Post Desire

The Art of Oblivion

“... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.” ― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

DamNation still

Art has always lived at the edge between structure and entropy, whether metaphysically, psychologically, metaphorically, symbolically or directly. Neolithic cave paintings were ritualistic in their attempt to bolster humanities’ fragility against overwhelming odds. Simple hand prints on cave walls affirmed our raison d’être as we fought in our terribly short lives against the climactic and barbarous conditions omnipresent then. In a geological heartbeat we have returned to a place where similar conditions await on the near time horizon.

As the constructs of civilization began when the Natufians effectively settled some 12,000 years ago in the Levant, the seed was planted that humans would from then on, try to manufacture their environment. The rapid recognition that water could be harnessed to perpetuate an unnatural agricultural cycle led to animal domestication, villages, trade, money, etc. Art evolved slightly beyond being the bridge between terror and safety, to the bridge between the sublime (i.e. offerings to the gods) and domestication (pottery, decoration, etc.) Art served as a metaphor that repressed terror, and enabled us to overcome the elements by creating agriculture, animal husbandry and eventually production. Or so we thought. We wore icons that mimicked Gaia or Mother Earth which suppressed memories of the wild, ultimately leading us to commit matricide. It took us just 10,000 years to subjugate the global environment to the extent that we created an irreversible trend in its systems. There is no artistic symbol or metaphor adequate to unpack the dimensions of our impact on the globe. Perhaps this is why the art world has largely regressed into the tortured space of Wall Street’s Capitalism.

I have always been a believer in the sublime in art. From my early days of artistic formation I was drawn to works that lived outside or beyond the dimensions of humanity. I remember the first time I saw James Rosenquist’s F-111, mesmerized by the bravado of its scale and metaphorical power. Since those high school days I’ve seen many works of art that captivate the imagination with their grasping at the impenetrable void. Not one work in my lifetime has moved me as much as watching a section of glacier the size of Manhattan calving off of Greenland in the movie Chasing Ice.

We don’t really understand scale as human beings. Our neolithic brains have great difficulty rationalizing large scale. How do we assimilate 7.4 cubic km of ice crashing off the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland? That is enough fresh water to provide 3 liters (0.79 gallons) of fresh drinking water to every person on Earth for 348 days. The Great Pyramid of Giza is roughly 2,500,000 cubic meters or 0.0025 cubic kilometers. Therefore, the ice that calved in Chasing Ice represents the equivalent of 2,800 Giza Pyramids. The section that is shown on film breaking free represents a tiny fraction of the endangered remaining ice flows in both Greenland and the Antarctic. How does art act as a bridge now, between the terrors of climate change and humanity? Has art served for too long as an agent provocateur in our understanding of environment?

[vimeo 89928979 w=500 h=281]

A film just released (June 2014) by Patagonia called DamNation reveals the tragedy of the U. S. post-war dam building boom of 1950 to 1970. During that period of time 30,000 dams were built across the United States in a frenzy to harness nature and build a more powerful, prosperous nation. Currently there are 80,000 dams in the U.S., only 2540 of which produce any hydropower at all. Many of these dams counterintuitively destroyed habitat that now, under the current conditions of climate change, only worsen our dilemma. The movie focuses primarily on two regions of the country where hydropower was seen as a necessary and potent way to sustain the nation’s growth, the Pacific Northwest and the Western/Southwest regions of the U.S. One of the most intriguing aspects of the film is the dialogue around what I would consider performance art pieces. These symbolic gestures, first created by Earth First when they rolled a giant piece of black plastic down the front of the Glen Canyon Dam to signify it’s need to be severed, are unintentional art performances with the potential power to speak plainly to the larger symbol, the dam itself. In 1987 Earth First painted a giant crack on the (now removed) Elwha River dam to bring awareness to the destruction of millennial-old salmon spawning grounds blocked by the dam. Watching the movie, it struck me that a possible future for art in the 21st century is not activism per se, but the creation of experiences on human scale that once again bridge the divide between terror and security.

