Finders Keepers

Jeanne-Claude, Christo, and Tinkerbell

You had to believe in Tinkerbell if she was to survive.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm a big admirer of Jeanne-Claude and Christo.  I met and talked with them some years ago about their projects.  But that's not what hooked me. What hooked me (as someone whose own work has sometimes been described as miniaturist, as someone who was once struck by David Hockney's little essay on postcards) was their re-sizing of Earth, their imperial seizures of whole landscapes without -- this is important:  without -- harming them. 

But there is a Tinkerbell quality to their work.   And god knows they have plenty of people clapping their hands and saying, "I  believe..."

That's what I was thinking when I read Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the 2/28 New Yorker, "Gated":

An art critic was testily perambulating “The Gates,” in Central Park, with his wife and a friend from Texas on the first Sunday afternoon of its installation when he suddenly got a load of their thousands of fellow-walkers and registered the common mood—a sort of vast, blanketing, almost drowsy contentment. He couldn’t think of any other occasion on which he had witnessed so many New Yorkers moving slowly when they didn’t have to. Each person looked strangely, nakedly personal: not a New Yorker at all, or anything else in particular. The crowd’s many-voiced sound had an indoor intimacy, like the bright murmur in a theatre, during intermission, when the play is good and everybody knows that everybody knows it. The over-all social effect, which was somewhat like that of an electrical blackout or a major blizzard, minus the inconvenience, was weird and terrific. (You could give yourself a nice scare imagining “The Gates” magically removed, and leaving the people looking as they looked—a goofball “Night of the Living Dead.”) The voluble disaffection of the art critic, me, collapsed, to the relief of my companions. I had to admit the reason for it, which was that “The Gates” is a populist affront to the authority of art critics, and to accept being just another shuffling, jostling, helplessly chummy citizen.

Of course, “The Gates” is art, because what else would it be? Art used to mean paintings and statues. Now it means practically anything human-made that is unclassifiable otherwise. This loss of a commonsense definition is a big art-critical problem, but not in Central Park, not this week. What the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been doing for three and a half decades is self-evident. They propose a grandiose, entirely pointless alteration of a public place, then advance their plan in the face of a predictable public and bureaucratic resistance, which gradually comes to seem mean-spirited and foolish for want of a reasonable argument against them. They build a constituency of supporters, including collectors who help finance the project by buying Christo’s drawings and collages of it. What then occurs is like an annual festival—Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a high-school prom—without the parts about its being annual or a festival. It feels vaguely religious. The zealous installers and minders, identifiable on site by their uniforms and chatty pride, are like acolytes. As with any ritual—though “The Gates” can’t be a ritual, because it is performed just once—how people behave during the installation is what it is for and about. Then it’s gone, before it has a chance to become boring or, for that matter, interesting.

Rubens and Warhol

Peter Schjeldahl, in the February 7th New Yorker, has a piece on the new Rubens exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  There has been a good deal of talk about this show -- it's Rubens' drawings which show Rubens at his best, many believe.  "People who like Rubens's paintings willl love this show; the rest of us will be hard put not to like it." 

He writes:

On the advice of an artist friend, I tried for a while to regard Rubens's art as a force of nature, no more reproachable for its mindlessness than are summer clouds, or a waterfall.  This futile exercise convinced me that the Rubenesque is, on the contrary, a force of will.  More concocted than cultivated, it has the weakness of all "international styles," from Hellenism to the modernistic:  the exaggeration of generally admired qualities, absent the grit of a particular culture or personality.  I suspect that Rubens attracts painters precisely because his style, being synthetic, presents no integral, daunting mystery.  It looks like something you might almost learn to do.

Excellent!  That explains the unease I've felt about Rubens for years. Schjeldahl continues:

A telling fact about Rubens is the character of his reliance on workshop assistants, which went beyond what I know of any other Old Master.  A Danish visitor to his studio in 1621 reported seeing "many young painters who worked on different pieces on which Sr. Rubens had drawn with chalk and put a spot of color here and there; the young men had to execute these paintings which were then finished off with lines and colors added by Rubens himself."  That is, Rubens provided designs at the start and tweakings at the end while ceding the middle, critical stage of a painting, in which, through innumerable decisions and unplanned impulses, thought and feeling become form. He seems to have especially relished the finishing part.  (The show includes a few of the hundreds of often fine drawings by earlier artists that Rubens collected and made his own by summarily retouching.)  He plainly believed, as did his contemporaries, that he had devised a literally foolproof manner, and he self-replicated to a degree that would be brazened by no other major artist until Andy Warhol -- who positively valued, as an aesthetic sensation, the deadening effect of proxy hands in a work's execution.  Rubens's sole excuse was efficiency.

Not entirely what it seems: Istanbul to Meshed to Srinagar to Saigon

Frederic Prokosch's novel The Asiatics and Anh Hung Tran's film Scent of Green Papaya are two of my all-time favorites.  What they have in common is that neither is entirely what it seems to be.

Here is Prokosch's protagonist crossing the salt marshes as his adventure takes him from Teheran to Meshed:

We stopped at tea-houses and ate sardines and biscuits and drank dark tea.  Everyone was smoking opium.  Old men sat in the shadows, nursing their sore feet and grumbling...  Everywhere, accompanying us as inevitably as the tinkling of bells, was the smell of sweat and opium.  The heat kept me weary and feverish all day, and at night I was forever dreaming ominous and frightening things.  Slowly we crossed the salty lands towards Meshed.

