Is Classic Abstraction the New Realism?

"Autumn Rhythm" (Number 30) by Jackson Pollock (1950), The Met

Is classic abstraction the new realism? One always assumes that a realistic view of the world is one filled with recognizable figures and it’s hard to digest the fact that ideas running through the mind are made up of preconceptions. You don’t have to be a neurologist to understand that sight is not necessarily restored in a blind individual once a particular ophthalmological advance or discovery allows for the repair of a congenital condition. Vision is a complex process and if one introduces solipsism or extreme subjectivity into the equation, there's no real way of confirming if one man’s red is another’s yellow or a rose is a rose or certainly. Isn't for instance vanishing perspective a kind of mind game? Who's to say that the abstractionists weren’t inadvertently unmasking a reality that had been under wraps—if it's impossible to actually agree that one person is seeing the same thing as the other? There are many issues here, but the chief ones boil down to the questions of A) what's reality? and B) what's perception? Abstractionists might be deemed Tiresias-like seers gifted with the ability to see beyond the surface images in which reality is wrapped. Perception is always a crap shoot in which an objectivist view of the outside world, what so-called “realists” strive for, is actually no more certain than the agreed upon value of some newly issued cryptocurrency.

False Positive

It’s always nice to find out that the positive test result for an ailment is false, but it’s not a great idea to be falsely positive. If you feel the obligation to put on a good face, even when you’re suffering inside, you run the danger of becoming an “as if” personality. Even within a culture which prizes self-revelation and emotional honesty, there’s always the pressure not be considered the kind of person who brings others down. When you're trying to sell an idea you require an upbeat demeanor. The only problem is that it’s a little like sludge building up in a drain pipe. If you keep too many things down, there’s eventually going to be toxic overflow. A rosy outlook is nice, but it's also the posture of the serial killer and the murderer who lures his victims into his lair with sweet nothings. Anthony Perkins the desk clerk at the Bates Motel is a perfectly genial and charming character until the famous shower scene in Psycho. Admittedly this kind of psychic aberration is an extreme example, but it points to the price to be paid by both the perpetrators and recipients of superficial nicety, not based on a reality principle. What makes for effective horror and terror in B movies is principally the break between a surface normalcy and calm and a lurking rage. Ebullience can, on a lesser level, mask dysthymia and turn into a kind of broken promise to those who expect that what they see is what they'll get.

The Fortress of Pseudo Contentment

Art of Self-Satisfaction: "Taoist Female Practices" and "Culture of Sublimation"  

There are people who are satisfied with their lives and have no regrets about anything. Some of these live in an enviable almost impermeable fortress of self-satisfaction and well-being. They've achieved their goals of raising a family and achieving a reasonable level of success in their chosen profession and they’re ready to pass the baton on the next generation.  At the other end of the spectrum are those enormously unhappy types who have never achieved the things they wanted. This doesn’t mean they haven't had success at anything. It may just indicate that the areas in which they experienced success did not conform with their expectations. They may even have raised that family and won the respect of their colleagues, but this is not what they wanted. John Updike for instance had wanted to draw cartoons, something for which The New Yorker is famous. It turned out that he became a legendary short story writer for that magazine. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, as was noted in Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro's recent NewYorker piece, appears to have opined on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. He joined the camp of those who believe that it was the Earl of Oxford who may have been the true Shakespeare. Judges have the wherewithal to be literary critics to the extent that they weigh evidence. Was he a frustrated scholar, who would rather have handed down interpretations of literature than law? Then of course there's another category of individual who suffers from a perceptual problem in which they actually feel they have never really had a chance to be, in any true sense? They may have put off or avoided the opportunities that came to them, existing in a limbo where they unhappily got by while others went about living their lives. Love and work, career and relationships seemed to have eluded them and whose fault was it really? If they are embittered and blame the world, they are the ones who will ultimately have to answer for their own frailties.

Abstract Climates: Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown

"Flood," by Helen Frankenthaler (Whitney Museum of Art)

If you read the chronology of Helen Frankenthaler’s life at the current "Abstract Climates: Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown" show at the Parrish in Southampton, you will note that she moved into the London Terrace apartments at 470 West 24^th soon after graduating from Bennington in l949. She had previously shared a studio at 232 East 21st Street. 173 East 94^th was the address of the brownstone she moved into with Robert Motherwell. She lived there from 1958-1998, though she was divorced from Motherwell in l971. The current show is about work created in Provincetown like the monumental “Flood” (1967) but the "color field" sensibility is pure New York, including the dates which read like a CV of the New York School. Ironically, the London Terrace apartments, a brooding block through structure, exists at the edge of today’s high powered Chelsea art world. After Bennington Frankenthaler studied for a short time at Columbia with the art historian Meyer Schapiro and then met Clement Greenberg with whom she had an affair. Through Greenberg she met Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Friedal Dzubas, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and David Smith. The romantic notion of the artist is one of solitudinous inner struggle. However, this current show depicts a collegial world. Frankenthaler and the artists in her circle were bound together by a greater project to which the general public was initially resistant. In l960 at the age of 32, Frankenthaler was already having a retrospective of her 50's work at The Jewish Museum. Frank O’Hara comments about the artist’s ambition in the catalogue for that show are quoted by the curators of the current exhibit thusly: “One of her strengths is the very ability to risk everything on inspiration, but one feels that her work is judged afterward by a very keen and erudite intelligence…(She is) a daring painter…willing to risk the big gesture, to employ huge formats so that her essentially intimate revelations may be more fully explored and delineated.”   

