Saint Monica by Piero della Francesca
In his review of the Piero della Francesca show at the Frick, “The Nobel Dreams of Piero” (The New York Review of Books, 3/21/13),
Walter Kaiser quotes the great 20th Century Polish poet Zbigniew
Herbert. Herbert was by the way known particularly for the character of Mr.
Cogito, whose soubriquet derives from Descartes. “The Principle of tranquility
does not lie merely in architectural balance,” Kaiser quotes Herbert as saying.
“It is a principle of inner order. Piero understood that excess movement and
expression both destroy the visual painted space and compress the painting’s
time to a momentary scene, a flash of existence. His stoic heroes are
constrained and impassive. The stilled leaves, the hue of the first earthly
dawn, the unstruck hour, give the things Piero created ontological
indestructibility.” Herbert’s last sentence is actually rather awkward, but why throw the baby out with the bath water? It brilliantly ties the
work of the quattrocento painter to the dream of classicism espoused by the
great French film director Robert Bresson in Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and also his Japanese counterpart Yasujiro Ozu, in Tokyo Story (l953). In talking about the aesthetics of a great 15th century Renaissance painter, a modern Polish poet is inadvertently furthering our understanding of the spirituality of two great figures of modern cinema. We might say that Piero helps us understand Bresson and Ozu or that Bresson and Ozu help us to retrospectively understand the work of one of the great Italian masters.
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Friday, March 29, 2013
Piero della Francesca, Robert Bresson,Yasujiro Ozu
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Harry Reems aka Herbert Streicher
photo: Kenneth Turan |
Labels:
Deep Throat,
Gerard Damiano,
Harry Reems,
Mark Felt,
Ron Jeremy
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Inventing Abstraction
"Artist Network Diagram" from Inventing Abstraction |
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here is,” are the lines that adorn Dante’s entrance to Hell. At the entrance to Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 at MOMA are the following lines written by Kandinsky in l911,
“Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and
instead lay bare the purely abstract?” The curators leave Picasso to answer the
question in their commentary accompanying his “Woman with Mandolin,” an
exercise in analytic cubism from l911, “There is no abstract art. You always
have to begin with something.” Move on in the exhibit to Kandinsky's “Impression III.” The work is offered up as an example of how the great painter, noted for
his famous work on abstraction, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, has foresworn the object. However, without being juridical,
where would the painting be formally or in terms of so-called “content”
without the Schoenberg concert on which it was based? By the way according to
the exhibit, abstraction was not invented by a person, but a network and it begins with a family tree emphasizing connectivity. At the top are Alvin
Langdon Coburn and Duncan Grant and at the bottom the futurist Marinetti. In
between those who are connected to at least 24 others—Picasso, Kandinsky,
Stieglitz, Leger—are highlighted in red. It looks a little like a weather map,
but has the net effect of defeating the the larger concept being espoused. If everything is
interrelated, then every subject has an object on which he or she has gazed. So
what, you might ask, is the object of Malevich’s "Suprematist Composition: White on White” (1918)? You might also ask “what is reality?” Perhaps it’s not the
nature of the object that was changing but the definition of what an object was a la quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Consider that the so-called
invention of abstraction was coeval with Einstein's The Theory of General Relativity which was published in l916. “Duchamp seemed
to intuit immediately that the emergence of abstraction spelled the demise of
painting as a craft and its rebirth as an idea,” is another of the questionable bit of curatorial commentary that appears during the course of the show. Even accepting the notion that abstraction harbingered the death of the
object, this is clearly not the case, unless one accepts the view that action painting was merely an ideology. And who says abstraction was invented in
the first place? It’s a dubious art historical premise. History and
particularly primitive art is rife with it. Still, Inventing Abstraction is
only on view until April 15 and even if an objectionable premise has been the
occasion to bring these seminal works together, they are well worth seeing.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
The New Colonialism
Monday, March 25, 2013
Entering Steubenville
The one thing Steubenville taught would be rapists is that
they shouldn’t use the internet or social networks to publicize their exploits.
Actually, what the two convicted football players were guilty of was not only rape but
hubris. Theirs was really an act of post-modern rape to the extent that they
sought to turn it into a media event, where their predecessors did anything to hide their acts. Some serial killers demonstrate the same need to not only commit crimes, but to call attention themselves and even taunt their pursuers. The one
thing that the post-modern rapist and his predecessor have in common is the
need to gain the complicity, silence and sometimes brainwashing of the victim into the belief that forced sex was consensual. Here the Stockholm
Syndrome comes into play. How many women or men who have been raped have ended
up excusing an act by telling themselves they’d brought it on? It’s one way to
get out of having to go through the unpleasant and frightening process of
accusing someone of a crime—a process that, incidentally, requires some
degree of belief in oneself, amidst the torrents of self doubt that can be
brought to bear in any situation in which someone is fucking not only with you
but your head. When Freud repudiated the seduction theory (the argument that hysteria and other symptoms were brought about by suppressed recollections of events that actually occurred), he opened up the
whole world of incestuous and transgressive fantasy that’s at the heart of the
Oedipus complex. But sometimes a predator really does take advantage of a
situation, as was apparently the case with the inebriated girl in the
Steubenville tragedy. The seduction isn’t a fantasy. It’s real.
Friday, March 22, 2013
Napoleon
“Spielberg Using Kubrick Script for Napoleon Series,” was
the headline in the Arts, Briefly section of the Times (NYT, 3/5/13) The announcement about the television series is a significant footnote to film
history since the last and only time Spielberg and Kubrick worked together was
on A.I. Artificial Intelligence which as the Times commented “Mr. Spielberg was producing for Mr.
Kubrick, and which he directed after Mr. Kubrick’s death.” The short Times
notice came with its own bit of science fiction beginning with Times reporter Dave Itzkoff's comment,
“While another collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg would
seem to require a time machine, a Ouija board of some sort of interdimensional
extraterrestrial monolith, plans are nonetheless under way for these two
celebrated filmmakers to work together again.” Though A.I. did gross $235 million at the box office, it’s one of Spielberg’s
most underrated films, primarily due to the unpopular notion that underlies its script: that consciousness can exist without the body. Moviegoers don’t like to
hear that someday the race may endure as bits of data in a cosmic
computer. As A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Eyes Wide Shut all
attest, Kubrick was not only a futurist, but a visionary about the fate of human
consciousness. Talking about consciousness, Spielberg’s direction of the Napoleon script, which dates from l961 (the last great epic about Napoleon was
Abel Gance’s l927 silent epic) could end up being a profound way of carrying on
Kubrick’s legacy.
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