Art: where the broken wings fly after all

Originally posted April 4, 2008. Thought I'd haul it up here again and update it a bit to remind me.

Every person has beauty and value. Some have other unsavory aspects which obscure the beauty and value, but it's there.

Some of us are eccentric, obviously old, ridiculously odd, too fat, too thin or perhaps misshapen or unpleasant or unreliable. Some folks, though beautiful, are misshapen in ways more difficult to see - disfigurement by the constant prejudgement of others, where every word was twisted, shaded, weighted and measured against some mythical standard of perfection. Or by constant criticism during childhood where every flaw was carved up like a roast repeatedly. Or by constant underserved praise and by life passages bought and paid for by blood money rather than earned. This unhappy learning is latter replayed on others.

Sometimes people find it really difficult to get past it all. Some are like moths that have emerged from the cocoon in a jar that was too small. (See my pencil drawing above) Their wings unfolded only midway and are forever bent. Yet even in this there can be value.

Like many other resources, the past can be transformed. Rather than repeat it, and live it out again and again, rather than turn the bitter criticism or the too clever manipulation on others or measuring them against an imagined perfection, or insulting them for dramatic effect (sounds familiar in the current political scene) -- the best use of the past is to render it down into art. (Not the so called Art of the Deal,  but art in the expansive sense - whether literary, musical, visual, theatrical etc.) In that way it is an offering, and something is given to world.

It doesn't even matter if the world accepts it. It is the making of it, and perhaps the offering of it, that heals in a way that golden toilet seats and hair implants never can.

- Mar  Walker

April 2016 Poem A Day #15 In The Gallery

For this prompt a set of words were given, an instructions were to pick four to use in the poem:

flat ring lavish gaudy vessel paper tooth blacklist 

In the Gallery

the statue wore a flat gold ring of gaudy teeth
around its marble neck, a lavish emblem
of artistic excess or social extreme
.
each tooth covered in scrimshaw
ceremonial pictures
for a biting afternoon
.
A critic in the paper said
the show should be blacklisted
or delisted or at the least recycled.
.
No one
read the review.

In The Museum: on our relationship to art

Our relationship to "art" (visual, literary, musical, theatrical etc) is complex, if we have one that is. Some don't ever look . If they did they might be surprised and find they relate to at least some of what they see. Is there possibility for us in works of art? A vision of  our humanity of our world of beauty or ugliness?  Is there a nobility we aspired to but didn't realize? A tarnished part we hide from everyone?   Are we more alive after facing and acknowledging these odd truths about ourselves? Just asking questions.

This is the first of a batch of works I've finished recently  but have not yet posted. This is an odd one.  It's oil on canvas board.  Below is a very rough sketch of mine on which it is based, though it differs considerably from the sketch. As stated, the visual metaphor here are about our interaction with art our relationship to art.

- Mar  Walker

Art vs the Artist: Disappearing into light

To much illumination and things get very hard to see. This photo, of some glass hung in a window, is a tad over-exposed, and forms of the glass bottles are barely discernible against the backdrop of a bright day.  I think this happens with people also.  An artists works are a brightness against which it is difficult to really see the flesh and bone, foibles and fragility. The works are larger than the artist. For instanse Wagner's operas are larger than his personal prejudice.  Then again, a given artwork may mean something completely different to each viewer, and something else entirely to the artist...

Why art satisfies

This is NaPoWriMo #2 .  At the very end - this poem makes a allegation about art and why we find it meaningful.

Better than television

The rolling wire probe
tests the level
of moisture
in this careful
world in glass.

Nurtured,
self-contained
moss, tiny ferns,
bugs, little lizards,
a climate trained for
atmospheric tricks
on command.

So every Friday night
Manfred sells tickets,
puts the terrarium
through its paces,
circles folding chairs
around his coffee table.
Unlocks the doors
Pops the corn
Announces each act.

"Ladies and Gentlemen
we bring you a special performance
by the Sudden Storm Troupe!
First up, the magnificent duo:
Lightening and Thunder!"
(applause followed by flashing
and crashing sounds, followed by
more spontaneous applause)

"And wasn't that spectacular?
And now,  please welcome:
Heavy Rains with Driving Wind:"
(applause, rapid pelting, vigorous
whooshing, then more applause).

Ringside seats
No channels to change.
Sometimes the storm inside
and the storm outside align:
Audience satisfaction.
Transcendance.

-- Mar Walker

The prompt was to take the acronym for the site name ( RWP for Read Write Poem) and run it through "Acronym Attic" then pick one of the lines and write a poem inspired by it. "Rolling Wire Probe" and "required weather performance" were the lines that inspired this poem

Inspiration's lineage: the discipline of play

To many teachers, this picture might well represent the ideal student that they have never before seen. Eager, empty and knowing it, friendly, waiting to be filled with knowledge. HAHAHAHA. Dream on teacher friends!

