A Clockwork Van Gogh

"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen." -Alex, from A Clockwork Orange

2009 the final year in the decade, appropriately of naughts (the decade of 00), is nearing it’s end here in the west. I’m sitting here watching A Clockwork Orange by my favorite director Stanley Kubrick, and I am reminded of Van Gogh. It’s the violence of change, you see that comes to mind as the year draws to a conclusion. Uncertainty is ugly, rough and violent.

We like to look for order amongst chaos as we humans are responsible for creating more chaos and violent behavior than any other entity on this planet. Van Gogh’s struggle was one of awareness. He saw the world in it’s true form, bright, vibrant to the point of near blindness and aggressive. The potency of awareness can be overwhelming and we find ways of avoiding it at all costs. We hide behind our simulacra and simulations hoping to deaden the persistence of the natural world that we have spent millenia attempting to avoid. Van Gogh confronted nature head on, absorbing it’s vibrant brutality. He wasn’t interested in assimilation but the acceptance of uncertainty that came with the color of the world. Color to him was a metaphor for this natural violence and he emulated it in his own epileptic fits eventually disintegrating into interictal dysphoric disorder. The violence of nature was whole, manifested as a real human existence, not as some simulation or painted reality. Van Gogh attempted to paint what he experienced rather than share some hallucination of the imagined.

In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick emulates this same kind of violent nature (as imagined by Burgess in the original novel) but within the context of societies’ attempts to cure it as a natural experience. The pseudo-modern world of 70’s future-kitsch serves as the plastic, fantastic background for the escape from the mundane. The lead character imagines the world as purely violent and acts on impulse, as horrible as that can be in its manifestation. Society reacts, aiming to cure the ills of this madness, much as it rejected the imaginings of Van Gogh. Inevitably the cure is worse than the illness and the message is lost on the whole. The real madness of course, is the social constructs that work outside of nature and conceal real experience, thereby leading to violent imaginings as an excuse to avoid the prison of the unreal.

It would be easy to accept beauty as the logical, the imagined math of Bach as opposed to the chaotic emotional violence of Beethoven, but that wouldn’t leave room for the full spectrum of experience. Without the extremes, without the violence of Fauvist imaginings experience grows dull and one outcome is our own manifestations of violence. What is persistent is fear, and it manifests itself in the disempowered. The crooks become cops and the cured protagonist falls victim not only to his own uninhibited actions in the acceptance of the chaos of living, but in society’s systemic reaction to uncertainty. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony becomes the metaphor for pure, emotional confrontation in the movie. What was once an illusive idea, sought after through the lead character’s imaginings, manifested in his violence becomes a prison of the real as he is reformed to fit the mold of society’s banality.

Ultimately, it is boredom and the lack of imagination that bring the ugliness of violence to light. Violence as a metaphor to nature’s potential and persistence of uncertainty is a concept only found in the imaginings of artistic spirit. The healthy manifestation of reality is found in our acceptance of uncertainty and the balance between Bach and Beethoven not the contradictory competition between the two. Salvation doesn’t live at the end of a cure or rehabilitation from real experience, but in the acceptance that we are responsible for our natural position within the world and our acceptance of it’s uncertain consequences rather than our persistence of our own violent acts. A Clockwork Orange brilliantly outlines the holistic responsibilities at play that are the complex interactions of human beings - natural, and real, not fictional inventions of our own.

Painting the Wraith

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."

— David Foster Wallace

We sit in rapt horror and conflicted emotion when reading Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men whether man or woman. Being a man I can only speak to that gender. The “interviews” conducted throughout the collection of short stories, for a female researcher who’s own character is a composite of those she interviews, form a unsavory landscape of the male ego. As a man you feel conflicted by your want, if you have any shred of dignity or empathy toward women, to feel disgust and repulsion toward many of the comments by the interviewee’s. Unfortunately, you also feel a tinge of identification with them as well. Within you is the understanding we are complex and confused animals often at the mercy of the opposite sex (and hope the opposite sex feels the same, but our fear prevents us from asking). This confusion takes on the form of gamesmanship, whereby we attempt to out-think, out-maneuver and out-wit women in what we believe an elaborate plot to unhinge us, leaving exposed, an empty shell of bravado, hubris and testosterone. Checkmate! Queen takes King.

