Satellite photo of the Costa Concordia capsized off the coast of Isola del Giglio (image via telegraph.co.uk)

Somehow I missed the 16,400 internet posts reporting that the ill-fated luxury liner, Costa Concordia — presumably still on its side in the waters off Tuscany’s Isola del Giglio — was the setting for the first act of Jean-Luc Godard’s latest feature, Film Socialisme (2010).

The DVD of Film Socialisme was released on January 10th, and the Costa Concordia crashed on the 13th, so how weird is that? If you look upon the appearance of a festival film’s DVD as being akin to its general release, then the gap between metaphor and reality has now collapsed to a mere three days.

Ignorance, in this case, was a peculiar kind of bliss, as some of the most gorgeous footage ever captured on HD rolled past my eyes, initially unclouded by the cruelties of irony and fate.

It was just as the camera was descending in a glass elevator through the ship’s atrium to its inlaid hardwood floor — a sequence evocative (and probably deliberately so) of the famous rooftop-to-underwater tracking shot in Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964) — that my mind drifted to the wreck of the Costa Concordia.

Gazing at Godard’s lush montage of the cruise’s cheap thrills (eating, drinking, gambling) and social atomization (exacerbated by his use of radically elliptical subtitles, which have been analyzed elsewhere), I began to picture everything suddenly going sideways, an escapist fantasy unraveling in waves of incomprehension and horror.

Moments later, there was a shot of the gangplank with “Costa Concordia” emblazoned on its side.

Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme (2010) (image via wildbunch.biz)

This encroachment of future catastrophe upon a Marxist morality tale, as unnerving and grimly absurd as it was, somehow seemed altogether, and immediately, appropriate — a secret confirmation of a deep-seated, atavistic belief in the shaman’s power over the elements. It was as if Godard had aimed a laser at the Costa Concordia from afar, and it was only a matter of time before it lay on its side, half-submerged in the surf like an abandoned beach toy.

Godard’s gnomic persona, cultivated over his six-decade-long career, first as a critic and then an auteur, reaches a kind of apotheosis in this film. His view of his characters is entirely exterior; they squabble among themselves and pursue their paltry pleasures, but they remain distant and opaque. He surveys their folly but casts no judgment, a disinterested god leaving a lost race to its own devices.

He may send Patti Smith wandering through the ship like an avenging proletarian angel (pity the poor fan who watches this movie just to see her — what, 40 seconds? — of screen time) and he may invoke evils past and present through well-worn (okay, worn-out) political dichotomies (Stalin, Hitler and even the Odessa Steps), but the movie plays like a half-remembered reverie, a lament over the shallowness of a new century that is no match, in dynamism and danger, to the last.

The capsizing of the Costa Concordia (James Cameron’s Titanic as remade by Jacques Tati) all too neatly falls into the line of fate preordained by Godard, just as I Am Cuba, a distant piece of art-cum-agitprop by a Soviet filmmaker about the genesis of the Cuban Revolution, all too neatly foreshadows the recent rebellions that continue to ripple across the globe.

In the scene I mentioned — so magically mimicked in the “Spill the Wine” sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s homage-besotted Boogie Nights (1997) — the bikini-and-sunhat-clad bourgeoisie frolic in nonstop party mode while, elsewhere in the film, a virginal peasant woman is reduced to turning tricks in her shanty, and a sugar cane grower, kicked off his land, burns down his crop in an act of desperate self-immolation.

Godard’s seafaring gamblers are the nickel-slot descendants of Kalatozov’s deliciously decadent leisure class, and perhaps that comedown in villainy is one of the things Godard is mourning, and why his references to Hitler and Stalin seem so jarringly out of place.

But still. No matter how kneejerk his politics, how cavalier his aesthetic or exasperating his techniques, throughout the malign half-century since the Cuban Revolution, Godard has never failed to retrieve his lance and turn to face his foe. If we could all be so irascible.

Early this week, The New York Times published an article under that title by longtime Philadelphia Inquirer film critic (and former Village Voice art critic) Carrie Rickey. It told the story of an independent film producer named Lindsay Doran, whom Rickey describes in the third paragraph as “a missionary for mood-elevating films.”

It seems as if Doran became enamored of a book by a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, and “began rewatching films through the lens of what Dr. Seligman identifies as the five essential elements of well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. (He refers to these elements collectively as perma.)”

I didn’t investigate perma’s psychological applications, but I’m sure it has its uses. However, if Doran’s campaign — which she is carrying out “in a series of presentations to filmmakers” — merits coverage from the newspaper of record, how seriously should we take her influence? Does her “concept of cinematic Zoloft,” as Rickey puts it, become something worth reckoning with?

If it does, one of my first questions would be what Doran thinks of Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), which I happened to watch, for the second or third time, not long before the article appeared.

The Lady in the Radiator, from David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) (via s607.photobucket.com)

For what it’s worth, All About Eve won six Academy Awards, including best picture, director and screenplay, and was nominated for eight others. The passage of time hasn’t been altogether kind. Much of the acting seems mannered and stagey. The expository patches get dull. Ann Baxter’s Eve comes off as one-note much of the time. And the story’s wordless dénouement quickly slips from subtlety into overstatement.

Still, the film shimmers with brilliance, and its most radiant passages are those that might be defined as inverse-perma. Emotions are anything but positive. Engagement is poisonous. Relationships are treacherous. Meaning is empty. Accomplishments are hollow. And watching them unfold is utterly euphoric.

