In Place of Art, Nature

The other week I was looking for a quote that would go along the lines of “throw away art, the greatest gallery of all is the natural world (God’s creation, etc.).” I have no doubt that Emerson, Thoreau or Whitman said something like that, but I wasn’t able to put my hands on an exact statement, so I moved on. Well, I’m more or less living that kind of thing right now, spending some time in Alaska. The physical land is the overwhelming presence here. There are probably very good artists at work in the state, but the population is small and the landscape is so spectacular that I imagine it can swamp much of the hunger for art. I spent today (Saturday) in Denali National Park and am going back in tomorrow. It is grandiose and beautiful (perhaps we should say sublime). It causes you to change the way your eyes see detail and distance. Compared to other environments it is empty. Relatively few birds for instance. But this makes you highly attuned to the birds you do see. The tree coverage is thin – no trees over large expanses, and the trees that do grow are smaller and thinner than most places. But this means you can make out the shapes of the land more clearly. Space is not so packed with visual events, so you mistake distances. Someone points out a wolf to you and your eye looks for something much bigger because you can’t quite get your head around how far away a bit of land is.

The greatest thing Denali has to offer (and Alaska too to a great extent) is a chance to be alone. It is a trail-less park, so you walk where you want except some areas closed due to protection of wildlife ranges. There’s a single road in and out. Walk away from the road, and you can separate yourself from anyone else. The park is so big that it can absorb people. The chance to occupy a large bit of space by yourself for some time is a gift.

When I have an experience of a place like Alaska or Denali, I am aware of the fact that so many other people have experience of the place that is older, deeper, of longer standing and more personal significance that my initiate’s reaction of exhilaration at seeing the park’s space, scale, shapes, and colors. There can be a competition among people for who has the heavier connection to a place. Some people are real Nashvillians (or Chicagoans, or Alaskans, or whatever). In fact there is always someone who is more of the place than you, making you feel like a poseur. Their love is greater and richer. So although you encounter a place in the isolation of personal experience, and feel moved in a way that seems singular, if you talk to people the stories start coming in, and someone will make your experience seem to pale.

This process occurs with works of art as well. We have our personal experience of art, and feel like we took something away from that encounter that changed us and has great significance. But there are always people out there who seem to be trying to show that you do not know the work as well as they. Art writers of all sorts, academic and otherwise (like yours truly) are obvious culprits.

I believe there is a desire to own a work of art, and a desire to own a place. A kind of competitiveness of knowing. It is great to think that you might really know more about something than anyone. At one time I had that sense, after preparing an analysis of the Emerson movement from Ives’ Concord Sonata for my undergraduate oral exam. At the time (a long time ago) I really felt I had cracked this piece, and I hadn’t seen any analysis that I thought went into the same depth. So that raised the possibility that I might have actually gotten further with a piece than most everyone. But I’m not a pianist, and there would be those who had performed the piece. Almost any of them could make a case that they understand it better, although I know at the time I would have argued against that in many cases.

The anxiety to know and feel more probably has up sides and down sides, like everything. As a critic, I know I often don’t really want to hear other people’s ideas about a piece or an artist. I just want them to share my excitement in my own observations. That’s a pretty crappy way to operate in the world, and requires conscientious effort to actually hear people. On the other hand, the desire to know more creates some of that free market effect of pushing people, or at least certain kinds of people, to go farther. What would it take for me to have that sense again, that I understood even one piece of music a bit better than almost anyone else?

I have pretty good Alaska experiences. I come up here from time to time. It’s on business, so I get to know a lot of Alaskans in the process. I can recount their stories. I share work with them. I come at different times of the year. So I can feel superior to a mere tourist. But there’s all those people who came and stayed, and many others for whom Alaska is a persistent, tantalizing and motivating dream, longing for a visit or to stay “if only I could figure out a way.” I have no town or place to which I have the claim that comes close to superseding all others. In the end, maybe outside of the most compulsive and single-minded in their devotion to a place, artist, experience, the tourist and dilettante are people’s natural roles.

Sunday Sermon

From Ken Johnson’s review in Friday’s Times of a juried exhibit run by a group called Christians in the Visual Arts: “It is hard to think of many great contemporary visual artists who have made Christian faith central to their work.” http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/arts/design/19john.html I think he was hedging a bit, because by context I’d say he wanted to say “any” in place of “many.” Either way, the statement seems true. When you survey contemporary visual art, you just do not come up with major figures who explicitly trade in the Christian messages that characterized earlier eras in art. Sure, people use religious images, but it always seems to be to criticize and distance or to address more general psychological or historical insight and sensations. Bill Viola may portray angels, but it doesn’t seem married to Christianity. Johnson contrasts the visual arts with literature, where you have Flannery O’Connor (or Walker Percy) making Christian art.

I think this observation starts from a comparison with earlier eras, but one factor that differentiates the current period is that Christianity is no longer compulsory. In earlier eras, how much of the religious art came from someone working within conventions to explore realms of sensation? Would artists have painted so many religious paintings if that wasn’t where the commissions came from? In Michelangelo you appear to have had a true believer, but what about the flesh of those Raphael virgins? Sure, it’s just the expression of inner spiritual energy.

Today, religious groups in no way represent a significant source of funds for advanced expression in visual art. For the most part church organizations do not fling money around for art like a High Renaissance pope, and when they do it is in the spirit of restoring supposedly long-lost artistic values, turning back the clock as opposed to accepting that art builds upon itself and promoting art that integrates what has gone before.

An objection to Johnson’s statement might be that the Christian expression is there, but in the best cases it isn’t expressed so crudely as to be immediately pigeon-holed as Christian art. It’s more like U2 – these guys are understood to be Christian, but they express that through something subtler and more universal. I don’t know of major visual artists whose work reflects a Christian identity in a similar way, but that is not to say there aren’t some. Of course one of Johnson’s complaints about this show is that some of the work is not Christian enough, open to other interpretations that do not necessarily have to do with the religion.

Johnson’s main criticism is that most of the work is “bound up in outdated, illustrative and technical clichés.” I haven’t seen the show, but I would expect this to be right. I imagine the work just isn’t as stimulating and energetic as what you would find in a Chelsea or Brooklyn gallery.

He does like several pieces, and he credits them with stylistic invention and a Christian context that makes “the situation seem even more charged.” He ends by arguing that there is potential for combining faith and artistic ambition, but the implication is that it is mostly unrealized potential.

If artists are to realize this potential, for one thing they have to avoid relegating themselves to a Christian art ghetto. There is encouragement in that direction: criticisms that the art isn’t clearly enough Christian, as if it must carry a sign so unsuspecting viewers don’t stumble into it; a separatist culture of Christian bookstores, schools, and social networks that fosters a protective, insular environment and also holds some prospect for financial reward (the exhibit reviewed is at the Museum of Biblical Art). Visual artists mist look for ways to deal with Christianity in substance as it exists today, variegated, troubled, dangerous and healing, and enter into the fray of the mainstream of art. The work will be better and more interesting.

