THE TORTURE GARDEN: The other place I went in LA was the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. We went to the main galleries, where the most memorable things for me were the Warhol-riffing Cuban soup cans sardonically lauding "America's Favorite Revolution," and a... lenticular?... picture in which the shining girders and industrial debris shimmered and shifted, if you tilted your head, to reveal a small overlooked human being at the far corner of the frame.

But the current exhibit is what I really want to tell you all about. It's billed as landscape paintings by David Siqueiros, who apparently is better known (though not to me) as a muralist. But these aren't landscapes in any traditional sense. They were mostly painted from photographs or from the inside of the man's own head, rather than from nature; many were painted while he was in prison. Some are surreal, science-fiction scenes of bulbous future cities. Some are (often unsatisfying) allegories of various aspects of Mexican history and revolutionary politics.

But some are just horror. Black, churning waves; twisting shapes which could be trees or monsters or both; thick, lurid reds; martyred men and menacing ravines. The whole world has turned against itself in his art. It's frightening and it's impossible to look away from.

If you're in the area you really should check this out.

"BLACK AND WHITE": I have a review in the current Weekly Standard, of the Phillips Collection's exceptional show, "Man Ray, African Art, And the Modernist Lens," through 01/10/10. The show is really terrific; and I think actually this review is pretty good, too. Subscribers-only for now.

FACTORIES THAT MAKE FACTORIES: I really loved (Untitled), even though I went in to the theater with a lot of skepticism. Basically, I expected the movie--no wait, I mean "film"--to beat up on experimental art from a fairly basic "my kindergartner could make that" perspective. Instead, I got a complicated, even humanist (not my favorite philosophical stance--I'm a personalist, not a humanist--but still) fable in which both commercial success and boundary-pushing were simultaneously celebrated and interrogated.

So here are three points/questions about the movie.

1) It's so funny! I mean, I'd already seen the line, "Harmony is just a capitalist plot to sell pianos!" in ads for the flick (and using that line in ads is kind of adorably recursive); but there were so many other great lines and moments. I think the sex scene, in which the classic "How does a bra come off?" puzzle was made vastly more complex by the lady's baroque clothing, might have been my favorite.

And I note that many of the satirized characters are also humanized. Not all--the Damien Hirst caricature, for example, doesn't get more than a comeuppance, and ditto the easily-snowed male collector. But this movie is more a debate or dialogue than a treatise: Lots of perspectives get their say, and get to be human.

2) I love how the movie draws out the bluntly literal bent of so much avant-garde art. This isn't art you experience, or even art you endure; it's art you solve. Possibly the most blatant expression of this fact comes early in the movie, when the hot haute collectrix says that the rattling of a bucket on the end of a chain signifies "the unchaining of desire," or some such. I will always stand up for abstraction and stylization as a way of representing a truth behind "realist," Naturalistic human experience; but this movie showcased the ways that abstraction can become childish, an alphabetic relation of image to concept in which the image adds nothing to the concept.

I think that's one reason that the movie manages to show so much terrific avant-garde art, and contrast it with the art being mocked. I mean, I personally didn't care for the shimmery-glasses music of the Avant God at the end--I thought it was pretty and twee. But I did nonetheless get that it was attempting to be music, something nonliteral, something unspeakable, something more lovely and complex than a chain falling into a bucket to represent the unchaining of desire.

3) Freddie's old post about Damien Hirst made me think about one question. I mean, I think Freddie is wrong on at least five different levels!, lol (what is actually wrong with fifty beautiful pictures of water lilies?), but the thing I most want to question right now is the idea that art has been emptied of meaning.

I think the responsibility of the modern artist is to recognize the inability of symbols to signify.

Look. In the modern era, wherever you'd care to place that, there was a crisis of representation. (I should say that this next bit isn't mine alone but rather is boilerplate undergrad art history. It's still true.) Everywhere, traditional structures of certainty and meaning were being subverted. Religion, science, government, civic society were all facing new and frightening challenges. Into this maelstrom came the popularization and eventual universality of the camera and the photograph, a direct and insurmountable challenge to the preeminence of the artistic image as the primary mode of representation. In the face of this challenge, the response of many artists has been to abandon the notion of representation at all. Just as literature in the modern era was the literature of exhaustion, art in the modern era was the art of a tradition that had, in a small but significant way, admitted defeat. Art itself fails, in the modern era.

--Freddie

Because I agree with Freddie that "beauty" isn't the only aim of art. And (Untitled), I think, does as well: It gives the stellar line, "When did beauty become so [redacted] ugly?!" to a pretentious painter of pretty corporate sunbursts. (One of the movie's many triumphs is that my self-confessed Philistine friend said, afterward, "You know--I really liked his paintings!" They're likable! They're pretty and pleasant, and I actually don't mean that with any degree of contempt; I would think well of a hotel or office which had these lovely, balanced abstractions on its walls. Anyway, point is, I get that art can go beyond beauty; I just want it to go beyond beauty into sublimity.

But even that isn't the fight I want to pick right now. The thing I'm curious about is... why some media and not others? Why are painting and "orchestral" or non-pop music so incredibly conflicted and self-doubting, so willing to accept narratives about the death or dearth of meaning... while novelists continue to churn out adultery stories, and movies continue to do more or less everything, and even comics seem to be recovering from a late-'90s period in which they were swallowed up into the maelstrom of their own navel? Seriously... if the Weakerthans are doing something new-enough; if The Wire did something new enough; where does anyone get off saying that painters, sculptors, and non-pop musicians have exhausted the possibilities of meaning?