Camp: Notes on Fashion

Jean Paul Gaultier's black taffeta dress at The Met

 In her famous l964 essay Notes on Camp Susan Sontag wrote: “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.” Hermaphroditism and gay culture with their emphasis on estheticizing were components of the camp sensibility, but while Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide were both gay, Sontag found that Cocteau epitomized camp while Gide did not. Perhaps the line of demarcation liees in the flamboyance verging on parody of a Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast as compared to Gide novels like The Immoralist and The Counterfeiterswith their serious and even moral messages. The current Camp: Notes on Fashion show at the Met provides historical and intellectual provenance for “camp” before dealing with the camp sensibility per se. Parenthetically, kudos to the curators for the room devoted to Sontag in which aphorisms pecked out on a typewriter stream overhead in the gallery like stock prices on ticker tape. That in itself is camp, par excellence. Digging further into the past, the exhibit deals with the l9th century notion of the “Beau Ideal” as manifested in the contrapposto stance of classical Greek figures like Hermes, Ganymede and Antinous, who was Hadrian’s lover. Vivian Westwood’s nude leggings with their acrylic fig leaf and Jean Paul Gaultier’s black taffeta dress which like a Castro convertible can be either one thing or other, pants or a dress, are cited along with “se camper,” the French word for posing which appears in Moliere’s The Impostures of Scapin. Christopher Isherwood dichotomized between high camp (which encompassed culture) and low which he dismissed as a “swishy little boy.” Paul Cadmus’ homoerotic “The Fleet’s In,” (1934) makes a cameo appearance, along with Oscar Wilde whose proto post-modernist homilies used wit and irony in ways that actually transcended camp. The dandy, the flaneur, the boulevardier all attended "camp." But is camp itself a museum piece? “Strike a pose,” is the way Madonna, begins "Vogue" (1990), but her flamboyance may have been a death knell for a culture in which all the humor and esthetic distance have been denuded from cross-dressing, for one. Ambivalence was an intrinsic part of the camp sensibility and with sexual identification now a political act, it’s no longer a laughing matter. You have to make a choice.

Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.

from "Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away."

“Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking they were to go through a delousing process,” testified Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, at Nuremberg in l946. Under what rubric should this testimony be placed? One of the many themes of "Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away." at the Museum of Jewish Heritage was that extermination was an organizational and bureaucratic process. There’s something satanically aspirational in making murder all the more sterile and surgical. “The Final Solution” was instituted by Reich Main Office SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference in l942. Despite the fall of the Third Reich, the Nazis were remarkably successful in exporting the idea of genocide which would outlive them. It was an idea whose time had come, if one looks at the sad history of the post-war years and what's going on here in America today. Here's another quote from the exhibit, this time from Primo Levi who survived Auschwitz: “If it happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen and it can happen everywhere.” 

Welcome to Caffeine Culture!

Welcome to caffeine culture! Coffee is probably bigger business than it’s ever been and your average gas station features at least ten flavors of brew compared to the old days when there was a single spigot from one of those industrial level metal pots (the other one being reserved for plain hot water) or even worse just a pair of desolate Pyrexes sitting on a heater. But what's the attraction? Caffeine is like being one of those characters in an Antonioni movie of the 60’s where decadent aristocrats flaunted fast cars and glamorous women. Where amphetamines are over the top and vaguely antisocial amidst an opioid crisis, coffee and its fellow travelers like black tea and Coke provide the extra kick that fuels one’s overdrive. If you're trying to get somewhere, coffee puts an extra "tiger in your tank" to recall the old Esso slogan. A coffee high can produce great ideas. Balzac’s productivity might partially be attributed to coffee—for which he had an outsized thirst (he reputedly died at 51 after drinking 50 cups on an empty stomach). Now you can buy concoctions with power names like Nitro Cold Brew which provide an even greater kick since they're cold enough to swill down in a couple of gulps. The only problem is that once the effect wears off, there's only one way to get it back and that’s by ordering a backup, a remedy which when taken too often can have an adverse affect on the intestinal tract, not to mention sleep which doesn’t normally go hand in hand with the imbibing of coffee or any other caffeinated drink for that matter.