A Pound of Flesh

“Thus ornament is but the guilèd shoreTo a most dangerous sea…” —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The latests meme fueling the zeitgeist is concerned with the obscene amount of money being spent on art, in this case one very specific triptych by the late Francis Bacon. The painting, Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) recently sold at auction for $142.4 million, allegedly to Elaine Wynn. Ironically her ex-husband, the casino magnet Steve Wynn famously put his elbow through Francis Bacon’s favorite painter Picasso’s La Reve (1932). Even more ironic, is that after repairing the La Reve, it was sold to the billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen in a private sale for more than Elaine’s Bacon, $155 million dollars. In the gilded age in which we live where people like Wynn and Cohen grow richer gambling with other people’s money and the United States is experiencing the greatest disparity of wealth between the rich and the middle class, it is easy to understand how the shiny object in the room is the point of derision instead of the devices at work behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, this is not only a very old story it is one that ultimately reminds me of little distance we have traveled since the birth of modern art with Cezanne and Duchamp. One hundred and two years after Duchamp painted his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) popular culture remains confused, and even resentful of abstraction in art. Even Holland Carter, the Pulitzer Prize winning art critic with the New York Times, felt the need in his piling on the meme, to snarkely deride Francis Bacon as he was simultaneously disparaging money in the art world saying the sale of the Bacon painting was “a monument to two overpraised painters for the price of one.” When a writer for the New York Times takes umbrage with one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, we can hardly expect the general public to gain insight into the work. The real conversation here and one that is classically American is that we have always presumed that wealth not only purchases power, but holds greater weight with its opinions. As Americans living in the throws of late Capitalism the dirty secret is that we equate money with ideas. Lets take for instance Oprah Winfrey, the only living African-American billionaire and arguably one of the most powerful women in the world. A woman who has built an entertainment empire on a confessional, dare I say, arena for whiners in a talk show format is capable of dictating what books people will read because people value and trust her opinion. Jonathan Franzen the celebrated American author and intellectual, questioned the veracity of this very notion when Oprah chose his book The Corrections for her book club, ultimately propelling it and him to fame. Franzen said then, “I think she was surprised that I wasn’t moaning with shock and pleasure. I’d been working nine years on the book and FSG had spent a year trying to make a best-seller of it. It was our thing. She was an interloper, coming late, and with an expectation of slavish gratitude and devotion for the favor she was bestowing.” In essence, our culture is beholding to people largely undereducated and primarily motivated by the accumulation of wealth to serve as our taste makers, our cultural gatekeepers. Of course the wealthy have always served throughout time as cultural gatekeepers for the masses, but the biggest difference today is many of the people of great wealth in America today lack any real substantial education or background in the arts, literature or history. Oprah has been bestowed an honorary degree from Harvard and gave the 2008 commencement speech at Stanford. Why? Because those institutions like our central culture, believe that money is all that matters in life and that achieving success equates to making a lot of money. That mythos is even more reinforced when someone like Oprah rises up the ranks of wealth after being a poor black child in Mississippi. This however, does not and should not give her cultural agency anymore than you and I.

The question should not be does Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) deserve the high price tag it achieved at a Christies’ auction, but rather who are we listening to in order to gain a deeper understanding of the world. Who is serving as the interpreters of the next avant-garde movement? How are we educating our future generations so that they might achieve not just wealth, but a deeper moral and cultural understanding of the world? The challenges we face in the coming decades are like nothing mankind has faced since the end of the ice age. The full weight of climate change will demand an intellectual prowess that cannot be found in the false platitudes of talk show hosts, casino magnets and hedge fund managers. It will require a generation of culturally sophisticated, historically knowledgeable creative thinkers who can see their way through the mistakes of the past and forge a life-saving way forward that preserves human kind. The danger in the money associated with the art market today is not the amount of money or the fact that art is commanding such great fees, proportionally that has always been present since the time of the Greeks and Egyptians. No, the danger is the agency given to the taste makers of today, the people we are entrusting to value what is important to not just our generation but many generations to come. As with the great revolutions of the past, the market will correct itself and the great divide between the haves and have nots will shift back to a more reasonable position. The need is to reimagine our culture as something more than money or we are doomed to serve another culture in the future, perhaps the Chinese.

