46 is 27 or The Math of Artistic Self Destruction

“. . . because art isn't something out there…It is not a "picture" of an artistic experience. It has to become experience itself, and in that sense it can only be earned by one's own body rhythms, one's own color sense, one's own sense of smell, of light, of texture being so automatically articulated there is no possibility not to make a work of art, in the sense that it is impossible to think of any other choice.”   —Robert Motherwell

I have always subscribed to Albert Camus’ “…in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” That is not a trite or easy statement in my mind. It is not suggesting that those that take their own lives are cowards, but they are indeed weak at least at the point of departure. More often than not, intoxicants smooth the way toward oblivion removing doubt and vexing any extant courage. When you reach a certain age—middle age, the weight of being begins to amplify in a way you could not have predicted when young. You accumulate so much that some days you feel as if you’re floating in a river of trash that is making it increasingly more impossible to reach the shore. Artists more than most, are acutely affected by this accumulation because they spend their lives deliberately trying to accumulate, or soak up the world around them, so that they might reflect back that unique experience to the world. Motherwell called it experience, Bacon sensation and Picasso said art was “and instrument of war.” Although I am normally loathe to employ metaphors of violence, Picasso was right, about art. As the saying goes, there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. Just insert artist for pilots and you get my point. Of course there have been and are great artists who have somehow managed both the courage and the stamina to fight through to old age, but for some the weight of genius is far too much. This was made poignantly clear once again this past weekend when Phillip Seymour Hoffman took his life with heroin.

All artists learn to mimic as way to get through to their own ideas, their own stories, but actors are unique in that their own stories only ever come through in the act of mimicking another’s. For great actors, and that list is very, very small, this must be an even more difficult burden to bear. As with Hoffman, the goal is to so thoroughly inhabit this fictional construct on the page that you make that imagined being whole in a way that leaves no doubt to the veracity of their existence. And yet, within that embodiment you must also lend your own uniqueness, your own personal artistic sensibility but without it becoming apparent or conflicting with the imagined character that was invented on the page. Hoffman himself commented on the difficulty of this strange life he was living when he said,

“Acting is so difficult for me that, unless the work is of a certain stature in my mind, unless I reach the expectations I have of myself, I'm unhappy. Then it's a miserable existence. I'm putting a piece of myself out there. If it doesn't do anything, I feel so ashamed. I'm afraid I'll be the kind of actor who thought he would make a difference and didn't.”

Making a difference to great artists is portraying the baldness of truth. What is hard for us all and seems universal in the mourning for Hoffman is the characters he chose to portray were misfits and oddballs, in other words anyone who is human. He invoked so much humanity in a little gesture or the movements of his face that he made empathy tangible to us, if even for a brief moment. You can do your damnedest to practice Buddha-nature in your day to day when confronted with angry, oblique or even smarmy people, but the truth more often than not, is we do not empathize with these people but dismiss them as outsiders. Hoffman’s genius was to imbue these difficult people with an innate humanity that is impossible to dismiss while watching his acting. As he said, “If you’re a human being walking the earth, you’re weird, you’re strange, you’re psychologically challenged.” Unfortunately, most of all for Hoffman himself, and then his family and then us, is that the weight of this construct inevitably became too much for him to bear. He had experienced too much and slipping back into an old addiction with heroin was all that was needed to ease his trajectory into nothingness.

It occurred to me shortly after getting a text from my brother than Hoffman had overdosed, that another great artist had committed suicide just a couple of year’s ago at the exact same age; David Foster Wallace, another three-named genius. I could easily imagine P.T. Anderson taking on Infinite Jest and ascribing Philip Seymour Hoffman to portray several of the characters from Wallace’s book in a movie, ala Peter Sellers, an acting genius from another time. Both Wallace and Hoffman succumbed to their demons in middled age and arguably at the height of their powers, or at least we’d like to think so. Wallace was very clear in stating his doubts about such powers and I can only imagine, given the previous statements by Hoffman, in combination with his heroin use, Hoffman was facing the same doubt. I suppose you could argue that both Hoffman and Wallace’s work was postmodern in the way they battled irony, emotion and the complexities of humanity, but I think of them more as throwbacks to another time when sincerity was pushed to its limits to manifest itself in the great art movement that was Abstract Expressionism. Where Abstract Expressionism attempted to unravel the banality of evil and the emergence of American hegemony and capitalism, the so-called postmodern work of Hoffman and Wallace had attempted to find a renewed hope and sentimental emotional grounding in this post 9/11 world. Both movements required their artists to dig into the depths of their own psyche’s. Both movements had their victims of that pursuit. This is how artistic accumulation works. A kernel of an idea blooms into a life long pursuit of a very particular (in time) truth and you follow that rabbit down the hole to see where it leads. The hole is dark and deep and some don’t come out on the other side because they forget as Picasso said that “art is a lie to uncover the truth.” The lie becomes the truth and then they fracture. Gorky planted the seed of Abstract Expressionism and then Pollock picked it up and ran with it. For them they were interested in the symbolic aspects of the psyche not the imagined ones of postmodernism today, but their emphasis on sincerity was the same. As Donald Kuspit so accurately pointed out a decade ago in his The End of Art, art has now abandoned any idea of sincerity in exchange for money. Kuspit lays waste to the artist who created a fracture in postmodernism, Andy Warhol to unveil a deeper truth about the loss of authenticity and sincerity in art today.

