STL #100: Objects of Fascination and Agents of Revelation

It has taken 8 years to complete 100 posts; that's only a little more than a post a month. With my rededication to daily writing, I hope that I can return a bit closer to my weekly rate. In any case, I have decided to mark the occasion by writing in my favorite form: the list. Following is a varied list of things, mostly works of art but a few ideas or lifestyle accoutrements,  I've become familiar with during the life span of STL.  Some of these things I've written about, but most I haven't. The most significant thing I've noticed in compiling this list is that the books are all of my own choosing: I haven't been assigned a reading list this whole time. This list might be seen as a memoir of the last 8 years of my life, but then again that might be pushing it. I'll add a bit more commentary after the list.

1. Absu, "Ye Uttuku Spells"
2. Belgian ales
3. Charles Olson, Maximus Poems
4. William Gaddis, The Recognitions
5. Jack Green's Fire the Bastards
6. Kill Bill
7. Graham Greene, The Comedians
8. Guy Davenport, Tatlin!
9. Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity
10. Reality-based politics
11. Jens Lekman, “A Postcard to Nina”
12. Eddie Campbell, How to be an Artist
13. "Lying In Bed On A Summer Morning," by Carl Rakosi
14. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
15. Deep Red
16. Halloween
17. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
18. Millennium Actress
19. Lost in Translation
20. Etre et Avoir
21. The Sopranos
22. The Wire
23. William Bronk
24. Watchmen, reluctantly
25. Seven Soldiers of Victory
26. Hendrick’s Gin
27. In the American Tree
28. Cy Twombly, Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)
29. Bread crumb eggs
30. George Simenon
31. Django Reinhardt
32. Freaks and Geeks
33. My So-Called Life
34. Carson, NOX
35. Lee Ann Brown, Polyverse
36. Fiery Furnaces, Rehearsing My Choir
37. Tori Amos, From the Choirgirl Hotel
38. Something Said
39. Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man, Out of Season
40. Joanna Newsom, Milk Eyed Mender
41. Sleater Kinney, One Beat
42. His Dark Materials
43. Battle Royale
44. John Cheever's Collected Short Stories
45. American Elf
46. Black Riders
47. Robert Duncan, "Opening of the Field"
48. Gilbert Godfery in The Aristocrats [2005]
49. Goodbye Dragon Inn
50. Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41
51. Team America
52. The singularity
53. Tender Buttons
54. The Pound Era
55. Three Places in New England
56. Alban Berg, Violin Concerto
57. Matt Fraction, Casanova
58. The New American Poetry 1945-1960
59. The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
60. Immortal All Shall Fall
61. Deathspell Omega Chaining the Katcheon
62. Wardruna
63. Girl Talk, All Night
64. Lair of the Minotaur, "Let's Kill These Motherfuckers"
65. Dope throne
66. Modern Life Is War “D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S.”
67. Mountain Goats “This Year”
68. Benji Hughes Love Extreme
69. Heartless Bastards, The Mountain
70. Opeth, Blackwater Park
71. Josephine Foster, Hazel Eyes I Will Follow
72. Cat Power The Greatest
73. No Thanks! Anthology
74. Haydn, Symphony 88
75. Robyn “Be Mine”
76. Spoon “Back to the Life"
77. Arcade Fire, Funeral
78. Dirty Weekend 
79. Old Boy
80. The Rothko Chapel
81. “Appalachian Spring”
82. Audition
83. Enter the Void
84. Y The Last Man
85. Marcel Dzama
86. Battlestar Galactica
87. John Porcellino, King Cat
88. Can These Bones Live?
89. Wicker Man
90. Blow Up
91. King Lear (Russian film)
92. Mozart, Symphony 40
93. Brandenberg Concertos
94. Garth Merenghi's Dark Place
95. The Grey Album
96. Community
97. Song of Ice and Fire
98. Siraccha and Earl Grey Ice Cream
99. O Paon

A few explanations are in order. With the exception of a few pieces of classical music, everything on this list is from the second half of the twentieth century or later. That is where my interests drive me, but as I was drawing up the list I made a conscious decision to make it this way to relieve me of the obligation to include things because I felt I should. Tom Jones, some Shakespeare plays, Milton, and other things I read for the first time in the last eight years might otherwise be on here. I felt that by keeping them off would cut away pretense and help me perhaps discover more of my true inclinations.  

