Modernist Hickory

 I don't know what this photograph is about, if it's supposed to be about anything, but the image of a hedgehog blowing up a balloon on the street is curious.

It was taken/constructed/conceived by Slava Beilin, an Israeli photographer, apparently in Jerusalem. The monochoming of everything but the red balloon is a fairly common technique in cityscapes, though the subject matter is usually more monumental, important or just bigger. If you look closely, the street behind is reflected in the balloon, and is in colour. It looks liek a bright, sunny day in Jerusalem.

On Nudity

Update: In the comments, Vincent points out that this post is badly in nearly of illustration. Although I am told that it is possible to find pictures of naked women on the Internet, I have added some here to give artistic coherence to the post (Never Knowingly Artistically Incoherent, me).

A Quick Sketch

I have spent a couple of afternoons trying to find a nude to draw. I first looked at Greek statues and eventually decided that there was no actual nude that was what I was looking for. Then today I tried modern photos in diffetent styles. Again I found nothing that wanted me to draw it, but I was struck by the variety of results of applying imagination to the representation of the human form. Not for the first time, I fell to thinking about it all.

The Original

Flesh in Stone, by the Genius of Bernini

There is great beauty in the human body. And great possibility. Despite the great beauty and plasticity of many animals, there is much in the human body that is, or can be, superior to them. One reason is simply the lack of hair, which allows the details of flesh texture and muscle tone and form to be clearly seen even at rest. The ability to be conscious of one's own body, to control its movements in detail, to conceive them with knowledge of how observers will react to them and to present them in a specific context independent of the movements themselves. There is also the important point that the lack of hair allows the play of light and shadow to exist, to be refined and exploited. The animality of the human body is more clearly visible than in other animals.

Naked Flamenco

Then there is the fact that we know and understand the human body, its functions, sensations and responses, far better than those of other animals. And then there is sex. We don't think of want cheetahs sexually.

But sex is not necessarily an important part of this perceived beauty, or even any part of it. I can see beauty in the male as well as the female form. On the other hand, it does appear that the female form is intrinsically more beautiful than the male. Women who appreciate beauty seem to agree with men on this. A beautiful woman is a beautiful thing. A man's beauty cannot so easily be appreciated by other men. Nevertheless, the beauty of the human body is not limited to the female.

Roman, not Greek, but one of the best

Nor is it limited to the young and well-formed. In many kinds of dance the performers tend to be youngish and slimmish, but then many forms of dance are too demanding for the old and fat. Some forms do allow for this. Flamenco rhythms are often danced to by old women. When it is well done, with skill and duende, not only the dancing but the women themselves become beautiful.

I remember a story I once heard about Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, in which he cried because he had seen an artist capable of making a chaste Venus. The story was probably apocryphal, carefully crafted to illustrate a point, as so many of the stories he told were, but it means, at the very least, that he thought it could be done, and that it was important.

Looking at pictures of attractive naked women purely- as it were- as beautiful objects, or the subjects of beautiful images, rather than as objects of male enquiry, is very interesting and instructive. The curiosities of anatomy, the signs of life lived and suffered, the differences that exist between what you may think of, at first glance, as similar examples of the Standard Pretty Girl, the ways in which the human body can be twisted, distorted, lit up, perceived, conceived, expressed and impressed. Their is apparently unlimited potential for teh creative mind to find new and beautiful ways to show it to us. I like this fact.

It is possible that that drawing will never be made. These reflections will have to stand in its place.

Lit Crit as the New Jazz

I have written before about a group of people who infest the world of literary and cultural appreciation. In University arts departments around the richer and freer world, there are parasites on the world of real understanding and discovery.

People like Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Susan Gubar, Sandra Gilbert, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, K.K. Ruthven, Henry Louis Gates, Judith Butler, and many more, and the ones who started it all- Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida… et al., as well as other, minor figures, some of whom I know personally because they have them in our University here, too.