Ed Ayres, founder of WorldWatch Institute has said, “We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that ‘something’ is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that as been sustaining us.” Here is one of art’s fundamental roles, to expose the dimensions of human imagination beyond our everyday experiences. Art is uniquely qualified to contextualize the impending trauma that is already unfolding as a result of the beginnings of the Anthropocene era. What we so desperately need from art now is a parsing of the terrors of the sublime, of climate change, so that we might imagine a way to at the very least, to plug the gushing wound. What we don’t need from art is more pandering to money which is actually pandering to the past, the status quo which inevitably makes it less art and more visual onanism.

Rorate Caeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum (2005–2006)

There is a long standing tradition in arts relationship to environment that focuses on the symbolic and the sublime. Anselm Keifer arguably has taken this to its logical end point with his majestic, allegorical paintings and sculptures that use landscape as a symbolic metaphor to translate the myth and memory of Germany. Keifer’s has combined those elements nascent in Bierstadt, Turner, Cezanne and even Rothko and pushed them into a dimension so heavily laden with teleology they immolate landscape painting as a useful genre altogether. “The real problem—what we might call the Kiefer syndrome—is whether it is possible to take myth seriously on its own terms, and to respect its coherence and complexity, without becoming morally blinded by its poetic power.” Beyond this arose the land art aesthetes, engaging the environment directly. Unfortunately, and as extraordinary this work can be, it is increasingly become a mirror for the hubris of mankind's intersection with the environment rather than an elegy for its enduring and sustaining presence. Didactic attempts to unravel in the aesthetic our place on this blue dot is dead. Art must find a new way forward.

There is no other problem, issue or need, there is only one and in that sense we should take heart that our jobs as artists have actually been radically simplified in terms of focus. If art is a reflection of the now, the state of humanity acting as a mirror unto itself, then the only thing that needs mirroring is our own impending doom. If we cannot see fit to displace short term arrogance of our pitiful achievements in order to maintain what’s left of the wildness of this Earth, then we will surely perish as a species. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” Art has much to learn from people like the late Edward Abbey and I think it comes down to effective strategies. For years I’ve been in awe of those artists whose power resides in poetic scale and what many might describe as machismo. The work of Walter De Maria, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Anselm Kiefer, and Richard Serra have captivated me due to their elegiac form, sense of grandeur and push beyond human scale. I still believe there is a place for works like Lightning Field, Roden Crater or Serra’s great tilted steel forms. I am now coming to believe these works are looking more and more aligned with an age that has passed. The time of humans will only be sustained if we stop imposing ourselves so directly on the environment and begin to deconstruct some of the impositions from our past. This is not to say that humanity and art should embrace some ecotopia, because that is both impossible and equally salacious. Rather there is a middle way—a measured middle ground—and I’m hopeful art will show us the way. There are extant artists in our presence we can look to. The work of Gabriel Orozco, Mel Chin, Hans Haacke, and Diana Lynn Thompson, to name a few, are artists who provide an alternative to the monumental.

Mel Chin & Hans Haacke artworks

My nature is to be optimistic, but the current conditions of the world are making that more challenging each day. There is no real paradigm shift, no terror in people’s eyes over the imminent loss of the Western Ice Shelf of Antarctica, the ever increasing average yearly global surface temperatures of the planet or the desertification of the San Juaquin Valley. In a land of relative comfort and prosperity enamored with corporate consumerism, it is easy to understand why this is so. Films like DamNation, Chasing Ice, and Do The Math can only take us so far. Documentaries, as powerful and emotionally wrenching as they can be, are stunted by their transient, filmic nature. They are also a form of preaching to the choir. A new kind of subtle art might open the door for the middle, the unconvinced and the comfortable classes to see the real terror around us and take action. At least that’s my optimistic hope. There are points of light in the darkness but the real question is will we have the courage to flood the room with light completely before we run out of time. Once again I’ll share Schama’s words as a nod to this hopefulness;

“…it seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrach’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. for within its bag are fruitful gifts—not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though ti may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has round the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalists supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over enervation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.”

