art
Art has anticipated what we think of as experience
In 1955, we were told that this was fiction.
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But it had already become what’s called real.
The New Yorker, September 24, 1949
Look at Studebaker’s wardrobe for 1949, think of the then new jet plane acting a new role in the unchanging plot of dream, and you’ll understand that Studebaker wasn’t at all the first walk-on to carry a bag of props. What’s called an event is only one of infinitely many acts already staged in the past tense. Regardless of wardrobe, the last act every night everywhere is the one that darkens all the universe into background for a marquee.
And the marquee’s only words, always, are the three that glow Lasciate ogne speranza.
Shod forever in red: two modes of immortality
1. That which never can change:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=eX6e8A9mk-g
Its oriflamme is, “The red shoes dance on.”
2. That which refashions mother memory into statesmanship:
Its talisman in words is, “Make [name of myth] great again.”
As if the word again could ever have had a not yet changed meaning – that is, a meaning not yet tangled in myth’s pubic hair.
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This is an anonymous, unattributed repost of a document dating from about 1938. Its text translates as, “Germanic Civilization and Way of Life: The Knowledge of the Sacredness of the Blood.”
The artist is immaterial
Take only the art to heart.
Iste perfecit opus
In Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi,” the artist who narrates the poem asks us to consider a painting filled to the margins with brilliantly illuminated images of men and women, every one of them as singularly alive as it’s possible for a human creator to make. Among all of those, one will bear a caption: Iste perfecit opus, “This man made the work.”
Browning read those words as the credo of the kind of artist who mines his way through the material of any world that comes to his hand. The credo’s key word is the one that guides Fra Lippo’s kind of art-labor: the adverb intensely.
This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
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Intensely through the course of his career, Donald Trump has often made it known that he’d like to see a new colossus blasted into the granite of Mount Rushmore, in addition to or instead of the existing four. This would be, obviously, the one depicting himself. However, the analysis of John Branch and Jeremy White concludes that that desire won’t be fulfilled. Geology prohibits it.
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To an ordinary artist, that would count as a rejection. But an artist possessed by intensity will resculpt rejection into a constructive consolation. Properly, a labor that is intense will be powered by nothing but biology. It will transcend human tools, even the power drills and dynamite that Gutzon Borglum used when he subjugated the granite of Mount Rushmore to fame. After all, even that fame was a limited one, incomprehensible beyond the limits of a single nation’s history. Its scope was physically ambitious but deficient in desire. But the moment when desire understands that what it desires is only desire itself – desire unfulfillable because unending and unending because illimitable – the limiting specifics of its implements will cease to matter.
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After all, the implements might be a mere chisel, a mere paintbrush, a mere pen. How much work has been done with those!
Or, for another mere instance:
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John Branch and Jeremy White, “Should (or Could) Trump Be Added to Mount Rushmore?” New York Times, June 27, 2025
History in an era before irony. Art in an era before color.
After the World Series of 1913, the New York Giants and the Chicago White Sox boarded the first of many trains and headed west for a series of exhibition games. After they arrived in California, they kept right on rounding bases through Asia, Australia, and then Europe. In England they played a game before King George V, then boarded one last steamer for their return to the United States. It arrived in New York on the morning of March 6, 1914.
It docked two hours late, and the weather over the harbor was rainy and snowy. Nevertheless, a riverboat brought hundreds of people alongside, cheering. A photographer from the Bain News Service recorded their approach, and after that somebody scratched three words of explanation into the silent negative that survived the event. Using a photo-editing program, I’ve erased them from this print. Trying to read them on their own single term is pointless now, because “now” is the period of time extending almost all the way back to the instant of shutter release. To read the word “now” requires a supplementary history archived far from the site of anything instant.
The words that no longer mean are “Ship with fans.” Other attempts at inscribing meaning might have been made, of course: words such as “prow,” “angular,” and perhaps “geometric” or “abstract.” Two more would have to have been “white” and “black.” Think of a Mondrian shape without color. As of March 6, 1914, however, the time for such a thing hadn’t yet arrived.
But one more incision scratched into the negative cut all the way through to the time beyond 1914. Referring across a few more inches of silver halide emulsion to the word “ship,” it gave it a name bearing the colors of a future. In 1914 “ship” in plain black and white was all it needed to be. For the purposes of a news service’s lexicon in 1914, the ship was only a mode of baseball delivery. The second scratching gave “Ship” a proper name, but as of 1914 that amounted only to journalism’s who-what-where practice at its automated busywork. The name itself remained insignificant.
