Eyes (Herakleitos 12)

12.

Eyes are better informers than ears.

Archilochos 279 (How Many Times)

How many times,

How many times

On the gray sea,

The sea combed

By the wind

Like a wilderness 

Of woman's hair,

Have we longed, 

Lost in nostalgia

For the sweetness 

Of homecoming.

1. Top image:  Vija Celmins, Ocean Surface, 1992, Woodcut, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

2. Lower image, Vija Celmins, Ocean Surface, 2000, Wood engraving, National Galleries of Scotland.

3.  Archilochos translation by Guy Davenport. Included in Seven Greeks, New York, New Directions, 1995.

Fascinating Inka Object (circa 1240-1470 A.D.) From L.A. County Museum

Lime Spoon in the form of a Hummingbird with Cast Picaflor, 1250-1470 AD
Utilitarian object, Gold, malachite, 3 5/8 x 1 1/2 in. (9.21 x 3.81 cm)

        The charming and beautiful object above, which Caroline noticed and pointed out to me at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last Friday morning, is really something.  Absent professional training in or familiarity with ancient  Peruvian art, artifacts and culture, I don't think one would easily guess that this was a coca spoon  in the form of a gold and malachite hummingbird that was fabricated and used by the Inkas between 1250 and 1470 AD.  

        The museum's label description of the spoon follows just below.  However, seeing and thinking about this "utilitarian object" takes the mind in all sorts of imaginative directions (L.A. and non-L.A.-related) in contemporary and ancient time and space:

    "The practice of chewing coca leaves became widespread during the reign of Topa Inka, the second Inka emperor, and various ceremonies developed around it.  This spoon, with its long handle, served to scoop lime while chewing the leaves.  Lime, a calcium carbonate, broke down the alkaloids in the coca leaves, thus hastening their stimulating effect.  Both substances were carried in small woven bags like the one seen here.  The precious material and elaborate decoration of surviving Inka spoons indicates coca chewing was strictly an elite privilege. (2008)."   

        I didn't have a chance to check out the museum store, but I'm fairly sure that despite its clearly enormous commercial potential, it does not offer high-quality replicas of the hummingbird spoon.  (Like New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, I suspect that LACMA sticks mainly to more traditional items like medieval crucifixes and Art Deco reproductions from the museum's collections, but I will confirm this and amend as necessary if I find that I'm mistaken.)  That being said, the museum does seem to be quite strong in representing the South American psychopharmacology paraphernalia category, as also evidenced by the two other objects illustrated below.  The first is an example of the aforementioned woven coca bag.  This item was created several hundred years before the hummingbird spoon, possibly as early as 800 AD.  The second is an attractive and impressive (strong modeling, delicate carving and fine polishing) wood and silver coquera, or coca storage container, from the late part of the eighteenth century.

   

Bag for Coca Leaves, AD 600-800

Costume/clothing accessory/carried;  Archeological artifact, Camelid fiber and cotton; dovetailed tapestry with loop stitch embroidery and branded fringe, 16 1/4 x 6 1/2 in. (41.28 x 16.51 cm)

Peru, South Coast, Nasca, Wari-related

Coca Box (Coquera), circa 1770

Vessel, Wood, Cast and chased wood and silver, 7 1/2 x 11 x 9 in. (19.05 x 27.94 x 22.86 cm)

Bolivia, possibly Moxos or Chaquitos

         We saw all sorts of terrific and exciting artworks at the museum, including a small, well-chosen exhibition of early Vija Celmins paintings, which traced and illuminated her development from creating highly accomplished, but somewhat derivative, works as a young artist to master status and the consistent expression of a powerful, unique vision; Chris Burden's Urban Light focus-shifting, uplifting sculpture/installation; and an extraordinarily beautiful, pale green medieval  Korean stoneware melon-shaped ewer, a piece which is simultaneously "there and not there".   (Please see illustrations of all three works below.)

        We did not have a chance to visit the new luxurious Stark Bar, donated by LACMA trustee Wendy Stark (daughter of famous producer Ray Stark), but that's ok:  I don't find hot, sunny days and alcohol consumption conducive to productive art viewing anyway.  (By the way, who does?  I assume the place is simply another concession to the museum-as-extension-of shopping mall trend, which seems unfortunate, inevitable, but at least more in keeping with Los Angeles' flat commercial continuum than this phenomenon does in other big-city museums, where the intrusions of fancy restaurant and ancillary commercial spaces seem to detract from and degrade the museum's core purpose.)  However, the Stark Bar looks lovely and LACMA was a great, great pleasure in all respects, including the consistent courtesy, cheerfulness and professionalism of the guards and other staff.

