John Perreault’s popular blog, Artopia, has a recent posting that brings together a disparate variety of themes. Braided into Perreault’s personal ruminations is reference to “Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya”, the aboriginal art show at Grey Gallery (NYU), the “Mandala” show at the Rubin Museum, as well as a discussion of images also on display at the Rubin, “The Red Book of C.G. Jung” (newly released in English.)

On my way to New York to see both the NYU and Rubin shows, I will have more to write about both of these exhibitions when I return. Perreault’s posting is chock full of issues that are worth delving into in more detail, particularly given how boldly Perreault ventures into some controversial (sacrosanct?) territory. So more on this when I return this weekend.

Winner of the “best conversation between an artist and his/her son or daughter”:

My friend George is an artist whose work ranges from representational painting to highly conceptual installation work. He’s extremely facile, but sometimes that range of output can leave his various audiences a bit confused.

After his new body of work was greeted with a bit of a scratch to the head, George wrote to his daughter. Like me, George has produced progeny with a great set of eyes and intelligence as well.

This exchange between them is so heartening and smart, I couldn’t not share it here:

George:
There is some discussion re my ‘new’ paintings. Are they relevant, good? I am talking about work which I have undertaken last week; a rather
non-objective blue painting on white ground…I would be interested in your take on the work…is there is a younger audience who can pick up my message/my paintings?

There is a pressure for me to ‘make sense’ and since i am not writing essays or short stories, i don’t choose to cut myself off OR to try to
describe my ineffable stuff. But maybe your father IS out of touch….

Anne:
The problem is, I’ve got the same taste as you. Of course I think they’re wonderful. I can’t very easily project the thoughts of others.

As for being out of touch. Well. There’s nothing to touch. On that note, perhaps, instead of asking, “are they ineffable?”, you should be asking “are they
ineffable enough?”

George and Anne, back in the day

Ed Moses, Untitled, 1987 (Photo: Sylvia White Gallery)

Moses is a member of that increasingly interesting group of California artists that constellated around the Ferus Gallery scene (along with Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, John Altoon, Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha et al) back in the 60s. He has a new show at the Sylvia White Gallery.

This excerpt is from a new monograph on Moses that accompanies the show. The essay was written by Barbara Haskell (someone I have long admired) with a foreword by Frances Colpitt:

The constants in his work are an emphasis on gesture, on mark-making, and on an intimate connection with his materials. In addition, almost all of Moses’ work has a sense of three-dimensionality to it. One doesn’t just look at an Ed Moses painting: one enters it, almost in the way that one enters the subconscious during meditation. Moses has been a serious student of Tibetan Buddhism for much of his life, and this influence, the sense of living in the moment, is evident in his work. He says it most succinctly: “I don’t visualize and execute. Every breath is brand new. Don’t think of the future, don’t think of the past, the only factor is now.”

I’m still combing the beach of Bly’s small book, A Little Book on the Human Shadow. In some ways this is a sequel to my earlier posting, The Thatness.

Bly is so open about his woundedness, in person and in his poetry. I don’t think I know of another poet who is so unabashedly brought to tears by the intention and influence of poetry and poetry making. Going to a Bly reading is like watching the street fill with water from a high pressure hydrant that has burst open. So no better voice to dig into this issue of shadow than his.

The last chapter of Bly’s book focuses on Wallace Stevens. Sigh. In many ways Bly comes down hard on Stevens’ later work, insisting that the later poems are as “weak as is possible for a genius to write.” His claim is that Stevens, for whatever reason, could not integrate his shadow into his proper, insurance executive, buttoned down self.

Here is Bly’s case:

There are some good poems, but somehow there are no further marriages in his work. Yeats’s work picked up more and more detail as it went on, the sensual shadow began to rise, the instinctual energy throws off its own clown clothes and fills more and more of the consciousness..

Wallace Stevens was not willing to change his way of life…He kept the house fanatically neat, evidently slept in a separate bedroom for thirty or forty years, made his living through the statistical mentality, and kept his business and poetry life separate—all of which amounted to keeping his dominant personality and his shadow personality separate in his daily life.

This willingness to allow life to follow where the art making goes speaks to the two quotes in the post just below as well. There is something undeniably irrevocable about descent, about the willingness to step into the forbidden territory that is the shadow. Bly makes reference to the 17th century theologian and philosopher Jakob Böhme who started one of his books by advising the reader to not go further unless he or she is willing to make real changes in his/her every day life. Otherwise, says Böhme, this book will be bad for you. In fact, dangerous.