Hollywood has had its systems and formulae from the very first crank of the camera, and so we shouldn’t be surprised by any scheme, however ham-fisted, that it might contrive in its quest for a sure thing.

But the upsweep implied in Doran’s standpoint not only makes, once again, a virtue of cheap sentiment, but it also reduces cinema to an instructional tool.

Doran is quoted in the article as saying, “I think the thing that they’re getting out of it is that the ‘happy ending,’ the one that is most memorable and might make people go back to see the film a second time, might not be about winning. It might be about not winning, about finding something deeper that means more than victory.”

Okay, sure. To be “Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings,” then, is not to get what you want, but what you need. But what else can movies do?

I keep thinking about the mutant-cheeked character known as the Lady in the Radiator, who emerges out of the darkness in David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) to sing in a threadbare voice, “In heaven, everything is fine.”

That interlude, with its devastating parody of forced good cheer, has no demonstrative purpose (which, of course, goes for everything else in the film). And yet its emotional and psychological pull is as magnetic, in its own way, as Bette Davis’ star turn in All About Eve as the grandiloquent, grandly operatic Margo Channing.

In the Times article, Rickey goes to the source and quotes Dr. Seligman thus:

“’Movies are a form of soma,’ he said, referring to the idea of an uplifting drug, and he hypothesized that ‘more perma-like movies would make people’s lives better, but nobody’s researched that.’”

The Lady in the Radiator and Margo Channing are both monsters. Their environs are unremittingly harsh and unforgiving. They impart no lessons, provide no insights, proffer no advice. They are both unerringly real.

Have they made my life any better? Nobody’s researched that.

Pistoletto's "Man With Yellow Pants" (1964) at the MoMA (via flickr.com/semerssuaq)

What do we see when we look at art? What do we want to see? Answers come readily and are various: we seek beauty; enlightenment; pleasure; escape from ourselves; insight into those same selves. Such questions always hover in the space between viewer and object, reader and page, and they have been on my mind lately as I try to re-imagine (justify, perhaps) the role of the professional critic in this technology-enabled age of democratized response.

Last year’s retrospective show devoted to Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the exhibition catalogue published by Yale offer a point of departure for considering the problem. Begun well before his association with the Arte Povera movement and created throughout the 1960s and early 70s, Pistoletto’s mirror paintings present viewers with reflections of themselves within the painting’s frame. The artist applied photographed images to polished stainless steel surfaces and thus created “canvases” in which the viewer is viewed. Next to one of the artist’s scaled, photo realistic human figures, the gallery-goer can pose, brood or cavort with the simulacra, even as other live subjects likewise enter the frame.

The very first mirror painting, at least in Pistoletto’s recounting, came about accidentally while attempting a self-portrait on a “black background … varnished to the point that it reflected.”

“I began to paint my face,” the artist recalls. “I saw it come toward me, detaching itself from the space of an environment in which all things move, and I was astonished.”

Why the astonishment? He was, after all, essaying his own likeness. What about the reflected image differed from the outcome he sought? Was it the unintentionality of the mirrored face, the fact that the face wasn’t painted but rather something that, as he put it, “came toward him”? The sheer surprise of the moment, it turned out, became an inspirational source for a decade of similar efforts. Pistoletto’s discovery, if we imagine how he felt in the moment, trumped craft and rendered aesthetics (what is verisimilitude in this case?) and meaning irrelevant. These were mere afterthoughts in the wake of revelation.

The mirror paintings can still provide viewers with comparable (though for the art-savvy, hardly as unexpected) visions. The chance movement of people in the room, the lighting, the angle of viewing and our own face (did you sleep well last night? flushed from the overheated room?) are all in flux as we approach the painting. However much you “get” the joke beforehand, if you come to the paintings with an attentive eye, you will be surprised. You will learn something.

The experience is defined by it being both personal and unrepeatable. And here lies the dilemma for the critic: How do you respond to a painting or poem, comprehend its “surprises,” its revelations particular to you, while communicating their value to others? How can you do so effectively, with nuanced feeling? And if effectively, how do you avoid spoiling the surprise (“you will feel joy!”)?

It’s precisely on these points of execution that I distinguish between the vox populi opinion and a capable critic with the very same idea. Responses to art are as numerous as audience members; we all have faces available for reflection. But responses that discriminate and illuminate are fewer; it’s a craft, a job, if you will, that you get better at by doing it over and over. Good criticism seeks out the particular and irreproducible, and then aims to convey some active-tense representation of that fresh knowledge. “Literature is news that stays news,” Pound claimed. If so, then the critic is the town crier who calls upon our attention; who calls us to look into the mirror for what is to be found there.

I look forward to working with my colleagues Thomas Micchelli, Claudia La Rocco and John Yau on Hyperallergic Weekend. I hope we can serve, along with various contributors, as town criers bringing news of astonishments large and small.

Dickinson, "Self-Portrait in Uniform" (1942) (Courtesy Babcock Gallery, via John Perreault's Artopia)

When Katherine Kuh asked Edwin Dickinson about his painting, “Self-Portrait in Uniform” (1942), where the artist depicts himself in a mirror dressed as a Union soldier, he answered, “I’ve had a number of hobbies; one was the Civil War. For about nine years I was particularly interested in that subject and the portrait comes from that time.”