Vija Celmins,  Gun with Hand #1, 1964 ("I've always been interested in very impossible images....things blowing up....things disappearing in a breath.  Things like the sky, which doesn't even exist.").

Chris Burden, Urban Light, 2008, 2 views  ("I've been driving by these buildings for 40 years, and it's always bugged me how this institution turned its back on the city....... a statement about what constitutes a civilized and sophisticated society: safe after dark and beautiful to behold.")

Melon-Form Ewer with Lotus Design, Korea, Goryeo Period, 918-1392 (12th century), Stoneware with incised decoration under green glaze  

        This Monday morning finds us back in Berwyn after a long, exhausting and health-diminishing weekend journey home. (I seem to have picked up some form of plague between California and Pennsylvania, which isn't entirely surprising; the Continental terminal at LAX was fetid and, one suspected at the time, spore-ridden.)  Turning on the television while making the coffee, I find we're still in a state of suspended animation.

         And in the same old Echo Chamber.        

         Marginal times produce marginal people.

         But ars longa, vita brevis.

Hummingbird Spoon displayed in vitrine with its neighbor, a Peruvian (Moche) Condor figure in ceramic, circa 200 and 500 AD. (Photo credit, Jane Roberts, Strange Phase Studios.) 

Reader Note:  All images enlarge when "clicked".

I Shall Be Released

 

          They say everything can be replaced.

        They say every distance is not near.

        So I remember every face,

 

        Of every man who put me here.

Philadelphia Experiment (Alien Sedation); Vija Celmins

          Yesterday I visited a well-known office building in Philadelphia (the newest skyscraper in a city whose formerly modest, but old and attractive skyline, has been ruined by the incredibly mediocre architecture of its newest buildings; if it mattered more, you could call it a tragedy) and saw something unexpected and dreadful.

 

          In the building’s lobby, across from the shockingly awful Permanent Display Of Important Art (in the form of  several groupings of brightly colored, life-sized sculpted human figures, modeled to resemble Crackerjacks toys, posed in ways meant to suggest a cross-section of daily activities  in contemporary urban Philadelphia), is what has been described as “the largest four-millimeter LED screen in the world………spanning 83.3 feet wide by 25.4 feet high, the 2,100 square foot video wall bring[ing] spectacular original programming to visitors 18 hours a day”.

      Depressing as the sculpture tableau is, the video wall and its “spectacular original programming” are simply beyond belief in their vapidity, stupidity and vulgarity.  Projected in apparently random, quietly assaultive, but non-hypnotic, succession are computer-animated  clips depicting continuously and variously: (a) ugly, badly dressed human “worker-figures” dancing among enlarged Styrofoam coffee cups or on and around “worker-pod” desks and chairs; (b) these same figures riding toy rocket ships while wearing hideous mime-like ooh-and-ah facial expressions; (c) enlarged variations on spirit crushing cog-and-wheel and interlocking gear designs; (d) nature scenes (presumably from Planet Earth but unrecognizable in terms of their geography) denatured and made to look airless, lifeless and synthetic;  (e) the most banal Philadelphia cityscape scenes imaginable expressing the lie that our local highways are actually slick, rational and navigable.  There are also occasional, purposeless, bilaterally symmetrical scenes of 1920s "flapper" girls dancing on and straddling bi-planes.

        I have unsuccessfully attempted to locate interviews with the creators of these horrors to learn more about their artistic intentions.  To me, it seems as though they decided that the easiest way to undermine the human spirit was to distill the grotesque late-20^th century sensibility of MTV (most artfully, in many  people’s minds, exemplified in Peter Gabriel’s dreadful “Sledgehammer” video) by removing all obvious elements of violence and cheap, clichéd social criticism, and substituting instead a Prozac haze patina.  I assume their purpose is to pacify and brainwash the building’s workers, invited guests, and pedestrians seeking the succor of the new, high profile “public art” display they’ve heard so much about in the local media.  The ultimate visual and emotional gestalt of this "wall of dearth" is pure Big Brother (George Orwell's, not the reality TV show).

Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash, 1963 

 

Jasper Johns, Target With Plaster Casts, 1955

 

          When I was much younger and was first thinking seriously about the function of art, I wrote an essay for an American history class about some figures I called “public artists”.  I focused on various 1960s American Pop artists and their precursors (Warhol, Rosenquist, Johns, Rauschenberg), as well as some other artists (Smithson, Serra) who seemed relevant.  It was an uncertain, highly imperfect student effort that contained a lot of inconsistencies, inapposite examples and theories shoehorned in to try to match whatever my main thesis was.   For all its faults, I think I did come to grips with the fact that the underlying function of art should be to communicate important things, not to deceive the viewer or waste his time.

 

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1959 

         Art can be anything -- seditious, disturbing, happy, sad, angry, organized, chaotic, male, female -- but it cannot be sedative.   It should wake and stir the spirit, not lull or, worse, smother it.

James Rosenquist, I Love You With My Ford, 1961 

  

 

Jackson Pollock, No. 1, 1948

 

          It can be decorative (I’m thinking of rock concert light shows in the 1960s) in ways that are not clearly momentous (I'm thinking about Iranian mosques of the Safavid period), but it cannot be utterly trivial.

Fillmore East, Joshua Light Show (Big Brother and the Holding Company), 1968

 

Interior of Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque, Isfahan 1615-18

          Remembering Egyptian and Mexican pyramids, Greek vases and temples, Islamic mortars and pestles, Chinese vases and Lascaux cave paintings (among thousands of other works and objects), I think this holds true throughout history.

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea # 2), 1969, Graphite on Acrylic 

       The concept of “public art”, whether we're speaking of monuments, other objects for the town square, the work of a poet laureate or any other writer, pop musician, etc., seeking immediate communication with a broad audience, is an interesting subject.  However, so too are the works of less public artists working on a smaller, more intimate scale like the Latvian-born American artist Vija Celmins.  I have admired Celmins’ work since I first saw it in the early 1970s because she seemed quietly and naturally to key into the mantra I have previously cited that “the function of art is to imitate nature in her manner of operation”.

Vija Celmins, Explosion at Sea, 1966, Oil on canvas 

       Working in the finest, most dexterous manual detail, creating her depictions of natural objects and phenomena and reclaiming the sublime medium of grisaille, I have read (and I am not a Celmins scholar or any sort of scholar these days), that Celmins intends in her work to “dispel notions of the sublime” about nature.

Vija Celmins, Comet, 1992, Linocut 

 

       For me, however, Celmins’ art reinforces my belief in the possibilities of achieving quality and possibly transcendence through art, i.e., in the sublime.  

       As art critic Joe Scanlon wrote in a review of a 1996 Vija Celmins New York City gallery exhibition:  "these are pictures made for reasons beyond the express purpose of being looked at".

Vija Celmins, Ocean Surface, 1983, Drypoint

Major Minor

For the last ten days or so, I have been crazy from the heat, sick as a dog, demented by details and generally inattentive. But all the while I’ve been planning to post a piece here, which I finally decided to call Major Minor, which is the name of a fine Peter Blegvad song that appears on his album, The Naked Shakespeare.

Originally, I had simply intended to write a short appreciation (because I am not a professional critic, that seemed to be the proper appellation for my projected effort) of the 20th century English novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton, who is probably best known for his successful stage plays Rope and Gaslight, both later made into famous, highly regarded motion pictures. Although I enjoy both plays (and think the recent transformation of “gaslight” into a verb is fascinating, if disturbing, language and behavior issue), I strongly prefer Hamilton’s novels (early to late, from Craven House through Unknown Assailant) and thought I would include in the post the section of Claud Cockburn’s memorable introduction to The Slaves of Solitude where he recalls Hamilton’s extraordinarily acute powers of physical and psychological observation, even in crowded settings like London pubs, which can overwhelm most people with their buzz and din, and his “bat’s wing ear” for dialogue. I also planned to include several selections from Hamilton’s work, including an excerpt from his remarkable, underrated early “graphic novel”, Impromptu In Moribundia (which illustrates Hamilton ability to raise and transform what might be viewed as tiresome political polemic into genuinely moving story-telling and art), and the short final section of Mr. Stimson and Mr. Gorse where we leave the story of Ernest Ralph Gorse (Hamilton describes his protagonist as “the worst man in the world” and creates a riveting portrait, sustained over a long haul, of a sociopath) proper, and are suddenly placed on a different plane of convincing, frightening prophecy, which has unfortunately proved to be a largely accurate picture of European and western life. Rounding the post out would be the inclusion of several charming “author photos”, including the one showing the great man’s drawing room in his flat at The Albany in London (also home to Lord Byron, William Gladstone, Raffles, Jack Worthing, Graham Greene, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Sir Kenneth Clark, Terrence Rattigan and Terence Stamp, among other notables).

