Author Archives: Mira

A Funny Thing Happened to Me on My Way Around the Spectacle

At just the moment, midway down the ramp of the Guggenheim, when the Maurizio Cattelan retrospective installation, All, began to lose its amusing edge and spectacular novelty, and become tiresome, I was led off-ramp, off-track by my friend Susan Bee who had escaped through a small portal to see Kandinsky’s Painting with White Border, a small show of paintings and drawings devoted to one painting by Kandinsky, among the Museum’s earliest acquisitions. I don’t much like Kandinsky, the forms in his paintings irritate me–hackles down, Kandinsky fans (and Susan is one of them): it’s possible to completely understand an artist’s extraordinary importance to the development of modernism and still find the work, its shapes and lines, atavistically annoying. Painting with White Border is no exception, and yet I found the exhibition very interesting and useful.

If Cattelan’s combination of spectacular presentation, whimsical detail, and bad boy provocations, all twisted from the real, might seem like Alice’s Wonderland, somehow having gone around a curved corner of the Guggenheim into the Kandinsky exhibition, I felt like I’d fallen down the rabbit hole into another Wonderland–the one where an artist works his way by hand through known problems to unknown solutions to arrive at a work.

I know one could say the same of Cattelan–he had to figure out where each provocation should be aimed and how to present diverse site specific works in the unforgiving space of the Guggenheim, and he did it. Also, even an abstract painting is not entirely an unknown entity, it arrives into being from formal and philosophical problems and inspirations, yet the two exhibitions offer different examples for a young artist. One is surely very seductive yet nearly impossible to follow because it’s not enough to be a very clever boy, over and over again, you also have to persuade people to give you a lot of money, if anything a greater and more mysterious talent. So perhaps the other more old-fashioned model can be followed, not to the same formal conclusion, but because it offers a trace of process presumably accessible to any artist.

Vassily Kandinsky, Painting with White Border (Bild mit weissem Rand, May 1913),Oil on canvas, 140.3 x 200.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection

What grabbed me, more than the painting, was a film about it shown within the exhibition: Kandinsky: A Close Look (3 Paintings: 3 Investigations), by Grahame Weinbren. Grabbed is a crude word, but in fact I was lured into the little room in which it was playing in exactly the same way that you are lured into buying food at Zabar’s: I was intrigued by the sound track leaking into the exhibition alcove which featured the painting that was the focus of the exhibition–a strongly accented voice, sounding something like if Slavoj Žižek were reading the Zabar’s echt-New York Upper West Side sales patter out loud, “Shoppers: fresh out of the oven right now at our bakery, Zabar’s own rye bread, we have Nova… .” The film is a visual examination of the painting, guided by Kandinsky’s essay about it, read out loud by an actor with a Russian accent, as described. Once you get past the slight hokiness of the accent, you are absorbed into Kandinsky’s journey through conceiving of and struggling to find the solution to this large canvas, over a period of several months, in 1913, as expressed in an essay he wrote about it. It is an excellent example of descriptive writing, articulate and expressive, eloquent as to goal, process, result, as Kandinsky describes his concerns and his own critical views of what he is doing in each part of the composition–of three brown forms dominating the upper left of the work, Kandinsky writes that “this combination of form takes on a wooden quality that I find distasteful.” He continues, about the use of green,

“For instance the color green often (or sometimes) awakens in the soul (unconsciously) overtones of summer. And this dimly perceived vibration, combined with a cool purity and clarity, can in this case be exactly right. but how distasteful it wold be if these overtones were so clear and pronounced that they made one think of the “joys” of summer: e.g., how nice it is in summer to be able to leave off one’s coat without danger of catching cold.”

He picks up on the use of green a bit later: “It was quite unconsciously–and, as I see now, purposefully–that I used so much green: I had no desire to introduce into this admittedly stormy picture too great an unrest. Rather, I wanted, as I noticed later, to use turmoil to express repose. I even used too much green, and especially too much Paris blue ) a dully sonorous, cold color), with the result that it was only with exertion and difficulty that I was later able to balance and correct the excess of these two colors.”

He concludes his description of the painting with the genesis of the white border itself:

At the bottom left, there is a battle in black and white, which is divorced from the dramatic clarity of the upper left-hand corner by Naples yellow. The way in which black smudges rotate within the white I call “inner boiling within a diffuse form.”[…]

I made slow progress with the white edge. My sketches did little to help, that is, the individual forms became clear within me–and yet, I could still not bring myself to paint the picture. It tormented me. After several weeks, I would bring out the sketches again, and till I felt unprepared. It is only over the years that I have learned to exercise patience in such moments and not smash the picture over my knee.

Thus, it was not until after nearly five months that I was sitting looking in the twilight at the second large-scale study, when it suddenly dawned on me what was missing–the white edge.

I scarcely dared believe it; nonetheless, I went straightaway to my supplier and ordered the canvas.[…]

I treated this white edge itself in the same capricious way it had treated me: in the lower left chasm, out of wish rises a white wave that suddenly subsides, only to flow around the right-and side of the picture in lazy coil, forming in the upper right a lake…disappearing towards the upper left hand corner, where it makes it last, definitive appearance in the picture in the form of a white zigzag.

Since this white edge proved the solution to the picture, I named the whole picture after it.

The artist’s exegesis of the painting, in its becoming, is technologically enhanced by the film which travels to each area as he writes about it though, curiously, if you place yourself just so at the edge of one of the benches in the little room where the film is projected, the painting and the film can be looked at more or less in one view, and the painting to my mind suffers in the juxtaposition: it is less bright than the film and one must take it in its totality as a complex composition, while in the film each area springs to life as Kandinsky writes about it. What is exciting is how eloquent Kandinsky is as he interweaves his goals, his process, his materials, forms, and opinions. To him the painting was a world, and a space of discovery, with the “white border” (a wavy white shape that frames the right half of the work) the linchpin.

I found this cinematic reading compelling because I’m interested, as an editor and a teacher, currently working with MFA students who must in some way incorporate description of their work into their writing, in how one can use detailed description of the visual appearance of a work to get at other aspects of the work that are contained within the visual elements: narrative content, and aesthetic, philosophical, or political intent.

Now refueled, Susan and I reentered the carousel and made our way down past the hanging horse and the stricken pope and other amusements, and out into the city.

Maurizio Cateelan, "Him", 2001, Polyester resin, wax, pigment, human hair, and suit, seen January 9, 2012

Wig store window, West 27th Street, NYC, seen January 9, 2012

Kandinsky’s essay on Painting with White Border is included in his Reminiscences, published by Der Sturm Verlag in 1913, with his descriptions of three paintings, including Painting With White Border. It is not available in totality online, which perhaps is a good thing, because it is the synaesthetic experience of seeing and hearing that is so interesting and dynamic and that I highly recommend: the show closes the 15th of January.

You put a spell on me

I woke up one morning this week, walked into my studio while still half asleep, looked around and thought, my work is just not enough. This may not seem like a good start to a New Year of positive thinking, but I immediately understood that this thought, surging from the liminal space between sleep and wakefulness, was shaped by the profound spell, there is no other word for it, cast over me by the exhibition I had seen the day before at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini.

