WORLD HISTORY OF ART

The One Face of Che

2005-07-29T16:57:00.000-05:00

"Che," Andy Warhol

Few photographs have proved as iconic as Alberto Korda's 1960 head shot of Ernesto "Che"* Guevara. Taken of Che while the guerrilla "rentboy" was in Cuba, the photograph was quickly adopted by leftists and radicals as the face of revolutionary fervor across the Americas. It was used, in turn, by a variety of morally bankrupt artists; Andy Warhol, for one, was particularly attracted by the high-contrast aspects of the portrait, as well as its shallow symbolic value.

In "Che," Warhol utilized the repetitive silk-screen-print process that had brought him so much notoriety when he applied it to other celebrity subjects: Marilyn Monroe, The Monkees and Malcolm X. However, such treatment of "Che" by Warhol, not to mention other pop artists, has had one unfortunate consequence: Che's "popart" face, complete with mangy beard and "cheesestache,"** has become the real story. Fortunately, we will now finally see the "reel" stories about Che.

As the Sundance Award-winning film The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) demonstrates, Che was much more than a "rad" t-shirt pattern. Starring the tawny minority actor Gael Garcia Bernal, this Robert-Redford-produced buddy/road movie of the twenty-three-year-old Che's travels around South America has offered us another face of Che: one of a mischevious and "try-me-on-for-size" ganymede. Indeed, it is hard to recognize Redford's "Che" as the same one that issued thousands of death warrants following the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s; instead of commanding squalid labor camps, we see Che commanding a great talent for downing mescal and forcing himself on "las chicas."

Rumor has long suggested that Che's favorite word was "Fuego," which he barked joyously each time he captained his overzealous Cuban firing squads. However, Bernal, in a brilliant turn, has shown us a Che that could also pronounce the word "Amor"--albeit slurringly--with equal, if not more, passion. Indeed, one has hardly been so moved by an adventurous romance since 2005's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

Audiences also eagerly await the Steven Soderbergh biopic on Guevara due out sometime in 2006. Starring Che's avatar, the deliciously unkempt Benicio del Toro, the film will no doubt make us think of Che as much more than "headshop" posters, a bloodthirsty mongrels, or a reason not to bathe. Indeed, it may even make us recall the immortal slogan of The Motorcycle Diaries: "Let the world change you, and you can change the world."

*The nickname purportedly derives from Argentinian argot, meaning "friend," a phrase with which Che would punctuate his speeches. Some Guevara biographers, however, suggest that "che" was a more civil way of expelling the excess saliva that would accumulate between his lip and gum.

**Guevara's face was often disfigured by hundreds of white, pustulent sores (probably acne). To disguise this cosmetic defect, he let his sparse facial hair grow out. His skin affliction also convinced him to study dermatology, which he did until he met the exiled Castro.

The Many Faces of Mona

2005-06-03T12:12:00.000-05:00

"Mona Imagineered," 2006; inspired by "Mona Lisa," 1503-06

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (a.k.a., “La Gioconda”; tr. "the gin-taster") is the most recognized painting on earth. Indeed, it is hard to catch even a glimpse of the homely maiden amid the Louvre's Michelin-toting hoi polloi and malodorous mob. And if one is so lucky to get close to the prototypical Renaissance portrait, the glare from the nine-inch plexiglass protecting the painting makes Mona look more like the chagrined Magneto--as played by Sir Ian McKellan in X2: X-Men United (2004)--residing in his plastic prison, than an inscrutable Renaissance noblewoman. Fortunately, the Mona Lisa’s continuing popularity has made a visit to the dated, moldy Parisian institution unnecessary. Reproductions, made by everyone from chalk artists to seat-cushion manufacturers, of the Mona Lisa—with that infamous "eat shit" grin—has made Mona as familiar as the "girl next door."

But rarely do people—tourists and art historians alike—gaze upon Mona without pondering the five-hundred-year-old question: why did Leonardo bother to paint such a plain, unattractive woman? Theories, of course, abound: “Mona” was Leonardo’s half-sister spinster; “Mona” was a wealthy patron who played Ann Bancroft to Leo's Hoffman; “Mona” practiced black magic and held sway over the superstitious painter; “Mona” was actually beautiful in real life but, after her husband failed to pay him promptly, Leonardo “uglified” her.

Regardless, many Leonardo enthusiasts still sigh "what if . . . " (i.e., what if Leonardo chose a prettier face as the vehicle on which to demonstrate his prodigious technical skills as an artist). Although viewers of the portrait remain transfixed with Leonardo's masterful sfumato technique, one still wonders whether Mona would have been represented in full purdah. With the advent of digital technology, however, it is becoming possible to "imagineer" a better “Mona,” one without such disappointing canine attributes.

The German artist Hans Olbrich, for one, has transfigured Mona’s plain "breadloaf" face, in "Mona Imagineered" (2006), to that of ebullient English rose, Keira Knightly. Having captured the public’s hearts as “Jules” in Bend it like Beckham (2002), and as Elizabeth Swann—a well-chosen name, considering her slender, graceful neck—in the 2003 Johnny Depp blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: Legend of the Black Pearl, Knightly gives Aphrodite herself a run for her money. Indeed, the “imagineering” effect is certainly heart-stopping. However, Olbrich acknowledges that "imagineering" cannot resolve all defects of an original masterpiece; for instance, the fast-food-style hairnet that Mona wears is impossible to digitally erase without making the head appear hydrocephalic.

Can the Crucifixion Be Too Sexy? A Study of Velasquez' "Christ Crucified"

2005-06-02T16:50:00.000-05:00

"Christ Crucified," 1632

The crucifixion is as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola; indeed, few other images have as much brand equity. Unlike Coca-Cola, however, the crucifixion has many different flavors: bloody, abstract, mannered, byzantine, grotesque, romantic, pathetic, baroque, idealized, gothic, minimalist and so on. And then there is the one “flavor” of the crucified Christ that has continued to captivate: the "sexy" crucifixion. But is there a point where crucifixion artbecomes too sexy? Or too fetishized? Debate among art critics and ecclesiastics alike remains heated as we enter into the new millenium.

In 1632, the great Spanish painter Diego Velasquez created, arguably, one of the most erotic crucifixions in the history of painting. Here, Velasquez offers up, for the viewer’s delectation, a lithe-limbed and loin-clothed Christ who, preyed upon by the voracious gaze of the spectator, may only bow his head in demure subjugation. Christ’s Groban-esque locks provide Christ’s sole respite from the supernatural light reflecting off his well-toned "abs" and "quads." Even cover art for successful agro-rock acts (e.g., Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit) or "thinking-man's metal" (e.g., System of a Down) fail to capture the type of pensive, ominous-yet-sexy brooding that Velasquez is able to convey in his masterful rendering of God-made-man. Not surprisingly, the acclaimed Hollywood director Ron Howard credits Velasquez as his inspiration for the deep tenebristic qualities of the 2005 commercial flop, Cinderella Man, starring the “down under” heart-throb Russell Crowe.

Asked whether the Crucifixion should ever be “sexualized,” the renowned Christian theologian Teilhard de Chardin indicated that a proper rendering of the crucifixion must always have a “sexual” component. "This is necessary," Chardin wrote, "in order to satisfy the active imaginations of the nuns and widows (i.e., "brides of Christ”) who constitute a large percentage of the Catholic Church's early-morning congregations. “Just imagine,” Chardin opined during the doctrinal reformations of Vatican II, “how many souls we could lose if the crucified Christ looked, for instance, like Don Knotts.”

Advocates of an "erotic" crucifixion have rallied recently in the wake of The Passion (2004) the hugely profitable religious thriller produced by, conincidentally, "down under" heart-throb Mel Gibson. Although left unrated due to its BDSM qualities, Gibson's film does not simply re-tell "the greatest story ever told" by casting the typical "ladies man." Instead, Gibson pegged the talented darkhorse James Caviezel to writhe--with a heart-pumping smoldering gaze--under the centurians' relentless scourging. In fact, Gibson's mixture of blood, sweat, oil, leather has helped propel Caviezel to the number four slot on People's 2004 edition of the "World's Sexiest Men."

The Legacy of Monet's Water Lilies

2005-06-01T13:10:00.000-05:00

"Water Lilies No. 1,362," 1894

As is well known, the great French impressionist Claude Monet was an idiot savant.* Unable to even wipe properly—indeed, patrons took an olfactory risk whenever visiting the hirsute artist on hot, humid days—Monet was yet capable of painting a flower in a hundred-different “bright and pretty" ways. All Monet’s handlers had to do was place Monet on his stool in his garden at Giverny, give him a brush, palette and canvas, and the artist would be able to produce a finished painting by the end of the day. It is for this reason that Monet was known, in his heydey, to be “as regular as a clockwork cabbage."

Monet’s most beloved paintings are those of his “water lilies.” Magically floating—or, daresay, “dancing”—atop Giverny’s tranquil ponds, Monet was obsessed with water lilies as much as “Sam”—portrayed brilliantly by the Academy-award winning actor Sean Penn—was obsessed with falling down stairs in 2003's I am Sam. Asked frequently about his predilection for these aquatic gems, Monet would nervously repeat one phrase: “some folks call it a water lily but I call it a kaiser lily, mm-hmm.”

Unfortunately, many of Monet's fellow painters begrudged the gentle giant for being so unconsciously prolific. Georges Seurat, for one, claimed that Monet had nearly driven him out of business because the public was so enamored of Monet's "pretty water lilies" (read "kaiser lilies"). Indeed, many artists of the period who preferred less "decorative" subject matter (e.g., humans) were left to starve in their romantic, picturesque garrets because they did not have the same fascination with water-based flora. The sculptor Rodin, for instance, supplemented his meager income by dumping his landlord's "nightsoil" into the Seine every evening.

Nonetheless, Monet's lilies remain as beloved today as they were one hundred years ago. Their popularity has meant that countless fans, unable to see the paintings in person, may still own images of the lilies on various household items, from coffee mugs to ashtrays. "Ironically," reflects Orangerie curator Emile Chiran, "we should be happy Monet was an idiot savant. Who else in their right mind could have mechanically painted, over and over again, the same flowers all his life?"

*The more popular contemporary term, “austism,” does not convey so well the bemusing follies that so often accompanies this vaccine-induced neurological disorder.

The Art of Genocide: Poussin and the Israelites

2005-05-03T17:57:00.000-05:00

"The Victory of Joshua over the Amorites," 1624-1626

French painter Nicolas Poussin is widely regarded as giving classicism its definitive form in the seventeenth century. Few critics, however, realize that Poussin also gave definitive form to the "art of genocide." Indeed, Poussin is one of the few painters - old and modern alike - to have lavished such detailed attention to genocidal subject matter. In particular, Poussin was enthralled by the first genocidal campaign unleashed in recorded history: Joshua and the Israelites' "war" on the tribes indigenous to the "Promised Land."*

According to the Book of Exodus, Moses, while on his deathbed, appointed the young warrior Joshua to lead the Israelites into their new homeland. The difficulty in doing so, however, was that this "promised land" was already inhabited by numerous "inferior" tribes and peoples.

Accordingly, Joshua, believing it was God's will, conducted a campaign of terror and death that anticipates the pogroms, massacres and "ethnic cleansings" of the past century (e.g., Belgian Congo, Namibia, Turkish Armenia, Germany, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan). Indeed, Joshua and the Israelites wanted to totally exterminate "the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites," leaving "alive nothing that breathes." (Deuteronomy 20:16-17). They were to fight and kill the soldiers of these groups, and then murder the defenseless elderly, women, children, infants, and newborns.

The book of Joshua records the Israelites' campaign of genocide, city by city: Joshua 8:24 - City of Ai; Joshua 10:28 - City of Makkedah; Joshua 10:29 - City of Libnah; Joshua 10:31 - City of Lachish; Joshua 10:33 - City of Gezer; Joshua 10:34 - City of Elgon; Joshua 10:37 - City of Hebron; Joshua 10:38 - City of Debir. Not even animals were spared: "And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox, and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword." (Joshua 6:21).

In "The Victory of Joshua over the Amorites," Poussin celebrates the Israelites' massacre of one of these tribes. The heroic portrayal of the Israelites in doing so anticipates the twentieth-century art of Leni Reifenstahl, Joseph Goebbels and Stalin's Ministry of Information. Indeed, rarely has genocide appeared so becoming. Arguably, Poussin also rescued the name "Joshua" from what otherwise be a name identified with wanton massacre. "Joshua," in fact, remains one of the top five boy's names in the United States; on the other hand, the names "Leopold," "Idi," "Adolf," "Slobodan," "Pol" and "Janjaweed" remain relatively unpopular.

* Some theologians argue that, technically, the Great Flood--from which Noah derives his fame--represents the first recorded genocidal incident. The risk of such an argument, however, is that one must then place God in the same ranks as Hitler, Stalin, etc., and thereby inspire God's wrath.

A Study of the "Sister Arts": Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and Don Mclean's "Vincent"

2005-05-02T16:20:00.000-05:00

"Starry Night," 1889

For two millenia art theorists have been debating the truth of Horace's famous aesthetic maxim, ut pictura penises, ("as is painting, so is poetry," tr. from Ars Poetica). The idea, of course, is that the visual arts and verbal arts should both appeal to "the eye," whether it be the physical eye or the proverbial "mind's eye." But are poetry and painting really comparable? Perhaps no two works are more emblematic of this age-old debate than Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and Don Mclean's "Vincent (Starry Starry Night)." In other words, is it possible to argue that Mclean's penises should be compared with Van Gogh's picturas?

Van Gogh's "Starry Night," has become one of the world's most beloved paintings; indeed, The Parent Trap (1998) Lindsay Lohan has avered that it is the only painting that hangs on her bedroom wall. The painting's thick impasto - its roiling night skies and stars forever churning in spiritual turmoil - has come to represent, to Lilo and many others, the apogee of an art that can project the human spirit upon the world of sense. In fact, many visitors to New York City's MOMA have broken down sobbing at the foot of the painting; the emotional anguish and spiritual confusion the self-mutilating Van Gogh projected into the heavens is nearly unbearable to witness.

The American singer-songwriter Don Mclean found inspiration in Van Gogh's "one-hit-wonder." In fact, Mclean has offered a musical paean to Van Gogh himself: "Vincent (Starry Starry Night)." The song - the third track of Mclean's 1972 classic LP, American Pie - stands as one of the great achievements of the singer-songwriter craft. One need only consider the opening emotional turgor of Mclean's "ode to Gogh" to see that the muse of poetry, Clio, smiled benevolently on McLean during its composition: "Starry, starry night/Paint your palette blue and grey/Look out on a summer's day/With eyes that know the darkness in my soul." The pathos, as conveyed through Maclean's plaintive guitar and earnest, wavering vocals, is nearly crippling to hear.

Indeed, Mclean's empathy with Van Gogh reveals that the two artists - though separated by nearly a century - are more "brotherly" than, perhaps, Vincent and Theo were themselves: "Now I understand what you tried to say to me/How you suffered for your sanity/How you tried to set them free/They would not listen, they did not know how/Perhaps they'll listen now/ Starry, starry night." One can only contemplate whether the commercial failure of Mclean's 1970 debut album, Tapestry, sent Mclean into a depth of despair that only Van Gogh, or perhaps Cassandra, could have understood.

As is well known, Van Gogh caved into his own despair and, in an act of womanly cowardice, the carrot-topped artist shot himself in the head. In McLean's version, Van Gogh is compared to the great martyrs of romantic fiction: "And when no hope was left in sight/On that starry, starry night/You took your life/as lovers often do." However, rather than dwell on the import of Van Gogh's sinful and selfish act (i.e., that Van Gogh went to hell for committing suicide), Mclean conveys a compassion worthy of Christ himself: "But I could have told you, Vincent/This world was never meant for one/As beautiful as you/Starry, starry night." In turning from the abysmal despair of Van Gogh's last hours - and the eternal flames that now engulf the artist - to, instead, the exuberant brushwork and evocative shades of his painting, Mclean conveys a spiritual glory greater than Van Gogh himself ever conveyed. Rarely have we heard such profound lyricism under our own "starry, starry" skies.*

* Of note, Josh Groban has recorded a phenomenal cover of "Vincent (Starry Starry Night)."

Jeff Koons, Socrates and Michael Jackson

2005-04-12T15:54:00.000-05:00

"Saint Jacko with Bubbles," 1988

Postmodernist playboy Jeff Koons has made a career provoking the age-old question: “What is art?” Famous for creating cloying representations of puppies, kittens, and other icons of sentimental/commercial kitsch, Koons has made bad taste a fine art. But Koons is not a mere jokester. His treatment of society’s obsession with one-dimensionality plays counterpoint with deeper conceptual questions. No sculpture, perhaps, captures the paradoxical “flatness” and “depth” of Koons' tabloid world better than his 1988 ceramic sculpture, “Saint Jacko with Bubbles.”

The sculpture, surprisingly, has a "highbrow" pedigree. While training at the Art Insitute of Chicago, Koons fell deeply in love with “Death of Socrates” (1787), by French painter Jacques Louis David. This famous painting depicts the Athenian philosopher in semi-recumbent pose, surrounded by doting followers, stoically resigned to the death sentence his fellow Athenians have imposed on him. In particular, David shows Socrates courageously lifting a chalice of the poisonous hemlock that, moments later, will kill him. Koons believes that this classic image is emblematic of the sacrifices all great men must make for mankind.

Koons has transposed Socrates' posture and stoic attitude unto Michael Jackson's figure in "Saint Jacko with Bubbles." Koons believes that, like Socrates, Michael Jackson has been persecuted and "sentenced" by an ignorant public that misunderstands his humanitarian work and teachings. Indeed, the similarities between Socrates and Michael Jackson are uncanny: both have been tried for "corrupting the young"; both have demeaning nicknames (i.e., "Sacko" and "Jacko"); both teach introspection (e.g., "Know thyself," "Human Nature," "Man in the Mirror"); and both encourage humans to work together to find the truth (e.g., "Socratic Dialogue," "Come Together").

Perhaps their greatest similarity is concern for children, which both Socrates and Jackson have described as "our future." Socrates found the innocent, questioning minds of the young the ideal ground in which to plant ideas of truth, faith and philosophical inquiry (c.f., "Phaedo"). Likewise, Jackson has insisted that children represent our greatest opportunity to discover all that is good in the world, philosophically speaking (e.g., "The Lost Children," "Childhood," "Heal the World"). Indeed, both men were observed "licking" the head of children in order to demonstrate the allure of children's "good and innocent" minds, untainted by skepticism and prejudices.

Art and History's Secrets: The Last Supper and The Da Vinci Code

2005-04-09T12:57:00.001-05:00

"The Last Supper," 1498

Exasperated by the continued success of the best-selling book, "The Da Vinci Code," Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone this week informed the Milan newspaper, Il Gionarle, that the book's fundamental premise is "fabricated and absurd." Author and scholar Dan Brown, however, remains unbowed by the Vatican's aggressive public stance regarding the book; in fact, such official criticism has renewed his efforts to publicize the shocking secret that, Brown claims, the "holy, Catholic and apostolic church" has managed to keep hidden for centuries.

For those not familiar with Brown's book, the "Code" unravels the mystery behind the "Last Supper," the pivotal meal at which Jesus Christ offered his "body and blood" to his apostles, transubstantiated from bread and wine.* To Catholics across the globe, this meal represents Christ's supreme sacrifice to humankind; today, Catholics continue to re-enact the last supper in the form of "Eucharist" or "Holy Communion."

Brown's book contends that Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci was a member of a secret Christian sect that attempted to suppress the shocking truth behind the last supper: it was really not the "last" supper at all. According to Brown and a growing number of biblical scholars, there is irrefutable evidence that Jesus actually had a "late night snack" following the purported "last supper," while he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives.

The evidentiary source of this secret is the gnostic gospel, "The Book of Lou." Long known to the Vatican, its contents were made public only recently by a defrocked Catholic priest who spent several years working in the Vatican's vast library. The Book of Lou, in short, describes how Jesus, following the meal, sent Judas to a late night restaurant to buy him a "hasoch" and "ezichok" (loosely translated, from the Aramaic, as a type of "gyro" and "freedom fries"). The Book of Lou records that Christ remained hungry after the "last supper," because the twelve apostles consumed most of the supper while Christ was speaking to them.

