Dying to See You

A couple of months ago, the conservator of Lincoln Center's artworks collaborated with me on a sort of VIP Art & Architecture tour, so I got a chance beforehand to chat with him. I asked him about this painting, and he said it likely won't be returning. He also said the Yaacov Agam sculpture, Three X Three Interplay (1971), probably won't be coming back either, which I also find very disappointing. He said the Agam sculpture is very large and there really is no place for it anymore. I really think they should have created a new spot for it. For the painting this post discusses, there does happen to be a perfect spot, at the western end of Alice Tully Hall's lobby, in a curved alcove that I believe contains doorways to back offices. He said that there was some resistance on the part of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro to reintroducing this painting in the space for some reason.

As much as I think I've made clear the enormous respect I have for this trio of architects, I have to say, I'm disappointed. Part of my defense of this painting is selfish, because I would LOVE the opportunity to tell this wonderfully disturbing story to the snotty, uninterested high school kids with whom I often have to contend. But the other part is that I think it's a brilliant piece, suited very well to the space. The third argument I'll make is that the painting was a gift from the artist to Lincoln Center. To just callously throw it away as a useless addition to the building is kind of a slap in the face of this gracious gesture. And the point remains that there is a perfect place to re-hang it, so there is no excuse.

I do feel justified in calling for this painting to be hung once again in Alice Tully Hall. At this point, I suspect it never will be. I hinted at this before, but since I probably won't have the opportunity to ever tell this story on one of my tours, I thought I'd share with you the (here revised) essay I wrote about it in creating the Art & Architecture Tour for Lincoln Center.

The piece I'm referring to is Black Dahlia (acrylic on canvas, 1971) by Gene Davis.

"What? THIS is the piece you're defending?" Yes, this is the piece.

First of all, Gene Davis (1920-1985) was from the Washington Color School of painters from D.C. along with Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and others. He started out as a sports journalist. As a writer he also covered the Roosevelt and Truman presidential administrations and often played poker with Harry Truman. He worked predominantly in acrylic.

Vertical lines fascinated Davis because he felt that they're conceptually infinite. His pieces therefore draw a contrast between the limits of the physical painting and the conceptual limitlessness of the lines in them. They aren't canvases dissected by lines. They're lines represented on the canvas that theoretically extend beyond its borders. He pushed this idea to its extremes in both directions of scale. In 1972, his Niagara, painted at a parking lot in Lewiston, New York, was the largest painting ever created at 43,680 square feet (4058 square meters). His smallest works were as tiny as three eighths of an inch square (a .95 centimeter square). Likewise, Tully is the venue in the complex dedicated to the smallest of the classical music performance types, Chamber Music, a question of scale.

Davis' works also often have musical themes: Banjo, Black Grey Beat, Solar Beat, Sonata, Sun Sonata, Yukon Sonata, etc. The vertical bars of color form obviously rhythmic patterns across the canvases. The connection may be that, like his paintings, music is orderly and restricted in form yet expansive and expressive in concept and meaning.

There are some deep reddish-purple dahlias said to be "black" like their counterparts in the rose and tulip families. The secondary level of signification no doubt appealed to Davis, but this botanist reference is so uncommon as to make the following explanation infinitely more probable. Many of you, especially from the West Coast, already know where I'm going. Surprisingly, considering my fascination with True Crime and anything disturbing, I'd not ever heard this story before I began to research this painting. The "Black Dahlia" was Elizabeth Short (1924-1947).

Little is known about her life, except that she moved around the country quite frequently as a teenager and had relationships with quite a few military men, leading some to speculate that she was a prostitute. This was later refuted by grand jury reports. A telegram sent by Short places her in Washington, D.C. around 1944. Although he was still only fourteen, there remains the possibility that Davis knew her, or at the very least, that he believed he might have met her. She was found dead in a vacant lot in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, at the age of twenty-three.

Her body was horribly mutilated. She was cut in half at the mid-section, all the blood had been drained from her body, and her face had been cut from the sides of her mouth all the way to her ears, what's known as a "Glasgow Smile." Because she liked to dress in all black, possibly she was nicknamed "The Black Dahlia" at a Long Beach drugstore where she hung out, as a play on the title of the currently-running film The Blue Dahlia (1946), starring Alad Ladd and Veronica Lake. In other accounts, newspaper reporters covering the murder coined the nickname.

At the time, it was the largest murder investigation ever conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department. Hundreds of people were considered suspects and were questioned. Around sixty people falsely confessed to the crime. In his book, Black Dahlia Avenger, published in 2003, Los Angeles police officer Steve Hodel claimed that his father, psychiatrist George Hodel, had murdered Short. The claim was never substantiated. Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who was very close with Hodel, has also been suggested as the killer. The crime remains unsolved to this day.

In their 2006 book, Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, authors Mark Nelson and Sarah Bayliss put forth a fascinating theory. Numerous details about the way Short's body was found, with her arms posed above her head and the ways that her body was mutilated, have direct correlations with specific works by surrealist artists. They therefore propose that Short's killer was well acquainted with the work of the surrealists (as was Hodel), and that the murder itself had been an extremely twisted work of surrealist art. The book's title comes from the parlor game played by the surrealists wherein each participant writes one word on a folded piece of paper, so that when unfolded, a nonsensical sentence has been composed. The authors go on to suggest the possibility that, similarly, Short's body had been passed around amongst a whole group of people, each of whom performed some disturbing act of surrealist-inspired mutilation to her cadaver.

Marcel Duchamp's final work, Étant donnés (probably NSFW, unless you work in an art gallery), installed posthumously at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is suspiciously and eerily similar to Short's crime scene.

In a brief and pleasant email correspondence with Nelson, he revealed to me the possible Washington, D.C. connection with Davis. The day I received my copy of Exquisite Corpse in the mail, my curiosity took hold and I began reading. I literally could not put it back down again, and finished the entire book that evening, something I never, ever do. For anyone interested in Art History and especially surrealism, the macabre or disturbing, or True Crime, I must highly recommend this brilliant and fascinating read. Although maybe something for the weak of constitution to avoid, the photos are illustrative but (purposely) not particularly the most graphic or vomit-inducing.

