Howl in an Era that Fears Indecency
Mention of the beat generation hardly ever comes to pass without the name of Allen Ginsberg following the term closely. In 1958, the proponent of beat poetry and the beat movement wrote a poem to Carl Solomon regarding what is mostly his freewheling, unedited observation and version of America, in the controversial Howl, starting with the famous or infamous lines which go “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…” It was a poem that begged to be read aloud, and Ginsberg did so in various gatherings, among them on 1966 in Washington Square.
The poem was banned from reaching the airwaves and the rest of the general public by way of media during its era because of the apparent obscenity and offensive as well as seemingly unpatriotic language which runs through the extent of the poem.
Today, Ginsberg’s Howl echoes not only in the mind of individuals reading it, or in schools and universities, but on the internet as well. The ocassion was called out in commemoration and celebration of the 50th anniversary when the supreme court decided not to completely ban the poem from reaching the general public, deciding that despite the use of obscene language, and critics referring to the piece as a ‘direct attack on american society,’ it was nevertheless an piece of art which was dubbed to have had ‘redeeming qualities’.
The Federal Communications Commission is incapable of regulating content in avenues such as the internet, satellite programming and cable television, which is why the airing of Ginsberg’s voice intoning Howl escaped censorhip.
But this much is to be expected if one person expects to see and hear art for what it truly is, detailed, spontaneous, sometimes offensive sometimes not, and evocative of the spirit of one century or reality at the very least; as opposed to vague interpretations peppered with insufferable euphemisms that beat around the bush, which for the most part, was never what art is and has been about.
Lines, Shapes and Subjects, Lost and Found, that link the Centuries
An exhibit at the Morgan and Library Museum displays the work of four contemporary artists alongside their choice of resident art pieces in the museum’s collection. It was an exhibit which called for a comparison between works of old and new paintings, drawings and art pieces, of artists long deceased and contemporary artists alive today. Unfortunately this did not fare well for the part of the living artists.
The works of Goerg Baselitz, Ellsworth Kelly, Guiseppe Penone, and Dorothea Rockburne falls short of expectations and more cedes to looking amateurish by paling in comparison to classic pieces and old-age methods employed by the likes of Cezanne, Jose de Ribera, Parmiginiano, Klimt, and so on.
But the aim of the exhibit was never to belittle and disparage contemporary art and its artists, but rather to present the differences in these drawings, and the methods and inspiration employed by each which shows the disparity in the end result.
Not surprisingly, the classic pieces of the artists who were deceased came off stronger than most of the contemporary artists’ work. And although the four of these living artists do not necessarily represent the broad and exhaustive extent as well as state of contemporary art, it exists as an approximate point of reference.
Quality of art may not be specifically quantifiable or absolute, and in all probability will differ from one individual to another in terms of taste and cultural leanings, but the apt phrase rings true and remains the same, “It’s tough to beat old masters.”
Hokum that Stands the Test of Time
“Art is also about what’s inexplicable and out of the ordinary. Painting is the world’s oldest conjuring act, colored dirt smeared on a flat surface to create an illusion. We may know it’s not real, but we still enjoy seeing how the magic is being done.” This phrase by The New York Times contributor Michael Kimmelman essentially and fundamentally sums up the circus experience and other carnivalesque forms of art.
Such art forms took shape at the Hammer Museum, where an array of 17th to 19th century circus ‘broadsides’ or advertising sheets were displayed along with a collection of other unique, ephemeral pieces by the sleight of hand artist, Ricky Jay in the aptly titled “Extraordinary Exhibitions.”
The broadsides range from a man balancing a ladder on his mouth with a jackal on the other end while carrying weights on both hands, to German ladies lifting anvils with their hair, to the usual contortionists, fire-eaters, magicians, and a variety of similar crude illustrations done in black and white, or sometimes in other monochromatic colors, but all of which are appended with bold hyperbolic announcements peddling the particular carnival or circus act in question.
The exhibition harps on the peculiar, and revels on the general public’s ubiquitous fascination with performance art, and the not so esoteric thrill and experience afforded by the circus. The appeal exists mainly in the form of subversiveness, in chaos and disorganization, which are less sanitized and edited and exists and prevails in these exhibitions more than any other forms of art.