Art & Perfection

Tim’s Vermeer: A Review

“The task is to restore confidence between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”  —John Dewey (1)

When I was an undergraduate student in painting we took many cross disciplinary classes, design being one of them. One morning my foundation design professor posed a question to the class for discussion; “If two absolutely identical grandfather clocks were sitting next to each other in a store, one made meticulously by hand, the other only by mechanical means, which one would you buy and would it matter?” This is essentially the question that the movie Tim’s Vermeer is asking. Does the end justify the means in art? Is it art, if the means are purely mechanical?

The root of this question at play in the movie is whether or not Johannes Vermeer, a 17th century Dutch painter renowned for his cinematic portrayal of everyday Dutch life, used mechanical aids in order to produce his paintings. This question sets Tim Jenison on an obsessive quest to try to discover the truth about Vermeer’s methods. Tim is a wealthy entrepreneur who gained notoriety and success by inventing the Amiga Video Toaster®. The Toaster revolutionized video editing for television. Today the majority of television stations use tools made by Tim’s company NewTek, to produce the graphics that inundate our news and sports productions. Tim’s computer graphics background gives him the unique ability to understand optics and color projected through light rather than reflection. From a simple physics standpoint, the type of light that Johannes Vermeer experienced would have been almost entirely, natural or reflected light. Reflected light is the light produced when certain wavelength of light are reflected off of surfaces resulting in the spectrum of visible color. In artistic terms, this is the CMYK light of printing (Cyan, Magenta, Yello and Black or K). However, in today’s world of electronics much of the light our eyes perceive from computer monitors, tablets, smart phones and televisions is projected light or RGB light (Red, Green, Blue). Painters in the 17th century were essentially using paint to mimic what they say using the same physical properties of light. Both human flesh and paint reflect wavelengths of light to produce certain colors. What Tim Jenison claims, is that when you look carefully at Vermeer’s work you see a different translation, one that uses paint to create cinematic or projected light effects, something impossible to render without the use of optics that change the way color, light and shadow behave.

Johannes Vermeer was born to relatively modest means, his father a middle class entrepreneur of sorts, dabbling in silk-working, inn keeping and art dealing. The 17th century Netherlands is referred to as the Dutch Golden Age. The tiny northern European country grew to be the wealthiest nation on earth during the better part of that century. Being middle class Dutch in 1632 when Vermeer was baptized, meant a relative life of comfort. Vermeer’s life paralleled the emergent empire, witnessing the terror of the Thirty Years’ War, and the great conflagration of 1654 known as the Delft Thunderclap that destroyed the greater portion of the city of Delft, Vermeer’s city of residence. These were vibrant and turbulent times for the Netherlands and Vermeer lived at its cultural center.

A compelling mystery surrounding the painter some consider to be the greatest Dutch painter in history, is the lack of information about how he actually became a painter. There is no direct evidence that Johannes apprenticed with another painter, despite being surrounded by many accomplished practitioners in Delft. No record has survived of such an apprenticeship. If you wanted your son to be a painter in 17th century Delft, you had to choose an apprentice he would train with for four to six years beginning at the age of 15. Despite the lack of evidence of his apprenticeship, it must have occurred because he was accepted into the Delft Guild in 1653, six years after his fifteenth birthday. It was impossible to be received into the Guild without the required proof of such an apprenticeship.

Painting and sculpture in the 17th century was firmly seated in the idea of craft. It did not have the open, imaginative associations we place on fine art today. A young boy (women were not allowed to apprentice) would be sent to apprentice with a master and educated in many of the cultural foundations considered important at the time.

