Knock, Knock, Equinox,
Tme to bring me balmy breezes?
You like my spring frocks?
03.20.12
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Intellectuals need not apply
Every four years I’m woefully reminded that in American politics intellect is no asset; rather, it is an anathema, especially to presidency. In popular view, intellect smacks of elitism, and elitism is undemocratic. In fact, intellectuals are likely to be ridiculed. The president needs not think but must have an ability to sway the public in one direction or another. The real political power, therefore, resides elsewhere, probably in the Congress, whose members are also elected on their capacity to persuade. In America, the president does not rule; she or he only leads by hook or by crook.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Anonymous celebrity
Copyright prevents me from reproducing the image here, but if you can check out Roberta Smith's NYT review of the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA (24 February: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/arts/design/cindy-sherman-at-museum-of-modern-art.html?pagewanted=all), you will see on the first page of Fine Arts Section, a photograph with Michael Dorsch, who teaches at Cooper and Hunter, strolling in the gallery, and down the text another photo of him from the back looking at a Sherman photo. His shorter companion, also from the back, happens to be me. I was just then commenting, in fact, that there is a man with a camera behind us taking a series of shots without waiting for us to clear the spot for a better view of the Sherman. So, I am now an anonymous celebrity.
Pictures titled "Untitled"
“Untitled” given as the title of a painting irks me so. For one it is a contradiction akin to the Cretan Liar paradox. We find on a page of certain official documents a warning, announcing prominently: “This page was intentionally left blank.” Oh, sure, not any longer, though. What? “Untitled”? Ain’t that a title?
Worse than “Untitled” is the title “Untitled” followed by a phrase in parentheses, such as “Untitled (Mother’s Garden in May)” or “Untitled (Flight/Fright).” This is a double contradiction, saying that the painting is untitled but not really. The painter is muttering to herself or himself: “Well, yeah, I don’t know, like, I don’t have a title but it’s kinda like something in my mind, you know, I’m not quite sure what, yeah, but heck here it is, um, make of it what you will.”
As a title “Untitled” could mean “still untitled,” that is, not yet titled. In that case. “Work in Progress” is more accurate as in a portion of a novel sent in to a journal for publication. No publisher, however, will accept a manuscript titled “Untitled,” nor a play so titled will ever be put on stage. Imagine a marquee “New York Premiere Albee’s latest play ‘Untitled’”. Musical compositions without a narrative theme came to be identified by the instrument/s and key signature: Violin Concerto in A-minor, String Quartet No. 4 in G-major., etc.
Historical paintings, that is, narrative paintings -- religious, mythological, or historical -- as those in the Renaissance, did not require titles since the subject depicted was obvious to the viewer: St. Catherine, St. Jerome in his Study, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Danae, Fall of Phaeton, Diana and Actaeon, etc. In the 17th century in Holland, when marketing of art came into being, titling became useful, especially with the proliferation of non-narrative subjects -- portrait, landscape, still life, and genre (scenes from everyday life). Thus, we find identifications like “River Landscape with a Ferry,” “A Gypsy Girl,” “Still Life with Eels,” “Ontbijt (Breakfast),” etc. Titling became a necessity in preparing inventories after the death of the artist. Subjects outside the established genres were unwieldy. Watteau’s reception entry he submitted in 1717 for admission to the Academy was called
“La fête galante,” as it didn;t fit any existing subject category; it was neither history nor mythology, nor genre. The exact subject is still debated: Embarkation for Cythera or Departure from Cythera. With the rising practice of artists inventing a new subject for each painting, together with the new tradition of public exhibition of art, titling paintings became a necessity and a norm.
The motivation for titling a painting “Untitled” is understandable and justifiable. Titling a painting implies that it has a subject -- literary, poetic, or thematic. It describes the work summarily, or, at least, provides a key to its meaning. The idea of titling a work “Untitled” is to eliminate narrative connotations and force the viewer to look at the work and read its theme and meaning in the painting itself. Pursuing abstraction, Kandinsky resorted to musical analogy in his titles: “Composition No. 5,” like the opus number in music. Some later non-figurative painters, just gave numbers, like, “Number 15” (Rothko), colors, like “Russet (Morris Louis), ” or the source of abstraction, like “Cathedral” (Hofmann), though others continued to give literary titles, like “Lucifer” (Pollock) and “Empress of India” (Stella). If the painter feels strongly that the work should not be titled, she or he should call the work “Painting” rather than “Untitled.”