Saving a Folk Artist’s Paradise
Baptist minister and bicycle repairman turned renowned folk artist Howard Finster has been a great contribution to the art world the moment he followed through with the epiphany fom the heavens asking him to create ‘sacred art.’ Although reluctant of portraying his particular creative talents, and questioning whether he had one to begin with, he tried his hand on sketching and painting, and that, among other congregational and domestic duties, is what he has been doing ever since.
The Howard Finster Vision House, The Paradise Gardens and the World’s Folk Art Church serves as the stadium and avenue by which Finster conveys his many art pieces underlined with light, ironic, playful themes steeped in the Christian faith and religion. Finster’s audience and following range from his own congregation to musicians where he had his hand on their album art, to the general art world who affords him a deep respect and considers him the grandfather of folk art.
After over twenty five years of sketching, painting and putting pieces of junk, scraps and other objects salvaged from the sidewalk or elsewhere, and taking commissions under God, like most great artist, Finster’s art transcended himself, and his house has now been converted into a museum, available to his following, and to people who delight in the combined playfulness, irony and sacred them of his pieces.
Benefactors and art connoisseurs are seeing to it that his house, along with his life’s work of art is preserved and kept intact, despite the attack of ruin and dilapidation besetting the Howard Finster Vision House. In the end, no matter how many dollars it takes to rebuild and preserve the museum of art that is Howard Finster’s legacy, and the vision he set about creating art with evidently lives on, and will, in point of fact, live forever.
After Death, Unfinished Art Work Gets a Life
Most artists harbor an ideology and worldview waiting to be released on canvass, on paper, a concrete wall, and similar stages of exhibition, exploding by paint, charcoal, and so on to satisfy and indulge voices in their heads awaiting structure and the taking of form. In instances such as these, great art, and sometimes less venerable ones are produced and created. When the artist is deprived of giving the voices and ideas in his/her head form and structure, these tend to bottle up and create inner tension and turmoil; other times it’s just the advent of another dormant, unproductive artist. In the case of the artist Jeremy Blake, however he was the former, and the artistic tension he harbored within him led to a tragic suicide, and Blake was dead at the age of thirty five.
But like many deceased artists who either died by their own hands or were offed naturally, left the world tragically or otherwise; great art doesn’t simply cease to exist because the individuals who created them resorts to leaving this plane of existence altogether. Great art leaves its mark, is absolute and is not as ephemeral as the individuals who create them.
The spirit of preceding an artist’s legacy is exemplified and made evident in Blake’s Glitterbest, an unfinished project which echoed his talents for melding the abstract and the tangible, the traditional and the digital, the violent and the decadent. A propensity for merging disparate areas and fields which led him to become the most iconoclastic artist of his time.
Glitterbest was taken under the wing of filmmaker David Sigal, who found the ‘moving paintings’ and the collage-like footages of Blake’s project heartbreaking, partly because they were beautiful, but mostly because he had to proceed with the film’s production and completion without its former creator and artist around to watch it come to fruition. It’s unfortunate, but much like what has often been said, Blake’s legacy will nevertheless live on, and his memory, by way of his art, won’t soon be forgotten.
A Painter’s Painter, Working with a Cast of Big Heads
“Mr. Greenwold makes the inanimate almost as alive as the animate.” Mark Greenwold’s art can be described generally as such. His art does not cater to a specific demographic, nor does it fall to a particular esoteric theme or taste for long intervals at a time. He doesn’t subscribe to a particular form or medium either. Unconstant, fickle and ever changing, Greenwold’s art in the absolute form can only be described the way it has been previously stated, he breathes life into the inanimate in a manner that makes the form it is taking look as though it were as alive and among the animate.
The extent of Greeenwold’s paintings as displayed in most major museums illustrate evidences of such animate ‘inanimateness,’ moving, living, breathing out of his canvasses. In The Excited Self, for instance, individuals are portrayed with massive craniums not directly proportionate to the size of their bodies.
The paintings are supposed to represent the primacy of human knowledge and consciousness, or it could literally translate to the inescapable hugeness of ego which afflicts every individual. Either way, it succeeds in commanding attention, and while it’s meaning and representation may differ from one individual to another, the general presentiment remains almost always the same, it harbors tones of an animate inanimateness, and breathes a gust of fresh air to contemporary art.
Greenwold also chooses to paint ‘real’ individuals who exist in his life, either from his immediate family or relatives or people he’s known, including even himself in his paintings. His rendering of ‘real people’ sometimes takes the form of their actual human selves, while on other occasion taking the form of pets and animals ranging from lizards, to insects, pigeons, and so on. The artist refers to his art as ’emotional cubism’ and one couldn’t think of a better way to put it.
