UD‘s old pal Paul Lafolley is featured in the New York Times.
UD has never been a fan of his work, which has at once a sort of all over the place New Agey thing going on, and a pretty obsessive rigidity to it…
“Mr. Laffoley has yet to encounter a system of mystical thought he could not absorb into his own project.” Right. This is a nicer way of saying what I just said.
“Mr. Laffoley’s works may seem impenetrable, but they are not nonsensical. They limn a richly provocative cartography of consciousness itself and its heretofore under-realized possibilities.” Rather pretentious formulation there, and note that the critic never says what place or places in particular this map designates for consciousness to realize.
Because work like Paul’s is all over the place conceptually, its power and legitimacy rest heavily on the artist himself, as a sort of mystic sage. I’ve never been able to grant Paul that status, and his art as such is for me too catch-all to express anything in particular.
Gentle Hitler meek and mild appears, a statue kneeling in prayer, as you peer through a hole in a wall at the site of the Warsaw ghetto. It’s an art installation.
Art journals dredge up the dead language people dredge up on occasions such as this. The artist’s work “reveal[s] contradictions at the core of today’s society.”
Praying little boy Hitler (We can look forward to praying little boy Pol Pot in the killing fields, praying little boy Stalin in the gulag, and praying little boy Assad in Aleppo.) is a quintessential work of kitsch – so much so that UD intends to feature it in her aesthetics course this semester. It conforms to Milan Kundera’s definition of the form: “the absolute denial of shit.” It’s the functional equivalent of “the Hitler with a song in his heart” in The Producers. Like Franz Liebkind, it wants to remind you that Hitler was essentially an innocent – a flawed human being like every one of us. He knows what he did was wrong, and if he were alive today and in touch with his inner child he’d be on his knees in the middle of the Warsaw ghetto praying for forgiveness.
Praying little boy Hitler conveys the important truth that we’re all potential Hitlers. Paul Berman, reviewing the work of Andre Glucksmann, writes:
The eleventh commandment that Glucksmann wants to append to the biblical ten is this: to know thyself as capable of being a monster – even if that means saying (and here the imp of excess wraps its fingers around Glucksmann’s neck [...]), “Hitler, c’est moi.”
Dadaist sensibilities characterized much of the remainder of Buffluxus’ performance: members of [the University of Buffalo's] PressBoardPress lowered rolls of toilet paper from a balcony into the audience, Melgard performed Emmett Williams’ “Is La Monte Young in the Audience?” (which consisted of posing that very question – a comment on the nature of performance), and a rendition of Metz’s own “There is no good or bad, only placement” was “interrupted” by incessant coughing fits from Basinski and Melgard.
The Toronto Research Group’s half of the presentation started with hefty helpings of irony and disconcertion: Poet and troupe member Chris Sylvester beseeched those in attendance to leave their seats and proceed to the back of the room for security pat-downs, all the while mimicking the tone and disposition of airport security. The implicit political comment was not lost on the audience.
Sylvester’s charged and insistent irony was immediately counterpointed by McCaffery and the rest of the Research Group – made up of the two aforementioned men plus McCaffery’s wife and adjunct English professor Karen Mac Cormack – imitating the detached and sterile instructive pleasantries of flight attendants. The skit was complete with humorous instructions for various safety devices that could aid the audience throughout the rest of the performance.
Bowling Green University has Metamorphosis, a sculpture its students have decided is a limestone vagina; and now Wasilla High School has Warrior Within, which (despite the artists’ insistence that it conveys moral virtue and the fighting spirit) the students have identified as a concrete vagina.
The artists propose educational seminars in which students are instructed in the proper reading of their sculpture, but this strikes UD as rather inimical to the spirit of art. Outside of North Korea.
In the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman comment thread, the locals weigh in (“I see a turtle.”). Some of them note the irony that the principal’s placement of a large tarp over the controversial sculpture now makes the work look like a penis with a condom on it.
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UPDATE:
The intellectual concept behind the Lincoln Trilogy is more successful than the visual relationship of the three figures. The combination of three distinctly individual sculptures of differing scale and spatial orientation has resulted in a somewhat awkward interrelationship.
That’s one way of putting it.
Bill, a UD reader, sent
UD some photos he took
of the statue being described here.
It’s in honor of Abraham Lincoln.
… for making a hash of a simple question – name some books that have changed your life – but UD thinks the answer his rival for the Mexican presidency gave is also noteworthy. Ernesto Cordero singled out Animal Farm and Alice in Wonderland.