In the early 50’s Willem de Kooning produced a series of portraits that helped form the foundation of Abstract Expressionism. This series of six “Woman” paintings created between 1951 and 1953 are evocative of the ambiguity Wallace so adeptly portrays fifty years later in his collection of Interviews. de Kooning’s relationship with women and specifically with his wife Elaine, was as complex as any of the interviews in Hideous Men. The power of the “Woman” series is in their ambiguous approach both physically and psychologically in portraying women. On the one hand these paintings are abstractions of women that can be seen to objectify (exaggerated breasts and big eyes) women as sex objects intended solely for the male gaze. This was the model moving through the sixties prior to the women’s liberation movement, and arguably remains a steadfast fixture within our culture today. It is also, under the surface a revealing gesture of the desires we are hardwired biologically to express to procreate. Abstraction after all is a simplification of the truth, the truth of seeing. de Kooning felt these desires and complexities of human interaction as a way of pulling previously unquestioned gender roles into the 20th century. In all likelihood, this was an unconscious act resulting in the paintings. Willem’s love for Elaine ran deep and despite a protracted period of estrangement and contention they never divorced. Elaine tirelessly promoted Willem in the early period of his career and is credited with his meteoric success much in the way Lee Krasner promoted her husband, Jackson Pollock. Elaine was a force to be reckoned with and despite working hard on behalf of Willem, built her own career as a painter and writer. Willem’s “Woman” paintings reflect the intense psychology, specifically of Elaine but of women in general. The powerful expressive quality of his brush strokes and color emulate this intensity, this hidden power within all women. Willem de Kooning’s Woman III is the Venus de Milo of our time, the winged Nike of Samothrace. It is homage and objectification, desire and respect — in essence of a majestic abstraction of the female archetype for the 20th century.

The postmodern age with all of its simulacra and simulation has confused and distorted our most basic of human understandings and emotions. As the writer Chris Hedges says we live in a kind of “moral nihilism.” In his latest book, Empire of Illusion he says we live...

“In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous.”

It is precisely this continuously layered irony with which Wallace was enamored. In his masterfully written expose on television E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, Wallace writes;

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."

Willem de Kooning witnessed the birth of this ironic purveyance in the early fifties with the prosperity that followed WW II. A dutch expatriate he had the background of a European, steeped in history and culture and the hubris of an American living at the beginning of it’s ascendency as a global superpower. Watching the apocalyptic conflagration of WW II left de Kooning and other European artists with utopian visions that hoped for a world of unmasked sybaritic desire and expression. Women, for de Kooning, became an iconic symbol for such utopian desire as emblematically embodied in his wife Elaine. However, much like Wallace decades later, de Kooning soon found that embracing womanhood solely from the perspective of a male dominated society was enough to grasp the complexities and dualities of the genders. As human’s we seek patterns and solutions to the complexities of life but seldom wish to recognize the paradox that produces in leading ever more questions. Artists do their best to lay bare these ambiguities in life so that we might find solace in beauty and just enough respite to contemplate our own blind, perfunctory postmodern drive to make the world simple. Wallace like de Kooning, laid bare the inherent confusion that comes with being a heterosexual man in the modern era with the hope of showing us all a road back to our most basic humanness. It is precisely the confronting of this ambiguity which offers us a way out of our multi-layered ironic existences. Men often confront women as wraiths, transparent visions of a more fully formed person that seems always out of reach. The uniqueness of the opposite sex should be seen as an apparition of emotional confusion whose dimension we don’t understand, but rather a human partner with a different biology sharing with us the human experience. We must not be spellbound by the wraith but metaphorically paint her into existence in order to free ourselves from the prison of absolutism.

“If I knew where I was sailing from I could calculate where I was sailing to.”  —No. 6, The Prisoner

right-hand image: Willem de Kooning, Woman III, 1953, oil on canvas.

And on it goes...

together we

laid down the gauntlet

and there are takers

even at this late date

still to be

found

as the fire sings

through the

trees.

