Category Archives: art

Did Bach find Coetzee, or did Coetzee find Bach?

 

Stranger Shores: Literary Essays (2001) – J. M. Coetzee
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

In an essay entitled ‘What is a Classic?’ Coetzee includes commentary on his early confrontation with the classics, and the political direction it might have lent him. Taking a cue from Eliot’s 1944 lecture of the same title [in which Eliot asserts that classic status can be known “only by hindsight and in historical perspective.”], Coetzee speaks of the classic in this way: “What does it mean in living terms to say that a classic is what survives? How does such a concept of the classic manifest itself in people’s lives?” This statement brings the classic from its supposed transcendental realm into the hurly-burly of history and makes it amenable not to passing fashions but to the sustaining values of each epoch. Whatever survives history’s ephemera, ‘that,’ according to Coetzee, ‘is the classic.’

In the first moment of aesthetic rapture upon hearing Bach, Coetzee muses: was the spirit of that culture ‘speaking to me across the ages … or … was [I] symbolically electing high European culture, and command of the codes of that culture, as a route that would take me out of my class position in white South African society … of what I must have felt … an historical dead end? (10-11).

The novelist and essayist—now Nobel prize winner—JM Coetzee, in his provocative essay, ‘What is a Classic? A Lecture’ considers the possibility that we may read for self-centred, pragmatic reasons: the drive for economic and social power. He re-examines his first contact, as a young man, with a classic musical text which he felt, he says, ‘was speaking to me across the ages, putting before me certain ideals.’ Later in his life, he interrogates his response sceptically, wondering whether he was, in fact, ‘symbolically electing high European culture, and command of the codes of that culture, as a route that would take (him) out of (his) class position in white South African society?’ He puts the question succinctly: ‘Was the experience a disinterested and … impersonal aesthetic experience or was it really the masked expression of a material interest?’ In his essay, Coetzee finally draws away from this sceptical account of his motives, but the doubt placed at the centre of the essay compels our attention. — Hermina Burns via http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s1308292.htm

Amsterdam

I spent a couple of days with D_______ in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is about 200 kilometers from Antwerp.

Books are my thing these days and my first stop was Kok antiquarian books, where I found Axel’s Castle by Edmund Wilson; a German non-fiction book on popular literature called Trivialliteratur (1981) by Peter Domagalski; Robert Darnton’s excellent The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), a Dutch book titled Verboden boeken (1989) (Eng: Forbidden Books).

I got to see Oldboy, the second fim I saw by Korean director Park Chan-wook in his vengeance trilogy (I still have to catch Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). Just as a couple of months ago, I was very much impressed. It’s a film by a man who is locked away in a private prison for fifteen years without knowing why. When he is released he is contacted by the man who imprisoned him and the quest on why he was imprisoned begins. The film is sufficiently bizar and rather poetical (“when a man laugs, the world laughs with him, when a man cries, he cries alone”). Park’s films are unlike anything I’ve seen in European or American cinema over the last years, combining the spirit of European countercultural cinema of the 1960s and 1970s (a critique of Asian post-industrial society) with the transgressions of 1990s Japanese cinema (think Audition and Tetsuo). Chance would have it that a novel by Sylvia Plath (I’m reading The Bell Jar at the moment) is featured in the film (by a character who appropriately later commits suicide). Over at Wikipedia the film is described as Sophoclean tragedy because it has incest as plot element.

The Frans Hals museum:

The Monk and the Nun (1591) – Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem

This particular painting is an illustration on how the clergy has been satirized in the history of art and literature in a genre that today would be called somewhat irrevently ‘nunsploitation‘, but which can be traced to the 17th century epistolary novel Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669) and in the visual arts to the work above.

Image sourced here. (follow link for a nice compilation on the naked breast in art)

We went to the Frans Hals museum where I saw a couple of paintings by Goltzius, Van Heemskercke and Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem which were to my liking. Though Hals has been attributed as being a precursor to impressionism because of the hasty brushwork of his latter period — and a generally acclaimed artist — I wasn’t much impressed with Hals’s work, which mainly consisted of portraits of the elite of Haarlem. In the museum shop I found the amazing photorealistic paintings by Pieter Claesz.