Bly as the crotchety old guy he can be, claims that a whole generation of artists have come into being and have never faced this very personal and very particular dilemma. Is it the absence of some serious skin in the game? I see a lot of visual art that has made no demands on the artist’s interior life whatsoever. For this approach to visual expression (and one that is becoming the de rigeur approach of contemporary art pedagogy), the approved loci for work is the detached and depersonalized arena of politics and/or social commentary. My poet friends may have a similar map of how contemporary poetry migrated from where Yeats and others were heading.

No answers here. But the provocations are hefty.

A scanning electron microscope image of a nerve ending. It has been broken open to reveal vesicles (orange and blue) containing chemicals used to pass messages in the nervous system. (Photo: Tina Carvalho)

Sally Reed, friend and artist, left the following quote from Anne Truitt’s Daybook as a comment to the posting below. It is such a powerful concept I couldn’t leave it buried:

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own intimate sensitivity.

That wise and sober counsel is coupled with another sentence that stopped me in my tracks. This came to me by way of Lisa who is friend, poet and fellow traveler into the deeper folds of Elizabeth Bishop’s life and work. Bishop’s biographer Brett C. Millier (Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It) identifies what he considers “may have been the most important single piece of criticism Elizabeth ever received” when Marianne Moore questioned her young protégé about the aesthetic problem of “depth”:

I can’t help wishing you would sometime in some way, risk some unprotected profundity of experience.

One interpretation of this advice is contextual: In the 1930s, Moore was advocating that Bishop turn to the moral and metaphysical Christian critique that was being explored by the philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr. That wasn’t the path that Bishop ended up taking for a number of reasons. But the admonishment as it stands has a powerful call to action. Moore’s phrase, “risk some unprotected profundity of experience” is enough to fill the rest of my day with its implications.

Thanks Sally and Lisa.

Installation view of “Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection,” at the Hirshhorn Museum (Photo: Lee Stalsworth)

I have been a fan of sculptor Anne Truitt’s writing since I read her book Daybook many years ago. First published in 1982, Daybook is Truitt’s personal journal while working at Yaddo, and her insights into the squirrely nature of the creative process spoke to me. Her style is nonlinear and yet insightful, personal and yet not too. When the book came out all those many years ago, there weren’t a lot of witnessings available of how women artists were navigating that behind-the-scenes art making life. There are lots of them now.

Truitt went on to write a few other similarly styled books, like Turn and Prospect. But none had as powerful an impact on me as that initial exposure so many years ago.

Her sculpture was harder for me to connect with. A Truitt was always easy to spot because almost every piece in a public collection is a slender wooden column painted with care and artfulness. Most collections have one. I liked her essential idea—a minimalist, Supremacist project that combines 3D and a feathery fine-tuned sense of color—but my “in the flesh” experience of the work just never held me in awe.

But that all changed when I visited Truitt’s retrospective, “Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection” at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. This is her first major show since the 1970s and includes both paintings and sculpture from her 50 year career. (Truitt died in 2004.) In the literature that accompanies the show (curated by Kristen Hileman), the column sculptures are referred to as Truitt’s “profoundly focused practice. Acting as a painter as well as a sculptor, the artist wrapped color around the corners of these sculptures, creating visually poetic relationships between structure and surface. Throughout her work, she investigated proportion, scale and color, as well as perception and memory.” Profoundly focused practice is a perfect phrase. The work has a meditative, disciplined, higher state of mind quality to it.

This is work that needs to be seen with its full gaggle of siblings. Placeholder pieces, token Truitts, cannot do the job. This is not one-up work. It is a body of art that demands your complete and undivided attention. You need to be able to lift out of the gallery, out of the museum, out of this terrestrially bound existence so that you can levitate in and around these silent, slender plinths, listening for the hum of their ethereal subtlety.

Truitt was a color ecstacist, a superlative neologism that goes beyond the everyday concept of being an ecstatic. At one point she says that the columnar format dominated her efforts to “set color free in three dimensions for its own sake,” a pursuit she saw as “analogous to my feelings for the freedom of my own body and my own being, as if in some mysterious way I felt myself to be color.” That’s the language of spiritual ecstasy, of finding oneness with god. Which in Truitt’s case is the Polychroma itself.

In a video that accompanies the show, Truitt talks about her process of choosing colors. It is like listening to someone channeling in an altered state. I sat and listened to her rapture with a sense of awe and amazement. If you go, take the time to sit and hear what she is saying.

