Why can’t I be you?

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

— Maurice Sendak

I wonder whether young Jim was Catholic. It seems a peculiarly religious thing to do. I hope he was an older kid, performing the ritual deliberately, and not a toddler. Maurice doesn’t say.

Reading this, I was reminded – in the undisciplined way such thoughts often are – of one of my favourite Cure songs: Why Can’t I Be You?

Robert Smith can barely express what he feels for his beloved, a longing so intense that notions of possession or even just intimacy are exceeded until nothing short of complete identification – the total abrogation of physical and psychic barriers – will do.

You’re so gorgeous, I’ll do anything!
I’ll kiss you from your feet to where your head begins
You’re so perfect, You’re so right as rain
You make me, make me, make me
Make me hungry again

Everything you do is irresistible
Everything you do is simply kissable
Why can’t i be you?

Ginny Grayson

It’s so rare to come across a ‘straight’ drawing show these days that it provokes comment for that reason alone. So my attention was drawn immediately to the invitation to Ginny Grayson’s show at Place Gallery in Richmond, which starts on 9 November.

It also helps that I am a sucker for drawing which is contingent and exploratory, an approach which is always associated in my mind with Alberto Giacometti.

Such a way of drawing, rather than making the statement “This is what I see”, continually asks itself “Is this what I see?”

I see this approach ultimately as having serious philosophical implications, about the nature of sensation and perception, about the limits of our ability to perceive the world, and maybe the ultimate question “is there a world to perceive at all?”

Some of the observations of phenomenological philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty actually have a great deal to teach practicing artists, those who face the perceptual gulf between all that is you and all that is not-you every time they front up to the white page.

Old Master Cheese

When asked what kind of cheese he would like, my son Sweeney (two years old) stipulates “Old cheese. Like a grown-up”. This must be what he means: Old Master cheese.

Tom Waits, an aesthetic credo

“What I do is kind of abstract. I break a lot of eggs. And I leave the shell in there. Texture is everything.” Tom Waits

Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010

Louise Bourgeois (the last great artist of the twentieth century?) is dead.

Holland Cotter in the New York Times:

Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.

Protection often translated into images of shelter or home. A gouged lump of cast bronze, for example, suggested an animal’s lair. A tablelike wooden structure with thin, stiltlike legs resembled a house ever threatening to topple. Her series of “Cells” from the early 1990s — installations of old doors, windows, steel fencing and found objects — were meant to be evocations of her childhood, which she claimed as the psychic source of her art.

But it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable. In some cases the body took the abstract form of an upright wooden pole, pierced by a few holes and stuck with nails; in others it appeared as a pair of women’s hands realistically carved in marble and lying, palms open, on a massive stone base.

Sure she was an extraordinary 98 and apparently making art until her death, but she was a great soul, and should be mourned.

The Banquet of Cleopatra

The Banquet of Cleopatra by Giambattista Tiepolo (1743-44)

The episode represented in Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra is drawn from the Roman historian Pliny’s Natural History (written in AD 77). Here Pliny recounted the tale of a famous contest between the Egyptian and Roman rulers (who became lovers), whereby Cleopatra wagered that she could stage a feast more lavish than the legendary excesses of Mark Antony. Tiepolo’s painting shows the dramatic moment at the end of Cleopatra’s sumptuous repast when,
faced with a still scornful Mark Antony, she wins the wager with her trump card. Removing one of a pair of priceless pearls that adorn her as earrings, Cleopatra dissolves the pearl in a glass of vinegar and drinks it, an extravagance that causes Mark Antony to lose his bet.

From a text by Ted Gott on the National Gallery of Victoria’s website.

A billboard off Smith Street, Fitzroy.

Michael Lusk’s disciplined eye

Originally uploaded by finsmal…Low & Slow.

A quality I sincerely admire in photographers is something I call “a disciplined eye”.

I suppose I mean an ability to seek out and find pictures in the world, even in the most unremarkable and apparently chaotic places. By ‘pictures’ I don’t just mean images, since anyone with a finger can make an image. I mean something with structure, whose features amount to an aesthetic argument of some kind, the evidence of a discriminating consciousness.

It’s a quality that is so easy to miss in others, since our landscape is saturated in images so that we come to think that such things are part of nature. But they’re not. They have be constructed from educated sensation. If you don’t think it’s difficult, just try it.

I found this person (photographer Michael Lusk) somewhere in the photographic dumpster that is Flickr.

‘Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire’

I will shell out an exorbitant amount of money to see a Dali exhibition (there seems to be one every five years or so), based on an assessment of how many pictures it contains of that period before 1940, before his thirty-fifth birthday, when Dali’s corrupt imagination burned with a peculiar, stinky intensity.