But in 1915 it suddenly began signifying on its own. Suddenly the ship sank below the visible surface of things; suddenly the letters on its bow and stern became unreadable; suddenly, then, they were transformed from a string of morphemes painted on metal to a meaning capable of existing anywhere. Now that they are gone into history, the metal letters are history. Their historiography took only a few minutes to accomplish, and in its final form it is only one synecdochic word long.
Say the synecdoche. In memory, as memory, say Lusitania. Like Guernica, it will be one of the words in which some artists of the twentieth century defined a mortal passage out of time.
Sources:
“Giants Get Rousing Welcome Home.” New York Times, March 7, 1914, page 12.
[“LUSITANIA, 1907-1914 . . .”] George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002721377/
Not heard coming
The cartoon is about something that was on a lot of front pages in September 1903: “the problem of aerial navigation.” Just below the picture, a little story about the impending voyage of Samuel Pierpont Langley’s flying machine Aerodrome is to be read as a footnote in advance.
Pedagogically, it teaches us that on October 7 and again on December 8, the Aerodrome and its pilot catapulted themselves into the air from a boat moored in the Potomac River but then nosed down and sank. Langley’s attempt at powered flight had been supported by the resources and publicity apparatus of the Smithsonian Institution, but when the ripples closed above them, the problem of aerial navigation remained unsolved.
It was to be solved on December 17 by Orville Wright, but even during the moment of the immediately post-Langley nobody at the Indianapolis Star was in position to see that coming. Elsewhere in its front-page layout for September 28 the Star had offered its subscribers opportunities to read about several murders, a gallows confession, an accidental electrocution, and a horse-show scandal. All those readings, however, were rooted in the still earth of September 1903. The problem of aerial navigation remained as unsolved as ever. Column 1’s long article about a train falling from a trestle could treat only the idea of descent from ground to ground.
But the Wright Brothers solved the falling-body problem, and over the following years the solution became known. By 1924 the body at the foot of the trestle could be imagined on the rise. According to Wikipedia, this record of the change was the first country song to sell a million copies.
https://archive.org/details/wreck-of-the-old-97_202102
Listen to its cheerful whistlings. Fast mail train no. 97 had taken on feathered flesh. Now it could fly on to heaven, leaving its wood and metal mortalities in death-filled earth.
Seminar with refreshments
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Act 1: setting for a modernist centennial
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Idol: its history
A portraitist sees flesh quantitatively, like a butcher.
In the course of professionally seeing flesh the artist may come to know desire, but his job is to look past what he knows to what he only sees: flesh’s light and color and shape. Because he has starved his senses in the brutal slimming salon of formalism, we customers of his ordeal have been enabled to look at the formal result and say things like, “She looks like she’s alive.” Working the artist’s diet in reverse, we who behold the art have purchased the sensation of flesh rewarmed under a heat lamp.
Back then, back there in the kitchen, the artist worked at a first remove from the space outside, manipulating not a bodily sense of things plein-air but an abstract model of sight made of stone or paint or pixels. In the same way, a historian works at a first remove from time. He works not with event and perception as they occur but in the afterthought of event and perception that’s called retrospect. The artist defamilarizes the spatial, making the appearance of the hitherto real seem different and then replacing it with a counter-reality. The historian defamiliarizes the temporal, replacing the mind’s external sense of is with was and then with a purely mental construct, because. With the advent of because, a newly living past kills a newly dead present. What happened is replaced by an idea of what happened.
So consider this body under two aspects in sequence: first as seen absolutely and without the mediation of thought (by, for instance, an artist) and then, in retrospect, as a relation between words (by, for instance, a historian of words.)
First the perception: a body seen. This is a prehistory.
Second, the perception’s translation into words. A general title for such words might be histoire: a French term that means both “history” and “story.” Of all possible histoires, here’s one.
You can read it with your Larousse.
As the word-seeds blow, a matinee metaphor in the present will be seen to have sown an image in the past. Now, with the reading of the metaphor’s words, the curtain before the image rises and an idol begins presiding over its altar. Now is now happily ever after. The image has become a god to be believed in. “He looks like he could be in a movie,” the customers think — and if the artwork has been powerful enough, could be is replaced in their minds by ought to be or even in my bed last night, in a dream, was. A faithful belief in a reality has come into being, even if the stone body newly fallen on the dreaming customer’s pillow doesn’t happen to be warm to the touch.
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