Writing Visceral Body - A piece of Roald Dahl Writing

I just finished a book of short stories by Roald Dahl. I've never read any of his work - but had seen a few of his movies - Willy Wonka and the Fantastic Mr. Fox, for example.

Some of the short stories felt like exercises or warm-ups - especially since it seemed as if the stories all had a similar twist and there were similar characters - or parts of characters found in more than one piece.

He really has a way with describing people that I found captivating. I want to try to see it more clearly here. As I am typing it, I see that much of the description that I found captivating was that it was based in MOVEMENT and that it was based in DISEASE or decrepitness...
I did not react the same way to text where he described someone as healthy and beautiful.

This one in particular: From 'The Visitor' is amazing:

"I pulled in alongside the pump, and waited. Nobody appeared. I pressed the horn button, and the four tuned horns on the Lagonda shouted their wonderful "So gia mille e tre!" across the desert. Nobody appeared. I pressed again....

....At last, after I had played the horns no less than six times, the door of the hut behind the gasoline pump opened and a tallish man emerged and stood on the threshold, doing up his buttons with both hands. He took his time over this, and not until he had finished did he glance up at the Lagonda. I looked back at him through my open window. I saw him take the first step in my direction...he took it very, very slowly...Then he took a second step...

My God! I thought at once. The spirochetes have got him!
He had the slow, wobbly walk, the loose-limbed, high-stepping gait of a man with locomotor ataxia. With each step he took, the front foot was raised high in the air before him and brought down violently to the ground, as though he were stamping on a dangerous insect.

I thought: I had better get out of here. I had better start the motor and get the hell out of here before he reaches me. But I knew I couldn't. I had to have the gasoline. I sat in the car staring at the awful creature as he came stamping laboriously over the sand. He must have the revolting disease for years and years, otherwise it wouldn't have developed into ataxis. Tabes dorsalis, they call it in professional circles, and pathologically this means that the victim is suffering from degeneration of the posterior columns of the spinal cord. But ah my foes and oh my friends, it is really a lot worse that that; it is a slow and merciless consuming of the actual nerve fibres of the body by syphilitic toxins. 

The man - the Arab, I shall call him - came right up to the door of my side of the car and peered in through the open window. I leaned away from him, praying that he would come not an inch closer. Without a doubt, he was one of the most blighted humans I had ever seen. His face had the eroded, eaten-away look of an old wood-carving when the worm has been at it, and sight of it made wonder how many other diseases the man was suffering from, besides syphilis.

"Salaam," he mumbled.
"Fill up the tank," I told him.
He didn't move. He was inspecting the interior of the Lagonda with great interest. A terrible feculent odour came wafting in from his direction.
"Come along!" I said sharply. "I want some gasoline!"
He looked at me and grinned. It was more of a leer than a grin, an insolent mocking leer that seemed to be saying, "I am the king of the gasoline pump at B'ir Rawd Salim! Touch me if you dare!" 
A fly had settled in the corner of one of his eyes. He made no attempt to brush it away."

Maira Kalman Selects at the Cooper Hewitt Museum

My husband, Mark, and I went to the Cooper Hewitt in order to check out a new digital pen tool they had for saving images/info for your visit as you went through the museum. The pen tool was nice - except I forgot to officially save mine - not knowing that you had to do a step at the end to do so. I liked the idea of taking home images/info from what I saw.

Even though I forgot to save my visit on the pen, we saw some interesting things and I liked some of the color and pattern displays especially.

We both thought the most successful exhibit of objects within the museum was the Maira Kalman Selects room. I did not know who Maira was before this, but upon looking her up - she is an illustrator, artist, writer and designer. 

This room. It could have simply been a room filled with old objects- like in all museums. I could have walked through and surveyed the objects in a half sweeping manner, looking to find things - to mine imagery, texture, pattern concepts- that suited my fancy of the moment. What would work within my own art? Yes, no, judge, check off list. That is how I often function when viewing objects -- unless something really grabs me! 

This time, I didn't skim over the objects. I looked at them with consideration, humor, maybe even love. 

How did this happen? Because I actually read her introduction on the wall upon entering the room. She set us up with a tone, a purpose, a kind of story. Mark called it a story. At first, I didn't recognize the story but then saw it as a loose non-narrative - or fill in with your own narrative... To me, it was simply her voice, her guidance, something in her style of writing- the pace. Where she chose to put a one word sentence or break a line.

Here is her introduction:

Maira Kalman Selects

Welcome.

This room contains objects I chose from Cooper Hewitt's collection and several from the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, along with my own sprinkled in.

What is this room about?

Very loosely, it is about life and death.

