By Deborah Barlow
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Jakara 5, part of the exhibit, “Material Ephemera,” currently on view at UC Santa Cruz
I will be away for a week for my show, “Material Ephemera,” on view through May 13 at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Porter College. I am speaking at the artist reception on Saturday, April 27.
I am back to Slow Muse on May 1.
For more information about the show:
Tags: Art, Material Ephemera, UCSC
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.–Excerpt from East Coker V, Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot
In What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, Robert Hass writes about this poem by T. S. Eliot and the difficulty in teaching students about poetry:
One of the traditional ways of teaching poetry is to discuss, to explicate, what Eliot is saying here to make sure that students (and the teacher) understand what’s being said…in teaching poetry, that is quite often what we settle for. We hope that the deeper thing that we can’t communicate has gotten communicated, passed directly from the poem to the student reader without our aid or interference. We do what we can with content, especially if, as in this case, the content is rich, psychologically or philosophically. And we do what we can, harder but still manageable, with affect. And we leave the deeper thing in the work of art, which is also famously the most ineffable, its tone or mood, which is like a sensation of echo, which we often take away quite mutely and quietly, in the same way that people do coming out of a concert hall or theater. In those deepest reaches of a work of art, the truth is what we mostly cannot teach.
Hass goes on to talk about the possibility of teaching echoes. As Eliot has said elsewhere, the past is “modified in the guts of the living” much the way a new work of art emerges from an old one. Like the lives we construct for ourselves from our experiences, our work and our relationships, the sensation of echo is ongoing and sometimes as close as we can get to our own deeper thing.
This feels particularly resonant for me this morning. This weekend is the fifth anniversary of the passing of Morris Arrari, a dear friend to many of us. A group of us are gathering in New York City to remember him. In thinking about Morris more than usual, I was reminded of these words delivered at his memorial service by Andrew Kimball:
Morris said once he would choose to return to earth — should that be our destiny — as a bird, high above hospital rooms, stomas, the gracelessness of ordinary manners — his artist’s eye quickened by the earth’s spiny geology, its interlocking clays and ores, its patterned waterways, the play of shadow across the landscape – observed this time from a distance.
The sensation of echo, the ineffable deeper thing—these are concepts that don’t translate easily into words. But remembering this wish for an ambient presence brought me closer to that unsaidness.
Tags: Art, Poetry, Robert Hass, T. S. Eliot
Ghostly demarcations of the land under cloud cover, taken over the US midsection during a recent cross country flight.
My very clever and well read niece Rebecca Ricks sent me a link to an essay published in Frieze Magazine last year. Titled Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art, it is an edited version of a lecture given by Peter Schjeldahl at the School of Visual Arts.
Peter Schjeldahl of course is the long time art critic at the New Yorker magazine. I read just about every article he writes and connect with him more than I don’t. This essay is particularly full of resonant wisdom and what’s more, it includes the full text of my favorite Wallace Stevens poem, “The idea of Order at Key West” (whose final line is referred to in the title: “Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,/The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,/Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,/And of ourselves and of our origins,/In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”) Schjeldahl says this about the poem after quoting it: “I think it’s safe to say that nothing in recent writing or art reaches this level of beauty and intelligence, so confidently, let alone with such total mastery of form.”
It just may be that there is a stealth tribe, not easily determined but primal nonetheless: the kinship of those who carry an unearthly passion for that poem. Recite it by heart, and you’re in.
A few snippets from Schjeldahl’s essay (and there are oh so many):
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Good art evicts intelligence from its left-brain command centre into other parts of the brain, and of the body. It does this by some or another touch or twist of beauty, which can’t be conceptualized but only undergone, like a beneficent seizure.***
To be really good at anything, assuming that you’re talented, is to work harder and longer, with more ruthless honesty and discipline, than other people could do without bursting into tears. Your secret is that, hard as it may be, it doesn’t feel like work to you. It feels normal, like eating and sleeping…So as an artist you’re lonely. You know the fragility and vulnerability of your Great Good Place but you lean your whole weight into it anyhow. Along with wanting fame and money and sex, like everybody, you want to slip that place into the map of the world, to make the world a little less wretched to you. You will even go without the fame and money and sex parts, if necessary. You will be misunderstood, often enough by people – darling dumbbells – who praise you. (Be kind to them if you can.) That’s the deal. No one said you were an artist. You said you were an artist. You asked for it. No whining.
