I love the smell of misery in the morning.

So you sit down and browse through endless rows of Netflix releases, pummel the mouse at Amazon’s Prime offerings, and sneak on through the tinny riches of Hulu and dammit a half hour of choice viewing time gets eaten up while the kids sleep (soundly/fitfully) and your own projects molder in the corner on an aging hard drive, your bedtime passed out on the couch fast approaching. In a move of desperation, burdened by the knowledge that almost any Criterion offering is a mid-stream, protein-laced carbo-crash destined to make you wonder what language they’re even speaking, you settle on something you loved long ago, ‘cuz that always works out, right? Nostalgia never fails. I can sing along, quote along, laugh at myself, laugh at them. So two nights ago I settled on The Road Warrior, now conveniently titled Mad Max 2. 

Now, I have to admit, I hadn’t watched anything Mad Maxian for decades until Fury Road. My memory of it was marred by UHF broadcasts or late-afternoon cable sprees at a friend’s house or sheer disinterest (“I’ve got some Fellini to watch, man!”). Still, fond memories and lingering fanboy logic compelled me to hit play. I prepared my sense of humor for ridiculous 80s hair, S&M costumerie, and lot of awesome death. I had not prepared myself for a damn good story and shock-to-the-system editing.

Looky looky

After the first fifteen minutes, the original state of mind (nostalgia + good-hearted fun = a movie to enjoy and sleep through) gave way to an honest-to-goodness surprise conjured by my inability to either turn it off or fall asleep during it. My brain tends to blissfully disengage its critical faculties during a movie, pulling itself out of cryosleep during the end credits and then going to town with the wakey-think. The Road Warrior unplugged my cryobed and said pay attention. Mel Gibson had the looks and the charm and the fierceness required to fill a silent action movie character with blood. His entire body carried meaningful details that gave him more history than the awkward opening montage of the preface did: the squeaky leg brace, the rough cut hair, the shotgun shells (watch how he breaks one open first to examine the shot, then takes the second for later use—there’s brain behind that stuff, real choices, like Brando and his glove in On the Waterfront). If semiotics still bossed everybody around, it’d rear its twinkling head and point out so many signs and signifiers that you’d strangle it later on while it slept on your couch.

And the cuts. Mmm. No scene too long, some scenes cut abruptly, the fade-to-blacks so rapid they jumpstart the brain. “No, wait! A century of cinema has set guidelines for this kind of thing!” And yet, there they are. Editing is a sophisticated craft, but with sophistication comes expectations, shortcuts, and reliance on repetition (where would film criticism be without a reliance upon sophistication that borders on the idiotic?). Maybe the budget required short heads and tails, maybe the editor needed to keep the running time down, but whatever the reason, the edits worked. Brief, rapid-fire cuts that didn’t feel molested by the culture’s nacent MTV DNA.

Nostalgia has one purpose: to satisfy a hunger and soothe the troubled mind. I mean, come on, what greater pleasure is there than to have a full meal and shut down in the process of being tickled, delighted, and massaged while literally reliving the past? Nostalgia is an act of memory without the effort, and it tastes good. Proust’s madeleine in 24 frames per second, persistence of vision without the necessity of dreams, promises kept until real life dampens the enthusiasm a little, like a Happy Meal with crappy toys…

Easter morning, this somehow made it into my basket. Good Bunny!

Our culture’s honest rationalization of infinite nostalgia (comic books into movies; movies into reboots; promises of no-sequels broken; kid-tested, mother-approved references to other pop culture; the appropriation of pop music into reflexively cool films; new toys from old films and vice-versa) encourages gluttony. Every evening is a new childhood for our 40-something set, and it’s glorious and fattening and delicious. But worse than gluttony is the post-binge stupor and the easy entitlement, which with one flick of the wrist dismisses with lazy enthusiam. It’s difficult to apply the critical mind on a stomach full of sugars, carbs, and grease. It’s next to impossible to apply honest, hard thought when our nostalgia makes our ownership of the entertainment past sacrosanct. Sure, The Road Warrior is a good film, and it might be a great film, but look at the limited variety of cultural responses to the remake of The Thing or the reboot of Ghostbusters: our nostalgia informs our prejudices and in that sense nostalgia kills. Nobody can argue against somebody else’s nostalgia if it isn’t their own nostalgia. Nostalgia is never wrong. I am nostalgic for G.I.Joe action figures and the first Marvel comic book that came from them. I am nostalgic for The Day the Earth Stood Still and Gort and Klaatu barada nikto. I am nostalgic and this worries me, because the older I get the deeper my capacity for nostalgia, and the more passive my brain becomes.

The post Nostalgia Kills in Mad Max 2 The Road Warrior appeared first on How To Like Art.

Or is it just an artifact whose nostalgia quotient outweighs its artistic and filmic value? This question arose when the Remake Factory Hostage Situation podcast invited me to help them remake Metropolis…

A girlfriend moves to Hollywood, and a young man crafts a connection with her by watching as many good films as possible during the months that she is gone. He succeeds only in forging a connection with movies…

I lived in a room at the top of my parents’ house and had a squeaky VCR hooked up to a color drive-through monitor rescued by a sound engineer friend from the renovation efforts of an old Hardees. Six inches diagonal, maybe, if that, smaller than the iPad that would come out nearly fifteen years later and not quite as conducive to comfort-viewing. Before heading off to work the evening shift at the hospital, I would walk down to the treasure trove of a video store whose owners never even bothered to alphabetize their massive movie collection, which to my wide eyes numbered in the tens of thousands. It had a footprint larger than the biggest Blockbuster I had ever set foot in, and smelled better, too. It was 1997, Pulp Fiction and Desperado were still fresh and unscathed by Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and names like Antonioni and Polanski prowled just around the corner. The first two films I rented the day she hopped on the plane were Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Altman’s The Player, and a couple days later, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Imagine watching Greenaway’s lush masterpiece on that tiny screen set on an apple crate on the carpet, my body cramped and sprawled on a large  pillow, cans of Mountain Dew compelling me through the night, my neck getting sore,  shoulders aching, bare toes tapping the baseboard, stiffly switching positions all while trying not to miss a single frame, each frame loaded with paragraphs of detail and subtleties that were enhanced by the barely audible sound coming from the speakers in tinny mono, the light from the moon coming through the south window left to right, and always thinking, always connecting, always admitting myself into this cinematic world unguided…

Razor across the eye, from Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou. If you’ve never seen this image, you haven’t looked very hard.