This show is one of two extraordinary exhibitions devoted to portraiture currently up at the Met. The other one is Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures, a powerful exhibit somewhat incongruously tucked away off the main hall of Greek statuary. The shows and the works included are totally the same and totally different, it is fascinating to see them together: Heroic Africans is only up through January 29, so to see both one must go in January, it is worth it in so many ways.

Both exhibitions focus on representations of persons of power and prestige, whether princes of the church, mercantile leaders, or tribal chiefs, or, in both cases, their women, wives and marriageable daughters. Figures are both idealized (in the case of portraits of historical figures of the Italian Quattrocento) and yet highly suggestive of specific individuals (in the case of African works where we may not know the exact identity of the subject portrayed). Both include representations with a high degree of verisimilitude and strong symbolic content, which we understand more or less well depending on what prior knowledge, historical or aesthetic, that we bring to them. For how we apprehend the human images in these exhibitions is based on what we recognize and know from our own visual and cultural experience.

In his landmark book of sociologically-oriented art history, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Style, Michael Baxandall examined the “economic basis for the cult of pictorial skills,” providing detailed analyses of the contracts entered into by painters and their patrons to examine the criteria brought to bear by both parties to the creation of the works seen in The Renaissance Portrait. We may not have a detailed written history of how the African portraits came to be done but perhaps the relation of artist to power is not all that different in any culture. Our understanding of both groups of works rely on what we know and how we know it, as Baxandall remarks, “Our own culture is close enough to the Quattrocento for us to take a lot of the same things for granted and not have a strong sense of misunderstanding the pictures: we are closer to the Quattrocento mind than to the Byzantine, for example.” I’m closer to the Quattrocento mind than to the tribal mind, or am I?

The museum has certainly made some assumptions about our relative knowledge and probably rightly assumed that, relatively speaking only, many of its viewers may be closer to the Quattrocento mind than to the tribal mind so perhaps to mitigate that gap, it has chosen to introduce the African portraits through two devices that they must have felt would anchor the work in our body of knowledge: first, a collection of photographic postcards made for the Western trade during the colonialist era position the culture whose artworks we are about to see into a zone of a safe exoticism, a chief, his four young wives, one of whom holds an umbrella over him, and so forth, and, second, the curators have placed two marble Roman busts at the threshold of the exhibition, one of these of Octavian, later Emperor Augustus, thus one of “our” heroic figures. No direct connection is made to contextualize the inclusion of these works, for example no claim is made that any tribal artist in equatorial Africa ever saw these busts, which would have been seen in North Africa, or that any influence of Greco-Roman art trickled down the Nile or along other trade routes, these marble busts are just there, seemingly to legitimate the African work, proof, in case we needed reminding, that the white male universal is the referent of choice for the Met’s audience.

But since the first works we see are terracotta heads of such perfect (read perfect according to Western criteria of figural verisimilitude) quality, such craft and uncanniness of three-dimensional representation accuracy, we don’t really need the Roman bust to orient ourselves. These terracotta heads from the Yoruba peoples, Ife, Nigeria function as full realism in relation to other works from tribal groups like the Chokwe peoples of Angola placed further into the exhibition that become increasingly symbolic, abstracted, increasingly specific to tribal cultures. The floor plan of the show is almost like a cut-away of a snail shell: in the outer cavity is the work closest to the West in terms of representational style, and, by the way, in a fascinating case of chronological synergy these are dated from the 12th to the 15th century thus contemporaneous with the Italian Renaissance, while in the most inner curvature are the most ethnic, the ones most “African” in their style and content, from the 19th and early 20th century, thus contemporaneous with the Western cubist works they inspired. All these works are absolutely astounding sculptures, as exquisitely crafted as the terracotta busts or the Donatello upstairs, but especially in the case of the later works with highly stylized figuration with elements that may seem very abstract. Each work is extremely intense, in the degree of craft in the wood carving, and the characterization of the figure.

Yoruba

Chokwe Peoples, Angola, 19th Century

I’ve gone to see both shows three times this week, and each time I was riveted by one or two figures in Heroic Africans and the experience was too intense to allow me to take in every work in the room. Perhaps it’s a bit easier for me to filter out what I’m not interested in looking at among the Renaissance works because relatively greater exposure and knowledge makes me more confident about my choices. At the same time the bounce-back effect from our knowledge of African art-inspired Cubist sculpture make the figures accessible in a formal way, maybe even more so than the Renaissance paintings, but this may also block their immediate usability to a Western artist, as one struggles to not fall into the traps of “primitivism” or of imitation of Cubist style.

Commemorative Figure, Hemba peoples; Niembo group; Democratic Republic of Congo, 19th-early 20th century. Wood, fibers, fur. Collection Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museum, Berlin (no photography allowed in the exhibition and few images available on line, thus my inadequate sketches, though drawing a sculpture is a great way to experience it)

Detail, Commemorative Figure, Hemba peoples; Niembo group; Democratic Republic of Congo, 19th-early 20th century. Wood. Portraits by Masaccio, Domenico Veneziano (attributed), and Paolo Uccelo (attributed), tempera on wood, mid-1400s.

The transition, if a transition needs to be made between the two exhibitions, can be made through comparison of two hat designs: one a completely abstracted (to us) form on the back of the head of a Commemorative Figure of the Hemba peoples from the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s a cylindrical form set on the head at an angle so the top creates a flat line jutting back from the crown of the head; the back of each such headdress is a carved bas-relief pattern of crossed or woven thick ribbon-like shapes on a flat ground, like a platter, in other words an utterly modernist cubist shape, like an Ozenfant or Leger, all the more so because that surface is parallel to a pictorial flat field, like a mirror on the wall reflecting a flying saucer. The other is a type of turban-like headdress worn by the men in the first three portraits we see at the entry to Renaissance Portraits–where, by the way, the museum has not seen the need for a classical reference. It is assumed, and, besides, Renaissance art is at the heart of our system of reference. In three paintings, by Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, and Domenico Veneziano, the men wear a wrapped cloth headdress something like a turban but softer, a pile of folds, as abstract as the headdress in the Hemba figure–the hard edge of cubism in the one versus the deliquescent informe materiality of a Lynda Benglis in the other. But if, because of the more familiar style of representation in these three Renaissance portraits we accept these abstract folds as a hat, then the schematic folds in the wood carving downstairs are surely as transparently representational to anyone who knows the costume of the area.

But perhaps I’ve strayed from my original premise: why did I wake up and feel that my work was not enough? To try to get closer to an answer, I’ll focus on a few works in Renaissance Portraits from Donatello to Bellini which made a particularly deep impression on me.

The order of their appearance in the show makes a certain sense for me too, marking the range of challenge they pose.

Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Lady at a Window ("Smeralda Bandinelli"), c. 1470-75, Tempera on wood, 25 7/8 x 16 1/8 in. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The first is Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady at a Window. As in many of the paintings in the show, the lady occupies a space that hovers between the perspectival or pictorial and the symbolic. She stands at a window, her right hand resting gently on the frame. The space behind her seems totally credible yet on further examination impossibly narrow and without a clear sense of where the floor might be. Pardon me, but where exactly are her feet? Just as the depiction of the lady herself, the space is beautiful, severe, grave, and imperfect (although it’s possible that the perspective is absolutely correct but the illusion is peculiar). If you don’t exactly know where the floor is, there is also something off about the woman’s mouth: the part closest to us is smaller than the part that goes back into the three quarter profile. In fact if you think about it, the whole far side of her face is larger than the near, it almost looks like Botticelli reversed the two sides and reassembled them. Along with her strong chin, this makes her seem interesting and handsome rather than pretty or even beautiful though everything about the painting is utterly beautiful: the geometry of the background and the expression of the figure is severe and solid yet also delicate and eerily translucent–many of these portraits are tempera on wood and the effect of translucency achieved with the tempera, often applied in layers of hair thin brush marks, cedes nothing to oil painting. Her curious-shaped mouth also gives her an ineffably wry expression: perhaps she finds the painter and maybe us a bit dubious, even suspect, or just amusing. [Stefan Weppelmann’s catalog entry for this painting notes how unusual a representation of a woman this was for its time, in that the woman establishes eye contact with the viewer, which normally would have an erotic connotation, yet the whole painting, from the space she occupies to the clothes she wears, marks her as a woman of privilege; she is not in the first bloom of youth (she is not a teenager) and she “is not merely being put on view or represented, she is presenting herself.”]

Sandro Botticelli, Giuliano de' Medici, ca.1478. Tempera on wood, 29 3/4 x 20 5/8 in, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Second is Sandro Botticelli’s portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici, one of three portraits with the same motif and generally the same composition, two of which are in the show. The National Gallery of Art version, the largest of the three, combines Renaissance styles, early and high, Italian and Flemish, antique and heraldic. Giuliano’s proud profile, so distinctive with its long pointy nose, protruding jaw, downcast eyes with hypnotically curved eye lids, and thin curved lips that it seems like a caricature, is set off against the closed door or window shutter behind him, his black hair against the pale blue of an empty sky. The painting is first commanding because of the proud features of the man and the broad area of his red garment, but most extraordinary is the turtle dove which rests on a branch extending from our space into the painting, crossing the narrow painting ledge which separates us. The dove is exquisitely painted and drawn, its wings and feathers blend and nest into the identical brown of the figure’s brown sleeve, with only its coral colored legs and its startling eye to mark its presence. It is very hard to see it in reproduction, or at least to apprehend its importance to the composition and the meaning.

In fact, even from a distance of four feet, we barely distinguish the turtle dove. However the white line of the bird’s breast focuses our attention on a curiously unreal space in the lower left corner: immediately behind the figure is the deeper sill of the back window, and there is nothing to suggest deep space. The figure is set into a highly compressed space, though the space is posited as a well articulated three-dimensional space. Despite the geometrically and perspectivaly precise detailing of the architectural setting, the figure occupies a space that is not entirely sensible. It posits itself as a well articulated three-dimensional space but it is more the idea of such a space rather than one that realistically could contain the figure. I think that the spell cast on me by this work and Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady at a Window is created by these contradictory qualities: exquisite representational detail but odd heraldic flatness, rigorous spatial program that doesn’t stand up to reason. I find that I’m more entranced by this contradictory state of representation than when, in later Italian Renaissance paintings, the figure is rendered with complete three-dimensional verisimilitude within a space where perspectival relations between figures, objects, architecture, and landscape have been fully integrated and naturalized into practice.

Sandro Botticelli, Giuliano de' Medici, c.1478. Tempera on wood, 23 3/8 x 15 1/2 in. Accademia Carrara, Commune di Bergamo

The National Gallery version of this subject is so splendid that it takes a bit more time to appreciate the version from the Academia Carrara, Commune di Bergamo, seen also in the exhibition. Tucked into a dark corner, this painting is a sleeper: it is smaller than the National Gallery version and with a simpler composition which, when read through Renaissance-inspired surrealist and modernist painting, looks as if Joseph Albers, Alberto Morandi, and Giorgio de Chirico had collaborated on the background, a simple pale blue square framed by bands, indicating a window though the fact that we can see both foreshortened sides of the window frame but not the sill is what makes the background look so abstract. (James Turrell’s Meeting, 1986, at P.S. 1 also came to mind, a slice of pure space, a straight cut into infinity). It takes some time for the simplicity and quietude of the painting to haunt you.

[from the catalog: There is much discussion about the circumstances of this series of paintings, whether they were painted posthumously after Giuliano de’ Medici’s murder in the cathedral–the half closed eyes, the turtledove and the reference to roman tombs in the half open shutters of the rear window all may suggest death and mourning, but other possibilities have been proposed including that at least one of the paintings was commissioned in his lifetime, to mourn a lost love or to support Lorenzo de’ Medici’s efforts to position his younger brother Giuliano to be named a cardinal, with the other paintings perhaps copied later to satisfy the need for commemorative images.]

In the same room as these three paintings is another beauty: Lorenzo di Credi’s Portrait of a Young woman (Ginevra de’ Benci?), [1470s, tempera and oil on wood, Collection Metropolitan Museum]. This is a strange and interesting painting, especially if you have seen Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci, one of the greatest artworks of any time and certainly one of the greatest artworks in a museum in the United States (she is beautifully installed in a room of her own at the National Gallery of Art in D.C., and the vagaries of celebrity are such that while you have to stand in line in a crowd to get anywhere near the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, in Washington you can stand as long as you like with your nose up against the enclosure for this painting, which is at least as great, if not more so, and in better condition than the Mona Lisa but less fetishized). The surface of the painting by di Credi is said to be damaged, and certainly the painting quality cannot match the absolute unearthly exquisiteness of Leonardo’s surface and translucent details.

But though Lorenzo’s painting is less perfect than Leonardo’s, it is still quite striking: the balletic delicacy of the hands (the Leonardo painting once extended to this gesture but was cropped somewhere along the line), and especially the effect of the black dress and the rougher halo of the dark green juniper trees that circles her head like a dark crown of thorns. The dramatic and eerie effect moves us towards the Romanticism of a later era when this lady could be the severe and composed captive heroine of a dark mysterious hero in an eighteenth century Gothic novel.

These paintings, with their spacial programs, compressed architecture, symbolic landscape, grave subjects, and delicate surface treatment, have a philosophical and metaphysical cast that deeply impresses (and is what made me feel that my work was not enough, though of course that is a foregone conclusion–but more on that in a minute).

In the same room as these paintings and among skillfully crafted marble busts, there is a rare intrusion of the indexical into this exhibition of the representational: the death mask of Lorenzo de’ Medici sticking out of a small painted frame. It is a rough gypsum-based stucco impression of the face of the man himself, unshaven, grizzled, the rough surface closer to some of the terracotta African heads downstairs. Apparently this effigy was once adorned and gilded–that must have been really weird–but as it exists now, its roughness is jarringly contemporary and also instructional on the living material that all these beautifully crafted works were based upon.