Tags: Art, Peter Schjeldahl, Poetry, Wallace Stevens
The poet Robert Hass has won the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize. I have admired his work for some time. So when a good friend enthusiastically suggested that I explore some of his prose as well, I took her up on it. What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination and the Natural World is a collection of essays that is so readable, engaging and elegantly thoughtful that this book has been at my side for weeks now. (For readers like me who suffer from extreme promiscuity, that’s a seriously committed relationship.)
It turns out that Hass and I score high on shared interests. His first essay is about his adolescent initiation into a lifelong connection to the work of Wallace Stevens (that’s when I fell under Stevens’s spell as well). That is followed by a contextual nesting of Allen Ginsberg‘s legendary “Howl” that was extremely helpful in rethinking that work (which is a portrait of San Francisco just as I was coming of age in the Bay Area), the thoughtful comparison of intent shared by poet George Oppen and painter Paul Cezanne (always a topic of interest), and insightful portraits of many of the poets who impacted me in my college years including William Everson, Robinson Jeffers and Czeslaw Milosz.
And most coincidentally I read his essay, “Notes on Poetry and Spirituality,” while I was flying back from two weeks in Utah. It turned out to be about an invitation for Hass to speak to poetry students at Brigham Young University. Just days before I had been asked to meet with art students at BYU, so reading about his experience at that school was both timely and resonant.
Here are a few passages that may engage you as well.
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Wallace Stevens:
I imagine I am not through thinking about this poem ["The Emperor of Ice-Cream"] or about “Sunday Morning” or “The Snowman” or “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “The Idea of Order at Key West” or “Of Mere Being” or “The World as Meditation,” which are other poems I have been brooding over and arguing with myself about for much of my adult life. But I heard it early and I’ve lived with it for some time and thought that it would serve for one image of the way poems happen in a life when they are lived
***
George Oppen and Paul Cezanne:
What’s extraordinary about George Oppen’s poetry is moment after moment in his work, line by line, syllable by syllable, you have a sense of an enormous ethical pressure brought to bear on the act of perception, and a sense that the ethical pressure of the act of perception is for him the same thing as the writing of the poem. And that is a way in which he is extraordinarily like Cezanne, it seem to me. The way Cezanne made lines, the way he studied color and tint, the way he insisted on seeing made it impossible for people to paint in the same way they had painted before…
Most poets are afraid of consciousness, perhaps because our art has magical and incantatory roots. And consciousness of consciousness, as the naked ground of all serious speech, has tormented twentieth-century writing. The first condition of honesty in poetry, and in the other arts, has been a certain self-reflexiveness; at the same time a flight from consciousness is probably the root of the passion to possess the world through language. That seems to be the fork in our path: a self-referential and hermetic poetry on one side, and on the other a passionate quest that strains toward and against dissolution.
George Oppen’s poems are remarkably free of both these passions. They are also free from many of the subversions of ego that accompany them: the desire to charm, the desire to dazzle, the need to have one’s suffering seen and acknowledged. This freedom is the ambience of only a few artists. Cezanne wasn’t trying to do anything to Mont Sainte-Victoire; he wasn’t trying to give it anything or take anything from it or make anything out of it. The mountain was there and he was there, and the painting—which was both consciousness of the mountain and consciousness of the consciousness of the mountain—was their meeting place and a single-minded act of devotion to the meeting place.
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Poetry and spirituality at Brigham Young University:
Sitting there I found myself thinking that those Mormon kids could be good Mormons for their entire lives without getting in touch with their spirituality, whatever their spirituality was. And that the discovery of that possibility must turn on some kind of break from trying to be the kind of person they thought they were supposed to be seen to try to be, that, for me, the content of spirituality was almost always everything in me that rebelled against whatever the pattern of being a socially approved and good person was, even when I experienced that rebellion as failure. And that for me, the content of poetry, or at least what drew me to poetry—the way in which I could say to myself it was spiritual—had to do with negation, with some version of saying no to the plausibly constructed world, and of being drawn through that negation toward—what? i didn’t like any of the words. I tried out mystery and wonder, and more helpfully I thought of Emily Dickinson.