Once upon a time Christianity was part of the West’s intellectual life, even long after the religion lost its political, economic, and intellectual dominance. Now too many Christians see that intellectual world as being another land, even the enemy. They want to destroy it, not act as part of it. That’s a lost opportunity.

Octavia Butler

In his comments on a post here about Alexis Rockman, Greg Pond brought up Philip K. Dick as an example that argues against seeing science fiction as limited or lesser than “non-generic” art. This made me think of other sci fi writers you would cite in a similar way, like Frank Herbert, and Octavia Butler.

Butler is a black woman, I think based in LA, and a MacArthur grant winner. I’ve read two related books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, set in a near future where the older characters were born in contemporary times. It’s a dystopic future where global warming has disrupted agriculture and economies, with Dickensian poverty, scarce oil, rampant violence, new drug scourges, the US politically disintegrating, and an ascendant and virulent Christianist movement taking over – a breed of totalitarianism taking advantage of social disorder.

I often think about these books when contemplating the trajectory and spirit of current political and social trends: the government getting out of providing services, people left to fend for themselves, a Christian movement dedicated to the domination of political structures, and of course every new scare about global warming.

I think there are problems with her vision, in particular she depicts a world in which the police and military are largely absent, where it really seems that the government is pushing to extend the reach of the state control of violence and trying to create a social order with a minimum of ripples on the surface.

I find myself tempted to introduce Butler’s description of the future into conversations, say with my wife, about how things are going, but find myself getting into trouble with it. It ends up sounding extreme and not very well connected to reality. Which raises the question of the extent to which you take sci fi scenarios you find compelling – in my cases, from Octavia Butler – as descriptions of a likely future, a kind of perversely alluring fantasy, or some sort of commentary of the spirit of the present. It is tempting to go with the first, most literal option. “Don’t you see, this is exactly what she’s saying in her books.” But I’m not sure Octavia Butler would want it that way. It’s a crude reading, excessively literal. Then again, the topicality of the narrative is hard to leave behind. Does it blind us or overwhelm whatever else might be going on?

Jay DeFeo

In the last year or so I’ve read about a painting by West Coast artist, Jay DeFeo, The Rose. It must have been almost two years ago when it showed at the Whitney (http://www.abstract-art.com/abstraction/l2_Grnfthrs_fldr/g084c_DeFao_The-Rose.html). It’s a massive work, composed by building up oil paint in a thick impasto so it becomes sculptural. I haven’t seen this, but last week in San Francisco I got to see another work by DeFeo, along the same lines. Called “Incision,” it’s 10 feet tall, with a vertical orientation, filled with a mass of black and grey paint that seems as heavy and solid as stone (http://collections.sfmoma.org/Obj22$88176). A few pieces of string stuck in the paint dangle down. It’s a monumental work, taking patterns of abstract expressionist painting and giving them a sculptural presence that is implied in the thick surfaces of many of the painters but never fully realized when taken into stone or bronze. DeFeo’s work gave the colors a body to live in, and the colors, even if they are just blacks and greys, put Abstract Expressionist painting into motion.

Rather than referring to the color as living in this encrusted paint, maybe it’s better to say it was encased in it. The work feels like an ancient gravesite excavated from its location and displayed in a museum. You expect to see the bones of an ancient human embedded in the hardened stuff that used to be porous, shiftable, or liquid.

DeFeo was born on the east coast but lived and made art in the Bay Area, part of the Beat scene there in the 50s and 60s (“Incision” is dated 1958-61). She died in 1989 at 60.

SF MOMA’s collection is smaller than MOMA in NY, but covers a lot of the same bases, maybe going a little further back into Impressionism. It does however, have emphasis shifts, definitely including more West Coast artists, like DeFeo. There always seems to be this alternate history for the West Coast, whether it’s hip-hop or jazz, or painting. You could argue that DeFeo was stuck in an Abstract Expressionist vocabulary well after pop art was starting to dominate in New York, and therefore is more marginal to cultural history than someone working with image-based art at the same time. The massive power of a piece like “Incision” is hard to dismiss, and if she needs the proper historical context, the literary-artistic milieu she was a member of has huge importance. But no one museum can tell every story, and a good art museum has to have a story line. A West Coast institution has to take responsibility for telling a West Coast story.

What Artists In the Bay Area See

Yerba Buena Art Center in San Francisco is currently running a regional show, Bay Area Now 4 (there’s also performing arts and film/video components to the show: http://ybca.org/ban4/index.htm). One thing that comes out in several of the artists is a real fascination with their physical and social surroundings, the place itself, which is something you come to expect from Western artists. The landscape imposes itself so forcefully onto your consciousness, whether it is in the form of mountain ranges, the ocean fog coming in and clearing, or the prospect and aftermath of fires and earthquakes. There is also the fetish of the West’s own relatively short (white) history, with caricatures of miners still knocking around the visual landscape. The potential for contact with wilderness, a brief glimpse of being alone in the natural world, also gives the physical environment more power to exercise overpowering psychic effects. Jack Dingo Ryan, recently returned to Middle Tennessee but a child of the Northwest, talks about this in his work in terms of the Kantian category of the sublime.

This fixation with the place shows up in three forms in three artists in this show. Sasha Petrenko has constructed a low wooden shack that looks like a crude frontier shelter. You walk into it to find a fragmented diorama of a Western landscape with models of modern vehicles like RVs and trucks scattered around, the contemporary conveyances of a people still in motion through this landscape. Adriane Colburn turns her attention to a more contemporary landscape, a big grid made from cut paper that runs along a wall and down onto the floor, representing the sewage system of San Francisco. The grid has been coded to reflect the city’s natural waterways which have been diverted into the system. She even opens up the gallery wall and some conduit inside it to integrate cables pulled from it into her piece’s grid. This grid points to one physical manifestation of the interconnection of people in a city, and of their connection through such structures to the physical landscape. The size of the piece gives the sense of it being an enveloping network of connection, and by integrating the architecture of the gallery the piece merges the viewer’s experience directly into that network.

Christine Shields deals more purely with the social characteristics of the place in a series of portrait paintings. These include a set of pictures of young hip-looking men who all have beards, the members of the band Vetiver, and an iconic portrait of the musician Devandra Banhart. The accumulation of pictures makes you aware of artist’s being surrounded by people that she is able to draw lines between to form connections on various grounds. Banhart and the musicians in Vetiver are friends, part of a scene in San Francisco that gets labeled neo-hippie or something else equally reductive. They appear on each others’ albums and tour together. The portraitist comes across as seeing herself linked to an exciting network of creative people, which you imagine is central to her experience of the Bay Area as a place.