Dickinson offers no other explanation for why he did the painting. He doesn’t even try to elucidate why he was interested in the Civil War, only that he was for nearly a decade. And to Kuh’s credit, she doesn’t try to make him rationalize why he made the painting or why he was curious about the Civil War.

Kuh doesn’t try to prove something, show-off, or trap Dickinson in her narrative — all of which are gestures of disrespect, and I suspect reveal an underlying envy of artists. Dickinson’s rather opaque answer doesn’t cause her to drop a boatload of names, completely obfuscating this amazing exchange. Instead, Kuh moves on to another subject. It is a moment of mutual respect. Both Kuh and Dickinson know that you can’t always give a good reason for your passion, even to yourself.

Can you really rationalize why you did a painting of yourself in a Civil War uniform in 1942, while war is raging in Europe and the Pacific? The painting remains to this day unassimilated and inadmissible, which is one reason why you should go see it and other works in Edwin Dickinson in Retrospect (Babcock Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, November 28, 2011- January 27, 2012). The other, bigger reason is that Dickinson is the great American painter who refused to repeat himself. He reworked some paintings for years, others he did in a few hours. Examples of both kinds are in the show, along with other types of paintings. Dickinson was interested in the unexpected, in being surprised; he was always curious, which is hard to be if you are always justifying what you are doing and why.

Kuh recognizes that Dickinson doesn’t have to make the painting seem reasonable because that would denigrate its existence, put it in a box marked “Done With.” That box is where most things end up. The justifications, or what elsewhere has been called the “sober theoretical underpinning[s],” are what seems to matter most these days. You have to be sober, theoretical, and come bearing the proper underpinnings. You have to stand in the doorway of the institutional world and prove the worthiness of your lineage and upbringing to those who hold your future in their angry little hands. You have to say and do the right things before you can climb into the white box stamped with a seal of approval.

It is one thing to be passionate and believe in something. It is another thing to be sober and theoretical, and be capable of rationalizing each and every move you made. Within this context, form and content are justifiable, but meaning remains elusive and excluded. I am interested in what is simmering in the zone of the prohibited and unacceptable. This is why I have started this online magazine with Claudia La Rocca, Thomas Micchelli and Albert Mobilio. This is the company I want to keep.

I want to thank Hrag Vartanian and Veken Gueyikian for offering us this space, and ensuring us that we can write what we want, go out on whatever limb we wish. In my experience, that hasn’t always been the case. I welcome this opportunity to start fresh.

Jean-Luc Godard, "Weekend" (1967), playing on a laptop near you (photo by author)

Any year that begins with the caucusing of Republicans in Iowa and the sacking of Jim Hoberman at the Voice can come to no good.

Yet here we are embarking on a new venture, Hyperallergic Weekend, to see what we can make of it.

And in an election year, no less: a dubious prospect even in the best of times. If the pack of Republican challengers weren’t enough — an unprecedented stew of the duplicitous and the deranged — we’re already inhaling the toxins spewed from the Citizens United decision, with millions upon millions squandered on attack ads to seize the day in the politically negligible Hawkeye State.

And this week we’ve watched, agape, as some grumpy billionaire threw away $5 million on the spiraling candidacy of Newt Gingrich, who should have been disqualified on the sheer ugliness of his name.

It’s an easy slide into dyspepsia, and perhaps part of our mission will be to keep nihilism at bay.

It won’t be easy. The firing of Jim Hoberman from the Village Voice on the day after the caucuses has generated the requisite cries of execration and the inevitable handwringing about mammon over manna. And that is as it should be.

But the significance of the Voice’s disgrace for me was that, like many others, Hoberman’s column was the core of my film education. There has been much discussion of how lightly he wears his erudition, but more to the point is how potently such wry, understated scholarship can influence a reader’s perception of a piece of living art.

A film insists upon the immediacy of its stimulation, but Hoberman’s subtle interventions are equally insistent upon unthreading the nuance and detail of its various contexts. More importantly, they also create a platform for improbable futures, as new filmmakers build upon insights learned.

As the ever-reliable and overused Walter Benjamin has said, “the cameraman penetrates deeply into [reality’s] web,” and as we circle the web of cinema and life, Hoberman is arguably our most gifted guide and interpreter.

In the opening credits of Jean-Luc Godard’s prophecy-infused Weekend (1967), two title cards make an appearance: “A Film Adrift in the Cosmos” and “A Film Found in a Dump.” The twinning of these concepts sets a pretty steep bar, not unlike Hoberman’s sense of cultural commentary, in which nothing is too high or too low in pursuit of an idea.

And so it will be, I hope, with Hyperallergic Weekend.  It will be a spot where art is always in the present tense, but resounding with echoes in a mirrored hall. And that’s all I can say for sure.

Many thanks to Hrag Vartanian and Veken Gueyikian for generously sharing Hyperallergic’s well-earned prominence and vibrant readership with us, and to my colleagues Claudia La Rocco, Albert Mobilio, and John Yau for undergirding this endeavor with their daunting talent.

North Korean Anti-American posters that read (clockwise from top left) The US is truly an axis of evil, Let's drive the US imperialists out and reunited the fatherland, Wicked Man and Don't forget the US imperialist wolves. (via businessinsider.com)

The death of Kim Jong Il has reinforced the feeling that North Korea may just be one of the most remote places on earth, yet it is a distance not based on geography but psychology. Looking at the retro-seeming images from this faraway land makes me think its population of 24 million has been trapped in amber for decades.