Each work of art on this list was chosen because it keeps drawing me back in one way or another, offering more each time I revisit it. Some of the films (namely, Audition and Enter the Void) keep their claim on my psyche, but I doubt I will ever summon up the resolve to watch them again. What the works offer is different is each case: the goofy comedy of Garth Marenghi sounds different chords than Ed Dahlberg's jeremiad Can These Bones Live?. Dahlberg I'm sure would be mortified to be keeping company with much of this list--I notice that I trend lowbrow in much of my tastes. Looking over the list, I don't feel I can make any grand pronouncements, nor do I even understand why I include half a dozen foodstuffs and only two works of visual art. As with everything I write, this turns up more questions. Here's to the next 100 opportunities to figure out the answers.

(In case you are interested, here's a census of the list: 35 items can be classified as music, 18 as movies, 9 as poetry, 9 as fiction (therefore 18 as literature), 7 as comics, 7 as TV, 5 as criticism, 4 as comestibles, 3 as visual art, and 2 as concepts. The music breaks down as follows: 7 as metal, 6 as classical (including modern), 6 as folk (I can't bring myself to type "freak folk," but everything in this category is moody and eccentric, and with mostly acoustic instruments), 6 pop, 6 rock, 2 jazz, and 2 dj mashups.

Archives Project: STL #24

Title: MOMA on the Road
Description: A Ramble Through the Twentieth Century
Date: 10 December 2003

This is an example of experience I might otherwise have completely lost if not for writing about it. In my upcoming move, I expect to burn the journals I kept on and off for 10 years. Maybe I should reconsider, or at least review these.

The Museum of Fine Arts-Houston is lucky enough to host the only American stop of "The Heroic Century," a collection from the Museum of Modern Art which is out wandering while MOMA's building is being renovated. There's a temporary MOMA space open right now in Queens I guess, but I don't know what's on display there because it seems like all the good stuff is in Houston. Though this treasure trove of modern art coming to Texas might seem like Michaelangelo's David visting New York, LA, and Springfield (on the Simpson's), there are some fine museums in this state, including the MFAH.

I've been to plenty of special exhibitions in my life, but tend to forget most of them. I'm going to try to retrace my steps through this exhibition, from the crowded entrance to the thinned-out exit, pausing at a few pieces which impressed me most. This collection is so well known by the reproduction that it's hard to see a lot of it with fresh eyes, and my experience of it mostly consisted of my tastes being confirmed: I still appreciate without liking cubism, still cannot fathom what people see in Salvador Dali, and still have a morbid passion for Adolph Gottlieb and Franz Kline. I wrote a few months ago about how hard it is to see art, a statement I felt stupid about when I noticed the paintings for sale in the coffee shop I go to everyday, but the quality of this stuff, above and apart from its familiarity, is extraordinary.

Entering the exhibit, you are confronted with Matisse's big painting of a ring of dancers. It's a well-known image, though I had never noticed that in the bottom left corner two of the dancers' hands aren't touching, so the circle actually isn't complete. It's fitting that this hopeful keynote to a show of the most self-consciously depressing century have this devious sign. The first large room is a mix of some late 19th century stuff, like Van Gogh's famous Starry Night and a nice Gaugin South Seas portrait, and early twenthieth-century European masterpieces, including Rousseau's The Dream, an image that decorates many a dorm room wall (though not as many as Klimt, who has a typical oil, gold and platinum piece in this room as well). I know this image well, having written an embarrassing descripto-symbolico poem about it as a teenager, but wasn't aware of its large size, nor of the color contrast which makes it hard to see the black stripe of the snake in the shadows. The next room is devoted to Picasso and Matisse, who I like but don't have anything to say about now. You then move into a room that charts the movement toward abstraction, from cubism to the purer abstractions of Kandinsky, who is juxtaposed with Monet in tribute to a recent, well-received show, and Mondrian.