I don’t care how much the wealthy decide to value one painting over the next in order to attain a false sense of spiritual enlightenment or at its most base, status. Perhaps Elaine Wynn was competing with her ex-husband when she outbid the other two wealthy bidders, nearly paying the same price as Cohen paid for La Reve. I would like to think she loved the Bacon and desired it and wishes to share that love with the rest of us. The fact the painting wound up in the Portland Art Museum avoiding $14 million in sales tax portends a potentially different future. Regardless of what the wealthy think or don’t think when they pay these astronomical sums for works of art because the art market outperforms the stock market is ultimately meaningless. We all need to find meanings in works of literature, art and music as agent provocateurs which push us outside of our normal expectations and closer to a collective understanding of our existence. As Shakespeare eloquently revealed in The Merchant of Venice, our corporeal selves are precious and no price can adequately be placed on it. This is a far more important lesson than the price of art or any other commodity, no matter how inherently potent it may be. Where art does matter is in its ability to remind us of our range as human beings. Francis Bacon’s genius was in his unraveling of the interior selves of others and himself in the form of a painting. That psychology was deeply grounded in the physicality of the body.   

“Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful. I don’t think anyone has ever really understood that. Ham, pigs, tongues, sides, of beef seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I find it very beautiful. And it’s all for sale―how unbelievably surrealistic!”1

Of course when he said “it’s all for sale” he was referring to a meat market, but in today’s art market it could easily be transposed to the paintings themselves. I imagine he would be heartily laughing at the outrageous sum his triptych recently commanded. Bacon was a life long gambler and loved the thrill of chance. The thought of a woman who once co-owned casinos buying one of his works for a huge sum would sure have given him pleasure. Bacon used paint to convey the sensation of actual flesh, because flesh is reality. Buying works of art for astronomical sums may give you social status but it will never give you immortality. Nobody remembers the name of the collector who bought Van Gogh's Irises (1890) which in 1987 commanded the highest auction price at that time at a paltry $53.9 million. Who is remembered and revered is Van Gogh.

I recently went to visit with the now infamous triptych at the Portland Art Museum and as with the last viewing of Bacon’s I had at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was surprised at his command of paint. Francis Bacon was a painter’s painter and for those of us who have spent their lives indulging in the struggles of rendering paint into something meaningful, he speaks to us. What surprised me even more than the work itself, was the rapt attention given to it by others in the room. It sits in the basement alcove, completely by itself in its own room with a double bench placed in front of it. It’s church and the visitors that day were clearly finding something more meaningful than the fact they were looking at something incredibly valuable. They may have come for the spectacle of visiting with something worth $142 million dollars, but they left transformed by the power of Bacon’s abilities. It will be important for us to continually remind ourselves of the importance of great works of art in the coming decades outside of their commodification or any potentially false value placed upon them by their price tag at auction. Yes the art market is rigged so that it can enhance the wealth of the one percent, but that really doesn’t matter as long as we have the basic toolkit to look at work and derive our own meaning from it without dismissing it out of hand because Oprah Winfrey or Eli Broad failed to purchase it for millions of dollars.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtMqbbBZ24w&w=560&h=315]

1. http://aphelis.net/francis-bacon-last-interview-by-francis-giacobetti-1991-1992/

Ontology of the Sublime

“The question that now arises is how if we are living in a time without legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?”  —Barnett Newman

I’ve been considering the sublime a lot lately. This concept of observation that invokes awe. I recently completed Ross King’s book Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, an excellent, and detailed account of the painting of the Sistine Chapel that took the artists from 1508 to 1512 to complete. During the celebration of All Saints Day, that October 31^st, 1512 when the ceiling was finally unveiled in its entirety, did the cardinals, attendants, dignitaries and indeed Pope Julius II himself, look up at Michelangelo Buonarroti’s ceiling and find it sublime as many of us do today? I ask this question because it appears, that for all practical purposes, as Barnett Newman said in the 1960’s, that we have lost our ability to create the sublime.

