worried about my total ignorance. It turned out that Sanden is a tremendous teacher, and, because I was swaggering like an artist, learning from him didn't compromise how I painted at all. Here's a Sanden:
John Howard Sanden, Dr. Kim B. Clark
And here's a detail of my first serious painting, done in response to his instructions for how to paint like him:
Daniel Maidman, Kem (detail), oil on canvas, 48"x24", 2004
Looking at it now, I see a couple of genes of Clemente thrown into the mix. But this is the first time I've thought of that.
Anyway, that's the story of how I became an artist. Let me return to Soodalter's story for a minute. She writes about it beautifully, more beautifully than I have here:
For me it was a specific Rothko. Having never really thought about him--or indeed Abstract Expressionism at all--much before, I wandered into a room at the Art Institute of Chicago and found myself faced with this painting,
Mark Rothko, Untitled (Purple, White, and Red), 1953, oil on canvas, 197.5 x 207.7 cm
and out of nowhere it just reached into my chest and yanked, hard enough to make me choke up. It really was a single transformative moment, and it unroofed some profound sink of emotional and aesthetic responsiveness to abstraction that has been the absolute and literal making of me as an artist. It took time to root, and lots of tentative and sheepish but infatuated gestures, before I found my voice, so to speak, with the object and wire pieces. That came very much with getting into Arte Povera too, that sense of a kind of profane sanctification of objects/spaces/events by the means of the artist's attention.
This is a piece by Soodalter:
Jesse Soodalter, The Only Way Out is Up, found object (asphalt), copper wire, paper, October 2012
Now, I don't know what I'm talking about when I talk about abstract art. I don't have a good sense of the terms of debate and discussion. But there is something that is so perfectly correct to my eye to this.
There is the found object, pure matter, close to the alchemical prima materia - raw, cruel, base, meaningless.
Then there is the first level of intervention by the artist, the wrapping of the object in a gold-colored wire. This wrapping is the sanctification of which Soodalter speaks. The eye of the artist perceives the object, the palm holds it, the soul blesses it - and the fingers express the blessing with wire. The artist interacts with the object at the most visceral, physical level.
Then there is a second intervention, the fixing of the object to the paper. This to me is the equivalent, by means of reason, of the first emotional-spiritual intervention. First the heart and hand absorbed the object, now the mind does too. The paper is flat space, the cartesian plane, the page of text. The sanctified object becomes part of the map of the universe in the mind of the artist. It is set in its right place, here and not there.
This minuscule thing records the confrontation between the human presence and the universe: a confrontation characterized on the human side, for Soodalter, by fascination, love, and ultimately, integration.
That's what I see in these humble materials. But part of the reason I see that at all in a jumble of stuff which I might otherwise overlook is that Soodalter has passed through the revelation of legitimacy. You are walking along, and you pass by her, and she holds up her hand and says, "Stop. Thou shalt look. This is art."
It is essential for the artist to have the revelation of legitimacy, to learn to make the assertion. You can make the assertion and still be wrong. But if you don't make the assertion, you can't be right.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Parthenogenesis: Self-as-Symbol in Lauren Levato's 'Wunderkammer'
This previously appeared at Huffington. No additional text is included here. But it will lead to some posts down the road, because it treats a topic I'm thinking about a lot right now.
Also, the artwork in this post is so insanely awesome.
---
Lauren Levato is a Chicago artist who previously specialized in bugs.
She had been working toward making the emotional and intellectual resonances she sees in bugs pictorially explicit:
But it is only very recently that she has made a breakthrough. Having tackled some personal issues, she was suddenly able to make self-portraits. And her outlook, grounded in the methodical qualities of scientific illustration, opened a very interesting path:
This could be a one-off until you look at a second one:
In these drawings, called "Wunderkammer," she incessantly repeats not only herself as an image, but more or less the same pose and the same gaze at the viewer. What is the significance of this?
When you have an encrypted but repeating signal, you can try to decrypt it by examining changing and fixed elements in the system of which the signal is a part. Levato herself is fixed in her drawings - what varies?
The imagery varies. It varies a lot - like the cabinets of curiosities after which the series is named, she includes diverse animals and manufactured objects:
But the variation takes place within a certain set of constant rules. They are all full-length nude self-portraits done with spare, elegant lines. They all involve animals and odd hairdos, and most depict Levato with unorthodox items in her womb.
Evaluated in this light, we begin to see that Levato's image construction follows only the most basic rules of visual grammar. The sophistication of the work results not from visual grammar, but from linguistic grammar. Each of these paintings is a sentence:
"I am Lauren Levato, and I am [ ] and [ ] and [ ] and that involves [ ] and [ ]."
They are elaborated reflections on the consequences of a series of self-recognitions. The titles reflect this.
It would be very easy to classify this work with the various other instances of pop surrealism which currently abound. I think this would be a mistake. Surrealism, in its original instances and even more so in its current degenerate resurrection, is dedicated to the peculiar, the allegedly unconscious, and the dreamlike, for their own sakes. This is a strength and a weakness. The weakness is that it too eagerly indulges an exclusive focus on preference, or taste, or style.
Levato's objects and arrangements are categorically surrealistic, but they are not ends in themselves. Like her self-image, they are words in her language. Just as her self-image is halfway to a Chaplinesque caricature, so her objects have been partly emptied out of their self-contained meanings and character, in order to fit more smoothly into their relations with one another. The meaning of her work emerges from its total composition, not any one part of it.
What is this language she creates? What is the meaning of her work?