In Shields’ portrait, Banhart is placed on a vibrant red background with orange streaks radiating out from his like an aura or corona. It turns him into an icon, bringing in a note of self-importance that characterizes the interest in place everywhere it occurs in this show. It’s not enough that Banhart is a musician and maybe a valued friend, but he is endowed with the trappings of sainthood. The invocations of local civil engineering and the history of Western settlement can have the feeling of “the epic story of the West.”

My sense that there is a grandiosity in this work is colored to some extent from my experience in traveling from Nashville and arriving in San Francisco. It is a much more ambitious city, with more obvious displays of community wealth, and it generates much more fascination from other parts of the world. It is awash in tourists in a way that Nashville never is, for all of its status as the home of country music. People do not swoon over our town the same way. Institutions in SF are bigger and there are more of them – the Yerba Buena complex, with its gallery, theatre, and whatnot is directly across the street from SF MOMA, with its landmark building and a collection that reflects the presence of very great wealth. Just on this one block.

Among the other work in the show, it was good to see Chris Ballantyne’s work again after his Cheekwood show. Christian Maychack makes site specific works that incorporate architectural details from the space like a staircase or a gallery divider wall and transform them in ways that confuse perspective. Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh collaborated on two sound installations. In one, a series of small speakers was mounted along a two-story wall, emitting the sounds of shell casings hitting the ground. The sound was gorgeous, ringing with a clear high pitch, and of course creepy – the retort of the shot removed, just leaving its aftermath. The other piece placed speakers behind a large pane of glass, giving off wet smacking/kissing sounds. It could have represented the sound of bullets entering flesh, again stripped of the rest of the sounds like the cries of agony.

An auxiliary to this show might be a work across the street in a photography show at SF MOMA. The show displays pieces lent by a single collector (I think this is one of those cases where the museum is courting the collector to try land a donation of the works at some future date). It includes a panoramic view of the city of San Francisco taken from a high point in 1877, by Eadweard Muybridge, the guy who did the sequential photo studies of a horses and people in motion. The 360 degree view is split into several photos. There’s nothing unusual in landscape as a topic, but it does go along with a sense of “take a look at this place” that seems to come across a bit more strongly than with artists in other places. In Nashville I think the engagement with place takes a more personal form.

Woonsocket

During our trip to Rhode Island we ventured out of Providence into the Blackstone River valley, a corridor of old mill towns ending in Worcester, Mass. Woonsocket, RI was at one time a leading center for manufacture of woolen fabric, but it suffered through an earlier era of deindustrialization as mills moved to the Southern US in pursuit of cheaper labor. There was a listener commentary on NPR recently in response to a piece on Southern mills closing due to overseas competition, where this guy remembered how basically the same process occurred in the early and middle 20^th century to bring those jobs to places like the Carolinas in the first place. It left behind cities with anemic economies. And maybe in an earlier time, Woonsocket was the beneficiary of a similar process. During the height of the city’s industrial economy, before and after 1900, the mills there were staffed with lots of workers from French Canada, who were the cheap immigrant labor of their day, giving the owners a way to undercut the wage demands of “native” workers. At one point 60% of the population was French Canadian.

Woonsocket still seems down on its heels. One thing to say for them is that they have preserved many of the old mill buildings, and converted them into housing – but unlike Chicago or a big city, it doesn’t look these have become luxury lofts, but appear to be used in a lot of cases for subsidized or affordable housing.

We wandered into the historical museum in Woonsocket. Usually I skip these, most due to laziness in the face of something that seems too close to being in school, but this was very well done. It is small, and with minimal resources its presents a version of the town’ history structured around a passionately pro-worker point of view. Its name gives an idea about it: The Museum of Work and Culture (http://www.woonsocket.org/workandculture.htm). The museum lays out the economics behind the experience of French Canadian immigrant factory workers and their families. The exhibits address the transition from self-sufficient agriculture in Quebec to paid factory work, the nature of the work and of the relations between owners, supervisors, and workers, and the role of the Catholic Church in preserving French identity and maintaining industrial order. The galleries include simple games to demonstrate basic factory tasks, like sorting bobbins and installing yarn spindles. It allows you to time yourself and explains the time requirements you would have had as a worker (demonstrating you how hard the work was). It also gets into the mechanics of control on the shop floor, like time sheets and technical expertise. This may sound dry, but rather than relying on long text explanations, oral history recordings play and you can handle artifacts like an original copy of a thick operating manual for a complex automated loom in use in 1960. Just leafing through this volume shows you how the complexity of the machine vested power in whoever had full knowledge of its technical operations. There’s a great display that shows what went into home work production of costume jewelry, including the loose “jewels” and stock settings used.

The person at the museum’s front desk attributed the exhibit concept and design to the site’s co-manager, Ray Bacon, and it is almost inconceivable that a museum with such a strong point of view would have come about through a committee process. The exhibits put forth a clear narrative of the French-Canadian workers’ experience in Woonsocket, they deal directly with their hardships, and do not try to cast the “golden age” of Woonsocket manufacturing as an Eden. It makes the case of workers’ rights rather than resorting to saying in some form “we told you so – wasn’t it a lot better when at least there were jobs here.” This museum refuses to take that false exchange, and they end up as one of the "reddest" (as in red diaper baby, not red state) museums I've ever seen.

Le Tigre, one of my favorite bands

Le Tigre played the Exit/In in Nashville last night. They're one of the few bands that I really want to hear. They have a very polished stage act, not much punk chaos. The band trades off delivering spoken, rapped, and shouted lyrics, with occasional steps into punkier scream-singing, over bouncy samples and drum machine tracks with live guitar on top. Like a hip-hop act, there’s dancing all the way through, and synchronized moves as they trade turns at the guitar and the sampler keyboard, and a video backdrop perfectly timed to the samples – an anti-Bush number included footage from protests in New York with the voices of the speakers on the sample tracks. The act is immediately likable, eye and ear candy for boys and girls, but unapologetically rooted in a feminist-progressive-lesbian (or sexually free) milieu. They did songs like “What’s Your Take on Cassavetes” which pitch-perfectly captures a kind of conversation that only can occur in an intelligentsia hipster relationship, and “Hot Topic” with its shoutouts to a long list of feminist heroes – if you can track all these references, it positions you in an alternate world (that deserves to be the prevailing world) where these writers, musicians, scholars, and artists are the culture guideposts. An exhibit last year in Cincinnati on political art in the 80s reminded me of how the art of that progressive world was pretty dreary back then. Nowadays guys like Le Tigre make it fun – a hell of a lot more fun than the prevailing culture, which is filled with killjoys and worse. The tables have been turned, and this seems more the rightful order. Le Tigre reclaims pleasure as an essential counter-cultural value.