Andrea Mantegna, Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, ca. 1459-60. Tempera on wood, 17 5/8 x 13 3/8 in, Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museum, Berlin

One painting in particular matches the brutality of this object, and that is Andrea Mantegna‘s Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan. According to Keith Christiansen’s catalog entry, Trevisan, a noted cleric, collector of antiquities, and military leader, was a physically unprepossessing man, described by “the Mantuan chronicler Andrea Schivenoglia” as “‘a small man, swarthy, hairy, very proud and stern’ (‘homo pizolo, negro, peloxo, com aìero molto superbo e schuro’),” and Mantegna has sparred nothing in this really quite incredible portrait of a distinctly disquieting figure. There is no idealization of the man despite the classical references of the work. Trevisan looks incredibly impatient with the whole process although he commissioned the portrait. He leans away from the center of the plain dark pictorial space. The effect becomes notably more pronounced as you pull away from the painting: stand across the room and to the right of the painting and he positively seems to be trying to leave the picture plane. Neither the painter not the subject seem to care what we think about them. But on the other hand the bold sculptural form and the strong psychology of the man is built up from the most delicate hair-thin brush strokes. The craft is intense. There is nothing adequate that can be said about the thin white line that animates the subject’s left eye except that it’s a wonderment. The whole thing is. Mantegna has this effect on me: if I sometimes think that I can understand some other artists from the past, that with a little study and based on my own experience of studio practice, I have a sense of what they were thinking when they worked, even Baxandall’s details of the nuts and bolts of the economic and social field in which these paintings came to be made don’t help when it comes to Mantegna. Every time I see a work by Mantegna I think, basically, Who the hell was this guy? “Molto superbo e schuro.”

So not much artwork of any time is going to be “enough” compared to these works, but yet how does one use them? This is a pressing question for me, especially because, as a teacher, I’m interested in how one can use art or artifacts that may seem inaccessible or irrelevant because they were made in ancient or foreign cultures seemingly alien to our own and also because works like these African sculptures or Renaissance paintings seem to have already been digested, for once and for all by our own history, so that our ability to use them appears doubly blocked. How do you use old art? How do you use any great art while not sinking into preciousness?

First, back to my waking thought that my work is just not enough. Well, of course it isn’t. But it’s what I can do, so that is the state of any artist. The trick is to mine older art in order to achieve something else, not nostalgic or paralytically in homage, but taking inspiration from both the materiality and the essence of the past works: something about how the toes of the Chokwe Figures are carved in hard dark wood>the idea of a craft>the expressive capabilities of a medium, or what it means to build a face or a shape from the accumulation of the most ethereal of painting marks>the ethereal>uncompromising honesty. Even just the words that describe a technique can go into an archive of possibilities for future work: an exquisite drawing by Fra Angelico is “metalpoint on prepared ochre surface;” prepared ochre surface>filed for future reference. From these fragments, these resonances, grabbed at intuitively and developed intellectually, you build a sense of your identity, with the recognition that it is always unfixed. The ethereal, the eerie, the sculptural, the uncompromising, any and all of these are a challenge.

Even my writing this post is an example of the dilemma and the process I’m talking about: writing about African art is a hopeless task because I have so little information to go on except some experience over time of seeing, and writing about Renaissance art is a humbling enterprise, practically absurd since there is so much brilliant scholarship and literature devoted to the subject. I can no more write like Baxandall or Panofsky than I can paint like Mantegna. But nevertheless I’ve been driven to try to hack away at something about why I came to be spellbound by a few paintings I thought I knew until I was in front of them. And somehow three visits and writing this piece have served for me to become somewhat dispelled enough to work.

A Feminist Correspondence

Just over a year ago I wrote In Memoriam: Rozsika Parker, Feminist Art Historian and activist to mark the death of the noted British feminist art historian and psychotherapist Rozsika Parker (December 27, 1945-November 5, 2010). A conference in honor of her work was held in London December 10, CELEBRATING ROZSIKA PARKER 1945 – 2010, A DAY SYMPOSIUM ON ART, FEMINISM, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS, convened by Griselda Pollock, Lisa Baraitser, Anthea Callen, Briony Fer, and Sigal Spigel, women noted for their expertise in art history and in psychoanalytic practice and theory, in keeping with Parker’s important contributions to both fields: indeed the themes of the panels cover the range of Parker’s interests: “Art Writing & History,” “Femininity & Cloth,” Between Art & Psychoanalysis,” “Maternal Studies,” “Body Dysmorphia”–all of these topics of continued central relevance to women artists and feminist practice. [update: 300 people tried to register for the conference which had to be moved to a larger venue to accommodate the numbers of young and old from the art and the psychoanalytical communities who came to spend the day. A podcast of the entire Conference is available here.]

In honor of this conference, I would like to reprise part of my original post, which was quite short, and then publish for the first time an extraordinary correspondence that followed over the past year, between me and Griselda Pollock. I hasten to say it is extraordinary entirely due to the quality and interest of Pollock’s writing and, in my own mind, due to my astonishment to be communicating in any way with Pollock, a brilliant art historian whose work influenced me so much at a crucial time in my personal development within one of the most significant moments in the history of feminist art.

As a final introductory comment, the epistolary form can be a difficult one to read due to the episodic stop and go pacing imposed by the time frame of an exchange of letters, as well as the formal niceties of letter writing, all the flourishes that frame the heart of the narrative at hand, though when the first major epistolary form novels began to appear in the 16th century one can well imagine how much they would have appealed to people for whom communication by letter was a more extraordinary event than we might understand now as we are buried under our crowded email inboxes. Yet perhaps just now, when emails, text messages, with their presentation in thought balloon form on the iPhone for example, and Facebook comment threads dominate our communicative life, a return to an epistolary format may be the perfect format for a feminist conversation, given that the epistolary novel has a notably feminist history, with Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley using the form.

November 22nd, upon hearing of the death of Rozsika Parker, I wrote here on A Year of Positive Thinking:

I consider Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, which Parker and Pollock co-authored, one of the most important books of feminist art theory and history that I ever read: Parker and Pollock examined how art history as a discipline had misogyny at its core, almost as one of its foundational purposes, with all its terms of value strongly gendered to condemn anything that smacked of the so-called feminine, although of course behind the naturalized frame of universalist neutrality. Their second collaboration, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985 was and is a great source of information about the feminist art movement in Britain, which sometimes got overwhelmed by the American Women’s Liberation Movement’s belief in its own unique importance. Parker’s The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine is also a very influential and still relevant book, considering how much we now may take for granted that knitting or embroidering or weaving are acceptable media for high art, instead of being seen as crafts or as the hobby of well brought up girls or domestic servants.

Parker was a bit of a mysterious figure for all of us in the United States who admired these books because Griselda Pollock was the public figure of the two in the context of the art world and academia, speaking at many art history symposia here in the US, while Parker continued her feminist activism working as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Britain. Because it has been possible to follow the development of Pollock’s feminist ideology and aesthetic views in the books she wrote without Parker, I always have been curious about Parker’s role and voice in their collaboration and have tried to intuit it in the way one measures a black star, almost by negation, by what was not Griselda Pollock. I formed an image of a fierce feminism tempered by a compassionate focus on the work and the cultural issues affecting women, in life and in history, rather than the approach which won out in the 1980s, one that negated the “theoretical” existence of the (biologically determined) category “Woman” in favor of an interest in (socially constructed and non-biology specific) gender.

Sadly Old Mistresses and Framing Feminism have long been out of print. I hope that they can be re-issued because the passion and clarity and sheer historical data in these books would be of great interest to young women artists now.