—from Trollius and trellises by Charles Bukowski

In Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas all of the content of the emotional world is laid bare. You see beauty, preciousness, politics, horror and vanity. You are witness to the painter’s reflected imagination, his recursive elegy to beauty and ugliness. You could be looking at a bum asleep in an alley or the most beautiful woman in the world, it’s all there for you to share. Velázquez deliberately utilized reflection to implicate the viewer in the loose conceit of reality, in our own consciousness. The painting is beautiful in its hatred for the obvious. The most mundane, facile and crestfallen of people immediately develop a narrative from its constructs. The painting, the one you are looking at now is within the painting hidden from our view. A dwarf stands in elegance next to a princess. A nun whispers in servitude to the greater power of a king. A room filled with beautiful paintings lingers in a damp green stale air suggesting a room that is forgotten by time. And on it goes.

Beauty is an intangible and as a kind of magic it persists in our own perceptions, our constructs of the world around us. The inexplicable aspect of being an artist is not that you own some special ability to construe truth but rather you unafraid to confront truth in its overwhelming completeness. You see no difference between the blood, soot and semen and the precise curve of a woman’s pale breast. You are seduced by the danger of trespassing in reality. The ecstasy and pain come in waves brought on by your adventure and welcome them both in order to remain sustained by their inexplicable logic. You can find math in the near spiritual contortions of a baseball pitcher as he throws a curve ball across home plate. The sharpness effects you like cold air and some days all you can do is loose yourself in drink hoping to avoid that which you have spent a lifetime cultivating. Unfortunately the drink is just another aspect of it all, another consequence — a cosmic quantum essence shifting relentlessly outside of clear understanding. And then comes the loneliness like an impenetrable vapor. As Bukowski said; “you get so alone sometimes it just makes sense.”

Beauty is a blood sport. An infinite arena filled with bruising consequences associated with the openness required to really ‘see’ the world and live fully within it. If you are ever lucky enough to find someone who understands these words fully, covet them together, and lay down the gauntlet.

Barnett Newman’s Heroic and Sublime

“I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.”

—Barnett Newman

It is not an accident that Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis hangs in direct opposition one room away from Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 at the Museum of Modern Art. These are the iconic art works of 20th century modernity. Each of the rooms at MoMa is a mirror of the other, an alternative reality. Each room contains a large soft bench where you can sit and loose yourself in these works. I often imagine the lights dimmed with only spots on these two paintings and large recliners set up to view them. They were the flat screen televisions of their time. The men who made them hoped for them to represent something much larger — our connection to the sublime. In the 21^st century the boundaries of our physical existence are less and less clear. We live in a virtual cocoon, separated from our heroic selves by the devices that simulate reality. Our experience with color, for example is primarily through reproduction on the internet or in prints in books. Even when traveling in our exterior environments we immerse ourselves less and less, preferring instead the cloistered canister of the automobile and its tinted, UV filtered windows. The bench in front of Vir Heroicus Sublimis is there not as a relief from walking, but a gentle suggestion to sit, slow down and allow us to meditate on Newman’s seventeen foot wide painting and what it means to us in this world of the simulacra.

Barnett Newman’s paintings are not elegies, narrations or allegories. His work was a descriptor of the basic relationship of human beings to our own unconscious. We are reductive, categorical, selective and analytical animals. We invented binary code, ones and zeroes now responsible for the entirety of our global communication. Newman’s invention of the “zip” was just that — an elegant gesture which allows the viewer to look not at the ‘object’ of the painting but into their own personal narrative. It is both a linear disruption of the horizontal plane (as architecture is against the landscape, for example) and a metaphysical meter; a stroke of time or note on an instrument. As Newman perceived it, it was a heroic gesture. Man’s insinuation on the landscape as the hero of modernity, the master of his universe and creator of the sublime. Newman wasn’t interested in wrestling with his inner demons and revealing the psychological underpinnings of our existence as Pollock was. No, Newman saw glory in our purpose as humans and modern painting would be the symbolic relic of our technological superiority.