“In the master's studio, the apprentice was exposed to the thoughts, opinions and artistic theories which circulated with great rapidity between artist's studios. A number of Dutch painters had traveled to Italy to study the works of the Italian Masters and returned with knowledge of new techniques and styles which were rapidly diffused. Painters' studios were often lively places frequented patrons and men of culture. Animated theoretical debates and exchange of practical information concerning the art market must have been the norm.” (2)

Being sent to an apprenticeship was no small matter for the families who sent children. At a time when standard education cost two to six guilders per year, an apprenticeship with a Dutch master painter would have cost up to 100 guilders a year. This is a rather important point the film ignores around the question of Vermeer’s skills. (3) To watch the film you would believe that because no record of his apprenticeship exists he was an in situ genius who produced masterworks without foundation and therefore, as the argument goes, must have required special tools with which to create his unique paintings. Genius is an often overused and misappropriated term in our society, tossed about and applied to anyone who appears to have a modicum of talent and enterprise above the norm. There were many, many gifted, classically trained painters at the time of Vermeer’s Delft occupation, Rembrandt chief among them and many more followed. The key component of Vermeer’s work, and one the film does great justice to, is his manipulation of light using pigment. Vermeer’s paintings unlike any other contemporary, are photorealistic. As Tim Jenison quite acutely points out in the film, Vermeer’s paintings are cinematic not painterly. This is the trigger for Jenison that makes him believe Vermeer must have used tools like the camera obscura widely available at the time. Although no such device was found at the time of Vermeer’s death, access to sophisticated optics would not have been hard to come by in the time of the Dutch Golden Age. The Dutch were master traders, and the flourishing of Dutch science at the time made mirrors, telescopes and optics readily available and understood.

I was skeptical ahed of the film, due in part to the fact that Penn and Teller, those shit-stirring, iconoclastic magicians from Las Vegas were behind the project. Having watched their show Bullshit in the past, I knew they could hold a polemicists eye to certain subjects and their glossy, opinionated approach was based more on showmanship and less on fact. However, Tim’s Vermeer was a pleasant surprise and lacked most of the skewed opinions I was expecting. The majority of the film tracks the intense efforts of Tim Jenison to recreate, as closely as he possibly could Vermeer’s The Music Lesson using optics but reconstruct the actual room up to the tiniest detail that appears in The Music Lesson (1662-1665). The magic (no pun intended) of the film is in watching the painstaking and often agonizing pursuit of one man’s attempt to recreate the stage for a the mid-17th century painting and the painting itself, with no formal painting training.

The film left me with a feeling of genuine respect for both Jenison and Vermeer. Although, based on Jenison’s pursuits it seems entirely plausible if not probable that Vermeer used the aid of some basic optics to create his unique style, it does little if anything to diminish the notion Vermeer had a mastery over the form if not the content. As a classically trained painter in the Delft tradition, Vermeer would have been able to leverage optics to recreate cinematic qualities in his work. These lighting effects in Vermeer’s work would have been nearly impossible any other way given the basic biomechanics of our eyes. Jenison is convincing when he reveals certain details in the original Vermeer are in alignment with things he accidentally discover while trying to replicate it using optics. Despite this reveal, I left the film feeling less interested in Vermeer than ever. I have never been a great fan because I’ve always felt Vermeer’s are cold and emotionless works. At a time when Bernini was creating The Ecstasy of Saint Therese Vermeer was toiling away in his little room in Delft making relatively unimaginative paintings.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze9r58eHnoc&w=560&h=315]

