A Book So Innovative, It Had to Wait for a New Administration
Not literally. It was coincidence that Leanne Shapton's Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (Sarah Crichton Books / Farrar, Straus and Giroux) arrived in my mailbox on January 21, 2009.
And Shapton has defied convention before often enough, in her own work and as co-founder of J&L Books, with its bias towards the experimental. But this is the first time I can recall a novel presented as an auction catalogue.
Christian Boltanski has presented catalogues of all the personal possessions of an average individual before, and plenty of pop photonovellas have told stories through posed photography. But no one I can think of has presented the tale of the breakup of a relationship by way of the photographs and accompanying description of personal objects that the couple has put up for auction. ("Strachan & Quinn Auctioneers, Saturday, 14 February 2009, New York")
It is up to the reader to piece together the biographies of Doolan and Morris, with ample quantities of family data via heirlooms, the evolution of the relationship via an array of tchotchkes and cards and letters, and everything from stolen salt and pepper shakers to bras and T-shirts.
I should perhaps emphasize again the innovative qualities of this book, which actually stands in the lineage of books with narrative supplemented by photographs first made familiar in the English-reading world through translations of the novels of W. G. Sebald, and continued by the translation of Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
But those novels don’t depend on the intimate blend of words and visuals to the extent that this one does, much less require the assembly of the story (which, truth be told, is an all too familiar one) from the available evidence.
There are textual parallels to this book in the French nouvelle roman of half a century ago, and in some hypertext image-laden fictions of a decade or so back.
But Shapton has done something genuinely new (as far as I know) with the format, and something that is simultaneously innovative and thematically appropriate. The story involves the trajectory of a relationship between a columnist for the New York Times and a photographer, and includes the books each of them has chosen to acquire…so print and the visuality associated with print are part of the tale. Although the format could be posted online, the implicit narrative involves the world of print-media professionals and their deeper discontents. There is a vintage typewriter (self-consciously retro) in the auction, but laptops, like cameras, must have been among the items withdrawn from the sale.
For the sake of the story, enough personal items have to be included to convey character as well as event. Some of the items do seem improbable (that is one source of the book's subtle but abundant humor); but then the auction is meant to represent all the things that are gotten rid of at the end of a painful relationship, and both parties will later regret having deaccessioned some of them so rashly.
Hence the inclusion in Shapton’s auction items of a good many small heirlooms and substantial library items along with the love notes and conversational exchanges written on theatre programs. If her fictional Doolan and Morris had been archivally inclined or pack rats, there would have been no story. (If Shapton herself weren’t so knowing in the ways of material culture, there wouldn’t have been a story, either.)
The regular dispersion of personal and family possessions constitutes a problem for the new academic discipline of material-culture studies: between the mobility of global society (whether from war or economic migration) and the rise of eBay, the material is always getting sold or abandoned.
All this hopelessly lost stuff is precisely the pile of debris that the Angel of History contemplates with such dismay in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (or in Laurie Anderson’s spoken-word recycling of same on Strange Angels). Only in moments of our own catastrophe do we perceive the human and physical wreckage we have left behind in the relentless march of what, according to Benjamin, we are pleased to call “progress.”
Auctions, thrift shops, and eBay complete the process by finding new owners for the detritus, covering the tracks of the crime by removing the evidence and finding a new use for what has become refuse, if not emotional toxic waste.
It is the function formerly performed by the ragpickers of Charles Baudelaire’s famous poem, a poetic analogy that Walter Benjamin recycled as productively as he did the frantic winged creature of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus..
So Shapton has given us underlying issues to think about as well as a story to piece together.
And it’s a lovely read, and an engaging, convincing look. If there weren’t a photograph of Shapton herself in the back to let us know that she cannot possibly be the protagonist, we would be tempted to read this as a roman à clef in spite of the incorporation of an adroit reference to Duane Michals’ “This Photograph Is My Proof” to remind us that, as Michals said, “Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be."
The many among us who have been involved in creating photographic and textual fictions for our own entertainment will be overjoyed to see this happy marriage of verbal and visual fictions (a happier relationship than the one experienced by the protagonists…not exactly a spoiler, since the book’s accompanying blurbs tell you that already).
Many of the photographs are by Shapton’s partner in L&J Books, Jason Fulford, whose work is well-known to many of the readers of this weblog, as are the books that both of them produce.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
y'all probably already know this site....
One of the People Whom I Choose Not to Name (except when he is named, misleadingly in passing, on my other blog) kept a file of news clippings labeled, if I recall correctly, “Monstrously Interesting.”