I'd also like to add a brief discussion of this crime from a Feminist perspective. I won't delve deeply, I think that's better handled by someone more informed than myself. But I think what this violent act says about both the Hollywood system and the Art World is quite poignant. It's how the female body in this case was viewed as a purely aesthetic object to it's most horrifying conclusion. Short's body was the artwork, and it had to be devoured, destroyed in order to be so. In fact, the very destruction of her body was the work's most defining feature. 

In our day and age, we've seen how the mutilation of one's body falls fairly easily into the category of Art. Tattoos and piercings are great examples, not to mention of course cosmetic surgery of any kind, but especially the most extreme cases. Note Jocelyn Wildenstein. In some cases, indeed the very act of mutilating one's body as it might be in a work of Performance Art clearly takes the name. 

From the other direction, most serial killers consider what they do to be a cathartic, precise, sick sort of art form. Ed Gein was, to be far too generous, a fashion and furniture designer (as were some of the nazis). But to my mind, only in the case of the Black Dahlia murder do all these troublesome qualities come together to make one powerful, shocking statement about American popular culture's view of and attitudes toward the Female Body. It alone speaks perhaps more than any other psychotic act of how and to what extent our cultural machine feels the Female Body should be (allows it to be) used and consumed, at least how it did in the 1940s.

On a much lighter note, due to the unbelievably morbid subject of this Gene Davis painting, one might be inclined to suggest that Davis was almost playing a practical joke on Lincoln Center, and that those in charge of curating the artworks were and still are unaware of this explanation (not even the published author of the book on LC's artworks had any idea about it when I mentioned it to him).

Davis is clearly saying something very specific about the piece by giving it such a provocative title. It may be proposed that the physicality of the stretched canvas is deliberate and very consciously considered. Its proportions necessarily cut the vertical lines into particular lengths, a key element in the artistic expression of the piece. At the same time, to cut the canvas into specific proportions may be akin to "murdering" the lines, in that it robs them of the infinity Davis praised them for having. In this sense, representing the lines in a painting becomes murder with an artistic purpose, much like the above theories surrounding the fate of Elizabeth Short.

Although no one who could make the final decision will likely ever read this, I do hope I've made my case for the reintroduction of Black Dahlia to the beautifully-renovated Alice Tully Hall. Perhaps I should get a petition going.

[EDIT: I found it. Black Dahlia is now hanging in a hallway on the ninth floor of the Rose Building at the northwest corner of the campus. It's the floor containing Lincoln Center administrative offices and conference rooms. I discovered it there purely by accident: "wait a minute, that's the Gene Davis painting!" Memorizing the exact colors, widths, and arrangement of the lines to compare with the image above was not easy, but luckily I'm a visual thinker.]

©2010, Ryan Witte

Wooden Chew?

As every year, Vancouver's Straight Line Designs had even more ridiculously fun pieces to show. I honestly don't know how or where designer Judson Beaumont gets his ideas, but they just never seem to stop coming.

Right out in front was his "Beaver" cabinet:

Clearly, it's been gnawed on by a beaver or two.

You know, the bees are pretty impressive, but beavers don't get nearly enough credit. They really are the civil engineers of the animal kingdom. I mean, that's seriously cool that a rodent evolved to build dams, canals, and lodges.

They were also showing this dresser, which I thought was terribly clever already as a place to store clothes:

But then the booth rep told me what it was called and the light bulb lit up over my head: "Little Black Dresser." Get it? I think it's hilarious.

Not at the show, but on the website I noticed this piece which I'd not seen before, which is also very cool, the "Marionette" dresser:

The name of it is fairly obvious, but I also think there's something wonderfully, playfully surreal about a piece of furniture floating in mid-air without touching the floor. I love it. And this is another piece that I think could add whimsy to anyone's bedroom; that is to say, I don't think this absolutely has to be in a kid's room. But maybe that's my own inner-child typing.

©2009, Ryan Witte

A Journey Begins

Through a number of books that recently reached the top of my reading list, I think I might be onto something big.  Something big concerning my understanding of violence against women, violence and destruction in art, violence as a cultural phenomenon, women in art, feminism in art and culture, and...just so many things.  It covers the entire twentieth century, actually.

I'm not going to reveal just yet how I came to find out about the Black Dahlia Murder, because it's such a deliciously great anecdote that deserves its own story.  Most people I talk to already know all about it, being all Goth and loving the dark stuff like serial killers as I do.  I had no idea, I'm shocked to reveal, and was fascinated.  

I've started with Exquisite Corpse--Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Bayliss.  It goes way past the 1930s and '40s, though, back to the nineteenth century's fascination with automata, to Cindy Sherman's use of anatomically correct dolls, performance art in so many forms, and so much between and beyond.  But related, I realized, is another acquisition from my reading list: Transforming a Rape Culture edited by Emilie Buchwald, et al.

I'm excited because I feel that I might really be onto something here, connecting so many disparate elements of my understanding of twentieth-century art and politics and culture all in one go.  Of course, I'll be reporting on it here.

Ryan Witte

Seeing is Believing

When I saw the notice for the Joan Miró show at the MoMA, Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937, I didn't bother to read very carefully, because there was no question that I'd be going to see it. I sort of figured it might be a few pieces from their permanent collection not normally on view that had been rotated out into the galleries. I was wrong. This is a seriously comprehensive show of the man's work during this decade, with a ton of amazing pieces on display.

The first year of 1927 opens the show with his very sparse works on bare, glue-sized canvas.

--48, 1927 (oil and aqueous medium on canvas)

--All images courtesy of the MoMA's online exhibition, except where otherwise noted.  That they've done this is impressive in its own right; there are a good number of works included in the online catalogue that didn't appear at the show and help to flesh out more of what the artist was doing.

I think what I love most about these first works was how extremely basic the statements were that he was making:

The surface is canvas.

Some canvas is gessoed.

