A Taxonomy of The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch has its admirers and detractors.  But what can we say about the sensibility of an author who writes a novel based on a sui generis work by a l7th century painter, Carel Fabritius, at the same time naming its central character after the brother of a famous post-Impressionist painter? Theo Van Gogh was an art dealer and Tartt’s hero, Theo Decker, the possessor of a stolen masterpiece, finds himself dealing in art. Answer: she has a feeling for connection and place that creates a mythic New York City neighborhood somewhere between Upper East Side aristocracy and West Village bohemia that readers from nowhere in particular may easily call their own. Chekhov created a similar feeling of familiarity by producing empathy with characters who audiences felt spoke their hearts. Tartt achieves a comparable end with blocks and streets, an imaginative universe which readers possess and ultimately relate to as a map of their own lives. Tartt partakes of the kind of psychogeography that the German writer W.G. Sebald applied in the landscapes he toured in novels like The Rings of Saturn, The Times recently reported on a more scientific iteration of the same impulse, a “date mining project” at Stanford called “Mapping Emotions in Victorian London” which “is part of a growing movement in the humanities to harness digital technology for cultural analysis (“Stanford Literary Lab Maps ‘Emotions in Victorian London.’" NYT, 4/13/15). But here is Theo returning to New York, “The streets were much louder than I remember—smellier, too. Standing on the corner by A La Vieille Russie I found myself overpowered with the familiar old Midtown stench: carriage horses, bus exhaust, perfume, and urine. For so long I’d thought of Vegas as something temporary--my real life was New York-- but was it? Not any more, I thought, dismally, surveying the thinned-out trickle of pedestrians hurrying past Bergdorf’s.” (p.365) Tartt could have described classic landmarks like Central Park and even the Plaza, but A La Vielle Russie is full of connotations all its own. Theo is exiled from his childhood like the émigré Russian aristocrats who buy and sell Faberge eggs at a boutique which call to mind an idyllic pre-revolutionary past. Theo purchases “fresh produce from the farmer’s market at Union Square, wild mushrooms and winesap apples” (p. 394) And the now defunct Jefferson market is also a pit stop. (p. 396) When he and Hobie, his boss and eventual partner in the antique business attend “showings at Christie’s and Sotheby’s,” (p.399), they go to Sant Ambroeus (locations in the West Village, Madison Avenue, Soho and Southampton) for espresso and chocolate croissants. If you connect the dots you begin to realize that Tartt is weaving, a pattern, a kind of music predicated on geography. The White Horse tavern on Hudson (p. 425), where Dylan Thomas, quaffed down drinks, the Paris Theatre (p. 458), a pocket of art house sensibility in the shadow of the Plaza, Match 65 on 65^th Street, Le Bilboquet on 60^th (p.508), “the King Cole room, and the Oyster Bar at Grand Central,” (p. 510),“deserted Tribeca evenings” (p.510), “the Subway Inn, straight across from the loading dock at Bloomingdale’s, a time warp straight out of Lost Weekend...the Twilight Zone glow if the jukebox and the Buck Hunter arcade game blinking away in the depths,” (pp. 523-524), Brother J’s “on 110^th, a workman’s dive with Bill Withers on the jukebox and a sticky floor, career alcoholics slumped over their third bourbon at two p.m.” (p.489) and Kate’s Paperie (p. 525).Tartt exudes the High Low sensibility canonized in the famous MoMA show organized by Kurt Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik back in l990. What novel about geographical intersection between aristocracy and bohemia would be complete without a mention of Manhattan’s last revival house. Though, The Bleecker Street Cinema, The New Yorker, The Thalia are all gone, the venerable Film Forum remains (p. 606). Where else would a Glenn Gould documentary be playing? What better place to rendezvous with the girl our hero has always loved and will never have? But yes despite the novel's disconcerting comic strip plot and personalities, Tartt sometimes even gets character right. Here is Theo on the rival for his beloved Pippa’s affections. “How the hell could she be living with this goofball Everett? With his bad clothes and his rabbit teeth and his always startled eyes? Who looked as if his idea of a hot time was brown rice and seaweed from the counter at the back of the health food store? (p.606) Are you an insider who gets it or has the author made you one, though her art? That’s the question. Does the person who understands all this about Everett follow the same journey that Tartt maps out, the way Joyce lovers follow Leopold Bloom’s journey through Dublin in Ulysses?

