It's surreal

When have you last heard the expression, "It's surreal!"

All the time, is what I say. 

The word "surreal" has become synonymous to "weird" or "strange".

Yet, that's not what surreal means.

Andrea Scott of the New Yorker Magazine, revisits the word in context of surrealism in the art world. 

She writes of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte in anticipation of a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Arts from September 28 to January 12 ("Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary"). 

Magritte's art created a jangling effect on the beholder's sensibilities because he transposed the banal and the unnerving.

Case in point is the painting "Time Transfixed":

How does one make sense of the locomotive that floats indelibly in the fireplace, and in our "normal" thought we don't instinctively associate a locomotive with a bourgeois domestic accoutrement like a fireplace.

But the presence of the dangling locomotive from a living room structure does alter our perception of both the locomotive and the fireplace, and together the two transform the ordinary scene into a strange one.

The effect in totality is surreal. 

When the ordinary becomes strange, it's surreal. 

According to Scott, Magritte "saw himself as a secret agent in the war on bourgeois values, and described his mission as a restoring of the familiar to the strange, because he felt that too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar.

In other words, the bourgeois domesticates and makes natural that which is really created/constructed, whether it be objects or values.

So that's surrealism 101 for you, and next time I hear the word surreal uttered when a centaur appears in the middle of Time Square, I'll wince.

Do judge a book by its cover

I am amazed by the deep thought that often go into the making of a book cover.

I imagine that thoughtful books have thoughtful covers.

Take for instance, the cover of William Gass' new novel Middle C (at first, I had thought it to represent "middle class," and why not? The battered and vanishing middle class is the subject matter of so much discourse in Western media today).

Artist Gabrielle Wilson, had initially proposed a book cover with a half-concealed-by-music sheets-human face on it, to reveal a basic profile of the protagonist Joey, who is an introvert, average intellectual, a University lecturer and an amateur pianist. 

But Joey in his mind, is also a brilliant professor who runs an organization called the inhumanity museum, a dark place full of clippings of news of world catastrophes. 

Wilson was in a dilemma--to show or not to show the other immaterial life that Joey is steeped in on the book cover. She eventually settled for a cover that gives a hint of Joey's real life--a middling, ordinary one, best represented by the piano key of C.

The history of the book cover that stayed is as follows:

I asked piano-playing friends and piano repair shops in New York for a C key, to no avail. I called Steinway & Sons on 57th Street, and they connected me with Anthony Gilroy at their Queens factory. He was perplexed but entertained by the idea of shipping a single key to Manhattan. The next day I received a beautifully hand-carved ivory key, but I discovered that a full-size key is nearly two feet long. I called Anthony again to see if the factory could cut it shorter and add a black C sharp key. I photographed them from above on a giant turquoise Pantone swatch, aiming to give the ensemble a menacing, lonely mood. Once in the jacket layout, I paired it with the elegant, slightly traditional Sackers Roman typeface so as not to distract from the image.

Lesbians can be cerebral

Director Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color won the 2013 Palm d'Or, at the Cannes film festival.

The story has a lesbian theme. It's about the developing relationship between two students, one of whom has her hair dyed blue. When she reverts back to the color blonde, the relationship is destroyed.

The film is based on Le Bleu est Une Couleur, a graphic novel by French artist Julie Maroh.

Maroh criticized the liberty the director took with her comic to reduce the love scenes into a spectacle of lesbian pornography.

In her blog, Maroh had to say the following of the controversial scenes:

[It was] a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and [made] me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theatre, everyone was giggling [...]The heteronormative laughed because they don't understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it's not convincing, and [they] found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn't hear giggling were the potential guys [sic] too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.

I am quite taken by the erotic quality of the scene above; the girls weave a gossamer web of eros around Sartre, Bob Marley and philosophy in general. The indication that the girl on the left is turned on by people who take a stand, is clear when she upholds Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up," as a signature song of commitment. I guess, the other girls reversion to being a blonde turns her off for that reason.

I feel like Maroh predicates lesbian love on something cerebral, so that the "heteronormative" don't get away with the notion that only grotesque sex binds same-sex relationships.

Trailer art

I'm always curious about the evolution of genres.

I thought of the genre of the movie trailer, and found the trailer of a 1983 British film, Educating Rita.

The announcements, I think are too loud, but nothing is really revealed of what the movie might be about.

The voice over exhorts audiences to see the movie primarily because of the actresses' "astounding" debut.

What I really enjoy about movie trailers from today is the subtlety; the trailers are an art form in and of themselves and they recreate for us the film's marrow with a great deal of of finesse.

Watch, for instance, the trailer of the forthcoming Will Smith blockbuster, After Earth:

It's sophisticated.

Art of Tino Sehgal

I hadn't heard of Tino Sehgal, till I read about his art on display at the art fair, Frieze New York, in Randall Island.