One time I was made keenly aware of the perfect rightness of the title “Untitled” was at the exhibition of the works of Agnes Martin’s paintings, which she consistently and most deliberately titled “Untitled.” From one painting to the next, identical in size and subtle in difference, at a glance they look alike; it is only on intense inspection the strong presence of each, which gives each work its unmistakably identity, impresses the viewer and makes it unforgettable. Each painting identifies its visual reality that no lengthy description, not to speak of a title of any kind, can ever communicate profitably; it is revealed only in concentrated and prolonged and seeing. Not all non-figurative paintings share this concrete optical quality.
Then, more recently, at the exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s photographs, I was equally impressed by her “Untitled” titling of her series “Untitled Film Stills.” Her self-portraits as fictional but plausible film characters might be identified as types, like “tired housewife.” “young hitchhiker.” “sex kitten,” or whatever, but any title with a literary or cinematic reference only detracts from the specific identify of each feigned character, its immediacy (even though distanced as a screen image, simulation as it may be). This observations holds, too, for Sherman’s later photographs of “society women, “centerfolds,” and “historical characters.” Moreover, any specific title is not only redundant but falsifying since the reality of her photographed images is double-layered: one of her self-representation in different guises and the other of the character she is donning. Her photographs simultaneously draws our attention to the persona as a person and the persona as a mask In later works, in fact, she makes her prosthetic applications deliberately visible to distinguish the two layers of representation. Strictly figurative, unlike Agnes Martin’s paintings, Sherman’s photographs are strong by virtue of their unmitigated specificity.
Too often, I still contend, paintings of vague or blurred identity are lazily left “Untitled”, and they vex me.
Worse than “Untitled” is the title “Untitled” followed by a phrase in parentheses, such as “Untitled (Mother’s Garden in May)” or “Untitled (Flight/Fright).” This is a double contradiction, saying that the painting is untitled but not really. The painter is muttering to herself or himself: “Well, yeah, I don’t know, like, I don’t have a title but it’s kinda like something in my mind, you know, I’m not quite sure what, yeah, but heck here it is, um, make of it what you will.”
As a title “Untitled” could mean “still untitled,” that is, not yet titled. In that case. “Work in Progress” is more accurate as in a portion of a novel sent in to a journal for publication. No publisher, however, will accept a manuscript titled “Untitled,” nor a play so titled will ever be put on stage. Imagine a marquee “New York Premiere Albee’s latest play ‘Untitled’”. Musical compositions without a narrative theme came to be identified by the instrument/s and key signature: Violin Concerto in A-minor, String Quartet No. 4 in G-major., etc.
Historical paintings, that is, narrative paintings -- religious, mythological, or historical -- as those in the Renaissance, did not require titles since the subject depicted was obvious to the viewer: St. Catherine, St. Jerome in his Study, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Danae, Fall of Phaeton, Diana and Actaeon, etc. In the 17th century in Holland, when marketing of art came into being, titling became useful, especially with the proliferation of non-narrative subjects -- portrait, landscape, still life, and genre (scenes from everyday life). Thus, we find identifications like “River Landscape with a Ferry,” “A Gypsy Girl,” “Still Life with Eels,” “Ontbijt (Breakfast),” etc. Titling became a necessity in preparing inventories after the death of the artist. Subjects outside the established genres were unwieldy. Watteau’s reception entry he submitted in 1717 for admission to the Academy was called
“La fête galante,” as it didn;t fit any existing subject category; it was neither history nor mythology, nor genre. The exact subject is still debated: Embarkation for Cythera or Departure from Cythera. With the rising practice of artists inventing a new subject for each painting, together with the new tradition of public exhibition of art, titling paintings became a necessity and a norm.
The motivation for titling a painting “Untitled” is understandable and justifiable. Titling a painting implies that it has a subject -- literary, poetic, or thematic. It describes the work summarily, or, at least, provides a key to its meaning. The idea of titling a work “Untitled” is to eliminate narrative connotations and force the viewer to look at the work and read its theme and meaning in the painting itself. Pursuing abstraction, Kandinsky resorted to musical analogy in his titles: “Composition No. 5,” like the opus number in music. Some later non-figurative painters, just gave numbers, like, “Number 15” (Rothko), colors, like “Russet (Morris Louis), ” or the source of abstraction, like “Cathedral” (Hofmann), though others continued to give literary titles, like “Lucifer” (Pollock) and “Empress of India” (Stella). If the painter feels strongly that the work should not be titled, she or he should call the work “Painting” rather than “Untitled.”