Be Your Own Pet opened the band, at a time shockingly close to 9:00, so I was in line on the sidewalk during their set and still haven't really heard them. It sounded good from the street. I talked to two friends at the show who also got there late and haven't heard BYOP yet, and these guys go to a lot more shows than I do. Maybe it's becoming a thing, how long can you go without hearing the band. I have seen one of their side projects, Jimmy Cushman! (the apostrophe is an official part of the name), just guitar and drums, good straight forward hardcore, and my friends rave about another BYOP side project Deluxin'. But I haven't heard that yet either.

Alexis Rockman, Sci-Fi Wannabe?

Spent a pleasant weekend in Providence, Rhode Island, taking a break from the Southern summer. I was a bit surprised to realize that RISD runs the primary art museum in town, but it is quite good. It’s a small facility, with a little bit of everything (I think – most of the European galleries were closed), and well chosen. I get a lot more out of Roman or Greek art on this scale, rather than the Met.

One of the temporary exhibits was Alexis Rockman’s Manifest Destiny, a monumental painting of a speculative view of the Brooklyn waterfront in the year 5000, after humanity has burned itself out and the world is a lot warmer. Water covers everything, and the view is a cutaway to show the submerged remains of human civilization, the decayed infrastructure of tunnels and bridges, and all variety of swimming creatures, many sporting deformities from centuries of poisoning and genetic abuse. Here’s a couple of sites with pictures.

http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/human_vs_nature.html
http://intranet.risd.edu/pdfs/Rockman.pdf

I saw this painting a couple of years ago when it was part of the Brooklyn Museum’s inauguration of its renovations. The painting is big, 24 feet long, with lots of detail to pick out. RISD has done more with displaying it than Brooklyn did, pointing viewers to some Hudson River and American Luminist paintings in the collection that are sources for the colors, the scale, and some of the atmospheric effects.

My wife, who is very smart (I could put together a blog just of perceptive and trenchant comments she makes in my presence in the course of a day), asked rhetorically how this painting is different than any sci-fi illustrator’s vision of Earth’s future. The realist style would fit in, and all of Rockman’s research is not so different from what someone in that realm would do. This painting may have more referential levels: to earlier schools of American painting, including its title which turns upside down their role in building the myth of a manifest destiny of white Americans over a majestic landscape considered empty; to vernacular museum painting, particular dioramas (his mother worked at the American Museum of Natural History); and finally to the enterprise of contemporary art, whose home base is the Brooklyn pictured.

One question is what separates something that is treated as “art” and given the museum treatment and “popular” art that runs through other channels. Or whether there really is any difference. I had a friend in college who used to argue that the most profound art was psychedelic album covers and whatnot. He said that sort of work carried him the farthest mentally, led to more insights and new experiences than traditional art – especially when tripping, but not only then. To some extent he was trying to get a rise out of those of us who had more conventional notions. A psychedelic design was cool, but not great like Rembrandt. But he was also serious about this argument, and it prefigured the current situation where there is no reason an artist can’t start with that kind of visual vocabulary and continue to pursue its basic pleasures. Still, one wants to see someone take that sort of genre base into a more nuanced engagement with experience. You look for things like whether the work takes into account its own status as an object, or whether the image is presented unproblematically as pure image. I think if Rockman does this in Manifest Destiny, it is by virtue of the scale of the work, which calls to mind different museum contexts and a body of monumental painting one can call to mind. A smaller work with a similar theme, Washington Square, also on display at RISD, is a straighter painting, but other paintings which I’ve only seen on the web are more surrealistic. There’s some range of painting vocabulary at work here, but I haven’t seen enough to get into it. And he consistently pursues a voice of strong ecological protest.

Here in Nashville, there is a student at the Watkins College, Mike Bielaczyc, who has had some success as a fantasy illustrator and is now getting his BFA (http://www.aradani.com/frameset.htm) . I’ve only seen a little of his work, but I’m sure I’ll see more before long. I’m interested to see what he does to synthesize his background in fantasy painting, drawing, and even costuming, with the contemporary aesthetics Watkins offers. It could lead to something really engaging, or be a combination that never quite gels. If Rockman is an art-school artist moving into popular modes of visual art, Bielaczyc might be making an opposite progression.

NY Times Review of Religious Art in Context

Holland Cotter had a great review in last Friday’s NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/arts/design/29cott.html?oref=login). It’s on an exhibit in Worcester of art that was produced in response to the plague in Europe from 1500-1800. Cotter explains that the curators have presented the works within their functional religious context, as acts of or prompts to devotion, talismans, and manuals offering instruction in piety. The paintings are viewed “through the eyes of a believer for whom a picture of the Virgin is a moral lesson and an emotional encounter before it is a Tiepolo or Tintoretto.”
Maybe because I’m part of the church-going world, I’ve been aware of the oddness in how we experience religious art in a museum – taken from its altar or chapel, lined up with other disparate paintings along a wall. In church we to some extent integrate the visual elements (sculpture, carvings, stained glass, painting) into the rest of our liturgical work. It’s not always great art, but it does the trick, and there’s no reason it can’t be great art. The Rothko Chapel works superlatively as a functional space for meditation, and you can never quite reach the same psychic space with a Rothko in a gallery, no matter how sensitively staged.
All you have to do is think about music to see Cotter’s point. We have different expectations of church music than concert or club music. I wouldn’t want to listen to a crowd singing the doxology, but I look forward to it as part of a service. There is unquestionably great church music (start with Bach). And you can go to some churches where it is performed at a stellar level – I have a friend who sings in the choir at St. Bartholomew’s on Park Ave. in NY, and it sounds like a superb group. But most people also tolerate something less perfectly executed. The purposes and expectations are different than a concert.
Cotter’s last paragraph is great:
“This approach also prompts an encouraging thought. Maybe someday in the future, when we are not here, a few bright scholars will re-examine art produced in response to AIDS in the United States in the late 20th century, and in Africa at the beginning of the 21st century. And maybe those scholars will choose to focus not on the comparative quality of objects or styles, but on intangible elements that science tends to be shy of: how art provokes emotion and conveys belief, and how a certain kind of art, at a certain time, gave certain people who felt the earth had been swept away beneath them a place to stand.”

Salon in Murfreesboro This Saturday

No, I'm not talking about some sort of appearance sponsored by the online magazine. A notion that is as improbable as it is tiresome. Salon is a name I could live without, it's so fusty-sounding, but the basic idea is good and compelling - get a bunch of people together to share art, music, or words on a pretty informal, unstructured basis. In the best case, this should provide an alternative to shrinking public space and impoverished commercial and institutional sectors as a way of letting people do what they need to do aesthetically and intellectually.