Sublime is something altogether different. Sublime, I believe requires abstraction, as Newman said. By this I mean using our imaginations in combination with our knowledge and experience to construct manifestations of what we observe beyond the simplicity of what are eyes are telling us (or any of the other senses for that matter.) Newman’s presumption, that we have lacked since the sixties this ability to abstract, might be argued in much of what is found in galleries and museums today. It would appear an ability to abstract is preventing us from producing, and in turn observing much that could be considered the sublime in art. However, I find myself surprisingly in disagreement with Newman’s comment, despite seeming overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I believe our capacity for abstraction has never been greater in human history and we are simply living in a natural in-between art state. A state that is percolating old ideas and mashing them against our current circumstances until we re-imagine the profound, the sublime, in a new way.

Here we are where one out of every seven people globally owns a smartphone and two-thirds of the planet has at least a mobile phone. Google’s search engine processes 24 petabytes (24m gigabytes) of data a day. We have sequenced the entire human genome. We have sent a probe beyond our universe and landed multiple crafts on Mars now roaming its surface, sending back data. We can look up any snippet of information in less than a quarter of second. We have looked back into time/space with telescopes to the edge of the Big Bang and visited the deepest ocean trench in the world. On the surface it appears this enormous amount of data is overwhelming us, rendering us not in awe but in a state of complacency. Much of the art being sold commercially and displayed in museums is recycling ironic gestures like a turgid whirlpool of endless self-referencing banality. The art world remains largely and firmly planted in traditions that no longer comment on our current reality let alone re-imagine a future one. “Art is either plagiarism or revolution” as Gauguin said, and today we are seeing a great deal of plagiarism, but I believe that is not cause for alarm. I think we are experiencing another fallow time in the history of art, similar to the Middle Ages in Europe, but on a much more compressed scale.

The Renaissance was a time of concentrated wealth whose expression was quantified in expanding culture based on classical ideas found in ancient Greece and the Roman empire. Although a time of corruption, war, plague and pestilence it was also a time of growing science and technology. Religion, not technology formed the center of the growth in the European Renaissance and indeed supplied the wealth that provided for much of the greatness that lasts today in terms of artistic production. Julius II commissioned extraordinary artists (considered great craftsmen at the time) such as Michelangelo and Raphael. There were vast numbers of ignorant people living in relative squalor and then there were the elite who had access not just to better living standards, food and sanitation but knowledge. Michelangelo was well schooled in Latin, the Greek classics, and was carefully tutored in advanced methods of sculpture, fresco, painting and architecture as well as mathematics beginning at 15. He had access to the finest Florentine crafted pigments, some so rare their ingredients came as far away as Iran and cost their weight in gold. Michelangelo might not have had cell phones and the internet, but he had that periods equivalent. His assistants in the making of the ceiling were the finest in Europe, all masters in their craft and knowledge in their own right. So, then as now, a great separation existed between the have and the have nots, between technology and ignorance. It is precisely out this sort of mixture that great art is born.

We are emerging from a brief middle ages of culture, where the clock was briefly turned back out of ignorance fear and mostly out of greed. But from the ashes of that fading, impotent ideology, will emerge a new generation of artists who were born into the dynamics of our technologically centric world. This new generation of artists will circumvent old ideas directly by leveraging the technology that is second nature to them. Ideas on communication, human interaction, perception and even the very nature of reality will be upended and greatness will be born. The ironic loop is one of diminishing returns and we have yet to experience the full measure of art in the 21^st century and with it new forms of sublime. As Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe said in his book, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime; 

Technology is produced by capitalism in order to consolidate and extend capitalism’s interest, which include the latter’s constant transformation, because capitalism’s persistence depends on its being the source, so that the product is also the producer as thinking is thought’s producer and product. I have suggested that the sublime becomes identified with the idea and image of technology, appears within it and adopts its appearance, at the point where the origin of technology is found in earlier technological functions rather than anything ever done or thought by a human—which is to say, where the technological is seen to have become the origin of, that which makes possible, a kind of thought and a kind of body which wasn’t there before.