Paint is applied with a brush.

Some paint has color.

Composition involves lines and points in space.

Something from the real world is being represented pictorially.

Miró lived at number 45, so 48 was right across the street, and he would see it every day. Certainly there's a precursor to Jasper Johns here in the symbolic quality of its representativeness, but again I go back to the progressive subtraction from the nature of painting that would lead to the end of it all. Because these paintings are so very simple, one gets the most crystal clear impression of what Miró believed to be the fundamental starting points for his explorations.

But he's also paring down the nature of representation itself to its barest minimum:

--Painting (Cloud and Birds), 1927 (oil and aqueous medium on canvas)

What is it really? A blotch of white paint, scribbly black lines, and sharp triangular licks accented by primary colors. But look at the title, and it is immediately obvious what's cloud and what's bird. Why? What is it about these primitive, even childlike forms that suggests anything from reality to the viewer at all? Is it that the white field is round? Clouds aren't always necessarily round. Is it that the scribbled black strokes are contained inside the white field, rather than straying outside it or being adjacent to it? Would that make a difference? Is it that the curving triangular shapes are where the colors are to be found and not in the white field? Is it the combined sum of all of these elements, where if one were missing, it would all fail to achieve what it has? All of these carefully controlled decisions bring into serious question the viewer's ability to assign representational meaning to the very basic elements of composition and how that process operates.

Speaking of titles, I believe the title of this next piece can be read in two quite significant ways:

--Painting, 1927 (oil and aqueous medium on canvas)

On the one hand, the title is a noun, describing what this object is. On the other, it's a verb, describing what the piece is about. To some degree, any artist's self-portrait essentially does something very similar to this. In other words, a self-portrait is a portrait of an artist in the act of painting a portrait of the artist. And unlike the furthest reaches of Minimalism, which just simply were Paintings, Miró's piece represents, depicts what painting is. According to him, it's paint applied to a canvas, line, field, and color, and the illusion of a three-dimensional universe in perspective. The question of the relationship between the means by which painting signifies, and what outside itself it is able to signify and how, is one he will return to time and again.

When he enters into collage, the whole question becomes transcendental. Here, though, he's talking not about what a painting is, but about the actions of representing:

--Spanish Dancer I, 1928 (sandpaper, printed paper, nails, conté crayon, and graphite on flocked paper mounted on paperboard)

First of all, the only thing representational about this piece is the tiny little shoe, likely cut out of a newspaper advertisement or similar, and glued on. Since it's collage, the very two-dimensional nature of the work's ability to be representational is strongly amplified by the shoe. The sandpaper, however, draws the sharpest contrast. It isn't just a two-dimensional surface anymore. In fact, the only reason sandpaper has any utilitarian function at all is because it has a three-dimensional, scratchy texture. By drawing on both the sandpaper and the flocked paper, he's made an analogy between the two materials. It's the three-dimensionality of both--however fine--that allows them to accept the wax and graphite from the crayon. The sandpaper fully scrapes the wax off the end of it, absorbing it in chunks into its sandy cavities. At a much smaller scale, all paper must do this to be drawn upon.

The sandpaper isn't just glued on, either; that would be a relatively two-dimensional object stuck to another by the means of a third, that is, a more or less two-dimensional layer of glue. Rather, it's nailed to the paperboard. Nailing is violent, piercing, destructive, it amplifies the physicality of the materials. The nails go in, through, behind the surface in three-dimensions and draw attention to the movements of hammering in addition to that of laying one paper onto another. The lines drawn onto the sandpaper converge at an angle, pointing upwards like an arrow, but in any case alluding to a direction in space, a movement. The texture of the paper calls vivid attention to the movement of the crayon across its surface. All this in a close relationship with the shoe, or foot, as if the dance that is the act of painting might be felt like the movements of a Spanish dancer.

I need to skip ahead briefly to discuss one last step in this vein:

--Collage, 1929 (conté crayon, tar paper, paper, and flocked paper on paper)

After a few painterly experiments, he switched back to collage for a short time. These collages mostly deal more with how the three-dimensional nature of the background surface affects and alters the lines and fields applied to them. But this one is particularly interesting because here the sandpaper becomes tarpaper. Its grain is so very coarse, and the tar so completely black. Quite contrary to the sandpaper--the texture of which exaggerates the ability of crayon to leave marks on a surface--here the analogous qualities of the paper confounds the possibility of leaving marks on it. In other words, the grain would likely take off chunks of wax too large to read as a continuous line, and on top of that, it's too dark to provide a suitable ground for a line drawing. Certainly he could have used white chalk easily enough. But I think the point here is that the wax crayon is very much constrained by a narrow range in the three-dimensionality of the surface: too smooth and it can't leave a mark (e.g. trying to use crayons on a coloring book with glossy laminated pages), too coarse (and dark) and it can't leave a visible line, either.

Going back, possibly the furthest he ever went into exploring the nature of pictorial representation by itself is this next one:

--Dutch Interior (I), 1928 (oil on canvas)

Dutch Interior is based on this painting:

--Hendrick Martensz Sorgh, De Luitspeler, 1661

--Image courtesy Lute of the Month.

But Miró was working from a postcard of Sorgh's painting. So Miró's work, hanging in the MoMA, is essentially six steps removed from the original subject:

The original three-dimensional room and subject.

Sorgh's two-dimensional representation of the subject.

Sorgh's 3D art object.

The 2D photographic reproduction of the painting.

The 3D postcard.

Miró's 2D reinterpretation of the postcard.

Miró's 3D art object.

The work swings back and forth between object and representation, signified and signifier. It's as if Alice is standing astraddle the looking glass and playing peek-a-boo with the Mad Hatter. It may be precisely because it precariously rides this line that Miró's resulting work raises these questions in its convoluted appearance. The real world of the original subject obeys the laws of physics, physiology, light, shadow, color, and the consistency of change. But the forms and shapes in Miró's representation exist in their own unique universe, with its own set of laws and prohibitions guided by the nature of the medium. He'll explore this much more acutely later on, but this one was for sure worth mentioning.