Despite Newman’s glorification of man’s heroic tendencies in a post-war America, the emergent consumer culture of the 1950s was largely baffled by his work and most Americans remain so today. What Newman understood long before our current idiosyncratic hyperactive culture was that the essence of humanity, the basis for our difference from the apes, was our ability to confront the existential. Newman was a painter and he saw a new way to say something by reminding us of our own divine purpose our heroic urge. When we gaze at the night sky we can choose to see white dots of light against black sky or the endless variety, density and complexity of a universe largely unexplored. The “zip” is symbolic, a ripple in the still pond, a line on the pavement or a word that breaks an uncomfortable silence. It is also the disruption, for better or worse, of mankind’s technological development. Newman recognized we were replacing the idea of the religious sublime with the technological sublime. The “zips” are programmatic, wether by God or man, their meaning is locked in the software of truth.

Newman used painting to describe, decades ahead of his time, our relationship with technology and the duality of our metaphysical and physical lives. Why do some devices, some technologies grab the collective conscience and others don’t? What is it about the iPhone, for instance, that connects with us in ways that other forms of technology do not? The answer is ambiguity, the least likely of our possible responses. It is not in the object which lies our desire, but rather, the object acts as the gateway for our own imagination. Barnett Newman’s paintings addressed issues key to modernity; scale, color, simplicity and geometry. These paintings were architectural in nature. The aftermath of the second world war left America the sole interpreter of modern culture. The architects of the time chose to represent that as hubris, the painters as epiphany (another kind of hubris). Newman among others, used the scale and geometry of architecture in conjunction with the color and line of painting in order to transcend our ideas of the object in the same way we forget the iPhone is an object. Painting to Newman, was heroic without signifying a singular hero. It empowered everyone by allowing them the contemplative space to produce their own ideas. What Newman chose not to see, in contrast to Pollock was the inevitable destructive power of the myth of the hero. He embraced the idea that programmatic thinking was a gateway to the sublime without taking responsibility for the software. The red in Vir Heroicus Sublimis represents glory, life force and the intensity of vision not the color of violence or the blinding center of a thermonuclear reaction. What we are now very slowly discovering is our own ‘heroic’ tendencies and blind embrace of technology may very well be our own undoing. As Peter Sloterdijk says in his new book, Terror from the Air; “Modernity conceived as the explication of the background givens thereby remains trapped in a phobic circle, striving to overcome anxiety through technology, which itself generates more anxiety.”

Wether programming (software) or “zip”, painting or flat screen television, we must be cautious of the draw toward the heroic. Technology allows us personal access to an elegance similar to natures. We are enticed by elegance because we intuitively know the extraordinary, the profound, lies hidden in plain site beneath the black mirror surface of a lake or beyond the twinkling stars in the night sky. We are drawn to mimic what defies our understanding in the hopes of gaining that knowledge. Newman’s brilliance was leveraging the physicality of pigment on surface to reconstruct the metaphysical of the mind’s understanding of its universe. Georges Didi-Huberman, leveraging themes from Walter Benjamin says in his description of Newman’s paintings; “We must seek to understand how a Newman painting supposes — implies, slips underneath, enfolds in its fashion — the question of the aura. How it maneuvers the ‘image-making substance’ in order to impose itself on the gaze, to foment desire. How it thus becomes ‘that of which our eyes will never have their fill’. Newman’s paintings remain relevant today because they give us the opportunity to question technology through the very questions Benjamin suggests. We can see in Newman’s painting the reductive embrace of the programming that has led to the narcissistic embrace of our own inventions. We impose our own narratives on devices such as the iPhone. The narrative of our lives as lived through the virtual connection the device gives us to our friends, colleagues and indeed the world. It should not, however, be mistaken for knowledge of any of the above. To dismiss Barnett Newman is to deny our grappling with the heroic, the metaphysical and our own narcissism. Narcissism is a denial of uncertainty and therefore a denial of a larger truth. What Newman can teach us, if we choose to take a seat on the bench, is our own dark desires. The very heroic impulses that led us to develop the personal computer, the cell phone and the internet are the very same that annihilated Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and pumped enough CO² into the atmosphere that we have irreparably altered the global environment. Heroic indeed.