No widescreen editions. No commentaries. No infinite number of internet blogs or articles to accomplish all the explorations of movies on my behalf. Better times? Nah. Just different. Outside of the city, few people shared my interest in film, fewer still who upon hearing that I watched Blue Velvet would then say, “Oh, yeah, but have you ever seen Eraserhead?” or after The Player, “My god, but you’ve got to check out The Long Goodbye. You won’t believe Elliot Gould and what they do to Chandler.” For a suburban cinephile, the only hope lay in used bookstores, where the discarded books of other cinephiles lurked as dog-eared and beaten up as the best dime-store mystery or bodice ripper—those who loved movies devoured these books. Never in color, rarely on high quality paper, these books offered too few samples of the low line-count movie stills printed in murky ink from the films one could only hope were at the shop around the corner. Anything by Murnau, old Hitchcock, Chaplin as a Keystone Kop, Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, and the endlessly reproduced razor across the eye from Un Chien Andalou. But none of these stirred as much longing as the stills of the android from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Who would you fear? Machinenmensch on the left, Gort on the right.

She moved. On a throne surrounded by rings of light, she pulsed. Behind the body of a naked woman upon a table, she reigned. Illustrated in the movie posters, she threatened in a way Gort could never. Maschinenmensch. What a hideous name for such a sublime creature. I wanted to see her move. I wanted to see her overthrow humanity.

Essays that accompanied these images told the story, which sounded interesting enough. The simplicity of its war between money and labor seemed logical given the rich architectural detail of the city, the stark, grinding horror of the under-city, and the stills of a flood that must have murdered its extras. Other Fritz Lang films filled the books, too, but Metropolis sat at the top of the heap, followed at a distance by M.

It’s not just me, is it? Say it’s not just me…

And so desire fed by deprivation created a rabid need to see Metropolis. I asked the proprietress of the video store if she had it. She didn’t know what I was talking about. I spelled it and she found it. She led me to the aisle and handed me something straight out of a Def Leppard album. Whoever this maniac Moroder was, he had replaced whatever passed for silent film scores with the most godawful music I had ever heard in my life, and this was the mid-90s, so come on! I had to watch the film with the sound turned down. The movie was short and confusing and left me wishing I had left the film to my imagination. Disappointment would be too harsh: uncertainty, befuddlement, and a slight loss of faith. I liked it, sure, but that wasn’t saying much.

As the years passed, though, more complete, less Moroder-ish versions of the film came out, each one slightly more comprehensible—and tasteful—than the last. A few years ago, a fine Blu-ray edition with a decent score and most of the film restored made it into my library. And then I watched it in preparation for a guest appearance on the Remake Factory Hostage Situation: Metropolis podcast. The podcast provided me with an opportunity to unravel the film and re-ravel it into something to that could be. “No problem,” I thought, “I like that movie.”

Listen to these guys. They’re one heck of a good time.

As the restored edition played, the thoughts came easy. “This is not a good movie. It’s also a pretty good.” “It’s too simple and kinda dumb.” “Really?!” It became apparent that the spectacle was the allure, both in the film stills I had seen twenty years earlier and in all editions I had seen since. The first half hour is full of amazing sights: The Shift Change, the Pleasure Gardens, The Explosion/Moloch, Metropolis Itself. Stunning visuals, inciting lust even as they play. “Linger longer, Fritz Lang, please, please.” And sometimes he does. But always a return to the terrible narrative, the awful motivations, the love-at-first sight with Maria surrounded by under-dwelling urchins, things that Fritz Lang would eventually grow out of. The only human highlights come from the performances of the father, Maria, her alter-ego as the Maschinenmensch, the leering of the eyes. I found myself desperate to see one more version of Metropolis released by Kino: The Subtle Metropolis. Hell, maybe that’s how the hosts at Remake Factory Hostage Situation could pitch their rewrite.

What happened? How is it that this film has a 99% Tomatometer from the Critics on Rotten Tomatoes? An astonishing 92% Audience Score? Silent movies should have a ravenous audience given the love lavished on this film. Murnau’s Sunrise has 98%, Nosferatu 97%, his Faust 94%. Buster Keaton’s The General is a laggard with 92%. And these are the easy ones. But this is a bad measure of a film’s quality, right…?

A critic’s job takes many forms: voice in the wilderness, police captain, thief in the night, mentor, guru, traffic cop, analyst, physician, and lighthouse keeper. Metropolis is an okay movie, but it’s not a great film. It’s a classic because of its age. It’s a keeper because of its bravado. But it’s pretty bad. It lacks everything Lang’s better films effortlessly achieve. Yet it stands proudly above them all. An icon. A symbol.

After finishing it the first time, lying flat on my belly, thinking of a distant girlfriend living it up on the set of Home Improvement, I felt empty. I still caressed the film stills, sketched storyboards of the frames that startled me, and couldn’t stop staring at Evil Maria. But unlike those films whose brilliance lay in the humanity, the subversion, the richly textured life they painted across the hours, Metropolis made me simply reach for the next cassette. The double feature that night introduced me to Charlie Chaplin, and The Circus made its way into nighttown.

The post Is Fritz Lang’s Metropolis Actually Good? appeared first on How To Like Art.

Twenty-plus years of reading leads to a peculiar sense of awareness. Patterns begin to emerge that when in the midst of them seem to be simple shapes—at the present moment, this is a circle; now, a square; now, another square, shaded slightly darker. Time passes in those moments, but it isn’t really time passing, it’s my mind and my body, present in a reality composed of the reading of the moment. One day it’s Nabokov, another day it’s Henry Miller, and beyond the examinations and analyses of the present book and its relation to myself, there is simply the author and his book. But twenty years on, the patterns slowly resolve as one looks back with personal history and the events of book combining into design that resembles the spirit of thing.