I think she is producing a rare form of a common psychological inversion among artists. All art has an expressionist component - the revelation of the interior life of the artist, their state of mood and thought, the progress of their soul. All art serves, to some extent, as an exteriorization of this interior state, as the objective correlative outlined by T. S. Eliot in Hamlet and His Problems:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
And yet, while this element is common, and even emphasized among, you know, the expressionists -
- it is, generally speaking, disorderly and inchoate, a matter of a self-willed passionate disposition violently expressing itself through bizarre imagery.
Levato, on the other hand, designs her work with a meditative calm. Emerging from science, she applies an artistic equivalent of the dissectionist's practice: the bloodiest of matter, the most methodical of excavations. Her image-objects are partly defined complex symbols representing internal states. She has developed the ability to relate important visuals in her life to specific aspects of her own state of being. She has thus laid portent on top of physicality, and trained herself to draw in a way that conveys both the likeness and the portent - "This is not itself, it is the substitute for something else." And she has also trained herself to detach, once each exploratory surgery is complete, from the brutal work of conjoining the interior and exterior worlds. Having detached, she can lucidly convey the results. She's got the tastes of a tiger and the sensibilities of a lab assistant.
In some of the drawings, certain symbols are immediately decipherable, as in the Self Portrait as Forgetting:
Here black ribbons are monstrously large versions of the strings children are told to tie around their fingers, to remember. In other pieces, though, the set of symbols defies simple analysis:
Yes, I know what a caul is, and I'm still not going to claim I get it.
But this is important - that sometimes I should be unable to get it. It is exactly when the symbol is indecipherable that its nature as a symbol is most evident. The falcon, nest, horns, and hair/cape clearly form a network of symbols. They mean something to Levato; they don't need to mean anything to us. What we receive is the unnerving imminence of the perplexing but loaded symbol, the threatening authoritativeness of the Tarot. We are not traveling on Levato's path; her art is not the same as her path. Our path with her art is an experience of the intellectual and emotional texture of Levato's journey. We see her walking. We do not see, entirely, where she walks.
There is only one other artist I can think of who has developed something analytically similar to this - Frida Kahlo, of course. But because Kahlo and Levato both generate absolutely sincere, personal symbol-systems, their work bears next to no resemblance on the level of content or appearance.
Kahlo's work expresses in rigorous formal terms a journey that is heated and violent, that careens between sensual pleasures and agonies, nearly undone with a self-regard so intense that the work threatens to replace a life forever in the process of becoming unlivable.
Levato's journey is cool and composed; we join her at the very end of that fiery compression which transforms graphite into diamond. She cannot bear to express any image before it has completed such a metamorphosis. In the aftermath of the violence, her images occupy a fairy-tale landscape, an uncanny semiotic world - forms, previously invisible, reveal themselves: animals and ribbons, jewelry and hair.
I called this body of work parthenogenetic because parthenogenesis is the manufacture of offspring without fertilization. In "Wunderkammer," Levato impregnates herself with herself, filling her symbol-womb with her symbol-objects. Again, the meaning of each of these objects is not really any of our business. Our business is that her work is compelling; it is airily weird; it is perfected and honest in its difficult conception and flawlessly elegant in its execution. Confronting it, our head fills with interesting thoughts, and our feet float a millimeter or two off the floor.
---
"Wunderkammer" at Packer Schopf Gallery, Jan. 11-Feb. 16, 942 W. Lake St., Chicago, IL, 60607
Opening reception Friday, Jan. 11, 5-8 p.m. (you missed this, but that's alright, I'm including it for completeness's sake)
"Wunderkammer" images courtesy of Packer Schopf Gallery
Lauren Levato online: laurenlevato.com
facebook.com/laurenlevato
Twitter/Instagram: hioctaneredhead
Also, the artwork in this post is so insanely awesome.
---
Lauren Levato is a Chicago artist who previously specialized in bugs.
Lauren Levato, Longhorn No. 2, 12" x 9", drawn with a single No. 2 pencil from Walgreens on paper, 2009
She had been working toward making the emotional and intellectual resonances she sees in bugs pictorially explicit:
Lauren Levato, From the Bodies of Dead Horses, graphite on Bristol, 2011
But it is only very recently that she has made a breakthrough. Having tackled some personal issues, she was suddenly able to make self-portraits. And her outlook, grounded in the methodical qualities of scientific illustration, opened a very interesting path:
Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Thief in the Night, 12" x 12", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012
This could be a one-off until you look at a second one:
Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Hex, 17" x 14", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012
In these drawings, called "Wunderkammer," she incessantly repeats not only herself as an image, but more or less the same pose and the same gaze at the viewer. What is the significance of this?
When you have an encrypted but repeating signal, you can try to decrypt it by examining changing and fixed elements in the system of which the signal is a part. Levato herself is fixed in her drawings - what varies?
The imagery varies. It varies a lot - like the cabinets of curiosities after which the series is named, she includes diverse animals and manufactured objects:
Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as St. John the Baptist, 12" x 12", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012
But the variation takes place within a certain set of constant rules. They are all full-length nude self-portraits done with spare, elegant lines. They all involve animals and odd hairdos, and most depict Levato with unorthodox items in her womb.
Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as My Sister's Keeper, 12" x 12", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012
Evaluated in this light, we begin to see that Levato's image construction follows only the most basic rules of visual grammar. The sophistication of the work results not from visual grammar, but from linguistic grammar. Each of these paintings is a sentence:
"I am Lauren Levato, and I am [ ] and [ ] and [ ] and that involves [ ] and [ ]."
They are elaborated reflections on the consequences of a series of self-recognitions. The titles reflect this.