The figure in the painting represents a muse and the conceptual problem with it is the same as the basic conceptual problem with many folks notion of education. The muse has appeared at a light source, removed the top of his head, and is indicating to the unknown source to "Fill 'er up!" Presumably, the muse will the travel to artists and musicians etc  in need of inspiration.  Then the muse will pour off a bit of inspiration into their heads....

But the world really doesn't work this way nor does education. Getting inspired, getting an idea, and getting educated are not passive activities.  They require preparation and effort, though the spark may come at a moment when the prep has paused.....   You have to have been entertaining various notions for a new one to pop into your head.  Reading or looking or thinking or writing or painting or playing generally happens first, usually on a regular basis. So this is another way of saying that inspiration is often the result of that boring old thing: discipline, even if it is a discipline of regular mental play.....  (hmm some irony there)

ABOUT THE PAINTING: This painting of mine is an oil on canvas which went to Cape Coral Florida with Sharon and Jim Houston many years ago,  I don't know where they are now, or if some hurricane has destroyed the canvas or if they sold it in some weekend garage sale.  Or if they are even still alive or have moved to god knows what state. I was known as Misti in those days, and that is how I signed this painting. This picture was scanned in from an old snap-shot.

-- M.M. (Mar) Walker

De Kooning's 'Woman I': perception or projection... scary either way

Standing under the brooding, dissatisfied gaze of Willem De Kooning's Woman 1 is a little unnerving. I was afraid of her in 1988 when I first saw her towering over me at  MOMA - New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the intervening decades, I've met a few women with the same expression, so I find her even more disturbing now.
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De Kooning painted Woman I from 1950 to 1952, so this work is nearly as old as I am.  She is larger than life size. When I first met her, those  huge eyes stared across a room which contained only non-objective paintings, so she was the only readable figure present. Yet she didn't seem out of place at all.  Dekooning built her with frenzied brush strokes and scumbling. Although he worked and reworked this painting obsessively for 18 months, the immediacy, the energy,  and the manic quality remain.
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Woman I is an amazing creature -  powerful, imposing, possibly malevolent, lost. Her great glaring eyes are intense and somehow, well, vacant. The top of her head is turban-like and  her long straight teeth are exposed in a lipless grimace. She has huge round shoulders, voluminous bullet breasts, and yet a delicate turn of ankle on parted legs. She's seated solidly with one leg forward and the other stretched sideways and backwards, as if she were trying to decide on a course of action.
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The brush strokes around and through her document passion, anger, vigor -  yet she seems solid and impassive, unresponsive to De Kooning's sustained spasm of creation. According to reports, he abandoned her after 18 months, as if in all that time he couldn't figure out how to please her. Later an associate Meyer Schapiro, convinced him the painting was finished.
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Every part of the painting's surface is full of vigorous bright brush strokes of thickly applied paint.  The idea of Abstrast Expressionist 'gesture painting' was to transfer the raw state of the artist's psyche directly to the canvas without the intervention of any preconceived notions of style or convention - either moral or artistic. Yet over 18 months, previous spontaneous expressions were being edited and superseded by more recent spontaneous decisions by De Kooning.
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A series of photos by Rudolph Burckhardt  shows Woman I at various stages  -- versions "no less compelling" according to Thomas Hess, than its current incarnation. Apparently she started with breasts bare, raised arms, head tilted back in a very spacial room with a clearly drawn window and objects in view beyond it.  Then the woman, the chair she is seated on, the window and a lamp - dance in and out of sight  - until, finally it's only the woman and the turmoil.
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If you are recoiling from this image, today in 2009 - remember when it was first shown in 1953, it caused quite a fuss on two counts. First the general run of folks thought De Kooning's Woman I was shamelessly vulgar, at least compared with June Cleaver and the passive demure wives of television. But it wasn't only Joe Public that hated it. Other Abstract Expressionists thought it was a step backwards -  a betrayal of the avant garde because it was representational and De Kooning's marvelous crazed woman could be clearly seen.
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De Kooning's rebuttal on his Women (and I think he painted four series of works called Woman)  was this: "The Women had to do with the female painted all throught all the ages, all those idols....It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light -- all this silly talk about line, color and form -- because that (the woman) was the thing I wanted to get hold of...."
Frankly, after all this time, she doesn't look willing.

-- Mar Walker

What art can reveal

Writing prompt: If you joined the circus, what act would you most want to perform?

If I joined the circus I would certainly not want  to be the fire-eater. I already have enough heart-burn for two or three people.  The trapeze is too far off the ground, the fat-lady and the bearded lady are both unjustly reviled by many. The face painters have to listen to bratty kids , the knife thrower can never get enough insurance and the bareback riders wear little tutus that ride up their behinds.  Putting your head inside the lion's mouth is fool-hardy at any age.