The good news is that ‘Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire’ at the NGV contains many choice morsels and a good many even older pictures when the little creep was just a teenager. There is bad news, but more of that shortly.

It contains a number of juvenilia, pictures done as he was chewing his way through diverse influences as a teenage prodigy.

It seems that he landed on a selection of Renaissance and Mannerist painters, especially Caravaggio with his ability to concentrate the eye on symbolically loaded detail with deep shade and theatrical light; and Velasquez and his bravura technique (that Dali regarded as a personal challenge) and domestic surfaces picked out in raking light, rendering them su(per)real, like the crustiness of peasant bread, the lustre on a terra cotta milk jug, and the ancient ruin of a crumbling block of cheese.

And of course the peculiar mix of sacred subject matter and perversity found in artists like Parmigianino, whose ‘Madonna with the Long Neck’ (1534) he imitated in an early self-portrait.

Wall texts in blockbuster exhibitions are always slightly dubious. There is often a sense of a curatorial barrow being pushed, or else I sometimes suspect pressure has been brought to bear by lenders to stick to an approved line. (I have no proof of this, and I’ve never even heard it complained about, but then if it was happening, the borrowers aren’t likely to complain too loudly.)

The man’s peculiarities were evident from an early age but the text in this exhibition is often coy about the nature of the imagery. ‘Portrait of My Sister’ (1925) and ‘Girl’s back’ (1929) both fetishize his sister’s hair, an obvious erotic trigger for him. The latter is a peculiar inversion of a salon portrait, the subject is turned from us, her suggestive ringlets hanging down and rendered in expert chiaroscuro. ‘Portrait of My Sister’ has a hard-edged eye for detail, like the early Miro, set in an uncanny de Chirico space, but those ringlets over the subject’s shoulder are pure Dali.

The text plays a straight bat, waffling about their neo-classical pedigree, with the names of Ingres and Vermeer invoked, but the weird intensity of focus is already Dali’s own, and its nature is unmistakeable. The paintings virtually throb with it.

Later, the game gets funny when attempting to say something apropos about ‘Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano’ (1934). Needles to say, things are kept nice.

I’ve always appreciated Robert Hughes’ comment that Dali had a mind “like a gland, irritated by constant scratching.” It neatly suggests the sense of morbid pathology that the early paintings radiate. That is their lasting power as works of art, and what makes them key objects of the 20th century – objects of any kind.

The work ‘Suez’ (1932) is strange and unsettling, maybe because its restraint is so unlike his hysterical signature style. The famous canal was being constructed at the time and perhaps the idea of a huge trench linking two continents had some unusual connotations for him. An elongated spoon, liquid as if hot from the forge, reaches out from one wall of the canal towards an odd arabesque object, which emerges out of the other wall, the two forms forever in an unconsummated coupling. The image is suggestive and pathetic at the same time.

He was constantly registering new objects as fetishes loaded with unlimited sexual potential no matter how unlikely the resemblance. I was keeping a mental list while moving through the exhibition, which included:

Bones, beans, crutches, spoons, pianos (soft), violins and cellos, ants, knives, skulls, lamb chops, shoes, keys, lobsters, watches, keyholes, telephones, milk, trees, cannon, wheelbarrows. The list is evidently limitless and unconstrained by any obvious (to the rest of us) sexual connotation.

I was stopped in my tracks by a picture so unlike what had come before it, ‘Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardines at the End of September, 1939’.

This sombre image, heavy with grief, represents a path not taken. Again the mesmeric concentration on domestic objects but this time stripped of artifice, carrying their symbolic load with dignity. I was put in mind of Picasso’s paintings of the war period when he was shut up in his studio, the curtains drawn, anxious and cut off from his supporters and seemingly at the mercy of the occupying Nazis (who never in fact came knocking). He turned to still life in browns and greys, pictures of skulls and bulls’ heads, bizarre disjunctions of imagery telling their own suggestive story about what was going on outside.

For me this was the point of eclipse for Dali, after which he descended into mediocrity and confusion and an increasingly desperate chase after celebrity. By the late 40s he was already a full blown reactionary. His stated ambition was to be a ‘Renaissance painter’, whatever that meant, when he left Europe for the US, claiming he was leaving surrealism behind.

Needless to say he came back to it shortly after; that’s where the money was of course: baguettes and circuses. There was no way the American media or art establishment was going to let him get away with that. “So what kooky surrealist outrage are you going to foist on an art-hungry (and newspaper-buying) American public now, Mr Dali – walk down Broadway with a leopard on a chain? Give a lecture dressed in a diving helmet? Oh, Mr Dali, you are a card!”