The label had nothing to do with a pun on monsters; he lived in England, and the combination of the two words was meant to convey no more than “instructively odd.”
I have to assume that all my readers already know the monstrously interesting http://www.internetweekly.org since it is the sort of thing that au courant web surfers would indeed know already.
I can’t say that I like the particular humor of the site’s heavy-handed political satire (however much I agree with its sentiments) but the overall quality and imaginative range of the visuality is illuminating, or at least instructive.
The art by others that this site features represents influences that bridge the gap between the Juxtapoz Factor (subtitle of a catalogue from the Laguna Art Museum, about which I hope to publish a book review shortly) and the new-romantic art that I have been seeing a lot lately. I’ve become increasingly interested in knowing how one gets from the art that cynicizes the sentimental big-eyed kids of Margaret Keane to the well-nigh unironic earnestness of Pop Surrealism’s Keanesianism, and from there to the eroticism-lite of the new-romantic work that seems to marry Pre-Raphaelite paintings to children’s book illustrations (there are, of course, earlier bridge figures such as Edmund Dulac who unite the two; see the exhibition catalogue for The Age of Enchantment). Without meaning to do so, this website looks like a source for answering the question of what strands of visuality are out there in the popular imagination.
This is a cultural-studies approach to what is in the alternative-space galleries, but since I haven’t seen any scholarly studies worthy of the name, you gotta start somewhere.
I am not sure that this is the place, or the way, to start; as an instructor wrote long ago in the margin of one of my college essays, "These sentences are grammatically correct, but awfully complicated."
The label had nothing to do with a pun on monsters; he lived in England, and the combination of the two words was meant to convey no more than “instructively odd.”
I have to assume that all my readers already know the monstrously interesting http://www.internetweekly.org since it is the sort of thing that au courant web surfers would indeed know already.
I can’t say that I like the particular humor of the site’s heavy-handed political satire (however much I agree with its sentiments) but the overall quality and imaginative range of the visuality is illuminating, or at least instructive.
The art by others that this site features represents influences that bridge the gap between the Juxtapoz Factor (subtitle of a catalogue from the Laguna Art Museum, about which I hope to publish a book review shortly) and the new-romantic art that I have been seeing a lot lately. I’ve become increasingly interested in knowing how one gets from the art that cynicizes the sentimental big-eyed kids of Margaret Keane to the well-nigh unironic earnestness of Pop Surrealism’s Keanesianism, and from there to the eroticism-lite of the new-romantic work that seems to marry Pre-Raphaelite paintings to children’s book illustrations (there are, of course, earlier bridge figures such as Edmund Dulac who unite the two; see the exhibition catalogue for The Age of Enchantment). Without meaning to do so, this website looks like a source for answering the question of what strands of visuality are out there in the popular imagination.
This is a cultural-studies approach to what is in the alternative-space galleries, but since I haven’t seen any scholarly studies worthy of the name, you gotta start somewhere.
I am not sure that this is the place, or the way, to start; as an instructor wrote long ago in the margin of one of my college essays, "These sentences are grammatically correct, but awfully complicated."
jocularities, or Bosch and the crisis
I had been meaning to post to Counterforces (and still will do so, someday, I hope) at length regarding the concurrent collapse of American newspapers and the larger implications of Google Books' digitizing of the contents of the world's libraries, plus the relationship of both to the financial crisis that is depriving us of traditional methods of correlating information at the very moment when we most need to have information correlated, and action coordinated.
But since I haven't yet written that post (even if I have just written that very long sentence), I refer you to a related fragment on my other blog (joculum.livejournal.com), whereon I have also posted a review of Kurt Falk's problematic book The Unknown Hieronymus Bosch, which should be regarded critically in terms of its approach but which contains illustrations of Bosch's oeuvre that will delight many of the readers of Counterforces. Next question.
But since I haven't yet written that post (even if I have just written that very long sentence), I refer you to a related fragment on my other blog (joculum.livejournal.com), whereon I have also posted a review of Kurt Falk's problematic book The Unknown Hieronymus Bosch, which should be regarded critically in terms of its approach but which contains illustrations of Bosch's oeuvre that will delight many of the readers of Counterforces. Next question.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
in lieu of a review of art, a book review from joculum
It is going to take way longer to write a proper review of the Young Movers and Shakers show at MOCA GA than it did to write this off-the-cuff review of George Steiner at the New Yorker, so I offer it instead for the moment (from my joculum blog):
Encountering the collected essays of George Steiner at the New Yorker is a bit like arriving with friends at a restaurant famed for its dessert menu: one wants to sample all the options concurrently, and as just as with the desserts, one may end up feeling slightly ill from one’s excess of self-indulgence.