Younger, I read Nabokov. Devoured him. First the American years, then the Russian years, which were actually chimeras, given that they were translated, transformed, by thoroughly American Nabokov and Nabokov the younger. Lolita first, and what a thrill, saucy story, intellect chiseled into sentences, a mind at serious play constructing forts out of cushions that are too heavy to lift. Pnin next, a flattering tale of too smart and too little. Laughter in the Dark later in the year, a Hollywood story that still resembled the Nabokov who symbolized my future writing self. And all the while, I wrote my own stories, translating and transforming the Nabokov style into a Hischier style that elevated my ego…

A year later, three years into a failing marriage, the Russian novels. The grace of Mary, the torpor of Glory, attempts at King, Queen, Knave, and then a quick return to the American novels, Look at the Harlequins, Transparent Things, and lastly Ada, or Ardor, a Family Chronicle. That last book sunk its fingers into my bones, my skeleton made of wet sand, my brain unresisting as teeth pried apart the hemispheres and shoved luscious black hair into the gaps…

All the while, concurrent to Nabokov, his antipodes, Henry Miller, kept stopping by with another book to weigh me down. Tropic of Cancer, finished on the grass next to the rushing waters of Niagara Falls, a feeling of exhilaration and hope that I hadn’t felt since finishing Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a younger man. I was aware that my fascination with Tropic of Cancer came from the dual nature of Miller’s writing, the pornographic and the philosophic. Dualities held me in their grip during my twenties, several years before hearing whispers of a transcendent third. The icon: Aubrey Beardsley’s life of drawing erotic images and separate catholic images thrilled me: a double life that added layers to each opposing side. Tropic of Capricorn somehow outdid Cancer by being perfect in ways I couldn’t describe. And how to relate this to the intellectual structures and sequences of Nabokov? There was no way, there was no pattern, I lived in circles, in squares, along dashes, curled up in wavy vectors that simply bore the titles of books, the signatures of authors, occasional common themes…

And so I played with the themes that haunted my own life, the way songs rise unbidden in the head, circling around the better thoughts, driving them out. The books formed no pattern in my life, they served only to please in the moment, my appetite growing with every last page, even the cud was worth chewing, its anti-nutrients exercising the jaw, the esophagus, the esophageal sphincter, going down, coming up, chewing some more. Books sampled like wine, sniffed, swirled around in the mouth, spat out again, the library merely fodder for an amateur sommelier. And yet, all that reading, all that time away from human beings somehow nourished. The fatty tissues of Henry James, hard chicken bones of Bataille, the family style breakfasts of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, the rich delicacies of Shakespeare read to orgasm on the floor of my unswept studio.

How human was that experience? How rooted in the utility of three meals daily were these shapeless explorations? I never thought to look for patterns in my self, in what I needed. I loved to read, I loved myself, and it seemed only natural to read for myself, to fill myself up.

At thirty-seven, I began reading Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus. A good friend recommended it to me when I was twenty-five. I tried reading it, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t the Miller of Cancer or Capricorn, it wasn’t even the Miller of Assassins or Oranges. Most everything Henry Miller wrote worked for me, but the Rosy Crucifixion did not. Until I was thirty-seven, that is. And I have read those 1500 pages on and off, in order, for the last four years. Throughout all my recent readings in literary theory or Hemingway or David Foster Wallace, Henry Miller has come to visit. He brings three packs of cigarettes and he opens his mouth to speak and I listen. There is nothing spectacular about these books. The prose is strictly Henry Miller, the story the same one he has always told, but he speaks like a friend, not a writer. And though I may read only a hundred pages every few months, those hundred pages are holidays, high holy days, the very opposite of nourishment for the mind, they add the fundamental qualities of life that make life worth living: conversation, other human beings, a myriad faults and a few crowning glories, all leading nowhere but ending up somewhere. When I drink with friends, I don’t analyze our conversations, I live it and I love it. When I drink with Henry Miller, it is the same.

And so the pattern emerges, and it is neither a judgement of myself or any author. It is simply the recognition that Nabokov satisfied my rampaging ego, flattered my intellect, allowed me to condescend, encouraged me to excel in my writing, to approach the craft as a craftsman, and to hold anything less than excellence in contempt. That’s fine. That stuff is valuable. But the pattern of Nabokov interlaces nicely with the patterns haphazardly spun by Henry Miller. Miller never made me want to write like him. Writing like Miller would be like adopting his conversational tics, interlacing profanity where he might, adding sex because he added sex. Of course I wanted to write like Nabokov, the crystalline spiderwebs that grew across his pages could be transferred via frottage onto the tissue paper of my own works. Not Henry Miller. Henry Miller simply makes me happy. I can relate to him. I feel my own humanity being justified as I turn the pages. All of my foolish behavior, all of my idiotic notions, all of my hopelessly romantic yearnings, even at the age of forty-one, are encouraged by Henry Miller, and he slaps me on the back and laughs aloud when I write a stupid page. He says, “Hey, at least you wrote, who cares, now let’s hop on our bicycles and fly down the city streets like wraiths. There is life to be had!”

The post Patterns and Shapes: On Reading Nabokov and Henry Miller appeared first on How To Like Art.

After I’ve then made it past the help desk or the ticket counter or the bored ticket takers who are quite clearly flirting with each other, there comes flooding a river of unasked questions into the dry bed of my brain that frankly I’m not sure how to ask (let alone write down in an article). Because honestly, once I’m inside, there’s a lot of inertial energy that (ironically) takes over, and that’s about it until the wandering begins. Maybe there’s a special exhibition I’d like to see, or perhaps I want to look at the latest photography exhibit, or maybe I just want to bump into a pretty girl who is also looking at art at the moment, and then we can notice (at the same time!) that both of us are looking at the same art (!), with the same inscrutable intensity that masks an utter bewilderment with a deep, fathom-defying knowing. We catch eyes, hold for a second, and then her boyfriend walks up, says, “Pretty cool, right?”, they kiss, and the rest of the exhibition is spent wondering if I can catch that eye just one more time…

Enter through the front doors of the non-Modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago and you are met with a grand staircase that either takes you up into the vast, blurry world of Impressionism (and other less myopically disadvantaged 19th century art) or down into the restroom hallway where the illustration exhibits hang ensconced in the odor of distant cafeteria food and nearby urinal cakes. If I avoid the staircase altogether (in this Narnian land of Escher, there is a whole world behind the staircase), I can go straight into both the Near and Far Easts, the suits of armor, the quiet spaces of the museum) or, even further, the special exhibits. Lots of choices.

