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Friedrich Nietzsche
Bodies. Language. Expression. Metaphors. Meaning. That’s a list of issues that most people who make things think about. A lot.
A recent article from the Boston Globe written by Drake Bennett touches on a lot of these themes, particularly how metaphor both comes from and impacts the way we think.
Here’s a sampling:
Philosophers have long wondered about the connection between metaphor and thought, in ways that occasionally presaged current-day research. Friedrich Nietzsche scornfully described human understanding as nothing more than a web of expedient metaphors, stitched together from our shallow impressions of the world. In their ignorance, he charged, people mistake these familiar metaphors, deadened from overuse, for truths. “We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers,” he wrote, “and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things–metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”
Like Nietzsche, George Lakoff…and Mark Johnson…see human thought as metaphor-driven. But, in the two greatly influential books they have co-written on the topic, “Metaphors We Live By” in 1980 and “Philosophy in the Flesh” in 1999, Lakoff and Johnson focus on the deadest of dead metaphors, the ones that don’t even rise to the level of cliche. They call them “primary metaphors,” and they group them into categories like “affection is warmth,” “important is big,” “difficulties are burdens,” “similarity is closeness,” “purposes are destinations,” and even “categories are containers.”
Rather than so much clutter standing in the way of true understanding, to Lakoff and Johnson these metaphors are markers of the roots of thought itself. Lakoff and Johnson’s larger argument is that abstract thought would be meaningless without bodily experience. And primary metaphors, in their ubiquity (in English and other languages) and their physicality, are some of their most powerful evidence for this.
I am left with a sense of the inescapable and blindingly transparent nature of these deep connections between language, thinking, concepts, perception. What is easier to trace in the realm of spoken language has its parallels in visual language as well. It’s just harder to track. But that is all part of the mystery and the endlessly provocative nature of making.
Large Reclining Nude, by Henri Matisse. Baltimore Museum of Art, Cone Collection
When I first came to the east coast from California all those many years ago, there were two museums outside of New York City I was determined to see right away. The Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania was at the top of the list. The second was the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The experience of seeing the work at both of these venues was as monumental and memorable as I had hoped. For fin de siècle art lovers, these two collections are a feast of extraordinary proportions.
So it was with nostalgia that I again sat in the world’s largest collection of works by Matisse in this, the least likely of cities. Or so it seems to me, since I have now come to equate Baltimore, Maryland primarily and foremost as the setting for the greatest TV drama every produced, The Wire. But in spite of its struggle with rampant inner city poverty and problems, it is city that was once lucky enough to have been the home town of the infamous Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta. Their compulsive collecting, at times brilliant and at times just downright odd, resulted in the largest donation of art the Baltimore Museum had ever received, and ever will. Some of my all-time favorite Matisse paintings—like The Blue Nude and Large Reclining Nude—were purchased by these two passionately devoted, self-styled collectors.
I was particularly struck by a display documenting the creation of Large Reclining Nude. Matisse sent photographs to Etta Cone as this painting progressed, and the over 10 very different renderings are an insightful study in the way a painting works its way into its final form. Clearly Matisse had a marketer’s mind since Etta bought the painting when it was finally finished, deeply invested as she was in its creation. (This “buy in” approach of endearing one’s children to non-family members has a history of success as well.)
As effortlessly as Matisse’s paintings can look to the viewer’s eye, this graphic evolution demonstrates how much hard work is actually involved in getting to what appears effortless and easy. It is frequently necessary, says Matisse, to “put your work back on the anvil twenty times.”
And more specifically, in Matisse’s words:
Each picture as I finish it, seems like the best thing I have ever done…and yet after a while I am not so sure. It is like taking a train to Marseille. One knows where one wants to go. Each painting completed is like a station—just so much nearer the goal. The time comes when the painter is apt to feel he has at last arrived. Then, if he is honest, he realizes one of two things—either than he has not arrived after all or that Marseille…is not where he wanted to go anyway, and he must push farther on.
Destinations that, as soon as they are reached, are no longer The Destination. That might sound like a portrait of hell on earth to anyone who is goal oriented, measuring results through arrivals, completions and column checks. But for makers like me, that’s just the way it works. I think we like to be on a journey with the destination TBD.