This is not a phallus

I also know, personally and through their writings, many people whose knowledge and study of literature and other arts genuinely illuminate the works they discuss, clarify the background and context, and seek the deeper meanings and motivations of the writer/artist, adding to our understanding and enjoyment of them. I’m not knocking the arts or those who study them, but those who disseminate their own nasty, ignorant opinions by prostituting the object of study, and ignoring truth entirely.

These academics and soi-disant intellectuals who make their living, and who largely craft their own identity, by producing tendentious, prejudiced, under- or un-researched, barely coherent tracts about literature criticism, post-colonialism, anti-racism, equality theory, feminism or whatever happens to be their gig (any ground sufficiently fertile to allow them to be applauded by their brethren for calling other people names), make the mistake of comparing themselves with scientific researchers, and their opinions with rational truth. Others make the mistake of taking them seriously, which is what they want, of course.*

The people who produce this kind of rubbish have no conception of the gulf that separates them from real thinking, real analysis, real reasoning, real logic, real thought, real results, real truth. They genuinely believe that what they do is comparable to real academic work, and think that the contempt they receive from people who know how to think is due to ignorance or prejudice. They cannot understand the truth, and they could not accept it if they did understand it.

They themselves would not accept what I am about to say, because it detracts from their importance, but it is probably a better way of interpreting the stuff they produce:

It is not truth, in the sense of being a representation of reality. It is an expression of how they perceive something at a particular time, and words, distributed in accordance with the way they feel their idea must be expressed, are their medium. To search for truth or reason in the result is to misunderstand the work.

We do not expect a painted portrait to tell us anything much about human facial anatomy or even precisely what the subject looked like unless we are fairly certain that the painter had both the intention to produce a near-perfect likeness and the technical competence to carry out the intention. Very frequently neither of these things is true, and so we interpret the painting in accordance with other criteria, and are happy to do so. It makes sense to do so. But when we see what looks superficially like a reasoned argument, and is presented as one, supposedly containing premises, facts and logic and arriving at conclusions that may be thus identified in some way as true, we treat it on these terms, and are baffled by the fact that patent nonsense, lacking any form of reason or analysis, is treated as truth. We dismiss it.

We do not see this as a kind of riff on the writer’s feelings, which is what it is. Even so it may well have little or no value, but at least we could understand why it exists. But those who produce this stuff lie to themselves and to us about what it is, because they want to be taken seriously. And so no one knows what’s going on.

Picasso and Lucien Freud, for example, would not insist, in the face of the most manifest evidence, that what you are looking at would be useful to the police in their search if the subject went missing. But that is what lit critters do.

Their disconnected witterings are art. Good art, bad art, every man his own critic, of course. They are a form of self-expression, no more, no less. They satisfy the artist’s urge to say something in a particular manner. They are not a search for truth.

*Anyone who thinks I exaggerate should Google some of those names. Unless you've had to deal with them, as I have, you would not believe such rantings could exist in serious universities. Because these are among the star names, they are not selected outliers. Their business, as you will see, is not truth but indoctrination, the very opposite of what higher education is supposed to be for,

The Sky is a Canvas

The sky is too great, too apparent, too compelling a canvas not to have drawn the attention of the greatest of artists. And what we see drawn on it is too powerful, too vivid, too varied, it imitates the range of human emotions and experiences so closely, yet so enormously, that it can only be the work of an artist. It can express calm, quietude, the love of beauty, anger, terror, despair, new life, authority, madness, dizzy colour, soul-destroying blackness. We recognise it all and feel it, respond to it all, more strongly, more broadly, than we respond to those same feelings within ourselves. The sky can tell us what we are and what we feel, it can tell us things about ourselves we didn’t know.

The sky can tell stories, and not just our own stories. Is it possible that the clouds have no narrative? Do they move about, around one another, heap up, disperse, attack each other, cover and reveal the sky, collide, stream and curl away to nothing, take on the colours of flame, anger, hatred, love, jealousy, the Virgin Mary, the deep ocean, the Jamaican sand at noon, the boiling, melting of a volcano, the gently mixing shades of a quiet river, the darkness of doom, all to no purpose? Can it mean nothing?

