Hocking Me a Chinik

"Autumn Rhythm" by Jackson Pollock (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, George A Hearn Fund, l957)

Some people with artistic aspirations get things ass backwards. They believe the racquet makes the player or the bottle makes the wine. Their as if attitude towards existence can lead to the existential crisis in which one wakes up one day as if they were drowning, unable to stay afloat and feeling as if their whole life were a sham, their self-conception like that of Humpty Dumpty, in short feeling as if they inhabited a false self. Norman Mailer famously stabbed his second wife Adele Morales and there are writers who think that maybe if they stabbed their wives they will magically attain fame—forgetting of course that Mailer had earned plaudits for his work in spite of the stabbing, just like the appreciation of the work of V.S. Naipaul came in spite of the brutal and sadistic treatment of his mistress that was documented in Patrick French’s biography ("Misogyny, mistresses sadism: why Noble prize winning author VS Naipaul is at the center of the most vicious literary war of the decade," Daily Mail, 1/30/09. Those who might choose to be recluses should be reminded that Salinger moved up to Cornish, New Hampshire, eschewing the New York literary world after he was famous—and not before he'd published anything. Yes Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree, yes Mark Rothko committed suicide, but the self-destruction came in the wake of careers in which they were enormously productive. Just getting drunk all the time does not lead to creativity. Post hoc does not necessarily mean propter hoc. One thing does not necessarily come from the other, even though it may be marginally associated with it and that's not to discountenance the subliminally important role the Orphic impulse whereby destruction leads to creation (Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” to talk about capitalist innovation) may play in creativity. So before you stab your wife, or run off to hide in a cave or drop some acid, you might be best advised to write your great novels or paint your magnum oeuvre. Then leave it for posterity to decide whether or not you're were having an out of body experience.

Ultimate Fighting

Extreme Cage Fight War (photo: Ticketmaster)

Prize fighting is a metaphor for life. At least it’s one of the metaphors and it’s probably the metaphoric quality that accounts for its popularity. The same can be said about mixed martial arts, a sport which takes place in cages (the Ultimate Fighting Championship is significantly the name of the company that promotes many of these events) and jiu jitsu. Of  course other sports like football offer the same possibility for enticement through their potential to create empathy. How may times have you heard someone who is going to undertake a challenge refer to “carrying the ball?” But fighting requires an especially high level of preparedness and the combat is the most individual (outside tennis or mountain climbing) and brutal. You fight to the finish with a win sometimes rendering the opponent senseless. A prize fight is not like a cockfight since it’s ultimate goal is not the death of the loser, but annihilation is certainly on the table. The victory exhausts the defeated party and breaks his or her will. But if there is an animal quality to fighting it also exhibits some of highest elements of the human spirit to the extent that it represents an aspiration of the consciousness to overcome bodily limitations. It’s no accident that writers like Hemingway, A. J. Liebling, Mailer and most recently Joyce Carol Oates have all exhibited a fascination with boxing since those who are prone to articulate the lot of the creative artist frequently equate it with over the top challenges, which sometimes involve the sacrifice of life. Whether it’s the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea or the great white whale in Moby Dick, the person who attempts to emblazon his inner life on reality faces a Herculean and sometimes Sisyphean task. The only difference between the fighter and the artist is that the battle the artist is waging is more solitary. His or her opponent is the self. But the whole fascination with fighting as a metaphor poses still other questions. Is all of life a battle? Should people fight for the things they want the way some patients fight against cancer. And is full-fledged combat the best way to fight cancer--or depression for that matter? Leni Riefenstahl’s film was Triumph of the Will and it was a consummate piece of Nazi propaganda.