It would be very easy to classify this work with the various other instances of pop surrealism which currently abound. I think this would be a mistake. Surrealism, in its original instances and even more so in its current degenerate resurrection, is dedicated to the peculiar, the allegedly unconscious, and the dreamlike, for their own sakes. This is a strength and a weakness. The weakness is that it too eagerly indulges an exclusive focus on preference, or taste, or style.
Levato's objects and arrangements are categorically surrealistic, but they are not ends in themselves. Like her self-image, they are words in her language. Just as her self-image is halfway to a Chaplinesque caricature, so her objects have been partly emptied out of their self-contained meanings and character, in order to fit more smoothly into their relations with one another. The meaning of her work emerges from its total composition, not any one part of it.
What is this language she creates? What is the meaning of her work?
I think she is producing a rare form of a common psychological inversion among artists. All art has an expressionist component - the revelation of the interior life of the artist, their state of mood and thought, the progress of their soul. All art serves, to some extent, as an exteriorization of this interior state, as the objective correlative outlined by T. S. Eliot in Hamlet and His Problems:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
And yet, while this element is common, and even emphasized among, you know, the expressionists -
awooga!
(Odilon Redon, The Crying Spider, 1881)
- it is, generally speaking, disorderly and inchoate, a matter of a self-willed passionate disposition violently expressing itself through bizarre imagery.
Levato, on the other hand, designs her work with a meditative calm. Emerging from science, she applies an artistic equivalent of the dissectionist's practice: the bloodiest of matter, the most methodical of excavations. Her image-objects are partly defined complex symbols representing internal states. She has developed the ability to relate important visuals in her life to specific aspects of her own state of being. She has thus laid portent on top of physicality, and trained herself to draw in a way that conveys both the likeness and the portent - "This is not itself, it is the substitute for something else." And she has also trained herself to detach, once each exploratory surgery is complete, from the brutal work of conjoining the interior and exterior worlds. Having detached, she can lucidly convey the results. She's got the tastes of a tiger and the sensibilities of a lab assistant.
In some of the drawings, certain symbols are immediately decipherable, as in the Self Portrait as Forgetting:
Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Forgetting, 12" x 12", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012
Here black ribbons are monstrously large versions of the strings children are told to tie around their fingers, to remember. In other pieces, though, the set of symbols defies simple analysis:
Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Caul, 17" x 14", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012
Yes, I know what a caul is, and I'm still not going to claim I get it.
But this is important - that sometimes I should be unable to get it. It is exactly when the symbol is indecipherable that its nature as a symbol is most evident. The falcon, nest, horns, and hair/cape clearly form a network of symbols. They mean something to Levato; they don't need to mean anything to us. What we receive is the unnerving imminence of the perplexing but loaded symbol, the threatening authoritativeness of the Tarot. We are not traveling on Levato's path; her art is not the same as her path. Our path with her art is an experience of the intellectual and emotional texture of Levato's journey. We see her walking. We do not see, entirely, where she walks.
Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Capricorn, 17" x 14", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012
There is only one other artist I can think of who has developed something analytically similar to this - Frida Kahlo, of course. But because Kahlo and Levato both generate absolutely sincere, personal symbol-systems, their work bears next to no resemblance on the level of content or appearance.
Kahlo's work expresses in rigorous formal terms a journey that is heated and violent, that careens between sensual pleasures and agonies, nearly undone with a self-regard so intense that the work threatens to replace a life forever in the process of becoming unlivable.
Levato's journey is cool and composed; we join her at the very end of that fiery compression which transforms graphite into diamond. She cannot bear to express any image before it has completed such a metamorphosis. In the aftermath of the violence, her images occupy a fairy-tale landscape, an uncanny semiotic world - forms, previously invisible, reveal themselves: animals and ribbons, jewelry and hair.
I called this body of work parthenogenetic because parthenogenesis is the manufacture of offspring without fertilization. In "Wunderkammer," Levato impregnates herself with herself, filling her symbol-womb with her symbol-objects. Again, the meaning of each of these objects is not really any of our business. Our business is that her work is compelling; it is airily weird; it is perfected and honest in its difficult conception and flawlessly elegant in its execution. Confronting it, our head fills with interesting thoughts, and our feet float a millimeter or two off the floor.
---
"Wunderkammer" at Packer Schopf Gallery, Jan. 11-Feb. 16, 942 W. Lake St., Chicago, IL, 60607
Opening reception Friday, Jan. 11, 5-8 p.m. (you missed this, but that's alright, I'm including it for completeness's sake)
"Wunderkammer" images courtesy of Packer Schopf Gallery
Lauren Levato online: laurenlevato.com
facebook.com/laurenlevato
Twitter/Instagram: hioctaneredhead
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Dragon Skin
So this painting, which is for a friend, was an unbelievable sonofabitch to complete:
Suckers, textured skin, the works - it took forever. It brought vividly to my mind an idea I have had, occasionally, for many years. I first had this idea when I stumbled on a sleeping chameleon in a hedge in Israel. The chameleon had turned white while sleeping, which seems like a poor idea from a survival perspective, but he's the professional. I had a chance to study him closely for a while. When he woke up, he turned green again.
He might not have been a he, I don't know.
The idea I had was this - human skin is fairly low in detail. We are low-detail organisms. Imagine if we had descended from lizards, or birds; if we had feathers or scales, or large-scale complex pigmentations, or involved edges. Our entire art history would have been different. We would either have had to commit more time to each picture and sculpture, or make due with a more stylized, reduced-detail visual paradigm from the very start.