Robert Boyers’ not-quite-flawless-but-close-enough selection of Steiner’s thirty years of extended review essays is a rich reminder of the verbal felicities of which Steiner was capable, which have often forsaken him during his descent into querulous retrospective mea culpa’s. Damn, but Steiner knew how to write well!
And he still does, when he takes the time and the Muse possesses him.
Steiner at his best, of course, channels the best of the best, both stylistically and conceptually. (Slight rising-tone accent on the second “of.”) Reading not quite at random, one wants to imitate the beginning of his essay on the late Guy Davenport (not “late” when he wrote about him, though far from early either) by indulging in the pleasures of selective quotation:
On Bertrand Russell (in this case, on what Steiner calls the “sinuous empiricism” of Russell’s 1914 Our Knowledge of the External World): “The problems raised are as old as Plato; this means that solutions attempted are less vulnerable to fashion than in other branches of philosophy. We are an epistemological animal, asking both whence and whither but knowing neither, unable to prove that we do not inhabit a long dream.”
On Simone Weil (in a tour-de-force of an opening gambit with which I disagree heartily, even as I admire its stylistic strategies): “She inhabited her body as if it were a condemned hovel.”
One could go on, but aesthetic indigestion would set in. Steiner at his best is downright Steinerian, the which of which there is no whicher (to more or less quote Alan Watts). Steiner at his worst is best described by the words with which he opens a review of Claude Lévi-Strauss: “Certain sentences in the book were right from the outset objects of legend and of parody.” (Notice how crucial to the sentence is the grammatically optional second “of,” and how badly the sentence would collapse if “right from the outset” were to be moved to the end or the beginning. Wow.)
Sometimes, we suspect that Steiner is just funnin’ us, as when his incomparably eloquent put-down of E. M. Cioran accomplishes its demolition work in terms that approach Cioran’s own exquisitely rhetorical bathos: “The quarrel with this kind of writing and pseudo-thinking is not one of evidence. … It is conceivable that human greed, the enigmatic necessities of mutual hatred which fuel both internal and external politics, and the sheer intricacy of economic-political problems may bring on catastrophic international conflicts, civil wars, and the inward collapse of aging as well as immature societies. We all know this. … Nor is it possible to refute an intuitive sense, a persuasive intimation, of a sort of nervous exhaustion, of entropy, in the inward resources of Western culture. We seem to be governed by more or less mendacious dwarfs and mountebanks. Our responses to crises display a certain somnambular automatism.” (Steiner was writing in 1984.)
But Steiner, who says his “own instincts are only marginally more cheerful” than “Cioran’s funeral sermon” (and anyone who has read In Bluebeard’s Castle would have to agree with these sentiments), has always given the anti-devil his due. The prospects for cultural and political renewal that are inherent in the horizons of fresh discovery don’t allow him to concur completely with Cioran’s self-consciously mocking assertion that “history itself is running down.”
At the same time, he mostly hates what is coming, even if it turns out to have its good side. As a result, he has missed a good many prospective benefits even as he analyzes incomparably what it is that we are losing.
He is the sort of guy who has inspired later American critics to recover a serious philosophy from the defense of both Mp3 and vinyl. And we read those critics’ Steinerian moments with equal pleasure.
One might quote regarding Steiner the passage regarding Kafka that Steiner quotes from a letter of Walter Benjamin: “Kafka eavesdropped on tradition, and he who listens hard does not see. … Kafka represents tradition falling ill.” But one would then have to quote Benjamin’s further words about Kafka, as quoted by Steiner: “This much Kafka was absolutely sure of: First, that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second, that only a fool’s help is real help. The only uncertain thing is: Can such help still do a human being any good?”
Steiner has listened hard, and both detected and embodied the radical decay of the tradition that Benjamin discerned in Kafka. And he has, in his time, mourned it as rhetorically as the thinkers whom he excoriates. But in his tendency to self-regarding seriousness, he has overlooked the dialectical spin that Benjamin and Kafka put on the problem: if only a fool’s help is real help, we will get little enough help from George Steiner, for whom self-aware foolishness is an alien notion.
But we will get an immense amount of insight, and insight is the first step towards real help.