And coming to her I knew I needed another definition. If religion is a community created by common symbols of the sacred, and is not the same thing as a spiritual life, then the first thing to say about spirituality is that it is almost always a private matter.
Tags: Art, George Oppen, Paul Cezanne, Poetry, Robert Hass
It is a bit like raising a child, having an exhibit: it takes a village to bring it into form. Orbilinia, a show of my recent paintings at the Woodbury Museum in Utah, was an (art) barn raising that needed the essential help of friends, family (I have the world’s best sisters) and an extraordinary museum staff—curator Melissa Hempel, installation wizard Allison Hamnett and lighting genie Larry Revoir. (For a complete guide to the show click here.)
A few images of the installation and the opening…
At the artist reception, March 12, 2013
(Photographs by Julie Pierce, Keegan Drawe and Anne Call House.)
Tags: Art, Orbilinia, Woodbury Museum
In front of Mandaliya, at the opening of my show at Spaulding Gallery (Photo: Marcia Goodwin)
It is a fine line that we ask ourselves to walk. My work requires hours alone in my studio, silently conversing with the work emerging in front of me. It is a form of primal nakedness, working that way, best done in private.
Every once in a while it is necessary to unfold that frock in the box under the bed, the gown of “adequate social skills,” as I needed to do for the opening of my show on Friday night. During those three hours anyone can enter your world. Conversations ranged from an in depth discussion of Sianne Ngai‘s provocative book, Our Aesthetic Categories (which has had me spellbound for months) to questions about why you seem to really like the color blue.
Most artists are jugglers. The intense focus required to do their work must be handled gingerly while the “everything else” part of life conspires to distract, erode and undermine. But wait. Is that really an accurate model? With so much discussion about the forces in our culture that are veering us towards attention deficits, multiplexing overstimulation and an absence of contemplative time, maybe this isn’t the right way to see things.
Benjamin Nugent‘s opinion piece in the New York Times on Sunday helped me put this into perspective. He starts his piece, The Upside of Distraction, with this:
Writing a book consists largely of avoiding distractions. If you can forget your real circumstances and submerge yourself in your subject for hours every day, characters become more human, sentences become clearer and prettier. But utter devotion to the principle that distraction is Satan and writing is paramount can be just as poisonous as an excess of diversion. I tried to make writing my only god, and it sickened my work, for a while. The condition endemic to my generation, attention deficit disorder, gave way to its insidious Victorian foil: monomania.
Monomania is what it sounds like: a pathologically intense focus on one thing. It’s the opposite of the problem you have if your gaze is ever flitting from your Tumblr to your spreadsheet to your baby to rush-hour traffic.
Nugent describes a period in his life when he had crafted an existence that allowed minimal distraction from his writing: No Internet, TV, iPhone or interesting neighbors. He was at his work with complete monomaniacal focus.
The disaster unfolded slowly. The professors and students were diplomatic, but a pall of boredom fell over the seminar table when my work was under discussion. I could see everyone struggling to care. And then, trying feverishly to write something that would engage people, I got worse. First my writing became overthought, and then it went rank with the odor of desperation. It got to the point that every chapter, short story, every essay was trash.
I could not imagine why; conditions were ideal. It took me a long time to realize that the utter domination of my consciousness by the desire to write well was itself the problem. Monomania, a 19th-century malady to which my 21st-century immune system had developed no defenses, had crept into my soul, like gout into a poet’s foot, and spoiled it by degrees.
When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see.
So Nugent assessed the patient and applied a sensible change in diet. He fell in love, started hanging out at his girlfriend’s house which came with wifi, flatscreen TV and a DVD player. He joined a band. “One morning, after I diversified my mania, my writing no longer stank of decay. Eventually, it sat up and took food.”
While most of us have heard Jonathan Franzen’s warning that you cannot be a serious writer and have Internet access, Nugent is suggesting more of a middle way. It may be like any dietary advice—every body has its own needs and as the owner of one, it behooves you to find out what yours likes best. I do know the one thing all artists share: A passionate desire to produce the best work possible. And to achieve that, we will do whatever is asked.
