Appropriate (verb, imperative) beauty
art
Exegi Polaroidum aere perennius
“Hi, this is Steve,” said the voice on the phone. “How are you?” The voice was a breathy basso and the intonation oozed with benevolence. A few seconds after that, Steve revealed that he was calling to offer me a reverse mortgage and I realized that Steve was an interactive audio file.
—
A cynosure of the international art world in the first decade of this century was the American artist Dash Snow (1981-2009). A member of the princely Menil family of art patrons, Dash devoted his life as an artist to wearing hats, vandalizing hotel rooms, and not much else. But he was also an almost unbelievably handsome young man, with waist-length blond hair and a really big trust fund, and he took tens of thousands of Polaroids of the life his Dionysiac force created around him. Most of these images are of people being drunk or drugged.
It was the drugs that got him. At
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/10/asx-tv-dash-snow-talking-about-dash-snow-2012.html
you can see an elegiac interview about that event with a gallerista who fondly remembers the fun she unfailingly experienced when Dash was in the room. Even as a little boy, the gallerista recalls, Dash was a nonstop source of creative energy: throwing things, smashing things, and setting fires until the very moment he was sent off to reform school. After a while, the interviewer cuts the conversation short and abruptly leaves the room. It’s time, he explains to the gallerista, for him to pick up his little boy.
—
At
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/09/asx-tv-dash-snow-interview.html
you can see Dash in extreme closeup with cigarette, aetatis suae XXIV. If he had lived, he would have looked like Mitch McConnell by the time he was 40. But art, even Dash’s art, admits you to an interior zone from which the human reaches out toward immortality. Back from the immortal, in this case, come a couple of sentences’ worth of Dashtalk: “I don’t believe in the laws or the system by any means whatsoever. I try not to obey them at any time.”
The words are just phatic sound, of course, like Steve’s “How are you?” They might as well be the clay language of a Grecian urn, stilled into perdurable ceramic. Yet when the speaker fills his lungs with smoke and speaks the words to the video track, he looks as real as Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
—
Dash-in-the-Polaroid doesn’t believe in the laws. He thinks of what he does generally, in the abstract. (The drugs probably have something to do with that.) Steve-in-the-computer doesn’t believe only in the Do Not Call List. He thinks of what he does in a focused pragmatic way, with the help of lawyers who edit his script and computer programmers who help him speak it. Dash represents inhuman art. Steve represents the humanity of the hucksters who ascribe a value to art.
—
At the end of The Bacchae, Dionysus destroys first those who didn’t worship him and then those who did. Look at this image and discuss.
“A certain pleasant sense of over indulgence, of having absolutely enough of the very best”
The two wistful images below depict an uneasy dream staged during the long naptime between the death of Victoria and the beginning of the Great War. That was the era of G. K. Chesterton, when language sweated grease under starched linen as it sleepily tried to say what it had to say; then tried again; then tried again.
All that the Philharmonic Society of Buffalo wanted to say during three spring evenings in 1912, for example, was one simple, poignant thing: “Beauty deserves to be noticed, even if we are in Buffalo.” But what prolonged the poignancy through seven agonizing paragraphs wasn’t its multiplying words; it was their echoless surround. In the merchant city of Buffalo, a city that was all transaction with others, the Society’s prose was admitting to itself that it could speak only to itself. Knowing (the Society’s own Buffalo ledgers confirmed the truth) that its words were being ignored, it comforted itself with a little song whose words went, “I am beautiful, nevertheless.” It repeated the song, tema e variazioni, but still heard no reply. Then, by way of at least salvaging a memory from the hurt, it wrote out the song’s verses in a pretty typeface and gave them a poem’s pretty title: “Proem.” At exactly the same historical moment, Lewis Wickes Hine was capturing his images of child laborers, some of them the scions of parents who had loved them and given them wishful aristocratic names. The images forecast no future except misery and premature death, and the Buffalo printer had trouble with the name “Philharmonic.”
