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Barbara Weir is one of my favorite painters. As an aboriginal artist, she approaches her work with a different set of expectations and intentions than is typical in the Western artistic canon. Like other women from her community (including now-deceased Minnie Pwerle, Barbara’s mother, and international art star Emily Kame Kngwarreye), her work is closely tied to nature, ritual and the metaphysics of the aboriginal belief system.
Her story is compelling. From Barbara’s website, Elizabeth Fortescue details a bit of her genealogy:
In the Northern Territory of Australia, there is a former cattle station called Utopia, also known as Urapuntja, which lies 300 km northeast of Alice Springs. The land at Utopia, totalling 1800 square kilometres, was handed back to indigenous people in the late 1970s and is home to about 900 people who live in a series of small outstations.
In the years between about 1910 and 1920, when the country at Utopia was first being opened up for cattle grazing, a baby was born there to a woman from the Anmatjerre language group and a man from the Alyawarr language group. Their shared country was Atnwengerrp. The parents named their baby daughter Minnie Pwerle and, like so many Aboriginal people of Minnie’s generation, the story of her life would be one of struggle and endurance. But Minnie would also become a respected elder of her community and, late in life, one of Australia’s most acclaimed indigenous artists. Minnie was destined never to leave Australian shores; not so her daughter Barbara Weir, whose own paintings attracted international recognition and opened up many opportunities for her to travel overseas. Three of Minnie’s sisters, and Barbara’s daughter Teresa, would also begin to paint, adding their names to the roll call of indigenous painters who live and work in the remote communities of Utopia.
The modern history of art from the Utopia region began in 1977 when the art of batik was introduced there through workshops that were offered to the women. Painting in acrylic on canvas followed in the late 1980s, and Barbara Weir began painting in 1989.
Then, in late 1999, Minnie also began to paint. Her first solo exhibition was in Melbourne in 2000, after which her work was much sought-after. Minnie died in March 2006. Towards the end of her life, she had been living at Alparra, the largest community in Utopia. She remained a prodigious long-distance walker and never lost her bush ways. One Sydney curator tells the story that when Minnie came to cosmopolitan, inner-city Marrickville and surveyed the local gum trees – which were obviously not a supply of good bush tucker — she remarked dismissively that there wasn’t much to eat in the city. She stayed at Bondi where she was fascinated by the sea and walked up and down the beach all hours of the day and night.
In speaking of her work, Fortescue puts her work in its context of nature and songlining:
Long, tapering lines which elegantly overlap one another in many of Barbara Weir’s paintings represent the grass which was found abundantly at Utopia until the introduction of cattle grazing in the early decades of the 20th Century. The botanical name for this grass is Portulaca oleracea.
The grass has been important to the Aboriginal people for thousands of years because it bears small, black seeds which are ground up to make flour. Barbara Weir does not paint these seeds, but she paints the grass itself. The colours she uses reflect the state of the grass in nature. When she paints it green, the grass is young and growing. When she paints it yellow, red and black, the grass is being burned in a bushfire. When she paints it white and grey, it’s the aftermath of a bushfire. Sometimes she includes some red in an otherwise white or off-white grass painting, which indicates there is still some fire burning.
Many of Barbara’s paintings are titled My Mother’s Country. In these works, she pays homage to her maternal ancestors, their lands, their dreamings and their way of life.
I see grass seed dreaming everywhere. While there is no “California beach ice plant” songline in the aboriginal taxonomy, the visual relationship is ongoing.
Barbara Weir (excerpt)
Ice plants along the beach in California
This morning I received an email from George Wingate, an artist and my first roommate in Manhattan oh so many years ago. He sent me an excerpt from a page torn from an old New Yorker that he found while cleaning his studio barn. Kenneth Tynan comments on the death of Janet Flanner in 1978 who, writing under the pen name Genet, was an éminence grise for many of the American ex-pat crowd in Paris during the 1920s and 30s:
Janet Flanner has died, aged 86…Enthusiasm, even at 80, never failed her for the promise of the day’s doings…She always urged me to visit aging celebrities and question them before they died: “Tax their brains…It’s like lobsters. Go for the head–there’s tasty chewing there.” As there was in Janet’s, on which I contentedly fed whenever we met. One consolation, I suppose, is that here at least, is a life-enhancer who outlived the shits–an American life with a perfectly resolved third act.
Turns out I had planned to see George today at his Edenic retreat north of Boston with my niece Rachel, visiting from Utah. While he continues to paint jewel-like landscapes and evocative still lifes, he also has turned his artist’s hand and eye to the land that surrounds his late 18th century home. What was once a large nondescript yard with a clay tennis court in slow decline is now an exuberant array of flower fields, stream beds, tree borders and trails.
We sat on his deck overlooking this extraordinary patchwork of color and texture, and continued the discussion of third acts and later-in-life epiphanies.
“When I was 25, before I became an artist, I didn’t know what I wanted to do or for what I was best suited,” George told us. “I took an occupational guidance test and was advised to consider being a gardener.
“My response to this suggestion was not positive. I felt like I was being told that I wasn’t good for anything but raking leaves.
“I wish that career counselor had taken the time to unpack that idea for me and suggest that I consider some variants on that theme, like landscape architecture and landscape design. Now, so many years later, I have found my way right back to that place. I AM a gardener.”
And a remarkable one, to be sure. Because Rachel is young, the fact that it took George many decades to figure out what work feels whole and integrated for him seems wrong or unfair. While it is age appropriate for any 22 year old to see it that way, I had a very different response. George has found his “perfectly resolved third act.” And for me, the fact that he found it and can have it makes all the difference.
This short piece by Jonathan Jones (in The Guardian) captures rather succinctly many of the frustrations I have written about here in earlier posts. We are currently living through a period of inappropriate dependence on language to extol and explain what is often beyond language in the visual arts. Enough words! My voice joins others in a plea for inviting a variety of different responses including silence, stillness, and to be outside of thinking and logic.
The anecdote about Jackson Pollock is particularly heartwarming…
It is a vice of second-rate art to come with its own eloquent explanation attached. If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying, in order to ease the way with patrons and funders; or the artist is a fool. And if dishonesty is the reason, that too is something that vitiates art. No serious art is easy to interpret. Nor is there ever a single valid interpretation of art. If art is good, there are many things to be said about it and much that will remain unsayable.
Yet, there are more and more pressures today on artists to explain themselves. Once, an artist was allowed to hide behind a vague and mysterious aura. The American abstract expressionist painters made grand pronouncements about their work that are so enigmatic they give away no hostages - nor do the kinds of epigrammatic comments made by Francis Bacon. Yet artists in Britain today are always offering explanations for what they do.
If you’re looking for the root cause of anything annoying, silly or spurious in the culture of art in 21stcentury Britain the source of the problem is never hard to locate. Once again the culprit is … public art, in which the popularization of art, the determination of institutions from parks to to local councils to be associated with it, and a lingering British Puritan visual clumsiness produce a lot of guff as artists try to promote the accessible virtues of their ideas.
As soon as you start saying what people want to hear, adapting your art to the common sense political and moral platitudes of ordinary speech, you betray subtlety and poetry. Artists presenting proposals for the Fourth Plinth, the Tate Turbine Hall and elsewhere should rebel again this. They should agree to all submit the woolliest and least explanatory pronouncements they can dream up. Something like: “The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely.”
That’s Jackson Pollock, writing a grant application in 1947. I don’t suppose it would get him much of a grant in Britain now. He’d have to explain what his webs and loops of abstract paint are all about … but he’d sit there chewing his pen, no more able to offer a simple explanation of them than the critic is half a century later.
I found an article in The Independent yesterday that I posted on my filter blog Slow Painting. It has dominated my thinking all day. In a singularly succinct manner, it captures a core set of issues that are at the center of my disaffection with a number of trends in contemporary art. These are some of the same concerns that drove me to start blogging two years ago.
Two imperatives are identified as de rigeur in the high profile world of contemporary art:
Rule 1) Justification by meaning: the worth and interest of a work resides in what it’s about.
