Free Bird

A review of the movie Birdman (2014) - spoiler alert. 

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“If I leave here tomorrow   Would you still remember me?”

               ― Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd

In a world encased in irony and cliché the hardest art to produce is that which wades right into that milieu and inverts it, onto itself. The movie Birdman against all odds, does just that. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s wonderful new movie behaves like a stone skipping across the pond of popular culture. With every scrape against the surface, it reveals a deeper, often sadder truth about our culture while simultaneously tearing at the fiber of the system that perpetuates it.

Iñárritu in Birdman has created a macroscopic view of our cultural landscape using the microscopic lens of an 800 seat theater on Broadway in New York and a play by the late poet, playwright and short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver’s play What We Talk About When We Talk About Love serves as the foundation for the move. The production is being staged by Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) an ex-movie superhero named Birdman, whose fame faded with the last of a blockbuster tripartite in the early 90’s. Funding, acting, and directing in Carver’s play is a somewhat last ditch effort by Riggan to regain attention through art rather than pop culture. Riggan’s shame about how he obtained his fame stands directly in contrast to his penetrating desire to be loved as something richer. Against this backdrop Riggan must contend with a cadre of actors replete with a mountain of their own emotional baggage, his daughter’s cold disdain, and his lawyers’ forceable pragmatism. It is a world anyone could empathize with wanting to fly away from and soar above the streets of New York.

What makes Birdman great is its tempo. The soundtrack is simply a drum kit pulsing out Riggan’s life in syncopation. The jazz drummer Antonio Sanchez created a soundtrack that paired with Iñárritu’s direction, creates an unnerving pulse that rises and falls, pounds and runs silent throughout the film, leaving you with an erratic heartbeat for the film. Iñárritu even puts an actual drummer (Nate Smith) playing the soundtrack visible in the film from time to time to reinforce Riggan’s growing delusion. It is a fantastic device not just for its pacing of the movie but because it suggests the beating heart of our own lives and gently nods at the protagonist of Carver’s play, Mel McGinnis who is a heart surgeon.

Jeff Wall, "After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue" (2000)

Beyond the use of an aged drum kit for a background, Iñárritu works against fiction and pop culture clichés that thrust the viewer into a bullfight arena of competing pettiness, comedy and tragedy. As a visual artist what I found most striking was Iñárritu’s wonderful use of visual metaphors. A scene in a liquor store mirror Ralph Ellison’s invisible man captured by the photographer Jeff Wall. A fogged filled stage littered with gauzy actors posing with tree filaments on their heads pokes fun at almost every stage production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A drunk on the street reveals a soliloquy from Macbeth. Even the actors themselves become visual symbols of their own roll in Riggan’s life. Sam (Emma Stone), Riggan’s daughter is bleached out with dark rimmed eye liner making her look like a creepy doll. Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), prances about like a mirror of Riggan’s former self, often barely dressed. In one scene, Shiner is literally the visual metaphor for The Emperor Wears No Clothes. All of these actors and stagings mainly take place in a Broadway theater’s claustrophobic back hallways and rooms, painted in nightclub garishness and faded putrid tones. Riggan’s dressing room resembles more of a prison cell than a lead actor’s sanctuary. Often during the film the chambered back end of the theater becomes the inner chambers of Riggan’s increasingly demented mind where only the stage provides open terrain and safety.

A poignant, keystone scene in the movie leaves Riggan accidentally locked out of the stage door right before the play’s apotheosis. Panicked and left in his tidy-whities (a reference to Breaking Bad?) Riggan awkwardly speed walks around the block, right through Times Square and a crowd of smartphone wielding fans who immediately tweet the experience to over a million followers. On the surface it speaks to the desperation of male middle-age, fading fame, and the cult of personality but what it most beautifully mirrors is Ellison’s Invisible Man;

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

A man whose fame is derived from playing a fictional superhero can stroll through one of the busiest places on earth and yet not really be seen. In this case of Birdman fame replaces race.