A picture of the night-time illumination on the Korean peninsula. (via bigthink.com)

Unlike other Communist nations, North Korea appears to have stopped all their clocks sometime in the 1970s and the colors, landscapes and people feel like elaborate movie sets to us in the West. Even a communist state like Cuba blends in with its poor and underdeveloped neighbors but North Korea is surrounded by states that are on the vanguard of technology and development and this only highlights its anachronistic reality. If you look at a picture of the night-time illumination on the Korean peninsula the disparity is obvious, the land of Kim Jong Il appears uninhabited.

In the age of globalization, the northern Korea feels as foreign to us as some remote tribe in the Amazon. The images that we’re being flooded with since the the death of the Supreme Leader reinforce our notion of this fairy tale-like kingdom in a corner of the Earth that technology has forgotten. The images of Kim Jong Il embalmed also have a Snow White feel to them. Of course, North Korea is nothing like a fairy tale though there certainly are similarities with the genre, including the autocratic familial dynasty and the prevalence of poor citizens/serfs, but nowhere is a benevolent monarch/dictator which rules our ideas of who would govern a good fairy tale. Of course, not all fairy tales are good but usually they do have some type of moral or lesson, North Korean appears to lack that as well.

Some of the most curious photos coming out of North Korea are those that portray childhood indoctrination. Tomas Van Houtryve’s image of nursery-school children being instructed to love their dictator is in a dream-like setting even if it is staged in front of a chintzy veneer. He has framed the image to emphasize the sense that this is their world, surrounded by painted rainbows, manmade landscapes and adults giving them direction, the dictator is clearly at the center of their world. Gone is the disorder and diversity we’re accustomed to seeing in our own nursery schools.

A photo by Tomas Van Houtryve of Nursery-school children being told by their teacher to revere Kim Il Sung, the "Great Leader." (via time.com)

It goes without saying that North Korean reality is quite different from what we often see in the official and clandestine images that have emerged from the country. As Achitizer suggests:

Looking at the coverage, you’d think a cartoon villain had died, rather than a megalomaniac responsible for genocide by famine.

Photos are often a source of witness but these images feel more silent and timeless. You even get a sense that the figures are afraid to speak, a feeling augmented by traditional East Asian mores that preference a formal and posed public face over the casual snapshot.

The country’s ubiquitous propaganda posters reinforce the retro nature of North Korean reality. Their stark humorless social realism is churned out for an audience that is instructed with literal interpretation that leaves no room to dream.

Even in photos of celebration there appears to be seriousness and caution in the air. The images of performing children are often the most human in that they remind me of child beauty pageant contestants in the US, though obviously more austere.

Those of us outside North Korea, and particularly in the West, have had trouble responding the the images of Kim Jong Il and his kingdom without resorting to humor or horror. Michael Shaw of BagNewNotes writes that:

More likely though, the reactions to these photos are mirrors into our own cultural psyche. It seems many — ingrained in the core, and unshakeable values of autonomy, free will, “don’t tread on me,”… and having been fed a steady stream of images of Kim as buffoon — look at these photos of crying Koreans not just with disbelief, but with distain [sic].

He’s right. The world in these images are of one man’s utopia, they are skewed by his personal quirks. To understand North Korea one would have to understand its leader, but always hiding behind sunglasses his eyes and world feel elusive.

Philipp Meuser's photo of the chronically unfinished Ryugyong Hotel is chilling. (via einestages.spiegel.de)

If we are to find the beauty of North Korea in the images than it is in its massive almost inhumanely scaled architecture. As Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan astutely points out, “The most fertile ground for megastructuralism is a totalitarian regime.”

The buildings are massive, like mountains and palaces made of concrete. They dwarf everything around them and reduce people to ants. The Ryugyong Hotel is the most famous example of the regime’s aesthetic aspirations and real world inadequacies. Started in 1987, the construction faltered when the Soviet Union fell and all the money associated with that once supportive regime dried up. Only in 2008 did work resume and this year the exterior of the structure has been completed, though other construction will continue until at least next year. The building in Philipp Meuser’s photograph is stark and unglamorous. The building that exists today is one that looks to Las Vegas for inspiration.

Part of the allure of North Korea for global observers is that it is inaccessible. As Westerners, we hate to hear “no,” as if the mere word activates us to fight against the prohibition. We want to see and know everything, whether as tourists, web surfers or temporary inhabitants. It is against our nature to let others tell us what we can and cannot do. We will create secret videos or guides, transmit photos, find ways around a firewall, anything to prove that nothing is forbidden anymore. The obstacles in visiting North Korea makes it more appealing, particularly when it is such a carefully constructed image for the outside and we’re all eager to peek behind the curtain.

I was particularly intrigued by the observations of one businessman who spoke to the BBC:

“North Korea is a land of vast motorways, some with as many as 10 lanes. But they are always empty. Very few people own cars.

Pedestrians and cyclists zig-zag across them as they are so unused to traffic.

But even though these roads host few vehicles, they are beautifully tended. Every Sunday, the people who live close by can be seen dusting down the gutter and pruning the shrubs on the road.”

It is as if the country was built as a stage for actors who never materialized. The worlds in fairy tales are often the same, they are drawn with broad brushstrokes and then disappear into your imagination. The problem with the images we see of North Korea is that it is a stage for millions of people who have no where else to go.