Steiner’s own minimalized playfulness seems to have confused the editor of the book on at least one occasion: The essay title “One Thousand Years of Solitude” appears in italics as though it were reviewing a book of almost that name, whereas the essay is actually about Salvatore Satta’s Il Giorno del Giudizio, a title that the essay cites both in italics and quotation marks. I suspect that the editor was tripped up by the old magazine habit of placing book titles in quotation marks. (I wonder if this habit began when one had to mark up italicized passages with clumsy bracketed instructions to the machine to “set in italic” and “stop setting in italic,” making it easier to substitute the two keystrokes of quotation marks for the seven keystrokes required to indicate “italics.” The compositor’s reach for the adjacent California job case (or other style of type tray before there was a California), in the days of hand-typesetting, was less likely to create errors than a single mistyped keystroke at the end of a command.)
By the way, “One Thousand Years of Solitude” is actually a review of The Day of Judgment, Patrick Creagh’s translation of Satta’s book, which to Steiner’s ear fails to reproduce Satta’s “marmoreal ferocity, the slow fire inside the stone.”
The quick, monosyllabically expressed metaphor that follows the heavy rhythms of its Latinate companion is a stylistic strategy best remembered from Shakespeare (the standard citation being “the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red”). It is a reminder that Steiner has gotten his chops from the greatest stylists of eight or nine languages (I am fairly certain as to seven of them), and it shows. Those of us who have mastered at most the several vernaculars of our one native tongue can only gasp with admiration. Those who have mastered all the languages in question may be in a position to imitate his example.
Encountering the collected essays of George Steiner at the New Yorker is a bit like arriving with friends at a restaurant famed for its dessert menu: one wants to sample all the options concurrently, and as just as with the desserts, one may end up feeling slightly ill from one’s excess of self-indulgence.
Robert Boyers’ not-quite-flawless-but-close-enough selection of Steiner’s thirty years of extended review essays is a rich reminder of the verbal felicities of which Steiner was capable, which have often forsaken him during his descent into querulous retrospective mea culpa’s. Damn, but Steiner knew how to write well!
And he still does, when he takes the time and the Muse possesses him.
Steiner at his best, of course, channels the best of the best, both stylistically and conceptually. (Slight rising-tone accent on the second “of.”) Reading not quite at random, one wants to imitate the beginning of his essay on the late Guy Davenport (not “late” when he wrote about him, though far from early either) by indulging in the pleasures of selective quotation:
On Bertrand Russell (in this case, on what Steiner calls the “sinuous empiricism” of Russell’s 1914 Our Knowledge of the External World): “The problems raised are as old as Plato; this means that solutions attempted are less vulnerable to fashion than in other branches of philosophy. We are an epistemological animal, asking both whence and whither but knowing neither, unable to prove that we do not inhabit a long dream.”
On Simone Weil (in a tour-de-force of an opening gambit with which I disagree heartily, even as I admire its stylistic strategies): “She inhabited her body as if it were a condemned hovel.”
One could go on, but aesthetic indigestion would set in. Steiner at his best is downright Steinerian, the which of which there is no whicher (to more or less quote Alan Watts). Steiner at his worst is best described by the words with which he opens a review of Claude Lévi-Strauss: “Certain sentences in the book were right from the outset objects of legend and of parody.” (Notice how crucial to the sentence is the grammatically optional second “of,” and how badly the sentence would collapse if “right from the outset” were to be moved to the end or the beginning. Wow.)
Sometimes, we suspect that Steiner is just funnin’ us, as when his incomparably eloquent put-down of E. M. Cioran accomplishes its demolition work in terms that approach Cioran’s own exquisitely rhetorical bathos: “The quarrel with this kind of writing and pseudo-thinking is not one of evidence. … It is conceivable that human greed, the enigmatic necessities of mutual hatred which fuel both internal and external politics, and the sheer intricacy of economic-political problems may bring on catastrophic international conflicts, civil wars, and the inward collapse of aging as well as immature societies. We all know this. … Nor is it possible to refute an intuitive sense, a persuasive intimation, of a sort of nervous exhaustion, of entropy, in the inward resources of Western culture. We seem to be governed by more or less mendacious dwarfs and mountebanks. Our responses to crises display a certain somnambular automatism.” (Steiner was writing in 1984.)
But Steiner, who says his “own instincts are only marginally more cheerful” than “Cioran’s funeral sermon” (and anyone who has read In Bluebeard’s Castle would have to agree with these sentiments), has always given the anti-devil his due. The prospects for cultural and political renewal that are inherent in the horizons of fresh discovery don’t allow him to concur completely with Cioran’s self-consciously mocking assertion that “history itself is running down.”