Sehgal's identity is mind-bogglingly hybrid, but there is a little bit of the Indian in him, buried under the palimpsest of the British and the German.

His art is even more eclectic: Sehgal says his art comes off "constructed situations," where people perform instructions conceived by the artist.

Here for instance, is an art named "These Associations," where a bunch of people run through the length and breadth of turbine hall in London's Tate Modern:

Spectacularum: Perspective on Contemporary Art, discusses the work and it's layered meaning indepthly.

2013: A Real Space Odyssey

"Second Life" in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We all know what was done to the swastika--the Hindu sacred symbol--when it was appropriated by the Nazis.

The symbol fell from divine grace and became a byword for genocide and evil.

Not all words and symbols suffer the same disgrace, but they do, in ways, small and big, risk altering into their "other" when hauled out of their originating contexts and put into a radically different one.

Italian artist Filippo Minelli recontextualizes names of Social Network giants like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube, by ripping them out of their familiar home of the browser and re-painting them on the walls of slums in Mali, Cambodia or Vietnam. 

His goal is not to strip these words, that are gateways into social networks that people enter to enjoy secure interaction and communication with online users across the globe, of their dignity, but to see if they undergo significant meaning-alteration when re-planted in real space and real time. Minelli is especially interested in putting the words in those spatial and temporal realms that are the "detritus" rather than the fragrant flowers of a technology-dominated capitalism. 

In a way, the slums of the world are the absolute "others" of the secure and organized virtual spaces of the online world. Imagine painting the word "Second Life" on the walls of a decrepit and dingy wall of a slum, where not only is another "life" a luxury and a sacrilege to contemplate, but also dangerously redolent of drug-addled escapism from the misery of real time indigence. Remember, the trainspotters in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting? The second lives of these Irish urchin addicts were cocaine trips into oblivion. 

Minelli says his intention behind transplanting social network words from their virtual cocoons into the real world of slums is "to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies."

Here is an excellent guide to what might be philosophically at stake in Minelli's work.

Where, I wonder can the word Facebook be re-painted? 

Jackie and Ann

The 2004 Austrian Nobel Prize winner and agoraphobic, Elfriede Jelinek has written a monologue from the point of view of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The play is Jackie.

The New Yorker Magazine describes the play's heroine as witty, fun, funny, catty, and a paranoid nut job.

Jackie riffs for eighty minutes on the pleasures and horrors of being a Kennedy icon, and on death. Jackie is shown to drag around dummies emblazoned with the names Jack, Bobby and Ari.

Holland Taylor plays the role of former Texas Governor and famous alcoholic Ann Richards, in a new play Ann. Holland has also composed the play.

Richards was governor from 1991 to 1995 and died in 2006. She had once barked at President Bill Clinton, saying "I'm as strong as mustard gas." She is best remembered for her salty, down-home wit, and the play, according to critics, spills over with her indelible gumption, as Texan and tangy as barbecue sauce.

Jackie and Ann, both powerful women, not in the simple sense of being in positions of power, but in the broader sense of displaying the strength and courage of individuality and the humility of being fallible at the same time.

Chilean-American India

Nachiketa is a new Opera; its librettist is well-known Chilean-writer-in-exile, Ariel Dorfman.

Whenever, a writer takes on a "foreign" subject matter, I'm always intrigued, primarily because that's a challenge that's worth taking on. In this sense, an apt predecessor of Dorfman's Nachiketa would be Peter Brooks' Mahabharata.

Nachiketa's story is borrowed from the ancient Hindu text of the Upanishads and modernized:

A little boy goes to Death and asks Death three things: “What is love?” And Death takes him on a trip to India to the child prostitute who wants to kill her own baby. “What is reconciliation?” And Death takes him to Africa to the child soldier who has gouged out the eyes of his best friend and killed his own parents. “What comes after death?” And then Death takes him to Chile or Argentina, where there are two orphans who don’t know whether their parents are alive or dead.

The gap

Israeli photographer Natan Dvir shows us a different kind of gap in his photography of gigantic billboards in Manhattan.

One can't miss the chasm in this photograph:

In his own words:

These ads are creating some kind of virtual dream world, a virtual reality, and when you compare it to what happens in reality — there’s a huge difference, sometimes a mind-boggling difference,” Mr. Dvir said. “That kind of lifestyle, that kind of mind-set, is not attainable. But this is how we frame our culture. And our culture says these are the right dreams to have. And I wonder... are they?

Coming from an Israeli culture that values sparseness and frugality as part and parcel of an acceptable lifestyle, Dvir's astonishment is only natural.

An establishment parody

Rarely does an institution parody itself as has the South Korean military in creating a video entitled "Les Militaribles."

I am guessing that the authorities who made this video didn't intend it to be a parody, but a brave borrowing of form and content of the immensely successful film version of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserable". 