Pop's Ragged Edges

When I was 14 years old I had two posters on the wall of my bedroom. The first a large image of a Porsche 928S and the second of Farrah Fawcett. She was every boys dream girl then. Farrah transcended the iconography of Marilyn Monroe’s forbidden sexuality by making female sexuality seem as natural as fresh cut grass. She was sexy but gentle. There was something very straight forward about her personality, a girl-next-door sensibility, relaxed and pure. Unlike the pop idols of today, the Britney Spears and Megan Fox’s, Farrah didn’t need to wear her sexuality on her sleeve. She didn’t need to leverage the underbelly of our lascivious desires. Farrah conquered the world with a one piece bathing suit of modest proportions. Like all celebrities she loved attention but unlike many, she was willing to risk it for her own principals.

I am lamenting the fact the King of Pop’s death is eclipsing that of an Angel’s. It is representative of the cultural choices we have made. We all loved Farrah (and the 1982 Thriller, Michael Jackson) because they were powerful in their innocence. Sure they wanted fame, but in our minds that was a fair exchange for their talent, their beauty and their irrepressible desire to please us.

Pop art emerged in the sixties as a response to post war cynicism. Warhol in particular, embraced mass media’s iconography and used it in order to reveal the very shallow depths of American culture. Warhol was in love with Pops ability to transcend the darkness of irony. He suggested Pop art and Pop culture were ways we could embrace our shallowness in a straight forward way. Warhol’s Pop for all its embrace of money, was intent on accepting shameless democracy. In 1977 there was something wonderfully democratic about Farrah Fawcett. She was literally the poster girl for American values, however shallow they might be. Today we are the pawns of huge corporate media conglomerates, but in 1977 we were not yet a demographic. The reason Farrah’s poster sold more than any other before or since, is because she crossed over demographics in true democratic style.

Charlie’s Angels began as a spoof, an exploitative half hour detective show that  Hollywood’s soft-core king, Aaron Spelling thought an amusing titillation. However, Farrah, Kate and Jaclyn transcended Spelling’s sexism and made us pay attention to female intelligence in parallel to their physicality. Sure we watched in anticipation of the tight fitting outfits and the revealing swimsuits, but we also watched because it was enriching to watch intelligent, self-reliant women. Charlie’s Angels and The Bionic Woman were ground breaking in their empowerment of women. It made perfect sense that Julie Monroe (Farrah Fawcett) would marry the Six Million Dollar Man (Lee Majors). It was the astronaut and the model, but it was also the athletic, smart, sexy detective and the cybernetic man. Farrah once said; “God made man stronger but not necessarily more intelligent. He gave women intuition and femininity. And, used properly, that combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I’ve ever met.” Farrah was significant because she made conscious personal choices intent on breaking down stereotypes about women. She fought for her own just treatment by arguing for a fair portion of the proceeds from Charlie’s Angels profits. Profits that people like Spelling had profited from for years by marketing the images of young, vibrant women. She went on to take challenging roles in TV movies that dramatized the dark underbelly in the treatment of women through themes of spousal abuse (The Burning Bed) and rape (Extremities). She was the first to celebrate being an older woman by choosing to pose in Playboy at the age of 47. She was intent on converting her pop icon status into something richer, but she never lost her innocence reflected by her ever-endearing smile.

Farrah Fawcett found personal relationships within the world of Hollywood impossible and was often the brunt of tabloid journalism, but she understood exposure was a responsibility that should necessitate service. In her final months, knowing she was dying she chose to document her experience so that others might gain knowledge from it, even at the expense of her own image. A personal friend of Andy Warhol’s and an accomplished art collector and sculptor herself, Farrah believed, like Andy in the power of art, even Pop art or popular culture, to transcend the everyday. In the seventies popular television was a gateway to digging at the richer ideas underneath. M.A.S.H., Archie Bunker, The Jeffersons and yes even Charlie’s Angels served as mediums through which the average American could confront the more difficult issues of war, racism and sexism without having to admit to intellectual literacy. Let us not forget Farrah’s contributions and use this time to mourn her and in turn reflect on the type of world we’ve embraced over the one we once had.

Montage of Farrah Fawcett: (from left to right) Iconic 1976 poster of Farrah Fawcett. First published in Life magazine in 1976, it is the best-selling pin-up poster of all time, with more than 12 million copies sold. Andy Warhol polaroid of Farrah Fawcett. Farrah Fawcett on skateboard - unattributed.