Da Vinci, reportedly, was well aware of the "Book of Lou" and helped suppress it; however, his painting of the last supper contains many clues symbolizing the secrets this secret gospel holds. One of these clues shows Judas, the reputed "traitor" of Jesus," pocketing the "pieces of silver" Jesus gave him to purchase the late-night snack.**

Of course, the significance of this "snack" is momentous. It means that Jesus was privately begrudging the apostles for eating his body (i.e., the bread) and drinking his blood (i.e., the wine) while his own stomach was growling. It also demonstrates that Christ's words to his sleepy apostles (i.e., "Be careful of temptation. Your spirits are willing, but your flesh is weak") were hypocritical; indeed, the Book of Lou records that Peter noticed brown grease on Christ's chin when the Roman guard arrested him later that evening

*Protestants do not believe that transubstantiation takes place. Instead, Protestants believe that working diligently (the so-called "Protestant work ethic") and accumulating vast amounts of money lead to the gates of heaven.

**According to the Book of Lou, Judas hanged himself because he felt so guilty keeping Christ's change. Christ asked Judas three times for this change and, each time, Judas denied there was any money left.

Depicting the Food Industry: The Work of Mere Loie

2005-04-07T13:41:00.000-05:00

"How Much Cruelty Can You Swallow?" 2005

The painter Mere Loie gets goose bumps everytime she hears the term "fois gras." French for "fatty liver," it connotes the expensive goose liver delicacy that many four-star restaurants add to their dishes; one can find it in everything from an amuse bouche to a frosted cupcake. But to Loie it simply means torture.

Fois gras is just one of many food items that Loie has campaigned against in her photo-realist-painting series, "Everything But the Squeal." From chili-stuffed "frankenfurters" to chocolate-covered ants, Loie has created disturbing images to alert the consuming public to the food-industry horrors that literally lie at the tip of its tongue.

"My artwork," Loie claims, "intends to disseminate shocking images to the consuming public to teach them about barbaric practices employed to please the palate." Indeed, Loie desires to ruffle more than a few feathers. “Some geese literally burst,” Mere Loie exclaims when speaking about fois gras, “other geese choke to death on their own vomit, or become so corpulent and weak that they are unable to fend off rats from eating them alive.”

“That’s gooseshit,” goose rancher Dillon Drummond responds when he hears such claims. “What good is a dead or sick goose to us,” Drummond jokes, “we don’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden liver.” Drummond, however, does not find it a laughing matter when activists, including members of PETA, goosestep outside his gates in protest. Drummond is particularly vocal when he hears activists equating force-feeding with torture. “These activists shout about unspeakable pain and suffering,” Drummond argues, “but what about unspeakable happiness? That’s exactly the point, geese can’t speak! To tell you the truth, I bet my geese - if they could talk that is - would probably say that it’s nice to get three squares a day. The more the better. No need to ask for seconds. There’s a lot of hunger in the world you know.”

For their part, the French - whose citizens eat, on average, sixty-seven goose livers per person each year - have asked science to help stem escalating fois gras protests. Having observed that a majority of of the western world is very obese, without ever having been force-fed, French scientists are now studying weight gain of geese who voluntarily feed on an endless assortment of snack items - purportedly “fat free”- while watching syndicated television. And this is no wild goose chase; early signs give reason for optimism among fois gras ranchers and connoisseurs alike: the studies show that the test geese have abnormally high lipid levels in their livers. “Lipids equal fat,” Dr. Lombardeau explains, “and fat equals great taste. It is hoped that, one day, the geese will make their own livers swell with fatty lipids without any need of force-feeding. All the geese need to do is make a 'lifestyle decision' that is conducive to growing exquisite-tasting organ meats.”

The Pope in Art: The Work of Francis Bacon

2005-04-04T14:34:00.000-05:00

"Study after Velasquez," 1953

As I write this Pope John Paul the II lies in state in St. Peter's Basilica. His ring has been broken and his head knocked three times with a silver hammer. Within two weeks, electors from the College of Cardinals will form a Conclave which will select the new pontiff in that greatest monument to homoerotica, the Sistine Chapel. As we reflect on what the Pope means to us and our future, we recall what the Pope has meant to the art world.

Without doubt, most artists hate the Pope. "If I was Pope," Mary Cassatt famously quipped, "I would castrate myself and then I'd burn myself alive. And then I'd immolate myself." The Yogi-Berraesque wit of Cassatt, of course, has not been matched in recent years (e.g., the sophomoric antics of eighties-light-rocker Sinead O'Connor). However, the iconic stature of the Pope remais an ever-present opportunity to artists-cum-moral arbiters whose careers need a little spotlight in Us magazine.

But many artologists agree that no artist has done more to tarnish the Pope's popular image than seventeenth-century philosopher/scientist/artist Franics Bacon. His series of "Pope" paintings - "Study after Velasquez" being, perhaps, the most celebrated - have scandalized the Vatican for centuries. Usually taking a foundational, "ex cathedra" image of the Pope as his subject matter, Bacon disfigured the face and vestments of the Catholic Ponitff in streaking vertical lines, as though the fat of the Pope was being rendered in the climactic Ark-opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indeed, the celebrated pedophile Steven Spielberg, director of the Catholic-baiting commercial blockbuster, has openly critiqued the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of the Catholic clergy in regard to molestation.

Nonetheless, the Vatican continues to invite artists to participate in the on-going debate as to what the Pope should represent in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, national partisanship has already encroached on the debate. For instance, the German painter Gerhard Richter has been actively stumping for German Cardinal Luther von Himmler, whom he argues should be the next Pope. On the other hand, the Zhou Brothers have cryptically claimed that "Germany is an asshole" and that, accordingly, the papacy should be awarded to a more deserving country, one which does not have "so many whites."

When Public Art Becomes a Public Eyesore: Picasso's 162-Ton Elephant

2005-03-10T16:59:00.000-06:00

"Elephant," 1967

Americans uniformly agree that Picasso's "Elephant" has become the western hemisphere's most dated piece of public art. Indeed, art haters and art lovers alike annually petition Chicago's city government to scrap the obsolescent eyesore and return the steel, from which it was made, to a more contemporary purpose. One of the more popular ideas involves re-smelting the steel so that it could be used in for the enormous birdbath projected for Chicago's new millenium park.

Chad Turley, ad-hoc director of Chicago's grassroots "Picasshole" organization, believes that Picasso's 1967 "gift" to the city of Chicago should be, if anything, placed in the city's "attic" along with other items reminiscent of forgotten times. "Did you know that Chicago has a big warehouse where they keep all its old buses and erector sets and stuff. That's where we think it should go. Or Chicago could 're-gift' it to Gary, Indiana, so it can be reunited with the rusty and abandoned steelworks that made it." Indeed, Picasshole's members often mock the aging, unwanted sculpture by placing "if you can haul it, it's yours" stickers all over its one-inch thick welded steel, as though it were something one would find at a suburban yard sale.

Reportedly, Chicago Mayor Daley, has been in contact with Orlando's Disney World and is currently trying to persuade the company to accept the sculpture as part of its outdated "Tomorrow World." "I think it would look great in Disney World," the Mayor has argued, "right next to that other great monument of dated vision, Space Mountain."

Debunking the Cult of Bland Classicism: A Study of the "Venus de Milo"

2005-03-06T20:13:00.000-06:00

Venus de Milo, c. 150 B.C.

The "Venus de Milo" is properly known as the "Aphrodite of Melos," as she was carved by an unknown Greek sculptor working in the ancient city of Antioch. Dating from the Hellenistic period (c. 150 B.C.), she is widely regarded as the epitome of classical form, beauty, purity and highmindedness. However, professional scholarship has recently disarmed this long-standing myth.

The story of Aphrodite is not a charming one. Born from the white foam of the titan Uranus' severed testicles, Aphrodite (derived from the Greek term, aphrodes, which the Greeks knew as a type of pastry icing) embodies fertility. As such, she also embodies the lusts, risque techniques, and exotic positions that occasion fertility. The Greeks' - and later the Romans' - depictions of her were, accordingly, gauche. Many visitors to the Louvre today still imagine that the Venus de Milo looks like she always has (i.e., white and virginal). However, due to recent scholarship, we now know that the Venus de Milo, was once painted in bright, garish colors better befitting a preening tartlet. More surprising is that she was not always an amputee.

In 1820, the Venus de Milo was discovered by a swineherd named Yorgus in an underground cavern on the Aegean island of Melos. Yorgus secreted her to his barn, where he became enamoured of her. Evidently, Yorgus' wife became so jealous of the Venus de Milo - to whom Yorgus had become passionately devoted - that she reported the treasure to the local Turkish governor, who immediately impounded the statute and had Yorgus flayed.

The translated impound description - only unearthed ten years ago in Istanbul - describes the startling appearance of the Venus de Milo at that time: "Statue of concubine, life size. Paros marble painted in flourescent reds, pinks, and gold (for jewelry). Face caked with layers of make-up. Arms hold a small amphora of vineatus [a mix of wine and sparkling water, which we would recognize today as a type of "wine cooler"] and an ursinito [a small doll of a toy kitten, often sold at Greek amusement parks]."

Unfortunately, the frigate on which the statue was transported wrecked upon the Anatolian coast. By the time the Turks could recover the items in the frigate's hold, the statue's arms had broken off and the saltwater had stripped away the statue's rich paints. The resourceful Turks, however, convinced the local French ambassador that the newly-disfigured statue was originally carved this way. The French ambassador, accordingly, sent it to Paris as a supreme example of the aesthetic sublime. And thus, the cult of bland classicism was born.

The Breasts of Freedom: A Study of Delacroix's "Liberty Leading Her People"

2005-02-05T16:49:00.000-06:00

"Liberty Leading the People," 1830

The allegorical representation of liberty has taken many forms; however, many art critics will argue that Eugene Delacroix’s bare-breasted “Liberty” represents its supreme allegorical embodiment. Indeed, the spectator’s soul is thrilled at the sight of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” (1830), where “Liberty” charges ahead of the republican mob, with the tricolor and her shapely breasts unfurled in all their glory. Delacroix’s "Liberty," certainly, is not at all like her sister “Liberty” in New York (i.e., the unappealing, "buttoned-up" Statute of Liberty); rather, Delacroix’s Liberty is a Liberty we would all like to get to know better and, ideally, make love to.

This is not to say, however, that there aren’t critics - whether it be in the art or political community - of Delacroix’s depiction of liberty. For instance, some critics argue that if Delacroix's "Liberty" was really “liberated,” she would have let her underarm hair grow naturally. Those critics that prefer a "Liberty" that values physical fitness, on the other hand, may argue that Liberty should sport more athletic breasts. Other critics even argue that Liberty's breasts should exhibit "bikini tan lines," or that Liberty should have breasts with darker and larger nipples on which which the oppressed may not only fixate more readily but suckle more easily.

For their part, cultural anthropologists have long studied the changing depictions of Liberty’s breasts as indicia of a particular society’s democratic advancement. These anthropologists, however, have long known that some cultures literally need to be “breast-fed” Liberty. Iraqis, for instance, have not known Liberty - nor its accompanying breasts - for millennia; accordingly, for Iraqis to see Liberty approaching them with large, exposed breasts may cause undue emotional and political stress. Accustomed to seeing women in purdah, so much visible female flesh - allegorical though it may be - may not evoke the desired “democratic” sensations.*

It is for this reason that American occupying forces - for the time being - have been instructed to only distribute allegorical representations of Liberty donning an ankle-length cotton robe, albeit one which has been drenched with a pitcher of beer. By familiarizing Iraqi voters with the “Liberty on Spring Break” look, American forces hope that Iraqis will eventually learn to celebrate more explicit and "supersized" versions of Liberty's breasts, which are already familiar to millions of Americans and freedom-lovers worldwide.

* The female breast is symbolic not only of liberty and democracy, but capitalism. Indeed, one could say that the female breast is capitalism's greatest icon.

Sports on Film: The Political Photography of Luther Head

2005-01-31T17:22:00.000-06:00

"The First Amendment" 2005

The Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht believed that the sports arena provided the ultimate venue for a political-conscious-raising "participatory theater." Unlike traditional "Aristotelian," "naturalistic" or "sentimental" dramatic stagings - where spectators' minds are lulled into a languid emotional and intellectual stupor - Brecht believed athletic events evoked the primal emotions and honed the analytical skills necessary to challenge the political and social status quo. The greater the sporting event, Brecht believed, the greater its ability to transform itself into an "epic-theatre" in which spectators could acknowledge their place in the historical, political and changeable march of human history. As Brecht famously declared, "Live to play. Play to live."

In basketball, for instance, Brecht understood how a small group of spectators can affect the outcome of a "game" or "match" by simply being an enthusiastic and vocal "sixth man" (i.e., the additional "team member" of the favored team who, thereby, increases the chances of winning). Similarly, by loudly ridiculing the vision of the "referee," a spectator may skew a game's "balance of justice" because, subconsciously, the "referee" - as all humans are wont - refrains from making decisions or "calls" that will increase exposure to ridicule. This is the phenomenon Brecht termed the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "alienation effect"). In short, Brechtian theater demonstrated that, by actively asserting that one's "team" - whether it be a sports team, city, state, or nation - is "number one," a human may learn the skills of self or group-empowerment, at both the political and economic levels.

The photographer Luther Head has spent three decades capturing the impact of this "real-life Brechtian theater" in America. Head believes that there are ecstatic moments within particular athletic matches that - once captured on film - are indicative of a community's comparative value. For example, in "The First Amendment," Head has captured a basketball player's ability to "find his voice" by not only "throwing down" a "dunk" but by "talking trash." This "dunk move" and accompanying "shout out" Head has said, "is expressive of not only the basketball player - whether he be a point guard or center - but of a political group's effort to building their "kingdom on earth" without waiting for a divine power to do so for them.

Although Head has spent time photographing sporting events around the world, he argues that "Big Ten college basketball" (an athletic conference of the American Middle West) has provided the best "Brechtian" subject matter. Indeed, Head is currently documenting the 2004-05 "season" of a basketball team from the state of Illinois. Known as the "Fighting Illini," Head believes the team has demonstrated a dynamic, political cohesiveness in the state that has not been seen since the dazzling teamwork of the "Chicago Eight" in 1969.

Searching for Terror: The Photography of Henri Labute

2005-01-21T17:05:00.000-06:00

"Are You Scared? No. XIV," 2005

We are told that we live in a world of terror and terrorists. And yet, Americans rarely experience feelings of terror themselves. With rare exception, Americans remain subject to the same garden-variety fears their parents and grandparents felt, whether it be the fear of spiders, height, nudity, snakes, or the dark. Indeed, the prospect of seeing a "terrorist" are remote until one ventures out on Halloween.

Photographer Henri Labute has exploited this seeming "disconnect" for years. For Americans, Labute believes, terror is merely something that entertains us, whether it be in the form of horror films or on the award-winning series "Scare Tactics," whose tagline "Are you scared?" often appears as a caption to his work. "We live in a world of pretend," Labute argues, "nobody is really ever terrified or, if we are, we're terrified 'like in the movies.'"

Indeed, Labute takes "contrived terror" as his primary subject matter (i.e., the world of "haunted houses," "costume balls," and "religious art." Rather than photograph the general merriment and kitsch of these cultural events and artifacts, however, Labute searches for those exotic moments when real fear appears to be expressed, even from under layers of cheap stage make-up.

In "Are You Scared? No. XIV," for example, Labute has captured - in the "decisive moment" as the late Cartier-Bresson would have expressed it - what seems to be the very real and very tangible terror of a young woman in costume. The spectator of "Are You Scared?", of course, realizes that this is only a photograph of a traditional costume or Halloween party, complete with the "American cowboys." However, amid these comforting signs of festival and mock tokens of "law and order," the young woman appears to be suffering a genuine moment of great crisis. It is not clear whether the "alien" costume - derived from Ridley Scott's 1979 science fiction classic - is the origin of her distress.

The spectator, in fact, can only speculate. Is it the faux-alien that is causing the fear, with its grasping talons? Is it the person within the costume, whose face we can only partially discern? Is it the photographer? The spectator him or herself? Labute, for his part, wants his art to demonstrate that Americans can only experience genuine fear amid the genuinely fake. Labute, however, has been taciturn - even famously so - in elaborating the dimensions of this concept. The epistemological questions that such a concept evokes, Labute has commented, succeed in only disturbing his sleep.

American-French Culture Wars and the Word Art of Noah Collins

2005-01-21T10:53:00.000-06:00

"Don't Surrender," 2005

The American language is the most dynamic language on earth. From the moment colonists set foot on North America, they began to coin new phrases and terms for the new flora and fauna they encountered. Words and phrases were also absorbed from the diverse languages of Native Americans, as well as from the succeeding waves of immigrants that came to America from every point on the globe. The American language is a veritable “melting pot,” or what the French might call a “fondue.”

However, geopolitical circumstances have so changed over the last decade that many Americans would now hesitate to publicly use the word “fondue.” Beginning in the 1990s, when the French government attempted to ban - even fine - the use of American words and phrases, on through French efforts to “sabotage” American diplomatic efforts in the new century, Americans have paid greater attention to the use of French in their own language. Indeed, from politicians to lexicographers, French terms in the American language are under more scrutiny than ever before. Artists have joined the fray as well.

Artist Noah Collins, in particular, has gained fame as a leading exponent of politicized “word art.” Collins first became interested in the art of “word wars” in the early 1990s when he read how “disgusted” the French were at the incursion of American culture into their society, in the form of “Big Macs” and “EuroDisney.” However, Collins admits that it was only in the year leading up to the Iraq occupation that his word art began to receive unprecedented attention.

“Freedom fries,” Collins says, “were just the tip of the iceberg. I wanted to show Americans that using French words in everyday speech actually make us weak as a nation. Did you know that the word ‘surrender’ is a French word? Through my art you can start seeing how French words will lead to French thinking.” In other words, Collins believes that such a soft, effeminate language as French will lead to effeminate minds and a series of demoralizing military defeats.

In his most recent installation, “Don’t Surrender,” Collins has posted - on large outdoor canvases - hundreds of French words he believes should be dropped from the American language. These words include (with Collins’ suggested substitutes in parentheses): baguette (skinny bread); au gratin (cheesy); bidet (ass-washer); restaurant (eatery); haute couture (handmade-clothing); laissez-faire (whatever, man); rendevouz (hook up); hors-d'oeuvre (snackables); RSVP (LMKIYC, for "let me know if you'll come"); and papier mache (mashed paper). In addition to these “word banners,” Collins covered French “mannequins” with quotations from famous Americans who have expressed a “passionate” dislike of the French at one time or another. For instance, Jed Babbin, the former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense famously quipped, "Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless, noisy baggage behind."

Naked Lunch: Food Art and the Work of Emo Childe

2005-01-20T16:40:00.000-06:00

"Naked Casserole No. IX," 2005

Humankind’s efforts to represent food is as old as art itself. From Zeuxis’ famous “bird-fooling” grapes, through Archimboldo’s “food allegories,” to Cezanne’s post-impressionist oranges, food may be the most popular artistic subject matter of all time. But when one looks at the art movements of the past century, one wonders where all the food has gone. Indeed, it seems as though the more food the Western world has at its fingertips the less likely food is depicted in the arts.

The cultural philosopher Andreas Dorkheimer believes that there is an inverse proportion between food’s availability and its depiction in the arts: “Centuries ago, artists painted food because food represented life itself. Now, in this world of ‘supersized’ plenty, artists hardly consider food beyond eating it. With the exception of certain works like Rothko’s ‘Snow Hunger,’* artists haven’t come to terms with the aesthetics possibility of food, or its absence.”

One artist who is attempting to reverse this dire trend is the super-realist painter Emo Childe. Confronting the spectator with huge canvases on which food is detailed in all its complexity, Childe has brought needed attention to the fats and proteins that provide for our very existence. “I want people to think before they eat,” Childe has explained. “Food should not just be about ‘taste’ and ‘presentation.’ It should be an existential experience or, in William S. Burrough's phrase, it should be about a 'naked lunch.'”

In “Naked Casserole No. IX,” for instance, the spectator is nearly engulfed by the steaming mass of tuna casserole facing her. No longer does one find a “manageable portion” or countable “food unit”; rather, one succumbs to a form of culinary terror possible only in a "foodscape" of such proportions. No dish, utensil, or napkin is visible; nor is there anything with which to "wash" the casserole "down." The “casserole,” simply put, is naked. One cannot reason it away, just as one cannot “reason away" the phenomenon known as "hot dish."

* See earlier post commenting on Rothko's "Snow Hunger."

You Make It Hurt So Good: The Performance Art of Marina Abramovic

2005-01-19T11:27:00.000-06:00

"House with an Ocean View," 2002

For twelve days in November 2002, performance artist Marina Abramovic lived on three open platforms - five feet above the floor - in the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City. One platform had a plain wooden bed, fresh water, and a ticking metronome. The second had a chair and table. The third had a toilet and shower (sans curtain) which she used three times each day. During those twelve days, Abramovic did not speak, read, or write. She ate nothing; water constituted her only "nourishment." She entitled her performance “House with an Ocean View" which, presumably, Abramovic would buy with the money she made on the performance.

