Sunday, July 31, 2011

THE DREAMER HAS AWAKENED: Lucien Freud (1922-2011)

Lucien Freud,  one of England's finest and most expressive painters died a bit more than a week ago.  He was most well known for his portraits,  those searing clots of paint that reveal just as much about the artist as the sitter.  Within those paintings,  several scenarios slowly emerge.  Firstly,  the artist's touch,  a kind of wordless narrative whose fluid swipes create skeins of encrusted paint and start us on a risky ride,  that of  eventually derailing our vanity.  And lets face it,  for the painter vanity is an enormous part of this endeavor,  a kind of fetishistic insistence of self. Secondly,  his approach to figurative painting can be said to be confrontational,  not merely an idealized picture of some anonymous model.  This approach was in direct opposition to classical  models in both setting (simple, domestic interiors),  technique (thick impasto in seemingly rapid strokes),  scale (large canvases),  and models (often obese and aging women and men).  This loosening of brushwork and copious amounts of paint can be traced back to the influence of his friend and fellow painter Francis Bacon,  who insisted that the application of an impasto imbued the painting with life.  To this Freud added "paint is the person... I  want it to work for me just as flesh does". His deceptively quick brushstrokes were actually done with a studied deliberation that belied their seeming brutality. Like his grandfather Sigmund Freud,  Lucien's work also had a subtext pertaining to death,  in that his depiction of flesh,  while intensely visceral,  had in its brushwork an air of impermanence.  It was this refusal of vanity and acceptance of death that made his paintings so powerful,  and that is his gift to artists and viewers alike. 

Friday, July 22, 2011

NOTES ON A REASONABLE DISCOURSE CONCERNING THE ARTS


                                                                                                           
The above painting by Surrealist Rene Magritte, "The Treachery of Images" (o/c 1928-29)  sums up perfectly the problem of talking about art when one's language is not up to the rigors of describing anything beyond the superficialities of surface.  Keep in mind that surface and concept work hand in hand when encountering an artwork that is not merely a reproduction of a previously seen (noticed that I did not say "experienced") moment.  Given that the words included in Magritte's painting are translated from the french as "this is not a pipe" really drive home the artist's expectations from his viewers concerning reality. An inability to confront,  digest,  and speak about a work of art (or almost any phenomena beyond one's comfort zone) seems to beckon a Golden Age of Insipidness,  a 21st century malaise where descriptive language is reduced to words like "awesome" and "cute".  Welcome to the world of those master tacticians of the mundane and the unreal,  the Twitter and Facebook generation.  While I may seem a luddite to some of you out there,  the idea that every moment of one's life should be documented,  every word heard by the world,  and every emotion a request for pity or therapy,  merely reduces life to hollow quotable moments.  The beauty of art is its ability to complicate,  and that really is "The Treachery of Images" to those without the intellectual acuity, patience, or desire to dig beyond the surface. The idea of what is "beautiful" lies with the fact that any worthwhile artistic endeavor must contain the duality (light/dark,  good/bad, rough/smooth, positive/negative, etc.) that comprises everyone's life  and adds  a richness of contrasts.   I must assume that if an image,  sculpture,  or film can be described as "cute" it is probably not art of any sort.  Now that's a good place to begin.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

TRIBUS

OSCILLATIONS: "The War is Over" by Phil Ochs



In an American (and global) mindset increasingly influenced and insulated by Facebook,  Twitter, YouTube,  I Pods,  and I Pads,  the idea of thoughtful communication or real protest (at least here in America) seems to be a thing of the past.  These networks and devices may give the illusion of community,  but to what extent is a community built on lazy banalities,  mindless sensationalism,  self-pity, and illusional "friends" something of value?  Before this explosion of "communication" there was protest, and the above song seems inconceivable in this climate of xenophobic mono-culture.  It communicates its ideas clearly,  and those anti-war sentiments would seem nearly treasonous in a present mired in conformity and military worship.  Where are today's protests?  This 1968 song (the military march arrangement on the TAPE FROM CALIFORNIA album is quite stirring and certainly preferred) is about loss on both sides of the Vietnam War,  and could just as well be about the madness of our involvement in three conflicts in 2011.  Horribly,  the insanity of the times eventually caught up with Phil Ochs.  He died by his own hand in 1976,  another in a string of American tragedies.

SHORT FORM

Saturday, July 9, 2011

OPTIK: THE HEART OF THE WORLD

This 2000 silent short,  written,  directed,  photographed,  and edited by Guy Maddin is certainly one of my favorite films of any length,  given my full immersion into its antiquated melodrama,  hyperkinetic editing,  emotive score,  and overall look of decrepitude.  It comes as no surprise that this B&W gem comes from our northern neighbors,  Canada (Winnipeg,  to be more precise),  a country well represented by maverick directors.  Think the body morphing antics of David Cronenberg and the psycho/sexual dilemmas of Atom Egoyan,  but much more playful, surreal,  and totally untouched by Hollywood.  HEART OF THE WORLD is surely more than the sum of its influences,  as it takes the syntax of silent film and design elements from Russian Constructivism,  and weaves them into a highly charged love story/ecological disaster movie/morality tale.  The dialogue cards add to the personal and global hysteria with which this tale of sibling rivalry, a lovely state scientist,  and the Earth's core proceeds to a poor choice and later,  sacrifice.  Anna,  the object of the brothers' longing,  chooses a lecherous bloated industrialist as lover.  In it's final minute,  Anna rejects (and apparently kills) the industrialist,  and gives her heart to replace the Earth's ailing pump.  All is now weirdly well in Maddin's world. Check out this and Maddin's full length movies for a real sense of how film can present displacement as a viewer condition,  and narrative as a bizarre maze.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

THE DREAMER HAS AWAKENED: Cy Twombly (1928-2011)



One of the last great men of 20th century American painting died on July 5th in a hospital in his adopted country of Italy at the age of 83.  He,  along with such luminaries as Jasper Johns,  Robert Rausenberg,  Willem DeKooning,  and Mark Rothko helped to elevate American painting to a status usually reserved for European art.  Strangely enough,  this Virginia native chose to move from NYC to Rome in 1957 and never looked back.  I myself have wandered the area of Piazza Barberini in hopes of bumping into him as he navigated Via Monserrato on his way to shop in Campo de' Fiori.  I even went as far as visiting Gaeta,  the town south of Rome where he had a summer studio.  I must say that this or any form of artistic hero-worship was something that Mr Twombly avoided like the plague,  which is quickly discerned from his limited availability to the art press and his relative anonymity on the streets of Rome.   It was his love of Classical art and literature that made the Eternal City more than a home for him.  The lyrical beauty and poetry seen in his touch is was made his paintings so special,  a hybrid of drawing,  painting,  and regret that made his art-making process both deeply human and intimately personal.  His erasures,  smudges,  scrawled lines,  and gestural markings formed a grand view of his "pentimenti" or penances. He spoke that "each line was an experience",  not an illustration of something else.  He called line "a sensation of its own realization".  That his last major commission was the ceiling of the Lourve's Salle des Bronzes seems entirely appropriate for a modern artist of his stature and sensibility.  Ironically,  the work is highly geometric and incorporates the clearly painted names (in Greek) of great Hellenic sculptors into its composition.  It now seems that Mr Twombly was a classicist after all.

OTHER?