At the same time, he mostly hates what is coming, even if it turns out to have its good side. As a result, he has missed a good many prospective benefits even as he analyzes incomparably what it is that we are losing.
He is the sort of guy who has inspired later American critics to recover a serious philosophy from the defense of both Mp3 and vinyl. And we read those critics’ Steinerian moments with equal pleasure.
One might quote regarding Steiner the passage regarding Kafka that Steiner quotes from a letter of Walter Benjamin: “Kafka eavesdropped on tradition, and he who listens hard does not see. … Kafka represents tradition falling ill.” But one would then have to quote Benjamin’s further words about Kafka, as quoted by Steiner: “This much Kafka was absolutely sure of: First, that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second, that only a fool’s help is real help. The only uncertain thing is: Can such help still do a human being any good?”
Steiner has listened hard, and both detected and embodied the radical decay of the tradition that Benjamin discerned in Kafka. And he has, in his time, mourned it as rhetorically as the thinkers whom he excoriates. But in his tendency to self-regarding seriousness, he has overlooked the dialectical spin that Benjamin and Kafka put on the problem: if only a fool’s help is real help, we will get little enough help from George Steiner, for whom self-aware foolishness is an alien notion.
But we will get an immense amount of insight, and insight is the first step towards real help.
Steiner’s own minimalized playfulness seems to have confused the editor of the book on at least one occasion: The essay title “One Thousand Years of Solitude” appears in italics as though it were reviewing a book of almost that name, whereas the essay is actually about Salvatore Satta’s Il Giorno del Giudizio, a title that the essay cites both in italics and quotation marks. I suspect that the editor was tripped up by the old magazine habit of placing book titles in quotation marks. (I wonder if this habit began when one had to mark up italicized passages with clumsy bracketed instructions to the machine to “set in italic” and “stop setting in italic,” making it easier to substitute the two keystrokes of quotation marks for the seven keystrokes required to indicate “italics.” The compositor’s reach for the adjacent California job case (or other style of type tray before there was a California), in the days of hand-typesetting, was less likely to create errors than a single mistyped keystroke at the end of a command.)
By the way, “One Thousand Years of Solitude” is actually a review of The Day of Judgment, Patrick Creagh’s translation of Satta’s book, which to Steiner’s ear fails to reproduce Satta’s “marmoreal ferocity, the slow fire inside the stone.”
The quick, monosyllabically expressed metaphor that follows the heavy rhythms of its Latinate companion is a stylistic strategy best remembered from Shakespeare (the standard citation being “the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red”). It is a reminder that Steiner has gotten his chops from the greatest stylists of eight or nine languages (I am fairly certain as to seven of them), and it shows. Those of us who have mastered at most the several vernaculars of our one native tongue can only gasp with admiration. Those who have mastered all the languages in question may be in a position to imitate his example.
Monday, January 26, 2009
following up on the art instinct
I reviewed The Art Instinct months ago (though I don't remember if I did so on this blog or on the joculum LiveJournal) but now the newspaper reviews are coming out, and of course Arts and Letters Daily is linking to them immediately (I wonder why?!), so here is an extract from the review in the Philadelphia Inquirer, more uncritically celebratory than mine was, though I was impressed ("the best-equipped thinker in the world to explain"? one of the better ones, I would say...but Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano presents a nuanced enough review for a general audience):
"Paleolithic cave painter, Renaissance madrigalist, New Guinea carver, urban hip-hopper - each confirms us, Denis Dutton writes, as 'a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences with which to amuse, shock, titillate and enrapture ourselves, from children's games to the quartets of Beethoven, from firelit caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens.'
"Why do we create art and beauty? Dutton may be the best-equipped thinker in the world to explain.
"An American who serves as professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and founder and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Dutton used to run a contest to identify wretched academic prose. He then launched and still curates artsandlettersdaily.com, an international digest of sophisticated cultural pieces that the Guardian named the 'best Web site in the world.'"
"Paleolithic cave painter, Renaissance madrigalist, New Guinea carver, urban hip-hopper - each confirms us, Denis Dutton writes, as 'a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences with which to amuse, shock, titillate and enrapture ourselves, from children's games to the quartets of Beethoven, from firelit caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens.'
"Why do we create art and beauty? Dutton may be the best-equipped thinker in the world to explain.
"An American who serves as professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and founder and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Dutton used to run a contest to identify wretched academic prose. He then launched and still curates artsandlettersdaily.com, an international digest of sophisticated cultural pieces that the Guardian named the 'best Web site in the world.'"
