"Groups squabble about literature because they have other than literary uses for the literary. The schools, which are busy finding ways to get the answers to the Test of Time smuggled to their chosen favoritism as coaches slip answers to their players so they may pass the latest examination, will now and then speak of Art and claim a disinterested purity. And there are an unorganized few (the unhappy few whom I should like to represent, "the immense minority," as Juan Ramón Jiménez so significantly puts it) who sincerely love the arts. There are those for whom reading, for example, can be an act of love, and lead to a revelation, not of truth, moral or otherwise, but of lucidity, order, rightness of relation, the experience of a world fully felt and furnished and worked out in the head, the head where the heart is also to be found, and all the other vital organs.
[...]
Inside the Academy, at the Symphony, within Museum walls, each warring faction will boast that God is on their side, and claim transcendence for their values and opinions. This is done by trying to ensure that only their ideas, and works correctly expressing them, get put before the public in the future, and by reanalyzing the past as far back as the library catalog has cards (a deliberately out-of-date metaphor) in order to show, as I previously characterized their internecine struggles, that "it has ever been thus," whatever it is that they say it is now.
Outside, in the vendors” streets, there is nothing but temporary tents. The lasting, the universal, are despised (except by those who are still peddling the classics to old fogies). But who really wants reruns of already winded warhorses? Well, only those arrogant and rapacious revivalists who set Rigoletto in the Bronx and who want Dido and Aeneas to sing about their love while costumed as colonials. Their pitiful originalities would have once brought them to the gibbet or the stake.
The ideal cultural product can come powerfully packaged, creates a mighty stir, can be devoured with both delight and a sense of life-shaking revelation, provides an easy topic for talk, is guaranteed to be without real salt or any actual fat– contains no substance of any substantial kind– so that after you have eaten it, for days you will shit only air."
–William Gass from "The Test of Time" found in The Test of Time: Essays (2003)
“The eyes of man are sun-like, because art comes and makes them more sun-like. Art is so mighty because it changes our perception of the world. It is almost as mighty as philosophy and not nearly so harmful, because it does not ask anything of us. Art makes no request except one – to be loved – but no other request will a work of art ever make. If we love art and participate in the experience given there then our entire being will be changed, so mighty is this experience and yet so harmless.”
Discussions that contain words like these are a good example of why I find it hard (if not impossible) to remain engaged in most discussion communities:
“Such discussions (about what’s a visual poem, what’s not) are like pinhead-angel discussions to the intellectually comatose, but for those involved they sensitize one to degrees of verbality and visuality, and the nuances each can be used to express, just as pinhead-angel discussions open one to sensitivity to the entire continuum of magnitudes, and quantities, and what reality most fundamentally is. But, hey, go with passive wonder–it’s way easier than active understanding.”
Everything is interesting to someone. If we want to speak on that level, then talking about counting angels on the heads of pins never makes any sense. But assuming the more popular uses of such expressions– intended to signify a serious lack of interest to the individual—then the choices aren’t a binary of the intellectually comatose vs. those hanging on every word of a discussion.
I’m not particularly interested in creating a taxonomy of visual poetry, just as I’m not interested in variations of rap/hip-hop lyrics, Catalonian landscape painting, or Hummel figurines. That’s nothing like being intellectually comatose (though such characterizations are part and parcel of the speaker’s bag of rhetorical tricks, seeking always to position himself as a marginalized martyr at the hands of rednecks and rubes). I’m interested in different things. If people want to have long discussions about what a visual poem is or is not and then what category or label best fits this poem or that, more power to them. That doesn’t make the rest of us intellectually comatose.
Plus, wtf is wrong with simply enjoying something, with open, receptive (“passive” has a negative connotation, which is of course why the almost-always negative speaker I quoted from used it) wonder? This is where the idea of “angel-counting” becomes relevant. I can’t (and don’t need to) become an expert in every kind of art that I am interested in. I enjoy many kinds of art—I have no pretense or desire to becoming an expert in most of them. In many cases, arguments about what is or isn’t an X or Y are, for me, useless. They don’t enhance my appreciation, they are tedious, and in the end there is never any agreed-upon resolution. In fact, the manner in which they distract me and take time away from engaging personally with a piece of art might even be damaging. Resolution isn’t always necessary, of course, but the conversations themselves aren’t always necessary either.
