Friday, October 15, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
These words are taken from the last lines of Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo. Woody Allen uses the excerpt in Another Woman, which then becomes emblematic of the main character’s struggles with self-discovery, and of how she can no longer hide from herself.
Gena Rowlands plays a highly accomplished German philosophy professor, who only in her fiftieth year of life begins to uncover the emptiness and loneliness she feels, which up until then she has denied. One day she over hears conversations from a therapist’s office through the ventilation system, in the apartment she is renting to write her book in. At first, she covers the vents with two pillows, not wanting to over hear people’s personal revelations. When she takes a nap, one of the pillows falls, and she is awakened by the sound of an anguished woman’s voice, played by Mia Farrow. Rowlands' becomes intrigued by Farrow’s despair, begins eavesdropping regularly, and in doing so, opens Pandora’s box, and starts to realize her own suffering.
The wistful piano compositions of Erik Satie reinforce the somber self-revelations of Rowlands, and the poems of Rilke strengthen and dramatize the sorrow that envelops her.
There is a beautiful fluidity in the structure of the film that allows the film to transition seamlessly into personal narrative, shared experiences, dreams, memories, and even to a play within a film.
The story never threatens to become a maudlin caricature or a romanticization of melancholy, which is something it could have easily become in hands less adept than Allen’s. Even at the height of the most agonizing confrontations that the protagonist must face, she maintains some vestige of her characteristic composure.
There is a critique of the potentially sterile life of the mind and of human achievement, running through the film. One of the greatest ironies about our professor protagonist is that despite having dedicated her life’s work to the pursuit of truth and ethics, she has left her own life unexplored. Her cerebral nature becomes not something to be revered, but pitied. She has not allowed herself to feel, and the nebulous side of emotions terrifies her. Rowlands’ proclivity to over intellectualize everything she experiences becomes a monstrous defense mechanism that isolates her not only from her own self, but also from others. When she fully acknowledges the tragedy of her own existence, her trusted intellect only lets her down.
Another Woman is my favorite Woody Allen movie, and I’ve seen most of his movies dozens of times. I find it to be simultaneously comforting and terrifying, like many of his dramas. Each time, I shed a few tears, but I also walk away feeling as though no matter how sad life can get, it still remains beautiful and bearable. The endings to his dramas are never happy, but they also don’t further the suffering you endured during the film. The viewer is always left knowing that life will and does go on.
The Panther
In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris
His gaze is from the passing of bars
so exhausted, that it doesn't hold a thing anymore.
For him, it's as if there were thousands of bars
and behind the thousands of bars no world.
The sure stride of lithe, powerful steps,
that around the smallest of circles turns,
is like a dance of pure energy about a center,
in which a great will stands numbed.
Only occasionally, without a sound, do the covers
of the eyes slide open—. An image rushes in,
goes through the tensed silence of the frame—
only to vanish, forever, in the heart.
(tr. Cliff Crego)
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Archaic Torso of Apollo
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Saturday, October 2, 2010
The Abyss Looks Back
Matt Brinkman’s Phantasmatgoria drawings, at the Hole, attracted me immediately with their simultaneously eerie, anachronistic mood and childlike playfulness. Taking a seemingly simple idea, Brinkman creates something that cannot be easily delineated. The way he switches from the clarity of the charcoal to the ambiguity of his ink drawings, only strengthens both bodies of work, mimicking the complexity and confusion underlying our presumptions about human nature.
The most literal interpretation of these horrific, little, fun-loving guys, is that they are just figments of Brinkman’s imagination; harmless, benign, fictive, post-modern artifice at its finest, but the psychological intensity with which the artist approaches his drawings, betrays such a simplistic read. Brinkman’s monsters are everything but univocal. Are these creatures, metaphors for who we are as human beings, or are they emblematic of our worst fears and nightmares? They can’t be either because they are too funny, or maybe they are both, who we are and what we fear, just because of how tragicomically absurd these drawings are.
Monsters are a universal and timeless archetype, and yet Brinkman manages to make his demons timely and relevant. Brinkman shares a history with Goya and Ensor, but splits away severely from them. There is a specific wit and self-consciousness about these drawings that makes them entirely a product of our time. There is no text to provide us with any clues, as to what caused the origins of these endearing, little monstrosities. In Goya, the sleep of reason produces monsters, whereas in Phantasmatgoria, the monsters seem to exist without a cause. Ensor infuses his works with sardonic, moralistic, Judeo-Christian references. Brinkman is less judgmental. His creatures are clearly misbehaving, but it doesn’t seem that they will suffer much retribution, unless of course another monster comes along and devours one of them.
