Tohu Bohu

Well, darn. I happened to come across a lovely facsimile of the Morgan Picture Bible, and I wanted to talk about how wonderful it was, but I’ve just wasted half-an-hour trying to find a good picture of 15v, and not only did I fail to find one, but I lost the available time for posting.

There is a scan of the individual quadrants of the page at Medieval Tymes. The image of the upper right, Samson pulling down the pillars (Judges 23-30) gives an idea of how magnificent, crazy, funny, and moving these images are, but sadly gives no sense of the whole page, and the way that the four images interact. The Morgan Library itself has an on-line exhibition with eighteen full-page images: 23v gives a sense of both the violence and the artists’ freedom from formal restraint, and 27v shows the startling technique of allowing the figures to cross from one quadrant to another. Make sure to use the zoom feature, once you’ve got a sense of the page; the details on these are superb.

Sadly, 19v is only available from Medieval Tymes in bits and pieces; in that one Peninah actually leans from the upper right into the upper left in order to stick out her tongue at Hannah, which is even better because Peninah is already in the upper left quadrant, smiling and well-behaved.

Anyway, as I said, I’m out of time for now. But it’s wonderful stuff.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Peter S. Beagle evidently wrote a book called The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is a sort of examination of the titular painting and several other works by Heironymous Bosch. Mr. Beagle is not an art historian, nor yet a critic. His grasp of the iconography is pretty good, but he rarely attempts to talk about the technical or formal aspects, other than to call them wonderful or brilliant. He restricts himself, mostly, to pointing out some of his favorite images from the multitude of mini-paintings within the big triptychs and delineating their significance.

This is too bad, because at the beginning of the book, Mr. Beagle talked about his own connections to the artist, how he came across the images (on pulp illustrators’ homages), and the connection in his youthful mind to Hiroshima and Auschwitz. I wish he’d gone on like that, talking about himself and his own reactions and connections to the art.

There are lots of art historians who know more about Mr. Bosch and his art than Mr. Beagle does, but few of them write as well as he does. In trying to write their book, he’s mostly just come up with a well-written but weak art history book. If they had tried to write his book, they would have come up with (one imagines) a poorly-written but strong art history book. If he had written his own book, he might have come up with something really powerful indeed.

The other thing to be a bit wistful about with this book is the images. Viking did a very good job, within the limitations of the book, but Mr. Bosch’s works cry out for a computer screen and a readers’ ability to zoom in and out on the high-resolution images while reading the text. It was hard for me to connect the details to the full images, to connect one group to another, or think about how its placement affects its meaning, or to go from one group to the one next to it or above it, rather than following Mr. Beagle’s (perfectly reasonable) scheme. Also, it would be good to be able to compare panels side-by-side, to compare versions of the Haywain or the Crowning with Thorns, or to compare one grotesque with another. If there is one area where you can argue that the book is obsolete, the presentation of detailed images is it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Possibly the best meme ever, courtesy of Tyler Green over at the Modern Art Notes blog: name three U.S. politicians and the works of art to which I'd like to see them chained (the reference is to Italy, and if you are not resident in the US, feel free to adapt to local conditions).

So. This is surprisingly difficult. Or at least, it’s surprisingly difficult to avoid cheap shots, such as chaining Dick Cheney to Slide Rock and then throwing art and veep into the ocean together.

• I’d rather like to Senator Diane Feinstein to chain herself to Robert Arneson’s sculpture of George Moscone for a while. No particular political point, but boy, wouldn’t that be something?
• Somebody has got to be chained to the Statue of Liberty, but who? Rudy Giuliani? Tom Tancredo? Alberto Gonzales? No, forget the Statue of Liberty, I want Mitt Romney to chain himself to Daniel Chester French’s statue of William Lloyd Garrison on Commonwealth Avenue: “I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD”. Hee hee.
• I’d like the eventual Democratic Party nominee for President next summer to chain herself (or himself) to Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms.

Your turn, Gentle Readers.

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My discovery today at Wadsworth Atheneum was an artist named Joseph Smolinski. He had three pieces showing. One was a version of the Charter Oak that would probably only be funny to Connecticutters. Such as Your Humble Blogger, who found it hilarious. The second is a set of four images of a tree in the seasons, ranging from Spring to Winter. I liked that one a lot, too. And the third was a digital video called Tree Turbine (the artist has only some early work for it on line), about, well, tree turbines.