If I could join the circus today, I would be the snake charmer. So many things are hidden, uncoiling their motives only when poised to strike. Like a skillful snake charmer, I would use a little music, a metaphor or two, a little color maybe, to coax a smooth, indifferent reptile out into the light so  its true nature can be examined.

-- Mar Walker

Repackaging the familiar for a novel view

Anything, no matter how plastic, ubiquitous or overstated, can be framed purposefully to evoke something different or new.  This photo was taken at night, with a phone, while waiting in line for the drive-up window....

As I was writing the graph above - I  saw a very clever  TV ad by American Express that uses this 'reframing' idea. In it,  more than a dozen or so common scenes and/or objects were reframed as smilie faces or smilie frowns. The audio featured a gorgeous cello line, no shouting or flashing, and many of the changing pseudo faces required watching the screen intently.

The process was oddly involving, surprising, delightful - intriguing even, more than most shows these days.  I have a better impression of the advertiser for mounting such a clever ad campaign.   Reframing is a neat trick. Well done.

-- Mar Walker

Dia: Beacon - thought-provoking exhibit...

Last Thursday, fellow Shijin Robin Sampson, White Plains Slammer Ann Marie Marra and I visted the DIA museum in Beacon New York (a snapshot of its website is to the left), which opened in 2003 in a 300,000 square foot printing factory.  We got separated in this large maze-like building and I didn't see them for two hours.

I was constantly surprised - each time I thought I had reached the end of the exhibits, there was a still a large part of the building I had not visited!   Better, each time I thought I had drawn a bead on the meaning of what was exhibited, another twist was revealed.

The first room featured an exhibit of  minimalist work "24 Colors for Blinky" by Imi Koebel - large odd shapes each painted in a single bright color.  They were not at all like the monochrome canvases of Modrian  which contain subtle, though barely discernible, complexities. Koebel's colors are utterly flat and uniform.  Just shapes varied wildly. Imi may well have been trying to "shape-up" Blinky Palermo whose small and uniformly square works were on display in another room.  Another room had works by Agnes Martin whose canvases were more in the actual lineage of Modrian, but with a much more personal touched-surface  feeling....

Then there was an entire warehouse-sized room of light work by Dan Flavin. I mean, a kind of minimalist work created entirely as arrangements or "monuments" of florescent light fixtures. I didn't really get off on these, though they were interesting.  On the lower floor were a several works that were a kind of minimalist drawing  and the medium was vivid  blinking neon lights .

And then there was a room entirely containing abstract expressionist sculptures by John Chamberlain that looked as if, and I think were actually made from junk cars and scrap metal. I liked several that were imposing crumpled metal cairns each cloistering a small brightly color nucleus.  But My favorite work of the day was The Privet - one of his metal  sculptures. (The photo simply does not do it justice...)  It is a bit of an abstract expressionist hedge - of metal strips painted capreciously with high gloss enamel. It's metal fronds twisted organically, and each with a unique color scheme. The form was so familiar, the material and colors, arresting. I was inspired to write a poem, though it has a miserable slant rhyme.

The privet's metal stalks aspire
To rustle 'neath the critc's pire
In colors crisp with high gloss shallac
The metal hedge row with varied palette 

Louise Bourgeois' mythic Spiders inspire primal fear, I think and awe.... One can walk right up to the monster which is sci-fi man-eating sized!

Another area I adore, was a set of architectural scale works by Michael Heizer - that involved enormous holes in the floor, I liked the effects, and as a bonus the polished concrete floors in that area were so beautifully and intricately marked, each of the huge sections could have been hung on the wall as art....

Another area I enjoyed very very much contained huge iron spirals "Torqued Elipses" by Richard Serra like the hulls of mysterious ships or giant vats in a factory, that were 15 feet tall with walls several inches. You could walk inside the huge spirals and sometimes, there were hidden inner chambers.  Their juxtaposition also made a very pleasing view of differing angles. There was an erie sonority to the pieces as well. I tried singing inside of one and the echos were amazing.

Interpretive verses generative art

One of the most fascinating aspects of the artists on display were the many who had not constructed the piece on view, but who had left a set of instructions as an architect leaves blueprints, or actually the very same way a composer writes a a score and then leaves it to the future - for others to bring to life!

There was one Lawrence Weiner who had left large sized instructions for the construction of arrangements of monolithic stones. One huge obelisk-like monolith was recessed into the wall. There was an exhibit of drawings by Sol LeWitt (who had recently died). The work required  a team of 20 artists to draw patterns of six different basic squares.  Each looked like a geeks creation on graph paper. The squares were drawn in combination, juxtaposition and super-imposition  in pencil right on the four walls of a museum room. It sounds so prosaic but the effect was sort of  contrary to that. Inside four twenty-foot walls all covered with this work, well the effect was strangely imposing and the repetition made it comforting and  tranquil. It had a great quiet dignity.

