Andrew Wyeth

Though the deaths of Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan are more film related, it's Andrew Wyeth's death that is haunting me this week. I am not sure what to make of him - I took him for granted in the days before I thought much about art, accepting his fame as a mark of his importance, then, after reading a few critical dismissals, maybe accepting them as the critical line... But when I did start caring about art, and trying to judge works on their merits, neither of those earlier attitudes helped... But then - I don't think I have been able to see much of Wyeth's work. In books, but that doesn't count. (Unlike his father's work, which was made to be put in books, and thus comes through quite nicely on the page - I have seen enough of his work to rank it near the best illustration I know of. Not Mervyn Peake, but the next best thing.) I don't remember seeing a lot of Andrew Wyeth's work up close - but I need to, to judge it. What I know of the controversies just underlines this - the pictures are pretty enough, but pretty pictures area dime a dozen. What happens when you see them for real? My guess is - they work. But I've never proved it. I very much want to - I don't know how I've missed him through the years - maybe his popularity led me away from the work, when it did show... I don't know. I do know - he seems to relate to the strand of art I particularly like - the developments after Homer and Eakins, through Hopper, maybe Scheeler - eventually (I'd say) Rothko, Still, etc. - nature (though also buildings, etc.), increasingly simplified and abstracted into shapes and fields of color - I don't know if that's right or not: it's what Christina's World looks like, quite a few others I have seen, reproduced - many of the images featured on his web site, for instance. But I don't know how much of the effect holds up on close examination. (It holds up very well on examination of Hopper, for instance - in person, the paintings exhibit a strong tension between the picture and the forms - the shapes, colors, the compositions: they are like representational and abstract paintings somehow layered on top of one another. After seeing Hopper - Rothko (say) starts to look like Hopper magnified, like one of his walls or windows viewed from very very close...)

All of which is to say that Wyeth is an artist I want and need to look at, in person. Reading of his death gives that desire a good deal more potency...

And finally - doesn't the composition of Christina's World remind you of this? A painting I have seen many many times,a nd one of the highlights of American art....

My Kid Could Paint That...

...probably not, actually. My Kid Could Paint That is a new documentary about Marla Olmstead, abstract expressionist in diapers. It's a cute story - dad's an amateur painter, Marla, aged 2, wanted to play with the paints so dad let her - and she produced things that looked like real art. Someone put some up in a coffee shop - where they sold. A gallery owner started showing her work - and it sold. And sold and sold and she became rich and famous and lived happily ever after! Until 60 Minutes came calling and put a camera in the basement and got footage of dad telling her where to put the red... Scandal! Mom and dad fought back, producing a video of their own showing the tyke painting a piece from start to finish, while hoping the documentary would clear their name. But the director, Amir Bar-Lev, was having his own doubts. All the time he filmed the family and the kid, he never saw her paint anything start to finish either. Hmm, thought he. And so the film ends, with director saying he doesn't quite believe it, then telling mom and dad, so they walk off, mom in tears... and you, viewer, are left to make up your mind.

It's quite a yarn. Enough that when I first saw the trailers, I thought it was fiction - a mockumentary. (Not having read anything about little Marla before this.) And even now, I'm not so sure it isn't fiction - you can create one hell of a viral marketing campaign on the internets - which I suppose is the theme of the film. Is little Marla, 4 year old genius painter, a work of fiction? Charlie Rose and a child psychologist say no: she's a normal kid, whose father coached her into creating works of art. The family of course says no no no! she did it all! Bar-Lev says - I don't believe it, but I have nothing more to show you, one way or the other. Which plays a bit like a cop out - though it's honest enough. But ending it there feels wrong; we need something like the ending of Imamura's A Man Vanishes: where the final confrontation between film crew and subjects seems to take place in a restaurant - but halfway in, a crew starts taking it apart, and it turns out to be a set on a sound stage. Now that's how you acknowledge the artifice of a film - not having a critic or newspaper columnist tell you your film will be a lie... (At least the critic asks if he can say it, then says it, as if he expects the scene to be edited: leaving it in is a nice touch.)