Rule 2) Absolute freedom of interpretation: a work is “about” anything that can, at a pinch, be said about it.
The article goes on to elaborate this conundrum:
In short, meanings are arbitrary, but compulsory. And this double bind holds almost universal sway. Whenever you learn that a work explores or investigates or raises questions about something, that it’s concerned with issues around this or notions of that or debates about the other, you know you’re in its grip.
It’s weird how people can’t resist. If you want to make art sound serious, this is simply the way you do it. Read any gallery wall-caption or leaflet or catalogue, and see how long it is before the writer commends the work solely on the basis of what it’s about. And then note how it is isn’t really about that at all.
Meaning comes first – even before the work itself…
That’s the problem with these meanings. They’re not just highly tenuous. They’re depressingly limiting. And we should put them aside. We should stop measuring art by its meaningfulness. We should heed the wise words of Susan Sontag, written almost 50 years ago in her essay “Against Interpretation”.
“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us.”
This runs in a similar vein with much of what Lawrence Weschler has explored in my still current favorite book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. What Irwin keeps moving in and out of in the interviews included in the book is related to Sontag’s issue of cutting back on content and getting the viewer closer to what is “real.”
I’ve referenced Irwin’s well known response to a Philip Guston painting in an earlier posting here but it is particularly pertinent to this discussion. He describes going to a gallery and seeing a small Guston hanging next to a large James Brooks. The Brooks painting was big in every way—large shapes, with strong color. The Guston, an early piece, was small, painted in the subtle and signatory muted pinks, greys and greens. But in Irwin’s eyes, it outstripped the Brooks completely.
In Irwin’s words:
My discovery was that from one hundred yards away…I looked over, and that goddamn Guston…Now, I’m talking not on quality, and not on any assumption of what you like or don’t like, but on just pure strength, which was one of the things we were into. Strength was a big word in abstract expressionism; you were trying to get power into the painting, so that the painting really vibrated, had life to it. It wasn’t just colored shapes sitting flat. It had to do with getting a real tension going in the thing, something that made the thing really stand up and hum…Well, that goddamn Guston just blew the Brooks right off the wall…
Not on quality, just on power…some people call it “the inner life of the painting,” all that romantic stuff, and I guess that’s a way of talking about it. But shapes on a painting are just shapes on a canvas unless they start acting on each other and really, in a sense, multiplying. A good painting has a gathering, interactive build-up in it. It’s a psychic build-up, but it’s also a pure energy build-up. And the good artists knew it, too. That’s what a good Vermeer has, or a raku cup, or a Stonehenge. And when they’ve got it, they just jump off the goddamn wall. They just, bam!
What Irwin keeps getting at—that power of the painting itself—lives outside the domain of applied and obligatory meaning. It’s Irwin’s memorable phrase that I referenced in an earlier posting—phenomenal presence. As Weschler posts in describing Irwin’s line canvases:
They only work immediately; they command an incredible presence—“a rich floating sense of energy,” as Irwin describes it—but only to one who is in fact present. Back at home, you may remember what it felt like to stand before the painting, the texture of the meditative stance it put you in, but the canvas itself, its image in your mind, will be evanescent. That is why for many years Irwin declined to allow his work to be photographed, because the image of the canvas was precisely what the painting was not about.
This is the deep furrow I want to plow. The contemporary concerns for obligatory meaning and languaged legitimacy melts away for me in the face of full-bodied power. Overlay and artifice? Enough already.
Early on in my art education, a professor told me a parable I have never forgotten.
Long ago, an emperor in China loved ducks. Inordinately. His passion was so overwhelming that he called forth the greatest artist and calligrapher in his kingdom and made his request: I want you to create the ultimate image of a duck for me.
The artist accepted his request and then left the court. Every day the emperor waited for his painting to arrive. Months passed, but still no word. After six months and a loss of patience, the emperor sent for the artist.
“I’ve been waiting for you for six months, and still you have sent me nothing!”
Without a moment’s hesitation, the artist pulled out a large blank sheet of rice paper and a sumi brush loaded with ink. With just a few graceful, simple strokes, he produced the most exquisite and elemental image of a duck.
The emperor was dumbfounded. The beauty of the piece was stunning, but he was still irritated.
“I have been waiting for six long months. Now you come to me and produce this beautiful painting effortlessly, right in front of me. Why did you wait so long?”
The artist answered, “It took me six months to be able to capture the essence with so few strokes. What looks effortless to you is the result of dedicated labor.”
It’s a simple story, yes. But as a young artist I knew it had some particular permutations of meaning in my own life. Coming from a culture whose landscaped backdrop was the parched soil of the Great Basin desert, my DNA was preloaded with attitudes about the righteousness of hard work. Mormonism has a proclivity towards being a “doaholic” culture, a quality which is captured brilliantly in an essay by Hugh Nibley called “Zeal without Knowledge.” My favorite line from Nibley’s piece captures the essence of the problem: “Mormons think it more commendable to get up at 5AM to write a bad book than to get up at nine o’clock to write a good one.”
The “hard work above all” value set probably parallels other family system “ubertangles” like alcoholism, sexual abuse and criminal mindsets. It’s hard to even place those terms in the same sentence given the righteousness with which hard work was embraced in my family. My mother was raised on a farm and often talked about hoeing the beets as a child. Everybody worked HARD. Being lazy was just not an option. But being “lazy” in my culture of origin was not just sloth—it also included things like sitting quietly and doing nothing (also known as meditation) and enjoying nature without raking the leaves at the same time.
As an artist who spends so much time in the studio alone, I have had a lot of time to dismantle much of that thinking. Dismantle does not mean dispel or destroy. It means you have a better idea of just how deep the stain has permeated your psyche. (Stain sounds so harsh, my mother would say. Perhaps we could go with “tinting”?) So while my discipline and focused hard work are held by many as a virtue—and I am not devaluing the importance of those qualities in the creative professions—I am also learning how to be at ease with the full arc of the process. Ease sounds too much like easy, and easy and effortless are not values where I come from.
This last spring was a period of so much grief and loss in my life that my ability to paint came to a standstill. For weeks I would go in to my studio and just sit, doing nothing. I thought that if I just showed up, the ice would melt and I would be ready when it did.
But this was being iced out at a level unlike any other I have known, and it did not melt as I had hoped. After several weeks of that brave vigil, I got the insight that I should stop forcing something that wasn’t remotely ready to budge.
Just a few weeks ago the nudge came to start showing up again. Not the long days of work that I was used to, but short visits, as if courting young love. Then one day new work burst out of me. It wasn’t planned or even premeditated, but was the most authentic gesture I could make from the most wounded place in me.
The work that resulted was very different from previous paintings. For over a week I had the complete series on my studio floor, not sure where it was going or what it meant. It wasn’t until my husband and two friends came to the studio and responded so powerfully to those pieces that I allowed myself to legitimize them.
Two of those images were used on the show card I sent out for my upcoming exhibition in Provincetown (details are available at Slow Painters). What has surprised me most has been how many people responded to the new work. I received more emails and phone calls about these pieces than any before.
My friend Riki, a brilliant artist and writer, wrote these words to me:
I came across this amazing image on your card. Can you talk about it? Is this a new series of work? Am I looking down on an interior space deep in the human heart disappearing at the upper left in a pure white light?
Is this about your mother?
Rap me on the knuckles if I’m trespassing but really, I’m stunned. Star struck. This feels very different.
Kathryn, my partner in the death and burial of our dear friend Morris, wrote:
Maybe what you’ve recorded there seems a record of my long siege of grief as well as yours. Why have we almost lost the Greek understanding of art as catharsis?
And Andrew, shaman in training, wrote this:
Captures for me a state of organization or un-organization in keeping with my pre-occupation with the ayahuasca experience. I can’t tell if this is of a mind dying or of a mind being born. Can’t tell if it is vision into the past or vision into the future. Can’t tell if it is a cave wall or the inside surface of a mind. As such distinctions may be arbitrary anyway, the art offers me wide-ranging freedom to think in all these directions at once and without boundaries. It seems like a node or switchbox but linked to what and channeling what I can’t tell.