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
a few self-deleted posts later...promises of more to come re art shows
Cultures are complicated things. This is one of those firm grasps of the obvious that seem to elude the scholars as much as the general populace.
We have long since outgrown some of the stereotypes about cultures with which we grew up in the days before multicultural children’s books, but there is still a great deal of nonsense abroad regarding the immutability of cultural characteristics and the importance of maintaining cultural ownership of said characteristics and the objects that accompany them.
Two exhibitions currently in Atlanta weren’t designed to disprove that scholarly assertion, but they do demonstrate the paradoxes of hybridity and globalization.
“Walking to Guantanamo,” the photographs of Richard Fleming on his 2000 walk and hitchhike across Cuba, is presented at Whitespace in conjunction with a book recounting his experiences (with a book of photographs to come). Fleming undertook his on-the-ground exploration of the state of Cuban society armed with only a couple of cameras, a fluent knowledge of Spanish, and a few thousand dollars in small bills to last for several months.
He acquired firsthand experiences that ought to provide valuable information for sociologists, but the anecdotes alone are brilliantly written (and Fleming performs them beautifully in his readings, incidentally).
He ends up traveling at one point with a man who channels one of the orishas of Santeria, and repeatedly encounters the general practice of Afro-Caribbean religion. This hybrid practice, co-existing with anything and everything including Communism, is the adaptation of traditional West African practice to the circumstances of life in the Caribbean and the Americas after the Middle Passage from Africa to slavery. It has not only survived but evolved ever since.
So it was peculiar to be talking to people at the opening who projected their own issues into the photographs in the ways that they did. It isn’t unusual that people project their own issues into artworks; that it what the aesthetic encounter is all about; it is always already relational, a world of words to the end of it no matter whether the work be formal image or conceptual text.
And in truth it took a good deal of caption-reading to begin to understand what was going on in the photographs. There was an inevitable quantity of exoticism simply because anyone visiting another place sees the exotic first and foremost; it is why we are used to seeing the same exoticizing photographs even of Atlanta, photographs that frequently echo the images beloved of the Chamber of Commerce but just as often echo remembered pictures out of Walker Evans or, for the sophisticated, William Eggleston.
But Atlanta artists exoticize their own city, romanticizing down-at-the-heels spots that look cool but are nevertheless not particularly happy. As one friend quotes the joke of someone regarding the clichés of the Great Depression, “Growing up then, we didn’t know we were poor. We just knew we were plumb miserable.”
Anyway, Fleming has broken out of the mold of gorgeous-architecture-of-old-Havana or other genre photos. And it would be useful to compare and contrast, in the good old-fashioned essayistic way, what he has seen and what he has overlooked or chosen not to put in the show, versus the exhibitions of other photographers whose work has been seen and written about at Jackson Fine Art or Fay Gold Gallery. None of them will ever be confused with travel photographers, and it is the dramatic difference between the images they give us that makes them useful starting points for thinking about the conversations between cultures.
For as I pointed out on opening night, the world’s cultures have been mixing and matching for a very long time, and disparities of power do not change that fact. We are in the midst of immense change at the moment, and have been, and pieties about autonomizing and empowering cultures will not change the fact that all of our cultures are being altered by external factors, the empowered as much as the powerless.
The problem of power is a problem of politics, not culture. Cultures find their own ways of asserting power, and they slip between the barriers built by the guardians of official culture.
And the exhibition of contemporary Tibetan art from the Rubin collection, at the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, is particularly illuminating in that regard. It’s also a larger and to some degree better show than the pioneering one presented at Emory University (in the art department gallery, which is not to be confused with the Carlos Museum).
How the artists of Lhasa become marketed in London (at Rossi & Rossi) and elsewhere, sometimes alongside the artists of the emigration, is a story worth pursuing, and apparently the Rubin Collection has full documentation. But for starters it is illuminating to look at what is being created inside Tibet as well as in exile.
Gonkar Gyatso’s setup self-portrait photos depicting himself as a Mao-suited cadre painting standard-issue socialist realism, a tangka painter celebrating the Dalai Lama, a New Age émigré, and an artworld celebrity are the only works that appeared in both the Emory and Oglethorpe shows (since most of the work in the two shows were paintings, there couldn’t have been overlaps of actual work otherwise). They illustrate, of course, the ironies of Tibetan artists of a certain age.