Frank Baugh, Ryan Lewis, and Jacqueline Meeks are putting together a one-night in-someone's-apartment showing of paintings, drawings, and zines this Saturday. The announcement is here: http://salond6.childismine.com/ . The address, if you don't feel like clicking the link, is 1311 Greenland Drive, Apt. D6 in M-boro. I'm particularly glad to see that they say the work will include zines. They provide an important crossover into words, and really into music a lot of times too when they include reviews and interviews. It also brings to mind a specific vibe of pervasive self-expression which is comforting and energizing, the way Halcyon Books felt, which I have missed since the store closed.

Real Big Flowers at the Airport

<>Viewing art at the airport is a little like catching a band on the late talk shows – it’s a substitute for someone who is too lazy or busy to actually go to the show. Still, it’s good to get some benefit out of the time at the airport, especially in the summer when there’s a pretty good chance everything is running hours late, and Susan Knowles does a great job of getting work that is well done, works in the space, and captures stylistic and regional variety.

Right now one end of the ticketing concourse has Monica Quattrochio’s multi-panel photos of flowers taken at extremely close range and blown up to extremely large size. The results are intensely colored, fleshy and moist. The flowers have beads of liquid on them that could be dew but seem more like their own secretions. A photo of a tulip bloom focuses in on the white pistil surrounded by the black or deep purple stamen. The petals of the flower form a blurry background.

<>Floral and botanical art seems to be a fairly common theme in galleries around Nashville. Often it comes with some claim to be a commentary on ecology and nature, its fragility, transience, or developmental processes. However, a lot of times that seems like an effort to give grander aesthetic rationale to work whose appeal rests on something a lot simpler. Pictures of flowers are pretty. They are nice to make, nice to look at, and you ought to be able to sell a few. One of the discomforts of a market-based art world (as opposed to say institutional or individual patronage, which have their own problems) is a conflict with an artist’s sense of integrity and higher purpose. Those things are great, but why are they worth anything to a purchaser? When you think about the nature of the financial transaction (and when someone buys art they beyond postcards we are talking about a fairly significant exchange of money), there are fortunate cases where the buyer writes the check sheerly out of aesthetic appreciation, but you can’t get around the fact that some people with the money to buy art are practical people. That’s how they got to be people with the money to buy art. And for some number of those practical people, the financial transaction represented by buying an art work is an investment, or a very nice way to decorate the house or office. When you paint floral paintings or take pictures of flowers, unless you have a Clyfford Still-like pickiness about whom you sell to, some of the sales will be serve the pursuit of higher home design.

Quattrochio finds one way to get around this, which is to push the images into such extremes – the close-ups emphasize the richness of color but also bring out the less comfortable aspects of the natural world, like the fact that living things excrete stuff. Where the focus on the very small brings out one kind of edginess, the large size makes for a degree of discomfort of the opposite sort. The big size makes the image overwhelming. I first saw her photos in a show at the Downtown Artists’ Coop in Clarksville, a nice second floor space in an old downtown building. The photos fill up the space and their slick surfaces nearly light the room. In the airport, the works look more like something put on a monumental scale to respond to the challenges of this terminal room. The size also means you cannot easily buy and display the entire image in a house, undercutting the tendency for the subject matter to devolve to decoration scheme. As I recall, Quattrochio offers individual panels for sale, something still pretty but more abstract and that may not be readily identifiable as a flower part.

Quattrochio’s photos walk a line for me. The combined scale effects give them a kind of concrete object presence, but I’m not sure the images go as far past pleasingly pretty to give them sustained aesthetic power and to lead into the kind of threads of thought and association that I enjoy most from the experience of art.

Recent Excuse to Reread Robert Duncan

The New American Poetry, put together by Donald Allen in 1960, is one of those classic canon-forming texts. The poets he chose, and the ways he grouped them together defined post WWII American poetry. As a teenager, my dad pointed me towards this book as an essential source of knowledge and enlightenment.

I went back to the book last week because of something that came up getting ready for a solo sax performance. I put one thing together by taking the first few lines of a Steve Lacy solo piece, Pearl Street from the Snips loft concert, which I used as the jumping off point for my own improvisation. That wasn’t the most successful thing I’ve ever done, but it reminded me of Robert Duncan’s “A Poem Beginning With A Line By Pindar” from New American Poetry. I read some of the poem as an intro to playing, and probably would have been better off just doing that.

I don’t know Duncan too well, and this is the main poem I know. He’s grouped with the Black Mountain poets by Allen, and probably by self-definition, but he was much more a lyrical poet than any of them. In this poem, he goes into a historical section, but I don’t think it’s as strong as other parts of the work.

The poem is a great cross-disciplinary work. It starts out with music and sound: the line from Pindar is after all “The light foot hears you and the brightness begins” and moves to reverberations of a Grecian lyre, a Rilkean motive. And dance is here as well, and comes back in the end with an image of children dancing. What really struck me was his writing about painting, Goya in the main instance:

<>“In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Pscyhe
have a hurt voluptuous grace
bruised by redemption. The copper light
falling upon the brown boy’s slight body
is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing
up from blind innocence, ensnared
by dimness
into the deprivations of desiring sight.

<>But the eyes in Goya’s painting are soft,
diffuse with rapture absorb the flame.
Their bodies yield out of strength.
Waves of visual pleasure
wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience.”

The description of Goya goes on a little longer. It reminded me of the Goya painting currently on display at the Frist as part of the Wadsworth Athenaeum collection, “Gossiping Women.” It shows two women, fully clothed, reclining outdoors in a pastoral setting. The woman in front is seen from the back, so she is all fullness and curve of voluptuous body. The painting has a narrow, horizontal shape, probably meant to go over a door. According to the catalogue its pendant was a sleeping woman, again reclining, in soft fabrics, this time seen from the front, her head resting in her hand. That seems more explictly erotic and seems to confirm that the image of the gossiping women is meant to be alluring. The eroticism is understated but pervasive, a function of the “desiring sight” Duncan describes.

<>Each succeeding line of the poem, especially in this early part, gives you something else to take and use for looking at pictures: “waves of visual pleasure”, “sorrow previous to impatience,” and later on “hot luminescence at the loins of the visible.” Its not necessarily the most sophisticated way to read a poem, something like the way historians use novels to illustrate some point or the other about an epoque. But pleasurable even if not entirely responsible to the status of the poem as an integral whole.

