Pictures titled Untitled

“Untitled” as the title of a painting irks me so.  What?  “Untitled, is it?  But isn’t this a title?”  This 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, except for this notice which makes the page no longer blank. 

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” when exhibited, 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.”

The 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. 

In these examples, the title “Untitled” means “No other title was adequate” and not  “No title was conceived,” that is to say, concrete rather than abstract.

Too often, I still contend, paintings of vague or blurred identity are lazily left “Untitled”, and they vex me. 

Study on Effort

Study on Effort performed at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn by Bobbi Jene Smith, a dancer out of The Batsheba, and violinist Keir GoGwilt, does not actively try to entertain.  As the ingenious title insists, it tries to involve the audience to experience immersively the reality of the hard work that making any art is, in this case dance and music.  Failing to understand this premise, the audience may be misled to read the dancer’s nudity as a titillation.  

The opening sequence immediately realizes the theme of effort as the nude dancer makes slow, tortured movements, accompanied by the drone of James Tenney on the violin as its player makes an equally slow ambulation around the periphery of the low stage surrounded by the audience on three sides.  The spectator/listener is invited to follow the work with as much effort as the nude body which lays bare all the strained muscles and the violin which tireless repeats barely changing phrases over and over.  

This overture is followed by four sections which are variations on the theme, four contrasting exercises, some frantically fast and energized, others slow again as in the act of hauling sandbags.  The musical selections marking the sections are distinctly contrasted; they include an Improvisation by GoGwilt himself and Sarabande from  J. S. Bach’s Partita No.1. The dance and the music mesh effectively by mutually reinforcing the theme, now in counterpoint and now in unison. Smith’s effort receives magnification from the violin, and the music, which by itself would be absorbed by the listener more passively, becomes muscular in combination with the dance’s physicality and forces itself on as hard work; and the audience in its effort becomes active participants in the making of this effortful art, at once visually and aurally.  The change in the character of art from section to section gave us a welcome respite for performers and the audience alike.  

The audience at the Invisible Dog was too large and diminished the impact the performance would have given amidst a smaller audience, preferably on two sides of the stage prompting a more concentrated focus on the happening.  

A Good Story Well Told

A good story, read on the pages, does not necessarily make a good storytelling.  I am always prompted to think this after attending a play by Connor McPherson, as I did most recently The Shining City at the Irish Rep.   

When we read a story, we might read it aloud to ourselves; but reading is usually done silently by sight.  When we read a story to someone else, even to a child at bedtime, or perhaps especially when we read to a child, we do so expressively by modulating the voice and articulating the pauses, and this way we capture the interest and attention of the listener every step of the way, allowing no moment for the listening mind to wander or even wonder.  We don’t want to miss a single word and we don’t have time to think about what is being said while listening. This is good storytelling.   A story well told addresses individual listeners and engages them.   A story as a written text exposes but does not address an individual; it addresses a generalized audience.  Lectures do that, as do essays; we are allowed to reflect as we listen, to pause and ponder while listening, to wonder and wander. 

A good play is thrilling when it is a good storytelling, when it speaks to us individually rather than collectively.  Saying this, I don’t mean that the actors in a play break the fourth wall and address the audience, as Brecht did; the effect, then, is distanciation rather than captivation.  A play achieves the latter, when it is akin to good storytelling in its continuity and modulation.  These are certainly in the domain of the director’s art of pacing.  But some plays display them already in their written text.  We are then more liable to be smoothly drawn into the world of the narrative much like the experience we remember from our childhood as we listened to a good bedtime story.  When we say that Irish playwrights are good storytellers and write good plays, we become aware of the oral tradition of storytelling in Ireland.  In the age before printing, stories were only told in vocal recitation and remembered as an auditory experience by those who later told the same stories.  As I insistently claim, a poem should be read aloud for full effect, even though admittedly it can be a visual text to be experienced visually and mentally. 

A good theater can be a spectacle, a primarily visual and aural affair, presented to an audience.  But a good play is a good story well told.  A story, good or not, could sprawl, narrated or performed.  The recent play by Dan LeFranc, Rancho Viejo, sprawled; Stephen Karam’s The Humans rambled.  If a play goes on lecturing, even if it happened to be a good lecture, I can’t help thinking I’d then rather go hear a lecture than attend a play.  What I call a good play may be just one kind of good play; but a good story well told is to me very satisfying.