Barney’s Wall

Barney Rosset was the founder of Grove Press and Evergreen Review and was a proselytizer for among other things the Theater of the Absurd. He brought the works of Beckett, Genet, Pinter and Ionesco to the reading public and also was famous for fighting the right to publish Henry Miller’s Tropics (of Cancer and Capricorn). He released seminal works as varied in their locus of rebellion as Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. As the publisher of Evergreen Review he crossed paths with literally every esthetic and political avant-gardist who was anybody. He was married to the seminal abstract expressionist artist Joan Mitchell and a kind of comrade-in-arms of the writer Norman Mailer, with whom he shared a love of wine, women and provocation. At the end of his life when Barney’s enterprise had been diminished by financial problems, he was no longer capable of employing his voracious appetite for life and manic energy in the same arenas he did as young man. But as the old expression goes one door closes and another opens. Barney turned his attention to a 22’x12' wall of his loft which he turned into an enormous mural. Besides leaving a powerful literary legacy when he died in 2012, he also left behind “his wall." Free expression was Barney’s turf and the cause he fought for and his wall is a mixture of abstraction and figuration, of life and art, that is the epitome what might be termed the  “free expressive style." The mural is really a three dimensional collage that contains sculpture as well as paintings within the parameters of the larger work. It’s outsider art, done by a consummate insider. Barney’s Wall is a picaresque journey through the history of 20^th Century modernism and it conforms to the dictates of the modernist view of what art should be. To quote Susan Sontag it’s Against Interpretation, being not a window onto the world, but a world in and of itself. The impresario's final act was to add himself to his own name to the list of luminaries whose careers he championed. And Barney’s Wall is something to be reckoned with. Yes there are fragments of his obsessions from Thai Bar girls to a pool table that might have existed in some of the famed downtown watering holes Barney frequented like the Cedar Tavern (where Pollock and other abstract expressionists held court). Now filmmakers Sandy Gotham Meehan (writer, producer), Williams  Cole (producer, director) and David Leitner (cinematographer) are creating a film entitled Barney’s Wall in which a number of visitors including writers, curators, analysts of varying persuasions, an anthropologist, a paleontologist and others, most of whom have never seen the wall, have been given an opportunity to free associate or riff about the wall’s effect on them. However, filmmaking aside, what will happen to the sui generis monument to the intersection of political and esthetic revolution--when Barney’s widow, Astrid, gives up the loft on Fourth Avenue where “the wall” now proudly stands? Hopefully MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney or one of the downtown arts institutions like the New Museum  will take it upon themselves to preserve it for posterity.

Thomas Demand's "Junior Suite"

photomontage: Gothamist

Carol Vogel’s Inside Art column from Friday’s Times reported on a Thomas Demand photo called “Junior Suite” that will be part of an upcoming show of the photographer's work at Matthew Marks ("A Remade Tabloid Image of Houston's Last Meal," NYT, 4/26/12) In the photograph Demand reprises a shot of Whitney Houston’s final meal first posted on a site called TMZ. According to the Times Demand checked into a similar room to the one Houston occupied at the Beverly Hilton on the evening of her death and ordered the same foods: a hamburger and fries, a beer, a flute of champagne. The flowers that decorated the original room service setting added a particular note of tristesse to both the original photo and Demand’s version of the event. What to call Demand’s work? A reproduction is literally what it is, but in photographic terms a reproduction is a duplication of the original and what Demand has created is clearly a separate work of art based upon a photo of the crime scene. “I don’t have anything to say about Whitney Houston,” Mr. Demand told Vogel who went on to explain. “Rather, it was the way the shot itself had the quality of a l7th-century Dutch still life that intrigued him.” What Demand has done is the equivalent of journalists using the techniques of fiction to enter their subject’s minds. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner’s Song provide the literary antecedent for Demand’s gothic “last supper.”

My Life in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider)

In the Belly of the Beast is Jack Abbott’s confessional about the life of crime that eventually earned him an all-expenses-paid return trip to prison, where he  finally committed suicide. My Life in the LHC recounts a similarly turbulent narrative. It starts with the collision of two protons in the Large Hadron Collider operated by CERN under the Swiss-French border. Told from the point of view of a Higgs boson, a particle that may, in fact, not even exist, My Life in the LHC introduces the reader to a new kind of underworld that is a far cry from the violent one represented by artistic criminals like Abbott and criminal artists like Norman Mailer. Mailer and Abbott shared an affinity for stabbing. Mailer stabbed his wife after announcing his candidacy for the mayoralty of New York, while Abbott’s return to prison was precipitated by an altercation with a waiter in an East Village establishment called the Binibon on the eve of receiving a laudatory review in The Times for In the Belly of the Beast. Book publishing and politics are both tough rackets, and perhaps the real moral of the story lies in the question of publicity. How far will an author or politician go when it comes to publicizing himself?

   

Of course, the author of My Life in the LHC didn’t have the kind of opportunities open to sociopaths like Mailer and Abbott in that it was only a subatomic particle whose non-existent mass meant that it would have relatively little pull—or gravitas. But My Life in the LHC is still a riveting story in the way that it plays upon Warhol’s idea that everyone has 15 minutes of fame. Here our hero’s fame lasts only a millionth of a second, but within that time, the narrator lives a life that is one of the great thrill rides of the century, something that makes the Coney Island Cyclone seem pathetic by comparison.  My life in the LHC reads like an accelerated On the Road. My Life in the LHC is, in this regard, a quintessentially American tale, told by an idiot and signifying nothing. Its great truth lies in the interstices, in the little turns in the tunnel, in the feats of engineering, and in the big magnets, which martyr themselves for the sake of science.