When, a few years later, he graciously agreed to let ArtsJournal host Artopia, I was thrilled. He generously said that he had been looking for a long time for a place where he could publish without the usual constraints of traditional publishing. His long essays and reviews here on Artopia are rich with insights on the artists and work that caught his attention.

Below is a collection of links to obituaries that have run in the past 10 days, and collectively they can speak to the impact of his work better than I. I will always treasure his friendship and am grateful that he allowed me the opportunity to host his work here on ArtsJournal. – Douglas McLennan, Editor, ArtsJournal

The New York Times: Mr. Perreault started out as a poet and painter, but after being recommended by the poet and art critic John Ashbery, he began writing criticism for Art News. In 1966, The Village Voice made him its chief art critic, and he used the position to make the case for new art and work outside the mainstream, especially the creations of feminists like Judy Chicago; photorealism; art with gay content; and the pattern and decoration art associated with the Holly Solomon Gallery.

Los Angeles Times: It’s his writing that has always proved most inspirational to me: clear-eyed and accessible, yet also incisive. He wrote the sorts of pieces that make a statement without dipping into dreaded artspeak. In the wake of his death, friends and artists have been sharing his work on social media, and it’s been a joy to go down the rabbit hole of his words.

ARTnews: Perreault is best known for being an early proponent of avant-garde movements like Minimalism, Land art, and Pattern and Decoration during the late 1960s and the ’70s. It helped that Perreault was closely integrated into the New York art world of his time. He staged a performance called Critical Mass at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. He also had an eye for artists who would ultimately become canonical. As a result, he achieved a following from artists, critics, curators, and readers of all kinds.

Village Voice:  I remember laughing out loud at my first sight of John Perreault’s white-toothpaste tondos — so many ideas gamboled off those roiling, bright surfaces: Robert Ryman’s thickly applied oil paint; the toxicity of traditional art materials (artists contracted “painter’s colic” from contact with white lead); the hoary art-school prohibition against using paint straight from the tube; and, since Perreault was a well-known writer, Jasper Johns’s “The Critic Smiles,” which substitutes teeth for the bristles of a toothbrush. But taut theory and tangy wit were ultimately subsumed in the chunky litheness of Perreault’s unexpected medium and in his gregarious handling, which combined to imbue this work with a beguiling and bodily presence.

USNews (AP): One of the first openly gay art reviewers and an emphatic champion of the avant-garde, Perreault was later the senior critic for Soho News and served as curator for several galleries, including the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and the American Craft Museum in Manhattan. A native of Manhattan who grew up in New Jersey, Perreault studied poetry at the New School for Social Research and was encouraged by poet John Ashbery to contribute criticism to ARTnews as a way of supporting his writing. Ashbery also provided the introduction for Perreault’s poetry collection “Camouflage.”

siLive: Perreault, who was also a critic, poet, novelist, educator and painter, became director of visual arts at the Newhouse in 1985, and in a short three-year tenure, transformed the modest on-site art program, moving it from the low-ceilinged and unsuitable Lower Great Hall into the four, purpose-designed galleries it occupies today.

Mrs. Webb on her motorcycle, n.d.

A Pot by Any Other Name Is Still a Pot

Two exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) spell out the contradictions that have finally surfaced at what used to be called the American Craft Museum — and before that the Museum of Contemporary Craft. Both names had incorporated the apparently now forbidden C-word.

The first of the exhibitions is “NYC Makers, The MAD Biennial” (running until Oct. 12), already effectively slammed elsewhere, but in ways that don’t approach the deeper meaning of this aesthetic catastrophe. The MAD Biennial attempts to survey a broad area of “making” and not craft or craft art, per se. But….

The second exhibition could be considered its alternative: “What Would Mrs. Webb Do? A Founder’s Vision,” to Feb. 8.

Back in 1956, after a string of other craft-oriented philanthropies (America House, The American Craft Council, The School of American Crafts in Rochester, and Craft Horizons magazine), Aileen Osborn Webb (1892-1979) founded the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. She had Vanderbilt blood, and like some others of her ilk she believed in good works, in her case supporting the crafts and helping them survive.

I myself descended into crafts because of the Patterning and Decoration Movement. Many of the P & D artists (e.g. Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Shapiro, Robert Zakanitch, Kim MacConnell…) appropriated craft and design traditions. So why not go directly to the source? I had already made it clear as a critic that I was in love with ceramics, therefore it was easy enough to also embrace wood, metal, fiber and glass, the other traditional craft materials. I was in search of whatever idealism I could find.

In 1993, I moved on to UrbanGlass, a gigantic glassblowing, glass-making nonprofit studio in downtown Brooklyn, and I was cured. Craft artists are the same as other artists.  Underneath the gas-bagging of “art for the people,” they are presently as self-centered and ambitious, bless them, as painters or sculptors. Furthermore, craft collectors are not much different from painting and sculpture collectors. Both MAD and UrbanGlass have governing boards stuffed with collectors. They have the time and the money.

The once-humble craftsmen (ceramist, turner, weaver, woodworker, glassblower, metalworker, goldsmith) is indeed an artist, at least under the descriptive use of the word art. But philosophy, even Ordinary Language Philosophy, will always foul things up; so too will history. Before artisans and artists were differentiated in the Renaissance, lines of demarcation did not exist. Subtlety is always dangerous.

J. B. Blunk, “Scrap Chair,” 1968. MAD Permanent Collection

Is It Craft or Is It Spinach?

The paradox we are now stuck with can easily be illustrated. Most of the objects on display in the Webb show (from the American Craft Museum’s permanent collection inherited by MAD) were made by persons who did not think of themselves as artists with a capital A. The great ceramist Peter Voulkos (1924-2002) failed only when he tried to make metal sculpture.

Truly, most of the works in this neat historic survey of the American Craft Movement, now apparently in eclipse, were not created under the mantle of fine art, yet they now look surprisingly tasteful and occasionally beautiful — an early Wendell Castle (b. 1932)  desk, a Paul Soldner (1922-2011) “platter,” an Otto Natzler (1908 – 2007) bowl, a Beatrice Wood (1893-1998) lusterware vessel, a weaving by Anni Albers (1899-1994). That cannot be said for most of the work in the MAD Biennial.

The Webb show might make you want to take up throwing clay on a wheel or making wooden furniture, or weaving. The MAD Biennial, taking up twice the space, will make you want to head for the hills. And I don’t mean summer craft schools like Penland or Anderson Ranch.

Byron Temple, “Teapot,” 1967. MAD Permanent Collecton.

Democracy in Action

A lack of curatorial oversight ruins the first of what is to be a MAD Biennial foray, city-by-city all across America. Here in N.Y.C., so-called “makers” were nominated by a panel of 300 “cultural leaders” then pared down by a panel of 10 others, representing each of the five boroughs. This was a recipe for disaster. Here, we witness as many definitions of “makers” as the “cultural leader” nominators.

I am not totally against mixing up craftspeople, designers and sculptors. But even our  ever-favorite Yoko Ono is included — in a slick multimedia presentation showing her making what looks like a traditional Japanese ink painting.

The show is tacky, wacky, fluffy and kitschy — technical terms I never use lightly. You are greeted by some overwhelming  party decorations (?) made by the set-design company Confettisystem, covering the elevator wall of the Barbara Tober Atrium and a great deal of the Barbara Tober Staircase with paper, fabric and metal foil. I dare not enumerate much more, for the fifth and sixth floors are jammed with equivalent mistakes: almost sculpture, almost Conceptual Art, almost craft. Anything challenging or promising is buried under the conceptual cacophony. To make matters worse, wall labels have been eschewed, so you have to follow things through the use of a giveaway pamphlet. Most people I watched didn’t bother looking things up, they just zipped right through. The same thing was tried recently at a major show of paintings at MoMA. Please stop this phobia. Labels are your friends; if you don’t want to read them, you don’t see them. Trust me.

Anni Albers, “Tikal,” 1958. MAD Permanent Collection

Craft Is Slow Art

In comparison to the MAD Biennial, much of the characteristically beige and strangely alien craft objects from the permanent collection looks luxurious, even thought-provoking. Visitors actually slow down to look at these now stately works that were chosen by experts in the field over a goodly number of years. Could it be that good work is produced only when, as in the past, tension among categories prevails?

When categories are broken or are ignored, arguments between materials and form and between use and contemplation disappear.  When anything goes, nothing stands out, nothing is puzzling or challenging. Wit goes missing.

When employing the descriptive use of the word art (rather than the evaluative one) we may call many things art, but that doesn’t mean we can similarly call almost everything craft: bright red display-manikins, packing crates, computer tricks and pedestals. The issues are different.

The handout does not claim that all these efforts on display are examples of contemporary craft, but that is the effect. Eliminating the C-word does not fool anybody. MAD to most is still MOCC or ACM. I bet many people go there looking for craft, maybe even ceramics. Calling this institution MAD was a big, big mistake. Did someone think it was funny? Is the C-word such a turn-off? Did some marketing firm take a survey?

I personally know that certain craft collectors like to call what they collect sculpture, hoping that such a designation automatically makes their investments worth more. Really? A pot is still a pot. A desk is still a desk. A necklace is still a necklace. Art be hanged. We already have a Museum of Everything: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met is full of ancient craft – armor, porcelain, ornate furniture, Greek pottery — and even sometimes contemporary craft, although two makers honored by the Met in recent times both prefer to be called artists or sculptors. Give me a break.

Until we see unapologetic contemporary craft exhibitions at MoMA, and at the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and The New Museum, there will still be a need for a contemporary craft museum in New York City.  And not much need for a Museum of Almost Art or Not Quite Art.

Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art.

MAD, 2014

The Future Was Yours

Although I mourn the sheathing-over of the original Edward Durrell Stone building MAD now occupies and think it a snore, short of stripping the building down and recreating those original Venetian columns and portholes, not much can be done. When it comes to museum architecture, maybe boring is good. Don’t the various expansions of MoMA prove that? Only architectural historians remember MoMA’s original Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone Bauhaus-inspired building. We are very nervous about Renzo Piano’s new Whitney building down at the edge of the old Meatpacking District. Please, please let it be boring, but good for looking at art.

At least under MAD’s new director Glenn Adamson, formerly of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the installation of the Biennial (with the exception of the lobby) looks relatively normal. You can breathe. Formerly it was the MAD installations that were cramped, not the spaces. I always wondered about that. The new spaces are not smaller than the old spaces of the building when it was Huntington Hartford”s Gallery of Modern Art, which showcased the A&P heir’s collection of Pre-Raphaelite kitsch. After five years, the building became the offices and the exhibition space of the N.Y.C. Department of Cultural Affairs. When I curated a show there, I found the spaces generous.

I am very happy too that at last Mrs. Webb’s good work is acknowledged. When I was employed at the American Craft Museum (1990-93) it sat across the street from MoMA. The registrar — who had been with the organization since the beginning of time — whispered to me that we still had Mrs. Webb’s desk in storage. I looked at it. It was handmade. I wanted it in my office, but I said we had better ask Janet Kardon, my boss, if she wanted it. “It is not big enough for me,” Kardon bellowed. It was big enough for me. So I was pleased to use the sacred item as my desk.

John Perreault is on Facebook, specializing in neo-modern, small-scale residential architecture.

Links here for John Perreault’s website & John Perreault’s art.

John Perreault videos: http://tinyurl.com/n6x848h

Joan Mitchell: Trees, 1990-91

Rich and Lonely

Joan Mitchell (1925-92) committed her First Sin by being a woman artist with more talent than many of the men in her generation. Nevertheless, being in the second generation of Abstract Expressionists was her Second Sin. No one ever wants to be the second generation of anything. Is that why we had Neo-Geo and the Pictures Generation instead of second-generation Pop Art?

Her Third Sin was that she had been born to a wealthy Chicago family. Artists, male or female, way back then, had to be starving artists living in cold-water flats. And then there was the Chicago part of that, in spite of her graduating from that city’s Art Institute. Can you name one famous Chicago artist before Leon Golub? And Golub, after trying out Paris, had to move to New York.