Curtis Mayfield Saves The Day

Susan Alcorn had her show in Nashville this week, and the performances were darker stormier than I remember from last year. Typically lyrical openings developed into very dissonant, noisy stuff. She also did her piece Twin Beams, which is a response to the 2001 attacks in New York but really a protest against what has become of the country since then. The piece opens up with small dissonances, the same note on two adjacent strings set just apart from each other. And it went on from there, to a dense, angry, wounded sound. But at some point it comes off that, and it ends up in People Get Ready by Curtis Mayfield. I don’t have the Wire review of her London show in front of me, but I think she made this same combination in on that show. It’s a remarkable tune, and to me was fully redemptive in this context. It is one of those soul songs that is so close to gospel it’s hard to tell the difference, making for the kind of non-sectarian spiritual expression that has great curative powers. It also brings to mind the person of Curtis Mayfield, who projected joy and gentleness (and I know little about his bio, so I don’t know if that’s the way he was).
Susan has discovered that this song, played on pedal steel, can counterbalance almost anything. She can make a lot of noise with the pedal steel, and when she attaches it by association with post-Trade Center political climate that makes for something very harsh. Even then, there’s no denying People Get Ready. Maybe that undercuts the protest, offering too easy hope – in spite of the evil spirits afloat in our culture, if we just tap into our memories of 60s peace and love it will be better. But from a technical perspective, it is remarkable what the combination of note sequence and instrumental timbre can achieve.

Billy Renkl Fold Refold

In my review of the Fragile Species show I wasn’t able to comment on every participant, which leaves me with some topics to take up on the blog.

I’ve seen Billy Renkl’s work at Cumberland Gallery a few times and it has some characteristics that make me suspicious. Primarily because it seems he often uses antique books or other sources as the background for an image of his composition. The problem I have with that sort of borrowing whenever you run across it is that the found material is a little too interesting on its own. You end up looking at and maybe trying to decipher the older material, which relieves the artist from some burden of holding your interest. I have the same problems with work that incorporates maps. I can look at a map for hours. When it’s in an art work, am I looking at the work or the map? If the latter, why not just frame some maps. Would I get the same thing from it? Sometimes one can be confident that the artist’s contribution is not nearly as interesting as the original image. So this creates maybe a higher threshold for the artist.

Renkl has two pieces in the Frist show constructed in a similar way (one tangential observation: while most of the pieces in the show were listed as “courtesy of the artist,” both of Renkl’s were lent by collectors other than the artist). He took parts of a map, cut it into strips, and recombined the strips so the boundaries printed on the map form outlines of children’s heads. These woven silhouettes are mounted on top of found material – in one case a ledger book hand-written in French, the other a book in Latin (Marcus Aurelius?) overlaid with an illustration of the geometry of map projection techniques. Like I said, this sort of work is tricky because I could spend hours just trying to decipher the ledger book and figure out what this person was selling. And ditto with the maps – from the fragments visible, what can you tell about the original, the area it represents, the age of the map. However, these pieces do have things going on that transcend the source material, and at least part of it relates to multiple transformation and reuse of iconic shapes.

In one piece called “Island” a map of England has been cut apart and rewoven so that the shoreline is reshaped to trace a head in silhouette, the green color of the English land inside the figure, the blue of the surrounding seas forming the background. In the other, “Foreign Country #2,” sections from a mountainous German-speaking country (could be Bavaria, Austria, or Switzerland, I’m not familiar enough with the towns there to know) have been reworked so the textured and orange-tinted mountain areas take the form of a head enclosed within the red lines of political borders surrounded by smooth green lowlands. What is particularly clever about these images is that the figure in “Island” takes on some of the shape of Britain, at least its southern part, and the other figure looks something like Germany before reunification with the East. In “Island,” Renkl seems to have accented this echo of the English/Welsh landmass by adding a little more of the figure’s chest, making a shape that looks a bit like Cornwall’s western reaches.

Renkl takes familiar map shapes, breaks them apart and reassembles them first into something that represents something entirely different – a human head – but then molds that head in such a way that it points back to the iconic shapes of the countries that he broke apart.

Using a map puts into play a very conditioned set of viewing responses. We know that maps represent places. When we see a map, even if its just part of a map (folded back on itself so we can read it in the car), we look to see where it is. If we see a section and realize it is England, we can imagine the shape of the whole from the part. That imagined shape probably colors my projection that the silhouettes look like England and Germany.

Silhouettes are similar to maps in that they are representations we are trained to understand. They reduce a human figure to a single element, its exterior outline. We think we can tell something about the figure represented from that line, but we accept some signals like hairstyle to tell us the age, sex, and era of the figure. When Kara Walker uses silhouettes there is a moment of recognition when we realize that the figures are unconventional, in that they are black – African-American – people. When Watkins student Cherry Smith-Bell used silhouettes of African-American figures in her senior thesis work, there is first the recognition that the work reminds you of Walker and then that unlike Walker these are contemporary, everyday figures. Or so I think. Silhouettes require the viewer to construct the image and fill in the details in an active way.

Renkl’s pieces engage in a complicated set of visual transactions conducted by both the artist and viewer as forms are broken down and reconstructed. He overlays two bodies of visual convention – silhouettes and maps – that require their own interpretative actions and also evoke the past in content and visual practice.

What Makes Dave Cloud Dave Cloud

I caught Dave Cloud for the first time in a few months last week when he opened for Comets on Fire at the End. The band sounded good, even tight, with 4 guitar players plus bass, drums, and Tony Crow on keyboards. Not that things were buttoned down – Dave did strip down to his boxers and do a couple of pushups, and the words are still what they are, strangely visionary, libidinous. My favorite was Helios, a long number, mostly spoken if I remember right, in which a guitar player like Link Wray descends from the sky and conquers the earth without mercy.

The band sounded like it had been rehearsing, working the songs out. On the obvious upside, tightening the music makes the band more accessible. If music sounds “messy,” many people can’t hear it. If DC and the Gospel of Power stay on this trajectory, it should be easier for more people to hear Dave. And it’s also important to remember that Dave Cloud loves rock music, and part of rock music is the rock star thing. Give the band a cleaner sound, and Dave gets to go further into that. Based on the band’s sound at the end, there’s a lot less reason why they should be relegated to underground venues and no-pay/low-pay gigs. I didn’t see what separated them from a band that would play shows across the street at the Exit/In.

Still, you expect a howl from Dave, a primeval expulsion of the sub-conscious, unfettered and unedited, and a rougher sound reinforces that primal growl character. The sound on Dave’s recordings or in shows at the Springwater is not just a matter of convenience, it also constitutes an aesthetic position with a discernible impact. When Dave Cloud sounds more like other rock bands, is that a good thing for rock music?

Pedal Steel Innovator Susan Alcorn Back In Nashville

Susan Alcorn, who does breathtaking things with the pedal steel guitar, is going to be back in town for a show next Wednesday at Angle of View. Starting from her home base in Houston, she’s doing a tour that will end up in New York. The details are:

<>Location: Angle of View, 417 Gallatin Road
Date: Wednesday, July 13
Time: 8:00 or so

I’m opening for her with a short solo set, then she’ll do a substantial solo set, and then we’ll play some duets. Chris Davis is trying to line up a couple of local bands to play after us since we want to start kinda early.

