A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

The title of Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence refers to a poem that is being read on stage by a little girl at a school event. When quizzed by her teacher about what the pigeon is thinking the little girl says that it’s thinking it doesn’t have enough money. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is a philosophical comedy, Monty Python meets Kierkegaard, with the title of Damien Hirst’s famous sharkwork, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," thrown in for good keeping. It starts off with three vignettes all lumped together under the rubric “Meeting With Death.” In the first a man dies of a heart attack, as his wife, oblivious to what is going on, cooks. In the second, the son of a dying old woman tries to wrest a bag full of valuables from his mother, whose intent is plainly to take her wealth with her to the grave; in the third another man dies in a cafeteria. The problem is what to do with the food which has already been paid for? The stars of the show are a pair of Vladimir and Estragons, Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom). They’re salesmen whose trove of novelties includes “vampire teeth with extra long fangs,” and an item they keep saying they "have faith in," “ a mask called “uncle one tooth.” Their business plan is to “help people have fun,” only they can’t escape the fear of death, with one tormented by a song (he can’t get out of his head), about going to heaven to see his parents. Among the other characters are a uniformed worker who’s constantly being stood up at a restaurant, a flamenco teacher whose leering sexuality recalls the surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou and the historical character of King Charles XII who shows up in a present day bar in search of a bathroom. A character sitting in a rathskeller cries out “I’ve been greedy all my life. That’s why I’m so unhappy.” Around him the staff begin to close up the place as if nothing untoward were happening. “I’m happy to hear you are doing fine,” functions as a kind of Greek chorus as varying grotesqueries are perpetrated, amongst them the torturing of a primate. Towards the end, the movie tips its hat to colonialism, as slaves are whipped and then forced into a rotating oven where they’re cooked to death. The scene is being witnessed by a group of tuxedoed aristocrats holding flutes of champagne. The locution of  A Pigeon Sat on A Branch Reflecting on Existence also recalls the famed philosophic conundrum about “a leaf falling in forest with no one watching,” but the intention of A Pigeon is far less benign. As imaginative sequences give way to adolescent outrage at the meaninglessness of existence, the film becomes its own best parody. Andersson’s pigeon needs to shit or get off the pot. Right now it occupies a no man’s land between philosophy 101 and watered down Lars von Trier. Are the questions A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence raises difficult or is the disquisition merely oppressive? 

The Rise of the "Crypto-Relic"

New Hoover Convertible (Jeff Koons, l980)

In a piece entitled “Traces of the Holy: The contemporary art work as ‘crypto-relic’” (TLS, 4/10/15), Matthew Bown makes the following comment, “The art market today is a market in crypto-relics, no more, no less. The dithyrambs of the experts—as when the director of the Tate art museums, Sir Nicholas Serota describes art objects as ‘symbols of optimism and renewal,’ as ‘objects of beauty and contemplation,’ or as ‘transgressive,’ 'raw and tender, brazen and subtle’—recreate the alluring discourse, the promise of miraculous potential, that sustained the original Christian relics in the public imagination.” How better to describe Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” the famed shark immersed in formaldehyde or Jeff Koons’ “New Hoover Convertibles” which might be subtitled “what you see is what you get.” Duchamp’s “Fountain,” with its R. Mutt signature, might as well have been a Kohler or Toto as it canonized the found object. But artists like Hirst and Koons have actually gone much further, in that the high demand almost requires an  iconography. Religiosity always had something in common with romanticism to the extent it was predicated on a belief in the unseen. What would the Shroud of Turin be without a higher love? The absence of value and/or meaning acts like a vacuum that creates the significance of Brown’s "crypto-relics." Everyone reads meaning into Chance, the main character of Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There. But Chance is just an idiot savant, a tabula rasa on which others paint their wishes for transcendence. And “so it goes” as Vonnegut famously says in Slaughterhouse-Five. Those who don’t keep the faith will say that the public is being Tartuffed.

Pornosophy: The Postmodern Playboy of the Western World

John Millington Synge

How does the post-modern playboy pass his day? Back in the 50’s Hugh Hefner introduced the Playboy life style which had something in common with Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Fearlessness and savoir faire were combined in a gently sadomasochistic form of hedonism. The hero of Fifty Shades of Grey is perhaps the grandson or great grandson or a close relative of Bond’s just as the literary heritage of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus might be traced back to Hamlet. But surely today’s metrosexual is not mixing martinis in a silk bathrobe or looking for direction on sophistication from the Playboy advisor or anywhere else. For starters the postmodern playboy might literally be questioning whether he is in fact a boy. Perhaps he partakes of the sensibility of a woman who loves other woman or even of a woman who loves other men or simply a man who loves other men. But like a Connecticut Yankee, it would be fun to consider the possibility of  scenarios where our hero is sent back to the equivalent of King Arthur’s court. Give this creature a fast car, beautiful women and a cold war adversary and let’s see see what SSRI would enable him to weather the ensuing anxiety attack? Hugh Hefner is still living. Albert Broccoli who produced many James Bond films is dead. Perhaps our hero would be a sad boy with a book, a Hamlet  picking up his well-worn copy of Shakespeare’s play. J. M. Synge wrote The Playboy of the Western World. Someone should write The Postmodern Playboy of the Western World, perhaps modeled, not on spies like Wild Bill Donovan, but on the career of polymorphously perverse mega artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