However these images came into being, I’m not sure. But I’m also not asking. I do know it wasn’t from righteously sweating in the beet field but more akin to the Chinese duck—the preparation at some earlier time allowed the gesture now.
Ticelle 1, 18 x 18″ mixed media on wood panel
Ticelle 3, 18 x 18″ mixed media on wood panel
Ticelle 5, 18 x 18″ mixed media on wood panel
Robert Irwin
The books stacked by my bed may appear to be pliantly passive, but don’t be fooled: the daily jostling that rotates one to the top spot is a highly competitive challenge. Feelings have been hurt, I can sense it, when that slim volume of finely chiseled poetry gets usurped by, dare I say it, non-fiction. There’s something touchingly poignant about being shunted aside—especially after having provided hours of sensuous pleasure—by a brazen and confident competitor whose voluptuous content titillates the mind into delirium.
The latest interloper to command control of my bedstand stack is Seeing Is Forgetting: The Name of the Thing One Sees, A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, by Lawrence Weschler. I’ve quoted from this book on this blog before (see my posting on May 12, 2008), and have read parts of it in the past. But as is the case with so many things in life, timing is everything. This book fell back into my hands recently, and I can’t put it down. I’m smitten. No doubt the other bedside volumes are murmuring their frustration with an infatuation that is lasting a little too long. Sorry, but this one is so seductive and provocative, and it is speaking to me right down to my bones.
During my formative years growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Robert Irwin—along with his cohorts Billy Al Bengston, Ken Price et al—were running their own art solar system out of Southern California with no fealty paid to that putative (and to some degree, self-anointed) center of the art world, New York. Their approach was insouciant, non-pedigree, fresh. As a young artist living outside the power grid of the East Coast, I was compelled by their confidence and transgressive points of view. And what a willful proclivity to be persnickety! For example, Irwin forbade any photographic reproduction of his work for a number of years, convinced that a photograph can only convey image, not presence. Cataloging and marketing be damned. I remember thinking, wow. Those guys were just so…cool.
Now, years later, I am reading the “story about the story” of Irwin and his crew during that extremely important period in their artistic evolution. What keeps striking me is how extraordinarily aligned I am with many of the issues they championed. I didn’t fully comprehend the full import as a much younger artist. Now seems to be the time when I am most able to understand, really understand, what Irwin was saying.
So many salient quotes could be offered here from this fascinating book. I’m sure I’ll be posting more from Weschler’s account in the weeks to come. But here is a start to give you some sense of Irwin’s point of view:
Irwin sometimes singles out a particular achievement of Willem de Kooning’s. “Really the best abstract expressionist paintings ever—in my opinion the best single ones—were an at-the-time recent series of large paintings by de Kooning. And one of the things about them is that they have this quality: it’s as if they were done in ten minutes. They look utterly spontaneous. A few simple gestures just explode on the canvas. But the control is amazing! The stroke stops and the paint splashes, but with the precision of the lace on a Vermeer collar. I mean, having done those kinds of paintings and tried to get that kind of freshness, I know the guy was really a master. He really knew what he was doing.”
And another:
“The big challenge for me,” he recalls, “starting around then, the ‘less is more’ challenge, was simply always to try to maximize the energy, the physicality of the painting, and to minimize the imagery. It could all be looked at essentially as turning the entire question upside down: moving away from the literate, conceptual rationale and really reestablishing the inquiry on the perceptual, tactile level. Nobody quite understood that at the time, because they were still thinking in image terms and in terms of literate connotations. When they talked about a painting, they translated it into subject matter, in a way, but it’s not only about that. It’s about presence, phenomenal presence. And it’s hard: if you don’t see it, you just don’t see it; it just ain’t there. You can talk yourself blue in the face to somebody, and if they don’t see it, they just don’t see it. But once you start seeing it, it has a level of reality exactly the same as the imagery—no more, no less. And basically, that’s what I’m still after today. All my work since then has been an exploration of phenomenal presence.
More to come, to be sure.
One of my favorite bloggers is G, the genius behind Writer Reading. A few days ago she posted an extremely thought-provoking piece called Are Writers Ever Really Loners? that I have been mulling over ever since. She probes the often disruptive relationship between the “solitary” act of writing and the role of interacting with the social network that is writers, publishers, literary influencers.
My experience is that the concept of community is very different for visual artists and writers. ALL my writer friends are in some kind of writer’s group, while very few of my visual artist friends participate in any formalized art critique group. But even so, I resonated with G’s frank admission about her low comfort level with the community offered to her in her profession as a writer: I’ve never met a social network of writers that I’ve liked.
There is an essential tension between the demands of working in solitude, that “rag and bone shop” that Yeats speaks of, and the cocktail partying, coterie development, personal promotion and politicking that is also part of every business ecosystem, creatively focused or otherwise. For a number of us, the obligation to “press the flesh” is the least appealing and most inauthentic aspect of the art making venture. The discomfort G addresses in her piece is a discomfort I have felt throughout my career as a visual artist.
Making contacts for no other reason than the possibility of future endorsements, fawning over the power brokers and monied players, strategizing about getting invited to the right parties and the biggest openings—it is part of the game I have the least inclination towards. Many artists seem to thrive in that milieu. It isn’t meant as a criticism of them that they can manage in that world; it is just a very clear demarcation point.
And as G points out in her posting, an unwillingness to participate in the appropriate art scene may operate to one’s detriment. I made the decision some time ago to be willing to live with those outcomes, whatever the cost. We veer towards and away from authenticity and meaningfulness in hundreds of small ways that end up defining the texture and quality of our lives. And those two values, authenticity and meaningfulness, are more important to me than what might be considered the pragmatic, realistic approach to the business of art promotion.
I have had to adopt the attitude that there are many ways for an artist to reach out, find an audience, and connect with people who care about the same set of issues. Art world schmoozing is just one.
The best part of my networking happens outside the visual arts. When I do an assessment of my closest associations and most inspiring friendships, very few of them are visual artists. My primary network consists of people who are operating in a variety of creative métiers—poetry, music, dance, theatre, business–and individuals who are compelled by those expressive pursuits. Talking across categories rather than within a category feels more vital and expansive to my own process.
There is a line to be drawn between isolation and communitarian exchange, between needing the reclusiveness of the studio and the celebration of completion that happens with an audience, be it one or many. It isn’t easily defined, but being conscious of that grey zone is probably a good start.
Here is the text of G’s post:
During my brief foray at an advanced post-doctorate age in a low-residency MFA program, I was struck not only by the greater youth of fellow students than I had expected, but also the extreme extroversion involved in nightly dance and beer parties; the constant day-time socializing at large chatty tables for all three meals; the jockeying for time alone with the published-writer-teachers who mostly hid from students during meals in the faculty dining room. As a reclusive individual I found the intensive undergraduate-type social scene overwhelming. It was nothing like the low-key intellectual social environment of “real” graduate school I’d experienced getting a Ph.D. So, I avoided the socializing whenever possible and as a result, made few friends, none lasting.
Now, I’m not so reclusive that I can’t hold a job. Or even a job that requires constant, in-depth human interaction. But that’s just the point. It’s “in-depth.” Partying is never an in-depth social interaction. Nor is sitting at a large table of loud laughter in an enormous college dining hall. Nor is flattering a teacher to get an A. Nor is socializing with people for the sole reason that they are the handful of others your age with whom you can gripe about “the youngsters”. No one ever mentions this aspect of low-residency MFA programs that differs from normal MFA programs, and normal graduate school in general. In that sense, I would have found writing correspondence school preferable, and easier on my bank account.
Anyway, I was having a debate with someone about whether reclusive writers have ever even been published, aside from the notoriously weird J.D. Salinger. I gave a few bogus examples to make my point, my opponent being too ignorant to know the difference, and I walked away feeling I had won the debate by lying. Sure, I’d said, plenty of reclusive writers have published and I named a ridiculous collection. A hollow victory. Because I believe that every single writer who has ever published was part of a network of writers however small. That if writing programs offer nothing else, they offer to fledgling writers that cohort of camaraderie. At least to those who are sociable enough to make those connections.