There are too many moments in Birdman to recount without spoiling the uncomfortable pleasure of the experience. Few films so eloquently balance comedy with desperation all the while making serious commentary on society, but Birdman succeeds admirably in doing so. The film reminds us of our shared humanity, and our fragility in order to disrupt what seems like an ever increasing reliance on fantasy over reality. Icarus is mentioned in the film but like everything else in Iñárritu’s Birdman, it is not the metaphor it seems. In this case the parable is directed at the viewers not its central character. A society bound to the cult of personality, and superhero movies is indeed flying too close to the proverbial cultural sun and like the Egyptians, Inca’s and Romans before, is destined for destruction. As with Carver’s Mel McGinnis, Riggan’s shame is a grounding force that creates a beautiful destruction in order to reveal a larger truth, “and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”*

*from Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

Burning Down Byrne

David Byrne, "Tight Spot" (2011) On October 7, 2014, David Byrne the modern day Renaissance man and ex-Talking Heads lead, posted a blog entry on his website “I DON’T CARE ABOUT CONTEMPORARY ART ANYMORE?” The commentary, a seeming impromptu riff on his reaction to the current state of contemporary art, has garnered a lot of attention. Byrne isn’t just a painter and musician, he’s currently partnered with one of the art stars of the 1980’s, Cindy Sherman. His position, therefore, provides him with unusual access from both the point of celebrity and art world insider, to the undercurrent of New York’s art market. So, when Byrne writes about the art world he is writing from a position of art and financial power as well as a practitioner.

Sam Falls painting

A few days later the artist and former gallerist, Ric Kasini Kadour wrote on Hyperallergic a counterpoint screed which attacked Byrne directly; “I Don’t Care About David Byrne Anymore?” A sideline memetic reaction has been taking place on everyone’s favorite social media platform Facebook. Aside from Kadour’s somewhat vitriolic retort (“Boo hoo, fuck off.”), I think both Kadour and Byrne miss the mark in their commentary about the state of contemporary art and strangely find themselves closer in alignment than either might admit.

First of all, contemporary art is not class warfare as many would like to pretend it is. As the late Robert Hughes so eloquently put it, “In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.” Capitalism by nature is predicated on constant progress and consumption, whether perceived or real. Art doesn’t play by those rules, which is exactly what makes it desirable to the 1%. What the extremely wealthy can’t have, they must have. This doesn’t pollute the art world per se, but only becomes more recognizable, more obvious in times of, as Hughes puts it, fluctuating intensity. Right now contemporary art is experiencing a period of low intensity, as is music. There may be a lot of people out there making things but there is no current collective zeitgeist to grab hold of and that makes for a lot recirculation of the old, the average, and the bad. Artists have always and will always pander to rich collectors because money makes the world go round and despite protests to the contrary, being a starving artist sucks. In order for art market to operate as class warfare it would have to persistently deny future Basquiats or present day Sam Falls, but it doesn’t. It may be dictated by tastemakers who see dollar signs but it doesn’t discriminate based on class. For this very reason, it keeps a perpetual flow of young, fresh MFA graduates hungry for success and fully participating in the system that fuels the amusement of the 1%.

Secondly, Byrne and Kadour both use straw man arguments to make their points. It is so easy to pick on the richest artist in the world, Damien Hirst and his For the Love of God (2007) diamond skull. Hirst is an opportunist more than a real artist and the bulk of his production is either a direct or near direct rip-off of other more talented artist’s work. So what. He is one man in a very large pool of makers and one man does not the art market make. Hating on Jeff Koons or Damian Hirst does little to add to the conversation on contemporary art. In equal measure, Kadour’s naive references to what might be termed ‘working class artists’ of various ilk is no better a position against the great art market engine. Just because you make something doesn’t mean you’re adding anything to the collective cultural conversation, especially didactic, playful sculptures of robots. Great art as we all know, penetrates deeply into the collective subconscious and communicates some form of undefinable knowledge that changes how we inhabit the world and bridges race, class and culture. The fact that there is little great art being made now may be lamentable but blaming it on economic conditions, secret gallery cabals or David Byrne himself, seems silly at best.