Her Fourth Sin was more complicated. After establishing herself on 10^th Street, she moved directly from the Big Apple to France. Critic Clement Greenberg – the power broker of Abstract Expressionism – told her not to. But love for a French Canadian racing-car driver (who was also a celebrated painter) made her move. That’s a woman for you, said many at the time, shaking their heads — not necessarily about moving to Paris, but about being smitten with Jean-Paul Riopelle.

If a man at the beginning of his career had disobeyed Uncle Clem and moved to France to be with the love of his life, that would have been exciting, thrilling, romantic. When a woman follows her heart, she is just a woman. When a man follows his heart – or his whatever – he is a hero.

So Mitchell’s Fourth Sin was a compound sin. She disobeyed Greenberg; she followed her heart; and, probably worst of all, she moved to France when America had established artistic hegemony thanks to Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and the U.S. State Department.

But, let’s face it, American painting was indeed better than European painting after the war, wasn’t it? Soulanges, Dubuffet, Hartung, Fautrier, Wols had been outclassed by Pollock and de Kooning, with Newman and Rothko rising fast. New York refused to recognize even the great Yves Klein. Too wacky. The New York School (Rosenberg’s phrase) had buried the School of Paris. Good riddance.

And it got worse. Mitchell stayed and moved outside Paris, quite near where Monet had captured some of his most famous works. Her gardener and her cook actually lived in Monet’s cottage.

If you squint, Mitchell’s ultra-painterly, ultra-tactile paintings seem to have something to do with nature. If not depictions, then certainly in a wild spirit that is always just right and almost always breathtaking. However, when she moved from Paris to Vétheuil (where, with an inheritance, she purchased a rambling estate), it was not to be closer to nature, but to please Riopelle.

Her Fifth Sin was that she didn’t have a wife to promote her and steady the helm. Wild woman Alice Neel once told me, when I was posing naked for her, that she would have been famous much sooner if like Jackson Pollock she had had Lee Krasner for a wife, or like de Kooning she had had an Elaine. Mitchell had been married to Barney Rosset, a high-school friend and eventually the brave Grove Press publisher of Jean Genet, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs. But later, Mitchell took up with the painter Mike Goldberg. And then, in 1955, Riopelle. Her stormy relationship with Riopelle lasted until 1979 — a good quarter century of brawling.

Red Tree, 1976

Mitchell by the Book

I read Patricia Albers’ Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life. Mitchell sometimes referred to herself ironically as “lady painter.” If you want details of Mitchell’s love life, gay best friends, and her illnesses, this is the book for you.

Mitchell, in or out of her cups, had a bad case of what we used to call the “frankies,” an affliction related to alcohol. She was frank to the point of rudeness. But she wasn’t quite the woman often depicted by Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. Her life would not make a good movie — which is her Sixth Sin. She had many house guests, but was apparently always lonely — the plight of too many poor little rich girls (and boys) cursed with not having to work for a living.

She was famously rude to Whitney curator Marcia Tucker, who was trying to arrange a show while Mitchell and Riopelle were throwing things at each other, including a dish of oeufs au plat. Tucker stood up to her: “I have had enough. I can’t work this way, and I won’t. If you want this show to happen, then you’re going to have to start behaving, stop insulting me and get to work. If not, then I am finished here. I don’t need to do this show, and I’m just about to the point here I don’t want to.”

For once, Mitchell obeyed.

Mitchell led two lives. Her personal life was a train wreck. The life does not match the brilliant paintings. Sometimes the most messy, messed-up, discombobulated souls are awarded, in compensation, the gift of the gods: in Mitchell’s case, the genius of painting. The further away you get from Mitchell the drunk, the closer you can get to the paintings.

Oddly enough, she was farsighted and had to step way back to see her own work. So do we. Time has been kind to her art. I rank her second only to Pollock and de Kooning. In fact, she too melded nature and facture.

Linden Tree, 1978

I Have Never Seen a Poem as Lovely as a Tree

The current sampling at Cheim & Read called “Trees” (to August 29) underlines Mitchell’s links to the visible. Her trees, however, are even less like trees than those Mondrian painted as he battled with himself to be free of Cubism, taking one step at a time toward what still passes for total abstraction or non-objective art. We are more canny; we see square Dutch fields and the mid-Manhattan grid.

After Mitchell moved to France, she adapted two- and sometimes three-panel formats, because her studio spaces, first in Paris, and then even in Vétheuil, were always too small for her vision and for the newly required scale for serious painting. The “touch” was always there. If you think color is difficult to talk about, try writing about tactility. It is not just a way of putting down paint; it is not just texture. It can also include the way the weight of the paint moves. In Mitchell, touch is vision, is ocular, curiously resplendent. She admired van Gogh and it shows. He too confused light and texture and color in a kind of grand synesthesia. He was the first, I think, to do that. Later, Mitchell may have been the first to do that with abstraction. De Kooning had tactility; Pollock had grandeur. But Mitchell had color, tactility, and light.

And she knew when and where to leave the canvas blank. So there is air as well as space. The relations between paint and canvas (or ground) are complex. Not Asian, not Western; purely Mitchellian. Her “trees” are not pictures of trees but meditations upon treeness, upon stature, upon growth and motion.

Her use of polyptychs (diptychs, triptych and quadriptychs) leaves her open to narrative. But could she help it if she never had quite enough studio wall-space to achieve the scale she wanted? The miracle is that she worked at the panels separately and that they usually fitted together in a thrilling way.

We know she was afflicted with or blessed by synesthesia, but did she also have an eidetic memory? Does a photographic memory include a memory for colors? She mostly worked at night under artificial light and always felt she had to check the colors by daylight.

As a teenager she was a champion figure-skater. That kind of stamina probably stayed with her, for it shows in her paintings. They are, so to speak, energy personified.

But they are also insoucient.

Cypresses, 1995

Rage Against the Norm

I read with great interest “Joan Mitchell, A Rage to Paint” by Linda Nochlin in the catalog for the Whitney 2002 survey. Art historian and feminist Nochlin brings up the question of rage and anger, projecting that the paintings are pretty much all about rage. Certainly, Mitchell had a lot of anger and was not a coward about expressing it. Was she enraged by how she was treated as a woman artist?  If she felt anger about not being taken seriously as an artist because she was a woman, she was not alone. However, she can never be accused of being a feminist.

She was one of the few women members of The Club in the 10^th Street/Cedar Bar days. In some ways, she was one of the boys. She swore, she drank to excess. Just about the only thing she didn’t do was throw Franz Kline or a door through a barroom window. She had some women friends, but few of them were artists. She could be fiercely competitive. For Tucker’s 1974 Whitney show, she refused to share the spotlight with Lee Krasner. Actually, I don’t blame her. Mitchell is by far Krasner’s superior.

Nochlin makes the usual mistake. What you see tells you what went in. If the painting looks angry – for whatever reason — then it was made in anger. An angry painting was made when the artist was angry. But there is another way of looking at things.

I myself find that when I am making a painting I have no emotion in mind. The painting itself creates the emotion. I discover the emotions and the feelings through the painting. Sometimes it is an emotion or a feeling I never knew I had in me; sometimes it is an emotion or a feeling that is totally alien.

The equation is not E/F = P; but P = E/F.

The emotion or the feeling may come after the painting, not before. In Alfred Gell’s anthropological terms, the painting looks at me. I will go further. In my studio, the painting creates me.

It is not that emotions (rage, anger, joy, reverence) are translated into paint. It is instead that the paint causes emotions in the artist and thence in the viewer — combinations of emotions and sometimes the creation of unknown emotions and feelings.

Does the same equation work for ideas? Yes. Ideas do not cause paintings, or if so, only bad paintings. Real paintings generate rather than illustrate ideas. Surely, I learn about myself through my paintings; but more important, I learn about the world.

We have no idea if Mitchell learned anything from her painting. She loved poetry and had many poet friends. Her wealthy mother, in fact, had been co-editor of Poetry Magazine, which had featured the likes of Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens. But Mitchell herself was not given to poetic utterances. The closest I can find is this:

“Music, poems, landscape and dogs make me want to paint. And painting is what allows me to survive.”

John Perreault is on Facebook, specializing in neo-modern, small-scale residential architecture. Links here for John Perreault’s website & John Perreault’s art.

John Perreault videos: http://tinyurl.com/n6x848h

In honor of the 100^th anniversary of the readymade, a big batch of remade readymades are now on view at New York’s Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue (through Aug. 29, 2014). This fall, “Readymade@100” debuts at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C. (Sept. 9 – Oct. 19). One of my very own readymades (Stolen Readymade, 2014) is part of the exhibition.

As one might suspect, many of the iconic pieces now on display at Gagosian still convey the master’s wit, but with much less aura than the originals may have had. I suspect that the signing of the 1914 Bottle Rack and Fountain (a urinal, inscribed “R. Mutt” in 1917) imbued these classic found objects with more than enough aura for their time.

The remade readymades (perpetuated by critic Arturo Schwarz, beginning in 1964) have absolutely no aura at all. This is an accomplishment of great import. The remade readymades look like art because we have seen them in books and online, but the feelings and thoughts they evoke reach the same level you might attain at Macy’s or at an outlet mall.

Wit is not aura; in fact, aura itself is not eternal, which can be proved by looking at any masterpiece that has endured the eyes of multifarious spectators in any given temple of art. Under certain conditions, these very multitudes, by praying in front of tin saints, can coat those images with aura. But that kind of aura may fade if not continually renewed.  Wit, however, tends to endure. I am not so sure about irony.

To further celebrate the 100th anniversary of the readymade, I here republish my essay Dada Perfume: A Duchamp Interview, which first appeared in 1996 in REVIEW and was, upon the occasion of an exhibition at the Whitney, called  “Making Mischief: Dada Invades New  York.”

John Perreault: It has been a long time since we had one of our little conversations. They always meant so much to me.

Marcel Duchamp: 1964? Bob Rauschenberg brought you by, thinking you could play chess.

JP: I can, but I hate it. Besides, I think it was Jill Johnston. I know it wasn’t Jasper, because I never really knew him and I didn’t meet John Cage until much later, actually, in the South Pacific at a kind of conference. A lot has happened since I first met you.

MD: Particularly to me.

JP: We needn’t go into that.

MD: It is kind of embarrassing. I used to say that what happened to me only happens to others.

JP: Not to belabor the point, but I remember that when I first met you, which was at the beginning of my career as an art critic, and the so-called end of my career as an artist – we might call it an occlusion — and almost the end of my career as a poet, you insisted that the true artist had no choice but to go underground. Now you are truly underground.

MD: Very amusing.

JP: Not as amusing as your last artwork, Given: 1. the waterfall. 2. the lighting gas. Very few knew about that tableau until after it appeared at the Philadelphia Museum of Art among your other masterpieces.

MD: My gift to the art world.

JP: Why did you keep it a secret?

MD: As we have discussed in the past, secrets have been essential to my work, which may or may not have anything to do with art.

JP: I read in Calvin Tomkins’ biography called simply Duchamp (Henry Holt, 1996) that your brother-in-law Jean Crotti once said that how you used time was your real art work.

MD: Rather, it was how I abused time.

JP: For me your main contribution has been your secretiveness. And this inspired my own Secret Artworks. I’d say that that secrets are certainly a theme in your work. I think of the 1916 Readymade called With a Hidden Noise, which is a ball of string with something inside of it that makes a noise when you shake it. What causes the noise? And the work, which I think is magnificent, is not Given itself — the barn door with peepholes and the nude and the waterfall beyond — but that it was kept a secret all the time you were working on it from 1946 to 1966 and beyond, until it was unveiled. Also, as I pointed out in print years ago, your output after the Bride Stripped Bare . . . when you were supposed to have given up art for chess has in retrospect proven not insignificant. Now when you look at the work, so much of which is at the Whitney now in Francis Naumann’s exhibition called “Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York,” it looks as if you were quite busy between chess games. The work was always there, but invisible, somewhat like Poe’s purloined letter in that famous short story: hidden but in plain sight.

MD: I always kept busy in a mental way.

JP: Was that mental activity art?

MD After a certain point I lost interest in making objects or pictures for sale. If you take away commerce and the prattle of critics, present company excepted, there is something left which may be art or something else.

JP: What is that something else? An idea? You have had an enormous influence on art that foregrounds an idea, on anti-object art, on process art, on postmodernism.

MD: No, not an idea. A rumor, a perfume.