But a century after that sad last paragraph, the Buffalo Philharmonic is alive and prospering. In 1912 the authors of “Proem” did not labor in vain. The memorial to their achievement is now an archival online tombeau that also holds the program of (for instance) a piano recital performed on April 17, 1928, by the undying Maurice Ravel, assisted by the soprano Greta Torpadie. During that era, too, Greta Torpadie not only sang beauty into a passing Buffalo night per “Proem” (“Music . . in the very act of being is gone”). No; in herself, as herself, probably while located somewhere other than Buffalo, she enacted a silent beauty within the universal memory of not-Buffalo. There in the not-Buffalo, at the instant she took a ceramic cat into her hand and instructed a photographer to commence recording, she established the shape called Cat in a form capable of communicating in human terms. Touching the cat under the camera’s transforming gaze, the soprano made it desirable. Desire then diffused throughout the camera’s work product, making its image of the piano and the pictures on the walls and the woman’s flowered tunic and smooth dark hair and profound eyes into the working, intercommunicating organs of a single living thing. Like “Proem,” that living thing came into being under the aspect of a generic name. The name of the unified life in the photograph was Collectible (noun).
In Buffalo after Buffalo, Collectible originates by acquisition and inheritance of a single genetic trait: “a certain pleasant sense of over indulgence, of having absolutely enough.” But uttering the spacious pronoun “enough” frees us to reutter “Collectible” in a simpler, grander way. “Enough” connotes the unlimited, connotes inexhaustible happy surprise, connotes treasure. The nouns “collectible” and “treasure” then combine into something like the emotion we feel when we experience certain faces. We call that emotion Beauty. Its origin is the idea of treasure: something desired without yet being namable, then acquired, and only then experienced as a growing, changing life in memory and as memory.
Reconsidered that way as a memory treasure, beauty becomes a Pharaonic inheritance of Cayman Island safe deposit boxes stuffed with mummified cats and remembered in wills. Soprano memento, beauty expresses itself as a culture’s collective will. Finally, says the document to us readers of its words, I, beauty, am so all-comprehending that I’m simple. All I’m for, all I am, is committed desire and the promise of return. The term of my bequest is this: the instant you vest me in the documented form of dark eyes and a score on the Steinway, I’ll burst into song, forever.
Sources:
“Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Pre-History: 1840-1935.” http://www.music.buffalo.edu/bpo/bx-pre.htm
The image of Greta Torpadie is from the George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2006001053/. Photoshopped for contrast.
The Simplex advertisement is in Vintage Automobile Ads & Posters CD-ROM and Book, ed. Carol Belanger Grafton (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010), image 080.
Disturbed areas of the world
A Lava step at any time
Am I inclined to climb
A Crater I may contemplate
Vesuvius at Home
—
Sources:
Archives of American Art,
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Passport–285890
Photoshopped.
Dickinson, Fr1691, “Volcanoes be in Sicily.” I read the first two lines as a subjunctive: “If at any time I am inclined to climb a lava step.”
Art and its capital: an update
I’ve blogged several times in the past year about Genshiro Kawamoto, a billionaire who buys multimillion-dollar houses in Honolulu by the dozen, partially demolishes them, installs giant garden statues at random on their lawns, and then abandons the ruins. As of March 4, the news is that Kawamoto is under arrest in Japan for tax evasion. Television coverage, with pictures of his Honolulu project, is at
Art is to money as T are to A
From the construction site of the museum through which the billionaire Genshiro Kawamoto is bringing some beauty to Hawaii, this offering.
$
The Courts . . .
Images from Mr. Kawamoto’s pagoda dump can be found at
http://theartpart.jonathanmorse.net/2012/11/allegorical-monument-to-late-capitalism/
Click any of the images above to enlarge it.
Swagger
L. Paul Bremer III, who spent the Bush administration bringing disaster to Iraq, is now self-employed as a landscape painter in Vermont. At
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/02/the_watercolor_paintings_of_paul_bremer
you can find an illustrated article about his oeuvre. The man is every bit as good at being an artist as he was at being a proconsul. But he’s confident enough nevertheless to bring his work before the public.