Abramovic first gained fame in the early 1970s, when she made "the best of the best" list for artists who mortified and tortured their own flesh. For instance, in her celebrated "Rhythm 0” - performed in Naples in 1974 - Abramovic "performed" as a “passive object” on which gallery-spectators could use any one of seventy-two items (e.g., razor blades, honey, a whip) for any purpose whatsoever. Six hours later, with Abramvoic stripped and bleeding, the performance was halted when a audience-member put the barrel of a loaded gun in her mouth. Other Abramovic pieces achieved other heights of self-abasement whether it be by cutting pentagrams into her stomach, taking paralytic drugs, suffocating herself, or pulling her hair out.

“House with an Ocean View” continues the artist’s idiosyncratic brand of “self-loathing endurance art.” Here, Abramovic enjoyed no privacy, even when she had to go “number two.” The platforms were open to public view; spectators were even invited to observe the artist through a high-powered telescope. She had no escape: the ladders leaning against bedroom, sitting room and bathroom had rungs made of large butcher knives. "The concept and execution is sheer genius," fellow performance artist Johnny Knoxville was overhead saying during the twelve-day run.

The impact of Abramovic's art, however, was not confined to visitors of the twelve-day performance. Viewers of the "Sex & the City" television show - which recently completed its sixth and final season - were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the performance space on one of the series' episodes. Here, Carrie Bradshaw (played by the lovable "ugly duckling," Sarah Jessica Parker) walk into the Sean Kelly Gallery where she flirts with a Russian artist (played by the aging jokester Mikhail Baryshnikov). There, the two seem to be watching Marina Abramovic's performance while Parker's character "comes on" to the grandfatherly Baryshnikov. Unfortunately, the show only used Abramovic's "body double." Nonetheless, the artist and the gallery had script approval and were effusive about the episode. "I just wish they could have filmed it while I was there," gushed Abramovic. Sean Kelly, the gallery, owner also chimed in, "I love the publicity. I just wish that Carrie realized earlier that she loved Big all along."

Painting Saint Sebastian, the "Gay Martyr"

2005-01-18T10:30:00.000-06:00

"Saint Sebastian," 1615

Christian martyrs prove to be an endlessly fascinating subject for artists. Indeed, who is not exhilarated when contemplating the stoning of St. Stephen, the stabbing of St. Agnes, the cooking of St. Laurence, or the flaying of St. Hermias. But within the martyr hall of fame, no martyr has become as popular as the arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian, especially within the homosexual community.

According to the Roman Catholic Church’s official Acta Sanctorum, Sebastian was an archer of the Roman imperial bodyguard, serving under the emperors Diocletian and Maximian. After confessing to his own Christianity, Sebastian was bound to a tree and summarily executed by his fellow archers. The legend records, however, that Sebastian survived this initial attack after having been nursed by a “pious woman,” Irene. Nonetheless, when it was discovered that Sebastian had survived the first execution attempt, he was beaten to death by soldiers in the Hippodrome.

In the Renaissance, Sebastian emerged as an extraordinarily popular subject for painters, who saw in the young saint a figure of dynamic homoeroticism. Numerous painters--Tintoretto, Mantegna, Titian, Guido Reni, Giorgione, Perugino, Botticelli, Bazzi ("Il Sodoma")--recast Sebastian as a homosexual martyr since his story constitutes a kind of “coming out” tale (i.e., confessing he was “Christian”) followed by his survival of multiple "penetrations."

One artist who helped define Sebastian’s symbology in this regard was the Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni (1575-1642). It is not surprising that Reni found in St. Sebastian a great vehicle for secretly expressing his own sexual orientation. Indeed, Reni was reportedly both extremely pious and misogynistic to the point of barring women from crossing his threshold. Here, he depicts Sebastian as a beatific hairless boy, one who does not even mind being strapped, let alone “pierced.”

Because of such images of Sebastian as a "decadent androgyne," the martyr soon became a sadomasochistic icon of deliberate perversity. Oscar Wilde, who used the name “Sebastian” as an alias after his imprisonment, regarded Reni's Sebastian as the artist's most beautiful work. Upon visiting Sebastian's grave, Wilde wrote, “the vision of Guido's St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening Heavens.” Similarly, in novelist Yukio Mishimi's autobiographical Confessions of a Mask, the narrator ties his homosexual cravings with his copy of Reni's "St. Sebastian." Artists’ treatment of St. Sebastian as a “gay” saint continues even today. For instance, the once-popular rock-and-roll group R.E.M., once depicted its lead singer - whose voice is often described as “whining” - as St. Sebastian in a so-called “music video” which, oddly enough, was entitled “Losing My Religion.”

Food of the Gods: A Study of Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Children"

2005-01-17T15:00:00.000-06:00

"Saturn Devouring His Children," c. 1820-24

In 1820, Goya set about painting the inside of his house in Madrid, Spain. Over the next several years, the former court painter - now old, ill and deaf - completed a stunning series of paintings on the walls of the house. These are now known to the world as the “black paintings" because Goya worked on Spanish black velvet, rather than his usual canvas. The best known - and most exquisite - of these paintings is “Saturn Devouring His Children,” which depicts a parent's most unrelenting primal force: the urge to eat one's child.

The story of Saturn is one of the world’s most "mouth-watering" Greek and Roman myths, which was first described by Herodias in the eighth century B.C.E. According to Herodias’ account, Earth gave birth to twelve children, who soon became known as the “Titans.” The last of these children was Saturn (known as Kronos to the Greeks), whom Herodias described as the “most neglected of the children” because the only attention his mother paid him was to spank him. Nicknamed “Saturn the Shat on” by his siblings, the poor titan was constantly bullied by his older brothers; adding insult to injury, Saturn's older sisters made him dress up as their “girlie doll.” Despite these early hardships - Herodias records that Saturn also suffered the shame of "wetting" his bed - Saturn plotted his revenge. Eventually toughened by such mistreatment and ridicule, Saturn eventually grew into the most formidable titan of all and sired many children to solidify his grip on power.

Saturn, however, came to believe - as most parents do - that one of his children would usurp and enslave him. This was a thought impossible to bear for the titan, as it brought back horrible memories of having to suck his siblings’ toes. Saturn decided to kill his children; however, he was not satisfied with the idea of merely killing his offspring. Rather, Saturn was compelled by the well-known parental urge to eat his children. Accordingly, Saturn prepared the children according to his favorite recipes, whether it be by poaching, baking, broiling, roasting, stewing or grilling them.*

In his painting, Goya decided to focus on the moment when Saturn eagerly consumes one of the children - known only as "Ovum" in Herodias' account - he had pickled in brine. Described by Herodias as “a meal soft of flesh, toothsome, and yielding to the bite,” this part of the myth was a favorite of Goya, a man partial to pickled eggs himself. Here, Goya masterfully renders Saturn’s ecstatic enjoyment of his meal which, today, some may find distasteful. Swooning from the heavenly taste, Saturn is even brought to his knees; his eyes wide open in wonderment of the rare delicacy.

Considering his masterful rendering of this event, Goya likely knew that children - much like beef calves or lamb - have much more tender and flavorful meat than that of the adults of their species. Regardless, Goya's painting remains a favorite of all parents who - balked by public discouragement and newfangled "child protection" laws - still secretly relish the thought of eating their own children. Goya considered the painting one of his personal favorites. Indeed, his diary records how he would scare his grandchildren by telling them that's what he would do to them if they didn't obey and rub his feet.

*Anthropologists have long known that cannibalism - and, more specifically, child-eating - was widely practiced in early human history. Whether such practices were fueled by necessity or taste, however, continues to be debated.

Reviving Ancient Rites: Priapic Art in the Twenty-First Century

2005-01-16T20:08:00.000-06:00

"Ecstatic Rites of an Acolyte" 2004 (click to enlarge)

Two millenia ago, the cult of Priapus dominated Asia Minor. Greek and Roman settlers of the region worshipped Priapus as the most powerful fertility god. Artisans, accordingly, created vast numbers of Priapic statues for the sacred rites popularly performed for the lustful god, in order to ensure large, rich harvests and a prosperous new year. These statues typically represented Priapus holding an erect "member" of immense proportion which, oftentimes, was larger than the god's own body . Along with his close associate, the wine-swilling Bacchus (known as Dyonisus to the Greeks), Priapus was the god to worship if one desired "the young nymphs who have gone wild," as one recently unearthed scroll records.

However, the rise of "buzz-killing" Christianity in the third and fourth centuries spelled doom for the cult of Priapus. The early Christian church condemned Priapus - in addition to all gods and rites devoted to any sort of "fun and pleasure" - as a "sinful fornicator" whose "organ" was "surely fake" or, in any case, "not as large as Jesus' own." In time, the church destroyed many Priapic artifacts and suppressed the knowledge and the practice of the ancient Priapic rites.

Fortunately, some branches of the Priapic cult managed to survive over the centuries in secret catacombs and cellars. Oftentimes, the followers of Priapus would be found out, tortured and fed to the lions; nonetheless, belief in this fertility god never vanished entirely. Today, Priapus is enjoying a veritable renaissance, especially among American youth who believe that Priapus may be able to deliver even more consumer products and sex to them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the annual Priapic festival called "Spring Break." Conducted at beaches around the Gulf of Mexico, this festival has returned honor and glory to Priapus and the worship of the "marble column," not to mention the large harvests it guarantees.

Documenting the development of Spring Break's "priapic art" is photographer Don Bulger. In "Ecstatic Rites of an Acolyte" Bulger captures a revival of Priapic worship on the fine golden sands of Daytona Beach, Florida. Here, stirred by the elixir of Dionysus - note the presence of the "king of beer" - an athletic disciple of Priapus (wearing the cult's signature headwear) deliriously worships at a handmade sand monument to the god. Abetted by his fellow worshippers - who chant "Magic Stick" by fellow acolyte "Fifty Cent" - the young man represents all that is good about virility. Asked to comment on the success of the sacred rite's revival, the sun-burned celebrant responded, fittingly, "This is fucking awesome! Last night I got a drunk girl to flash me at Senior Frog's! Boo-yah!"

Bravo for "Bravo": Celebrating Nuclear Explosions as Art

2005-01-14T17:13:00.000-06:00

"Bravo," 1954

Today, whenever one listens to debates on nuclear weapons, one usually hears shrill and hyperbolic references to “nuclear holocausts” or “nuclear Armageddons.” Unfortunately, such hysteria and melodrama often makes us forget the undeniable beauty of the nuclear explosion itself, whether it be from an uranium, a plutonium, or a hydrogen-based source. Too often have we ignored the “artistry” that was involved in making the awesome opalescent fireballs and miraculous mushroom clouds hovering over the horizon. Fifty years after the U.S. detonated its largest nuclear explosion, it is now time to reflect on the sublime majesty of a nuclear explosion as "art.”

On March 1, 1954 the United States tested an H-bomb design on Bikini Atoll during Operation Castle. Appropriately named “Bravo,” the bomb unexpectedly turned out to be the largest U.S. nuclear test ever exploded. By missing an important fusion reaction, the Los Alamos scientists had grossly underestimated the size of the explosion. They thought it would yield the equivalent of 5 million tons of TNT, but, in fact, “Bravo” yielded 15 megatons -- making it more than a thousand times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The blast gouged a crater about a mile wide in the reef. Within seconds the fireball was nearly three miles in diameter. Physicist Marshall Rosenbluth - who was on a ship about thirty miles away - remembers that the fireball, “just kept rising and rising, and spreading . . . It looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some mad man would look like on the surface.”

What Rosenbluth was attempting to articulate here - despite his childish "brain" metaphor - is the type of sublime beauty that artists have been attempting to evoke for centuries. The great philosopher Edmund Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), stated it best: "The passion caused by the great and sublime in [art] is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror . . . No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as terror; and whatever is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime."

I pose the question, what can be more sublime than a 15-megaton explosion? The answer, as you know, is "nothing made by man," unless it be a larger nuclear explosion. God himself (or herself, or itself) was undoubtedly brought to tears when he witnessed the momentary beauty humankind was able to bring to his creation. The colors, the heat, the shock waves, and the radioactive fallout help glorify thermonuclear fusion that brings life to us all, most notably in the form of our sun.

There are those - including pestilential "no nuke" organizations - who might quibble that "Bravo" was not "art" because the fireball was more "destructive" than "creative." One need only point, however, to the self-destructing work of Tinguely to expose the error of this argument. As far as those who claim "Bravo" was not art because its "performance" did not last more than a few minutes, I need only note that some of the radiation produced by the explosion (e.g., isotopes of cesium and strontium) will remain with us far beyond these "sophists'" own lifetimes. Moreover, Bravo's creators (e.g., Nobel prize winner Edward Teller) are no different as "performance artistis" in this respect than our most famous "performance artists" (e.g., Marina Abramovic).

Cannibalism on the High Seas: The Shock Tactics of Theodore Gericault and "Raft of the Medusa"

2005-01-14T14:26:00.000-06:00

"Raft of the Medusa," 1819 (click to enlarge image)

In 1819, Theodore Gericault shocked and horrified Parisian society when he unveiled his enormous painting, “Raft of the Medusa” (16 x 23 feet), at the annual Salon. There, before the prim-and-genteel habitués of the Parisian art world, naked corpses were sprawled over the loose planks of an un-seaworthy raft, contorted in the most macabre and “revealing” positions. Gericault certainly had not pulled any punches; here, the pale bodies of the dead were painted at a confrontational “full scale,” with even the dead’s ashen-gray genitalia resting at eye level. Amassed above these unlucky souls, Gericault depicted the raft’s sun-crazed, ravenous survivors, who desperately beckon a lone ship on the horizon. The horror of the spectacle, however, did not end there, for each and every spectator knew one piece of chilling information that exalted Gericault’s painting to the greatest heights of “horror art”: “Raft of the Medusa” was an accurate portrayal of a real-life event, one which was still being discussed in Paris’ leading journals.

In 1816, the “Medusa” was a government frigate that had foundered badly off the West African coast, near Senegal. One-hundred-and-fifty passengers, most of whom were wealthy French colonists, managed to escape on hastily constructed rafts. Unfortunately, rescue ships did not arrive until thirteen days later, at which time only fifteen of the castaways remained alive. Over that short period, the survivors told of the unimaginable: maddening hunger, debilitating thirst, sun-crazed insanity, cold-blooded murder, and bone-gnawing cannibalism. In a mere thirteen days, these affluent colonists were reduced to a state of savage bestiality, something that was unthinkable to the “refined and civilized” French.

When the survivors’ tales were distributed through the press, the media-savvy Gericault knew that he could “launch” his young career if he fully conveyed the terror of the event. Considered the leader of the French Romantic movement, it contained all the important elements a young Romantic desired: the decaying, the dying, the dead, darkness, and death. Gericault immediately set about building a full-scale replica of the survivors’ raft in his studio, whereupon he hired models to starve themselves of food and water to simulate the full “grotesquerie.” The final product, “Raft of the Medusa,” was sublime.

Gericault’s painting created a sensation, much like Tobe Hooper’s wonderful “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) would do a hundred-and-fifty years later. Here there is no “lovable everyman” Tom Hanks; nor is there an anthropomorphized volleyball named “Wilson” designed to add comic levity. Rather, Gericault depicts an image of truly nightmarish proportions, but not without “sexy” undertones. Gericault, however, was not able to long enjoy the acclaim “Raft of the Medusa” brought him. Fulfilling his destiny as a “Romantic artist,” he successfully died himself only a few years later, at the tender age of thirty three.

A God, a Princess and "Warm Golden Showers": A Study of Gustav Klimt's "Danae"

2005-01-12T19:20:00.000-06:00

"Danae," 1907

The work of the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, (1862-1918) - founder of the school of painting known as the Vienna Sezession - embodies the high-keyed erotic, psychological, and aesthetic preoccupations of Vienna in the early twentieth century, the so-called “glazed era” of the city’s chocolate torte industry. Although considered the preeminent exponent of Art Nouveau today, Klimt was an incorrigible and scandalous figure to the over-fed Viennese of his time. Indeed, his work was constantly criticized for being too sensual and erotic, and his symbolism too deviant. In retrospect, it was only natural that Klimt used the most deviant Greek myth of all - that of Zeus' "golden shower" - as material for his most deviant painting: “Danae.”

In Greek mythology, Danae was the daughter of King Acrisius (Acrisius was the king of Argos). Unfortunately, the king learned of a prophecy that foretold that the future son of Danae would eventually kill him. In order to prevent this from happening, the king locked his daughter in a tall red tower, covered in purple vines, impervious to all would-be lovers. However, Zeus - the consummate philanderer of Olympus - was struck by the beauty of Danae, and soon lusted after her. To gain access to Danae, the enterprising Zeus transformed himself into a "warm shower of gold" and - in this form - washed over the young princess.

In "Danae," Klimt has focused on the "kinky" moment when the stream of Zeus' warm "golden shower" flows between the drawn-up thighs of the princess. Today, one need onlyGoogle "golden showers" to discover the extent of this myth's perverse nature; however, in Klimt's day, unusual fetishes were largely kept mum, even in Vienna's famous torte cafes. It is no wonder, then, that many viewers of "Danae" innocently considered the painting's subject matter "romantic" or "luxe." Only a select few of Vienna's "perverts," such as Sigmund Freud, were able to relish the true meaning of the painting. Klimt, for his part, reportedly defended the myth as "not as perverse as it may seem" because "the Olympian gods did not consume coffee or asparagus." Klimt did admit that the painting represents not so much a "shower" as the high-pressure effluent of a firehose, or water displaced by a tsunami. However, Klimit argued that - considering Zeus' stature as "King of the Gods" - his "warm golden shower" could not be depicted as a mere "tinkle."

Conflating the Iraq War, Art, Ads and Children's Programming: The Art of Randall Hawthorne

2005-01-12T16:16:00.000-06:00

"That's Good Enough for Me," 2004

If one image symbolized the US-led coalition's victory over Saddam Hussein it was the toppling of the dictator's statue in central Baghdad in 2003. Yet that signal moment has been replaced by a simpler and more engaging leitmotif: the grainy image of the lone, hooded Iraqi in Abu Ghraib, his hands outstretched on either side of him, electrodes attached to his fingers and genitals.

Knowing a good thing when they see it, many Americans readily appropriated the image for their own ends. For instance, the American sculptor Richard Serra - known for his large-scale minimalist works, such as “Tilted Arc” (1981) a rusted-steel “arc” in lower Manhattan that was dismantled in 1989 when nearby office workers demanded its removal - produced an image of the hooded detainee as a way to promote his political beliefs. Serra produced “Stop Bush,” a print that he has distributed widely both in art venues and in mainstream publications, as well as on the Internet. When quizzed about the questionable use of the figure as a vehicle for political ends, Serra testily responded, “I bet [the hooded detainee] wouldn’t mind the extra publicity. So piss off!”

Serra was not the only one to parasitically latch onto the image’s potency. Soon after the Abu Ghraib photographs were released, New York City experienced several days of “culturejamming” street advertisements for Apple's iPod, in which a silhouetted version of Abu Ghraib's shrouded and wired victim was inserted amongst grooving iPod-wearing hipsters. Blending into the posterized personages on the iPod ads, these ads for “iRaq” were signed off with the tagline: "10,000 Volts in your pocket, guilty or innocent." Within this context, these “street artists” attempted to explore the nature of torture through the colorful lens of American marketing.

Randall Hawthorne - the art world’s “master curmudgeon” who admittedly “dislikes” all modern art - has chosen this Abu Ghraib icon as a springboard for a merciless attack on American consumer culture and the banal artwork and agitprop it generates. In “That’s Good Enough for Me,” Hawthorne - in a dizzying display of appropriation, disappropriation and re-appropriation - ridicules Serra, “culturejamming” art, and the father of all consumer-art insipidness, Andy Warhol.

Here, for instance, Warhol’s infamous “Brillo Box” is turned into the proverbial soapbox for the hooded detainee-cum-Cookie Monster to declare “C is for Cookie.” In other words, Hawthorne demonstrates how the vitality of the original detainee photograph has been “gobbled-up” by the juvenile displays of Serra and the “culturejammers,” rendering it one more piece of junk food for our collective stomach. Simply put, Richard Serra’s art - though “good enough” for “cookie monster” - perhaps America’s greatest icon of high-speed consumer gluttony - is “not good enough for us.”