So are there any reclusive writers, outside of any social network of other writers who have made it? Is that why slush piles are so dreary, because writers whose work ends up there, particularly orphaned agent-less book manuscripts, have no other writers plugging for their work, encouraging them, critiquing them? Can you actually smell the musty odor of loneliness wafting off their manuscripts?
Unless you are a total genius like, say, Stephen Hawking, every other profession requires social networks to succeed. So why shouldn’t writing? Well, I don’t think it should, because original work is not created within a social network, except maybe in science. But I have a feeling that I am very, very wrong and I hate that, because I’ve never met a social network of writers that I’ve liked, which does not bode well for me and my writing. Which I already knew anyway.
The work of Hiroshi Sugimoto cannot be comprehended without having been experienced in the flesh. Every artist believes this about their work, but in some circumstances it goes beyond optimal and moves into the imperative. So it is with Sugimoto’s photographs. (I have included this reproduction as an indicator but not the thing itself.)
The first time I saw one of Sugimoto’s photographs, I couldn’t move. I just stood there in front of that large scale seascape and basked. After 30 minutes of Sugimoto, there was nothing else in the museum that could penetrate my perceptions. He had filled up every receptive cell in my body with that one image, so I just had to sit down and be with a presence that was quiet and yet very powerful.
As described by David Ian Miller:
Sugimoto works on vast projects, each concerned with photographing the essence of time. He coined the phrase “Time Exposed” to describe his work. In his most famous project he photographs film theatres over the course of a movie, the screens turn brilliant white and illuminate the theatre. With his Seascape series he photographs the eternal sea, each frame bisected by the horizon. Sugimoto works on vast projects, each concerned with photographing the essence of time. He coined the phrase “Time Exposed” to describe his work. In his most famous project he photographs film theatres over the course of a movie, the screens turn brilliant white and illuminate the theatre. With his Seascape series he photographs the eternal sea, each frame bisected by the horizon.
His technique is also worthy of consideration, given the powerful results he is able to create:
These pictures have been taken with a technical view camera that shoots huge 8-by-10-inch negatives. It’s the kind of camera that consists of a long bellows, with a tea-saucer lens attached at one end and a ground-glass viewing screen at the other — in use, it looks like an accordion perched on a tripod — and that asks the photographer to stoop under a black cloth to look through it. It produces an ultra-precise, highly resolved image of whatever has been set before the lens, as though the photographer’s dedication to truth-telling won’t tolerate the missing of a single hair or speck of lint. It’s the kind of camera that produces a stunning “reality effect” — an overwhelming sense, even in black and white, that the world must be just the way the picture makes it look. Blake Gopnik
The spiritual dimension to his work is elemental to its presence. In an interview with Miller, Sugimoto had a few modest comments:
Miller: You wrote that artistic endeavors are “mere approximations, efforts to render visible unseen realms.” What did you mean by that?
Sugimoto:Well, this is one of the purposes of art itself. Science tries to understand nature in a logical sense, but there are many, many natural phenomena that cannot be explained by logic and science.
Historically, religion served this purpose. But now, we are getting into the 21st century and the power of religion is fading. People still need another way to understand the world besides logic — and we’re turning to art and spirituality to help us understand our environment and the world.
M: Is there a spiritual dimension to your photography?
S: If so, it is whatever the viewer feels looking at my work. I’m not purposely trying to make it spiritually strong. I’m just practicing my art. If people see it as a spiritual, I’m glad to accept it. But I’m not particularly promoting a spirituality of any kind.
Spirituality is a particular characteristic of the human being that no other animals have. I’m just trying to investigate where this comes from. In that process I sometimes stir up ancient memories and spirits, and maybe people who see my art respond to that.
Yesterday I received an email from a new poet friend, Martin Dickinson. He has written a remarkable ekphrasic poem, “Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Sea of Japan,” which was published in California Quarterly in 2007. He sent it with me along with some insightful words about Sugimoto’s work. I share both with you here.
I find it so amazing that he takes these time lapse photos of films–and all that we see is an incredible burst of white light coming at us. It looks unreal—but of course, on another level that IS reality, we just don’t usually look that way or see that way. Similarly with Sugimoto’s ocean series: superficially every single one of those photos is the same—shot at the same exact angle to the surface of the water and same exact distance above the surface. We see no earth at all, but just the surface of the water. As you look more deeply into these photos you begin to see remarkable and engrossing detail. Every single photo is unique and very unusual.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Sea of Japan
Hiroshi, wave after wave after wave
of endless blue, or rather, endless
black—or is it endless gray?
This is your language.
Dusty parts of the planet are worthless
except as places to plant your tripod—
pedestal for the all-seeing eye,
vantage toward this world
that pulses like a beating heart,
image of the thing becoming the thing,
then ebbing back to its image again,
heard like the slap of water against a pier,
tongued like the taste of salt,
felt like a slosh in the gut.
This instant that’s entered your lens,
ray relating from your retina to mine,
our thoughts electrons, chemicals really.
Is all the world ocean
or silver dots on gelatin, or both?
Truth is beams of light,
and you’ve seen it, alright.
Everything that is is motionless
everything that is is flow
wave after wave after wave, Hiroshi.
–Martin Dickinson
The World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893
This morning I excerpted from an article in the Chicago Tribune about Daniel Burnham on my Slow Painting blog. For those of you who have read The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, you will recognize his name. Burnham was the architect and visionary behind the magical Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, nicknamed the “White City” for its grand pavilions. Larson couples his tale of Burnham’s extraordinary feat with a ghoulish tale of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who used the fair to lure victims to his World’s Fair Hotel. But it is Burnham’s story that fascinated me.
The fact that Burnham agreed to take on such a grandiose project with ungodly time and money constraints still astounds me. The obstacles he encountered came from every corner—people, politics as well as a seriously unstable construction site. His achievement wearies me just to remember reading of the complexities he faced over and over again.
He wasn’t a purist with a supremacist vision like his cohorts Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright. In many ways he steered American popular architecture into a direction that outdistanced the more subtle aesthetic orientations of a Sullivan or a Wright. He’s certainly not my favorite architect by any means, but I am fascinated by his prowess in playing the game. He shares some of his skill sets with the likes of other still controversial master builders like New York’s Robert Moses or Baron Haussmann of 19th century Paris.
Here’s a sampling of his achievements from the Architect Gallery of Architectural Art :
In 1891, Burnham planned the enormous World’s Columbian Exposition on Chicago’s south lakefront. The largest world’s fair to that date, it celebrated the 400 year anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the new world. In 1909, the Commercial Club sponsored the Plan of Chicago , again headed by Burnham who donated his services in hopes of achieving more of his own aims. Using some of his south lakefront plans and conceptual designs as a base, he envisioned a new Chicago as a “Paris on the Prairie” with French inspired public works constructions, fountains and boulevards radiating from a central, domed municipal palace.
Root’s [Burnham's former partner] death had altered Burnham’s aesthetic compass and he no longer felt constrained by the pragmatic utility of Chicago School construction. Greece and Rome became his models for the world’s newest empire. He even sent his sons to Paris’ Ecole des Beaux-Arts for their grounding in Classical technique. The fair had introduced middle America to a grandiose Beaux-Arts “salad” of colonnades, domes, arches and vistas. Bankers and corporate chieftains wanted just the same Olympian grandeur for their new edifices..
Louis Sullivan, considered the greatest architect of the Chicago School, never forgave Burnham for turning his back on pure structural expression in favor of the archaic classicism of the fair, calling it alternately “feudal” and “imperial.” Feeling that it would “…set back architecture fifty years,” he was nearly proved right as he watched his own career collapse after 1900 while corporate America and Daniel Burnham turned to Rome for inspiration. In his 1924 Autobiography of an Idea, Sullivan bitterly wrote: “(Burnham) was a colossal merchandiser whose megalomania concerning the largest, the tallest, the most costly and sensational, moved on in its sure orbit, as he painfully learned to use the jargon of big business.”