JP: Yes. A perfume. You once said that art had a smell that only lasted 30 years. And in the interview I published in the East Village Other in 1965, I quoted you as saying that art left a scent behind, even when it was removed to another room, another state, another country.

MD: One of my many contradictory statements, so it must be true.

JP: Speaking of contradictions, does the current Whitney exhibition bring back memories? All your friends are there from the New York Dada period. The Countess, Man Ray, Beatrice Wood. Is there any art scent left in the objects, drawings, paintings, books?

MD: For me, none at all. All that work is dead. They have passed their 30 years. All the energy has been sucked out of them. I felt I was looking at work found in an Egyptian tomb.

JP: I had a different experience. You still come up as the kingpin, although most of your important work has always been on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art all of these years. On the whole, I think the show is worthwhile. You can see it and save the train fare to Philadelphia.

MD: Nicely put.

JP: I did, however, like the seven paintings by your old friend John Covert, particularly the one of an apple and an apple cut in half. And the little collection of things by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. It made me go and look up some of her poems.

MD: She was an inspiration to us all. She had absolutely no fear. Her costumes were her art. And I enjoyed the way she hunted down and tortured poor William Carlos Williams, who had somehow become the object of her lust. Hadn’t you seen her or Covert’s art before?

JP: Not that I can remember.

MD: There. That explains why they were still alive to you. They have not been seen as much as my works. They have not been drained of their energy by the public. That explains their present-day perfume. Also I am sure you have guessed by now that the art perfume is sometimes mostly in the nose of the sniffer.

JP: True. I also liked the mock-up of the Walter Arensberg apartment, where so many salons were held, having never been there myself.

MD: I found it suffocating. But business is business. Let the legend linger.

JP: Can I dare to urge you to be even more personal?

MD: I hate being personal, but since I have long admired what the awful Hilton Kramer in the N.Y. Times called your avuncular, haphazard approach to art criticism, I will do my best.

JP: This is a dangerous question. Why did you marry Lydie Sarazin-Levassor? I have been reading about that in Calvin Tomkins’ biography of you. I can understand your relationship with Mary Reynolds, and then your marriage to Teeny, but Lydia, whom you married in 1927, seemed totally unsuitable. She was uninterested in art and not even very rich.

MD: Although it would have been pleasant if she had been as rich as I first thought, I married her because she was indifferent to art. I now claim the marriage as an artwork, a Happening, a Performance, very much ahead of its time. After all, my masterpiece is called The Bride Stripped Bare by Bachelors, Even. My first marriage extended that theme.

JP: My next, quite personal question is also about money. We know you kept your expenses to a minimum. But isn’t it true that you became a private art dealer?

MD: There were all these Brancusi sculptures floating around and this and that. One has to make a living. But also remember that for a long time I made some spending money by giving French lessons.

JP: And the Whitney exhibition? Is it true to the period?

MD: It is not for me to judge. For me, it is a collection of ghosts; cadavers on a slab; dead meat.

JP: Is there Dada now?

MD: The Dada we tried to create has not yet come into existence, probably cannot come into existence. This exhibition is not Dada; Tomkins’ book is definitely not Dada. It might have been better to have added another floor showing fresh art, art with some surprise in it.

JP: The show is educational. It tries to capture a really wild period in American art. I am not sure that Naumann’s theory that New York Dada, as opposed to European Dada, is humorous rather than witty. Tomkins points out that the French word you used, usually translated as “mind,” in your famous statement that you wanted to put painting in the service of the mind, also means spirit, soul, vitality, character and wit.

MD: He’s right.

JP: The exhibition inadvertently confirms your role as a catalyst. But beyond the time frame of the exhibition, it is now a commonplace that without you, and without Dada, there would be not Pop, Conceptual Art and postmodern art.

MD: I take no responsibility.

JP: Have you seen any new art that you like?

MD: I don’t get around much any more.

JP: May I recommend an exhibition?

MD: Certainly. I am always interested in what other artists are doing, particularly when they are following up on my ideas.

JP: Just yesterday, when I was opening my mail, there was a large-format newsprint poster picturing what I thought was your Fountain, the urinal you signed as a readymade in 1917. The poster said Saint Duchamp and gave the address, which happened to be quite near where I live. How odd, I thought.

MD: And?

JP: It’s a brightly lit store front painted stark white, and directly in the window is a rack of novena candles, lit, and to the left a kind of kneeling device from a church with your Mona Lisa above it. Further inside: Nude Descending a Staircase, Fountain, Bottle-Rack, an unfinished Tu m’ and the two-way door from Paris. At the rear, a door is open revealing a toilet with the lid up. The gallery was locked.

Fortunately, I saw light pouring out of the open cellar door — it was early evening — and walked down the stairs. Inside were a man and three women sitting around, the walls covered with drawings of Fountain. I was recognized, and they offered to take off their clothes, because of the painting Alice Neel did of me nude. I said that wouldn’t be necessary. The man remembered that I once had a studio in P.S. 122, which is untrue. But then again, I recently discovered that there is a young poet in New Jersey using my name, or pretty close, so perhaps he was the one who had the studio.

MD: Don’t tell me. The man in the cellar was the notorious Mike Bidlo, who has made Jackson Pollock paintings and copied everything exactly. Even Andy Warhol.

JP: His best show yet. His name isn’t even on the announcement. At the risk of adding inspiration to injury, I would like to add that eight of the 16 objects by you in the Whitney are replicas, reproductions, reconstructions or latter-day editions. Bidlo’s Duchamps might be seen as replicas of replicas.

MD: Well, I always said that a readymade had to consist of something of no aesthetic value, and that is certainly true of my readymades. I think that Bidlo fellow is on to something… .

JP: Are you still making art yourself?

MD: It is one of my bad habits. I am sure there will be more posthumous artworks surfacing.

JP: Finally, since the Whitney show focuses on New York Dada, what did New York mean to you and your artist friends?

MD: Freedom.

JP: What did Dada mean?

MD: Freedom.

John Perreault is on Facebook, specializing in neo-modern, small-scale  residential architecture. Links here for John Perreault’s website & John Perreault’s art.

John Perreault videos: http://tinyurl.com/n6x848h

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“Play-Doh,” 1994-2014.

Pop Art Comeback

Announce that you like Jeff Koons and they’ll think you’re crazy or a capitalist running-dog lackey. Say you hate him and you’re just another anti-capitalist snooty spoilsport, without a sense of irony. So the best thing to do might be to avoid the big, expensive show of his shiny, expensive art now at the Whitney. After all, everyone has already seen most of the stuff; everyone has already decided what to think, what to say.

But then you run the risk of being accused of cowardice.

We don’t want black or white; we want nuance.

After listening to me complain about the art world on the telephone one night, Andy Warhol told me: Well, you know, John, it is always better to like things. Was he right? What would he think of Koons? Did Koons become the next Andy Warhol, or merely Warhol minus the darkness?

The soup cans and Brillo boxes must have been an influence, yes. But you will find nothing in Koons equivalent to the silkscreen painting of the deadly tuna fish cans, the car crashes, or even the mourning Jackie. If Koons is a latter-day Warhol, he is a Warhol without shadows. If he is not totally a latter-day Oldenburg, it is because he did not have a trusty wife to do all that sewing for him. Instead, although there is no sewing done, he has many paid accomplices to mold, paint, polish, or whatever is required to achieve those merciless surfaces, that gloss, that perfect finish. Koons would never go soft. The recent inflatables look soft but they are as hard as steel. Don’t count on these floats to save you from drowning in your infinity pool.

My best Koons story is that my beloved and I did see the now famous Koons show in 1985 at International With Monument in the East Village. And we both agreed that the floating basketball was pretty swell. We debated for days about buying it. We actually then could have afforded it: it was priced that low. We decided not to and have been kicking ourselves ever since.

My old friend Lil Picard had a similar experience with an affordable Pollock in his first show with Betty Parsons. Lil, the ex-Weimar coffeehouse girl and then New World destruction artist, actually left the opening reception and walked around the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenue several times. Fifty-seventh Street has very long blocks. She didn’t buy it. This is not to even hint that Koons is as great as Pollock.

These are just two stories with the same moral: You indeed can dine on regrets.

Stories are important. Looks too. Andy proved that with his wig. Joseph Beuys also had a look, so later, whimsical James Lee Byars (now at MoMA/ P.S.1) had to have a look. Marina, after a certain point, needed one also. And Koons, the man with the permanent smile, had to remake himself, too.

Recently I had to appear in public in my artist persona. I am not sure I have quite acquired one yet, so I turned the whole appearance into a performance. Remembering that Andy occasionally hired an actor to impersonate him when he had a gig he didn’t want to go to, I decided to pretend I was an actor hired by John Perreault to impersonate me. It was one of my Secret Artworks. I kept myself interested in my Performance by constantly hinting to people that I was not me but an actor who had been paid to imitate Perreault for the evening.

And then, in an ultra-Hitchcock turn, you become the person who is impersonating you. Or even more scary, he or she becomes you permanently, and you are cast aside, a mere nobody.

“Three Balls Total Equilibrium Tank,” 1985.

The New Is Now Old Hat

We actually braced ourselves and looked at the art. Again.

You should learn something by seeing all the Koonsiana together, right? I will summarize by saying that some things are better than others. The suspended basketballs and the encased vacuum cleaners are topnotch. The 2D works are uniformly awful — photorealist montages of Tom Wesselmann, Jim Rosenquist, Audrey Flack, with a little bit of Picabia double-exposure overlays, via David Salle, thrown in for good measure. The gazing balls plus classic statuary recently foisted upon the wary public are good, but at Rockefeller Center the new ersatz topiary is not as charming as the puppy was. Popeye in any form doesn’t work. Porn in any form, either.

Or just this:

The balloon dog – in any size, any color —  is not Meta Art, but it is also not Almost Art.  It is something else. A kind of stand-in for art, which is quite an accomplishment, if you think about it. The new, new, new Play-Doh is a play on words, equivalent to Warhol’s silkscreened money.

But I recommend you first see the Duchamp multiples, thoughtfully mounted at Gagosian a block uphill from the Whitney. Yes, it is the 100^th anniversary of the first readymade. I myself am going to be in a show of readymades called “The Readymade@100” this fall at the American University in D.C. Not me personally, but a readymade by me.

But just so you won’t forget that Jeff Koons is having his big moment down the road, there’s also a small show of recent Koons “Inflatable” multiples at Gag Mad.

So you won’t forget Koons’ debt to Marcel?

In the beginning, St. Marcel unintentionally generated Pop by influencing Jasper and Bob who influenced Andy, and so forth. Lineage is as important in art as it is in royalty or among the Hasidim or Mohammedans. The great mystical story-teller Rabbi Nachman, grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, is called the “dead rabbi” because he left no descendants.

“Balloon Dog (Yellow),” 1994-2000.

Dough-Re-Mi or Moola Hula

And then there is the matter of m.o.n.e.y.

I recently joked that the Whitney Madison Avenue building would make an ideal flagship store for the Gagosian Empire. And now it is. Gagosian is actually listed on a wall text thanking corporate sponsors:

Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by

                          GAGOSIAN GALLERY

I always assumed galleries covered shipping and helped out with contacting owners of artworks needed. I am not sure what “leadership support” means. But it takes m.o.n.e.y. to mount an art exhibition. I have often thought that those who profit should pay. On the other hand, although museum shows once generated sales, I doubt that is the case now. Prestige now wears a different mink coat.

We have long cherished Thorstein Veblen. We cannot understand postmodern life without his concept of “conspicuous consumption.” Conspicuous consumption transcends premodern, modern and postmodern. When an artwork becomes so expensive that nearly everyone has to mention how much it now costs, we are no longer dealing with an artwork; we are dealing with a symbol. You bought this Koons to prove to everyone that you have enough money to buy this Koons. Therefore, you are clever, talented and certainly rich, rich, rich.

I think you should buy art only if you can’t afford it, but simultaneously cannot live without it. Certainly not to flip it for quick profit or use it as an advertisement for yourself or some building you want to rent out. You thereby risk financial disaster, weird diseases, genital disfigurement, sterility and the sudden death of your grandchildren at the hands of the Art Furies. You heard it here first.