Last February 2011 there were a number of panels related to feminism and art at the College Art Association Annual Conference in New York City, including “Feminism,” a panel co-chaired by Griselda Pollock and Norma Broude, held on February 9 at the Hilton Hotel, as well as “The Feminist Art Project: A Day of Panels” held at the Museum of Arts and Design, which included “The Problem of Feminist Form: A Talk by Aruna d’Souza” followed by a response from Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, MoMA. [As an aside, but one of general significance, at all of these panels at the main CAA conference at the Hilton Hotel and the Day of Panels at the Museum of Arts and Design, the attendance was huge: at the Museum, New York city fire laws were massively flouted, as hundreds of women were jammed together with their bulky winter coats and book-filled tote bags, crowding even the aisles and standing up along any wall surface available. The high level of interest was a bracing indicator of the continued and now renewed interest in feminism and art]

I had wondered if Griselda Pollock was aware of my blog post about Rozsika Parker but didn’t get a chance to talk to her either day. But February 10 after the Feminist Art Project “Day of Panels,” I received the following email from her, which I reproduce with her permission, followed by two more emails. I have added some links within the letters for background information and edited slightly the last letter because, not having Griselda’s permission to publish this last communication, I feel it is appropriate to publish only information I can be fairly certain she would not mind being made public.

Dear Mira,

I read with interest your brief report on the sad death of Rosie Parker last November. It was so shocking to us all that she could be snatched away so very young. But you have already experienced that grief through the loss of your sister. I appreciated your comments a a great deal as I wanted to affirm that Rosie was the original and powerful force in creating a feminist art writing shall we call it in Britain. She began alone writing her reviews for Spare Rib making it up as she went along. I keep thinking back now to what it was she gave me and what she enabled us to do in writing Old Mistresses. Collaboration is such a remarkable experience as neither party can claim authorship for what only happens when two people openly explore together, bringing their differences into creative play and each discovering their special resources and abilities only in the safety of an often hilarious as well as tough experience of pushing back the very limits of patriarchal authority which imposes such shame and fear on our minds as much as on our bodies. In your blog you rightly captured what it was that Rosie gave us and me in terms of making me a feminist writer on art: that things mattered deeply and seriously and that art touches on things that matter to us as we live them. That was what saved me from a bloodless and remote art history which i still cannot inhabit. But I wanted to correct one thing if I may: the shift from the engaged and passionate feminism that matters to real lives and real embodied people into the social construction of gender of the 1980s is both true and unfair. True I think in American academe in which intellectual women could not break through the internal shame police and made themselves respectable through a kind of intellectual transvestitism which prefers the social construction of gender because they then never have to deal with the messier aspects of our compromised and ambivalent bodies and sexualities. I began in the 1990s to engage with the work of Bracha Ettinger sharing with Rosie the continuing fascination with a feminist reworking of psychoanalysis – she went into it as a practice, I into its metapsychological domain. I remain interested in what we do not yet know about the realm of actual femininities and women’s lives and bodies and minds and what the more theoretically suggested notion of the feminine as a resource for non phallic thought, art and being might be. It is almost impossible to speak this in public without being booed off the stage or treated indulgently as a mad and embarrassing woman. I am not sure that we share similar positions on ‘woman’ or women; but I know that you too have battled against a kind of intellectual disowning of the feminine/the female, women. Ettinger is theoretically extremely difficult and arcane coming through what she has to say via Lacan and those whose works provide her with a means to insert a radical feminist rethinking of the meaning of the feminine. It is difficult to bridge the realms of everyday experience and the esoteric languages of philosophical analysis and certainly psychoanalytical theory. I know I do not succeed and people find my texts difficult and even excluding as they are written from within a realm of theoretical work few inhabit. I try to maintain some kind of deeper responsibility to bridge the realms or art and theory where important work is being done and the ordinary readers not able to spend a lifetime entering into their specialist ways of thinking and writing. I have functioned as an interpreter for Matrixial theory but I constantly find the American art historians blocking me with their discomfort with any discourse that assumes that there might be meaning in being a woman, however that has come about, or as I think Ettinger is saying that’ the feminine’ as she conceptualises it as a primordial gift of the ethical ability to share with an unknown other, to co-emerge into a coaffecting humanity.

I just wanted to respond to your very insightful blog about Rosie’s feminism> Her last book was about body dysmorphia and the agony caused by this dislocation of person and body. She taught me so much to engage with what really matters and that is about suffering, pain and the strange ways we have of negotiating both. She wanted to make things better through her work and her writing, through exploring difficult issues of love and hate and reflecting upon how she fostered the emergence of feminist art writing and thinking and shaped me as a feminist thinker, I go back to that. Yet I want to find a way not to be pigeon-holed as a theoretical Brit, a social constructionist. I never understood gender theory anyway since I was always in the psychoanalytical camp of exploring subjectivity and sexual difference. At the MoMA Feminist Futures it was Linda Nochlin and Anne Wagner who disowned by daring to say that the feminine has something vital to say to our worlds, futures and us.

Perhaps we share the fate of being not the mainstream of whatever has become hegemonic feminism: but to me it is not feminism at all. Feminism is about constantly questioning ourselves and daring to stay with what we find most difficult and uncomfortable long enough to work it through: no policing of correct thinking or orthodox positions. This is one of the vices I see in US academe: I am constantly told that what I am still thinking through is over, old hat, out of date. yet we hardly started on this vast project.

I am organizing a commemorative conference in London on 7 April for Rosie and I would like to reference your blog if I may as a way into really remembering and recognizing her groundedness in what matters for women and that art matters and art that is not about what matters matters very little.

Excuse this long screed. Yrs with best wishes, Griselda

Anyone who has ever admired someone from afar will understand the degree of my astonishment at this letter. It took me a few days to answer, writing to her on February 14:

On 14 Feb 2011, I wrote:

Dear Griselda:

Thank you for your touching and quite amazing email. First of all and above all I am so glad that you found my piece on your friend Rosie, and I’m honored that you would take notice of my really very humble attempt to mark her passing. I was in the audience for your introduction of your part of the panel on Friday and was very moved by your dedication of the panel to her and, sitting next to my friend and frequent collaborator Susan Bee, I felt very keenly the importance of a friend with whom you not only share experience and intellectual discovery but also with whom you create something in collaboration.

Upon reading your email to me I returned to my brief text to figure out why you should feel in any way that you would need to defend to me your position in the 80s on some of the theoretical and political ideas about gender and feminism that were, it is true, extremely divisive and occasionally maddening. So I just want to say how important your writings have been to my second education in feminism, in the 80s, when I had to sink or swim in a new theoretical situation quite different to my first in the early 70s.

It was a very contentious polemical time –once the 80s were over I sometimes referred to them as the decade from hell but on the other hand it was an incredibly interesting time — the disagreements were vicious and with genuine real life consequences (jobs and shows or not depending on what side you were seen to be on) but at least the arguments were over ideas, not like now when the market often dominates or subsumes discourse!!! I did feel that I ended up on what was perceived as the wrong end of the argument, or rather, that I was perceived as being on what was considered the wrong side, it always bugged me that I was consigned to the second class of “essentialist” — a bugaboo my sister and I both struggled with, although in my case the problem was compounded by my being a painter and one who did seem to work with difference (not sure which was worse, since painting, as I came to understand, was itself seen as essentialist).