The truth is - I wish Bar-Lev had followed through more on the promise that the film would be about modern art, and what it means that a 4 year old can (or can't) fake it. The point is raised, a couple times: hostility to modern art, the idea that if a kid can fool the experts then the experts are full of crap, or that no one buys art like this for what it is, just for what they can say about it. For the story. That's the only part that is really addressed, though - the ways abstract expressionism, action painting, was about the story of the painting being made as much as what ended up on the canvas. And that drives this story, clearly: people buy these paintings because a precious little girl painted them - or rather, they pay $20,000 for these paintings because the precious little girl painted them. Which, to be fair, is a significant element of modern art - it has become increasingly "indexical" rather than "iconic" - taking meaning from their production more than what they represent. But there is a lot more going on in abstract art that the conditions of their painting - and Bar-Lev doesn't do much to explore those things.

What does makes a good abstract painting vs. a bad one? It's an important part of this story: it's why people like these paintings - why people are "fooled" if they are "fooled" - why they got attention in the first place. It's also why people doubt that Marla painting them: they are too good - and they are good in ways that betray too much knowledge and understanding about art, and abstract art. They are, as far as I can see, nice paintings - pretty, pleasant to look at - with a decent sense of unity and compositional sense - they have balance, structure - the forms and colors lead the eye around, and satisfy it. They work for the same reason classic abstractions work - they look good, they are unified, they create an enveloping visual field. Which, I have to say, is one of the things that casts some doubt on them. People say it in the film - that they are too finished, too complete - kids don't cover whole canvases like that, when left to their own devices. And it seems to me (and my amateur eye) that they are too well designed - they have too much balance, of color and form.There's no sign that little Marla even knows how to draw - and these paintings don't look like something you could get more than once in 10 tries without being able to draw. Drawing takes more than just making the hand do what the mind wants it to - it's knowing what the hand should do. Marla just makes shapes and marks - it's hard to see how she could know to create paintings that look like these, except by accident. Maybe she's painting 10 bad ones for every good one, and the bad ones are disappearing - there's no sign of that though.



(This is "Dinosaurs" by Marla Olmstead. Image found at the New York Times.)

And there's more. First - I don't want to say they are great paintings - they're nice, they're pretty, but I don't know what more to say about them.... For one thing, they are about 50 years behind the times. Abstract expressionism was a product of the 40s and 50s - by the 60s it was being replaced by pop art and minimalism and conceptual art. This is important too - especially if you think this story and this film are about resistance to modern art. The real story of Marla Olmstead is that abstract art has long since ceased to be anything special. This kind of modern art is now completely mainstream, completely safe - it's pretty and fun and looks good on the wall. Which is not a condemnation - that's equally true of Pollock or Matisse or Degas or Warhol these days. But it means this story isn't quite about resistance to abstract art. It's about the acceptance of modern art, it's transformation into mainstream culture....

In any case: this is what is missing from the film. any kind of formal discussion of the paintings - or a fairly serious historical discussion of them. Just assuming the kid is painting them - what does it mean that she's working in a 40 year old style? more or less. But more significantly, Bar-Lev should have found time for some kind of analysis of the paintings. There are comments in the film related to these issues - the adult themes, the big ideas, the compositions and so on - but none of it is developed. What is an "adult theme"? a "big idea"? How do these paintings have them? why isn't that here?

For that matter - the hints that the film might be about the question of the emptiness of abstract art - "a kid could do that!" - aren't really fulfilled either. The most substantial statement of that case comes fro the gallery owner himself, kvetching that he slaves over his photo-realist canvases for ages and this kid dashes hers off in a couple sittings and gets almost as much money as he does - he even claims he pushed her to expose the con game of modern art. This rant might be more convincing if it didn't come right after the 60 Minutes revelation in the middle of the film. Now, sure - Bar-Lev could be cheating here: there's no indication of when Brunelli said those things - Bar-Lev puts them right after the 60 Minutes footage, but he might be cheating. But it sounds about right - it sounds like sour grapes, like something Brunelli would say when he thought he'd lost his cash cow. In fact, the paintings are still selling, and he doesn't seem to have stopped pushing the kid's art - though I suppose if he's in it for the money, he wouldn't... But at best, it says more about him than the kid's art (or her dad's art, if this is all a scam.)

