The ordinary

I'm translating some material for the catalogue for a Beijing exhibition of photographs by the German poet Dieter M. Gräf. Here's the end of the foreword:

That is the essence of the arts: they speak their own language, a language that always escapes us. The ordinary: here it is; it doesn't really exist.

The arts—and poetry as one of the arts—always resist "the ordinary." The language of the arts cannot be translated into an "ordinary" language. That is the scandal of art: even when it looks ordinary, it says something extraordinary.

Or perhaps this is the way to put it: art can look ordinary, but art that only looks ordinary without saying anything extraordinary is not very good art.

True Art

What struck me when I saw this ad a few months ago was that the "true art of fine desserts" barely comes through when the Vermeer is there. I was so captivated by seeing the painting that I barely noticed the poster. The "true art" overwhelmed its use in the advertisement. The experience made me feel good about the power of something that is really "true" art: the real work cannot be put to use for purposes beyond itself. An optimistic view of art, but that was how I experienced this ad.

Houses of Games (Con men, forgers, artists)

I was delighted when I came across a reference to one of my favorite movies in James Surowiecki's column on Bernard Madoff in the January 12, 2009, issue of The New Yorker:

In David Mamet’s movie “House of Games,” the grifter played by Joe Mantegna explains to a former mark, “It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.”

This description of the scene is not quite right, but that's not a problem. I've always liked the overtones of "House of Games" that have to do with the relationship between artists and audiences: there's a great deal of trust and confidence involved on both sides.

Compare Peter Schjeldahl on art forgers (specifically, on the Dutch forger Han van Meegeren; the article is a review of two biographies of the forger) in The New Yorker from October 27, 2008 (this is the last paragraph; it is on page four of the on-line version):

Art forgery is among the least despised of crimes, except by its victims—the identity of those victims being more than exculpatory, for many people. Art is unique among universally esteemed creative fields in its aloofness from a public audience. Its economic base is a club of the wealthy, who share power to impose or repress value with professional and academic élites. Lopez’s muckraking of van Meegeren scants a fact that Dolnick merrily exploits: the forger gratifies class resentment precisely because he is a pariah. Unlike the subversive gestures of a Marcel Duchamp, say, his outrages will not become educational boilerplate in museums and universities. They are impeccably destructive, tarring not only pretensions to taste but the credibility of taste in general. The spectre of forgery chills the receptiveness—the will to believe—without which the experience of art cannot occur. Faith in authorship matters. We read the qualities of a work as the forthright decisions of a particular mind, wanting to let it commandeer our own minds, and we are disappointed when it doesn’t. If we are disappointed enough, when the named artist is familiar, we get suspicious. But we can never be certain in every case that someone—a veiled mind—isn’t playing us for suckers. Art lovers are people who brave that possible chagrin.

Just Do It

People will play golf, even if they aren’t Tiger Woods, but longevity isn’t sustained in poetry. Poets won’t write for a lifetime if they can’t see themselves as the next Ashbery? Except, poets certainly do write for lifetimes, with or without Orr’s knowledge, and they do so without worrying about winning the gold cup or whatever prize golfers aim for. There is no set goal in the “game” of poetry, though Orr’s comparison sets the terms as such (i.e. John Ashbery’s Library of America collection). How do sports metaphors of the competitive masculine variety so often wiggle their way into measuring poetry and her cultural cache? What team am I playing for again? Where’s the goal line? Who do I have to smear to get there? Are my subjects suitably dainty as I take up the stick?

(Amy King, "On Greatness & Them That Do It")

Back in about 1997, I participated in the Tempolabor, a weekend event organized by the curator and editor Clementine Deliss, with talks, presentations, and discussions attended by a multitude of artists, curators, and art critics (I was there because I had translated for art catalogs, including for Clementine's magazine Metronome).

For me, the most memorable event of that lively weekend came during a discussion after a talk. I don't remember whose talk it was, or what it was about, but it led Nebojsa Vilic, a Macedonian art historian and curator from Skopje, to give an impassioned, extemporaneous comment on the theme of "Just Do It!"

In the international art world in the nineties (which I grazed a bit in my role as a translator for catalogs), a common issue was whether "anything goes." The boundaries of what could be considered art had been pushed back so far that it seemed like there were no longer any boundaries to push back, as if it were really true that anything could be art.

Vilic's comment was an attempt to downplay the sense of crisis that many of the Tempolabor participants associated with this theme. His analogy was the "Just Do It" commercials that Nike was running at the time. Artists (and curators and critics) should stop worrying and "just do it." The issue was not whether "anything goes" but whether each particular work worked. That's the gist of what he said (at least as I remember it).

Vilic's speech was vigorous and passionate, and I might have remembered it just as well even if it had not triggered a further comment by the Basel artist Eric Hattan. Eric liked the simile, but he pointed out an important difference between Michael Jordan and an artist. No matter what route Jordan took in doing what he did, the goals of "just doing it" were always the same: to score baskets; to win games; to win championships. In contrast, the artist who "just does it" must figure out the rules of each new work from scratch; whether the work is process or product, or some combination of the two, the goals are not known from the start, but only realized through the making of the work.