And if you as an artist are making stuff only to satisfy a market … well, you are just doing what artists have always done. If no one buys your art, who will save it for posterity? For a sense of balance, however, just think of Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899). Her dreadful horse paintings once fetched the highest prices for a living artist, and who cares about them now?

“Michael Jackson and Bubbles,” 1988.

Day of Judgment 

The takeaway: Koons is as good as Oldenburg, but not as good as Warhol.

Why didn’t everyone see that Koons was a Pop artist way back when? And why don’t they see it and say it now? He was associated with Neo-Geo, whatever that was, but merely because he debuted in the same gallery – the aforementioned International With Monument — with several other artists who could also be better seen as Pop.

Big bad Pop had gone away.

No, it merely was in occultation. And was called by another name. The art world was suffering from a failure of nomenclature. Should we have called Koons Neo-Pop? Can we call him that now? No one wants to be a Neo anything. And no one wants to be cursed with the Second Generation label, right? Just look at all those poor, poor artists – some of whom were actually quite good — tarred with the rubric “Second Generation New York School.” Everyone wants to be one of the originals.

New sells. New art must have a new name.

But Pop Art never went away. After Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Indiana, Rosenquist, we had Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons, Meyer Vaisman (whose recent two-gallery show in the Lower East Side was a timely reminder of how smart and talented he is), Ashley Bickerton, Peter Halley, Haim Steinbach, etc.

“Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules),” 2013.

Is This the End?

The Jeff Koons show at the Whitney on Madison Avenue is the last show there. Is the move to the Meatpacking District the end of an era, appropriately marked, or merely a real estate ploy? When the move was announced, the rent for a gallery in the Meatpacking District quadrupled.

I should be sad but I am not. As usual, I greet the future with my tongue in my cheek.

Think of all the great solo shows in the strangely unloved Marcel Breuer building: H.C. Westermann, Chuck Close, Nam June Paik, Richard Tuttle, Andy Warhol. The Whitney has come a long way. The Mad Ave venue opened with Louise Nevelson, Andrew Wyeth and Mauricio Lasansky. Something for everyone — which is always a big mistake. And the Biennials and all the other terrible exhibitions will be forgotten. Name four really awful exhibitions at the Whitney. See what I mean?

And the Whitney, I predict, will be up to its old tricks. The new space at the end of the High-Line Park opens this fall with Archibald Motley, Frank Stella (?), Laura Poitras, and David Wojnarowicz (!).

John Perreault is on Facebook, specializing in neo-modern, small-scale  residential architecture. Links here for John Perreault’s website & John Perreault’s art.

John Perreault videos: http://tinyurl.com/n6x848h

Entrance to the Last Room of the Lygia Clark Retrospective

Is Lygia Clark’s oeuvre another case of the oeuvre with a caesura? If so, Clark (1920-1988) got it backwards. You are supposed to start out avant-garde, like some artists I dare not name, and then end up producing Almost Art. It look like art, it smells like art, but something is missing. At least it is saleable.

Clark, a goddess of the avant-garde, started out with decades of Almost Art. Then after she abandoned art, she ended up with spiritualized, therapeutic non-art that has more art in it than anything she had done before. Even the sculptures she called  “bichos” (“critters”), the direct antecedents to her participatory breakthrough, were variable but not viable. They are so non-haptic that they make Calder (certainly an influence) seem warm and cuddly. Hinged metal shapes with sharp metal edges are not an inducement to play.

The MoMA survey, titled “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art” (to Aug. 24), follows Brit-crit Guy Brett’s pioneering 1994 Art in America article “Lygia Clark: In Search of the Body,” and is even more noncritical. At MoMA, almost three-quarters of the “art” is that which came before Clark “abandoned” art. The abstract paintings and variable sculptures distract from the “non-art” — the participatory rituals that are true art and so over the top that we don’t as yet have adequate language for them. Fewer, more carefully selected examples of Clark’s Almost Art would have sufficed. As it is, much of the show look like the result of the curatorial “will to completion.” The CWTC requires that every work that can be borrowed is borrowed, thus filling huge amounts of space but avoiding critical decisions.

By the way, why did it take MoMA two decades to catch up with Art in America?

Answer: If participatory art is still not de rigueur, Performance Art now is, and we can thereby sidestep pondering Therapy Art and Spiritual Tech if we care to. They are, after all, only subsets of Performance Art, right?

Although she had studied with the great Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, Clark’s early, architecture-inspired abstract paintings are, to put it kindly, tasteful. Looks like she was a bad student. Consider Marx’s swirling Copacabana Beach promenade or his Brasília gardens. Far from tasteful, these works gave a new meaning to Marxism; in enlightened quarters it means gardening with zest and excess.

Clark’s abstract paintings, however, like everything else of hers until Therapeutic Art, are tepid Cubism or Constructivism, influenced by Swiss artist/designer Max Bill of Ulm. He has a lot to answer for. You cannot blame the avant-garde Brazilians of the period for wanting to be international, but Max Bill? Even the Neo-Concretism that Clark and Hélio Oticica (a remarkable artist in his own right) had co-founded does not live up to its promise of participatory, organic art.

Rio is not Ulm. And Clark’s hinged, variable “critters” do not quite deliver. The paper models in a case are better and, in contrast, highlight the big flaw of the hinged sculptures. These studies, even under glass, are tactile; the “critters” are not.

Tropicalism? It is all too cool, even after you get rid of whatever your preconceptions of what tropical art might be. Oticica went on to make very uncool but quite wonderful “nests,” one of which was in the 1970 “Information” show at MoMA. Clark went on to become a legend.

Bicho (Critter), 1959

The Lady or the Tiger?

Which way should we enter the exhibition? Through the door that leads to the chronological display? Or through the big, graphic entrance that leads directly to the major, participatory work?

Clark’s late, great work, unlike what led up to it or stood in its way, is supremely tactile, so much so that it is nearly unmuseumable. The works preceding the astounding last room of the survey are an indication of how great the struggle must have been in the then culturally conservative and politically repressive Brazil. Fear was internalized —  unless, like Clark, you had the means to move to Paris.

Duchampian Lesson: You have to give up art in order to make art. Otherwise you are merely repeating what you have been taught. Or you yourself taught. Or saw in the art magazines of yore.

Also, it appears you have to make decades of saleable art in order to have your far-out,  non-saleable art preserved or even acknowledged. I hope this is not true!

But if there had not been decades of Clark’s Almost Art, there would have been no rupture, no rapture. Without the Almost Art there would be no story. Without a story, no myth.

Baba antropofágica [Cannibalistic Drool], (1973?), Lygia Clark.

After Art

What we have in the last room of the Lygia Clark exhibition are photos, texts and souvenirs. Devices for hearing your own breathing. Hoods. Goggles to distort vision. Pictures of participants wrapped in wet string or gauze. Stones on breath-inflated plastic bags…pebbles on various parts of the body and on closed eyelids….What we have is legend.

But here is a clue from the 1994 article by Brett. It is about Clark’s Baba antropofágica  [Cannibalistic Drool], (1973?) :

A group of people again surround an individual and, holding cotton reels inside their mouths, they continuously pull the thread from their mouths and allow it to fall upon the person lying in their midst, eventually covering the entire body.

Clark reports:

The idea is that a person “vomits” life experience when taking part in proposition. Thus vomit is going to be swallowed by others, who will immediately “vomit” their inner content too. It is therefore an exchange of psychic qualities and the word communication is too weak to express what happens in the group.

Stone and Air, 1966, Lygia Clark

Other Paradoxes

Now that museums have destroyed Performance Art, what can they ruin next? If some of the best art of this 21^st century is not painting or sculpture — which seems to be the MoMA gambit — how is it be preserved or even presented to the public after the event? Is video adequate? Will there be constant recreations with decrepit art stars straining against age, or paid actors? Will each reiteration be slightly diminished, slightly misinterpreted until strings of new works disguised as old works are created with hardly any relationship to their origins? And who, besides myself, will keep Performance Art separated from bad theater?

Do we need new forms of art built to accommodate transmogrification, warpings and reimaginings? Can we see Performance Art as a virus that rapidly mutates?

To conceive the art museum of the future, we might imagine what a museum of modern and postmodern dance would be. Ephemera, scores, videos, interviews, reperformances? Hardly seems adequate to those of us who witnessed Judson Church dance.

And So It Goes

MoMA really tries to communicate the latter-day Clark. In the room filled with tabletop “critters,” there are actually two variable sculptures you can manipulate under the gaze of friendly guards. In the Clark Triumphant Room, a play-station with objects you may touch and manipulate (with the help of two facilitators) offers much more of the tactile, haptic, participatory.

There is too much to read and a lot of photos. More elaborate participatory events are scheduled now and then, but away from the exhibition space. To be truthful, it really takes a leap of imagination to “get” the work.

One week after the opening of the exhibition, the catalog was out of stock. Could it be that the catalog and perhaps the ancient article in Art in America are better at communicating the art than the exhibition? It may be that exhibitions, just like painting and sculpture, are so last century.

Pierre Restany shaking hands with Andy Warhol

A Strange Meeting in New York City

I met Clark once. It was when I was wary of participatory art or anything like it. We did not approve of the Esalen Institute: We did not approve of all things Californian. We even hated the Living Theater.

It was in the ‘70s, when the infamous French art critic Pierre Restany – he who “discovered” and promoted Yves Klein (and the entire School of Nice) – was shepherding Clark around the New York art world. Clark was in exile from her native Brazil. It was the era of the bad generals and of their 1968 Institutional Act Number 5 (aka A/5) that legalized onerous censorship of the arts in Brazil as well as almost everything else.

I have an artist friend who left Argentina because of the “disappeared” phenomenon — persons eliminated in the middle of the night for their so-called political tendencies. He had a few happy moments on the beaches of Rio, but soon found out that, although they had less garish uniforms, the generals in Brazil were almost as evil as the ones down in Argentina.

When I was introduced to her by Restany, Saint Lygia was teaching at the Sorbonne and, I now find out, undergoing psychoanalysis because of a personal crisis of some sort. Sounds like a classic meltdown.

Giacinto Scelsi’s Ondiola

Another Famous Meltdown

In this regard – and as an aside that is not really an aside —  I have recently become taken with the handsome, aristocratic, self-taught Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). After his wife left him in 1959, Scelsi had a breakdown and turned to Eastern spirituality and Theosophy. In 2005, Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker:

After the Second World War, he suffered a breakdown and stopped composing for a few years. He spent day after day playing a single note on the piano. The casual observer might have thought that he had gone mad. He was, in fact, finding his path.

Thus, Count Scelsi developed single-note compositions – dictated to him from on high — and then redacted them into scores by a hired hand. First he used a piano to compose, then something called the ondiola. He meant these pieces – the best-known of which is Four Pieces on a Single Note (1959) — to communicate a transcendent reality. My favorites, though, are the complete works for double bass. Performed, they are almost guaranteed to produce carpal-tunnel syndrome in the poor bassist. Once the sounds  tune your ears, however, you will easily dismiss the accusation that Scelsi owed everything to György Ligeti (whose Atmosphères was part of the score for 2001) or, on the other hand, that he was the father of Drone Music, and other half-truths. In comparison to Scelsi, Ligeti is quite corny. In terms of Drone Music, did La Monte Young know of Scelsi? In comparison to Scelsi, Young is Baroque.

The musician Scelsi hired to turn his “improvisations” into scores (Vieri Tosatti) maintained that his employer was a fraud and that he himself was the composer of the works. Surely there is some interpretation involved in transcription, but claiming that transcription is composition is irrational. It is almost like claiming the program you use to download music from Amazon is the composer, and not Mozart or — Scelsi. In any case, should it turn out that Scelsi’s works were composed by someone else, that would also be quite a story. But the music would not change. It would be equally unearthly and totally strange.

Relational Object, 1980. Lygia Clark.

Clark’s Virtue

After her meltdown Clark moved her participatory impulse out of variable sculptures into life and into a kind of touchy-feely art therapy with spiritual roots. If you have somehow forgotten, the art world used to ban both spirituality and art therapy. Not pure enough. Nowadays, of course, Marina Abramović is peddling her own brand of attentiveness therapy, first to Lady Gaga, now to the world.