The presence of a whole room of Andy Warhol canvases gives real weight to the idea of art by collaboration rather than by one hand.  So much of the art in this exhibit was  what I would call Art Divisi - that is art divided into inceptor or "Idea-ator" and executor. Or more completely - as in music - the generative artist and the interpretive artist. As in theater or in the performance arts, this allows subsequent generations to add cultural nuance...

Could an artist devise a handmade drawing or painting of so many layers that generations of interpretors would be required to fulfill the design? One thinks of the great cathedrsls ( one was still unfinished when I was in college. Not sure now)

And on the topic of great catherdrals - the Photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher were of wonders of another sort - the great detailed twisting industrial cathedrals of European industry of an era past.

It's a great exhibit. They also have a fine coffee shop for lunch and a fabulous book store. Check the museum's website at http://www.diabeacon.org/exhibs/bindex.html

While we were in Beacon, we also visited the Muddy Cup for Lavendar Tea....

-- Mar Walker

Art: intention and meaning involve more than viewer projection

This is a drawing from a live model, made during a college drawing class.

I like this drawing very much, but some who have seen it concluded it was something other than what it is... Two people have said to me that the figure seemed to be engaged in some sort of sexual something. In reality, the live model in class was reading a book which is out of sight from this angle.

Oddly, both persons who objected were conservative christian men, one was a born-againer and the other a catholic knights- of-columbus type. And they were so obviously projecting something out of their own minds onto this scene which was utterly innocent! See what repression breeds!!!!

Point of view, context, getting the whole picture seems relatively important to interpretation. Filling in the blanks with your own stuff, doesn't tell you what the artist was actually thinking.

- Mar  Walker

PS This drawing is on plain white paper - the redish tinge is some odd camera effect from lights at night. I kinda like it like this.

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What is art? some questions...

This article has been on my web pages in similar form for a few years.

This rose is lovely, but the plant and the photo , well they are not exactly art. But what is art?

What’s the difference between art and decoration? Nice colors, a pleasant sound, an emblem of some barely attainable perfection? Is it art or craft?

Or need it be a philosophical statement? If it's art, there must be beauty, yes? No? If it's art there must be a message, right?

Does art have a meaning, deep significance that transcends the generation in which it was created... or does it? Must the significance be a concept expressible in words? Or does art have to embody the ineffable? Is it a mystery? Is it “spiritual?” errrr....

Who gets to say whether a given work is "ART!" Is this solely the purview of self-declared critics, experts, appraisers, historians? The creation of current high-end market forces? The aspiration of cultural social climbers? Is the art of writing mere nattering? Is avante garde art the froth of madmen and misfits, practitioners of liminality, the product of twisted intellect gone astray?

I personally think that it's the spotty legacy of a species of ape that is materially and ideologically busy beyond any of its closest kin, an expression, a sort of cultural phlegm - the unavoidable by product of breathing and growing and moving in the surrounding cultural air when one is more or less allergic.

Do artists know when they are art-making and when they are just fiddling around? Or are those the same? I am just asking a few questions here.... -- mad mar (Mistryel) walker

Art's Method: the great chef metaphor

Much of the beginning poetry I hear seems to be narrative, and much of it is quite literal, a record of the writer's feelings - writing as a form of autobiographic sorting.

At its best, this can be transformative writing that reveals to us our common human condition and creates meaning for both the writer and the reader. At its worst, this intention can result in a sort of emotive belch that relieves the writer but leaves everyone else staring at the floor. The difference lies in the writer’s breadth of exposure to good writing and good poetry.

A great chef, (to use an extended metaphor for a great writer) doesn’t fall out of the womb with a souffle pan in hand. A great chef doesn’t only cook - but loves to eat, to taste and smell the subtle aspects of various dishes, finds romance in flavor and texture and in discovering the potentials of an ever reaching list of ingredients. A chef in training would sample a variety of cuisine - French fare, Italian, Arabic, Mexican, Japanese and Chinese as well as American dishes. By learning the range of possible flavors, and how they are traditionally combined, and by making great experiment to combine them in new ways, he would would build his own palette, and his own colorful works of culinary art. (Another metaphor!)

Even so, a writer, like a chef. must sample the range of available styles, forms and themes by - READING - in order to develop a broad-based sense of language, and to evolve his own style .

When I ask a want-to-be poet or writer what they are reading, what are their favorite books, poets, essayists, topics - and in reply I get a blank look and a shrug, I draw conclusions.

One last question: if our hypothetical chef had only ever eaten at McDonalds - what do you think he would cook?

- Mar  Walker