Talking about her extremely minimalist painting series called Arundel, Truitt had this to say:

In these paintings I set forth, to see for myself how they appear, what might be called the tips of my conceptual icebergs in that I put down so little of all that they refer to. I try in them to show forth the forces I feel to be a reality behind, and more interesting than, phenomena.

The reality behind and more interesting than phenomena. That nails it.

From a distance

Closer still

I’ve been in a silent streak these last few days. Is it because the fall is so exceptionally beautiful this year that I am feeling even more speechless than usual? Perhaps. But also I think it is because I’m deep in a dig. This time it is a new curiosity about shadow. You know, that incorrigibly vague term that can mean anything from our darker impulses to that which we cannot see or accept. What I’m looking for is vague but it has something to do with art making, creativity, sourcing, the interior archaeology. That’s about all I know so far.

Robert Bly’s slight volume, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, is a brisk short walk with Bly’s poetic sense on the topic. As is my usual response to Bly, there are times when his take on a thing grabs hold of me with its authenticity and won’t let go, and other times when his flailing just floats out of earshot. The chapter on Wallace Stevens has attached itself to me for several days. He has strong opinions about how my favorite (and extremely complex) poet navigated (or failed to navigate) the shadow in mining his poetic gifts. I’m still sorting through what I’ll keep and what I’ll give away on that subject. But here’s a passage that has resonated with me since I read it:

William James warned his students that a certain kind of mind-set was approaching the West—it could hardly be called a way of thought—in which no physical details are noticed. Fingernails are not noticed, trees in the plural are mentioned, but no particular tree is ever loved, nor where it stands; the air in the ear it not noticed…Since the immense range of color belongs to physical detail—the thatness—of the universe, it is the inability to see color. People with this mind-set have minds that resemble white nightgowns. For people with this mind-set, there’s not much difference between 3 and 742; the count of something is a detail. In fact the number they are most interested in, as James noted, is one. That’s a number without physical detail.

Bly turns to Steven’s poem, “Metaphors of a Magnifico” as a way of freeing one’s self from this mind set and avoid being “murdered” by it:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.

Trees. Tree. Leaves. Leaf. All. Nothing. Everything.

Increasingly granular

If you live in the Boston area, DO NOT miss this: Sleep No More, at the Old Lincoln School in Brookline. It runs through January 3.

And if you have a nature that is excessive and appetitive like mine, you might need to go twice. (I’ve already purchased another block of tickets to go with a gang of friends and my children.)

There are lots of reviews of this installation theater production, links to which I have included at the bottom of the post. But let me just share the essentials: The production is inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth and is the work of Punchdrunk, an enigmatic theatrical troupe from the UK. This is their first foray into U.S. territory and they are here in Boston by way of Diane Paulus, artistic director of A.R.T. Paulus saw Punchdrunk in action when she was in London a few years ago. After that initial exposure to their work, Paulus said she could not view any subsequent theatrical event without the overlay of that experience.

Paulus is a seasoned theater pro, but her comment made me think about “never the same” theatrical milestones in my life as an audience participant. Living in New York City in the 70s and beyond, I was altered permanently by a number of theatrical experimentalists:

Robert Wilson. The 12 hour production in Brooklyn of The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. A Letter for Queen Victoria. And then most memorably, Einstein on the Beach in 1976 at the Metropolitan Opera.

Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines. The Beckett projects and the Shaggy Dog Animations, productions that explored how symbols become characters. And then the unforgettable Gospel at Colonus.

Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Where do I start? His performances were almost impossible to describe but I returned again and again.

Andrei Serban at La MaMa. The Fragments of a Trilogy (composed of three plays: The Trojan Women, Medea, and Elektra ) where the audience becomes the Greek chorus and the proscenium-centric format is annihilated. Greek tragedy is us.

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Esoteric Mormonism was laced throughout the story line, so watching the two plays was like stepping into a highly personalized archaeological dig of my tribal past. Most of those references fell outside the expertise of reviewers, but it was clear Kushner had done some deep research into the psyche of this very American religious tradition.

Tom Stoppard. Anything by Sir Tom, but most unforgettably, The Coast of Utopia 12 hour marathon at Lincoln Center in 2007. At the end of the three play performance, I just wanted to do it all over again.

Should Punchdrunk and Sleep No More be added to that list? I want to go again before I make that call. Does the magic wear off with over exposure? (Does anything survive that most difficult of tests?) Will those haunting rooms feel as imbued with magic as they did last week?