There are many stories to be read in the sky, stories told by the great artist who wrote painted them there. But I have never been able to read them. It should be possible. Not easy, but possible, to read the stories in the sky and to know that they are true.

The sky is a great canvas, and the artist is the observer.

Artistic Suicide Part 2

Following on from yesterday’s thoughts on the Berlin artists claiming to be committing artistic suicide in order to protest against something, I want to consider the concept of artistic suicide per se. To then it seems to mean something like this: they are artists, they distinguish themselves from people who are not, they consider their work to have technical/aesthetic merit and also to be valuable in itself as the product of an act of creative self-expression. Valuable to them and to others, which I think is an important point.

There is, of course, no reasonable comparison between burning a painting and setting yourself on fire in front of the Ministry of Employment, but it does involve a definite sacrifice of something that not only belongs to you, but which you understand to be part of you. If this seems to be straying into pompous cobblers territory again, this time you’re probably right.

Nonetheless, there is some truth in it. Assuming that the works have some artistic merit and that they weren’t produced specially for the occasion, and assuming that they have done this with the real aim of saving these arts centres, and not just to get their picture in the paper, the symbolism of the event means more to these artists than would the mere destruction of their property. There is no reason why anyone should recognise the importance of that symbolism, or take it remotely seriously, but it is their work they have destroyed, something which is more important to them, and, they think, to you, or at least it should be, than mere belongings, even those that were worth much more than the flaming art. If their painting were worth money, they wouldn’t be in this position, so I think it’s safe to assume that the artworks were among the least valuable of their possessions. Yet they have not burnt their iPads and Prada handbags, because the sacrifice, and so the protest, would have been less.

I’m a writer. Not a successful one, it’s true, but an artist of sorts. I can never bring myself to destroy or delete any of the stories I write, even the ones I know aren’t very good or haven’t worked the way I intended. Or which I now recognise will never be finished.* So I know why they think they have made a sacrifice, and that their protest should be understood in that light.

To Paul Erdich, the eccentric mathematician (eccentric is something of an understatement, but there you are) death was a mere inconvenience. To learn that a colleague had shuffled off this mortal coil meant no more to him than that he would have to change his schedule and find someone else to bounce ideas off about that paper they were working on. To learn that a colleague had ceased to do mathematics, however, was a tragedy that could affect him very deeply. A mother will choose to sacrifice her own life before that of her child (or so we are told, and anecdote tends to bear it out). That which we think of as part of ourselves, for whatever reason, whatever we have made emotional investment in, has far more value to us than an observer would guess who didn’t know of that investment.

So with all these caveats, and mutatis mutandes, I recognise and accept the concept of artistic suicide.

Artistic Suicide Part 1

Artistic suicide is an interesting idea. Destroying one’s own work, work that has cost time and effort to create, and which involves a, perhaps considerable, investment of one’s creative energy, does not come easily to anyone who has created anything. I’m a writer, not a commercially successful one*, and my artistic success is rather questionable, too, but in a sense I make art, and I understand how hard it is to lose your work and see it destroyed. The assumption, then, is that these Italian artists have a good reason for burning their stuff.

I think it’s a fair bet that their main purpose is to attract the attention of the press by dramatically burning things in public. In which case, they have clearly understood how the media works, and if it’s their own work they’re burning, it’s entirely up to them. I think it’s also a fair bet that much of what they have burnt was specially produced for that purpose, but I could be wrong.

There are two things I want to talk about here: one is the cause they claim to defend, the other is the concept of ‘artistic suicide’ itself.

They are trying to draw attention to the fact that two arts centres they consider to be important are under threat. They refer to these as centres of ‘independent’ art. I believe very deeply in freedom, and the freedom to find ways, means and media to express outwardly what your mind conceives within itself is important to the individual, and the result is often important to others. Art is not beautiful in itself, but it can provide beautiful things for the pleasure of others. Art is not uplifting in itself, but it can help others to learn, understand or explain to themselves things about the world that they would otherwise not have noticed. Most people, without art, would have a very limited mental life, being unable to create with their own understanding and imagination what those with a greater creative gift have made for them. In short, art is good.