Forbidden Fruit

Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Back in the 70’s there was a strip club located in the garment district, on 35^th off Eighth called Forbidden Fruit. That was back in the days when New York was a far more dangerous and wide open city. New York was on the skids and anything went (or goes), It was years before there was money for the kind of development that was the modus operandi behind Rudy Guiliani’s clean up of Times Square. But even by the standards of the time, Forbidden Fruit lived up to its name, with totally naked often inebriated sylphs populating what was essentially an adolescent wet dream. But the name is the point. There were other strip clubs but they had more prosaic names like Diamond Lil’s and Legz Diamond (which still exists). But who ever named Forbidden Fruit was inspired by the biblical story of temptation which led to the Adamic “Fall.” In l990, MoMA would present High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, an exhibit curated by the then New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik in collaboration with Kurt Varnedoe, the director of the museum’s department of painting and sculpture.  But it’s nice when the conjunction of two impulses takes places in a truly underworld, or underground setting. Forbidden Fruit was a far cry from today's Gentlemen’s lap dancing clubs (like say Scores) where sex is highly regulated, expensive and accompanied by fine food and wine. Forbidden Fruit—its name conveying a biblical jeremiad—could have been the second circle of Dante’s Inferno where sinners as varied as Paris, Semiramis and Helen were punished for their desires. It also resembled the lust scene in David Fincher’s Se7en, minus of course the murderous rape device. Forbidden Fruit was painted in chiaroscuro and the action that transpired on the premises called to mind Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

Inventing Inventing Abstraction

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky

There are sultanates in the Middle East and there is the sullenate of Manhattan which appears as midtown begins to empty out in the hours before Christmas Eve. If you are foolish enough to think you can avoid the crowds lining up for the newly installed Inventing Abstraction Show at MOMA by  going on Christmas Eve, you are left holding the bag, i.e. holding your overly salty perennially disappointing oversized pretzel in your hand as you are greeted by an unbeauteous yellow notice behind a closed grate, “Museum Closes at 3:00 P.M. Today." But you can enjoy the low definition approach by which the imagination fills in the space between the lines. Inventing Abstraction…who needs a show? You can invent inventing abstraction in your own mind. To begin with it’s not realism. So you don’t have to worry about illusion and therefore perspective. You don’t have to worry about the painting representing anything. Why? Because the painting is about itself. Admittedly you read these ideas when you were studying Clement Greenberg and you also read about people like Duchamp who said that art didn’t have to be a gilt framed portrait of the dauphin. It could even be a urinal. Though you’re making your way down Fifth Avenue rather than Broadway, you’re reminded of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Yeah, art can be a little bit like music too, patterns interrelating for the sake of themselves. You’re still itching about not being able to see the new show. Secretly you’d also hoped you’d get lucky and have been one of the fortunate ones who didn’t have to sacrifice their lives in order to see The Clock (also on exhibit at MOMA. However, in your frustration in not finding something to fill the emptiness you always feel on Christmas Eve, you started to talk to yourself and in the course of talking, you leaned a little something about what you thought about art.

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de Kooning Retrospective

Capitalism and Marxism were the two predominant ideologies of the l9th and 20th centuries, and those who gloat over the fact that the fall of the Soviet Union made capitalism the winner might be counting their chickens before they’re hatched. The sociologist Daniel Bell wrote a book called The End of Ideology. Later came Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. In the world of art, the two great ideologies were of the l9th and 20th centuries were figuration and abstraction, and it would be nice to associate the more traditional form with the more traditional ideology. But, as we know, artistic and political avant-gardists chose different paths, and the art of the totalitarian state tended more towards traditional than non-representational or revolutionary forms. Clement Greenberg became the ideologist of abstract expressionism, doing for revolution in art what Marx did in politics, and showing that the work of Rothko, Pollock and others was the necessary product of history, at least from the point of view of what might be called evolutionary esthetics. Which brings us to the interesting case of de Kooning, whose works are now on display in a retrospective at MoMA. De Kooning is to art what Daniel Bell and Fukayama were to political philosophy. Here are some of his quotes, taken right off the walls the museum: “Art should not have to be a certain way;” figuration or abstraction “could simply be different options;” “I never was interested in how to make a good painting…but to see how far one could get;” “Being anti-traditional is just as corny as being traditional.” Of one of his most famous paintings, Excavation, he said, “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in, drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space.” Whether de Kooning’s anti-doctrinaire views emanated from Picasso or not, the two artists shared an obsession—a love-hate relationship to women (to regress into psychobabblese). Picasso’s famous portraits of women were a hard act to follow. They had to be the monkey on de Kooning’s back. His Woman I (1950-2) is a kind of Mona Lisa in reverse. Did he adore or revile his creation, a vagina dententa (with the dententa part placed right back in the mouth) with glowering eyes? Picasso’s discarded women became his masterpieces, but de Kooning was far more faithful to his ambivalence.