Forgetful but. . .

Viewing on YouTube video the repertory of the Buglisi Dance Company in preparation for attending its latest performance, I realized that I hardly remembered them even though I saw them previously, two or three times.  This was four years ago.  More recently, after attending Mozart’s Idomeneo, I thought I had never seen it before; but checking my record I discovered that I had seen it four times already in a decade.  Sometimes, what I didn’t remember, I rationalize, was forgotten because it was forgettable.  On the bright side, however, poor memory retention in old age is a boon because what might be a tiresome old hat of experience turns out to be all new and fresh.

A stitch in time

A stitch in time saves nine

so I wait a while longer 

and let the rip go a bit farther

then with many more stitches to mend 
don't I save a lot more than nine?

Mazzoli Breaks the Waves

I attended Missy Mazzoli's opera Breaking the Waves last night at the NYU Skirball Center.  It was outstanding. Everything about it was top notch: the music, the libretto, the set, the direction, the singers. 

The set, designed by Adam Rigg was a jumble of crisscrossing planks that filled a half of the stage, but it served ingeniously now as a promontory overlooking the sea, now as the oil rig, now as a hospital room; and the screen projections for different loci were very effective, too, especially the scene of the accident at the rig and the black smears that gradually filled the screens in the later scenes of the heroine’s behavioral degradation. The chorus, sometimes in black as churchmen, moved and sang menacingly, and their quick change to act the men at the rig and later as sex predators was also impressive; and the chorus members, highly individualized, registered as memorable characters.  James Darrah’s direction expertly blocked and paced the singers up and down the rickety planks. The libretto by Royce Vavrek, written in short phrases and, often repeated, were clear and easily heard.  Most of all, Mazzoli’s music was hauntingly expressive of intense and often complex emotions, dramatic at every turn.  The singers were all good, John Moore as Jan, certainly, but most of all the soprano Keira Duffy sang the difficult role beautifully; her total nudity, still shocking to some, may foretell a future, as Joyce's prose, once criminalized, no longer disturbs anyone today. 

The film by Lars von Trier tells a horrendous story about Bess, a strictly spiritual woman, who falls in love with Jan, an oilman; when he returns from an accident, totally paralyzed, she accuses herself and puts in action Jan’s order to go and have sex elsewhere, our of sheer increasing sense of guilt.  Mazzoli’s opera clarified the drama and powerfully conveyed the devastating effect on the two lovers rendered by the hypocritical church and the accident at the off-shore oil rig and ultimately the ironically twisted theme of Omnia vincit Amor.  As some critics claimed, this was certainly the best contemporary opera I had seen this year. 

Two years ago, I heard Mazzoli’s works in the Composer Portraits series at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre.  The program included the aria “His Name is John” from Breaking the Waves.  She was briefly interviewed during the program and shone in her articulate intelligence.  But the work of hers that I found especially impressive was “Death Valley Junction” from 2010, which depicted the place of that name on the border between Nevada and California, inhabited by three people, a home to eccentric Marta Beckett, “the woman who resurrected and repaired the crumbling opera house in the late 1960s and performed one-woman shows there every week until her retirement in 2012 at age 87. ”

Tomorrow

On 31 December, as I thought about the New Year’s Day, I became keenly aware of the artificiality of conceiving time numerically.  There is no boundary marking the shift from the last day of this year to the first day of the next unless you watch the fall of the ball at Times Square in New York or open a new calendar.  After all, a day follows another, as one minute another for that matter, seamlessly like the water of the river one never crosses twice, to paraphrase Heraclitus.  Like birds and beasts and plants I am keenly aware of seasonal changes but not of calendar counts.  Tomorrow is another day, as we say. Then, it occurred to me that this statement is double-edged.  It could mean, optimistically, that there is still another day after all, which could be or might be better than today.  On the other hand, it can be taken pessimistically that days come and go and tomorrow is yet just another day, no better and no worse than today.  For me, every new day is something to look forward to.