Getting back to the question my design professor posed so many years ago, if mechanical production can match the hand of the artist then what does it really matter? There are now robotic machines that can carve marble into anything you can scan into a computer. Artists like Roxy Paine and others have created robotic painting and sculpture machines, sometimes with compelling and imaginative results. Many blue chip artists today, just like in the time of the Dutch Golden Age, employ assistants and craftspeople to aid or actually fully realize their artistic ideas. Is the power of the Sisteen Chapel diminished when you learn that a group of artisans, many masters at fresco, which Michelangelo was not, worked on the project? In fact many artists reach a certain level of success and find they cannot meet the demands of the market in terms of production and farm out the actual painting of their work to teams. Jeff Koons, and Kehinde Wiley, chief among them. The question isn’t machine versus human. The question is what are the ideas being represented. I don’t care how the hypothetical grandfather clock was produced, only its inherent aesthetic and intellectual value as a creative idea. I would often say to my drawing and painting classes, you can teach a monkey to draw but it will never imagine what we can. Although hyperbole, the point is that the creative spirit is held within the ideas of the artist not with the mechanical production of those ideas, whether by their own hand or by any other means. A paint brush is a tool and so is a camera, hammer, computer, etc., but I defy anyone to replicate a Francis Bacon, Whistler or Caravaggio. Jenison was able to replicate, with reasonable accuracy (I have not seen Jenison’s fake Vermeer or The Music Lesson in person) mainly I think not  because Vermeer was a cheat, a conceit to great painting, but because the subject matter and staging were so dull. A Rembrandt on the other hand would be impossible to replicate, not only due to the way it was created (Rembrandt would often use his fingers in the paint) but because Rembrandt’s imagination was far beyond that of Vermeer’s. All one has to do is compare Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring to Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox to see why that is true. Where Vermeer saw middle class convention, Rembrandt saw sex, lust and the meat of of everyday life. Vermeer’s The Music Lesson is a still life of a room filled with static objects and people without character. Despite all the optical, cinematic detail it is still an incredibly boring subject. But, a hanging cruciform carcass of beef tied up in a dark barn with it’s chiaroscuro lighting and rough-hewn paint strokes demonstrate a man who didn’t want to capture a film still of life, but life itself.

Obsession can be one aspect of art making but it is not an essential element. Clearly, even if Tim’s Vermeer is only half true, Johannes Vermeer was an incredibly obsessive person. That however, does not make him a great painter. Our art historical fixation with Vermeer in the modern world is due to our fixation with cinema. We have largely lost our ability to see paintings as more than photographic pastiches. We are no longer educated in the important differences between reflected and projected light because we live our lives staring at tiny screens that project cinematic light. Paintings do not operate in that dimension because they are dealing with the expressly human condition of seeing reflected natural light in our environment, which is how our eyes evolved after our ancestors crawled out of the sea. This leaves us visually and intellectually poorer I think, because we are more and more bound by the simulacra. Vermeer’s uniqueness was in his idea that paintings could be made to look like photography or cinema before either came into being. As Picasso said, “Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.” I’m afraid Vermeer didn’t feel a whole lot.

(1)  John Dewey, Art as Experience p. 03 (2)  http://www.essentialvermeer.com/saint_luke's_guild_delft.html#.U1PrH-ZdX7k (3)  http://www.essentialvermeer.com/timelines/timeline_vermeers_life_2.html#.U1PpT-ZdX7k

Identity & Image

Finding Vivian Maier: Gently Resisting Immortality

“Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.” 
 —Diane Arbus

[spoiler alert - this essay reveals details of the film Finding Vivian Maier]

The instant a photograph is made it defies time/space. The linearity of being alive is gone in an instant as the aperture closes down and image is imprinted, chemically or digitally. It’s an act of jouissance really, whereby the moment the photographer snaps the photo le petit mort is realized. The act of photography is a mechanical attempt at reproducing ecstasy. Capturing that which is ineluctable, illusive and impermanent. Melding the moment of being with the past and future simultaneously. In its jouissance it is fumbling towards identity, hoping to understand the fleeting present by capturing it eternal.

“The more of each photograph, its auratic power and animism, runs precisely on the excess of each beyond artifice and explicit content that is a consequence of the combination of the camera’s mechanic looking and the proliferation of images, each being part of an indefinitely long series.”1

The enigma of Vivian Maier is her contradiction in being a photographer— being in this world and interacting with her surroundings, photography her mediator, and consciously avoiding the outcomes of the mediation itself. Her’s was perpetual self inflicted tease, never fully having the courage to fully realize that living means death by a thousand tiny cuts.