I am not quite sure that jolly Restany discovered magus Yves Klein. I never met St. Yves, but from what I can deduce it was probably he who discovered Restany and, as a Rosicrucian and judo black-belt, sent him on his road to Tibetan Buddhism and a book about the Dalai Lama.

In any case, my contact with Saint Lygia was “ether-ial.” I do not speak Portuguese. She did not speak English. She shook hands with people. We shook hands. I assumed this was an artwork. She was a well-turned-out woman wearing ladylike gloves, but she had the force, the charisma, the virtue.

“Virtue” is a synonym for energy, life-force, vitality, mojo as well as the good behavior and moderation recommended by Plato and Aristotle. It is also the term for a rank of angels.

I should have known this. But I was attempting to read John Buchan’s dreary The Gap in the Curtain (Buchan wrote The 39 Steps) when I came upon this (to me) odd use of the word: “… his experiment was draining his scanty strength. The virtue was going out of him into us.” His virility, his Vril, his aura?

Later, when I first visited Brazil, Clark was already a living legend. I was informed by Brazilian sources that in her psychotherapy practice she was using techniques learned from indigenous shamans – wrapping her patients in string and gauze, laying stones on their eyelids and upon mystic pressure-points. I did not even attempt to contact her, figuring that she did not want to be dragged back into the very art world she had transcended. Big mistake. For now she has arrived, with bells — and pebbles and gauze.

Art museums, if they remain on their toes, can handle transcendent art. They are already churches. Some, like MoMA, are big enough and rich enough to be cathedrals. Challenging art, in both senses, is now what they have to be about. How else can they keep the customers coming? How else can they fulfill their duties to culture, criticism and art history? Acknowledgement of Clark’s genius has been a long time coming, but just remember this: Yesterday’s Lygia Clark is tomorrow’s van Gogh.

Uncle Paul playing the harmonium in Alphonse Mucha’s studio. 1895. Paris.

Seeing the art world as a family is a handy tool, for it is like the philosophical idea that things in a category have a family resemblance rather than embody an archetype or, perish the thought, a Platonic form. On the other hand, if you are not Protestant, or Jewish or Muslim, you also have The Holy Family and the various saints to think about.

When did the art world stop being a family or a religion? When it became a strictly financial machine. Andy Warhol deemed his studio The Factory and said business was the best art. Was he being realistic or wickedly satirical?

No matter what your age or gender, if even now your two fathers are Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock, then your much older uncles must be Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. I myself at this point have a few sisters and nieces, but, as typical of male artists of a certain age, I have no mother. My grandmothers, however, are Alice Neel and Beatrice Wood.

Within this frame of reference, why then did Uncle Paul, our St. Paul of the South Pacific, run off to French Polynesia to search for his mother, whom he already knew?

MoMA does not have the answer. But when you view its current, somewhat pedantic, necessarily underlit un-blockbuster, it might help to keep this question in mind.

Self-Portrait with Gauguin Portrait for Vincent, Émile Bernard, 1888.

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Self-Portrait with Portrait of Vincent, Paul Gauguin, 1888.

What You Need To Know Before You Go

“Gauguin: Metamorphoses” (to June 8) puts together some of the most important paintings with woodblock prints, sculptures and ceramics, so it is a must-see. Willfully exotic images move from medium to medium, jumping across academic boundaries, in a way that no artist had ever managed before.

It is also the first Paul Gauguin solo exhibition at MoMA. Why? Because he was a  bookkeeper for stockbrokers? Because he played the French stock market himself? Because, when he was in the chips, he was a spot-on art collector who gambled on  Pissarro and Cézanne? Because he was one-eighth Peruvian on his mother’s side? Because he was a late bloomer? Because at the age of 47 he left his wife and children and headed out for a new life as a fulltime artist? Because like his Dutch friend St. Vincent he was self-taught? Because he copied or was inspired by the Cloisonnism of Émile Bernard?

No, none of these reasons work. Lesser artists with greater sins have been given MoMA shows.

Not even the plagiarism accusation—mostly by the bitter Bernard – is an excuse. All you have to do is compare a Bernard to a Gauguin when they were working side by side in Brittany. Bernard had virtually no talent; Gauguin was already a master of form and color—and, I hasten to add, emotion and meaning. He, like his buddy Vincent, had the  mojo. And our St. Paul of the South Pacific kept his mana until his sad death in the Marquesas in 1903. Bernard turned to timid, really timid painting, and loud complaining.

My theory is that Gauguin was eschewed by MoMA because their darling Picasso owed him too much: certainly the chic primitivism; the Spanishness –  Paul spent a key part of his childhood in Lima and he preferred speaking Spanish to French; the machismo, the satyriasis; even the guts to work across all media. Now, however, St. Gauguin Revised can be seen not just as a key Post-Impressionist and Symbolist, but as a proto-appropriationist, postmodern modernist. It may have been the Symbolist part of Gauguin and the decorative part that got him off-sided from MoMA Modernism. Also it may have been a problem elsewhere that, unlike van Gogh, he was not beholden to painting from life. Art makes strange bedfellows. For Gauguin, memory was just as good as, if not better than, an equally fictitious “realism.”

There is technically nothing wrong with a MoMA-formalist, didactic, “facts”-only labels and wall text. Art newcomers may require this approach. But I don’t and you don’t.

Dare we mention the anti-Christianity of many modernist artists? Dare we present the facts about venereal disease, alcoholism, drug addiction, third-sex meanderings? The outright repression? The fun?

But it is wondrous indeed and telling that as an acolyte of the Religion of Art, I can pray for help to St. Paul, St. Vincent, St. Jackson and, yes, even to Saint Alice, but never to St. Pablo. There is no St. Pablo. Picasso lived too long; he had no tragedy. He sold too much art, and he made too much money.

John Perreault as Vincent

How I Am Connected To Gauguin

Since it’s bad enough that I became van Gogh, I must now thoroughly prevent myself from becoming Gauguin.

Analyse Lovers: The Story of Vincent (1990) by Irish/Canadian-American video pioneer Les Levine, proves that I am Vincent, or at least his reincarnation. The video was commissioned by Dutch National Television. Levine’s clever tape has snippets of various art types giving their opinions about van Gogh (me): Alanna Heiss, Malcolm Morley, Julian Schnabel and so forth.

At the press conference in Amsterdam, much to Levine’s chagrin, the reporters wanted only to know where he had found such a talented actor to play Vincent. Levine claims to have written the film, but yours truly actually made up Vincent’s words on the spot. Levine asked me questions off-camera and I channeled my great-great-great uncle Vincent.

Fortunately, I bear little resemblance to my great-great-great uncle Paul. My first connection to him, other than through Vincent (and that is a big connection), is his Brittany Period.

Some years ago, as an artwork, I made a map that charted all the John Perreaults in the U.S. at that time — 186 or 156,depending how you spell Perreault, which can also be Perrault or Perreau. And then on to Canada, searching for both John and Jean, of course

Then I searched through the Internet for Jean Perreaults in France

I already knew there had been significant Perraults in Paris long ago. Charles Perrault (1628-1703), was a founding member of L’Académie française, advisor to Louis XIV. He wrote about the court’s favorite painter, Charles Le Brun, penned the guide to the Labyrinth of Versailles, collected folk tales under the title Tales of Mother Goose and was “a leader of the Modern faction during the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.” Sounds like I am a chip off the old block.

And I knew of Claude Perrault (1633-1688) who designed the East Wing of the Louvre (Perrault’s Colonnade).

But the home of my name was not Paris, but Brittany. So many Jean Perreaults and Perraults! More than in the U.S. and Canada combined. I am where my name came from. I was further relieved that Brittany is Celtic, like Ireland, Scotland — where I unexpectedly feel immediately at home — and Cornwall. Gaelic was spoken and sometimes still is in these Celtic nations.

In Brittany, road signs are sometimes in both Gaelic and French. Parisians, a snooty lot, do not quite accept Bretons as really French.

So, yes, Gauguin first went searching for the authentic and primitive in Brittany, where he mostly painted women and, strangely enough, naked boys. Clearly he was searching for me.

Myth Buster : When Gauguin began to paint scenes of Pont-Aven in Brittany, it had already become an established summer art colony by the late 1850s . Beginning in 1860, it became home base for artists and art students from distant Philadelphia, who somehow thought it was more magical to paint from nature in Brittany than Bucks County. The advent of the railroad in 1862 brought even more artistes.

One commentator has opined that Pont-Aven was probably like Provincetown in the 1950s. Three hotels served up summer rooms for the artists; the region provided numerous windmills and a river running down to the sea. The huge white hats celebrated by Gauguin were really not so ancient: Breton women donned them only after the French Revolution. On the other hand, those boys always swam naked.

“Vision After The Sermon,” Paul Gauguin, 1888.

St. Vincent Goes To Tahiti

My other connection to Gauguin is even more twisty. Invited to lecture at the University of Australia, on the way down the plane stopped on Fiji to refuel. The following year I was hired back to Canberra as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art Theory and Glass (don’t ask). Remembering my runway glimpse of Fiji, I called my artist/travel-agent friend: I have a ticket to Australia. How much will it cost to stay a day or two in Fiji?

Forget Fiji, he said, he had a surprise for me: I could stop at Tahiti for a hundred bucks and whatever the hotel would cost for the days I could spend in Papeete.

Myth Buster : I now know what St. Paul of the South Pacific knew (and couldn’t say), which was what naval officer and novelist Pierre Loti knew before him, that Christian missionaries had already destroyed Maori culture. What the Calvinists hadn’t wiped out, the Catholics and the Mormons finished off.

After a little research, I also now know that Gauguin had borrowed his information about the Maori religion, published as his own discoveries in his little promotional booklet Noa-Noa (Fragrant Scent), from Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout’s Voyages aux îles du Grand océan (1837).

First turned on to South Pacific culture by the Colonial Exhibit in the Exposition Universelle of 1889, Gauguin later fancied he could unearth Tahitian cultural secrets passed from mother to daughter. Turns out that he really didn’t understand the language that well.

By the way, how well did van Gogh speak French or Gauguin speak Dutch? How well, if at all, did Gauguin speak Danish? As you may have discerned if you have foreign friends, you may know what they say, but not know what they mean.

Gauguin’s titles in Tahitian are full of errors. And we are not quite sure he really understood the culture. He had no inkling, for instance, that on the Windward Islands of the Society Islands in French Polynesia, there had been a secret cult that cleverly engineered population control – thus the management of scarce food resources—through the ritual sacrifice and cannibalization of all but first-born infants.

Well, it may not be the thought that counts, but the paintings that resulted. It is the myth that’s true. But which myth? The old one or the new ones?

Tahiti has a McDonald’s. I had to eat there. The Big Mac was even worse than in Ramapo, New Jersey or Pigalle. And Papeete is just like the South Pacific ports of Robert Louis Stevenson’s late realist works: tide wrack, drunks sleeping it off, and ruffians. It is true, however, that young Tahitian women are the most beautiful in the world (the men not so hot). Maybe this was different in Gauguin’s time, for he took a shine, as we shall see, to at least one young Tahitian male.

I also noted that when the ferry came across from Tahiti’s less-settled sister island, bat-shaped Moorea, in the late afternoon, it expelled some of the tallest, most muscular drag queens I have ever seen. Transvestism is a Polynesian value. The mahu came down the gangplank in a flurry of pareos, leis and makeup, marching to the main drag to waitress in the pubs and eateries. I missed the monthly Miss Mode contest at the Piano Bar and Restaurant Waikiki.

Myth Maker : In Moa-Moa, a promotion piece for one of his Paris shows (it wasn’t printed in time), St. Paul of the South Pacific goes on and on about the androgynous Polynesians. How many native drag queens did he know? Something strange was going on. It is a common hypothesis that he was in search of his part-Peruvian mother. But surely, just to complicate things, we should know that long after she had passed on (when Paul was 19), it was her loyal French-lover who arranged for St. Paul’s stock-market job.

Thor Heyerdahl once tried to prove that ancient Peruvians were the ancestors of the Polynesians. Now it seems to be the other way around. What is now Peru was settled by Polynesians. The Incas were Polynesians. But Gauguin could not have known that back in the 19^th century.