At his death in 1912, Daniel Burnham’s company was the world’s largest architectural firm and had become the model for countless later firms that utilized global business techniques instead of the traditional, near Medieval methods of earlier architects. He had become the head of the American Institute of Architects and been named by President Taft to be Chairman of the Committee on the Fine Arts…
Frank Lloyd Wright, in his 1912 eulogy in Architectural Record , wrote: “(Burnham) made masterful use of the methods and men of his time…(as) an enthusiastic promoter of great construction enterprises…his powerful personality was supreme.”
There are times when stories like Burnham’s make my much more human-scaled challenges seem less overwhelming. For those of us who do not commandeer a flock of employees and have no need to court political favor, life in the studio seems quite unburdened by comparison. Burnham’s life is a valuable shift in perspective when dealing with deadlines, self-imposed and otherwise, starts to pinch and chafe.
Another day of rag and bone shopping, of gentle and cautious gestures, of softly silencing the voice of judgment, of speaking in a quiet voice when I want to be screaming. This is my courtship of the muse, I remind myself. The process is a dance of seduction, and success requires great patience and focus.
My husband now has a phrase he uses for my art making time: Studioing. He pronounces it studi-O-ing, accent on the O. I like his name for it because it gives the illusion of doing something recreational, like leaving the house to go kayaking or to take a canoe down a river. The reality is that I feel like I’m underwater, not gliding over the surface; I am a diver who must go down to the sea bed and secure the cabling, an anchor, a piling.
Once again my friend Sally Reed has enriched my thinking with her insightful offerings. This comment was left in response to my posting from yesterday about wooing the muse, “Court and Spark.”
The poem by James Wright is a stunner. And in the words of Emily Dickinson (thank you for reminding me of this Sally) a great poem “makes my body so cold no fire can warm me,” and makes me “feel as if the top of my head were taken off.” I felt headless the first time I read this piece. Thank you Sally.
***
Yes, sometimes it is a playful and sweet seduction.
In some cases it can be a darker and more painful story. Sometimes the muse herself can be feeling fragile or frightened. So then patience and gentleness are the watchwords. I don’t think it dampens the joy, ultimately, do you? In fact, perhaps the opposite.
To the Muse
It is all right. All they do
Is go in by dividing
One rib from another. I wouldn’t
Lie to you. It hurts
Like nothing I know. All they do
Is burn their way in with a wire.
It forks in and out a little like the tongue
Of that frightened garter snake we caught
At Cloverfield, you and me, Jenny
So long ago.
I would lie to you
If I could.
But the only way I can get you to come up
Out of the suckhole, the south face
Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you
What you know:
You come up after dark, you poise alone
With me on the shore.
I lead you back to this world.
Three lady doctors in Wheeling open
Their offices at night.
I don’t have to call them, they are always there.
But they only have to put the knife once
Under your breast.
Then they hang their contraption.
And you bear it.
It’s awkward a while. Still it lets you
Walk about on tiptoe if you don’t
Jiggle the needle.
It might stab your heart, you see.
The blade hangs in your lung and the tube
Keeps it draining.
That way they only have to stab you
Once. Oh Jenny.
I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy
And disastrous place. I
Didn’t, I can’t bear it
Either, I don’t blame you, sleeping down there
Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring,
Muse of the black sand,
Alone.
I don’t blame you, I know
The place where you lie.
I admit everything. But look at me.
How can I live without you?
Come up to me, love,
Out of the river, or I will
Come down to you.
–James Wright
I had my three children in three years. (It didn’t take much back then, just washing our clothes in the same batch could have done the trick…) During those years when they were small, I took some time off from painting. Once I was out of the acute care phase and could consider getting back to work, I found a studio space and just assumed I could pick up right where I left off.
It didn’t work out that way. There was a petulant, resistant energy in me that had no intentions of doing what she was told. This took me by surprise. I didn’t know that the artist in me could get very pissed and uncooperative. Up until that point in time, she had been attended to very well. My short term hiatus from working—all for a good reason—felt like a betrayal to her.
So I talked with a wise friend about what I should do. She told me that I needed to woo my artist self the way I would a lover—shower her with gifts and attention. Make visits to see her, but don’t overstay. Dish up hefty helpings of sweet nothings. Be patient in winning her over.
It was unexpected but extremely wise advice. And eventually the resistance dissipated.
So I am in a similar place once again. Now the hard work begins—the court and spark, the cajoling, the sweet talking. Come on, baby, give me a chance. I’m all yours…
From the wall of green glass in my studio
During a time when I am still sitting in the silence—in the thinking and feeling rather than the doing, making, manifesting—my thoughts have been drawn to examples of significant disruptions in the flow of artistic output. Not just my own, but others.
Probably the standout example from the recent past that is pointed to most frequently (and which I have written about here previously) is the painter Philip Guston. In the early 1970s his work turned rather quickly from a career of lyrical abstraction to the caricatured world of goons, rednecks and Klansmen, a Southern version of a Mad Maxian nightmare. He said he wanted to “paint things as if one had never seen them before, as if one had come from another planet…to paint as a cave man would.” I was a young painter at the time, and the shock of that shift is one of my most salient memories of reoriented response to an artist whose earlier work I adored.
Thoughts about this radical shift were prompted by reading a Ken Johnson review in the New York Times of a current show of his drawings at the Morgan Library. (An excerpt of that review is posted on Slow Painting today.) According to the review, Guston stopped painting in 1966 and did nothing but draw for two years. He wanted to “clear the decks.”
Although it took me years, I did finally come to terms with Guston’s last phase (he died in 1980.) I “came to terms” in the sense that I spent hours looking at his work and reading what he wrote about it. At a retrospective of his work at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge several years ago, I watched several documentaries made about this shift, and the evolution came to make more sense to me. As Johnson states in his review of this phase of Guston’s output, “suddenly all the ideas and preoccupations that abstraction had no use for come pouring out.”
I’m not contemplating a shift in my own work of that magnitude, but I do feel a sea change that is still unnamed and more inchoate than clear. Unlike Guston, I do not have a sense that there are ideas and preoccupations that my life long interest in non-representationalism cannot hold. But Guston’s willingness to “go naked” and follow where his sensibilities led regardless is an extraordinary gesture of guts. Overidentification with a particular aesthetic, technique or process results in the same troubles that we encounter in our psyches when we overidentify with our own story, our highly subjective (and usually painfully inaccurate) sense of who we think we are. As the spiritual traditions advise, achieving wisdom means you have to give up your story, your safe concept of what reality is. The wisdom path demands that you start the day by breaking yourself apart. Then the next morning, you wake up and break yourself apart again.
To all this I say yes. Notwithstanding, this passage about Guston’s earlier work, written by Lawrence Weschler in his book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, still rings true for what a great piece of art does for me:
I remember one time, for instance, seeing this small Philip Guston hanging next to a large James Brooks. Now, the Brooks was a big painting on every scale: it had five major shapes in it — a black shape, a reed, a green — big areas, big shapes, with strong, major value changes, hue changes. Next to it was this small painting, with mute pinks and greys and greens, very subtle. It was one of those funny little Guston kind of scrumbly paintings, a very French kind of painting…[m]y discovery was that from 100 yards away — this was just one of those little breakthroughs — that from this distance of 100 yards, I looked over, and that godd*mned Guston… Now, I’m talking not on quality, and not on any assumption of what you like or don’t like, but on just pure strength, which was one of the things we were into. Strength was a big word in abstract expressionism; you were trying to get power into the painting, so that the painting really vibrated, had life to it. It wasn’t just colored shapes sitting flat. It had to do with getting a real tension going in the thing, something that made the thing really stand up and hum… Well, that godd*mned Guston just blew the Brooks right off the wall.
Luc Tuymans’ paintings have an atmosphere all their own. They stand out whenever I have seen them on display, with that signatory diluted palette and the painterly, brushstroked surface. His content is usually identifiable and yet the paintings have a mystery to them that makes them feel more aligned to non-representational work. Although much younger than Gerhard Richter, the giant of German contemporary painting, Tuymans shares similarities with Richter (another artist whose work I adore) in the way he uses photographs as source material, the cropping of images and the highlightly of subject matter that is often, on the surface, rather mundane.