A similar thing happens with this portrait:

--Portrait of La Fornarina, 1929 (oil on canvas)

It's rather large, and the dark, muted, somber colors, somewhat unusual for Miró, make this an extraordinarily moody and beautiful piece. Fornarina is a reinterpretation of this painting:

--Raphael, La Fornarina, 1520

--Image courtesy Art Catablogue.

No one knows exactly who she is, but she's alleged to have been Raphael's lover. That her true identity is mysterious I feel is important for Miró, but that will go further later on. The maybe sole exception is the yellow eye--and I think worth noting that it is the eye, and not some other part of her, look at how intense her eyes are in Raphael's. Otherwise, take any of the three main fields of color out of Miró's work individually, and there would be absolutely no indication that they were extracted from the portrait of a person. The darkest field at the bottom would be nothing more than a quick impression of a mountain peak. So again, why is it so clear, in their combination, that it is a portrait? What is the fundamental nature of representing the human body, however abstractly, that we can still recognize it as such?

They do have quite a few of Miró's sculptures on display, many of which are quite interesting, but I'm just going to show this one:

--Object, 1932 (oil, sequins, and sand on pebble, shell, mirror, wood, paint, and nails (original mirror and shell have been replaced))

I like this one because it seems to very specifically deal with a lot of the same issues as the works I've been discussing. First of all, the painting is flat, but it's executed on a rounded three-dimensional object, the stone. More interesting though is the mirror and the shell. It's a sculpture, so you can experience the bottom of it as well as the top.  It's a construction that includes a mirror, so you can experience more than one vantage at the same time.  The mirror allows you to see up inside of the shell, where a sea creature once lived. The shell has been replaced, so who knows what it was originally, although I'd be extremely surprised if it weren't as identical to the artist's choice as could be found. So it's interesting that it's a clam shell and not an oyster shell. There's no possibility that by viewing this work from the correct angle, one might find a pearl. It's therefore not the value of what one might find as a result of its construction, like a buried treasure, but the process of discovery per se, made possible by it being three-dimensional.

But what happens next is kind of exciting.  He has a sort of breakthrough where the two separate lines of thought in his work suddenly come together.  He starts making paintings of his own collages:

--Collage (Study for Painting), 1933 (printed paper and graphite on paper) and Painting, 1933 (oil on canvas)

Now, granted, these collages are clearly just studies.  They don't particularly stand alone as collages, at least not in any way like his other collage work does.  We have this same question of distance here between the original real-life subject of the work and the pictorial universe of Miró's landscape.  And he's pushed it one step further, as well.  The objects in his universe start to become something else entirely from where they began.  What starts as a soda siphon now has a face, it's become a figure.  In the other direction, the figures in his work have been distorted by the objects from which they derive.  What I find most interesting here, though, is this source object:

It comes from a political cartoon drawn by Feliu Elias.  But the figure/object is already surreal. With Dutch Interior one can trace the imagery back to a real physical environment, and it's the distance, the layers one goes through to get there that causes the distortion.  Here, the original source object is instead something conceptual, an idea.  There's something similarly ambiguous in his use of industrial machinery in the collages:

--Collage (Study for Painting) [detail], 1933

He's turned it on its side, so from the beginning he's clearly concerned with the formal personality of the object, rather than whatever symbolism it might offer.  But on top of that, while it's still a piece of industrial machinery, most normal viewers at first glance would have not the slightest idea what this machine's function is.  It therefore becomes vaguely symbolic of "machinery" in general, rather than of some specific product or activity that might be performed on it or by it.  With something like plumbing or a propeller, the function of the object and all it connotes is available to most viewers.  Here, the original source is not just simply conceptual, it's for the most part inaccessible.  It means that Miró's pictorial universe must stand alone.  It has a sort of orientation toward something being represented but has been cut loose from it, left to float adrift.

The following year, this direction leads him head-on into his own unique brand of Surrealism, and there's no longer any doubt about it.

--Figure, 1934 (pastel and pencil on flocked paper) and Woman, 1934 (pastel on flocked paper)

On the one hand, the pictorial objects in the painted universe now fully follow their own internal logic.  In practically no way are they guided by the forms, weights, colors, or laws of the real world.  On the other hand, the enormous, grotesque genitalia makes an extremely directed reference to the gendered identity of the figure being represented.  It's almost as if the gender of the subject is one of very few remaining elements Miró considers crucial to the piece even being a portrait at all, but that he's reluctant to have to concede it.

I'm including this one for no other reason but that I think it's hilarious:

--The Farmers' Meal, 1935 (oil on cardboard)

I don't know.  Cows and chickens are just inherently goofy, aren't they?

--Personages Attracted by the Forms of a Mountain, 1936 (tempera on Masonite)

Miró's use of color had always sort of obeyed its own internal logic, even when he was being most representational.  This painting is really interesting, though, because the way color is being used has completely shifted.  That is to say, how figures and ground are delineated in the pictorial space isn't by dividing them up into distinct color combinations as with Farmers.  Instead, the entire work is stark primaries, with only a few exceptions.  His color choices here don't separate objects in space, but instead are used to reference the way that forms in space are modeled.  He's not dealing as much with the way the work represents something outside the painting, but rather the very act of representing it, in and of itself.  It is, in fact, one further marked step toward abstract expressionism.

--Painting, 1936 (oil, casein, tar and sand on Masonite)

Suddenly he switches again, into this last group of quite abstract works in mixed-media.  The subject is quite different, as well.  The forms and symbolism are extremely primitive, in terrific contrast to the complex works immediately prior.  Instead of color, now he's begun exploring the very internal relationships between line and field, line and texture, texture and field, how each is constrained or affected by the others, and the very materiality of the work.  There's practically no exploration of representation here at all, relatively speaking.  The questions of three-dimensionality are completely internal to the artwork itself, in the interrelationships of texture.  The catalogue notes that he actually gouged out part of the Masonite board, so there's something else here about the duality of construction and destruction in the creation of a work of art.