When Pope Julius II gazed upon the chapel ceiling during the final reveal by Michelangelo, he was excited and thrilled and he asked for more gold. The Pope did not encounter the sublime that day anymore than he did when he gazed upon the three frescos of Raphael’s in his private chambers. His ego and the context of power would not permit it. Michelangelo may have been the greatest living artist of the time, but he was still a craftsman, and artisan who drafted stories for the masses. The sublime experience was intended for those who came to the chapel for mass, not for those in power. Then, like today, art served in parallel to technological advancement as a gateway to the sublime. The third law of Arthur C. Clarke’s applies then and now, to both art and technology; “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is precisely why we haven’t yet seen the next generation of great art. Artists need to construct a kind of magic, that will reveal the underpinnings of a deeper knowledge and we will once again experience the sublime. The magic in Michelangelo was in his interpretation of often obscure bible passages and characters using an extremely difficult technique to master combined with some of the finest foreshortening and drafting techniques ever rendered by hand. Imagine painting something into wet plaster (intonaco) with a badger hair brush using pigments that have been hand-ground by monks in Florence on a curved surface 60 feet above the ground and representing perfect perspective in a contorted figure that is twice life size. The intonaco dries within one day, so you can’t paint the figure all at once but must break it into Giornate’s (the famous figure of Adam on the ceiling took just four.) That would indeed seem like magic.

Manifestos and Madness

“Mama always told me not to look into the eye's of the sunBut mama, that's where the fun is” —Blinded by the Light, Bruce Springsteen

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice. —F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909)

In the recent issue of Harpers Magazine an article by T. M. Luhrmann focuses on how the Christian Hippie movement of the sixties became the evangelical right of today. It was both mesmerizing and enlightening to read about this recondite subject that so few have researched. We have a strong tendency as Americans to wish for expeditious answers and ignore the deeper meaning and history behind things. To discover the Jesus Christ Superstar of my youth, that even I, a devote atheist, found inspiring, was the underpinning of much of what Democrats today despise, was nothing short of revelatory. It occurred to me, however, that we are wired for such things be it religion, art, science, etc.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvVr2uks0C8]

In 1909 a young radical named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote the Futuristic Manifesto. That same year Nicola Tesla had presciently predicted our current wireless network we are so desperately dependent on, Ernest Shackleton had nearly died visiting the south pole and the fragmented sub-cultures of Europe were stirring with resentment toward empire. It is a compelling bookend to the denouement that was the sixties. The flower children, hippies and the Summer of Love actually set the stage for todays right wing radicalism as a bookend to Marinetti’s embrace of Futurism.

Luhrmann eloquently describes his investigation revealed the children of devote Catholics and Protestants who loved God, country and JFK bore the fruit of the evangelical, privileged class of the right-wing today. Hippies drawn to hallucinogens and free love in order to escape the confines of modernity found themselves pulled toward the security of big church love and a need to belong outside of addiction, filth and disillusion lay the open arms of evangelicals and a different, more structured religious belief. In effect this is absolutely the same thing that has happened in art throughout time. The ebb and flow of radical vision gives way to reactionary responses that reinforce accepted forms of creating. The late Thomas Kinkade, the so-called ‘painter of light’ was the most successful and popular artist in America over the past twenty years. Kinkade, just like the Futurists, leveraged a popular mythos to express a dogma, in his case a Christian ethos. Americans sacrificed critical thinking for wealth, which in turn they were denied by the elite. As Robert Hughes said of Jeff Koons,

“If cheap cookie jars could become treasures in the 1980s, then how much more the work of the very egregious Jeff Koons, a former bond trader, whose ambitions took him right through kitsch and out the other side into a vulgarity so syrupy, gross, and numbing, that collectors felt challenged by it.”