Susan has defined a musical realm for herself that is nearly unique. She is thoroughly grounded in country and jazz, but has gone way past that to integrate Indian music, gamelan, minimalism, and contemporary classical music. Her music is lush and meditative, and usually works from defined melodic material, but she improvises freely and organically. Her harmonies, timbres and textures shift in unexpected ways. In addition to her own compositions, she has adapted old hymns, Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready, a choral piece by Oliver Messiaen named O Sacrum Convivium, Piazzolla tangos and Chilean Nueva Cancion. The pedal steel guitar has an amazing sound, and Susan starts with the material qualities of its sound and distills it in an almost overwhelmingly emotional way.

I think an important reference point for Susan’s music is the work she has done with Pauline Oliveros over the years. Oliveros is a minimalist composer, but her work has evolved to include strong meditative and psycho-spiritual aspects. It seems like people who work with her develop a distinct stance towards sound, they see it as powerful and sacred and healing. The Argentinian band Reynols absorbed a lot from Oliveros. So has Susan.

In addition to her performances with Oliveros, Susan has recorded with Eugene Chadbourne, played with Chris Cutler and Peter Kowald. It seems like she has been touring more – she played at High Zero last fall (http://www.highzero.org/2004_documentation/photo/alcorn_session/index.html). Then she participated in the London Musicians’ Collective’s annual festival in November (there’s a picture of her at that event and a nice mention in the review in the January 2005 Wire, p. 87).

The sound of Susan’s music, her words about music, and the qualities of her personality have been deeply influential on me. It is worth taking a look at her web site (www.susanalcorn.com). The following passage comes from her “performance notes” page:

“Blurry the distinction and uneven the border between notes and sound. Music has so much to say and so little time to say it. For this reason, I often feel that music should be more shamanic ritual in nature and less recital for each note is a god or goddess, and they live with others of their kind in the primordial space under the fingers, between the strings and surrounding the twelve notes that humans have delineated. And in this community of countless notes surrounded by sounds and noise, each has a story to tell if it is properly beckoned and if our ears will hear it. This is the nature of music. It is this beauty, the depth and the heart of sound formed from this community of notes and from the original sound that I hope to touch lightly, to bring forth, and to share with you in this time and space tonight.”

The passage about each note being a god or goddess comes back to me all the time.

Susan and I have played a couple of times over the years. They have been among the best musical experiences I have had.

Recorded Music and the Decline of Music

Bill Friskics-Warren, the very capable music editor of the Scene, author of books and articles, and thoughtful critic, sent me a copy of an article from the June 6 New Yorker on the effect of recording technologies on musical performance (the full text is actually available online http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050606crat_atlarge). The author, Alex Ross, is reviewing a couple of books. The focus in the books and the review is on the impact recording has had on classical music. The big hypothesis of the books is that it has contributed to the decline in audiences for classical music, although Ross makes the case this case doesn’t hold up. Leaving aside whether recording can take that rap, the article points out some effects that are hard to deny. Most significantly, recordings have contributed to a homogenization of classical performance styles. There was a time when players from different countries played to different standards of rhythm and timbre, but the availability of recordings led to a convergence on the styles that sounded best in recordings. Especially in early recordings, musicians had to cut through the surface noise, favoring piercing sounds and effects like vibrato to provide a wider range of sound.

One wonders if the decline of the classical recording market will lead to more diversity of performance style. On the one hand, the conservatory system will tend to promulgate standards. However, as playing occurs outside of recorded gaze, local peculiarities may creep in. You may be able to see it in a place like Nashville already. This Spring, at Alias’s last concert of the season, I was struck by violinist Zeneba Bowers’ approach to a Baroque piece by Matteis. To me her playing seemed loose – very effective, exciting and enthusiastic, and somehow akin to bluegrass fiddling or jazz. As a violinist in Nashville, you know that Bowers cannot help but be aware of “folk” fiddle styles. Moreover, as a leader in one of the city’s main classical performance groups, she is self-consciously trying to reach out to people not immersed in classical music. It’s a strategy shared by the Nashville Chamber Orchestra and to some extent by the Symphony. For someone presenting classical music, the violin or fiddle provides a common ground. There is an audience that flocks to performers like Mark O’Connor, Allison Kraus, or Vassar Clements. Bowers can make the case that if you like that kind of violin music, you should check out what Alias does. With that in mind, it would make sense that Bowers would throw herself at the music with some of the abandon of bluegrass fiddler. What is the point of inviting the bluegrass audience to the concert, and then presenting them with a performance style drained of the emotion that they respond to.

As Bowers does this from one concert to another, won’t her performance style shift slightly? As a performer in Nashville in a world of an anemic classical recording market, she will be able to develop her style without negative feedback from record reviews by unsympathetic national critics.

Based on this concert, one remains skeptical about Alias’ success in luring that audience for fiddling. The audience looked like the typical contemporary classical audience, slanted heavily towards older people. No matter how accessible their programs, I think there are barriers. Musical education is often cited. Perhaps so, especially if you understand education as going beyond the forms of music to the rites of musical performance. Anymore, piling into a quiet concert hall at a specified hour and remaining stationary and silent is an odd way to experience music. People are used to getting up, talking, making sound themselves. At least sipping on a drink and munching food. Of course, classical music was designed exactly for this enforced stationary setting and the degree of attentiveness possible in it. I’m not sure what it would take to resell people on this as a mode of experiencing music, and the best parts of the repertoire get lost in other settings. On its program, Alias played a Shostakovich string quartet with a an elusive structure that becomes just meandering if you don’t track it pretty closely. You can’t walk in and out on the piece.

One train of thought is that the reconnection to classical music is a long process. It will take years of exposure to Zeneba Bowers and similar performers before it sinks in. The other possible is that many pieces lose their broad audience, and listening to Shostakovich gets to be like reading Latin.

Neomanagerial Art and the Cultural Will to Power

The March/April edition of the New Left Review has an article that almost earns its keep from its title alone: “Neomanagerial Art.” It’s written by Matthew Jesse Jackson, a faculty member at Cal Arts, and it deals most directly with Ilya Kabakov, who was able to work within and on the margins of the Soviet art and culture system and is now doing the same thing in the era of post-Soviet capitalism. During the Soviet years, Kabakov was identified as a dissident artist, even though he was a member of the Union of Soviet Artists. Outside of his day job illustrating children’s books and science magazines, he engaged in “conceptual actions” that took the tools of state control systems, such as surveillance and documentation, and reapplied them to pointless activities under his leadership. Jackson refers to this as “an essentially homeopathic undertaking,” a great phrase that refers to taking the active ingredients of a syndrome and applying them to build up resistance to that syndrome. In this case it would be the tools of totalitarianism putting up some protection against totalitarianism. The pointlessness of the activities documented in the “conceptual action” make absolutely clear the pointlessness of the activities required by the Soviet bureaucracies in culture and all other spheres.