It’s also very hard to make a living at. The painting scene around here is very lively, and I know a dozen or so painters whose work is of very high quality. They have all won national or international prizes at some point, exhibited in important galleries, and are generally recognised as being very good at what they do. Only one of them makes his living directly from his work. The rest either teach or have a day job unconnected to art.

If you’re thinking at this point that this is going to be a load of pompous, rent-seeking cobblers, I beg you to bear with me.

Let us explore this concept of ‘independent’ art. The two ‘independent’ arts centres in question are the Tacheles Art House in Berlin, and the Museum of Modern Art in Naples. The Naples museum is publicly funded, and is going to lose some of that funding because the Italian government, like so many others, has run out of its people’s money. In other words, the problem in Naples is that the centre is not independent at all. It is entirely dependent on the tax-payer.

The Tacheles, on the other hand, is a squat. I don’t know if their art is any good, perhaps it is, I imagine some of it probably is, but that isn’t the point here. The owners have been trying to kick them out for twenty years. The squatters complain that they are “threatened by a network of investors, banks, lawyers and politicians who are more interested in making money…” than in providing “places where artists and public can be brought together with art that is aimed at people and not markets.” Of course, when you are being paid by those same politicians you’re now complaining about, or you can simply steal other people’s property to live in, you don’t need to worry much about making money. But the people who have to pay for it all, do. And quite what the important difference is between making art that people want to see and making art that people want to buy, I don’t understand either. All a bit confused.

They want the local government to buy the building and pay them to live and work there. More of that ‘independence’ we’ve been hearing so much about.

In other words, more self-indulgent hippies moaning about not getting enough of other people’s money.

*So I work for a living instead of demanding to be housed and fed at the Prytaneum

Art and Truth- A Post in Progress

Easter holidays. Warm sun. The country calls, the lakes call, the owls call (all bloody night, in fact), and there will be no internet, no bloggimng, no wider world at all, for a few days. When I come back, regular readers know posts will be bucolic and whimsical in nature until the mind adjusts and normal ranting resumes. So I leave you some very incomplete thoughts on the nature of truth:

It’s easy to do art. A minimum of imagination, Something to express, anything, and a medium. There are plenty to choose from. It may not be good art, people might not like it, or understand what it’s for, or agree with what it says, but it’s art. Truth is hard. Science is hard, because it seeks truth. If it doesn’t seek truth it is not science. If it calls itself science, or research or some such thing, but doesn’t seek truth or has no means of evaluating what it finds, it is worthless. Vast sections of our universities, of those parts of them dedicated to the humanities, make no attempt to seek truth, to discover new things, but they claim to. If they presented themselves as giving opinions, as riffing on the texts and situations they look at, as merely using the text they are analysing as a starting point, as a way to set their minds working, as a medium to express their own opinions, moral judgements, intellectual conceits, prejudice, ignorance or whatever, they could be judged on how far they achieve the goal, and on how interesting or useful the results are. Or they could just have fun. They could do a form of art. Of course, they would be less obviously suited to tenured posts at universities if they were open about what they do, and their motives for doing it. And they wouldn’t get to take themselves so immensely seriously, which I suspect is part of why they do it.*

Art does not care about truth. It has no need of truth. Only of some form of perceived coherence. Its purpose is to communicate something. I don’t think it matters much whether the perceiver appreciates what the originator had in mind. The producer  is trying to do

The ways in which art is defined, or what we assume it to be, can have some awkward consequences. If Damian Hirst is simply a self-publicist playing the public through manipulation of the media, then he is not doing art all. And that is not a critical judgement of his work, it is the truth.

*The more direly dreary and politically charged areas of the humanities attract people who are not intelligent enough for real academic work, but who want to feel part of the game. They’re like the boy you allow to play on the team sometimes because his father has an off-licence, but only when it’s cold and wet, and only at left back.