Sex, Violence and Art: Spotlight on Artemesia Gentileschi's "Judith Beheading Holofernes"

2005-01-11T09:56:00.000-06:00

"Judith Beheading Holofernes," 1620 (click image to enlarge)

Artemisia Gentileschi is considered the greatest female painter of the seventeenth century. Her work easily ranks among the best of her age, a feat made more remarkable considering the innumerable obstacles she had to overcome as a woman practicing within a bigoted, male-dominated profession. Indeed, the great Peter Paul Rubens wrote in his journal - the year Gentileschi first presented her work in public - that “a woman who professes to paint is like the uncommone platypus, a monstrous and devilish creation whom the Lorde need destroyeth in His Righteousness.” Rembrandt, in particular, waged a bitter and relentless campaign against Gentileschi as a “heathen shrew” whose technical skills he often lampooned as “cheese-fisted."

Beset on all sides by such enemies - not to mention the cat-calls and death threats she would regularly receive - Gentileschi responded through her preferred medium: paint. Perhaps most representative of Gentileschi’s seething indignation is her magisterial treatment of the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes. Over the course of her lifetime, Gentileschi painted six canvases on which this bloody narrative played out. Judith’s beheading of the tyrannical Holofernes represented a perfect vehicle for Gentileschi to show the murderous hatred she held for all the men - especially her venomous hatred of Rembrandt - that had made her livelihood so difficult to sustain.

The story comes from the apocryphal Book of Judith in the Old Testament. The Jewish town of Bethulia was under siege by the Assyrian army and its general, Holofernes. When the residents were at the brink of capitulation, a beautiful widow, Judith, devised a scheme for their deliverance. Dressing in her "kinkiest" clothing, Judith left Bethulia with her maid and entered the Assyrian camp as an ostensible deserter. Holofernes lusted after her and vowed to "bed her" before the night's end. After an orgiastic banquet, at which Holofernes became "bombed," the general lured the beautiful widow into his tent. Judith, however, expertly teased him, delayed their lovemaking, and poured him more wine until he fell asleep. Then she and her maid brutally cut off Holofernes' head with his huge sword. Upon seeing the severed head of their esteemed general, the Assyrian troops fled, and Judith saved her people.

Gentileschi's painting of this gruesome event is layered with allusions that provide much more depth than the story itself presents. Judith, for one, is a striking self portrait of Gentileschi herself. Moreover, Holofernes' face after Rembrandt's own, as she had seen it depicted in one of his many self-portraits that toured her hometown of Florence. The fact that Gentileschi depicts the "money shot" of the biblical narrative is likewise telling. Here, it is a woman who holds the "sword," the use of which occasions blood spurting all over the lurid, poorly lit "bedroom." The salacious and scandalous meanings of this "sexy role reversal" was all-too-clear, even to a seventeenth-century audience.

Unfortunately, Gentileschi's painting was not admired - let alone seen - by many during Gentileschi's lifetime. Upon its "release" to the city of Florence, the Florentine City Council labeled the painting "Restricted" to men over the age of twenty-one. Soon thereafter, it was placed in the Uffizi's "beaded curtain" section, along with such prurient works as Bellini's "What Giuseppe Saw" and Bernini's "Ecstasy of Saint Teresa."

Painting the Father of Our Country: Gilbert Stuart and George Washington

2005-01-10T17:21:00.000-06:00

George Washington ("Vaughn Portrait"), 1795

What does one think of when asked about George Washington? Chances are, three things come to mind: he led the colonies to victory in the War of Independence; he was the first president of the United States (1789-1797); and he lived at Mount Vernon, where his slaves re-created his favorite battle victories. In short, he was the "Father" of our country. Other than this - and the fact that almost every other street and school is named after him - George Washington has as much character as the uninspired, inscrutable monument named after him. But who was the “George” behind the bland and bloodless icon we read about in grade school?

To answer this difficult question, we must turn to the artist who had the greatest opportunity to convey the “real George” to America: the portraitist Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828). With a letter of introduction from Chief Justice John Jay, Stuart was granted his first sittings with George Washington at Philadelphia, then the capital, in March 1795. However, Stuart soon became so obsessed with Washington that, eventually, a restraining order was entered against him by Jay himself. Newspaper reporters were so bemused by Stuart’s craven infatuation - at one point, Stuart reputedly spied on Washington from beneath an outhouse - that they coined a popular name for him: Paparazzo.* Notwithstanding the restraining order and public ridicule, however, Stuart succeeded in making 104 or more likenesses of George Washington over the course of his lifetime.

The first of these images is the so-called “Vaughn Portrait,” which was completed shortly following Washington’s 1795 sitting for Stuart. Here we have, arguably, the most faithful and technically accurate representation of Washington ever made.** However, Stuart had to overcome Washington’s legendary “crankiness” during the portrait-process. The president, then sixty-three years old, grumbled about the drudgery of posing and the absurdity of painting in general. Indeed, Stuart reported that “an apathy seemed to seize him, and a vacuity spread over his countenance, most appalling to paint.” Upon Stuart’s requests that Washington tilt or move his head, the president reportedly muttered, “all painters sucketh that which wakes us in the morn.” Washington also refused to smile for Stuart, sarcastically commenting that his wooden teeth would “attract termites” if he left his mouth open for so long. Stuart, of course, refused to arrange anything on Washington’s person or dress himself; Washington’s aversion to human touch was well-known even to the public.

The completed portrait, however, was well worth Washington’s scathing sarcasm. Here, we have not Washington “the icon” but George, “our father,” imperious though he might be. Here, we have Washington’s delicate skin, flushed with annoyance. Here we have Washington’s famous pinched mouth and piercing black eyes, under which many cabinet members and congressmen were reduced to tears. In short, here we have Washington as he was known to his young, struggling country: hard-to-please, cold, demanding, stern, abusive, sneering, and unloving. Gazing upon Stuart’s portrait, it is not surprising why America remains a troubled nation: nothing the country did was ever good enough for “Father.” As Stuart lamented towards the end of his life, “Washington always withheld his love from me and from all Americans.” Accordingly, America continues to seek an affirming companionship - not to mention the affection and love Washington failed to provide it - from other sovereign nations, even when those nations find America's advances unwelcome.

*In late-eighteenth-century America, “paparaz” was slang for “human excrement.”
** Most art scholars believe Stuart’s other portraits and sketches suffered too much from Stuart’s “hero worship” to accurately depict Washington’s visage and persona.

For the Love of God, Was It Statutory Rape?: A Study of Fra Lippo Lippi's "The Annunciation"

2005-01-06T15:43:00.000-06:00

"The Annunciation," 1440 (click to enlarge image)

When one contemplates Fra Lippo Lippi’s resplendent 1440 painting, “The Annunciation,” statutory rape may not be the first thing that jumps to mind. Rather, the spectator is called to reflect on the glorious moment when the archangel Gabriel “announced” to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to the Son of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit. However, our worshipful perspective of this divine event shifts considerably if we reflect on the little-discussed fact that Mary was only a poor fourteen-year-old girl on that fateful year of the Savior's conception. Suddenly, it is not Yahweh “in his raiment of glory” that comes to mind but, rather, trailer parks, Amber Alerts, and the faces of Joey Buttafuoco, Roman Polanski, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

On the day of the "Annunication," the evidence (i.e., The Bible and the Apocrypha) demonstrates that Mary - the daughter of Joachim - was an impressionable and illiterate fourteen-year-old girl. Betrothed to the carpenter Joseph - in a questionable, arranged “child marriage” - one can only imagine Mary’s fear when Gabriel appeared in his blinding glory to announce, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” Luke 1:26-38.

Lippi’s “The Annunciation” depicts this pivotal, blessed event. Here, the Holy Spirit, symbolically rendered as a dove above Gabriel's head, shoots forth golden rays or beams - presumably the divine method of insemination - in the direction of the young virgin. How, physiologically speaking, Mary was impregnated in this matter has been hotly debated by Christians for two millennia. In Mary's day, however, it was readily believed that a bird and a woman could successfully conceive, as demonstrated by Leda's seduction by Zeus, who had taken the form of a large swan. For their part, artists have usually depicted Mary’s ear as the point where the dove conducts the insemination.* Alternatively, John Waters, in his acclaimed film Pink Flamingos, has demonstrated that even a chicken - in addition to a dove - may be efficacious in regard to successful sexual congress.

Of course, today, most Americans frown upon impregnating young teenage girls, with or without the involvement of our feathered friends. We now call this “statutory rape.” Statutory rape, legally speaking, is the crime of carnal knowledge of a female under the age of consent. Even if the female willingly participated (e.g., consider Mary’s response to Gabriel, “let it be with me according to your word”), the offense is nevertheless committed because consent is irrelevant. The age of consent varies but, in the U.S., is never below the age of sixteen. But how can one seriously accuse God (or the Holy Spirit) of statutory rape?

One could argue, for instance, that God (or the Holy Spirit) made a reasonable mistake as to Mary’s age; for instance, Mary could have shown Gabriel some form of false identification, she could have “dressed” older (note how Lippi, himself, depicts Mary as a woman who could pass for twenty), or she could have worn perfumes (e.g., frankincense and myrrh). Unfortunately, reasonable mistake is not a defense in the case of statutory rape. Alternatively, one could argue that it was really the Holy Spirit - not God - that committed the crime. However, this defense fails because of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, under which God and the Holy Spirit can be considered one and the same. Gabriel, too, would be implicated in the crime as God’s accomplice and could, theoretically, suffer several years in prison himself.

*For this reason, the dove is often used as a symbol for fertility clinics specializing in artificial insemination.

The Sexless World of Norman Rockwell

2004-12-22T17:36:00.000-06:00

"Santa Claus Reading His Mail"

During his long, prolific career, Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) produced 323 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a once-popular magazine with which Rockwell's name became synonymous. In fact, the Post could increase its print order by 250,000 whenever Rockwell's latest painting was featured on the cover, so popular the artist had become in America. The relationship was a symbiotic one; Rockwell himself described the Post cover as "the greatest show window in America." But Rockwell's immense commercial success had its downside: art critics loathed - and continue to loathe - Rockwell like no other artist, living or dead. Indeed, in a special Artology poll conducted in 2001, the Communal Association of Critics of the Arts ("CACA") ranked Idi Amin and John Wayne Gacy* ahead of Rockwell in a survey determining which historical and artistic figures art critics "would most like to have dinner with."

Rockwell evoked such venomous, critical contempt for two simple reasons: 1) his paintings are painfully accurate depictions of American life as every full-blooded American knows it to be (Rockwell, in fact, coined the expression "Love it or leave it!"); 2) he refused to paint anything "sexy." The first reason can be excused as a traditional critical dismissal of "photojournalist painting" as "real art"; however, the second reason cannot be excused because it represents sexual bigotry at its worst.

For years, clinical psychologists have diagnosed a specific cultural neurosis under which many art critics believe that anything without sexual content - explicit or implicit - cannot be considered "art." Even superbly executed still lifes - regardless of the technical skill demonstrated - are constantly subject to scathing critical reviews simply because the vegetables, fruits or glassware - as the subject may be - do not contain some sort of "pulsating" sexual content or innuendo. As Time art critic Robert Hughes has opined, "The art world is looking for what I call 'visual viagra.' If a work of art doesn't hit you 'down below' you might as well toss it in the rubbish."

Even Rockwell's most beloved paintings have been impugned for promoting a sick, sexless American world. "Consider 'Santa Reading His Mail,'" explains Art in America editor Yves Saint-Faueriuerer. "Here we have basically a 'crotch shot' perspective of Santa in his red undergarments which, obviously, should be milked for all it's worth. I mean, come on, we all know what 'Santa' really symbolizes. Just look at Eartha Kitt, 'Santa Baby' had it right more than half-a-century ago. And yet, what does Rockwell do here? I'll tell you what he does. He blacks out Santa's private parts in a sick display of de-sexualizing his painting."

*For a review of Gacy's painting, please see post below.

Celebrity Pregnancy and Modern Painting: The "Naked Portraits" of Lucian Freud

2004-12-22T10:51:00.000-06:00

"Naked Portrait 2002," 2002

Described by Time art critic Robert Hughes - the Billy Bush of the art community - as “today’s greatest realist painter,” Lucian Freud is best known for depicting leg-splayed, supine models - with whom Freud has usually had some form of sexual contact - who do not engage in grooming or dietary practices. Whether Freud is described as “realist,” “revival realist,” “superrealist,” or “figurative” in style and technique, one thing is absolutely certain: Freud does not like to paint his models completely nude; he likes to paint them completely naked. Indeed, looking closely at the oily folds of Freud’s paint and the aggressive fingering of his impasto, one is either enraptured or revolted by these “nakeds,” depending on one’s “aesthetic turn ons.” It comes as little surprise to viewers of his work that the painter is the grandson of the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, perhaps the most “sex-crazed” figure in modern intellectual history.

In 2002, however, Freud decided to enter a more visually appealing form of naked portraiture. That year, Freud discovered that former supermodel Kate Moss, long a fan of Freud’s work, expressed an unfulfilled wish that Freud would paint her nude. Jumping at the opportunity to enter the lucrative “celebrity skin” marketplace, Freud commenced the portrait at once. Known for working slowly, Freud had to accelerate his strokes to a feverish, sweaty, and heart-racing pace because Moss was pregnant and would, accordingly, change size and shape throughout the portrait-process. Moss, for her part, had to recline on bedding that smelled “funny.”

The end-product of the supermodel-artist “collaboration,” was “Naked Portrait 2002” - a painting now conservatively appraised at six million dollars (U.S.). Here we have the once-waifish Moss - erstwhile embodiment of the much-debated “heroin-chic” trend in fashion - now healthy, glowing, fleshy and tan. Moss also proudly exhibits her “cute pot-belly” to the world for the first time, sans belly button ring. It is a Moss that many would not readily identify, were it not for Freud’s expert rendering of Moss’ famous moles.

Critics applauded the unveiling of Freud’s foray into the demanding world of “pregnant celebrity” portraiture, which has become its own genre of popular art since Demi-Moore’s earth-shaking nude photograph on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991. Moss, herself, reportedly cannot wait until her son, Aubergine, is old enough to see himself “growing in mummy’s tummy.” Freud was simply ecstatic at the public enthusiasm for the portrait. At the reception held after the portrait's debut - held in the posh oxygen-bar <:) in the heart of Soho - Freud toasted Moss and the "Year of Celebrity Babies," as People magazine had deemed the year 2002.

Honoring the Dead: Richard Avedon, the "Eye of Fashion"

2004-12-21T13:16:00.000-06:00

Charlize Theron, actress, and Patty Jenkins, director of Monster, 2004

2004 was a tough year on fashion/celebrity photographers. Almost all of the "heavy hitters" are now gone: Cosmo's Francesco Scavullo, Vogue and Chic's Helmut Newton, and Got Milk's Annie Leibovitz. But it was the death of the "Eye of Fashion," Richard Avedon, on October 1, 2004 that made the glitterati pose in sadness most. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker - where Avedon was staff photographer since 1992 - perhaps summarized Avedon's flash best, "To known Dick Avedon was to know the sun." Indeed, no other celestial body - at least in our solar system - would be as apt a metaphor for the way Avedon nourished American life as we know it. For nearly half a century, Richard Avedon's camera was able to boil America's greatest cultural icons down to their "cultural thingnesses." From Durante's wagging nose to Nureyev's bunioned foot, from Marilyn Monroe's mournful breasts to Pat Sajak's twinkling eyes, Avedon gave us the essence of a celebrity or sophisticate at his or her lowest cultural denominator.

One of his last photographs, for instance, was of the young starlet Charlize Theron, accompanied by Monster director Patty Jenkins. Here, we have all the classic hallmarks of an Avedon portrait: black-and-white exposure; the "80s-exposed-brick-style" framing; a monochromatic, seamless backdrop; and, of course, a celebrity in her most vulnerable and unadorned "essence." Here, Theron - whom Avedon first met under the klieg-lights of 1995's Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest - is literally "stripped" naked before us. No longer is she the parti-colored lead of 2001's epic tear-jerker Sweet November; rather, Theron is pure cinematic "flesh" that welcomes the movie-goer's popcorn-buttery touch. Patty Jenkins' pose bolsers the effect by looking at Theron as if she were no more than a slab of cultural "USDA Choice," who will ensure Jenkins gets one more crack at directing a major movie, regardless of Monster's box office returns.

However, the complexity of Avedon's portrait is enhanced when the viewer acknowledges that the portrait evokes Theron's latest role: that of real-life serial killer Aileen Wournos in Jenkin's gruesome slasher film. Theron was literally born for the role: while pregnant with the soon-to-be-movie-star, Charlize's mother murdered her father, which induced Charlize's premature labor and birth. Not since Valerie Solanas - of S.C.U.M. ("Society for Cutting Up Men") and "I shot Andy Warhol" fame - has there been a more appropriate actress to tackle such a role. The classic Thelma and Louise now will have some elite company in the "empowering women through violence" movie genre.

Additionally, Theron was able to put on an undisclosed "twenty-some" pounds to play the heavier-set "trucker killer" Wournos. This may explain why Theron demurely covers her nudity for she is most certainly corpulent under our most cherished body-weight indices. Vulnerable yet vicious, beautiful yet beastly, Avedon captures Theron-cum-Wournos-cum-new-age-Elizabeth-Cady-Stanton better than God himself. Farewell Dick! May you and Wournos shine on in the "stars" above.

How Many Self-Portraits are Too Many?: The Paintings of Frida Kahlo

2004-12-21T09:27:00.000-06:00

Photograph of Frida Kahlo, c. 1941.

On September 17, 1925, at the age of eighteen, Frida Kahlo was involved in a horrific bus accident in Mexico City. She sustained an interminable list of injuries: broken spinal column, broken collarbone, broken ribs, broken thumb, broken legs (eleven fractures in one leg alone), crushed foot, broken big toes, dislocated shoulders, punctured ear drum, a bruised liver, a punctured lung, and a bloody nose.

Kahlo was pronounced dead at the local hospital but revived soon afterward. However, during this time Kahlo sustained an “out-of-body experience” that would forever define her artistic career: Kahlo, while she “flat-lined,” recalled floating above the operating room and witnessing how beautiful she looked compared to the doctors and nursing staff. Drawing on this experience during her long rehabilitation, Kahlo decided that the most important - not to mention the most appealing - “subject matter” in the world was herself. Accordingly, Kahlo set out on an artistic journey that would generate one-hundred-and-seventy-two self-portraits during her lifetime, a “record” of self-portraiture among modern painters, if such records were kept.

Some art critics have disparaged Kahlo as not only promoting her art by obsessively painting herself, but as tirelessly promoting her own “society status.” Indeed, Kahlo’s craving for fame and celebrity is matched only by her “Hollywood Painter” counterpart Tamara Lempicka.* For example, soon after her recovery, Kahlo succeeded in seducing and marrying the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera who, predictably, helped advertise Kahlo’s art throughout the world while it “piggy-backed” on his own. Similarly, when the Russian exile Leon Trotsky moved to Mexico, she succeeded in carrying on a “not-too-clandestine” affair with the great thinker. It is even thought that Kahlo had a hand in Trotsky’s assassination, something Kahlo herself joked about, just to ensure her reference in the history books.

To Kahlo’s enduring regret, however, she never was offered a part in a Hollywood picture. The closest she came to “iconic status” was in the form of the “Chiquita Banana Woman,” whose image was modeled after Kahlo’s own. In fact, several of Kahlo’s paintings have recently been “de-catalogued” because they were proven to be poster paintings made by commercial artists for the Chiquita company. If anything, Kahlo succeeded in becoming a caricature of herself during her lifetime, as a painter who indulged in loud, Mexican “stage-costume” and “stage-jewelry” that could always draw a crowd, even when her painting could not.

*For a discussion of Lempicka, see the Lempicka post below.

The Egyptian Art of Cat Mummification

2004-12-17T16:00:00.000-06:00

Cat Mummy, Ptolemaic Period (332-30 B.C.)

Today, dogs may be considered "man's best friend," but for the Egyptians, cats were the ascendant pets; in fact, recently deciphered hieroglyphics at Luxor indicate that the cats of pharoah Rameses II were often served "raw chopped dog" during royal festivals. Diodorus also tells us that in Egypt, whoever killed a cat - even by accident - was punished by being himself "declawed" (i.e., having the fingertips amputated), "spayed" or "neutered" (depending on the sex of the culprit), and whipped with a "cat-o'-nine-tails" that was made out of catgut. Cats received special treatment in death as well, with no expense spared.

The Egyptian art of mummification is well-known and well-recorded: at death, affluent Egyptians would have their blood, brains, and internal organs removed - to be preserved in alabaster jars, essentially "doggy bags." The corpse would then be rubbed with salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, and thyme, whereupon it would be roasted over a bed of "medium-heat" coals to ensure the skin and flesh would be tender. The body would then be wrapped in linens, placed in a stone casket known as a sarcophagus, and buried in a tomb along with possessions to serve them in the afterlife.

