Seeing!

Eye Contact, William Benton (essays on art)

The Museum of Modern Love, Heather Rose (a novel)

During the decade that I spent living in Washington, D.C., I visited the National Gallery several times a month, and Thomas Eakins's "Biglin Brothers Racing" (1872) grew to be the painting that meant most to me. Eakins's composition feels perfect--the postures of John and Barney are balanced as each prepares to dip his oar back into the water, and the care with which Eakins composed the background, visible only upon close inspection of the original, made me feel as if, in viewing the picture, I had fallen back in time to that day in May 1872 when the Biglins raced Harry Coulter and Lewis Cavitt along the smooth surface of the Schuylkill River.  Eakins painted the pair numerous times, and his study of (nearly) nude human figures, a study that gave him the skill to reproduce the musculature in the arms and legs of the straining oarsmen, eventually cost him his teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of of the Fine Arts.  I love Eakins's work, and, for reasons that are unclear to me, this painting in particular has been one that I have wanted to really and truly see.

We often look at pictures, but how often do we see them? We have to internalize the object, pull it off the wall and into our consciousness in the way that, from time to time, we pull a fictional character, or a poetic image, into ourselves, making it a part of the way we imagine the world. Most of the time I wander through museums reminding myself to pay careful attention; and then, in the Rembrandt room of the National Gallery, or in in front of the Kandinskys at the Guggenheim, or in the astonishing room that holds Monet's "Water Lily Pond" at the Art Institute, I don't have to remind myself at all, I become, as one must, fully attentive, present in my person in the way I always should be but almost never am.

Heather Rose's wonderful novel The Museum of Modern Love, which takes as its subject the famous Marina Abramovic piece The Artist is Present from 2010 (seen above), a performance work during which, for seventy-five days, Abramovic sat still and silent, inviting anyone who wished to sit opposite her and to immerse themselves in the commitment to truth that has defined Abramovic's work for decades. "Commitment to truth?" As Rose makes plain in her evocation of the performance as experienced through a cross-section of (fictional and real) individuals, it was indeed the "truth" that Abramovic was seeking, that is, the unmediated experience of looking into the eyes of another human being, without preconceptions, without judgement, outside of language, politics, and even time (those who sat could sit for as long as they liked; over 1500 people participated and three-quarters of million visited the gallery space where Abramovic sat).  Rose, a Tasmanian novelist, beautifully recreates the effect on the viewer of the raw experience of another's presence.  The central character, a musician whose own art has failed him, whose wife is dying, and whose daughter thinks him unfeeling, finds in Abramovic's stoic sitting a restoration of the values that had slipped from his grasp.

Like Rose, the poet and art critic William Benton is attuned to the life-changing power of art.  Most everyone enjoys looking at pretty pictures, but thinking about what these pictures mean to us, how they change us, is a rare gift.  Among the best essays on art I have ever read is Benton's "Prodigies," a concise recognition of the role played by children's art in the Modernist movement.  I thought about these sentences of Benton's as I was thumbing through the images in Sandler's Art of the Postmodern Era: "In 'The Dance I,' 1909, the anatomical inaccuracy in Matisse's line has vivid equivalents in the markings of a six-year-old. That no six-year-old could perceive how a departure from precise rendering redistributes energy across the canvas in a way that gives an allover aspect to the composition is what makes art Art [!]. It bears repeating: perception, not dexterity."

True in painting, true also in poetry and fiction--perception, not dexterity or talent.  Benton offers us insights into the making and seeing of art in each of the twenty-nine short pieces collected in Eye Contact.  So much art criticism, taking a cue perhaps from the ex cathedra style of Clement Greenberg, fails to consider how and why art become Art for the average viewer.  Greenberg's pronouncement "Value judgments constitute the substance of aesthetic experience" seems wrong-headed to me.  Of course value judgements are an important part of our experience of art--what are we to bother looking at?--but the substance of aesthetic experience must also include questions about meaning, about our inner transformation in the presence of beauty (however defined), about what in the world art does for us, how it unsettles us--"unsettles" in the sense that Heather Rose asks this question in The Museum of Modern Love.

Here's Benton on the solitary female figures of Nathan Oliveria, a comment that quickly laid to rest my own inability to make sense of this painter: "Oliveria's women are other. Their native element is mind. They owe their lineage to the formative welter of male imagination. The central position they occupy on the canvas has less to do with existential space than with immanent singularity." This seems exactly right.  Not that it matters, but I want to see pictures--not "correctly"--but with the greatest possible insight, and Benton, in his brief essays on Knobelsdorf, Gordon Baldwin, and Oliveria (artists whose work I have seen), and on James McGarrell, Edmund E. Niemann, and Sidney Nolan (artists of whom I knew nothing of before Benton), allowed me to search their work with renewed confidence that I wasn't shortchanging either them or myself.

 Not only is Benton a perceptive critic of art, and, in particular, of artist of whom one might know little, he is also a fine poet, as evidenced by his sensitive transformations of images into words:

Tree Trunks Reflected in Water 

Standing in a row
at the edge of the river,

those trees are the men.
I'm the water. I mimic the way

they look and what they do
in the sliding wind.