Actually, reflecting on it now, my friend rupa dasGupta, who has been drawing an octopus every day since 2010, at the appropriately-titled http://anoctopusaday.tumblr.com/, has been confronting this problem continuously. Her project can be read as a set of experiments in the question of detail: its representation, interpretation, aesthetics, and reduction.
---
My thought is not a very interesting thought, because art would also be different if we could see the polarization of light, or ultraviolet, or radio. Or if oil were highly volatile. Or if the electron had a different mass.
I'm just saying. Feathers and scales. That would be fucked up.
Thank you very much.
Daniel Maidman, An Octopus, oil on panel, 12"x12", 2013
Suckers, textured skin, the works - it took forever. It brought vividly to my mind an idea I have had, occasionally, for many years. I first had this idea when I stumbled on a sleeping chameleon in a hedge in Israel. The chameleon had turned white while sleeping, which seems like a poor idea from a survival perspective, but he's the professional. I had a chance to study him closely for a while. When he woke up, he turned green again.
He might not have been a he, I don't know.
The idea I had was this - human skin is fairly low in detail. We are low-detail organisms. Imagine if we had descended from lizards, or birds; if we had feathers or scales, or large-scale complex pigmentations, or involved edges. Our entire art history would have been different. We would either have had to commit more time to each picture and sculpture, or make due with a more stylized, reduced-detail visual paradigm from the very start.
Actually, reflecting on it now, my friend rupa dasGupta, who has been drawing an octopus every day since 2010, at the appropriately-titled http://anoctopusaday.tumblr.com/, has been confronting this problem continuously. Her project can be read as a set of experiments in the question of detail: its representation, interpretation, aesthetics, and reduction.
---
My thought is not a very interesting thought, because art would also be different if we could see the polarization of light, or ultraviolet, or radio. Or if oil were highly volatile. Or if the electron had a different mass.
I'm just saying. Feathers and scales. That would be fucked up.
Thank you very much.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
The Patron Saint of Hunger
The other day I went to the Met to see the last day of the Bernini show. On my way to the Bernini section, I had one of those art museum experiences which I find essential to my well-being as an artist.
Here's what happened. I went the long way around, passing through the medieval and early Renaissance galleries on the second floor. I glanced to my right, and this is what I saw:
This is Bartolomeo Montagna's (no, I never heard of him either) oil-on-wood "Saint Justina of Padua," painted, as nearly as I can tell from the museum label, between his birth before 1459 and his death in 1523.
Saint Justina here hit me like a solid punch to the gut. I had a jaw-dropping, soft-legged sensation of ringing stillness. I was being overpowered by the beauty of this painting: the compact rounded clarity of the depiction, the model's force of virtue, intelligence, insight, and wit, and Montagna's gorgeous technique.
I don't go to art museums often enough. They say you can't just invent art out of your own head, without reference to history. This is less true than you would think. I have gone through a very long period of studying some of our art heritage very intensely. But I have also sequestered myself intensely from it for a time, and my new pictorial ideas build, as much as anything, on my older pictorial ideas. Fortunately for me, I'm either very good or deluded enough to believe I'm very good. So I do not perceive myself, moment by moment, becoming impoverished by living in my solipsistic art referential universe.
Then, after a long absence, I go to the Met, or the National Gallery, or someplace like that. And it is just shocking. Here is simply magnificent work, the wealth of age upon age of discipline, inspiration, and genius.
If you are not an artist, your experience of attending an art museum will be different from mine, just as a musician's experience of a musical performance is different from that of a music fan.
If you are an artist, when you are just starting out, the work in art museums - the really good stuff - seems miraculous, it seems to be a unitary phenomenon on the far side of an unbridgeable abyss. Your ambition is to earn your own spot in these museums, these treasure-houses, and yet you despair of ever earning such a spot, because of the magnificence of the existing residents.
Your despair, however, inspires you. You start down the long road of your training, to see if you can rise so high as to reach up and touch the drapery, trailing below these gods as they circle the empyrean.
You study and work for years and years, and that unitary miracle you saw begins to come into focus, and as it focuses, it separates. Now you see that this incredible work is not immortal only; like the Greek heroes, it is the offspring of a union of mortal and immortal parents.
The immortal parent is vision. Vision is beyond your control as a would-be artist. You have it, or you do not. You can gain and lose it; it will come and go as it will. All you can do is prepare yourself to receive it, and even so, nobody has found a method for this preparation which is more successful, in terms of statistical significance, than just getting drunk like an asshole every night.
The mortal parent is technique. This, you can gain, and in fact, much of what you are spending all those years and years on is refining and improving your technique.
As your technique improves, it will begin to match the work you have admired in museums. You will not want to admit this to yourself; it will seem sacrilegious. But recognizing what is so is part of being reasonable. Technique is mortal. You can train hard enough to beat it. I can paint as well as, say, the bottom quintile of the painters in the Met. And my technique is not as good as that of dozens of painters I know, many of them annoyingly younger than I am. Technique is difficult, but not impossible. Some of it derives from talent, but without practice, talent doesn't amount to much.
Now you go back to the museum, and you have lost the innocent awe of the art lover or the aspirer to art-making. You're an artist, and you spend a lot of time squinting at particular passages in paintings, decoding the methods of their creation. You admire the flow of compositions. You make notes on bits to steal.
You begin to evaluate vision, to say, "My vision is as strong as this, but not yet as strong as that." You know it is foolish, that this kind of evaluation is notoriously biased, unreliable, and best done in the long light of centuries. But you cannot resist. You are still ambitious.