—
Here, in front of the cathedral in Padua, is the first Renaissance equestrian statue, Donatello’s image of the condottiere Gattamelata. In their own right, the armored image and the cathedral come to us massively, in the final rightness that history bestows on its darlings. But click the photograph anyway if you wish to enlarge it.
Sometimes confidence does bring forth works with the power to outlive. For them, “outlive” is an intransitive verb. It survives their makers, burning away all the evil of their beginning. They can kill, but the deaths they impose aren’t just blundering Bremerian Fingerfehler. We love them for the reason Rilke loved his angels: because they serenely disdain to destroy us.
Photographing the perfect
Detroit Publishing Company, “S. S. William G. Mather — stern view before launch.” Great Lakes Engineering Works, Ecorse, Michigan, October 1905. http://www.shorpy.com/node/13149 . Click to enlarge.
Rising through the black verticals of men’s upright bodies and the sheer of the William G. Mather’s side, your eye soars upward. At the top, a climax to the shape begun by the ship’s rudder, the ship’s stern executes a curve. The curve is a parabola, the arc traced by a body rising and then falling back on itself, but this rise reaches its limit only when it has passed out of the ship’s body and reached the sky.
On that day it was a lightly clouded, all but touchable sky. Far beneath it, legs spread wide and steady, a tripod held up a camera in which waited an 8-by-10-inch glass negative. Then the lens opened wide the camera’s rosewood box, and it poured in cloud and steel and flesh and light. It molded them there into the round of the image’s great dome. Ever since, it has been launching the dome back upward.
As of 1905, that gesture in the light might have taught Ecorse to see itself as a universe made of tangible things — the camera’s glass and wood, the ship’s bronze and steel, the men’s bodies. In an embodied universe like that, in an Ecorse under its dome of light, you don’t look at the dome, passively. Instead, you watch it be. Changing through time as it lights the ship which is about to descend the ways and begin moving outward from Ecorse, the dome has a beginning and will have an end. In the old sense of the word, meaning “complete,” it is perfect.
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
—
But to look at Ecorse today is to look not outward but downward.
The Great Lakes Engineering Works went out of business in 1960, and if any trace of it remains, it isn’t visible from orbit. To Bing Maps (early in the disapearance) and Google Maps (later), the most prominent feature of Ecorse in 2012 is the bulldozed ruin of what was once a steel mill.
This full-color image, captured from space by a process unrealizable in 1905, depicts an economy which itself has been derealized. If any people were visible in this 21st-century Ecorse, they would be seen differently by the lens because their bodies would have a different relationship to the eye. They would have to be conceptualized eyelessly, with the mind alone, because they are now subjects of a bodiless economy. In an Ecorse without a Works, their exchanges with one another are governed not by anything with a heartbeat but by capital’s Platonic idea of buying and selling per se. Ecorse in 1905 became perfect for a single instant: the fraction of a second it took a shutter to open and fill a rosewood box with light. But Ecorse in 2012 is imperfect everywhere. Its economy is now only an exemplum of the idea of money operating at a distance, far from the light that once could complete a picture by localized duplication as it reflected itself upward from flowing water to completing dome.
Have the laws of perspective in this new economy been established yet?
Perhaps they will be. If and when they are, let’s spare a moment to remember Ecorse. By then, perhaps, we’ll be seeing upward toward the domed sky of a new Ecorse. That may help light our way out of the art of the long twentieth century.
Exegi monumentum aere perennius
The article from Inside Higher Ed,
is titled “Sports Artists vs. Universities,” and it reports that the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit has ruled that the University of Alabama can’t prevent an artist named Daniel A. Moore from painting pictures of Alabama football players, even if they’re wearing their trademarked uniforms. Said the court, “Like other expressive speech, Moore’s paintings, prints, and calendars are entitled to full protection under the First Amendment.”
But the University of Alabama was joined in court, amici curiae, by 27 other universities. Please stand now in respectful silence and hear the words of their brief. They testify to the power held by the American university system over the English language.
And shall we remain standing a moment longer to remember Walt Kelly (1913-1973), prophet of the state of the language in 2012?
Where art provides us with role models
Click to enlarge.