Maybe "fine artists" are living in the world of The Last Unicorn--where most unicorns have been captured, it's true; but every time they see a real unicorn, they think it's merely a strange white mare.

AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS that make health claims. For a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be a processed than a whole food. Generally speaking, it is only the big food companies that have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world.
--Michael Pollan, "In Defense of Food," which I found in Best Food Writing 2008

"Food rules" are really better understood as velvet ropes, which you duck under even though you respect them--I'd eat a Swiss Cake Roll right this minute, I love Coca-Cola with an unholy passion, and I only stopped eating Chicken McNuggets because the outlet closest to me stopped giving me free processed honey--but as far as food rules go, this seems like a sound one. Cooking is an art, and defending it in utilitarian terms shocks my conscience as much as defending Mozart because it makes your baby have a higher IQ.

SURREALPOLITIK: I have a review in the current Commonweal of the Philadelphia Art Museum's Lee Miller retrospective. The review is subscribers-only now; I'll let you all know if that changes.

Miller--possibly my favorite visual artist, ever--went from fashion model to war correspondent, but despite her immense range and talent has never had a major retrospective until this one. Lots of photos here. An old post of mine on Miller here.

"SHE TREATS POEMS LIKE PICTURES": Unqualified Offerings gives a more charitable, and quite interesting, reading of one of the problems I had with Sexual Personae. Comments also interesting.

"THUS WE KNOW THE SQUID'S SECRET GENDER.": Sexual Personae. I'm developing a theory that you can tell more about a work of literary criticism by what doesn't appear in its index than by what does. One tendril of this theory posits that any lit-crit work is fundamentally unsound if it devotes more than two sentences to de Sade and not a one to Pauline Reage (our true nouvelle Heloise). I find both the theory and its subtheory (...so to speak) vindicated by Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, a big, weird, brilliant, silly book that sometimes seemed more lacuna than presence.

This is a big-idea book, revolving around the opposition of mother-nature-chaos and son-reason-linearity-order. (And yes, I know that's an oversimplification, but I'm trying to give people some sense of what they're getting into, here....) Each of the sexual personae turns out to be one attempt among many to negotiate or conquer this opposition.

If you want to get the best of this book, I'd suggest starting with the chapters on Spenser and Dickinson and then seeing if you want more. I really love both authors, and was not sure I wanted Paglia getting her lipstick all over them, but her readings in those chapters are terrific--violent, erotic, brash, but always rooted firmly in the awesome texts. I think there may have been one minor problem with the Spenser chapter--it's been almost a month since I finished the book, so I may be misremembering, but I vaguely recall insufficient attention being paid to The Faerie Queene as a narrative progression rather than a series of episodes or incidents--but in general, these were fantastic, challenging chapters.

Paglia is better at picking her battles than many academics working the same Everything Is Either Phallic Or Vaginal territory. Several times, I found myself saying, "Oh, c'mon, you're just being trendy with that reading--this bit really isn't about daemonic lesbians or whatever"... but then she'd quote a few more passages from the same work, and I'd have to say, "Uh... you know, she's kind of on to something here." That didn't always happen--her reading of De Profundis as Wilde's sentimental return to his mommy is just infuriatingly bad, more on this in a moment--but it happened often enough that I'd say she earned the benefit of the doubt with me.

My real problem with Paglia, I think, is that she and I consider different things interesting and important--worth taking the time to explore on their own terms and as fully as possible. I summarized this to Ratty as, "She'll go to the mat for the belief that cats have rich inner lives, but she doesn't seem to think the Crucifixion is worth talking about."

I'm pretty sure her lack of attention to the Crucifixion is related to her disdain for King Lear ("obvious"--well, yes, Camille, torture is generally obvious, that's kind of the point of torture) and to the bathos of her utterly annoying misreadings of Wilde. (I will say that her take on The Importance of Being Earnest is fun and mostly right. Her failure, which is large but not devastating, is that she doesn't take the play as a narrative of conflict and resolution. Paglia points out lots of interesting things about that conflict, but she swerves around the fact that it is resolved, and that it would be a much less satisfying play without that resolution.) Paglia's unwillingness to consider suffering and powerlessness as points of view is as ideological as any Randroid's. You can see it in her oh-so-edgy approving use of the term "fascism"--seriously, lady often sounds like a repressed homosexual with a crush on a skinhead, and it's not a good look for her--and it genuinely warps her criticism.

I feel like I should mention the strenuous overwriting, so... here I am, mentioning it. "The real honeyed crotch in which we all drown is the womb-tomb of mother nature"--that's a completely random example from the page opposite the squiddess--there's one of those on every other page, and you just have to resign yourself to it. I'm tempted to say that this stuff got into the book because Paglia was trying to import the techniques of classroom performance into writing, and written lit-crit requires different performance techniques; not sure if I'm giving her too much credit, there.

...Finally, the title of this post is entirely within context. Respect, y'all.

Comments, criticisms, howls of execration? Email me with your chthonic and/or fascist insights....