But isn't everything?

It is about falling in love with a group of objects. About the ephemera of history with bits of information about how people lived. It is a room that recognizes that many of the most important memories in your life will be populated by the most seemingly unimportant objects. A chair. A bowl.

It about the preciousness of time. Elusive. Fragile. The unpredictability of it all. The comfort derived within the unpredictability. The joy derived from the comfort. These objects are brave and beautiful. They have survived and are here to tell you something.

What should you do here? 

If you are plagued with doubts or troubles, or are in need of a respite, just sit there and stare into space and listen to the silence. That is more than enough.

Or maybe someone will come into the room and sing a song about a spoon. Any songs you hear, about spoons or otherwise, are composed by the brilliant Nico Muhly. You never know. This was, in fact, once the music room in the mansion, when people lived here and had arguments in the kitchen (perhaps about overcooked peas).

If you are curious, have a look at the objects.

To wander about in a room in a museum and to have the fluttery feeling of discovery and potential. A quickening of the pulse. That is a great feeling. Excitement! Inspiration!

But my advice is not to think too much.

Unless it pleases you.

And a walk in Central Park might be the perfect finale to a day in a museum.

-Maira Kalman

I copied her introduction here in order to analyze it. What is this magic she brought us that allowed me to view these objects in such a fresh and light fashion?

First she set up that there was a story to the objects- to Mark's point - in saying it is about life and death. We can all identify with life and death but we also always forget about it (death- on a conscious level anyway) - and not separately -life -as a journey and its own entity instead of our striving, goal-oriented mindsets). 

She then tells us why the objects are special. Because of life, silly billy! Because they are part of that life that we drive mindlessly through and forget to pay attention to. And they are old! And they have survived! Yes, they are special. Why am I taking this museum and these old objects without wonder? 

Then she makes sure that you are not pressured and that you are comfortable - as any good hostess would. Please come in and take off your shoes. Make yourself at home. You don't need to worry, just flow as you will. My house is your house with a real smile.

A song about a spoon- how light and humorous! I will walk through these objects and revere them - but without too much pressure or weight - and maybe a silly, trivial (if anything is?!) song may come along. That feels good. How charming.

She then gives us advice, but then again, lets you have your own will - your own journey - 'unless it pleases you'. No pressure. Just a suggestion.

This introduction to a room of objects is stunning! It is so well done! I am enthralled.

Now to go into the exhibit for a second. I'm not replaying it all out in this post. But there is a jewel I'd like to put here.

This jewel:

Square (Egypt), 5th–7th century Medium: wool Technique: plain weave with discontinuous wefts (slit tapestry)

Yes. Look at HIM. Look at his expressive, modern!, expression. Yet look at his age. He is AMAZING. 5th Century! What?!

That's not all!

And then she (Maira) did this:

With her human hand, her human touch- she wrote right on the non-white pedestal. A personal non-museum thing to do that takes you out of the typical museum mindset and into her personal story/space.

And then there is this on the side of the pedestal:

Well, I have to keep walking around to see where this might go...

Oh my. I love this. This quote. That I was guided to walk around the pedestal. Her squiggly hand writing.

But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody and everything. One lives only to make blunders. 

- Charles Darwin

Mr. Darwin. I looked it up. These two sentences are from a letter he wrote to Charles Lyells on October 1, 1861. How beautifully human! And how connected to this old Egyptian man's facial expression! haha! 

It is also an interesting sentence in context with Darwin's famed work. The blunder part, I mean. We are all happy accidents in dna replication coupled with what survives / develops over time and what doesn't. Any new development in a species or when we slowly- over millions of years -develop into other species is reproduction, survival and dna replication 'blunders'. The dna miscopies create change!  And to our benefit ... at the moment anyway...

That is just one of the objects that Maira showed us in a new light.

There were many other charming quotes and objects that I didn't put in this post - but here is one more quote I noticed upon leaving the exhibit:

Remember. Remember to not rush through your life and not even see it flowing all around you. This is such a difficult thing to do. But Maira reminded me to do that in this exhibit. What a gift she gave us with this exhibit.

Chewing on some quotes from John Zerzan's "The Case Against Art"

Quotes from "The Case Against Art" by John Zerzan

This article - in the book, Apocalypse Culture, edited by Adam Parfrey, caught my attention a few times - enough where I want to go through it here and figure out where and why I'm attracted to parts of this work. Zerzan's thesis of art not needing to exist anymore is not something I agree with, nor do I think his article makes that point successfully. (I don't agree with him that art needs to remain in alienation, which is the lynchpin of his argument). But I don't want to go into that - because that isn't what grabbed me. I have listed some quotes from the article here so that I can swim around in them and figure out why they attracted me and maybe, even, what that has to do with my current work.