Point one, it’s sweet to see a politician in macho Mexico list a children’s book. Point two, how appropriate both works — surrealistic dystopias — are for a life in Mexican politics.
Banned Books Week, in which we celebrate novels which have excited the legal system, has come and gone. The commemoration always reminds me of the singular moment in my life when, grazing the bookcases in my parents’ bedroom, I found Henry Miller’s much-banned Tropic of Cancer.
My father was an immunologist who studied cancer at the National Institutes of Health (and this was the heyday of Nixon’s War on Cancer), so maybe I initially assumed I was looking at a technical book. But something in its stark blue/black Grove Press binding drove me further, and I cracked it open, immediately discovering a use of the word crack with which I had been unfamiliar.
I’d opened Tropic to one of Van Norden’s notorious, hilarious rants about women, failure, and the dirt in his belly.
“All I ask of life,” he says, “is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt. … The trouble is, you see, I can’t fall in love, I’m too much of an egoist… You sort of rot here [Like Tropic's narrator, Henry Miller, Van Norden is an American living in Paris.] Would you believe it, I’ve never been to the Louvre – nor the Comedie Francaise. Is it worth going to those joints? Still, it sort of takes your mind off things, I suppose. What do you do with yourself all day? Don’t you get bored? … You go queer over here… all these cheap shits sitting on their ass all day bragging about their work and none of them is worth a stinking damn. They’re all failures – that’s why they come over here… I’m a neurotic, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about myself…. Ah, well, shit! I’m going to take a walk… wash the dirt out of my belly…”
Transfixed, I lowered myself to the bedroom floor and began at the beginning.
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Inside the Whale George Orwell called his essay about Miller, and that’s just it. Tropic had brought me inside the vast dark unfettered head, a place where immersed thoughts swam mightily up and broke the surface. I badly wanted access to this disreputable underworld, and here it was.
The social reality outside Miller’s whale was ‘twenties Paris, a world, wrote Orwell, of
bug-ridden rooms in working-men’s hotels, of fights, drinking bouts, cheap brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and temporary jobs. [These were] the poor quarters of Paris as a foreigner sees them — the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the green waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro stations, the cigarettes that come to pieces, the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens …
This is Henry’s setting, and in it his thoughts reel back and forth from rage and despair at a cancerous world, a world where meaning and beauty and energy are all used up, to ecstasy at rare unbidden moments of meaning and beauty and energy that continue, somehow, to survive the deadness. By chance in a foul dark Metro station Henry finds a ticket to a Ravel concert one night; the stepped-on, rubbed-out, grubby ticket is Henry’s ticket to one of the most complete experiences of aesthetic bliss UD has ever read. The very neglect and chanciness of that ticket seem to generate the spectacular responses Henry has in the concert hall. Art needs something to transform, and the more deeply you’ve taken in the cancerous world, the more intense your receptivity to its transfiguration. The stronger the artist (here, Ravel), the more fulsome the embrace – and transfiguration – of the cancerous.
There’s nothing escapist or ephemeral about this transition from death to life – the point is that the art sweeps up all of the suffering degraded reality outside the concert hall and makes it art, just the way Miller’s novel itself takes in with such capacious, nervy, fascination “the imbecilities of the inner mind… the real-politik of the inner mind,” as Orwell calls them, that he ends up glorifying this stuff.
[T]he truth is [writes Orwell] that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to admit. [Walt] Whitman himself ‘accepted’ a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the ‘grey sick faces of onanists’, etc.,etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
Henry puts himself in the way of decay, every day. Decayed streets, people, buildings. He revels in urinous medieval Paris and detests the fake shininess of new American cities. In giving words to this descent into the truth of everyday horrors, Miller offers us a known, though rarely exhibited, social and psychological reality. As Orwell notes, there’s nothing edifying here; Tropic doesn’t end, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentimental story Babylon Revisited (which has the same time and setting and expatriate American narrator) does, with an assurance that the character will eventually reverse his losses. There’s only a primer on how to remain human and alive in corrosive times.
[I]n 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and a sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had been a soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of Prufrock than The First Hundred Thousand or Horatio Bottomley’s Letters to the Boys in the Trenches. I should have felt, like [E.M.] Forster, that by simply standing aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was carrying on the human heritage. [Hence] the passive, non-co-operative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel. Once again it is the human voice among the bomb-explosions, a friendly American voice, ‘innocent of public-spiritedness’. No sermons, merely the subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently, it is still possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an edifying novel, but a novel worth reading and likely to be remembered after it is read… [Henry Miller] is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.