Although he spent an important part of his childhood in Peru, maybe it was not only his Peruvian and therefore Polynesian “heritage” he was looking for, but his own androgyny — the female side of his psyche. As already mentioned, he favored painting boys in Brittany, and in Paris he was friendly with pedophile poet Paul Verlaine, who spent two years in jail for shooting his poetry-genius teenage lover Arthur Rimbaud in the left wrist. And Gauguin obviously had a stormy bromance with Vincent.

But I don’t think our St. Paul was a pederest….in spite of these paintings done in Brittany, which are not in the MoMA show. He just equated clothes with civilization. The last painting shown below is my favorite because it is so grim.

“Boys from Brittany Bathing,” Paul Gauguin. 1886.

“Breton Boys Bathing,” Paul Gauguin, 1888.

“A Breton Boy,” Paul Gauguin, 1889.

This Way To The Polymorphously Perverse

In Moa-Moa, Gauguin gives voice to what can only be described as a panic attack. But is it the swoon of a predominately heterosexual man afraid of his feminine side, or of a repressed homosexual? As you shall see, there is no way to tell.

Following a young man through the jungle, he is temporarily confused or enlightened and sees in this youthful figure some kind of divine androgyne.

“Was it really a human being walking there ahead of me? Was it the naïve friend by whose combined simplicity and complexity I had been so attracted?”

He thinks that in Europe the sexes are too separated; in Tahiti, male and female bodies, because of living outdoors half-naked, are similar — at least in his eyes.

And then he opines: “In spite of all this lessening in sexual differences, why was it that there suddenly rose in the soul of a member of an old civilization a horrible thought? Why, in all this drunkenness of lights and perfumes with its enchantment of newness and unknown mystery?…The fever throbbed in my temples and my knees shook.”

And Paul’s mythic male/male fling with St. Vincent in Arles? What had Paul said or done that resulted in the famous razor scene? Did one or the other of the two close friends have a panic attack? About to obey a voice that said “Kill him!” Vincent cut off part of his own ear instead and gifted it to a local prostitute.

Myth Buster : We now have some evidence that later Vincent’s “suicide” was an accident. He was horsing around with a few of the local boys; one of them had a gun. On his deathbed, out of pity or guilt, St. Vincent claimed he had shot himself.

But mythic truth demands that Vincent commit suicide. Could we call this new version of his demise “suicide by yokel”?

Furthermore, hagiography requires that we never know the actual circumstances of the bromantic razor incident. It could have been something as banal as “you finished all the absinthe, you bastard.” Or maybe they were arguing about the use of secondary colors or who was going to wash the dishes. That’s the marvelous thing about myths, they leave a great deal of room for the imagination. That is their power. Or as Gauguin once said about art: Emotions first, explanations later.

We tend to forget how intense male/male relationships can be, even when not sexual. Here’s something from a newly discovered van Gogh/Gauguin statement handwritten at Arles, where they famously lived and worked together for two months in 1888:

Gauguin interests me much as a man – very much – [writes Vincent] I have long thought that in our dirty profession as painters we have the greatest need of people with the hands and stomachs of a laborer – and more natural tastes – more amorous and benevolent temperaments – than the decadent and exhausted Parisian boulevardier.

Now here without the slightest doubt we are in the presence of a virgin creature with the instincts of a wild animal. In Gauguin, blood and sex prevail over ambition…

We have made several excursions to the brothels and it’s likely that we will end up working there often.

[“Eight weeks later, on 23 December, the partnership came to a violent end when the pair quarreled violently over, it is believed, Van Gogh spending the meagre household budget on prostitutes, and his refusal to stop drinking absinthe.”]

Next Time: Hiva Oa

Still in search of paradise, St. Paul moved on to Hiva Oa in 1897, far away in the Marquesas.

One very early morning, I was strolling around the Papeete docks and saw a ship dedicated to the Marquesas. A sign said that. Mysteriously, the only one about was an elderly lady who looked like a retired schoolteacher from the midwest in a Walker Evans Great Depression housedress, seemingly waiting for departure, but without any baggage. Maybe her luggage was already on board. She was seated in the totally empty waiting room, looking as if she had slept there. I asked if she needed help. But she was in some sort of dither and waved me away. Maybe she was French and didn’t understand English. Or maybe she was mad.

If one still did such things, you could write a novel explaining why she had ended up here, like this. Had she saved every penny in order to visit St. Gauguin’s grave upon her retirement and missed the boat? Or was she waiting for someone to return from Hiva Oa?

At one point, St. Paul hated Hiva Oa almost as much as he grew to hate living in the jungle suburbs of Papeete, so much so in fact that he wanted to return to Paris. But his famously clever dealer, Ambroise Vollard, wrote back that if he returned it would ruin his market. Myths help sell art.

On Hiva Oa, Gauguin was writing actively, probably to earn a few francs.

In a review of a play on the theme of women’s liberation by a Polynesian woman at the National Theater of Bora Bora, he wrote: “I must confess that I myself am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.”

But the official myth prefers him to be a misogynist, just as it simplifies his relationship to his Danish wife and family. After the  French stock-market crash (1882), he, Mette-Sophie and their five children moved to Copenhagen, beholden to her family. In 1885, it was Mette-Sophie and her family who asked him to leave. He didn’t run away — which the myth demands – but was ordered to leave. Why? My guess is that he was simply impossible. Mysteriously, he took one of his sons, Claude, who was ailing, back with him to Paris. Claude soon died of a hip infection.

The rest is history, art history. The rest is myth. Arles, Tahiti, Hiva Oa. Or as his absinthe-addicted, Swedenborgian buddy, playwright August Strindberg, once wrote. “Gauguin is the savage who hates the restraints of civilization…the child who takes his toys apart to make others.”

And how did our St. Paul of the South Pacific actually die?

All heroes must die. All heroes must be punished. He turned his back on bourgeois life, so he must pay the cost.

List of things actually found in Gauguin’s buried well, recently excavated near his hut…….

Four molars with extreme tooth decay, in a glass jar; broken French perfume bottles; shards of a hand-painted plate from Brittany; empty liquor bottles; an empty Australian beer bottle; a Bovril jar; fibrous end of a pandanus frond probably used as a paintbrush; broken coconut shell with three chunks of ochre and orange pigment; syringe with two morphine ampoules.

The cause of death not syphilis; his teeth had no trace of mercury, which was the treatment back then even in the South Pacific, where this scourge was called the Sailor’s Gift. Gauguin died, instead, of a heart attack caused by a morphine overdose.

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Giovanni Acquaviva: Facismo/Futurismo Plate from The Life of Marinetti Dinner Service 1939. Wolfsonian Musuem, Miami, Fla.

To some, mixing art and politics is like mixing oil and water. In reality it is more like mixing oil and vinegar. But where’s the salad?

The dangers are (one) political aesthetics and (two) artistic politics.

Examples of the first danger are when, in olden times, Greenbergian formalists froze out political art, the better to promote capitalism around the world; and nowadays, in more enlightened times, when poststructuralists use aesthetics to destroy their academic rivals.

An example of the second danger — artistic politics — is Futurism. Poet and  provocateur F.T. Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, was a Fascist war–monger and a passionate supporter of Mussolini.

In “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe” (to Sept. 1), the  Guggenheim bravely surveys all of Italian Futurism, not just the so-called Heroic Period we know so well from the Museum of Modern Art. For better or worse, we get to see the Second Futurism, which transpired during Marinetti’s full-fledged support of his friend Il Duce — who like Franco in Spain and Marshal Pétain of Vichy France was in bed with Adolph Hitler. By 1938, Mussolini was also a rabid anti-Semite. Marinetti was not.

I am happy to report that unexpectedly, the art historians and the art critics have been right all along.

Futurism after World War I, when Marinetti led his brigade into the hands of the Fascists, had a serious decline. Even the much awaited New York debut of Benedetta Marinetti’s wan post-office mural at the Guggenheim is a disappointment. There is a certain frisson in spotting Balla’s overtly Fascist dinner set —– the second time for me, for I have seen it before at the Wolfsonian Collection of Decorative and Propaganda Art, in Miami Beach. But it is indeed the nastiest dinnerware I have ever seen. Would you eat Marinetti’s “divorced eggs” (from his Futurist Cookbook) off Balla’s Futurist/Fascist plate?

Marinetti, the  manic producer of manifestos, to his credit was anti-farinaceous. In his Manifesto of Cuisine he claimed pasta was making Italian men weak. He was ahead of his time in being anti–carb. He was the Dr. Atkins of Milan.

The Ant-Pasta Marinetti supposedly caught eating spaghetti, 1930. Story here.

Marinetti Was Against Spaghetti

We once cooked a Futurist dinner for art critic Lawrence Alloway and his wife, the painter Sylvia Sleigh. They were not amused.

If I remember correctly, we started with “divorced eggs” — minced hard-cooked eggs divided into adjacent mounds of yellow and white. Or was it the whites mince surrounding the yolk mince? And then we had:

Chicken Fiat: A chicken is roasted with a handful of ball bearings inside. “When the flesh has fully absorbed the flavor of the mild steel balls, the chicken is served with a garnish of whipped cream.”

Simultaneous Ice-Cream: Vanilla dairy cream and little squares of raw onion frozen together.

Luigi Russolo and assistant with Intonarumori (noise-making machines), 1913.

Listen Up! 

So the big question here is what do you do if you admire certain aspects of Futurism but loathe the politics. If you admire the iconoclasm, the valorization of speed, motion, and 20^th-century mechanization? The celebration of the locomotive, the automobile and then, in the so-called Second Futurism after WWI, the airplane, but not the desire for war? If you admire, the invention of Performance Art, Noise Music, and Radio Art? If you admire the daring invention of Mixed Media, Trans Media, and Fashion Art? If you admire Futurism’s emotionalism in opposition to the café cool of Cubism?

We shouldn’t throw away the babies floating in the toxic Futurist bath. These “babies” are our grandparents. Without Futurism there would be no Dada. Without Dada, no Surrealism. Without Surrealism, no Abstract Expressionism. Without Dada, no John Cage, no Pop….

Another thing we can do to save Futurism is to pull back and look at International Futurism.

We now deserve an exhibition of same. Certainly Marinetti seeded International Futurism, but art history zigzags, intertwines, and braids.  For instance, the on-the-ground instigator of Russian Futurism was the remarkable, Ukrainian-born David Burliuk, who was joined by, among others, my favorite Russian poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a full-fledged Bolshevik. Burliuk, as I have pointed out before, also was the instigator of Japanese Futurism!

Furthermore, in 1925 Marinetti went on a tour of South America — Rio, São Paulo, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. His one-man Futurist poetry performances were roundly booed, which, as in Italy, he no doubt instigated and provoked by his in-your-face declamatory style. Some accused him of merely trying to gain support for his fat friend Mussolini. Screaming at people and shouting “nonsense” syllables is a strange way to promote a cause. Nevertheless, in Brazil he is usually credited as a key inspiration for Modernismo, their modern art.

Their were Futurist poets in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Slovenia, Portugal, Ukraine, England, and Lithuania.

AND….. 

The Extraordinary French Futurist, Valentine de Saint-Point, 1914.

Although Marinetti is usually considered antifeminist, there were female Futurists. Perhaps he wasn’t so much antifeminist as anti-housewife. Not only was his wife, Benedetta, a Futurist but so was the fascinating Parisian Valentine de Saint-Point, grand-niece of French poet Alphonse de Lamartine.  Saint-Point was an artist’s model for Rodin. But, more importantly, she was also a poet, painter, sculptor, playwright, choreographer, and journalist. She wrote two Futurist manifestos of her own in rebuttal to Marinetti’s sexism. Here’s a jolt from her Manifesto of a Futurist Woman (1912):

(((If you don’t like this, you should have your weakly sentimental head split open by an apache-dancing tramp with a pistol.)))

Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn…

It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being.

Any exclusively virile individual is just a brute animal; any exclusively feminine individual is only a female.

The main point of her Manifesto of Lust (1914) is that lust,  even for women,  is “the quest of the flesh for the unknown.”

In 1918, she moved to Morocco, converted to Islam, and delved into North African politics. Later in life, destitute, she practiced dowsing and acupuncture. She died in Cairo in 1953, a kind of Muslim saint. Her tombstone described her as “a zealot of divine light.”