Zerzan starts the article by trying to dismantle the idea of art being inherent to the human mind, being something always tied to humanity. He states that a shift occurred during the Upper Paleolithic (30,000 years ago) period where we have found the oldest enduring artworks such as the handprints made by blown-pigment or the naturalistic looking herds at Lascaux. Zerzan suggests that this is the first symbolic. He quotes German Art historian, Wilhelm Worringer, who posited a direct relationship between the perception of art and the individual. Worringer claims that "We sense ourselves in the forms of a work of art" led to a formula, "The aesthetic sense is an objectivized sense of the self."

Repeat morsel: 'We sense ourselves in the forms of a work of art.' I am remembering how I've felt in front of works of art that I was experiencing. Did I get a sense of myself, as a person or as a human? Yes, I can kind of see that empirically. But since we are talking about an individual's sense of something- it is hard to pin down, that floats through subtly. Although if thought of in theory, vs empirically, it does make sense that we build ourselves into everything we make. I personally love sculpture because - to me - it make me sense my own physical body in the moment - especially if it is around body-sized - as an example. I also feel my sense of self in large architecture - like grand churches - as they were designed to awe us.

Finally, here is Zerzan's Worringer quote: "The veritable explosion of art at this time [Upper Paleolithic] bespeaks to an anxiety not felt before, in Worringer's words, 'creation in order to subdue the torment of perception.'

Torment of Perception. Yes, I have felt that, viscerally. Reality can change based on who is looking at it? A recognition, an anxiety, that nothing is fixed! Is the Upper Paleolithic when the human's brain started to change to recognize ourselves as separate from nature, other animals, the earth? Is this when our god complex started?

His quote goes on:
"Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of 'the beginning', the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself."

If we are separate, then we have to capture it, fix it, control it. If we aren't separate, we wouldn't think this way...we'd be inside it, not outside looking in. We wouldn't even be able to recognize ourselves as being separate. There is a quote often sourced to Marshall McLuhan that this reminds me of, "We don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish."

I also find the part of Zerzan's quote above, 'we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of 'the beginning', the primordial paradise of the timeless present' interesting. When he says 'the moment 'of the beginning' - is he talking about the story of Adam and Eve? Is the Christian paradise the pre-civilization before we were aware of ourselves as separate from nature? I always considered Adam and Eve to be a misogynist parable about disobeying god and about not having sex. I never tied it to our sense of self - our consciousness, our ego, our sentience. I also never considered that what I think of Buddha's timeless present could ever be tied to the paradise before the fall of man for the Christian and Jew or maybe even versions of the story in religions before Judaism. This is interesting.

Zerzan continues in his description of the human recognizing its difference from the rest of nature. "In the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo, the world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already configured."

El Juyo is the oldest known religious shrine- made about 14,000 years ago. From the NY Times article below, "The El Juyo sanctuary contains a free-standing sculptured stone head, interpreted by the scientists as that of a supernatural being. On one side of the sculpture is the visage of a human being, and on the other is that of an animal, probably a cat."

Here is the rest of the article on El Juyo:

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/28/us/mankind-s-oldest-shrine-discovered-in-spain.html

I've always been fascinated with human/animal hybrids from past mythologies...I am also fascinated with cyborgs. It is a non-whole hybrid entity, vs something thought of as whole or contained/controlled, which enthralls me - yes - and those are both that. But also - since reading this article - I am fascinated to see that my mind is drawn to the actual line, the cusp between where we belong with the world around us (we are all made of the same materials throughout all of space, our DNA is very similar to everything on Earth) and where we separate ourselves. We separate ourselves in consciousness, in making civilizations, in creating art and machines and technology. We separate ourselves into a hierarchy where we use up the world around us as if it is not a part of us. We separate ourselves from the animals and plants as if we are a superior species because of our own consciousness of our own intelligence. We are growing and changing still. Animal/Human : Human/Machine.
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A later morsel of a quote from the article: "Vision is placed at the highest in the hierarchy of senses instead of using all of them...Levi-Strauss discovered..a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in the daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very acute, they were also not ordered and separate. Part of training sight to appreciate the objects of culture was the accompanying repression of immediacy in an intellectual sense: reality was removed in favor of merely aesthetic experience. Art anaesthetizes the sense organs and removes the natural world from their purview. This reproduces culture, which can never compensate for the disability."

Definition: Anaesthetize- administer an anesthetic to (a person or animal), especially so as to induce a loss of consciousness; to deprive of feeling or awareness.