No, our moment is not 1917; and no, not all novels have to rub our noses in horror and imbecility. But there will always be high value in capturing and recording the human undercurrent – its stuttering resentments and rages and bewilderments and obscenities. For this – along with our delicacy, hopefulness, and high-mindedness – is our subjective reality, and we are right to ask from our artists the peculiar mix of reportage and transcendence the best of them bring to it.
… Or maybe they feature a nature poem or something… Moving us up up and away, for a day, from the earthy immediacy of politics, corruption, conflict. But UD, at least this Sunday, seems to have started in on sex, so allow her to continue.
A public painting – it’s on a much-trafficked street corner in Taiwan – is generating some controversy and also some stupidity.
Here’s the painting.
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First, the stupidity.
In response to nearby residents complaining that they don’t want their kids having to walk by it all the time, the museum director explains that “nude does not necessarily represent sex.”
True. But sex represents sex.
In response to people taking offense at the political content of the painting – Taiwan’s getting fucked by China but cynically doesn’t mind – the artist (a professor at Taipei National University of the Arts) said that “the paintings [this one's part of a series] were simply an expression of esthetics and that critics were overreacting.”
You don’t get to paint a political satire and then, when people get upset, say it’s a Jackson Pollock.
As to the controversy: Neighbors have a point about the public nature of an image this explicit. And in fact the painting will soon be moved to the museum’s interior courtyard.
On the business of the message upsetting people – well, yes, it would. But political art often wants to provoke in just these ways in order to prompt viewers to reexamine certain attitudes, etc. Nothing wrong with that. The artist, and the museum director, shouldn’t be coy and evasive. They’ve chosen to create and present provocative political art, and so be it.
Looks like them big tough guys at the coalface can’t take a little heat.
A Wyoming politician has expressed his own displeasure with a University of Wyoming artwork attacking coal’s environmental effects in this way:
[E]very now and then, you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from.
See, folks at the University of Wyoming don’t understand that ideas critical of funding sources are forbidden. This here’s a kind of learning opportunity for them in the limits of free expression.
… Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud has died.
He was Sigmund Freud’s grandson. In a recent interview, he said: “I am not at all introspective.”
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He was interested in presence, and not only human presence: a lightbulb’s glare, a dog’s leg, a horse’s arse, a frayed bit of carpet. The language with which he described people and things, animals and lovers, atmosphere and futility, was a frightening construction. I believe he shared more with his psychoanalyst grandfather than he liked to admit.
… one of America’s greatest painters, has died.
Like Henry Miller and Terrence Malick, Twombly’s part of what UD calls the Being Brigade – an artist who above all wants to capture on canvas or on film or in prose what it feels like to exist. To exist intensely, euphorically.
Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later, he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture,” he said. The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed but he himself barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days,” he said.
Isn’t something like this precisely what all the reviewers of The Tree of Life are saying? It does not illustrate. It prompts in us a sensation of intense existing. A journalist asks a man who has just seen the film what it means. He says meaning’s not the point: “There are no answers to existential questions.”
Twombly, Miller, Malick – They’re not illustrating anything. They’re not even telling much of a story, or offering much of a representation. They are all, we feel, about movement, the sheer onrush of human being in time. Hence Malick’s primary use, in his film, of Smetena’s Moldau with its rapid light spiraling notes building and building through major and minor modes, more and more triumphal, more and more exuberant, exhilarated. Everything’s caught up and brought along in that strong current of sound – even sorrow, marked by dips into minor keys, is somehow assimilated into the fundamentally delighted music.
Miller’s American heroes, dragging their impoverished asses through depressed interwar Europe, are peculiarly vitalized by this dour atmosphere. They are, said George Orwell, “Whitman[s] among the corpses.”
The Being Brigade wants to bring home to us our capacity to transcend this and that life narrative and instead uncover an intrinsic flowing joy within, a ceaseless ecstatic internal movement that speaks of the imperishable bliss of simply being.
This joy is most dramatic, most defiant, when it bursts out of situations of profound negativity, as when, imprisoned in Lubyanka, Aleksander Wat finds that the darker the literature he reads there, the happier he becomes:
The more pessimistic the book, the more pulsating energy, life energy, I felt beneath its surface – as if all of literature were only the praise of life’s beauty…
For me, Twombly’s big wobbly canvases have always been precisely this body electric, this unstoppably alive, grateful soul.