Vanitasstilleven met nautilusbeker en pomander aan een gouden ketting (1636) – Pieter Claesz

New figurative art

By new figurative art I mean art since about the 1980s which depicts people in a realistic/fantastic way. Another term for this kind of painting might be “new pictorality” (see below), examples of which are John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Odd Nerdrum. The term figurative art was coined after the acceptance of abstract art in the early to mid twentieth century. Before that, all painting was figurative (notable exceptions by Whistler and near-abstract work by Turner notwithstanding). I think I first became aware of the power of allegory by seeing — at Art Brussels — a painting of a man in a trench coat weeping: out of his handkerchief came tears, these tears formed a puddle at his feet, which subsequently became a brook, a river and finally to the right of him: a waterfall. A terribly funny picture. Humor is one of the things I appreciate most in contemporary art. It’s wonderful when a painting has the power to make you laugh out loud.

What follows is a review by Matthew Rose of a travelling exhibition (Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt) entitled “Dear Painter, Paint Me…”. The superscripted links are image links.

The age-old profession of applying paint on canvas may have simply been overshadowed by the plethora of art strategies begun as early as 1917, with Duchamp’s “Fountain,” the overturned urinal signed “R. Mutt.” Interestingly enough, Duchamp’s very good friend, Francis Picabia, was a tried and true painter, although his approach to the canvas was anything but conventional. The flamboyant French artist (1879-1959), immensely talented and outrageously brazen, mapped out a world of tongue-in-cheek kitsch works in a prolific explosion that spanned the middle parts of the 20th century.

Picabia’s late work from the 1940s [1] [2], the fulcrum of this exhibit, borrowed generously from soft-core pornography and other photographic sources, and does more than inform the direction these artists have taken. Combining the comic, kitsch, popular culture and adding a jigger or two of surrealism, Picabia undoubtedly had a great deal more influence on pictorial subject and style than he’d ever dreamed.

“Dear Painter, Paint Me…”, (the title taken from Martin Kippenberger’s 1980s series) is a travelling exhibition (Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt) turns the spotlight on contemporary figurative painting since the Frenchman’s heyday painting pin ups in the 1940s.

Among the 18 artists in this expansive show, modern figurative masters such as Alex Katz, Luc Tuymans and even the droll French outcast Bernard Buffet, are complemented by the sexy and often grotesque contemporary worlds of John Currin, the surreal pop worlds of , and the dreamy romantic ones of Elizabeth Peyton. Kippenberger [1, nsfw], a strong influence on the group, is well represented, as are a handful of single-minded, dyed-in-the-wool painters of a younger set: Kai Althoff, Glenn Brown, Brian Calvin and Peter Doig. Sigmar Polke, perhaps the most Picabian of the group, appears with several mid-1960s masterpieces, works that are funny, skilful and acid, laying bare the bones of 20th century man (and woman). –Matthew Rose via http://www.art-themagazine.com/pages/paris14.htm [Dec 2006]

American art critic Craig Owens (1950 – 1990) and new pictorality:

One of the key texts about this new pictorality of pictures was Craig Owens‘ ‘The Allegorical Impulse’ published in 1980, then propagated in the central organ of postmodern esthetics, the ‘October’, founded in 1976. Owens is offering six notions, to catch on to the new complexity of pictures, which, following the then rather trendy Walter Benjamin, he summarizes in the title ‘allegorical’, (the only one outdated notion in Owens’ conceptuality is, accordingly, this collective term). –THE PICTORIAL IMPULSE Rainer Metzger, 2004 via http://www.maderthaner.cc/maderthaner.texte/pictorial_impulse.htm [Dec 2006]

Quotes from The Allegorical Impulse:

“This deconstructive impulse is characteristic of postmodernist art in general and must be distinguished from the self-critical tendency of modernism. Modernist theory presupposes that mimesis, the adequation of an image to a referent, can be bracketed or suspended … When the postmodernist work speaks of itself, it is no longer to proclaim its autonomy, its self-sufficiency, its transcendence; rather, it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence.”