Patti Smith at MoMA (image via @museummodernart

On December 19th of last year, Patti Smith and Michael Stipe gave a “walk-in performance” in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art to celebrate the centennial of Jean Genet — poet, playwright, novelist, radical leftist, hustler and thief.

It was also the final day of the uprising in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, which started three days earlier when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, set himself on fire and burned to death to protest the confiscation of his merchandize by the police.

Bouazizi’s self-immolation, a seemingly random and inexplicable act, was the flashpoint that begat a year of cascading events — from the Arab Spring to the austerity protests in Europe and the Occupy movements in the US.

The timing of the performance and the Tunisia riots were, of course, purely a coincidence.

On December 19th of this year, alone with her guitar, Patti Smith returned to the same place — now occupied by an enormous obelisk holding aloft Sanja Iveković’s golden, hugely pregnant “Lady Rosa of Luxembourg” — to mark Genet’s 101st birthday.

Between last year’s performance and now, the long-entrenched and purportedly untouchable governments of Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi and Silvio Berlusconi have been left in the dust. This too, of course, was a coincidence.

Iveković’s interventionist anti-memorial, installed as the centerpiece of the Croatian artist’s MoMA retrospective, Sweet Violence, is dedicated to the Marxist humanist Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered by German reactionaries in 1919. The glittering, pregnant, repurposed figure of Nike, more than 70 feet above the floor, offset by Smith’s lanky, black-suited, scraggly-stately presence, lent an unexpected, loopy dignity to the chasmic void at the museum’s core. Very unexpected.

Smith recounted the absurd circumstances of Genet’s death (already in the terminal stages of throat cancer, he was refused entry to his usual cheap Paris hotel, the Rubens, and found lodging in the unfamiliar Jack Hotel, where he apparently missed a bathroom step, hit his head and died).

She read from Genet’s work and sang “Southern Cross” and Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather” (in soulful a cappella, because she didn’t know the chords). She marveled at the swiftness of change sweeping the globe, of which “the Occupy movement is only one movement” of many, and she recited “People Have the Power” and sang “My Blakean Year.”

Just beyond the edge of the quietly attentive crowd, you could wander through galleries full of editions by the 1960s anti-art group, Fluxus (whose manifesto, written by ringleader George Maciunas in 1963, begins “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual’, professional & commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art…”).

Or you could admire the “portable frescos” (if you consider the 1,000-pound “Agrarian Leader Zapata” portable), rife with images of anti-colonialism and class warfare, that Diego Rivera made for his solo turn at MoMA in 1931. (Be sure to note the archival letters and photos from his aborted mural for Rockefeller Center, which was chipped off when he wouldn’t consider Nelson A. Rockefeller’s request to substitute a portrait of Lenin with a more “anonymous” face.) Or you could witness Harun Farocki’s equivalencies of military maneuvers and video games in his exhibition, Images of War (at a Distance).

Quite a revolutionary lineup of for the World HQ of High Modernism. And that too is a coincidence.

You could scoff that Diego Rivera and Fluxus are dimmed by time, their fire-breathing tactics sicklied over and neutered by the patina of history. But a museum (from the Greek mouseion) is the “seat of the Muses,” and these objects are now present and available. If we take notice of them, they become as inextricably a part of our reality as Harun Farocki and Sanja Iveković and Patti Smith.

The refrain of “My Blakean Year” goes “One road is paved in gold / One road is just a road.”

It’s the end of 2011. Patti Smith, as she announced to the crowd, will be 65 on December 30th, and she’s “ready for more —  the great stuff and the shit.”

Upstairs, on the sixth floor, Willem de Kooning is 107, yet his paintings are the most of-the-moment of any around: colossal, chaotic, rough-hewn, spontaneous, accident-prone, handmade, offensive, glorious, unfinished, never finished. As Smith sings in “Blakean Year,” these works, from the first to the last, are “so disposed / Toward a mission yet unclear.”

Happy Birthday, Patti Smith, and Happy New Year.

Wayne Thiebaud's "Coastline" (1993) featured on the California Arts License Plate (photo via artsplate.org)

I’m almost embarrassed to confess I’ve only just recently made the acquaintance of artist Wayne Thiebaud‘s work. The man’s been painting upwards of 70 years and spent much of his time in California. I, despite my accumulation of years in New York, also consider California my home. There’s really no excuse.

Case in point: That painterly interpretation of the palm tree and sunset image on the California Arts License Plate, the specialty plate (first of its kind in the country) that benefits the California Arts Council? Just learned it’s Thiebaud’s “Coastline,” circa 1993. Those plates have been on the road since 1994. Seen ‘em.

And the Google doodle celebrating Google’s 12th birthday on September 27, 2010? The one of the cake that reads “Google” on top, only the “l’ is a single lit candle? Yup, that’s his too.

Thiebaud's Google doodle design for Google's 12th birthday (2010) (photo via google.com/logos)

But something about his work just won’t let me do it. Feel embarrassed, that is. It could be the contact sugar high — Thiebaud first made a name for himself in the American art scene painting cakes, pies, parfaits and other diner-esque confections around the time Warhol was in his soup can phase, and has experimented with the form and function of such since. But I’m not really a drool-on-cue, sweet tooth kind of girl. (Somewhere in my online immersion I read Thiebaud’s favorite food is cheese. Whether that’s true or not, now that’s my sort of guy.)