But why am I here? Why this museum? And for that matter, why is everyone else here? These tickets were expensive! Does anybody really want to look at art, let alone a specific artwork? Why the hell is there a museum all around me anyway? Who built this thing and what was the point? Was this the ideal solution to their intentions or was there possibly a better one? Why is it even open? Why don’t people wash their children?

And I pause between a tiny Buddha and a towering suit of armor (the former has no one’s attention, the latter is surrounded by three adolescent boys either making swooshing sounds or mocking said swooshing sounds). A suspicion grows that our visits to museums are obligations fulfilled, which isn’t exactly a great way to promote art appreciation or whatever the fuck they call it in school these days.

Art 101. The professor’s assignment was 1) go to a museum, 2) write about a specific piece of art. Horrible assignment. No direction other than formulate a thesis and then write an essay defending/explaining said thesis. In addition to making the 1-hour drive to a distant museum, we then had to roam the corridors like horny singles looking for something (anything) to woo. And the game was tailor-made for our hunt, which took some of the excitement out of it. Hundreds of paintings strutted their stuff, showing a little leg here, some cleavage there, calling to us in sultry, non-committal tones, telling us to have some fun with them. And it worked. Everyone in the class eventually found their art, but I doubt very many came away from the experience with more than a shadowy stimulation and an uneasy swagger.

And that bothered me. When we go to a museum with a specific intention, the artwork on display suddenly gains primary significance as a means to an end. But, I say angrily to my doubts, if we don’t have a goal, we are simply left with that series of questions I usually experience when I first enter a museum of my own free will (see top of page or the next two sentences). Why am I here? What should I look at first?

Sigh.

Okay. Another tack, then. Since I don’t have the answers yet (if there are any) and because additionally I don’t want to consider goals in such a bald fashion, let’s look at the different ways we can identify the museum itself, since maybe, just maybe, it’s the museum that is the problem, not us. We can do this with metaphors. Maybe after some careful consideration or casual strain the questions I typically have will drop away and new ones will take their place.

That’s really all I want. A chance. And so…

TEN POSSIBLE METAPHORS FOR THE MUSEUM, FOR USE IN SCRUBBING THE BRAIN

1. THE MAUSOLEUM. Where dead people go. Where family members can take pride in their past and their future decomposition. Where a certain amount of respect is given to the dust that still has a legible name carved in stone or brass. Where an epitaph can provide instant guidance for expected response. A curious, if untrustworthy, instigator of the sublime.

2. THE REPOSITORY. Where scholars scurry to find the unsung, unobserved, unimportant object. Where specialists hunch over details and specks. Where the lovers of the past find their ideal beloved. Where artists find their master’s muse.

3. THE SCHOOLROOM. Where children go to hear what they are supposed to hear and forget what they are supposed to remember. Where energy builds up without chance for release. Where teachers whose passion is struggling to stay alive hope to revive the passion through sharing.

4. THE ZOO. Does anybody really want to go to the zoo? Aren’t most of us kinda grossed out by zoos? Especially after the age of 25, when we’ve finally attained some level of freedom but then realized it was just the other side of the cage?

5. THE FAMILY REUNION. Where relatives convene to share stories, memories, and potluck lunches. Where the threat of rain promises the quick extinction of a half-good time. Where the heat makes ill-feelings intolerable. Where half the people want to be there, and the other half are trying not to flirt with their cousin and vice versa.

6. THE LOUNGE. Where the drinks are expensive, the sensory overload is highly skilled, and the strategies for quick lays are quickly adjusted to suit the current mark.

7. THE CHURCH. Where worship of god is tempted away by boredom, insecurity, and the promise of immortality regardless of present behaviors. Where religion goes to die. Where belief turns into habit and faith removes all doubt.

8. THE TELEVISION. Where the lure of infinite choices is whittled down into the banality of familiarity. Where people go to see the same stories they saw before. Where the possibility of seeing something great is ever-present but always uncertain. Where addicted brains go to die. Where the conscience is salved.

9. THE PLAYGROUND. Where all the excess energy is dissipated in a flurry of excitement and unknown people. Where the danger of a scuffed knee or a quick plummet to the ground is overcome by the desire to have fun. Where the parents go to fade away. Where the children go to become adults.

10. THE NURSING HOME. Of which the less said, the better, because really, if you use Nursing Home as a metaphor for Museum, we already know how you feel: sad, unable to help your loved one, and desperate to wash your hands just before making it to the exit.

The post PROBLEM 0022: Anxiety and the Museum; or, Please Don’t Feed the Art appeared first on How To Like Art.

I wanted to learn how to condescend today, for the express purpose of not condescending, or at least condescending with intention and style. That might be fun. But it’s a word that has always baffled me, condescension. I heard the word in House of Cards last night and was impressed that the character recognized condescension when it happened to her. I was less impressed that whoever wrote the episode was able to use it. Condescension is a horrible thing, or is it…?

WILLINGLY SINKING INTO A PERSON PIT

The best definition I’ve found of “condescend” is on Etymology Online. “[The] Sense of ‘to sink willingly to equal terms with inferiors’.” From mid-fifteenth century France. Much better than the Webster’s pallid offering. Look at that adverb there, willingly to sink—and to where shall we sink if in this mode?—down to our inferiors, to be on equal terms with them at last. Beautiful. Très intentional. But how to do it with style? That is the question.