As of the moment, Mr. Smolinski does not have a slash-co2 page. I think that artists will have awesome slash-co2 pages, don’t you?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger spent much of yesterday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Actually, Your Humble Blogger spent much of yesterday mocking the MFA,B, which richly deserves it, what with their pitiful collection of contemporary art, their baffling insistence on blockbuster shows of not-art, and their risible wall-text. And their delusions of grandeur. Great salad bar, though.

Actually, the thing about the MFA,B is that for all my animosity, I am forced to admit that they have a magnificent collection. Their ancient Greek stuff, for example, particularly the vases, is astonishingly good, and it is incredibly instructive to spend twenty minutes or so looking at a couple of dozen painted vases, each slightly different from the others, giving a picture of the range of subject matter and style, while also making clear the similarities, each to the other, particularly in subject matter and style. Admittedly, you have to really want to find this marvelous collection, because it’s in a darkened corner at the end of a corridor that’s been blocked off for construction. But it’s worth it. And there are more wonderful things: a set of breathtaking works of Arabic calligraphy in marbled paper; a gaggle of Roman heads, of various times and styles; enough Egyptian stuff to satisfy any ten-year-old boy, including, yes, mummies; some insanely lovely Asian scrolls; a tiny ivory Christ as Good Shepherd from Asia with the cutest little-widdle sheep, more like hedgehogs, really; a magnificent Titian-haired St. Catherine, with actual Titian hair; all that Impressionist crap people seem to like; an enormous Medieval Spanish portal, with all the stonework around it; a Sol LeWitt they are hiding somewhere. So, you know, I mock it because it deserves the mockery, but I still go, when I can.

But that’s not what I’m here to puff today. No, I mention the MFA,B because at the moment the cavernous West Lobby space is occupied by a piece called “Artificial Rock # 85”, by Zhan Wang. It’s a big, shiny scholar’s rock made of stainless steel. Now, I walked in to the lobby and went “ooh, shiny scholar’s rock!” and knocked over a bunch of old ladies to go over to it (this is a joke, for those of you unfamiliar with Bostonian Old Ladies in Bombazine; one would hesitate to attempt to knock over a BOLiB with an earthmover. Many of these are the same old ladies who were BOLiB when Francis Dahl wrote about how the Nazis couldn’t knock them over with a Panzer), and it was pretty cool, but when I had a chance to look at it over a long period, I found myself a trifle discontented with it. I liked the idea of it, but it somehow didn’t quite work for me.

So I’m not here to puff the Artificial Rock # 85, either. Now, it happens that a friend of my Gracious Host (and an acquaintance of mine, as well, who I would be happy to be friends with if the opportunity really arose) recently started a blog, on which she posted some lovely photos of scholar’s rocks. Real ones, you understand, not shiny ones. Which reminded me of the Artificial Rock (# 85); I don’t know if Kam would particularly like it, but I wanted to mention it to her. So I decided to do a little internet searching, and immediately found out the name of the artist, which I had of course forgotten, and several pictures of shiny scholar’s rocks, including one at the DeYoung in Golden Gate park, one that’s at the Kennedy Center and one that is evidently in Shanghai.

And then those links led me to a shiny floating island and a shiny rock in a stream, both of which are very cool and, um, shiny, and an installation that evidently just closed up at Williams of a shiny cityscape that looks very cool indeed. And the flickr tag for Zhan Wang has a bunch of pictures of what appears to be a very disturbing installation at the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. Some of those pieces look much cooler than Artificial Rock # 85 (“I thought it would be a series of three—four, at the most"). But that’s not what I’m puffing.

What I am puffed about, at the moment, is that the internet exists. And more than that, that it has accumulated this vast amount of trivia. Much of it searchable. Ten years ago, the internet existed, more or less, but if I had come across something that I was vaguely interested in, a search like that would have been almost totally useless. If I had happened to see a big shiny Scholar’s Rock at more or less the same time that a friend’s friend expressed interest in scholars rocks, I would have been unable to quickly find out the name of the artist I had seen, and probably wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it, because it wouldn’t have been worth it, just to say that there is a big shiny scholar’s rock in Boston at the MFA. And then, I wouldn’t have known that this friend of my friend had an interest in scholar’s rocks anyway.