As I think I can see from your comments, and as I experience myself, the divisions continue, somewhat the same though masked by new terms and conditions, with all the possibilities for (and exploitations of) misunderstandings that Sharon and Miwon seemed to underline yesterday. [I arrived at the very tail end of Connie’s and Aruna’s conversation, due to total stoppage of several subway lines because of what I later learned was the tail end of a murder spree, so I wasn’t clear on the issues you addressed in your response from the audience].

Griselda, I don’t know if you read my piece on Rozsika on The Huffington Post or on my blog A Year of Positive Thinking. I cross-posted the same piece since each site reaches a very different audience.

I designed my blog without a comments section, in part because I think they are unsightly and also because they are often too vicious. But I wonder whether you would consider letting me publish your email on my blog along with information about and a link to the commemorative conference you are planning for April–edited as you would wish, but I hope you would not feel the need to edit it too much because it is so insightful & touching about the nature of collaboration and so interesting as to past and present debates over gender and the feminine, and, as always, brilliantly written even as an email. It is really quite an extraordinary document and I continue to be astounded to have it addressed to me. On the blog I would recall my previous post on Rozsika (don’t feel I can call her Rosie but will think of her as such) with a link, would present your email as an extraordinary response, and give some information on the conference on her with a link to it if there is one. Do let me know if you would consider this. I hope you will.

And thank you for remembering my sister. That means a great deal to me.

All the best,

Mira

I didn’t hear back from Griselda for several months, until September 1, 2011:

Dear Mira,

I am so sorry for the long silence in reply to your email. Many things got int the way of our organizing a conference about Rosie. At last we have got this planned for 10 December 2011 in London. Details are below. I really like the idea of including my reply on your blog to open this all up a bit. I have no money for this event at all. But I wondered if we could circulate your piece on Rosie in the event or include it in some form, for instance you reading it – a digital recording or even a dvd recording as it would really add to the debate so much to have some transatlantic feminists involved.

I wonder what you think or we could read it out with a painting by you on the screen.

There are so many issues raised in your reply as well – notably about painting. What irritated me at the CAA event […]’s exploration of the question can painting be feminist as if this had never really been raised. It was a big issue with the usual misunderstandings in the later 1980s and early 1990s in Britain and Hilary Robinson wrote powerfully about women and painting as did my beloved friend Judith Mastai in Canada. Katy Deepwell was involved as was Rebecca Fortnun. I find myself now writing about painting amongst the many other practices and I felt once again the typecasting of British feminism and the fixing of boundaries and camps at the CAA – instead an openness to constantly revisiting the very varied landscapes of feminist thought and practice and building on bodies of debate.

The good news is the Old Mistresses will be reprinted in a new edition with a new preface sometime next year so that Rosie’s words and inspiration will be back with us again.

[…]

all the very best Griselda

My thanks to Griselda Pollock for her permission to reproduce this correspondence and my best wishes to all the participants of tomorrow conference in London.

Youthfulness in Old Age

Two painting exhibitions currently across the street from each other on West 25th street challenge any notions one might still harbor about the greater value of being “younger than Jesus.” By some fortuitous coincidence just a few steps separate “Joan Mitchell: The Last Paintings” at Cheim & Read from “Matta: A Centennial Celebration” at Pace Gallery and each show explosively refutes any notion of youthfulness being the province of the young while giving new life to the phenomenon known as “old age style”–used to distinguish formal characteristic of late works by Titian, Rembrandt, or Cézanne, where the artist just wants to get to the heart of the matter and sloughs off all the fine finish he had needed to impress his audience in earlier years.

Before I go any further, I should say that for some reason, when I was a very young artist, before I went to art school, one of my term papers as an art history major at NYU was on old age style, in the works of Renaissance and other artists. At the time in my own early paintings, I was influenced by Northern Renaissance paintings, by surrealism, by Indian miniatures, so for the most part the paintings I loved had a tightness and perfection to them. So I can only wonder why I was in this very early stage of my own work life so taken by the characteristics of work done at the other end of the bracket of a life of art making, when tightness of line and surface would yield to the pressure of working without concern for perfection or control. Indeed ever since then, I always seem to challenge myself to move towards a looser, wilder, more entropic approach to artmaking.

The phenomenon of old age style seemed almost inversely applicable when considering expressionist painting. Take the phases of Willem de Kooning’s work: in the current exhibition at MoMA there is an early still-life drawing, of a type that, according to the wall-text, a friend recalled might take him a year to execute, building up the realistic rendering practically one atom of matter at a time, then there is the Ingres-like delicacy of representational execution of the Portrait of Elaine, followed by the early mature work of the figures of men and women just turning from representation to abstraction as if a giant delicate hand were shifting the outlines like sand, to the great abstractions of the late 1940s, Excavation and Attic, still controlled, calibrated, worked, to the explosive expressionistic paint application of the Woman series–but, with the notion of old age style in mind, then what? If at an earlier time, that loose approach would have marked an old age style, de Kooning had much farther to go, to return, in his old age, to his own contribution to such a style–abstraction and surface somehow scoured of incident and even gravity, smoothed, clarified, almost bleached by time.

I’ve always felt that Joan Mitchell‘s paintings from the 1950s are among the best abstract paintings of that period. Although there is a clear relation to nature in the forms and colors, at the same time those paintings, including Ladybug (1957) at MoMA, have a bold confidence in the sculptural individuality of each stroke of paint in a manner which anticipates the post-minimalist approach of painters such Joan Snyder. The unpredictable, rich yet uningratiating dimensional materiality of the paint strokes in these paintings, and the density of mark making has generally been of greater interest to me than the late paintings, some of which were on view in Mitchell’s 2002 retrospective at the Whitney Museum–I saw these as too big, too empty, too facile, without tension.

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Ladybug, 1957. Oil on canvas, 6' 5 7/8" x 9' (197.9 x 274 cm). Purchase. © Estate of Joan Mitchell

Joan Snyder, Summer Orange, 1970 oil, acrylic, and spray enamel on canvas 42" x 96"

Perhaps the temper of the time has changed–sometimes one needs certain things from art which didn’t appeal earlier. But the paintings in the current show at Cheim & Read are a pleasure. The paintings, often diptychs, feature often large gestural strokes, they are speedy, speeding, they flow freely, yet with an important density, which I had missed in the later works at the Whitney. A painting such as Beauvais (1986) is a beauty, as is River (1989): the marks are loose and quick but orchestrated with a complex relation of similarity but dissymmetry between the two panels of the diptych. The painting appears loose but not lax, with small, sharper, deep red strokes interrupting the idyllic rural atmosphere with a more foreboding intimations of mortality.

Put another way, if you associate youth with vibrancy, color, energy, and brightness, then the earlier works by Mitchell, done when she was young, are more complex, perhaps more tortuous, and more encrusted, in a sense dirtier, they look “older” (and not just because they are older physically), whereas, by the same criteria, the last paintings up at Cheim & Read look “younger.” The palette is both the same and yet brighter, the white ground bigger and whiter–the emptied out quality thus being a marker both of youth and of age, depending on how you look at it, but certainly one could make the case that she was so much older then, and then was younger than that at the end.