Richard Tuttle, artist and wisdom worker
From time to time I have observed how protracted, focused work in the studio can leave me feeling a particular kind of tightness. It could be described as a slow motion contraction that has moved me away from that elemental sense of expansion and playfulness that should always be present.
This proclivity can be remedied by a number of techniques, and here’s one to add to my list: The San Francisco MOMA has assembled a cache of video interviews with or about Richard Tuttle, any of which take me right back to the reason I started making art in the first place. Whether he is talking about his small work or his use of language, Tuttle is the best human reminder of what is magical, enchanting and beguiling about making something out of nothing. In one of these short video clips he says, “Art is a kind of food, a food for the spirit”. Just hearing him say that, with no pretension, artifice or posturing, moved my set point higher, wider, lighter.
And referencing my post from two days ago, I think of Tuttle as an episodic narrativist–his is a wild adventuresomeness with an overarching connection to meaning. And yes, happy endings.
BTW, I’ve written about Tuttle a lot on this blog over the years since he is one of my all time favorite artists. For a listing of those postings, go here.
Photo: Richard Tuttle
Thanks to my friend David Novak for alerting me to this link.
Howard Zinn
Some of my favorite advice for living came through Howard Zinn by way of The Impossible Will Take a Little While, a collection of essays about and by people who did not give up even though the deck was stacked against them. To paraphrase the outspoken, truth-wielding Zinn, he says you have to wake up in the morning with hope because if you aren’t hopeful, then there isn’t any. Zinn is pragmatic as well. He advises that if you have friends who are depressed and discouraged, then you just better get some new ones.
In the spirit of Zinn’s advice, It is refreshing to read about something positive in the arts, which is exactly what the blog Creative Destruction did with its coverage of a recent meeting of arts leaders held in Michigan. Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center and the turnaround artist behind Alvin Ailey Dance Theater’s resuscitation was the keynote speaker. In spite of the economy and draconian budget cuts for the arts, the meeting attendees seemed upbeat and hopeful.
This is from Creative Destruction’s report:
Kaiser, known for his book, “The Art of the Turnaround”, offered three primary ideas to stave off disaster: Don’t cut funding for the artistic product, don’t cut marketing, and plan really INTERESTING projects which might take several years to accomplish. Donors will support bigger, interesting ideas more than little, boring ones, but big ideas need time to get funding in place and to capture the public imagination. His four-word mantra: great art, well marketed…Have the courage to be creative, daring and interesting because tepid art isn’t worth the price of admission, and in a down market no one will spend money to come to something that isn’t compelling. For all your budget woes, continue to market aggressively and innovatively because potential audiences won’t come if they don’t know about your art and potential donors won’t give if they don’t care about your institution. Even in times like these it’s ok to think big, but give yourself time to succeed.
Advice well suited for organizations as well as individuals.
I’m on my way to New York City for a weekend full of the best kind of distractions—a book reading of The Enthusiast by college chum Charlie Haas (a very funny and endearing book that both my partner David and I loved, something that doesn’t happen often), tea at Lady Mendl’s in Gramercy Park, the Francis Bacon show at the Met, a Bill T. Jones/Jason Moran performance in Harlem and spending time with lots of old friends from back in the day. Full circling, to be sure.
And in that spirit, here’s yet another great passage from Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes the World:
One of Picasso’s favorite assignments for a young artist was to have him or her try to draw a perfect circle. It can’t be done; everyone draws a circle with some particular distortion, and that distorted circle is “your” circle, an insight into “your” style. “Try to make the circle as best you can. And since nobody before you has made a perfect circle, you can be sure that your circle will be completely your own. Only then will you have a chance to be original.” The deviations from the idea give an insight into the style, and thus, Picasso says, “from errors one gets to know the personality.”
This, then, is the sense in which an artist both works with accidents yet creates work in which “there are no accidents.” “Accidents, try to change them—it’s impossible. The accident reveals man.” With Picasso as with Jung and Freud, accidents point to the concealed portion of the man or woman to whom they happened.
Ancient or modern, then, one continuing line of thought holds that accidents break the surface of our lives to reveal hidden purpose or design. The carefully interwoven structures of thought and social practice provide stability and structure, but they bring a kind of blindness and supidity, too. Gifts of Hermes tear little holes in those fabrics to offer us brief intelligence in other realms.