In the last piece in the show, he again turns around practically 180° and head-on into a still-life:

--Still Life with Old Shoe, 1937 (oil on canvas)

It really is a wonderful way to end the show.  While there's no full circle to speak of, particularly, this work seems to sum up everything that the artist had explored over the previous decade into a single piece.  It's at once a pure painting, fully representational and yet striving at every moment to sabotage its ability to represent what it in fact does.  It creates the illusion of a three-dimensional universe that obeys its own rules and regulations, completely in conflict with those in the world of the objects it represents.  This is a new way of seeing the world, a new way of conceiving the relationship between painting and painted.

©2008, Ryan Witte

This Is Not a Museum Exhibition

This past Friday, I went over to see the Salvador Dali exhibit Painting and Film at the Museum of Modern Art.  It's really incredible, and I highly recommend it.

Right outside the show they were playing a Buster Keaton film, a scene from One Week.  

I just adore Buster Keaton.

I'd seen both L'Age d'or and Un chien Andalou while in film school, so I didn't spend too much time on those.  There were a couple of other incredible things to be seen, however.

I went chronologically backwards, and first saw Dali's video work, Chaos and Creation (1960).  

I'd never seen this one, but it was pretty funny because he was totally making fun of Piet Mondrian.  He has a sort of pig pen with various compartments, which viewed from above looks like a Mondrian painting.  Then there's pigs and mud and a girl covered with food or some kind of goop writhing around in it.  This one was getting those comical kind of matter-of-fact observations from the crowd ("It looks like one of those hamster balls."  "There's soapy water in it.") that indicate they have no idea what the hell they're watching.

Next was Warhol's screen test of him.  It's sort of an unfortunate viewing experience in a crowded gallery, and a shame that they don't appear to be showing that one in their movie theater (which, by the way, is a fantastic place to see films).  I'd seen a bunch of Warhol's films at a festival at Film Forum many years ago, when I worked there.  I had a number of religious experiences during that festival, but Warhol's screen tests were really mind-blowing.  For the first few minutes, you think "okay, the person's just sitting there, doing nothing.  So what?"  But as you sink deeper into the experience of it, you start to notice the most unbelievably subtle things about the person's facial expressions.  The very, very slightest raise of an eyebrow, twitch of the lip, or series of blinks begins to take on the most profound significance.  You realize in the end, you've seen much deeper into this person's soul, their real persona, precisely because they're sitting there doing nothing at all.  I think my favorite of those I saw was the one of Henry Geldzahler, former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

He starts playing with his eyebrows halfway through and is just a goofy character.

Then there's Dali's Impressions de la Haute Mongolie from 1975, where he looks every bit the "guru in drag" that Lennon did.  He also appears like he'd have been a hilarious person to be around.

They're also showing his dream sequence for Hitchcock's Spellbound.  

I feel like I have the vaguest recollection of knowing that the sequence was actually by Dali, himself, but it's been a very long time since I'd seen it.  Hitchcock said he was bored with the hazy, out-of-focus way dream sequences were often done, because he felt that dreams were in fact quite sharp and vivid, much like Dali's paintings.  The best thing about this, in my opinion, is they have the actual studio backdrop from the film shoot there, a giant black and white canvas hanging in the gallery.

It was very cool to see The Persistence of Memory in person.  

I can't recall if I've ever seen it, although it's definitely possible.  It's very small, there was a huge crowd of people around it, about eight deep, so there was really no way I was going to be able to interact with that painting.  To make matters worse, there was this couple standing directly in front of it, pretending to know ALL ABOUT what the whole thing means, pointing out all the symbolism and having an oh, so intelligent conversation about it, meanwhile blocking everyone else's view of the piece.

Regardless, there are so many great paintings that for sure I'd never seen, in person or otherwise, that I didn't necessarily need to spend an hour on Persistence.

I think what excited me most, did you know that he had collaborated with Walt Disney?  No, really, it's true!  Dali felt Disney was actually one of the few true Surrealists himself.  A few years after Fantasia, Disney wanted to do another similar film, but perhaps more serious.  So he began working with Dali on a segment for it called Destino in 1940.  

They only completed about 18 seconds of it until the project was abandoned perhaps due to lack of funds.  But then in 2003, a group of Disney animators got together and finished it, based on the original treatment.  It's playing at the show, and it's really quite creepy and beautiful.

Oh, and just to make the whole thing even more Surreal, I bumped into a total blast from my past, John Witherspoon, The Artist Formerly Known as Lahoma Van Zandt.

As a man, though.  Lahoma was the greatest emcee to ever grace the stage of Limelight's Disco2000 (which I told him, a little too enthusiastically), and allegedly his trip from Atlanta to New York with Larry Tee and RuPaul was the basis for To Wong Foo...  I hadn't seen him around in years and years, which is kind of sad because Lahoma was such a hoot.  Maybe she'll do a comeback tour.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Characters

I had the pleasure of including Vancouver's Straight Line Designs in my coverage of the show last year, but this is another company I will always keep up with, because Judson Beaumont's work is always so imaginative and fun.  Here's some of the new stuff he has this year.

This is "Canned Seat":

A sardine can, and I love that the key provides a little tabletop.  It's so Oldenberg.  This totally reminds me of that store Think Big.  Does anybody remember that from the '80s?  I used to love that store.

A major theme for Beaumont would seem to be pieces that are destroyed, broken, or are self-destructing--so here's the "Oops Cabinet" that he was displaying at the show:

Not at the show, but a new item I noticed on the website, "Sobey Dressers":

At first glance I liked this because it looks like a row of little buildings.  But it's really in the subtle details.  All the drawers have one knob, like shirt buttons, except for the top one, which has two, like eyes.  And they're all smiling.  I've said it before, but this is another case where if your furniture smiling at you doesn't make your day just a little more pleasant, I'd say you can't possibly have a very good sense of humor.