Mussolini

But Why Were Italians So Attracted to Mussolini?

Il Duce was at least as popular in Italy as Hitler was in Germany. Great Britain had Oswald Mosley, and the U.S. had Huey Long and Father Coughlin, favorites of architect Philip Johnson during his youthful pro-Nazi period. And there were huge meetings of the German Bund, out on Long Island in Yaphank at Camp Siegfried. This German-American “culture camp” was eventually closed down by the F.B.I. because when the Nazi threat abroad became more apparent, the locals accused the Bundists of espionage.

Why was the U.S. finally immune to Fascism? I think because we had FDR tinkering with the economy and initiating the WPA, whereas in Germany and Italy they had parades. They had scapegoats. They had thousands upon thousands of thugs in military costumes. 

Recently I came across Christopher Duggan’s Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford University Press). Duggan has recounted and analyzed the letters Mussolini received from his fellow Italians, an average of 1500 a day. There can be no doubt that the deluded Italians, like their Nazi allies, went in for hero worship in a big way, even when their idol wasn’t much of a hero. Not all the letters are suck-up pleas for intercession. The most disgusting ones are pure adoration.

I can remember older Italian friends saying Mussolini may have been a disgusting tyrant and a gangster like Stalin, but at least he made the trains run on time. We think the siren call of totalitarianism is the fear of disorder, peppered sometimes with the embarrassment of defeat. Weak minds yearn for a father figure, who through strong will, strict enforcement, and punishment will finally set things right. Artists and writers are not necessarily immune.

There is no doubt in my mind that Marinetti was a genius, but, alas, a kind of permanent adolescent. An aristocrat with his head up a certain part of his anatomy.

Bendedetta (Marinetti): Synthesis of Communications, 1934. Palermo Post Office, now at the Guggenheim as part of Italian Futurism.

How to Tackle the Exhibition

The “good” stuff,  sanctioned by art history, you already know.

Alas, the paintings in the Guggenheim, even the famous ones, up close in real life now  look timid. These (if you excuse the expression) warhorses, these modernist machines (“machines,” as in academic art), are dull.

Is it the lighting? Is it the vortex space and the slanted floors? The Guggenheim long ago solved the curved-bay problem presented by Mr. Wright, but climbing from bottom up, round and round — which you must do for sake of chronology – has a draining effect.

But even if you elevator to the top and walk downhill, seeing the show backwards, you still cannot avoid the infamous MoMA Syndrome.

Unlike the tin saints and plaster statues “aurafied” by praying grandmothers, paintings seen by millions and known by many more through reproductions and now jpgs suffer hugely from “aura depletion.” They have been sucked dry  – another technical term – of their je ne sais quoi.

Still from digital recreation of Giacomo Balla: Fireworks. 1914

So what else is wrong with the exhibition? A little video fails to communicate what the poetry events/readings and the art performances and theater pieces were like. It does not communicate the outrageous inventiveness and the sound and fury that led directly to Dada.

And I was looking forward to Balla’s Fireworks, a dancerless ballet commissioned by the great Sergei Diaghilev. Alas, in spite of a ministadium tricked up with colored lights, all you really get is Stravinsky’s music and a tiny screen off to the side. In itself, the 2010 digital recreation is swell but, as presented, swell only in a dollhouse way.

Fortunately, I found my dog-eared copy of Michael Kirby’s Futurist Performance, E. P. Dutton (1971). Kirby also wrote the book on Happenings. When I was teaching, I used both.

Kirby does no better than most with the Futurist conundrum, recommending that we once again separate politics and art.  Fortunately, when he gets going with his skillfully collected material, I am even more convinced that the real contribution of Futurism was its poetry and theater, not the Baroque Cubism of the whirling paintings or the bland Art Deco of the Second Wave.

Futurist performance started with the wacky poetry readings (serates or evenings)  that Marinetti instigated — chanting, shouting, assaulting the audience. And these evolved into what the grand mischief-maker called sintesi  [synthesis(es)]. The sintesi are amazing. Most were short, like theatrical koans. But unlike various skit-oriented comedies we know from past TV (Laugh-In, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, even the work of the inspired absurdist Ernie Kovacs), they were vicious and transcendent at once.

Some have no sound. Some have no light or too much light. Some have no actors. In one you see only the actors’ feet. As Kirby points out, without Futurism there would be no Pirandello (who knew Futurism) or later, Ionesco. From a contemporary viewpoint, without Futurist poetry slams and theater there would be no Performance Art. Here is an example of a Futurist play, Lights by Francesco Canguillo:

Raised curtain.—Neutral stage.—Stage and auditorium completely in DARKNESS  for 3 BLACK minutes.

                          Voices of the PUBLIC

1. (person) —– Lights!

     2. (persons) —- Lights!

         4. —————— Lights!

               20. —————-  Lights!! Lights!!

                           50. —————-  Lights!! Lights!! Lights!! Lights!

     (Contagious)

                           THE ENTIRE THEATER

                            LIGHTS ! ! ! ! !

( The obsession for light must be provoked — so that it becomes wild, crazy – by various actors scattered in the auditorium, who excite the spectators and encourage their shouting.) 

The stage and auditorium are illuminated in an EXAGGERATED way. 

At the same moment, the curtain slowly falls.

Giving proper weight to poetry and performance in a visual-art venue is obviously difficult. It usually means, as at the Guggenheim, books and posters in glass cases and a few paltry videos. Why wasn’t a ticketed performance or two added during the run of the show?  The Guggenheim is stuck in the conservative, market-oriented, art-history hierarchy that puts paintings, no matter how awful, at the top. In this installation, the awkward truth about Italian Futurism is studiously avoided. The parole in libertà  (“words-in-freedom”) and performance are the best and most important contributions of the Futurist folly.

Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed and Sound, 1913-14.

Do You Have a Tolerance for Illustration?

Your reaction to Futurist paintings will largely be determined by your tolerance for illustration. Even the extremely talented Balla, for all the Futurist gabbing about speed and putting the viewer in the center of the painting, rarely did more than illustrate these principles. It took many years to arrive at Action Painting, which embodied rather than illustrated the kinetic and really put the viewer at stage center. Futurism is the unacknowledged link between the Baroque and Action Painting. If the most important thing in the world  is crossing a river, it doesn’t matter what the bridge looks like.

On the other hand, you could also say that Futurism was a poetry movement: Marinetti’s. It toddled along after World War I by embracing aero-views, absurd cuisine, design, and the decorative arts. Futurism died in 1944 — along with Marinetti, its ringleader and pitchman. Too bad he wasn’t able to see how World War II turned out, Mussolini and his mistress shot dead by partisans in 1945 and hung upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.

Can we learn something about art by studying Futurism? Yes. Can we forgive the  adherence to Fascism? No.

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Derek Adams: We><Here

BLACK TO THE FUTURE……

Afrofuturism has been smoldering underground for awhile. The term was coined for African-American Si-Fi by critic Mark Derey in an essay called Black to the Future in 1994. In music, in the personage of Sun Ra, it existed before it was named, and it has a prehistory in science fiction too, in the work of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. And some now claim that Afrofuturism may go as far back as two works by Harlem Renaissance author George Schuyler.

Black No More (1931 ), which posits for purposes of satire a scientific way to turn black people white, and Black Empire (1936-38), an over-the-top revenge serial featuring a black Goldfinger — who, financed by robberies, successfully liberates Liberia, takes over Africa and perhaps the entire world through murder, aircraft, drugs and a fake religion. Black Empire was recommended to me by a black artist I know from Chicago. But author Schuyler became an arch conservative. He was even against Martin Luther King. And his two semi-sci-fi efforts are kind of nasty, which Afrofuturism is not.

But the good news is that at last, the visual-art expression of authentic Afrofuturism has emerged.

“The Shadows Took Shape” is at the The Studio Museum in Harlem, to March, 2014. A display case of Sun Ra relics honors the jazz-giant pioneer of Afrofuturism, as does the official title of the show, which is a line from one of his poems. Yes, Sun Ra wrote poems, some of them even published by Amiri Baraka, when he was LeRoi Jones.

There is a land

Whose being is almost unimaginable to the

Human mind.

On a clear day,

We stand there and look farther than the

ordinary eye can see.

Far above the roof of the world,

We can encompass vistas of the worlds.

There is a land

Where the sun shines eternally . . .

Eternally eternal:

Out in outer space

A living blazing fire,

So vital and alive . . .

There is no need to describe its splendor.

yawar mallku by William Cordova, Nyeema Morgan and Olabenja Jones & Associates

What Is It? 

A diagram of Afrofuturism would be complex indeed. Afrofuturism is thoroughly cross-media in a way that has not really occurred since Futurism and Dada. There was Surrealist painting and literature, but no Surrealist music. There was Constructivist design and architecture but no Constructivist music and not really much literature. Afrofuturism embraces music, poetry, art and science fiction.

Is Afrofuturism an art movement or a sociological phenomenon? Both.

The possible kink in my glib response is that art movements usually are defined by stylistic or formal traits. Solution: Dada had no formal code and is nevertheless considered an art movement, and an important one at that. Instead of formal definers, it had a strategy, which was to turn everything in art on its head. And, in so far, as it was a response to the First World War, it was also a sociological phenomenon.

Is Afrofuturism global?

The sacred movements of modernism were more or less international, way back then meaning mostly European. We might posit Abstract Expressionism as global, but only if we see AE and Action Painting as the same thing as Tachism in Europe and Japan (which I increasingly do). Even so, this is a stretch.

I once wrote (1971) that Conceptual Art was the first truly global art movement, and I stand by that. Cubism traveled, but morphed into Futurism in Italy, Constructivism in the USSR. But Conceptual Art emerged almost simultaneously across the globe, in a way that Cubism, Constructivism, Pop Art and Minimal Art had not. This was not because Conceptual Art was better. It was just faster. Art media itself had suddenly become global. The whole world seemed to be reading the same art magazines. It also helped that Conceptual Art was readymade for media transport and instant communication, as is Afrofuturism now. Afrofuturism is about media and uses media. It rides on the wings of music and science fiction.

Afrofuturism even includes Africa, which was not the case with Conceptual Art. “The Shadows Took Shape” at the Studio Museum is a sampling of art by African artists and artists of African descent living in the Americas, Asia and Europe — persons of the African diaspora. Afrofuturists are inserting blacks into the future, where in the past they have been pretty much ignored.

What I find moving is that Afrofuturism is powered by exile, displacement, invisibility and erasure — and the emotions these cause. But it can also include reclamation and invention of the past. It can be joyful and playful as well as anxious, angry and awe-inspiring. It stakes a claim on the future.

Afrofuturism makes use of myth. Afrofuturism, since it is happening now and not in 1913, has to be about mass media and technology. One spectacular piece here is a blow-up of the Wizard’s cubistic mask from The Wiz, which as a movie and a broadway musical is the black version of the Wizard of Oz. Another is a wooden model of the spaceship Enterprise, titled yawar mallku, made by William Cordova, in collaboration with Nyeema Morgan and Olabdnga Jones and Associates.

Other works I particularly liked:

Wayne Hodge’s photo-collages…

Android/Negroid #11, by Wayne Hodge

Cyrus Kabiru’s C-Stunner “funkadelic” eyewear made from scrap metal from the streets of Nairobi…

C-Stunner eyewear by Cyrus Kabiru

Christina de Middel’s Afronauts photos, recreating a Zambian schoolteacher’s 1964 proposal for an African space program…

The Afronauts, a photo series by Cristina De Middel.

 And David Huffman’s MLK, a painting showing black astronauts carrying the coffin of Martin Luther King…

MLK, by David Huffman

Why do you need to know about Afrofuturism? I don’t think Afrofuturism is post-black, but it is certainly post-Postmodernism. It is Social Art with a global sting. Make way for the future.

Language play and humor is part of the Afrofuturism tool kit, but if you step back, the darkness and despair is unbearable. The Afrofuturist escape to the future, whether folkloric, artistic or mythic, should tell us something. As strange as it may seem, a malady can be discovered through and even defined by its antidote.