Tuymans has achieved that rarefied success in the international art world that is reserved for a select few. I have seen his work on display in museums and galleries everywhere–Europe, Asia, Australia, the United States. So it is rather interesting that he agreed to conduct a version of the “Joshua Bell playing in the subway” experiment in his home town of Antwerp. (A description and link to the video are posted on Slow Painting.)
While the design of the “experiment” that anonymousizes great art or music in public spaces can be criticized, the issue of art and context is still relevant. And the visibility of these stagings with the likes of a Joshua Bell and a Luc Tuymans may shift what we as mere pedestrians on a city street expect. I’d like to think that more people have been opened up to the possibility of seeing and hearing a moment of greatness outside the context of a concert hall or gallery.
A third posting from Jack Anders’ essay…this section explores Galvin’s poetics in more detail. I particularly like Anders’ line—”poetry always tries to show raw flux in frozen form”:
In any event, in X, all revolves around the elemental subject matter which is the end of the marriage. Each poem represents an effort to embrace the following paradox: how to be true to the emotional situation which is uncontrolled, and at the same time, somehow show formal control. It is, in a sense, just a more extreme example of one of the basic situations of poetry, since poetry always tries to show raw flux in frozen form.
The process can be therapeutic. As Galvin said in an interview regarding X, “Most art springs from anxiety in the artist,” however, “If you take some source of anxiety and formalize it, it makes it more bearable, not less bearable.” In the same interview, Galvin also explains that X is “a book about getting to a certain point in my life when I realize many of the things I believed in turned out not to be true.” You can hear the pain and anger still simmering in his comment. Then he adds, regarding the title of the book, that is concerns “the cancellation, the mathematical unknown, the betrayal.” Here, you can see his mind trying to formalize, capture in form, in language, the emotions. (This is typical of good poets, that even in their casual speech, you can see their poetics at work).
Poetic form is necessary in order to bridge the gap between writer and reader. Although I may have powerful feelings inside of me, because you are a separate person, if I am just standing facing you, you may have no sense of my feelings. To get my feelings (or my intuitions, or my thoughts), over to you, I must use language, communication. That language is an agreed-upon code. Form is the laws of that code. More generally, poetic form is the laws that allow me to capture and transpose the feelings within me, out onto neutral turf, out onto the white slate of the poem—where potentially if all goes well, you can come along and read it and feel those feelings in you. This space between me and you, where the poem is, is exceedingly mysterious. My self has ended there. I am dead there: it is dead air, past my being, past the limit of my self. Somehow, though, form gets the job done. Form does not make the poem a living thing in itself, but does make it an artifact excreted by my life, which your life can pick up on. Poetic form is thus a vehicle for the movement of messages between two lives, through the entire abyss of nothingness and death. This might help explain the pull of poetry for some of us: every successful poem, whether it’s one you write or one you read, is a movement of life across death, a reincarnation of sorts. But form is necessary to make this transference possible.
Galvin appears to agree with the traditional notion of poetry as a communication in this way. He says in one interview, “The idea of writing poetry is making a connection with others or nature that starts from a personal place.” Ideally in his poems he seeks a double connection. His best poems connect both with the raw landscape around him, and with us, the readers, fellow humanity, at the same time. His best poems have two directions in this way. It is again a traditional poetics, which certainly can be seen in the Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, who sought to connect both to nature and other people. Galvin adds, “Love is a part of nature and it is often a reflection of nature. . .”
So in a poem such as the following, we see the double movement, toward the landscape, and toward other people:
A score of years ago I felled a hundred pines to build a house.
Two stories, seven rooms in all.
I built my love a home.
Our
daughter was in orbit in the womb.
(“Depending on the Wind”).
There is a connection here between the poet and the “hundred pines” which make up nature; and, a second connection, between the poet and his wife and coming daughter.
In another poem, he sings a lonely cowboy lament, the “cowboy poetry” sense of the piece enhanced by the throwback form, with its ballad a/b/a/b stanzas:
What did you expect
Threadbare me to do
With nothing to deflect
The gale of your remove?
The scanty sacred secret
Tries to thumb a ride
Through drubbed, irresolute,
And famously slippery light.
Like a spooky spark from an anvil
The sun makes a teary streak
Across the almost tranquil,
Which is the almost bleak.
What is threadbare me to do
When wind cleaves your summer dress
To almost all of you?
(“Dear Nobody’s Business”).
I think what makes a poem like this inherently dramatic is the sense that what we have here is the spectacle of a man who would rather be reticent, spilling his guts. Since he has always been a poet who mines his subject matter from his own everyday life, he has no choice but write about the breakup. To avoid the subject would be to betray his own poetic. But in a sense he’d rather not talk about it, it makes him uncomfortable, because the content is so private. He has no mastery over the content: she left him, not the other way around. And, since he does not use irony, he cannot deploy that most basic of emotional shields. So he is left vulnerable and exposed, but at the same time, his basic character is that of a pretty tough, self-reliant guy. So in these poems it is fascinating to watch this dramatic dynamic unfold:
Stars leak mixed feelings
Over sheet lightning’s weft of echoes.
You, I can’t get over your shoulder blades,
Like music from the center of the earth.
I want to live happily.
You can have the ever and the after.
You are quite life-like, but you can’t fool me.
I know the unearthly when I die from it.
I’m not talking about the body’s mutable components—
I’m not talking.
Look— wild irises, like every spring,
In the salacious green of Dirty Woman Creek
(“Wild Irises on Dirty Woman Creek”).
Here, the vanished and remembered lover-figure mixes in with and unites with the surrounding landscape. The poem could be viewed as a rumination on how place names come to be. The tone and thought-direction shifts in every line, reflecting the stress of the form fighting its way through rough feelings, “mixed feelings,” as the poem says. The voice changes registers from one moment to the next, from the common talk idiom of “you can’t fool me” to the highfalutin sound of “the body’s mutable components.” The voice here and elsewhere combines a kind of cowboy plainspokenness, with weird words and vectors one imagines have been picked up over years of kicking around the U. of Iowa English Department. The tone is somewhat spooky because the more highfalutin effects sound like echoes of Jorie herself, of his long immersion in her mind, looking at drafts of her poems, etc., over their long marriage. Again, there is nary a whiff of irony. He protects himself through break-off and change-up. The roughness of the emotions causes the learned mind to react by going back down to basics and elementals in an effort to figure it out, resolve and get through it:
Being in love isn’t about being happy.
Here’s a good idea: let’s live some more.
After bad things happen we always live
A little more. Good timing, bad timing,
The people against me were probably right:
You can’t step in front of the same bus twice.
From here on out, honesty’s its own
Intelligence, which may, or may not involve
Philosophy. Try to understand
The world, and leave the mind to darkness where
It thrives. Werner Herzog, for example, says
The mind is a room, better dimly lit
For livable ambiance, some lively music
For habitability — than floodlit, mute
For self-knowledge — a bogus notion, anyway.
According to the quarterback from Cedar
Rapids, Iowa, Jesus is a
Football fan, without whose intervention
The Rams could not have won the Super Bowl.
Aren’t you ashamed at refusing love
Like an hors d’oeuvre (outside the work — which was?).
Love’s not love until it’s lost, and then
You write a corybantic poem about it.
That’s what you think. What I think — what do I think?
I think the house we lived in wept itself
All the way down. I think forgiveness mirrors
Facetious animals at play: horseplay.
Horse-sense, more what we aspire to —
Remains the province of the horses, no?
(“Winter Solstice Full Moon at Perigee”).
The poem here reads like a direct address by the poet to himself which then morphs into a direct address to Jorie, especially in the line, “You write a corybantic poem about it” followed by “That’s what you think.” (By the way, the dictionary definition of “corybantic” is “wild; frenzied; uncontrolled”). The string of particulars in the poem shows a poet who is very efficient at using and in a natural way true to the data of his daily life, i.e., what one would expect to be the stuff of the day-to-day life of a ranch nut who also happens to be a writing teacher at Iowa: remembered quotes from the German arthouse film director Herzog and the local quarterback on the sports page. This mix of high and low is appealing and feels American, in the best sense, melting-pot, unstratified.