Finding Vivian Maier is a documentary by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel that tells the accidental discovery of a treasure trove of film and personal effects by an unknown photographer, Vivian Maier. Maloof discovered the first boxes of black and white negatives at an auction in Chicago while researching a historical book on Northwest Chicago. Maloof’s obsessive character and his historical-detective instincts led him to trace the origins of the negatives he found based on an address he found amongst them. He traced the address and found the caretakers of her estate, old employers whom she worked for as a nanny. Eventually, Maloof uncovered more than 100,000 negatives in black and white in color spanning decades beginning in 1949, along with letters, tchotchkies, her Rollieflex camera and even rolls of Super 8 film. The result has been a treasure trove of impressive work that nudges at the coattails of greats like Robert Frank, Arthur Fellig (Weegee) and Diane Arbus.

Maier while alive, never showed her work professionally. Only a smattering of images were ever printed. Born in New York City, she ended up spending the balance of her life in the northern suburbs of Chicago, working as a nanny for a series of wealthy families. She even worked for Phil Donahue in the 1970’s. She remained in northern Chicagoland until her death in 2009. Her work as caretaker and surrogate mother to well-to-do Chicago families afforded her both the security and flexibility she desired to pursue her photography. Her daytime childcare often included adventures into the inner city of Chicago, children in tow, shooting the seedy underbelly of the city and its downtrodden occupants.

Maier’s had a gifted eye for human nature, particularly in the early black and white work. The contrasts between light and shadow mixed with her fascination for urban street life gives her work an energy that is often absent modern street photography. Although the full oeuvre has yet to be revealed, it is clear at the moment, her early work from the 1950’s and early 1960’s in black and white was her strongest. The contrast between her suburban, wealthy neighborhood and the bustling, ragged streets of Chicago gave her photography an emotional content that runs deep. There is little doubt that had she pursued professional representation she would have been well received if not heralded as a contemporary of the greats of that period, like Frank, et. al. Maier instead chose to be reclusive, mysterious and antisocial. She hoarded objects, newspapers and film for years with a purpose she took to the grave. She never pursued any public recognition and stored her observations away in boxes, transporting them from place to place until they wound up in a mini storage unit after her death.

The character of photography, especially street photography, as an art is beholding to collective memories and our desire for connection. We look at photographs in our present world knowing all of them reference some past. This creates an automatic nostalgia. The great photographers negotiate this inherent quality of photography by embracing the sublime or creating their own deliberate, imposed narrative onto the images, no matter how candid they may appear. Maier’s work follows in the footsteps of Walker Evans who made photojournalism an art form. This places her work both in alignment with the art form and at odds with it due to her lack of exposure or professional attitudes toward the practice. The draw of Maier’s work is a dialogue on poïesis, whereby her identity and existence was contingent upon the poetry of making. She didn’t care about an audience because her photography was an act of alterity which reaffirmed her identity daily.

“The experience of of a photograph is associative and simultaneous, and in this respect it resembles our experience of poetry. In poetic writing, meaning is not achieved by means of a consistent structure of controlled movements along lines made up of sentences. Rather, the pen is made of lines that may resemble sentences typographically but which abrogate the requirement to be read the way sentences are read. So there is a break with any necessary relation to the chronicle.”2

I find myself enamored and troubled by Maier’s work. Her fixation on the downtrodden and destitute demonstrates an allegiance to the cause and her unwillingness to actually be present in that world. She remained safely tucked away in her suburban enclave while her daytime exploits made her a poverty tourist and a hypocrite. This doesn’t diminish the power of the early work, but it may explain an ultimate weakness as an artist. Weegee worked for years as a newspaper photojournalist living in the heart of his native NY. Frank traveled through America as a Jew, family in tow, traversing the deep south at a time when Jews were as equally despised as African Americans. And Arbus, befriended the strange and wonderful people she encountered, perhaps even to a fault, given her eventual demise. Maier on the other hand remained aloof, a perpetual visitor but never a full inhabitant.