The next room apparently recreates a famous show from the thirties, "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism." There's a Duchamp ready-made, a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. I haven't mentioned that, for the first time in my life, I was listening to one of those audio guides.* I generally scorn these, but they gave it to you with admission. Anyway, the description of the Duchamp went strictly by the book, citing Duchamp's questioning of the nature of art by exhibiting a mass-produced item as sculpture. The commentary didn't get into recent research that suggests that Duchamp altered all of his ready-mades or made them himself. If this is true, it obviously complicates the meaning of his art. (Find out about this new theory here.) If I ever get smarter, I'd like to study Duchamp in depth, and puzzle out a theory of his work (including his turn from artist to chess-player). Most of the rest of this room is worthless, though I almost missed a Cornell box, only the second I recall seeing, because it was wedged between two Dails. I had to shove through a herd of mouth breathers to see it.

Then you go through a room of sculpture to a small room of later representational paintings by Balthus, Beckman, and Hopper. Hopper is a funny case, since his current popularity is based, I suspect, on nostalgia, though his ongoing argument was about the isolation of modern life. The Beckman was an eye-opener, a symbolic tryptic called Depature. His topic is Nazi domination of German politics, represented by disturbing images on either wing. The center panel is ambiguous, of a king and queen on a boat. Are they leaving or returning?** Are they even relevant? I wasn't familiar with this painting at all, and haven't though too much about Beckmann in my life, but was mightily impressed by this piece.

This painting is an appropriate place from which to take leave of European painting, moving with emigree artists to America. A large room featuring de Kooning, Pollock, Klein, Gottlieb, Motherwell, and others was comparitively empty. Sure, the crowds pressed around Starry Night were tired from progressing through real space and so passed quickly toward the exit, but they are also increasingly challenged as we progressed in represented time. People simply don't want to grapple with something that looks like this in terms of "art." They do cluster a little more in the following rooms on pop art, though this walk is starting to tire me out, so I think I'll head toward the exit. I will pause though, to quote the Audiostar (TM) guide on Claus Oldenberg's big floppy sculpture of a piece of chocolate cake: "He changes the way we look at cake" (paraphrased, but it was just as stupid.)

This last thing you see before heading downstairs is an assemblage by Dan Flavin of multi-colored fluorescent light tubes connected in a square. It's not a ready-made (more like a made-made), but all the parts are store-bought. There's plenty of 'nature-of-art' theorizing that you can do about it, but the bottom line is that the artist worked with the materials of the contemporary world, and made something pretty. A good way to end this ramble though last century.

*Funny anecdote on those audioguides (or whatever they're called): My wife and I were eating at a second-rate Italian restaurant in downtown Austin (go figure). A couple at the next table, obviously on a first date, were making small talk next to us. The woman was from New York (you could tell from the shoes) and the no-neck was an urban Texan (you could tell from the utter studidity). After asking if his date was a big eater (he wanted to get salads and split an entree--classy move), he steered the discussion to museums, for that she was cultured and all. He liked museums, he said, especially the headphones. Especially the headphones!

**Yeah, this seems a thick-headed question because of the title, but it's worth asking departure of whom, from what, and by what means. Or maybe I'm just getting excited about The Return of the King.

Archives Project: STL #3

I like this one, though I can't recall the middle piece at all.


Title: Three Imaginary Pieces
Description: STL #3: On Museum Going
Date: 16 July 2003