One time I was made keenly aware of the perfect rightness of the title “Untitled” was at the exhibition of the works of Agnes Martin’s paintings, which she consistently and most deliberately titled “Untitled.” From one painting to the next, identical in size and subtle in difference, at a glance they look alike; it is only on intense inspection the strong presence of each, which gives each work its unmistakably identity, impresses the viewer and makes it unforgettable. Each painting identifies its visual reality that no lengthy description, not to speak of a title of any kind, can ever communicate profitably; it is revealed only in concentrated and prolonged and seeing. Not all non-figurative paintings share this concrete optical quality.
Then, more recently, at the exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s photographs, I was equally impressed by her “Untitled” titling of her series “Untitled Film Stills.” Her self-portraits as fictional but plausible film characters might be identified as types, like “tired housewife.” “young hitchhiker.” “sex kitten,” or whatever, but any title with a literary or cinematic reference only detracts from the specific identify of each feigned character, its immediacy (even though distanced as a screen image, simulation as it may be). This observations holds, too, for Sherman’s later photographs of “society women, “centerfolds,” and “historical characters.” Moreover, any specific title is not only redundant but falsifying since the reality of her photographed images is double-layered: one of her self-representation in different guises and the other of the character she is donning. Her photographs simultaneously draws our attention to the persona as a person and the persona as a mask In later works, in fact, she makes her prosthetic applications deliberately visible to distinguish the two layers of representation. Strictly figurative, unlike Agnes Martin’s paintings, Sherman’s photographs are strong by virtue of their unmitigated specificity.
Too often, I still contend, paintings of vague or blurred identity are lazily left “Untitled”, and they vex me.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Three meals again 再び三度の食事
As I was cooking a meal, it occurred to me how much time I spend each day preparing and three meals a day. I made a note of this before: “Three meals.” I gave a further thought on the effort of feeding myself, and remembered how much more hard work beasts of prey have to do. Little wonder that wild cats like lions, leopards, and tigers sleep so much, Hunting for food is all the work they do during their lifetime. Even squirrels have to scurry all day to hoard their provisions for immediate and future consumption. On the other hand, grazing animals do much less work than we do, though in the wild they may have to trek a great distance for their sustenance. Those who don’t work to feed themselves are many a husband, kids, and pets, like my cat Qif.
食事の支度をしながら毎日三度食べる事に費やす時間と努力については，前に「三度の食事』で書きましたけど、再度考察するにつけ，肉食の野獣は餌食を追うのに我々以上の労働をしますね。道理で，ライオン，豹、虎等のネコ科の動物は、殆ど一日中寝てます。食餌の追跡狩猟が一生の仕事。リスでも，直ぐ食べるなり後の為に蓄えるにしろ，一日中走り廻って食料集めに専念。その反面，牧畜連中は，ぶらぶら，むしゃむしゃ，楽な事。でも，荒野では草を探すのに大分の距離を行くのが難儀でしょう。何もしないで食事を楽しむのは，夫の殆ど，子供，そして飼い犬，飼い猫、あたしの愛猫キフ。
食事の支度をしながら毎日三度食べる事に費やす時間と努力については，前に「三度の食事』で書きましたけど、再度考察するにつけ，肉食の野獣は餌食を追うのに我々以上の労働をしますね。道理で，ライオン，豹、虎等のネコ科の動物は、殆ど一日中寝てます。食餌の追跡狩猟が一生の仕事。リスでも，直ぐ食べるなり後の為に蓄えるにしろ，一日中走り廻って食料集めに専念。その反面，牧畜連中は，ぶらぶら，むしゃむしゃ，楽な事。でも，荒野では草を探すのに大分の距離を行くのが難儀でしょう。何もしないで食事を楽しむのは，夫の殆ど，子供，そして飼い犬，飼い猫、あたしの愛猫キフ。
Monday, February 6, 2012
Zdenka's Terezín
Two weeks ago I went to 92nd Street Y and saw the documentary film, The Music of Terezín, which had its first public screening in North America. It was made in 1992 and shown on the BBC the following year. Simon Broughton, a British TV director, has a special interest in world music, and made documentaries on famous composers as well as Fado and the Sufi music. The story of the concentration camp is well known; the Gestapo made into a ghetto the fortified garrison town at Terezín (then known as Theresienstadt) where Jews from Czechoslovakia and surrounding areas were brought in to live before they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Broughton’s film portrays the creative life of composers and performers who continued to produce music under the horrendous living conditions that could only be described as subhuman. Yet, the musicians smuggled instruments, often in parts to be assembled in the camp and performed the music the composers wrote, at first in secrecy but later more openly as the Nazi supervision changed its tune. It was a beautifully crafted film, lucid and informative in its narrative, supported with interviews with surviving witnesses. Most of the interviewees have passed away since 1993. One of them, a Czech actress Zdenka Fantlová, accompanied the director who conducted a discussion after the film.