 The Patron Saint of Afrofuturism 

Sun Ra

Jazz giant Sun Ra is the patron saint of Afrofuturism. He ruled over his far-out band Arkestra for 40 years, creating almost 200 albums. Anyone who can do that can’t be insane, said one psychiatrist when asked for his opinion. Why would anyone seek a psychiatric opinion?

Sun Ra insisted, with a straight face, that he had not been born on Earth. He came from Saturn; he was on a rescue mission. His “slave name” was Herman Poole Blount  (1914-1937), but he became Sun Ra (c.1937-1993). He had a vision.

My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up … I wasn’t in human form … I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn … they teleported me … They talked to me … the world was going into complete chaos … I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That’s what they told me.

Sun Ra came to earth to use music to transport blacks to a new planet, for a new start. Whether he was a UFO abductee, a visitor from Saturn or an angel is irrelevant. He was on message for the rest of his life.

In the arch but curiously moving prologue to his 1971 movie Space Is the Place, Sun Ra explains his vision:

The music is different here. The vibrations are different. Not like Planet Earth. Planet Earth sounds of guns, anger, frustration.There will be no one from Planet Earth we could talk to who would understand. We’ll set up a colony for black people here. See what they can do on a planet all their own, without any white people there. They would drink in the beauty of this planet. It would affect their vibrations, for the better, of course. Another place in the universe, up in the different stars. That would be where the alter-destiny would come in. Equation-wise – the first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended. We’ll work on the other side of time. We’ll bring them here through either isotopicteleportation, transmolecularization of better still, teleport the whole planet through music.

After Sun Ra moved from Chicago to the Big Apple, his Arkestra commandeered  Monday nights at Slug’s Saloon in the northern part of the Lower Eastside, just as it was turning into the East Village. Albums he did for  ESP Records hit the charts. By 1969, he was on the cover of Rolling Stone. He toured America and Europe. He and his Arkestra  “family” even visited Egypt, the romanticized black homeland.

Certainly he was a showman — those  space-age costumes, those five-hour concerts with dancers, his “girl singer” June Tyson chanting Sun Ra proverbs (“You made a mistake. You did something wrong. Make another mistake, and do something right!”).

But he was also a mystic, Cabbalist and a poet.

Sun Ra proposed Africans and those of the African diaspora were, like himself,  extraterrestrials or stranded angels.

In the cult movie Space Is the Place, dressed up as a chubby, dime-store Egyptian king, here is what Sun Ra says to two black youths in an Oakland pool room:

I’m not real, I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we’re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as a myth. because that’s what black people are, myths. I come to you from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago.

But here’s the irony: Sun Ra and his Arkestra achieved their greatest popularity through rock concerts, which had mostly white audiences, and with the urban, white-hipster intelligentsia.

Sun Ra, The Man From Saturn

 Catching Up With Sun Ra 

“Open your ears so that you can see with the eye of the mind.”

      — Statement accompanying the first Sun Ra recording, 1956

Get ready, world. His Chicago broadsides and Lower East Side poems are now in print, and I have already read one insightful Master’s thesis on Sun Ra as a writer.You can read My Music Is Words — the Poetics of Sun Ra by Nathaniel Earl Bowles by clicking HERE.

You can see a BBC documentary HERE.

And now is the time to look at Sun Ra’s 1972  Space Is the Place. HERE  It is a movie beyond belief: Blaxploitation sci-fi, a fascinating but crudely made advertisement for leaving the Earth before it is too late. No, there is not enough music. Yes, it has Egyptian headdresses and clichéd urban youths in Oakland, but it also has nonlinear, jaw-dropping mystic pronouncements, naked ladies, at least one pimp and magic entrances and exits. And, a very weird spaceship.

Alas, Ra’s charisma is not much in evidence. If you want Sun Ra charisma, check out this YouTube clip of the Man From Saturn playing an electronic organ HERE.

You can catch up on Sun Ra sounds on YouTube, too. But be prepared. He is doing weird and original things with transitions, chord progressions, jazz references and, I think, time .My favorite is still Sun Ra: Heliocentric Worlds I (1969).  HERE.

Strangest? Strange Strings! And on that album “Door Squeak” will drive you up the wall. HERE

You can hear him read his strange and moving poem “Like A Universe”  HERE

 And hear him sing Why Was I Born (1988)  HERE

Sun Ra’s 1965 ESP Album

The Pandora Effect

Pandora is a cellphone/computer music service that allows you to choose any number of “channels.” Mine range from Bach, Bieber and Heinrich Schütz to Coltrane. But then they think they are doing you a favor by adding “variety” according to characteristics of the music you have chosen. Sarah Vaughan will segue into the unctuous Bing Crosby. Even Bach morphs into long strings of lesser Baroque.

If you want a demonstration of Sun Ra, the unique and one and only, try Pandora’s    Sun Ra Radio channel. You will get some great Sun Ra and then some splendid music by Coltrane, Miles Davis, Max Roach. But Sun Ra is so different, it is mind-boggling. He was right. His music is not quite bop, and not quite free jazz, which we know he influenced. His music is cosmic.

I’m actually painting pictures of infinity with my music, and that’s why a lot of people can’t understand it. But if they listen to this and to other types of music, they’ll find that mine has something else in it, something from another world.

                                                                                                                                      — Album text, Outer Spaceways Incorporated, 1971

 Sun Ra’s poem The Immeasurable Equation (1972) is an example of his cultural debt to both Christianity and more esoteric spiritual practices:

The word that was made flesh was made fresh

It is the new, the new test … the new tester, the test-testertestament

The testament new

Words, words, words

Made fresh, made again

The recreate, the recreation . . .

The word was made fresh

Thus is the cosmic reach

Dark meanings brought to light

See the mystery

Hear the sound duplicity

The double opposite parallel

Hear the sound duplicity

The double opposite parallel.

John Perreault is on Facebook. Links here for John Perreault website & John Perreault’s art.

Christopher Wool: Untitled, 2009

Christopher Wool gets better in this century. The Guggenheim retrospective (through Jan. 22) proves it. The words and wallpaper-roller and black-on-white sprayed, printed and tricked-up paintings of the last century all have their place, but the 21^st-century “gray paintings” are so far his best. Less sarcastic. More complicated. More subtle. More ironic.

I look upon his 20^th-century paintings, even the word paintings, as rehearsals for the  gray paintings. No more offhand appropriations of graffiti and Pattern Painting. Just erasures and smears. Spray-enamel loops smudged with solvent. Gloomy layers, like smoke or dust from the World Trade Center towers, long ago.

And there are black-and-white photos, too. These intermissions or sidebars seem to puzzle everyone but me. Some show the dark side of the artist’s walks from the East Village to his studio in Chinatown. Is that dark side in his paintings? He clearly picked up words in capitals and lanky spray-can lines from the graffiti he saw. In regard to the words, everyone quotes the artist to the effect that his spotting of UV SEX LUV spray-canned on a truck yielded his first word painting: LUV SEX LUV.

Alas, the most famous word painting, Apocalypse Now (1988) [SELL THE HOUSE SELL THECAR SELL THE KIDS] ), had been put up for auction and was not available for the retrospective at the Guggenheim. Instead, it sold for $26.5 million.

Apocalypse Now, 1988.

And when people began to cover up and clean off tags, did those cloudy smears get stuck in Wool’s head too as inspirations for his gray paintings?

The artist now lives part-time in Marfa, Texas, which has become quite an artist colony, if you can avoid the Donald Judd monument to himself — which, I am told, casts a spell over all. Will Wool’s art change? I am always interested in how environment influences art, aren’t you? What you see every day feeds your brain. That is why living in boring places kills all art. As for myself, I am Ernest in town and Jack in the country. And didn’t de Kooning lighten up when he settled in East Hampton?

The Guggenheim spiral ramp offers a judicious LINK survey of Wool’s work, from bottom to top, apparently with the artist’s help. Usually that’s a sign of weak curatorial practice, but in this case it seems to have worked. There are no rules. Some artists know their own best work, and others, alas, do not. I could tell you stories, but not quite yet.

Robert Motherwell: Blue with China Ink, 1946

Another Intermission: Motherwell

By happenstance we are also treated to (on Annex Level 4) a show of Robert Motherwell’s early collages done from 1941-1951, when the young and ever-so-wealthy editor of the seminal anthology Dada Painters and Poets was still enthralled by his Surrealist buddy Matta. Just so you know, Motherwell’s father was the president of the Wells Fargo Bank.

I confess I have never really liked Motherwell’s much-acclaimed “Elegies to the Spanish Republic.” Of course, we are anti-Franco, but it turns out that the collages are so much better than the “Elegies.” How can this be? Perhaps the small scale and the use of paper and glue was less intimidating than paint on canvas

The Elegies always look to me like blow-ups of something else. I thought perhaps of studies and preparatory drawings. Maybe Motherwell had secretly violated the Ab-Ex principle of ad hoc painting? But no, it is merely that he could not translate what he had accomplished in the early collages into real paintings. Most of his paintings are hesitant, though some are insouciant. The distance between these two adjectives is enormous.  How can you be insouciant about the Spanish Civil War, or after reading Hemingway?

The Elegies are never quite convincing. The collages are solid. So you see it is not just recently that we are confronted with the phenomenon of the early bloomer not able to surpass first efforts.

In art there are no Rimbauds. Rimbaud, the miraculous French poet, burned out like a shooting star at the age of 20 and never wrote another poem. In art, we want long-distance runners. Painters are never allowed to escape to Africa and live the life of adventurers, which is what Rimbaud did before dying of cancer of the leg at 37. The value of moving to Tahiti has long worn out.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

More Wool-Gathering

The gray paintings hint that in Wool we may have our long-awaited long-distance runner. They are about fear. This and the colorless pallet – blacks, whites, grays — form a language that grows out of the earlier, more sarcastic work that is now so popular with collectors.

Is the fear a fear of expression or a fear of inauthenticity? Or even of authenticity? I doubt that it is the weak fear generated by those self-serving academics who were in favor of “pictures” rather than paintings. The Artformalists insisted that by 1984, painting had painted itself into a corner. That was hogwash. Painting was Crimped and Kraused in service of weakly conceptual pictures, about which distance does not make the heart grow fonder. True, some artists transcended the category, but many have now been left in the dustbin of “art history” as … not quite distanced enough.

In contrast, Wool’s gray paintings are so distanced that they make Warhol seem like van Gogh. Warhol’s technique of silk-screening found that photo images on canvas in the long run made the images more emotional, as liquid sloppily applied tends to do. The photo images were emotionalized, even though poet Gerard Malanga or a number of others did the actual silk-screening. I myself was witness to Andy “finishing” a bunch of silkscreen paintings on the floor of the Factory. He kicked them here and there with his foot, to give that personal, handmade touch, that unexpected irregularity, that little bit of added value.

Wool’s smeared-solvent erasures are more closely linked to Lichtenstein’s painted cartoon-splashes rather than Warhol’s grungy, improper registrations. Some have compared Wool’s erasures to Robert Rauschenberg’s famous erased de Kooning drawing. The difference is that Wool is erasing himself. And it is not nearly half the fun.

What is he hiding?

The layering, erasures and blockages engage the eye and induce what a painter friend of mine calls “ocular excavation” — a taboo aspect of Abstract Expressionism.

Yet in Wool there is an archeology of surfaces — but, alas, not of the soul. The paradox, I suppose, is that self-effacement has produced, on the surface, some highly decorative abstract paintings, but ones that do not photograph all that well. I tried to find some images that matched my experience, my memory. None.  Zero. You have to be there. You have to see them in real life to understand what is happening.

Will this be one of the characteristics of 21^st-century painting, that it is camera-proof, rather than camera-approved? We all knew last century that if your work was not photogenic, it did not exist. When and if camera-proof art replaces camera-approved art, how will grants be awarded to painters who make camera-proof art? How will that art be communicated to the public, to collectors, to art historians?

In terms of Wool’s gray paintings, somebody had to do them. Somebody had to denature both Ab-Ex and Pop, leaving a new world wherein painting would once again be allowed to have meaning.

Assignment: If you removed Wool’s printing, rubber-stamping, erasures, overlays and other strategies of distancing, what would you have left? Nothing! The distancing is the meaning.

John Perreault is on Facebook. Links here for John Perreault website & John Perreault’s art.