A few more thoughts gleaned from the Guggenheim show, The Third Mind. This show was as closely aligned to my view of artmaking as any other exhibit I’ve ever seen. The experience is still reverberating for me several days later.
Here are some provocative words from two giants, John Cage and Philip Guston.
We learned from Oriental thought that those divine influences are, in fact, the environment in which we are. A sober and quiet mind is one in which the ego does not obstruct the fluency of things that come in through the senses and up through one’s dreams. Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
–John Cage
Art is not self expression but self alteration.
–John Cage
Look at any inspired painting. It’s like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.
–Philip Guston
To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortion. Clear the way for something else—a condition which…resists analysis—and probably this is as it should be.
–Philip Guston
Balancing intuition against sensory information, and sensitivity to one’s self against pragmatic knowledge of the world, is not a stance unique to artists. The specialness of artists is the degree to which these precarious balances are crucial backups for their real endeavor. Their essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse’s neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again. When they find that they have ridden and ridden – maybe for years, full tilt – in what is for them a mistaken direction, they must unearth within themselves some readiness to turn direction and gallop off again. They may spend a little time scraping off the mud, resting the horse, having a hot bath, laughing and sitting in candlelight with friends. But in the back of their minds they never forget that the dark, driving run is theirs to make again. They need their balances in order to support their risks. The more they develop an understanding of all their experiences – the more it is at their command – the more they carry with them into the whistling wind.
–Anne Truitt, from Daybook
This has been a quote I have paraphrased to others so many times that it became a litany. It struck me deeply the first time I read Truitt’s book 25 years ago. But you know how a story or a memory takes on a life of its own over time, and I recently realized I needed to reconnect with her original words to make sure I was remembering it properly.
So I began looking for my copy, lovingly marked and highlighted, amid the chaos of books that have been waiting in stacks for over 2 years to be properly ensconced in the new library we have been hoping to build. Using the space that was once the children’s playroom, the plan was to build floor to ceiling shelves designed by my son and arrange the volumes by topic, from art to poetry, ancient megaliths to mythology, fiction to food.
For a series of complex reasons, it has not yet happened. Meanwhile the only access to my books is the randomness of choosing a card from a deck. Sometimes it’s the two of clubs, sometimes a King. But rarely the book you really want or need.
So Whiskey River came to my rescue (once again) and posted the very passage I was looking to reread. Bless you WR for picking up my longing, something you have demonstrated an uncanny ability to do time and time again.
That little tirade of a detour aside (is my frustration too obvious?), I want to return to the passage by Truitt. Her image, “like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse’s neck, peering into a blinding rain” cuts right into the piercing vulnerability of the lonely ride anyone who does their making all alone knows well.
And this line—”the more they develop an understanding of all their experiences – the more it is at their command – the more they carry with them into the whistling wind”—means more to me now than it ever did when I was younger and significantly less seasoned by the acidic marinade bath that is life. Whistling wind, indeed.
I had a conversation yesterday with LP (Lisa the Poet) about speaking the truth whether it be in poetry or in the visual arts. She went to the same lecture by Jenny Saville that I have written about here (although at the time we did not yet know each other) and felt immediately at home as Saville took her audience on a visual tour of many of her haunts for inspiration—the morgue, slaughterhouses, plastic surgery medical files. LP said that Saville was showing us the world and saying in effect, look at these things, really see and accept the reality that is life.
As a non-representational painter, truth speaking takes a different form for my work. But it is still important to me—very important. It feels like this is music written for a different scale, that doesn’t translate over into a 12 tone frame. I was also painfully aware of how difficult it was for me to articulate this distinction in my conversation with LP, something that made me feel the need to pay more attention to what this is.
So I returned to my notes from Saville’s lecture. Here are a few of the jottings I took down that night that may or may not offer insights into this complex but compelling set of issues.
Some excerpts:
Saville said she used text in her earlier works out of desperation. “Writers are more precise.”
Getting out from under the “burden” of painting was important to her. When she started looking at medical images and reading about the body in that detached, scientific way, the “veils of art” were gone. She began a phase where she stopped looking at art and turned to other image making forms to get at the raw state of things.