“Warhol’s art exploits the aura of glamor that surrounds material and social success, ignoring its existential cost. His art lacks existential depth; it is a social symptom with no existential resonance. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” This consummate statement of postmodern nihilism suggests the reason that art has lost faith in itself: It no longer wishes to plunge into the depth — it doesn’t believe there is any depth in life, and wouldn’t be able to endure the pressure of its depth if it believed life had any — which is why it has become risk-free postart dependent upon superficial experience of life for its credibility.”

There is something in Hoffman and Wallace’s work that wants to unravel this spurious notion propagated by Warhol. Even though as artists they are exploring a new terrain that both led up to and carried us through 9/11 of this imaginary space conflated by ironic gesticulation, there’s is an authentic space disconnected from the conceits of money. Wallace took years to write books and often chose to write low-paying essays instead because he followed his mind. Hoffman was a renowned stage actor who recently played Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman on Broadway. To these artistic geniuses money was nothing more than a confusing object, a demon, not an important component to their work. In fact, this only adds to the sadness brought with their loss because we can see how both them struggled with the inhumanness of money and celebrity.

It would be easy to lament the death of Hoffman, as Wallace, Pollock and Gorky before him, as a loss of a special kind of authenticity, but that would be a mistake. There are authentic artists still going strong who have held on to their courage and not succumbed to the weight of accumulation. The practice of art is in so many ways in parallel to the great mathematicians who have struggled with the concept of infinity (a subject that Wallace himself found dear and consistent with his mathematical background) in that is persistently questions the nature of our reality and in so doing, reforms it. It takes a strong will to step back from this ouroboros of the mind because it would be easy to let go and let it take you. Indeed the nature of what we call postmodernism is concerned with that third level of experience where as Zizek says, “function is dissociated from form.” The normal constraints of the physical world or the symbolic are left behind for a pure exploration of the imaginary. It is not authenticity in and of itself that makes losing genius so hard, it is the combination of empathy and truth. In a world of deadened emotions due to video games, fear, endless war and televisions’ perpetual emphasis on violence, finding empathy in art is getting harder and harder.

There is no lesson to be learned from the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman, in fact that might be the hardest pill to swallow, but there is encouragement that there are still artists born who retain the wish to go deeply down the rabbit hole on everyone else’s behalf, even if they don’t come out the other side. Hoffman’s death puts a finite point on his career of his own choosing and I prefer to honor that rather than speculate on the greatness that might have been. There is so much to be learned just from his one performance in The Master it reminds me of staring at Pollock’s Lucifer (1947) and remembering what it is to be human.

Anthropic Landscapes and Memory

Apologies to Simon Schama’s fine book Landscape and Memory, but my title is appropriate for discussing how we observe art. The question that often comes up with friends of mine who are non-visual artists is “how do I look at art?” At a recent open studio, a friend of mine and I were ruminating on the fact his two studio mates received a great deal more attention at these events than he did. His work is an extension of the abstract expressionist vein. His fellow studio artists create much more traditional work that harkens back to the 19^th century traditions — plein air landscape paintings and wire mesh sculptures of beautiful human bodies. One after the other we would watch people enter his studio, garnish a bewildered look and either pause like a deer in the headlights or scurry out unable to form words. I am not, by any means advocating one form over another. They are all accomplished artists in their own right. What is mystifying is the very specific reaction to abstraction (without bogging down in the argument that they are all technically abstract artists). Why are Americans adherent in 2013 to work that is based on ideas 160 years old? It is not as though Abstract Expressionism is young.