Holy crap. I see what he means. (Funny that I use the word 'see' here). He is arguing that our human (vs animal) side has placed vision at the top of the hierarchy and ignored the full mixture of all of our senses that are better used when we live in the moment -as in not in the removed civilization and its symbols, hierarchies, labels, we've built since becoming aware of ourselves as separate from the earth. Vision is the primary sense in art. It is about looking and feeling through that moment with an object. And he is arguing that it, therefore, is actually a desensitization because it is culture which is, itself, desensitization and not in the moment.  I now am starting to see his argument against art. It is limiting. It is only a reproduction of culture which could never compare to the real deal (nature). That is already obvious to anyone who really looks at nature. But I never thought of it being an anaesthetic before...since it is removed from nature.

Art is a part of culture. Art is only reflective of what exists in the culture or is used as a means to make change in said culture (propaganda). This is my opinion. I'm not sure how much art is able to make real changes in said culture by itself. It has to be hooked to propaganda. Maybe art can be a powerful part of a culture willing to become less hierarchical and willing to have a better relationship with nature. Because art is about symbols, it is language. Any symbol is at least one step away from the present/the real. It is representative, an abstraction.

His use of the word anaesthetize really affects me. It makes me think of all the ways we remove ourselves from real awareness (alcohol, drugs, food, sugar, even film, theater and art are an escape.) But he also seems to say that all of culture is this already. All of culture is a separation of ourselves from nature, or really - a recognition of our separation that already exists through our sense of autonomy.
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Another quote from the article: "Recently the painter Eric Fischl presented at the Whitney Museum a couple in the act of sexual intercourse. A video camera recorded their actions and projected them on a tv monitor before the two. The man's eyes were riveted to the image on the screen, which was clearly more exciting than the act itself...even the most primal acts can become secondary to their representation."

Wow- 'secondary to their representation.' Why does our mind do this? It is kind of like a god view. There is a sense of satisfaction from stepping back and seeing yourself. Maybe it is a sense of control...

It makes me think of when I was younger and would have weird moments where I felt like I was in a tv show - where something would happen that was so sitcom-ish or so like a tv character's life- and it felt almost like a deja vu kind of feeling- but I recognized it as me identifying with a television character and I remember feeling...validated?...or some kind of small positive feeling. I was brought to light - seen somehow -by experiencing something that a tv character - a removed representation of a self - also experienced.

'Secondary to their representation' is so on point with the selfie craze. I was sitting next to a woman in her 20s on the subway the other day- a girl really, she was probably early to mid 20s. She was going through images on her i-phone and throwing some in the trash and viewing others. Curating. I saw a video of her dancing in lingerie. I saw her posing in sexy lingerie, squatting in a side shot in heels. I saw her completely topless taking a selfie in front of a bathroom mirror and - this was the weirdest part - I saw her watch a video of herself that was several minutes long where she was talking slowly and sexy and maybe singing a little.

More of Zerzan quote on our privileging representation over the real:
"Conditioned self-distancing from real existence has been a goal of art from the beginning. Similarly, the category of audience, of supervised consumption, is nothing new, as art as striven to make life itself an object of contemplation."

I do understand his critique of art in this sense. And I know I've felt comfort, satisfaction, a sense of worth and happiness in those representations of art, theatre, literature, tv, film, culture that was because of a distancing from the real.
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Another jewel of a quote:
'The vivid representation of the late hunter/gatherer art was replaced by a formalistic, geometric style, reducing pictures of animals and humans to symbolic shapes. The narrow stylization reveals the artist shutting himself off from the wealth of empirical reality and creating the symbolic universe. The aridity of linear precision is one of the hallmarks of this turning point, calling to mind the Yoruba, who associate line with civilization, "This country has become civilized'', literally means, in Yoruba "this earth has lines upon its face."

The symbol can be repeated with more ease than the vivid representation. The language can spread. The lines are the spread of civilization. They are the human moving away from nature. I recently made a sculpture piece - C28, H33 - (stands for Cyborg and Human and it is a score) where I painted a bodily torso sack form with a plaid patterned shirt. I wanted the organic curving body to fight the plaid, to make it curve and not be straight, to push its grid. The plaid was my symbol for the cyborg, the machine, the part of humanity that is removed from the human (in this sense the human as animal). I also think it is closer to the masculine even if i wouldn't put the feminine on an opposite pole or anything. The human form, the blobby, uncontrollable, form is all of us in our animal human sense.