And so the moustache grew in inverse proportion to any actual artistic achievement until it looked like a pair of tusks; classic sublimation, which as a good Freudian, Dali should have realised.

The only objects worth a damn in the latter part of the show (which goes on forever) were a couple of the jewels he made in the late 40s, just as I had given up hope and thought the show had hit a new low, with crude rehashes of his best imagery done in gold as indescribably tacky brooches and pendants.

There is only one object that for me suggested he still had his sense of humour about him. A ridiculous beating heart in rubies and gold, for the new Queen Elizabeth II, which actually throbs by means of a tiny motor, hitting just the right note if he was attempting to perpetrate an elaborate joke, which I’m not at all certain was his intention.

There is a section of the show dedicated to ‘Destino’, the animated film on which he collaborated with Walt Disney, left unfinished but completed (I assume faithfully) by Roy Disney in 2002. What a natural collaboration Dali and Disney turned out to be, Disney the entertainer anxious for high artistic credibility, and Dali the freak European aesthete who after all just wanted to play to the gallery.

I have my doubts about the success of the finished film. It’s hard from this distance to know how surprising it would have seemed to an audience at the time, but I doubt it would have really have satisfied anyone. It is too formless and lacking in narrative for a general audience, and too ‘Disney’ to satisfy the art crowd.

Given it was never finished, it looks like the evolution happened anyway. Less than ten years later, Terry Gilliam had started to make his surrealist cut-out animations for British TV, with a similar stream-of-consciousness (lack of) logic, and certainly advertising was well on to Dali much earlier than that. The fact that none of this would have happened had it not been for him is no criticism, but merely to say that he had anticipated himself way back in the 1930s. The rest was repetition.

I left the show feeling slightly sad and deflated, and the usual tacky merchandising outside the entrance was for once not a great break from what had immediately preceded it.

Pump that Expressionist bass!

“If they were alive today, what speakers would Max Beckmann or Edvard Munch buy”? I know I’ve asked myself this questions thousands of times.

Question no longer. The Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass FX3022 Speaker has arrived.

Forget about bass booming at your shins. The Expressionist Bass features twin desktop speakers with subwoofers built right in the base of each one. Separate 1.5-inch drivers deliver mid and high frequencies so vocals and details come through with brilliant clarity. And an auxiliary input gives you the convenience of connecting any MP3 player.

And what sound should I play through my Expressionist Bass speaker? Why, a scream, of course.

Classically white

When we use the adjective ‘classical’, we mean to suggest certain qualities possessed by the classical Greek and Roman worlds: restraint, symmetry, clarity and seriousness of purpose, harmoniousness of proportion, a lack of excessive ornament. Whatever image we conjure up to accompany the idea, whether it’s a building or a piece of sculpture, one thing is certain: it will be white.

I had read before that those ancient buildings and statues were originally not white at all, but brightly coloured. It’s hard to keep that it in mind while contemplating the corridors of marble white sculpture in the Vatican Museum, though. The whiteness of them seems to accord with very deep cultural prejudices and is hard to shake.

The New Scientist reports that a team at the British Museum has found the first evidence of coloured paints used on the Parthenon, built in the 5th century BC. Researcher Giovanni Verri has developed an imaging technique sensitive to Egyptian Blue, a pigment known to have been used in ancient times. Shining red light onto marble, the pigment absorbs the red spectrum and emits infrared light. Through an infrared camera, any area that was once blue will glow.

Traces of the pigment have been found on statuary and on the building itself.

Ian Jenkins, a senior curator at the British Museum, says the temple would have looked “jewelled” and “busy”. Judging by similar Greek sculptures, the pigments used were probably blue and red beside contrasting white stone, and liberal use of gold leaf.

Seeing evidence of this kind of painting for myself at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples was an aesthetic shock. The realism of ancient art was something I just wasn’t prepared for, keeping in mind that the statues were so often painted as well as sculpted with astonishing fidelity to life.

The annoyingly conscientious guards stopped me from taking pictures, but this one, of Scipio Africanus the Elder, is floating about the internet. It has painting on the eyes still intact, but is plain otherwise. My memory is that others still had bits of flaking paint attached to them.

The figures I saw came from the Villa of the Papyri, the house of a wealthy and cultured lover of philosophy and the arts who lived at Herculaneum, the less famous neighbouring town of Pompeii. Unfortunately the town and the villa met the same fate as their sister city in 79 AD.

Still, had they not been subsumed in rock and ash on that terrible day, these breathtaking sculptures would not now be in a museum upsetting the smug preconceptions of twenty first century folk like me.