Category: Fine Arts

The Genius Child



By David Ross. I make my living stumping for high modernism, so I am not exactly an enemy of the avant-garde and the experimental, and yet I am diffident about the extraordinary reputation of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), the Brooklyn-born Haitian-American wunderkind who during the early eighties vaulted from graffiti artist to Warhol protégé and Madonna boy-toy in a mere ten years before dying of a heroin overdose.

I turned to Tamra Davis’ documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2009) for a glimmer of an explanation. The documentary turned out to be a trove of vintage footage and articulate commentary provided by those who stood just at the perimeter of Basquiat’s spotlight, but in the end I could find no trail of breadcrumbs to lead me out of the postmodern funhouse in which fame multiplies by some hidden law of light and reflection and desire. Basquiat wrote meaningless koans with spray paint and became famous; he founded a band with some downtown types, none of whom could play instruments, and become even more famous; he mooned around the trendiest clubs and become more famous still. He painted childlike hieroglyphics on whatever he could find and became a superstar. Dying young, he became a legend, which is precisely what he had set out to be.

Really, though, what is the substance of his achievement? His art is certainly vivid and energetic, and its neo-expressionist assault on the minimalism and conceptualism of the seventies is impossible not to cheer (“white paintings, white people, white wine” is how one interviewee recalls the pre-Basquiat era). And yet his art does not – for me at least – resolve into meaning. Its presumptive symbol language is too private and haphazard, and it is not tantalizing enough on its face to rouse my analytic energy and resolve. We kill ourselves to make sense of Finnegans Wake because we intuit that there is sense to be made; Basquiat’s art demands a gamble of time and energy that seems to run against the odds of an ultimate payoff.

The film’s numerous interviewees note Basquiat’s influences: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, William Burroughs, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning. There’s something to be said for each of these connections, but Basquiat’s art seems to me closest to that of De Kooning: stark, nightmarish, garishly and luridly childlike, suffocating in its self-enclosed logic. I would say, though, that De Kooning’s punch is more concerted and harder thrown, his vision more ordered and hefty. Basquiat may have been more talented – I have no idea – but I doubt he had reflected nearly as carefully about what he was up to or exercised the same kind of winnowing intelligence. He seems to have worked by spontaneous trial and error, adding, subtracting, and overlaying in accordance with some inner sense of arrangement and meaning. This kind of improvisation can be electrifying when executed with supreme technical command (Keats, Coltrane, Pollock) but Basquiat was very far from virtuosic.

I can comprehend Basquiat only as a talented and perhaps semi-inspired cipher whose most superficial accouterments – name, hair, race – won him the role that had to be filled one way or another: that of the boy genius, the tragic naïf, with royalties and two-hundred years compounded interest owed to Keats. Basquiat was particularly suited to this role, being soft-spoken, dreamy, and vague in a way that might be misinterpreted as poetic. In comparison to Patti Smith, perhaps the only genuine genius of the punk-era downtown scene, Basquiat seems flimsy; his flourishes may or may not dazzle, but they are never more than flourishes.

The film, incidentally, adopts as epigraph Langston Hughes’ bad poem “Genius Child”:

This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild.
Sing it softly as ever you can –
Lest the song get out of hand.

Nobody loves a genius child.

Can you love an eagle,
Tame or wild?
Can you love an eagle,
Wild or tame?
Can you love a monster
Of frightening name?

Nobody loves a genius child.

Kill him – and let his soul run wild.

The suggestion that the world “kills” the “genius child” in a snit of aggressive philistinism or atavism is ludicrous and particularly ludicrous in this case. Everybody loves a “genius child” and certainly everybody loved Basquiat. He was surrounded by benefactors. They paid his rent, slept with him, bought him paints, canvases, whatever he needed, furnished him with studio space, collected his paintings from the very start. Basquiat, in his early twenties, was fast on his way to substantial wealth and permanent celebrity. Had Basquiat lived only a few more years he would have been showered with a MacArthur Genius Grant and other remunerative goodies, and he would have wound up splitting his time between a downtown duplex and the south of France, with occasional appearances on Oprah to pontificate on the strain of being a genius.

Has society ever genuinely killed a “genius child”? It’s very hard to think of a case. Shelley initiated the accusation in “Adonais,” his bloated elegy for Keats, alleging that John Wilson Crocker’s savage review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review had done in the young poet. He writes in his preface:

The savage criticism produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wontonly inflicted.

Hating this kind of misty whining, Byron did his best to stab the trope in its cradle. His wry retort comes in Don Juan (Stanza 60, Canto XI):

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate:
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

Byron did his best, but it was no use. Every suicidal, immuno-compromised, coke-snorting, sport-car-gunning boy-genius would be laid like some pierced fawn on society”s doorstep.