Zerzan continues:
"The inflexible forms of truly alienated society are everywhere apparent; Gordan Childe, for example, referring to this spirit, points out that all the pots in the Neolithic village are all alike. Relatedly, warfare in the form of combat scenes makes its first appearance in art."
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Zerzan:"Art not only creates the symbols of and for a society, it is a basic part of the symbolic matrix  of estranged social life. Oscar Wilde said that art does not imitate life, but vice versa, which is to say that life follows symbolism not forgetting that it is (deformed) life that produces symbolism. Every art form, according to T.S. Elliot, is an 'attack on the inarticulate.' Upon the unsymbolized, he should have said.'

This is the first time I've seen the negative in either of those quotes. I've always privileged searching for knowledge, ways to say something, civilization over nature, ashamedly so. Of course, after living for awhile and observing, I now see that the grand piece of architecture only tries to mimic the majestic mountain in its feeling of awe and wonderment and ability to make the human feel small and powerless. (I enjoy that feeling). Also, after thinking of Buddhism over the last few years, I now see the negative in having everything quantified and controlled and symbolized. When he says that 'deformed' life produces symbolism - deformed because it is a civilization, not pure real life, I think...

Zerzan continues:
'The primary function of art is to objectify feeling, by which one's own motivations and identity are transformed into symbol and metaphor. All art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes, surrogates for something else; by its very nature therefore, its a falsification. Under the guise of 'enriching the human experience', we accept vicarious, symbolic descriptions of how we should feel, trained to need such public images of sentiment that ritual art and myth provide for our psychic security....Life in civilization is almost wholly a medium of symbols. Not only scientific or technological activity but aesthetic activity consists largely of symbol processing...The sense of a symbol, as Charles Pierce concluded, is its translation into another symbol, thus an endless reproduction, with the real always displaced."
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Another one:
Art cannot rival nature in terms of beauty so why does it receive the reverence/attention that it does?
"As compensation and palliative, because our relationship to nature and life is so deficient and disallows an authentic one. As Motherlant put it, 'One gives to one's art what one has not been capable of giving to one's existence.' It is true for artist and audience alike; art, like religion, arises from unsatisfied desire."

Wow, so amazing, that quote. This article has really taken me by the throat. There is so much interesting juice in here! I'll probably read it again later and get even more to ruminate on.

The article goes on in describing how art has dealt with its own realization that it is bankrupt and now just regurgitates the same thing over and over - basically. I don't agree that it is the same thing...because the individual artist in the individual time with the individual viewer all communicating in one moment in time is unique --- that is the real in our civilized world - the nuanced moments of speaking in time as everything changes around us. So I don't agree with Zerzan that art itself has nothing new left...since our culture continues to change, so will art.  I do agree with him that we are not connected enough to nature and that any piece of culture is a poor substitute to being one with nature...but I also think we can only make our own relationships with nature - it isn't like culture is going to go away and we are going to be like we were before we started making symbols and language and religious ceremonies. So I'm still going to make my own language, my own symbols, my own art. But I'm also going to sit a lot with the real. Because ... it is the real.

Urs Fischer

I first encountered the work of Urs Fischer at the New Museum- in person that is.  I had seen his work in magazines and online and there were advertisements for the New Museum show all over the subway showing a sculpture of a very realistic looking tongue poking through a plaster wall.  Bits of plaster lay on the tongue and the way in which the tongue was 'frozen' in movement was also realistic as if the photograph had captured a moment in time of a tongue moving through a piece of drywall.  The image above even has some marks on the plaster wall similar to that made by pencil accidentally scraping the wall.  Nice.  I was attracted to the visceral reaction of seeing this as an image.  I wanted to see it in person.

The show had many of these boxes with large crisp images on all sides of ordinary objects and pop references.  I wasn't attracted to these and there were many.  Here is an image of some of these boxes.  Their flatness was annoying to me, maybe...or maybe it is their size.  As I walked around them, they didn't make me take the imagery in a different light even if that doughnut is the same size as the phone booth. 

I did like the trompe l'oel piece in this show in which every square inch of the gallery was photographed and reprinted as a wallpaper that covers the very same walls and ceiling.  The absurdity of that is wonderful to me.  Obviously this is something that would be a useless photograph.

I've never seen Bread House (2004).  I'd like to see one of the bread houses (I think there is more than one).  From the Whitney site:

                                "Bread House (2004) is a life-size cabin built from loaves of sourdough bread, 

                                expandable foam, and wood. The quaint alpine structure is set on an arrangement 

                                of Oriental carpets and inhabited by four young parakeets that haven’t yet learned 

                                to fly. Over time the house decays, shedding crumbs on the floor and emitting a 

                                distinct, pervasive odor. As with all of Fischer’s works, the meaning lies within the very 

                                substances and processes of its making, whereby ideas become material and materials 

                                take on a life of their own."