For all the annoyances of the internet and the bizarre nearness of trivia, it’s terrific to me to have this odd coincidence of interest lead me to a quick, annoyance-free introduction to a handful of pieces of art that I would likely never have seen. Even though I don’t think all the stuff is fantastic, even though I’m not an instant fan. It’s just a nice thing, a new bit of interesting stuff for me, a tasty treat in the box.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger is back, having had an excellent Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is in some way all about wresting our attention from those things that get up our noses to those things we happen to actually like, yes? So here’s a Puff Piece, since we haven’t had one in a while, about guerilla artist and pedestrian activist Xing Ped. Honestly, I don’t know much about Mr. Xing, who is (or perhaps was) incredibly reclusive. A lot of what I do know is unverifiable anecdote; a lot of people claim to have known or even worked with Mr. Xing, but it seems unlikely to me that he would have confided in them. Anyway, it’s the work that counts. The most likely bio, based as much on conjecture as reliable evidence, is that he was a war orphan of a Chinese soldier and a Korean mother, adopted by a Canadian nurse and brought up somewhere in lower Canada or northern US. The influence of Pop Art and minimalism is obvious, but the stories about his relationship with Donald Judd are probably false. It’s tempting to imagine them on a cross-country car trip, the older man holding forth on materials, on sites, on consumerism, on galleries ... and then the crash outside Marfa and the youngster’s vow never to drive again. Still, there’s no evidence of that, nor of the similar stories about collaborations with Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono or Sol LeWitt. The story of the Marfa crash, particularly, seems to contradict the story about his adoptive family being killed when they were crossing a busy intersection and a car failed to stop. Of course, there’s no evidence for that, either. Or, really, for the youthful flirtation with First Nation religions that led to the early site-specific works.

It was those works—the two-dimensional yellow diamonds, all flat surface, the stenciled words and images, the roadside locations—that really started Mr. Xing’s career. It’s hard to imagine how startling the now-iconic deer or moose would have appeared at the time. Just the silhouette, and the name of the animal (and the stenciled signature) in easy-to-read large sans-serif letters. Later he eschewed the images for short, passionate slogans, making my own favorite pieces. The thing that makes the works powerful is the contrast between the style of the work—cold, industrial, manufactured—and the passion of the pleas to ‘End Road Work’ or ‘End Construction’. And, of course, the siting, by the side of the road, always near some of the ubiquitous construction, the attempt to make the roads wider, longer, faster.

In fact, these later works without Mr. Xing’s name affixed are even more powerful for me, because they play with the whole question of identity. After the seventies ‘happenings’ where he spray-painted the ‘graffiti’ (just his name, in all caps) on the road near some dangerous intersection, his legions of followers have taken to stenciling his name on roads in cities and towns across America (oddly, in Canada they put his family name last as if it were a Western surname). The strong association of his name with dangerous intersections and bus stops carries over to his later, unsigned work, to the point where the signs in proximity to the ever-increasing roadways evoke the danger to pedestrians as well, and even while driving, I find myself raising a fist and shouting his name, as if it had been printed right on the sign.

Of course, after so many years, it’s not clear whether Mr. Xing is still active, or whether he has retired from the active supervision of the team of assistants he had delegated to do the actual siting. He had always taken the minimalist rejection of craft to an extreme, using geometric figures, stencils and print to universalize the artworks. Like the conceptualists, he distanced himself from the actual production of the art. What was clearly his own hand was the placement of the signs and the graffiti, and he attempted to remove himself even from that by allowing assistants to choose the placement of the signs. Added to that, of course, was the work of ‘independent’ copycat artists, and of course many pedestrian-rights activists took his work as part of their cause. By removing his self from the works, he in effect multiplied himself; because it is impossible to tell whether a particular work is a “real” Xing Ped, all of them are and none. There is no artist, there is just art. And yet, when you see any of them—the most amateurish scrawl on a road near a school, or a flimsy canvas orange sign on the roadside—you take it for a Xing Ped, you say his name, you think about the other works (I haven’t even mentioned the marvelous Holzer-like installations where his stylized self-portrait alternates with a warning hand, or where the words WALK and DON’T WALK alternate in red and green like a contradiction incarnate) and, inevitably, you think of the place of walking and driving in our culture.

That’s the magnificent paradox. He removes himself from the work so that he doesn’t stand between the viewer and the (political) meaning, but the result is not that he disappears but that he grows larger, his name encompassing all the byways of the nation. Even if he has already died, and the studio now carries on making the works without any supervision at all, his influence is so strong that they are him, they work for him and he works through them, achieving a sort of immortality. There will always be Xing Ped; the endless construction demands Xing Ped; the children dodging traffic in front of approved Xing Schools grow up to be the drivers he excoriated but also to be the activists he still inspires.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Xing Ped, Self-Portrait, date unknown.

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