Whenever I read a blog post or visit some website that offers opinions, I often suspect (let’s be fair: unfairly) that the author (whoever they are, and they are everyone) is trying to help me. Makes sense. Most people read a blog or website to get something out of it. If the readers get something, they’ve been helped. Fine. But I’m not talking about How-To articles or lists of interesting things or flat news. I’m talking about everything else. Opinions. God, I hate opinions. Opinions come from all corners, and most of those corners are at least subtly elevated above the reader. (The balding therapist with the first fruits of rosacea points out that the present author prefers to be firmly planted above such people…) (naughtiness)

So maybe that’s the problem, Number 0020b: On Opinions.

WHAT IS AN OPINION?

• The seed of a fresh debate
• The seed of a moldy debate
• The seed of debatable value
• The declaration of a declarer
• The interrogation of an interrogator
• The propagation of a head full of [insert preferred scatalogical reference here]
• The gold of a mind
• The silver of wood in the palm of a hand
• The copper who notes your license plate with no probable cause
•  The iron shavings seeking a willing magnet
• The tiny hairs off of a freshly shaven chin that will surely clog up the sink
• The china in the cabinet brought out for every meal, even the lonely ones

Okay, so none of those definitions are very nice to opinions and probably count as opinions in and of themselves. But a declaration of value is what I’ve come to expect from myself, if this website is any indication. But this website also tries to give things the benefit of the doubt. Can we find value in opinions if we can write a list such as the one above?

ART AND OPINION

I have always hated art that makes a point of making a point. Rarely has art with a point been something I return to with any frequency. I prefer to look at Picasso’s Guernica without thinking about what it’s really about. Instead, I set it next to his blue guitar and his dishes. It’s fascinating for what it is, not what it represents. Is this fair? Not really. But Guernica is not an opinion piece, it’s not an editorial. If it was either of those things, it would be ineffective. (And surely it must be something else, as a Google search for “Guernica” returns much more about the painting than about some invisible borders within Basque country, whose bombed out death toll was either more than 1500, somewhere between 100 and 500, or exactly 802, thank you very much, Mr. Wikipedia.)

Or take Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature. Full of opinions. But in the role of lecturer that is his job, to be stern and at times condescending with the purpose of altering a miseducated mindset. His book on Gogol? At times, it is the gold standard of condescension. When he relates his conversations with the publisher regarding his refusal to summarize Gogol’s stories, one cringes at the man’s porcelain balls. It’s amazing the book was ever published (and perhaps this is condescension with style?). Nabokov refuses to condescend (literally) to the reader and yet speaks in a condescending tone about his publisher (who is at the same level as the reader in his opinion). But now the word is becoming more diffuse, less visible, a Guernica of a word that is losing its utility even as it makes itself more useful. Perhaps this is less about thinking critically and more about feelings…

When either opinion or condescension are recognized, an instinctual revulsion occurs, inert gases charged to irritating brightness and faint buzzing. Take any random conceptual artist who creates art out of neon (Bruce Nauman? Kelly Mark? The bar down the street?). These works are the very type of ironic condescension that I find irritating and banal (“Who’s condescending now, Mr. Hischier?” “Me?” I reply), which by a nice tautology means they succeeded (hell, yeah!). Some of these artists claim to have a self-deprecating sense of humor about their work, but I find it to be more of a global self-deprecation. “This is what I think, and you do, too. Except that I noticed it and made something out of it.” That’s totally okay. I just don’t like it or find it worth more attention than the five minutes I’ve spent writing about it.

Feelings. Personally, I get condescending when my feelings are being threatened. Look at that paragraph above. Is that a fair assessment of neon art? Personally, yes. I have my critical reasons which I’ve chosen to leave out of this article. But is the paragraph a fair assessment extra-personally? Not likely. If anything, it may sway where it has no right to sway (this is the purpose of rhetoric)(note that the parenthetical is the typographic mode of neon condescension). I would hope that in a true debate my words stay away from condescension, as condescension implies that I have noticed that I am debating with an assumed inferior. Not a good thing. And probably an impossible expectation of one’s self.

THE VALUE OF CONDESCENSION AND OPINION

The only value I can see (right now, today) in either condescension or opinion is one of ignition. If a person suspects another of condescension, they are ignited against the speaker. If an opinion is dropped, it is a glove thrown down for rebuttal. This is good. Just because a debate or argument has an unpleasant start, that doesn’t mean the conversation as a whole won’t be valuable. There is a lot of good that comes from conversation that is meaningful, and both condescension and opinion can push two people wrestling on down the road to meaning. Feelings may be hurt, goodness may be threatened, but hopefully it all turns out to be amusing and/or beneficial to both parties.

The post PROBLEM 0020: On Condescension and Opinions appeared first on How To Like Art.

I was recently asked by an acquaintance who was familiar with this website, “How is it going?” And I had to admit that at the moment, it was suffering from some bumpiness. I’ve been unable to pursue the quest of 50 museums in 50 states or, it must be confessed, to write for the website for the last two months. Life gets in the way of everything, even death and blogs. The continuity of posts was broken. That is a difficult hill to surmount.

And what is continuity anyway? If I publish on this site every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, what have I accomplished other than the satisfaction of a calendar’s appetite? If there is nothing to write on Monday, Monday does not get a post. If there is nothing to post in October, October is empty. But that doesn’t mean that October was empty for the author. It was just empty for you, my occasional reader.

Empty Spaces by Brian Hischier

The internet is an electric land of broken promises. People surface on the web for a moment only to disappear when everybody’s back was turned. Internet writers are magicians with an audience who aren’t watching for the trick, they’re listening for the applause while doing something else. Only when someone else erupts in laughter or recommendation will they return to watch. This is no longer a magic show, it is a car accident involving only clowns. If the clowns die, all the better.

If one is to write convincingly—for themselves and for others—about art, one must be willing to allow moments of silence to fill the space of thought. I wouldn’t trust an author who “phoned it in” any more than I would trust an author who met a deadline three weeks early or not at all. Authors aren’t meant to be trusted. They’re meant to be read and responded to. An author knows there’s always more to do, and it takes time to do it, and this holds true for the reader as well. Time is the enemy of no man, no website, no art: the only enemy is not doing and its ally is not responding.

The post PROBLEM 0019: On Empty Spaces appeared first on How To Like Art.