Instead of advertising the sacrifice and hard work that the conscripts of the South Korean army undergo "Gangam style," the "Les Miz" style is a more appropriate choice. It celebrates virtues of nobleness and community, while the Gangam culture is a bit on the undignified, lampoon side of things.

"Les Militaribles" has gone viral.

Bush baths

Just as there is the bubble bath, there is now the "Bush bath." I coined the term to indicate, not the luxurious and largely feminine undertones that accompany the bubble bath, but a more matter-of-fact kind of bathing under the shower. 

The bather in a "Bush bath" is characterized by a certain kind of "introspective self-absorption."

Where am I deriving such stuff from? 

From a recently posted cache of the paintings of George Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. 

The "Arts Beats" segment of the NYT brought the fact of Bush's amateur persuasion to my attention. I liked the paintings and so did the critic who reviewed them, enough to discuss the form, content as well as the possible intellectual and painterly tradition to which George Bush the painter might belong (though there is still that wariness that the painter under scrutiny is none other than the boyo Prez, who was considered to have minimal intellect).

The forms, the critic opines,

[Are] handled with care, but awkwardly, which is the source of their appeal. Things are recognizable but just: you can detect posh details like the shower’s chrome hinge and glass door. Everything is honestly accounted for, not sharply realistic, certainly not finicky.

As for the influences working on Bush, the critic speculates that he might be familiar with Jasper Johns' "The Seasons

[Where] each of the four paintings is shadowed by a male, seemingly unclothed silhouette, or Pierre Bonnard’s strangely chaste, luminous paintings of his wife reclining in a bathtub. And one can imagine them being not too out of place in a group show that might include the figurative work of Dana Schutz, Karen Kilimnik, Alice Neel, Christoph Ruckhaberle and Sarah McEneaney.

Chinese ambiguity

While two of James Joyce's most difficult of novels, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, have enjoyed near-best-selling status (sale of Finnegans exceeded 8000, while Ulyssees sold 85,000 copies upon publication in 1994), the Chinese ministry of culture refuses a show of Andy Warhol's famous 10 paintings of Mao.

Is this an evidence of Chinese ambiguity?

Conversely,

What the Chinese read is Joyce in translation--can't imagine the quirky Joyceisms retaining their unique lexical flavor in translation--and my hunch is maybe what the Chinese read are watered down to what they can digest, i.e. censored in any which way. 

While words can be tinkered with in translation, a painting can't be altered, let alone 10 paintings.

Below is the 10th; it's the Mao drawn in the darkest of tones.

Monet's light

Eva Figes' Light is

[A] slim book—ninety-one pages in all, describing a single summer day in 1900—but an amazingly capacious one. As the subtitle promises, it’s set in Giverny, the place where Monet produced many of his best-known works, including his paintings of water lilies. These are among the most widely viewed and most often reproduced nature studies in the world. What the paintings don’t show, however, is the dramatic extent to which their subjects were in fact man-made. As numerous biographies have detailed, the father of Impressionism was an avid student of botany; he employed and oversaw a team of up to seven gardeners and imported seeds from around the world. The pond in which the famous water lilies grew existed only because he persuaded local authorities to divert a river, and his garden was as assiduously manicured as any aristocrat’s lawn. He was painting nature, but a nature constantly modified in the service of his artistic project.

Not too many people would remember Eva Figes: She was an English writer, who died last year at the age of 80. Figes is best known for her feminist treatise, "Patriarchal Attitudes," published in the 70's. The treatise ferrets out the sexism that Figes saw embedded in almost every aspect of Western civilization.

It's no wonder then that in the novel, Light, Monet, is recreated in the image of a patriarch. However, unlike her other works of fiction and non-fiction, Light isn't a crude vehicle of Figes' ideology; it is something more, as Figes makes it clear that the greatness of Monet's artistic accomplishments are not cancelled by the conditions of their production.

In Light, Monet is shown to be a callous husband and father, not fine-tuned to the emotional needs of the largely female members of his household. He was single-mindedly invested in the procreation of his art. Even where his own children were concerned, Monet fed them and clothed and sheltered them, but inevitably reduced them to a medium via which an aspect of his art would be refracted:

During lunch, he looks down the table at his stepdaughter Germaine and becomes absorbed by the interplay of light and shadow on her hair and gown—so much so that he momentarily forgets whom, exactly, he is looking at.

Monet's patriarchal attitudes are, if one could say this, luminous; he is shown to be in pursuit of "light," not crude power.

In praise of the "slow" and "demanding"

Giles Harvey composes a wonderful paean to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's 4 and a 1/2 hour long avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach.

But the tribute is really paid to all works of art that are "slow", like Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and consequently "demanding," i.e. cannot be consumed instantly.

According to Harvey such works of art are all the more valuable in an era of distraction and short attention span.

