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.
*********************
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.
Another whole year of fun art stories.
… 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.
********************************************
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.
****************************
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.”
************************************
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.
An art student at NYU sells cheese.
Okay, take a gander.
This wildly popular painting shows Jesus holding the divinely inspired American Constitution and glaring at a group of bad people downstage, right. Near the bad people lie scattered papers — Supreme Court decisions vesting political authority in the Court rather than God.
One bad person reads The Origin of the Species.
Prints of the painting have been displayed and sold at the Brigham Young University bookstore. Until recently.
[An] adjunct art professor at BYU found the piece way too politically charged, and expressed concerns to the bookstore that it was a propaganda piece for the tea party.
Her main concern was not Christ holding the Constitution, because most Mormons believe God had some role in the American founding, she said. Instead, her biggest problem was with specific ideological details portrayed…
There’s the “good” student who is holding a copy of Cleon Skousen’s book, “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which has been heavily promoted by Glenn Beck and somewhat “adopted” by the Tea Party, she said.
Among the “bad” people is a professor holding a copy of “The Origin of Species,” by Charles Darwin.
“For a university to have that promoted as a bad thing, where half the biology department probably has you read that, just seemed really out of place for BYU,” she said…
The art professor – clearly one of the downstage people – is not the only person at BYU who wanted this painting out on its ass. Once she looked at it carefully and complained, other people looked.
Faculty and administrators and store staff are embarrassed. They’re embarrassed that their bookstore stocks and displays outrageous kitsch that – alter a few faces and book covers – could have come out of North Korea.
The store’s decision not to stock this print anymore has so enraged l’artiste that he has pulled all of his work from the store. So there.
From the Taipei Times:
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei assured the public on Tuesday that all its exhibitions followed legal and safety regulations in the wake of a controversial show on Sunday in which sleeping pills were reportedly handed out.
Local artist Su Hui-yu (蘇匯宇) staged a sleepwalking exhibition entitled Stilnox Strolling, in which he appeared to be handing out Stilnox…
Jed Perl considers the ironies of postmodern appropriation art.
[T]he Andy Warhol Foundation [has refused] to authenticate a silkscreen self-portrait that Warhol instructed somebody else to make. Warhol had signed the painting and authorized its inclusion in his first catalogue raisonné, where it was even reproduced on the cover. I am not sure that anybody has actually said that this silkscreen is in fact a plagiary, but the Foundation will not say that it is real, either. …Warhol wasn’t even present; the artist spoke to the fabricator on the phone, to specify the red that he wanted.
Reminds me of Bill Reid.
Perl distinguishes between being influenced by a precursor, and simply appropriating the precursor (in the case of Warhol and Reid, the precursor is yourself):
[S]usceptibility, the sense of emotional connectedness, is what influence is all about as it unfolds in Western art, in the work of Michelangelo, Poussin, Delacroix, Cézanne, Picasso, and countless others. The chill of appropriation, with its emphasis on impersonality and anonymity, suggests not the great tradition but the academic tradition, a calculation about the past rather than an engagement with the past.
The appropriated piece can stage a statement or two — Everything is mass produced, including art. Individuality is a myth. — but cannot express feeling or craft.
A vault in Nanterre
Is the location where
They’re keeping a bunch of Picassos.
Monsieur Le Guennec?
The master’s vieux mec?
I fear that his asso is grasso.
Fisk University’s shocking indifference to – hostility to – its ownership of some of the twentieth century’s greatest artworks has finally exhausted the patience of Dwight Lewis, an opinion writer at The Tennessean.
Fisk’s attorney has said that Georgia O’Keeffe’s gift of the spectacular Alfred Stieglitz collection was never of much interest to the university, because most of it was created by “‘Caucasians’ who weren’t Southern and ‘never came to Nashville.'” And now, even with a fund having been offered for the collection’s maintenance, Fisk still wants to sell it all.
Fisk officials said a proposal filed in Chancery Court by state Attorney General Bob Cooper is a “scheme which fails to address Fisk’s survival.’’
A scheme? What in the world is wrong with Fisk’s leadership? There was no scheme involved in Fisk alumna Carol Creswell-Betsch establishing a designated fund at the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee so that the Stieglitz Collection could be maintained and kept at Fisk without the university having to spend any money.
… Johns Hopkins conference on The Science of the Arts, the most intriguing came from a biologist who, when asked if he thought aesthetic creation and receptivity were hardwired in us for evolutionary reasons, said:
No, I don’t think so. Our brains are so powerful… art is an epiphenomenon of that power. Art has fallen out as a side-effect of our complexity and sophistication as creatures. Art is clearly about communication, which is a fairly low-level survival skill… We’re not hardwired to be appreciators of art at a Darwinian level; we’ve simply evolved an incredibly complex central nervous system out of which art appreciation has evolved. When you have levels of complexity that are extremely high, you get unexpected phenomena, like the art instinct.
********************************
Speaking of evolution, UD notes that Leigh Van Valen, the University of Chicago scientist who originated the Red Queen hypothesis, has died.
Stephen Stearns, in a Yale course on evolution, said this about the Red Queen hypothesis:
[The hypothesis is that] all life on earth is in fact caught up in a coevolutionary web of interactions. And his evidence for that is that the long-term extinction rate is constant. If you look over the Phanerozoic, if you look over the last 550 million years, the probability that a species will go extinct, within a given period of time, has remained roughly constant.
There’s some slight evidence that maybe species have started to live a little bit longer. But, you know, broad brush, this claim is correct. Things have not gotten better at persisting, over the last 500 million years. So in some sense I think Leigh’s claim is probably true. Every time a species on earth tries to get a leg up, some other species compensates. So this is where that term comes from. This is an illustration from Through the Looking Glass by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). This–Alice is a pawn on a chessboard, and Alice is supposed to, in this mental game, march down the chessboard and get turned into a queen, when she reaches the end.
And the Red Queen, who is next to her, says, “Alice, this is a game in which you run as fast as you can and you can only stay in place.” So it’s like one of those nightmares that you have, where you’re running as fast as you possibly can, and you can’t get away. That’s Leigh Van Valen’s metaphor for evolution: everybody is running as hard as they can and they’re just staying in place; their fitness is not long-term improving.
———————————————–
Further intriguing ideas from the conference, these from Pat Metheny:
It’s really all just ideas. Jazz improvisation is a narrative, linguistic experience… You’re dealing with a vocabulary and a language you work to refine in order to say what you mean, to express yourself honestly. Aesthetic success is when communicative flow happens, when a certain engagement happens.
Music is this wild thing – you can’t see it, taste it, smell it. It’s unreal. But it’s so effective as narrative, as basic communication…
What I’m getting at is elusive, and hard to quantify.
The idea exists before the instrument. If you ask me to play Funny Valentine on three different instruments, I’ll play it the same on all of them.