You have gained a great deal, but you have lost a great deal as well. You are jaded; there are scales on your eyes. You have looked at so much art that you are blinded to art.
This is a hazard of the profession. We are like bouncers at the strip club of the soul.
This is my experience of it, anyway. There is nothing in this sequence I have not undergone, the pointless vanities and stinging disappointments alike. You know I am ambitious, and I am doing my best to share with you the convolutions of my ambitious road...
So all of this explains the tremendous importance, the absolutely vital importance, of the sensation of being punched in the gut. This is the return of the original interaction with great art, the reminder of the might and grandeur of the thing. It is the humiliation that redeems the drudgery and the vanity, that renews the challenge of the majesty of the project, of us, we ourselves, when we look up from the mud.
My sensation of this sucker punch was different from what it used to be. It used to be, "I will never make such great work." Now it is, "I will never make this great work." This is an astonishing leap in assertion, and it was surprising to me how highly I regarded my work. But it would not do to make a false report. My sensation was not of an essential incapacity, but of an essential lack. Whatever I ever do, I will never paint Montagna's Saint Justina; Montagna already did. I will never paint any one of these masterpieces. I might paint masterpieces, but they will not be these, they will be some other ones. These are no longer available.
Since, it would seem, my craving has the same borders as the universe, this unavailability struck me like the pang of a hunger that cannot be fed. It was a terrible feeling, an abrupt sense of envy and loss. It was actually the reverse of that impulse to paint which I described in Credo - I saw what Montagna loved, and loved it too, and could not perform that conversion of adoration into paint which is so central to my experience. I became Montagna, but with my hands cut off, my tongue cut out, an incapable Montagna. My craving burned me.
And this - this is enough! I have worked to become mighty, and every inch of might I conquered cost me an inch of wonder. It is no good to live without wonder. I've got plenty of wonder about plenty of things, but less about art, and I need to have wonder about art to remain an artist. So this experience, this discovery, is vastly reassuring. The wonder moved, and hid, and finally, it re-emerged. Its quantity is undiminished. The inner circle of wonder that I cannot make so great a thing has narrowed, but the outer circle, of wonder at things I might possibly have made but did not, is greater in area. It is a savage lack, a gnawing absence. It is the very hunger I am always worrying about losing. Saint Justina teaches that the true hunger is unfeedable.
Here's what happened. I went the long way around, passing through the medieval and early Renaissance galleries on the second floor. I glanced to my right, and this is what I saw:
This is Bartolomeo Montagna's (no, I never heard of him either) oil-on-wood "Saint Justina of Padua," painted, as nearly as I can tell from the museum label, between his birth before 1459 and his death in 1523.
Saint Justina here hit me like a solid punch to the gut. I had a jaw-dropping, soft-legged sensation of ringing stillness. I was being overpowered by the beauty of this painting: the compact rounded clarity of the depiction, the model's force of virtue, intelligence, insight, and wit, and Montagna's gorgeous technique.
I don't go to art museums often enough. They say you can't just invent art out of your own head, without reference to history. This is less true than you would think. I have gone through a very long period of studying some of our art heritage very intensely. But I have also sequestered myself intensely from it for a time, and my new pictorial ideas build, as much as anything, on my older pictorial ideas. Fortunately for me, I'm either very good or deluded enough to believe I'm very good. So I do not perceive myself, moment by moment, becoming impoverished by living in my solipsistic art referential universe.
Then, after a long absence, I go to the Met, or the National Gallery, or someplace like that. And it is just shocking. Here is simply magnificent work, the wealth of age upon age of discipline, inspiration, and genius.
If you are not an artist, your experience of attending an art museum will be different from mine, just as a musician's experience of a musical performance is different from that of a music fan.
If you are an artist, when you are just starting out, the work in art museums - the really good stuff - seems miraculous, it seems to be a unitary phenomenon on the far side of an unbridgeable abyss. Your ambition is to earn your own spot in these museums, these treasure-houses, and yet you despair of ever earning such a spot, because of the magnificence of the existing residents.
Your despair, however, inspires you. You start down the long road of your training, to see if you can rise so high as to reach up and touch the drapery, trailing below these gods as they circle the empyrean.
You study and work for years and years, and that unitary miracle you saw begins to come into focus, and as it focuses, it separates. Now you see that this incredible work is not immortal only; like the Greek heroes, it is the offspring of a union of mortal and immortal parents.
The immortal parent is vision. Vision is beyond your control as a would-be artist. You have it, or you do not. You can gain and lose it; it will come and go as it will. All you can do is prepare yourself to receive it, and even so, nobody has found a method for this preparation which is more successful, in terms of statistical significance, than just getting drunk like an asshole every night.
The mortal parent is technique. This, you can gain, and in fact, much of what you are spending all those years and years on is refining and improving your technique.
As your technique improves, it will begin to match the work you have admired in museums. You will not want to admit this to yourself; it will seem sacrilegious. But recognizing what is so is part of being reasonable. Technique is mortal. You can train hard enough to beat it. I can paint as well as, say, the bottom quintile of the painters in the Met. And my technique is not as good as that of dozens of painters I know, many of them annoyingly younger than I am. Technique is difficult, but not impossible. Some of it derives from talent, but without practice, talent doesn't amount to much.
Now you go back to the museum, and you have lost the innocent awe of the art lover or the aspirer to art-making. You're an artist, and you spend a lot of time squinting at particular passages in paintings, decoding the methods of their creation. You admire the flow of compositions. You make notes on bits to steal.