The only figure who begins to make sense of Hughes’ silly poem is Oscar Wilde, though his genius was only part of the problem. Wilde was genuinely destroyed; all of the others – from Shelley himself to Michael Jackson – destroyed themselves for reasons of their own.

Posted on December 14th, 2010 at 9:45am.

Rear Window

From Wafaa Bilal's "Domestic Tension."

By David Ross. Here’s the latest odor emanating from the moldering flesh of the art tradition. Wafaa Bilal, a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has in manner had a camera implanted in the back of his head. On December 15, the camera will begin to upload constant footage to a website (www.3rdi.me) associated with the new Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar (see here). The project will raise “important social, aesthetic, political, technological and artistic questions,” Bilal told the AP (see here). According to the AP, Bilal’s recent works “have invited debate and controversy”:

In a 2007 online installation, “Domestic Tension” in 2007, virtual users could shoot a paintball gun at Bilal 24 hours a day. The Chicago Tribune deemed it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time” and named him Artist of the Year that year.

A 2008 video game piece, “Virtual Jihadi,” was censored by the city of Troy, N.Y. where it was shown. In it, Bilal inserted an avatar of himself as a suicide bomber hunting then-President George W. Bush. The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a claim against the city of Troy for closing the arts center showing the work.

The artist has said the work was meant to shed light on groups that traffic in hateful stereotypes of Arab culture with video games like Quest for Saddam.

In a recent live performance piece titled “…and Counting,” Bilal had his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty. Bilal, whose brother was killed by a missile at an Iraqi checkpoint in 2004, used the piece to highlight how the deaths of Iraqis are largely invisible to the American public. The dots for the Iraqis were represented by green UV ink only visible under black light, while Americans were represented by permanent ink.

The AP story on Bilal’s latest opus generated a mountain of vituperative user comment. Some of this response has a racist and right-wing cast, but most of it indicates deep, genuine, and politically neutral bitterness at the cooption of the arts by leftwing stunt-pullers and theoreticians of the fundamentally empty. The people crave art of the eye, hand, and mind as they have since the cave painters sat in smoky meditation with their berry juice and charcoal. Their comments grope for words like those of Yeats’ great injunction from “Under Ben Bulben”:

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God.

Thomas Kinkade has grown rich speciously filling this void (see here). Why can’t someone fill it genuinely? Where is the Martin Luther of art with his 95 theses? The reviver of the arts will need incontestable artistic genius, intolerable arrogance, and a scathing polemical or satirical tongue. I envision some combination of Beethoven, Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and Wyndham Lewis. He or she will have to clear the way by force, because institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have decades of dubious decision-making to defend, and they are not going to let their multi-billion-dollar collections evaporate in a puff of punctured theory.

Wafaa Bilal and his camera.

There are certain promising developments in architecture, where the brutality of modernism, the juvenility of postmodernism, and the sheer laziness of the strip-mall remainder have been answered by a resurgent aestheticism with both neo-classical (see here) and neo-modernist manifestations. Julian Bicknell’s Henbury Hall (1986), Cheshire, epitomizes the former development, Santiago Calatrava’s Tenerife Concert Hall (2003) the latter. Le Corbusier’s corrosive notion that “a house is a machine for living” seems to be in retreat, and tendrils of extraneous beauty are beginning to peep through the cracks in the modernist concrete.

Might fine art follow this pattern? It’s possible, but there’s the important point that architecture is a relatively unfettered and unmediated arrangement between client and builder (cf. the tale of Henbury Hall), while art is tangled up in the bien pensant folly of museums, government agencies, and universities, and subject always to the media-driven fads of the marketplace.

The Tenerife Concert Hall.

Three salutary if fantastic measures: 1) Fire all the artist/professors, 2) Close the museums of contemporary art, and 3) Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and similar troughs of largesse. Let artists sell their wares in the street and relearn of necessity the language of the human. Let them rediscover how to carve, draw, and shape with their hands, and let them try to create what people might actually covet and save and pinch to own. Let them sketch passers-by in parks and squares, dawn to dusk, until they rediscover what Yeats calls the “old nonchalance of the hand.”

What? Return the arts to the bondage of the masses! The Dutch Golden Age was built on the tastes of burghers and merchants, men who drank beer and drove hard bargains. Turner was the son of a barber, Ruskin the son of a suburban wine merchant. As the comments on Bilal’s work suggest, the “masses” can at least spot a charlatan, which is more than can be said of so many museum mandarins.