But the thing I think I was most delighted to discover at their booth this year is that they've started working with ceramics.  Here's their new Vase:

So the flowers are like faces.  Awesome.  They had some all white ones that they'd evidently baked RIGHT before the show, and I guess they don't have images of them, yet.  I think I preferred those, because in all white, you maybe don't notice right away what they are.  In fact, I had to see it from the side, actually, to notice that it was a shoulder and arm with hand-in-pocket.  That moment of discovery was just great, though.

I guess maybe I have a thing for anthropomorphized design objects, but those are really fun, so I'm not apologizing.

Straight Line Designs

(BC) 604-251-9669

©2008, Ryan Witte

Body and Soul

I was introduced to the work of Heidi Taillefer at a fantastic gallery in Montreal last year, and decided to have a conversation with her.  The interview is a little longer than I'd anticipated, but she just had such interesting things to say.  Here's my interview with her, for your enjoyment.

--Silence is Golden (2005), oil on canvas

Ryan Witte: Your paintings are in some ways quite precise.  Would you say your studio--your working environment--is also precise, immaculate, and well-organized, or do you get messy while you work?

Heidi Taillefer: I get messy, the place gets messy, it's all fertile chaos.  Then after each painting is done, sometimes after a month or more...I clean up and start all over again.  It's quite refreshing to strip all the confusion and dirty rags and paint particles away to start fresh.  It invigorates and adds momentum to the beginning stages of a work, which I find quite a challenge.  It's like breaking out of an egg, I suppose.  The rest is easier.

RW: That's as long as it takes you to complete one?  Not all that much more than a month? You must work extremely long hours!

HT: I don't get as much painting done as you'd think!

RW: You're said to come from a very creative family.  Are your parents artists, also?

HT: My mother is an artist with a great sense of humor, and my father is very musical with a logical business side.  But he was a huge mischief-maker and is entertained by shenanigans still, so I would consider that to be creative (or playful), as well.  

--Amphibious (1993), watercolor on paper

RW: What do they think of your work?

HT: I had a lot of freedom to create and if I didn't, I just did it anyway--the result of my father's influence.  I had great parents; lots of love with enough strictness to become functional, and freedom/ independence to strike out and make it happen with a touch of chaos to stir the pot and generate a flurry of imaginative ideas.

--The Argument (1993), watercolor on paper

RW: It seems the Terminator films had a big effect on you.  They're great.  What did you think of this most recent one, Rise of the Machines?

HT: I actually haven't seen that one, yet.  I stopped focusing on the Sci-Fi films after my adolescence and focused on Classical myths, which were woven into the vocabulary of Sci-Fi imagery I'd established for myself already.  That is now tied in with current trends in examining technology in art, which I try to marry with our fundamental human nature--which is totally separate from Technology (primordial, universal, what the ancient cultures and religions explored).

RW: Don't you suppose our technology is threatening to become so sophisticated (with Artificial Intelligence, the drastic prolonging of life expectancy, and so on) that it could begin raising very fundamental questions about human nature?

HT: Yes, but I don't see how longevity interferes with human nature.  Maybe Artificial Intelligence, for sure.  But there's no going back without a cataclysm, so the only choice is to run forward with it and get mature and wise people into the fray to offset the inevitable tide of craziness that will come with the foolish and corrupt--living longer and being more intelligent, too.

RW: Oh, completely.  The way I tend to understand them, anyway, pretty much all of our spiritual philosophies throughout human history stem from either questions of mortality and death, or reproduction and social relationships--all of which would be drastically affected if we lived to be 800 instead of 80.

HT: I think our spiritual philosophies transcend death altogether and deal with love, trust, the ego, morality for sure--but the nature of events--as being more neutral, and there being a need for synthesis and unity.  Time adds a constraint in that there are only so many experiences we can have to deal with this, but just as Greek gods faced the same human foibles, yet remained immortal, so would we go through the same dramas--just drawn out over longer periods of time.  Maybe in the past longevity didn't exist as a possibility, so it was never sewn into the myths and philosophical representations...but they were, actually: the bible speaks of Moses being 800 years old, I think...something like that.  Sloppy as it sounds, Time and Philosophy are not mutually exclusive, other than philosophizing on the limits of time.

RW: Yes, I understand what you're saying, especially about mythological figures.  Perhaps you're right.

So right after the Lindberg baby was kidnapped, Salvador Dali's wife, Gala, showed up at a party with a doll that looked like the bloody corpse of the baby on her hat, and everybody completely freaked out.  I love that story.  Do you think your personal style in dress and demeanor reflects who you are as a painter?

HT: Not at all.  I may have my own style at times, but I live out my expression through lifestyle and art production.  At first glance, you'd never think I was an artist...which I kind of like.  I don't need another avenue of expression; it's automatically inherent, even if I try to go the conventional route.  But if I told you my life story you would think I was different, for sure.

RW: I wasn't aware that you'd designed the theme for a production of Cirque du Soleil until I looked around for more information about your work.  I absolutely loved the one I saw, though.  Had you seen any of their shows before you were approached to collaborate with them?

HT: I had seen a couple shows a few years back, but when I was told who the poster contract was for, I had no idea how big they were at the time, believe it or not.  Mind you, they were still at a more intermediate stage then, ten years ago.  It was an ad agency that approached me.

RW: What was your impression of what they do?

HT: I had found their shows inspiring in the stimulus I received, visually and musically.  But I'd say, by now, there needs to be much more edge to the shows.  I'm quite familiar with them and they need to be weirded-up more, made much more surreal, although the acrobatics are incredible (I would accept to help direct a show!).

RW: I hope they ask you!  I kind of agree, from what I've seen, that their surrealism could be made a more cohesive element in the way the show flows.  The comedian Kathy Griffin, on the other hand, has a whole hilarious bit about how she loved the contortionists, but she doesn't need to see a clown very slowly rolling a beach ball across the stage and going "AYE AYE AYE."  So I guess some people don't quite get their quirkiness.