Tags: Art, Benjamin Nugent, Spaulding Gallery
Jay Heikes, Ear of Dionysius, Collection Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will be mounting a show of paintings in February, their first group painting show in 10 years. Titled Painter Painter, the exhibit has been co-curated by Bartholomew Ryan and Eric Crosby. I was intrigued—and heartened—by their selection process, their view of the state of painting, and the easy informality of their approach. Here are a few passages from each of them, chosen because they rang true for me:
Ryan:
Painting has always been a somewhat fraught medium, and particularly so over the last 30 to 40 years. Both Eric and I avoided bringing the more trenchant dogmas associated with it into our conversations with the artists. We wanted to be more attentive to the work on its own terms and try to figure things out from there. So our earliest questions were really simple, for instance: why choose the materials of painting today, at a time when artists can work in so many other ways?
We were also interested in a question related to some of the work being made now, which one often hears from older generations of curators, historians, and even artists, which is “Where is the criticality?” There is a certain expectation today that if a painter is to continue as a painter, there has to be some basic level of self-reflexivity, some wry acknowledgment of the problematic status of continuing to paint in a postmodern era, when painting itself has been toppled from its lofty perch. I think that’s been a good thing up to a point, but it has become deadening and knee-jerk. Many of the artists in our show have consciously sidestepped that way of framing their work, and they find more interesting things to think about.
Crosby:
There’s also something about the resolute materiality of painting that continues to attract artists. These are objects that follow deeply subjective and individual ways of thinking, as expressed through specific materials. In this show you will see works that are stained, collaged, sprayed, cut up, stitched, assembled, glued, smeared, rubbed, and so on— some works are years in the making. Painting offers a frame for contact with this very physical presence. It’s a vivid contrast with our daily routine, where we experience so many images by using a cursor, linking to them, altering them, navigating away from them. Painting resists this kind of experience. A lot of artists today embrace that notion to an extreme. They go where the materials take them, not where the history of painting tells them to go.
The Walker exhibition features Matt Connors, Sarah Crowner, Fergus Feehily, Jay Heikes, Rosy Keyser, Charles Mayton, Dianna Molzan, Joseph Montgomery, Katy Moran, Alex Olson, Scott Olson, Zak Prekop, Dominik Sittig, Lesley Vance, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.
Tags: Art, Bartholomew Ryan, Eric Crosby, painting, Walker Art
Charles Burchfield, “Moon and Thunderhead”
There are many craftsmen who paint pleasantly the surface appearances and are very clever at it.
There are always a few who get at and feel the undercurrent, and these simply use the surface appearances selecting them and using them as tools to express the undercurrent, the real life.
If I cannot feel an undercurrent then I can only see a series of things. They may be attractive and novel at first but soon grow tiresome.
There is an undercurrent, the real life, beneath all appearances everywhere. I do not say that any master has fully comprehended it at any time, but the value of his (or her) work is in that he had sensed it and his work reports the measure of his experience.
It is this sense of the persistent life force back of things which makes the eye see and the hand move in ways that result in true masterpieces. Techniques are thus created as a need.
–Robert Henri
This is such a simple idea but one that feels so close to my sense of how things are in the studio. It is a metaphor that applies to both the making as well as the viewing of art.
It was my sense of just that—a powerful undercurrent—that knocked me out when I saw Robert Gober‘s brilliant show of Charles Burchfield‘s work that was on view a few years ago at the Hammer Museum in LA as well as the Whitney in New York. Gober’s selection of work made it so easy to enter into Burchfield’s paintings in a new and revelatory way, something I had never done before. Burchfield was a nature mystic, and he felt the life force in nature. Amazingly he also found a way to capture that undercurrent in his work. Since piercing through and into that sense of things, I cannot approach a Burchfield painting without feeling that energy. Some are better than others of course, but that undercurrent is so present and so there in his work.
(For those of you in the Boston area, I just discovered three new Burchfields. They are hanging unassumedly in rooms adjacent to the Addison Museum at Philips Academy in Andover. Just ask to see them.)