The style in which these drawings are executed, also directs them toward a contemporary dialogue. Classical chiaroscuro has a huge goblin orgy with the pastiche of Expressionism, 70s and 80s metal album covers, and the kitsch aesthetic found currently in the “bad” girl/boy merchandise sold through the Old Glory catalog. The debauchers birth love children, as a result of this unlikely union, who then go on to form their own identities in Phantasmatgoria.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Always Counting
Elephant embryo at twelve months
Sengupta began his talk with an ancient Greek quote, which he translated to “man is always counting,” also giving examples of how numbers and quantities constantly inform our understanding of thought and language, an idea that I hadn’t really considered before. When I became aware of how much of what we say and think is based on an abstract understanding of amount, I began seeing how difficult it is to mention or comprehend anything without using numerical values. According to him, even the solitude of one is made of thirds and halves and no one is alone. Sengupta explains that when something is invisible or forgotten, it denotes an idea of quantity or even when things change they become MORE or less. He goes on to ask, how deep is our abyss or shallow our grave?
As a member of a collective, Sengupta definitely exhibited a bias towards art made in collectives and saw the collective as a natural progression in which all art was heading. Although I can see the collective gaining increasing popularity in art practices, I do not see it as replacing artists who are working alone. His argument was that historically, art relied on what he called “dividuated practices,” citing old masters and Leonardo DaVinci, specifically as an example of this, which I found problematic since the old masters ran their workshops much like contemporary architects do or even how an artist like Kehinde Wiley does, who employs assistants to carry out his ideas rather than as a group of people with shared interests coming together to work through a common goal.
It seemed that Sengupta considered solo practices to be inferior modes of working in comparison to the collective, stating that even the word “individual” is prefixed by a negative prefix, implying that such a semantic detail placed a moral value on the word, which was also a point of contention for me. I view both the collective and the solo practice as valid ways of working, and don’t see one inherently superior to the other. In Sengupta’s view, solo practices tend to be solipsistic, although I could see collectives just as easily turning myopic, depending largely on whom they consist of and how they are approached. In the end, the only value lies in the work that either mode of working produces.
Despite these discrepancies, there were many attitudes and views mentioned in the lecture that overlapped with things that I have been thinking about. One of them was how limiting and small the human perspective actually is. Man might always be counting, but neither man nor woman is the measure of all things or anything, really. Are we human, all too human, or are we even human? Certain anti-aging specialists consider us to be bacterial/human hybrids consisting of 95% bacteria and 5% human.
I remember the first time I saw photographs of different animal embryos, in the very beginning phases of development; one was human, one was reptilian, and the differences were indistinguishable! It is only in the later stages that the differences between the bird, the reptile, and the human can be seen. These photographs changed my perception of life, and caused me to revaluate my place in it.
Sengupta brought up the painting of the Birdman in the Lascaux Caves looking at the bison, and the possible interpretations of that image, which ranged anywhere from a failed hunt to a shamanistic ritual. About a decade ago, it had been discovered that the image also contained star maps, revealing that the artists at Lascaux, had been more sophisticated than we had believed. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/871930.stm) The subjective explanation that Sengupta offered was that the birdman was a stargazer conducting research, but I would prefer to think that the birdman was a daydreamer, who did not allow the banality and ordinariness of the world to interfere with his rich fantasy life.
I was struck by how similar the symbol of the birdman at Lascaux is to a series of drawings that I have been working on. These drawings are based on drawings I did in childhood, only they are more detailed, ornate, and suggestive. I used to draw hundreds of bird princesses, and these hybrids of princesses had the body of actual princesses, but just happened to have bird heads. I remember thinking that I was drawing these bird princesses, because I did not know how to draw a human face as beautifully as a bird face. Now, it seems more like I was tapping in to an archetype that I was unaware of. In my current incarnation of bird princesses, I depict theses strange creatures as staring at the sky, much like the birdman.
Another bird hybrid that Sengupta discussed was Hermes, with his winged shoes. In one myth, Hermes teaches himself the alphabet by looking at the patterns of migrating cranes. Sengupta also compared Hermes to the artist, and said that those who aren’t artists are “too philistine to read what gets written in the sky”, which might be true, but it seems that artists are often just as guilty of the same crime.
I appreciated a well-known allegory that I hadn’t heard before, but that Sengupta mentioned, which is known commonly as the Language or Conference of Birds. The story follows thirty birds who want to choose a king, and who travel to a mountain to find their soveirgn, but who realize that they don’t need a king, because they already have a king. The birds only needed to know themselves to find their soveirgn. What appealed to me most, in this allegory, were its anti-authoritarian message and the belief in the self-rule. The story can even be interpreted as an allegory about independence and individualism.