In any event, on my way to “there” (“there” being the composition and publication of the post), I ran into the following quotation about Hamilton from the English critic D.J. Taylor: 

“Every so often, though, the revulsion slips away and one is left with the joke or the sideways glance, the twitch upon the psychological thread that guarantees Hamilton a singular place as one of the great minor English novelists.”

The word and classifier “minor”, which I have seen applied untold numbers of times in various ways to artists I admire by critics I don’t, stopped me dead in my tracks. As it usually does, it made me angry for a while and arrested forward motion. I’m feeling better now and would like to say (as briefly as I can manage) that for some reason it appears that many of the artists I admire most are regularly classified as “minor”. Henry Green, who I consider to be the greatest English writer of the 20th century and an incomparable genius, has regularly been called minor. The extraordinary Ronald Firbank, author of Considering The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, a writer of peerless wit, facility and humanity (read Sorrow In Sunlight) – minor. Denton Welch, the brave, gimlet-eyed soul who achieved so much as a writer in his short life, ending with the masterpiece A Voice Through A Cloud, is generally considered minor. And Julian Maclaren-Ross, a short story writer, memoirist, critic, parodist and novelist of uncommon character and quality (and the only critic with the sense and integrity to praise Patrick Hamilton’s uniformly loathed conclusion to The Gorse Trilogy, Unknown Assailant) is , for some pitiable and misguided souls, an artist placed at the minor end of minor.

I believe (and recall being taught) that classification was a key intellectual step forward for mankind, through which we bring order to the chaos of our copious, but disheveled, direct observations of life, supposedly in a rational and effective pursuit of our desire to discern “first principles”. That being said, I haven’t encountered (as far as I can discern) the intellect, soul or any other aspect of Aristotle in critics who expel the word “minor” like a puny bullet, damning artists with faint praise in order to elevate themselves to a plane higher than their target. The practice reminds me of a remark I read the other day in a magazine article about the “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer: "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength”.

Critics apply this “major/minor” idiocy/fallacy to other arts also and I confess to having a consistent record of finding talent, value, genius and pleasure in “minor” figures across the spectrum, from the Greek poet Archilochus to the artists of the French rococo period, from the French painter Yves Tanguy to the American painter of small details, Vija Celmins, from the English expatriate songwriter and pataphysician Kevin Ayers to the American expatriate songwriter and cartoonist Peter Blegvad, both artists of surpassing talent whose “crime” against “major-ness” was simply never having had a big commercial hit. 

(Notes to probably already bored readers: 

1. I have decided to dispense with the fuller list and to give only the several examples cited above. I could go on and on. N.b. I am leaving The Kinks out of this.

2. I am a Quaker, which is, I suppose a “minor religion” in some people’s eyes, although such a conclusion would be inaccurate in any number of ways. 

3. Peter Blegvad is the author of one of the world’s longest grammatically correct palindromes. “Peel’s foe not a set animal laminates a tone of sleep.” MINOR? I ask you.)

In conclusion, I would like to offer my “crazy from the heat” friends (and their parents in the case of Recipe 2 below) something delicious for relief from the high temperatures and stress of it all:

Recipe 1: Papaya-Banana Smoothie

1 cup milk

1/4 cup Greek yogurt

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 small ripe banana, peeled and sliced

1/2 large, ripe papaya, peeled, seeded and chopped

1 cup ice cubes

Combine the milk, yogurt, vanilla, banana, papaya and ice cubes in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour into a large glass.

Recipe 2: Mango-Yogurt-White Rum Smoothie

2 ripe mangoes, peeled, pitted and chopped

2 cups Greek yogurt

1/2 cup mango nectar

1/2 cup white rum

Crushed ice

2 to 4 tablespoons simple syrup, depending on sweetness of mangoes

Combine mango, yogurt, nectar, rum and a few cups of crushed ice in a blender and blend until smooth and frothy. Sweeten with simple syrup, if needed. Divide among 4 glasses and serve. 

Stay cool. A toute a l'heure.