Jackson describes Kabakov’s efforts to apply the same principles within the new system of cultural management, particularly in regard to his competing visions for the reuse of an old coking plant in Germany. One of the points is that he transfers his attempts at a kind of cultural homeopathy to the new cultural masters, masters who operate within a market context. There is an equivalence in the kind of absolute control both systems and their bureaucracies would exercise.

Jackson describes the Western cultural system as dominated by “cultural actors plugged directly into the entrepreneurial sector.” Thomas Krens of the Guggenheim is the poster child for this character. There has been a convergence in which the business world has adopted ideas pioneered by cultural radicals, such as iconoclasm, constant change, and fluid identities and relationships. The business world’s cooption of these sorts of ideas has been well described by Tom Frank (The Conquest of Cool) and earlier by people like my friend Warren Leming, who as a musician in the late 60s saw rock music quickly converted into profit by many levels of opportunists. Jackson’s article reminds us that it goes the other way too, as artists take on the role of managers: organizing human resources, logistics, financing, and marketing.

The managerial instinct has been around as long as artists ran studios to help them turn out their work. It may have gotten more pronounced in the 1960s. Earth artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, James Turrell can’t do a thing without a managerial hand. With Christo and Jean-Claude, the process, the business of getting one of these things made, is nearly the entire point. The question is whether artist-managers and their work resist or reinforce the prevailing systems of dominance in society. As the business world embraces anti-institutional instability (e.g., a world of purely contingent workers replaces standing employment relationships), do artists simply become adjuncts to the drive for corporate profitability? Jackson suggests that “the arts become more commercialized while business recuperates their discarded mythology of creative individualism.”

Kabakov’s response is very Constructivist, to build monuments to the non-artist rather than in engage in “yet another exercise in Effective Cultural Management.” He would make of art spaces like the coking plant “a liberated zone where the diktats of the cultural managers would be rendered redundant and ridiculous.” The inevitable role of cultural power makes any institutional setting problematic for art, whether it is the Frist Center or a small art center that is striving to “institutionalize” itself and become more of a player in the art scene. The tendency towards oppression lurks behind them all.

Eels on Letterman

The Eels are one of those bands I think about looking into every once in a while, so I listen to a few samples but inevitably end up deciding to leave it for another time. They were on Letterman last night (the late night shows are the lazy/cheap person’s way to eventually hear more than 30 seconds of a band). I didn’t pay too much attention to the song, but enjoyed the theatrics of it. The band was the leader, E, singing and playing celeste, an acoustic bass player, a drummer, and a string quartet. Everyone was dressed in pajamas. The best part was the drumming, which used drum cases rather than the drums. It was a perfect depressive scene – no one could get out of their pajamas, the drummer couldn’t summon the energy to pull his kit out of the case. E has a shaggy beard, like someone who’s been out of work a long time. At the end, the string players dropped out one by one and picked up percussion instruments, so all you had was this quiet, muffled, rhythm. E stopped playing, got up, lit a cigar and walked around the stage with a cane, tapping it along with the rattling of the band. It was like a geriatric hoofer, padding around his assisted living apartment. He brought it all to a clean stop with a cue from the cane.

I have a feeling this performance pissed Letterman off. At the end of these shows there is a ritual where the host gets up, walks over to the band, shakes some hands and tells them how great they were. Last night NBC cut to some filler footage. I wonder if we didn’t miss Letterman giving them hell. I’m thinking it might have been because of the cigar – is it illegal to light up like that? Or it just seemed to him like goofing around. After the break he made some comments about the pajamas. I liked that, it reminded me of times I was depressed and didn’t understand it, just knew all I wanted to do was sleep.

More Major Production Photos

Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary is running a show by Anthony Goicolea that goes with the Crewdson photos at Frist very well. Like Crewdson, Goicolea stages strange, vivid scenes for his photographs. Of course the imagery is different: woodlands, crude structures, and school boys in private school uniforms. He runs a lot of riffs that contrast the markers of high social refinement with a state of nature. In a video, two boys in school uniforms and ski masks crawl along the ground, grunting, until they find a trap set for them – a tea service set under a box propped up as a trap like what I used to do to trap birds as a kid. The feral schoolboys are irresistibly attracted to the tea and cucumber sandwiches, and fall into the snare. Inside they eat the food and drink the tea, dose it with something from a flask, but it makes them sick. They pass out or go to sleep, and then fade out.

In one of the photos, “Still Life with Pig,” two men sit under a crude shelter in the woods made from cardboard and tree limbs. Their faces are smudged, maybe with paint, maybe with dirt. They blend in with the environment. The shelter could be something in a homeless encampment, or castaways. On the ground in front of them lies a profuse array of foods, all with luscious reddish tones. A raw pig, scalded but not cooked, Rainier cherries, turnips, apples, beets, black grapes, carrots, cantaloupe, and other cuts of meat. Food almost too perfect to be eaten, something out of a painting. Like classic still life, it is a delight to look at, but an intrusion in this setting.

Goicolea is Cuban-American and is interested in mixing up the two cultures and their folklore, one southern and tropical one, the other northern. His imagery doesn’t seem to draw too literally from either, but isolates elements of wildness and social order. The schoolboys in several of the works seem more English than American, and that reflects the way England stands as the ideal form of social norms people have tried to establish here. The woodlands settings seem to refer to a larger view of Caribbean culture and history as the site of encounter and conflict between cultures. The suggestions of castaways in “Still Life with Pig” made me think of an essay I read years ago by Roberto Fernadez Retamar, a Cuban writer, on Caliban, the savage in Shakespeare’s Tempest, as a model for the encounter between European and people of Latin America and the Caribbean. Within the lush woodland setting, or a cave in Hawaii, social forms get confused. The two men in the shelter seem to be reverting into the landscape, and the fruit and meat are what stand out.

In addition to having different thematic concerns that Crewdson’s Blue Velvety suburbia, Goicolea’s photos have photos’ crisp edges. They are more conventional photographs on the level of first appearances. Goicolea’s interventions in the environment are less extreme than Crewdson, but he makes up for it with digital manipulation. He uses his own image in many of the photos, repeatedly in the same scene. “Pile” shows two boys in school uniforms throwing another boy on a pile of boys dressed the same in front of what looks like an English stone church. All of the boys are the same person, and as I understand it they are all images of Goicolea, who apparently is a very youthful looking guy.

Cheekwood is running this through July 31. Their mazes are also open (following last year’s treehouses), but I was doing a blitz of galleries in town Saturday when I saw the Temp Contemporary show and didn’t get a chance to look at anything else.