Tanuki, or “Raccoon Dogs” are neither raccoon nor dog. Their distinguishing characteristic, in case you didn’ tpay much attention to the print above, are their extremely large scrota (yep) which are obviously used in inventive ways. One of many artists to represent this popular folkloric creature, Utagawa Kuniyoshi created a series of Tanuki prints in the 1840s.
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Cezanne’s art fascinates me because of its duality, both rooted in the Impressionist/Post-Impressionist tradition and straining toward what would become Cubism and a whole new kind of art. Not to mention that, by all accounts, Cezanne was a temperamental and frustrating man, prone to angry outbursts and deep, black depressions, who clearly suffered trying to create the absolute best art that he could. A story shared on the WebMuseum site is illustrative:
Cézanne’s pictures of people can be regarded as still lifes, because he demanded that his models sit absolutely still. Sitting for him was something of a nightmare. Not only was he foul-tempered, he was an extremely slow painter, probably the reason his subjects always look tired and sombre. Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who arranged Cézanne’s first one-man show a century ago, posed 115 times for a single painting, sitting absolutely still “like an apple” and then Cézanne, dissatisfied, abandoned the picture with only two unpainted spots remaining. He told Vollard that with luck he would find the correct color and could finish the painting. “The prospect of this made me tremble,” noted Vollard in his biography of the painter. In the artist’s eye, there was no difference between a human sitter and a bowl of fruit, except that the reflection value and the palette were different. In the end, both his subjects and his fruit wilted.
As trying as the sittings might have been for the subjects, Cezanne created some incredible portraits, such as my favorite:
"Portrait of Victor Chocquet"
But the works I enjoy most are the ones where Cezanne’s titanic impact on future artists is apparent. These pieces make me think that part of Cezanne’s famous moods and frustration must have come from knowing that he was an artist out of time, limited by the environment, desperately seeking an artistic language that didn’t exist yet. I’m fascinated by these revolutionary characters… Giordano Bruno comes to mind, born 50 years before the discovery of the mathematics that would illuminate his thinking.
For example, consider the canonical example:
"Still Life with Peppermint Bottle"
Here is a painting that visibly struggles to emerge from the Impressionist tradition. It retains the heavy, bold brush strokes and solid lines and much of the lack of blending of color but presented with a (lack of) perspective that clearly presages Picasso. There’s a feeling of geometrical precision in the echoing curves that can be found everywhere in the “center” of the composition, but at the same time the glass flask in the center is bulbous, the whole painting leans to one side as if there is a gravitational force working against the traditional symmetry.
Similarly examine the change in his landscape work, where his early work is clearly heavily Impressionist:
"The Pool"
To his final years when he has breached the abstract sphere, creating work that would easily have fit into an exhibition 50 years later as a “contemporary” piece:
"Bend in Forest Road"
The WebMuseum’s Cezanne section has many great paintings and a good bit of interesting biographical information of a painter that many know by name but too many haven’t looked at very closely…
The fine folks at MODOFLY make incredible, customized Moleskines. A few samples of at least 50 designs, one of which I’m not showing here despite its Simian nature:
Considering how tedious and difficult I once found it to cut out a block letter stencil, the intricacy of paper cutting art continues to blow my mind. Beatrice Coron has some wonderful items on display as well as an incredible set of links to paper artists, traditions, history, tools, and more. Some of the links are broken, but easily found with a bit of Google-fu. Well worth it when you discover mind-boggling pieces like this:
At first I saw this little work of flash photography digital art and thought “that’s interesting.” Then I read the tips and played some more and discovered it is damn cool, tight, phat, neato keeno, hot, gnarly, whatever…
Ever wonder what happened to that one kid who thought making the bunny ears on the screen before the movie started was so hilarious he had to do it every single time the teacher showed a film in class? Apparently he went on to become this guy
January 23, 2010
Posted in: Commonplace Book 
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