Radical Invention

The Matisse Show at MOMA is subtitled “Radical Invention” and deals with the period after the painter’s return from Morocco to Paris in 1913 and before his leaving Paris for Nice in 1917. But one of the most significant paintings in the show, Still Life After Jan Davidsz de Heem’s "La Desserte," is based, as the title suggests, on a previous painting, which dates from 1640 and was rediscovered in 1893. Matisse had studied with Moreau, who encouraged him to copy the old masters. The proto-Cubist piece exhibits the confidence and originality that would be epitomized in Bathers by the River (l909-17), The Moroccans (1916) and The Piano Lesson (1916), where a shadow on the painter’s son’s face is represented by a triangle of darkness, shows the artist’s debt to the past. Two floors up, MOMA pays homage to the very movement the museum played such an important role in encouraging, in a show that seems to hearken back to Claudi Levi Strauss’s famous dichotomy between bricoleurs and ingénieurs (or inventors), highlighting the notion that the New York school really was the home of a radical break with Europe and the past. New Yorker art critic Harold Rosenberg pressed this point with his famous distinction between Coonskins and Redcoats, as he referred to American modernists and their European counterparts. But can one imagine Franz Kline without Velasquez? Pollock, Rothko, Newman, and de Kooning all have their separate rooms or walls. William Rubin refers to Arshile Gorky as “The Godfather” of the movement, and de Kooning is quoted as saying “flesh is the reason why paint was invented” on a wall plaque next to his angry rather than enigmatic Mona Lisa, Woman 1 (1950-2). The abstractionist photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind are represented, as are the lesser known Grace Hartigan (Shinnecock Canal) and Joan Mitchell (Ladybug), along with Nevelson, Frankenthaler, Gottlieb (with his famous exploding red balls), Clyfford Still and Sam Francis. But let’s take two early Pollocks, The Flame (1934-8) and the Mask (1941), which have the mythic quality of a Picasso or even a Georgia O’Keefe. There’s something comfortable about a long-term relationship with its routines and its rituals, and in this case the subject is the artist’s relationship with his work. By the time Pollock paints Gothic (1944), the image is already being lost, and by 1946, in Shimmering Substance, the drip style has come into being. Large canvases like One: November 31, 1950 and the famed Autumn Rhythm, which hangs in the permanent collection of the Met, are the embodiment of the classic action painting depicted in Hans Namuth’s famous film of the artist at work. What is dramatic, however, is not the break with the past, but the constant nostalgia that even pulls at an artist as revolutionary as Pollock. In Echo: November 15, 1951, Pollock is already returning to the image. Images are the way that memory is conveyed. The picture of Pollock on the cover of Life, like the picture of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, may have augured the artistic version of the idea put forth forty years later in Francis Fukayama’s The End of History and the Last Man, i.e., that the past is coming to an end. But the revolutionary innuendo is misleading. If there is one thing that the current show at MOMA demonstrates, it’s the fact that art is fundamentally more conservative than science, carrying as it does the burden of history. Abstract Expressionism was ultimately not as revolutionary an event as nuclear fusion. The past is evidenced in every brushstroke of the works on display in MOMA’s comprehensive homage.

The Art of Endurance

When her brother was born, Marina Abramovic almost drowned him. Her mother slapped her. Another time, she caught her arm in an electric washing machine, one of the first in Belgrade.  Being an old-world personality, her grandmother didn’t think to pull the plug. After Abramovic’s mangled arm was removed, she again was slapped. “I was punished for whatever I did,” she says now.  She lived under a strict curfew until she was 29 years old, and one night when she came home from one of her  performances, in which she appeared naked in front of an audience, her mother, a partisan fighter during the second world war who was married to a Yugoslavian national hero, threw an ashtray at her head, saying, “I give you life and I am taking it from you.” 

In some artists’ work there is the equivalent of sublimation, in which cruel and painful experiences are turned into art. On one level, Abramovic’s work avoids that kind of transformation. She describes playing Russian roulette with a friend when she was young. There was one bullet in the gun; they kept taking turns and nothing happened. Finally, the bullet went off, hitting a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Should this anecdote be taken symbolically as well as literally? Abramovic’s art is nothing short of a re-enactment of her painful past. In one early performance piece, she allowed her mostly beneficent audience to do anything they wanted to her. She has cut herself with knives. She has produced convulsive muscle contractions by administering anti-psychotic medications to herself, and followed that with medication normally administered to schizophrenics. She has done pieces in which the whole work consisted of being slapped. In another, she and her performance partner and former lover Ulay were tied to each other by the braids in their hair. Before she ever became a performance artist, she once intentionally tried to break her nose so she could get a nose job. Is this the beginning of her ars poetica?  Abramovic’s work is the art of endurance. She and Ulay each walked l000 miles along the Great Wall of China to say good-bye to each other after they’d decided to split up. The finale of the current MOMA exhibition is a work called The Artist is Present, in which Abramovic sits all day without moving as varying spectators line up to face her in a chair, while she looks on impassively. In this work the audience—like those journalists embedded for short periods of time with soldiers in hotspots like Iraq and Afghanistan—tastes what it’s like to be part of an Abramovic piece.