Instead, what I feel is an innate sense of hospitality. The artist as host. “Sit down for a while. Would you like a slice of pie? An ice cream cone? Some hors d’oeuvres? You can hang your coat over there.”

Now, this isn’t to say that every piece of work, every series that Thiebaud has completed over the course of his expansive career, has this sensibility. His landscapes — his vertical San Francisco scenes, his study of the Sacramento River delta, and, recently, his towering mountain abstractions — are each their own.

But when it comes to his food offerings, it’s all about abundance and sharing. And joy. As in, “Here, have some. Are you hungry? Please, help yourself.”

In California we have this saying, “Mi casa es su casa” In that spirit, The New Yorker could not have commissioned a more perfectly suited artist to create the cover of its annual food issue, published on November 21, 2011, the week of Thanksgiving — one of the most gracious, and food-centric, holidays of the year.

Wayne Thiebaud, "Turkey Dinner," The New Yorker (2011)

In “Turkey Dinner,” Thiebaud, the consummate host, sets the table: Roasted turkey leg, mashed potatoes with a pool of gravy, peas and carrots, side of cranberries. Plate of toast with a pat of butter. Salt and pepper shakers, perfectly folded triangular napkin, glass of water, and set of clean flatware. Single rose in a bud vase.

It’s such a beautiful spread that the quiet aloneness of the scene — a proper Thanksgiving meal for one, in one of a thousand New York cafes, on a holiday that celebrates togetherness — only comes later. Right after you’ve accepted the invitation to sit down and dig in, you realize this solitude. But it’s okay. You know Thiebaud is not letting you leave without dessert.

Home page image credit: Wayne Thiebaud, “Plate of Hors d’ouevres” (1963) (photo from “The California Artists Cook Book,” San Francisco Museum of Art, 1982, via tinybanquet.blogspot.com)

A still from Diana Heise's video "Commands" (2010)

…good chemistry, good common man, what
Of that angelic sword? Creature of
Ten times ten times dynamite,
Convulsive Angel, convulsive shatterer,…
Still, still to deliver us, still magic,
Still moving yet motionless in smoke,…Presto, whose whispers prickle the spirit.

Examination of the Hero in a Time of War
—Wallace Stevens

Perhaps from embarrassment or hitting a deep seated pain. A sensitive nerve that doesn’t like to be touched or exposed. Whatever the particular cause, its effect is a shutter that runs down the spine. A quivering sensation starting at the nape of the neck and rolling like a barbed ball of wire down each vertebrate, prickling until it strikes the tailbone and exits the body. The shoulders shift a bit at the beginning to reorient their position, and the back wiggles at the release of each tingle. There is an old adage that instructs ‘shake it off’ when something upsetting occurs. This advice incited our inquiry.

The idea of shaking for health crosses both time and cultural boundaries. With a deep interest in healthful living and rituals that evoke such existing, we embarked on an investigation of methods from diverse cultural contexts that illuminate relationships between health and movement. These methods are at times varying levels of extreme, elucidating ways of ridding oneself of emotional, psychological of physical trauma. This impetus is also the force behind the included videos and projects by artist Diana Heise that are discussed below.

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Purging Poison

In his lectures and books, surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland extensively investigates the evolution of our own condition and the methods developed to alleviate aspects that plague us. The term “shake the demon out” was a response to possession behavior in early medieval Europe, often resulting in rituals of exorcism and can still be found today in radical religious practices. Cleansing through writhing traveled into scientific realms when investigations in the human mind and behavior intersected with the birth of Botany in the 1450’s. Scientists experimented with combinations of plants to induce convulsions. For example, Belladonna is a commonly used remedy of the homoeopathic tradition, which continues to be used today for throbbing migraines, seizures and severe anxiety. This plant is also known as “Deadly Nightshade” and “Devil’s Cherries” and is a poison, leading to death if taken in large doses.  The signs of poison sickness include convulsions, delirium and hypersensitivity of the senses. Yet, if this poison is taken in small controlled amounts, the slight spasms induced by the remedy cures the ailment.

Command 1

Command 1 from diana heise on Vimeo.

This idea of the slight spasm that reorients one’s imbalance was part of the inspiration behind the first section of the video Command.  After a romantic relationship that overreached an internal boundary of balance, Diana wrote the text and made this performance to restore a sense of inner-grounding.  The action is slightly violent, the text feels slightly poisonous, but only as to restore a psychological balance through the course of the text’s narrative. The experience of the piece purges the past damage, offering a new beginning.

Flicker

Centuries after the first botanical research, the electrical revolution in the modern world brought a group of psychiatrists in the 1930’s to Italy where a team of neurologists, led by Ugo Cerlettito, experimented for the first time with humans and electric currents to produce shaking. They were in search of a solution to reduce depression and mental health disorders such as schizophrenia. The group of patients experienced positive and long-lasting results in lifting their depression after a series of induced epileptic seizures. Hence, the birth of measured electrical convulsions entered modern psychiatry and is still present today.

descript from diana heise on Vimeo.

This idea of an electronic convulsion, relates to Diana’s video, descript.  After an experience of sexual assault, Diana was faced with the question of pressing charges against her assailant. Instead of being caught in the legal battle of “he said/she said,” Diana produced descript as an accusation. The shaking of the electronic image through quick editing mimics a heartbeat that speeds up as the image comes into focus and the details of the story are clear. Again relating back to ideas of health and well-being, this piece was the crux of recovering from the trauma of the assault.