Some moments from the piece:

The thought of spending a month, or several months, with a single work—a “The Magic Mountain” or an “In Search of Lost Time”—is somehow enervating [...] Of course, there is a pernicious logic at work here. Why read a long novel when you can read a short one? Why read a short novel when you can watch a movie? Why watch a movie when you can watch a TV show? Why watch a TV when you catch a minute-long video of a kitten and a puppy cuddling on YouTube? As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.

The experience of witnessing "slow" and "demanding" art works is rewarding:

The payoff is handsome [...] I saw “Einstein on the Beach” over three months ago, but I have hardly stopped thinking about it since; the manically even “Night Train” duet plays on an almost endless loop inside my head.

It can sometimes seem as though modern life has no room for four-and-a-half-hour-long experimental operas or difficult poetry; but this is a mistake. In a world of speed and distraction, the slow, demanding art work is more indispensable than ever, for it holds out the possibility of those elusive commodities: stillness, clarity, and peace.

Artistic and aesthetic

Philosophy professor Gary Cutting has a thing or two to say about Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes.

He confesses that regardless of their iconic status in the art world, the boxes, and by extension the entire corpus of Warhol's work, does "very little" for him.

In other words, Warhol maybe an artist but he does not necessarily produce aesthetically moving experiences in the minds of many a beholder of his art:

Praise of Andy Warhol often emphasizes the new possibilities of artistic creation his work opened up. That would make his work important in the history of art and for that reason alone of considerable interest. But, as Jerrold Levinson and others have pointed out, a work can be an important artistic achievement without being an important aesthetic achievement. This, I suggest, is how we should think about Warhol’s Brillo boxes.

Finding a different kind of stillness...

Be still and write... in your head.

Spielberg's Poetics?

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln

Once upon a time, literature students used to grapple with the question of art and the the accuracy of history. 

In my case, the grappling was grounded in a seminal text on this topic: The Poetics by ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

In essence, Aristotle, sharing the concern of other Greek thinkers that art, or a dramatic representation of reality, could beguile people into confusing representation with the real, made one thing volubly clear: art is a second order dramatization of the reality of history. One cannot and should not go to art for accurate information about the past. 

In light of the debate swirling around Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln, the Aristotelian dictum comes to mind.

Critics have been worrying about the film's "historical accuracy," forgetting what historian Philip Zelikow has thoughtfully pointed out: Spielberg and other artists are not to be burdened with the mantle of a "historian", but accepted as folks who are free to interpret a moment in history according to their particular artistic needs. 

Challenging as it is, Zelikow says, to translate the "tangle of history" into good "streamlined art," Spielberg's (and screenwriter Tony Kushner's) Lincoln has accomplished just what it is expected to--a specific view of that moment in history (the passing of the 13th Amendment through the U.S. Congress).

Can a good painter make a good writer?

Novelist Orhan Pamuk seems to think so, if the same body houses both.

Pamuk is a painter and these are the following things he says the painter in him taught his writerly self:

1) 
Don’t start to write before you have a strong sense of the whole composition, unless you are writing a lyrical text or a poem. 

2) 
Don’t search for perfection and symmetry — it will kill the life in the work. 

3) 
Obey the rules of point of view and perspective and see the world through your characters’ eyes — but it is permissible to break this rule with inventiveness. 

4) 
Like van Gogh or the neo-Expressionist painters, show your brushstrokes! The reader will enjoy observing the making of the novel if it is made a minor part of the story. 

5) 
Try to identify the accidental beauty where neither the mind conceived of nor the hand intended any. The writer in me and the painter in me are getting to be friendlier every day. That’s why I am now planning novels with pictures and picture books with texts and stories

The seer

From the latest "Things I Saw"; drawings by artist Jason Polan:

I'm impressed by the presence of turtles and bats in public places. Americans would shriek at that! The Spaniards obviously have a different, more "European" view of such promiscuous interminglings.

Greatest Artist of "Our Time": St Lucas

I have a problem with the word "greatest" and the phrase "our time".

Nonetheless I read Camille Paglia's election of George Lucas as the "Greatest Artist of Our Time" with interest.

Paglia sets out to justify her choice, but her justification is a bit diffuse. 

What's clear, however, is Paglia's claim that Lucas' success lies in his marriage of tradition and modernity, or in other words, of art and technology. He is also global in that he 

fused ancient hero legends from East and West with futuristic science fiction and created characters who have entered the dream lives of millions [...]

Paglia goes to the extent of Da Vinci-izing Lucas as she sees glimpses of Leonardo's versatility in the children's graphic books published by the Lucas' production company (The Definitive Guide to the Craft of Star Wars).

Paglia has found a bit of many great artists and visionaries (including the Buddha) in Lucas's art and vision, and one feels that Paglia has composed a hagiography, somewhat canonizing George Lucas in the process.