In the worst case, Thomas Kinkade and his kind win out. So be it. I prefer juvenile notions of beauty to sophisticated denials of beauty. I prefer a saccharine village scene to a dead shark in formaldehyde. The former can at least evolve in the direction of genuine beauty because it has not broken ranks with the human. The latter is hopelessly estranged; nothing can be built on its example.

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 9:43am.

In the White Room

Designs by Karim Rashid.

By David Ross. Gary Hustwit’s Objectified (2009) is a cerebral documentary about industrial design. It considers everyday products we don’t usually think about as solved physical puzzles – peelers, garden sheers, computers, cars – and presents the thought processes of those who do the solving. The documentary is articulate, but also tendentious and leading. It purports to explain and defend ‘good design,’ but what it actually defends is a stringent minimalism and futurism. Its approved objects are clean lined, smooth surfaced, mono-tonal, ergonomic, and – in its dreams – ‘sustainable.’ This is the design philosophy of Apple, IKEA, and OXO – the spirit of molded plastic chairs and cell phones everywhere – in direct descent from the manifestoes of the Bauhaus. Continue reading In the White Room

The Cool School

"Standard Station" by Ed Ruscha, 1966.

By David Ross. Morgan Neville’s The Cool School (2008) is a propulsive, loose-lipped documentary about the birth of an indigenous modern art movement in Los Angeles. It tells the story of painters, ceramicists, and assemblage artists whose hub was Walter Hopps and Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery at 736a N. La Cienega.

Craig Kaufman, with one of his installations.

These artists – John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Wallace Berman, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, and Ken Price – may be unknown to the uninitiated, but Frank Gehry and Ed Ruscha, who moved at the periphery of the group, give the idea. Between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, these artists led the West Coast transition from the astringency of abstract expressionism to the affectless exclamation of pop and postmodern art, and created from scratch an aesthetic and cultural posture to rival the pomp and self-importance of New York. Their inspirations were local and various: the custom car culture, the surf culture, urban detritus, plastic, glass, signage, the bright sharp aspect of the sunshine and the sand and water, …the Pacific light itself. The prevailing spirit was macho, competitive, and hard-living in the Pollock vein, with women present “to service the men” and suffering the usual collateral damage. By the late-1960s, the gallery was hawking the work of New Yorkers like Lichtenstein, Johns, Stella, and Warhol, and the local scene broke up amid long repressed mutual annoyance. Hopps sold out to Blum and Blum moved New York, while the Ferus artists went on to early deaths and/or a degree of fame.

The Cool School artists played out “all of the Los Angeles prejudices,” says Shirley Neilsen Blum, a PhD. in art history who left Hopps to marry Blum.

“They were very involved with the beach and with the surf and with the road and with automobile and with the girls and with the local tavern [Barney’s Beanery]. That’s what they did. They had a lot of spare time. But the studio was a very different place. When they got into the studio, they were alone. And they were all born with the legacy of modernism. In other words you didn’t look at the external world for your subject. The subject came from you … Los Angeles is the city of light and air and reflection and scintillation of surface. They began to play with qualities of perception. Instead of what the impressionists tried to do, which was to see the effect of color on light, light itself became a palpable experience of the object itself.”

The Cool School is interested in social history rather than aesthetic analysis and doesn’t have much to say about the art itself. I would have preferred more lingering reflection on the images and somewhat less gossip and reminiscence. Postmodern art of the surface – superficiality in the literal sense – is the kind of thing I’m inclined to beat with a stick, but I have a hard time mustering my usual ire. While Warhol and Lichtenstein trafficked in crowd-pleasing irony, the artists of the Cool School were at least emotionally sincere, and their emphasis was for the most part aesthetic: they were interested less in social and political commentary than in image, reflecting their origins in abstract expressionism. None of this art seems to me particularly profound, but I can’t say that it’s entirely wrongheaded. Ruscha, the shrewdest and most ingenious artist to emerge from the cool school milieu, largely traffics in ironic conceptual puzzles, but even in his case there’s a redeeming subtlety and sense of humor and refinement of execution that distinguishes him from Warhol. He reminds me, in fact, of Saul Steinberg, another ingenious visualizer of what words mean and a particular hero of mine.

Ed Ruscha's "Felix," 1960.

Ignoring its merely sidelong glance at the art, The Cool School is impeccable as documentary craft. Nearly all of the key figures – happily, an unguarded bunch – contribute their recollections and grind their axes, and the film pops with color and sound: vintage footage on the one-hand and a sublime soundtrack of jazz, surf music, and punk on the other. Whatever one thinks of the art – and there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical – nobody is likely to fall asleep.