In which the author considers the difference between his own eyes and googly eyes. In which a painting is thought about by both the author and the Google. And where those thoughts are compared for interest and accuracy and fun and ultimately lead the author to be glad he’s not a computer.

THOSE FRUITFUL ORBS

Our eyes are fruitful beasts. They receive images that attack the brain, activating synapses and associations and begin a cascade of thoughts that connects to our past lives, our hopes and dreams, our disappointments, our grief, our present situations, our desires. They activate an innate awareness of our humanity that we recognize only as a moment that is different from the rest of the moments in our day to day life. Something is happening, but it’s hard to say just what exactly.

Google has eyes, too. It roves bit by bit, pixel by pixel across the grid of a painting or picture and proceeds to match one bit to another. It engages in pattern recognition, compression, and calculations. It is a marvelous machine and it can do marvelous things. It can “look” at a painting and find other instances of the same painting elsewhere on the internet.

But when Google looks at an abstract painting, something interesting happens. It tries to make sense of it and find other images that resemble it. It extracts concrete meaning from the painting a thousand times a second and produces results that don’t definitively make claims—rather, the results say, “Is this it? Is this it?” Google is a blind magician trying to do a card trick.

Meaning is hard. The temptation to find meaning in abstraction is often too great, and many times I don’t even realize I’m doing it. And regardless of the subject/anti-subject, content, objects, or meaning of a painting, we all have associations that crop up seemingly out of nowhere when we look at a work of art. I don’t think Google makes associations. Its brain doesn’t make helpful or imaginative leaps.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

THE EXPERIMENT: HUMAN EYES AND GOOGLE EYES

MY THOUGHTS AND ASSOCIATIONS (COLLECTED IN FRONT OF THE PAINTING AND LATER)

1. Huh.
2. Who bought this thing?
3. That’s pretty damn yellow
4. What’s that white bar doing there?
5. Okay okay, maybe it’s in the technique.
6. I don’t think there’s any technique.
7. Who painted this? Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of him.
8. This is crap.
9. Focus on the colors.
10. Yellow. So yellow.
11. That’s more mustard-gold-piss than yellow.
12. That house is wearing a bow on its head
13. Is it on a hill or on a pig snout?
14. No no no. Stop looking for things. How does this make me feel?
15. It makes me feel like my toilet is dirty and I have company coming over any second
16. Also, those reddish vertical lines are interesting. Slope away, come back.
17. What’s this thing called anyway? Homely Prostestant? Sure it is.
18. Can’t get away from the house and the pig snout.
19. Unless the snout is a head. Could be a head.
20. Nuts, that’s actually a woman or a clown standing behind their own footprints
21. No no no, it’s nothing representational, stop it, Hischier!
22. Okay. Hum to yourself. Hummmmm. Let abstraction be your mantra.
23. I can already hear someone saying, “Just look it at it and let it be.” I can already hear my response…
24. Ooh, neat, there’s a sloppy grid cut into the canvas. That might have taken some effort.
25. Try being smart. Ahem. There is an extreme asymmetry (isn’t that redundant?) of execution, with some lines uncontrolled, others relatively constrained by straightness.
26. Smartness sounds stupid on paper.
27. Triangles are a big part of this painting, in a dominating sense and in a granular, subtle sense.
28. That was better.
29. The green interrupts the pee-colored nastiness with its own nastiness. Like a homely protestant.
30. There’s an awful lot of effort put into whatever you’d call this stupid thing.

As a contrast, here are Google’s associations when I plug the image (no title, no attribution) into its “similar images” search function.

Oddly enough, Google doesn’t give me a house or a pig or a clown.

Sure is pretty, though.

COMPARISON OF EYEBALL BRAINS

Which cluster of associations is richer?

Which is more pernicious?

My long response to the painting may not have been pleasant, accurate, kind, or helpful, but at least it was something. Google’s response tells me nothing I didn’t already know. It gives me pictures and it gives me a lot of yellow. It is a rich tapestry of unique sameness never ending. And if anything, it’s a much more interesting image than the artist’s. Way to go, Google.

I like that I can barely escape my own associations and thoughts. I prefer my response, no matter how innocuous, how philistine, how uneducated, or how foolish. They are my thoughts. This painting belongs to me now, even if I don’t like it. I own it in a way the copyright holders, the publishers, the museums, and the computers will never be able to take advantage of. I can return to this painting whenever I want, or I can burn it on a bonfire every time I recall it. Over time my thoughts will mature, while Google’s will only become more or less accurate given the probable improvements in technology.

If we have algorithms in our brain, they are made of ants and honey and a million scintillating things.

NOTE. The painting above is Homely Protestant, by Robert Motherwell. I don’t like it. So it goes.

The post PROBLEM 0018: Human Eyes and Google Eyes appeared first on How To Like Art.

In which the author addresses Unpleasant Art, because it exists and probably exists for a reason. Namely that humans are unpleasant. He uses Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper Suitcases as a prime example of Unpleasant Art that is worth engaging. Then he gets all serious because that’s what the author does at times like these. 

UNPLEASANT ART

The various forms of Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases are on Netflix Instant Watch right now. This is a cause for celebration if you’re into the good kind of self-immolation. Just listen to the deafening roar of the world’s rejoicing! Okay, so the world was silent, but I was thrilled. Those “films” deserve to be at least available, in the same way that Cézannes deserve to be available (the two are more similar than you think). Look at your options: There is the trilogy of films , the 2-hour reduction, and a 16-part tv series. The trilogy is for those with stamina, the reduction is for the curious, and the TV series is for the binge viewer. Each one of them has a very admirable 1 to 2 stars on the Netflix scale of value, an honor rare for a master filmmaker. Whatever the myriad, unknowable reasons for those ratings, it is always good when a master seems to fail.

I confess, I have started watching these puppies at least a dozen times in the last decade but never really “got into them.” I couldn’t get into the “story” because there wasn’t really a narrative arc (though there were hundreds of stories/episodes throughout) and some of the conceits Greenaway used grated on me. But that’s Greenaway. He’s never been particularly fond of narrative cinema or other people’s expectations. He creates what he wants to create. I know this.