Arshile Gorky, the progenitor of Abstract Expressionism began making work pushing in that direction in 1930. In 1942, the New School artists saw a painting at Betty Parsons by Max Ernst made from dripping paint from a can tied to a string. Shortly thereafter Pollock began experimenting with drip painting until he was ‘discovered’ in 1947. The greater American public has been aware of abstract expressionism since Life magazine published its now famous exposé on Jackson Pollock in 1949, 64 years ago. So why the cognitive dissonance or at the very least, misunderstanding and mild approbation to Abstract Expressionism?

Our modern world is fraught with ambiguity and a lack of knowledge-authority. Where painting was once looked upon as the source of some of that knowledge-authority, offering a gateway to our subconscious at the genesis of apocalyptic behavior, it now holds virtually no authority. As J. M. Bernstein says, “So the disenfranchisement of art entails the disenchantment of nature, which disenchantments jointly entail the disenchantment of society.”^[i] A recent American Psychological Association survey^[ii] discovered that Millennials are the most stressed out generation yet due in large part to their hyper-connectivity with smart phones, tablets and computers. To Bernstein’s point, our contemporary world is accessed almost exclusively through the simulacrum and it’s stressing the hell out of us. If we are to believe Bacon’s approach to painting as sensation then how is that possible by looking at Pollock on your iPhone? At its core, viewers feel disassociated from abstraction because it resembles a pixelation of their simulated daily experience. On the other hand, the arcadia of 19^th century painting and sculpture, feels much more secure in its avoidance of anything digital at all. Its simulation provides a gesture toward nature and forgotten landscapes, not the advance of psychotherapy and the digital age. Despite the failings of Denis Dutton and Ellen Dissanayake’s attempts to quantify art-making as anthropological grounded^[iii], the foundations of our residual memories do seem to be made from the collective recollection of our early ancestors arcadian experiences on the great plains of the African subcontinent. Why else would Picasso be more palatable than Pollock to a global audience if not for his theft of the tribal?

Getting back to the question of how one should look at art, I have come to realize its the same as asking how do you taste food. Both are couched in a combination of epigenetics, life experiences and historical knowledge. This is the kind of thinking behind Schama’s book Landscape and Memory. Speaking on the nature of Anselm Keifer’s work in the context of German history, specifically Naziism Schama astutely comments, “For it has attached to countless artists and anthropologists who have parted company with Enlightenment skepticism about the cultural force of myth and magic and who have seen in their complicated symbolic elaboration something more than a hoax perpetrated on the naive by the unscrupulous.” There is a seduction in how we own our observations whether scholar, scientists or barista. All art is selling a seductive observation. How we look at another’s observance is highly dependent on our own seductions, experiences, genetics and memory.

Abstract Expressionism is very self referential, meaning it focuses inwardly on both a psychology of observation as well as art history itself. Pollock was equally enamored with dismantling and reconstructing the conventions of painting technique, approach and practice that came before him as he was in unravelling his on manic depression through the sensation of painting. It is asking a great deal of people in today’s existence of simulacrum and simulation to extend their own observations simultaneously inward and free of irony, as well as metaphorically toward the experience of paints plasticity in service to sensation. It’s not impossible but it is indeed an esoteric exercise that will likely only be coveted by a select few.

Retraction and reactionary behavior is a logical outcome to rapid and disruptive change. Our current obsessions with the magical realms whether religious doctrine or the Twilight movies is just such a reactionary expression. The 70’s dreams of nuclear holocaust have transformed into zombies and vampires. Our addition to tool-making in the age of accelerated progress is causing our minds to fracture and is freezing creative thinking. In just my lifetime we have gone to a firm believe in Einstein’s relativity to the notions of multiverses and anthropic string theory. This severe compression of technological sophistication and philosophical expansion combined with our hyper-connectivity (try answering a trivia question without reaching for your smart phone) will inevitably force us through to another kind of existence, whatever that may be. In the meantime, we are forced to contend with our own dissonance and longing for utopian forms as a weak justification that whatever we do technologically it will lead, contrary to all past indicators, to a richer kind of existence. The new art will have to address Leonard Susskind’s assertion that reality may forever be beyond reach of our understanding. I’m looking forward to people asking me how to look at that art.

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^[i] Bernstein, J. M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006. Print. p. 241

^[ii] http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/256133.php

^[iii] I am not disputing an obvious anthropological underpinning to art-making but rather the philosophical or anthropological scientific framework that Dutton and Dissanayake use to make their particular and related arguments related to how art is made.