When matter is out of place, everything changes. That is what she was seeking in her exploration of “monstrous” sized bodies that live outside the norm, or in putting pig intestines in unfamiliar contexts.
Warhol presents icons of violence in a cool and detached way. It is his endless multiplicity of an image that is the violence in his work.
She looks for the in between–a body that is too big, a hermaphrodite, siamese twins, the border between life and death.
Figuration is very problematic. “It is embarrassingly hard to create the reality of human presence.”
* * *
Although not referenced in her lecture, I also found this passage from Umberto Eco’s famous book, A Theory of Semiotics, also fitting for a meditative approach to this topic:
Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else…Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.
More is needed on this, clearly.
View of my studio, looking north
Friend and artist Pam Farrell has invited artists to do a show and tell on her blog. Calling her project Interactive Studio Blog Post–ISBP–Pam now has nearly 10 artists who have participated. Their postings typically feature a work or body of work and an image of their studio.
Pam included some salient quotes from James Elkins about studios and workspaces:
In “What Painting Is”, James Elkins includes a chapter entitled “The Studio as a Kind of Psychosis”.
”Working in a studio means leaving the clean world of normal life and moving into a
shadowy domain where everything bears the marks of the singular obsession.”
Elkins talks about the artists’ studio in terms of the alchemy of art making:
“Alchemy is the best model for this plague of paint, for the
self-imprisonment of the studio and for the allure of insanity.”
For those of you interested in behind-the-scenes art making, it is definitely worth a visit. And for anyone who is a maker who would like to open their own kimono a bit, you can contact Pam directly.
Flower Ben, by Elizabeth Peyton
I have had a long relationship of ambivalence with Elizabeth Peyton’s work. And I’m not alone. As famous as she is–she is a true art world “darling”–there are many like me who cannot find their deep way into her work, to that place where you really feel connected. Sometimes a work will seduce me into engagement (like Flower Ben above), but mostly I am in between.
Some of my artist friends are big fans. But I keep asking myself, what it is about her work that usually keeps me outside of it?
It has a particular flavor of charm, to be sure. A deftness of the hand. And it presents itself as easy, accessible, light. It isn’t dark or brooding, which is its own refreshing change of pace. But I’m on the lookout for art that takes my breath away right there on the spot; the kind that I can feel deep inside, making me dizzy with feelings I can’t describe in words. Being with art you love is like having great sex: It should involve every part of your body, and the feelings should be outside the range of human language.
In the end it is highly subjective, this “like/don’t like” business. But the best part of this in between state is that you get to change your mind. Sometimes that happens all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a potentiality I love having around me.
Regardless of my yes and no regarding Peyton’s work, I did enjoy reading Sebeastian Smee’s review of her current show at the New Museum in New York. I like Smee’s writing. He isn’t afraid to be emotionally exuberant and titillated by what he sees and what he likes. Not one to stand back, he is neither cool nor detached. I find his reviews engaging and fun.
I posted the full Smee review on Slow Painting, but a few excerpts are included here, ones that can be meaningful as stand alone passages:
Elizabeth Peyton attracted attention in the mid-1990s not because her work was any good – that would take years – but because it catered to certain hankerings (for beauty, for human connection, for the rush of infatuation) that up until then the art world had grimly suppressed. People were disproportionately grateful.
***
It’s almost always wonderful when artists dare to be shameless – to go ahead and paint what they want. The trouble was, little of Peyton’s early work rose above the standard of lackluster fashion illustration, or of those saccharine, on-the spot portraits made by street artists in tourist traps.
Still, we can be thankful that she was encouraged by the kind reception extended to her early work, because she has gone on to produce one of the most daring and exquisite oeuvres in contemporary art. I fell completely for Peyton as I ambled through “Live Forever,” the retrospective at the New Museum here, feeling more and more like a mopey, heart-struck teenager every minute.
Many of you will not want to give in to such feelings, deeming them indecently frivolous.
***
In the end, I love the unlikeliness of Peyton’s success. Who would have thought that one of the most acclaimed and closely watched artists of our time would be a young woman who paints small, unabashedly girly portraits in oils on board – pictures that have no tough-guy conceptual underpinning to speak of?