It is a parallel reflection of our inability to step back from the edge and accept the uncertainty of not-knowing. We want, damn it, we demand certainty in our society. We hold smart phones that provide instant answers, drive cars connected to satellites hovering in orbit 22,000 miles above our heads yet lubricated by a fluid born from the detritus of millions of years ago. It is no wonder we live in an age of fracture, of a potential universal schizophrenia. Marinetti and his fellow Futurists rang the warning bell of this ideation in 1909! Of course, Marinetti himself avoided the outcomes of his belief but many of his fellow Futurists fell pray to it, dying as a result of horrors of trench warfare.

Whether art, religion or science the key to enlightenment is ones ability to come back from the edge of radical experience. Science is now reaching the same boundaries of truth as all dogmas before it. Cosmologists like Leonard Susskind question the idea that truth is accessible at all. He has walked to the edge of reality and he has stepped back. This is closer to the methodology native cultures of the Amazon basin use to accept the complexities of our world. It is a fair analogy. Although, Amazonian basin tribes do not carry smart phones or access the internet, they are surrounded by a pharmacopeia that to this day is still little understood by modern medicine and science. Shaman acutely understand the relationship between the frontiers of our own imaginings, understanding and reality and the present. They say ‘plants speak to them directly’ but really mean the ingestion of psychotropics allow access to a knowledge that expands our postmodern understanding of reality. Like the best artists, scientists and devout, they approach the sublime with feet firmly planted on the ground. They do not embrace dogma, but rather the uncertainty of our world and in so doing they scrape against a kind of truth.

“If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.” ― Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

For those hippie, Jesus-freaks turned right-wing evangelicals, the psychotropics ingestion of the sixties was a result of psychological loss. They discontent from the mainstream culture was not as it would seem a matter of direct denial of its efficacy, but rather more psychologically bound in its adherence to sociological structures that disrupted acceptance. If you’ve watched the show Mad Men then you understand this reaction. 1950’s America was a reaction to the simultaneous hubris of winning a war that we had little to do with (compared to Europe or Asia) and left America wealthier than it deserved due to its bounty of industrial resources. It was denial of death (as opposed to the Futurists) and an embrace of immortality (realized the in the dogma of corporate culture). Beware the manifesto, the embrace of certainties, liberal, conservative or otherwise as it only leads to a society of judgement, and absolution.

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.

---

^[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.

Cynical Hope

Modernism was born of a utopian ideal to elevate humanity through science and order. It looked inward and saw perfection, clarity and infinite creativity. The promise never came to fruition. The perfect alignment and sweeping majesty of the Plaza in Albany, NY or Niemeyer’s (who died last week) Brasilia, became monuments to the banality of capitalism and the excesses of human hubris. Hope turned to cynicism turned into postmodernism and we’ve never looked back. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UCT6J0u8B4]

Say what you will, even of minimalism in the sixties and seventees, but it cannot be said it was depressive. The coldness of minimalism was modernities mind, not the cynicism of today. Like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, minimalism offered an interior space that suggested the power of the infinite mind, that anything was possible, even if that was dangerous. Postmodernism, today’s ruling art class, is the post Punk pun. The regurgitation of modernism’s themes as self replicating memes that finds nothing profound and everything worth riffing on. This is the mood of Killing Them Softly.

The film staring an A-list of method actors is based on the book by George V. Higgins, Cogan’s Trade. Higgin’s book is paralleled closely in the movie revealing the inbred underworld of a 1970’s Boston. The movie swaps the 70’s gloom for the ironic optimism of Obama’s first election at the end of 2007. Ray Liotta and James Gandolfini appear but in roles that work to undermine their previous roles as psychopaths and killers. The central character is Jackie Cogan played by Brad Pitt, a mob hitman who reports to what he calls a “committee.” The mob leadership persistently frustrates Cogan with their corporate sensibility for slow decisions and sloppy management. It’s a mashup of The Soprano’s and The Office. The mob committee’s pointman is Richard Jenkins, who plays with finesse and understatement a corporate attache’. Cinematically, it is fresh and takes time when needed to unwind a general environment of pathos, cynicism and laissez-faire. Action takes place in slow motion or a matter-of-fact pace. The director, Andrew Dominik is more interested in sedate settings as backdrops for colorful abstraction, blurred light and what seems like a perpetual rain.