My Twombly

My Twombly When I was invited to contribute to this blog and asked to write, as my first assignment, a personal epilogue to the recently ended life and career of Cy Twombly, I questioned whether my own knowledge of the artist and his work was sufficient to construct even a modest statement of informed inquiry. Should I first dust off my undergraduate bibles for a refresher course in classical mythology and the relics of antiquity? Must one have studied semiotics, become fluent in Lacan, made the pilgrimage to Roland Barthes, and met Clement Greenberg at the crossroads of aesthetics and apotheosis before taking that fatal turn toward Derrida? How far down the rabbit hole of academia must one go in order gain a firm foothold on Twombly? Into what thicket of intellectual discourse must one tread? Of course, perpendicular to this very question runs another: why does work so often described as child-like attract such intellectual admiration from theorists and artists alike? It is perhaps because Twombly was, after all, a painter who imbued his work with labyrinths of allusion to poetry, philosophy, and history which, while not allegorical, nonetheless spun myriad opportunities for meta-synchronous reference and trans-historical dialogue.

Consider, for example, Twombly’s “Apollo and the Artist” (1975).

Whether we engage with the painting before knowing its title or vice versa, we know we must search our memory for who and what was Apollo. There are, of course, not one Apollo but many: the Dorian Apollo, the Minoan, the Anatolian, yet it is the Delphic Apollo with which we are most familiar, the prophetic deity attending the Oracle of Delphi who presided over medicine, healing, arts, poetry, music, and much else.  Hermes, from whom we have the term hermeneutics, the process of discovery and interpolation, created for Apollo the lyre, the musical instrument (associate muse-ical and museum) to accompany lyrical hymns of poetry.

The use of palimpsest so prominent in Twombly’s artwork draws convenient metaphor to the artist’s retreat in 1957 (which also marked the closing of the Black Mountain College where he studied) away from emerging American postwar consumerism to Italy where ancient art and relic still stood as icons of a classical Arcadia. In Rome, Twombly’s abstract expressionist style grew modernist roots into the cracked foundation of European past.

Returning to the painting, we may think we recognize allusive clues: Mediterranean blues (Twombly identified himself as a Mediterranean painter), a musical clef symbol, a laurel branch. But a search for symbolism, in Twombly’s pictures will go only so far before the viewer is pulled under the surface of familiarity into a watery world where the signifier of language retains its intonation but is dislodged from signified meaning, like the voice of Charlie Brown’s school teacher whose muffled unintelligible speech is not unlike a voice heard through a wall, or underwater. We can explore “Apollo and the Artist” as a map; our eyes navigate as they are trained to along the drawn directional arrows, up and across to our own familiar-looking habitat of alphanumeric symbols with arrangements we know and trust. We try continuing along the plane of a sentence toward meaningful conclusion, but suddenly the act of reading is disrupted. Twombly has arranged legible (at least that) numbers and letters alongside scribble marks so approximate to handwriting that the reading mind is still marching on toward meaning when we realize we are no longer standing on logos’ solid ground. We see signs that can no longer direct us; it seems that wherever we have ended up, our own language is no longer spoken here.

Enter inference. Twombly’s writing marks have been referred to as gestural, iconic, aniconic, calligrammatic, evocative of runes, akin to graffiti. The ancient Greek word for the verb to write is graphein, which means to inscribe, incise, scrape off. Naturally the ancestral derivation of our current meaning may speak more to the process by which writing was made than to the conceptual implications of overlay and removal, or subtraction versus addition of material or meaning. Yet it is in the paradoxical midst of these echoing processes that Twombly’s para-mimetic glyphs both approach meaning and slip it, the way the populace of dashes in Emily Dickinson’s poetry simultaneously link and separate lines, are as much a part of the language as words, and suggest a trailing of mind from words into that for which there are no words, while also acting as a lifeline back from that realm.

In reading Twombly’s writing marks one finds what is presented, not what is represented; that is to say, if his paintings evoke a deus ex machina, it is because he creates a past-present allusive dialectic through an anachronous linguistic mechanism, or medium. It may be tempting to believe that Twombly’s pictoral context is subsumed by its textual relevance, but it is precisely the relation between the two that offers the viewer the greatest freedom in appreciating the work.