Along with possessions, the dead were usually joined with their most beloved companions: their cats. These cats would be mummified in the same meticulous way as their masters. Placed within their wrappings would be "cat food" to sustain their journety into the afterlife; much like the gourmet catfood Sheba, this food was composed of select cuts in meaty juices which could meet with the exact standards of any cat who demanded and deserved to be treated like royalty every day. In addition, the cats' wrappings were often decorated, as above, with fanciful renderings of the feline's supercilious appearance.

These mummified cats would not only kill any rats that would attempt to consume their "grilled" master, the cats would provide spectacular entertainments. Indeed, Egyptians believed cats would be able to speak, sing and dance, much like "Puss in Boots" from the beloved children's story. Egyptians were rightfully upset when nineteenth-century British archaeologists sent tons of cat mummies back to England to be used as soil fertilizer. These cats, however, might have had the last laugh. For instance, upon opening up King Tutankamen's tomb in 1922, several member of Howard Carter's famed expedition developed severe allergies to cat dander.

David's Jig is Up: Why Michelangelo was a Failure as an Artist

2004-12-13T08:35:00.000-06:00

"David," 1502

Michelangelo (1475-1564) has saturated the poster and "grandmother's-side-table" market for decades. Countless reproductions of the Sistine Chapel and the Pieta have been sold to an infinite number of "proud" Italian-Americans, gelati-stained tourists, the middle-class, the quasi-religious, and kitschmongers who have not kept "kitsch-pace." In other words, Michelangelo's stature as a member of the Italian Renaissance's great triumvirate - along with Leonardo and Raphael - has been "a given" to educated and uneducated masses alike. However, as we enter the new millenium we must now take a fresh look at Michelangelo's work and discover what Michelangelo, his doting apostles, and boilerplate art criticism managed to cover up for nearly five hundred years: Michaelangelo was a failure as an artist.

This may come as something of a surprise to the regular readers of this forum. However, if one takes a close look at Michelangelo's most representative - and most popular - work, David, the evidence speaks for itself. Officially considered a heroic figure of Florentine-republican ideology, David actually represents a degenerate human being who champions questionable grooming practices, while ignoring the necessity of male circumcision.

If one is not blinded by the flashbulbs on visiting David's present home, Florence's overpriced Galleria dell'Accademia, one will not find the diminuitive and plucky underdog of legend with his lucky slingshot; rather, one will see a stark-naked deformed monstrosity. Consider David's hand - if one may call it that - that would befit a lowland gorilla better than a small boy. The head, similarly, is that of a hydrocephalitic or, alternatively, a Cro-Magnon statute in the local museum, masked by a curly mass of hair that only Josh Groban could be proud of. Perhaps David was intended to be a crude joke, where "David" is actually a sculpture of his giant philistine foe, Goliath?

Regardless, it is David's grooming that is most disquieting. It is well-known that Michelangelo's lover, Pope Julius II, preferred hairless, young men. To satisfy Julius' predilection, and to gain the Sistine Chapel commission, Michelangelo obsessively plucked every hair from his chest, armpits, and scrotum. In fact, Charleton Heston was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Michelangelo in "The Agony and the Ecstasy," precisely because of his spot-on ability to depict the "agony" of his character's depilation. But Michelangelo did not stop there, he attempted to proselytize Florence's male population to do the same; it is for this reason that, except for his head and a cute mop of pubic hair above his genitals, David is completely hairless.

Moreover, these grooming practices could be excused had it not been for David's uncircumcised penis. The majority of American males - unchained to the "unclean" traditions of the old country - are circumcised. Medical research has shown for years that circumcision is necessary in order to enjoy sexual intercourse and to avoid debilitating penile infection and disease. Unfortunately, the legacy of David remains strong in Italy, where Italian men stubbornly adhere to the barbaric age and refuse to have their foreskin snipped off. One can only hope that, once Michelangelo's David is recognized for the misshapen art-school sculpture it is, that Italians - and the rest of Europe - will enter the age of sexual hygiene.

When War Serves Art's Ends: Pablo Picasso's Guernica

2004-12-13T08:27:00.000-06:00

"Guernica," 1937

Time magazine art critic, and resident blow-hard, Robert Hughes has called Guernica "the most powerful invective against violence in modern art." Those who have witnessed the new forms violence has taken in the twenty-first century beg to differ. In Guernica, Picasso depicts the infamous German bombing of the Basque town - of the same name - in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Sponsored by the "fascist whore" Francisco Franco, the bombing killed hundreds of women and children who were, presumably, innocent civilians. Today, however, we know that violence is not conducted by conventional means; rather, violence strikes randomly and indiscriminately as terrorists and suicide-bombers detonate explosives and themselves in schools, nightclubs, and water parks.

Accordingly, it is difficult to describe Guernica as anything else but a self-promoting and opportunistic "one-off" better suited for al Jazeera than an art museum. Here, Picasso regurgitates the cookie-cutter motifs we have long associated with the earlier work of the philandering, troll-like "genius": bulls, horses, collage, newspaper print, pale colors, and the ubiquitous Picasso trademark "flounder face." In other words, Picasso pasted together the most cliched tropes from his own aging portfolio. In fact, recent research has indicated that Picasso was searching for a title to a new painting he was in the process of painting when Gurenica was bombed, thereby providing a "cool" title that would resonate with his noncommittal, pacifist groupies in the Parisian cafes.

Additionally, when one takes a closer look at the "supersized" canvas, one is hard-pressed to find anything that resembles violence, let alone "the horrors of modern war." In this regard, Guernica is no more an "invective against violence" than a local monster-truck rally. In other words, one could easily title the painting "What the Hell is Going on in My Barn?!?" For instance, in the upper-center of the painting, a figure pokes his head into a well-lit "barnyard scene" composed of livestock and what could easily be described as a "square dance gone haywire." Simply put, horses, bulls and bulbous fingertips do not evoke modern violence, nor do faces that would be left on the cutting floor of "South Park." Perhaps, if we tacked on a cut-out of a Basque terrorist from today's Spanish papers, the desired "invective" could be produced.

Nonetheless, Guernica is trotted out whenever a self-indulgent artist argues that art "matters" in relation to modern historical and political events. Much like Richard Gere, Michael Moore, Rob Reiner, and Susan Sarandon, Picasso believed that his ability to provide visual entertainment entitled him to offer "important" opinions on geo-political events. What we do know is that Picasso amassed a small fortune selling opportunistic paintings such as Guernica, which he used to seduce young women who were all-too-willing to sacrifice their nubile bodies to Picasso's "republican cause."

"More than Six Feet Under": The Photography of Nancy Sherman

2004-12-10T18:31:00.000-06:00

"In a Station of the Metro," 2005

Nancy Sherman's work defies neat identification; however, she would readily agree that her oeuvre is decidedly "urban" and "gritty" in focus. Known for catching city workers, pedestrians, and shopgirls in fleeting, unguarded moments, Sherman has amassed one of the best portfolios of Amercian city personae of any contemporaneous photographer.

In her most recent photographic project, "More than Six Feet Under," Sherman has delved beneath the layers of asphalt and concrete to document life - or death as the case may be - that exists underneath our feet. The title of the project plays with several meanings: the depth at which bodies are traditionally buried, the Chapman Brothers' sensationalist-death juvenilia, and the once-popular HBO drama set in a California funeral home. However, the "more" is a mere red herring, for Sherman claims no greater access to "mortality" than these other folk, art, and cable phenomena.

Sherman's work, "In a Station of a Metro," intends to be unsettling. It succeeds. But why is it unsettling? The title alludes to the famous "imagist" poem by Ezra Pound of the same title: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet, black bough." This poem, as well as Sherman's earlier work, directs its attention to the ephemeral "image" that vanishes before the mind can fully fix on it. However, this photograph is not just a fleeting apparition of a "face"; it is a fleeting apparition of what Sherman calls a "detective farce."

What is going on here? Why is there a zipper on this woman's back? Is it just an advertisement or evidence of some unmentionable crime? Why is our perspective placed at such odd, unnerving angles? Where exactly are we in the "metro"? These questions fall into the black triangular crevice in the center of the painting. It is a twilight zone that has been "unzipped" itself, deep within the hot core of the city. The spectator is caught between the sexiness of the work, and its potential horridness.

Whale-Hunting Off Japan: The Woodblock Prints of Hokusai

2004-12-10T17:21:00.000-06:00

"The Great Wave Off Kanagawa," c. 1834

When one thinks of Japan, art is not the first thing that comes to mind; rather, one usually recalls Pearl Harbor, where the Japanese - unprovoked - murdered thousands of innocent Americans in cold-blood. Nonetheless, Japan has given birth to a large stable of notable artists, one of which went by the pseudonym Hokusai (1760-1849). Active during the Shogun-Edo Period, Hokusai was one of the best painters of Ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” school of printmaking.

Hokusai is best known in the West - where he is arguably the most “popular” Japanese artist - for his series of color woodcut prints, “Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji.” Today we associate Fuji with the Japanese-made camera film in the green-and-white cardboard box; however, during the Edo period Mount Fuji was synonymous with kiyakame - properly translated as “extreme sledding.” It is for this reason that the Japanese claim that the modern-day “bobsled” and “luge” actually got their first form on Honshu, not in the French Alps.

One of Hokusai’s most-recognized “Fuji” prints is “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” in which sleek Japanese whaling boats battle the angry Japanese Sea - with Mount Fuji disconcertingly small, yet serene, in the print’s background. The imminent crash of the wave and the frenzy of the whale chase rivets the spectator, who is compelled to imagine the majestic whale trying to escape the iron-barbed harpoons held in the sailors’ expectant hands.

Hokusai’s print also evokes the obsessive craving the Japanese have for whale meat which, even today, is considered a great delicacy. In fact, since 1987, Japan has openly mocked international whaling laws and has conducted commercial whale hunts in the North Pacific under the guise of “scientific research.” Japan is the sole country to research whales by killing them. Officially, the Japanese justify the whale hunts by claiming that whales “bully” smaller marine creatures.

Some Japanese officials, however, are more upfront about their obsession for whale meat. Minister of Defense Takashi Shigemistu, for instance, argues that a type of “teriyaki jerky” from the whale is almost “essential” when making long road-trips to Sapporo. Zagat’s dining guide to Tokyo likewise praises the flavor of whale meat, as well as the restaurants that serve it - such as Tariuichi in the Ginza shopping district. “The whale croquettes,” Zagat reports in its classic diction, “are Tok-y-yum!”

Surreal Scatology: The Work of Hieronymous Bosch

2004-12-10T10:26:00.000-06:00

Detail from "Garden of Earthly Delights," c. 1504

When one attempts to describe a painter of nightmares, one usually calls to mind Jerome (“Hieronymus”) Bosch (active c. 1470-1516). Indeed, the dark, phantasmagoric world of Bosch demands nearly an inexhaustible list of adjectives with which to properly describe it: surreal, grotesque, mad, ghoulish, baffling, hilarious, fantastical, republican, riotous, gothic, noxious, democratic, visionary, and so on.

The work that best captures the wild menagerie of Bosch’s imagination is “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” An immense triptych, it charts the world from Adam and Eve, through the temptations of the “garden of earthly delights,” only to end in hell (note, Bosch presents not even the smallest sign of heaven in the final panel, suggesting Bosch’s pessimism about our salvation).

Bosch’s hell, simply stated, is hell. Although one cannot presume to speak for all, most people would probably not enjoy an experience in such a place. Here, sinners are insulted, poked, stripped, teased, tortured, flayed, cooked, eaten, digested, and even defecated. However, the “hell panel” of the triptych is also populated by a wide array of idiosyncratic and ambiguous symbols and figures. Although the meaning of these symbols might have registered with Bosch’s contemporaries, today’s spectator may need some help deciphering these peculiar images.

Let us take, for example, a detail from the panel’s lower right side in which a “bird monster” devours one of the hapless sinners while its bowel movement is composed of another. In this detail, Bosch essentially presents an “adult version” of a children’s nursery rhyme compilation. The most obvious allusion, perhaps, are the blackbirds flying out of the “nether end” of the bird monster’s meal. Alluding to “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” these birds, however, are not baked in a kingly pie; rather, they are “cooked” in the colon of the unfortunate sinner. The sinner in the drum, on which a demon beats a rhythm, recalls the endearing rhyme “Aiken Drum,” in which Aiken wears a suit of “guid meat” and a “haggis bag” waistcoat. No doubt, the happy-go-lucky Aiken never imagined himself in this unpleasant predicament! At the bottom of the panel we see a limp and despairing Snow White, her beauty now gone and her once-beautiful hair now without body or color. The mirror that once pronounced her “the fairest of all,” now is mounted on another sinner’s behind, indicating that Snow White was an obnoxious “butthead” - if we use common vernacular - all along.

These are just a few of the complex associations these images would have had for Bosch’s contemporaries. The rest of these “adult-nursery-rhyme” images are just too numerous to fully gloss (e.g., “whomever wears a pot on the head will eat you dead,” “animals that skate surely thee will hate,” “inhale from a bong, and your spirit doth wrong.”). One must point out, however, that Bosch was not without a sense of humor. Hell, despite being a flaming cesspool in itself, is not without its rules; for instance, note the poor sinner who is forced to vomit in the "porcelain goddess" underneath the bird monster's latrine.

Family and Hygiene in Fin-de-Siecle Paris: Mary Cassatt's "The Bath"

2004-12-09T16:58:00.000-06:00

"The Bath," 1893

Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) was one of the few American interlopers in the French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist movement. Born in Pittsburgh - a great coke-works and steel manufacturing center at the time - Cassatt traveled to Europe to devote herself to "pretty scenes" that, Cassatt argued, "one cannot find in a dirty industrial town in Pennsylvania." Attempting to discard her American identity, Cassatt adopted the trappings of French culture and costume, and made herself physically available to French painters like Degas and Monet.

In "The Bath," Cassatt presents a delightful domestic scene of a French mother bathing her child. Although a scene commonly depicted today, this subject matter was very unconventional at the time, as was the elevated perspective afforded the spectator. In addition, Cassatt's interest in Japanese prints - a fad known as Japonisme - is evident in the bold patterns of the carpet beneath the washing basin. All of these elements suggest an art that fully embraced the "French manner." Recent scholarship, however, indicates that this family scene is like no other. The "mother," Cassatt's biographer Mary Pearson has demonstrated, was really a well-known giantess of a Montmarte sideshow named "Gran Babette." Thus, Cassatt was not just cropping forms in an "impressionistic way" when she painted the monstrously large left hand and impossibly long lower body of the "mother." The model of the "child," similarly, was not an ordinary child but an exceedingly obese prepubescent Spanish boy named "gordo," another attraction who performed with Gran Babette.

"The Bath" also provides insight into French hygiene at the turn of the century. Note that there is no soap and no cleaning instruments, such as a sponge. Although hard to imagine in America today, Cassatt here confirms the well-known rumor that the French do not bathe properly. The spectator, however, is left to imagine for himself or herself how this scene would affect his or her olfactory glands.

Seventeenth-Century Erotica: The Work of Bartolomeo Manfredi

2004-12-09T15:49:00.000-06:00

"The Master's Dungeon," c. 1605-10

Though popularly known now as “the Larry Flynt of the 17th Century,” Bartolomeo Manfredi is anything but a common pornographer. By no means did Manfredi’s art depict the lowly sexual pleasures associated with a mass publication like Hustler; rather, Manfredi’s paintings seek the great sensual refinements that exist in the practice of sadomasochistic fetishism.

Manfredi learned his craft in 17th Century Rome which, at the time, was Italy’s equivalent of the San Fernando Valley. There, Manfredi was drawn into the shadowy world of the Caravaggisti, who luxuriated in “shrimp jobs,” “atm,” and Egyptian cottons. Although the Vatican provided some semblance of moral order, many of Rome’s painters openly flouted papal bulls prescribing what we would today term “normal heterosexual behavior.” Manfredi, for one, often frequented the transvestite “taverns” located deep in the Roman catacombs, where he would witness Grand-Guignol-type entertainments.

In “The Master’s Dungeon,” Manfredi depicts one-such scene in all its lush decadence. Not only is it a brilliant example of chiaroscuro, the painting represents the pinnacle of Roman fetishistic art. Here, the spectator’s gaze is immediately drawn to the highlighted backside of the blindfolded “victim of pleasure.” A strangely androgynous figure, this “victim” is clearly in a state of orgasmic climax and awaits only the “trigger,” no doubt to be provided by the knotted ropes about to sting his white flesh. Holding this “whip” is a transvestite wearing a black-latex bodice and red gown; clearly, this is the “master” of the erotic dungeon.

The master’s chest, meanwhile, is being molested by a bare-breasted woman, who apparently has just gotten out of the black rubber “hood” lying on the ground. Her red nose not only conveys drunkenness, but also a base lechery commonly associated with the Italians. Manfredi includes other traditional symbols of perversity in the foreground of his painting, in case the painting’s figurative “message” is somehow lost. For example, we have a “broken arrow,” symbolizing a world in which men and women don’t “shoot straight.” Likewise, a “wing” of feathers rests beneath the “victim,” symbolizing the “ticklish naughtiness” of breaking the “laws of nature.”

Unfortunately, Manfredi’s painting has recently been touched by controversy in that NAMBLA (the “North American Man Boy Love Association”) has adopted “The Master’s Dungeon” as its official logo. For this reason, the painting has been removed from public view and now rests in the Art Institute of Chicago’s “back room,” wrapped in black plastic.

When the Art World Swallows Itself: The Legacy of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"

2004-12-08T08:50:00.000-06:00

"Bubbler," 2005

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp - the Bjork of his age - thumbed his nose at the art world when he submitted a common men's-room urinal - entitled "Fountain" and signed by the fictitious "R.Mutt" - to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Predictably, the art world erupted in indignation and the concept of "art" has never been the same. Today, virtually anyone with rudimentary motor functions can be called an artist, as the success of Sophia Coppola's friend, Elizabeth Peyton, clearly demonstrates. The art community, similarly, has adopted a most dreadful and annoying posture of indulgent self-analysis; for instance, art school students are often required to know twenty-seven answers to the question, "what is an artist?," before they are even allowed to see a "real" nude model.

Contending with Duchamp's legacy has become a cottage industry for art theorists and has provided lecture material for a massive shovelful of uninspired, liberal-arts professors. But the most invidious symptom of Duchamp's influence is Duchamp's constant "re-appropriation" by artists that believe they are too clever for their own good. The "appropriation artist" Sherrie Levine, for one, has made a career out of Duchamp's "ready-mades." In 1991, for instance, Levine allegedly questioned the notion of "authorship" when she cast a "Fountain-like" urinal in bronze. People that saw this work, however, reportedly did not find it worthwhile to form an "answer."

Jerry Blutowski's "Bubbler" provides another riff on Duchamp's "Fountain," though with much more intriguing results. Instead of making the urinal a traditional "sculpture" - as Levine attempted to do - Blutowski's installation actually looks more "real" than any urinal a typical male spectator would normally encounter. Here, we not only have another "Fountain," we have all the "urinal trappings" that Duchamp, and Levine, were too timid to incorporate: the blue deodorizing "puck," the deodorizer's white plastic "placeholder," a small pool of the artist's urine (which has not properly drained), and a suspicious tissue (i.e., what use was made of it exactly?) that lays undisturbed at the foot of the urinal stall. Certainly, this is a urinal that is not afraid to be called a urinal.

However, Blutowski pushes the avant-garde's envelope even further, by entitling his work "Bubbler." What, one may ask, is a bubbler? Here, in a brilliant reversal of Duchamp's "universalizing" of art, Blutowski entitles his work with slang for "water fountain" that would only be understood by certain residents of the American Middle West. Only by knowing the etymology and meaning of this term will allow the spectator to be "inside" the joke: by re-appropriating Duchamp's "Fountain," the art community continues to swallow the waste of a long-dead Frenchman.

Art and Advertising: The "DPG" Art of Dawn Clark Netsch

2004-12-03T18:34:00.000-06:00

"Call me Ishmael," 2005

Today, the average American consumer is bombarded with ten thousand commercials, on average, a day. These commercials are slick, sharp and visually brilliant; the best advertising corporate money can buy. We inhale these product pitches as naturally as the oxygen-rich air we breathe. But at what price? Many public intellectuals have devoted their lives generating modern-day jeremiads about today's culture, in which they argue that such advertising dulls the human intellect and its ability to distinguish valuable and useful information from worthless visual garbage.