I understand Byrne’s disappointment as much as I get Kadour’s anger at Byrne and the art world. How many artists were of equal or superior measure to Vermeer or Titian in their time but lacked middle class upbringings or support from the church? Nobody ever said the art market or life was fair. I don’t believe that money pollutes the water of art production, there are just too many examples of great artists who found their power outside of the art market or wealthy patronage to convince me otherwise. Likewise I’m tired of the old 1960’s argument that by virtue of your own wealth or lack there of, you can’t comment on certain cultural conditions because you are either in or out of the “club.” Byrne paid his dues and couldn’t have possibly predicted his rise to wealth by way of an incredibly strange art-rock group that emerged in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Saying he’s rich so therefore he can’t comment on the rich is absurd. If anything, there is potential for him to reveal things that others would not ever have access to. By the same token, Kadour’s middle-class status, or at least non-wealthy status, isn’t an automatic pulpit for criticism either. The answer to contemporary art’s dilemma is not a socialist equalizing one. History teaches us that art often blossoms during conditions of inequality more than its opposite and therefore cannot be constrained or defined by economics or politics alone. Kadour regurgitates a lazy and tired argument that implies that if only less rich people were involved the art market would be more fair, and by association, better. Nothing could be further from reality.

Byrne’s comparison of the Dutch tulip bubble or Tulpenwoede is an apt one that Kadour completely glosses over. As someone who has spent a lot of time in working class artists studios, smaller more provincial galleries (like the Portland, Oregon gallery Kadour mentions—I live in Portland) I can tell you I have yet to see a great hidden, seething mass of talent. Bryne is right that the art market is paralleling the current economic conditions. Art has always been a profitable investment, out earning the stock market with regularity. It’s experiencing a bubble and with bubbles come breaks and then something interesting usually happens.

The real danger we face in the art world is the institutionalization of art production. Every year there are over 1,200 applicants for the MFA program at Yale. Yet, the percentage of employment of arts-related graduates has steadily declined since the 1970’s. The number of students receiving a bachelors degree in fine art in the U.S. has gone up 25% in nine years. In 2010 there were 29,000 graduates in art related fields. That’s 300,000 degreed people calling themselves artists in a ten year span. With tuition having risen at such rapid rates over the past three decades it is no wonder we have such simmering anger amongst young artists. There are simply too many artists who carry too much college debt to ever be equalized by even the most economically balanced art market. Combine this with the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans never set foot during their lifetime in a commercial art gallery, despite millions attending art museums and you begin to see the dilemma. Art production is equated with laziness and frivolity in America and paying for such things is considered the folly of the rich. Why would you ever spend $1,000 for a work of art when you can endlessly listen to the new Beyonce album for a mere $15.99?

Until we change the underlying dynamics of how artists learn to practice their craft, how they form a professional practice while holding down a full time job and how they can create collectively owned gallery spaces that establish themselves in the suburbs and lower income communities, using micro payments and shared economic models, nothing will change in the art market of America and likely little will happen to create the conditions for the next generation of great artists.

Departure

Erased de Kooning Drawing

Erased de Kooning Drawing

Dan: I'm older, and I'm much less friendly to fuckin' change. Al Swearengen: Change ain't lookin' for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.

—Deadwood

The efficacy of life is held within the grip of memory. Without memory we and indeed everyone we know or have known do not exist. We spend our lives fighting against loss which is primarily fighting against the loss of memory. We manifest things—art, to hold onto the world which we live in. It is within this contentious dance with death that we manifest life.