From a cinematic standpoint it is easy to see Dominik’s homage to Cassevettes and Friedkin or even David Fincher, but the sensitivity to light, especially that putrid, yellowish light of faded fluorescent fixtures was reminiscent of the minimalist artist Dan Flavin. Flavin who in the early sixties discovered mundane, off-the-shelf fluorescent lighting as his medium, pursued light as material object. The work juxtaposes banal materialism of an everyday object and the transcendent quality of light itself. The light fixtures, white metal boxes, have come to represent modernities’ egoism. He never concealed this, never tried to hide its banality.

Killing Them Softly embraces the commonplace setting of criminality and the pettiness of human behavior even during moments of transcendent beauty, just as Flavin’s work demonstrates. Beauty comes in tiny moments, a slow motion bullet penetrating glass or the blurred sparklers of an election night celebration. There is a magnificent scene with Scott McNairy (Frankie) and Ben Mendelsohn (Russell) sit in some squatters’ apartment drinking and smoking. Russell is retelling a tale of his trip to Florida for some illicit activity while he shoots heroin. In and out of his fading consciousness, at the edges of euphoria the lens gently flares into a blurry, crystalline light with darkened edges. It happens only twice, briefly, but it is potent. Dominik is saying, we live in these tiny moments of the divine amidst our every day mundane existence, just like Flavin did.

Dan Flavin’s fluorescent fixtures are characters unto themselves playing out a similar drama. Look at the beauty that is possible within my electricity, they say, all the while never escaping their core nature, a mass produced light fixture used ubiquitously from the late 1950’s till today. Stare at them and they are transcendent and mesmerizing a reminder of the zen possibility of simplicity overcoming complexity. Flavin once said; “My icons do not raise up the blessed savior in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.”

There is a quality of light throughout Killing Them Softly that is either fluorescent or reminiscent of it. Even the night shots where streetlight mercury vapor mimics the greenish tint of fluorescent glow. It operates as a grounding mechanism for the film, allowing it to function dualistically. On one hand, fluorescent lighting is the cheap, mass-produced lighting of the everyday and on the other, it is soft, cold and flattening, making shapes and characters vapid. The characters in Killing Them Softly are soulless, empty figures. They are deeply cynical, greedy and ironic. This is the world of Ayn Rand personified on a small scale. Jackie Cogan poignantly sums this up,

“My friend, Thomas Jefferson is an American saint because he wrote the words 'All men are created equal', words he clearly didn't believe since he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He's a rich white snob who's sick of paying taxes to the Brits. So, yeah, he writes some lovely words and aroused the rabble and they went and died for those words while he sat back and drank his wine and fucked his slave girl. This guy wants to tell me we're living in a community? Don't make me laugh. I'm living in America, and in America you're on your own. America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fuckin' pay me.”

Standing in Dia Beacon a few years ago, I couldn’t help but feel the cold and empty conceit of the American empire writ large in Flavin’s Monuments V. Tatlin series. These constructs mimicking the Russian avant-garde work of Vladimir Tatlin is also an homage to American empire. Formalism is the minister in the church of business. His dig on Tatlin and America, is the idiocy of monumental thinking. The works are transgressive towards modernism while simultaneously celebratory of it. In the same cynicism of Jackie Cogan, Flavin spoke of the work in terms of its deliberate lack of obscurity. We ignore the moments, the flashes of light, or the tiny obviousness before us in favor of something larger. Like Cogan in Killing Them Softly, Flavin’s work kills softly, from a distance and without emotion.

“It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else. . . . Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered. There is no overwhelming spirituality you are supposed to come into contact with. I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is no invitation to meditate, to contemplate. It's in a sense a "get-in-get-out" situation. And it is very easy to understand. One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.”