You begin to evaluate vision, to say, "My vision is as strong as this, but not yet as strong as that." You know it is foolish, that this kind of evaluation is notoriously biased, unreliable, and best done in the long light of centuries. But you cannot resist. You are still ambitious.
You have gained a great deal, but you have lost a great deal as well. You are jaded; there are scales on your eyes. You have looked at so much art that you are blinded to art.
This is a hazard of the profession. We are like bouncers at the strip club of the soul.
This is my experience of it, anyway. There is nothing in this sequence I have not undergone, the pointless vanities and stinging disappointments alike. You know I am ambitious, and I am doing my best to share with you the convolutions of my ambitious road...
So all of this explains the tremendous importance, the absolutely vital importance, of the sensation of being punched in the gut. This is the return of the original interaction with great art, the reminder of the might and grandeur of the thing. It is the humiliation that redeems the drudgery and the vanity, that renews the challenge of the majesty of the project, of us, we ourselves, when we look up from the mud.
My sensation of this sucker punch was different from what it used to be. It used to be, "I will never make such great work." Now it is, "I will never make this great work." This is an astonishing leap in assertion, and it was surprising to me how highly I regarded my work. But it would not do to make a false report. My sensation was not of an essential incapacity, but of an essential lack. Whatever I ever do, I will never paint Montagna's Saint Justina; Montagna already did. I will never paint any one of these masterpieces. I might paint masterpieces, but they will not be these, they will be some other ones. These are no longer available.
Since, it would seem, my craving has the same borders as the universe, this unavailability struck me like the pang of a hunger that cannot be fed. It was a terrible feeling, an abrupt sense of envy and loss. It was actually the reverse of that impulse to paint which I described in Credo - I saw what Montagna loved, and loved it too, and could not perform that conversion of adoration into paint which is so central to my experience. I became Montagna, but with my hands cut off, my tongue cut out, an incapable Montagna. My craving burned me.
And this - this is enough! I have worked to become mighty, and every inch of might I conquered cost me an inch of wonder. It is no good to live without wonder. I've got plenty of wonder about plenty of things, but less about art, and I need to have wonder about art to remain an artist. So this experience, this discovery, is vastly reassuring. The wonder moved, and hid, and finally, it re-emerged. Its quantity is undiminished. The inner circle of wonder that I cannot make so great a thing has narrowed, but the outer circle, of wonder at things I might possibly have made but did not, is greater in area. It is a savage lack, a gnawing absence. It is the very hunger I am always worrying about losing. Saint Justina teaches that the true hunger is unfeedable.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Use Anything
This here is another bit of blog pilfering. I cooked it up for a website I used to write for. When I quit, it got caught in the gap - it never wound up getting posted. I was just back from Italy when I wrote it. I was thinking over what I learned, not as a human being, but as an artist.
You'll have to forgive the jarringly second-person, affirmative tone. House style. I cut some introductory fluff I've covered previously here.
---
...like many towns in Abruzzo, the one we stayed in was a jumble of centuries-old limestone houses, walkways, and staircases built into the side of a mountain. It is jaw-droppingly beautiful. Naturally I was inspired to make some pictures.
So I went to grab my pencils and fancy paper and, what do you know, I forgot to bring them. What did that leave me with? It left me with what I had in my pocket. Which was this:
A 59-cent blue ballpoint pen, and a Moleskine. Well, that's life. I started drawing. First I drew that which provides us with the will to live:
And then I started a series of drawings of the dazzling perspectives around me:
I felt pretty good about the body of work I produced over the course of the week. I would have liked to have had better materials to work with. But I didn't, so I made the materials I had work for me. I hadn't used a blue ball point pen as a serious drawing tool in many years, and it took a few tries to relearn what it brings to the table. If you're patient with them, they really have excellent and unique properties, especially for rendering soft gradations and dark darks.
But they will also support the integrity of the flimsiest net of lines.
That's great news, but in the end, I could have had anything - a number two pencil, a crayon - one time I got stuck in Joshua Tree National Park with no drawing materials except some red wine and cigarette ashes. Fine - that's enough for art supplies.
The principle this demonstrates is that you do not need to wait on materials to start making work. And conversely, you mustn't use lack of materials as an excuse not to start your work. Wherever you have eyes to see, you will find things to look at, and you will more than likely find something to draw or paint with. Roll with the punches - use what you have handy - but above all, draw and paint. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just have to want to do it. Everything else falls into place on its own.
Happy drawing, all of you.
---
You can see why I would want to resuscitate this little snippet, right? I think it's a good sentiment for the end of the year. I hope to retain the spirit of it myself, next year and always, and I also hope it for you. I hope you'll have the most excellent of art supplies, but I also hope you'll use anything you can grab. Just so you're working. That's a day-to-day attitude that maintains a supple art, and one that prepares you to produce the most necessary work.
You'll have to forgive the jarringly second-person, affirmative tone. House style. I cut some introductory fluff I've covered previously here.
---
...like many towns in Abruzzo, the one we stayed in was a jumble of centuries-old limestone houses, walkways, and staircases built into the side of a mountain. It is jaw-droppingly beautiful. Naturally I was inspired to make some pictures.