I'm not sure how anyone can dislike the above piece... I really wish I'd seen it.  I'd like to stand in that pit of dirt within a white walled clean space.  Imagine walking in the gallery door to find this!!  Of course, major koodos goes to Gavin Brown gallery for allowing such a thing to happen to their gallery floor...  Here is a quote about this piece from the New Museum website:

                                     "In 2007, in a now-legendary exhibition, he excavated the floor of his New York 

                                     gallery, digging a crater within the exhibition space. Throughout his work, with 

                                     ambitious gestures and irreverent panache, Fischer explores the secret 

                                     mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque 

                                     taste for the absurd."

The description, "Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque taste for the absurd" hits the nail on the head.  I wouldn't have been able to necessarily put that together but in reading it - I completely agree and now appreciate Urs Fischer's work through that lens.

Separately, in an Interview magazine interview - I like what Fischer says about the artist and working.  It makes me think of that Tom Sachs show at Sperone Westwater I just saw:

                                   "If you don't enjoy making work, then it's bad. It's rough. Artwork is brutal for so 

                                   many people. They let it happen to them, but it's brutal. I like the idea of an artist 

                                   as somebody who works. A lot of the artists I like share this understanding. Like 

                                   Bruce Nauman. He always seems to have an understanding of what he does. 

                                   He does work."

Body pieces:  In re-looking at images of Fischer's work, I noticed several that had a direct sense of the body.  I love the way that the photographs are transformed with the object - the objects are in direct relation to the body - a banana jutting out like a huge errant nose and a screw embracing the side of a tuxedo-ed woman.  The banana and the screw make the photos of the human a hybrid between the object and the image of the person...and althought it is about the photograph, the image - they are all images of people and the objects placed on the photos interact with the body.  The melting bodies are also transformed - or transforming during the period of an exhibition - and that is also lovely.

William Pope L.

William Pope L. is an artist who works in more than one discipline and with a variety of materials. He is best known for his series of more than 40 'crawls' started in the 70s: performance-based pieces in which he inched along on busy city streets in order to draw attention to the plight of those members of society who are least empowered. The photograph above is one of Pope L. doing a crawl through the Bowery dressed in a suit.From a Bomb Magazine Interview with Martha Wilson:

'I did that street work over a period of several weeks, and when I first began I believed in the image, that the conjunction of a black man and his suit, crawling down the Bowery could produce not just
contradiction, but a feeling that would somehow transcend itself. My take on homelessness in New York was that we’d gotten too used to seeing these people on the streets. I hadn’t gotten used to it, but it seemed as if people were devising strategies in order not to see the homeless. We’d gotten used to people begging, and I was wondering, how can I renew this conflict? I don’t want to get used to seeing this. I wanted people to have this reminder.'



Another performance, called The Great White Way, featured Pope L. crawling for the 22 miles that make up Broadway in NYC. It took five years to complete. I'm not sure where rests and vacations and other work fit into this timeline. The artist wore a Superman outfit and had a skateboard strapped to his back. This is from his C.V. on the Foundation for Contemporary Arts site, Pope L. states:

'My work is not glamorous yet it is ambitious in its feeling. It seeks a visceral, bodily, material "explanation" for human desire writ large in human action....Like the African shaman who chews his pepper seeds and spits seven times into the air, I believe art re-ritualizes the everyday to reveal something fresh about our lives. This revelation is a vitality and it is a power to change the world.'

In regards to changing the world - or his ability to do so - he seems to question it as well -the arrogance of thinking one could or whether one would know really how to control the world. From the Bomb interview again with Martha Wilson:

"MW Is the purpose of your work to change the world in some tiny way?

WPL That seems arrogant to me, somehow.

MW Well, no, the opposite would be self-indulgence, which would be much worse than the arrogance of trying to change the world in some small way.

WPL Hmmm… You think you know what that change should be…

MW Ah. That would be arrogance. To believe that you have any control, whatsoever, that anybody would listen, that anybody will actually do anything differently, that the media, the social structures… would change."

I admire him for confronting these issues - the world being changeable by his art or not. I think it is more than self indulgence. I mean maybe he has to do it for himself - so what! Most artists have to make art for themselves. That is how they deal with the world - how they communicate. I wonder if there has to be a hope to make his work though...if there is a certain amount of hope he has to have to continue.