So I’ve watched them. Finally. They are much bigger than we realize. And they are very unpleasant. But also not. “Hurray for the paradox!” the author growls.

WHAT DOES PETER GREENAWAY CREATE THAT IS SO UNPLEASANT?

Let’s begin with the admirable.

Peter Greenaway is very fond of cinema and cinematography. He clearly has a respect for the stage. Painting is an obvious influence on his visuals, with its historical nudes and its ability to encapsulate the dramatic within the limits of a single frame. He uses music in a very Samuel Beckett way, with repetitions recalling prior repetitions and giving the listener a helpful cue. Sculptural light adds a drama that almost needs no acting, and yet the acting is acting in the purest sense of the word, complicated by naturalism, mannerism, and a rare dose of vaudeville. Space is always important to Greenaway, and motion through space (by light or camera) is critical to appreciating his work (although often that’s all people see). There are monumental locations, intimate scenes, and highly effective stage locations (his choice to open the films on an obvious sound stage with children recreating an attack may be enough to keep most people from continuing—a method used by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose to weed out readers who couldn’t handle the long haul—likewise used by Greenaway in the opening of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover). His ironic use of text in the face of a text-based cinema gets raised to Pillow Book heights, but without the focus on beauty—these are typewriters, handwritten letters, and official documents rather than calligraphy and paper. Images overlap, collide, slide past one another, repeat themselves simultaneously, disrupting one another—at other times they blend into a perfect unified whole, demanding to be relished, a concession to the “zapper”, the remote control that Greenaway sees as the bullet that killed cinema. There is nudity, sex, death, torture, comedy, and once in a very great while, a sublimely beautiful moment.

YOUR FOND, ABDUCTED DESIRES

And everything you want to see goes away very quickly.

Every text you want to read is quickly obliterated.

This is true of life. It is true of the Tulse Luper films. It is a work of abducted desire.

We stay away from Greenaway because his humanity tends to be just a little evil in his films—cold, heartless, greedy, violent, and in consistent pain. This keeps people away from his work as well, given that many acts are simply unfathomable in his films (honey smeared on genitalia to attract bees; a dentist torturing and killing an anesthetized patient; three Graces shooting a lonely man’s dog because…). But why shouldn’t he portray on an intimate scale a humanity that is capable of murdering six million people at a pop? Why shouldn’t he try to come to grips with a horrifying 20^th century by attempting or exploiting catharsis in his own way (the chilling third act where the murdered Jews arrive in threes lasts longer than most filmmakers would ever dare). Why not? Why? Why not? Should artists not try? Should we castigate them because they admit that babies are dropped out of windows, that women are trampled upon, that men torture other men and themselves over gold? Over silver? Over lead? Over plastic? Over dirt?

And to counter that he obviously did a bad job leading us to the sublime moments of his film because nobody will ever watch that far is not a good retort. Naughty, naughty. If we can’t be bothered, it’s not his fault. Greenaway is clearly not into seducing or tricking us into watching his films. He writes the invitations, but he throws unpleasant parties. We know that and decide not to show up.

AND THEN THERE ARE THE ARTISTS

And any artist who can’t help but create will see in the Tulse Luper Suitcases not only Peter Greenaway’s valiant, necessary abominations (nigh unto failure but not quite), but their own future abominations (and inevitable, valiant failures), because that is what happens—art leads us into ourselves and we are awful, beautiful, wondrous, hideous creatures who have awesome babies and great sex. We live, we die, and with any luck we have created. To create is less inevitable than decay, and that is the battle.

Greenaway exhausts himself with Tulse Luper. We exhaust ourselves in watching it. Fantastic! Thank you, Peter Greenaway. You have done something. There is no Netflix rating system that can convey the monumentality of that fact.

The post PROBLEM 0017: On Unpleasant Art via Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper Suitcases appeared first on How To Like Art.

In which the author makes some blanket statements about the genreless. In which the blanket statements are pure, unwashed wool, and therefore very itchy. In which the blanket is washed, smoothed out, and shrunk, but remains itchy. And where the brain sheds the blanket because that’s what brains do.

A PROBLEM WITH GENRE

§. If a good movie doesn’t have a genre, its proponents will call it A Film. This loses the film a huge part of the movie-watching populace.

§. If a book doesn’t have a genre, they’ll call it Literature. This annoys the future while denigrating the past.

§. If an artwork doesn’t have a form, we’ll call it abstract. This is just unhelpful.

§. If music doesn’t have a beat, we’ll call it noise. Can’t argue that one.

THE SILLY HUMANS HAVE SOLVED ALL PROBLEMS WITH WORDS

La trahison des images, 1928–29. Rene Magritte

We silly humans have a very strange need. When something has no name, we must name it, if only to give ourselves something (anything) that will let us hold on to it (babies would be impossible to care for without names—or would they? Do apes name their offspring? Do birds? Do worms? Do viruses?).

When thinking intently on something, the only way for our minds to hold that ethereal Thing before our mind’s eye is to either visualize it concretely, or to hold it by its Name (try it, it’s almost impossible—of course, you first need to find a Nameless Something to experiment on, which is harder than you’d think). Without a name, the Thing slips through our mental fingers and fights against comparison with other Things which by their names have fallen naturally into a pre-existing taxonomy of human experience.

EXAMPLES FROM THE WORLD OF SILLY HUMANS

For instance, because we know what Abstract Expressionism is, whenever we hear that a certain formless painting is labeled or from the school of or is certainly Abstract Expressionistic, we can immediately apply what we know about Abstract Expressionism to the thing itself, thus jump-starting or hamstringing our comprehension. Names and labels and groups are shortcuts to thought. We should be cautious with them. [Side note: Here is how to be cautious: take the group called “shortcuts to thought” and look at what I lumped in there: “names”, “labels”, and “groups”: now, is that label in itself a “shortcut to thought”? Isn’t most writing?]

Or…

By knowing ahead of time that X is an art film, we know immediately a) if we want to see it or b) if we are immediately annoyed by it and c) that it will never make any money ever for anyone in the world.