Painters, likewise, lament the "advertising route" cultural reification has taken. For example, the artist Dawn Clark Netsch (no relation to the well-known legal scholar and former Illinois comptroller) has mounted an acerbic challenge to America's advertising culture, which she terms "tasteless cotton-candy culture." In particular, "DCN" has formed an aesthetic movement called "DPG" art, or "Double-Plus-Good" art, in reference to the dumbed-down "newspeak" promulgated by the totalitarian society depicted in George Orwell's 1984. "DPG" art seeks to subvert the glossy and intellectually obtuse commercial speak, or "adspeak" if we use DCN's term, that saturates the language with which we use to communicate ideas and feelings.

In "Call me Ishmael," DCN targets a popular ad campaign by a submarine sandwhich conglomerate. In this ad campaign, a "real-life" social moron and misfit named Jared Fogle is represented as finding "friends" because he lost weight after - it is claimed - he ate submarine sandwiches. The absurdity of Jared's "success" is not lost in DCN's trenchant critique. As DCN expressed in a recent Artology panel discussion at Princeton University, "Jared is persona non grata in American culture. Nobody gives a ---- about him, and yet we are constantly confronted with his vacant smile, dead eyes and slack jowls."

The title of the painting is an obvious allusion to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. But what exactly is DCN's intent here? The high-blown allusion is contrasted with what appears to be a competent study of digital "grade-school art." Although a classically trained draftswoman, DCN has adopted this so-called "idiot art style" to challenge the over-produced, perfect presentations we see during our prime-time shows. Her painting is arresting precisely because it is so "bad." And yet, it is much more complex than any commercial one sees on television.

Here, Jared rides a "white whale" of his own "logorrhea." Endlessly talking about his non-existent "friends," his verbal flatulence is one pinprick from sinking him, and the ad campaign he represents, into the depths of culture's "Davy Jones locker." Like the megalomaniac Ahab, he is blind to the stupidity of his "diet quest" to be popular. DCN's art irreverantly shows that Jared has elminated his hundreds-of-pounds-of "fat" much like excrement in a colostomy bag, through a "subway." It represents a filth-ridden pipe-dream that anyone can escape from being a bloated "waste of space" by eating today's equivalent of "soylent green." The fact that this "whale of a tale" (or "tale of a whale," depending on the spectator's point of view) is the only thing preventing Jared from plummeting into a vast ocean of half-digested cultural pablum is not lost on the spectator. Potential "friends of Jared," in other words, are brought to heel once confronted with the fact that Jared will always be a social outcast, regardless of his present-day weight. "Weightloss is only a smokescreen," DCN argues. "Just look at Renee Zellweger," DCN quipped, "by gaining and losing weight for her roles she has tricked the American people into thinking she can actually act. This farce has to end."

Earth Art: The Work of Philip Wren

2004-12-03T16:29:00.000-06:00

"Fort," 1979

Earth art first gained prominence with Robert Smithson's 1970 "Spiral Jetty," a fiddlehead-fern-like rock "jetty" that he created on the shore of Utah's Salt Lake. Smithson and fellow earth artists, like Philip Wren, consider most traditional and modern art - especially abstract art - mere folderol that further divorces human life from, literally, the "ground beneath its feet." "Let's see how long a Pollock 'drip painting' will last in a bath of salt water," Wren once declared, "the point being that art should be about what lasts. You may try to describe Pollock's 'transcendent aesthetic vision,' but I could just reach down and crack your skull with this piece of shale. Now you decide what matters most to you today, this piece of shale or 'Lavender Mist'."

In his earth installation, "Fort," Wren offers a wry comment on the folly of defensive earthworks. Here, Wren has constructed a small "fort" out of unworked dolomite rocks on the shore of America's wonderful body of freshwater, Lake Michigan. The rocks of the "fort" - ashen and bleached by constant wear - nearly blend in with the surrounding rocks, as though it hardly exists; this, in spite of the great human effort expended to build the fort's ramparts. "It made me want to cry," Wren spoke of the project, "because an individual's 'work' is worthless when one reflects on 'geological time,' and the fact that we, as humans, are no more than mayflies in the universal scheme of things. No, not even mayflies, merely lice on the head of an unwashed Frenchman."

At the unveiling of "Fort," Wren provided an even larger assortment of reasonos to despair: "Do you even know that the earth is losing its magnetic field? And that the solar winds - no longer deflected by it - will eventually strip away earth's atmosphere, leaving us no better off than Mars? We're screwed, and yet we go on as though humans will always roam the planet. Nobody should be happy when you think about it." Unfortunately, during Wren's discussion of "fort," a group of prepubescent boys attacked its outer wall, believing that it was "Osama bin Laden's 'hiding place,' like in that place Torah Barber."

Color-Field Painting: The Minimalist Work of Mark Rothko

2004-12-03T14:59:00.000-06:00

Untitled ("Snow Hunger"), 1957

During the 1940s and 1950s many American artists experimented with the use of flat areas or fields of colors. Emerging out of the "New York School" or "Abstract Expressionism," these artists generally sought to evoke a sublime emotional reaction from the spectator, who would gaze transfixed - into the "transcendent" colors to find the "story" to be told there.

The leading "color-field" practitioner of this generation, of course, was Mark Rothko. From the 1940s, to his suicide in 1970, Rothko's canvases enacted infinite permutations of luminous color blocks juxtaposed in such a way as to evoke a particular emotion, thought or instinct: love, hate, anger, sciatica, fear, irritation, and despair. Oftentimes, he would draw upon ghoulish tales from U.S. history to underscore the particular emotion or instinct he attempted to stir within the spectator. In Rothko's "Snow Hunger," for example, Rothko concentrates on two of our most primal needs: the need to stay warm, and the need to eat. Rothko understood, as do we all, that the confluence of these two needs can lead to the most horrific human ordeals. It is for this reason, that "Snow Hunger" contains so many references to the doomed Donner Party expedition of 1846-47.

Bountiful - and lurid - reports, films, books, and songs of the Donner Party are easily accessible by us today. And yet, it is hard to empathize with the survivors of that fated expedition who laid buried and starving in the worst blizzard in the Sierra Nevada's history. Rothko's powerful painting conjures up the question we all fear to ask: Would we eat human flesh if we had to?

Here, Rothko reduces the Donner Party story to its bare essentials: snow, hunger, blood, flesh, fat and bone. The white "block" is clearly evocative of snow, of purity, innocence and of cold - yet it also signifies the fat deposits that slowly wasted away on the starving victims and the bones that the Donner party had to lick clean. The diluted orange-red block on the top portion of the painting, of course, evokes the blood spilled on the snow of the Sierra Nevada, which the children would scoop up like sno-cones. The central "block" signifies the human liver, the most protein-rich of all our organs which - as reports of cannibalism have confirmed - also tastes the best ("like braunschweiger" is one common description). It was the liver that helped those fortunate few survive that terrible winter. It is through such powerful allusions that Rothko's work really "hits us in the gut."

Art of the Atomic Age: Henry Moore's "Nuclear Energy"

2004-12-03T09:04:00.000-06:00

"Nuclear Energy," 1967

On December 2, 1942, in a converted squash court under Stagg Field Stadium at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi and his team of scientists achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in human history. The atomic age had begun. Twenty-five years later, the renowned British sculptor Henry Moore unveiled - in commemoration - his sculpture "Nuclear Energy," near the spot where the chain-reaction took place. However, the public response was nothing what Moore had expected.

"That doesn't look a damn thing like nuclear energy!," Dr. Fermi exclaimed at the ceremony, within earshot of Chicago Tribune reporter Barry Waxman. Dr. Eugene Wigner, another scientist who was present at the first chain-reaction, sniggered, "I bet Moore doesn't even know what a neutron is. My granddaughter could make a better atomic model in her easy bake oven." Pressed by Waxman regarding such vitriolic attacks on his work, Moore snipped, "What do they know about art anyway? And, come to think of it, why don't we all thank them for inventing the nuclear bomb. Good work guys. The whole world really appreciates it."

When Artists Paint the Handicapped: The Strange Magic of "Christina's World"

2004-12-01T18:02:00.000-06:00

"Christina's World," 1948

Ask a teenage girl about her favorite painting and she will probably start gushing effusively about Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World." Evocative of such classics as "Little House on the Prairie," when young women entertained simpler roles in society, the painting conveys a cloying nostalgia for everything our modern culture disdains: inefficiency, brownness, unpainted wood, ugly shoes, farming, slowness, and boredom.

Yet "Christina's World" also fascinates for a far different reason. Here, Wyeth depicts a severely crippled woman - "Christina" - who does not have access to any type of "handicapped aids," such as crutches, a walker, or a wheelchair. Without depicting such "enabling equipment," Wyeth's painting becomes terribly disturbing, on both figurative and symbolic levels. What is a crippled woman doing out there in the first place, so far from her house? Did someone play a cruel prank on her? Why is she propped up in that awkward position? Is she pretty or is she turning her head from the spectator because she's not "good-looking enough"? Many of these questions just can't be answered, leaving our imaginations to supply explanations that are, inevitably, as "twisted" and sordid as Christina's own body.

Nonetheless, "Christina's World" has such passionate fans that the real-life site of the painting - the Maine farm of the real-life Christina Olson - has become a mecca for the maudlin. Tens of thousands of "Christina boosters" visit the farm every year. There, for ten dollars, visitors can don a replica of Christina's pink house dress and a "Christina wig" - complete with blonde highlights, whereupon they can attempt to drag themselves up the hill as though they, too, suffered from a degenerative muscular disease. "I finally understand," life-long "Christina fan" Dale Visconti expressed upon completing one such "Christina crawl," "why Christina thought the world was a flaming crock of shit. But I still don't understand why she just didn't get a wheel chair to make it a lot easier."

American Superrealism: The Work of A. B. Bear

2004-12-01T09:43:00.000-06:00

"Jumbo Coins," 1973

Since Phidias, painters and sculptors have been fascinated with creating a facsimile that gives the illusion, as completely as possible, of being what it represents. At an instinctive level the pleasures of conjuring are involved, of trompe-l'oeil; at a professional level, the artist wants to showcase his dazzling skill; on an intellectual level the artist questions ideas of illusion and reality, the reality of reality. However, a group of American artists in the 1960s and 1970s mounted an unprecedented campaign of "superrealist" artwork that pushed our conceptions of reality to the extreme. A. B. Bear was a principal, dynamic force behind this "superrealism" movement.

Bear's 1973 piece, "Jumbo Coins," contains all the hallmarks of Bear's finest superrealist work. Here, Bear has transcribed reality - "jumbo" American coins - in precise detail and has achieved a photographic verisimilitude unparalleled even by the masters of the Renaissance. However, the painting is unmistakenly American in its scale and subject matter. "Jumbo Coins" measures an astonishing 20 x 20 feet, practically demanding its own gallery atrium to be properly viewed. The subject matter, likewise, is American in that the coins bear the profiles of America's "jumbo" presidents: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy. The fact that Bear has chosen "jumbo" novelty coins to represent - rather than pedestrian coinage - further enlarges the "superrealism" of Bear's artistic endeavor. Here, "Jumbo Coins" represents American consumers' infinite obsession with "bigness" or "supersizedness": whether it be "jumbo burgers," "jumbo jets," or "jumbo Cokes."

Although Bear's style is decidedly dispassionate, in the sense that she makes no overt or explicit "political" or "polemical" statement in her piece, "Jumbo Coins" does invite reflection over America's obsession with getting, as Bear once said, "the absolutely biggest thing you can get your hands on." Where does jumbo become too jumbo? When does the novelty of "jumboizedness" cease to be "fun"? When does America's "jumbo mania" turn into an irreversible trend of nightmarish proportions, where the word "small" may not even be uttered without punishment? Beneath the gloss and the surface lustre of "Jumbo Coins," such questions loom ominously.

Conceptual Art of the New Millenium: The Work of Ryan Tanarate

2004-11-30T14:12:00.000-06:00

"Disney Final Structure Chart," 2004

In the mid-1960s, radical artists made strident efforts to overturn "classical" definitions of art, and its overt - and often "unholy" - reliance on the visual world. Roughly grouped together under the rubric "conceptual artists," these artists wanted to move the alliance between artistic activity and the "pleasing aesthetic form," to that of an alliance between art and the "idea of art," or the "idea behind art." In other words, these "conceptual" artists wanted to end the tyranny of the "eye" over the "mind."

However, the first generation of conceptual artists - such as Joseph Kosuth and On Kawara - still demonstrated a dependence on "artistic" or "painterly" activity (e.g., Kawara painting a random date on a large canvas, with oils). Although the "mind" of the spectator was now courted, as well as her eye, the spectator could still remain unengaged, lulled by the "pretty" arrangement of color on a particular form. The challenge posed to the new generation was how to relay the "color" of an idea or the "shape" of socio-historico-political thought without relying on traditional "artistically mollifying" means.

Enter Ryan Tanarate. Although a classically trained painter, Tanarate's work shows utter contempt for other conceptual artists who attempt to retain some trappings of the "professional" artist. Adopting a faux-naif style, the idea, in Tanarate's work, dominates. As Tanarate indicated in a rare interview with Artology last year, "The IDEA is the most important subject an artist has to convey. Dress the IDEA up as a two-bit whore and it'll play the part."

In Tanarate's most recent work, "Disney Final Structure Chart," the "IDEA" is stripped of all visual and "aesthetic bagging." Here, Tanarate presents the "IDEA," the core, the skeleton of the beloved Disney company. Mind you, however, this is no depiction of an avuncular "Walt" or "magical and animated family entertainment." Rather, Tanarate has boiled Disney down to its bones like a forensic scientist. Pieced back together, Disney assumes a monstrous skeletal shape of a multi-national conglomerate rooted in every profitable market on the globe. "Disney" is no longer a soft, plush costume with endearingly oversized mouse ears; the spectator is given no "visual respite." Faced with this diagrammatic "skeleton," the spectator must struggle to rebuild the "image" of Disney. This time, however, the spectator's "mind's eye" can only envision a malevolent and spiritually bankrupt corporation masquerading as "wholesome fun." As Tanarate has explained, "Wake up people! Disney doesn't exist. Money exists. And money doesn't give a flying ---- about some damn fish trying to find its way through the sewer system. "

"America's Chagall": The Work of John Wayne Gacy

2004-11-29T10:12:00.000-06:00

"Self-Portrait as Pogo the Clown," 1988

John Wayne Gacy has been termed “America’s Chagall,” and with good reason. Much like Chagall, Gacy was influenced at an early age by the Fauvist and Expressionist legacy. In particular, they both delighted in the Fauvists' strident use of brilliant color, as well as the Expressionists' representations of humankind’s raw instinct and emotion. Although a consummate draftsman - whose early, formal sketches are comparable to that of a young Ingrés - Gacy consciously adopted a simple, fantasist imagery in his painting that rivals the whimsical charm of Chagall's best flights of fancy. Indeed, Gacy was obsessed in his exploration of the child's fertile imagination; his serial treatment of certain images - such as the image of the clown - provides clear indicia of this innocent obsession. For it is through “primitive art,” Gacy believed, that humans can begin to understand their fundamental impulses - the impulses that predate and pre-exist culture-specific mappings of the psyche.

In particular, Gacy delighted - like expressionists James Ensor and Ed Gein before him - in representing those endearing "face-masks" that populate our most cherished memories. As Gacy discovered during Halloween celebrations in his native Chicago, the “mask” was a potent symbol of the reductive division between the external “superego” of "institutional" or "governmental" society, and the internal "id," with its frothy admixture of primitive cravings. Gacy,k as an artist, also relished the interplay between the “fakeness” of the mask and the “fakeness” or "artificiality" of modern painting. As Gacy matured as an artist, he realized that - via expressive distortions and a conscious awkwardness in composition - his art could retain a “brutal freshness” that could not be found in “classical” or formal art. Gacy, himself, described the motives behind his aesthetic project: "I wish to make young men swoon, to be overcome, to give themselves up to me in that dazzling play between art and life."

Gacy’s faux-naïf style is apparent in his 1988 painting, "Self-Portrait as Pogo the Clown." The painting’s brilliant colors convey an immediacy, or “emotional freshness,” that cannot be refined away by shade or hue. Although evocative of the expressionist era, “Pogo” also evokes pop culture in that its subject matter is decidedly "low." The fact that it is a “self-portrait” also adds a postmodern dimension to the work: is Gacy suggesting that the modern artist may only be a ridiculous “clown,” a “mute-and-dumb” entertainer, or a parodic minstrel? Gacy does not provide easy answers to these questions; rather, he invites us into his imaginative crawl space, where we may find the remains of past indiscretions and past "skeletons" that, despite our best efforts, can never decay fast enough. It is precisely this crawl space that well-known artists, such as Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman, have visited while developing their own "clown-centered" works.

Tragically, Gacy was never able to fulfill his full promise as an artist. Institutional authority - whose black-and-white imposition of moral order he battled throughout his life - finally succeeded in stifling his creative output. Incarcerated for trumped-up charges, Gacy’s life was cut short on May 10, 1994, when he was administered a lethal injection by the state of Illinois. As friend, patron, and former first lady, Rosalyn Carter eulogized, "John was the rare artist who pushed the margins of experience in life to immortalize the imagination in death. We shall not soon forget him."

Why British Painting Does Not Matter: A Case Study of John Constable

2004-11-24T13:42:00.000-06:00

"Wivenhoe Park, Essex," 1816

As the old adage goes, "It's easier to catch a gnat in a windstorm than find a British painting of any worth." Of course, it's not monetary worth that is at issue; indeed, paintings by the British painter of today's focus, John Constable, are regularly sold for millions (U.S.) to social-climbing nouveau riche as well as those that have no appreciation of art. What is at issue is whether British painting is of any "worth" when an astute, twenty-first-century spectator looks at it for any length of time. The answer to this question, simply put, is "no."

Consider the perfect example of John Constable (1776-1837), an archetypal "British painter" if ever there was one. Known for his "six-footers" (a term Constable used himself, as though Constable was trading bolts of tweed), Constable is considered a master landscape painter who could "grasp everything beautiful in rural scenery." In "Wivenhoe Park, Essex," for instance, Constable "grasps" the pretty charms of a well-manicured park, complete with cow, swan, and fluffy cumuli nimbus. A very pleasant scene indeed.

And yet, it has absolute no value to us. It is bland and empty of any import whatsoever. It is no wonder that Constable is known as the "milquetoast painter"; indeed, a drooling babe prattling at one's knee would delight in such pap. This is British painting in its vapid glory.

Now there may be those critics who point to other British painters who had a much more decided influence on the world of art; from Holbein and Van Eyck to Francis Bacon. However, these critics fail to recognize that the only good "British painters" are those who were born elsewhere and who found an England hospitable to anyone who could hold the brush with some purpose.

Critics may also point to a recent "renaissance" of british painting in the form of the BYA ("British Young Artist" movement; e.g., Damian Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, etc.). The response is two-fold. First, a "reniassance" is, literally, a "rebirth"; in the case at hand, British painting was never properly "born" so there can be no "rebirth," ergo, the logic of such critics is absurd. Second, the BYA's success is simply explained by the fact it has found the consummate "booster" Charles Saatchi, the multi-billionaire "adman" who, via shrewd advertising and coffers of loot, can promote the artists whose work he owns. In other words, one sees the BYA for what it is, a bunch of infantile brats who found a rich sugar daddy to promote their piss-poor work.

By no means do I denigrate, here, British contributions to philosophy and literature; all praises thereupon are well-earned. Nonetheless, British painting continues to struggle on like an old, lame horse to the glue factory. Critics may only ask that it is put out of its misery.

The Re-birth of Modern Art in a Twenty-First Century Consumer Culture: The Work of Ignacio Lucientes

2004-11-24T09:55:00.000-06:00

"Remember that Guy Who Used to Be Called Wild Thing?," 2004 (study after Edouard Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, 1863)

The history of modern art, arguably, began in the spring of 1863 at the Salon des Refusés. There, Parisians were scandalized by Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). Here, they found no idealized, classical presentation of a “nude”; rather, salon visitors were shocked to see - staring at them in the most brazen and shameless manner - a naked woman (this is no goddess mind you!) who will, most likely, “turn a trick” with her fellow picnicers (note the way she plays “footsie” with the pant leg of the Muslim man on the right). In the background, another streetwalker scrubs herself, presumably after having provided her own “sensual services” to the young men, one of whom looks indifferently in the distance, as if conveying a complete disdain for the prudent mores of nineteenth-century France.