Probably because I am one, I do find his speaking of white liberals to be uncomfortable. It is funny because this same uncomfortableness that I felt in reading his quote is exactly the uncomfortableness he is speaking of that leads white liberals and blacks to be unable to effectively talk about race. Again from Bomb:
"WPL In this country, there’s a history of black people being constructed as valueless or threatening or nothing. If you hold up a mirror to certain white liberals, and you say. “Hey you know, you’re right! You’ve got a point. Black people are pieces of shit,” they’d get nervous. Me, I’ve always rejected whites when they spoke about blacks, as if what they had to say had no credibility. But then I thought, What if I reversed it? What if I explored what whites think about black folks as a kind of truth. Especially liberal whites. There’s a whole nest of vipers and ambivalence there… It’s sad. I don’t speak about blackness with most of my white friends. We very rarely talk about race, and if we do it gets very uncomfortable…

MW Even though you collaborate with Jim Calder, who is white, you don’t actually spend much time discussing race as a subject?

WPL We have discussed it. White people don’t seem to think about being white or ‘raced’. They don’t have to think about it. That’s just my take, from what I’ve observed. When you get into a discussion with someone white about race, either one or two things happen: It either peters out and there’s nothing to say: or there’s everything to say and you say nothing. It seems there isn’t a common ground where you can take a position and maybe have some back and forth, yeah, and maybe it gets a little fractious. So what!? But at the same time, perhaps you get to share your concept of the world in terms of race. Basically I don’t think that conversation happens very much. At least not productively."

I think the uncomfortableness is guilt. I think white liberals do have a guilt thing that conservatives don't have. Guilt can easily lead to uncomfortableness on the subject of race. I do agree with him that white people don't think about being white as a 'race.' That is where the idea of the Other comes in.



With Pope L.'s work, I am interested in his use of alternative 'charged' materials such as mayonnaise and peanut butter. (I can't find a direct reference to the Mayo jars image above; I don't know what piece that is from. The second photo is the cover of his book, "William Pope L. The Friendliest Black Artist in America".) Pope L. says that mayonnaise is a kind of makeup and he points out that as it dries and is out of jar, the more transparent it becomes. That is interesting. In the Bomb article (obviously the best interview /writing with him I could find online since I'm using it so much) he says that mayo is 'bogus whiteness.' I find it particularly interesting that his material choices come from his childhood. They were cheap foods from his childhood. Being a food product which will deteriorate over time - they change in texture and in the way they look. And then there is the smell. Visceral. In the Bomb article, he speaks further on race associated with these materials:
"Mayonnaise gave me a quirky material means to deal with issues black people claim they don’t value very much, e.g. whiteness. Black folks’ political and historical circumstances are at odds with whiteness, whether we want them to be or not. There are societal limitations to how much one can reconstruct one’s conditions. We are born into whiteness. On the surface, it seems wholly to construct us, and the degree to which we may counter-construct sometimes seems very limited. But, I believe we can be very imaginative with limitations. And I am lucky that today I can hold that point of view… Mayonnaise was a very useful and fresh way for me to get out of this dead-end: whiteness constructs blackness. Mayo and peanut butter allow me to think about race in a more playful, strange, and open-ended way. For example, the idea that there’s a pure good blackness or a pure bad whiteness is untenable for me. I use contradiction to critique and simultaneously celebrate."



Another favorite part of Pope L.'s work is his views on contradiction. I don't know enough about his work - and have never seen it in person - to see the contradiction in his work aside from pairing a black man in a suit in his Bowery crawl piece. But that awesome Bomb magazine interview has some good tidbits on this subject I'd like to include anyway:

"In my family, there was this tendency for things to fall apart. The conflict was in the desire to keep things together. The driving force in my work is recognizing those two tendencies and seeing them as ways to make things happen, i.e. how to produce a world or object with these types of tensions.....The reason for the contradiction is that I’m suspicious of things that make sense. Maybe I’m afraid of it. False security. Whereas contradiction does make sense to me. When I was able to accept that something could be true, and not true. I felt at home. This feeling felt threatening yet familiar. For example, one of the hardest paradigms is that your family can hurt you and love you at the same time. How can that be possible? I believe if you do not accept that this can be the case, then you have to reject your family. Now, one doesn’t have to be with one’s family. But I have decided to be with them, to live my life with them. It was important for me to come to grips with the fact that I could love them and at the same time, not like them very much. This may sound simplistic, and overly autobiographical, but being able to accept that contradiction at this level has been a guiding principle for me; it’s not an answer, it’s a positioning that’s always unstable.”

Regarding the two images above:
The image on the left, Aquarium, is a fish tank filled with red water and inks. Plaster models of Le Corbusier's Carpenter building are dunked in the tank and marked by the experience to create a set of 'Monoprints." This piece was in a show at Samson in Boston. The second image is one in which I can't find any information on but I like it so much that I kept it here. It seems to have the same elements as Aquarium in that it is about white and color in a color context but is made from a conceptual place of critiquing issues of race in our society.