This is a continuation of the essay by Jack Anders as posted below. In this section he contrasts the metaphysical and mystical qualities of Graham’s exquisite poem San Sepolcro with one of her more recent works. The distinctions he identifies ring true for me.
Anders then moves his focus more specifically to poems written by James Galvin in response to the end of his 25 year marriage to Graham. He calls up another famous poet pairing, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, to provide an alternate point of view around the subject of loss of a relationship, in this case due to death rather than divorce.
As the focus shifts from Graham’s poetic evolution to the pain of lost love, I’m still on board with Anders’ meandering tour of the poetic landscape, his own middle-ground perhaps. His reference to “two very craft-attentive, experienced poets confronting a loss-void that is so large that their craft and experience starts to sear and crumple as they approach and enter it” is deeply poignant. As he continues, I found parallels with my own artistic struggles on several levels: “Craft and voice get stretched to the breaking point, but because both of them go against the void in such a brave, straight-ahead manner, the results are brave and straight-ahead, regardless of whether the voice makes it through the fire with its form intact, or gets destroyed on the shoals of uncontrolled, formally unharnessed feeling.”
Now let’s compare part of one of Jorie’s more recent poems:
Up, up you go, you must be introduced.
You must learn belonging to (no-one)
Drenched in the white veil (day)
The circle of minutes pushed gleaming onto your finger.
Gaps pocking the brightness where you try to see in.
Missing: corners, fields,
completeness: holes growing in it where the eye looks hardest.
Below, his chest, a sacred weightless place
and the small weight of your open hand on it.
And these legs, look, still yours, after all you’ve done with them.
Explain the six missing seeds.
Explain muzzled.
Explain tongue breaks thin fire in eyes.
Learn what the great garden-(up, up you go)-exteriority, exhales . . .
(from “Underneath (9)”).
Yes, this is very cutting-edge in style. Yes, it is daring. But it feels like some heart of subject matter, connection to the inner and outer worlds, has been lost. It’s like the camera is taking pictures of itself instead of the outside world. I think this kind of deterioration of style might reflect a gradual alienation from the landscape around (and in) this poet. The poem feels too abstract, too gauzy. The parentheticals might in theory be markings of a superior authenticity on the part of the poet, indicating explicitly her second-guesses, her questionings – but is it a pleasure to read? And before you say “that is a vulgar test for a poem, whether it gives pleasure,” remember, I got that test from Wallace Stevens. The poem feels if anything too urban, urbane. It is strung out up in some stratosphere of post-post-everything sophistication. It smells too bookish. At the same time, while it looks at the land, it does so in a contextless way that is too abstract. It gives us glimpses of outer landscape that are only like photos of blank dirt, blank sky. The poems feels at once too close and too far. One might argue that she has somehow become alienated from the middle-ground of her own life, the life around her, and so she is focusing too much on stuff she has read in books, and images seen through books, through the eyes of other authors. There is no solid comfortable middle-focus, no clear scene of her family life, her daily life. She is recording an authentic existential state, no doubt; but is it fun to read? (In the Stevensian sense). My sense is that the collapse of her marriage to Galvin is somehow related to the problems we seem to find in her later poems. It will be interesting to see how her style changes now that she is living back on the east coast, teaching at Harvard.
The breakup was clearly intensely painful to Galvin. Unlike Graham, who may have been, as I speculate, in some way misplaced there, the Iowa and Wyoming region is Galvin’s home ground and where he has lived his whole life. That landscape is without a doubt the right place for him to be and a natural source of subject matter for his own writing. Which means the marriage may well have been more organic, more of a “right” situation, to him, right up to the end even, than it may have been to her—because she may have been more displaced from the landscape. This also means the breakup might have hurt him and shocked him more than it did her. Indeed, to discern from the poems below, she was the active instigator of the rupture. It comes as no surprise that the poetry book, X, he wrote after the breakup, shows searing personal marks of loss and anguish. The effect is like Clint Eastwood in a grizzled cowboy role, when some tragic thing finally touches him too deeply and he finally opens up, softens and breaks down with raw, nonironic emotion:
So out of love with life am I
No future will have me.
. . .
Where once I was not alone, now each
closed door is panic, and spaces grow immense with memory, like
shadows at dusk,
. . .
You are in love with
someone else
. . .
Now I don’t care what you do.
I’ve seen your worst at its best.
. . .
How many times did you kiss me
Without meaning it?
(from X).
Ouch! This is a remarkably direct breakup-voice. It hearkens back to James Wright in its rawness, its refusal (or constitutional incapability) to become shielded behind irony. It also reminds us of the poems of Donald Hall when he lost his wife Jane Kenyon, not to divorce but to death. The tonality in Galvin’s grief is different, obviously, because the circumstances of the loss are different, but the bluntly direct and simple tenor of his expression is like that of Hall when Hall wrote such lines as:
Back home from the grave,
behind my desk I made
a gallery of Janes.
. . .
Your presence in this house
is almost as enormous
and painful as your absence.
. . .
we lived in a small island stone nation
without color under gray clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls
or palm trees without vegetation
or animal life only barnacles and lead
colored moss that darkened when months did
(from “Without”).
Whether mourning, reminiscing, or raving, the spectacle is amazing, and similar, in both Hall and Galvin as you watch two very craft-attentive, experienced poets confronting a loss-void that is so large that their craft and experience starts to sear and crumple as they approach and enter it. Craft and voice get stretched to the breaking point, but because both of them go against the void in such a brave, straight-ahead manner, the results are brave and straight-ahead, regardless of whether the voice makes it through the fire with its form intact, or gets destroyed on the shoals of uncontrolled, formally unharnessed feeling. With James Wright, for example, yes, sometimes he goes down in a blaze of sentimentality, mush, gush, maudlinity, howling, etc. But you still respect his bravery. I have the same respect for the efforts of Hall to confront the loss of his wife and of Galvin to confront the end of his long marriage. The risk-taking is inspiring, as they try to write their way through the emotional chaos, even if, as each might say, it is not bravery because they had no choice.
I am in awe of Jorie Graham’s gifts as a poet. But although I have spent time powering through her later poems, they haven’t captured me with the same breathless wonder that her earlier work evokes.
As an artist, I feel uncomfortable when this happens. It’s the art maker’s creed–we want everyone to respond most to our latest work, that latest culmination of our experience and know how. Old work is viewed with honor, but new work…well, it gets all the love.
The fact is, new work can cause a kind of inebriation. Lots of artists have taken wrong turns, missed the mark, had to backtrack. I know some who ended up leaving one audience behind and having to find another. In the moment of making, it is hard, very hard, to be objective about where you are being taken with your work.
Not that Jorie Graham isn’t clear about where she is headed. The issue here is the willingness to say, straight up, I feel my connection in the earlier work.
In an essay by Jack Anders on Mipoesias about a volume of poetry by James Galvin titled X, I found a tie in to my own vague dissatisfaction with Graham’s poetic evolution. I was also heartened that he uses one of my favorite Graham poems as an example of her early style— San Sepolcro is a lush and powerful work. Anders’ essay is very rich and deeply personal on so many levels. It is a bit long so I’m going to break up these extracts into a few separate posts so that the length doesn’t make the read too daunting. Stay with it, he’s plumbing a primal vein here.
James Galvin was married to Jorie Graham for about 25 years, until they broke up in 2000. That’s a long time, a long marriage. Maybe the breakup was in some sense organic to their overall relationship, or potentially inevitable, because they are a study in contrasts. Galvin is less the critical theorist, less the highbrow. He wants to derive his ethic from chopping wood, not reading Merleau-Ponty. Graham, however, as anyone who has read one of her interviews or essays knows, revels in the intersection between critical theory, philosophy, and poetry, and can talk a high-powered blue streak in that regard. (Galvin noted this personality difference in one comment at a reading when they were still married: “I live with a woman with more firepower upstairs than anyone I know. I just try to catch her on the curves.”). Graham is much more urbane, much more a city poet, and in some ways more European than American (she was born in Europe). She is more influenced by postmodern, deconstructionist and post-structuralist critical theory, which has heavy roots in urban European intellectual culture (figures such as Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Barthes). She does spend time in her poems musing on the countryside, raw nature, but her bookishness and interest in critical theory makes her, for me, a more urban than country poet.