Laugh Track

In Native American healing traditions, illness is seen as an imbalance between the individual and their community over the spirit of nature or the great mystery. Rituals and ceremonies are conducted to restore balance, drawing from the idea that all aspects of the earth and its creatures have a spiritual energy. During healing ceremonies, members of the community will break into laughter or tears, at times telling jokes in the middle of a ritual.

According to the Navajo or Diné people, a child’s first laugh is an important step in their social and emotional development. It is considered a time for celebration and gift-giving as this young being is integrated into their community. According to Diné belief, the act of laughing and crying expresses empathy and kinship, an emotional connection that embeds the individual into the collective community. Anthropologist Maureen Trudelle Schwartz writes that “the developing Navajo person will continue to express empathy for others through laughter and tears because they are acknowledged as culturally appropriate forms of communication in the Navajo world.” Laughing is seen, not as a method of denial, but as an acknowledgement of deeper understanding. Instead of allowing the imbalance to penetrate deep into the individual’s spirit, adversity is viewed as a way of seeing situations in a new light and breaking forms of assumptions.  Convulsing laughter and tears become the physical and spiritual acknowledgement to other members of the community and to the great spirit of this acceptance, reconnecting the individual with the whole.

Laugh Track

laugh track from diana heise on Vimeo.

Drawing from the idea of communal laughter, Diana produced Laugh Track. The collective audio comes from a group of young women that Diana have been working with at the Sion School in Kansas City, Missouri. The image concentrates on a singular female character’s physical act of laughing by portraying her through a disjointed point of view. We do not see her whole face or smile. Instead we see pieces of her body from multiple perspectives. As the laughing begins, we also hear a collective laughter, a group of young women instead of only one individual, referencing a greater community.

Bad Qi Release

According to the Taoist traditions, the soul is housed in the organs. If the organs are damaged through emotional distress or imbalance, the soul can flee. In order to maintain health and dissipate disease, the physical and spiritual vitality of the organs must be maintained. Each organ is related to a particular emotion, for example, the lungs correspond with sorrow, the liver houses anger and the heart is attributed to both joy and shock. Qi Gong is a tradition known as ‘energy work’ in Chinese, which is used to restore balance to the organs through meditative and active practice. One exercise is the shaking of the organs. This practice ensures first, that the organs have not been moved due to poor posture and stress. Secondly, this practice jostles any stagnant energy that can be stored up in the body. A person stands, bending their knees to shake their legs, shaking their arms, their head, their tongue. Then with the minds eye, the participant scans the interior of the body to shake the pockets of the lungs, the heart, the eyes, the ovaries, the kidneys, visualizing any areas that need to be loosened. Once enough shaking has occurred, the participant stops and observes, checking to see if there is any place of pain or holding. If so, one breathes into these parts of the body to soothe the area. The body usually tingles after this practice as blood and energy  (or qi) reach areas that were tight and restricted. According to Chinese medicine, disease occurs in stagnant areas that are allowed to fester.  This practice revives the body for the soul to dwell.

Being directly influenced by qi gong, which is a daily practice for Diana, the two videos Scratch and Command 2 explore visualizing some of the physical rituals that belong to these traditions. Through scratching and shaking, anxiety and tension are released, creating a space for the purging of such emotions.

Scratch

scratch from diana heise on Vimeo.

Scratch does not directly reference a particular event from which an emotion or thought needs to be purged. Instead, the video is more focused on the physical activity: the quality of the hair moving, the slight sound of the nails against the scalp and the subtle shaking at the end of the action.

Command 2

Command 2 from diana heise on Vimeo.

Command 2 is also not as direct in subject, as the text dances around the idea of expectation and desire, purging the impossible promises of yesterday and tomorrow, in favor of the present. The shaking, its intensity and its conclusion mirror the sentiment of the text, concluding when the narrator’s expectations have also been released.

Sound Shake

The vibrational qualities of sound have also been employed to maintain health. Monty Moeller directs the clinical operations for a program called Prescription Audio. Prescription Audio was developed through a science called Quantum Harmonics by Jill and Rod Slane, a published author in holistic healing and health trends and a composer and innovative sound engineer. The program offers vibrational sound treatments for individuals suffering from stress disorders.

By listening to low-level frequencies, or what are called binaural beats, the alpha and beta waves of the brain drop as delta and theta wave activity increases. The participant is induced into relaxation and sleep and this method can be used as a restorative during the day or a way to calm the body before nighttime slumber. Because this therapy is done with sound and sound only, one can quickly return to an alert state, if need be. This process avoids the addictive and chemically damaging aspects of sleeping pills or other prescription medications.

The late 6 Century BC Greek philosopher Pythagora was the first  to investigate sound therapy on the Italian Peninsula. As the first person to deeply explore the relationship between mathematics and music, Pythagoras posited that sound is a reflection of a cosmic or spiritual condition. Based on mathematical relationships, he believed particular intervals of sound could heal mental and physical states and harmonize human beings. He prescribed particular tones, known now as the Perfect Fifth, to his followers to listen to in the mornings and determined that this interval can relieve anger and violence. These harmonically related notes vibrate with each other at the ratio of 2:3 within Pythagoras’ mathematical tuning system. These tones have also made an impression on other thinkers and traditions. Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching, referred to this interval as the source of universal harmony between the forces of Yin and Yang. In India, the Fifth is believed to create a noise through which Shiva calls Shakti to the dance of life.