The tenuous dialogue between memory and existence has grown even more difficult in the digital age. Ideas constructed within the macro world of paint, stone and pencil become much more liminal in the world of bits and bytes. Not only do we struggle with the relationship to digital art in how it’s displayed—computer monitors, televisions—but its preservation and continuation. Since the 1970’s the platform for music has gone from vinyl to 8-track to cassettes to compact discs to purely digital storage and now, back again to vinyl. How is an artist to predict the format which will hold the memories and expressions of tomorrow? Who now owns a betamax machine or a cassette player? As difficult as it is to sell works of art on paper, vinyl or canvas, it becomes even harder to make a living from digital production. As we’ve witnessed with the near death of newspapers and the implosion of the record industry, digital media lacks the tactile semi-permanence of something hanging on your wall. A Bill Viola work requires a monitor whose own technology is shifting every year. Televisions have gone from cathode ray technology to LED in just a few decades. Imagine how we will view our digital creations in 20, 30 or 50 years from now.

What I’ve come to realize however, is that none of this matters. The act of creation must go beyond the desire to hold on and the need for remembering if it is to become universal. The work of Bill Viola isn’t dependent upon a television monitor, it’s dependent upon the themes of being human. One could imagine his work being acted out live or drawn as a graphic novel or written out as a poem. It is the works of art which transcend the grip of memory that ironically live on the longest in our collective recollections and cultural identity. Loss is a starting point not an ending. When we loose someone important to us we don’t also kill ourselves, despite the anguish and sorrow we feel. We inherently understand that living is the point even if we understand very little about how that actually comes to be or why it is we too will eventually die. The 1953 work Erased de Kooning Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg is a testament to the way art can transcend the confines of memory and become something else, something universal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever seen a de Kooning before or even if you know who de Kooning was and his importance in the art world. It is enough to understand that one artist erased the work of another. The act of destruction becomes an act of creation.

This year has seemingly become a meditation on death, loss, and memory in my life. Mortality took up a seat next to me in my favorite pub and asked me to buy her a drink. I didn’t invite her to sit next to me and frankly before a couple of years ago I didn’t even know her name let alone hang out with her, and yet here she is, now a permanent fixture on that bar stool. My resistance was, at first swift, because like everyone else, I saw death as a threat to life, a destroyer of memories. Her presence there, forced me to confront entropy in a way that I had always pretended to embrace and understand, but suddenly realized was a pretense. I had disguised fear in a cloak of creativity. Life it turns out is much more like Schrödinger's cat experiment than even I had cared to admit.

Memories are not a box of photographs or a fleeting glimpse in our minds of a time we lived in the past. They are biochemical constructs built from electrical impulses that are stimulated from interactions in the real world as a tool for navigating the challenges of being. Evolutionarily speaking, memories have aided homo sapiens by providing us the foundation to create analogies, make tools, and catalogue our world. Memory has extended our lifespans and allowed us to surpass all other creatures on earth in terms of our dominance as a species. And the way in which those biochemical impulses are leveraged is through creativity and that creativity works by first assailing the memories we have available to us and then seeing how they can be reconstructed in a new way. The collective memory of de Kooning is now the collective memory of Rauschenberg which is really the collective memory of humanity. The symbolic is the real because we are alive.

The exciting opportunities available in the digital realm are the ones that challenge our understanding of permanence not the ones which reinforce our desire for nostalgia, for remembering and memorial. The creative act is an act of destruction because entropy is a natural component of being alive and to embrace its reality is to embrace being. It is also an impossibility. Matter is a constant in the universe and although it desires a state of equilibrium it is a constant. Staring at the Erased de Kooning Drawing brings us closer to that knowledge of equilibrium and a little closer to understanding the nature of being.

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” ― Jean Baudrillard

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

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)

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

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?

On left, Tim Jenison's fake Vermeer. On right, Johannes Vermeer's original The Music Lesson

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.

L, Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665). R, Rembrant Harmenszoon van Rijn, Carcass of Beef (1655)

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.

Roxy Paine, PMU, (2001)

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