On Saturday, I went to an exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art called “Embracing the Present: The UBS Art Collection,” which features works from what was once the Paine Webber corporate art collection. If the pamphlet blurbings are honest, the former chairman started buying contemporary art to display at their Manhattan offices in order to convey to employees a company ethos of risk-taking and innovation. It’s grown to one of the most important corporate collections in the world, and holdings have recently been touring smaller museums. (I believe the last stop was Ft. Lauderdale; it's on the way to Phoenix.) I like to visit museums, and go several times a year, but I have a fundamental problem with them. Because I have such a poor memory, I don’t take much away from them. It takes repeated trips for me to really grasp a painting or sculpture, and I don't think I'm that unusual in this respect. For most of us, museum-going is a type of tourism (occasional and distracted, kind of like my reviews.) I have lived near enough Seattle’s Frye Museum to learn their permanent collection, but it takes time and repeated entry fees to really "read" a painting. I like books because I can own them, in more than one sense. I'm not in the position to physically own art, so frequently I’m left with imaginary works in my mind, partial reconstructions mixed with incorrect memories and constantly changing inventions. Even today, five days after the visit, I have only sketchy recollection of my favorite pieces in the UBS collection.

The first of these I want to talk about is a painting called “Chester’s Gambit” by Eric Fischl. I start with this painting because it made my own interpretive protocols apparent to me. The painting is not reproduced on his website or anywhere else I can find, so let me describe it to you, best as I recall. In the bottom right corner is a horse’s head of some kind (sculpted, it seems), a headless female torso (sculpted again), and an ancient bust of a bearded king. In the opposite corner, or a little out toward the center, are four people, looking at us: a young woman in a white gown, a middle-aged woman in simple clothes holding a baby with a paper crown, and a middle-aged man in a business suit who seems the very likeness of prosperity. There's yet another statue farther back in the corner, I think. The first thing I do with a representational painting, without thinking about it, is imagine the narrative implied by the scene. Is the woman a bride? Is the man her father, is she a trophy wife? If the latter, is the woman the maid? And to whom does the child belong? There are no answers to these questions, but in searching for clues you eventually start to consider the form of the painting. Our perspective is pushed into the corner of the room, looking over the sculptures. The horse head is strangely prominent. The horse suggests a knight in chess, and the moving at right angles, this horse might endanger either the queen in white or protect the king's bust. Is the painting simply an endgame? The dominant hue is a yellowish bronze, suggesting lateness in the day, though I can’t remember if there’s a window for the light to flow through. The game element doesn’t overwrite the potential narrative, but provides an nice route to thinking about form.

The next work I am re-imagining is a painting (of sorts) by David Salle, though I can’t remember the title. It’s actually a two part work, consisting of an oil-painting of a nude woman sitting on a chair, her legs pulled up under her on the seat, looking off toward the other half of the work: a shallow metal box painted with black house paint and perforated with a regular series of baseball-sized holes. Why this work sticks in my mind I’m not sure. There’s a nice color contrast between the pale green of the painting and the industrial black, sure. It let’s you use the words “juxtaposition” and “mixed-media” in one breath, which is always fun. Maybe what I like how it invokes the potential of art. It looks from the transparent to the impenetrable. I would like to go back to look at this work some more, but if I don't make it before the show leaves, I may never see it again.

Finally, a work I can remember the name of nor the artist’s name. It’s a sequence of small photographs (maybe two-inch square) of the interior of a studio: a chair by the window, a drafting table, maybe a telescoping lamp on the lip of the table. Each photo is labeled for a minute of the day, and the 60 photos of each hour are collected in a single frame. The hour/frames are hung eight across, in three rows, filling the wall of a room. Backing up far enough to take in the entire work, I was struck by the variation of color. Asymmetric swathes of yellow electric light bracket the sequence, which yield to whitening and darkening patterns of light and dark. It all sounds very mechanical, I know, and in fact the pictures must have been taken mechanically. Yet its effect, in suggesting the cumulative beauty latent moments of stillness, in creating complexity and scope out of simplicity and smallness, in not captured in mere description. And let me just say that in this one case at least I am sure I am not making that up.

The problem I have with museums is what they represent: the fact that art isn’t diffused through society. Few of us work in offices with non-kitsch, to say nothing of innovative work. Sadly, art is not an everyday thing--it's something you make an appointment with.

Recent

Books: Cheever (still); Best American Poetry 2002 (ed. Creeley) Appointment in Samarra; Dance of the Intellect by Perloff; Radiant Textuality by McGann

Music: revisiting Sonic Youth from 87-92 or so

Film/Video: My So-Called Life, Angel, Bamboozled