So I went to grab my pencils and fancy paper and, what do you know, I forgot to bring them. What did that leave me with? It left me with what I had in my pocket. Which was this:
A 59-cent blue ballpoint pen, and a Moleskine. Well, that's life. I started drawing. First I drew that which provides us with the will to live:
coffee maker, 8-20-2012
And then I started a series of drawings of the dazzling perspectives around me:
nested space, Calascio, 8-22-2012
I felt pretty good about the body of work I produced over the course of the week. I would have liked to have had better materials to work with. But I didn't, so I made the materials I had work for me. I hadn't used a blue ball point pen as a serious drawing tool in many years, and it took a few tries to relearn what it brings to the table. If you're patient with them, they really have excellent and unique properties, especially for rendering soft gradations and dark darks.
a pear, 8-24-2012
But they will also support the integrity of the flimsiest net of lines.
il toro, 8-22-2012
That's great news, but in the end, I could have had anything - a number two pencil, a crayon - one time I got stuck in Joshua Tree National Park with no drawing materials except some red wine and cigarette ashes. Fine - that's enough for art supplies.
using anything
The principle this demonstrates is that you do not need to wait on materials to start making work. And conversely, you mustn't use lack of materials as an excuse not to start your work. Wherever you have eyes to see, you will find things to look at, and you will more than likely find something to draw or paint with. Roll with the punches - use what you have handy - but above all, draw and paint. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just have to want to do it. Everything else falls into place on its own.
Happy drawing, all of you.
---
You can see why I would want to resuscitate this little snippet, right? I think it's a good sentiment for the end of the year. I hope to retain the spirit of it myself, next year and always, and I also hope it for you. I hope you'll have the most excellent of art supplies, but I also hope you'll use anything you can grab. Just so you're working. That's a day-to-day attitude that maintains a supple art, and one that prepares you to produce the most necessary work.
horse-cheese, so called not because it comes from horse milk,
but because it is formed in roped sacks appropriate for slinging over the back of your horse
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Svévò
In the dream, I was at a book-release party for a bestselling fantasy novelist named Svévò. His new book had a devil on the cover, high-collared like The New Yorker's foppish mascot, and grinning at the viewer. The devil was based on a more serious rendition, in profile, on the cover of Svévò's family Bible - it was the devil's Bible, the version they use in Hell.
it was a bit - bit - bit like that
Jonah Freeman/Justin Lowe, Stray Light Grey, 2012
Svévò's name was an overlap of two words: "Zvuv," the Hebrew for "fly" - the devil's name is Ba'al Zvuv, "Lord of the Flies," and Svévò was one of his flies. But it was also "Sovev," the Hebrew for "rotate" - Svévò was familiar with the turning of things.
Svévò had always written fiction, but he spent much of his life making a living as an aircraft engineer. By the time his first book was published, he was in his late forties. The book was moderately successful; the next few performed unevenly; only the most recent series had hit the bestseller lists. He was in his fifties before he was able to devote himself full-time to writing novels. At the party, a journalist asked him what it was like, having his ambitions delayed so long.
Svévò said, "It was good, because it made my successes mean more to me, and my failures less."
---
Here's the point I was trying to figure out how to make. When I look at the online personae of other artists, I am often intimidated, not only by their work, but by its success in the world. I think: "Well, this person is obviously more talented than I am, and they know cooler people, and they're going to get all the things I would like for myself. There is no room for me..."
I am also aware that I've had a string of successful sorts of things lately - those of you who are friends of mine on Facebook have followed this process in the most detail.
Naturally, I have begun to worry that my own recent adventures are beginning to operate in a suppressive way on the ambitions of other artists, as the successes of other artists have acted on me in the past. This is the opposite of my purpose. If I thought I would be suppressing other artists, I would post my artwork and CV and call it a day. The main point of my writing, on this blog and elsewhere, is to make not only art, but life as an artist, more available, not less.
So I wanted to say, in case my worry is justified, that my failures dwarf my successes; that I have always wanted to accomplish more than I have been able to; that I am often disappointed and bitter; that I depend frequently on the people closest to me to remind me that career comes second, and art first; and that I continue not in the absence of difficulty, but in its face.
Like Svévò's, my successes are delayed. I aspire to the equanimity of this strange man, but I do not have it. My work is not a threat to yours.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
CREDO
Wait, let's dress us up for the show:
She dresses up better than I do.
Here's Lee Vasu, the more public of the two gallerists who constitute Dacia Gallery:
I am proud to call this man a friend. Lee hung the show, and did a staggeringly good job of arranging the work.
Dacia is an archaic name for Romania. Lee is from Romania; he was raised under Ceaușescu, in Transylvania, down the road from the actual Castle Dracula - Vlad the Impaler's old place. Under the communists, it was apparently an abandoned dump. Not the Vampire Disneyland it is now.
One oddity of Dacia, the gallery, not the country, is that if you're an artist, and you've got an opening there, Lee Vasu wants you to give a little talk. Fair enough. I'm no kind of a public speaker, though, so the prospect of this stunt scared the crap out of me. I was eventually corralled into giving the talk, to an assembly of family, friends, and artists (there was some overlap). I found that if I leaned against the wall, it steadied my nerves.
So that's me giving the talk, looking very nonchalant, because I'm leaning against a wall. But if I hadn't been leaning against the wall, I would have fallen silent, or over.
These are the notes I had in hand should I need to remember what I was talking about. I had carried them around the city for three days beforehand, mumbling bits of the talk to myself:
I'm not above scrounging up a free blog post wherever I can get one.
So here, to the best of my recollection, is what I said. Some of it I've told you before. I think it's worth saying it again. I called this post "Credo" because this is as good a summary of what I believe, for my own personal mode of figurative art-making, as I've attempted.
Don't get me wrong - there are many legitimate ways to make art. Some of them are even mutually exclusive. The world is very large, and there is room for many of us, and for us to love one another despite our many differences.