... for even as golfers are folowing their game’s rules, poets are making their own ways, similarly and separately, differently and communally, as multitudes and as individuals, sans a set standard of formulas and rules. Golf goes after stroke counts and a finish line. Poetry goes after life and everything the concept entails. Greatness certainly is not the little box declaring a winner vis a vis book publication or any golden laurel leaf. Poetry is not merely words on a screen/page or how dramaticaly the poet lived her life. (Amy King from the same post)

Or, to quote two of my touchstones:

Nicht um anzukommen, sondern um aufzubrechen, nicht um Erzählung, Roman oder Buch zu werden, sondern um in Bewegung zu sein und möglichst auch zu bewegen.

Not to arrive, but to set out, not to become a story, a novel, or a book, but to be in motion and, if possible, to move. (Anne Duden, my translation)

Das Schreiben ist notwendig, nicht die Literatur.

Writing is necessary, not literature. (W. G. Sebald, my translation)

Between them, Duden and Sebald articulate why one writes: to write. Not to arrive at a goal, not to publish, not to become "literature"—not to be "great."

(Credit for stimulating this memory goes not only to Amy King but also to Adam Fieled and Joseph Hutchison.)

An Artist's Text Book, by Jan Svenungsson

My friend Jan Svenungsson recently published an excellent book about writing for artists that will surely be of interest to all creative people who are thinking about writing about their own work: An Artist's Text Book.

The book is available from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (because that's where he taught the course that led to the book):

Finnish Academy of Fine Arts
att: Anna Herlin
Kasarmikatu 36
00130 Helsinki
Finland

or by email: anna.herlin@kuva.fi

I proofread the book for Jan, and I assure you that it is an excellent read! (There's a quote from it here.)

Meridian

Die Kunst ... bildet ... den Gegenstand einer Unterhaltung, die in einem Zimmer, also nicht in der Conciergerie stattfindet, einer Unterhaltung, die, das spüren wir, endlos fortgesetzt werden könnte, wenn nichts dazwischenkäme.

Es kommt etwas dazwischen.

Paul Celan, "Meridian"

In John Felstiner's translation:

Art forms the subject of a conversation that takes place in a room, not in the Conciergerie prison, a conversation that could go on endlessly, we feel, if nothing intervened.

Something does intervene.

Beautifully, when Celan identifies art as "the subject of a conversation," he chooses the word "Unterhaltung" and not the word "Gespräch" (which he does use later in "Meridian"). You see, "Unterhaltung" can also mean "entertainment." Celan is not usually identified as someone whose poetry one reads and thinks about for entertainment, but I have always derived the greatest possible intellectual entertainment from reading, thinking about, and discussing his work with people. It can be a harrowing experience, discussing Celan, but harrowing experiences are part of what constitutes art—as the age-old concept of tragic catharsis makes clear.

The scene Celan is referring to is in Büchner's "Danton's Death," and the conversation involves several revolutionaries (including Danton) who have been condemned to death. So what "intervenes" here is a death sentence.

There are many ways to read this intervention, but all of them involve a recognition that although art is a matter of "Unterhaltung" in the sense of both conversation and entertainment, art works provide the best material for "Unterhaltungen" when they recognize the imminence of interruption, of "intervention," of death sentences.

Poems can be "lighter than air," but at their best, their lightness points towards something unbearable, harrowing, cathartic.

Insect Lab

Here's something else from qarrtsiluni: "From the Insect Lab." These are incredible insect sculptures made by Mike Libby. As he puts it, "Insect Lab is an artist studio that customizes real insects with antique watch parts and electronic components."

Art and Jan Svenungsson

"In art, no problems are ever eliminated." (Jan Svenungsson, An Artist's Text Book, forthcoming)

I once wrote an essay on Jan's work, "Abstract Reception." Here is the opening paragraph:

'For me, Jan Svenungsson's work is "abstract" in the etymological sense: it has been withdrawn from me (Latin abstractus, from abstrahere, to withdraw, to draw away). When I suggested to Jan that I write something about his work, he immediately forbade me to look at any of his works until I had done so. This would be an interesting project: the obstacles faced by a writer discussing an artist's work from memory are worth addressing. However, I have never seen Jan's work (nor met him in person); I have only read texts about it ...'

Youth 4

"It is not beautiful, yet it speaks like beauty, imperiously."

In Youth, Coetzee writes this of Robert Motherwell's "Elegy for the Spanish Republic 24" (which I was unable to find on the web; this is no. 34 instead).

There's something about this statement that makes it feel different than many other statements about the tastes of the "youth" at the center of JMC's memoir; here, it does seem like something JMC would like to have his work be: not necessarily beautiful, but as imperious as beauty — as many paintings by Abstract Expressionists were and are.

But for me, the most beautiful feature of this statement is not that it points toward a way to understand the effect of art works that are not beautiful but that generate emotions that resemble those we have when do experience beautiful works. No, for me, the most beautiful thing here is the idea that beauty is imperious.

Energy

Dushko Petrovich's article about "a practical avant-garde" contains this nice passage about what an avant-garde is:

"Fairfield Porter, the great midcentury painter and critic, ... said the avant-garde was always just the people with the most energy."

He also has a nice summary of how the art world works (at least how it worked a couple years ago):

"The scene seemed wild, but there were simple rules all along. You were given a white room in a Big Art City for a month. You had to do something in that room to generate attention beyond that month. You had to be written about, bought, or at least widely discussed. Then you would get to have the white room again for another month, and so on. If you did this enough, you had what was called a career."