Not that it matters anyway. Brunelli's claims aren't very convincing anyway. Painters have never been paid by the hour: the value of art, to collectors and critics alike, has never been determined by the effort put in. Ease, effortlessness, spontaneity are valued just as highly as hard work (more so, though it's usually a myth - the effortless genius. That's another aspect of this whole story that gets short shrift: the utter pervasiveness of the myth of the genius, whose work is a miracle - that's what little Marla is, just like Giotto before her!) Spirit and feeling valued as highly as skill, overall effect and expressiveness as much as virtuosity. Though all of this tends to simply circle the question of how much ability is involved in being able to create a truly great abstract painting. And that's still open for debate, guess. I got into a fracas recently over the merits of Pollock and Rothko and the like - defending them against a fairly standard array of arguments: a kid could do it, it takes no skill, it shows no skill, it's boring. All of which, to me, seems driven by a refusal to take the painting at face value, or to read it on its terms. I found a nice quote from Clement Greenberg, the great champion of this kind of art: "art is essentially a matter of means and results, not of means and ends." Whatever Greenberg meant by it, I think you can take it to mean, you can't impose your idea of what art is on the work. You can't judge the skill, the effort to create it, on something outside the work itself.

Which has wandered a ways away from little Marla Olmstead and whether or not her dad painted her paintings. But it is still related. First - because abstract paintings are not simply random patterns of paint - the good ones have structure and unity (or a significant type of disunity), that sometimes arises from randomness and chaos. Second because, the fact that a 4 year old might do something like this would not, really, discredit the work of the Pollocks of the world: it doesn't discredit painters to discover forms in nature like the forms in their work. It's probably not far fetched to say Pollock and others like him were trying, at some level, to reproduce natural forms, with their mixture of randomness and structure - it's also probably not to far-fetched to expect a 4 year old's paintings to have a similar natural mix of randomness and structure. She isn't reproducing it - she's just doing it... if she's doing it. And I suppose - it tends to undermine the claims that she did this unaided: it seems far more likely that she was guided, probably by her father. He doesn't seem to have had the ability to paint these things himself - but he probably has the eye to "edit" his daughter's improvisations into more unified canvases. At least, that is my interpretation of it.... Unfortunately - I don't know enough about art to really make the case I want to make here. I wish I did - and I wish this film had done more to make it.

And finally - I will say that this film comes at a very good time, as far as I am concerned. I've been thinking about art. I've been wondering how to work in more posts about art, music, books, and so on - not that I've been banging out the film posts recently. But I'm interested in art: I was grateful for the post I linked to above, and for Tucker's recent post on Jeff Wall - both were chances to talk about art. Arguing about Rothko, especially, sent me to the books - to Greenberg and others - and to the BMFA, to look for specific things. (Unfortunately, all their 20th century art is in storage - no Pollock! Dove! O'Keefe! Sheeler! Davis! Marin! even the Hoppers are out of sight! even the Picassos and Legers are gone! Fortunately, one can make a lot of good arguments about Pollock and Rothko from Monet alone.... And there are compensations - a wonderful wonderful wonderful exhibition of Japanese art. That should be a future post, if I have any discipline in me at all.) This film, whatever its failings, fits in well with my current mood. It makes a good jump off point for all kinds of thought about art, the media, documentary filmmaking, whatever you'd like.



The real thing - Pollock's Lavender Mist. Your kid couldn't paint that.

A Bit of a Rant

Could it be time for a political post? (Preferably random and incoherent!) I see a certain amount of shock and horror being expressed over a Da Vinci parody - not directly, I mean I see a few blogs reacting to the shock and horror over a Da Vinci parody... I mean - I'm not going to read Rod Dreher for love or money.... and with things like this, you can never be sure if there's anyone who's not basically earning a living by Taking Offense who cares a whit. (Or why they'd care, if it wasn't in their job description.) But it reminds me of some things I've been thinking about, so I'll use it as an excuse to gas a bit about religion and art and politics and such...

A first point worth noting is that the inciting poster (Leonardo's last supper enacted by folks in bondage gear) is not, really, parodying or insulting religion - it's parodying The Last Supper: a famous painting, already (as Dan Savage documents) much parodied in the culture. A second point might be that the picture itself is hardly offensive: a bunch of guys and a couple women in leather, maybe a mask or two - whatever. Sure sure, if you want to examine it closely, I'm sure you can find something to be offended at - and I suppose the mere thought of S&M is going to offend some people - again: whatever. Their problem. None of that in the picture. Now I know - the outrage is fake; it's ginned up to justify oppression of homosexuals, and oppression in general - the plain authoritarianism of the right has long since been proven... It's all about establishing the right as the voice of "morality" that it can use to justify its authoritarian politics... It's still worth repeating the point. Noting, again, that the "outrage" is not aimed at anything concrete - not what's in the poster, but the idea behind it: that there might be people who like a good spanking in the world. And probably - the idea that people who like a good spanking now and then might be quite happy and good natured people - since everyone in the picture looks quite satisfied with their lot....