Dorothea Tanning - Overview: Life of art

I am very impressed by this artist. Her work changed and grew over time and she seemed to never stop moving, changing, growing. She died this Tuesday at the age of 101. She began being known in the Surrealist circle of the 1930s and was married Max Ernst. This first set of images, above, are from this period-1940s. I've always had a soft spot for Surrealism. I love the dreamlike, psychological space they inhabit and the darker undertone that is often found. I also heavily identify with the idea of a broken up body image. I've gotten myself into trouble with this in the past. It conflicts with my feminist views since, more often than not, these broken bodies belong to women and the male artist's objectification of them. I am sure Tanning faced the questions of a not whole female body as a female artist at some point in her life.

I think my own attraction to dismembered bodies is the following:

It isn't about gore but it does contain violence. It has a sexuality to it that I find interesting - that might be the problematic conflict mentioned above. I do wonder if this conflict is that a female in a male culture begins to take on the male gaze themselves in order to adapt. I have thought this was the case for awhile. We women pick apart our sisters as much or more so than our male counterparts. We sexualize and objectify each other at the same time as we complain that men do it. Perhaps that is a reason.

I think that I also am attracted to the body depicted in compartments, turned around and upside down is that it forces the viewer to really look at what is in front of them as being a body. You notice what it is separate from your own body. It is the same feeling that I get in my body (recognizing it) as I get when standing in the presence of a sculpture that is body sized in a gallery. I become present with my own body in that moment.

And then there are cyborgs. There are human/not human juxtapositions that I am attracted to and surrealist work that depicts the broken apart human body does make me question our body and our human-ness in a similar way that the idea of cyborgs do.

Concerning the narrative quality of these works, here is a quote from Tate magazine (online):

'Tanning's paintings of the early 1940s reveal her taste for the unsettling moods and preternatural occurrences of Gothic novels. Girlish figures struggle with unearthly forces in scenes that combine the familiar and the imaginary. With growing technical mastery she manipulated colour and light to infuse the quotidian with metamorphic identity and extraordinary surface qualities.'

Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, Tanning's work took on a different form with abstraction and fragmentation. They still hold a dreamlike quality - but not hyper-realistic. It seems to become hazier and more about color and paint in some ways - I guess if you take out the hyper-realistic, this automatically comes to mind but color and paint can still be a central concern in hyper realism. It is just that a narrative shifts the focus for the viewer at first taste.

These (above) are my favorite. I love the hotel room above. (Chambre 202 Hotel du Pavot 1970). All that grey and brown with a splash of red carpet and fleshy pink bodies protruding from the walls. In the 70s, Dorothea began to make soft sculptures based off of the figures from her paintings. But, of course, what the artist bases their work off of is not necessarily the way in which their work is considered.

Critics spoke of Tanning's work in the feminist context which is not what she desired. She did not want to be categorized as a woman artist or within the feminist context.

From the Tate Article again:

Refusing to be co-opted into the re-evaluation of women artists associated with Surrealism, she has repeatedly said that the forces that impelled her to take up the career of artist, and that sustained her work, had everything to do with being human but nothing to do with being a woman....Not that she has been anything less than acutely aware of the various inequalities that have affected her life and the reception of her work. In her memoir she wrote movingly of the compromises that life with Max Ernst entailed. But these paled compared with the joy brought by her partner. 'Does the sharing of a direction deprive a female of her imagination? Or her hands? Is it a hardship, is it unfair to have to live in an enchanted space where striving after approval by other not always distinguished human beings is no more than a faraway rumour, frivolous as the place cards at a distant dinner party?'

I understand her not wanted to be pidgeon-holed as a feminist artist. Feminist art holds a special place in my heart - but I also understand that it is sectioned off to this one area and this one - although important- context. To be pidgeon-holed is to be limited. As for being a 'woman' artist - I also understand her dislike of this label, of course. It is a way of categorizing based on sex vs. on the merit of her work.





I am also fond of her work depicted above which seem to be mid 70s. I enjoy the flat color and shapes in this work - and she never leaves the body behind. All is contained in the body. It does seem like the work after the 1940s would be harder to place within the literary realm she referenced simply based on it's lack of narrative. Maybe that is part of the reason her work became viewed more about the female body - because it was soooo body. Really.




I do not have images here except this one - but before turning to poetry in the late 1990s, Tanning completed a collection of 12 large flower paintings. She just kept moving. I hope to follow and forage my own path in such a long winded manner.