*

I take on the mannerisms, voices,
even the thought processes of others.

I despise my skin and can't escape or fully occupy it.
An empty insufficiency

forces me to act. I pool slowly, all
surface stars and self doubt.

*

The row of trunks

in a single motion

rakes through my life.

Eye Contact is published by Fomite (58 Peru St., Burlington, VT, 05401)

The Museum of Modern Love is published by Algonquin

George Ovitt (1/25/2019)

To Build a Road

Man As An End: A Defense of Humanism by Alberto Moravia

The only truly rational means is violence.

                                                                                Alberto Moravia

Now, more than ever before in my lifetime, it is money that is the nation’s Holy Writ, the people who manipulate it—the CEOs and CFOs, the brokers and accountants—our sages and savants. Indeed for many their reach, their vision, is oracular. Yet one needn’t be a prophet to understand that our adherence to this faith, this cult, has proven catastrophic in its impact on the environment, on our civic life, on our very understanding of what it means to be human.

While the base, reductive thinking of Wall Street was once restricted to the financial sector itself, to the hawking of stocks and bonds, to the humdrum vernacular of saving accounts and IRAs, it now has permeated every aspect of life in this country. Not only has this mercenary dogma redefined and subverted democratic governance, healthcare, publishing, sports, news, fashion, entertainment, policing, urban planning, public transportation, food systems, social services, national security, the military, water and land management, social media, the criminal justice system, and international relations, but it has even permeated the Arts and education, traditionally the bastions of civil, humanistic discourse.

The result is that now virtually every significant decision in the country is made (or at least highly influenced) by some man or woman with an MBA. Time and again their decisions are sold to us (for now everything is sold) as logical, rational (meaning tested, scientific, objective), as justly, even supremely, pragmatic. Just ask these ‘experts’, these mystagogues; they will show you the numbers on the page.

Of course to treat something—anything—‘objectively’, is to abstract it, deform it, to exempt it from the messy realm of human affairs, so as to make it manipulable, so as to make it useful, profitable. Look around you: nearly everything these days has been reduced to a ‘science’, a technique, a method to be mastered and exploited by rational means. A scam, a pyramid scheme, this ubiquitous corporate gospel is the ultimate realpolitik.  

If neo-capitalism (or anti-humanism) was a concern to Moravia in 1963, when he compiled this book, it (like the state of the environment today) is now a matter of despair. His warning is plain:

So we must have no illusions. We shall have an ever larger number of cheap, well-made consumer goods; our life will become more and more comfortable; and out arts, even the most demanding and difficult ones, indeed those especially, will become more and more accessible to the masses; and at the same time we shall feel more and more that at the heart of this prosperity lies nothingness or a fetishism which, like all fetishisms, is an end in itself and cannot be put to the service of man.

In his first essay, “Man As An End”, he goes further to say:

Since then [in Bismark’s Germany] the strides made by Machiavellianism have been triumphant, like a headlong, irresistible river that swells and increases in power thanks to the very obstacles it overcomes on its way. Machiavellianism now seems inevitable, it is taken for granted and seems to have no alternative. In the field of pure thought it appears invincible, and it is the ineluctable center towards which all roads in politics seem to lead… The only result of the universal and indiscriminate practice of Machiavellianism in modern times has been to provoke the two biggest wars in history and to bring infinite suffering and immense destruction on mankind.

Arguably the most powerful part of this book for me appears in his first and aforementioned essay, “Man As An End”, an essay and introduction in which Moravia, by way of an example, describes two approaches to building a road. The first, a method employed since the beginning of time, involves nothing less than an exhaustive study of the land and peoples through which the new road would pass. As the road is meant to serve them, such an approach makes sense. It follows that central to this approach must be the careful consideration of the landscape itself, the hills and mountains, the streams and rivers, the fishes and mammals and plants. What’s more, the planners must get to know the people who reside there, their farms and villages, their hunting and fishing grounds, their churches and temples and shrines. They must devote months, even years, to familiarizing themselves with the local customs and traditions, living closely with the locals, as one of their own. Only in this way will the planners know if the construction of the road makes sense, if it will enrich rather than impoverish the locals’ lives. 

Of course you know the other way. Trump and his kind have made of virtue of it. Writes Moravia:

The second way is just the opposite and consists in building the road without bothering about the obstacles. In this case my road will cut across the farm land, span the river at its widest point, flatten the homesteads. I shall hack down mills, oil presses, chapels and workshops, fill in the wells, eliminate the sports ground. Furthermore I shall dynamite hundreds of thousands of cubic rock and dry up hundreds of thousands of square yards of marshland.

Nothing binds me to build the road in one way or the other. The law is on my side. There is a decree of my government whose execution is guaranteed by force. I can do whatever I want: I can even kill the inhabitants down to the last man and destroy all the farms and farmland… It is enough to say that I want to build a road.

In the first scenario the people and the environment are considered the end itself, the very reason for the road, if the road is to be built at all, while in the second the people and the environment are resources, tools, things, but the means to an end that has little or nothing do with them. 

Peter Adam Nash