At 88 or 89, Fantlová was still beautiful, articulate, and high-spirited. She confirmed that neither she nor anyone else knew where the “train to the East” went. But in 1944 she was on the very last transport train to Auschwitz together with most of the musicians who eventually perished there. On arriving at Auschwitz, she managed, by falsifying her age, to be sorted to the group destined to the labor camp rather than the gas chamber, and survived. She told the audience emphatically that although the life was miserable in the camp, instead of dwelling on it, she learned a valuable lesson how to live the precious life fully day to day. Her words struck a chord in me, as I, too, lived the war years, certainly less horrendous but equally terrifying and deprived. In 2001 she wrote an account of her life during the war entitled My Lucky Star (after a Fred Astaire song), originally written in Czech in 1997. Then, in 2010 she had it updated and republished as The Tin Ring. I bought a copy, had it autographed by the author, chatted with her, and shook her hand. It was for me a terribly emotional, intensely moving experience.
I asked Broughton why the documentary slept all these 19 years, and he said that there was no interest. I did not have time to pursue the question. But I speculated that in these intervening years, the audience demanded and expected that the films that dealt with concentration camps focused on the horrors of the Holocaust and presumably found one that portrayed music-making at Terezín, even under the adverse condition, insufferably frivolous. Some may even have seen it as a gentle denial of the truth of the Holocaust, aligning it with the heavily-faked Nazi propaganda film showcasing Terezín for the Dutch Red Cross as a happy internment town. There were questions from the floor, in fact, asking to give (for the benefit of the audience) more details about the miseries in the camp life. Only in recent years, the works of the Terzín composers came to be recorded and publicly performed -- Viktor Ullman, Pavel Haas, Giedion Klein, and Hans Krása, among them, some of them students of Schönberg and contemporaries of Janacek. Time may be finally ripe for a larger audience appreciating the film that extols the courage, strength, and irrepressible creativity of those musicians (and actors and artists, too) of Terezín -- Zdenka’s Terezín.
The film The Music of Terezín was discussed at some length in The Observer/The Guardian at the time it was shown in England in 2010. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/13/terezin-ghetto-jews-holocaust-vulliamy.
At 88 or 89, Fantlová was still beautiful, articulate, and high-spirited. She confirmed that neither she nor anyone else knew where the “train to the East” went. But in 1944 she was on the very last transport train to Auschwitz together with most of the musicians who eventually perished there. On arriving at Auschwitz, she managed, by falsifying her age, to be sorted to the group destined to the labor camp rather than the gas chamber, and survived. She told the audience emphatically that although the life was miserable in the camp, instead of dwelling on it, she learned a valuable lesson how to live the precious life fully day to day. Her words struck a chord in me, as I, too, lived the war years, certainly less horrendous but equally terrifying and deprived. In 2001 she wrote an account of her life during the war entitled My Lucky Star (after a Fred Astaire song), originally written in Czech in 1997. Then, in 2010 she had it updated and republished as The Tin Ring. I bought a copy, had it autographed by the author, chatted with her, and shook her hand. It was for me a terribly emotional, intensely moving experience.
I asked Broughton why the documentary slept all these 19 years, and he said that there was no interest. I did not have time to pursue the question. But I speculated that in these intervening years, the audience demanded and expected that the films that dealt with concentration camps focused on the horrors of the Holocaust and presumably found one that portrayed music-making at Terezín, even under the adverse condition, insufferably frivolous. Some may even have seen it as a gentle denial of the truth of the Holocaust, aligning it with the heavily-faked Nazi propaganda film showcasing Terezín for the Dutch Red Cross as a happy internment town. There were questions from the floor, in fact, asking to give (for the benefit of the audience) more details about the miseries in the camp life. Only in recent years, the works of the Terzín composers came to be recorded and publicly performed -- Viktor Ullman, Pavel Haas, Giedion Klein, and Hans Krása, among them, some of them students of Schönberg and contemporaries of Janacek. Time may be finally ripe for a larger audience appreciating the film that extols the courage, strength, and irrepressible creativity of those musicians (and actors and artists, too) of Terezín -- Zdenka’s Terezín.
The film The Music of Terezín was discussed at some length in The Observer/The Guardian at the time it was shown in England in 2010. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/13/terezin-ghetto-jews-holocaust-vulliamy.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Free Gift
If it ain’t free, it’s no gift, and there is most likely a hidden price one pays on receiving a free gift. Yet this advertising gimmick is so rampant, especially among institutions soliciting donations, regardless of the blatant tautology of the expression.
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