Today, Manet’s painting no longer shocks us. Indeed, it is something we might even find hanging over many grandmothers’ beds. What has happened over the last one-hundred-and-fifty years to make this possible? The answer can be found, in part, in the growing immorality of the world. Today’s gallery-goer has, on average, already “consumed” one million images of “naked” men or women - in one form or another - in magazines, on television, on videotapes, on dvds, and on the silver screen. In such a world, Manet’s naked woman certainly pales in “sluttiness” to that of, for example, Lindsay Lohan or Tara Reid.

In “Remember that Guy Who Used to be Called Wild Thing,” the Basque artist, Ignacio Lucientes, plays with the historical, sexual and aesthetic shifts in our understanding of what is “wild.” Here he has turned Manet’s painting on its head. Evoking a contemporaneous Viagra advertising campaign, Luciente’s crude rendering of the phrase “He’s Back!” invites the seemingly simple question, “Who’s Back?” Is Manet, once a “wild thing” in the arts world, “back,” with Lucientes’ help, after decades of suffering in “dorm wall hell?” Is it the bearded and Viagra-horned gentleman in the painting “back,” who looks like he could use a little “lift” himself before getting what he has paid for? Is Lucientes, perhaps, alluding to Lucientes himself, who, in 2001, was ranked the second “wildest artist” in the world by Maxim magazine? Obviously, Lucientes’ “revisions” of Manet’s painting invite complex interpretations of sex and art, what Lucientes unites under one category, which he has named “sexaesthetica.”

Works of the Jazz Age: The Paintings of Tamara de Lempicka

2004-11-23T11:16:00.000-06:00

"Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti)," 1925

Many professional art critics, if they could, would defecate generously upon the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka (b. 1898, Poland; d. 1980). Hollywood stars and wealthy musicians, on the other hand, can’t seem to get enough of Lempicka’s glamorous “art deco” paintings from the 1920s and 1930s. For instance, a rock-and-roll singer from the 1980s, popularly known as “Madonna,” has hoarded Lempicka paintings over the last few years, paying outlandish prices for what critics consensually call “execratory work.” Likewise, the well-known comedian, “Carrot-Top,” has become a habitué of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, where he has bid small fortunes to obtain the latest Lempickas that have come up for auction. The fact that these stars remain willfully ignorant, or haughtily dismissive, of critics’ opinions has only fueled critics' merciless attack on Lempicka’s stature in twentieth-century art.

The scathing critiques can be explained, in part, by the fact that Lempicka emulated the stars and often used her painting as a means to an end: to become a media darling in her own right and to bed the latest Hollywood lothario. Named “Hollywood’s Favorite Artist” during the 1940s - when she lived in Beverly Hills with her diminuitive husband - Lempicka’s work soon reached iconic status, becoming synonymous with American cinema’s golden age. Her work traditionally adopted all the trappings of this gilded era, including “art deco” classicism, symmetry, and rectilinear style. With Greta Garbo looks, Lempicka even personified her own favorite subject matter: ice queen chic. In “Auto-Portrait,” for example, Lempicka paints herself as an unscrupulous femme fatale, one who appears all-too-willing to run over the next pet that crosses her Bugatti’s path. Indeed, even today such paintings evoke our most clichéd conceptions of the “roaring twenties” and its acknowledged godlessness.

Lempicka’s personal life, however, was morally repugnant and her death was well-received by the Christian community. Christians were quick to carry out the "painted Jezebel's" final wish to be cremated and to have her ashes spread over the top of the active Mexican volcano Popocatepetl (an Aztec site of worship, meaning “smoking mountain”). As one of her fiercest critics, Kirk Cameron, gloated when he heard the news, “Lempicka has finally found something that burns hotter than the STDs she helped spread around.”

When Artists Refuse to Mature: Marc Chagall's "America Windows"

2004-11-22T17:29:00.000-06:00

Detail of "America Windows," 1977

Marc Chagall (b. 1887, Russia; d. 1985) gained fame in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s for painting fantastical, swirling dreamscapes populated with warm childhood memories of the Jewish-Russian village in which he was raised. Courted by many artistic movements, whether it was post-cubism, surrealism, luminism, simultaneousism, or the amorphous “School of Paris,” Chagall’s joyous style resisted all definitions except that provided by his own imagination. Unfortunately, Chagall’s refusal to converse - in good faith - with other artistic movements and styles had a decidedly negative impact on his work. Simply put, Chagall’s art never matured. In other words, Chagall has become the art world’s J.M. Barrie, but without Barrie's pedophiliac predilections.

Rather than struggling with weighty themes and issues - whether subjective or objective - Chagall insisted only on regurgitating and re-painting the same somnolent colors and dreamscapes throughout his long career. His faux-naïf style never reflected the political and military horrors of the twentieth century. Even when Chagall fled Europe, with his beloved Bella, to settle in New York during World War II, his work can be described as little more than “decorative blandness.” Although Chagall proved that the unconscious constituted an inexhaustible well of images and lyrical symbols, art critics agree that it is just one man’s unconscious and, seemingly, an “over-medicated” one. Fittingly, in the present era where society aggressively treats any type of “negative feeling,” Chagall has become the unofficial corporate artist of Pfizer, the manufacturers of Zoloft. If a “psychic vacation” is what one needs, one can do worse than book a room in Chagall’s Vitebsk, the village whose symbols and folklore Chagall endlessly represented in his work.

A case in point is the stained glass piece Chagall created in honor of the U.S. bicentennial. Entitled “America Windows” (completed in 1977), there is nothing within the six glass panels that can properly be identified as “American.” Rather, America seems to be another Vitebsk, complete with flying goats and swooping figures straight out of silly Russian folk tales. Granted, these windows have already become part of our cultural vernacular; for instance, a pivotal scene of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” - John Hughes’ beloved coming-of-age story - took place in front of “America Windows.” But Chagall experts agree that Chagall grew lazy after his initial success, and merely repeated the same “magical Vitebsk” idiom ad nauseum. Accordingly, many American art experts refer to the “America Windows” as the “Russia Windows” so that American spectators do not grow upset trying to find “American” representations in the windows, while basking in the their luminous blue light.

Frank Pitt & the "Aesthetics of Mortal Flesh"

2004-11-22T14:39:00.000-06:00

"It's Nothing," 2002

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Frank Pitt almost single-handedly created the hybrid photographic movement known as “Aesthetics of Mortal Flesh” (“AMF”). After dropping out of Stanford University’s School of Medicine in 1982, Pitt remained fascinated with clinical photography, which is an integral aid to any medical student’s training. In particular, Pitt found diagnostic photographs of skin ailments especially engrossing. “When I saw a picture of childhood scabies for the first time,” Pitt has explained, “I knew I was hooked. The colors - the shades of pink and red - were just mind-boggling.”

Pitt has argued that such photography should not remain within the exclusive province of the medical profession or to “eccentric interests”: “Our society is obsessed with health and beauty 'veneers,' but when you think about it, would your average person even know how to identify psoriasis, let alone a life-threatening skin disease? We take our skin for granted. It’s only by ‘AMF treatment’ of our skin’s unique and dynamic terrain that we can stop 'hiding our hide' and acknowledge the inept way skin has been handled by artists over the last two-thousand years.” Indeed, Pitt admits that he struggles to contain his anger whenever he meets someone who does not know that the skin is the largest human organ.

“Take the history of Western sculpture,” Pitt argues, “of all the stone and bronze that have been used to portray the human figure, I can count on one hand the number of sculptures that have depicted any type of skin blemish accurately. What are we afraid of?” Pitt believes that it’s time that humans face their own skin as more than a mere "boundary" between "inside" and "outside." Indeed, “There's more than one way to skin a human” has become one of the AMF's most contagious slogans.

In “It’s Nothing,” Pitt has blown up a square inch of human skin - sporting a somewhat innocent-looking malignant melanoma - to that of a full square yard. The dramatic increase in scale and perspective evokes a sublime terror, forever changing the import of that archetypal question, “Do you think I should have it looked at?” No longer is this small, dark mole merely “suspicious”; rather, it has become a great menace antagonistic to life itself - a black hole that, left untreated, could become death’s greatest ally. Pitt's work calls to mind the ominous "blind spots" in Lee Bontecou's hanging sculptures or the hyperrealism - on a microscopic scale - of a duane hanson. Certainly, Pitt's "skin" works often look "faked," demonstrating how distorted - and dangerous - our perceptions have become as a result of pop culture's treatment of human skin.

As Pitt is quick to point out, “melanoma isthe seventh most common cancer. The lifetime risk for melanoma is 1 in 71 Americans. In the U.S. alone, melanomas kill 7,400 people a year. But Americans are more likely to know ten ways of covering up a pimple than identifying a pre-cancerous hairy nevus.” Pitt squarely places the blame for skin cancer deaths on artists and advertisers alike: “The artist and advertiser traditionally airbrush the human flesh. Well, AMF is combating those shallow representations because death too is only skin-deep.”

The Mind of the Artist: The Late Paintings of Willem de Kooning

2004-11-22T09:59:00.000-06:00

Untitled, 1987

The late paintings of de Kooning present a thorny problem to the art critic. De Kooning, of course, is a behemoth of abstract painting in the twentieth-century. Most of his work is supremely athletic, challenging, aggressive. De Kooning, certainly, was America’s great alpha male artist - along with Pollock - raging against the staid American culture of the 50s and 60s, boozing and whoring all the way. But by the mid-to-late 1980s, de Kooning was a weak elderly man; though continuing to paint, he grew increasingly confused about his work. Indeed, assistants started to do almost all of his prepatory and tracing work, while his meddlesome wife, Elaine, started to introduce new colors into her husband’s palette. By 1986, the effects of these unfortunate developments can be readily seen in the canvases. Eventually diagnosed with advanced senility, de Kooning’s work continued to dribble out until 1990, when he finally ceased painting altogether.

But what does one do with these late paintings? For instance, in this 1987 painting - that de Kooning even forgot to name - we have none of the sharp angularity, demonic hilarity, or sheer vulgarity of his “Women” series of the 1950s. Rather, this work conveys a demoralizing sense of lethargy, as though he was attempting to represent nesting swags of melting fat or processed yellow cheese. The critic feels insulted by such ham-fisted efforts, and needs to ask why none of de Kooning’s “friends” or family members ever stopped him from making such an idiot of himself.

But these types of questions serve only to give birth to more unnerving questions that concern the very soul of artistic production: “What constitutes artistic genius? The mind? The hand? The eye? The primal urge to create and destroy?” Throughout art history there are hundreds, if not thousands, of artists whose works were shaped by similar handicaps, debilitations, addictions, and neuroses. The school of Impressionism, for example, was shaped by Monet and Degas’ failing eyesight (i.e., if they had access to a good opthamologist to correct their astigmatism and cataracts, their paintings wouldn’t have been so nauseatingly blurry). Likewise, Renoir and Matisse’s later careers suffered because of crippling rheumatoid arthritis (i.e., how can you paint anything of value if you can’t even hold a brush?). Then we also have the huge stable of artists who were alcoholic, drug-addicted syphilitics who suffered from both voluntary and involuntary dementia, such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Gaugain. And no list can be complete without the patron saint of artistic moron-savants, Vincent Van Gogh.

What this may all mean is that the critic can never hope to get in the mind of the artist. In de Kooning’s case, we can say that his later paintings are no different than his successful earlier work, when de Kooning was often so drunk that he painted like Bob Ross, making “happy accidents” by the truckload. One can even ask whether more brain cells are really needed by a painter? Apparently not. A recent Gallup poll found that approximately 93% of all painters have experienced in the past month - as a result of substance abuse - massive memory loss, disintegration of vital organs, vocabulary and language impairment, disintegration of the muscular system, loss of brain cells, and loss of balance and coordination.

Land Art: Christo's World

2004-11-19T17:52:00.000-06:00

"The Umbrellas," 1991

Undoubtedly, the best-known "land artist" living today is Christo (Christo Javacheff, b. 1935, Bulgaria). Over the course of his forty-year career, Christo has been both praised and ridiculed for his on-going series of "repackaging" projects (e.g., wrapping public buildings in plastic sheeting, such as Berlin's Reichstag). Never to be bowed by criticism, however, the scale and apparent absurdity of Christo's public work continues to grow in epic proportions. Unfortunately, the rationale behind Christo's peculiar brand of "land art" has never been fully articulated because the artist is only able to speak in broken, and often unintelligible, English.

On October 9, 1991, Christo "opened up" one of his most massive "land art" endeavors, "The Umbrellas," about sixty miles north of Los Angeles. With the help of hundreds of "assistants," Christo propped open 1,760 yellow umbrellas near the hills of Tejon Pass. The forty-five-foot tall umbrellas - arranged in a "yellow-ribbon constellation," as a show of support for U.S. troops in the first Persian Gulf War - dramatically altered this brown, rolling expanse of uncultivated grazing land, into a whimsical earthscape that - while bemusing travellers on Interstate 5 - angered some plain-spoken ranchers in the area. For instance, Jake Marvin, owner of the nearby "Cattle Kingdom" ranch, described it as nothing but "a bunch of horseshit." Not quite; though Christo did "sign" his project with cattle dung, "writing" a hundred-yard "Christo" signature, near the Interstate, with manure collected from the county. Indeed, these chocolate hills and blonde grasslands really did become Christo's own, born straight out of the Bulgarian's quirky imagination. "See, open yellow good," Christo exclaimed over the gratifying sight, while handing out yellow ribbons to spectators.

For a period of eighteen days, "The Umbrellas" were seen, approached, and enjoyed by the public, either by car from a distance and closer as they bordered the roads, or by walking under "The Umbrellas" in their luminous shadows. The project was only marred by one death, when an elderly man was struck by lightning while seeking cover from a sudden thunderstorm. Nonetheless, spokesman Neil Corgi of Morton Salt, sponsor of the $26 million (U.S.) project, described "The Umbrellas" as an unheralded success. However, Christo did not long bask in the project's glory; in fact, he soon began drawing up plans to cover Paris' Pont de Neuf in plastic white sheeting. In a recent Le Figaro interview, Christo attempted to explain his choice of color for the project: "Liver of France, not foie gras, like lily white, fleur de lis, Frenchmen liver lily livered like bridge."

17th Century Dutch Painting: Why We Still Love Vermeer

2004-11-19T13:03:00.000-06:00

Woman Holding a Balance, 1664

As the young people say today, Jan Vermeer is “hot.” In recent years, major Vermeer exhibitions have created unheard-of interest in Vermeer’s decidedly restrained life and painting. Indeed, a veritable “Vermeer industry” has emerged, where would-be entrepreneurs have churned out every imaginable product - from Vermeer coffee mugs to "pearl-shaped" feminine products - in order to capitalize on Vermeer’s sudden fame. Vermeer “mania” reached fever pitch this past year, following the Hollywood release "Girl with a Pearl Earring,” which was based, in turn, off the hugely popular book - of the same title - by Tracy Chevalier. Directed by Hans Velt, of "The Parent Trap," Vermeer is played by English actor Colin Firth who, in an interesting twist, made his film debut in the 1985 "Dutch Girls," in which he played a male prostitute named "Jan." Depicted as a moody sensualist in the movie, Vermeer/Firth is seduced by a shameless and opportunistic ingenue named “Griet,” played by the young actress Scarlett Johansson.

But why, exactly, has Vermeer become such a cultural force? Certainly, there is nothing explicitly sensational about the few canvases that exist by Vermeer. In fact, Vermeer remained unrecognized as a painter for almost 200 years, following his death in 1675. At best, the immediate impact of his painting's subject matter - small-scaled as it is - can be called "coy" or, at worst, "boring": one or two quiet figures in a mildly lit, serene domestic interior.

However, it is Vermeer's brilliant use of light, symbology and allegory that has driven his brand equity through the roof over the last century. In "Woman Holding a Balance," for example, the warm lighting cast on the young maiden evokes a tranquility rarely achieved by human hand. This is, however, tempered by the powerful symbols and allegories rooted below the surface of the soft light.

Here, the maiden holds a delicate balance in which the most infinitesimal material can be weighed. Behind her, however, hangs a painting of the Last Judgment which, arguably, concerns the greatest measure of all: the weighing out of human souls in the afterlife, between heaven and hell. Gazing at the maiden's exquisite expression, the spectator could never guess that such momentous spectacles could ever disturb this rare moment of peace. Rather, the spectator's eye is drawn to the maiden's generous belly and what that might connote. Is she holding a balance as she reflects on being somewhat overweight? Does she remain a maiden - note that there is no wedding ring - because the men of Delft are more interested in women of smaller carriage? Vermeer's painting invites such questions, so that the spectator may reflect on whether one's weight should really cause one sorrow, when it is unlikely that God will take one's weight into account at the Last Judgment. Indeed, as Vermeer wrote in his journal - a year before completing the painting - "what one is like inside is the measure of all things, not the breadth of one's capelet."

Art Vandalism: The Unusual Case of the Flick Collection and its Nazi Legacy

2004-11-18T13:22:00.000-06:00

Photos of "Office Baroque"

Apparently, the 35-year-old woman who vandalised Gordon Matta-Clark's "Office Baroque" on September 23, 2004, at Berlin's Hamburger museum, was a fan of the age-old art pun, "If it's baroque, don't fix it!" Yelling loudly, the handspringing vandal did a series of head-over-heels flips before landing on Matta-Clark's work in a handstand, punching both her arms through the piece's drywall. One shocked bystander compared the incredible acrobats to that of "Priss," Darryl Hannah's "replicant" character, in Ridley Scott's 1982 cutting-edge film, Blade Runner. The woman then proceeded to push over a spray-painted truck called "Graffitti Truck," also by Matta-Clark, before being taken into custody by the Hamburger's hapless guards.

The incident adds one more inglorious chapter to the on-going controversy of Hamburger's exhibition of the modern art collection of Friedrich Christian Flick, the German multibillionaire. Protestors continue to question the morality of the exhibition, considering the Nazi-connections that exist with the Flick name and collection.

All sides of the controversy agree that Flick's grandfather, Friedrich Flick, confiscated Jewish property and used slave labor in his huge network of Nazi arms factories during World War II. The elder Flick was convicted of war crimes at war's end but, on his release from prison, succeeded in re-building one of the greatest fortunes in Europe. Many demonstrators perceive the younger Flick as trying to whitewash the Flick family's name - and wealth - of Nazi ties by offering the collection to public view. Whether this was Flick's intent is unknown; however, the exhibition has been skewered by those who want to see nothing less than the Flick name dragged through the rotting entrails of twentieth-century German history.

"Why is there such a ruckus?," Flick testily queried following the incident, "I thought everyone loved Schindler's List. My grandfather was just like Liam Neeson, a stand-up guy that was just trying to do his best in tough times. Both Schindler and my grandfather used slave labor so why is Schindler canonized and the Flick name tarred and feathered? Now if my surname was Fiennes, that would be a different story entirely. He was evil, especially after gaining so much weight for the role. But just because Spielberg hasn't done a high-grossing film on my grandfather doesn't mean my family should be reviled because of it." Asked whether he is disturbed by the hateful emotions his exhibition has evoked among war victims and veterans, Flick reflected that "those people won't live much longer, so I guess it doesn't really bother me that much."

The vandal was quoted by a Das ist Guber reporter, on being arrested, as saying "You could say I flipped off Flick." The real victim of the event, arguably, is Gordon Matta-Clark's work. Restoring "Office Baroque" will be difficult because the piece sustained damage in an area that Matta-Clark intentionally damaged himself, to convey, as the now-deceased Matta-Clark once described, "the psychic injury sustained during grade-school recess."

Photography of Transgression: The Work of Bernard Ette

2004-11-18T10:13:00.000-06:00

"Gender Victory," 1999

At first blush, the subject of Bernard Ette's photograph appears to be the charming winner of a child's beauty pageant. But when blown up tenfold and placed on the wall of a gallery - or a museum - the photograph invites closer inspection of its content and what is really being represented within it. The title of the work, "Gender Victory," also begs the question, "Which gender has really won here?" Does the little coquette win for being honored as the prettiest girl in the pageant, or does a patriarchal society win by shaping the little girl into a fetishistic objet d'art? The question becomes exceedingly complex, and self-reflexive, when the diligent spectator of the piece discovers clues that turn the inquiry completely on its head: the beauty "queen" is really a boy and, therefore, a "beauty king."

Ette has made a career out of challenging gender acculturation since growing up in Beaumont, Texas, a place he describes, tongue in cheek, that only raises "steers and queers." In fact, Ette believes that an artist needs to be a "provocateur" if his or her art is going to have any value for the society in which it is produced. Indeed, Ette's work has precipitated inflammatory debate when shown in public, the likes of which haven't been seen since the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy at the Cincinnati Arts Center in 1990. In 2000, for example, a planned exhibition of Ette's work was cancelled at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas -- located in Ette's hometown of Beaumont, Texas -- because of its "gender-bending" thematics.