To Attract New Fans, Program Uses Dance
More than its share of opera singing, stage acting, or visual art by way of costume, stage and set design, the ballet and similar forms of dance are of as much significance to theater, and the performance art as any of the previously stated components competing to its share of the stage.
Dance is one contemporary art form which has long been associated with the history of theater. Plays and musicals would lack certain forms of zest and liveliness without it. It exists as a type of performance art which compels audiences and viewers to interaction, and stimulates interests of more than average degrees. But like most art forms, it needs to be reinvented, repackaged, and revived.
Major Ballet companies are answering this need for newer and more contemporary sets of moods and moves to satisfy the interests of the theater-going public. Companies know all too well about the cliched need to either ‘shape up or ship out,’ dancers and performance artist in turn, are stepping up to the plate. The executive director of the Miller Theater, George Steel, is leading the movement of this Dance Renaissance.
Steel believes in embracing performance art as a whole and this includes the expansion of dance program, not just as a short term project, but as one of its long term goals. He and his colleagues envision dance as an art which refuses to be bound and restricted by the rhythm and beat of the musical piece they are performing to. Instead, reacting to it in a natural, free flowing grace and movement that is to be expected in any and every dance sequence. This need to pursue improvements in dance ideology which would ultimately be for the benefit of the theater and all aspects of its production.
Splendid Threads Off the Walls of Monarchs
The tapestry is among the oldest and grandest of traditional art forms which is still in existence today. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is exhibiting a series of tapestries in a collection designed by Brussels’ born artist Peter Paul Rubens in the 1600s. “The Triumph of the Church Over Ignorance and Blindness” is among one of twenty tapestries from the said artist.
Its arrival on the Met was marked by a number of people carefully handling the massive work of art, which was supposed to enter through the museum’s basement, like every other pieces, but because of its enormity, had to be carried through the front doors of the museum, into its equally massive staircase. These twenty two collection of tapestries is still among the greater set of forty four exhibited at the Met entitled “Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor.”
Woven intricately with excellent craft and design, the tapestries carried through five years in the making. A timeframe that doesn’t appear at all surprising when people are looking at a spread of more than sixteen by twenty four feet constituted of threads collectively weighing in at about three hundred pounds. Not to mention the complex and detailed intricacies which lie in every pattern, be it of biblical scenes, cherubs, horses, religious symbols, military and diplomatic achievements, and so on.
“Tapestry now tends to be seen as a stepchild to painting, but from the Middle Ages through the 18th century it was just the opposite.” This rings true from the fact that most kings and queens in the middle ages commisioned artists and paid greatly to have the tapestry of their choice generated, whereas paintings and sketches where seen as pieces of lesser significance and value.
It is important to note that while tapestries embody an approach and form of art steeped in antiquity and one which exists in the baroque period, its beauty, enormity and the time spent on its completion is still very much acknowledged and appreciated in the contemporary setting.
Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Smirk
Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs is the type of ‘performance artist’ who specializes in achievements which not many people may not necessarily agree with and refer to as one. Among these said achievements are of sampling every product at Wal-Mart, going on a cross-country gas station tour and reading the entire Encylopedia Britannica from cover to cover. Jacobs credits these ‘achievements’ as results of having an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Among his most recent of forays to the idea of following rules and patterns is a project which he calls “The Year Of Living Biblically,” where he plans to follow the rules in the old and new testament of the bible literally, listing these rules and instructions on seventy two pages, containing what he is to do on a monthly basis for the extent of the year. Jacobs’ attempt at this biblical living is something that he admits to finding foreign and very new considering his agnostic persuasions, he playfully points out “I’ve rarely said the word Lord, unless it’s followed by of the Rings.”
Depite the seeming playful nature and mockery of religious text that Jacobs goes on about writing and acting out. Or aside from his propensity for antics and the need to be talked about and noticed, “The Year of Living Biblically is seen as a form of artistic expression, if you will, that is very much a product of this generation and era.
It exists to fuel poeple’s needs for subversion, and perhaps to some extent, the bizarre and the surreal. In its root, of course, is an itch, an idea waiting free from itself. And that is what A.J. Jacobs is and has been doing, perhaps not appearing as profound as other bizarre art forms, but nowhere near the small scale, and essentially, is unfamiliarity and less threatening dissidence at work.