To name something is to make it decipherable. More accurately, naming eases the mind into fulfilling its cognitive potential in the quickest, most efficient way possible.

NON-SILLY HUMANS DO NOT EXIST

A work of art that is outside genre is a work of art that is supremely difficult upon first impression (take any of the existing forms of Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases, aka A Life in Suitcases). We can make assumptions about such a work of art only after encountering it, rather than beforehand. And we relish being able to use our preconceived notions as often as possible. Preconceived notions are like sleeping pills. Why drift off to sleep when you can explode into it?

Does this mean we need genres? Or pocket-sized descriptions? Or does this mean we need a method of thought that does not rely upon prior conventions? Is this even a possibility? Am I being utopian here?

The post PROBLEM 0016: The Problem with Genre appeared first on How To Like Art.

In which the author broaches an anathema. In which it is speculated that some works of art may be above/beneath criticism. And where the author looks at some examples and waits for the hornets to build a nest in the dark corners of his website.

Are there works of art that are immune to criticism? It’s an interesting idea. I have no clue what the qualifications would be for a work of art to fall outside of criticism. I worry that even making such a conjecture would undermine decades of hard work by well-meaning people everywhere. Ah well, consequences be damned. Let’s give it a shot.

SOME INCOMPLETE THOUGHTS ABOUT CRITICAL IMMUNITY

1. Whenever a work is so strange that it takes theory and kindness and patience to comprehend it, it probably falls outside the realm of criticism (but not critical thinking).
2. Whenever a work is unfinished, it is barely even a work of art, for it lacks the final signature, the last correction, the tombstone date of completion.
3. When a work of art is on such a scale (i.e. a magnum opus) that comprehending it would take as much effort as the building of it, a la Proust or Dante, we who cannot give it such time should back off a little. (Also, we shouldn’t just call every big work a magnum opus.)
4. When something is so new that there is almost nothing to compare it to. Don Quixote perhaps fell into this category once upon a time; as did perhaps Tristram Shandy; or Sartor Resartus; or Gargantua and Pantagruel; or The Satyricon; or The Iliad; or Finnegans Wake; or Marcel Duchamp or the earliest works of the French New Wave or Robbe-Grillet. All that is left to their contemporaries is theory. As more imitators arise, criticism finds a foothold.
5. Whenever a work seems to transcend all common sense and defy critical conventions, it’s time, perhaps, for criticism to call it a day. The best case scenario for a critic in this scenario is to fall back on criticizing the ideas, of which there are only so many in the world. But criticizing ideas is like criticizing a hairdo or a fence.

Go ahead. Try to criticize this. I can’t.
But I could just be superladen with naivete.
I’m willing to admit that possibility.
“The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers”
by Joan Miro, 1941, MOMA.

Imagine now what would happen if a critic were to do decide not to criticize something. How wild would that be? I don’t mean a decision based on the impossibility of reviewing everything—no, that’s not interesting. But what if a critic looked at a work of art and decided that critiquing it was simply not possible. What would that do to the status of the work of art? Would it be deemed true Art or would it find itself located outside of art? How would that affect its value?

SOME EXAMPLES OF ART THAT CRITICS PROBABLY SHOULDN’T CRITICIZE

The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov. This was the work that first raised this question for me. One could say that The Original of Laura isn’t even by Nabokov the Author, since it was never finished—in fact, it’s foundations were barely laid. Yet it is a fascinating work-in-progress and has moments of brilliance and moments of embarrassing uncertainty, like life itself, your life, my life. This is the work of Nabokov the Man and we have no idea what it would become in its final, elusive form. See also: Kafka’s The Castle.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases by Peter Greenaway. Some things are destined to be grand failures in the eyes of man. In this/these film/s, Greenaway became his own architect’s belly, feeding his grand visions to the bursting. It is a massive project, a cancer-filled stomach whose tumors are bursting through every bone and organ within reach. But what a fructive cancer. The style is all his, yet it is nearly every style imaginable. A bigger magnum opus than most can create, har har. And yet, it can hardly be called a film. It is The Tulse Luper Suitcases, almost unwatchable except in small doses, almost impenetrable except for brief spans of hideous time, and certainly a success, even if only for Greenaway himself. It should be respected, avoided by those would prefer to not encounter it, and embraced by those who enjoy encyclopedic minds that know there is no chance of ever being truly encyclopedic.

The Cantos by Ezra Pound. Like the two works above, there is something perversely personal about Pound’s Cantos. There is also something unfinished about The Cantos that leaves one feeling simultaneously distant and near to the writer. Their opacity amounts to something of an alchemical personal code whose meaning, though discernible through reference materials, will always elude the reader/scholar/critic—for all its seeming coldness, this is perhaps one of the most extreme examples of personal poetry that is barely fit for consumption outside the brain that created it—that brain is now dead and The Cantos remain to baffle and puzzle and overwhelm. Like Tulse Luper, it will have instances of obtuse lucidity and moments of stultifying torpor. [Critiquing poetry almost falls into the category of bad manners anyway (unless you are a truly brilliant critic, a rare bird indeed), but a “magnum opus” is a magnum opus. Lesser minds will rarely comprehend such things.]

The paintings of Henri Rousseau. What the hell are we supposed to say about this stuff? When a man’s works are praised for the very thing other painters are criticized for, we have left the realm of criticism for the land of pure taste, which is meaningless. At this point, we might as well eschew all criteria whatsoever.

Any Abstract paintings. Well, they’re abstract, you know? What is there really to criticize? The technique? There is no technique. Not really, if you think about it. Certainly not the subject. Maybe we could criticize the titles. Those are usually facile and unhelpful.

SO IF WE DON’T CRITICIZE, WHAT DO WE DO?

Perhaps this is where theory comes in? Theory is useful. Theory is fun. Theory can be ignored with everything else or taken seriously—so seriously—and open up the mind to new ideas—qv, the French. This is a good thing. There should be room in our lives for theory, just as there should be room in our lives for good conversation, belles lettres, the personal essay, and the bicycle ride.

The post PROBLEM 0015: Critical Immunity appeared first on How To Like Art.