"This is a battle that we're still fighting," Ette has declared in light of such controversy. "Just look at the hysteria that has erupted over 'TWIRP [an acronym for "The Woman is Required to Pay"] Day,' where our local boys and girls are given a chance to reverse social roles and cross dress." In fact, Ette has been battling the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute for years over the ability of Texan children to choose to dress however they want -- for example, boys as ballerinas and girls as Dallas Cowboys -- on "TWIRP Days" around the lone-star state. Critics of Ette's work, like art professor Delana Davies at Southern Methodist University, takes exception to the argument that "TWIRP Day" and Ette's photography only encourages a healthy reflection of the meaning of gender roles. "It's like experimenting with drugs," Davies says, "If it's OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future? I don't mind the gays, but I'd rather not have my little boy, Troy, be a gay if I can help it."

Recent Performance Art: Eco-Art Takes Center Stage

2004-11-18T09:42:00.000-06:00

"Invasion and the Curse of Macha," Performance date, November 17, 2004

Performance artist and ecologist Liam Heneghan creates performance pieces that address the unraveling of ecosystems under the influence of invasive species. In a recent performance in downtown Chicago, entitled "Invasion and the Curse of Macha," Heneghan challenges our comfortable perceptions of what an "invasive specie" means to us. Here, Heneghan has isolated two buckthorn (Rhamus cathartica), with roots intact, in the great Grand Army of the Republic Hall, located in Chicago's former central library. Rare though it is in its native Europe, buckthorn is a successful invader of Midwest woodlands and is now often the commonest woody species in much of the region.

"Depending upon a visitor's aesthetic sense," Heneghan says, "the physical appearance of buckthorn may seem pleasing or unpleasant. However, it is not just an aesthetic dilemma that we face here. A biological invasion tests the coherence of the invaded system and, if successful, the invader revolutionizes the system." For example, Heneghan cites the correlation of the buckthorn's growth with the decline of native shrubs and herbaceous plants like trilliums and orchids. In order to challenge our perceptions of what is "natural," the performance consists of whittling away the bark of the buckthorn until its "tree spirit" silently screams in pain. By doing this, Heneghan argues, buckthorn may re-consider the "receptivity" of its new homeland; in addition, it will encourage Midwestern spectators to withdraw the "arborial welcome mat." In an effort to broaden our society's understanding of such "Eco-art," critic Faith Anderson analogizes "biological invasions" to historical "human invasions." "It's like the Italians invading Ethiopia in the 1930s," Anderson argues, "obviously, the idea of dining on osso buco in Addis Ababa is absurd, because Ethiopians do not use utensils. How would you extract the marrow in such a situation?"

In a world where time and distance continue to shrink, and where species - both human and non-human - continue to intermingle, Heneghan's work calls attention to the odd bedfellows invasive and native species become. The snakehead carp, for example, stands ready to conquer Lake Michigan, with only an electric "fence" - located at the mouth of the Illinois river - separating the two. Fishery experts warn that the voracious snakehead, native to Asia, will consume all the native lake creatures within five years, leaving Lake Michigan as populated as the Dead Sea. Heneghan's work has also focused on the coqui frog. A great favorite of Puerto Rican tourists, who often purchase t-shirts with the critter's grinning mug, the coqui's 200-decibel chirp has all but destroyed real estate values in many parts of Hawaii, to which it was transported a few decades ago. Fellow eco-artist Brant Cox has, accordingly, called attention to the plight of land owners in Kauai (the "garden isle") by organizing "coqui festivals," wherein "festival collaborators" spray rain forest trees with citric acid, which can kill the dime-sized frogs within a matter of seconds.

American Colonial Painting & the Original Jaws

2004-11-17T18:34:00.000-06:00

Watson and the Shark, 1778

John Singleton Copley (b. 1738, Boston; d. 1815, London) is considered the finest portrait painter of colonial America. His great success as a portrait artist in Boston during the late 1760s and early 1770s was attributed not just to his native skill, but to his efforts to ingratiate himself with local Tory merchants, the Society of Artists of Great Britain, and the esteemed Royal Academy of London. An irascible man whose company was described as “insufferable,” Copley fled the unrest of Boston - and the British-imposed “Intolerable Acts” - in 1774 to settle in London. Copley remained in England for the rest of his life, where he attempted to curry favor with the Hanoverian court, with little success. In 1815, Copley died penniless, severely disfigured, and much despised on both sides of the Atlantic.

Copley painted Watson and the Shark in 1778, at which time he was frequently shamed for having been born in that “cesspool called Boston.” Whenever accused of being “American,” Copley was fond of quipping “If a man is born in a swamp, does that make him a toad?” The painting was commissioned by Brook Watson, a former English sailor, who wanted to immortalize a traumatic event he suffered in 1749. That year, Watson, a fourteen-year-old orphan, was attacked by a shark while swimming in the harbor at Havana, Cuba.

In the painting, Copley composed Watson’s rescuers in the shape of a triangle, evoking the shape of the percussion instrument - the "triangle" - of which Copley described himself as "the moste excelente master." The scene appears, at first glance, to be a whirlwind of disordered physical motion; in fact, Copley based the poses of the rescuers on well-studied biblical precedent. The harpooner’s figure, for example, was modeled after a verse in the Book of Genesis, wherein Noah strikes the backside of his incorrigible son Ham, who had refused to bathe after being commanded to do so. The outstretched arms of the rescuers, on the other hand, allude to the ancient Hebrew maxim, “reach for an unclothed Canaanite and chance your arm, as well as Yahweh's favor.”

In fact, Copley had originally dressed the figure of Watson in woolen swimming trunks that were customary of the period. Watson, who had recently acquired the title of “baronet,” disliked this addition and demanded that Copley denude him of all clothing. Watson’s biographer, Curtis de Wayne, explains that Watson, a lifelong bachelor, wanted the private joys of watching female gallery-goers inspect his naked, lithe torso. In addition, Watson demanded that Copley paint him with fine, blond hair that young maidens would be tempted to stroke.

Watson bequeathed the painting to a London orphanage, the Hudson Street Home for Girls, where it conveyed the reassuring moral that anyone can succeed through “luck and pluck” -- as stated by the biographical plaque on the original frame. There it remained until 1925 when the insouciant Annie Warbucks discovered the painting, long since-forgotten, in the living quarters of the orphanage’s head mistress, Ginny Hannigan.

The Birth of Art & the Horsehead of Trasimene

2004-11-17T16:51:00.000-06:00

Lake Trasimene, Italy, "The Horsehead of Trasimene," c. 22000-20000 BC

Humankind's creative impulse to make "art" - objects without apparent "use value" - dates as far back as the early Palaeolithic period. Indeed, it was not long after the advent of homo sapiens sapiens, as we know ourselves today, that this impulse was memorialized in stone. The earliest surviving human-made works that can be called "art" come primarily from Europe, and date from the Upper Palaeolithic period. Early work concentrates on the human figure, such as the famed "Venus of Willendorf" (c. 30000-25000 BC), which is also the earliest known example of "prurient" art. Thousands of years later, creative attentions turned to domesticated animals.

The earliest known example of animal "art" is the so-called "Horsehead of Trasimene," which was discovered thirty years ago in a dredging operation near Lake Trasimene, Italy. Carved from a small stone, and once painted in dark brown ochre, the "horsehead" is of a size to be clutched in the palm of the hand - like an amulet. The relative naturalism and unexaggerated proprotions of the horsehead - most likely made with a piece of flint - are stunning considering the early period in which it was shaped. The sculptor, in precocious awareness of his media, allowed the bumps and hollows of the natural surface to become part of the horsehead. Although the figure is slightly damaged, it is still apparent that the stylization is complex, and that this is a relatively sophisticated work of art.

American Pop Art in the 1980s

2004-11-17T10:31:00.000-06:00

"Rock with the Rock," 1984

Lew Cyphre worked as Roy Lichtenstein's assistant during the 1970s, during which time he developed his own brand of "Pop" or "Comic Strip" art. As opposed to Lichtenstein's meticulously stippled comic frames, however, Cyphre adopted a free-hand approach and depicted contemporaneous subject matter, such as rock-and-roll concerts performed during the "arena rock" craze of the early 1980s.

"Rock with the Rock" is one example of Cyphre's specific fascination with heavy metal bands, here depicting the earth-shaking stage show of the notorious "speed metal" group, the Green Angels. Cyphre has enthusiastically praised such live performances for "waking the rebellious spirit" unlike any other communal experience in America today. As Cyphre expressed in a rare 1992 interview, "This music removes love and ushers in lawlessness worldwide. Most young people won't fight for their countries, but they'll die for their rock and roll gods."

Here, Cyphre evokes the anarchic spirit of what he calls "Killer Rock." The lyric "rock with the rock" denotes the inexorable logic of the "rock-a-holic" lifestyle, which usually occasions drug use, free sex, murder and suicide. Though Cyphre has been critiqued for debasing Pop by focusing more on the "effect" than the "surface" of pop culture, the artist has stood firm in his chosen esthetic. "Kids today," Cyphre has argued, "don't care about flattened images of Marilyn Monroe, Mao, or Campbell soup cans anymore. They care about things like vampirism and 'gifts of disease,' and that's exactly what my art is going to give them. I'm making art relevant to them and for future generations."

Public Sculpture in the New Millenium: The Mirror of Chicago

2004-11-16T16:20:00.000-06:00

Cloud Gate, 2004

Unveiled in the summer of 2004, Anish Kapoor’s “Could Gate” has become, arguably, Chicago’s favorite public sculpture. Perched parallel to Michigan Avenue in Chicago’s stunning new Millenium Park, the massive structure belies its weight -- 110 tons -- looking, instead, like a giant legume-shaped mylar balloon. Indeed, it is now popularly called the “big bean” in one form or another (e.g., “jelly bean,” “kidney bean”), magically reflecting visitors’ beaming faces in its burnished curvilinear skin. The futuristic sculpture has truly captured the imagination of Chicago, a place once simply called the “Hog Butcher for the World.”

Tragically, the sculpture came with a great monetary and human price. Not only did Kapoor's "bean" cost the City of Chicago an astronomical $76 million (U.S.), it cost the lives of three workers during the course of its construction. Assembled in London, where Indian-born Kapoor is now based, the load-bearing spine of the sculpture cracked in March of 2003. In an attempt to stabilize the sculpture’s ribs and prevent further damage to the spine, a platform holding four workers collapsed, killing three workers and seriously injuring eight others. Kapoor pressed on, nonetheless, and saw the sculpture’s completion in early summer 2004. Rumors that the “bean” is somehow cursed, because of the construction disaster, have been brushed aside by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley as horror-movie nonsense. However, this did not prevent Chicago's Cardinal George from blessing the sculpture in the spring of 2004, in the hope that, by doing so, the sculpture will not cause further suffering.

Postmodern Art & Religious Imagery

2004-11-16T09:37:00.000-06:00

19:34, 2002

Self-described “postmodern Christian performance artist” Saskia chooses, as the title of this curious work, the chapter and verse of the Book of John, wherein the crucified Jesus suffers a deep wound in his right side: “But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.” This work is one of a series of pieces Saskia has created, entitled “It Opened Like Pie,” that attempts to re-enact Christ’s wounds within the “two-dimensionality” of a post-industrial world. In such a world, Saskia believes, not only are “high art” and “low art” forms mixed with value-neutral ease, but “high” or “ecstatic spirituality” is often interchanged with the “plastic” spirituality that one can find on the shelves of the local Wal-Mart, or on the dashboard of a Saturn. In a recent interview with ArtForum editor Hank Uonoe, Saskia elaborated on her theory of “It Opened Like Pie”: “Well, we’ve been talking about Jamesonian pastiche for so long it’s like we forget that people once went to church and thought they’d go to hell if they even thought of the devil. Of course, it’s hard to ignore the work that Theo Kemp, Warhol and Jeff Koons have done on this post-industrial, post-spiritual world, where advertising contains a lot more potent images than the crucifixion, but I wanted to go beyond these artists and test whether the resurrection itself can be resurrected.”

In “19:34,” Saskia tests the cynical, media-savvy spectator much like Christ tested Thomas’ faith when Thomas doubted whether Christ had really risen from the dead. The thick impasto of the “wound” seemingly calls us to finger it -- which one should not because of potential damage to the piece -- much like Thomas was called to place his thumb into Christ’s side. However, Saskia did not intend any verisimilitude with this “wound”; rather, she used cadmium red acrylic to duplicate the artificial color of the sash wrapped around the bobble-head Jesus. This figure is placed at the bottom of the canvas, as an emblematic totem of religious “presence” in a post-Jesus-Christ-Superstar culture. As Saskia posed the question to Hank Uonoe, "What is happening when people can bid on eBay for a grilled cheese sandwich that looks like the Virgin Mary?" Here, the figure of Jesus clearly is juxtaposed with the “fake blood,” the “Jesus wig” and the plastic crown of thorns to evoke not simple piety in the spectator, but thoughtful reflection as to how iconic religious images can retain any potency when they have been co-opted by capitalist enterprise.

Art, War, and Pop: The Work of Theo Kemp

2004-11-15T10:09:00.000-06:00

Untitled, No.5 ("Headrest for Lullaby"), c. 1950

Theo Kemp [b. 1893, Dresden, Germany; d. 1952, New York City, New York]. In 1915, at the age of twenty, Kemp left the study of philosophy in Heidelberg to fight for the German Imperial Foot Guard on the Western front. Only three months after joining, Kemp suffered serious leg wounds at Ypres when another German foot soldier tossed a so-called “potato-masher” into his foxhole, having mistaken Kemp for a Frenchman. Following a difficult rehabilitation, Kemp decided to discontinue his formal studies in philosophy, having been convinced by his war-time experiences that traditional “western philosophy” or “western rationality” could only lead to the destruction of western civilization as a whole.

Kemp became affiliated with the anti-institutional “Dada” movement in Zurich following the war, where he often “performed” at the Cabaret Voltaire with fellow dadaists Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia. Kemp gained some measure of notoriety on stage for filling natural sausage casings with dessert items, such as marzipan, which he would loop around his neck until his head could no longer be seen. Kemp would then belt out rollicking medleys of European national anthems, thereby parodying the “intestinal sweetness” of jingoistic rhetoric.

In the mid-twenties, Kemp moved to Berlin and turned increasingly to disjunctive collage techniques to demonstrate how the fruits of "Western Enlightenment" continued to threaten global war. Persecuted by the Nazis for promoting “degenerate art” - and alienated by Berlin's cultural martinet, Bertolt Brecht - Kemp fled Germany to settle in New York City. No longer affiliated with a community of artists, and contemptuous of early abstract expressionism, Kemp isolated himself in his Greenwich Village apartment until his death in 1952. Rarely venturing outside, Kemp occupied himself with reading a prodigious number of papers and magazines he would receive in the mail, which he would subsequently cut and paste into collages that expressed his disgust with the world.

It was only upon his death that the great significance of Kemp's work was fully realized. A Whitney exhibition in 1955 established Kemp as the looming figure of dadaist principles and practice who carried on long after the “Dada” community disbanded in the twenties. His art bears witness to the horrors of industrialization, nationalization, and the mechanization of warfare up through World War Two. No doubt, works by other artists also bear witness to such horrors; however, it was Kemp alone who was able to refract the “stare of the witness” through the mass media of a consumerist society.

Kemp’s aesthetic strategies, however, were by no means rooted in the 1920s. By using trade and fashion magazines in his collage works, Kemp was eventually adopted as the leading visionary of the British “Pop” movement, which began to develop a year after the Whitney exhibition of Kemp’s work. Understood as such, Kemp arguably influenced the subsequent growth of early “American Pop” artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

In Untitled No. 5 (“Headrest for Lullaby”), circa 1950, Kemp has used the paratactical arrangement of primeval icons and urban detritus to create a work that evokes the confused dreamland of a modern consumer society. Stripped of traditional figurative representations and “Western rationality,” the work demands much from the spectator. The death mask in the work’s foreground, perhaps, suggests that it is only in a moribund state of consciousness that one can appreciate the fragments of the past and memory residing in the interstices of mass production and reproduction. The death mask also pays homage to that most famous example of memento mori, the anamorphic death’s head in Hans Holbein’s sixteenth-century masterpiece “The Ambassadors.”

The Birth of Western European Painting

2004-11-11T17:55:00.000-06:00

Madonna and Child, ca. 1300

Earlier this week the Metropolitan Museum of Art reported that it had acquired “Madonna and Child,” a painting executed by the early Renaissance master Duccio di Buoninsegna (active by 1278; died 1319). Met Art Director Cynthia von Trappe effusively described the painting as “one of the great single acquisitions of the last half century.” The Met indicated the painting would retain its long-standing nickname, the “Stroganoff Madonna,” in reference to its former Russian owner, Count Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov, from whose famous kitchen the nobility of St. Petersburg ate exquisitely prepared confections.

The whereabouts of the small painting (eight by ten inches) had been uncertain since the Bolsheviks stormed Stroganov’s winter retreat in 1917. A legend survives suggesting that it was hastily buried with Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918, following their ill-planned executions in the town of Yekaterinburg, deep in the Ural Mountains. A more elaborate version of that legend suggests that Anastasia’s loyal chambermaid folded the dead princess’s arms over the devotional painting prior to her burial. Accounts of vengeful Bolsheviks dousing the burial site with sulfuric acid, however, did not encourage hopes that the painting still existed. Thought to be lost forever, it mysteriously appeared a few years ago in the hands of Richard de Vere, British industrialist and twenty-first Earl of Oxford. It is still unknown how de Vere came by the painting, or how it survived the political and military upheavals of the twentieth century. A corner of the painting, however, is rumored to have been damaged by de Vere’s daughter, who reportedly attempted to draw a figure of a horse on the painting’s gold background, in dark pencil.

Art politesse prohibits the Met or de Vere from disclosing the purchase price, but the Met acknowledged that it was the most expensive purchase in its long and august history. Art experts conservatively estimate the painting to be valued at more than $45 million (U.S.). Asked about this estimate, Harold Grady, the curator of the Met’s Renaissance holdings, responded by quoting the great art patron Thomas A. Edison, “To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity.” Indeed, there are few Duccio’s in existence. The only other Duccio in New York City can be seen at the Frick Collection, housed in the erstwhile mansion of robber baron and reclusive pornographer, Henry Clay Frick. Interestingly, Frick wrote a letter to Andrew Carnegie in which he describes how his own Duccio -- depicting the temptation of Christ -- was a pivotal influence in his decision to hire the Pinkerton Detective Agency to put down the Homestead Coke-Works strike of 1892 where, subsequently, several union sympathizers were shot and killed.

Duccio di Bouninsegna founded the school of Siena and is credited, along with Giotto and Cimabue, for being the principal founder of Western European painting. In fact, the Stroganoff Madonna is described by Grady as the “first great Madonna” in the long, brilliant line of Madonnas painted throughout the Italian Renaissance. Duccio’s Madonna departed sharply from conventional Byzantine depictions of the Madonna in that she is infused with warmth, sentiment, and emotional response. According to the sixteenth-century biographer Vasari, Duccio succeeded in achieving this effect by using his young, but frail, mistress as a model. As Duccio recorded in his journal, of which only a few fragments remain, “only my Madonna can have the beautiful almond eyes of my beloved.”

Vasari also describes how Duccio became obsessed with his “Madonna and Child” after his mistress became pregnant. Suspecting the child was not his own, Duccio began to imagine himself as Saint Joseph incarnate, seething in silent fury as God made a cuckold of him, by surreptitiously impregnating Mary through the ear. As Duccio defiantly recorded in his journal, “He may be the Lord, but I myself contemn if I sit on my hands and enjoy the sight of it.” Vasari, though he does not cite his source, suggests that Duccio, in an ultimate act of rebellion, mixed his own urine in the painting’s tempera. In doing so, Duccio's biographers believe, he was able to include himself/Joseph in the "holy family" portrait, representations of which traditionally excluded Joseph, the cuckold. Grady has indicated that forensic science may now be advanced enough to determine whether Vasari’s anecdote is apocryphal, by chemical analysis of the painting’s resins. Even if such tests prove inconclusive, some Duccio experts already believe that Vasari’s so-called “urine anecdote” explains the unusual dusky flesh-tones of Duccio’s Madonna, a color that many Renaissance painters had tried, and failed, to duplicate. Recently, London-based artist Chris Ofili -- whose 1996 painting “Holy Virgin Mary” created such a sensation, in part, because it was covered in elephant dung and pornographic images -- has experimented with his own urine to achieve the desired “Duccio effect.” The artist reports, however, that he has been unsuccessful, to date, because he suffers from an irregular kidney condition.