A note on Robert Henri: His book from which the above passage is taken, The Art Spirit, was foundational reading for me when I first became an artist. Henri is probably better known today from that collection of his teachings—assembled by a former student, Margery Ryerson—than from his paintings although many of his works are very memorable. He also left an extraordinary legacy as a teacher. (He taught at the Art Students League, still an ongoing institution in New York, from 1915 til 1927.) Some of his more famous students include George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
Other posts on Charles Burchfield on Slow Muse:
Tags: Art, Charles Burchfield, painting, Robert Henri, undercurrent
Jenny Saville, photographed in her Oxford studio, June 2012. (Photograph: Pal Hansen for the Observer)
Some memorable quotes about Jenny Saville from an article in the Guardian last year, Jenny Saville: ‘I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies’:
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Painting is my natural language. I feel in my own universe when I’m painting. But, in Britain, there has been a drive in art schools to describe and to rationalise what it is that you’re making, and that is a death knell to painting. Painting doesn’t operate like that. It works on all the irrational things. If you stand in front of Willem de Kooning’s Woman, I, you can’t unravel with words how that works on you. In America, painting is embraced, perhaps because one of the last great moments of painting was in New York, with de Kooning and Pollock.”She hesitates. “I’m not anti conceptual art. I don’t think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that’s like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There’s something primal about it. It’s innate, the need to make marks. That’s why, when you’re a child, you scribble.”
***
Later, she was encouraged by her uncle, an art historian, to whom she remains close (he lives near her studio in Oxford; they like to eat lunch together, and talk about Prussian blue). “When I was about 11, he gave me a section of hedge, and told me to observe it for a whole year. So I did, and I learnt such a lot about how nature shifts, and the necessity to really look.”She sees my face. “It wasn’t weird at the time! It’s only weird when I tell other people. I’m so grateful to him. Later on, he took me to Venice, and it wasn’t just that he said this is Titian, and this is Tintoretto, or whatever. At six o’clock one morning, we went to draw at the fish market at the Rialto bridge. Great art wasn’t something far away; it was part of life. We would go and drink in the same bar Rembrandt drank in; it was as fundamental as that in terms of the working life of the artist.
Once again I feel a commonality with Saville. Our work is very different, but our views often overlap.
Previous posts on Slow Muse about Jenny Saville:
Tags: Art, Jenny Saville, painting
Joi Ito, my favorite nowist
The selection of Joi Ito as Director of the MIT Media Lab in 2011 was a departure from the norm. A former nightclub DJ and college dropout turned venture capitalist, Ito is a selfmade entrepreneur, visionary, “adventure capitalist”, tech guru. In recent interviews, Ito has shared his approach to innovation now that he is at the helm of one of the world’s top computing science labs. Reading his words is like encountering a blueprint for how I need (and want) to be and do in my studio. Creativity is creativity after all, but it is comforting—and less isolating—when science and art spill over into each other’s worlds.
Here are some excerpts from a recent post that demonstrate some of those commonalities:
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It has always been my opinion that “education” is something people do to you, whereas “learning” is something you do for yourself. Consequently, the only thing I learned in school was typing. In the old days, people like me who don’t have college degrees had a hard time thriving in society. But today, the ability to learn on your own or from your peers has become really easy. I think this change is leading to a fundamental disruption in education. Independent and lifelong learning are really starting to peak—there is an inflection point coming around how people learn.
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I don’t believe in futurists that much anymore—they are usually wrong. I’m calling myself a “nowist,” and I’m trying to figure out how to build up the ability to react to anything. In other words, I want to create a certain agility. The biggest liability for companies now is having too many assets; you need to learn how to be fluid and agile.It’s kind of a spiritual thing. You want to have your peripherals wide open and adapt as quickly as you can. I think that will be an important survival trait of people and companies in the future…What I’m searching for are people and things that don’t fit anywhere: The misfits of society.”
A nowist. What a great word to also describe what a “trust the process” artist strives for. The ability to react to anything. To be agile. Fluid. And a bit of a misfit.
And yes, I would agree with Ito: It IS kind of a spiritual thing.
Tags: Art, Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab, Science