But there are curious biographical details about which we would like to know more (or I would, anyway). Tsering Nyandal, born in 1974, was educated in the exile school in Dharamsala from 1985 to 1993, then returned to Lhasa to work as an artist. This does not fit the expected models in any respect.
And the entire exhibition deserves an extended review, which I hope to give it one of these days. The conversations between tradition and innovation are more complex than we would anticipate, and it would be interesting to know just how much of this art is ever seen in Lhasa prior to export…and by whom. We would need on-the-ground observation to know what the composition of the art scene is in Lhasa and what role it plays in the society as it exists in 2009.
We have long since outgrown some of the stereotypes about cultures with which we grew up in the days before multicultural children’s books, but there is still a great deal of nonsense abroad regarding the immutability of cultural characteristics and the importance of maintaining cultural ownership of said characteristics and the objects that accompany them.
Two exhibitions currently in Atlanta weren’t designed to disprove that scholarly assertion, but they do demonstrate the paradoxes of hybridity and globalization.
“Walking to Guantanamo,” the photographs of Richard Fleming on his 2000 walk and hitchhike across Cuba, is presented at Whitespace in conjunction with a book recounting his experiences (with a book of photographs to come). Fleming undertook his on-the-ground exploration of the state of Cuban society armed with only a couple of cameras, a fluent knowledge of Spanish, and a few thousand dollars in small bills to last for several months.
He acquired firsthand experiences that ought to provide valuable information for sociologists, but the anecdotes alone are brilliantly written (and Fleming performs them beautifully in his readings, incidentally).
He ends up traveling at one point with a man who channels one of the orishas of Santeria, and repeatedly encounters the general practice of Afro-Caribbean religion. This hybrid practice, co-existing with anything and everything including Communism, is the adaptation of traditional West African practice to the circumstances of life in the Caribbean and the Americas after the Middle Passage from Africa to slavery. It has not only survived but evolved ever since.
So it was peculiar to be talking to people at the opening who projected their own issues into the photographs in the ways that they did. It isn’t unusual that people project their own issues into artworks; that it what the aesthetic encounter is all about; it is always already relational, a world of words to the end of it no matter whether the work be formal image or conceptual text.
And in truth it took a good deal of caption-reading to begin to understand what was going on in the photographs. There was an inevitable quantity of exoticism simply because anyone visiting another place sees the exotic first and foremost; it is why we are used to seeing the same exoticizing photographs even of Atlanta, photographs that frequently echo the images beloved of the Chamber of Commerce but just as often echo remembered pictures out of Walker Evans or, for the sophisticated, William Eggleston.
But Atlanta artists exoticize their own city, romanticizing down-at-the-heels spots that look cool but are nevertheless not particularly happy. As one friend quotes the joke of someone regarding the clichés of the Great Depression, “Growing up then, we didn’t know we were poor. We just knew we were plumb miserable.”
Anyway, Fleming has broken out of the mold of gorgeous-architecture-of-old-Havana or other genre photos. And it would be useful to compare and contrast, in the good old-fashioned essayistic way, what he has seen and what he has overlooked or chosen not to put in the show, versus the exhibitions of other photographers whose work has been seen and written about at Jackson Fine Art or Fay Gold Gallery. None of them will ever be confused with travel photographers, and it is the dramatic difference between the images they give us that makes them useful starting points for thinking about the conversations between cultures.
For as I pointed out on opening night, the world’s cultures have been mixing and matching for a very long time, and disparities of power do not change that fact. We are in the midst of immense change at the moment, and have been, and pieties about autonomizing and empowering cultures will not change the fact that all of our cultures are being altered by external factors, the empowered as much as the powerless.
The problem of power is a problem of politics, not culture. Cultures find their own ways of asserting power, and they slip between the barriers built by the guardians of official culture.
And the exhibition of contemporary Tibetan art from the Rubin collection, at the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, is particularly illuminating in that regard. It’s also a larger and to some degree better show than the pioneering one presented at Emory University (in the art department gallery, which is not to be confused with the Carlos Museum).
How the artists of Lhasa become marketed in London (at Rossi & Rossi) and elsewhere, sometimes alongside the artists of the emigration, is a story worth pursuing, and apparently the Rubin Collection has full documentation. But for starters it is illuminating to look at what is being created inside Tibet as well as in exile.
Gonkar Gyatso’s setup self-portrait photos depicting himself as a Mao-suited cadre painting standard-issue socialist realism, a tangka painter celebrating the Dalai Lama, a New Age émigré, and an artworld celebrity are the only works that appeared in both the Emory and Oglethorpe shows (since most of the work in the two shows were paintings, there couldn’t have been overlaps of actual work otherwise). They illustrate, of course, the ironies of Tibetan artists of a certain age.