The film raises a question regarding her mental health, which feels like a conceit to push the artist-as-eccentric frame. The terms recluse, hoarder and mentally ill are tossed around throughout the film to describe her perceived state of mind. She exhibited borderline autism given her social anxieties and need to keep her art hidden from view and her desire for privacy, often inventing fake names or no name at all. However, I found the cliche’d tropes mentally ill, weirdo, reclusive artist, an injustice to her artistic drive and humanity. The contingency of serving as a nanny to wealthy suburbanites both enabled and seriously hampered her development as an artist. Having no community of her own to relate to she was imprisoned by the largely culturally empty community she served, raising children for people that had more money than time, so much so they entrusted the raising of their children to an eccentric photographer. Had Vivian been introduced to a few like-minded artists, no matter her dispensation for isolation, she might have found a pathway to sharing her work with a larger audience, and sadly, enabled herself true freedom from the suburban confines.

The question arises of outsider art in Maier’s work, which may be in part, the reason institutions are currently resistant to analyzing her images or including them in their collections. What is of greater concern to me, is not whether she pursued a dedicated exploration of her craft—meaning the usual public exposure which in turn provides a dialogue back to the artist, but rather her lack of depth. After watching the movie I spent a considerable amount of time looking at her work online and what is striking is the absence of work later than 1980. The work that is visible shows a recognizable decline in its content as time passes. This I think, is a result of her lack of exposure to any peers or audience. Without a foothold in reality she was left to replicate the same narrative over and over again with few fresh insights. The power the work holds in its early stages, 1950 to 1975 is due in large part to the freshness of her eye, her personal energy and the content of what she was capturing. To audiences of today, the rediscovery of a time when the clothing and culture were so fundamentally different, has a nostalgic power that captivates far more than perhaps anything she may have shot during the 80’s or 90’s. As personal technology has become ubiquitous, so has the homogenization of our culture. The differences and fractures between our various players in American society are less evident than they used to be. The homeless are ushered out of cities into camps, largely out of view of the average citizen. The vibrancy of individual merchants has been replaced by the uniformity of chain stores. The expectation that a suit or dress of a certain caliber as the baseline for public dress has been subsumed by hoodies, jeans and Keds. Sitting in a 3-star restaurant in San Francisco or New York, you can no longer distinguish the multimillionaires from the middle class. In Vivian Maiers more powerful photographs, this milk toast America was largely absent. In fact Maier seemed to revel in the contrasts between fur coat cloaked elite and one-eared bums.

Herein lies the rub with Maier’s work. There is an increasingly coldness and distance that seeps into her work as time passes. Even in the limited body that is available for viewing online, it is apparent that certain staged themes and ideas are replicated with no new ground being broken. Her color photography has a gentle beauty in its naiveté but seems not to mature. Maier is not a colorist for sure, certainly not in the way William Eggleston or Jeff Wall are. All artists need an audience to grow and the lack of this is apparent in Maier’s work. It’s ironic that a woman so fascinated by the world around her was so resistant to participating in it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o2nBhQ67Zc&w=560&h=315]

The film repeats the question of an artist’s worth in relation to their own gained immortality. Some artists take on immortality as a quest, continually working with a long-term view that each work will sit within a larger, collected body retrospectively analyzed postmortem. Others simply work for works sake. As William Eggelston has said, “Photography just gets us out of the house,” The making, being the end to a means, not the other way round. Whether Maier was the former or the latter matters not because she’s dead and it bears no real meaning to the work itself. If Maier’s work becomes part of the important 20th century photographic canon it will be because it adds to the historical conversation or given our current art market, because someone deems it equal to the hoarding of gold or diamonds. Time will tell, whether or not that holds true but one thing is certain, Vivian Maier will not have a say in her own immortality.

Having witnessed a plethora of art at this stage in my life I can tell you unequivocally that Vivian Maier is certainly worth visiting with. She’s stronger than most photographers ever become and despite her shortcomings there is a magic in some of the photos that will hold you breathless. I’m glad her images avoided the landfill and I’m glad for Maloof’s persistence.

1.  J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. p. 276

2.  Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews: Monochrome and photojournalism in On Kawara’s Today Paintings. p. 138

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.

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.”