Implant from diana heise on Vimeo.

Diana’s installation Implant uses this interval as the basis for a composition. This soundscape is played on speaker systems imbedded in a series of sculptures. The piece also provides pillows and places for the audience to sit, creating a meditation garden in the gallery space.

FreeForm

Diana’s next project FreeForm, which has been sponsored by the Fulbright Commission and the US Department of State, also engages this idea of shaking for the sake of health. On the Isle of Mauritius, a dance and music form known as Sega was developed by African slaves after working hours to shake the woes of oppression from their bodies. This tradition continues today, now acting as the national dance and music of the nation.  Diana will be making a series of works based on these traditions once she travels to the island next year.

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It has been said that when you imagine purging negativity from the body, visualizing the cleansing of the bone marrow and thus releasing noxious qi, that you must put the bad mojo in a place where it cannot harm others. Some suggest a hole many feet in the ground or in a burning star. Maybe this weakened energy travels to a marsh, bog or fen, filled with wild rice and cattails, boneset and bulrush, swamp maples and sedge. This is a place where water is recycled, restored with much needed oxygen. Sediments and pollutants are filtered out, purifying the liquid clean, ready to be released back into the environment. Perhaps we are all in need of our own personal wetlands for physical and mental restoration. These thoughts and images have been collected as a reminder to purge and restore.

Takashi Murakami, "A Picture of The Blessed Lion Who Stares At Death" (2009), Acrylic on canvas mounted on board (image courtesy the artist)

MÉRIDA, MEXICO — Over the past two years planet art has born witness to a drastic metamorphosis. The mental apparition of “Asian Art,” inhabiting its blanket concept, was once as innocuous as Casper the friendly ghost. Westerners were at leisure to muse and amuse themselves with its mysteries and exoticisms, with the fleeting attentions of a visitor into another lord’s cabinet of curiosities.

Today our imaginations and anticipations have fed it to megalithic proportions. And the economic boom of contemporary art in the 21st Century continues to relentlessly close the gap between the world’s cultures of expression, to the point where the bedsheets of West and East have begun to rub up against one another — sometimes roughly. There is even talk of the voracious appetite of the Yellow Peril of Asian Art, positioning its markets and state-ordained “cultural industries” to consume planet art altogether.

Let’s not fool ourselves; when we say “East,” we mean China. This is not to say there are no other important works or artists in the region, but that most of them are derived from the indomitable cultural swagger of the Middle Kingdom. This is becoming a badly-mediated tragedy within the region.

Of course, Japanese artists like Takashi Murakami and the Superflat movement have recently made enormous contributions to discourse, bringing us Asia’s answer to Andy Warhol, but these men and women see themselves as mercantile artisans, not artists. Their contributions have been to steer us back into Warhol’s brillo box, away from the direct engagement with such esoteric components as the spirit. They prefer to pull off the bed-sheet, dust off the apparition and polish up the artefact beneath.

The opening of China has not only brought us the other half of the equation to a more rounded notion of “global contemporary art,” but an entirely different lens through which to view our own. So much of Western art has been influenced by the East, to the point where the closer you look, the more blurred the distinctions become. To take an example, we can find the genesis of the 17th century craze for the landscape painting genre as a product of Chinese scroll paintings, not to mention the mimicry of Europe’s Chinoiserie movement. It is not hard to find and be fascinated by.

Liu Yan, "The Man World" (2007) (image courtesy the artist)

Like Alan Watts, and so many of us, my first exposure to Asian art was not in a gallery or museum, but on my plate at dinner time, when I lay on my bed looking at the painting on the wall. We come into adulthood highly dosed with many of the images and iconography we would encounter if we had grown up in Asia — sometimes even more.

Despite all this, we are stunned to realize that this mysterious land of the Orient does actually exist. And by the time you get there, the most amazing part is the reality that the place is almost the complete opposite of the art and images its traditional heritage flouts.

The integral power behind Chinese art is that it comes from its own independently consolidated tradition. There is no such thing as a tabula rasa for Chinese art. After toying with much of continental philosophy that has shaped contemporary art today, Chinese critics such as Xue Wei have begun to parody Nietzsche, writing articles like “who killed postmodernism?” and laying to rest much of the leftovers of contemporary art theory. There is no way to start from scratch. Whatever is brought in is set to bear against the fortified digestive juices of the culture.

The excitement of the Asian Art world is precisely that it is looking forward. As the Western art market felt the pinch of economic recession two years ago, the Chinese were just getting started. At ShContemporary 2009, commentators and gallerists remarked with enthusiasm how the burgeoning domestic interest in China was propelling them above and beyond the Western slump, and pioneering Western galleries of Chinese art such as Eli Klein Fine Art in New York have begun to see their names on the New York Times and CNN.

The influence of Marxism on contemporary art has until recently been the mainstay to the saleability of many Chinese artists on the international market. But now the old guard have begun to make way for the youth, who bring new ideas and renewed enthusiasm to push the government’s buttons. Ai Weiwei‘s politics have encouraged Chinese artists to find a voice in art that is unavailable to them under the censorship of public life.

That voice is beginning to dictate the future of art throughout the world.