--Venus Envy (1999), oil on canvas

So much of what I read about your work zeroes right in on your meshing of animate and inanimate forms.  I love that duality--I probably wouldn't mind being a cyborg someday.  But to me, that seems to completely miss the point, or at the very least, is a relatively superficial take on your style.  One thing I'm struck by, for instance, is the incredible way you play with the idea of Gender.  Do you consider yourself to be a Feminist?

HT: I love men too much to be a Feminist!  I admire and respect their greater sense of equanimity when dealing with things, although that's a generalization, since it's just a reflection of the influences from women I saw from my past.  Women need to become more like men, be more radical and less emotional and dependent on having a man.  But not to trump men, just to draw from their strengths.  And men could do the same with women and their strengths (which includes sensitivity and greater observation--it's very useful, especially in business, for example--the founder of the Cirque du Soleil operates very much on intuition, a feminine quality, and it has helped him dramatically).

I definitely don't like double standards, because they nullify too much of what women could offer and trivialize their abilities, as if they were useless.  But men and women are different, for sure.  It's just that women's attributes and qualities need to be recognized and not overpowered by men, who only validate nuts-and-bolts facts, whereas women are almost more esoteric, somehow.  It's the intuition: a product of motherhood and the need to read between the lines and understand beyond language.

--The Ventriloquist (2007), oil on canvas

Women need to emulate the strength men possess, while remaining true to their femininity, which is quite powerful in itself.  But men need to stop trying to domineer women.  It makes them seem threatened or something.  That's one way I may be a Feminist--I have trouble being domineered, unless I respect and accept the man's superiority as an individual, but it has nothing to do with gender.  If I am respected and appreciated, I will gladly cooperate and follow.  

I also think women tend to be much stronger and courageous, emotionally.  So combine it with men's greater inclination toward logic and imagine the synthesis!  I think the bottom line is that women need to be given the chance to meet challenges from a young age and not overprotected as they are just because they're "cute little girls."

--I Put a Spell on You (2006), oil on canvas

RW: What might your thoughts be on our current ability to surgically reassign a person's sex?

HT: Well, I think it's an individual's decision, which is their business and impacts them the most--but often families reject transgender relatives, from what I understand.  In the animal kingdom, it would appear that bisexuality is quite normal in nature and beneficial in sustaining peace and harmony among groups.  But a transsexual person is flirting with the notion of bodily mutilation of some kind, and I think there is a primal aversion to that; the same way people don't like cosmetic surgery, and Judaism doesn't like tattoos, etc.  

I don't know enough about Psychology, but if a person is truly unhappy as a man or a woman and wants to change, I wouldn't have a problem with it, unless it meant losing a man I was in love with or my dad, then I might be affected.  But for sure it is unsettling to think of so much toying with nature, although I think cloning is fascinating.  It's a matter of stretching the envelope and getting used to different ideas.  I'm sure most of the advances in medicine and nutrition and the like would have shocked and offended people a few hundred years ago.  So there is a continual evolution in public perception which lags behind the initial technological advances.

--Frustration Attraction (2006), oil on canvas

RW: Would you say there's a discord between the bodily mechanics of our sexuality and the emotions that accompany them?

HT: Let me see how to answer this...in Western culture today, yes.  It seems fashionable to become sexual immediately or soon after meeting someone new, regardless of the chemistry.  I do believe there can be an immediate chemistry which draws people together in some instances, but there seems to be this exaggerated expectation of sexual intimacy as a social norm soon after meeting someone, regardless of the more delicate aspects of interpersonal connections.  When sex for its own sake becomes a general norm, it amounts to such shallow and superficial encounters with little meaning--which turn into lonliness--and many people aren't even aware of why that is.

However, I have to say, after being to Brazil, which is a country of seething sensuality and bodily comfort, things feel a little different, and that sexual veneer is quite liberating.  The same holds true of French culture, but I think the difference may also lie in the fact that they incorporate an appreciation of pleasure of all things into life: food, music, arts, business, and physicality.  But after a while, you can't get past the limitations of sexual mechanics, and I think the family values upheld in (at least Brazilian) culture helps bridge the sterility of pure sexual mechanics.

--Sneaky Work at the Crossroads (2006), oil on canvas

However, the Vedic religions (Hinduism, etc.) originally understood the fundamental connection that does exist between bodily "sexual mechanics" and emotion, as explored through Tantric practices, which encouraged a devotion to the entirety of the other person, body and soul.  There, the body is the tool, or vehicle, or "machine," through which the essence of two (or more) people can merge, express their truest vulnerabilities through the act of intimacy and trust in the safety and care the other is offering--via the respect and devotion of each person's divine essence...and body.  Pretty nice, eh?

RW: Sounds very intense.

HT: It is why it has such a healing influence on so many ills suffered by an individual.  So there is definitely a synthesis to be had between the two, it's the philosophical perspective that makes the key difference.

--Silverfish (2005), oil on canvas

RW: Do you have any pets?

HT: I had pets growing up: cats, a dog, a snake, piranha, budgies, raised guppies, hamsters, salamanders, ants, etc...and now I'm thinking of getting a cat.

RW: Holy cow!  It's no wonder your work is so full of animal imagery.  Did you often draw or paint your pets?

HT: Not back then.

--Nothing and Yet... (2006), oil on canvas

RW: Are you a vegetarian or vegan?

HT: I became a vegan in my early-20s, for ethical reasons.  Then it became easier to include fish and seafood, and occasionally dairy and eggs.

RW: Why are you a vegetarian?

HT: It's only because of the factory farm industry and its hugely destructive environmental impact--and morally, it's way too cruel--the ultimate slavery.

RW: Oh, yeah.  One thing that really hit me hard was how unbelievably destructive the farming of shrimp is.  You've probably seen this before, but they basically dredge anything and everything up off the ocean floor, tearing out everything that gets in their path for miles at a stretch.  The shrimp amount to like 5% of what they bring up, the other creatures die, and then they just dump the rest back into the ocean as waste.  It's horrible.  Do you think you'd be less inclined to feel the way you do about your diet if we lived 1000 years ago and collected all our own food?