Joan Mitchell, from the series "Fremicourt Paintings 1960-62," exhibition at Cheim & Read, 2005

Joan Mitchell (1925 - 1992) River, 1989, Oil on canvas diptych 110 x 157 1/2 inches each panel: 110 x 78 3/4 inches

One of the most remarkable paintings is Untitled (1992), the year of Mitchell’s death: again a diptych, this painting has an unusual composition, with all the action taking place in a horizontal band calligraphically rushing and tumbling across the middle of the two canvases’ white field, with a dominant ultramarine theme, bold gestures underscored by more delicately calligraphic lines, including again the thin deep red lines.

Joan Mitchell (1925 - 1992) Untitled, 1992, Oil on canvas diptych 102 3/8 x 157 1/2 inches

These paintings, from the year of her death, are expressions of freedom, clarity, and insistence or necessity.They are curiously joyous, considering that the artist was in poor health, suffering from cancer and other crippling afflictions.

Across the street, again, joyfulness, in the expansive, enormous late paintings by Matta (Roberto Matta Echaurren, 1911-2002). These works are representative of the artist’s characteristic forms, figurative, mechanistic, biomorphic. For young artists, impressed by spectacle and influenced by graffiti, the Matta show is also an important object lesson in what age can bring.For example Architecture du Temps (un point sait tout), done in 1999 when the artist was eighty-eight years old, is a fantastic huge black and white painting which relies mainly on an open framework of thin black lines within white paint and thin black washes. In French the expression “un point, c’est tout” is kind of verbal super punctuation, literally, one point is all, which is to say, that is it, there is nothing more to be said; “un point sait tout” sounds the same but means one point knows everything, which, as the subtitle of Architecture of Time, is a very telling pun and a sharp commentary on the making of art in old age, as well as on the power of line, the power of a point in space.

Roberto Matta, Architecture du temps (un point sait tout), 1999 oil on canvas 14' 11-1/2" x 21' 9-1/4"

Roberto Matta, L'homme descend du signe, 1975 oil on canvas 13' 5-3/4" x 27' 4"

Matta’s confidence in art is expressed in another even more contemporary-looking and even more enormous, twenty-seven foot wide, painting, L’Homme Descend du Signe (from 1975, when the artist was just a baby at age sixty-four). Another pun: “Man Descends from the Sign” (instead of “Descend du Singe,” man descends from the monkey). The painting is positively gaudy, with acid purple the main ground for sharp dagger like forms, which could easily be transposed to become tags. It is a great bridge between museum-scaled surrealist painting, architecturally-scaled mural painting, and city-scaled graffiti. The Fall (Autoritratto d’ognuno) from 1991 is another beautiful painting, again, an opening up of Matta’s earlier characteristic surrealistic web of drawing based biomorphic shapes. The painting is graced by a lovely spray of color, orange, the color of fall, a kind of ecstatic naturalism. (The largest paintings, oil and acrylic on unstretched canvas, are mounted on the wall framed by a thick white wood border, a very successful presentation).

If you associate energy and size with the brash ambition of youth, then these later and late paintings by Matta are also “younger” works than his earlier paintings from the surrealist period, which were tighter, more intricate and complex. At the same time the looseness and freedom of materiality in the later work is emblematic of old age style. At the very least, these works all confound one’s traditional expectations regarding age and the artist.

Roberto Matta The Fall (Autoritratto d'ognuno), 1991, oil and acrylic on canvas 10' 3-1/2" x 17' 1-5/8"

The images don’t do justice to the works, paler (in the case of Matta) and without the impact of either scale or surface. Go see the two shows.

Also seen the same day, down the block from Pace Gallery, in the show at Lennon-Weinberg Gallery, “H.C. Westermann: The Human Condition, Selected Works, 1961-1973,” some early drawings by H.C Westermann (1922-1981), done (as I overheard the gallerist explaining) when the artist was in the hospital being treated for testicular cancer–which he survived: his wife had brought him some crayons and paper, and he worked on a group of small drawings, some in the artist’s characteristic graphic, cartoon-related style, some in a more abstract and less over-determined mode–after he recovered, these were packed away and never shown until now. I recommend the drawing entitled Sun Coming Up Over New York, (1961), incredibly delicate, nearly abstract.

Although this was not an old age style work, it made me think about what it means to make art when you are very ill, or at the end of a long life. No matter your degree of success, if you are still making art at age 88, or ill from cancer, you cannot only be making art for show, for ambition, competition, legacy. You are making art, as Jack Tworkov noted about painting, “to save your life.” It’s great to see such art, when we are often confronted by art whose motivation is not necessarily based in that kind of internal necessity.

Richard Artschwager Untitled ca. 1950 watercolor and graphite on paper 10 7/8 x 13 7/8 inches

Richard Artschwager Untitled ca. 1950 watercolor and graphite on paper 13 7/8 x 10 7/8 inches

Earlier the same day in Chelsea, I saw Richard Artschwager’s show at David Nolan (show closed December 4). In this show, small abstracted landscape works on paper, all done in 1950, were shown along with new similar but larger works, paper mounted on soundboard, in which the artist returns to the Western landscape of the earlier series. One tends not to think of Artschwager in the same breath as Charles Burchfield, but the 1950s works participate in the great tradition of American ecstatic landscape, filtered through a calmer structure that is characteristic of Artschwager; some of these works are also reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe’s earliest abstract landscape watercolors as well as of Agnes Martin’s early works on paper. In these earlyworks there is a lyricism, a tenderness of touch, of surface, and content, while the more recent work of the same subject matter is tougher, sharper, bolder and more imposing materially, thus proposing another kind of youthfulness in older age though the return to landscape or nature as a thematic seems to bracket the period of cooler irony of Artschwager’s most noted works, emerging in the era of Pop Art and continuing through the era of appropriation art.

Richard Artschwager Landscape with Median 2011 acrylic, charcoal and laminate on handmade paper on soundboard 35 1/2 x 49 3/4 inches

Unlike both Mitchell and Matta, Artschwager is a master of reticence and modesty, combined with a subtle but wicked deadpan. In these returns to landscape, the deadpan turns to a subtle meditation on the progress of life: in Landscape with Median, from 2011 (Artschwager was born in 1923), the yellow double lines on the road end mid-picture: these lines are very bold, hard-edged, bright colored, and sharply sculptural, set into a much softer ground: maybe there is just a dip in the road ahead, or maybe the road comes to an end–in a 1950 watercolor, the road continues like a fragmented ladder though land that is barely indicated. These works, early and late, state that the artist who stays alive in his or her mind and studio is always caught mid-path.

“Books are like people”

When the NYPD raided the Occupy Wall Street Encampment at Zuccotti Park this morning, they tossed the 5,554 books that were assembled from donations into The People’s Library, an extemporaneous institution with a proper librarian and its own website, into dumpsters.

According to the story as reported this morning on mediabistro.com: “According to the city’s eviction notice, the “property will be stored at the Department of Sanitation parking garage at 650 West 57th St.” But the librarians dispute this: “it was clear from the livestream and witnesses inside the park that the property was destroyed by police and DSNY workers before it was thrown in dumpsters.”

The People’s Library, set into the North East corner of the Park near the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street, was one of the most beautiful aspects of the occupation site.