A. O. Scott’s “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow"

Jose Ortega y Gasset

In a recent Times Arts and Leisure piece, “The Squeeze on the Middle Brow” (NYT, 8/1/14). A.O. Scott takes aim at both Virginia Woolf and Dwight Macdonald who decried middlebrow culture. Macdonald’s Partisan Review essay "Mass Cult and Midcult,” in particular, is a classic primer on the vagaries of a watered down culture. Ortega y Gasset took another view of the same issue in his essay “The Dehumanization of Art," in which he basically saw difficult modernist paintings as a bulwark against the juggernaut of mass culture. Anyone who has ever been in a gallery when a tell it like it is viewer claims that his infant could have pulled off the Jackson Pollock understands the crushing effect the demand for accessibility can have on artistic endeavor. But Scott’s piece sees the conflict between high and middlebrow in light of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the breakaway bestseller which describes the increasing economic disparity between the economic elite and the middle classes. And Scott’s view is almost a wistful one in which a once empowered middle class brought both the high and the low to the middle. Scott writes, “High culture became more accessible, popular culture became more ambitious, until the distinction between them vanished altogether. Some of the mixing looks silly or vulgar in retrospect: stiff Hollywood adaptations or comic book versions of great novels; earnest television broadcast about social problems; magazines that sandwiched serious fiction in between photographs of naked women. But much of it was glorious.” David Lean’s Great Expectations, PBS's Brideshead Revisited; CBS's acclaimed documentary about migrant farmworkers, “Harvest of Shame” and magazines like Playboy, The Evergreen Review and Eros  all are examples of the positive side of middlebrow culture that Scott alludes to. A side issue has always been the dichotomy between political and esthetic avant gardism which became particularly noticeable in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution when Mayakovsky and other vanguard writers, artists and composers began to run afoul of the party line. However, Scott’s jeremiad makes sense in the rarified world of an increasingly powerful elite defined entirely by wealth. The aristocratic patrons like Peggy Guggenheim who once supported innovation have been replaced by a new class whose crushing materialism places little value on anything whose quiddity is not validated by the marketplace--and who fuel the demand for diamond studded skulls by Damien Hirst.

Spotting

Damien Hirst, Octanesulfonic Acid, 2010

Action painting, was described by the art critic, Harold Rosenberg, as a memento of a creative act that once was. “What was to go on canvas was not a picture, but an event,” he said. By this definition what remained on the canvas could be the equivalent of fingerprints at a crime scene or merely just hype. There would be no way to know. Hype has always been the way in which one segment of the public has viewed certain kinds of innovation in art, particularly those of a conceptual or highly abstract nature--which might be like the emperor’s new clothes. There is always some plain dealer who is still  looks at a Jackson Pollock abstraction or an Andy Warhol Soup Can and asks, is this art? But what if abstract expressionism, pop, conceptual art and now Damien Hirst is all hype? Who is to say that hype isn’t art or that at the very least, there isn't a great amount of artfulness in hype? The emperor might have been selling a bill of goods, but it takes work to make much ado about nothing. So we come to the question of Damien Hirst and his dots. The Times reported on the fact that a catalogue raisonne of Hirst dot paintings has been produced iterating the fact that there are just 1365 in existence (“Hirst Counts the Dots, or at Least the Paintings," NYT, 6/11/13). According to the Times sales of the paintings have fluctuated between $53,000 to $1.7 million in the last 18 months. The threat of inflation resulting from a possibly unending supply (many of which are created by assistants) might have accounted for the fluctuation and such a catalogue would be a stabilizing force. One of the most interesting parts of the Times piece is the graph delineating sales of the dot paintings over the past 18 months. The graph is a work of art in and of itself which definitely would qualify to be in any retrospective of graphs of sales of Damien Hirst’s art, if one is ever organized. Speaking of hype, the Times points out that that Hirst “brought to prominence" by Charles Saatchi the advertising mogul who became a collector. In the Times piece, James Kelly, the director of Hirst’s company Science Ltd is quoted as saying, “Damien is working on some spot paintings with very small spots, including a painting with one million spots.” Posterity will decide what place Hirst will occupy in art history. But whether it’s art or not, making one million dots is no small task. And there is no doubt that Hirst’s famed Shark in formaldehyde, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living"qualifies as one of the great titles in the history of art. If the art market ever goes South, Hirst could definitely get a job in advertising.