But there are curious biographical details about which we would like to know more (or I would, anyway). Tsering Nyandal, born in 1974, was educated in the exile school in Dharamsala from 1985 to 1993, then returned to Lhasa to work as an artist. This does not fit the expected models in any respect.
And the entire exhibition deserves an extended review, which I hope to give it one of these days. The conversations between tradition and innovation are more complex than we would anticipate, and it would be interesting to know just how much of this art is ever seen in Lhasa prior to export…and by whom. We would need on-the-ground observation to know what the composition of the art scene is in Lhasa and what role it plays in the society as it exists in 2009.
Friday, January 16, 2009
and this totally refers people to joculum.
I have long had an interest in how cognitive packages get delivered.
Also how physical packages get delivered, or presented, anyway; a long-ago exhibition of the exquisitely crafted boxes used for delivering ceremonial gifts in traditional Japan left me with a fresh appreciation for the role of etiquette as secular ritual, so that how the gift is presented or the artwork staged takes on a surplus energy that other societies pour into religious activities as well as their secular parallels…all this is commonplace stuff, but I always wonder why there are not more anthropological studies of, say, the taken-for-granted worldviews of those who consume the wares of the late Oscar de la Renta versus those who not only can only afford Wal-Mart, but like its stuff better than the high-end knockoffs that Target markets, giving us the style but not the designer label.
Probably the question is too inconsequential to be investigated, which is why it always interests me. I drop in on schlock fiction of various descriptions for similar reasons, if the subject matter interests me even if the manner of presentation does not: I want to know why people choose methods and objects that are not only less complex but less emotionally comforting than some of the available alternatives. (A large part of officially received culture, whether classical or contemporary, is actually neither complex nor comforting, and would be worth revisiting beginning with Derek Walcott’s famous closing line “The classics can console. But not enough.” But that would take us off into critiques of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, one of the beasts I find more noir-ish than most such books we love to hate.)
Anyway, I have several parallel tracks that would take a few two thousand word essays to do properly, so be forewarned. I am going to post this general note on both Counterforces and joculum, because the topic pertains to art and aesthetics as well as to anthropology and religious practice. One of the advantages of being congenitally unable to negotiate the ways of the world is that everything seems equally strange, and amenable to scholarly investigation.
So now we will begin a several-part investigation of cognitive packages, and marginal practices of all sorts, including the investigation of same. We (no, actually, I) shall begin with re-reading a classic text and go to a couple of pieces of previously mentioned scholarship and a curious new piece of popular fiction.
Also how physical packages get delivered, or presented, anyway; a long-ago exhibition of the exquisitely crafted boxes used for delivering ceremonial gifts in traditional Japan left me with a fresh appreciation for the role of etiquette as secular ritual, so that how the gift is presented or the artwork staged takes on a surplus energy that other societies pour into religious activities as well as their secular parallels…all this is commonplace stuff, but I always wonder why there are not more anthropological studies of, say, the taken-for-granted worldviews of those who consume the wares of the late Oscar de la Renta versus those who not only can only afford Wal-Mart, but like its stuff better than the high-end knockoffs that Target markets, giving us the style but not the designer label.
Probably the question is too inconsequential to be investigated, which is why it always interests me. I drop in on schlock fiction of various descriptions for similar reasons, if the subject matter interests me even if the manner of presentation does not: I want to know why people choose methods and objects that are not only less complex but less emotionally comforting than some of the available alternatives. (A large part of officially received culture, whether classical or contemporary, is actually neither complex nor comforting, and would be worth revisiting beginning with Derek Walcott’s famous closing line “The classics can console. But not enough.” But that would take us off into critiques of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, one of the beasts I find more noir-ish than most such books we love to hate.)
Anyway, I have several parallel tracks that would take a few two thousand word essays to do properly, so be forewarned. I am going to post this general note on both Counterforces and joculum, because the topic pertains to art and aesthetics as well as to anthropology and religious practice. One of the advantages of being congenitally unable to negotiate the ways of the world is that everything seems equally strange, and amenable to scholarly investigation.
So now we will begin a several-part investigation of cognitive packages, and marginal practices of all sorts, including the investigation of same. We (no, actually, I) shall begin with re-reading a classic text and go to a couple of pieces of previously mentioned scholarship and a curious new piece of popular fiction.
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