Some of these concerns are captured in a review of the production by Frank Rizzo in Variety:

Shakespeare is not so much spoken as gleaned, and if something is lost in the translation, something else is gained in the experience. This, after all, is not “Macbeth” — it’s a very different theatrical animal with its own agenda, not the least of which is to attract adventuresome audiences in search of what’s new and hip. The production abandons text, poetry and linear structure to create a more engaged audience dynamic. But one can also ask what does that experience add up to: a richly imagined reality or just a fleeting dream?

Whatever one’s aesthetics, just be sure to bring comfortable shoes. As the old joke about the aging hooker goes, “It’s not the work but the stairs.”

Reviews of Sleep No More and Punchdrunk:

Variety
Edge Boston
Boston Herald
Boston Globe
Arts Boston
Guardian

One more thing to love about San Francisco

Sunday night I went to hear a lecture at Lesley University by Thomas Moore (author of Care of the Soul) and Richard Tarnas (Passion of the Western Mind) on the topic, “Soul and Cosmos: A New Way of Imagining Life in the 21st Century.”

I have heard Moore speak before (he is, after all, something of a local luminary) but it was my first encounter hearing Tarnas speak. I hope it isn’t my last. He is thoughtful and articulate which is even more impressive when it happens in the domain of that hard to describe, edgy, thin ice world that goes by a number of different names—metaphysics, New Age, cosmic consciousness, soul-centered theology, neo-paganism, mysticism, among others.

Every once in a while you come across a person who has been extremely well educated in the rational traditions, usually sporting a PhD in a serious field. And then something happens. Their world cracks open.

I have come to call this “scientists gone galactic”. David Bohm. Ken Wilbur. Rupert Sheldrake. Stanislav Grof. Richard Tarnas is another one to add to the list.

Sunday night was a steady stream of idea kernels, and I hope to write about many of those in the future. Here is a small one as a start.

Tarnas referenced research that demonstrated how a small consortium of like-minded people can shift the overall cultural patterns much more readily when systems are in a state of chaos and upheaval. The discontinuity is actually an advantage for leveraging a change in thinking.

In other words, small groups can have a much larger impact than might have been supposed. This is an idea that can’t help but make you feel more hopeful. There are possibilities here.

And today I found an example that is a case in point. Bruce Weber wrote a piece for the New York Times about the extremely supportive and convivial literary scene in San Francisco. This is far afield from the competitive posturing that is typically found in New York and London. And even though the number of well known writers is small by comparison, San Francisco appears to be creating a literary community that does thing differently. Writers mentioned in the piece include Amy Tan; Po Bronson, Ethan Watters and Ethan Canin (founders of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto); Dave Eggers (creator of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern); Stephen Elliott. Weber also pointed to the positive influence of programs like Stanford University’s prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowships.

From Weber’s article:

The city’s writers — and, notably, its readers — celebrated the 10th anniversary of the book lovers’ festival known as Litquake with dozens of readings, panel discussions and other events (including the braising of Ms. Tan). It all culminated in Saturday’s edition of Lit Crawl, the annually overcrowded word-and-drink fest in city bars.

It was, over all, a pep rally, an emblem really of the school spirit that San Francisco literary life has established in the last decade or so. And though the city has a venerable history in letters, the community of writers has never been as, well, communitylike as it is today. Like the thriving theater culture in Chicago, which coalesced around a few key companies and created an important center for the art form without becoming a rival to New York City as a center for theater commerce, so San Francisco’s writers have come to recognize and trumpet the idea that this city prizes their craft, its solitary difficulty and what can emerge from it, even though there isn’t much of a publishing industry here.

Feelin’ good.

Salmon Boy

That boy was hungry. His mother gave him Dog Salmon,
Only the head. It was enough,
And he carried it hungry to the river’s mouth
And fell down hungry. Saltwater came from his eyes,
And he turned over and over. He turned into it.

He lay on the riverbank with his eyes open,
Saying nothing while his father emptied his belly.
He said nothing when his mother opened him wide
To dry in the sun. He was full of sun.
All day he dried on sticks, staring upriver.

–David Wagoner

It is a rainy day and a Sunday, which seems like a very suitable juncture for spending some time with a poem I have held in awe for many years. Whenever my friend Kathryn and I get to talking about the experiences in our lives that have “gutted” us out, this is the poem we are referencing in our heads.

Salmon Boy is my personal paragon for a very particular kind of energy. I’ve never found another poem that does what this one does. Everything in its musical structure, choice of language and idea flow is incantatory. And each time I get to the end—a process I have gone through countless times— I feel the peculiar sensation of having witnessed (and at times, even participated in) a mystical rite. Oh that all the guttings that life brings could be experienced in a container as crystalline and exquisite as this.