Visual culture

Click the pictures

Geltenbachfall im Winter (1778) – Caspar Wolf

Le jeu des vagues (1883) – Arnold Böcklin

Grotesque Head [detail] (1878) – from “Magazine of Art Illustrated”

Ruhender weiblicher Akt (1886 – 1887) – Lovis Corinth

The Lair of the Sea Serpent by Elihu Vedder

The Lair of the Sea Serpent () – Elihu Vedder

The American artist Elihu Vedder (1836-1923) is little known in contemporary art circles, although one of his paintings, The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863), has entered the late-20th-century image bank via a parody by Mark Tansey. His other best-known images depict such fantastic scenes as The Lair of the Sea Serpent (two versions, 1863 and 1889), in which a giant serpent lies coiled along an otherwise unremarkable stretch of beach, and The Roc’s Egg (1868), a scene that could have furnished Ray Harryhausen with inspiration for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Such images were Vedder’s most peculiar and establish him as something of an eccentric in 19th-century art, but his present obscurity has more do with the fact that, as modernism swept through galleries and exhibitions at the turn of the century, Vedder’s allegorical subjects and Italian landscapes were old-fashioned the day he painted them. –March, 1999 by Charles Dee Mitchell

The “cult of beauty” vs. the “cult of ugliness”

Frontispice des Amours jaunes, dessin par Tristan Corbière
image sourced here.

In his 1913 essay The Serious Artist, Pound discusses two types of art; The “cult of beauty” and the “cult of ugliness”. He compares the former with medical cure and the latter with medical diagnosis, and goes on to write “Villon, Baudelaire, Corbière, Beardsley are diagnosis.” – “beauty is difficult”: Cantos LXXIV, LXXX

The monkey in art

Two monkeys smoking pipe
Etching by Coryn Boel (1620–1668), after David Teniers

From symbolising sensory pleasure to poking fun at the follies of mankind: Lucy Cutler on the role of the monkey in art

To contemporary eyes man has become the naked ape, but this was not always the case. The similarities between monkeys and men have always been recognised, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries monkeys formed part of the great chain of being and, like men, occupied a position between angels and animals. They were linked to the angels above by virtue of sharing their faculty of reason, while also being linked to the animals below through the experience of the senses. Monkeys and apes also became emblematic of man’s baser nature; dependent on or trapped by sensory pleasure. —http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/stories/cutler_monkey.html

[Dec 2006]

Rochegrosse (1859–1938)

The Booty (pre-1893) – Georges Rochegrosse
Etched by Eugene-Andre Champollion, sourced here

Rochegrosse (1859–1938) is above all else the painter of Flaubert’s Salammbô, which he illustrated in great detail with absolute accuracy but a complete lack of understanding. The antique pictures which the artists of the fin de siècle offer us are more often than not laborious reconstructions and pretexts to depict nudes. Dreamers of Decadence, Philippe Jullian, page 140.

Bretonian and Bataillean strains of Surrealism

I stumbled on the document excerpted below by researching the 1934 quote by André Breton “Have professed absolute surrealism“, and it got me to modify my page on Surrealism and give more prominence to my perennial favourite and “dissident surrealist” Georges Bataille.

Apparently American modern art criticism as professed by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster has been much influenced by Bataille. Although I should add that it has not only been Bataille who influenced American art and literary criticism; the whole of French theory has had an enormous — and by some much bemoaned — influence on postmodern American theory, much like German theory was influential in post-war France.

When considering Spanish Surrealism, André Breton’s Freudian-based models of automatism and subconscious manifestations predominantly occupy the majority of the attention given. While these frameworks are at least partially relevant within the scope of the early twentieth-century poetry and art, other models that have been overlooked deserve due attention. Namely, the philosophical approximations concerning informe (formlessness), “the excremental,” and “the ethnographic” as developed by the French thinker Georges Bataille–a renegade surrealist–are of great importance and need elucidation. Even though critics such as Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster have elaborated on these Bataillean motifs in their examination of contemporary art, the influence of these theories in early twentieth-century Spain has not been extensively examined. The contention here is that Bataille’s ideas of the twenties and thirties amplify our understanding of the literature of the poets of the literary Generation of 1927 in Spain, many of them so-called surrealists. In Michael Richardson’s words, “Bataille’s understanding concentrates on elements [like ethnography and informe] within surrealism that few critics have recognized, and thus gives us a new perspective on what surrealism may mean”.

… This dialogue [between France and Spain] is evident when considering Hispanic avant-gardists such as Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alejo Carpentier, and others, who continually cross borders and establish a correspondence between the Parisian, Hispanic, and Catalan artistic ambiences. Of particular interest here is a detailed examination of this rethinking of the surreal (in Bataillean terms) in one of the most disputed works of the period on the Spanish front: Federico García Lorca’s 1929 collection of poems Poeta en Nueva York. –David. F Richter via ~david.f.richter/Informeing%20Lorca2.pdf