The salt marshes glittered like snow.  My eyes began to ache, my senses were badgered gently into a mild hysteria by the icy flicker of sunlight upon the lands that rippled away to the left.  Thin and contemptible thoughts shot in an dout of my mind; bits of irritability splinters of suspicion, of jealousy, of detestation, of loneliness, of wicked understanding.  Everyone around me and everyone I'd ever known appeared to me during these three hours in a glassy unpleasant light.  And I swore to myself that I'd keep clear of them all.  Watch them if you wish, so I muttered to myself:  but don't let them toy with you, don't let them wriggle their way into that part of you that matters.  Be alone.  Be proud...

The novel, written in the 1930's about a journey during the early part of that decade, was very well received not only by the public but by other, better-known writers of that period -- Thomas Mann and TS Eliot among them.  What is hard to believe if you've read the book -- with its detailed descriptions of Central and Southeast Asia -- is that Prokosch had never been there.  He wrote the book when he was a young graduate student at Yale from Wisconsin, a new writer who had immersed himself in old maps and accounts of journeys before writing The Asiatics.  He went on to write a dozen novels, several books of poetry, and a memoir, Voices.   He was also a passionate printer of books.  And a forger.

I haven't read his memoir so I don't know whether he mentions the forgery problem..  Here's one description of what happened from the University of Virginia Library:

The University of Virginia Library has acquired two rare and privately printed booklets of poetry written by T.S. Eliot, including a minor poem, "Virginia," that has a U.Va. connection in its origins...

..The finely printed books were published by Frederic Prokosch, an American novelist and poet, in 1935, when Eliot was at the height of his career and already one of the most celebrated and influential poets of the 20th century.  Only about 20 copies of each chapbook were published and only a handful may be found today in libraries, said Kendon L. Stubbs, deputy University Librarian...

...It is likely that the American-born Eliot, who lived in London and had become a British citizen, wrote the short poem "Virginia" after his 1933 visit here, Stubbs said. And it is probable that to print the "Words for Music" booklet Prokosch drew the text of the two Eliot poems straight from the U.Va. quarterly, where he had come across them.

Themes of time and place -- a slow river, children's voices in an orchard -- found in "Words for Music" appear later in Eliot's masterpiece "Four Quartets," Stubbs noted.

Prokosch, whose own fiction at the time was the subject of international acclaim, had also published poetry in the VQR, which was founded in 1925 and growing in prestige.  On the side, he had begun to print small limited-edition chapbooks of poems by well-known writers.

Pleased with the "Words for Music" publication when he received it as a surprise gift from Prokosch, Eliot the following year sent the younger writer the text of "Two Poems" and paid him to publish it so Eliot could use it to give to friends as a fine-press Christmas card.  The two writers maintained a cordial relationship in the years to come...

...In the 1960s Prokosch, his writing career in decline, became involved in a publishing deception that, when discovered, shocked the rare-book community, according to George Riser of the Library's Special Collections staff.  Prokosch again printed some fine chapbooks by well known poets but this time pre-dated the publication to the 1930s to make them appear rare.  "Words for Music" and "Two Poems" are not among the forgeries.

For more on this, and view of the chapbooks themselves, take a look here.

Anh Hung Tran's film is far from being a forgery.  The Scent of Green Papaya has the same authenticity that you feel when you read The Asiatics. 

This is a film of such beauty that, even if the story were dull or inauthentic, you'd have a hard time taking your eyes away from the screen.  When I think about it, I think of the little patio where the food is cooked.  Mui is a country child who has arrived in the Saigon household of a middle-class family in the 1950's to be brought up as a family servant and who grows up in the household until that family -- and her own life -- change completely.  The sounds of the city, the weather, the breezes, the smell of the cooking -- all are part of the memory of the film.  You are there in Saigon before the war begins.

But then again, you are not.  Watch the film over and over again and you will still not quite believe that it was shot entirely in a studio in Paris.  I've tried to find the hidden seams in the photography and can't.

Self

From anthropologist and friend, Dorothy Lee, in Freedom and Culture:

The definition of the self in our own culture rests on our law of contradiction.  The self cannot be both self and not self, both self and other; the self excludes the other.

Wintu [natives of the Mt. Shasta area] philosophy in general has no law of contradiction.  Where we have mutually exclusive dualistic categories, the Wintu have categories which are inclusive, but not mutually so; that is, object A will be included in object B, but not vice versa.  Out of this context, B can be distinguished or emphasized through various linguistic devices.  For example, in Wintu thought, man is included in nature; natural law, timeless order, is basic and true, irrespective of man.

However, independent judgement, private experience and free will are not thereby excluded, but function transiently within the framework of natural law; man actualizes and gives temporality and concreteness to the natural order upon which he impinges [my emphasis] -- through act of will and personal intent.

The concept of the self forms one of these non-exclusive categories.  When speaking about Wintu culture, we cannot speak of the self and society, but rather of the self in society.  As a member of my society, writing for readers of this cultural background, I am presenting my study from the point of view of the self and its gradually decreasing participation in society; however, I believe that this is only due to my cultural bias, and that a Wintu would have started from what for us is the opposite direction, the gradual distinguishing of the self from society.

In our own culture, we are clear as to the boundaries of the self.  In our commonly held unreflective view, the self is a distinct unit, something we can name and define.  We know what is the self and what is not the self; and the distinction between the two is always the same.  With the Wintu, the self has no strict bounds, is not named and is not, I believe, recognized as a separate entity.