But that's old hat. This is a good excuse to note again that this is Bunuel week - an artist who had great fun mocking religion (as well as the great artworks of our past), including his own Last Supper parody, in Viridiana... as well as more offensive tricks - the ending of L'Age D'Or, with Jesus and disciples in the roles of the libertines of 120 Days of Sodom, is particularly amusing. Which suggests one angle on this latest "controversy" - the fact is, religious imagery is pervasive in western culture: a very high percentage of visual art is religious, is drawn from religious material. Stories, symbols, sayings, language itself, is drawn from or heavily influenced by religious sources. So - anything you do, that addresses the culture - the shared pool of images and ideas and types and so on - is going to refer to religion, somewhere. It can be hard to specify where the lines are drawn: this is a clear example, where a bible story has been adapted into a painting - which has become every bit as pervasive in the culture as the story. But is the painting religion? Is parodying the painting an insult to religion? does it have a thing to do with religion?

There's a broader question here - of what religion is. One thing that sometimes bugs me about radical atheists (like PZ Myers, say - who in fact I quite admire) is their tendency to speak of religion as a single, unitary thing. As if religion was the same as religious belief. It isn't. "Religion" covers a world of things - institutions; beliefs; moral and social rules and precepts; rituals and practices; symbols and images; cultural identities. And it is not religion so much as religionS: they are all different, putting different weight on the various pieces of religion. And many of these aspects of religion are taken over whole by ideologies that get rid of the idea of God: Stalinism, Maoism (so often cited as proof that atheists are Just As Bad as Christians at being murderous bigots), were religions in pretty much everything but the name. Even the central, organizing, imagery - the images of Stalin and Mao - the cult of personality.... (This is of course also the case with perfectly harmless movements.) I am inclined, myself, to think that the unifying principal of religions is their reliance on symbols: religious thought itself is based on taking symbols literally. Religion becomes about the enactment of symbolism - all the rest (the institutions and cultural identities and texts and moral systems) are all extensions of the founding symbols. (That is a reason why things like this story, starting from the idea of a group of atheists trying to come up with a symbol for themselves, seem so profoundly wrong to me. Once you get a symbol for your particular set of views about the world - that sounds like religion to me. In the worst sense, too - of forming gangs, and identifying who is in and who is out. It gives me hives.) If there is a defining religious principal, I would think it is aesthetic: it's taking aesthetics literally.

Okay... I've lost the plot. What does that have to do with an S&M parody of the Last Supper? or the "outrage" it causes? Ah! found it! It's the outrage... The manipulation of the complexity of religion by the profession Takers of Offense. Because: religion is many things - one thing it is is a set of beliefs. As a set of beliefs, there should be no question of the right to ridicule it. Beliefs - religious, philosophical, political, you name it - should be fair game: to argue with, pick apart, mock - there may be better and worse ways of doing it - but arguing with beliefs is as fundamental a right as holding beliefs and expressing them.

But things get complicated with religion. Ridiculing someone for their race is not acceptable, or shouldn't be. Race, ethnicity, culture - you see where this is going? Religion is not just beliefs - it is culture. And charlatans like William Donahue exploit this - they take things that ridicule (or parody or generally question) religious belief, or religious institutions (as political and social forces in the world), or religious symbolism or practices - and treat them as though they were attacks on religion as a cultural identity. But they are not: this is a conflation. That leathermen parody of the Last Supper is not, in any meaningful sense, attacking christian culture - it's not like a blackface version of the last supper would be. It's not. It's not like Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a faggot (as Dreher claims) - it's not. Saying it is is cheating. It's an important point to remember because there are plenty of instances of attacks on religious cultures - much of the anti-Islamic rhetoric in this country is plain bigotry. And certainly when religious beliefs are grounds for discrimination - whether against atheists as in the symbol story linked above, or the not always all that subtle attempts to go after Mitt Romney's Mormonism (from both sides) - that is unacceptable. But those kinds of genuine offenses have to be distinguished from criticism of religious policies, or even mockery of the specifics of religious belief. The Outrage industry turns it all to mush, turns everything into posturing. Bastards.