HT: The reason I became a vegan/ vegetarian was because of the cruelty, then the environmental damage, which is hard to avoid anywhere now.

--The Muse (2006), oil on canvas

RW: Are the human subjects in your pieces friends of yours?

HT: They are usually friends, and I take photos from which I then paint.

RW: Lucky for them.  I'll be sure to send you a photo of myself so I can be in one of your upcoming paintings.

--Govinda and the Heifer Nymph (2007), oil on canvas

There are also deeply spiritual implications in your work.  Do you believe that icons, particularly those represented by the visual arts, become somehow more "alive" as a result of being worshipped, fetishized?

HT: Any image gets a certain life of its own once it's worshipped, just as celebrity confers an almost divine quality onto a person.  They seem set apart from "regular" people and are expected to be above all the noisy and clumsy happenings of everyday life.  Symbols are powerful things.  They can galvanize forces such as armies, or populations, groups, etc., and that power is a mechanism which seems alive unto itself.  Once they are a target of focus, they channel our own inner power and may seem life-like--just like the Orishas of Candomblé or African fetishes.

--Chimeric (2005), oil on canvas

RW: Did the creatures in your pieces come into existence in the form we see them, or did some outside force combine, alter, genetically mutate, change their physical composition?  Is this state painful or awkward for them--like an animal with only three legs--or does it feel perfectly natural for them?

HT: Well, their altered form is meant to be felt as would a real being's altered form.  So missing a leg might represent hobbling of some kind, depending on what animal is "represented" at the time.  A goat with a broken leg might signal diminished potency, as the goat is also a symbol of sexuality.  Although sexuality symbolizing potency does not mean potency is of a sexual nature, exclusively.  It could be potency as energy, etc.  But if the leg is jagged, yes, then it hurts the animal.  If it's just a string of bells instead of a leg, it's just an anomaly, inconvenient as it may be.

RW: Do you suppose it's painful having some of their parts be machinery, or is it more like having a fake hip or an artificial heart: painful at first, but then the body adapts?

HT: I think only the surgery would hurt without an anesthetic!  And maybe scarring, after, for a while.

RW: Certainly I could interpret and interpret until my brain explodes, but viewers of artworks can often get into trouble doing that.  When I asked him about your work, the man at Yves LaRoche Gallerie in Montreal told me practically every object in your pieces has some specific meaning.  Perhaps you'd go through one of them for me--and why not the one he was motioning to--Auto Erotic Immolation.  Could you describe, as succinctly as possible, what each symbol represents for you, its reason for being there?

HT:  More and more, the elements aren't as individually significant as before, but there are key elements which are.  In Auto Erotic Immolation, the painting is about self-destruction through erotic pursuits.  That destruction is meant as a change of state, not as a negative impact.

--Auto Erotic Immolation (2005), oil on canvas

• The snakes in the hair are Medusa snakes = bad, or in this case, sin.
• The hands are sensual, and preoccupied with the self.
• She is a Sati, or Hindu woman, who throws herself into the funeral pyre, so her many arms attest to Hindu culture, as do the Hennaed hands.
• The image is decorative and pretty because it is happy, nonetheless.
• Red because of the inherent sensuality.
• The snails symbolize (very active) feminine arousal.
• The snakes at the base of the spine indicate Kundalini energy (represented by coiled snakes, usually), which pierce the chakras via sexual activity.
• The breasts are traditional Indian hunting lanterns.
• There is a plecostomus in the stomach in place of a baby.  The preoccupation with motherhood is frustrated, but present, nonetheless, and its associated symbols (breasts, uterus) are sterile or diverted from the real thing: the plecostomus echoes the presence of life, but doesn't allow for the real thing to take hold; and there is no milk in the breasts, rather, lantern oil, which burns along with the subject of the painting.  You can see flames at the bottom right.
  

RW: I'm going to pat myself on the back just a tiny bit because I feel like I was getting most of that--some of it maybe subconsciously--but I'm not convinced I could have gotten it all, or at least not very exactly.  Are you attracted to the idea of using symbolism from cultures other than ours here in North America (or Western Europe) because of the mystique they can have for a "normal" (relatively culturally isolated) viewer, or do you believe many symbols transcend any one specific culture?  In other words, do you believe certain symbolic elements--say snails, or the color red--come to represent certain ideas by a process that's more universal to the human condition (however subconscious it may be) than it is cultural?

HT: I'm not sure if there are universal symbolic elements.  I'd say yes--like a skull is a symbol of time and mortality--there are elements which cross over into the transpersonal, like Jungian psychology would suggest, which is very tied into Surrealism and the subconscious.

--Bemoaning the Loss of Limbo (2006), oil on canvas

RW: The tensions in your work are often quite palpable, emotional and symbolic rather than optical.  Do dissatisfactions often drive your work?  Is painting a catharsis?

HT: A painting is carthartic, for better or worse.  Dissatisfactions fuel many ideas, and the painting process is a cathartic one which allows for a release of frustration, a healing of the soul, greater understanding and wisdom, in general, and clarity of spirit.  It's clearly healthy and therapeutic.  But the problem is the source of ideas being dissatisfactions.  Sourcing oneself from challenges translates into a Sysyphian task of endless dissatisfaction and subsequent resolution to keep the flow going.  Very tiring!

RW: I tend to think life will just hand that to us whether we seek it out or not.  If at least you're drawing inspiration from it, you're making it work for you, rather than just being its hapless victim.

HT: Yeah, I think so, too.  It's 10% what happens and 90% how you react.  I think we each have a destiny of some kind and we're going to go through certain experiences no matter what.  But we can direct how it goes if we move onward and upward by our reactions, or else get sucked into mayhem and hell all over if we react in maladaptive ways.  It's all a matter of personal control.

RW: As long as it's not a secret, what do you have wet on the easel right at this moment?

HT: An image for an album cover of a winged mermaid.

RW: Thank you so much!

HT: It was my pleasure, and thank you for taking such a keen interest in my work.

Heidi Taillefer

art@heiditaillefer.com

©2008, Ryan Witte