Yet despite direct references to classical text or modern literature, Twombly’s paintings remain friendly and buoyant in a way that the work of other abstract expressionists did not. Twombly’s paintings, on the other hand, cradle the viewer in safe, natal spaces of beauty often rich with vivid color, yet both entertain and guide us with the element of surprise. The words surprise and suddenly derive from the same root word meaning emerging from beneath the surface. While “Apollo and the Artist” appears to sink chromatically and formally into deeper realms of oracular mysticism, we find we are protected and carried up by Apollo and the artist, since Delphi shares textual allusion to a dolphin by way of delphus, a Greek word associated with womb.

So while Twombly worked heavily with literary allusion, referencing well-known poets such as Alexander Pope, Rilke, Yeats, whose works may not be established in the minds of the masses but whose names are generally recognized, Twombly also references utterly obscure poets like the 7^th century BCE poet, Alkman, who haunts Twombly’s “Coronation of Sesostris” (2000) and reappears in the four panels of “Leaving Paphos Ringed With Waves” (2009), the words a line from Alkman’s poetry.

I say that the artist referenced literature, but I do not believe as others do that his paintings are referential. One need not know that Paphos was the island home of Aphrodite. To the contrary, Twombly’s work can equally be seen as so strictly self-referential that it is therefore autonomous, in which case the meaning of the work, if there is one, is found within that loop of self to reference to self-reference to simply self again. While Twombly may have delighted in the possibility, however unlikely, that his viewers would rush to their nearest bookstore to take home a ten-pound copy of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, he did not paint solely toward a well-schooled demographic of English majors. In fact, many might argue his true intended audience are first-graders still capable of expression abstracted from meaning or any other establishment of rule.

At the other end of Twombly’s perceived lyric ideology is what art critic and historian Simon Schama calls, in his introduction to the Whitney monograph Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, Twombly’s “happy-scrappy quality” (“Cy Twombly,” 2004, pg. 17). I love this, and I find Schama’s playful candor a fabulous foil to Roland Barthes, who also supplies an introductory essay for the monograph titled “Non Multa Sed Multum,” in which Barthes poses the question “How does one go about drawing a line that isn’t stupid?” (pg 38). Granted, Barthes’ essay validly defends Twombly against criticism that the child-like nature of the work belies lack of deliberation and want of technical skill, but the question imposes the very aesthetic governance that Twombly rebels against. Twombly’s hallmark technique of scribbling words, near-words, and marks suggestive of words (descriptions for which critics have no shortage of words), hems notions of reference and representation into the realm of the graphical dialogue, one taking place presently with paint, in a language of paint that remains within the painting without the necessary extension of a linguistic dialogue outside of it.

In the late 1960s Twombly completed a series of untitled paintings now commonly labeled the “blackboard paintings.”

Indeed, the paintings, produced using wax crayon and house paint, so resemble a schoolroom blackboard that we might consider why Twombly did not create the same artwork with chalk on slate. The “writing” seems as if it could easily be wiped away, like memory. It cannot. One feels a temporal tension in the work between permanence and impermanence. (Or is it not a tension at all, but a harmony?) In these paintings impermanence is both implied and indelibly denied, held not in a past tense or future tense, but in the past-perfect or future-perfect tense, where things will have already taken place relative to a moveable present. Memory is experiencing the past in the present. To illustrate, bring to mind your experience of learning grammar. The present perfect tense designates something that began in the past, and which continues into the present, or which effects into the present.

Some of you reading this will understand what I am saying. For others, my grammatical explanation sounds like gibberish (again, compare to the sound of Charlie Brown’s school teacher). The dichotomy I have just created by translating the “blackboard paintings” through an analogue language only some of you speak is precisely the broadcast level on which these not quite black-and-white paintings operate: divisions and oppositions between the recognizable and the unrecognizable, the recalled and the forgotten, the insinuation of time on memory and vice-versa that can, at any given instance, evoke entire mysteries of emotion simultaneously and without resolution.

Thus, returning to my question whether one must be scholastic to understand Twombly, I arrive at an inconclusive, but elementary, notion: some inchoate sense that Twombly has been working at the very core of epistemological inquiry. What do we think we know? Where does knowledge come from? And where does it go? How do we distinguish discovery from creation? Where is everything that isn’t here?

Cy Twombly leaves behind a body of work revealing glimpses of his own examination, unique to him alone yet, inscribed by, to, and with the collective human experience. So long as we remain part of that collective, we will have to be content in seeking what Cy Twombly now knows.

—Andra Maguran

Painting the Wraith

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."