Staring at Death and Finding their Bliss
Jenny Philips, a cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist is adding a new title after her name, filmmaker. Her documentary “the Dhamma Brothers” which won its share of awards at film festivals, chronicles a little over a week of imparting buddhist teachings and it way of life, to the most unlikely of candidates, prison inmates.
Philips documents the 10-day meditation provided for prisoners at the Donaldson Correctional Facility in Alabama. The process by which these people are affected by the buddhist faith and philosophy is surprisingly staggering and affecting.Philips constantly receives mail at home from the candidates who profess of how much the introduction to the particular oriental philosophy has greatly shaped and marked a difference in their lives for the better. Thirty six of the participating prisoners where referred to in the same manner as the documentary’s title, “Dhamma brothers.” Dhamma, otherwise referred to as dharma, which referred to the entirety of buddhist teachings.
Buddhism is visibly growing in the country and the rest of the western world today as a form of pop trend, one which suddenly strikes mainstream and mass appeal, or just plain visibility at the very least, largely because of media. Celebrities and renowned public figures incorporate it into their lives and refer to it as their faith as a form of creating an image of a hip lifestyle.
Jenny Philips is able to show that more than for the aesthetic or for public show, buddhism can be incorporated into the lives of individuals who need it most, and it can change their way of thinking, living, feeling, and the general state and direction their life is heading to. Film is an important art form because it indulges the more than one of the senses, while not unknowingly feeding off ideologies, beliefs and worldviews which greatly affects individuals, whoever they are, and wherever they may or may not choose to be. The Dhamma Brothers is able to exemplify at least that much.
An Artist Turned Towards Complexity
The Merce Cunningham dance company is always literally on the move. But more importantly, in terms of reinvention and applying different forms of style, Cunningham and his colleagues are never the type to settle with a single direction or choreography, much less rest on constancy and the absolute. Dancing, after all, is an artform which requires its artists, its performs to remain ever changing, graceful, immobile, willing to experiment, and so on. Enumeration of qualities at odds with the previously mentioned will result to a staleness and vapid performance which will bore audiences whether they possess a deep affection for viewing dance or otherwise.
Cunningham’s choreographies are renowned for their complexity and ever changing styles. The renowned choreographer is compared with artists the likes of Haydn, Picasso, Stravinsky and Goya among others, in that they all share propensities for restlessness in reinvention.
At a time, Cunningham did not want to have his dancers perform on other avenues but the stafe, refusing to have performances filmed, but in a span of a few years, he allowed against the opposite of it, and soon most of his choreographies, his dance routines can be seen on film, performed gracefully and beautifully by human dance puppets.
His ballet still continues to take its form on stage, and many regard Merce Cunningham as the classical artist that he is, despite the contemporary nature of his choreographies and his art. Cunningham’s contribution to the field of performance art is nothing short of spectacular.
Business (Some Unfinished) From Titian
At the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Tiziano Vecellio, or the late Titian’s work is fraught with looming questions and controversies, such that goes “Does Titian’s late style betray aging infirmity or maybe impatience, or does it imply that pictures like this aren’t finished?” critics and scholars alike have pondered on this question, the ‘pictures like this’ that they were referring to was The Flaying of Marsyas, a haunting painting of a scene between Appollo and the Marsya, the satyr. Where the god of the poetry and music slices of the latter’s skin in triumph after winning a musical contest. Tiny drops of blood dripping from Marsyas head lie on the floor being lapped up by a dog. Titian’s works were either derived from mythologies, the religious, or that of monarchs and past public figures, all of which afford its audiences a striking look, and another closer glance at his paintings.
Sensuality runs as a predominant theme, and althought most his works can be categorized in this generation as that of ‘antique art’ or similar terms, Titian created an eeriness and beauty in his paintings which captivated many artists, who in turn shared his persuasions and his style. Perhaps more subdued and filtered, but his influence remains unchanged.
Most of his art is accused of being recycled and reproduced, but in the long run, if it would lead to the generation and multiplication of a venerable and breathtaking piece of art, then it can only be for the greater good of all involved.
Ultimately, an artist’s work may be accused of being inferior or superior to his previous and succeding pieces, but in the end, all of it will be rembered. Once created, nothing is put to waste, everything lives on, ever forward, ever onwards. Art which coaxes out sentiments, perhaps of disgust and indifference, but let us hope mostly of pleasantry, and a delight in life shared by many for generations to come.