The film complains that the L.A. art scene was co-opted by glamor-seeking know-nothings from the moneyed world of film. Ironically, then, it taps Jeff Bridges as narrator and indulges Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell as a spacey, possibly stoned chorus. Hopper was a major collector of contemporary art, as we all know, but all the same I would have preferred less from posturing actors and more from historians in a position to assess the Cool School and give a larger sense of what it was up to. What’s lacking is any sense of responsible external opinion.

Ruscha, by the way, is making his entire catalogue raisonné available online. As far as I know, this is an unprecedented experiment in public access and self-canonization. See here.

For more Libertas coverage of fine art, see here, here, here, and here.

Posted on October 10th, 2010 at 11:08am.

Le Corbusier and the Annihilation of Culture

By David Ross. Genocide gets plenty of publicity, and rightfully so, but there must be a word – and the attention that goes with it – for the willful annihilation of culture. It’s terrible to kill, but also terrible to sever and expunge and leave people naked and shivering in a void. Among the perpetrators of what we might call ‘civilicide’ or ‘sociocide,’ Mao is without peer, having reduced one of the great civilizations of history to childlike incapacity, to the extent that it can barely produce a readable book (so I’m told). Le Corbusier (1887-1965) ranks second to Mao, only because he desolated a narrower field of expression and did so without force. When you look at a city or a building and find it aggressively repulsive and comprehensible only in terms of self-inflicted punishment, you are almost certainly right to blame Le Corbusier.

Destroyer.

I work in a building inspired by Le Corbusier. It is a concrete beehive that rejects windows and public meeting areas, travesties the other buildings in its vicinity, and spurns all decoration and organic flow of space in favor of the repetitive, numbing geometry of the cube. I compare this to the charming irregularity and understated delicacy of Bulfinch Hall (1818) at Phillips Academy, Andover, where I began my long dalliance with literature, seduced, perhaps, by the building itself. It was designed by Charles Bulfinch, the greatest architect of colonial Boston. The difference in the two buildings is not merely aesthetic, but functional in the largest sense. I suspect we would think better and learn better in buildings that exemplify graceful thought and mastered education. People have a way of living up to their buildings, and buildings have a way of teaching what we must live up to.

Theodore Dalrymple offers these strong words on Le Corbusier. As usual, Dalrymple is right about everything.

Posted on September 12th, 2010 at 1:06pm.

Modern Art

Jeff Koons' "Girl with Dolphin and Monkey," at The Whitney Museum.

By David Ross. The more I am immersed in the study of art, the more I am appalled by what now passes as art … viscerally, even angrily appalled … and amazed that our culture – the culture of Palladio, Vermeer, what have you – sold its birthright for a mess of pottage that was not even tolerably good pottage. I recall an instructive day of cultural tourism in New York. My wife and I spent the morning at the Whitney, where we joined a sparse gaggle of pierced and alienated art-student types. We could not help noticing the mood of sour dutifulness that seemed to prevail. Nobody was enjoying and nobody was there to enjoy; the purpose was to symbolize one’s commitment to the modern, and to demonstrate one’s figurative manning of the barricades in the war against the bourgeois. After a while, I said to my wife, “Let’s get the hell out of this morgue.” We tried a palette cleanser of French pastry at Payard (see our wedding cake here), but the rancid taste was still in our mouths, and we felt the need for the stronger mouthwash of the Met. We wound up looking at Georgian furniture. Amid the gracefully tapering forms and magnificent burnishes, the public mood was all delight. Vacationing soccer moms stood before an impossibly lovely escritoire or settee and exclaimed, “How pretty! Kids, look at this one! Ooh, wow!”

From Marcus Harvey's "White Riot."

The problem, just to be clear, is not modern art, but art that has abandoned the refinement of the hand and eye that marks the aesthetic. The problem is art’s increasing identification with aims that are not aesthetic at all, but political, sociological, commercial, sensational, and self-promotional, with impulses that are subversive but not beautiful in their subversion (as say Baudelaire and Toulouse-Lautrec were beautiful in their subversion). Turner has much in common with moderns like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko; he has nothing in common with a postmodern like Damien Hirst.

I constantly search for a definitive diagnosis of what’s gone wrong. Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) is lucid and amusing, but even better, because more pissed off, is Theodore Dalrymple’s essay “Trash, Violence, and Versace: But is it Art?” (see here), a review of a 1998 exhibition called “Sensation.”  The Royal Academy of Art, historically a bastion of the staid, was the offender in this case, which suggests how strangely and thoroughly the cultural life of the West has been perverted. Dalrymple is particularly roused by the vapid amorality of Marcus Harvey’s portrait of the mass-child-murderer Myra Hindley. The portrait is rendered in children’s handprints, and the parents of the murdered children naturally protested (not that anyone cared). Dalrymple comments: Continue reading Modern Art