In fact, I am tempted to go further, and extrapolate that the decline one sees in her poetry over the last decade or so might track in some arcane way whatever decline it was in the marriage that ultimately led to the divorce. Of course I know neither person so I am just speculating. But I have myself been in a bad marriage before where I loved the other person very much but just ended up hurting her, and I know that it had a straining, paining, scattering effect on my writing. If you compare a later to an earlier poem by Jorie you see in the earlier poems a clear seductive presentation of sensory particulars and true mystery and wonder. Whereas in the later poems you see this sort of corrosive doubting and imbrication, or rubbing, of the doubt-notations, right into the text (all the parentheticals and italics we see in the later poems), in a way that becomes (I would argue) confusing and depressing for the reader. Between her earlier and later poems, some sense of pleasure, some “jouissance” to use the French word, has been lost. For example, look at this earlier Jorie poem:
In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to. This
is my house,
my section of Etruscan
wall, my neighbor’s
lemontrees, and, just below
the lower church,
the airplane factory.
A rooster
crows all day from mist
outside the walls.
There’s milk on the air,
ice on the oily
lemonskins. How clean
the mind is,
holy grave. It is this girl
by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into
labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before
the birth of god. No one
has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
line—bodies
and wings—to the open air
market. This is
what the living do: go in.
It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity
to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
is a button
coming undone, something terribly
nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.
(“San Sepolcro”).
This is a dark, sunny, scary, seductive poem, with brilliant sensory particulars in such fine details as “milk on the air” and “ice on the oily lemonskins.” The metaphysical, mystical core of the poem is like a lizard that flicks just out of reach beyond your eyesight – there is a delicious sense of a mystery that has been invoked but not defined, touched but not imprisoned. It is a subtle effect also found in some of Ashbery’s best poems. In her earlier poems Jorie shows true orphic fire sometimes, by saying more than she knows, like the old Greek Delphic oracles through whom spoke the gods even they could not fathom. By opening up a mystery, her best earlier poems counteract nihilism. “San Sepolcro” is also a poem which is referring back to European memories, Italian landscapes, and further, to European art history. I could argue that the basic voice and sensibility one finds in this poem, is not necessarily a voice and a sensibility that is going to translate well into and be entirely happy and at home living in Iowa or Kansas. There is just something too chic, sophisticated and to my mind, European about it.
My work has a close relationship to landscape, but it is not a direct one. People often talk about a certain place and say something like, “It is so beautiful, you really can’t capture it in a photograph.” What is it that can’t be captured by a representational process like photography? What exists beyond the ocularcentric view? Some people look “on” or look “at” an object or landscape, but I am trying to look “into.” It’s like getting into the landscape and then viewing it from within.
Coupled with this line of thought is my ongoing curiosity about how the body plays out in the various manifestations of creative exploration. I’ve been haunted for days by the image from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Unbeliever”, by way of Bunyan, of sleeping on top of a mast (see my posting below from April 30th). This image plays out on so many levels–conscious, creative, sexual, spiritual.
One of the books that addresses some of these same concerns is Earth-Mapping by Edward S. Casey. (He has written several other books–Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, and Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps–all of which I would like to explore as well.) I’m not even half way through Earth Mapping, but his themes are so in line with many of the ideas that have been threading in and out of my consciousness and my work lately.
Casey writes about leading earth artists like Robert Smithson (who created the Spiral Jetty, a personal favorite) as well as how the earth and landscape play an elemental role in the work of abstract artists like Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. He also addresses the concept of the body and its primal role in that landscape/abstraction connection.
I’ll write more about this topic as I continue my careful progress through the pages of Casey’s book. In the meantime, here is an excerpt that gives a taste of his point of view:
The lived body is at stake throughout. It is the means of being in touch with the earth, whether the actual earth of an actual scene, the imaginary earth of non-representational landscape, or the virtual earth explored by the viewer’s phantom body. The lived body is what affords a “feel” for a given landscape, telling us how it is to be there, how it is to know one’s way around in it. Such a body is at once the organ and the vehicle of the painted or constructed map, the source of “knowing one’s way about,” thus of knowing how we can be said to be acquainted with a certain landscape. This landscape need not be our own; nor need it be the land east of Aix or the fields around St. Remy. As re-presented to us as viewers, the painted or drawn or sculpted map of the landscape allows—invites, indeed sometimes demands—our lived body to enter into intimate accord with the configurations of its smooth space. In this way, we come to know this landscape from within the terms of its own re-presentation. Knowing it by means of this re-incarnate knowing is the root of all subsequent representational knowing; it is the way by which we realize our kinship with the landscape itself. Thanks to the re-presentation—the presentation again of this landscape—we sense just how intimately linked we are with and in this re-implaced earth-world, how much our very “thrownness” is attuned, in mood, with the flesh of the world that we come to know in our own flesh as the world’s flesh.
I’ve been in my studio all week, doing very little in the way of art making. In my vigil of just sitting, I have pondered this question: How is it that a juicy, lush stream of creative expression can dry up and disappear overnight? What is the fragile chemistry of the brain or the body (or both) that is unkiltered by grief and suffering?
Sometimes sorrow can bring on an outpouring of expression. The number of exquisite poems birthed from the fractured shards of a broken heart is not insignificant. At the same time, I know of artists and writers who have gone lights out for years because of a deep loss.
The question feels more rhetorical than answerable. But thinking about it so much has led to research, and the exploration of its rational/scientific manifestation is a kind of palliative distraction.
Here’s an interesting extract I found in the Harvard Gazette. The work of Alice Flaherty, a neurologist at Harvard and the author of The Midnight Disease, is featured in this piece:
The notion of muse as a “divine voice” or an inspiration from some ethereal source intrigues Flaherty. But for her, writing, and not being able to write when you want to, come from interactions between and changes in specific areas of the brain. The muse, in other words, is merely a matter of making the right brain connections.
The limbic system, a ring-shaped cluster of cells deep in the brain, provides the emotion push. Many nerve fibers connect it to the temporal lobes, areas behind the ears that understand words and give rise to ideas. Finally, the frontal lobe, behind your forehead, serves as a critical organizer and editor, penciling out bad phrases and ideas.
“It’s likely that writing and other creative work involve a push-pull interaction between the frontal and temporal lobes,” Flaherty speculates. If the temporal lobe activity holds sway, an aspiring scribe may turn out 600 logorrheic pages. If the temporal lobes are restrained by frontal lobe changes, the result might be pinched and timid.
Most academics regard the study of creativity as what Flaherty calls “intellectually unhygienic…”
In planning are more cerebral tests that would rely on brain scans to show actual differences in brain activity when the muse is rampant and when it hits a wall. If Flaherty’s theory is correct, brain cells in the temporal and frontal lobes should crackle with different patterns of activity.
Another technique that may influence as well as map the paths of creative activity involves passing a magnetic wand over the heads of people. Called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), it has increased creativity when applied to the frontal lobes in preliminary studies at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
“Such testing should give us information, never available before, about what goes on in the brain during creativity, and what doesn’t go on when it’s blocked.” Flaherty notes…
What about people who believe they have something to say but can’t get it out? Traditional remedies like alcohol, or sticking to the task even when nothing is flowing are not going to break the block. “Repeatedly failing at the same attempt is probably a frontal lobe malfunction that makes it hard for someone to give up a faulty strategy,” Flaherty says. “This condition is best treated by taking a break.” John Keats, the English poet, treated his writer’s block by stopping and getting dressed in his best clothes.
I quite like that phrase, “intellectually unhygienic”. But I’ll take my chances.
And as for Keats’ solution, maybe I’ll give the haberdashery cure a try…