— David Foster Wallace

We sit in rapt horror and conflicted emotion when reading Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men whether man or woman. Being a man I can only speak to that gender. The “interviews” conducted throughout the collection of short stories, for a female researcher who’s own character is a composite of those she interviews, form a unsavory landscape of the male ego. As a man you feel conflicted by your want, if you have any shred of dignity or empathy toward women, to feel disgust and repulsion toward many of the comments by the interviewee’s. Unfortunately, you also feel a tinge of identification with them as well. Within you is the understanding we are complex and confused animals often at the mercy of the opposite sex (and hope the opposite sex feels the same, but our fear prevents us from asking). This confusion takes on the form of gamesmanship, whereby we attempt to out-think, out-maneuver and out-wit women in what we believe an elaborate plot to unhinge us, leaving exposed, an empty shell of bravado, hubris and testosterone. Checkmate! Queen takes King.

In the early 50’s Willem de Kooning produced a series of portraits that helped form the foundation of Abstract Expressionism. This series of six “Woman” paintings created between 1951 and 1953 are evocative of the ambiguity Wallace so adeptly portrays fifty years later in his collection of Interviews. de Kooning’s relationship with women and specifically with his wife Elaine, was as complex as any of the interviews in Hideous Men. The power of the “Woman” series is in their ambiguous approach both physically and psychologically in portraying women. On the one hand these paintings are abstractions of women that can be seen to objectify (exaggerated breasts and big eyes) women as sex objects intended solely for the male gaze. This was the model moving through the sixties prior to the women’s liberation movement, and arguably remains a steadfast fixture within our culture today. It is also, under the surface a revealing gesture of the desires we are hardwired biologically to express to procreate. Abstraction after all is a simplification of the truth, the truth of seeing. de Kooning felt these desires and complexities of human interaction as a way of pulling previously unquestioned gender roles into the 20th century. In all likelihood, this was an unconscious act resulting in the paintings. Willem’s love for Elaine ran deep and despite a protracted period of estrangement and contention they never divorced. Elaine tirelessly promoted Willem in the early period of his career and is credited with his meteoric success much in the way Lee Krasner promoted her husband, Jackson Pollock. Elaine was a force to be reckoned with and despite working hard on behalf of Willem, built her own career as a painter and writer. Willem’s “Woman” paintings reflect the intense psychology, specifically of Elaine but of women in general. The powerful expressive quality of his brush strokes and color emulate this intensity, this hidden power within all women. Willem de Kooning’s Woman III is the Venus de Milo of our time, the winged Nike of Samothrace. It is homage and objectification, desire and respect — in essence of a majestic abstraction of the female archetype for the 20th century.

The postmodern age with all of its simulacra and simulation has confused and distorted our most basic of human understandings and emotions. As the writer Chris Hedges says we live in a kind of “moral nihilism.” In his latest book, Empire of Illusion he says we live...

“In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous.”

It is precisely this continuously layered irony with which Wallace was enamored. In his masterfully written expose on television E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, Wallace writes;

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."

Willem de Kooning witnessed the birth of this ironic purveyance in the early fifties with the prosperity that followed WW II. A dutch expatriate he had the background of a European, steeped in history and culture and the hubris of an American living at the beginning of it’s ascendency as a global superpower. Watching the apocalyptic conflagration of WW II left de Kooning and other European artists with utopian visions that hoped for a world of unmasked sybaritic desire and expression. Women, for de Kooning, became an iconic symbol for such utopian desire as emblematically embodied in his wife Elaine. However, much like Wallace decades later, de Kooning soon found that embracing womanhood solely from the perspective of a male dominated society was enough to grasp the complexities and dualities of the genders. As human’s we seek patterns and solutions to the complexities of life but seldom wish to recognize the paradox that produces in leading ever more questions. Artists do their best to lay bare these ambiguities in life so that we might find solace in beauty and just enough respite to contemplate our own blind, perfunctory postmodern drive to make the world simple. Wallace like de Kooning, laid bare the inherent confusion that comes with being a heterosexual man in the modern era with the hope of showing us all a road back to our most basic humanness. It is precisely the confronting of this ambiguity which offers us a way out of our multi-layered ironic existences. Men often confront women as wraiths, transparent visions of a more fully formed person that seems always out of reach. The uniqueness of the opposite sex should be seen as an apparition of emotional confusion whose dimension we don’t understand, but rather a human partner with a different biology sharing with us the human experience. We must not be spellbound by the wraith but metaphorically paint her into existence in order to free ourselves from the prison of absolutism.

“If I knew where I was sailing from I could calculate where I was sailing to.”  —No. 6, The Prisoner

right-hand image: Willem de Kooning, Woman III, 1953, oil on canvas.