But this is the core of what I do when I do people, and I believe in it intensely:
"All of you - family, those who have come in from out of town, out of the country, my friends from the art world, and my friends from the rest of my life - thank you all for being here tonight. It means a great deal to me to have you here. Thank you.
Before we get going, let me clear up the art historical references. [I wasn't thinking of these works when I came up with mine, but I cannot deny they are in my blood.]
Courbet.
Mantegna.
You might not have noticed it, but the David.
[not the first time I've ripped that one off]
And, of course, the lighting owes something to Caravaggio, although I've changed the spectrum.
So - this talk is supposed to be about why I paint, or what my paintings are about, or something like that. I'd like to tell you a favorite story of mine on this subject. It's from Pliny the Elder, and it's one of the Greek myths of the invention of drawing. In this myth, a young woman from Sicyon, near Corinth, is sitting with her boyfriend. He has to leave the next day, and she's going to miss him. They're sitting by the hearth fire, talking. Suddenly she turns and sees the shadow of his profile on the wall. So she grabs a piece of charcoal, and makes an outline of the shadow, to remember him by. And that's the invention of drawing.
Joseph Benoit Suvee, Invention of the Art of Drawing, 1793
The next story I know that is parallel to this is a medieval story about the crucifixion. Jesus is on the Via Dolorosa, hauling the cross toward Golgotha. He's sweating, he's bleeding. He's covered in mud, people have been spitting on him. And a woman in the crowd, a sympathizer, takes off her veil, and pats his face with it. When she takes it away - a miracle! There is an image of his face imprinted on the veil. This image is the true image of the face of Jesus, and in the middle ages, they even had a fakey Latin-Greek term for this concept of the True Image: the vera eikona. With a bit of folk etymology, the name of the True Image, the vera eikona, becomes the name of the woman - Veronica.
Hans Memling, The St. John and Veronica Diptych (right wing), circa 1483
Both of these stories, the woman from Sicyon, and Veronica, are stories about the True Image. They are myths based on the importance to us, as human beings, of making a True Image. But they have something else interesting in common: the means of producing the True Image is essentially mechanical in each case.
So the question arises - if the means of manufacturing the True Image is mechanical, why do we still feel a need to paint after the invention of the camera?
I think we can answer this question by drawing on a very interesting concept raised by Neal Stephenson in his recent novel Anathem.
In this novel, the main character is press-ganged into serving as an amanuensis. "Amanuensis" is a fancy word for a stenographer - somebody who writes down what somebody else says. The main character, very reasonably, asks why they don't just get a tape recorder and some voice recognition software. And his boss explains to him that what is needed isn't a record of the words alone, but also that the words should pass through consciousness on their way to the record. It is absolutely essential - for narrative reasons - that a consciousness parse the words.
It is necessary that a consciousness parse it. This pertains to our question:
It is necessary that a consciousness parse what is seen for a True Image to be produced.
The finger on the shutter, the hand that holds the brush, the arm that swings the chisel - these are extensions of consciousness. They are required to produce a True Image.
Why? To answer this, we have to answer: what is the True Image a true image of? It is entirely possibly to measure the density or volume or boiling point of iron, for example, by mechanical means, or to find out the color of a star. These are purely physical phenomena. Machines are good at representing physical things. But it is next to impossible for a scale, a telescope, a surveillance camera, to represent consciousness, or the soul, the spirit - whatever you want to call it. The True Image is an image of something that is not physical. It is of the same nature as consciousness, and this is why consciousness must parse it to represent it accurately.
Daniel Maidman, preparatory sketch for Blue Leah #2, pencil on paper, 15"x22", 2011
When we paint, we are making an image of a spiritual phenomenon. The image itself begins to partake of consciousness, owning itself and making person-like demands on the viewer. It is very difficult to make such an image. It is not hard for the artist alone. It is also hard for the model. Modeling as a practice is physically demanding, it is a form of athleticism. And more than that, the model must present themselves, make who they are available; their consciousness must, unhidden, interact with yours. It is very difficult to do, and I am very grateful for having worked with my model - can we all give a hand to Leah, who is here tonight?
[applause, Leah blushes]
Daniel Maidman, preparatory sketch #1 for Blue Leah #3 (rejected lighting), pencil on paper, 15"x22", 2011
Now, given how difficult it is, let's ask again: why would anyone bother? Why is the True Image so important to us? I think Plato addresses this problem with his distinction between Being and Becoming. Everything eternal - ideas, mathematics, things like that - is described as partaking of Being. Everything that changes, that comes to be and passes away, that lives and dies, is described as partaking of Becoming. And Plato says that that which is Becoming is an illusion. It doesn't really exist. Why does he say that? It's a radical rejectionism. He's rejecting death. He says, "It is impossible that death should exist."
Consider again the woman of Sicyon. She looks at things that are partaking of Becoming - her boyfriend, who will leave in the morning. The fire. The shadow. And she realizes she will miss these things. So she reaches for those objects closest to her which partake most of Being: the charcoal and the tiles of the wall. And she translates that which is Becoming into that which is Being.
We pursue the True Image as a less radical version of Plato's rejectionism. We say, "This thing, which exists now, is real. I see it now. I love it now. I don't want it to go away." So we reach for whatever we can reach that partakes of Being, and we make a True Image of the thing we see. We make an image using materials that will last longer than we will. That way we can remember, and not die, and we can go on telling the future what we thought was so precious and so important.
Thank you very much."
---
A more concise version of this talk appeared in the December, 2012 iPad edition of Poets and Artists, which is a marvelous magazine that you should check out, and this would be true even if I didn't have the good fortune to be in it sometimes.
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