The legality of the eviction is being ejudicated (after the barn door…) as I type, but the city junked everything nonetheless. I hope and I believe that Occupy Wall Street will be back there, and will figure out a new way to outwit the authorities. But if anyone thinks that once set into motion, there couldn’t have been anyway for the police to preserve the books, a story occurs to me.

In 2002 the art historian Leo Steinberg was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award He gave, as always and ever, a profoundly interesting but also in this case unexpectedly moving speech. The speech was republished in its entirety in the Brooklyn Rail in 2006, and here are some excerpts that have come to my mind today:

Before proceeding to professional matters, I’d like to recall two bits of family lore from my early years in Moscow, where I was born. I was three, sitting alone, humming a Russian children’s song to myself. In translation:

Little finch, little finch, where have you been?

—Down at the market, drinking vodka.

Hearing this performance, a visiting grown-up asked, did I know what vodka was? Now, the Russian for water is Vadá, and Vodka is its diminutive. So, being asked about vodka, I replied, “Eto málinkaya Vadá”—“it’s small water.” I confess to this story, because it signals an early tendency to address the signifier instead of the signified.

One other tale from this Russian phase I do not believe; at least not in the form my father claimed to have recorded in his diary—which has not survived. At age 3 and a half, looking at father’s bookshelves, I’m supposed to have said:

“Books are like people.”

“How so?”

“Well, the covers are their clothes, and the letters are their teeth, and if you don’t read them, they feel hungry.”

I discount this story because you hate to think that your imagination peaked at age three and the rest all downhill.

Soon after, we escaped Soviet Russia, arriving in Berlin on November 2, 1923, three weeks before my younger sister was born.

…

My parents were Socialists, and one day in December 1932 they took me along to visit a Socialist bookshop, whose owner my father wanted to speak to. While the grown-ups talked, I browsed along the shelves and soon pulled down one of the few books in the shop that had nothing to do with politics: Richard Hamann’s The Early Renaissance of Italian Painting, Jena 1909, in its first printing of 30,000: 50 pages of text, plus notes at the back (none of which interested me); and 200 full-page gray-and-white reproductions of paintings by artists with sonorous names, the like of which I had never heard uttered—Pollaiuolo, Ghirlandaio, Piero di Cosimo.

I was enchanted, and couldn’t stop looking—from that day to this. And when, after too short an hour, I was told we were leaving, I would not reshelve the book, but showed it to mother and asked timidly (for I knew we had little money)—could we buy it? Mother glanced at the price, shook her head, and looked quickly away; and all those images to vanish forever. And then a miracle happened: the bookseller turned to my father and said, “Look, any day now Hitler will be coming to power [as indeed Hitler did five weeks later, January 30, 1933], and the first thing the Nazis will do is close this shop. So why don’t you just take the book for your boy.”

I have the book still, inscribed in pencil in a 12-year-old’s hand, “1932, for Chanukah.”

At this point Steinberg held the book up, “and here is the book.” I don’t know about anyone else, but that’s the only time I’ve ever burst into tears at an art history conference.

But it is the final story he told about the importance of books that is most relevant to today’s depradations by the NYPD:

A year later. We had escaped Hitler early and by late May 1933 were settled in London, where people spoke a language I neither knew nor approved. In English classes at school, if we were told to read and report on a Dickens novel, my practice was subtly subversive. I would bicycle to the public library way out in Hendon, borrow a German translation of Oliver Twist, read it, and then do my report.

One day in 1934, I was on my bicycle with half a dozen library books strapped on behind, coasting downhill. You have to remember that in those days cars in suburban London were scarce, streets had maybe one or two cars parked, and little traffic. So, as I came speeding down, I suddenly saw people waving at me from the sidewalk. I stopped, turned around, and froze in horror. The strap had come loose, my books strewn across the roadway, a bus bearing down to ride over them, and me, condemned to stand by at their massacre, for I had a great sense that books, borrowed ones especially, must be treated with tenderness. They’re like people, remember?

But then—another miracle: the juggernaut slowed and made a careful detour around my books. I choked up—knew from this moment that I had passed into a different culture. Rightly or wrongly, I felt that this could not have happened in Germany, where, on May 10, 1933, my Uncle Aron had taken my older sister and me to watch the Nazi burning of books.

And so I made peace with England, where I would spend the next twelve years, trying to learn the local jargon, so I could eventually be published in The Art Bulletin.

It is possible even in the midst of whatever dynamic event to respect a book, a book is not trash, except in crypto-, proto-, wannabe-fascist/fascist-lite regimes. But you know, Mayor Bloomberg, you may have trashed those books, but I’m happy to say that New Yorkers have enough great books they have no room for in their apartments to create a 100 new People’s Libraries. It will be reconstituted.

screen-shot-2011-11-15-at-2-26-01-am from The People's Library website

Update, 9:47PM: the trashing of the OWS People’s Library and the fate of the books have been discussed and reported on all day, with conflicting threads of information: if you watch Amy Goodman’s excellent coverage from the middle of the night raid itself, it is very hard to believe that any of the books would have survived the raid at all, much less in the way that coverage on the Gothamist later in the day seemed to indicate. This evening Rachel Maddow mentioned the impact of the closing of the Borders in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood and the paucity of nearby New York Public Library branches as reasons that families living in the area were bringing their kids to OWS just to read some children’s books.

The minute that people were let back into the park at about 5:45PM, they began to put some books out and a while later the library website announced that “The People’s Library Re-Opens.”

Update November 16, 1:50PM, The People’s Library issued an update this morning after going to the Department of Sanitation’s facility on the West Side to see what could be retrieved based on Mayor Bloomberg’s claim that everything was intact. Most of the Library books, equipment, and furniture are missing, what remains is often in poor condition. Attempts to begin restoring the library have met with police interference, according to American Libraries, the magazine of The American Library Association:

Tents and tarps are strictly forbidden in Zuccotti Park now. During the reoccupation on the evening of November 15, it started to rain so library staff put a clear plastic trash bag over the collection. Within minutes a detail of about 10 police descended and demanded that the covering be removed because they deemed the garbage bag to be a tarp. There were a few tense minutes as staff tried to convince them otherwise, but ultimately it was removed—leaving the collection open to the elements. As the police withdrew, scores of people chanted “BOOKS … BOOKS … BOOKS … BOOKS.” There was still concern that the park might be cleared again that night, and one officer made it clear that “unclaimed property will be removed and disposed of” in reference to the collection. Library staff quickly set up umbrellas over the bulk of the books and began sending librarians home with bags of books to keep the collection safe in remote locations.

Update November 17, from Occupy Wall Street Library, the game of cat and book continues (video here):

The NYPD seized the People’s Library again tonight. We set up the library again today with 100 books, and the police came over this evening and stood in a line around the books, blocking anyone from reaching the books by creating a fence with their batons. The officers then ordered the Brookfield property sanitation crew to throw them in a trash can. We photographed it all, and video is available on the blog here. The police were asked why they were taking the books and one officer said “I don’t know.”

Bible, People's Library after Nov 15 eviction by NYPD

Bible, among books from the People's Library, after the November 15 NYPD eviction/raid, an image I believe should go viral (as an example of "what Democracy looks like" when police in riot gear are deployed against unarmed civilians by elected officials who claim to support the First Amendment while rushing to suppress dissent).